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This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? There has to be someone out there, right?
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Mar 15, 2013 19:43
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? I don't know about any celebrities but I certainly did. After 9/11 I was all about an invasion and revenge. I wasn't in favor of nukes or genocide but I did support the initial invasion of Afghanistan to find and capture Osama Bin Laden and either weaken or splinter Al Qaeda. It did not take me very long to turn around on that issue after all the facts came out, and I was very much opposed to the shift in focus from Afghanistan to Iraq.
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Mar 15, 2013 20:06
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Minorities posted:Dennis Miller was easily one of the funniest SNL cast members when he was on it and his HBO show was pretty funny too. If you say so. I never found him funny at all. Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Jon Lovitz, and Kevin Nealon might like a word on that as well. Victoria Jackson would probably agree with you.
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Mar 15, 2013 20:10
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BiggerBoat posted:If you say so. I never found him funny at all. Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Jon Lovitz, and Kevin Nealon might like a word on that as well. Victoria Jackson would probably agree with you. I may be a weirdo, but I even thought Dennis Miller was funny on Monday Night Football. 
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Mar 15, 2013 20:52
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? A friend of my ex-GF sort of had an epiphany that you can't gently caress with the whole world without it lashing back somehow then, but he wasn't famous or anything. The reverse was far more common, though. One of the first things that got me hooked on US politics as an early blog, called Think Left, I believe. It had great state-by-state political descriptions, research and anecdotes sent in by readers, and was really acessible to a foreigner like myself. Right after 9-11, it was suspended and the writer left a message basically stating that he had been wrong all along and had re-evaluated his priorities and now the important think was to kill towelheads and the Right had the right attitude for achieving that.
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Mar 15, 2013 21:06
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I do radio theatre, so I could never really hate Prairie Home Companion. Keillor can sometimes be kind of obnoxious by himself, though.
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Mar 15, 2013 21:10
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? I think this happened a bit with the Iraq war. That was finally enough to break some folks on the right.
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Mar 15, 2013 21:15
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The immediate aftermath of 9-11 probably made me more liberal. I had always been vaguely aware of the American war machine and jingoism but seeing all that destructive power in action along with people gleefully cheering for the bombing of a bunch of people who may or may not have had anything to do with 9-11 scared the hell out of me. Also the fact that everyone in America seemed to suddenly be openly racist towards Arabs and anyone vaguely middle eastern.
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Mar 15, 2013 21:19
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Sephyr posted:Right after 9-11, it was suspended and the writer left a message basically stating that he had been wrong all along and had re-evaluated his priorities and now the important think was to kill towelheads and the Right had the right attitude for achieving that. To be fair the US collectively lost it's poo poo with 9/11 and I don't know anyone, no matter how liberal, that didn't want to "kill towelheads" to some extent. Tim Kreider posted:I believe that we collectively decided, without quite admitting it to ourselves, that somebody, somewhere in the world, had to die for 9/11, and we didn't really care whether they'd had anything to do with it or who they were, so long as they were brown-skinned and worshipped Allah and lived in the Middle East... Kreider's the same one that wrote the scathing eulogy of Reagan when he died so you're not going to find to many people to the left of him and even he was crazy with bloodlust after 9/11... at least for a little while. On the flip side, I think that the colossal mistake that was Iraq really opened a lot of the younger generations eyes to the fact that the US is actually loving horrible with it's foreign policy and maybe we did deserve it on some level.
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Mar 15, 2013 21:30
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A Winner is Jew posted:To be fair the US collectively lost it's poo poo with 9/11 and I don't know anyone, no matter how liberal, that didn't want to "kill towelheads" to some extent. I did not, I honestly did not. I was angry prior to 9/11 when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and started destroying cultural heritage, because it was out of blind, stupid religious fanaticism. And I was very glad to see them overthrown, but I never once had any kind of indiscriminate "kill towelheads" feelings at all. If you understood the history of that area, you knew quite well why they wanted to do what they did. It was a horrible act, but the damage that we've done to our country in the years since then has massively outweighed anything they could have accomplished on their own. I'm disappointed in my country for the reaction to 9/11. Walter fucked around with this message at 11:02 on Mar 17, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 21:45
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No one "deserves" a 9/11 event. We shouldn't pretend we didn't know of their motivations, or pretend they arrived at them through voodoo magic or that they're all little doctor dooms running around being evil just because. But c'mon. I'm also incredibly disappointed at our nations reaction to 9/11, with most of the blame going to a president and government that decided the proper response was an invasion of Iraq, by way of lying. 9/11 was tragic, what we did afterwards needs some other kind of word to be invented to describe how stupid and terrible it was. Intel&Sebastian fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Mar 15, 2013 |
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Mar 15, 2013 21:48
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? I was a low-information liberal before 9/11, but the funny thing is leading up to the 2000 election I really warmed to John McCain and was thinking about becoming more conservative. 9/11 shook me up and compelled me to educate myself about why it happened, and I began to see that the GOP was a corrupt outfit. Then the whole Iraq debacle cemented it. So 9/11 definitely changed me for the better.
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Mar 15, 2013 21:52
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Intel&Sebastian posted:9/11 was tragic, what we did afterwards needs some other kind of word to be invented to describe how stupid and terrible it was. I'm not usually one of those "Hey on the Daily Show..." guys but they nailed it with "catastrofuck".
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Mar 15, 2013 21:54
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? Hitchens went from smarmy douchebag to unbearable rear end in a top hat, and then when he got waterboarded he dialed it back a bit and just became a regular, racist rear end in a top hat. He did nudge to the left, but only after being tortured for 2 seconds. It was pretty much a unanimous political shift to "turn the Middle East into a land of glass" after 9/11.
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Mar 15, 2013 22:06
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A Winner is Jew posted:To be fair the US collectively lost it's poo poo with 9/11 and I don't know anyone, no matter how liberal, that didn't want to "kill towelheads" to some extent. I don't think I ever got to the level of "Kill all Towelheads everywhere!" But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 if the government had said that our response was to make Afghanistan burn from north to south and east to west, I'd have been on board with that. I calmed down enough by the time Iraq started to ramp up that I knew something was up, but I didn't completely come out of my 9/11 insanity until mid-2003 or so. By then it was too late. On the plus side, I don't think I'll let myself get carried away like that again.
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Mar 15, 2013 22:27
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:I do radio theatre, so I could never really hate Prairie Home Companion. Keillor can sometimes be kind of obnoxious by himself, though. Anyone who hates PHC has never needed to put a baby to sleep right the gently caress now on a Sunday.
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Mar 15, 2013 22:51
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While getting in the car with my parents today, I heard who I am reasonably sure is Mark Levin asking "Joey" about comparing he size of their Facebook friends list and education credit entails before the station was switched. I say I think it was him because others in this thread have pointed out his surprising amount of education and Master Shake-esque voice. I'd say the Facebook thing is petty and childish, but at no point in history did even middleschoolers actually use Facebook and Myspace friends list sizes as ammo.
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Mar 16, 2013 07:26
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:I do radio theatre, so I could never really hate Prairie Home Companion. Keillor can sometimes be kind of obnoxious by himself, though. I don't understand why people hate Keillor. He is literally the most inoffensive man on the planet. And anyone who doesn't think Prairie Home Companion owns never heard the septic tank story. (To summarize: A 1937 chevy that was converted into a septic tank crashes into the highschool homecoming parade. If you want to hear it, it's on this: http://www.amazon.com/Humor-Stories-Collection-More-Wobegon/dp/156511275X ) He presents his show as a corny little homage to Norman Rockwelliion old timey local radio programmes, but really he's got a subversive streak of master comedy a thousand miles long. Edit: An example. (He wrote the movie.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O35iphfiMhs Spacedad fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Mar 16, 2013 |
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Mar 16, 2013 10:35
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A Winner is Jew posted:To be fair the US collectively lost it's poo poo with 9/11 and I don't know anyone, no matter how liberal, that didn't want to "kill towelheads" to some extent. No one 'deserved' 9-11 as others have stated - poor choice of wording. As it was in the middle-east whenever the US intervened & meddled there, innocent civillians were caught in the middle of the US government's horrible policy decisions and the far-reaching consequences they have in motivating radical elements to hate our guts. What made it different was that it was happening on our soil, and in a massive manner. 9-11 I think actually had the reverse effect though - it ramped up anti-muslim hate and the desire to go meddling in foreign countries without understanding a drat thing about them. It was only after Iraq and subsequent wars became huge badly planned clusterfuck quagmires that it started to dawn on people that the US had terrible loving foreign policy. Spacedad fucked around with this message at 10:46 on Mar 16, 2013 |
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Mar 16, 2013 10:44
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I never watched Dennis Miller's show in the 90s or whenever it was, but I saw a clip on the youtubes with him and a really young (and really ugly) Bill Maher, and Miller actually seemed pretty cool. Definitely noticeably different from the unbearable shithead he appears whenever he's on Bill O'Reilly's show.
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Mar 16, 2013 13:33
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His HBO show was alright. Definitely a product of its time. The interviews were generally pretty good.
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Mar 16, 2013 14:11
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I watched it now and then with my dad as a kid. The endless 'Yeltsin is a drunk' jokes shaped my politics a little.
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Mar 16, 2013 15:54
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Maybe he just drank from Gallagher's glass in the backstage and caught the brain-bug. Though I'm not sure Gallagher's case was triggered by 9-11 or if he had already gone nuts before that.
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Mar 16, 2013 16:24
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Sephyr posted:Maybe he just drank from Gallagher's glass in the backstage and caught the brain-bug. Gallagher was always a shithead, but he used to fit in a lot better in the 80s because his kind of bigotry was much harder see against all the background noise. He only looked like an old hippie, and as the boomer culture receded he stayed landed up on the beach, drying out and hating gay people. Plus, he got really bitter once people got tied of his watermelon poo poo: http://www.cantstopthebleeding.com/comedy-is-not-pretty-and-neither-is-gallaghers-act http://www.avclub.com/articles/gallagher,36622/
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Mar 16, 2013 16:58
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Jack Gladney posted:Gallagher was always a shithead, but he used to fit in a lot better in the 80s because his kind of bigotry was much harder see against all the background noise. He only looked like an old hippie, and as the boomer culture receded he stayed landed up on the beach, drying out and hating gay people. Those interviews are amazing. I've never seen so much bitterness, from someone who achieved more in his field than 98% of his contemporaries ever did. But no, he deserved to be more successful than David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Jerry Seinfeld put together, because he was braver and funnier and more cutting edge than those hacks.
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Mar 16, 2013 17:10
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Yeah, my parents (who are old hippies themselves,) loved Gallagher back in the day and when I was a kid we'd watch his shows a lot. In retrospect there were a lot of things that would be considered conservative dog whistles today. The same goes for Dennis Miller's show I think, he always came across as a bit of a laid back libertarian but back then libertarians weren't as annoying because so many of their ideas hadn't become pervasive economic policy and (the biggest change,) there just wasn't a huge market for being extremely hateful and shrill. On the flip-side there's George Carlin. I think a while back here or in another thread there were a lot of people talking about how they were unsure about his politics and thought he might have been kind of conservative since he was really into offending people. If you watch his acts they were always a bit political but late in life he went all out and I think he was to the far left of most of America. The guy really hated corporations, the military, the police state and political corruption (every joke he made about politicians started with the premise that they were all completely bought off.)
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Mar 16, 2013 17:22
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Walter posted:
I do this. I listen to NPR when I am in my car, all the time. Morning edition, All things considered, and BBC news hour(if I finish early) keep me entertained for my commute. I typically go to Whole Foods for lunch, and loathe my local stations' eleven o'clock hour programming which includes The Splendid Table, You bet your garden, Dr. zorba doesn't know what the gently caress he is talking about, and some show where people call in and have there poo poo appraised. I flip to Rush for his opening monologue because I can't stand the mindlessness of those other shows. He'll, even on Fridays at 4:00 my station runs a locally produced Foreign Affairs show with the dean of my alma mater and I listen to Hannity for 30 minutes before flipping to ATC. I hope if I get a new car I can figure out how to stream WBUR's feed over my stereo, they seem to have it together. I don't get the hate for WWDTM though, it plays while my wife and I are driving to the local social justice church in OKC and is usually good for a few chuckles and topical humor.
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Mar 16, 2013 17:51
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Jack Gladney posted:
Holy poo poo that second one "If Michael Vick worked at the pound, he wouldn't have gone to prison." Well that's certainly one way to look at it. "Why can't cops arrest kids with droopy pants for attempted public urination, which it is totally reasonable to assume is what they were doing?"
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Mar 16, 2013 20:04
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Gallagher's also bitter because his brother one day started doing his act and nobody could tell the difference.
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Mar 16, 2013 20:09
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I remember an episode of Miller's HBO show that aired sometime after 9/11 where he interviewed Christopher Guest, who is a very liberal guy, and the tension was incredibly thick...I guess by then Miller had begun to espouse some neocon viewpoints and Guest was very cold & gave him withering looks throughout the interview, while Miller tried to remain polite. It was extremely uncomfortable to watch. My guess is situations like that contributed to Miller becoming a bitter jerk. A lot of conservatives turn into overbearing assholes because they've been painfully rejected by liberals at some point in the past. It's why so many of them measure the validity of any particular argument by how much it pisses off the left (as opposed to how factually accurate it might be).
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Mar 16, 2013 20:50
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Blastedhellscape posted:The same goes for Dennis Miller's show I think, he always came across as a bit of a laid back libertarian but back then libertarians weren't as annoying because so many of their ideas hadn't become pervasive economic policy and (the biggest change,) there just wasn't a huge market for being extremely hateful and shrill. Pretty much. Miller's always had a soft libertarian thing going, sorta like the gang at Red Eye on Fox plus a couple standard deviations in IQ. The foolishness of movement conservatism in the 80s and 90s made it easier comedic fodder, so a lot of people commenting on it seemed more lefty than they really were. Also at least at SNL he wasn't the only person writing his material. Alec Bald Snatch fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Mar 16, 2013 |
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Mar 16, 2013 21:16
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This is some serious Tiger Beat material.
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Mar 17, 2013 02:03
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So Glenn Beck's site, TheBlaze.com, put up an article about those white supremacists that crashed the CPAC breakout session on racism. Care to guess what the comment section looks like? http://www.theblaze.com/stories/201...g-cpac-session/ If you guessed "a vibrating beehive of full-blown, unabashed racists", you'd be correct. It's really a sight to behold.
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Mar 17, 2013 02:37
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Dr Christmas posted:Way are you talking about? MSNBC is all liberal, while Fox has tons of opposing viewpoints, like Colmes and... hold on, it'll come to me... I thought they got rid of Alan Colmes right around the time Obama was elected so that Sean Hannity could just go to town with crazy poo poo.
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Mar 17, 2013 03:52
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whaley posted:I thought they got rid of Alan Colmes right around the time Obama was elected so that Sean Hannity could just go to town with crazy poo poo. They still bring him on their various shows when they need a liberal punching bag for a particular segment.
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Mar 17, 2013 04:05
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? Speaking only for myself, indirectly. I was a registered Republican and a center-right conservative who switched to Libertarian the day after GWB won the nomination. As the war talk about Iraq ramped up, I edged further and further left and by the time of the 2004 election I had jumped ship entirely due to the growing insanity on the right. I'm still glad the Taliban was overthrown, but Afghanistan is such a loving mess 12 years later that I'm still not sure if it was worth it. Then again, even when I considered myself a Republican I would lecture people about how Desert Storm was a case of the US saving one dictatorship from another, so I was a bit weird to start with. Sulphuric Sundae posted:I do radio theatre, so I could never really hate Prairie Home Companion. Keillor can sometimes be kind of obnoxious by himself, though. Garrison Keillor is loving Treebeard with a microphone and I hate him. Hurf durf lol rhubarb pie herf durf.
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Mar 17, 2013 05:18
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Dirk Pitt posted:I do this. I listen to NPR when I am in my car, all the time. Morning edition, All things considered, and BBC news hour(if I finish early) keep me entertained for my commute. I typically go to Whole Foods for lunch, and loathe my local stations' eleven o'clock hour programming which includes The Splendid Table, You bet your garden, Dr. zorba doesn't know what the gently caress he is talking about, and some show where people call in and have there poo poo appraised. I flip to Rush for his opening monologue because I can't stand the mindlessness of those other shows. If I hear Zorba on NPR, I lunge for the buttons, even if it's a choice between the right wing station, with its paid advertisement for "Purity Products," or the local top 40 station, where I can choose from the remarkable musical stylings of Usher talking about boobies or Ke$ha. If I catch Zorba at the right time, though - mid-laugh - I can't resist mimicking it, because it's so damned annoying. Fact is, I've actually gotten to the point where I flip to the local right wing station first when I get in the car in the mornings, rather than NPR (which is still #1 on my radio presets). I've gotten a little tired of the way things are presented on there. Why? (And this is where some of the content from this post may be found.) Because like a lot of liberals, I actually find that NPR strays curiously right in some of its coverage, particularly on market / economic matters, and in some of its political coverage. I realize that they're usually pretty centrist, which is fine - I would rather listen to a news station that's not biased. But the omissions and glossing over of some pretty major issues on NPR leave me feeling a bit as though I could do better by just reading a wide variety of web sources and skipping radio news altogether. The last thing I appreciate is a radio station (or any news source) that purports by reputation to be impartial in how it treats issues, but is (when you get right down to it) not. And the only thing I really listen to NPR for anymore is news. In contrast, the right wing station, awful as it is (or at least as it can be, depending on who's on) is at least entertaining. I don't have to guess where the political center is, because I know (for the most part) that the station is so far right (I'm in East Tennessee) that if I'm in my car, the center can be found somewhere over in the left lane. So I can listen, shake my head, yell at the idiots calling in on the radio, and be fairly certain that nothing remotely resembling a fact will appear on that station. I can also screen advertisements - any companies, local or otherwise, who advertise solely on the right wing station around here are on my "do not patronize" list. Either way, right wing radio is basically any Internet article comments section or Reddit political thread put to the airwaves, and that means train wrecks and moron callers with terrible opinions. At the very least, that's entertaining at 6am as I'm driving to the gym. I've learned the schedule here, so I know when I can listen and be entertained, and when I'll just vomit a little in my mouth or want to punch someone squarely in the face. Some local guy who usually is center/right, but that means relatively rational compared to the other folks on there, comes on in the morning. I've even called in a couple times for the hell of it. Then Geraldo (who is as close to center as anyone on that station), then Rush, then some local boob who I can't stomach because he's a bona fide moron who just happens to be sort of conservative, then Hannity (who I cannot stand and won't listen to, he crosses the line from entertaining to enraging), then Levin (let's get the crazy rolling!). In contrast, the weekday NPR is Morning Edition (twice), then classical music with really terrible local hosts, Fresh Air (sometimes interesting), more classical, All Things Considered, and then more classical or jazz. Weekends, it's reruns of Car Talk (good once, not on reruns), PHC (both Saturday and Sunday), WWDTM or Zorba, This American Life (occasionally entertaining) or "On Being" (bullshit feel good crap, used to be called "Speaking of Faith" and was even more obnoxious then), and then good ol' Splendid Table, "the show for people who love to eat." I can't stand it. Yesterday, "This American Life" (which I caught on the way to / from the grocery store) opened with an extended intro from a guy who apparently moved to New York, got a studio apartment. His neighbor ended up on "The Bachelor," and the girl dumped him because of his apartment. Apparently that was enough to get this guy depressed, because his apartment sucked or something. And then went on and on about how upset and depressed he was about it. I wanted to punch both him and Ira Glass. I know a lot of folks in this country listen to right wing radio because they actually agree with it, but I'm increasingly convinced that (like many of us in this thread) the listening audience is a little like the people who used to go to freak shows.
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Mar 17, 2013 11:26
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Rev. Bleech_ posted:Garrison Keillor is loving Treebeard with a microphone and I hate him. Hurf durf lol rhubarb pie herf durf. Treebeard's a good description. To my ears he sounds like an old man slowly dying on the toilet.
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Mar 17, 2013 11:52
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Cheapsteaks posted:This Miller chat does make me wonder, is there anyone who went from being a tool before 9-11 to becoming a reasonable human being after, or is this extremely rare? I fully supported the invasion of Afghanistan because of the Taliban's complicity in attacking us, and the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a terrible human being and I had absolutely no problem with invading every country whose homicidal tyrant was brutalising its population in political and ethnic cleansings. Then I deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and realized that war isn't actually an effective solution to anything. Pretty much ever. A few years getting a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies confirmed this to me. It also left me without any real job prospects. 
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Mar 17, 2013 12:01
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Blastedhellscape posted:Yeah, my parents (who are old hippies themselves,) loved Gallagher back in the day and when I was a kid we'd watch his shows a lot. In retrospect there were a lot of things that would be considered conservative dog whistles today. The same goes for Dennis Miller's show I think, he always came across as a bit of a laid back libertarian but back then libertarians weren't as annoying because so many of their ideas hadn't become pervasive economic policy and (the biggest change,) there just wasn't a huge market for being extremely hateful and shrill. Not really though. Carlin used to rail on social conservatives and then go with "and these guys on the left are just as bad from the other direction" and then rail against the nanny staters and the politically correct police. He went after feminists as much as he want after the vagina regulation crowd. He really hated the activists and true believers of both sides equally and loved to point out how repulsive and idiotic they all were. What you have to keep in mind is that the end of Carlins career and life was when Bush was still in office. So a lot of comedians seemed to have far more of a liberal bent at the time. There wasn't really a "left" to rail about in office. Most of the material they had to work with stemmed from the Republicans in office. This also explains a lot of liberal griping as to how many of them seem less "liberal" and more "both sides loving suck" now that the Democrats are back in office.
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Mar 17, 2013 14:35
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