I agree with you on that mistake. Osama was clearly the biggest newsmaker in 2001. Part of the problem is that they called the award “Man of the Year” (although now I think it’s “Person of the Year”) when really it should be more accurately called “Newsmaker of the Year”. Man of the Year sounds like an award from the local Rotary Club.
Curtis, I went home and opened that issue of Time to find the ad that had you all worked up. I’m not kidding, I had to flip through the magazine page by page twice before I saw it (and this was after I had already read the magazine once).
Yep! It was a girl in a bikini all right. Did you notice the naked lady on the first page of the Health section, about longevity? What did you think of that?
And how long do you think it will be before he gets it? 
I am not going to discuss the specific book I recommended to Curtis but I will explain my rationale for recommending that he read transgressive literature. It’s important that he realize that words only have so much power. The rationale I presented to him was that he has the wherewithal to take in information and decide how he wants to process it. He has the free will to do with that information what he wants; furthermore, I offered this perspective to him: if he is as religious as he says he is (and I do believe that his faith is sincere,) then he will accept that the Bible is the one true book and that God is the one true voice, and that anything else is powerless in comparison. If he is strong in his belief, he will stay steadfast and keep a sound head even in the face of things that are disgusting, shocking and jarring, and realize that they are merely words and that they cannot harm him. This is an exercise in philosophy and Curtis, despite his young age, is intelligent enough for it.
I mean it, he’s a smart kid. He’s far more self-aware than most people his age.
Curtis, I want to be sure we’re talking about the same thing. Page 130, with a photo that looks pretty much like this?
If so, personally I think you need to set your offend-o-meter a little higher.
He’s going to have to send that bar into orbit to get it high enough to get through Argent Tower’s likely recommendation.
And AT, I have to agree that recommending that book to a 13-year-old (especially one as sheltered as this one is) is really, really inappropriate.
Shhhh. Let’s just admire Brooklyn Decker. Even you, jayjay. I don’t care if you’re gay.
If he can handle the brutality of the Old Testament, he can handle anything.
Is that more offensive than this? (For the cautious, it shows Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, a classical fifteenth century painting showing a discretely covered nude Venus.)
Argent Towers, I hope you don’t really think we’re that stupid. Obviously, you do not need to recommend the Old Testament to Curtis, given that he is religious and has most likely already been exposed to it. Besides which, if you wanted to point out to him that there is depravity in the OT, you could have mentioned it right here in the thread.
Again, I hope you have rethought this before making such a recommendation to a 13 year old. There’s nothing in that book that he needs to know about at this point in his life.
I will say only this: I have had private correspondence with Curtis LeMay, and I can attest to the fact that he is extremely self-aware, remarkably intelligent for his age, and quite honestly, conducts himself like a true gentleman. Obviously he has a lot of growing up to do, but so did all of us when we were 13. I think when he eventually goes out into the world on his own, he is going to amass a great deal of wisdom. He is an inquisitive and clever fellow.
Oh, but I will. It’s obvious from your description and your recent obsession with it that you mean Hogg, a pornographic novel about an 11-year-old boy named “Cocksucker” and the men he happily services in graphic detail. Someone has been reverting the Wikipedia article, but here is a link to history page that shows a long and brutal synopsis. Reading it turned my stomach.
The fact that, even after the recent kerfluffle, you would use this board to recommend that book to a 13 year old boy is astounding. At best, you are profoundly stupid and socially maladjusted. At worst…well, maybe there’s a reason you were so ardent in your defense of Cesario.
I think a private correspondence may be a bad idea for the both of you.
Believe me, you are missing my point. Forget about the book; he is not going to read it and I respect his desire not to. I had an abstract conversation with him about philosophy and free will, in which I can tell he is a smart and principled guy.
But you still recommended it to him. Are you utterly out of your mind?
We’ll see how well his principles hold up once he learns about jacking it.
Personal insults aren’t allowed in this forum. This is a warning not to do this again.
And I realize the irony of following up a discussion about the power of words with a warning, but I’ll have to live with it.
As a general note to everyone: this discussion of Curtis LeMay as a person is over. Let’s steer this thread back to the advertising issue instead of having it turn into yet another conversation about his age and other opinions that aren’t related to this thread. This is not the place for it.
I’m more than fine with not discussing Curtis. Let’s discuss Argent Towers and whether or not it’s appropriate for him to be using the SDMB as a place to find 13 year old boys to recommend pornography to.
My recommendation of transgressive literature to him was to make a point about words and their power. Words are just words. This is a crucial concept for people to understand. Especially in a world where thousands of people are being murdered in the name of a book - and in previous decades and centuries, millions of people have been murdered in the name of various books. And I’m the bad guy for trying to subvert this insane cycle? It all ties into philosophical and theological issues that Curtis has brought up.
In any case, I think his disapproval of the ad was on the grounds that it was cheap and tawdry, in his opinion, not simply that it contained images of the female body. This view I will not begrudge him.
If a news program on a huge television network run by one of the world’s most influential media moguls isn’t part of the establishment, nothing is.