- cross-posted to:
- the_dunk_tank
- cross-posted to:
- the_dunk_tank
You're probably familiar with Cracked.com, the epic listicle site that was popular a decade ago and now mainly exists to promote paid content. In their heyday, they made many of the standard "lol look at how evil North Korea is" articles, but what stood out more to me was this article, 6 Ugly Facts Of Life In Communist Cuba, which wasw ritten with input from some gusanos and reads like US state department propaganda.
Most of the article is literally anecdotes from these people, which are the standard "Castro bad" crap, but one is notably ridiculous:
One day, my sister came home and exclaimed, 'Fidel is better than Jesus!' In school they had asked the kindergartners to close their eyes and pray to Jesus for ice cream. When they opened their eyes -- nothing. Then they closed their eyes again and prayed to Fidel for ice cream, and ... surprise! Ice cream cups on their desks!
Wow, such a plausible story! How could Fidel deceive the children like this?
The few sections that are actually sourced aren't any better:
It's hard to say how many people Castro's new regime gunned down (evil dictators being notoriously spotty record-keepers), but the butcher's bill was probably around 30,000.
This links to the 1995-ass website of some rando Italian-American writer called Piero Scaruffi, who cites The Black Book of Communism among others. A very credible source, I'm sure.
He got lucky: Thanks to Operation Pedro Pan, a joint venture between the Swiss embassy and the Catholic Church to spirit children to America, he secured permission to leave ... alone. "So I came to the U.S. without my parents and lived in a refugee camp in Florida."
No criticism of Operation Pedro Pan? At all? Alright!
You'd be surprised how many Cracked alumni show up in media.
Soren Bowie writes for American Dad! now (which I think is actually the most tolerable Seth show, probably because it's currently just absurdist humour and not random jabs at minorities like Family Guy)
Dan O'Brien writes for Last Week Tonight, which is lib but did help "radicalize" at least one person I know from radical centrism so I'll forgive the show for being lib
Doctor Mister Cody Johnson has a show on Youtube about how bad feral boars are with Katy Stoll
Robert Evans is now a famous fed
Cracked inexplicably fired all those people and shut down their video section, then the site pretty much died.
IIRC they got owned as part of facebook's "pivot to video" where they lied about analytics.
All the more reason why I don't understand why we're digging up this dead horse to beat it more. Who cares?
I expect more refined dunking from my fellow hexbears
They also had a decent podcast hosted by the editor in chief Jack O’Brien but then he left for another site and all of cracked went downhill.