Gregory Cochran is what you’d call a “hyphen man.” Formerly a physicist, now an anthropologist, with ancillary interests in various other topics, it is said that if you speak a falsehood to a mirror three times, Greg will appear in the reflection and yell at you.

I’ve collected some of his quippage.

[Innumerable uses] “You’re wrong.”

“When you think about it, falsehoods, stupid crap, make the best group identifiers, because anyone might agree with you when you’re obviously right. Signing up to clear nonsense is a better test of group loyalty. A true friend is with you when you’re wrong. Ideally, not just wrong, but barking mad, rolling around in your own vomit wrong. Movement conservatives have learned this lesson well.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/megafaunal-extinctions/

“Ron Unz explains that his model took no more than five minutes to produce. I believe him.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/hamilton-rules-ok/

[On the origin of homosexuality] “The Emmdees say that when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. When explaining homosexuality, people think of pterodactyls and unicorns.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/homosexuality-epigenetics-and-zebras/

[On the existence of the Kinsey Scale] That would make exactly as much sense as a bell curve of food preferences ranging from steak at the left to granite at the right, in which people in the middle liked steak and rocks equally well. Is an even split between a behavior that works and one that never does what you expect from biology? Do you expect half the geese to fly north for the winter?
http://www.unz.com/pfrost/origins-of-male-homosexuality-germ/

“Homosexual men are nature’s Petri dishes”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/recantation/

[On Iraq] “There are now a number of talkative idiots saying that Bush has made a mess of Iraq…I compare this to someone who has had a bad sexual experience with a porcupine and is now trying to decide just where he went wrong. Should he have used Brylcreem on the quills? Should he have sent flowers? Did he ‘come on too strong’?”
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail309.html

“There is no threat out there that can be usefully addressed by a larger ground army. In fact, there’s not much of a short-term threat out there at all. Except the threat from within: crazy people. That one is serious, as always.”

[Later] Many of you seem to think that invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11 was a reasonable response, just as we always attacked the Navaho or the Cheyenne in response to Comanche attacks. Ah, but we didn’t, because that would have been pointless and incredibly stupid. Nor did we talk as if the redskins were the coming threat to Western Civilization, even though jihadists are actually relatively weaker than Sitting Bull was. […] If accuracy or making sense mattered, I can think of a a few hundred pundits who would be cleaning septic tanks right now.”
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/08/wheres_snow_whi.html

“…if Iraq had been about 50 times cheaper, in terms of money and casualties and reputation, I could maybe see someone reasonable arguing that it wasn’t a mistake, or at least wasn’t the stupidest thing this country has ever done. But it wasn’t 50 times cheaper.”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/a-god-damned-hippie/

[On the Chelyabinsk meteoroid] “If this meteor had exploded at a lower altitude, it would have smashed that city flat and killed hundreds of thousands of people. How likely that was depends on the details—most meteors are not strong enough to hold together during that kind of re-entry, although some nickel-iron meteors may be. The Tunguska explosion would have utterly destroyed any city it hit. It’s not quite as bad as a nuclear weapon: It would only kill you with fire and blast, rather than fire, blast, and radiation. You’d only die twice—Sean Connery might survive.”
http://takimag.com/article/paranoid_about_asteroids_gregory_cochran

“What’s Arcturus really like? The real Arcturus, not the touristy parts?”
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/13/charade/

There’s a puddle of water on your floor. How did it get there? Maybe you have a hole in your roof. Unfortunately, you lack a ladder.

Is there a way to check if there’s a hole in your roof without a ladder? Affirmative. Does the puddle only appear when it rains? Does your house get cold at night? You can’t gain “ground knowledge” (or “roof knowledge”, or whatever) but clues can be used to triangulate what’s going on.

The key thing is that “my house gets cold” is a weaker form of evidence that actually seeing the hole in your roof, so it’s a good idea to let a few clues pile up before making judgement. JREF is wrong. Sometimes a plethora of weak evidence CAN equal strong evidence.

I like to do this with internet users. I can’t look into anyone’s head and determine that they’re stupid or pathological. But there are distinctive and uniform “tells” that relate to certain types of people. I’m against making snap judgement based on just one trait, but let each additional one be a hair raised on your neck.

Pink hair: likely a woman who posts frequently on twitter about how she “needs feminism”. Like many women who “need feminism”, a cauldron of insanity, vindictiveness, and narcissism. Comments will be interpreted as death and rape threats.

Anime girl avatar: strong risk factor for trolling, being a sockpuppet, or being from /r9k/.

Self-describes as an “atheist”, “rationalist”, “free-thinker”: moderate risk factor for selective skepticism, hivemindedness, or being some social cause’s automaton (substantially more so than someone who self-describes as “religious”)

Self-describes as “traditional”: very opposed to moral degeneracy. Deletes internet browser history with the frequency and compulsion of Lady Macbeth washing her hands.

Self-describes as a good person: thoughtful and conscientious. Keeps the thermostat low enough so that neighbours don’t have to smell the decomposing hooker in the basement.

South Park Avatar: guy who’s been on the forum for 10 years, and whose every post is an impenetrable mare’s nest of inside references and in-jokes. Every reply after him being some variant of “hur hur hur, that’s exactly what you’d say, South Park Avatar Guy. Hey, everyone, check it out. South Park Avatar Guy just said the kind of thing South Park Avatar Guy says.”

Avatar of himself playing guitar: male who disregards life in favour of carefully staged pictures of himself having a life. Zoom in and the guitar will probably be strung back to front and held in the wrong hand.

PGP Key in profile description: you’re not meant to USE it. You’re meant to ADMIRE it. Woah, shit, this busta has a PGP key!

I hope this has helped you in your online adventures. More will be posted at the brisk schedule of “probably never”.

But not in the sense that I’m sitting here Youtubing Naruto AMVs. I like badness that’s intricate and elaborate. Badness that invites you to sit and think about it.

This is the itch that things like the Onion and Tim and Eric scratch so well. They take the small things that are subtly wrong about TV and exaggerate it into a yawning chasm of wrongness. This: to wit. Saccharine blandness overlaying a creepy cultlike message. Lovey-dovey cosmic oneness ideals mashed together with crude “get rich now” pragmatism. These ingredients combine and form a cake made of unease and discomfort, and it’s hard to look away.

But that video is satire. The truth is, there’s a lack of authentic badness in today’s world.

Blandness, boredom, hypocrisy, incompetence, and evil we have in abundance. Genuine cringeworthy badness, not so much. James Rolf (proprietor of The Angry Video Game Nerd, a Youtube series that critiques videogames) has lamented this in the past: there just isn’t enough material for him. Most videogames can be described as “mediocre and unmemorable.” There’s only so many games like Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing…an alleged racing game where your opponent never even moves, and when you cross the finish line you get a “YOU’RE WINNER” message. Most bad games are forgotten as soon as you put them away. Big Rigs tends to stay with you.

It’s not that something’s shoddily made. It’s that your brain was primed with certain expectations, and the thing either failed to meet them, or met them in an unsettling and disturbing way.

And it’s very hard to “fake”. We respond to authenticity, even when watching atrocity porn. That’s the reason Tara Gilesbie’s My Immortal became so notorious, while the countless attempts at one-upping it have failed…because it looked real, while the ripoffs. No comment on whether My Immortal itself was a troll job. That’s not the point, only that it was close enough to the genuine article to fool people.

One thing’s for sure: if you can generate authentic bad things on spec, you have a talent, and you should be using it to become rich. Trains are boring. We see them every day. Usually we don’t even look at them when they pass. But when they crash…now you’ve got attention.