- Joined
- Oct 1, 2014
Obviously, he's not nearly as well regarded as he thought, but misreading a situation seems to be a defining trait of his. Wonder if they'll ban him finally.
Maybe if they ban him he'll come back to us.
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Obviously, he's not nearly as well regarded as he thought, but misreading a situation seems to be a defining trait of his. Wonder if they'll ban him finally.
Maybe if they ban him he'll come back to us.
Oh that would be a happy day. But he won't come back here because he can't control the conversation or pull his usual tactics in debate.Maybe if they ban him he'll come back to us.
I wouldn't call it plagiarism, unless and where Sweet is actually passing off content by others as by him. At least Sweet is giving credit there, even if the stuff he makes may not be that original.publicly claims where he stole something from
I wouldn't call it plagiarism, unless and where Sweet is actually passing off content by others as by him. At least Sweet is giving credit there, even if the stuff he makes may not be that original.
Can you make a heads or tails on what that site is? I got confused by its 90s website design.Let's return for a moment to "The Second Mrs. Pecker." (Someone may want to archive it before a frenzy of editing takes place.)
There's an episode of "Forensic Files" reporting on a case in which this occurred.Well, considering his history, I'm 99.99 percent convinced that somewhere out there is a long-forgotten TV episode from an old mystery series or a dimly recalled short story from some obscure anthology in which: (1) a man slowly poisons his wife with arsenic, which (2) accumulates in her hair and which (3) being an element, is detected by analysis in a mass spectrometer.
I wonder if he's such a nuisance that as people retired/moved on, they told their successors about Sweet and his "crusade". I can't imagine the same people who fired Sweet and banned him from campus are all still there, yet the ban seems to be in effect still, so someone is telling the new people about him.
I can share a few things about ASU Jonesboro in the late 1990s, because I was a student there myself in 1997. I think I missed Sweet by a year or two, either way I didn't know him directly, and I think I was there before him so I wouldn't have heard anything based on his reputation.
The overall area is economically depressed to an intense degree. The areas in the East of Arkansas, especially along the flood plains of the Mississippi river, are some of the most destitute in the US as far as I'm aware. It's so bad they have to bus in medical supplies and vaccinations to kids, as in, literally, a bus shows up in and all the local parents bring their kids to the bus for their shots, because otherwise they won't get them. It's the kind of place where you can go on Google Maps Streetview and see people playing dominoes in the middle of a street, complete with large table and four chairs, because there's no traffic, or even other houses sometimes for miles. It's a hopeless place to be a kid of any race, but, you can imagine that once you add the racial component into the poverty, it's an even nastier place to get your world-view from.
Jonesboro itself, like most Arkansas towns, is a farming town primarily. There are cow fields literally bordering the campus in some places. Soybeans are a big local crop, as is rice. Methamphetamine was and still is a large problem. If you go to the "wrong" part of town the prostitutes and crack dealers would be brazen and out in the open at the local hotels. There is a nicer part, a more downtown part, with a small art and music scene and so on. Liquor sales were illegal in the county up until 10 or so years ago iirc, so, it was illegal to buy booze locally when Sweet was there. There are a lot of gangs in the area, although not so much as you would see in a place like Detroit or LA. They'd claim Crip, Gangster Disciple/Folk (Folk Nation doesn't exist anymore I don't think) or Blood and fight pretty openly but for the most part the squabbles didn't get into gunfights (although this was different in relatively nearby Little Rock, which was the murder capital of the US for a year or two I think, and the much closer Memphis).
In short, life was (and probably still is) cheap out there. You can be born, live, and die, and not travel more than 50 - 100 miles away from home, ever. When I was in high school my health teacher once asked everyone who hadn't left the county to raise their hands, and about half the class (these are 16 - 18 year old kids) raised theirs. So it's not just isolated, it's not just economically fucked up, it's not just redneck, it's like a perfect storm of depressing.
Regardless of exactly where in North-East Arkansas he lived, this is the sort of place John Sweet called home while growing up. There are nicer places out there, but, they are exclusively for the rich, suburbs with McMansions and their own school districts, that sort of thing. Based on his fear of practically everything, he probably never even saw the inside of these neighborhoods, and probably doesn't have any concept for how much better others have it than he does.
The University was a rather typical place, but, in a setting like Jonesboro what the rest of the US would call typical does look somewhat heavenly. All around are pig fields, cow fields, farm equipment, rednecks, drug addicts, and failed lives, even the local malls are boring, dreary places with little to see, and here's this reasonably attractive campus with relatively educated people and a fairly nice environment. It had both a buffet style cafeteria (with terrible food that was "free" as in included in the overall price if you paid to live in the dorms) and a second, smaller restaurant style place serving (probably Soy) burgers and fries and so on for a few bucks. There were even a few quarter-taking arcade machines (Street Fighter I or II iirc) and so on. To John Sweet, it probably was Shangri-La.
Another thing I'll confirm is that Sweet would have stuck out like a sore thumb. You notice in the yearbook pictures that all the rest of the kids look, for lack or a better word, "normal", and that's no fluke. Growing up in the south you either conform or you are in for a rough time. There would have been several dozen kids in his high school that somewhat resembled Sweet, including female versions. More or less alone, raised in some remote fuckhole, probably a face full of acne or eczema just to add insult to injury, with shit parents, shit neighbors, no future. Most of those kids didn't bother to go to college, because no one made them, or as Sweet would put it "No one told them to". They'd take a job working fast food or security out of high school to escape their shitty home life, marry some heavyset person who churned out 2 - 3 kids, and that's it. That's their life story. In that light, it's somewhat remarkable that Sweet made it to ASU at all. I might can explain that, though, because of how I got to ASU myself. At that time, you'd take an ACT and a maybe an ASVAB, a PSAT and/or SAT as routine. If you did even marginally well on the ACT, you didn't have to take the others and you'd automatically get a full paid scholarship to a public State University of your choice. All you had to do is show up and not be completely incompetent and you were good. To give some reference for how easy it was, I showed up deeply stoned and with no math ability and I still got a scholarship on the first try. Sweet is repugnant as a personality, but he's knowledgeable enough that I wouldn't be surprised to hear he got into college in a similar way.
I can't speak for how he was treated, but I can say how we treated people who acted like Sweet; we hazed the shit out of them. Flat out. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't the sort of place where you'd get bullied just for showing up and being weird, far from it. There weren't many "freaks" or people into "alternative" music or any of that so there were tight knit cliques of rejects and stoners and so on, and you had to work really hard not to be accepted because most of us came from poverty and were in no position to judge. Being an atheist was a big deal. Being gay was a big deal. I can't imagine anyone being trans out there because they would have been hazed relentlessly and from all directions, the local adults (although not so much the professors) as well as the kids.
The stuff about pennies in his dorm door ring true. If you got on anyones nerves in the dorms they'd be sure to let you know. People would do things like coat your doorknob in.. substances, whatever substances they were I don't know, so you'd get weird crap on your hand and it would slip off when you'd try to open it, or they'd slide anon messages under your door (we didn't have the internet in dorms back then, and computers were luxuries only the rich kids had) as a warning when you were asleep. Hell, one kid was known to brag about being a woman-beater, and some kids took the plastic covers off all the lights in his dorm hall and piled them up on his door at an angle so when he'd open it they'd fall on him. They'd do it repeatedly, too, and when he'd complain about it no one would help him. I want to repeat that, for emphasis; if you were so weird you got bullied, and you were a dude and especially some creepy dude, no one had any sympathy for you. Not even the Resident Assistants. It was that kind of place. Someone like Sweet would have been the equivalent to walking around with a "Kick Me" sign on his back, and found no shortage of people willing to spare a kick.
So you've got an atmosphere of somewhat dog-eat-dog kids, not in the competitive sense, but in the "if you're too weird we're going to haze you until you leave" sense. This is probably why the people at the school paper tried to be nice to him. They likely were trying to be the counter-balance to the hazing Sweet was taking, because they'd have realized instantly that the pennies weren't "to shower him with wealth", and maybe they thought he knew better too, but was trying to face the bullying without losing his dignity (ha). Things like the "bad boy of conservative college journalism" (double ha) or whatever he said they called him were probably some really nice older Christian ladies trying their best to support and help steer this obviously wayward guy back onto the path of semi-respectablity before he became so ostracized that he became pants-on-head crazy.
Being a staunch and outspoken conservative would have been enough to get Sweet bullied, not because of the views being unpopular (far from it), but because of who he was. A suave looking guy in a suit, or a lumbering jock from the football team, saying the same things Sweet said, even making the same off-color jokes, would have been fine socially. There are huge portions of Arkansas population that are quietly (or otherwise) racist. But Sweet would have gravitated to the weirdos, the loners, and apparently the journalists and writers. These were absolutely cliques there that were open to outcasts like Sweet, but he would have alienated them completely the first time he popped his mouth open and a "black people" joke came out. That shit does not fly down there unless you're with your racist buddies behind closed doors, and I'm 100% certain Sweet was an open target in his dorm (to the point of honestly flirting with violence, hell, I knew a high school kid who was shot dead for teasing a kid for being black) because everyone would have been talking shit about him. He would have been the local freak show on the floor he lived on, and fucking with him would have been a bonding experience for everyone doing it. I think I read in the AFD thread here where someone wrote something like "You made everyone hate you so much they united and bonded from their shared hatred of you". I think that is a perfect explanation for what happened to John Sweet.
To sum it up, Sweet could have cut his mop of hair, shaved, put on some decent clothes, and been sadly almost identical to a lot of the rest of ASU students. He probably wouldn't have had to change anything else, because it was a low-effort atmosphere where how you looked and carried yourself said a lot more about you than the things you did. He could have imitated the dress style of virtually any male he came into contact with (jeans, button up shirt tucked in, optional cowboy hat) and found his niche quite easily, probably even some girlfriends. Instead he decided to dress up like some kind of wayward hippie straight out of the 60s, alienating any conservatives who would otherwise have come at least somewhat to his aid, and then further alienating any liberals with his 1950s political views, sounding like someones cranky-ass grandpa.
I speculate that the plagiarism accusation is both true, and was more or less totally inconsequential, the sort of thing that would have been brushed under the rug for most other students. With Sweet, I think they saw the opportunity to be rid of someone who was using their paper to spread a hateful and completely unwelcome message, and took it.
Apologies for the long ass post, I think that's everything I had to say about it, hopefully I didn't sperg out too much about my own experiences, but, maybe this will add some color to the background haze of his past.
I was aware that Sweet was bothering the staff at ASU, but in a threatening way for 17 years? Wow.you will see that for the past 17 years he has continued to contact the faculty, staff and former students of ASU who "persecuted" him.