Yesterday, I visited a Discord server called Philosophical Checkmate for a bit of a freewheeling discussion. It was a mixed mob of creationists and atheists and odd indefinables vs. little ol’ me — maybe I’ll post a recording (I’ve learned my lesson, don’t do these things without independently recording them myself) later, and let you visit the spectacle yourself.
I thought the moderator did a good job of maintaining order and reducing it to a series of single combats, but then this morning I discover a Discord user posted the video below. I guess I didn’t endear myself to him, and he thought this would punish me. It’s a YouTube video titled “PZ Myers is an evil a$$hole”, posted a few months ago.
I totally missed this when it came out, because I don’t name-search myself, although Sarah Braasch professes that she does. Boy, she really hates me, although I think she might hate the “Embrace the Void guy”, as she calls Aaron Rabinowitz repeatedly, even more, because she won’t even say his name.
If you can’t remember who Sarah Braasch is (How dare you? She’s famous, as she says), you’re not alone. It took me a moment to jog my memory and recall her claim to fame, too. She’s that Karen who called the police on a black woman who was napping on a couch in a Yale dormitory.
Thanks to Philosophical Checkmate for doing the name-search for me, and bringing this delightful video to my attention. I had a good laugh, and figured it was only fair that I let all my readers know what an Evil A$$hole I am.
I for one really appreciate Evil A$$lhole outlook. You should trademark that title though.
Voltaire had some interesting stuff to say on the topic of one’s enemies that may apply.
Typically, when you don’t “give a shit” about someone, you don’t post a 10 minute video rambling on about them. Nice makeup, though.
And you a “sanctimonious blowhard asshole”? You are most definitely not a blowhard asshole by any means!
That’s a great handle, considering that “Stupid Evil Bastard” is already taken. StupidEvilBastard.com.
Super-famous. She has 371 subscribers!
I knew Sarah in high school. At the time, she was a JW (and I was Lutheran), but we got along well.
I lost track of her, until I heard her on a FFRF podcast – we had both become atheists in the years since.
We were FB friends when the Yale incident happened, but then she unfriended me at some point (I think because I didn’t give her unqualified praise and support for what happened).
If I didn’t know she was the person I knew in the early 90s, I would never recognize her. I don’t know what happened to her.
She just calls you names and never says why really.
Watching the video now. It’s weird how the title is about PZ, but 90% of it is about the “Void Guy”.
I don’t know what happened to her.
Goddammit, I wanted that title for myself.
As of today, I am “Equally Great Satan”(from the Iranian POV) , ‘Mostest Godless Bastard’ (from the evangelical POV), and ‘Doctor Evilest’.
To quote Alucard; ‘I killed a lot of people to earn that title, I deserve to be called as such”.
Yeah, it’s no fair. I get the title, but then all the whining is about @ETVPod.
7 minutes in and I had to tap out. Holy shit is she full of herself.
Don’t want to be accused of racism, then don’t be racist. Calling the cops on a black person for sleeping (and not for the first time, either) is racist. This isn’t that hard for most people. Why is it so hard for her?
Oh right. Because she’s racist.
Her not giving a shit falls far short of the standard set by the honey badger. And the badger is a lot more charming and interesting.
Don’t you need more $$$ to be an evil a$$hole?
Does this mean that in addition to “poopyhead”, “evila$$hole” (or the European “evilar$€hole”) is now a PZ-approved nickname for PZ?
It seems to me that 2 $$ is enough for evil a$$hole, but villainou$ a$$hole does indeed require 3 $$$.
A bunch of insults is just boring. I want to know the reasons you are “evil a$$hole”.
I made it three minutes. She had 11 minutes to say something and in the first 3 she didnt say shit other than to call you an asshole 3 or 4 times. Why do people who have nothing to say take so much time to say it?
I watched it, mostly to hear if she ever bothers to mention exactly what her problem with PZ might be. No reasons for the evil are given.
I looked at her video list, and it’s as entitled and self-involved as this rambling example of navel gazing. The fake helpless little girl voice is as endearing as a gnat in the ear.
Her entire schtick is to whinge on about legal bills resulting from her racist actions.
She also claims that we are in a moral panic, and she is being killed by multiple people talking about her. KILLED!!!$!
Tethys@18
I won’t bother watching, but it’s starting to sound like mental illness. I remember people like that from Usenet days. By now, I guess a lot have gone pro.
Maybe the loon is complaining about this
poopyheadevilar$€hole post and comments, presumably using the time travel capabilities of the Covid-19 vaccines (as“documented”looned-about in the subsequent post) ?Re: StonedRanger @ #17…
Brevity is the soul of wit. Perhaps she should try that sometime.
Susan Montgomery@3
I shouldn’t focus on the superficial, and her makeup is her choice. If she likes it, more power to her.
But now that you mention it, the way this is shot reminds me a little of “Leave Britney Alone” from about a decade ago, granted without the sheet backdrop. Chris Crocker had a lighter touch with the eye shadow.
Speaking of make-up, Ms. Braasch also has a YouTube video about using black cherry Kool aid as eyeshadow.
It includes the use of sexist slurs, while complaining loudly about being silenced by other people writing things about her.
I’m starting to feel sad for her. She is killed, silenced, and the poor thing deliberately puts kool aid on her eyelids. I don’t think it’s a wise idea to put food dye in your eyes at all… Perhaps it’s affecting her perceptions?
In all seriousness I believe she is in dire need of a good grief counselor. Loss has the strangest side effects, and American culture is entirely lacking in appropriate mental health care for those experiencing bereavement.
Tethys@23
It sounds at least potentially less harmful than using approved cosmetic products. Cheaper too. Maybe she’s onto something.
PaulBC @22
Chris Crocker was much different in that he was also right. People should have been leaving her alone.
Tabby Lavalamp@25 Agreed. It’s not just Britney Spears. I mean the hounding of celebrities is never right. I think it is extremely creepy when fans believe they “own” them as a public property, often causing existing personal problems to accelerate.
And Crocker got a lot of mockery, but the video always struck me as sincere. I mean over-the-top and I would not have done it, but his heart was in the right place. I am not sure what he was going for with the sheet, though. Just one of those early Youtubisms maybe like “I move away from the mic to breathe in,”
True.
Look at what happened to Princess Diana.
…Well, that brings back bad memories.
Look at what happened to John Lennon.
blf@14: “or the European “evilar$€hole”
Hey! Even pre-Brexit, “evi£ar$€hole” would have been correct, and now it’s required!
Huh. I had a run-in with her in a blog comment section maybe ten, fifteen years ago. We argued about hate crime laws – she was against (perhaps unsurprisingly, given later developments), I was for. Or at least, I thought her arguments were bad, which always makes me move away from someone’s opinion.
So, what happened to Braasch after the Yale racist incident? Did she stay there, is she still working on her degree?
Yale is pretty efficient at quietly hustling people out the door as a solution to everything: did they employ their SOP in that case as well?
I remember her as someone who wrote a few posts a decade ago on Adam Lee’s blog, Daylight Atheism. I remember she’d talked about growing up JW and one of her brothers had died and I felt very sorry for her. I was surprised when she popped up in the news in 2018 as the incident didn’t seem in character for the writer from 2010 or ’11.
As best I can tell from her various posts and videos I’ve seen, she’s been struggling with mental illness for a long time. I also get the feeling she’s struggling with paranoia, and has been for awhile. I don’t know if that explains how she construes every not-wholly-positive mention of her as a ‘death threat’ but it does help paint a picture of the mental and emotional state she’s been in for awhile. I can’t help but think she’s needed medical treatment but hasn’t been able to get it. her obsessively name searching and picking online fights I don’t think it helping her mentally.
Ah! As PZ said, Braasch says that she searches for her own name, on Twitter, Facebook, and Google.
That’s what happened. Searching for yourself on the internet is 100% certain to make you insane. It’s got as high a mortality rate as rabies. The CDC should issue a warning about it, actually.
You think that’s what happened to Naomi Wolf?
garnetstar@33 For me it’s just disappointing. When Google came out, I was the first hit on my name. That persisted through the early 2000s. Now I have to add several other details to narrow it down. Even ResearchGate does a pretty poor job figuring out if someone is citing one of my papers or somebody else. I self-Google now and then for citations of my PhD work. Sometimes I get kind of annoyed because the work has had some traction but I don’t get anything out of it.
Whatever happened to James “Kibo” Parry from Usenet days? Before search engines, and I think before the web itself existed, he had a script that would grep through news feeds and see if anyone was posting about him. Then he would appear as if by magic to reply, no matter what the group was or whether he had ever read it before. The good old days… it’s all just WAY too easy now.
@31, “So, what happened to Braasch after the Yale racist incident?”
Some admittedly quick searching suggests she’s still a student, but now living in California(?) and cannot visit the campus without special permission. However, I don’t have solid confirmation of most of that (and am not interested enough to try and pin the details down), other than she’s still listed at Yale’s site — and some of the sources seem rather dubious.
Paul@34&35: “When Google came out, I was the first hit on my name.” Tell me about it. Now (at least if I’m looking for “L.” instead of “Lee”, which is important!) I get historians of American science education, specialists in the sex-life and parenting of the maritime earwig, and all kinds of other (moderately interesting) noise. At least I no longer get hits on a blackjack player who wrote under the pseudonym “Lee Rudolph” both on that subject directly, and in fictionalized form about an Atlantic City casino (which I retrosuspect may have been one of Trump’s). Someone from the Library of Congress actually phoned me once, to double check that I (the author/editor of a book that they had just gotten the paperwork on from—as it was in 2013—”Routledge […] an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business”, though I wouldn’t bet against there having been several more mergers in the last 8 years) was the author of three earlier quite unrelated books (which I was), and I got to inform the LOC that I was not the blackjack whiz but was also one of the authors of a(n equally unrelated) textbook from 1969.
I actually met Kibo and one of his kibological sidekicks (a physicist) in the flesh, back in the 1990s, when four or five programmers from Sun Microsystems decided they’d fly from California to Cambridge MA just to meet a few fellow Usenet addicts. I’m out of touch with those of them who are still alive (at least one—who’d attended MIT with the Magliozzi brothers—isn’t), but I see the former sidekick around a lot at another blog, though not in the flesh.
My name, which has multiple alternative spellings (I’ve met at least one (we worked at the same company and people were forever confusing us in e-mail and telephone (I found it funny, my namesake didn’t))), is sufficiently common it’s pointless to search for it. I once went to school with someone with an identical first name, surname, and middle initial — who also happened to have a strong science / mathematical interest.
My favourite (which I know I’ve told before, so apologies if this seems familiar) dates back to something like the fourth or fifth grade, when my teacher had the same surname. The rule at the school’s library was, when checking-out a book, to fill in your surname and classroom number. Which, of course, was identical for the both of us. Despite the handwriting being presumably quite different, the librarians eventually made a special rule just for me: First initial and surname…
I was trying to think who she reminded me of. Tokyo Rose and Axis Annie came to mind but they had a much broader vocabulary and better script writers. Then she mentioned that boil on democracy’s bum, Joe McCarthy. With that hair and make-up she could pass as his ghost. She really should look in a mirror and practice talking to herself before she opens her mouth to vomit into the microphone.
@22 I’m trying to find something nice to say. FWIW, I love heavy applications and dark, unusual colors. I spent a lot of the 90’s in an ill-advised attempt at being a drag queen and I used to be a cosmetologist during the late-90’s. I always wonder if my taste in makeup came from coming to awareness of the world when Disco was in full-swing.
@26 I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.
0 arguments, 100% personal drama. I even hate it when people on my side do it. Who fucking cares.
Dear Karen, eh, Sarah, sorry, you keep saying it’s like McCarthyism, but we all know exactly which side you’d have been on.
So her argument seems to be that all the supposed “race crimes” are actually “race hoaxes”, because obviously she never did anything wrong, so it can’t be true in other cases either.
As for the make-up, she either deliberately tried to imitate the Joker, or she needs to work on her lip liner work.
Her voice, too. And syntax, and diction, and pre-teen uptalking mixed with paranoid declaiming. In case she’s Googling her name, let me say, Sarah Braasch, you are a paranoid racist swine, in desperate need of a consultation from a stylist, several years of therapy, and well, lots of other things. Happy happy joy joy be with you always.
Sarah Braasch reminds me of SNL’s “Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With” .So she thinks 11+ minutes of name-calling is a short note. I don’t want to be around when says how she really feels.
We all know you’re a dispicable asshole, but I want to know more about that sadistic death threat you tweeted to her. Don’t leave us hanging..