The decline of Cracked.com has been well documented around the general internet. Lots of people are realizing what they were becoming in terms of hyper-politicization and militancy over several years, but recently we have crossed a threshold. Cracked.com getting attacked by shit-pits like Britebart and The NRA regarding their content is not really something you'd find surprising (The NRA are gun-nuts and Brietbart is just terrible on every level). But when Huffington Post and F.I.R.E. have to call you out for basically the same bullshit, and fan blogs and entertainment websites have to take a step back and start being critical, then that's a different story. Since that one article (now deleted) that said having the World Cup in your country would be more harmful than helpful, and when it comes to the USA we can expect absolute bedlam (all the while being obtusely oblivious to the fact that the USA did indeed host the World Cup in 1994 without incident), Cracked.com has been moving away from pure, and puerile, humor to a strange changeling of Buzzfeed listicles and Rolling Stone style life-experience reporting, to finally going all-out SJW in the course of about 5-6 years.
What happened? Oh, David Wong showed up (the guy who got kicked off his own AMA for acting like a tool. No, seriously he did).
David Wong's real name is Jason Pargin by the way. Yeah take one look at the guy and you'd never ever think "Wong."
And before you go and say "well you know those stories on the right side didn't all come out the same day" you can then ask yourself; how much does that f-ing matter if they all in fact came out on that site. Because they did.
So as Cracked.com continued their march down that path for better or for worse, something interesting happened and and that "something" was quite recently. There started to be a bit less politically and socially absolutist assertion pieces and a bit more actually funny stuff. Oh, not real funny as in the days of Swaim and the only O'Brien at Cracked.com that matters, but at least it wasn't the barrage of "hey-hey ho-ho this penis party's got to go!" stuff they'd been putting out. And then on February 27, 2017, they published this piece:
There's nothing more awful out there I guess... yeah nothing at all.
Yeah, according to this Cracked article, super-atheist Bill Maher, the guy who made the film "Religulous," is totally a "religious bigot" because questioning the veracity of any religion is ok, except that one (I'll give you a hint, it's not Scientology). They go on to treat Maher's show as if it's Meet The Fucking Press and not a late night commentary program created and hosted by someone who is, at his core, a comedian. It then continues to equate the appearance of Brian the Dog on an in-episode segment of Maher's program on an episode of Family Guy, to some sort of serious barometer on transphobia and its implication on social policies. Yep, Family Guy that bastion of cultural and racial sensitivity.
Totally a perfect template for no social argument what so ever.
You can think that Bill Maher is awful. How anyone reacts to what Bill Maher says and does are matters of opinion, and they will undoubtedly range between "he sucks so bad I'm gonna murder him" to something like, "ready for your fellatio Mr. Maher sir?" to which I am thinking the majority of them will fall somewhere in between. Additionally, the fact that this article contains the phrase "Oroborus of white male privilege" when speaking about Maher's efforts to legalize Marijuana, is like having a neon sign blazing out that your insulated life in a social value echo chamber might be impeding an ability to reach reasonable conclusions. But that sign is on your back, and the one wearing it will never see it, which just punishes the rest of us.
But I am not here to defend Bill Maher (you can read that crazyness for yourself and you'll realize no one has to). What I am here to do is continue the story of what happened next. Cracked.com's reaction was first to start deleting comments, not for being obscene or profane, but for disagreeing with the tenents that the article bases its conclusions on. Now this is something they have been long known to do, and they continue to delete comments that the author or editors don't like for political reasons. What was surprising is that, in addition to deleting comments, Cracked.com actually blocked the IP addresses of the people who made the comments entirely. Someone who made a comment that was deleted was simply met with a blank screen should they try to access the site's home page or any other page on the site. I know this because when my desktop was being given the "oops something went wrong" message, the separate tablet I had running on the same network was able not only to refresh content on the site, but leave additional comments via a different username/login. So now, if you incur the wrath of the arbiters of social justice on Cracked, you can expect to be kept completely out. No dissent, no outside information. That reminds me of something... what could it be..?
Cracked.com has seemed to have just skipped the next step of Full Mcintosh and went straight to Little Red Book territory and has moved house directly to The Left Pole. For those unfamiliar, The Left Pole is a concept developed by the cognitive scientist and Harvard Professor, Steven Pinker. To paraphrase, in that the earth has a north pole and south pole, and if you are at the south pole, then any direction moved away from that singular point is going to be ipso facto moving north. At The Left Pole, the points and doctrine are so extreme and absolute, that any move away or critical analysis of them is considered a move to The Right Pole and therefore right-wing. It doesn't matter what it is, but if you have any disagreements with anything they say or do in the name of their doctrine, you are ipso facto right-wing, wing-right, alt-right, far-right, old-right, right-right, or a member of the left-rights... and you'd have to be on Crack in order to think like that.
Remember when it was just cats, cats, cats cats cats...? Cheeseburger anyone?
So after they did that, they eventually backed off and went back to just deleting comments. But like an alcoholic who has that one drink and then a day or two later goes on a bender because of it, Cracked.com went completely down the rabbit hole, hit the bottom, bounced back up to apogee, screamed at everyone who happened to be standing around the general vicinity, and then fell back down. This happened on March 1, 2017.
No caption. Just frowny face.
Does any of that look funny, comedic, humorous, or even satirical? I'll save you the trouble on clicking on any of that; No it's not. It's the Following:
-TRUMP BAAAAD! (like tell us something we don't know).
-Video about depression is depressing
-BE AFRAID!
-Look at me! I just got an undergraduate degree in Political Science!
-This should be on Live Journal but because I'm John Cheese they're gonna put it here.
-Not as funny as you'd think
-Thanks for telling me asshats are asshats... any jokes about them? Or are you actually expecting me to have not known this stuff beforehand?
None, and I mean NONE of this was funny. None of this was written TO be funny. It was just fucking sad. Go see for yourself. Cracked.com March 1, 2017. The day Cracked.com's cancer metastasized.
That "This should be on Live Journal" comment is something I actually posted on the Cracked.com article, but someone (and I won't say who) was just too ...emo, to let it stay there and deleted it. That's the shit you do on your own YouTube channel, not what a commercial website valued at 39 MILLION DOLLARS that calls itself " America's Only Humor & Video Site Since 1958 should be doing. I don't even delete comments here that are critical. I use them as the genesis of conversations that might lead to a better understanding. If you are not willing to compromise the conditions of your own environment to hear the thoughts of others who are nothing but divergent with you, then you are incapable of gaining value.
Anyone know what The Battle in Seattle was like? I am sure a few people do. Anyone remember being there? I am sure a few people do. You know what ruined it? Those fuckers in the black hoods, and the ones with bricks breaking windows at McDonald's and doing it right next to the Union march (that had a permit by the way) so that the shock troops of the police would swoop in and just start kicking everyone's ass. You can argue that some were agent provocateurs, and they do exist. But I saw enough of them, and you see, they all aren't agent provocateurs, but artards who try to start violent revolution because they read Abby Hoffman or whatever a year or two ago. All it takes is a hit from one or two of them to start the sad downward spiral into absolute bedlam where no one can get a single message across and everyone is just throwing shit at each other, figuratively or literally, it doesn't matter. Result is the same. Cracked.com is fast becoming that element.
So, that cred out of the way, I know bullshit when I see it. The other O'Brien (the anorexic douche looking one), probably doesn't give a crap about any of this and just wants clicks. I hope he gets them, but he won't be getting much from me. The rest of them over there... yeah they drank the Kool-Aid by the gallon. This will cause a pigeon-toe effect that will perhaps show an increase in their traffic during the short run, but in another 5 years when the cause du'decade isn't anything they can possibly relate to in time (seriously, you ever see an irrelevant brand suddenly catch up to relevancy?) he sure as hell won't be there and the Kool-Aid drinkers will be going down like the Titanic and saying "I just don't know what went wrong".
Whole new meaning now, isn't it?
Cracked.com has gone beyond an Oroborus of SJW insanity, it has become a Chimera of Left Pole absolutism, moving between the planes of fanatical reason and reasonable fanaticism. Unaware of the direction of the winds that it, with bird-like movements, soars through. Striking with its head and piercing its beak into current pop-culture, all mistaken for the body politic, hoping to inject positive social congruity, but it is an action which serves only to leave a septic bite that simply horrifies the tissue around it with which it sought to be relevant. And once it passes its attack, there is no progression of its will, because not but scars remain. Scars which retain the memory of being that which absorbed the intensity of absolutist thought from such a sting, and a piercing from irrational anger, free from all reason. Cracked.com is naught but a terror bird, ready to do the like of its kin, and tethered to that, The Left Pole, which fewer and fewer dare approach, despite the siren song of true goodness which it represents. True goodness. For they are those whom it would try to eviscerate, forgetting that in the process it does but sheer the flesh from its own legs leaving only the bare calcified stalks of legs to support an absolutist inflated body. They shall then turn their backs away from it or at most give but the resistance of paper swords, when a true malignant blow comes to shatter them.
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