Historical Lolcow General

[darkhorse816]

Admittedly, I'm not from New York state, so it was pretty ignorant of me to claim that East Hampton was "bumfuck." I still think little Edie counts as a lolcow though because of her delusions (I'll admit I'm kinda an asshole for finding delusional behavior to be hilarious, even if it's caused by mental illness. But I guess that's why I'm here).

If it helps, they ended up turning their once magnificent mansion into something that resembles "bumfuck" due to their deteriorating mental states. There's this really good HBO biopic about them, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. And there's a musical about them as well.

With the Beales, they are less lolcow-ish, and more eccentric. There's some legitimate sadness to them as well. Little Edie had alopecia that resurfaced due to her anxiety, so that's why she was she dressed like that (and honestly, she kind of pulled it off). Little Edie actually wanted to be a singer/performer, but kind of developed a co-dependent relationship with her mother, but wanted to break free as well. By the time she got onstage, she just wanted to be onstage, that was it. She liked performing. I think with both of them, they were self-aware of their status. They were also very lonely. There was something admirable about them, their confidence, their bond, which is more than I can say for most lolcows. And they never meant harm to anyone else. One of the problems with them, especially Big Edie, was that they were the creme de la creme, they were socialites, they never thought they'd have to adapt, they were used to people coming to them, being waited on. So that's what tributed to their decay. They were literally a product of their upbringing and times. Whereas now, there are ways for exceptional individuals like Chris to get a job, and there is research about autism or whatever said lolcow has so they can't BS their way through it. And Little Edie did have a happy ending, she had people who honestly admired her and friends. She lived a quiet, peaceful life, and according to wikipedia, she'd go swimming every day. Her body was found because one of her fans was actually worried about her. They were both actually charming.

 

[Hummingbird]

I'd consider Carrie Nation, the infamous prohibition advocate a lolcow. Her main tactic was being "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like." She claimed that God told her to begin her mission when she way praying and her antics got so bad that her second husband divorced her. Some other lolzy things were her being happy about President McKinley's assassination because drinkers get what they deserve and saying this, "Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whisky-greased, red-eyed devils."

 

[Pinball Lizard]

I'd consider Carrie Nation, the infamous prohibition advocate a lolcow. Her main tactic was being "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like." She claimed that God told her to begin her mission when she way praying and her antics got so bad that her second husband divorced her. Some other lolzy things were her being happy about President McKinley's assassination because drinkers get what they deserve and saying this, "Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whisky-greased, red-eyed devils."

Didn't Jesus give a whole lot of people a whole lot of wine? Surprisingly inattentive of her.

 

[Hummingbird]

Didn't Jesus give a whole lot of people a whole lot of wine? Surprisingly inattentive of her.

Mental disorders did run in her family and her first husband died due to his alcoholism so those might've helped cloud her judgement.

 

[AnOminous]

I'd consider Carrie Nation, the infamous prohibition advocate a lolcow. Her main tactic was being "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like." She claimed that God told her to begin her mission when she way praying and her antics got so bad that her second husband divorced her. Some other lolzy things were her being happy about President McKinley's assassination because drinkers get what they deserve and saying this, "Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whisky-greased, red-eyed devils."

I don't know, anyone who goes into bars full of drunks and demolishes them with an axe as a hobby has at least some of my respect.

 

[TheMightyMonarch]

I'd consider Carrie Nation, the infamous prohibition advocate a lolcow. Her main tactic was being "a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn't like." She claimed that God told her to begin her mission when she way praying and her antics got so bad that her second husband divorced her. Some other lolzy things were her being happy about President McKinley's assassination because drinkers get what they deserve and saying this, "Men are nicotine soaked, beer besmirched, whisky-greased, red-eyed devils."

In a sense, I feel bad for Carrie A. Nation and other prohibitionists. Although their goals and tactics were definitely ridiculous, alcoholism was a big problem in the 19th century. Life back then was much harder than it is now and there was a lot less to do when you weren't working or whatever, so I can see why people would turn to drinking. Plus, there wasn't a precursor incident to prohibition to tell prohibitionists that banning all alcohol is a really stupid idea. It's kinda like they had to see it for themselves.

But yeah, she's still a cow though. And that last quote indicates that she would fit right in on Tumblr.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid
Ovid the Roman poet was basically the original nice guy. He wrote whiny faggy poems about such varying topics like how all the legionnaire JERKS were stealing all the pretty girls, how all girls just care about looks and muscles and not how nice you are, and how he deserves to be famous and bang a lot of attractive women.

He was also an edgelord analchest, and bitched about the government until Augustus exiled him to a desert island, where he wrote whiny letters about how he deserved a girlfriend and was an underappreciated genius until he died.

Wikipedia says that he was at least married once and had a daughter. So at least he got more action in comparison to your average loveshy.

 

[VLAD]

It happened fairly recently, but it's an amazing story and I'm not sure where else to put it.

Byron (Low Tax) Looper successfully ran for the position of Putnam County, Tennessee tax assessor in 1996. Despite making no public appearances and participating in no debates at all, he managed to win after inundating the airwaves with negative campaign ads and legally changing his middle name from Anthony to (Low Tax), parentheses included. Yep, he's the namesake of Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka from Something Awful.

As tax assessor, he did an admirably shitty job. He wasted state resources on printing out something like two or three press releases a week about how good a job he was doing. Meanwhile, he was indicted on fourteen counts of official misconduct, theft of services and official oppression for theft, misuse of county property and misuse of county employees. His former girlfriend sued him for $1.2 million and claimed that he got her pregnant after forcing her into sex and used his position to steal her house. He also misrepresented her as his wife in campaign ads.

This is already ridiculous enough, but Byron (Low Tax) Looper ran for Tennessee's 6th Congressional district, as well as State Senate, in 1998. He finished third in a field of four in the former primary, but he won the State Senate primary by default since he was the only candidate running on the Republican ticket. The stage was set for a battle between (Low Tax) Looper and the long term Democratic incumbent, Tommy Burks. But the election took a sudden turn on October 19th of that year when Looper drove up to Burks' farm and straight-up shot his opponent in the fucking head.

Tennessee state law required that a candidate who died forty days before the election would have their name removed from the ballot, and Looper was all set to actually win the race based on this absurd technicality, while being simultaneously indicted for actual real-life bullet-in-the-face assassination of his opponent. Burks' widow ran as a write-in candidate and swept the election with 95% of the vote.

Byron (Low Tax) Looper was finally convicted of murder in the year 2000. He went through at least six attorneys during his trial, one of whom filed a sealed court document stating that their own moral code prevented them from being Looper's attorney any longer. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and died in his cell in 2013. Charlotte Burks held her late husband's State Senate seat until 2015, when she retired from politics.

 

[Pinball Lizard]

While we're on assassins, I'm surprised no one has mentioned John Hinckley, the guy who almost killed President Reagan. In addition to being an assassin, he was also a stalker, loveshy, and possible proto-fictionkin. He was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver and its leading lady Jodie Foster, to the point of enrolling in Yale just to be near her and so he could slip creepy notes and poems under her dorm door. When she still wouldn't pay attention to him, he decided he had to "become" Travis Bickle, the film's main character, and go out and murder a politician, as Bickle tries to do in the film. Surely then senpai would notice him, right? He wrote her a whiny letter before he went out to do the deed, and nearly killed Reagan and his press secretary James Brady (the latter was shot in the head and crippled for life). He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, which caused the country to flip its collective shit and pass new laws about who the insanity defense can and can't apply to. He remains in the funny farm to this day.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

Mark David Chapman was also a proto lolcow. He was absolutely obsessed with catcher in the rye and was fictionkin to holden caufield and he was a massive attention whore

Herostratus arsonist of the temple of artemis was also probably a lolcow as he did it only to have his name remembered

 

[AnOminous]

Mark David Chapman was also a proto lolcow. He was absolutely obsessed with catcher in the rye and was fictionkin to holden caufield and he was a massive attention whore

Why don't people get that Holden Caulfield was an asshole and a lolcow, sort of like Salinger himself? Mark David Chapman is exactly the kind of asshole who would worship that jackass.

 

[Darwin Watterson]

I think Timothy Treadwell (aka the "Grizzly Man," the nature documentary guy who got killed by a bear along with his girlfriend in 2003) was something of a careercow. If you watch the documentary, you'll find that he was a very...interesting person. For example, when he was about 18 or 19, he got his name changed (his original last name was Dexter) and started pretending that he was an orphan from Australia or something like that. The Grizzly Man documentary contains a lot of footage of Treadwell's eccentric behavior, including throwing a tantrum when a fox steals his hat, marveling over bear shit, swatting a fly unironically right after delivering a speech about how all life was sacred, and screaming at various gods to make it rain more.

 

[Pinball Lizard]

H.P. Lovecraft. Among other things, he was extremely paranoid, ridiculously racist even by the standards of the '20s and '30s, and thought that the U.S. should go back to being ruled by England. He was obsessed with England in general and basically thought people without English blood weren't fully human.

 

[Roosechu]

Gianluca Buonanno (Northern League Party), member of the Italian Parliment.

He is famous for bringing stuff into the Parliment: a cardboard pitchfork, cardboard signs, a pair of handcuffs, foundation to look like a dark refugee, a fish.
He is also notorious for wearing a Merkel mask at the European Parliment.

"Mr. Buonanno, put that bass away!"

 

[Darwin Watterson]

H.P. Lovecraft. Among other things, he was extremely paranoid, ridiculously racist even by the standards of the '20s and '30s, and thought that the U.S. should go back to being ruled by England. He was obsessed with England in general and basically thought people without English blood weren't fully human.

One of his stories (which one exactly escapes me) contains the "horrifying twist" that the villains are black people, or something along those lines.

Edit: It was "Medusa's Coils," and it was actually treating an interracial marriage as something horrific. This is the final part of it:

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside — the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation — was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman — for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.

 

[Pinball Lizard]

King Shaka, the greatest ruler of the Zulu Empire, went completely batshit toward the end of his life after the death of his mother. Among other things, he forbid his people from growing crops or drinking milk for a year, sent the army to make sure people were grieving enough (and kill them if they weren't), and even butchered cows at random so their calves would "know what it's like to not have a mother." He was eventually assassinated on the order of his own brothers to stop him from running the empire into the ground by being such a homicidally pathetic momma's boy. A glimpse into the future of CWCville after Barb passes, perhaps?

 

[Darwin Watterson]

Nobody's mentioned Caligula, one of the biggest horrorcows in history, yet? Dude was an absolute nutcase.

He had a 3-mile-long bridge of boats made across the Gulf of Baeiae and then rode his horse across it just to spite an astrologer who said he didn't have a chance of becoming emperor, had incestuous relationships with his sisters and (if I remember correctly) would whore them out, ordered men with nice hair to have their heads shaved 'cause he was insecure about going bald prematurely, bankrupted his empire on orgies and building a palace for his horse, impregnated his sister and then disemboweled her to abort the baby, and made a horse a senator.

There was also the time he decided to wage war on Neptune (Roman god of the sea). He had his troops stab at the water, and then made them collect seashells as "trophies" after he declared victory. He would make laws and post them on very high pillars in very small text, making them unreadable. He'd do this specifically so he'd be able to punish people for breaking laws they weren't aware of.

Those are just some of his antics. His reign was pretty much one long sperg fit. Eventually, his people got sick of his shit and killed him along with most of his relatives.

 

[VLAD]

Nobody's mentioned Caligula, one of the biggest horrorcows in history, yet? Dude was an absolute nutcase.

He had a 3-mile-long bridge of boats made across the Gulf of Baeiae and then rode his horse across it just to spite an astrologer who said he didn't have a chance of becoming emperor, had incestuous relationships with his sisters and (if I remember correctly) would whore them out, ordered men with nice hair to have their heads shaved 'cause he was insecure about going bald prematurely, bankrupted his empire on orgies and building a palace for his horse, impregnated his sister and then disemboweled her to abort the baby, and made a horse a senator.

There was also the time he decided to wage war on Neptune (Roman god of the sea). He had his troops stab at the water, and then made them collect seashells as "trophies" after he declared victory. He would make laws and post them on very high pillars in very small text, making them unreadable. He'd do this specifically so he'd be able to punish people for breaking laws they weren't aware of.

Those are just some of his antics. His reign was pretty much one long sperg fit. Eventually, his people got sick of his shit and killed him along with most of his relatives.

A great way of seeing how much the Romans hated Caligula is when you take a look at the name we remember him by. It's his childhood nickname.

His proper name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. When he was a little boy, his father would bring him along on military campaigns in Germania. The young Gaius had a kiddie-size soldier's outfit that he liked to run around in at the base camp, complete with his own pair of child-size caliga, or soldier's boots.

In Latin, you form the diminutive of a noun by throwing in an -ul- infix before the word's declension ending. It's equivalent to dog versus doggie in English; the Romans would do it as canus versus canulus.

So when we call him Caligula, that literally translates to "booties." And the fact that we remember him by that name, as opposed to any other Imperial title, tells you just how much the Romans couldn't stand him.

 

[Mrs Paul]

H.P. Lovecraft. Among other things, he was extremely paranoid, ridiculously racist even by the standards of the '20s and '30s, and thought that the U.S. should go back to being ruled by England. He was obsessed with England in general and basically thought people without English blood weren't fully human.

A real shame, since he was a kickass writer.

 

[Pinball Lizard]

Sultan Murad IV of the Ottomans was basically Turkish Caligula. On the one hand it's hard to blame him for being nuts, as he came from a family that periodically murdered each other and he was hurried onto the throne at the age of twelve by his scheming mother, but once he was old enough to assert his power he went completely bananas. He banned a ridiculous amount of things including coffee, with the penalty for breaking the ban being death, executed all but one of his brothers to prevent them from plotting against him, would shoot boatmen who passed too close to him on the river with arrows, and is rumored to have been an honest-to-gosh serial killer in his spare time. Even in death he was an exceptional(ly awful) individual, his very last order being to put his youngest brother and heir to death for being a slow-in-the-mind. As this would've caused a gigantic succession crisis, the order was not carried out.

 

[Darwin Watterson]

Martin Bryant, perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre, is a tragic case. He likely wouldn't have done what he did had he been born later. He was severely autistic, and leading up to the massacre he began to feel more and more like the world was against him. He'd try to make friends, but nobody wanted to associate with him because they all thought he was a weirdo. This was all before the internet really took off. Had he been able to socialize online, he may have been able to find a community that accepted him (or at least a less violent outlet for his anxieties like YouTube videos or blog posts).