Brontoforumus

The Red Menace has been replaced by some sort of... Non Menace? Transparent Menace? Uh... Ghost Menace?

I had a long discussion elsewhere with friends about celebrating the death of Alies, and it came down to humanity. On their side, it would be inhuman to celebrate the death of anyone, even Alies. My stance was that Roger Alies was someone who would willingly strip humanity from others, for his own benefit. In this, to me, he gives up being treated "humanely" in death, for his willingness to strip it from others.

When a person devotes their life to making the world worse, them leaving the world is a thing to be celebrated. Decorum is just erasing the victims.

Eh, we've done this before. My feeling is always the same. I'm not glad a person is dead; I'm sorry that that person fell into depravity, and I'm glad that he stopped.

It's... difficult to be fair with these negative obituaries. Of course it's awful from an atheistic perspective; human consciousness winking out and crumbling into oblivion and all that jazz. But it's hard to feel anything but bitterness when remembering that- and apologies if I'm repeating myself- assholes like Ailes outlived comparatively sainted members of my family. Like, "okay, that's cool. Grandma was the pillar of the family and we lost her to breast cancer in her fifties. My aunt loved me and my son like her own, and she was murdered before she was sixty. But yeah, let that fucking harpy Phyllis Schlafly live to 92, that's fucking fair."

Okay, getting off track. Speaking for myself, but it's hard to feel anything but bitterness and regret when these shitbirds die. With someone like Ailes, it's legitimately depressing to think the only way they can make the world better is by exiting stage right.

I dunno, in the past year alone I've noticably drifted from "there are some obituaries that I read with some satisfaction" to "die, fuckers, die".

Hardly Ideal wrote:With someone like Ailes, it's legitimately depressing to think the only way they can make the world better is by exiting stage right.

I'll agree with that statement, with the caveat that "exiting" means more than one thing. I'd say he already made the world better by getting fired. A conviction would have been nice too.

I've been meaning to talk about this for a bit, but there have been rumors for years -- since they were reshuffled into the Fox News chain -- that James and Lachlan Murdoch hated Ailes, O'Reilly, Hannity, et al and were looking for ways to push them out. The ouster of two out of those three lends credence to that hypothesis, but of course it's possible that it was nothing personal and that the shit Ailes and O'Reilly had been pulling for decades finally caught up with them and made them bigger liabilities than assets.

We'll see what happens in the coming years. Clearly the younger Murdochs are caught with the dilemma that Fox News is extremely profitable because of the culture war nonsense that's been its bread and butter for the past two decades, but that its audience is older and casual bigotry doesn't play as well with the next generation of potential viewers. (Plus there's every possibility that Trump is a ticking time bomb and when he goes he's going to make everybody who ever supported him look very, very bad even to many Republicans.)

I wouldn't be surprised to see Fox News rejigger itself to favor more of an economic conservative bent in the next few years -- just as smug and condescending toward the poor, but with less concern about who people marry or what bathrooms they use, and more veiling of racism behind economics.

Still not a good thing (the enemy of my enemy and all that), but an improvement over what it's been historically. I mean, in the same way that Paxton Powers was an improvement over his father.

Maybe. Inertia is hard, and wishful thinking can lend rumors more credence than they deserve. And it's not like swapping out Tucker Carlson for Bill O'Reilly feels like progress, but then again it's hard to think of him as anything but a placeholder until they find somebody better.

Aw shit.

The personification of cheery suave has left us to give lessons on the subject elsewhere.

No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!

By elaborate torture device or simple age. Whichever comes first.

ETA: Dang, wrong Bond, but hey.

Lisa Spoonauer, Caitlin Bree from Clerks.

Gregg Allman.

Aw shit.

When it's time for leavin'
I hope you'll understand.

Peter Sallis, an actor who did a hell of a lot but who'll always be Wallace from Wallace and Gromit to me.

Wallace, no

:( :( :(

He's eating moon cheese in heaven now.

Adam West

:(