There’s a “famous” gore video showing a Russian soldier being brutally murdered by Chechen rebels. Ya’ll probably already know what I’m talking about, so I don’t need to explain (and if you haven’t seen it or don’t know what it is, don’t bother looking for it, it’s not nice and does you no good to have it on your psychic hard drive). Since seeing that clip in ~2000, I’ve desperately wanted to know the man’s identity and the circumstances in which he was killed. I’ve had people swear to me that they also saw the clip, but the version they saw was quite a bit longer than the ~20-second clip everyone is aware of, and they describe some details that could well be useful in identifying him, but alas this alleged longer version seems to have vanished entirely, if it ever existed. The version we have is obviously heavily-edited, lots of quick cuts and time-jumps, so there is at least a version without all of that, somewhere.

Trust me when I say that I’ve looked into this issue on and off for the last 25 years, and I have heard many bullshit claims about who he is: they’re all wrong and provably so. I’ve watched hundreds (literally) of clips from that conflict that show barbarity of one degree or another, and in doing so I have identified the clips that specific reports and testimonies are alluding to when they claim to have identified the victim. None of them is our guy, it’s always some other video clip where some other Russian is knifed by a Chechen (there’re a lot of such clips).

There was a user on a gore forum who uploaded the Tukhchar massacre (safe click) video in full, and he claimed to have the full version of our mystery clip, but refused to post it and grew increasingly hostile the more people asked him for it, eventually taking his ball and going home by stating his intention to never post it because people were mean to him. He was obviously a bullshitter who had a few good uploads and decided to use that momentum to generate hype around this other ‘holy grail’ clip which he almost certainly did not have. Other than that one prick, nobody online has access to the full video or the identity of the man. At least, not on the English-speaking internet.

I’ve seen a lot of awful videos on the net, but there’s something about that one in particular that really energised me to find out who he is. I guess it being the first video of that kind I ever saw would probably have something to do with it, but it’s also just so fucking cold. You could sense the all-consuming hatred in the killers in the way they staged the scene and the matter-of-fact way they slaughtered him. Just pure inhumanity. There are “worse” videos, there are drug cartel videos that would make a Spanish Inquisitor lose his lunch, but man, that Russian dude is always lingering in my mind.

I recently made an Unpopular Opinion post about this (TL;DR I’m supportive of remakes/reboots if done with genuine passion for the material, just as I am with cover versions of songs or transplantations of stage plays to modern settings/Disney cartoons, etc.):

https://lemmy.world/post/35309322

The originals aren’t going anywhere (unless you’re George Lucas 😒), and there are new films coming out every week from all over the world, the reboots/remakes are like less than 1% of what gets released in any given year. Marketing and social media can make things seem bigger and more pervasive than they actually are. Having said that, I’d honestly be happier if the number was more like 5% (with the aforementioned caveats about passion, talent and quality).

But yeah, there are lots of remakes/reboots that are borne of pure cynicism and boardroom sociopathy. Fuck those. But they aren’t the only ones on offer. Baby/bathwater.

We’re all (as political blocs) guilty of taking away people’s livelihoods for unacceptable speech. I don’t even mean dangerous speech, like vaccine disinfo, but people just being cunts and bigots. Pretending that we’re free speech paragons in the face of the Kirk nonsense is silly and just gives those cretins all the impetus they need to carry on with it.

Also, burn in hell Charlie Kirk.

“He was actually an FBI informant against Epstein” seems to be the trajectory, per the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Michael “My Son Monitors My Porn Consumption Via a Special App” Johnson. The fact that it came from him and not some mushroom-infested 4channer makes it sound believable (if you’re already poised to believe such horseshit, that is).

Fucking hell… 🤢

He should not have been shot. The shooter was, like virtually all such people, a narcissistic main character sociopath who only cared about his own fame and notoriety, and was likely spending too much time in the damp and mushroomy corners of the internet instead of developing an actual personality in the real world. He’s less an anti-fascist soldier and more a Travis Bickle wannabe wanker.

But Charlie Kirk was a humongous piece of shit and I am glad he’s dead. One fewer humongous pieces of shit to have to listen to. I would never advocate the murder of a man like him, and like I said, I think the shooter was a colossal cunt who unleashed way more danger and harm to marginalised groups than Kirk was capable of provoking on his own. But thank fuck he’s gone. Silver linings n’all that 🤷‍

Can’t whistle loudly. I can barely do it quietly. I certainly can’t do that badass thing where you put fingers from both hands into your mouth and blow.

Me when my keys tumbled out of my breast pocket into a fire I was poking and I instinctively snatched them back out.

I feel bad that his children had to witness that, and even if they hadn’t been there (which they were) they’d undoubtedly have the video clip shoved in their faces eventually. That’s a hell of a way to lose a parent.

The fact that he died while in the middle of talking about trans mass shooters being a huge problem certainly makes it feel like cosmic karma at work. I struggle to give a shit about the man himself being shot dead. But I do worry about political violence… it’s a very rare occasion when murdering someone sitting in a chair talking is a good idea. Not a single person in his right-wing sphere of repugnance is going to do any self-reflection and change their ways, they’ll just become even more rabidly anti-everything left of Hitler. Shit like this doesn’t go unanswered too often. Violence is a contagion with no cure except time, and the clock gets set back another decade every time someone retaliates. I’m sure we could chain all of these assassinations together into a causal sequence. But even if they’re all independent events, the narrative-makers will be hard at work making it sound like a grand battle of the ages, so the result is the same either way.

Source: History, memory…

P.S. Any bets that the shooter was a MAGA nut? Seems to be the trend 👀

I was an early adopter of No Man’s Sky (long before the shift in public perception), and I fucking loved it back then, and love it now as well. But admitting that in public a few years back was tantamount to saying that stapling your child to a rabid badger was a great alternative to hiring a babysitter.

I instantly and impulsively pre-ordered a special superduper collector’s edition of Lake Mungo for ~£80. I probably shouldn’t have done that. I love the film and will no doubt love the goodies and bonus features, but 80 fucking quid…

https://shop.umbrellaent.com.au/products/lake-mungo-2008-4k-blu-ray-collectors-edition

Arbitrary choice, but Wherever I May Roam by Metallica never gets old for me.

Did you forget to microwave it first?

The locations of past atrocities (N. Ireland).

Not even joking. It’s a huge part of our tourism industry. It’s like those Jack the Ripper tours in Whitechapel. Living here, you barely even think about them, but visitors act like they’re meeting Taylor Swift when they spot a bullet hole, bless 'em.

Any non-cunts in the EV manufacturing space? Or is that a prerequisite?

The nihilist school shooters of the world are way more litigious than I thought possible.

I am so terminally carless and unautomobile pilled that I have literally no clue what this is about.

I have it on good authority that love is

I agree with this sentiment. It’s insane to me that people need to cough up thousands of dollars to see their loved one off. It’s so wrong, although I do accept that funeral providers can’t simply give away their services for free. I would support a taxation that had a provision for funerary needs for all citizens. Universal death care. I mean, we’re all gonna die. It’s not like you can say “oh boo hoo I’m paying all this tax just for some other cunt to die on my dime??” because your day will come soon enough and you don’t want your family having to blow their savings on putting you in a hole.

I wanna be harvested for organs like a Chinese dissident, and whatever is left can be mulched and used to grow trees or something.

But if we’re talking “cheapest”, in the UK and Ireland there’s a pauper’s grave thing where the state will put you in a very basic grave and with a very basic marker. Not sure if you need to be poor to qualify, or if they’ll just do it when asked.

Honestly, I don’t. I came up in the '80s, wasn’t diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn’t feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.

Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish ‘Troubles’. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were ‘yesterday’ if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.

If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I’m not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the ‘70s you were your parents’ property and didn’t develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.

I still wouldn’t bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I’m glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.