What were you thinking!?!
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/520/is-procter-gamble-run-by-satanists
It makes you sound so ignorant.
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Laters.
meh.?
I’m not sure why thousands of kids being born with limb defects has anything to do his statement. Do you?
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Cecil and other writers for the Dope make jokes like this all the time. It’s pretty par for the course here.
If you’re looking to Cecil for polite and respectful responses, you’re going to be disappointed a lot. And enough time has passed that people make thalidomide jokes a lot. (I mean, not a lot because it’s kinda obscure but I know Futurama’s had a gag or two about it and I wouldn’t be surprised if Family Guy hasn’t so…)
You do realize that this “joke” is from 25 years ago, right?
A 25-year-old joke about a 50-year-old tragedy? There may be more worthy targets for your outrage.
Ok, I have to know - what’s with the vertical ellipse?
As an aside, when one of the staffers writes a column that doesn’t have enough jokes in it, Ed will often insert some. So you can’t necessarily assume that the other writers are making any particular joke.
I can usually ‘get’ these kind of insults, and often don’t really care.
I knew a victim at school, he was very bright, just had deformed arms.
My own mother was about to be given the drug, but at the last minute her doctor decided against it. I guess I was lucky, but ~20,000 were not. It’s been seen as the worst medical disaster in history.
I just didn’t like his association with mental faculty and Thalidomide. It’s basically wrong, and ignorant.
That’s all really.
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it was prescribed for my mother, but she said no. Other kids in the neighbourhood born about that time were not as lucky.
Those are bullet points. The first will be “Join message board to complain about 25-year-old joke,” and I’m pretty sure the last one is “PROFIT!”
Thalidomide wasn’t associated with mental defects, though, just underformed limbs.
No. It’s a habit from using forums where people don’t read the last line of text as they presume it’s some line of quoted signature. It’s also a form of…
“Vertical Ellipse” would be a cool band name.
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Or maybe not.
Your monitor renders that as an oval?
/pedant
It’d be even cooler if instead of a vertical ellipse it was a vertical ellipsis.
C’mon people, we’re the 'Dope. We know this stuff. 
^ First letter published in the “Letters” section of The National Lampoon.
I have no outrage, but the OP does kind of have a point. For the “joke” to work thalidomide would need to be associated with mental retardation, which it isn’t.
The only other thing I could think of was if P&G were the ones who manufactured thalidomide, and Judy from Chicago suffered physical problems from her mother’s use of the product, then it could justify her hatred of the company. However I couldn’t find any evidence that P&G were involved with the drug, and actually Judy didn’t seem to display any hatred, just a wariness of Satan worshippers.
So I guess my issue is not that Cecil made a joke about thalidomide, but that the joke as written doesn’t seem to make sense.
“It’s basically wrong, and ignorant” - I quote… myself.
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The joke fails for mere factual incorrectness, like “If ignorance were cornflakes, you’d be General Mills.”