Sylvester Stallone is a major asshole in various ways, but may not qualify as “Undeniability talented.”
I Googled for corroboration and got the SDMB thread “What celebrities are complete bastards?”
They only wave it for one song AFAI’m aware (i.e. The Trooper, which is about the Charge of the Light Brigade and how daft it was, so putting on the jingo for that one is contextually and ironically appropriate). Besides, it’s kind of like skulls and norse imagery and inverted crosses and that - few metal bands take this stuff seriously but they *look *hella cool, so.
I’m more leery about Lemmy’s apparent Nazi enthusiasm, on and off stage. I’m sure he’s no fascist himself, but he’s still creepy about it sometimes IMO.
Anyway, if he hasn’t been mentioned yet : Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Great writer. Very shitty person, especially when it came to the Jews.
Wow. This post from corkboard from nearly six years ago is kind of eerie, and consistent with what we’ve heard about the Cos lately:
Then there’s Lassie. What a bitch!
Wasn’t my kid, but the son of a coworker this happened to.
The coworker lives in St. Louis, and it happened when Bonds was with the Pirates (therefore, before 1993). Bonds was a prima donna back then, maybe even a royal dickhead, but he probably only recently started juicing and wasn’t yet suspected of being the cheater, Mr. Asterisk, who stole Aaron’s record.
True enough, it’s a unique story, but imagine an 11-year old boy, proud of his glove and his autograph collection - when he first sees what Bonds did, he may have thought (and, I wasn’t there when it happened): Now, why did he do that? That, and maybe also Hey, both autographs are ruined!
But into his adult years he does have a good story and physical evidence of how much a royal dickhead Bonds is.
A black man who lived through the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and 1960s in America harbored some “racial hostility”? Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. How unreasonable of him!
Also, your quotation was incomplete and therefore somewhat misleading. You can see the article here:
Davis had white musicians in his various groups throughout his career. Early on, in the 1940s, he even got some criticism from black musicians for it. From his autobiography:
With a dong. All the “Lassies” were Laddies, because female collies are apparently so stupid you have to lead them to the feed bowl every day.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Applies here.
Though with Lovecraft, that moderated over time, and he married a Jewish woman, right? Didn’t Wagner make exceptions for the Jews he knew personally, explaining that he didn’t hate, but he thought that Jews just would never fit in with European Christian civilization? Still vile, but hardly Nazi-caliber.
Weird and creepy, but his life was turned inside-out, without producing anything that would prove he harmed any children. He actually didn’t fit the profile of a sex offender.
I always take it case-by-case.
And didja hear? Tomatoes are fruit.
[Chico Escuela]Tomatoes been berry, berry good to me. [/CH]
This concludes the baseball portion of the thread.
What I know about Wagner I only know through my study of Nietzsche’s life. Nietzsche was at one point obsessed with Wagner and believed him to be Europe’s salvation - his first book, The Birth of Tragedy is basically a giant love letter to Wagner. He was really into the aesthetic of the Dionysian impulse that he thought Wagner’s music represented, blah blah.
Wagner was an extreme anti-Semite and a debaucher in the very least, and it was his anti-Semitism in part that drove a wedge between the men. It was a very public falling out, and at one point, Wagner accused Nietzsche of being too heavily influenced by Jewish thinkers. Nietzsche later published Nietzsche Contra Wagner which painted Wagner as a sad, sad little Christian anti-Semite.
I’m certainly not implying Nietzsche was unbiased - indeed, his entire philosophy throughout the course of his life was profoundly and obviously biased - nonetheless, his philosophical differences with Wagner were a profound driving force in his life. Wagner may not have been running concentration camps but he was actively, publicly anti-Semitic. Nietzsche’s anti-Semitic SIL Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche later went out of her way to draw a connection between Hitler, Nietzsche and Wagner, and to co-opt Nietzsche’s works for Nazi propaganda during a time when Nietzsche was syphilitic and catatonic. Wagner’s music is ‘‘unofficially’’ banned in Israel.
More on that: Are public performances of Wagner still rare in Israel? - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
I think most black people who made it through the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and then made it to 1985 (the date of Davis’s quote) did not harbor a desire to spend their last hour on Earth slowly choking a random white man to death.
You can argue about whether he was justified in becoming an asshole, I guess, but that quote makes him an asshole.
:dubious:
reported
I actually clicked on those links. I’m not saying it was smart. Both pages seemed like a hodgepodge of images. Maybe trying to plant spyware?
Maybe, or maybe not. Leaving political opinion aside, does anyone class Reagan as an *undeniably *talented actor?
I’m not a huge Motorhead fan but I like them well enough. I don’t know anything about the subject but I do have a little anecdote.
Back in my active duty Army days I was stationed in Germany a few of us went to see Motorhead at the Frankfurt Festhalle. The crowd had a very enthusiastic mosh pit going on which probably couldn’t be seen from the stage. The crowd area was very dark. Because they were going crazy during the songs, in between it was pretty quiet while everyone tried to catch their breath. Lemmy obviously could not tell that was what was going on from the stage. He was getting frustrated until he yelled at the crowd, “What the fuck is wrong with you people? Did Hitler turn you all into morons?” So from that one instance it did not seem like he thought Hitler was a good influence.