I have figure that this is a good thing; let's make this shit explicit--there's no plausible deniability here.
I agree. It's weird that there's a sort of radio-blowhard exception built into rules of decency, though.
I've been led to understand it's a blanket Republican exception, but what do I know.
Has Dick Cheney no sense of decency?
Oh wait, never mind.
A modern-day warrior
Mean mean stride,
Today's Tom Sawyer
Mean mean pride.
Seems intended more as joke than insult to me. But we already had this conversation re: Imus just a few weeks ago. Y'all are humorless.
6: My first response to the "rules of decency," was to go "uh oh" and start thinking about what I should burn, but I think we can take what Labs said with the subtext Imus the Racist helped us develop (politically oriented show with high-profile national politicians as guests != getting to say whatever the fuck you want repercussion free) and realize he doesn't actually mean jokes are banned.
If nothing else, though, this should prove that 'articulate' means exactly what we've been saying it means.
And on the other hand, there's this bullshit.
I guess Connecticutians are pretty hung.
I was thinking -- one of the comments to the linked post says the kid pictured has the picture hanging on his wall, and if people are going to make that kind of mistake I can see why.
I apologize if it's not his genitalia and I'm blowing something out of proportion.
This person wins the thread.
Seriously, google around and look for the picture. It so clearly isn't a cock you have to wonder if the people who wrote the letters have been averting their gazes their entire lives and really don't have any idea what a man's thingy actually looks like.
Sorrell did not comply with an agreement to alert the principal about controversial articles
Tolerating homosexuals is controversial? I could understand if it was explicit descriptions of safe sex or something, but criminy.
11: If that was actually his dick, he could have used it as a tourniquet.
I'm sure this thread is warming the cockles of ogged's heart. IYKWIM.
low-resolution + inability to size images + fevered imagination is all I can come up with.
I just googled for a long time and can't find a non-tiny version of the image in 11. Anyone?
If you click on the picture halfway down the linked page, you get a bigger version. Still not huge, but big enough to make the salacious interpretation ludicrous.
Here. Blow up the pic and you'll see what people were probably freaking out about--it's not the bit of the tourniquet hanging down between his legs, it's the bit that with a great deal of imagination and a complete ignorance of anatomy looks like a semi-erect penis sticking up between his legs.
27: You think? That wouldn't be flattering at all.
And Nelson Mandela
Aha, an excuse to link to a copyright-violating post of an entertaining LRB essay
The late Angela Carter once told me I was a 'formalist'. We didn't meet often, and this may have been the first time we did, in which case it was at a party. It had slipped my mind that I don't smoke, and I cadged a cigarette off her in exchange for reciting the first sentence of one of her novels ('On my last night in London I paid you a small tribute of spermatozoa, my dear Tristessa' - an opening that is actually easier to remember than forget). I felt baffled and obscurely hurt by her comment. I honestly didn't know what she meant, but I understood that a formalist wasn't a good thing to be. I knew that 'formalism' was one of the headings (along with 'decadence' and 'bourgeois leanings') under which Soviet composers of the 1930s were bullied into abandoning experimentation, but I didn't connect with the word at all personally. Now I feel I've more or less worked out what the term means, and though I think I was misdiagnosed on the basis of a single symptom (an elaborately structured story), I wish I had defended an approach to making art which can claim Bach, Dante and Joyce among its dupes.
And, of course, the excuse in question.
What did the Special AKA want when they sang 'Free Nelson Mandela'? Exactly what it said on the record label. The song was saved from obviousness by the ambiguity in the simple lyrics. The words 'Are you so blind that you cannot see?/Are you so deaf that you cannot hear?' seemed to be addressed both to the indifferent West and to the South African authorities. The lyric sent intoxicatingly mixed messages to the listener: you're stupid, you're helpless, you don't care, you're powerful. And the music, wonderfully rollicking, spilled out of the narrow emotional range of most protest music. 'Free Nelson Mandela' made it sound as if the party celebrating Mandela's release had already started.
28: Well, the other possibility is (even more) ludicrous. Also, it's not what was edited out in the altered images. I assume that even sexophobes know that cocks are attached in front, not in back....
This is why a small part of me was ambivalent about the whole Imus thing. You can nail the guys who have pretensions toward being respectable, but that won't do anything to hurt the ones who do this stuff unapologetically and who are the main problem. Rush isn't going to try and climb down and express remorse the way Imus did. He's just going to shove it down our throats and his ratings won't be affected.
. He's just going to shove it down our throats and his ratings won't be affected.
He was doing that anyway. We're never going to get rid of demagogues; I'm not sure I'd want to.
You can nail the guys who have pretensions toward being respectable, but that won't do anything to hurt the ones who do this stuff unapologetically and who are the main problem.
On the other hand, if you shrug and say, well, Imus isn't the main problem, you help ensure that outrageous racism isn't really all that bad, because there's always someone that's worse.
Thanks B. There's nothing even remotely cock-like in that photo; people are odd.
So what? You can't stop racists from being racists, or stop racists from having an audience. Big surprise. But you can erode the acceptability of racism until all that's left is Stormfront and the like.
Rush will probably keep being Rush until he and his audience have passed on. But the successor to Rush will either be less racist or more like Stormfront. Count on it.
Huh. Another sign that it's time to get back out there, I suppose. 'Cause I could totally see people being confused by that photo, at least at first...
5:
what you say about his company
is what you say
about society
36: The dangly bit or the bit at the top?
The bit at the top, though I wouldn't have called it "semi-erect" and realize that it would be a rather biologically odd placement spatially. But I'm not all that good at spatial orientation and, at first glance, I can see what people were thinking.
It couldn't even remotely be a dick if it weren't semi-erect, what with it actually sticking out from his body and all.
40: Girl needs to see some more thingys. Some of us (apo?) have extra belts even when watching the Golden Girls.
The confusion had to be from the dangly bit at the bottom. The thing at the top doesn't look cock-like at all.
43 is impossible.
Bea Arthur, on the other hand, is awesome.
44: Ben, I know you're young but, just internet-wise, can we make sweet, sweet love?
Not in a gay way.
Obviously.
40: I'm just sayin' it takes me a good amount of thought to parse out the impossibility. At first glance, I see it. I'll cop to IDP's fevered imagination theory in 21 -- and to Tweety's theory in 41, for that matter. (Also, I have an overdue eye-doctor appointment in a couple of weeks. But really, fevered imagination/fuzzy recollection probably covers it...)
Even when watching the Golden Girls.
Bea Arthur was on Fresh Air (I think) the other day.
And Nelson Mandela.
When I did college radio, back in the late '80s, you could count on some College Republican calling the station to complain every time someone played that song, "My tuition pays for this station! Why are you playing songs about communists?" No doubt some of those kids are running the country today.