Ravenews is a labour of love, drugs, and EDM. It wouldn’t exist without a complete and total disregard for common decency. At Ravenews, we have no shame — and neither should you.

We were all thrown into the Universe without getting much of a say in the matter. Some of us landed into cozy situations, many of us did not. None of us, however, asked to be here. Now that we are, we shouldn’t waste a single second of our lives apologizing for it or for anything else that’s beyond our control.

Life isn’t easy — for anyone. Robin Williams was a wealthy comedian who was loved, respected, and adored by millions. That didn’t stop him from struggling with depression, it didn’t stop him from getting sick, and it didn’t stop him from taking his own life.

Buddha said that life was suffering, but there are a lot of people out there, especially liberal art graduates, who believe otherwise. They think life is only suffering for some people, and that thanks to their political enlightenment, they believe that they are in a position to judge the authenticity of your pain.

We at Ravenews reject the idea that pain can or should be judged. We believe that pain is incommensurable, that we all suffer in our own way, and that the moment we begin to compare one another’s suffering, we lose the ability to empathize and to feel compassion. In other words, the moment we judge another person's pain, we kill our ability to empathize with that pain.

We started this site to poke fun at journalists who wrote sensationalist stories about ravers. Journalists love a good scare story, and ravers have provided a lot of fodder to them over the years. The 90s were the golden age of Raver Danger stories, and while newspapers carry fewer of these stories today, they still publish them with hilarious consistency. Newspapers wanted people to look down on ravers. They were profiting off the creation of shame.

Journalism has always been a shit show — it’s never been a respectable business. Newspapers thrive on drama, and drama thrives on shame. They antagonize, belittle, provoke, incite, and enrage. That’s their modus operandi. They’re not in the business of sharing useful news, they’re in the business of manipulating people by making them angry and afraid.

In the past, readers could escape the hatred and fear mongering they read in the news, but now there is no escape. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the fear and the hate never end.

Journalists are professional assholes. They shit on people for a living. There’s a reason studies show that psychopaths are attracted to careers in journalism. What happens when all these psychopaths start congregating online, networking with each other, creating a giant echo chamber full of sycophantic rage addicts who eat up their every word? We believe that journalism, when combined with social media, fosters intolerance and promotes violent rhetoric.

Journalism is, at its heart, abusive. It relies on drawing out negative emotions from people, and hence profits from misery and suffering. Social media, on the other hand, is about connecting people. When you combine journalism with social media, you get people connecting over commodified misery. The journalists have an incentive to create more misery, since the more misery they create, the more attention they get, the more attention they get, the more ad dollars they make.

We know that newspapers and the journalists they employ have weaponized and commodified shame, and thanks to the internet, we know that it’s harder for us to escape their shame machine.

This is why Ravenews would like to encourage everyone to reject the shame machine, the journalists who run it, and the readers who enable it.

It doesn’t matter what race you are, what gender you are, what god you pray too, or what you do with your private parts. You have no reason to be ashamed of yourself, and if anyone tries to make you feel bad for being who you are, recognize that they have appointed themselves your judge and jury, and then tell them to fuck off.

You are valuable, you deserve to be treated with dignity, and your feelings are legitimate. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.