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Dirty Laundry: the Naked Curmudgeon blasts TV reporters stupid questions
Dec 28th
People have been upset with bearers of bad news at least as far back as the days of Sophocles, Euripedes and Aeschylus, the writers of tragedies in which a messenger could be killed just for bringing the king some bad news.
Nowadays, we don’t kill the journalists for giving us bad news; we seem to thrive on it and demand they give us more.
Oh, every decade or so there will be complaints that newspapers just report bad news and never good news, and some newspaper will be started that proudly proclaims it will print only good news. Then it will lose money and go out of business, because people are more interested in tragic events than in happy events … unless, of course, the events happen to them.
Remember, the Greeks invented tragedies before they invented comedies. Bad news allows us to feel good about ourselves, to feel pity for the sufferers and fear that the events could happen to us and to achieve a catharsis of those emotions.
Comedies, however, make us laugh and allow us to feel smug about our happiness. Greek tragedies were about the nobility, but comedies were about common people. Then the moralists of the 16th and 17th centuries decided that the purpose of comedy was not only to amuse and entertain, but also to instruct.
So, what would you rather read about (or more likely these days, watch on TV), the latest scandals about Washington politicians, foreign nobility and Hollywood stars or the fact that the reported number of crimes went down last month?
Bad news doesn’t usually come with the admonition that we shouldn’t act this way, but have you noticed how popular TV sit-coms usually end with a moral?
When I was young, I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I was fascinated with the challenge of gathering all the facts about a story and then writing those facts according to journalistic formulas so that the least common denominator, Everyreader, could understand them without difficulty.
However, newspaper reporters didn’t make very much money, Woodward and Bernstein hadn’t made investigative journalism fashionable yet and the epitome of TV journalism was Edward R. Murrow, not some blow-dried performer who just reads the teleprompter.
Later, whenever any argument arose about journalism, I always defended the reporters. They were doing their job. Bad things happen. People would rather hear about bad news than good news.
News reporter messes up, calls herself stupid on… by Christian_Carrion
And yet I have become extremely upset with TV reporters and their stupid questions.
Why ask an accused criminal “Did you do it?” Do you believe a criminal will suddenly confess on national TV instead of to the police? Does another denial give the audience any more insight about the story?
Why ask anyone “How do you feel?” How do you believe anybody feels after tragically losing a loved one, surviving an accident or winning the Super Bowl?
And why do journalists insist on inserting their own opinions? I have a rule of never answering a question beginning with a negative. “Don’t you feel the proposed health plan will cost the taxpayers too much money?” is a weak way to ask for someone’s opinion, because the reporter’s opinion overshadows the question and any answer.
I have always wanted to be part of an important story, just so I could counter reporters’ stupid questions.
“Did I do it? That’s a stupid question.”
“I feel like you have just asked another stupid question.”
“Don’t you feel that by asking your question that way, you are just giving your own opinion instead of asking for mine?”
And speaking of opinions, who cares what the public believes? Why do so many TV and radio shows keep asking for public opinions? A Denver morning TV “news” program once asked, “Does it seem like you have a lot of bad hair days?” Back then people actually paid money to call in their one little vote.
Why are there so many daytime talk shows? In 1961 Jackie Gleason probably started the first prime-time TV talk show when he sat down with just one guest and they simply talked. I believe Phil Donahue established the pattern of involving audiences, taking phone calls and having guests with unusual problems or stories.
Perhaps fascination with dirty laundry is nothing more than wanting to feel fear and pity for the catharsis, being able to feel smug at the absurdity of other people’s lives and watching tragedies about the common folk for a change.
I rest my case.
The Naked Curmudgeon
Dan Culberson
Oh my God! @downtownBoulder Parade of lights really stupid
Dec 3rd
C’mon there wasn’t even a band. What no band?? nope. Lets see Boulder has 11 marching bands. Count them and downtown Boulder with all, their hoi poli snobbery push and shove , they couldn’t even land a marching band for a parade. What about the CU marching band? or the CU football band? How about the CU School of music band?? Boulder High Band? Casey Jr high Band. Dawson School band? How about the Salvation army band?? Nope.
How about there wasn’t any music at all. How about the parade sucked. I came out to freeze my balls off, shoot video and there wasn’t even a drunken bar band. WTF. Oh but there was Ginger and some nameless Twitter chick in the grand stand. Well Whoop dee doo. Where is blinky the clown when we need him. Oh dead , just like that parade. Don’t ever have a parade again with out music you dopes.
From the Merry fucking Christmas Lights of lights with no music
Jann Scott
Boulder Colorado
Culberson’s Challenge
Nov 13th
Rational thinkers need a corollary with which to counter Pascal’s Wager, which essentially is “Either God exists or doesn’t exist, but if so and I believe in God, I will go to Heaven instead of Hell after I die; if God doesn’t exist, I have lost nothing.”
That’s not believing; that’s just saying you believe.
By that reasoning, then you might as well follow the teachings of your chosen “God.” Otherwise, you are admitting that your “God” is so weak as to be fooled by lip-service believers and lets anyone into Heaven just for half-hearted belief, not for good deeds. That’s not a God. That’s a bored security guard.
Blaise Pascal lived from 1623 to 1662 in France and was a brilliant scientist, mathematician, and writer who also invented a calculating machine at 18. In 1654 he had a “mystical experience” and converted to Jansenism, a doctrine of the sect of Roman Catholics in opposition to the Jesuits.
In other words, Pascal himself had doubts about what he had been taught as a Roman Catholic, and if that isn’t enough to make his so-called “wager” suspect, consider that he also wrote “Men blaspheme what they do not know” and “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction,” both in his Lettres Provinciales [1656-1657].
So, for all you people with such weak religious belief that you take the easy way out to literally “save your soul” or with such weak intelligence that you cannot decide for yourselves what to believe, here is Culberson’s Challenge:
Assume there is no “God.” Then, priests, cardinals, the Pope, preachers, ministers, and all other self-appointed spokespeople for “God” are either liars or deluded into ignoring the empirical evidence of science and mistakenly believing that God exists.
Either way, they are not to be trusted, and as the growing evidence of widespread sexual misconduct mounts, that would seem to be the case.
Now assume there is a God who created us and all the so-called reality around us: the planets, the solar system, the stars, the universe, and the “world.” Then we are all merely figments of God’s own imagination and therefore do not exist outside of that imagination.
However, if we are figments of God’s imagination, if we are manufactured “real” creatures in God’s own image, or if we are truly independent sentient beings with or without free will, what would eternity in either Heaven or Hell mean? We would eventually become used to our existence in either one and inured to the pain that supposedly awaits us in the one and bored in the other of those futures.
And name one other thing in nature that lasts forever without wearing out, running down, burning up, or simply dying.
Therefore, I propose that neither future of “eternity” is anything to aspire to, and consequently believing in the existence of “God” is of no benefit whatsoever while we are alive, just as not believing in Santa Claus when we were children didn’t change whether we got Christmas presents from our parents.
Thus, I challenge you either to give up your belief in a supreme being who supposedly created you and controls you and the world, or else to continue your disbelief in such a mythology, because either way, you lose nothing.
Of course, there are some misguided fools who will not accept this challenge and say, “Better safe than sorry,” which is merely religious belief by slogans and sayings.
This thinking is the basis for all religious belief, and it is the most dangerous aspect of believing in a “God,” because it leads to this sort of logic:
“There must be a God, because everybody says there is. Therefore, I can lead my life believing in God and do anything I want to, because if I ever do anything that God doesn’t want me to do, God will stop me. Therefore, I can do anything I want until God stops me, including trying to convince as many other people I can that God exists, because there is ‘strength in numbers,’ and the more people who believe in God increases the chances that God does exist.”
If you accept my challenge and choose to live without a belief in God, your life on earth will be much less complicated and frustrating and stressful, and it will be much more rewarding, enjoyable, and definitely free of self-imposed religious pressure.
“God” loses. You win.
I rest my case.