Call it common decency, but it seems to me that the children of public figures, especially the ones we elect, ought to simply be out of bounds. No, you can’t rip Bristol for having a child out of wedlock, no, you can’t do the same to Malia for wearing a t-shirt.
Once that child reaches the age of majority, he or she is fair game, until then, no.
See, we’ve managed to drag this thread out for three pages based on comments we know, we KNOW were tasteless, wrong and unncessary. Sure, it was a joke. Sure, free speech and all that, but just because we can, doesn’t always mean we SHOULD.
Granted, Letterman wasn’t racist and bugfuck crazy, but his comments were, none the less, tasteless and unecessarily mean.
The freepers OTOH are obviously hovering in the vicinity of bugfuck and deserve no attention from thinking people other than to tie a proverbial bell around their necks so we can always hear them coming.
No one did, but we can rip her mother for letting it happen while advocating policies which forbid education about birth control, and we can rip Bristol (as an adult), for becoming an activist for the same policy that got her pregnant.
I generally agree with this. However, to me, it doesn’t apply to the most recent round of Bristol comments. See, Bristol chose to use her status as the child of a public figure to become a public figure herself. Therefore, she’s in bounds.
I’m not going to argue whether the actual comment was tasteful or not (I don’t think it was), the fact is that she has now, voluntarily and by her own actions, opened herself up to commentary including (perhaps especially) commentary regarding the out of wedlock child.
Is there a lefty equivalent of Free Republic? I often hear Bill O’Reilly bitching about Kos and DU as “hate sites,” and reviling them as the “most vicious sites on the internet,” but I’ve never actually read much of those sites. I think I’ve clicked one or two links to Kos, I don’t remember ever even going to Democratic Underground, and I’ve never waded into the comment sections on those sites? Are they comparable?
Democratic Underground is closer to Freep than DKos. During the presidential primaries last year I was checking out both of them daily, but DU eventually lost me because of its intense echo chamber qualities…I’m liberal but I’m not completely wacky burn-the-republicans far wingnut leftist. Daily Kos is a bit more deliberative, and abusive comments (death wishes or threats on ANYONE, including Republicans, for example) are dealt with by hide-rating and eventually banning. I’VE actually been seriously warned (as in “Do this again and you will be banned”)over there (for a one-time trespass…I snarkily changed the tags on what I saw as a homophobic diary) and I’m a fairly middle-of-the-road liberal.
Not comparable, at least at Daily Kos. From time to time there are forays by individuals into froth-spewing, but respectable swaths of the regulars will smack the frothers down for it. The sort of naked vitriolic filth spewed by the Freepers isn’t tolerated. It’s a strongly partisan site, yes, and strongly opposed to the rightwing, but I have never seen at Daily Kos the kind of widely accepted and uncensured disgusting crap that is the norm at Free Republic.
Besides which, Markos provides SOME degree of site discipline. Wingnut conspiracy theories are verboten…he WILL instaban you if you post a Truther diary. Trutherism, Birtherism, etc can be DISCUSSED as phenomena, in passing, but you cannot write a diary advocating those positions. Debunking, yes. Advocating, no. There have been quite a few anti-Birther diaries (not the least of which are the recent ones criticizing the reservist who only volunteered in order to sue (represented by Her Birtherness herself, Orly Taitz) on the basis of “forcing” Obama to prove his citizenship).
You are wrong. Extremely, extremely wrong. For godsakes, these people think ANN COULTER is sexy!
I’d say DU is similiar to the Freeps. Right after 9-11, there was a thread that actually suggested Bush was behind it all, and it was getting pretty long. jayjay Truther? Birther? Da’hell? (A Birther, I would imagine, is “Obama was born in Kenya!”) But what the hell is a Truther?
Really? Do I have to do the thinking for you all? Do you not understand how insulting jokes work? There’s no rule that say you have to make truthful claims, or ones backed up by objective evidence. The purpose is to be hurtful and scornful, not to make a well thought out argument.
The way they’re dressed, obviously. [snaps fingers] Pay attention now…stay with me here. I’ll say it slowly for you so you understand. It doesn’t have to be true to be insulting.
Not when I mention explicitly that it’s about the photo in question, and asked if ghetto is a racist term and what it means to call someone “ghetto”. Thus, the responses of ‘low class’, ‘impoverished’, etc. Our resident black guy, Brian, had trouble grasping how that could be considered racist. He said he’s seen a lot of racism in his life, but the term “ghetto trash” doesn’t really rank anywhere.
“I guess it could be said by a racist,” he says, “but the term itself isn’t really insulting [to blacks particularly].”
I find it strange that when you hear the word “ghetto”, you think of black people. Is it that you think all black people live in ghettos or that ghettos contain only black people? If you didn’t like the example of the Jewish/immigrant ghetto comments, how about a Latino? Have you ever heard of a Latino ghetto, in say, Los Angeles or San Diego?
Let’s pretend that the girl in the picture was lily-white, with blonde hair and blue eyes, but dressed identically. Do you think anyone would have referred to her as “ghetto” then?
YES!! YES THEY WOULD!! I grew up with a woman down the street that let her house fall into the worst shape of any in the neighborhood. Her windows were covered in plastic, weeds overgrew the sidewalk, she was always strung out on god-knows-what, and had the police over her house all the time, breaking up some fight or another. She was as white as I am. You know what the neighborhood called her? Ghetto street trash.
This just in: My Korean (by birth) boss weighs in on the subject. She grew up in a ghetto- a real American success story of the pulled-up-by-bootstraps variety. She went to a high school that drew from two very different social strata. The rich kids referred to the poor kids (all of them, including the whites) as, you guessed it, ghetto street trash.
I showed her the comment where the poster says ghetto=nigger. She said “Wow. That person is…misguided.”
Are you now willing to acknowledge that ghetto != black?