vintagegeekculture:Can anybody tell me what this fantasy painting of a dragon has to do with the 201

vintagegeekculture:

Can anybody tell me what this fantasy painting of a dragon has to do with the 2012 attacks on the US State Department consulate in Benghazi, Libya? 

Alright, since nobody guessed, I might as well tell you, as clearly, this is a piece of internet lore that’s been lost. Not just the internet lore, but also the history as well, like the role of the West in “regime change” in Libya, which has become murky and completely forgotten.

In 2012, the US State Department was running weapons out of its consulate in Benghazi to anti-government rebels, in a bid to overthrow the Qaddafi government, which has been a thorn in the side of the west since the days of Top Gun and Back to the Future. As a consequence of this, the consulate was attacked in 2012, resulting in four deaths of US State Department personnel, including the US Ambassador, Christopher Stephens.

One of the four people who died in the Benghazi consulate attack was a state department intelligence officer named Sean Smith, who was a moderator on the SomethingAwful Forums, as well as being a community leader on Eve Online, where he went by the name “Vilerat.”

Sean Smith was widely disliked by both communities, both for his heavy-handed moderation as well as for his neocon views, which are bog-standard among state department bureaucrats, but which nonetheless, rightfully horrify most sane, normal people who hate war, like his admiration for King Leopold II’s actions in the Congo, his wholehearted support for the Iraq War, and the idea that the West has a responsibility and right to overthrow unfriendly governments abroad. It is a terrible tragedy that Sean “Vilerat” Smith was killed, but that simply does not change who he had been in life.

Before his death, Sean “Vilerat” Smith was widely mocked by the SomethingAwful goons as he got a tattoo of a blue dragon based on the above painting by Keith Parkinson. He was laughed at because this is a lanyard-toting imperial bureaucrat lamewad’s idea of what cool and badass is, and also because the piece of body art he got looks terrible (as compared to the beautiful Keith Parkinson original), with a squatting dragon. In a detail that is a mix of tragic and comic, some eulogies of Vilerat in the press used this tattoo image to represent him in their eulogies, as it is the picture that most commonly comes up when searching his name. 

When Sean “Vilerat” Smith died, Eve Online’s playerbase named a lot of structures and facilities in the game after him as a memorial.

One of the more interesting ways he was memorialized was that Sean “Vilerat” Smith was played by Christopher Dingli in the Michael Bay produced movie, “13 Hours: the Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.”

There were a number of hearings on Benghazi, but they were about the weasel vs. weasel world of US party politics, where no one was seriously interested in asking questions about the validity of US interventions in the Mideast, or about the real scandal, the role of the state department in arming rebels to create instability. Discussions on this were simply not on the table, as all groups in question take pro-intervention as a given. 

Incidentally, I have a message here for any future moderators: the last mod who banned me, died in Benghazi. It might be a coincidence, of course, but…are you willing to take that chance?