struck by this next to J Peterson on the same stage

Stormy Daniels tells Oxford Union that Trump and politics have ‘completely destroyed’ her career

the-conservative-scumbag:

Had a friend say they didn’t care about history because it didn’t affect them.

No further comment.

Americans Have Almost Entirely Forgotten Their History

The Childish View of the First Amendment

10 American Treasures: A Very Personal and Subjective list

Hunters Don’t Need to Apologize for Their Sport | National Review

Those who seek to
draw the parameters of acceptable topics for comedy frequently invoke
this golden rule of ‘punching up or down’. But sometimes comedy works
best when it is testing the limits of our tolerance and skipping lightly
into moral minefields. To rid comedy of ambiguity is to undermine its
potential impact. Offence is the least interesting response to comedy,
because it cannot be anything other than subjective. There will always
be those who will take satire at face value and therefore fail to
understand its purpose.

As bored as most of us are with the incessant news stories about
comedians ‘crossing a line’, this is a development that reveals
something ugly at the heart of our culture. It is obviously anyone’s
right to criticise the quality or taste of a comedian’s work, but the
tendency to demand apologies and retractions reveals a widespread
censoriousness and entitlement. Worse still, those who claim to be
offended are now taken so seriously that they have the collective power
to force people out of their livelihoods because they don’t share the
same sense of humour.

Can anyone take a joke?

And that
fact is the thing I can’t quite get past. That a decision I made for a
list I put on the internet has impacted a family business and forever
altered its future. That I have changed family dynamics and
relationships. And it could very easily happen again.

I’ve
been asking myself what the other side of this looks like. How do I do
this better? Is there a way to celebrate a place without the possibility
of destroying it? Or is this just what we are now – a horde with a
checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction
of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?

Clearly,
I don’t have an answer. I understand there are larger forces involving
tourism and technology and society writ large at play here, and I’m not
enough of a hypocrite to turn this into a morality play about the
internet and the consequences of our actions, but maybe if we were all
as kind to each other as Steve Stanich has been to me, we might just
survive this apocalyptic puddle of shit we currently find ourselves in.

I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.