Heres a taste. Go Here for the whole thing, but be warned, Strong Language.
Because, ultimately, what happened to Imus happened because of his speech, and if you wanna, say, giggle when the Rude Pundit attacks someone, then Don Imus gets to say his non-FCC violating insults. Yes, the Rude Pundit's aware that there's a qualitative, historical, and ethical difference between calling white conservative evangelicals nasty names and calling a women's college basketball team "whores," but it's still speech. Hate speech is speech; yes, sadly, angrily, we must call it "speech."
The Rude Pundit's concern can be divided into two incompatible areas with cliched names: the slippery slope and the sacrificial lamb.
The slippery slope is that we start getting 'em all fired, de-advertised, whatever. And this is where the Rude Pundit's grappling with this fucker like he's trying to put snakes in a bottle (yeah, yeah - it's early, the Rude Pundit hasn't slept yet, fuck off). No, of course MSNBC and CBS don't have to give Imus a platform for his speech. But this point is that they did. And they knew, they fucking well knew, what Imus was about. Just because this time his bullshit, sad, I'm-down-with-poor-man-lingo fucktardery got noticed by Media Matters and others, that doesn't mean that they didn't use Imus and profit off him and, to be sure, egg him on for ratings.
This might be my favorite part here. OH and again STRONG LANGUAGE, including a word that otherwise would never get on this site, you can probably guess which one.
The real solution is to use speech to combat speech, not silence. Rather than getting Imus fired, why not get people to stop listening? And if they don't, if they wanna listen, well, fuck, you lost then. But you need to keep trying to get people to shift away from one way of thinking. Just because you got rid of Imus doesn't mean the sentiments go away. Just because you come up with some pussy voluntary ban on the word "nigger," or you say "the n-word" instead, doesn't mean the word or the feeling goes away. Civil discourse? Fuck that. It's not possible. You don't change hearts and minds by silencing people. (The Rude Pundit has called for Ann Coulter to be kicked out of newspapers, but not for her pathetic little wet spaghetti slap insults - it's because she says things are facts that are, in fact, lies.)
I just hate censorship. Was he wrong to say what he did? Absolutely, but this is America, he can say it if he wants. But we don't have to listen.
2 comments:
Well, you hear worse things in music now, but no one is offended by it, are they? I mean they say "ho" and.. you get the point. I realize it was the sponsors who pulled out but why aren't people offended by the words in music? Just curious. In my opinion he should have not been fired. Everyone associated with Imus, his bosses, the sponsors etc. all knew he was hired as a shock jock, so WTF?
exactly.
I find this almost a non-issue, I thought he was terrible the few times I ever heard him, but I've heard a lot more offensive things come from the mouth of our president and his ass hasn't been fired.
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