Who made Martin Shkreli?

[Tailsteak]

Okay, thought experiment.

We all know Martin Shkreli, right? He's the guy who bought a cheap AIDS drug and jacked up the price. He bought that Wu Tang album. He looks like this:

Martin-Shkreli.jpg (13.01 KiB) Viewed 8450 times

Although he has his few fans, Shkreli seems, to most, to be the world's most punchable human being. I mean, just look at him. Look at his punchable face.

A little too punchable.

The starting point of our discussion is this: let us assume that Shkreli, all his antics, his public persona, his media footprint - let us assume that it's all manufactured. That someone needed a Martin Shkreli to exist, so they sought out an already naturally punchable person and directed him to do punchable things, and put him on the air a whole lot, and now he's a sort-of celebrity.

Given that initial assumption and its plausibility, speculate: who or what made him? What are they trying to accomplish? What end goal do they have?

[Horizon]

The Freemasons.

They created Shkreli along with Fred Phelps and other famous ne'er-do-wells, for a simple purpose: to unite society, there needs to be a common foe. A supervillain is a good way to do this; Fred Phelps was a fairly successful attempt, although he has more popular support than his creators would like. So, because they needed a newer, better supervillain, they picked Shkreli, and made a different sort of supervillain.

Shkreli is more universally punchable than Phelps is, because while some people agree that gays should be put to death, or that the military and its members deserve absolutely no respect, almost nobody agrees that you should extort sick people for money.

Personally, I want to see who the Freemasons try to make their next supervillain of. I fear I may not live to see it, though.

[Merle]

A vague yet menacing government agency. They need him to distract attention from the privacy bill that was just attached as a rider to the budget, and to make Trump look less evil by comparison.

[Tailsteak]

See, I was thinking Trump... even though the election is still a year off, it's still the main thing dominating the American news, now's a good time to prime people's minds with simmering, long-term ideas, especially about health care and classism.

And yes, Trump, even though he's basically Gordon Gekko as played by PT Barnum, has come out against Shkreli. It is true, he makes Trump look like less of a bad guy by comparison. But when you think of the anti-Shkreli, Trump isn't exactly who comes to mind, is it?

My #1 pick - Bernie Sanders. Or, if not Sanders' campaign itself, whoever thinks they're gonna get the VP slot.

[snowyowl]

"Mason - I can call you Mason, right - let me pose you a hypothetical situation. You're drawing your webcomic one day, when you get an e-mail from a reader. It says your art is ugly, your writing is stupid, and your characters shouldn't talk about sex because it makes Baby Jesus cry. Do you accept this criticism and change your comic to make that guy happy? Why not?

Exactly, screw the haters because they're just looking for attention. You've learned that lesson the hard way, Mason, I can tell. Most people haven't. I'm like that troll, only I'm much better at it. I want attention. And I don't mind being the bad guy to get it.

You understand this, right? You write a sensitive, inclusive treatment of neglected minorities and all you'll get is "good job". But one page of Scooby-Doo rape and the Internet will beat a path to your door. They'll hate you and call you an asshole, and they'll think they're clever and righteous and they'll never notice you already sold them two t-shirts and a porn commission. People shoot money out their eyeballs without realising it, whoever they're looking at gets rich, even if they're only looking so they can aim a brick at my face.

Screw the haters, because I'm just looking for attention. So invite me over to your two-hour interview! Meticulously explain to me why I'm a terrible human being! Tell me about the HIV-positive babies I've killed! I dare you to do it! Because I charge a $100,000 appearance fee and I can claim back travel expenses from the tax I don't pay.

Seriously, you'd know all this if you went to the Illuminati Business School for Punchable Individuals. Only about 5% of us get our fifteen minutes of fame - uh, infamy - but we share the takings."

*Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Illuminati Business School for Punchable Individuals, or any other entity under the shadowy control of telepathic lizardmen.

[MugaSofer]

The Media, looking for clickbait.

That picture you posted? Gosh, that sure has been posted online a lot, right? That and a few others like it.

But hey,I'm sure that was selected because it's the most accurate possible picture of his face. Yep. Nothing to do with the way school shooters always seem to have really dead eyes, and politicians always seem to be gesticulating crazily when they've said something the author of the article disapproves of...

That Wu-Tang album, funny thing, but all the media coverage of it seemed to think it was cool until it was revealed who bought it. Hell, I thought it was cool.Bill Murray can steal the item in a caper? That's awesome!

But the man jacked up the price of some medication, right? Life-saving medicine! He's practically a murderer!

Hmm.

Turing recently announced discounts of Dara­prim for hospitals, and Shkreli says that for people without insurance it will cost only $1 a pill. For everyone else, insurance, which he argues is paid for by corporate America’s profits, will cover the cost. “I’m like Robin Hood,” he continues. “I’m taking Walmart’s money and doing research for diseases no one cares about."

That's from deep within an article by Vanity Fair. What's that? Yeah, it was an inflated price for insurance companies, a standard practise in medicine.

In fact, Shkreli has done it before, when he acquired the rights to a lifesaving heart medication to make it available in the US:

If benznidazole receives FDA approval, then suddenly the outlook for the thousands of sufferers in the U.S. will change enormously. Any local physician, armed with nothing but a simple blood test, will be able to write a prescription and start a course of treatment, which could save lots of lives.

Of course, the drug needs to be affordable. Shkreli said that he would give the drug away to anybody who didn’t have insurance, but that’s not as generous as it sounds: all drug companies have some kind of “compassionate use protocol.”

But oh dear, he got arrested for - as the popular meme puts it - stealing from the rich:

(Whether or not he's even guilty. He's already stepped down as the CEO of his company to avoid it tainting his work.)

He's a poor kid made good, a nerdy child of working-class immigrants who's dedicated his life to medical research. But sure, he's the bad guy.

(Just to be clear, I wrote this using Google, I know absolutely nothing about this man.)

[Valkyrie]

Okay, so here's a little-known fact about me--and it's not something known by many people I know in person, either--I love, love, love conspiracy theories.

Vigilant Citizen (vigilentcitizen.com) is one of my favorite websites of all time. My favorite conspiracy theories are those that sound crazy when you see them from a distance, but the closer you get, the more it feels eerie and a little bit true.

If I were writing for Vigilant Citizen, then I would talk about how this sleazeball is being set up to take the fall. He's a distraction designed by the part of the Illuminati that uses the media to control people through choosing what they do and do not see in the news.

He's taking up valuable media space that could be better used for other things, other serious issues. Yes, the life-saving medication is important. But he's so cartoonishly evil that I can't help but think he's a pawn.

It's about taking the fall, if you think in terms of how the Illuminati manipulates people. Miley Cyrus, for example, took the fall when she did that horrifying "Blurred Lines" performance. It's about debasing yourself beyond how far you can see yourself reasonably going. In order to gain power through the media, you have to create a spectacle of yourself--it has to be strange and oddly compelling in its ridiculousness.

The Illuminati is what distracts us from the important things that they're doing behind the scenes. They are most likely receiving something in return for their gracious act of allowing him to be a major news story over and over again. Now that he has proven his loyalty and dedication, he will be given more power, so long as he continues to be their fall guy.

There are a lot of celebrities who outright say that the media is controlling them, and it's distinctly possible that mind control is involved somewhere. After all, who could possibly be disturbed enough to do these two outrageous things, especially in such close proximity to each other?

It is likely that the Illuminati have bigger plans and are using the time to prevent the media from noticing other stuff, such as important bills being sent directly to Congress or pulling certain people from the spotlight so they can be mentally abused some more in order to make them a more perfect minion.

The media is a carefully calibrated tool that highlights things, using that emphasis to disguise other things that are generally more important. Think of all those times when something important was happening in the world and all anyone on the news wanted to talk about was some celebrity's mental breakdown.

Frankly, the second you see him start to cover up one of his eyes, then it's all freakin' over.

Regardless of whether you believe the Illuminati is involved or not, it is very, very strange how much we see people putting emphasis on only one eye in magazines and on posters. There are a lot of pictures I've seen where I am unable to think of any logical reason for one of their eyes to be covered. It unsettles me.

Okay, I'm taking my Conspiracy Theory Hat off now.

This post is mostly conspiracy theory, but there are points I've made that should be considered--particularly the part where he just seems cartoonishly evil. He is not a reasonable human being. He's too ridiculous not to be manufactured in some way.

I'm sure the things I say in this post seem silly, but I'm putting myself in the head of someone who thinks like that. That's something that I find quite fun.