His buddies laughed at it. 
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According to the station’s website, his slot will be replaced by ‘America First, with Sebastian Gorka’.
Not really an improvement, I’m afraid.
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Good!
(That is all)
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That’s because their idea of humour is always mean-spirited punching down. Only a bully thinks that mocking the powerless is hilarious, and that kind of “comedy” tends not to attract the sharpest knives in the drawer.
That’s another thing that conservative “comedians” never learn: bootlickers of authoritarians are considered completely disposable by those in power.
He worked for an AM radio station that also choose to air the views of Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, and Sebastian Gorka. That kind of work environment tends to warp one’s morals and ethics.
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“you can’t shake the devil’s hand, and say you’re only kidding”
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Guessing you don’t have a child in school in Colorado, where earlier this year multiple school districts closed because a Columbine enthusiast traveled to the state. There are lots of those people, and they really do take right wing media personalities seriously.
Also, the station is a private company and they have capitalism’s god given right to fire whomever the fuck they want.
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Well it’s NOT being treated as a crime. Nobody is talking about arresting him, or even suing him. If they were, I would be dead set against it. Being incompetent at your job is rarely a crime. But it is often a reason to get fired. And that is what happened here. His job is being funny and he has been spectacularly bad at it. If you operate a multi-million dollar machine on an assembly line an your incompetence breaks it you can expect to be fired.
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Schrodinger’s asshole: someone who claims to be joking when and only when everyone is horrified at what he said in earnest.
Then you hire him, and the next time he pulls this shit (and there will be a next time) you can wag your finger at him and say “now now, that’s not very nice.”
So when someone does something socially unacceptable, we let it slide?
That’s kinda not the definition of “unacceptable”.
Of course, back in the day, different things were unacceptable. Off-color jokes were socially acceptable, but being gay or trans (or black) was not.
Statements about using children as pawns to further a political agenda were also not.
That wasn’t comedy, it wasn’t a crime, it certainly wasn’t “culture”, and nothing is dead, so what are you on about?
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Well, again - to be clear - I agree that making such a joke was extremely insensitive. And yes it was indeed a shitty excuse for a joke. I also agree that some form of reprimand for making such a joke is appropriate.
I also did not read the article, just BoingBoing’s tldr, so I admit I did not have all the facts.
My concern lies solely with our culture’s recent tendency to take penalization for alleged actions into its own hands.
Take for instance all of the shit Johnny Depp has gone through in the kangaroo court of the media due to the allegations of his former wife. Those allegations are turning out to be false, and yet he has suffered considerably because of people wanting to punish him for those actions without any proof.
Another example of this is when Jennifer Connel sued her 12 year old nephew after her arm was broken by his enthusiastic hug. She was dragged through the social coals, but it turned out that she had no ill intent toward her nephew and that they had agreed upon doing this law suit in order to pay for the medical bills that her insurance wouldn’t cover.
I’ve been seeing this again and again. Someone makes a mistake - or is simply accused of that mistake - and our society pounds them into the ground without having all of the relevant information and without trying to fully understand the circumstances.
Because of this I find myself getting more and more frustrated when I see some article trigger a demand for punishment that seems completely disproportionate to the circumstance. That is what I saw when reading the comment thread here, hence my contrary response.
“Society” didn’t fire him, the radio station did. It’s not like he was torn limb from limb by a lynch mob in the public square.
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Nor did I say so. I was explaining where my point of view comes from. I thought that sufficiently clear.
He said it live on air.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, the radio station fired him, because he went too far even for far-right Xtian grifters. They don’t give a shit what we think. They care what their Trumpist audience thinks, and, more to the point, they care what their advertisers think. If their advertisers bail on them, it’s because they realize those listeners don’t want to do business with brands that pull the shit he did. Ain’t no one obligated to give their hard-earned money to any businesses they don’t like. That’s not mob justice; that’s people choosing not to fund something they believe to be wrong.
If someone wanted to dynamite the top off Mount Everest, I wouldn’t be concerned with you not putting a few bucks toward Project Blow My Top.
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What’s the world coming to when you can’t “jokingly” call for the mass murder of school-children live on daytime broadcast radio in the state where the most infamous school shooting in history happened? /s
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Yeah, that’s our “culture”, and if you fire someone for calling for the deaths of innocent children as a political distraction, not only are you somehow criminalizing that, you’re killing our culture!
/s
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Killing a culture of killing. What a culture! /s
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[Impotently shakes fist at Millenials]
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I must have missed people taking it into their own hands. Did they perform a citizens arrest and incarcerate him in their home prison? Assault him?
Oh - you mean they had opinions?
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Opinions! OH NOES!
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