Poets and Lovers exists since five years and a half. It is now the sole survivor of a group of four related sites. Those devoted to the artist Graham Ovenden and his Garage Press have definitively disappeared: Graham died on 9 December 2022, then nobody was responsible for maintaining these two sites, and after the person in charge of the technical management of the four sites disappeared, their domain names were not renewed. The domain name of Pigtails in Paint was also not renewed: according to a press release dated 9 March on its Facebook page, when the person in charge had gone, the Editor-In-Chief could not get complete access to the domain name, so the latter expired. He decided then to let the project sleep until he could get help from other people.
Early in May, the police raided the Editor’s home and arrested him. According to the press release of the Police Department dated 14 May, “On May 9th, 2024, detectives followed up on a cyber tip received from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) regarding an individual who uploaded and downloaded image files containing child pornography.” Then they found “hundreds of child pornography images and several electronic devices believed to contain more child pornography images in a digital format.” This is completely false, the site only contained art and scholarship, there was no pornography in it, and the Editor-In-Chief collected art related to little girls, not pornography.
This is not the first time that cops falsely claim to have uncovered large volumes of child pornography. They often make such claims to get fame and to show that they “act” efficiently; moreover, their “detectives” generally can’t distinguish nude art from pornography.
After his arrest, the Editor-In-Chief was released on bail, and he is now preparing his legal defence. The weight is too heavy, he cannot resume working on Pigtails in Paint, so the site is definitively dead. It had lived for nearly 13 years.
The Wayback Machine, which falsely pretends to be fighting for the preservation of documents against censorship, has removed from its archives all material related to Pigtails in Paint, not only those with its last domain name (since 2017), but also with the previous domain name (until 2016). Some posts have been saved on archive.today, but there was no systematic backup policy towards this site.
The Amputated Limbs Of Children
While authorities and law enforcement persecute art sites and their owners, the governments support murderous wars that kill and maim thousands of children, they sell weapons to the killers, and sometimes they try to silence protesters. Recently, a corrupt war criminal received a standing ovation from members of the US Congress.
Caitlin Johnstone published on 18 April “The Amputated Limbs Of Children,” a poem about the children in Gaza who lost an arm or a leg in the war, while the world does not really care.