"Not the Supreme Court of the United States, admittedly — it really would be astounding if those pompous geriatric arseholes could take a break from sending women’s reproductive rights back to the Stone Age and legislate on something useful — just the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. But it’s still a thing. Even if the court itself is barely more than a provincial Portakabin of self-important windbags I would hesitate to characterise as bog-trotting, gin-soaked hayseeds had they not just loudly decreed that my right to do so is mandated by their constitution.... Rudeness is funny and useful and democratising and classless and easy and brilliant and sexy.... [Rudeness] is letting your mouth and brain go full tilt when you’re pissed off with someone, deliberately eschewing the rules of politeness and gentility to make absolutely clear what you think of them."
A slight qualification emerges: You're "free to say absolutely whatever you like to anyone, as long as he is a rich, white, able-bodied, educationally normal straight bloke of about 53. But don’t worry, I can take it."
Posts
41 comments:
I guess Trump won't get arrested in MA now.
"I'm the enemy, 'cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, "Gee! Should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbeque ribs with a side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, and butter, and buckets of cheese, ok? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cinncinnatti in the non-smoking
section. I want to run through the streets naked, with green jello all over my body, reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, ok pal? I've seen the future, know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar-Mayer weiner". You live up there you live the way Cocteau wants. When he wants, how he wants, where he wants. You come down here and you get to say what you want and maybe starve to death."
- Edgar Friendly character (Dennis Leary) - "Demolition Man"
The right to be rude is absolutely sacrosanct. I would die and I would kill before someone tried to police it.
Reproductive rights to the Stone Age? Sorry. With all due respect to hyperbole, STFU.
Here's how the decision was summarized by another article (free of paywall):
Last week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Barron v. Kolenda, a case in which a resident of Southborough was ordered to leave a town meeting after (correctly) accusing the board of selectmen of violating open meeting laws, characterizing them as spending like “drunken sailors,” and describing one of the members as “a Hitler.” The state supreme court declared unconstitutional the town’s public comment policy, which requires remarks in public meetings to be “respectful and courteous, free of rude, personal, or slanderous remarks.” Civility, the court held, can’t be required in a public comment session of a governmental meeting.
White guys are easy targets.
Try being around liberals and calling trans-women dudes.
Hilarity ensues...
Was that meant to be funny? Maybe ironic?
I feel like he was trying to be funny.
"He sits in your room, his tomb, with a fist full of tacks
Preoccupied with his vengeance
Cursing the dead that can’t answer him back
I’m sure that he has no intentions
Of looking your way, unless it’s to say
That he needs you to test his inventions"
"free to say absolutely whatever you like to anyone, as long as"
As longs as: liberty under prog rule. Or did MA just deviate a tiny bit from orthodoxy?
Everything does seem to come back to our right to kill our unborn. Supporters of the Democratic party will sacrifice every constitutional right in order to enshrine in law that one can terminate their pregnancy at any stage, up to and including just before the feet leave the canal. That is why every fight is partisan. The Republicans are Neanderthals, and thus they must be wrong about everything, ipso facto. If you were able to question a lefty and have them admin honestly their motivation, it would always boil down to abortion. Laws, decorum, respect, all are sacrificed at the alter of the almighty right to kill the unborn.
This is an unsolvable and unresolvable split in the conscience of the nation. On one side you have people who think the child has no value, and on the other side you have those who think it has infinite value. No Solomonic compromise will ever work.
"legislate on something useful"
Yeah, see, that's supposed to be the job of the legislature.
I get that Brits don't quite understand the separation-of-powers thing, since they only separated their Supreme Court from the execulegislature in 2009, but, really.
U may, butt We are not amused.
Peach, not White. Orange? Yellow? Symbols and rhetoric of albinophobia are celebrated with social progress of pop?... ma culture.
At CAIR headquarter, "Abdul, this puts a Western invented-&-manufactured monkey wrench into our plans to force the Shariah on America. If these infidels can be rude to us Muslims, they won't know their place."
Yes, in a public forum that's all true. But don't try to exercise that right if the public forum is full of people who will disagree with whatever rude stuff you want to say - e.g., an antifa crowd in Portland. You might regret the extra-legal consequences. In a non-public forum, the host can set its own rules, and rudeness of the disruptive sort is rarely allowed. But the consequences for breaking the rules will probably be milder than in the antifa/Portland hypo. This author doesn't seem to have antifa/Portland or anything like it in mind, just the more milquetoast-y kinds of forums where being rude isn't likely to get you clobbered.
>"And I’m not talking about boring old freedom of speech. That we have."
If this Brit truly thinks he has freedom of speech there in the UK, then he is singularly unqualified to write commentary on freedom of speech - rude or polite.
>So now rudeness has been saved (what happens over there happens here eventually), we must protect it...(and) to be on the safe side, keep nationality out of it too."<
Did this supercilious Pom who devoted a couple paragraphs of his article to rudely disparaging (of course) Americans really write that in the same article?! More reason to ignore him.
Sure, but don't ask about your kindergartener's curriculum.
Some things are beyond rude.
To clarify:
"Last week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Barron v. Kolenda, a case in which a resident of Southborough was ordered to leave a town meeting after (correctly) accusing the board of selectmen of violating open meeting laws, characterizing them as spending like “drunken sailors,” and describing one of the members as “a Hitler.” The state supreme court declared unconstitutional the town’s public comment policy, which requires remarks in public meetings to be “respectful and courteous, free of rude, personal, or slanderous remarks.” Civility, the court held, can’t be required in a public comment session of a governmental meeting."
Not quite as broad as suggested by that mush-mouthed fancy-boy Brit.
“ — it really would be astounding if those pompous geriatric arseholes could take a break from sending women’s reproductive rights back to the Stone Age and legislate on something useful — “
A. They didn’t send anything back to the Stone Age, dipshit. They sent it back to the states. Convince your state to adopt the policies you like..
B. They shouldn’t “legislate” anything. They’re the Supreme Court not the congress. In fact, legislating from the bench (in the Roe case) was what stated all this crap.
"As long as he's white, [etc., etc.]...." Yeah, pretty much undermines his whole daring rant about the right to public rudeness, as well as the "fundamental" nature of the right. In fairness, he could've been prosecuted in Old Blighty if he didn't qualify that statement thusly.
If this guy can take a moment away from mansplaining killing children before birth and celebrating the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which Wikipedia tells me invented the racist concept of "separate but equal" before Plessy adopted it, maybe he can speak to women just quietly standing on a sidewalk, not saying or doing anything, but getting arrested by British jackboots because she was thinking disallowed thoughts, namely, thoughts about God, etc.
The author wants the Supreme Court to "legislate" and that tells you all you need to know.
Giles sounds like someone who has never talked to anyone with different opinions.
Remember the Joe Biden with a penchant for his own quasi-insults?
It's like he put away foul-mouth Joe Biden.
But, smell the little kids Joe Biden still lives. Saw POTUS smelling a little one just yesterday via twitter.
Well this British restaurant critic sure has some great opinions there. Must make for some engrossing reading over there across the pond, where rudeness is not permitted. Imagine the shock of the genteel foxhound class at having to read 'pompous geriatric arseholes' and then their relief that they were not the subject and therefore could give their barrister a rest.
The great Mr. Coren, probably so interested in the qualities of the latest serving of boudin noir sautéed in butter with apples, must have missed the FUCK REAGAN signs so popular once, and then the FUCK BUSH and FUCK CLINTON and FUCK EVERYBODY AFTERWARDS that have been waving in our faces since this republic was born.
Perhaps we can invite Mr. Coren to drive our highways for while at a mandatory maximum speed of 50 kilometers per hectare and see his horizons expand.
Just remember that if you have a right to be rude, so does your target.
“… admittedly — it really would be astounding if those pompous geriatric arseholes could take a break from sending women’s reproductive rights back to the Stone Age and legislate on something useful-“
How rude lol
Pretty sure they might have cherished life and the future generations much more than the “oh-so-much-more-advanced” folk of 2023.
How Progressive.
Violence is so way out of the realm of acceptable communication, if insults hadn't been invented, we would've wiped ourselves out long time ago. Walmart and Mcdonal's fight nights notwithstanding.
So, there is a time and place for insults.
Just remember to keep them withing the current acceptable bounds.
Giles sounds like someone who has never talked to anyone with different opinions.
He is the son of a journalist. He is a restaurant critic. He and his sister often appear on British TV. His sister Victoria besides being a journalist is also a famous poker player and is married to British comedian David Mitchell. He's a fairly controversial figure in the U.K. for his rude Twitter posts.
And I’m free to punch Giles if he pops off to me.
But guys like that never do.
They are pussies.
Giles Coren, if his written persona is a fair reflection of himself, is a breezy, ultra-confident nitwit. Incidentally, the US Supreme Court's position on extreme rudeness was stated in Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011), allowing the Westboro Church to insult US war dead at their funerals. Does it get any ruder?
"The right to be rude to people in public has been upheld as a fundamental legal one by a supreme court in the United States. Not the Supreme Court of the United States, admittedly — it really would be astounding if those pompous geriatric arseholes could take a break from sending women’s reproductive rights back to the Stone Age"
They sent abortion law back to "the Stone Age" AKA, the states, one of which just made a ruling which is being lauded in this very article. Not shabby for "Stone Age".
Here's a non-paywalled version of the piece.
https://archive.fo/vuIG4#selection-827.118-829.50
London Times. Look in the mirror, you pompous twats. No one gives a shit what ‘the Brits’ think about anything and haven’t done for 200 odd years.
Giles Coren is nowhere near as funny as his Dad was.
BTW, it's the "Supreme Judicial Court" of our Commonwealth (one of four of those, along with Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky) because the laughably incompetent and corrupt legislature is the "General Court" (formerly the "Great and General Court." So now you know!
--tpm
Do note the fey manner in which our little twit of a correspondent archly refers to Southborough, Massachusetts as "a hick town", as if you can only decide weighty matters of civil rights based on things that happen somewhere suitably up-market and tony.
I like his sister. I find him a dreadful human being with few redeeming features, and prone to behaving like an entitled asshole. He's not even a serious public figure, and I know who he is from the nasty crap he's lied about on subjects as diverse as Polish culpability for the Holocaust to badmouthing another conveniently-dead fellow journalist he'd likely lack the balls to confront were she alive.
Not much of a man. Or, a writer.
rude, nude, and tattooed... Forward!
I thought Abbie Hoffman, wearing jeans with a US flag pattern on his ass, flipping the bird to the reporters as he walked into court, settled the freedom of speech issue about offensive words, conduct, and appearance way back when being anti-establishment meant something positive.
AR 15 sales just spiked again. Keep it up assholes.
Not to be rude, but IMO Coren is overrated, especially by Coren.
Also IMO there are times when it is right and proper, perhaps even mandatory, to be rude.
IIRC it was the late Florence King who wrote that a properly reared Southerner is never rude by accident.
Word.
Being tactically rude helps in getting rid of toxic lawyers. Especially hanging up on them. Applies to others that are merely a nuisance.
Hate crime, obviously.
Post a Comment