Back here, recent arrival and crabby wanker "goombah" takes your humble scribe (uh, that would be me) to task for my overwhelming hypocrisy:
Let's see: you don't comment on stories like "Al Gore's house", while they don't comment on, well, whatever your whine-of-the-day about the Blogging Tories happens to be. Seems like a wash.
You really don't get the pot-kettle metaphor, do you? And you should change the batteries in your irony detector.
Conveniently (for me, at least), goombah's whining can be disemboweled on at least three different levels, so let's not waste any time, shall we?
First, goombah seems to be suggesting that the newsworthiness of any issue is a purely subjective thing and a matter of personal opinion. This is, as I hope you can see immediately, hogwash.
Consider, if you will, the latest foofaraw over the death of well-known celebrity and skank Anna Nicole Smith. My word, but you couldn't turn around without reading about that, could you? Apparently, the mainstream media thought that this was a major story.
But let's say that Smith happened to kick off on the same day that a bunch of swarthy, foreign evildoers flew a couple planes into a couple of tall buildings in New York. Which of those two stories do you think would be the lead on most newscasts? Take your time, I'm sure the correct answer will come to you.
Why, yes, I'm guessing that the first thing we'd hear about would be the terrorist attacks. I'm fairly sure you wouldn't find any news reports opening with, "In today's news, 3,000 dead in New York. But first, Anna Nicole Smith ..." No, I don't think that would happen, the point being that, yes indeedy, whatever your personal preferences for information, it's safe to say that current events have at least some objective level of newsworthiness. Which is why, when you have a major breaking story like the number of wounded and disabled American troops living in squalor, you can certainly take someone to task for ignoring that entirely to shriek on and on about how David Suzuki's tour bus runs on diesel.
Are you with me, goombah? Can you follow that simple logic? Take your time, and while you're trying to come to grips with that, I'll be working on part two.
10 comments:
The first weekend I lived in Denver there was a major shooting - six people from the same family gunned down by another family member. It was in all the little promos for that night's local NBC affiliate.
The first story on the news at 10: Broncos pre-season football, then the killings. I emailed them to complain, and the news director told me they had accidentally loaded the tapes in the wrong order...
"First, goombah seems to be suggesting that the newsworthiness of any issue is a purely subjective thing and a matter of personal opinion. This is, as I hope you can see immediately, hogwash."
Wrong, CC. Did you hurt yourself jumping to conclusions there? Where did I say anything about "newsworthiness"? I merely pointed out the fact that you do what you whine about others doing.
Try the night school thing, CC. I'm sure that remedial reading will help you out.
Your position, goombah, was that CC and the BTs were no different, but just blogged according to their own worldviews, irrespective of each item's relative merit. That suggests that, in your mind, Al Gore's house and Walter Reed veterans have no inherent qualities that makes one more worthy of comment than the other -- or to put it another way, one is no more newsworthy than another.
If this is incorrect -- if you don't believe that those two stories have the same merit -- how would you assess their relative merits? Because if you can't answer that, then you really have no grounds to complain about CC's characterization of your position.
Lord Almighty, just how dense can one human being possibly be? Whines goombah:
"Did you hurt yourself jumping to conclusions there? Where did I say anything about "newsworthiness"?
Um ... here, you dimbulb (appropriate emphasis added):
"Let's see: you don't comment on stories like "Al Gore's house", while they don't comment on, well, whatever your whine-of-the-day about the Blogging Tories happens to be. Seems like a wash."
Seems like a wash.
In short, an unambiguous suggestion that the two situations should be considered equally. That's what the expression means.
In other words, one of us needs a course in remedial thinking. And, hint: it's not me.
Again, sadly, your lack of basic reading comprehension skills leads you to misunderstand the subject of my sentence, which was the respective choices made by you and the BTs. No mention of the contents of the stories themselves.
You said it best yourself: "Lord Almighty, just how dense can one human being possibly be?".
Do you want me to provide you with phone numbers in your area for that remedial class?
Can we delete any further posts by this idiot?
Wow. The person is almost reaching Richard Evans' level of stretching to claim a victory.
The stupid hate being called stupid. It hits a raw nerve.
thwap:
Yes, I believe goombah has been given enough rope here, and I'm going to start deleting any further comments of his.
And, no, once again and as I've explained many times, I'm not censoring him. If he has this much to say, he's free to get his own blog where he can claim to be misunderstood as much as his little heart desires.
I don't mind commenters who disagree with me, but I really have no patience with people who start a discussion, then continue to move the goalposts in a "Hey, I said it seems like a wash, I never said they were equivalent" kind of way.
Quite simply, life's too short to drink bad wine or waste time arguing with goombahs. And I say that in an appropriately generic way.
What a perfect nametag to choose, too.
You know what Goombas are in Mario, my friend?
Little brown mushrooms that waddle around and get stomped on by the hero.
How appropriate.
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