Post a controversial opinion

I get the impression that Clarkson is not stupid and/or emotionally damaged enough to be a full on crypto-nazi in the Farage/Rod Liddle/Toby Young vein, idk if that just makes it worse that he engages in that kind of stuff for bantz

Toby Young is as bad as that? I thought he was just astoundingly annoying.

tucked in t-shirts sometimes look good

xp here's a Toby Young tweet chosen completely at random

Toby Young@toadmeister

I set out the argument for “progressive eugenics” that I just discussed on Radio 4’s Analysis in more detail here http://bit.ly/1O2Ruuz

lol wtf

Toby Young is as bad as that?

Worse.

A lot of the resistance to this idea will come from a visceral dislike of anything that smacks of eugenics, for understandable historical reasons. But the main objection to eugenics, at least in the form it usually takes, is that it involves discriminating against disadvantaged groups, whether minorities or people with disabilities. What I’m proposing is a form of eugenics that would discriminate in favour of the disadvantaged. I’m not suggesting we improve the genetic stock of an entire race, just the least well off. This is a kind of eugenics that should appeal to liberals—progressive eugenics.

Didn't read the whole thing, maybe not what I was imagining but still sounds pretty nutty.

Though compared to Rod Liddle he's Pope Francis.

clarkson has had occasional moments of subtle thinking, I'm sure some people think that makes the rest of his output more contemptible

fuck Clarkson as per but it's currently more dangerous to have Trump-cherishing trollumnist Piers Morgan helming Good Morning Rainy Fascist Island

I was shocked that I enjoyed Clarkson talking about music. I assumed he only owned greatest hits collections and a lame compilation with a name like "The Greatest Dadrock EVER".

If only there was footage of when Clarkson punched Piers Morgan.

"A lot of the resistance to this idea will come from a visceral dislike of anything that smacks of eugenics, for understandable historical reasons. But the main objection to eugenics, at least in the form it usually takes, is that it involves discriminating against disadvantaged groups, whether minorities or people with disabilities. What I’m proposing is a form of eugenics that would discriminate in favour of the disadvantaged. I’m not suggesting we improve the genetic stock of an entire race, just the least well off. This is a kind of eugenics that should appeal to liberals—progressive eugenics."

jane fonda on the screen today convinced the liberals it's okay

I really hate the idea of Clarkson/Top Gear/The Grand Whatever in my head but sometimes I'll find myself in the same room as someone else watching it and the reality is usually not so bad and usually mindlessly watchable even for the offence-prone non-driver like myself. I guess the "Clarkson is a monster" people are also stuck in a bit of a hate-spiral where they ignore the more benign stuff and only hate-click to get worked into a rage over the latest controversy

the recent crop of alt-rightists plus the good old tabloids going full on "words mean whatever we want them to! elites! fake news! MSM!" make him look relatively harmless, but it's often hard to tell where the bants/not bants line is when everything is claimed to be merely a hilarious snowflake-baiting joke until suddenly shit gets real (and a constant climate of "jokes" makes shit real too)

also I would almost like to be one of those people who finds eating a boring inconvenience. I snack compulsively all the time and am consequently fat and unhealthy, it sounds nice not to be constantly thinking "what delicious thing can I shove into my face next"

Fairly sure all three Top Gear guys don't believe in global warming.

Newspaper columnists are trash and clarkson is p easily dismissable as a fairly garden variety dorky tory and the format of "the three naffest men imaginable pretend to argue about cars" is already so ugly and repellent on an aesthetic level that you wouldn't want to associate with anyone who enjoyed it even without the wacky racism

then again he is a broadcaster who uses the epithets "nigger" and "slope", noting that this is unacceptable doesn't make you a foaming libtard taking the bait as much as it makes you a human being

Didn't realise he had used those words! Wow.

I hate cars yet I found Top Gear surprisingly watchable when someone else had it on.

Xp Speaking of progressive eugenics have you guys heard of bio-artist Adam Zaretsky? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/510818/?client=safari

“The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form,” he said. “Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose, and an ostrich anus. That makes for difference––bodily difference, and surely metabolic difference, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that is based on collage, so it is literally gene collage. What’s weird is once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce, then you’ll have children who are born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses.”

...

“The idea is that you take a gene, say for pig noses, or ostrich anuses, or aardvark tongue, and you paste that into a human sperm, a human egg, a human zygote. A baby starts to form,” he said. “Developmentally, the baby is mostly human, but it has an aardvark tongue, a pig nose, and an ostrich anus. That makes for difference––bodily difference, and surely metabolic difference, but it also makes for a version of ourselves that is based on collage, so it is literally gene collage. What’s weird is once you get that started, if it stabilizes, if you can find partners, if you’re still fertile, if you’re still into it, you go ahead and reproduce, then you’ll have children who are born with ostrich anuses and aardvark tongues and pig noses.”

ah yes professor two-times

Ack i messed that up. Second part of the quote is:

“It’s important to make versions of transgenic human anatomy that are not based on idealism,” he insists. “I want to make sure that there’s plaid kids, like queer anatomy out there, to compete with the other add-ons that other parents are going to be paying for. To get bio-queer transgenic humans is going to save a lot of difference on the planet. It’s going to stop us from mono-culturing ourselves. It’s going to offer a real and possibly unacceptable face of the democratization of the human genome.”

Essential piece on clarkson is s Lee diatribe

IN FULL, if you please

I've seen that and its funny but it didn't go into the slurs he used.

"some of you are saying 'oh, I quite like top gear'. The trouble is, I hate top gear, and I'm now going to explain why for 45 minutes."

hoped we were talking Sammy Lee diatribe tbh

marcos: my daughter's school dress code requires tucked-in shirts.

When they wrote it, I think they were thinking of a 10-year-old boy wearing a polo shirt or Redskins t-shirt. When he tucks his shirt into his jeans he looks okay.

Consider, however, a five-year-old girl wearing a tunic and leggings. If she tucks her tunic into her leggings she looks like a severely mangled sausage.

ha that's so weird, they don't have a uniform and can wear whatever they want but they have to tuck in their t-shirts?

I remember when I was a kid and we had no dress code, just kids who were ordered to go turn their t-shirts inside out because even if your dad got a cool t-shirt with all his marlboro bucks, no cigarette advertising at school, please

yeah our dress code was no alcohol/cigarette ads, nothing "offensive" or "sexually suggestive" (I recall "dolphin shorts" and halter tops being explicitly banned)

Dolphin shorts?

I went to a prep school and people wore khakis with dolphins, crabs, whales and other sea creatures on them all the time. Horrific.

i'm thinking there was some t-shirt brand that was outlawed for a while. i want to say "no fear" shirts, but probably because they really should have been banned

https://usercontent2.hubstatic.com/9583461_f260.jpg

i think i remember some kid being told he could no longer wear the Metallica "METAL UP YOUR ASS" t-shirt but school admin was totally missing out on the dudes wearing L.A. Kings jackets with their gang name stitched on the back and their gang names (Hitman was one. Hitman!) stitched on the front. i thought they were wannabes but as it turned out they were actual gang affiliates.

Remember And-1 shirts? I had a friend who remembered the insults being far more extreme than they were.

And 1 and JNCO are my favorite brands of all time.

omg @ "Hitman"

co-ed naked beach volleyball it's a senior thing you wouldn't understand

omg coed naked, that was a banned shirt brand for sure

Coed Naked Analytic Geometry never caught on for some reason

coed naked vs senor frogs

salty dog cafe

anyway i am wearing a tucked-in t-shirt right now

I, to my great shame, have been to a senor frogs

it really does encapsulate everything a middle school kid thinks "partying" should be

did y'all have Big Johnson shirts. those were banned as were Bart Simpson shirts

yes, and yes

Spent many happy high school classes watching M the punk argue that being told to change his IF IT AIN'T STIFF, IT AIN'T WORTH A FUCK t-shirt was some kind of tradeucement of his civil rights.

About food again, is it a British thing and/or working class thing for food to be treated like a naughty luxury? (Dylan Moran has a bit on this)

I've puzzled over this a lot. Makes me think of old British kids comics in which food is frequently the goal of the story and they get it in a cheeky way then wink at the audience at the end.

Twice this week someone passed me while I was eating and they chuckled and said something about enjoying the food, as if I was up to some mischief.
Some people have gave me kinda dirty smiles about it or licked their lips and winked at me when I'm getting food.

Maybe it's mostly people who've been poor? If so that makes it less funny.

that's like the protestant ethic of allowing you the fruits of your success but not taking pleasure in them. can't look like you're enjoying the windfalls of your labor

or they're body-shaming you with the "eh, looks like you've already had enough to eat" implication, also rude

Believe me there is not much pleasure to be had from a Scottish diet.

lol