Monkey Business

July 8, 2023 5:28 PM

Global network of sadistic monkey torture exposed by BBC [BBC] [CW: sadistic monkey torture; fuck people really]
posted by chavenet (30 comments total)

I read this a while ago. I still don't get the mindset that posts fannish gushing and heart emojis under videos of torture. They're clearly not under the illusion that their interest is healthy or widely acceptable, so why is the behavior so normal? Like it's not even the kind of thing you see posted under porn videos. It's like aunts reacting to cookie recipes on Facebook except, y'know, unutterable horror.
posted by Scattercat at 5:37 PM on July 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

"We've seen an escalation in this extreme, graphic content, which used to be hidden but is now circulating openly on platforms like Facebook," said Sarah Kite, co-founder of animal charity Action for Primates.

food for thought, maybe, when people excitedly sign up in droves for the new latest hotness from Facebook's software division. torture and murder = ad revenue.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:23 PM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

"Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto."
[sigh]
posted by a non e mouse at 6:34 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Of course “The Torture King” has a Confederate flag and a Trump flag. It’s very on-brand.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:37 PM on July 8, 2023 [19 favorites]

And there's also a T-shirt with Ice Cube hanging on his wall. WTactualF.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:52 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ice Cube backed Trump in 2020.
posted by interogative mood at 6:53 PM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

.
posted by signsofrain at 8:08 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

What. The. Actual. Fuck.
posted by jferg at 8:19 PM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wait, the same Ice Cube that did Arrest the President in 2018 backed Trump in 2020?!?!
posted by keep_evolving at 8:20 PM on July 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

That's the reason I've always backed Ice-T, despite his breaking my heart by becoming a regular on Law and Order. Like, you had Jello Biafra introduce one of your albums, Iceberg.
posted by credulous at 9:16 PM on July 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Just noting the more substantive reporting is here.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:29 PM on July 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

Wait, the same Ice Cube that did Arrest the President in 2018 backed Trump in 2020?!?!

Not really. My understanding is that he met with both campaigns to lobby for federal money to go to black owned businesses and neighborhoods he thought that the Biden campaign blew him off, and the Trump campaign offered him half a trillion dollars. He never endorsed or appeared with Trump. He did criticize the lack of any sort of substantial plan for racial justice in the Democratic platform, and the GOP certainly benefited politically by being the party who let Ice Cube write a plan to spread $500b around, but those criticisms were pretty legit, and if Biden wanted to be the guy promising money he did have the option.

It is pretty likely that Trumps promises were completely empty and Cube got played, but I don't particularly blame him for rolling the dice on that one.
posted by St. Sorryass at 9:49 PM on July 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

" I still don't get the mindset that posts fannish gushing and heart emojis"

I think it's just layering transgressive thrill (acting normal in reaction to something clearly obscene) on to the main transgression. Ooh, look at me, look at me ironically adding heart emojis. Admire me.

When I think about this, I think back to my thoughtless youth, and alt.tasteless, and rotten.com. There is a kind of pleasant brainzap that comes from contemplating something really, really gruesome, and I think some people find it a bit too pleasant, and seek more, and this is where they end up. I don't really buy "I was hurting so I wanted to see something else hurt" as a sufficient explanation, although I am sure having been brutalised may make you want to brutalise others. What puzzles me is not how people end up getting off on this, at least not the mechanism, but how they don't at any point step back and say "I am a person who wants to see monkeys hurt for fun and this is a bad thing and I should stop." Because this is a very extreme end point to get to without any insight at all.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:30 PM on July 8, 2023 [14 favorites]

Mod note: Bizarre trolling comment removed.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:08 PM on July 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

I am Joe's spleen, I also have a history with similar sites back as an edgy teenager, however there is a leap from looking at transgressive material to paying for it and especially commissioning it. That's the part I don't understand. Seeking it out while kind of horrifying is something I can sort of understand. Actually playing for more if it to happen, that goes beyond anything. When I was a regular visitor to rotten.com part of what allowed me to avoid the guilt was that these were horrific things that has happened elsewhere, that the site and I were uninvolved in. They were just aggregating. (I now see the error there, but this was 18 year old me in 2000)
posted by Hactar at 3:50 AM on July 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

I haven’t looked at any of this but the title will haunt me
posted by InkaLomax at 4:39 AM on July 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

This just reinforces my belief that, no matter how utterly horrific of an act you can imagine, there are probably humans doing it somewhere.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:43 AM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seeking it out while kind of horrifying is something I can sort of understand. Actually playing for more if it to happen, that goes beyond anything.

Yeah; I think there's a big difference between knowing something awful is out there on the Internet and deciding to watch it, and actually causing it to be created.

The first impulse is IMO the same thing that causes people to go to horror movies. It's that Imp of the Perverse pushing you to do something you know is going to make you recoil, but doing it anyway; a sort of mental scab-picking. It's gross but most people do it even though we probably know we shouldn't.

It's one thing to know that some ISIS beheading video is out there online and deciding to watch it just to see if you can, or for whatever reason, but that's a far cry from actually joining ISIS. The people commissioning this stuff are at at the "actually joining ISIS" level of participation and responsibility.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:03 AM on July 9, 2023 [6 favorites]

Eh, I wouldn’t bring horror films into this, since one reason we watch them is that we know they aren’t real. The thrill here may be that the viewers know that it is real, but they are insulated from it, since it’s happening elsewhere and you are “only watching a video.”

The goading into escalation and voting on torture aspects ought to break that separation, but it clearly doesn’t. There seems to me an infinite space between “I found a monkey torture video and it made me feel” and “please take my money to create a specific torture of a specific monkey,” but, then, I’m not part of the monkey torture community. It reminds me of the complex bureaucracy around Nazi medical experiments to keep each doctor and bureaucrat isolated from the entirety of the system to disclaim responsibility.

The number of participants who claimed to be secretly trying to stop it suggests that they need some kind of curtain between their desire and reality.

For at least some of them, money seems to be the largest motivator, which is chilling in is own way.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:38 AM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

A filthy man molested me for years and would have me watch horrific porn. This stuff isn't as underground as one would hope.
posted by lextex at 6:59 AM on July 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Hammurabi's Code has its time and place and this is one of them.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:33 AM on July 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

This is fucking awful I had to stop reading part way through.

I think about that time as a mid-teenager watching that horrible scene in Faces of Death with the monkey. I was morbid, and I can't recall if that shocked me at the time - but I think I justified on "that's fake effects" or "that's in the past" (and also "food" if one wants to pretend to justify it -- though don't ask me how I feel about Primate Bush Meat).

This is not that. This is 1000x worse. Psychopathy on a social scale.
Have any primate researchers noticed any outbreaks of disturbing social problems amongst the native population (e.g. did these poor creatures get released back into the wild now inflicting in others?)

What i was going to say was - this is very different than - oh well this was a video filmed x years ago... (never bothering to think about the economic engine, I was a fucking kid after all)).

Still this doesn't have that excuse it's an active ongoing social phenomenon. These are the same sort of monsters that engage in dogfights and cockfights.
posted by symbioid at 11:29 AM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

That article (I read the BBC one) is real horrifying and don't read it, maybe, if you don't want to witness the utter worst of humanity today. Like, it is torture, no exaggeration, and the people are bad people. Some people are working on fixing it and good on them.

I mostly wanted to leave a comment for lextex to say, yikes, buddy. That is horrible and I hear you and I hope you're as okay as you can be.
posted by lauranesson at 1:23 PM on July 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

i couldn't finish any of these links. This has to be a different branch off the human evolution line. I can't even process who does this kind of thing.
posted by Increase at 1:29 PM on July 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

As a complete sideline, I’ve been thinking about the YouTube algorithm. On one hand, its shittiness led a group of people to maybe shut down one part of an awful global trade. On the other hand, what kind of sociopath lets a system continue that, if you watch enough cute animal videos, you will eventually be shown those same sorts of animals being tortured. When engagement is your only metric, you breed hell.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:34 PM on July 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

It reminds me of the complex bureaucracy around Nazi medical experiments to keep each doctor and bureaucrat isolated from the entirety of the system to disclaim responsibility.

Same here and remember this article about the dehumanization process and the insane history of Nazi Germany concerning "animal welfare"
posted by clavdivs at 4:48 PM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't really have much to say about the torture aspect of the article; I mean, what can you really say? Some humans are monsters, and their fixation on torturing primates in particular suggests strongly to me that these people would certainly escalate to doing the same to other humans if the opportunity presented itself. Even if you do not value animals intrinsically (which in most cases would be the end of any discussion I'd want to have with you), but only value human welfare, the existence of such people in our society is almost certainly a Bad Thing, and catching and incarcerating them (I am skeptical about the opportunities for correction and redemption, but I guess I'm open to evidence) before they have the opportunity to escalate to humans, seems like an easy win.

It really seems like the sort of thing almost any reasonable person in any reasonable society can see the danger, not to mention the disagreeableness, of. And it's good to know that there seems to be a fair amount of international law enforcement cooperation in going after them.

However, I have to admit that I am disappointed verging on disgusted that the BBC decided not to publish the name of the monkey-torturing kingpin from Florida, citing concerns about their safety. Really?

And don't give me any horseshit about liability. The law is quite clear that there's no liability on a publication for reporting true facts about someone, just because they are unpleasant and the publication might cause harm. I mean, think about that argument for a second, and how damning it would be to the concept of a free press. It's a good thing that the law doesn't work that way. The worst they can do is sue you, in which case you'd better have only reported the truth, but that's sort of what we expect out of journalists anyway.

It's exactly that sort of hand-wringing, overcautious-to-a-fault self-censorship—done exclusively for the benefit of really bad people—that exemplifies the unilateral handicap under which good people and good institutions place themselves when engaging with true evil, and it's why I despair sometimes about whether the forces of reason and progress will, in the long arc of history, really triumph over the worse devils of our nature, as they are exposed via cruelty and sadism, hierarchy and domination.

I really do think that most people are intrinsically good and want to build a better world (for values of 'better' that are sometimes strikingly at odds with each other, but could probably be negotiated if everyone was in the right mental place), but if we give the bad guys—whether they're torturing monkeys or trafficking children or attempting to overthrow democratic governments to advance or preserve racial chauvinism, but all sharing the same general theme of not giving a shit about others besides themselves—all the advantages and benefits of the doubt, they could still win. It is perhaps an overused cliche, but we're seriously at risk of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory here.

The only way you're going to make a point with a Nazi is with your fist, and I think the only way you're going to make a point to someone who tortures primates for fun is if there are real-world, no-shit, fuck-up-your-daily-life negative consequences for feeding that impulse.

And if the goddamn BBC, with what I assume is at least a battalion of lawyers if not an actual army, can't find the stones to name-and-shame someone for whom they presumably have reams of evidence detailing their behavior and substantiating their reporting, how can we expect other people to take stands against lesser evils in their own lives?
posted by Kadin2048 at 5:44 PM on July 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

I don’t know their particular reason for refraining from naming “Mr. Ape” but presumably they had one, since they named several others.

It seems reasonable to want to avoid the major figures in this criminal investigation coming to physical harm before it is concluded, if that’s a serious concern. Again I’m not quite sure why concerns only apply to one of them, though.
posted by atoxyl at 6:41 PM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

@increase - totally agree... it's so ugly and DNA gone wrong that the perpetrators are literal cancers on human history and humanity. #shame
posted by specialk420 at 10:37 PM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

For every human trait, there is a human who embodies that trait to excess. People possess varying degrees of cruelty; some people are overwhelmingly, unrelentingly cruel.

Human civilization cannot tolerate people who collaborate in order to manifest this level of cruelty. Whatever checks and balances we possess are inadequate. The monkey torturers are an atavistic aberration, a poison or cancer.

Weeping for my species, weeping for the karma we have unleashed.
posted by ohshenandoah at 10:10 AM on July 12, 2023 [2 favorites]