Historical Lolcow General

[Syaoran Li]

Honestly, Benito Mussolini was a lolcow and so were most of the leaders and big-wigs in Fascist Italy.

The only one who wasn't a complete lolcow was Giovanni Gentile, and he was still a bit of a sperg who mainly looks better by comparison because Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels plagiarized his works and made them even more autistic by throwing in a bunch of Nordcuck occult bullshit.

If the totalitarian political philosophers of the early-to-mid 20th Century were like lolcows, then Giovanni Gentile would be David Gonterman, Alfred Rosenberg would be Chris, and Leon Trotsky would be ADF.

 

[Rick Pratt]

Jozef Mengele and Hitler would be lolcows
Jozef is more of a horrorcow though

 

[TowinKarz]

If the totalitarian political philosophers of the early-to-mid 20th Century were like lolcows, then Giovanni Gentile would be David Gonterman, Alfred Rosenberg would be Chris, and Leon Trotsky would be ADF.

Remember, the world's worst conflict was set off by a guy who failed art school......

 

[Darwin Watterson]

So recently a British friend of mine told me about this guy over there called "Purple Aki." Most British Kiwis would probably know right away who this is, because he's apparently reached "mythical creature" status.

For the uninitiated, though, Purple Aki is a hulking behemoth of a man (6'5, 310lbs) who, for over 20 years, has had a reputation of appearing out of nowhere to young athletic boys, feeling and measuring their muscles, and getting them to lift him over their shoulders and do squats.

He even got someone killed doing this; after one of the boys he did this to went to the cops, he saw Purple Aki at the pool after he'd gone for a swim. As he'd gotten this offensive linebacker of a man in trouble with the law, he naturally wasn't too keen on seeing him again because he probably wouldn't escape the encounter in one piece. So he hightailed it. In trying to escape from Purple Aki, he jumped onto the train tracks and electrocuted himself. Purple Aki got a manslaughter charge for this incident, that was later overturned on a technicality; even though he absolutely was pursuing this kid, he successfully argued that standing on the platform and staring into trains wasn't illegal. He also got awarded £35,000 for crying racism.

Since then, Purple Aki has been in and out of prison, has gotten literally hundreds of charges, and was even given a special sexual offenses prevention order that banned him from touching and measuring muscles, and asking people to do squats. This ban is no longer in effect, but was the only one of its kind in British history.

 

[Gingervitis]

Purple Aki got a manslaughter charge for this incident, that was later overturned on a technicality; even though he absolutely was pursuing this kid, he successfully argued that standing on the platform and staring into trains wasn't illegal. He also got awarded £35,000 for crying racism.

Since then, Purple Aki has been in and out of prison, has gotten literally hundreds of charges, and was even given a special sexual offenses prevention order that banned him from touching and measuring muscles, and asking people to do squats.

The British legal system in action, folks.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

So recently a British friend of mine told me about this guy over there called "Purple Aki." Most British Kiwis would probably know right away who this is, because he's apparently reached "mythical creature" status.

For the uninitiated, though, Purple Aki is a hulking behemoth of a man (6'5, 310lbs) who, for over 20 years, has had a reputation of appearing out of nowhere to young athletic boys, feeling and measuring their muscles, and getting them to lift him over their shoulders and do squats.

He even got someone killed doing this; after one of the boys he did this to went to the cops, he saw Purple Aki at the pool after he'd gone for a swim. As he'd gotten this offensive linebacker of a man in trouble with the law, he naturally wasn't too keen on seeing him again because he probably wouldn't escape the encounter in one piece. So he hightailed it. In trying to escape from Purple Aki, he jumped onto the train tracks and electrocuted himself. Purple Aki got a manslaughter charge for this incident, that was later overturned on a technicality; even though he absolutely was pursuing this kid, he successfully argued that standing on the platform and staring into trains wasn't illegal. He also got awarded £35,000 for crying racism.

Since then, Purple Aki has been in and out of prison, has gotten literally hundreds of charges, and was even given a special sexual offenses prevention order that banned him from touching and measuring muscles, and asking people to do squats. This ban is no longer in effect, but was the only one of its kind in British history.

Has a thread.

 

[Captain Hastings Official]

Since Francis E. Dec, Esq., has already, inevitably, been mentioned, I'll bring up my #2 favorite historical lolcow, John Murray Spear. Back in 19th century Massachusetts - which was as fertile a breeding ground for kooks of all varieties as has ever been found upon this earth - he set up a relatively early Spiritualist cult. Now, if you don't know, the Spiritualists were the seance-giving, automatic-writing-receiving, ectoplasm-summoning sort of people that Harry Houdini relentlessly debunked and Arthur Conan Doyle relentlessly fell for.

But Spear was rather more inventive - and possibly actually insane - than your average table-rapper. He instructed his cult that he had been in contact with the spirits of deceased geniuses such as Benjamin Franklin, and that they were telling him to construct an electrical Messiah, "The New Motive Power", on a hill overlooking the Atlantic in Lynn, MA. Together, his cult labored to build a massive anthropomorphic sculpture/machine made of conductive and magnetic metals (of which, AFAIK, sadly no reliable drawings survive) whose "birth" was ritualistically consummated by the public copulation of Spear with one of his female cultists (the symbolic 'New Mary') and which would usher in a Utopian age of technological progress and spiritual fulfillment, immanentizing the eschaton and bringing forth the Millennium.

It, uh, didn't work out. This being 19th century America, when the press was genuinely popular, local, and free, he was roundly mocked in New England papers*. Ultimately, his New Motive Power was disassembled and his cult rather rapidly decreased in size.

Of course, now, 150+ years later, the idea that we'll achieve a perfect Universalist utopia through the exercise of complicated electrical equipment is one of the most well-represented ideologies among America's ruling classes, and so one has to pause and wonder about the efficacy of Spear's Messianic rite.

*Really, I think that "editor for a mid-19th century Massachusetts newspaper" has got to be pretty high on any Kiwi's list of desirable historical occupations.

 

[Syaoran Li]

While not technically a lolcow, I do want to mention a historical lolcow phenomenon known as the penny dreadfuls.

If Kiwi Farms existed in Victorian times, then we'd probably have a thread on penny dreadful books and their fans in the Community Watch section.

The penny dreadful was a genre of cheap low-end books that were extremely popular among youths in the Victorian Era, both in Britain and in North America.

The genre is more commonly associated with British writers since most of the surviving penny dreadfuls were from British authors, but the genre was also very popular in the United States and in mainland Europe as well.

Their name came from their low price and the fact that the subject matter was often sensationalist and highly lurid for their times.

Penny dreadfuls were like a 19th Century equivalent of fan fiction, both in terms of its ubiquity and popularity among teenagers and the fact that the genre had a very negative reputation among serious literary circles at the time.

Heck, a significant portion of penny dreadfuls even used pre-existing characters and properties since copyright laws were often lax or poorly enforced back then, at least in terms of intellectual property rights.

A lot of tropes commonly associated with fanfiction today can also be found in the penny dreadfuls, including the OC who's a blatant rip-off of a preexisting character.

Lemon fanfics? Yep, that too was a popular genre back then.

A lot of the fucked-up porn from the Victorian Era was in the form of written erotica published as penny dreadfuls and usually sold on the black market, including reprints of works such as Fanny Hill or the writings of the Marquis De Sade.

Not only was the genre of the penny dreadful often looked down on, but so were the fans of these works.

Penny dreadfuls were primarily read by teenage boys and young men in their early twenties who were typically from a working poor background. It's a strange contrast to the primary readers and writers of online fan fiction, who are often middle class teenage girls and middle-aged women.

The common stereotype of the penny dreadful reader was that of a lower class hoodlum who was just smart enough to be literate but often too dumb or too much of a philistine to read "proper" literature.

As printing became more ubiquitous, a lot of the people who read penny dreadfuls would try their hand at writing their own works and then sell the manuscripts to less-then-reputable publishers, who usually published the prints under an obvious pseudonym and would not pay royalties to the original author, as most of them were poor teenagers who were often selling their manuscripts for drinking money.

The penny dreadfuls largely died out in the Edwardian Era as new forms of media such as cinema and recorded music became available.

You also had dime novels, which were seen as a step up from penny dreadfuls but below the kind of works that were seen as legitimate literary fiction.

If the penny dreadfuls were like fan fiction, then dime novels were like cheap paperbacks like the ones sold at airports and dollar stores. Dime novels survived well into the 20th Century, at least in the United States.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I nominate T. Cullen Davis.

Holy shit, what a whacko. Had a white-trash wife and wound up separating from her. Later on, was accused of murdering her boyfriend, her daughter, and a bystander and trying to kill her (ironically, her breast implants stopped the round). Goes on trial, beats the rap.

Then he gets hooked up on an attempted murder rap for trying to hire a hitman to knock off his ex-wife and the judge who presided over the first trial. Guess who beat the rap again? If you said 'you got to be kidding, again?', well, welcome to the wonderful weird world of T. Cullen Davis.

Good times.

 

[Ceiling Kitten]

The people in charge of the Rape Nanking are horrorcows, John Rabe in comparison was the only Nazi I know that turned into a good guy because the Japanese at Nanking were that pure evil

And then there's Surgeon General Shiro Ishii and his Unit 731. Bunch of absolutely sick, batshit insane motherfuckers, holy crap. No wonder Ishii was referred to as "Japanese Mengele", because he WAS.

 

[Francis E. Dec Esc.]

Cyrus Teed was a 19th century doctor and cult leader who declared himself a messiah and prophet after being badly shocked during an electrical experiment in 1869. He subsequently renamed himself 'Koresh' after the Hebrew transliteration of the Persian king Cyrus, and started a Time Cube-esque cult called 'Koreshianity' based around the notion that the earth is hollow and we live on the inside, and the sun is a giant battery powered lightbulb. When he died in 1908, Teed's body was watched over by his followers hoping he'd come back from the dead, but they gave up after it visibly started to rot.

 

[bigshot]

Ed Gein

 

[Mexican_Wizard_711]

I'll put on my money on Tarrare,the stuff he does makes look like he's a mix of Amberlynn Reid and Nick Bates.

 

[REGENDarySumanai]

Emperor Caligula ( Gaius Julius Caesar )
Ruled Rome for 4 years, and in that time he was known for his wasteful spending, sadism and s3xu@l perversion.

They even made a movie about it

Caligula means Little Boots. His nickname is more well known than his real name.

 

[AnOminous]

Caligula means Little Boots. His nickname is more well known than his real name.

Nobody wants to disgrace the name of Julius Caesar by calling him that even if his name is more or less Gay Julius Caesar.

 

[TrippinKahlua]

Christopher Colomubus was kind of a lolcow when he wasnt sailing and navigating.

 

[Ceiling Kitten]

Caligula means Little Boots. His nickname is more well known than his real name.

There's some degree of discussion regarding how much of an actual lolcow Caligula was. If I remember correctly the ones writing Roman history in these days were affiliated to the Senate, and Caligula absolutely HATED the Senate and defied them whenever he could. So it's not unlikely that they exaggerated the bad things he did to make him look worse than he actually was.

(There's also how he seemingly started more or less okay but, but few months after his reign began he got severely sick and THEN went loopy. Hm. )

 

[Darwin Watterson]

What about Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong? She’s a pretty good example of a horrorcow I think. Some of you might know her as the main subject of the Netflix documentary, Evil Genius.

For those who don’t know, I’m not gonna give too much away because it’s a really good documentary that I’d recommend watching. But a barebones explanation is that Marjorie wanted her dad out of the picture so she could collect inheritance. To this end, she came up with a stupid and needlessly complicated bank heist plan with the help of a few beta orbiters (most of whom were cows in their own right) to get the money needed to hire a hitman to kill him. When the plan predictably fell apart, Marjorie went into full on denial mode, maintaining her innocence to her dying breath, insisting that this was just the result of those dang dirty trolls plotting against her in spite of literally everything pointing to her.

 

[AnOminous]

She's better known, though, for the bizarre bank robbery that ended with this:

Spoiler: splodeydope

The scheme involved what the kablooey dude above believed to be a fake bomb. It wasn't fake. It wasn't supposed to end that way but this nutter's bizarre and overly complicated scheme ended that way after a series of missteps along the way.

 

[Oskar Dirlewanger]

There's some degree of discussion regarding how much of an actual lolcow Caligula was. If I remember correctly the ones writing Roman history in these days were affiliated to the Senate, and Caligula absolutely HATED the Senate and defied them whenever he could. So it's not unlikely that they exaggerated the bad things he did to make him look worse than he actually was.

(There's also how he seemingly started more or less okay but, but few months after his reign began he got severely sick and THEN went loopy. Hm. )

Roland Auguet's biography of Caligula deconstructs the common myths about him. The actual data available points to how he was very popular among the actual Roman people and his policies were reasonable and made with real intent to improve the well-being of the citizens of Rome. However as you said he absolutely hated the Senate, and he kinda had a good reason to do that since thanks to the Senate his beloved mother was made an outcast, viciously beaten, had her eye gouged out, and finally was starved to death. This would probably make most people upset, so it's understandable Caligula took every chance he had to humiliate members of the Senate.

tl;dr Caligula did nothing wrong