The Null Device

There's bad news for the Westboro Baptist Church, a religious organisation whose central principle appears to be hatred of homosexuals and of anybody who doesn't hate them; they've been hit with a US$10.9m fine for picketing the funerals of soldiers (on the grounds that their deaths are divine punishment for America being too corrupt to put homosexuals to death).

Albert Snyder's attorney, Craig Trebilcock, had urged jurors to agree an amount "that says 'Don't do this' in Maryland again. Do not bring your circus of hate to Maryland again".

Defence attorney Jonathan Katz's argument that the $2.9m in compensatory damages already far exceeded the defendants' net worth and would be enough to "bankrupt them and financially destroy them" was ignored.

¶ attention seekers hate psychoceramics religiots schadenfreude westboro baptist church [no comments]

Arizona sherriff Joe Arpaio, who has won acclaim from law-and-order types and opprobrium from liberals by keeping prisoners in harsh conditions, is now bidding to add heiress, serial unlicensed hazardous driver and all-round waste of oxygen Paris Hilton to his chain gang:

"Instead of reducing for her sentence, which I feel is wrong, why not bring her over here? We can incarcerate her here. She can do her time over here."

Female inmates who are put on the chain gang work outside seven hours a day from early morning, six days a week in the desert surrounds.

The inmates wear traditional black-and-white striped uniforms and perform such tasks as creating fire breaks, removing trash, and even burial duty for vagrants.

Critics have condemned these housings, which can get blisteringly hot, as violations of human and constitutional rights.

(via M+N) ¶ celebrities joe arpaio law enforcement paris hilton prison schadenfreude usa [no comments]

Leo Stoller, self-styled "intellectual property entrepreneur", revolutionised the monetisation of trademarks a few years ago. He did this by registering a large number of words, including "Stealth", "Sentra", and (perhaps appropriately) "Chutzpah", as trademarks and then aggressively going after anyone in any field using them, often extracting substantial settlements. Unfortunately for him, the bonanza came to an end when defendants began fighting back and losing lawsuits, and judges started invalidating his patents. Even worse for him, when he tried to declare bankruptcy, a judge ordered the liquidation of all his assets, and found that his personal and corporate assets were one and the same. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy...

(via Boing Boing) ¶ copyfight intellectual property schadenfreude skulduggery troll [no comments]

America's love affair with the Hummer, the oversized, aggressively ugly SUV that has become synonymous with everything from macho triumphalism to crass consumerism, may be over. Thanks to rising petrol prices, dealerships are finding themselves with a glut of unsold Hummers. Of course, they can't just keep them near the showrooms, because that would scare potential buyers away, so they drive them to vast parking lots, not unlike the graveyards of B-52 bombers in the desert. I wonder if they're visible from satellite photographs?

Apparently the thrill of driving Hummers back and forth between the remote storage lot and the dealer showroom wears off quickly, as each round trip requires that another five gallons of fuel be dispensed in order to ensure a complete round trip.

(via substitute) ¶ hummer machismo schadenfreude usa [no comments]

Russia's biggest spammer found battered to death in his Moscow apartment. Insert repurposed jokes about disliked professions here.

(via /.) ¶ crime death russia schadenfreude spam [2 comments]

For your daily dose of socially-approvable schadenfreude: bait car videos; video/sound recordings from specially wired "bait cars" left by Canadian police to trap car thieves. Watch the perps squeal like bitches over the movie-hip soundtrack coming from the stereo. (Which makes one wonder whether the cops pre-supply the cars with Franz Ferdinand CDs.)

(via bOING bOING) ¶ bait cars canada crime schadenfreude stupid [no comments]

Panzerfaust Records, one of the largest record companies in the neo-Nazi "white power" music scene, appears to have gone out of business after one of the owners accused the other of being half-Hispanic:

As a result, and Pierpont's refusal to take a DNA test, Calvert wrote last month that he would quit the company and so would its webmaster. The center reports that influential hate groups Hammerskin Nation and Volksfront also denounced Pierpont.

The Free Your Mind site said that any business done with Pierpont should be considered "an act of treason."

¶ extremists neo-nazis racism schadenfreude white power [no comments]

An article looking at seven sentiments most people won't admit to having, and feel embarrassed at even thinking about; and these are not any stereotypically Freudian sexual kinks either. They are: feeling uncomfortable around physically disabled people, publicly expressing grief for people one didn't care about in life/"Harolding" at funerals, schadenfreude, playing favourites with one's children, judging people by their wealth, feeling relieved when someone in chronic pain dies, and having sexual fantasies about people other than their partner.

Why jump on the bandwagon, when the bandwagon is a hearse? There are self-serving reasons: Evolutionary psychologists argue that the public expression of grief boosts your reputation as a trustworthy member of the community.

Sudden tragic death can inspire emotional rubbernecking in anyone. (How many of us have boasted about near misses--say, driving through an intersection five minutes before a fatal crash?) A national catastrophe such as September 11 brings this behavior out of the woodwork. That fall, people felt compelled to disclose that they had friends of friends of friends in the World Trade Center. New Yorkers morbidly compared notes: How close were you? What did you see? Who did you know? (In this creepy social gambit, the "winner" is the person most directly affected by the attack.) The same calculus was at work in other states or countries, where the comparison was not what you saw firsthand but who you knew in New York City or Washington, D.C.

¶ disabled guilt psychology schadenfreude sex society status [no comments]

Disgraced right-wing politician and larrikin-wowser hybrid Pauline Hanson will need protection in prison, as the large Aboriginal populations behind bars hadn't forgotten her anti-Aboriginal rhetoric, a Democrat senator has said.

¶ australia bigotry pauline hanson politics prison schadenfreude [no comments]

And while we're on the subject of the lovely people in the entertainment industry, media/sewage conglomerate Vivendi Universal is looking rather fucked these days. And Universal Music head thug and former CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. is probably kicking himself for letting it happen. Of course, given Bronfman's record as one of the most rabid hardliners in the War On Fair Use, I can't say I feel sorry for him.

(Though even if his corporate career is washed up, he could always take up songwriting again. It worked for another hard-nosed businessman.)

Oh, and you can find more schadenfreude here.

¶ edgar bronfman jr. schadenfreude the recording industry universal [3 comments]