I don’t think any of her ribald antics have been captured on camera though.
Do security cameras count? Because James Woods might still have som old footage.
What prompted the rant was the fact that this morning, when I instructed my Favorites folder to open in tabs, what I got from Tab One at Fox when it opened was Britney-oh-nos, and what I got from Tab Two, CNN, was Britney-oh-nos, and what I got from Tab Three at Drudge was Britney oh-nos. (God bless the BBC, who somehow missed the scoop and lead with, like, actual news. :rolleyes: )
Front-page news, with photos. Hard to “turn off” because as soon as the tabs came up, BAM! there it was, in my face.
What I object to is (A) the sheer ubiquity of it, (B) the breathless reporting of trivial events like fender-benders as though it were of earth-shaking importance, and (C) the sheer not-important-ness of her. I mean, I’m sorry, Otto, she may have had X number of hit albums and Top 40 hits and won however-many awards, but push come to shove–she’s just a pop singer. Lots of pop singers out there. Lots of much more talented pop singers out there. And lots of much more talented pop singers out there with mental or substance abuse problems, but you don’t see them week after week on Fox or CNN’s lead story, with pix and interviews.
Being a pop singer–even a pop singer worth $8 million a year–IMO doesn’t merit the 24/7 OJ Simpson-trial level of coverage.
And it’s the sheer mundaneness of it all. Michael Jackson, in his “Jacko” heyday, who got similar wall-to-wall daily coverage, could be counted on to do something bizarrely fascinating, like more plastic surgery to look even more like Diana Ross, or dangling his baby out a balcony window, or naming two of his children Paris. It was never a dull moment with Jacko.
But Britney’s oh-nos are all such…mundane things. Trailer park trash things. The noisy split with the husband, the late-night calls to 911, the fender-benders, the drunk driving, it all takes place every day right here in Decatur, Illinois–I don’t see why it’s newsworthy just because it involves a twerp of a pop singer.
And, yanno, I sat here wondering for a while whether whoever arranged to have her taken away–presumably Lynne–did so because she’s her mother, or because her daughter represents an $8 million a year cash cow. And yeah, I’m a horrible cynic, so sue me.
Screw entertainment industry people–how many fathers, mothers, sons and daughters, wives or husbands were confined yesterday? Without adequate resources to give them quality care.
The real tragedy is that we, as a culture, find that number to be irrelevant. Not some talentless little trailer-ho who can’t handle the fame she doesn’t deserve, but ordinary people who have more than their two non-custodial children depending on them.
First you admit she’s “entering the endgame of a very ill person,” and then you expect her to take responsibility and accept/know she isn’t getting the right help. Come again?
She’s repeatedly defied the judges orders to get a psych evaluation, but the family has said that a doctor once told her that she is bipolar. People who are bipolar often (when manic) believe that everything is fine and that others are trying to “get them” by saying they need help. Join that with the fact that she is surrounded by people who probably don’t have her best interests in mind, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. How this doesn’t inspire compassion in some people is beyond me.
I don’t know about the cynical part, but you seem petty and unsympathetic.
I don’t see a ton of information about Britney on my newscasts, but when I do I always think that I’m lucky to have a functioning brain. I’m silly and sentimental I guess, but I take it as a reminder to be grateful.
If people hate seeing it all the time, contact the offending news station to let them know how you feel. It may not help matters unless enough people complain, but it’s more productive than bitching here.
Uh, why do photos of the Huffington Post columnists come up?? The Google be weird.
This is the Pit. The whole reason for its existence is precisely to allow us to bitch. 
It seems to me that for everyone with major, life-destroying mental illness (and I’m going to include alcoholism and drug addiction here) there comes a point where nothing external to the person can be done to cure them. I’ve seen people put into involuntary treatment, and IMNSHO, all it does is waste time, effort and resources that could be used on people who haven’t fallen that low, and are trying to get help.
Do you remember the case with Carol Gotbaum, the woman flying across the country for alcohol treatment, who ended up freaking out at the airport, and dying in custody? That’s an example of a woman who, for whatever reason, was going to intensive inpatient treatment for alcoholism, and whose reaction to that was to take the time on her way there to make sure she was properly liquored up before she got there. This post from a thread on the topic mentions another poster’s experiences talking to the people who work for, or run, those facilities.
If the person involved doesn’t believe they have a problem, and one that requires drastic help, IMNSHO there’s damn-all that can be done. For that matter, the point of an intervention isn’t to simply get someone into treatment - it’s to hold a mirror up to the person, and force them to admit, to themselves, that they need help, and they need to change what they’re doing.
Without that first step, nothing else is going to work. So, yes, even though she is a very ill person, I will say that the first step for her to begin to get well is going to have to be admitting to herself that what she’s doing now isn’t working.
This has nothing to do with whether I have sympathy for her, just a recognition of what the pre-conditions for successful treatment are.
And I agree. 100% See above. If she doesn’t have a responsibility to see, and evaluate that things aren’t working for her are they are, who does? Who can force her to admit she needs help?
Odd, I thought I’d mentioned that more than a few times. That she’s surrounded herself with people who have no interest in her getting well. But society cannot change that situation for her. If she asks for help with it, there are many avenues she can take, and many ways in which she’ll be able to get assistance doing it.
Until she recognizes she has a problem that her current techniques are not solving, it cannot happen.
Fuck you with a rusty fire plug, then open the mains to wash the shit you have in your head out. If your definition of compassion means that one has to simply sit there and say that ‘because they’re ill they can’t be expected to accept responsibility for their actions,’ you’re part of the fucking problem. Yes, let’s go back to simply fucking locking up the mentally ill, because they can’t be trusted to get help on their own. Once you start giving society license to make decisions for people because they cannot make them on their own it opens a whole messy can of worms. I accept that there are times that it is necessary, to provide for the safety of society in general, but I want to keep strict limits on that sort of power. I’m actually one of the more authoritarian sorts on the Dope - I’ll actually condone the use of involuntary ECT. There are others here who feel that even something as relatively benign as suicide watches are an affront to liberty. I don’t agree with them, but I’m not 100% certain that they’re wrong.
In the end, the only alternative to expecting people to recognize when they’ve hit rock-bottom and start trying to work their way back up from there, would be to take over their responsibilities from them. Absent a threat to public safety, your cure is worse than the disease.
Sean Young. That woman used to be sex on legs. (And about 14 kinds of crazy.)
Where on EARTH did I suggest that we should lock up mentally ill people againt their will? Why don’t you READ the words that are actually ON you screen instead of making things up? I didn’t say that, nor did I imply it. I was simply shaking my head at YOUR notion that someone who is at the “endgame” can take “responsibility” for their mental illness.
With all of your chest puffing bravado, you seem to not realize that you’re contradicting yourself. It isn’t worth the time to try to reason this out with you, you’re hellbent on your point of view. I’ll leave you to your silly insults and reading words that aren’t really on the page.
Never stick your dick in crazy, son.
We have had a few new members lately, so it’s hard to keep track. But I just wanted to say I 
you.
James Woods would agree.
Actually, it was worse than that. What she did was invade the Warner Brothers lot dressed in a homemade Catwoman costume and demand to speak to Tim Burton, the film’s director. After making a big scene, security “escorted” her off the lot. (During this time, a weirded-out Burton supposedly tried to avoid staying out of Young’s line of sight by hiding under his desk.) It was likely that incident that sent her career into the crapper (or litterbox in this case).
BTW, Young never did appear on Letterman dressed as Catwoman (I think that was Joan Rivers’ daytime show). She was, however, a frequent guest on Letterman’s show until she got a little too “touchy” one evening and was banned.
In any case, I’m not surprised she’s now in rehab. However, judging from her past behavior, I have doubts that her problems primarily stem from abuse of alcohol and/or drugs.
And chillun, if you don’t think Sean Young is nuckin’ futs, consider what it must take to put Tim Burton in a place called “weirded out.”
Not to continue the Sean Young hijack, but Joe Queenan wrote a piece on her yonks ago (collected in his book “If You’re Talking to Me, Your Career Must be in Trouble”) in which she talks about some of her crazier (alleged) antics, also her love of algebra.
She must be mighty dangerous to require that level of security.
Good thing that those officers were keeping America safe from her.
I don’t know if thats exactly true. I certainly don’t give a shit about Britney and the only reason I know anything about her is because the headlines are thrown in my face. Yesterday I saw the headline while reading CNN and thought “Good grief, thats news? Nothing else of importance happened on the freaking planet?”.
I care more about the crazy man on the corner than I do about Crazy Britney. At least she’s got people to help her and the means to get help. Outside of entertainment pages and magazines her escapades shouldn’t be news.
Imagine if someone’s home or business was robbed during this time and they could have been helped but for the Britney Escort.
I don’t shop at WalMart (except in circumstances where I have little choice). Yet WalMart is the biggest company in America - people shop at Wal-Mart. People shop at WalMart more than they shop at Macys. If you aren’t paying attention to Brittney, its fairly obvious someone else does - lots of someone elses.
Magazines - particularly ones of the “People/US” ilk - track sales by who is on the cover. If sales go up putting Brittney on the cover, they find more excuses to put Brittney on the cover. For a while Julia Roberts sold magazines. Princess Diana STILL does - lady has been dead for years and they still find excuses to put her on the cover.
“People” like to read about her and she sells magazines does not mean that cloistered nuns in Argentina go out and buy magazines when she is on the cover. It isn’t inclusive of everyone.
People or Us are one thing. Just like TV’s Entertainment Tonight, it is easily avoided. However, this morning, the Brittney saga was the number 3 story on the local news - which meant it came on right before the traffic/weather (the reason I watch local news). That said, the number one story was the Superbowl, given that the local boys in Blue are in it, so I should not complain too loudly. Sandwiched between these two groundbreaking news stories was a fluff piece about the Democratic debate. CNN isn’t much better about tucking the celebrity-de-jour stories into the last 5 minutes of their 1/2 hour segments with other entertainment fluff.