One of the highlights of Hobo With A Shotgun was when the titular character forced a gutshot stand-in for this creep to eat his own VHS tape.
Who would have thought that the creator of Bumfights would be involved in something so unseemly.
“Bumfights creator accused of stealing remains of dead children from Thai hospital museum”
I was going to vote this as Most Unexpected “In other news, the sky is blue” Headline.
Ayn Rand would have loved this guy. He’s definitely following his own path.
And he used DHL, the shipper you turn to when you absolutely positively want your package to go to the wrong address.
I don’t know what Bumfights is, but I know that dead children belong in a museum where everyone can enjoy them, and not in the hands of some selfish private collector.
Pft - most of the mouth breathers out there can’t truly appreciate dead children nor have the same amount of passion for them as many dedicated private collectors.
This is framed in a weird and distorting way.
He stole relics from a museum, but the fact that they happened to be of human biological origin somehow means we get to make it sound more like grave robbing or organlegging or something? If he stole taxidermied beavers instead, would anyone even care?
I get the guy is sketchy and horrible, and yeah stealing things, but can we please just judge him for what he did without having to invoke the whole “remains of dead children” loaded buzzphrase nonsense which is rather misleading without deeper context?
I agree that this headline is a little bit like clickbait, but it is also a crime different than stealing taxidermy beavers from the local historical society. I have visited the museum in question and it serves important training and forensic purposes. There is certainly a “gross out” appeal to the place, as there are many examples of traumatic and violent injury. The fact remains that the displays are useful for forensics and pathology students.
It’s also double crappy for anyone to steal from a health care provider, in this case the largest public hospital in Thailand. I would guess that the museum makes money for the hospital. The non-Thai admission is about $6 and there were quite a few visitors when I was there. Most of the displays are long-dead cadavers or parts of long-dead cadavers. In my visit there I walked by long lines of people waiting for emergency room and outpatient care. So for me this theft is worse than grave robbing and something I could only imagine the Bumfights guy doing.
Medical museums aren’t exactly tourist hotspots and big money-makers, so I have a hard time imagining this resulted in much tangible damage - particularly to those long lines of people waiting for emergency room and outpatient care you mention anecdotally for no reason at all.
The training and forensic purposes I could see having greater value, but that point is largely moot - it’s still just theft of academic objects of probably little material value, not at all comparable to things like desecration of graves or the selling of human tissues. I personally would be far more upset if he stole drugs or equipment. Heck, any hospital of that size, particularly in that part of the world, I’d wager there’s regular low level embezzlement and theft-for-resale going on with far greater impact to the organization.
In any case, there’s little to no excuse for clickbait - and letting this nonsense slide only encourages more.
I suppose that’s an appropriate analogy if you think dead beavers and dead children should be treated with equal reverence and respect.
When the “dead children” (actually select preserved tissues such as organs) are medical specimens in jars of formaldehyde, yes, they receive roughly the same reverence and respect as taxidermied beavers.
This isn’t robbing a morgue - it’s robbing a medical museum. These aren’t “human remains” in the sense of fresh corpses, they’re preserved bits and pieces in the sense of specimens. They’re about as sacrosanct as vials of blood samples that just happen to have been taken from children - and in actuality they are of far less practical value.
Many medical ethicists would disagree. In general, human remains are treated with great respect and deference in medical schools and museums. One of the stolen body parts recovered was an infant’s head, for crying out loud. You still want to downplay this creep’s actions?
Such a loaded question. If you’ll remember, I was taking offense with the clickbait headline and the poor journalistic standards on display in this article, not making any sort of personal defense of… ya know, I don’t actually know the name of the party in question, as this was literally my first exposure to this Bumfights website…
-peruses the linked article-
Huh. The police actually haven’t said anything that can rationally lead us to the conclusions this article draws. Literally the only connection to McPherson is the fact that the police stated one of the two men they questioned was named “Ryan Edward McPherson”, and the separate fact that one of the two men was an American tourist, aged 31.
The Bangkok Post is jumping to a few conclusions without actual confirmation. First, it’s possible the “Ryan Edward McPherson” in question is not also the American tourist aged 31 - it might be a completely different person of the same name but different age, and the other man was the one aged 31. In the absence of verification of who exactly the police stopped, I cannot view this as anything more than speculation and conjecture - essentially just hearsay or rumor.
Second, even assuming it actually is the exact McPherson in question, it’s still possible the story the two men told the police checks out, and they bought the specimens at a night market - meaning without evidence that they were knowingly receiving stolen goods, they might be entirely innocent. (Since clearly simply possessing the specimens wasn’t a problem, given the police inspected them while questioning the men and released them without pressing any charges.)
This is exactly the kind of lack of journalistic integrity that drives me nuts. My cursory brushing up on McPherson reveals he’s a real slimebag, but that alone is not actual evidence of anything, no matter how unsavory he is. Without some sort of tangible, rational proof actually linking him to any of the events reported here in any verifiable way, I can only assume that peoples’ (entirely warranted) biases against McPherson are causing their imaginations to run away with them.
But back to the topic of my allegedly “downplaying this creep’s actions”, I could just as easily snarkily accuse you of exaggerating them. The difference between us is that I’m speaking from a position of doubt, and you are speaking from a position of unfounded confidence. The burden of proof lies with those making the claims against someone - even if that someone happens to be immensely unsavory and unsympathetic.
The headline is a perfectly accurate and non-sensationalized summary of the alleged crime. You seem to think
Bumfights creator accused of stealing remains of dead children from Thai hospital museum
is misleading or exaggerating. So exactly what part are you taking issue with? You seem to be arguing that a baby's head isn't really a baby's head if it's stolen from a medical museum.Exaggerated how? “Accused of stealing an infant’s head from a medical museum” isn’t an exaggeration, it’s a factual statement.
Not so. You opened your comment with
He stole relics from a museum, but…
So you seemed to accept the premise that he stole body parts from a museum, you just thought that the description of said crime was “framed in a weird and distorting way.”
You’re referring to the comment I made PRIOR to actually looking at the article in depth and revising my position, in which I was taking the articles statements at face value, trusting that they were accurate. A deeper reading revealed severe flaws which caused me to question and distrust the article as a whole.
I happen to disagree, for a number of reasons which I outlined. You seem to take offense at my disagreement, for reasons I can only guess at. In turn, you are making some very pointed and indeed personally insulting insinuations in your responses.
You don’t seem interested in having a discussion - you seem to want to shout me down for having a view you disagree with, and to try to villify me with cheap character assassination tactics and sarcasm like these.
I have no time for such drek, so unless you are prepared to apologize for your insults and for employing these tactics, then proceeed to engage with me on a rational level, I consider the matter closed and will not respond further.
Our fundamental disagreement isn’t over whether the person accused of this crime deserves the benefit of the doubt. I agree that he is innocent until proven in a court of law.
Where we disagree—strongly—is whether stealing human remains, including a child’s head, is a crime akin to stealing a dead beaver as long as said remains are stolen from a hospital museum instead of a morgue.
Good day.
I was going to make a Logan Echolls joke but then I decided that would be in poor taste.
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