Palate cleanser before we get down to business?

Katherine Timpf is exactly right:

Don’t get me wrong — I agree that our culture is experiencing a terrifying shift towards censorship. People have become so easily offended that it’s almost impossible to say anything without someone getting upset about it; and concepts like trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions are threatening free speech.

But none of this changes the fact that Phil Robertson is an ignorant buffoon, and that many of his comments — despite the fact that he does have every right to make them — are not ones that anyone should ever want to be associated with.

(source: Stop Defending Phil Robertson — You’re Embarrassing Yourself)

Some people just realize that if they play to the hustings, go for the belly-laughs from the cheap seats every time, they will keep getting asked back by the sort of people who measure success by the decibel level of the response from the imbeciles who hoot and holler.  After all, showing up to CPAC doesn’t mean they don’t have pretty much exactly the same acculturation as people who find Jon Stewart funny or cheer on the execrable Bill Maher.

It will not do to encourage them.  It is a true saying, worthy of acceptance, that “Bad money drives out good.”

I mean, you do know what happened to Bardolph, right?

It doesn’t go well for lowest-common-denominator players.  More importantly, it goes badly for those who are seduced into following them.

It’s not good to get into a habit of being moved by mass-market belly-laughs, in any case.  Once you’ve rotted your brain badly enough, it’s hard to figure out why the latest sensation is so dangerous.

And that is why, though I don’t much care about talk radio, I don’t encourage too much devotion to Rush Limbaugh or any other entertainer who poses as a polemicist.  Nonetheless, I have to agree with Jay Nordlinger that the casual elision of systematic abuse in the service of distorted religion’s brutally oppressive politics and inappropriate vulgarity in service of populist debate becomes quite shocking at times.  Nordlinger reports the following reaction to some remarks by a composer at a performance:

[Adams] read Arabian Nights, and was appalled by the “casual brutality toward women” depicted therein. At the same time, he was reading of brutality toward women around the world: in Egypt, Afghanistan, and India, for example.

But we were not to think we Americans were exempt from this brutality. For example, you can “find it on Rush Limbaugh.” (Rush equals the Taliban or the Muslim Brotherhood, you see.) To this remark, the audience responded with sustained and robust applause.

In 1984, Orwell writes of the two-minute hate. The applause in Avery Fisher Hall did not last for two minutes, but it went on long enough.<

[…]

This is a sick and twisted culture. It features that toxic combination of ignorance and hate.

Adams is a good composer, and this violin-and-orchestra piece is a skillful work (as I will write in a later review). But even if he wrote music as good as Mozart’s, he would not measure up to Rush Limbaugh. He apparently has nothing like the decency or goodwill of my friend Rush.

You’re never supposed to analogize anything to the Nazis. That’s the rule. But sometimes I break the rule. And I believe I got a whiff — just a tiny whiff — of Nuremberg in Avery Fisher Hall tonight. Collective hatred, and self-satisfied hatred, based on damnable lies.

(source: A Sick and Twisted Culture)

See also here, here, here, here, and here.  And don’t be a bigot.  Even if “he called me names first,” you may not hurl bricks.

One just doesn’t do such things.