In his glowing endorsement of Peter Soto's PURE magazine, a child pornography zine which got Sotos convicted of possessing and distributing CP, Albini praises PURE for it's punk rock ethos and speaks warmly of Sotos. Albini also goes on to express his own pleasure at the content of the magazine:
The cover of PURE 2 is a guy holding open a toddler’s puny hole so his spuzz can dribble out. The girl is past crying. She is destroyed. Like I said, I like that sort of thing
Source: https://i.imgur.com/Gm7otzo.jpg
From the European Big Black tour diary, Albini recounts his enjoyment of the child pornography magazines he found in a sex shop in Hamburg:
Jaded as I am, I can't help but flip seeing a girl and guy of twelve or thirteen, tops, ramming Martel bottles up each other's asses. These are not the Dutch equivalent of abused trailer-park kids, either. They look to be in excellent health and seem to be honestly enjoying this. Makes all the conventional arguments against this kind of thing seem really silly. They're kids. Kids like to play with their own and other people's privates. They're just being photographed at it. Now, people who get a voyeuristic charge out of watching them, like me, I guess, well, we've got some grip-on-reality problems. There's maybe 1% of all pornography that has any effect on me, and it's definitely not a turn-on very often. But when it is, and it's as weird as this, it's pretty hard to take.
Source: https://i.imgur.com/9obDb08.jpg
Further elaboration on Albini's friendship with Sotos and his own child pornography conviction:
Sotos defending his distribution of child pornography in court, stating "child abuse is a sublime pleasure: https://i.imgur.com/UCn5NFB.png
Albini praising Sotos' "art" and his friendship with the convicted child pornographer: https://i.imgur.com/WLQb5ke.png
Albini also helped Sotos produce Buyers Market, a unauthorized collection of court testimonies and police interviews from child rape victims.
TL;DR - Steve Albini is a pedophile who has twice admitted to owning and enjoying child pornography. He is also close friends with Peter Sotos of White House, a convicted child pornographer who published child porn zines in the 80s and makes "art" about child rape.
The edgelord obsession with shocking people withe child porn and serial killers and war criminals is less transgressive than it is complacent with the status quo. These kinds of atrocities are commonplace in the world today in the service of global capital. Nothing contained in Pure is anything more shocking than what goes on in a southeast Asian shrimp farm today or the violence that has been perpetrated on colonized and enslaved people the world over. The most depraved and predatory actor is the economic system we exist under.
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You can probably draw a direct line from that to chan culture, vice news, and maga. A lot of people took it at complete face value and thought it was good because it was fucked up.
I mean we got blue maga now so maybe I owe horseshoe theory an apology