#409: The Lionel Countdown
Today, Dan and Jordan self-quarantine from Alex Jones' nonsense by taking a vacation into the exotic, very trivial world of Lionel's career.
March 18, 2020 - Knowledge Fight
02:32:43
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It's time to pray. | ||
| I have great respect for knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Knowledge fight. | |
| I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys saying we are the bad guys. | ||
| Knowledge fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Dan and George. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I need money. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Andy in Kansas. | |
| Stop it. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| Andy in Kansas. | ||
| It's time to pray. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a friend. | ||
| I'm a huge fan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love your world. | |
| Knowledge Fight. | ||
| KnowledgeFight.com. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| Dan! | ||
| Jordan. | ||
| We're all having a rough go, so let me ask you a question. | ||
| Is it about The Witcher? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, good God, no. | ||
| I've started to play the card game. | ||
| Oh, have you? | ||
| Gwent is amazing. | ||
| It's so good. | ||
| I love Gwent. | ||
| I do like the diversity of things to do in the game, especially that that is such an extreme example. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| There's just a whole different game inside the game. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| Anyway, I'm sorry to derail your question. | ||
| I was just saying, let's have a happy thought. | ||
| What was your happiest St. Patrick's Day? | ||
| Because here we are recording. | ||
| Huh, that's an interesting question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| Remember St. Patrick's Day's fondly? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think during my younger childhood years, it was just like a thing that, you know, maybe you'd draw a little four-leaf clover at school or something. | ||
| And then as I got older, it was just an excuse to drink. | ||
| And so I just get fucking drunk. | ||
| But at the same time, I was doing that almost every other day, too. | ||
| It wasn't like, you know, my... | ||
| Early 20s and late teens, it wasn't like a... | ||
| You didn't need a reason. | ||
| It reminds me of Paul F. Tompkins' bit where he's like, I don't remember that it's St. Patrick's Day, mainly because, for me, any old day could be St. Patrick's Day. | ||
| It's new and I could crank out a beer. | ||
| Especially whenever I've driven out a snake. | ||
| It wasn't something that... | ||
| I think I might be a little bit Irish. | ||
| At some point. | ||
| At least one of my grandparents is adopted, and we don't really know a whole lot of family lineage and stuff. | ||
| But I understand there may be a little bit, but I can't really claim that as being something really important to me. | ||
| I guess the best specific St. Patrick's memory was back when I worked at Groupon. | ||
| My office was right over the river, downtown Chicago. | ||
| Oh, that's great. | ||
| And so we had just an amazing view of them dying the river green. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's so cool. | |
| And so you could just see it dispersing, and you could see it becoming. | ||
| The celebration of St. Patrick's Day. | ||
| I thought that was pretty cool. | ||
| Yeah, the becoming is very interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I like that. | ||
| And then a couple days later, you know, walking around like in Wrigleyville and just seeing the trash. | ||
| Oh, this is the other side of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great. | |
| Yes, absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, this is a podcast where I don't know too much about St. Patrick's Day, but I know a lot about Alex Jones. | ||
| And I don't know much about either, Dan. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we have an interesting episode to go over, but before we get down to that, we've got to take a moment to say thank you to some folks who have signed up and are supporting the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, first of all, Michael, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Michael. | ||
| Thank you, Michael. | ||
| Next, 281-330-8004. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Normally, I would have said... | ||
| Did you try calling it? | ||
| No, it's a reference to a Mike Jones song. | ||
| Otherwise, I would not have said a phone number on the show. | ||
| It's a rap song. | ||
| Larry Nichols, is that you? | ||
| It's not. | ||
| Next, Matthias. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Matthias. | ||
| Straight out of Redwall right there. | ||
| Next, Tag. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you, Tag. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, Chris. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| The Conspiracy. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Chris. | ||
| Next, Rosemary. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much, Rosemary, as well as parsley, sage, and thyme. | ||
| Aha. | ||
| And finally, I'd like to say thank you to a couple people who donated on an elevated level. | ||
| We appreciate that very much. | ||
| So first of all, Kelly, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| And Vidya, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| Alright, we gotta go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, alright? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare... | ||
| Infowar on you! | ||
| Thank you so much, Kelly! | ||
| And thank you so much, Vidya! | ||
| Yes, thank you very much, Kelly and Vidya! | ||
| If you're out there listening and you're thinking, hey, I enjoyed this show, I'd like to support what these gents do, you can do that by going to our website, knowledgefight.com, clicking the button to support the show, we would appreciate it. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much. | ||
| So, Jordan, today we're in a situation where, I mean, the world is going a little bit out of control. | ||
| There's a lot of various ways you could describe it. | ||
| I think tensions are incredibly high. | ||
| I think that there's a lot of trouble. | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| I don't know how to put this well. | ||
| It's the most uncertain I think I've ever felt in my entire life. | ||
| I think so too, for me. | ||
| Unprecedented on many levels. | ||
| The uncertainty surrounding the health situation in the country and all over the world. | ||
| The whole fucking world. | ||
| And in a situation like this, I don't... | ||
| I don't want to talk about Alex Jones. | ||
| I don't really want to. | ||
| We did our episode on Monday. | ||
| They covered a lot of the solidification of his conspiracies around the virus and the outbreak. | ||
| And I don't really have a whole lot of faith that it's going to grow much from there. | ||
| Yeah, it's doubtful. | ||
| And simultaneously, you see his own personal struggles. | ||
| Bleeding into his show in a way that makes him incapable of covering it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I haven't actually listened to Monday's episode of Alex's show. | ||
| I don't really have a whole lot of faith that it's going to be anything really all that interesting to cover. | ||
| And I worry that we would be spinning our wheels. | ||
| And I don't know if that's necessarily a great thing to do. | ||
| And I feel like... | ||
| In this climate, there's a lot of information, and I think that people should be getting that information from better sources than us. | ||
| In terms of health information, what you should do, what's best practices, I think that there are tons of other outlets, and I don't think that we can fill that hole. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Whereas I would love to be able to be the show that does literally everything. | ||
| That's just not possible. | ||
| It's not what we can do. | ||
| So, Jordan, I find myself in a situation where... | ||
| Also, it's just a real bummer. | ||
| It's just a real bummer. | ||
| It is. | ||
| I don't know exactly what to do. | ||
| There's a lot going on, and it's a scary time for a lot of people. | ||
| We're going through this unprecedented health crisis, and the question of what's going to happen, it's impossible for us to answer. | ||
| No clue. | ||
| I feel like in times like this, listening to Alex and talking about his bullshit isn't the highest priority. | ||
| He's going to do what he does, and on our next episode, we can get back to paying attention to that. | ||
| But in this time, I think a lot of people, you know, they're self-quarantining, and stress is really high. | ||
| So maybe the best thing we can do is provide an escape, an amusing escape from the present day. | ||
| In order to do this, though, I'm going to need to perform a magical ritual. | ||
| I need everyone to close their eyes. | ||
| All of you listening, Jordan, you included. | ||
| Unless you're driving, don't do that then. | ||
| But close your eyes and take a deep breath. | ||
| Breathe in. | ||
| Breathe out. | ||
| Breathe in. | ||
| Breathe out. | ||
| Feel your breath taking you to a simpler time, a simpler place. | ||
| What's that sound you hear? | ||
| Is that a breeze rustling a palm tree? | ||
| Is that a songbird fluttering right outside the window? | ||
| It feels so familiar. | ||
| What is that sound? | ||
|
unidentified
|
it. | |
| Don't put it. | ||
| I know! | ||
| Alright, let's do this! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's hear some cranky bullshit! | |
| I felt like maybe the best use of our time would be to do another episode about Lionel. | ||
| If he gets into the fucking subway now, he's still going to be bitching about people's fucking backpacks on the goddamn subway train. | ||
| I will say that I was going through a lot of his back catalog, and I found that there's a lot more episodes about backpacks. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| Yeah, he's a man who's very mad at people having backpacks on the subway. | ||
| Oh, Lionel. | ||
| So, in case anybody out there have not heard the other Lionel episodes, Lionel is a gentleman who used to be a pretty regular guest on Alex's show. | ||
| He is a former lawyer. | ||
| Maybe he's still a practicing lawyer. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure what his life is all about. | ||
| But he would come on Alex's show and be really dishy about stuff, and then it stopped because he went real far into QAnon. | ||
| He loves QAnon! | ||
| He now currently does three live streams a day. | ||
| That can't be real. | ||
| Three. | ||
| Three live streams a day. | ||
| 8 a.m., 2 p.m., and 8 p.m., I believe. | ||
| That is a working man. | ||
| You gotta give it to him for the work ethic. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| That's what Geddy Lee calls him. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's a Rush song called Working Man. | ||
| So he's super into QAnon now, but even before he would go on Alex's show, in the earlier days, you know, 2010, 2011, 2012, back in those days, he was a commentator on a TV station in New York, and he would complain about the most trivial bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like it was the biggest deal in the world. | |
| People having backpacks on the subway is a real piccadillo of his. | ||
| He also is mad at how words are pronounced. | ||
| They're terrible! | ||
| He owns a thesaurus. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And so now you're up to speed. | ||
| A very dog-eared, crumpled thesaurus that has been rifled through several hundred times a day. | ||
| And in order to help get us through this, I've got us this spiteful brewery, Miss O 'Leary's Chocolate Milk Stout. | ||
| Love it. | ||
| The Illinois product, helping out these Illinois companies. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Let's take some novelty beverage drinks. | ||
| Cheers to you. | ||
| To the end of the world, my friend. | ||
| Drink or smoke them if you got them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Eat, drink, and be merry. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| So, we start off. | ||
| There's been some trouble with this public health emergency that we're in. | ||
| With cruise ships. | ||
| Are we in the present day? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Okay, good. | ||
| This is all in, like, 2011, 2012. | ||
| Okay, all right, okay. | ||
| I was thinking about getting some of his current day stuff about the QAnon and all that. | ||
| I'm like, why ruin a good time? | ||
| So there's a lot of trouble about the cruise ships. | ||
| You know, there have been the Diamond Princess situation. | ||
| There's, you know, people are saying, hey, don't go on cruises. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Turns out Lionel was way ahead of the curve. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He really did not like cruise ships. | ||
| Way before anybody with the exception of maybe David Foster Wallace. | ||
| I was going to say, if people needed to listen to David Foster Wallace, we wouldn't be in this situation! | ||
| Lionel had a supposedly fun thing. | ||
| He's never going to do it again. | ||
| And here is Lionel complaining about cruise ships. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lionel! | |
| This story about the tragedy involving the stricken Italian cruise liner reminded me of something I'd like to forget. | ||
| Let me see if I can get through this without becoming a medic. | ||
| That means throwing up for visitors and viewers of other stations. | ||
| I'd rather drink bleach than go on another cruise. | ||
| You will, my friend. | ||
| If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand what the attraction is. | ||
| To cruises. | ||
| My wife and I have been on our share, radio and work-related paid promotional deals. | ||
| And the only thing worse than going on a cruise is not being able to hide because you're obligated to a meet and greet. | ||
| And you can't escape. | ||
| You're on a prison scale, confined to quarters, either referred to as cabins or staterooms. | ||
| The height! | ||
| Of duplicitous labeling. | ||
| You got him. | ||
| Your mind immediately shuts down through a cruel and systematic sensory deprivation. | ||
| So starved are you for stimulation that you'll see anything vaguely labeled as entertainment. | ||
| Bingo on the Lido deck. | ||
| Bad mime acts. | ||
| Ventriloquists. | ||
| Broadway cavalcades. | ||
| Karaoke. | ||
| Charades. | ||
| Staring at your hand in the crow's nest lounge. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| You'll do anything. | ||
| Look, I need to pause here. | ||
| I can't tell if this is self-deprecating. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Because Lionel already established that he's been on these cruises as a media thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's on there and has to do meet and greets. | ||
| He is the entertainment on the cruise ship. | ||
| And he hates me! | ||
| Meet and greets! | ||
| Like, how could you be on this? | ||
| Oh, what an asshole. | ||
| He's complaining about how anything appears to be entertainment on a cruise ship when he is entertainment on a cruise ship. | ||
| Yeah, they will do anything, including listening to Lionel talk. | ||
| Talk to Lionel, yes. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| I really can't figure out if that's trying to be self-effacing or not. | ||
| Who wants to meet and greet Lionel? | ||
| Hey! | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Because you're stuck! | ||
| I have an idea for a great reality show. | ||
| How about entertainment acts not good enough for cruises? | ||
| Imagine the horror of that. | ||
| I do imagine that. | ||
| Walking around and around in a catatonic fog in a seemingly endless death maze like a rat sentenced to spend the rest of its miserable life in its god-awful mind of a paralyzing boredom mill and the food. | ||
| Nondescript and amazingly similar cuisine motifs with exotic names. | ||
| Oh, but the quantity. | ||
| Oh, the quantity. | ||
| Look how much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is great comedy. | |
| You will. | ||
| Period. | ||
| And you can see the gradual destruction of your mind and will to live in the series of pictures on sale, no less, that chronicle your maritime equivalent of Gitmo. | ||
| The first day, a thousand-yard stare. | ||
| Day three, facial paralysis and the stultifying expression of someone just condemned to death in a Turkish prison. | ||
| Day five, Edvard Munches the Scream! | ||
| and your table mates, the people you're forced to eat when nightly, the people that have been in, I'm sure personally selected through some CIA rendition torture algorithm to annoy the living out of you. | ||
| I'd rather lick a bar rag than go on another cruise. | ||
| Can't do two licks. | ||
| Can't do two licks. | ||
| can't do two lick things. | ||
| I'd rather swipe over a bear trap than get near anything, anything even resembling a cruise. | ||
| Have I made myself clear? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Comment as you see fit. | |
| I love the guy saying no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's great. | |
| Also, what kind of a niche complaint is this? | ||
| He's getting on the news and doing a piece about how much it sucks to be entertainment on a cruise ship. | ||
| Oh, very relatable. | ||
| Millennials are so terrible. | ||
| They're the worst people. | ||
| They complain about the smallest shit. | ||
| Anyways, I'm rich enough and popular enough to go on cruise lines. | ||
| Other people pay me to go on. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| The food's bad. | ||
| The food's bad. | ||
| And all the dumb people on the cruise ship want to talk to you and you're stuck. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I'm so frustrated. | ||
| We've all been there. | ||
| I'm so frustrated by the people laughing at his. | ||
| Like, I don't know where the bit is. | ||
| Well, because I think that some of that is uncomfortable laughing. | ||
| A lot of the laughter was at the, I'd rather suck a hospital mop. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And also, that's one of Lionel's, like, sort of go-to lines. | ||
| He says that a lot. | ||
| He says he'd rather suck a lot of things. | ||
| But mostly hospital mops. | ||
| I'd rather lick a bar rag. | ||
| The problem with that, from a structural standpoint, if you're writing a bit, is that licking... | ||
| Sucking a bar rag is less disgusting than sucking a hospital mop. | ||
| You have to flip those, too, if you want this to work. | ||
| At least the bar rag has a little alcohol. | ||
| The squatting over a bear trap is a good third one, because that causes bodily harm. | ||
| Escalation, yes. | ||
| But you're going backwards, then forwards, in terms of the rule of threes there at the end. | ||
| And that's a failure of a bit. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So even if you're trying to do this hacky nonsense... | ||
| At least do it with a little bit of joke structure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Anyway, that's my notes for you there, Lionel. | ||
| You said comment as you see. | ||
| I've been with enough road hacks to know that if you just get the rule of threes right, you can do fine. | ||
| Yeah, it's less disorienting when you at least have the progression correct. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So, Lionel, in this next piece... | ||
| Has found some news. | ||
| In this next piece, I like that. | ||
| Well, I think this is a little bit different from a structural perspective, even from our show, because these are a little bit longer than most of the clips of Alex. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And there's someone trying to be funny a lot of the time, whereas a lot of Alex is just discomforting, very upsetting. | ||
| Dispatches from the lower upper class. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what this is called. | ||
| So Lionel here has found some news stories that he thinks are funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so he's going to cover these stories. | ||
| That are funny. | ||
| Let's see what petty bullshit this is. | ||
| I think this might be the opposite. | ||
| This might be like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is, these are not funny stories. | |
| Just the headlines, ma 'am. | ||
| Watch it, Sparky. | ||
| The subject of tonight's piece. | ||
| News stories that are so great, just in terms of their fact structure and premise. | ||
| That's what tonight's piece is about. | ||
| I don't trust you with that. | ||
| My dear friend Lewis and Graphics, thank you, because as titles go, this one really sucks. | ||
| Now let me explain. | ||
| Scouring the internets as I do daily, I come across stories that are just great. | ||
| And I've got three for you tonight. | ||
| Now, first, please. | ||
| These stories are not funny. | ||
| I in no way want to create the impression that I'm mocking anyway, okay? | ||
| Then don't do this. | ||
| The category of interesting stories, this one comes out of New Orleans. | ||
| Already you've given the point where this is flawed in conception. | ||
| You're talking about funny headlines and you're like, I'm not trying to make fun of these stories. | ||
| See if you can thread that in here. | ||
| Joe Neuberger had her four monkeys seized by state wildlife officials. | ||
| Neuberger, who... | ||
| I'm not... | ||
| I don't think this is funny. | ||
| Neuberger, who doesn't claim has a form of autism, claims that chimps are service monkeys. | ||
| Now, here's where it gets interesting. | ||
| It seems that said state officials were suspected for claims as to the chimp's status as service monkeys because they were dressed in pirate costumes. | ||
| She was also decked out in buccaneer tongs and charged two bucks for a picture with her and her swashbuckler primates. | ||
| They're service monkeys. | ||
| No, they're not. | ||
| But you charge two dollars. | ||
| So what? | ||
| They want to take a picture. | ||
| What can I do? | ||
| I can't stop them. | ||
| This is what I might go for the usual pirate pun, okay? | ||
| But I'm not argmating all that. | ||
| Just the facts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now... | |
| So this first story here is about a woman having some monkeys that she dressed up like pirates. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| There's no joke in Lionel's segment about this. | ||
| He just thinks the very existence of this story is enough to be fucking hilarious. | ||
| So there's no need to do any more work. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Just say monkey pirates. | ||
| It's time to go to lunch. | ||
| And then don't even bother with the slightest of puns to kind of accentuate. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You do the joke where it's like, I would do this joke and that's supposed to be the joke. | ||
| That's terrible. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, you're not Todd Glass. | ||
| There is an explanation for this story. | ||
| The monkeys were dressed like pirates because it was New Orleans during Mardi Gras. | ||
| Also, there's much more to this story that Lionel could have riffed on if he cared at all. | ||
| So this is a piece from 2011. | ||
| But if Lionel did any work past just letting a headline be a joke, he could have found that this woman had one of her monkeys stolen in 2007, years prior. | ||
| That's great! | ||
| I mean, it's not great. | ||
| It turns out she works for an exotic pet store, and four men allegedly came into the store and stole her monkey friend that was named Destiny. | ||
| The explanation for them being service monkeys is spelled out in an article from News 4 Jacksonville about this Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| An article in the Florida Times Union points out that the store was the victim of a number of pet thefts in a short span of time. | ||
| A police major told them, quote, it was the second time in six months that this type of monkey was stolen from that business. | ||
| The store owners also found a leopard gecko, king snake, and ball python missing around the same time, presumably stolen. | ||
| Okay, alright, okay. | ||
| That's how we're doing this. | ||
| People are stealing monkeys from snakes. | ||
| Alright, okay. | ||
| So, on the one hand, you have a clearly struggling older woman who has some monkeys who may or may not be trained to help her in the event of a seizure. | ||
| One of her monkeys was stolen a few years prior, so having them taken in 2011 is probably re-traumatizing for her. | ||
| Yeah, that's fucked up. | ||
| But then, on the other side of this, which is that... | ||
| The situation is a double-edged sword. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In July 2011, this woman was convicted of cruelty to monkeys over this whole thing. | ||
| All right, well, that's trouble. | ||
| She didn't have permits to have the monkeys. | ||
| They were being used as street performers. | ||
| That's an issue. | ||
| And a Department of Wildlife and Fisheries spokesman said, quote, the monkeys were in poor health overall with a diaper rash, dehydration, and piercings. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| There's a larger story here. | ||
| Oh, because they're pirates. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| What, the diaper rash? | ||
| No, the piercings. | ||
| Oh, piercings, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So there's a larger story that on the one side deals with an unwell person who has a connection with these monkeys and on some emotional level probably does need them as support animals. | ||
| On the other side, it also is a story that clearly deals with animal abuse. | ||
| Both of these are serious issues, but to Lionel, there's a funny headline about a crazy lady dressing monkeys up like pirates. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| This is a disservice to the story. | ||
| There was a rash of exotic animal thefts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But again, that's years prior. | ||
| That was in 2007. | ||
| Whatever happened to Destiny? | ||
| Did they find her? | ||
| I couldn't tell from the news reporting. | ||
| She moved to Atlanta, and you know where she's working. | ||
| She was a big fan of 2 Chainz. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Is it the Magic City? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I couldn't tell from the stories what became of Destiny. | ||
| But it appears that maybe she got another monkey friend. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Anyway, he's not done with his headlines. | ||
| Let the premise of the story marinate with you. | ||
| Next, this is just a great headline. | ||
| From the Center Daily News in Pennsylvania, and I hope you can read this. | ||
| Butts waves hearing in boob murder case. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That one involves Kermit Butts and Mirinda Boob. | ||
| I'd love to hear our own Marvin Scott, the great Marvin Scott, announce, live from the courthouse, Butts waves hearing in boob murder case. | ||
| Marvin Scott picks 11 news. | ||
| He doesn't sound anything like that, but then again, neither do I. That's what he's got? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is just about people with funny names. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Butts and boob. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's a murder case! | |
| What a fucking dick! | ||
| So this is a story about a man named Ronald Heichel, who was romantically involved with a woman named Mirinda Boob. | ||
| Problem was, Mirinda was married to Samuel Boob. | ||
| And in order to take care of that inconvenience, Mirinda and Ronald decided to murder Samuel, and then Ronald paid Kermit Butts $5,000 to help him dispose of the body. | ||
| This is a pretty fucking serious story, with the murder and all, but these people's names are funny. | ||
| This is so fascinating to me, because on the one hand, Lionel tries to play this game where he has a hundred synonyms for every word he uses and tries to sound like the smartest fucking dude in the world, but he also seems to have the humor of a fucking third grader. | ||
| His name's Butts. | ||
| Ah, this is great. | ||
| All I need to do is read this headline, and people are going to go, ape shit! | ||
| Yeah, love it. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And finally, please, I'm not making this up, and I even got an okay ahead of time, so don't email me about this one. | ||
| This is true, this is real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I'm going to email you. | |
| From the Global Times out of China, the headline reads, I swear to God, a happy ending to farmers' anus woes. | ||
| And let me just read part of the first sentence from the story, okay? | ||
| Quote. | ||
| A farmer from Jiayu County of Hubei Province has lived 55 years without an anus. | ||
| Now, for some reason, G comes to mind. | ||
| Now, what you think? | ||
| Wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| That's a fucked up medical... | ||
| You know when he talks about the weekend? | ||
| I imagine G, Natalie Attire, saying, Do you know anyone in GIU County? | ||
| A special hello and a howdy-do and a get-well-soon to my favorite farmer with the, um, you know. | ||
| Hope you get better. | ||
| So there you have it. | ||
| Thank God for the internet. | ||
| And I have these stories linked in their entirety on my Pix11 blog. | ||
| Comment if you're bored out of your mind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Comment. | |
| Ooh. | ||
| That took a dark turn. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| To be clear, also, when he says Xi, he's referring to the weatherman at the station. | ||
| He's not talking about President Xi. | ||
| That's confusing now. | ||
| Yes, it is confusing now. | ||
| So that story's fucking horrifying. | ||
| Yeah, what are you talking about? | ||
| So there's a 55-year-old Chinese farmer who was born with a congenital condition that left him without an anal opening. | ||
| Without getting too graphic, prior to 2011, he had a surgical hole that he could use to shit, but he also had to extrude it manually. | ||
| According to an article in Pediatric Clinical Advisor, there's some degree of imperforate anus in approximately 1 in 5,000 live births. | ||
| But you can imagine this is usually not too big of a deal for people with better health coverage. | ||
| They can take care of it pretty immediately upon birth. | ||
| But it can be horrible for someone like a farmer living in China. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| This story is just... | ||
| Haha, this guy didn't have a butthole to Lionel. | ||
| I can't believe this. | ||
| He probably thinks it's like really edgy comedy stuff, like he's out there working blue. | ||
| Man. | ||
| I never imagined missing Jay Leno. | ||
| If you're going to read headlines, at least he has some competence to it. | ||
| I think that he thinks that he's kind of like a hipper, edgier Andy Rooney or something. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| But this shit's just funny to kids, man. | ||
| Guy doesn't have a butthole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is a tragic reality that that guy lives with. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| This is just Lionel mocking people with shittier lives than him. | ||
| The headline really should be, like, awareness that this congenital condition exists. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, absolutely. | ||
| We should be donating to his medical bills. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What an asshole. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Choose your words better. | ||
| Oh, goddammit. | ||
| That really was unintended. | ||
| Lionel is a mess. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it would be wrong of me to sit here and say that he is wrong about everything or doesn't have some good takes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| For instance, he seems generally to be very in support of LGBTQ rights. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| That is one thing that he is... | ||
| I did watch a video where he was very in favor of legalizing sex work. | ||
| He has some pretty decent cosmopolitan ideas, let's say. | ||
| And this next clip, I got to say, I find no fault in this take that he has. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why do we have presidential debates? | |
| Seriously. | ||
| Have you ever heard some candidate say something about anything that made you say, hey? | ||
| I think I'll vote for that guy or gal. | ||
| I never once considered this idiot for a second. | ||
| Not once. | ||
| But that answer just now, well, that changes everything. | ||
| I'll save you the time. | ||
| No! | ||
| If you like a candidate, you'll love her debate performance. | ||
| If you hate someone, short of them announcing the cure for cancer, it doesn't make a bit of difference. | ||
| Real quick, this isn't the part I agree with. | ||
| I think that's a bad take. | ||
| I think a lot of people are swayed by it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I think that's kind of how it works. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| It's all, well... | ||
| I can't say what it is, but I can think it. | ||
| Now, if I had my druthers, and I'm not so sure what druthers even are. | ||
| Whom am I kidding? | ||
| Have you ever heard me before? | ||
| Of course I know what druthers are. | ||
| What? | ||
| That was great stuff. | ||
| If I had my druthers, here's how I'd do debates. | ||
| Take the GOP snooze fest. | ||
| For one solid hour before the actual debate, everybody commences drinking. | ||
| I mean hardcore power slaps. | ||
| Alright, he's swaying me with this one. | ||
| Then, let him at it. | ||
| Ties at half-mast, hair messed up, a cigarette dangling from their lips, maybe an eyelid droops, words are slurred, but their truth pours out and exudes like a septic tank hit by Irene. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Michelle Bachman says, hey, look, I'm hot! | ||
| And you know it. | ||
| I was a frontrunner! | ||
| Really? | ||
| What, for an hour? | ||
| That's what Michelle Bachman's got to say. | ||
| I look like an Avon lady on sopers. | ||
| By the way, four guys in Brooklyn just got that joke. | ||
| Romney, hey! | ||
| You think I like being me? | ||
| I know, I know, I'm boring. | ||
| And I'm sick of the Romney jokes. | ||
| Even I'm sick of me. | ||
| Perry, ever try playing cowpoke 24 /7, destroying business? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Ron Paul, look at me. | ||
| Secretly, the country loves me, and they keep calling me a nut. | ||
| I want to follow the Constitution, and they call me a nut. | ||
| Wait, that's what Ron Paul's going to say when he's drunk? | ||
| That's what we've got. | ||
| They call me a nut! | ||
| Ron Paul's going to get drunk and start yelling about how blacks need to get out of the country and suspend foreign aid. | ||
| No way. | ||
| He's just doing frontier psychiatry. | ||
| No, I'm a nut. | ||
| I'm crazy in the coconuts. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Unbelievable. | |
| But that's your image of what Ron Paul would be like drunk. | ||
| We're talking about how he tried to invade that island. | ||
| It would start like this. | ||
| All right, let's get real. | ||
| And then it would go real bad. | ||
| Yeah, let me tell you about my problem with OSHA. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Well, maybe I am a nut running with these bunch of losers and thinking the media will cut me some slack. | ||
| Cain and Huntsman, oh, you think you've got it bad? | ||
| Herman's adding the initial Y to his name. | ||
| Yep, Herman, why Cain? | ||
| Why, why? | ||
| Because of all the times people ask, Herman, why? | ||
| Nude. | ||
| Got him. | ||
| You've got problems. | ||
| Nailed him. | ||
| I'm old. | ||
| I look like Chucky. | ||
| My wife's run up a half a million dollar tab at Tiffany's, so quit your belly aching. | ||
| And finally, Santorum. | ||
| Why am I running again? | ||
| Anybody? | ||
| Help me. | ||
| Now that I'd like to see. | ||
| Comet as you see fit. | ||
| I like the idea of coming onto your platform and being like, presidential debate, they should be fucking wasted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, I'm fine with that. | |
| I think that that's an interesting take. | ||
| I'm fine with that. | ||
| And the public conversation, I think, has room for that. | ||
| Like, that being floated. | ||
| However, as a comedy bit, those are bad examples of what these candidates would say when they're drunk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| He needed to take another pass at that. | ||
| Extreme. | ||
| Newt Gingrich is just saying he's fat. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| No, Newt Gingrich is like, I'm trying to get another wife right now! | ||
| Yeah, Michelle Bachman's like, I'm hot. | ||
| You can do better than this, Lionel. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Michelle Bachman is like, I can see on either side of my head, but not straight ahead. | ||
| Lionel, to go with your drunk thing. | ||
| You know what they say? | ||
| They say, write drunk, edit sober. | ||
| Take a night. | ||
| Take a night. | ||
| Get tanked. | ||
| Try and embody these presidential candidates and see what they would say if they were in your position because you're wasted. | ||
| See, now I'm going to take his idea. | ||
| Then wake up in the morning, polish it up a little bit. | ||
| Get on TV. | ||
| Get the language better. | ||
| Remove some prepositions. | ||
| Some slurs for Ron Paul's section. | ||
| Do I go with the hard R? | ||
| Also cut that section about druthers. | ||
| It was pointless. | ||
| Made no sense. | ||
| Get that out of there. | ||
| Okay, so I'll take this idea. | ||
| I'll improve it. | ||
| Did you ever do... | ||
| There was a show out in the northwest suburbs where they would get you a hotel and you would do the first show over and the second show completely drunk. | ||
| In the meantime. | ||
| I'd heard of that, but I've not. | ||
| I'm going to go with that is the perfect format for a debate. | ||
| That would be interesting. | ||
| I think those kinds of shows are really irresponsible. | ||
| I probably, while I was doing stand-up, would have done it if asked, but I'm glad I didn't. | ||
| I think it sends a pretty... | ||
| A fucked up message. | ||
| I hope people enjoy it and I can't lie and say that I was sober every time I did stand up. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| This is as close to like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright, Lionel. | |
| But again, as a comedy piece, it doesn't work at all. | ||
| I say we give it a shot, but you should head back to the editing room. | ||
| So I'll say this for Lionel in that last clip. | ||
| He had a point, and he made it concisely. | ||
| And that is that these debates would be better if everyone was drunk. | ||
| That is the point of it. | ||
| The message is gotten across. | ||
| Now, I think that I stumbled into a couple of these missives of his. | ||
| These letters. | ||
| Dispatches from the lower upper class. | ||
| I need a thesaurus. | ||
| Can't think of any more fucking synonyms. | ||
| Epistles? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not bad. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| These next couple are muddy. | ||
| I don't know what the point of them are. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| From now on, before we start these, I want you to try and guess what they're going to be about. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| This one, we're talking 2011. | ||
| Almost all of this is from the 2011-2012 window. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He was gone from this station by about 2014, I think. | ||
| That's when he started doing like... | ||
| Overly long, boring vlogs. | ||
| And I'm not going to cover those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| Pass. | ||
| I mean, 2011, we've got to go with Obama. | ||
| This one's got to be Obama, right? | ||
| It's not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye, friends. | |
| I'd like to discuss something with you. | ||
| One of the best of human endeavors. | ||
| In fact, it's what makes us different and separate and distinct from the other animals. | ||
| The pyramids. | ||
| It's our ability to hope and wish and pray and dream of winning. | ||
| Winning! | ||
| The big one! | ||
| The pot of gold. | ||
| The brass ring. | ||
| And do you know what provides that vehicle of hope? | ||
| The lottery. | ||
| Powerball. | ||
| Mega Millions. | ||
| Lotto. | ||
| Take five. | ||
| Take a chance. | ||
| Take a hike. | ||
| Scratch and sniff. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So if you're listening at this point, you're thinking, oh, he's going to take the piss out of the lottery. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| He's going to go after either the exploitative nature of the lottery. | ||
| You would think. | ||
| Or the dum-dums who buy lottery tickets. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It could go either way. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because it's Lionel. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| He likes to punch down. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Scratch and sniff is his best job. | ||
| At this point, no idea where this is going. | ||
| But you think it's going to be about the lottery. | ||
| It's going to go back to Cruises? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's your ticket to a dream! | ||
| And nothing better exemplifies this than the office pool. | ||
| You see, it works like the dreamer-in-chief, the most fanciful of the group, perhaps a tad daft and dreamy, decides that for reasons that I can't quite reckon or fathom, a given lottery jackpot is significant enough to warrant pooling his co-workers' hard-earned shekels to buy a series of tickets in a mutual fund of sorts. | ||
| So he's mad about office pools for lotteries, which seems... | ||
| Borderline antisocial on a certain level. | ||
| But also, he seems to be actually saying it's kind of dumb. | ||
| Nothing exemplifies this dumbness. | ||
| I mean, I guess? | ||
| It feels like a negative. | ||
| How does he feel about March Madness brackets? | ||
| He doesn't bring it up. | ||
| He doesn't bring those up? | ||
| No, but he will point to this fool, this simpleton who believes and has all this hope. | ||
| He's constantly pointing to the guy working the board behind him. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Somebody personal. | ||
| When you hear laughter, it's often because he's gesturing to the rube, the fool. | ||
| Okay, it can't be just like, hey guys, let's just do a fun thing together and we'll all... | ||
| Nobody wants to win, but it'll be fun. | ||
| He's pimping out like a technical employee of the station. | ||
| A mutual fund, an index fund, or a derivative of hope and fantasy. | ||
| So this wide-eyed, delusional, and frankly insane alpha member of the psych ward... | ||
| Collects everyone's dollar and buys a series of tickets. | ||
| He photocopies them, serializes them somehow, and provides weird notation as evinced by an almost childish, psychotic scrawl that an FBI profiler would look at and say, "Aha! | ||
| Serial killer!" And that he and his dream mates wait, dream, and hope, and pray, and wish to win. | ||
| To say they won! | ||
| It's not the money, it's the chance to say I'm a winner. | ||
| And you look at this poor example of genetics run amok, who has the slightest idea of math, probability, or anything approximating rudimentary, elementary cognition! | ||
| And you know, you know in your heart, that should this man-child ever win, He certainly would be that lottery victim, that pathetic urchin who blows it all on mountain bikes, fast times, loose women in German porn. | ||
| But I say, I say let a man dream. | ||
| Let him grovel in delusions. | ||
| So what? | ||
| Wait, so now you're fine with it? | ||
| Let the man dream. | ||
| That noted philosopher Charles Manson once noted as follows. | ||
| Look down at me and you see a fool. | ||
| Look up and you see a god. | ||
| Look straight at me and you see yourself. | ||
| What does that have to do with anything? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I have the foggiest idea of what that has to do with anything. | ||
| But this is a part of life. | ||
| The sacred dance. | ||
| The ritual of aspiration and reverie. | ||
| To dream. | ||
| Perchance to dream. | ||
| Winning. | ||
| Of being something. | ||
| Just once. | ||
| For one moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let the man dream. | |
| Comment. | ||
| As you see fit. | ||
| This is a kind of... | ||
| Like, incoherent. | ||
| You know, like, from a standpoint of, like, what is he saying? | ||
| It's like, he's abusing this guy as being crazy at the beginning. | ||
| He called him genetically inferior for doing this. | ||
| But then the point turns into let the man dream. | ||
| Let the genetically inferior just hope. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| I'm not quite sure how to decipher it. | ||
| Is he pro or against hope? | ||
| I can't tell, really. | ||
| I mean, I guess at the end he's definitely for it, but at the beginning he thinks it's stupid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So maybe it's just sort of a thing where it's like, ah, the dumb raffle, the crowd, the rabble. | ||
| Let them eat cake. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I get paid to be on cruise ships, and I hate it. | ||
| Let them have their stupid dreams of office pools. | ||
| I think he's just mad that no one invited him to the office pool. | ||
| That might be. | ||
| I think that there's something behind this, quite frankly. | ||
| This is one of those that I'm like, there's a personal story here. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's mad at a guy in the office. | |
| Generally speaking, his topics might as well be like, he looks over his balcony and is like, what's a billboard say? | ||
| I'll be bitchy about that. | ||
| But this does feel like there's a guy involved. | ||
| Two important points. | ||
| One, the German pornography thing. | ||
| Is a running gag. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's why everyone laughed at that. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Because he always, whenever he brings up pornography, he references German pornography. | ||
| Right, right, right, right. | ||
| And then the second thing. | ||
| Oh, the Germans. | ||
| The second thing is that Charles Manson thing, I think, is actually the closest he gets to being pretty absurdist funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It has nothing to do with what he's talking about. | ||
| And the way he calls himself out for, like, what does that have to do with anything? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it's close to working. | ||
| But because of the surrounding confusion about what the joke is, I think that it fails. | ||
| I think maybe my biggest issue here is his complete and utter lack of timing when he slows down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, he can get the rant timing pretty well, but once he starts trying to hit the punchline, he winds up fucking up completely. | ||
| That is a problem. | ||
| You know, that just like, Charles Manson, noted philosopher! | ||
| Charles Manson, once noted! | ||
| And then, ugh. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
| You should go do some reps at an open mic. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Get some of this worked out. | ||
| Most people work out their five at some shows long before they show up on The Tonight Show or anything like that. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Work out your five-minute missives. | ||
| My friend, this is not The Tonight Show. | ||
| Ah, that's fair. | ||
| So that I thought was a little bit confusing, a little bit muddy, what his actual point is. | ||
| I think this next one is another example of that. | ||
| What do you think this is about? | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Well, we just had... | ||
| Office pools? | ||
| You bet. | ||
| The scourge. | ||
| The genetically inferior getting everybody in the office to give them one dollar. | ||
| The very important pressing issue in American culture. | ||
| Office pools. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It's got to be backpacks again. | ||
| It's got to be backpacks again. | ||
| That's a good guess, but I will say that I didn't include any further backpacks. | ||
| No backpacks. | ||
| Although I could have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Oh, my God. | ||
| This week, a friend of mine was showing a young lady in her 20s snapshots from about, oh, 40 years ago. | ||
| And he handed her the yellowed photos, and she held them like you'd handle bones from an extinct mammal. | ||
| And it hit me. | ||
| She never held snapshots before. | ||
| Photos. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| Never before. | ||
| I mean, she's got a smartphone, an iPhone, but all her pictures are on a screen and may be printed for a special occasion, but that's rare. | ||
| She knew nothing of Polaroid Kodak, Kodachrome, one-hour Photoshops, and we're not even talking home movies. | ||
| So right now you can tell that the setup is kids these days. | ||
| Yes, yeah, yeah. | ||
| This is Andy Rooney. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| This is Andy Rooney all the way. | ||
| Yeah, it lives in the genre of these kids don't know anything about X, Y, or Z thing. | ||
| They don't know about chasing a hoop down the road with a stick. | ||
| I was going to say, what are we doing? | ||
| These kids have never worked in the coal mine. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It has that feel of it. | ||
| Look, I'm not hearkening back to those days. | ||
| No way. | ||
| But what really got me... | ||
| It was when she asked, when were these photos taken? | ||
| How old were they? | ||
| And I said, well, turn the photo over. | ||
| And it was a printed month and year. | ||
| She'd never seen a snapshot. | ||
| Remember when you'd get your photos back? | ||
| And every now and then, through some snafu, you'd get the wrong batch. | ||
| And just for a moment, just for a moment, you thought, who are these people? | ||
| How do we remember taking these photos? | ||
| Who are they? | ||
| Remember before when photo books came with the clear plastic sleeve? | ||
| Remember before that you had these little black almost construction paper albums and you'd glue in these little triangles to hold the pictures in place? | ||
| I'd spend hours looking at the same pictures and now that I can see theoretically the pictures on a phone or computer or screen, it's just not the same. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it's better today! | ||
| That's why! | ||
| Comment as you see fit! | ||
| I don't know what the point of this is. | ||
| Wait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So his point is, look at these dumb, dumb young kids who don't know what a snapshot is, don't have a Polaroid in their bones, and cool. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| It's kind of set up as this, like, hey, these kids don't know from photographs. | ||
| Dumb kids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then at the end, it's like, because it's better now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| This is maybe a trite observation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's just an observation, yeah. | |
| These kids don't know anything about photographs and good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good. | |
| I know! | ||
| Okay, alright, alright. | ||
| Thanks for signing off on iPhones, Lionel. | ||
| These kids don't know anything. | ||
| The TV used to turn off at 9pm and there was nothing until 6am the next morning. | ||
| And that's bad. | ||
| Now I appreciate late night infomercials. | ||
| It's like the whole message is having people remember and evoking images of this bygone time and being like, that sucked! | ||
| Yeah, I know! | ||
| I spent hours looking at the same photograph wondering, who are these people? | ||
| And now I don't have to do that. | ||
| It's a lot better, actually. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| On a certain sense, I think maybe that's an example of Lionel subverting the form. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| And I think that might be like, I think it's poorly done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think there's, you can't just throw the twist there in the last second of the piece. | ||
| You kind of need to earn it a little more. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Overall, I just think it's poor construction. | ||
| Anyway, this next clip, Jordan. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Next missive epistle letter post. | ||
| Report. | ||
| I'm out. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This next one, what do you think it's going to be about? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm going to go with young people again. | ||
| What are young people destroying? | ||
| Ooh, ooh, ooh. | ||
| This is about IPAs. | ||
| The beer? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's actually about... | ||
| Why doesn't anybody drink lagers anymore? | ||
| It's about how there's a rash of stupidity that is going around the country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
*Music* | |
| I'd like to address a topic that isn't ever discussed. | ||
| It's a condition that someone you know suffers from. | ||
| There's no cure and the diagnosis can be tricky. | ||
| It's called stupid. | ||
| Now, no one talks about stupid. | ||
| I mean, it's not that we don't have a long-standing... | ||
| A series of aphorisms about how stupid people cannot be cured. | ||
| Well, and he seems to be trying to set this up with a like, hey, no one talks about how some people are dumb. | ||
| This is the quiet problem. | ||
| Again, I would say go to an open mic. | ||
| You'll disabuse yourself of that notion pretty quick. | ||
| That's basically what we do. | ||
| The heartbreak, the pain of stupid is responsible for more lost jobs and lost opportunities than you can imagine. | ||
| It's wrecked political careers, marriages, relationships. | ||
| It cost this country billions of dollars in lost productivity more than any other individual pathology factor. | ||
| There isn't a person or family today who hasn't been personally touched by stupid. | ||
| For years, medical science has both failed and refused to address and quantify this sometimes deadly diagnosis. | ||
| The stupid I refer to is uncontaminated by either a substance abuse or sexual component. | ||
| Take Brett Favre's penchant for obscene sexting and the like. | ||
| Is he stupid? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But there's a sexual component involved which renders many a man completely devoid of any rational thought. | ||
| In fact, it could even potentiate stupid, like, for example, how alcohol potentiates certain medication. | ||
| Brett Favre was motivated by, you know... | ||
| So that's weird. | ||
| Okay, so men aren't responsible. | ||
| If there's a boner aspect to it, then it's not stupid. | ||
| You're not stupid. | ||
| Well, he is saying that it is stupid, but it's not the stupid that he's talking about. | ||
| So he's made that clarification. | ||
| He missed the easiest joke. | ||
| He missed the easiest joke that everybody has had a family member who does it. | ||
| And then the obvious joke there is, if you don't know who it is, it's you. | ||
| That's the oldest style. | ||
| Lionel does not do low-hanging fruit, man. | ||
| Oh, it's right there. | ||
| Lionel doesn't take the easy road. | ||
| He doesn't take any road. | ||
| But no, pure and authentic stupid is different. | ||
| Stupid enjoys a singularity on the boneheaded spectrum that is untouched and uncontaminated by any other factor, chemical, emotional, or hormonal. | ||
| Case in point, Navy Captain Owen P. Honors, who enjoys the honor... | ||
| Of losing command of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise because of a series of profanity-laced, sexually explicit, homophobic, and inappropriate videos when he was the ship's executive officer. | ||
| Translation? | ||
| He was stupid. | ||
| He wasn't drunk, high or aroused. | ||
| He did it for the heck of it on his own. | ||
| In a strict military regime that doesn't brook any of this nonsense, a man who clawed his way up the career ladder, whose wartime command is pure gold, he gave it up for no reason whatsoever at what makes him stupid. | ||
| Subtext here, he was drawn by the lure of the camera, even an in-house closed-circuit camera. | ||
| There's also the similarity of the case of General Stanley McChrystal, who on his own, for no particular reason, disparages Commander-in-Chief in, of all places, a Rolling Stone interview. | ||
| Stupid, stupid. | ||
| Stupid. | ||
| Stupid. | ||
| Profoundly. | ||
| Inordinately. | ||
| Magnificently stupid. | ||
| Colossal. | ||
| Enormous. | ||
| Bromdenagian stupidity. | ||
| Stupid is dangerous. | ||
| You can't throw up from it. | ||
| Medication won't help. | ||
| And it can strike anyone at any time. | ||
| If you or someone you love suffers from the heartbreak of stupid, there's no known cure. | ||
| No medication. | ||
| No treatment. | ||
| And don't be misled by milder forms of the disease. | ||
| Foolish. | ||
| Idiotic. | ||
| And the seemingly ubiquitous damn... | ||
| So, I don't understand this, because the parameters as they were set up is that Brett Favre's stupidity doesn't count because he was horny. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So horny and stupid doesn't exist in this piece. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| It's just about stupid, stupid. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So that first example that he used, Owen Honors, that guy was a Navy captain until he got in trouble for those offensive videos he was filming while he was on board his ship. | ||
| The reason this shouldn't qualify as pure stupidity is because Honors wasn't just making those videos for fun, he was screening them on Saturday nights for the crew. | ||
| In the same way that Favre had a secondary motivation to his actions, namely being horny, so did Honors. | ||
| He was driven by a desire for attention and some form of localized celebrity on the ship. | ||
| This obviously doesn't meet the standards Lionel has established for the sort of stupidity that this report's supposed to be about. | ||
| The situation with General McChrystal was a Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings where McChrystal and his staff talked a bunch of shit. | ||
| Maybe this is closer to an example of just regular stupid, but I don't know if I would say that speaking to a journalist critically is necessarily stupid. | ||
| This seems like, you know, the problem isn't what McChrystal said, it's that he was doing so while being the commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. | ||
| Given that these are the only two examples Lionel gives about this rash of stupidity he's worried about, it seems like maybe he was trying to talk about a lack of discipline in the military. | ||
| That seems to be more what connects these two examples is military people who got out of pocket. | ||
| It boggles my mind just because his problem with honors seems less about the massive homophobia and more about that he recorded it. | ||
| Eh. | ||
| I agree with you, but you might be splitting hairs. | ||
| With McChrystal, it's like, oh, the issue isn't that his criticisms were correct or incorrect, it's that he told somebody about it. | ||
| Military discipline. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| It's just like, hey... | ||
| Keep your house in order, otherwise you're stupid? | ||
| You might want to consult that thesaurus, because I don't think that military discipline is stupid. | ||
| I don't think they're synonyms. | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| I think he's trying to Trojan horse a complaint about military people not following orders and being really regimented and all that, but he's trying to say, everyone's so stupid. | ||
| The problem with the world today is stupid, and I have two examples, both of them exactly the same. | ||
| Yeah, that's weird. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| clip or that report is really weird to hear. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Particularly after you hear this next one. | |
| If you think for a minute that Rick Perry's disastrous performance Wednesday night is going to affect his chances of cinching the GOP nomination, you're out of your mind. | ||
| If anything, it will endear him more to Republicans. | ||
| Look, let me be brutal. | ||
| The GOP and Republicans have some kind of immunity against stupid. | ||
| Now, before you think of being partisan, perish the thought. | ||
| Let me remind you that the Democrats were nuts over the prompter-dependent Obama, whose campaign transmission never got out of hope and change. | ||
| They love what they perceive as smart, though messageless. | ||
| But Republicans love anything... | ||
| Any Republican says, no matter how he says it, so long as he mentions lowering taxes and bats his eyes lovingly over the image and myth of Reagan, he can dispute evolution, Darwinian mechanics... | ||
| Gravity? | ||
| He can believe in intelligent design and that the earth is 6,000 years old? | ||
| No problemo. | ||
| And the more the supposed left-wing media laugh and chortle over Perry's incredible inability to remember the three agencies whose removal represents the sole basis of his campaign, no big whoop. | ||
| Republicans since W have repackaged maundering confused logolalia and grammatically unidentifiable blather as somehow charming. | ||
| Oh, these guys are good. | ||
| They've immunized their verbally and intellectually ambiguous candidates and politicians from any critical analysis by rebranding them as a new and improved departure from the intellectual elite. | ||
| You have a pretty good diagnosis of the situation here. | ||
| You have a take where it's like Republicans have immunized themselves against being seen as stupid because it's in opposition to some kind of idea of the intellectual elite. | ||
| He's talking about anti-intellectualism in the right wing. | ||
| Aside from his useless thesaurus, this is a fairly accurate take, I would say. | ||
| This is middle-of-the-road shit. | ||
| Let's see where it goes with it. | ||
| They embraced the incurious and laud the functionally illiterate, stupid, uninformed, and grossly underqualified. | ||
| No, no inclusion in their political lexicon. | ||
| But I must say something about old Rick Perry. | ||
| I'd get this guy checked out immediately. | ||
| I'm not sure if he's got a drinking problem, a drug problem, or a combination thereof. | ||
| But something's wrong with this dude. | ||
| If your parent or kid acted as goofy as he does, you'd rush them to a neurologist right away. | ||
| And just think what old Mitt's thinking. | ||
| What the hell do I have to do to get ahead in this town? | ||
| Herman Cain's allegedly assaulting women. | ||
| Okay, 14 years ago. | ||
| Perry's yelling, what about me? | ||
| I love Reagan. | ||
| I'll lower taxes. | ||
| Hey, I can play Wall Street sellout. | ||
| Come on, people, please. | ||
| But remember, when it comes to Republican candidates from Bush to Bachman to Palin to Perry to Cain, it's nice to know that there exists not anything that they can say that would be considered so stupid that it would disqualify them. | ||
| And in a way, that's kind of nice, isn't it? | ||
| What? | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| So it's a good fit. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm not. | ||
| There's something wrong with Rick Perry! | ||
| And I think that's a good thing. | ||
| He should be president. | ||
| I could be president. | ||
| I don't know what he's trying to say to me. | ||
| I'm not sure either. | ||
| He's like a toothless Joe Pesci. | ||
| Like, you're just confused, but you're not afraid of him. | ||
| Yeah, there's a complicated sort of point he's trying to make. | ||
| I guess? | ||
| Well, I don't think it's complicated, the point. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| The follow-through. | ||
| Incomprehensible. | ||
| The follow-through is my issue. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, he does a whole piece about how there's a rash of stupidity going around the country as evidenced by two military guys. | ||
| And he also has a thing where it's like, hey, all these Republican candidates are allowed to be as stupid as they want, and that's great. | ||
| Isn't that lovely? | ||
| Don't you want to live in the world where one half of the political system is completely stupid? | ||
| It seems that those two things are a little bit contradictory. | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| So we're gonna get to this next report. | ||
| What do you think it's about? | ||
| Back to our game. | ||
| You're over already. | ||
| I'm over. | ||
| Well, yeah, but he's so out of left field. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| Let's go with left field. | ||
| He's going to talk about Sammy Sosa. | ||
| That's what's going to happen. | ||
| Left field, so he's going to talk about Barry Bonds. | ||
| I should tell you this. | ||
| In terms of sports references he makes, it's almost always pro wrestling. | ||
| It's always pro wrestling? | ||
| He's an old school pro wrestling guy. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| That's the only thing that makes sense. | ||
| I'm not sure if there's baseball references as much as there is talking about gorgeous George. | ||
| These are all shoot promos, essentially. | ||
| You could say that, but heavily scripted. | ||
| So maybe not. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| It's not about sports at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| As you listen more to me, you'll know that I believe at looking at the UK to see where global insanity is heading. | ||
| No disrespect to the Britons, but it's true. | ||
| Seems disrespectful. | ||
| Ah, hell, let's be fair and just call it Europe. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But to be honest, the Brits are simply the best laboratory to see what insanity is cooking up. | ||
| Now, I'm sure by now you've heard of schools in our country prohibiting dodgeball, tag, hugging, name it, because of fears of whatever. | ||
| That's what. | ||
| They all started in the UK first. | ||
| I'm telling you, if it's nuts, it's in the UK. | ||
| You know, that would make a good tourism slogan. | ||
| Anywho, here's the latest that you won't believe. | ||
| Some primary schools in the UK are banning school kids from, are you sitting down? | ||
| Having best friends. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Swear to God. | ||
| They're banning kids from having best friends. | ||
| Why, you ask? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| The first reason is because they want to encourage kids to play in large groups versus focusing on one-on-one, individualized amicability and socialization. | ||
| There's a weird socialist message there, I guess. | ||
| And the main reason... | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| They're doing it to save the child from the pain of splitting up from their best friend. | ||
| When I guess the friendship ends, the kid moves, gives you the heave-ho, or predeceases you, I suppose. | ||
| Kind of novel, don't you think? | ||
| I guess along that line, kids and adults should not have pets because they'll die. | ||
| They shouldn't grow too attached to grandparents or their own parents because, let's face it, they're old and they're going to kick. | ||
| Perhaps self-loathing might be a theme as well because you're going to die, so don't get too attached to yourself. | ||
| And for that matter... | ||
| Yeah, there's a philosophy based on... | ||
| You laugh, huh? | ||
| The UK is any teaching tool. | ||
| It'll be here before you know it. | ||
| Now, what's the real reason for all this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Simple. | |
| Learned helplessness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, you got it. | ||
| When you're subjected to overwhelming, unrelenting, negative stimuli without surcease, you learn to accept it and become helpless. | ||
| To give up. | ||
| To just stop. | ||
| It's the guiding principle behind the abused spouse syndrome. | ||
| And in our world, you are overcome, overwhelmed, and oversaturated with law after law. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Limitation after law. | |
| Too many laws. | ||
| You can't even keep them straight. | ||
| And now we're habituating kids to becoming habituated. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You can do nothing. | ||
| We control what you eat, smoke, wear, read, and eventually think. | ||
| You'll become habituated and conditioned. | ||
| And when the feeling of helplessness completely sets in, they will have won. | ||
| They will have captured your will to resist. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Come it as you see fit. | ||
| So this is a story that Lionel's reporting on out of The Sun. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which I might say has thin sourcing. | ||
| Oh, The Sun? | ||
| No, that rag is right on it every time. | ||
| There are no specific schools or educators who are said to be banning kids from having best friends in that piece. | ||
| The entire article is based on two secondhand comments saying that some schools are doing this. | ||
| The rationale provided is basically close to what Lionel's talking about, you know, avoiding the pain of losing your best friend if you move. | ||
| But it's also supposed to be, like, the emphasis, largely, is on encouraging group play instead of children excluding each other. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I have no idea if anyone is actually doing that from this article, though, because no one who's enacting this policy is mentioned or quoted in the article. | ||
| What's super weird is that this article was published in March 2012. | ||
| Then... | ||
| In March 2013, there's an article on Fox News, quote, several schools in the UK issue Best Friends ban. | ||
| God damn it! | ||
| These people are all stupid! | ||
| Weirdly, this is just Fox News reporting on the story in The Sun from a year prior. | ||
| Fox News is great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They've always been tip-top. | ||
| Then in September 2017, there's an article on Business Insider. | ||
| Quote, schools are banning best friends to protect students'feelings. | ||
| This article is implying that UK schools are banning best friends, but the only source it has is a Mary Claire article about a school that Prince George attends, which might be a skewed. | ||
| God, this is that... | ||
| Then... | ||
| No! | ||
| There can't be more! | ||
| In September 2019, there was an article in The Sun about how Princess Charlotte is going to a school where she can't have a best friend. | ||
| The Sun came full circle? | ||
| Which happens to be the same school that Prince George goes to. | ||
| Goddammit! | ||
| God, these people just want something so bad. | ||
| But there seems to be a singular obsession on the idea that Britain or the UK won't allow you to have friends. | ||
| This is such that rainbow lipstick party thing all over again. | ||
| Do you remember that? | ||
| You're talking about the blowjob parties? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The blowjob parties. | ||
| Who are you people? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What are you guys doing? | ||
| This seems a little bit more damaging, though, as an urban myth. | ||
| Yeah, it does seem to have gone on for a long time. | ||
| Oh, because, you know, like, Lionel gets the message of what these stories are supposed to evoke in you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the socialist social planners trying to... | ||
| The government's making me not have friends. | ||
| Create learned helplessness in the kids so they can't do anything. | ||
| Nothing's more 1984 than... | ||
| An unsourced report about some Britons maybe not wanting to have best friends anymore? | ||
| The Royals? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think the royals are allowed to have best friends, period. | ||
| I don't know if there is a movement in schools entirely, in the United States or in the UK, about not letting kids have best friends, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some schools that tried to emphasize communal group playing. | ||
| It's healthier that way. | ||
| Exclusionary behaviors are generally things you want to discourage in children. | ||
| Even if this is 100% accurate... | ||
| The place behind all of this shit is coming from is just like, hey! | ||
| Don't exclude people. | ||
| That's a good idea. | ||
| Social planning. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why do we have to turn this into a fucking... | ||
| The government is monitoring you. | ||
| What I think is so fascinating is for, I don't know, the span of seven years, there's all these articles about the UK banning Best Friends. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| It's catnip to right-wing media sources. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It's just that thing. | ||
| They're just like, I want to yell about something, but there's nothing really big going on in the news today. | ||
| I think I remember that story from like 10 years ago where Best Friends were maybe banned? | ||
| And it's always presented as like this new thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| In 2012, it was this new thing based on its own article. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The next year in Fox News, it was being presented as a new thing. | ||
| Brand new thing. | ||
| Even though it was a year old article that was the source. | ||
| God, these people. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| This is out of control. | ||
| So in this next clip, Lionel... | ||
| I think stupid might be an issue for America. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| So Lionel talks in this next clip about the collapse that's coming in the world. | ||
| Summer of rage. | ||
| What do you think is going to precipitate this collapse? | ||
| Oh, some petty bullshit. | ||
| It's got to be some petty bullshit. | ||
| I'm going to go with pet ownership. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
incorrect This New Year's weekend was television heaven for me, luxuriating before the flat screen, ensconced on the couch with the wife watching TV marathons and marveling at how great those classic shows were. | |
| We gave you The Honeymooners, the gold standard. | ||
| I watched Dallas... | ||
| The Honeymooners is the gold standard. | ||
| ...and the absolutely, incredibly brilliant Larry Sanders show. | ||
| The writing was incredible, the acting superb, the show's timeless and classic. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Whilst flipping through the hundreds of channels, I came across the most frightening television show that I have ever seen. | ||
| What do you think it's going to be? | ||
| What do you think it's going to be? | ||
| I just, I mean, New Year's, well, it's not the Twilight Zone. | ||
| It's not Doctor Who. | ||
| No. | ||
| Let's go with The Bachelor? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| A show whose impact and import are beyond anything you could imagine. | ||
| Two and a half minutes. | ||
| A television show that will be looked at by civilizations who sift through the rubble of our once proud culture at the beginning of the end. | ||
| While many factors cause Rome to fall, our fall will be because of this program. | ||
| The show is called... | ||
| My strange addiction on, and this is the saddest of ironies, the Learning Channel. | ||
| Yes, the same Learning Channel that has yet to apologize for toddlers and tiaras. | ||
| But wait, I know what you're thinking. | ||
| Why do you want it, Lionel, if it's so bad? | ||
| Why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because it's my job. | |
| That's why. | ||
| I watch it for you. | ||
| I've got to. | ||
| That's a cop out. | ||
| So while I'm in favor of teaching the public about the problems associated with mental illness You heard that laugh there. | ||
| Also bad bit. | ||
| It's because he pointed at the employee again. | ||
| That's sort of also a running gag. | ||
| Selling out the board off. | ||
| I mean, you know, you watched and learned about the problems of OCD from hoarding buried alive. | ||
| Not to be confused with the animal planet's confessions. | ||
| But this show, My Strange Addiction, let me just tell you about a few of its episodes in no particular order. | ||
| There's the woman who has Pica Syndrome and is addicted to eating household cleansers, you know, like Ajax. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Since she was 12, she's addicted to eating Ajax. | |
| You're going to be a QAnon guy, buddy. | ||
| Now, she's not going to be confused with a teen who eats the turkey up to seven times a day. | ||
| Another woman eats toilet paper. | ||
| Clean, of course. | ||
| Come on, G. Come on. | ||
| Clean, of course. | ||
| They've got standards. | ||
| Then there's the gal who's addicted to sleeping with her hair dryer turned on right next to her all night. | ||
| That doesn't seem that crazy. | ||
| They also highlight more ordinary addictions like the ventriloquist who can't leave home, you know, without her puppets and won't stop talking to them. | ||
| The one who tans up to three times a day. | ||
| Tanorexia. | ||
| But wake up. | ||
| Do you see what's happening? | ||
| We're devolving, dematerializing as a creative culture. | ||
| The Honey Motors, Dick Van Dyke, MASH, even Seinfeld, slowly giving way to the reality show. | ||
| And now this! | ||
| My strange addiction. | ||
| And there's no end in sight to the pathetic and pitiful who'll bear all. | ||
| Not to share or teach, but for that chance to stand before a camera and be noticed. | ||
| Look at me, they scream. | ||
| Look at me, I'm as helpless as... | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| That got really cruel at the end. | ||
| Woof, yeah. | ||
| Like, that, like... | ||
| It seemed to be that he was sort of dancing around a commentary about what our tastes in media were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, like, I think that there's a fair point to be made that the way, the exploitative way people engage with media, like, let's say, Celebrity Rehab or My Strange Diction. | ||
| It does seem like the modern version of the freak show. | ||
| And those things would not exist on television if people didn't want them. | ||
| If there wasn't a demand, the supply probably wouldn't be there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or it would be, like, one season and then... | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Another season of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? | ||
| No, that one was done. | ||
| We went too far. | ||
| Somehow, Undercover Boss had two seasons or whatever, which is bananas to me. | ||
| That one was interesting. | ||
| Sociological. | ||
| Is there another Joe Millionaire? | ||
| That one was mean. | ||
| That one was mean. | ||
| If that were the critique he was making... | ||
| I guess that's fine, but then I don't know why you have to point fingers at the people with pica. | ||
| Like, that's a real condition. | ||
| That's not like something that people are just making up for attention or something. | ||
| And it just gets cruel at the end when he's like these desperate people. | ||
| And then the problem that I have is that because he's really bad at this, I don't know if that part at the end is supposed to be self-effacing. | ||
| Like, he's shitting on these people on My Strange Addiction for their desperation to be in front of a camera. | ||
| But meanwhile, he's so desperate to be in front of a camera that he thinks insulting them counts as worthwhile commentary. | ||
| Like, I don't know. | ||
| I really don't know if that was meant to be a winking jab at himself at the end, or if it was just a cruel outro punching these people who he has only heard about because of their openness about their struggle. | ||
| And because of that, because I can't tell, it's a bad bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think what really undercuts him here, his biggest problem is, I think in most of these clips, he has kind of gotten the point. | ||
| In each one, he's also kind of given a nod to that idea of like, well, these are about destigmatizing mental illness and getting people more comfortable with it. | ||
| And then incredibly obtusely goes as hard against that as humanly possible. | ||
| Like, almost deliberately. | ||
| He's literally like, these are people who deal with strange addictions, and we're watching this out of fascination, but also, it does help us kind of get more comfortable with the idea of addiction being a mental illness, and hey, look at how dumb those dum-dums are for going on TV. | ||
| They're so desperate for attention. | ||
| What are you fucking doing? | ||
| Yeah, it's very weird. | ||
| And if he'd made it more clear, like, at the end, if that was supposed to be, like, winking, like... | ||
| I am desperate for attention, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He should have laid the setup for that punchline throughout the rest of the... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| There should have been some hints along the way. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| Because as it stands now, it really just feels mean. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It feels like pointlessly mean. | ||
| Not least of which because Buddy. | ||
| You're talking about, one, you're living through the fucking golden age of television with the Mad Men and Breaking Bad and so many of the Sopranos. | ||
| Like, this is the golden age. | ||
| Yeah, you've just had The Wire. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And then, not only that, but he's not going after... | ||
| Reality TV shows that are based entirely around gathering attention, like fucking The Bachelor or Jersey Shore or any number of these. | ||
| He's going around reality TV shows based around people who are struggling. | ||
| This is a mean man. | ||
| Yeah, there's a more full criticism that could be made of the exploitativeness of that genre of television. | ||
| I just think Lionel's incapable of it. | ||
| Certainly within two minutes. | ||
| So he just goes this route of kicking people who are in trouble or dealing with stuff. | ||
| People going on the real world are looking for attention. | ||
| People who are going on My Strange Addiction are sometimes people who just cannot afford to get counseling any other way. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| And those types of shows, they do deal with things that will be a problem. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| Like, there was a situation on the Real World Road Rules Challenge where a couple of dudes sexually assaulted a female contestant. | ||
| And, like, of course, they were never on the show again. | ||
| Like, they got sued. | ||
| And, like, that altered the programming because of obvious, like... | ||
| There's an issue here. | ||
| The demand would be a problem if they didn't address this thing. | ||
| Same thing with... | ||
| I can't remember what it was. | ||
| There was that VH1 when they were trying to do all their reality show stuff. | ||
| There was a show called Megan Wants a Millionaire. | ||
| And there was a contestant on that. | ||
| She was like a gold digger lady and what have you. | ||
| And there was also their version of Real World Road Rules Challenge. | ||
| It was called I Love Money. | ||
| And so it would be like the people competing for money. | ||
| And there was a contestant who was on Megan Wants a Millionaire who then ended up on the I Love Money. | ||
| And that guy, after they had filmed the season of I Love Money, he murdered his wife. | ||
| Okay, well that's not good. | ||
| And it was a grisly murder. | ||
| He dismembered her and put her in a suitcase. | ||
| They were only able to determine it was her because of the serial number on her breast implant. | ||
| The only way that Lionel would know about that is if her last name was Butts. | ||
| True. | ||
| So what ended up happening was they just cancelled that season. | ||
| It had already been made. | ||
| It never came out. | ||
| A lot of people believe it's because he won. | ||
| The show. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You can't just get rid of the first couple episodes or re-edit it. | ||
| He won the fucking show. | ||
| So what I'm saying is... | ||
| That's tragic. | ||
| The point that I'm trying to get around to is that there is a... | ||
| Whether it's an actual demand or an implied demand element that will alter content that is supplied. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So if people started engaging with content like these rehab shows or... | ||
| My Strange Addiction in ways that weren't freak show-ish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The treatment of it wasn't as freak show-ish. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Then there would be less incentive for the shows to be created in that vein. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the way Lionel's behaving is actually part of the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because he's there for the exploitative nature of these programs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what he's there for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's the demand. | ||
| But it's his job. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Sure, buddy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So this next one, what do you think? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I want to try and ask. | ||
| I want to try and lead you towards. | ||
| Give me a pointed. | ||
| Yeah, give me a direction. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's a social criticism. | ||
| Don't know if that helps. | ||
| You got me. | ||
| I'm going to go with... | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Some people are saying... | ||
| Consumerism. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| I'll try and give you like a fill-in-the-blanks Madeline. | ||
| Some people are saying X or Y. Wait, some people are saying X are Y? | ||
| X people are Y adjective. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's not, I mean, that is as good of a template as I can give you, and you are never going to get it. | ||
| Alright, I'm going to go with, well, obviously if I'm never going to get it, I'm going to say young people are out. | ||
| I'm going to go with... | ||
| I'm not sure that Lionel complains about the youth as much as... | ||
| It seems? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It seems like he does. | ||
| I'm going to go with some people think women are capable of holding public office. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's some people think women be shopping. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Damn it! | ||
| I knew it. | ||
| You are incorrect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| The word hero might be the most overused word of our lexicon next to genius and love. | ||
| Look. | ||
| We all are thankful that nothing happened at Times Square and more thankful that the mad bomber turned out not to know diddly-squat about car bombs. | ||
| And while we're thankful and relieved that nothing happened, let's not refer to everyone who was vigilant and alerted the cops as a hero. | ||
| Let's thank them, laud them, appreciate them, congratulate them, but not automatically bestow the hallowed title of hero. | ||
| So Lionel gets a certain amount of time on air for these reports, and he sat down and was like, you know what? | ||
| I'm pissed off that people reporting terrorist attacks are being called heroes. | ||
| Yeah, you know what? | ||
| People who avert tragedy are being called heroes, and I'm sick of it. | ||
| I'm going to say that this take is heroic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Heroism involves an act of bravery, doing the right thing. | ||
| Calling 911, calling the cops, is what's to be expected. | ||
| It's what civilized people do. | ||
| To suggest that it's heroic to alert the cops that something's wrong means that getting involved is not the norm. | ||
| We want to thank folks for being alert, for doing the right thing. | ||
| We've seen the video of that poor man left to bleed to death alone on the sidewalk, a man who really was a hero. | ||
| He showed bravery and stopped the woman from being mugged. | ||
| How about Wesley Autry, who in 2007 lay on top of a complete stranger who had fallen on subway tracks as the train passed over him. | ||
| Psychologists now refer to the Yes! | ||
| Did that involve bravery? | ||
| Hero overuse is a verbal version of raid inflation. | ||
| It's becoming knee-jerk, an automatic reflex response that's really meant to show thanks, and well-deserved thanks at that. | ||
| Do you know how many police dogs still in the lines of duty have received heroes' tributes on dogs? | ||
| And as wonderful and great and fantastic as they are, they're not heroes. | ||
| Celebrate them, herald them, fine, but a hero is special and human. | ||
| Thank the Congressional Medal of Honor, which isn't even given to everyone actually demonstrating bravery. | ||
| It's given to Rush Limbaugh. | ||
| Only some bravery is recognized for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of one's life above and beyond the call of duty. | ||
| The word hero is almost holy and recognizes quintessential valor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To you. | |
| And it's been used for everything. | ||
| Hero. | ||
| Sandwiches. | ||
| Guitar hero. | ||
| And the worst? | ||
| Sports heroes. | ||
| You know how Xerox became the word for photocopying and sketch tape for all adhesive tape? | ||
| Don't let that happen to hero. | ||
| Remember, the First Amendment doesn't protect someone from yelling fire in a crowded theater. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If, and only if, there's really no fire. | ||
| Because if there is, it's your duty. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Write me, read me, and comment as you see fit. | |
| So if I understand correctly, it's your duty to yell fire if there is a fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So if you don't, you're going to be arrested for not yelling fire? | ||
| I guess? | ||
| It's against the First Amendment to not yell fire? | ||
| This is a weird point. | ||
| Not that part of it, but this whole idea is very weird. | ||
| So there was a... | ||
| People who, they reported a suspected car bomb. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And the police came and a crisis was averted. | ||
| Everything worked out okay. | ||
| An act of heroism, if you will. | ||
| Lionel is fucking bent out of shape about this. | ||
| For a guy like Lionel to argue about the sanctity of words and their definitions, while at the same time tossing out as many $10 words as he possibly can in places that do not need them. | ||
| The only reason you would use those words is if you need to be incredibly and very specific. | ||
| Not if you wanted to show off your fucking vocabulary. | ||
| Take your hero word and shut the fuck up. | ||
| That's a really good point. | ||
| It kind of is an invalidation of his thesaurus use. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think my response to this, if I were just like... | ||
| What I like to do is I like to imagine that every single thing I hear from Lionel is somebody saying this to me at a dinner party. | ||
| I'm hanging out with a cocktail. | ||
| Like dinner for schmucks kind of situation. | ||
| I'm hanging out with a cocktail and this guy is telling me that people aren't heroes. | ||
| I think my response would just be relax. | ||
| Calm down. | ||
| No, people overuse the word hero too much. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I honestly think this is sort of a position that I've turned the corner on. | ||
| I might have agreed with him in my younger years. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Well, because I used to work at a movie theater, and the movie Coach Carter came out. | ||
| And the movie was all about Samuel L. Jackson played this coach. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He closed the gym. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He locked the gym because his students that were on the team were failing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And unless they got their grades up, they couldn't play sports. | ||
| For some reason, I recently watched Coach Carter. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm not joking with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I think it's the... | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I think I wound up watching it on Netflix with my partner there. | ||
| I don't remember if it's a good movie or not. | ||
| You just saw it, so you might be able to have more insight on it. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's very paternalistic. | ||
| It gives that idea of the hard-nosed coach who really teaches people a lesson about ownership. | ||
| It's a very non-white people version of the blind side. | ||
| Saying nothing about the movie, because I don't remember it well enough to have a critique, my position on it back then, and I remember telling a lot of people this, was that He's supposed to do that. | ||
| These kids are failing. | ||
| He's supposed to not let them play sports if they're failing. | ||
| That's part of the rule. | ||
| Why is he being considered a hero for this? | ||
| Why is there a movie? | ||
| And I think that now, as a 35-year-old man, looking back on that position I had, I think it's a little asshole-ish. | ||
| Because it's not so much doing what you're supposed to do that is considered the heroic thing. | ||
| It's the result that comes from it that you're celebrating. | ||
| So the act, even a trivial, trite act can be heroic in the right circumstances. | ||
| And I believe that Lionel's missing that forest for the trees. | ||
| Well, and not just that, but there's a certain amount of what do you have to overcome in order to do what you're expected to do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, it would be legitimately heroic. | ||
| If somebody actually took control of our current situation and was like, let's fucking do some shit about this. | ||
| Like they're fucking supposed to do. | ||
| It would be because the insurmountable odds are there. | ||
| Just doing your job is sometimes heroic. | ||
| And taking it outside of that context, I mean, like, if you're thinking about what you have to... | ||
| Sorry for putting it in that context. | ||
| It's just on the head, you know? | ||
| Even when you're talking about, like, what do you have to overcome? | ||
| Lionel makes that clear. | ||
| The psychological bystander effect. | ||
| Exactly! | ||
| It is almost... | ||
| Something built into your human brain! | ||
| Right! | ||
| There wouldn't be a name for it if it wasn't something that was studied and is a shortcoming of human reasoning. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely! | ||
| You see something happening and you assume someone will take care of this. | ||
| And so no one does anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Overcoming that to the point where, like, I gotta do something. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is abnormal. | ||
| You should celebrate it. | ||
| Call it hero. | ||
| Call it the get-her-done guy. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Call it whatever you fucking want. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| This is pedantic nonsense. | ||
| I worry that Lionel likes the movie Boondock Saints too much. | ||
| You think he's a Boondock Saint? | ||
| I think he's a Boondock Saint. | ||
| I think that's what's going on there. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think he's been fighting Willem Dafoe for years now. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| I haven't seen Coach Carter in a long time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But I also haven't seen Boondock Saints in a long time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I haven't seen Boondock Saints in a long time. | ||
| I did not happen upon that recently. | ||
| Is there blackface in it? | ||
| In Boondock Saints? | ||
| No, but there is a lot of racism. | ||
| Well, it's interesting. | ||
| There's a load of... | ||
| How is he about to defend blackface? | ||
| Your face does not say the good answer. | ||
| Here's where it's at. | ||
| I don't know if I would say that Lionel's defending Blackface. | ||
| There's a quick answer! | ||
| I will say that this next missive of his does seem to imply that everyone is too worked up about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Black face, black face, black face. | |
| This week I read the umpteenth story about blackface. | ||
| It seems an Australian cosmetics makeup brand was running an ad that appeared as though the woman depicted was in blackface. | ||
| I mean, she had a blackface, but I'm not sure it was blackface as in Jolson or Minstrel Show or, you know, the Cakewalk. | ||
| Look, it featured a woman dressed in black, dark complected, and the caption read, not dreaming of a white Christmas. | ||
| I don't even know why I'm describing it. | ||
| It's right here. | ||
| To clarify, it is up on screen and it is blackface. | ||
| It's blackface. | ||
| Now look, take note of this. | ||
| There is a very simple rule that you must learn, especially if you're in the communications world. | ||
| Blackface is never without objection. | ||
| No one will ever ask you why you explained it. | ||
| They won't ask you its basis, the message, the theme, the meaning, the direction, whether it's instructional, historic, a parody, nothing. | ||
| We care not what your intent was. | ||
| Correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We care nothing of your goal or aim or messaging strategy. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very simple. | |
| You're nailing it. | ||
| Blackface inspires immediate objection in time. | ||
| And without fail, it's almost Pavlovian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I honestly don't think that's totally true. | |
| I really don't think that that's true. | ||
| I think there may be a conversation that comes up around artistic uses of blackface or parody uses. | ||
| But I don't think it has the negative social stigma that Lionel is trying to paint it to be when it's used in a context that is kind of like, okay, whatever. | ||
| Like, Robert Downey Jr. didn't suffer any consequences for doing it in Tropic Thunder because of the parody satirical context within the movie. | ||
| Somehow that is allowed. | ||
| In ways that, let's say, this Australian ad clearly is not. | ||
| Or, let's say, Ralph Northam's. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Or our dear Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. | ||
| I should also say that this is not the only video. | ||
| Of his that's about blackface. | ||
| I would not be surprised. | ||
| And one of the other ones, he tried to point out that like, hey, the Wayans brothers made white chicks. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| That is a man deliberately trying not to get to the point. | ||
| And pretending that people didn't say like, yeah, it's fucked up. | ||
| About the movie White Chicks. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But anyway, he goes on. | ||
| I remember. | ||
| There are scores of people who thrive on being offended. | ||
| Oh, they pour over the news. | ||
| That's you! | ||
| Trying in vain perhaps to find anything. | ||
| It's your job! | ||
| To be offended by and over. | ||
| There was a most interesting Broadway musical in 2010, The Scottsboro Boys. | ||
| I remember in November of that year, my wife and I saw the production at the Lyceum Theater, and there was a protest. | ||
| Guess what was important to know about this incident? | ||
| Okay, I'll save you the time. | ||
| The protesters who heard about the blackface part hadn't seen the musical. | ||
| They heard about it. | ||
| The black actors who performed brilliantly in the production didn't seem to take offense, probably because of two major points. | ||
| First, they saw the musical, and they were in it. | ||
| And two, they understood the message. | ||
| You might recall it was 1999, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani took offense to the painting The Holy Virgin Mary. | ||
| It contained, in Turalia, pudenda references and elephant dung as a theme. | ||
| Let me remind you, first, it was Rudy, and the story got a lot of traction. | ||
| Second, he was offended. | ||
| Offended and cared not about the symbolism or imagery. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he loved the warm glow of being offended. | |
| We all do. | ||
| To be miffed and violated. | ||
| Our senses and sensibilities under attack. | ||
| And throw in blasphemy, and you are ready for Freddy. | ||
| We love to be offended. | ||
| I'm offended, therefore I am. | ||
| And the audacity that cannot be missed is that because I am unable to appreciate your message, and because I'm unwilling or incapable of appreciating or grasping your message, too bad for you. | ||
| I'm offended. | ||
| You lose, and that's it. | ||
| No important thought or idea is not capable of not offending or insulting or angering someone. | ||
| If an idea or messaging is so vapid and insipid and anodyne, it's not worth even having, much less saying. | ||
| The marketplace of free speech involves the marketplace of controversy. | ||
| I thrive on controversy. | ||
| America thrives on it. | ||
| It's who we are. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| This is also this weird contradictory thing where it seems to be the entire report is about people are too offended by blackface. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But then by the end, he's talking about how great it is that people are offended because people thrive on controversy. | ||
| So it's actually a good thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't get what's going on. | ||
| He's shitting on people who are offended by blackface. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And saying that's stupid. | ||
| You're way too sensitive. | ||
| You shouldn't be offended by this. | ||
| But then at the end, like, ah, we all love controversy. | ||
| We all love to be offended. | ||
| But it's not presented as that being a bad thing. | ||
| Being, like, into being offended, he seems to be like, eh, it's all good. | ||
| Trying to parse this, I think what's going on is he's fine with his own version of taking offense, which is performative and full of bullshit. | ||
| But I think he feels it. | ||
| But he's against people taking actual offense when something offensive is going on. | ||
| You're supposed to just perform it. | ||
| You can't actually mean it. | ||
| He doesn't like valid criticisms. | ||
| He hates valid anything. | ||
| He just enjoys two and a half minute pieces of trite bullshit. | ||
| He's like that guy who just likes to argue. | ||
| And you're like, fucking, I don't have... | ||
| Not today, man. | ||
| Not today. | ||
| So people are mad sometimes about blackface. | ||
| Rightfully. | ||
| Well, not according to Lionel. | ||
| No, let's just call it rightfully. | ||
| Well, according to Lionel, it is overblown. | ||
| Okay, fair enough. | ||
| They're too sensitive. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Too sensitive. | ||
| Can't even look through it and see what's going on. | ||
| White people really don't like talking about how racist white people are. | ||
| Hey, man, blackface is totally cool, according to Lionel. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But something else is not. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lionel, Lionel, Lionel, Lionel. | |
| Whiteface is not. | ||
| I'm going to try and make it through this commentary without soiling myself. | ||
| I tend to lose certain bodily functions when some subject matter invades my soul and I speak of it. | ||
| what I have to actually put into words and explain and explicate and limb the basis of my contempt, I feel a rage that may be hard for you to understand. | ||
| What am I talking about first? | ||
| I hate hate. | ||
| I hate the word hate. | ||
| I'd rather be bathed in an ocean of f-bombs. | ||
| someone spouting that he hates something There are a bunch of videos on Lionel's YouTube page about how much hate crimes are bullshit. | ||
| So I think he's sort of hearkening to those. | ||
| He thinks that hate crime designations are stupid. | ||
| Right, right, just like heroes. | ||
| But look, dude, he's mad. | ||
| He's mad about something. | ||
| He's about to own the load. | ||
| You can say he hates it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I will make an exception for no word or concept comes close to even describing the vast and incomprehensible disgust, that pathological rage that is inspired by these people, this one group of people that I will tell you I hate. | ||
| Who are they? | ||
| It's those six selfish, egocentric, egomaniacal, self-centered, self-absorbed, look at me, rude! | ||
| Get to the fucking point. | ||
| Does anybody talk to you? | ||
| And I am rumored to share DNA with people who claim limb space on our phylogenetic tree. | ||
| Now it's reported that some Starbucks may be covering AC outlets with blank face plates to force these sick people to leave once their laptop batteries wear down. | ||
| And you see these degenerates, some of these psychopaths sit in a store in excess of eight hours a day. | ||
| By the way, I would assume that the Starbucks, if they are putting plates on there, it's more to not allow, let's say, people who are experiencing homelessness to charge their phones. | ||
| I would assume it's more that than the guy writing a screenplay and sitting there buying a croissant. | ||
| Yeah, I think they're fine with the guy writing a screenplay. | ||
| Putting all their... | ||
| I can't say it, but I can think it. | ||
| You know, all their adjusta on a table and using a separate chair for their laptop case or files. | ||
| Some of these animals ask for free water all day and think that their coffee is somehow rent. | ||
| And do you know whom I blame, huh? | ||
| Starbucks. | ||
| You sick idiots encourage these people. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What were you thinking? | ||
| Trying to report that cool Seattle spirit? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Does he think that this is unique to Starbucks? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Has he ever been to any other coffee shop? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No other coffee shops have these people. | ||
| Other coffee shops have the fucking moral fortitude necessary to keep these loiterers from just sitting there and working. | ||
| This is the whole thing with a coffee shop. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
| How long is he spending in the coffee shop to know how long they're spending? | ||
| Why does he need to sit down, get your coffee, and go? | ||
| Nobody's bothering. | ||
| Nobody's walking over being like, hey, have you read my screenplay lately? | ||
| Why is this a problem? | ||
| It's a huge problem, Dad. | ||
| I hate these people. | ||
| Their arrogance, their attitude, as though they are the epicenter of the human race. | ||
| They haven't spoken to you! | ||
| They're being sick, demented, heartless, mindless zeros. | ||
| And before laptops, they sat with their journals, thinking and musing and recording their deepest, uttermost thoughts. | ||
| If there was a God. | ||
| And if she answered my prayers just once, I pray I could walk into a Starbucks, survey the room, and snap my fingers, and produce a flamethrower, a blowtorch, or a water cannon, and let these sick loiterers have it! | ||
| Take that, you Starbucks squatters! | ||
| Top of the world, Ma! | ||
| And what I would give to walk over to one of those journalists that are writing her deep thoughts for the past ten hours and pull out a gallon of unleaded and a Zippo and scream with a blood-curdling delight, I am the god of hellfire! | ||
| And take that heavy way! | ||
| Well then, yes, it's fear, and I just soiled myself. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| So Lionel wants to murder people who loiter at Starbucks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will kill all poets! | |
| John Keats, I saw you at a cafe in the early... | ||
| I will kill Rainier Maria Rilke for going out to a park and sitting there and thinking. | ||
| Look, I understand... | ||
| All poets must die! | ||
| I understand that he's trying to be funny. | ||
| You know, like, it's an attempt at a bit. | ||
| Right, but the bit is, I want to murder all these people who loiter at Starbucks. | ||
| Now, you compare that to his other material, which is... | ||
| People are too offended about blackface. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It kind of looks weird. | ||
|
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I don't think his priorities are in the right areas. | |
| Oh, people sit somewhere too long. | ||
| Oh, murder! | ||
| People are offended by referencing the absolute exploitation and murder and enslavement of an entire race. | ||
| But let me tell you something. | ||
| If they were sitting in a Starbucks, then I would be angry. | ||
| That is weird. | ||
| Woof. | ||
| So Lionel wants to ban something. | ||
| What do you think it is? | ||
| I'm guessing Cosmopolitan White Men isn't the situation. | ||
| I need a serious answer before I can hit play on this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| What does he want to ban? | ||
| Okay, this is the point where... | ||
| Lionel is a rational, reasonable person. | ||
| This is the point where I think you're fucking with me, and it's going to be backpacks. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I would never do that to you, and I apologize if I've lived in such a way as to make you think I've set you up. | ||
| You haven't, but this would be a good time to set me up, should you? | ||
| We all know he wants to ban backpacks. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is something you don't know that he wants to ban. | ||
| I think he's going to want to ban two-ply... | ||
| Toilet paper. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nope. | |
| Incorrect. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I won't dance. | |
| Don't ask me. | ||
| Did you see the story about the couple who was arrested for allegedly dancing on a New York subway platform? | ||
| Well, after they were pinched for impeding something or other, the case was dropped, and now they're suing. | ||
| I wish them well. | ||
| But I absolutely advocate the prohibition of all dancing. | ||
| I mean criminal, incarcerative sanctions. | ||
| As Cicero said, no sane man will dance. | ||
| Ballroom dancing, square dancing, polka, I don't care. | ||
| I am without that part of the brain or nervous system that craves silly movement, ostensibly set to a perceived rhythm structure. | ||
| No sane man will dance. | ||
| You old fucking white dude. | ||
| See for yourself what I'm talking about. | ||
| Watch videos of the audience for the sound of. | ||
| And let's play stump the neurologist. | ||
| But there exists throughout our history, ordinance after ordinance, that limited public dancing altogether, or without first obtaining a permit. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because dancing is unnatural and un-American. | ||
| It's counter-evolutionary. | ||
| Here's the old joke. | ||
| Why do some strict, and you can fill in the blank with your particular favorite conservative faith system, but why do they never make love standing up? | ||
| Because it looks too much like dancing. | ||
| I'm being very serious here. | ||
| There's some atavistic, primordial reason why we loathe dancing, because remember, no sane man will dance. | ||
| There are things that we humans do... | ||
| We is doing a lot of work there, buddy. | ||
| ...that are, again, atavistic and vestigial. | ||
| Why do we nod our heads to indicate affirmation? | ||
| Because it mimics the suckling our mother's breast. | ||
| Why do we shake our head no? | ||
| To mimic the action of spitting out something bitter. | ||
| And why do we dance? | ||
| Well, the reasons are basic. | ||
| First... | ||
| To attract mating partners, to define and mark territory, to evince dominance, and for the most part in human cases, to create the illusion of hot, sexy, and attractive. | ||
| Dancing indicates a breakdown of structure and control. | ||
| It precedes riot, societal tumble, and a complete and total breakdown in civilization. | ||
| Dance has nothing to do with ceremony or the rhythm of life. | ||
| It is about exhibitionism and the devolution of societal order. | ||
| And besides, no sane man will dance. | ||
| Comet! | ||
| As you see fit. | ||
| I mean, that's all good fun and all that. | ||
| I don't know, like, obviously he doesn't want the government to ban dancing, right? | ||
| I mean, like, obviously that can't be- The only way this works is if Kevin Bacon shows up and gives him the people's elbow. | ||
| Like, there's no other way that this function- He doesn't reference Footloose at all. | ||
| I know! | ||
| How do you not reference Footloose? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, like, okay, so here's the thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Based on his political set, he can't possibly want- Dancing band. | ||
| No. | ||
| He can't possibly want that. | ||
| That's free speech. | ||
| The only way... | ||
| Unless you're dancing fire in a crowded theater. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| When there is no fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| If there is a fire, it's your duty. | ||
| That's your duty. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Fire dance. | ||
| But you're still not a hero. | ||
| You have to fire walk with me out of the theater. | ||
| Yes! | ||
|
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|
The... | |
| So the point that he has to be making, since he obviously doesn't want dancing bad, is that dancing's great! | ||
| And that's clearly not the point he's making. | ||
| The satire element of it doesn't make sense. | ||
| But it's all good fun. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| The problem, though, is that Cicero quote that he bases this whole thing on, no sane man will dance, is actually a mistranslation of the actual quote. | ||
| Dancing is fucking dope, bros. | ||
| It's not quite that. | ||
| Quote Cicero. | ||
| The quote is taken from Pro Morena, which is in the context of Cato accusing a dude of being a dancer, which apparently back then was a serious accusation. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You, sir. | ||
| That's like a man who doesn't wear a hat in the 1930s. | ||
| You have to duel at that point. | ||
| Somebody's got to die. | ||
| So in response to this, Cicero says, quote, No man, one may almost say, ever dances when sober, unless perhaps he be a madman, nor in solitude, nor in moderate or sober party. | ||
| Dancing is the last companion of prolonged feasting, of luxurious situation, and many refinements. | ||
| The basic argument he was making against this accusation was that no one other than a madman danced sober, and he wasn't being accused of being drunk. | ||
| So the accusation of being a dancer must be an accusation of being mad. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Paraphrasing the quote as no sane man will dance is fine, I guess, but then attributing that quote to Cicero is really unfair. | ||
| It essentially is putting words in Cicero's mouth, or more accurately, taking context away from what he was actually saying. | ||
| Cicero wasn't saying only insane people dance. | ||
| Drunk people dance, too. | ||
| He was saying no sober man will dance. | ||
| No sober, not sane. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Insane person will dance. | ||
| Dude, these guys got... | ||
| I dance at home all the time by myself. | ||
| Are you drunk? | ||
| Dancing is great. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, sometimes. | ||
| Wow, you're crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fair. | |
| I have a singular obsession with how all these people who end up becoming fascist bootlicking cheerleaders seem to have a common inability to understand quotations. | ||
| No idea. | ||
| I'm really getting to the point where I'm starting to wonder if that commonality is significant among them. | ||
| Like if there's actually a legitimate piece of... | ||
| What informs their ability to deal with the world that they can't understand quotes within their proper context? | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
|
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|
Is it a chicken and the egg situation? | |
| That kind of thing? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| The thought that I'm having is whether or not it would be predictive. | ||
| You see somebody who is unable to wrestle with what a quote really means, where it comes from, if that makes them more likely... | ||
| Is that a high correlation to being a right-wing... | ||
| Maybe even not right-wing. | ||
| It could break either direction, but certainly you see it a lot in these right-wing big dongs. | ||
| But that might also be partially because how ascendant that is in the conspiracy world over the last decade or so. | ||
| The left-wing conspiracy world has not been nearly as fertile. | ||
| Of a ground, particularly as a place you can make money, as the right-wing world. | ||
| So you would obviously see the results skew in that direction. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| I wonder about that. | ||
| That is interesting. | ||
| Is there a high correlation? | ||
| If I was in grad school, I might make it my thesis. | ||
| That wouldn't be a bad poll idea. | ||
| Just give somebody... | ||
| What do you think this quote from Thomas Jefferson means? | ||
| And then in small parentheses... | ||
| Are you sure it's from Thomas Jefferson? | ||
| I'll give you two hours. | ||
| Determine if this is real and tell me what it means. | ||
| Perfect, perfect. | ||
| But then that also is going to skew the results because it wouldn't have the knee-jerk element to it. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Of their own accord, they'll never figure out what these quotes mean. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But No Sane Man Will Dance is the formulation of it that is thrown around in memes and stuff like that. | ||
| Using that is not a fair description of... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But you apply it to Cicero because it's better than just saying no sane man will dance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would say at the same time, though, it's very much like that controlled media environment that they take in because they don't want to expand beyond that if a source they trust gives them a quote about some bullshit that reinforces their beliefs. | ||
| That's just a true quote. | ||
| You don't have to look into it. | ||
| It reinforces what I already believe. | ||
| So, for a lot of people, maybe one of the issues is that real quotes reinforce what the left tends to believe, and fake quotes reinforce what the right tends to believe. | ||
| I think this one's politically neutral, though. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| That's what makes it almost more interesting to me. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like, when you have the Thomas Jefferson ones, it's like, obviously these are weaponized by propaganda outlets that are all the fringe militia weirdos and stuff. | ||
| This one is really just a trite I want to complain about dancing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But the behavior is similar. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Well, I have old white man prejudices, so I'm looking for a quote that reinforces my old white man prejudices. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Which include dancing. | ||
| Yeah, you could draw that parallel there. | ||
| So, I should tell you, I go through Lionel's YouTube page, scroll through it, try to find... | ||
| Yes, anything good. | ||
| Maybe watch a hundred other videos that we're not talking about because they're so goddamn boring. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I should tell you this. | ||
| Almost all of these have like 300 views. | ||
| These are old videos that no one has ever watched. | ||
| So we're getting to a popular one. | ||
| Some of them only have 10. Like, these are long and dormant. | ||
| No one watches those. | ||
| You're spelunking for bullshit. | ||
| This next one, out of nowhere, has 100,000 views. | ||
| What could this possibly be? | ||
| That's what you have to guess. | ||
| What could it be about? | ||
| What could Lionel penetrate the consciousness with? | ||
| This video right before it, 200 views. | ||
| Video after it, 15. This one, 100,000. | ||
| Okay, this is going to be... | ||
| Colin Kaepernick. | ||
| No, this is before he started kneeling. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| This is too early for that. | ||
| It's got to be something like that, right? | ||
| It's got to be something that captured the zeitgeist in 2012. | ||
| Early 2012. | ||
| Around that frame, yeah. | ||
| This might be a live one. | ||
| I'm not entirely sure. | ||
| Damn it. | ||
| I'll tell you this. | ||
| It has nothing to do with politics. | ||
| Nothing to do with politics. | ||
| Nothing to do with, like, the 2012 election. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Get that out of your mind. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm going to tell you this right now. | ||
| There's no way you'll ever guess this. | ||
| I'm going to go with, like, an American Idol or a singing TV show. | ||
| Oh, you think it's, like, pop culture? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| TV show related? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's a good guess. | ||
| You're wrong. | ||
| Of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo, Lilo. | |
| Light of the sun Who are we or anyone to say what is and isn't a legitimate religion? | ||
| Okay, now, with that clue, with that clue, you have no idea where this is going. | ||
| Why would I know where this is? | ||
| I mean, this has to be Islamophobia, right? | ||
| That's an interesting way. | ||
| Do you think? | ||
| No, you're wrong. | ||
| And what business is it of a secular government to pass judgment on the theological authenticity of one's faith? | ||
| Scientology. | ||
| Well, that's precisely what this intrepid young man wanted to know. | ||
| His name? | ||
| Nico Alm, Lionel's Hero of the Week. | ||
| Mr. Ahm, an Austrian atheist seen here in these photos, applied three years ago for an Austrian driver's license. | ||
| Please inspect these photographs carefully. | ||
| Pastafarianism. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| I remember the story. | ||
| It was heated debate over a discussion over a provision of the European Union's and Austria's recognition of, quote, confessional headgear in official photographs. | ||
| You know, we'll even have the perennial case where a Muslim woman wants to appear in a driver's license or official ID word. | ||
| Don't let her dance! | ||
| All referred to erroneously by Americans as a burka. | ||
| You responded with a gasp, like mocking Lionel. | ||
| And I should be clear, at this point in his career, he does not seem to have a negative opinion. | ||
| I'm not saying he does. | ||
| Just in case any of the audience gets that impression. | ||
| So what Nico Arm did was to announce to Austrian motor vehicle authorities that he was a pastafarian. | ||
| And a member... | ||
| of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as depicted here in this holy painting. | ||
| Its website states that the only dogma allowed in the church is the rejection of dogma. | ||
| They also list in part as articles of faith that they believe that pirates, the original Pastafarians, were peaceful explorers and it was due to Christian misinformation that they have an image of outcast criminals today. | ||
| What about monkeys? | ||
| I was going to say, they're actually all monkeys. | ||
| As such, Mr. Ahm explained that pursuant to his faith, he had to wear a plastic pasta strainer as religious headgear. | ||
| Placed sideways, of course, in the photo's display. | ||
| Needless to say, the Austrian officials were not amused by the pastiferian Mr. Am, so to make him prove his bona fides and eligibility to tool about, Nico had to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to establish his mental fitness to drive. | ||
| Now stop. | ||
| Wouldn't that be great here? | ||
| Hammer time. | ||
| A psych eval to get a driver's license. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| This city would look like a ghost town. | ||
| I'm guessing that it wasn't a psyche evaluation to see if he could drive, and it was more like, this guy says he worships a flying spaghetti monster. | ||
| Let's make sure, because that sounds outside of the context of what Pastafarianism is. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Not knowing any context, that might be something that's like, oh, we might need to check in on this person. | ||
| Yeah, if you weren't familiar with the internet, you'd be like, uh... | ||
| Yeah, but it has nothing to do with the driving. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this month, three years later, I'm happy to announce that Mr. Nico Ahm, pastafarian and member in good standing of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, finally received his laminated official driver's license, seen here, with his pasta strainer colander chapeau firmly and conspicuously affixed to the devout Mr. Ahm's noggin, placed sideways, of course. | ||
| Austrian officials, certainly not to be accused of being antipasti, remarked that as long as his face could be made out clearly, he could pretty much wear whatever he wanted, and that this was not an official acknowledgement of Pastafarianism or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. | ||
| To which I'm coyly announced, that's next. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| So what's his point? | ||
| Is it good? | ||
| I mean, he seems supportive. | ||
| He seems like you shouldn't take away religious freedom at this point in his career. | ||
| It's weird because he becomes a giant QAnon guy, which is essentially a cultish. | ||
| It's strange, but I think that's about as middle of the road of a report as you can do. | ||
| It's just about this guy. | ||
| Hey, isn't it cool that he did this thing? | ||
| It's cool, but also a little silly. | ||
| And so let's just kind of like, hey, let's reflect on this being cool and silly. | ||
| Yeah, there's a quirky interest to it. | ||
| That's as close to a... | ||
| Fine Lionel report. | ||
| There's no real analysis or anything that goes along with it. | ||
| There's no, like, he's pointing out kind of the absurdity of religion as a whole, and this whole thing is kind of threatening to a lot of people. | ||
| I would imagine that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't want you to ban dancing. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| Yeah, and it's so weird to me that, I mean, I guess maybe... | ||
| Although it would be interesting if it turned out that John Lithgow was the Flying Spaghetti Monster. | ||
| That would be weird. | ||
| That would be wild. | ||
| I just think it's strange that this got so many more views than any of these old reports. | ||
| I guess probably the Pastafarian online community sent it around. | ||
| Maybe there wasn't a ton of coverage of this story. | ||
| Maybe it was early coverage. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It's got to be something like that. | ||
| He probably just got memed. | ||
| I didn't realize that there was that robust of a Pastafarian community. | ||
| Or maybe this was picked up by the reactionary right-wing kind of people who are like, Oh, we gotta talk about this. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| I doubt it. | ||
| I think it was, I think, if I would assume, my assumption would be it was more just these people who were into those sort of meme-y worlds. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Putting it out. | ||
| So 100,000 views. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which is shockingly more. | |
| The ceiling. | ||
| That's a thousand times. | ||
| The ceiling for a lot of these videos, like being very generous, is like 1500. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like these are not, no one watches these videos. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| And they're a decade old, basically. | ||
| They've been online for nine, eight years. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| Oh man. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, he knows. | ||
| I'm surprised he didn't lean into the zeitgeist then. | ||
| I would make more stories. | ||
| Yeah, more stories about get rid of this Q bullshit. | ||
| Go Pastafarian. | ||
| That's what almost makes me think that possibly these views all came like later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They came like two years after he posted this video. | ||
| There was a resurgence of interest. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| He's like, oh, look at this. | ||
| A fucking news guy covered the spaghetti monster. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| I like your voice for a news guy covered the spaghetti monster. | ||
| It's how meme guys talk. | ||
| It's my meme impression. | ||
| Alright. | ||
| So, let's see. | ||
| It's really hard for me to try and lead you down the roads where you have a chance. | ||
| How are you going to lead me down pastafarianism without giving up the game? | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, like, I mean, even for this next one. | ||
| Lionel thinks a president did something. | ||
| What do you think it is and who's the president? | ||
| Um, okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| God, there's... | ||
| Think Project Camelot. | ||
| Think Project Camelot. | ||
| Okay, I'm gonna go with Eisenhower met aliens. | ||
| Bingo! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Look at him. | ||
| Ike. | ||
| The 34th POTUS and Supreme Commander of the United Force in Europe. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Did they? | ||
| Consummate badass. | ||
| I dig how cool he was. | ||
| Notice the bit of his fruit salad and campaign ribbons. | ||
| I like the cut of his jib. | ||
| Understated. | ||
| He didn't have to impress you. | ||
| He wouldn't think of going all Petraeus on us. | ||
| Wait now, Dave. | ||
| Wait now. | ||
| You're the general. | ||
| But Ike was general of the army. | ||
| Ike, a most misunderstood man with a tremendous legacy. | ||
| But what sets Double D-E apart is that he thrice met in secret meetings with aliens. | ||
| Dig. | ||
| According to author Timothy Good, Ike and the FBI scheduled sit-downs by sending out telepathic messages. | ||
| They met at various installations, including Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. | ||
| In fact, Ike and Winston Churchill had discussed UFO sightings on many occasions. | ||
| Remember... | ||
| During World War II, Allied pilots reported seeing balls of fire, mysterious glowing spheres that followed the aircraft. | ||
| I tried not to. | ||
| Speaking of balls of fire, did I ever tell you when I was attacked by red bugs on a camping trip? | ||
| What are we doing now? | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Remind me later. | ||
| Where did this go? | ||
| Great story. | ||
| Now let's be serious. | ||
| Tell that story. | ||
| You know and I know that there's something out there. | ||
| There always has been. | ||
| And they've been here plenty of times. | ||
| UFOs, extraterrestrials, aliens, whatever you want to call them, are the, the most protected secrets that your government holds. | ||
| The idea of our being the lone planet supporting life is beyond absurd. | ||
| The age of our planet is four and a half billion years old. | ||
| That's 4,500 million years. | ||
| If another planet was just 4,501 million years old, it would be a million years more advanced than us. | ||
| Foccal, fossil, or foccal, as you would say. | ||
| That makes zero sense. | ||
| I could do a Bermuda dance. | ||
| You dumb, dumb bastard. | ||
| But fossil records show modern man first appearing just a couple of hundred thousand years ago. | ||
| There have been thousands and thousands of contacts throughout time all over the world by reputable, lucid, professional witnesses. | ||
| And non-lucid. | ||
| Unreputable. | ||
| The internet is replete with references. | ||
| The French Comita report in Turalia. | ||
| When you bring this up, invariably someone will say, but why don't they want to make contact with us? | ||
| Well, first, they have and do. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And second. | ||
| Why would anyone want to speak with us? | ||
| Have you ever gotten down on the ground, face-to-face with ants? | ||
| So, real quick, it's really weird to me, because this isn't a bit. | ||
| This is clearly, he thinks, for sure, that, first of all, aliens are coming down and talking to us a bunch. | ||
| And, like, it's not a joke. | ||
| No, he really does. | ||
| He does seem to believe that. | ||
| There is no joke here. | ||
| It doesn't seem like there's a joke. | ||
| Now, at the end here, he's talking about the, like, why haven't they contacted us yet? | ||
| Two answers to that. | ||
| One is, they have. | ||
| And then his second one is, why would they want to? | ||
| Those seem contradictory. | ||
| Those do seem contradictory. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It'd be like you talking to an ant. | ||
| But then the first answer was, they have and they are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is it? | ||
| It would be like me talking to an ant, which I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Talk to them. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Why don't you want to communicate with them? | ||
| Maybe because they're beneath us. | ||
| Maybe because we're superior to them. | ||
| Wait, they're beneath us? | ||
| Maybe because we just rather observe them and not disturb them. | ||
| You get the picture? | ||
| And look at me. | ||
| You know I'm right. | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, I will. | |
| I like her. | ||
| Lionel is an alien supremacist. | ||
| Okay, I will. | ||
| You dumb bastard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Lionel likes aliens more than humans. | ||
| I do like the rudimentary logic that he applies of like, well, if our Earth is four and a half billion years old and we're here, then that means that if there is a planet that's four... | ||
| 4.6 billion years old, then they have a 4.6 billion year old. | ||
| Mathematically, he's right that there is a million year... | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| But that has nothing to do with when life might have been seeded or the progress or any pressures that might have come that it would lead towards species branching. | ||
| You don't have a million year head start just because this thing is older. | ||
| Lionel's dumb. | ||
| Lionel is very dumb. | ||
| So this next clip, I think... | ||
| He is right. | ||
| We have talked to aliens, though. | ||
| And Double D Eisenhower. | ||
| He thought he was... | ||
| I swear to God, when he wrote that down, he was like, I might be the smartest, funniest man alive. | ||
| And he probably thought, like, this is ribald. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that would be a word he would use. | ||
| This next clip, I'm not even going to ask you what you think it's about. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I just need to tell you that I think the only reason I kept this clip or I took it at all is because Lionel uses the word sneaky snake. | ||
| Ha ha ha ha ha ha! | ||
|
unidentified
|
L assim Bam bam bam bam Aphidiophobia is a fear of snakes. | |
| Aphidiophobia is unique in that the fear component is in part rational, as some snakes are venomous. | ||
| Bullshit, man. | ||
| There's so many fears that are rational. | ||
| Fear of heights could be rational. | ||
| Nope, it's crazy. | ||
| Anybody who's afraid of heights is crazy. | ||
| What's next? | ||
| A fear of dancing? | ||
| I wish I knew the name of it. | ||
| There's got to be a name for it. | ||
| It's not Logolalia. | ||
| No, that's certainly true. | ||
| There are a lot of fears that are completely rational. | ||
| If you're allowing that snake fear is rational. | ||
| I don't understand how a fear of cars isn't rational. | ||
| Yeah, probably kill more people than snakes. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Biobehavioral experts believe that the fear of snakes expressed as hyper-developed and exaggerated and that it originated to accompany man's walking upright. | ||
| You see, it's believed that since he was now farther away from the ground where snakes hid, he was more prone and likely to stumble upon our more venomous serpentine brethren. | ||
| The hyper-developed fear of stakes was preferred through natural selection and evolution mechanics. | ||
| Now! | ||
| Wouldn't that be the same with all sorts of predator things that you're afraid of? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's completely irrational to be afraid of tigers. | ||
| Armchair Freudian folks love to see the hidden subliminal representations, but I let others play with that one. | ||
| Figuratively. | ||
| Now this Bronx Zoo Cobra story, the BZC Escape, is the dream story for the criminally unimaginative and culturally shunted world of the dreaded mainstream media. | ||
| Not them! | ||
| The MSM! | ||
| Alex will complain that they're all... | ||
| The main snake media, Dan! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Alex will complain that they're all Mockingbird CIA trying to cover his DWI. | ||
| Lionel will tell you that no, they all want to talk about a snake escaping from the zoo. | ||
| Intellectual junk food quickly digested with a high glycemic distraction level. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Cobra story was a true control for the mainstream media. | |
| Not here, mind you, but there. | ||
| Now first, wake up the dude in the video library and have him dig up and dust off every conceivable pup. | ||
| He's a wrestling guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I got it. | |
| What about an Ouroboros of bullshit like you? | ||
| Sneaky. | ||
| Mentally deranged and criminally vapid weathercasters screaming nonsensical nothings only to capture that YouTube moment. | ||
| Anything. | ||
| And gee, I'm proud to say, you're off the hook on that one, my friend. | ||
| Now, punsters and piranhasiacs alike using every conceivable play on serpentine imagery. | ||
| History. | ||
| The missing cobra. | ||
| Islamophobia meets ophidiophobia. | ||
| It was an Egyptian cobra. | ||
| Ah, Egypt home of the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| Donald Trump weighs in and demands to see the cobra's birth certificate. | ||
| It's a Muslim snake as alleged by the comb-over-quaffed bombast whose mane is dyed the color of News accounts report that the escapee snake broke out of the Bronx Zoo, thus conjuring up the image of this menacing serpent. | ||
| Messenger of death marching down Broadway while frightened New Yorkers run for their lives. | ||
| It wasn't an escape. | ||
| They found it in the reptile house outside of her cage, which would have been my first place to look. | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| Look, if Charles Manson fails to show up for a chance, they don't announce the escape from the court or estate prison. | ||
| Even Bindi Irwin, the late croc hunter's 12-year-old daughter, said, you know, he's probably right by the cage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And meanwhile, in Libya... | |
| Anyway, comment as you see fit. | ||
| So, here's what's great about this. | ||
| First of all, I mean, the trite issue of a snake escape that even within the report, you're like, it wasn't a big deal. | ||
| I don't know why we're doing this. | ||
| I don't know at all, but he does reference sneaky snakes. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| That's worth it. | ||
| Most important thing, though, is that Lionel is on a New York... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He hates Trump. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| He hates Trump back in like 2011 because Trump is a dick. | ||
| That's because he hadn't unsealed the indictments yet, Dan. | ||
| There were thousands of secret indictments. | ||
| Lionel very regularly will make jabs at Trump for the birth certificate stuff. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| For him being a birther guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And one of the things that I wanted to actually do was I wanted to trace Lionel's path towards supporting Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Because I think it follows a video. | ||
| Very similar path as the people we've seen like Alex and Nick Fuentes. | ||
| But actually his path is a little bit different. | ||
| He's super against Trump as the campaign begins. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then he gets to a point where he's like, alright, you had your fun. | ||
| Cut it out. | ||
| You either need to stop what you're doing or just get out. | ||
| He tells him to drop out in September 2015. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like he's just not into this anything at all. | ||
| Then, once Trump becomes really likely to be the candidate on the GOP side, he endorses him. | ||
| And the reason is just anti-Hillary. | ||
| When he endorses Trump, it's a dual endorsement of Trump and Sanders. | ||
| Because it is a specifically anti-Hillary thing. | ||
| Anybody but Hillary. | ||
| He is not super interesting to me in terms of the right-wing path towards Trump thing. | ||
| Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones seem to follow a very similar trajectory of real negative, horrible things about Trump. | ||
| Trump shouldn't be in their orbit, or they shouldn't care about him all that much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then right around very similar times, they end up supporting him. | ||
| With Lionel, he's a New York media guy, so obviously he's been aware of Trump for a really long time. | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| And fucking doesn't like him, thinks he's a piece of shit. | ||
| Yeah, like all of New York. | ||
| Yeah, and then when he starts running for office, he's like, all right, we're tired of this act, whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And then as soon as he realizes the devastating damage potential Trump has of destroying the GOP... | ||
| These rhinos or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, get them! | ||
| Yeah, he's into that in the same way that he's into what Bernie Sanders could do to the Democratic Party. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| He wants a certain amount of disruption. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so he supports both of them. | ||
| The system doesn't work, so he's going for either candidate that is not the system. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| But also primarily, I listened to a bunch of the clips. | ||
| Primarily, it is surrounding like... | ||
| Like, abject hatred of Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| So, his path is not that interesting. | ||
| Although, it is interesting to hear this next report that he has. | ||
| Lionel talks about what sort of president he would vote for. | ||
| Oh, God, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, this is in the context of the 2012 election. | |
| It's interesting to hear this with the awareness that later he would end up supporting Trump. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| Don't ask me whom I would endorse or vote for in the 2012 presidential elections because I'm neither endorsing nor voting for either Mittens or Hopi. | ||
| But if I had to craft the ideal hypothetical candidate that I might even consider as maybe earning my vote, they must have one characteristic. | ||
| They must be crazy. | ||
| Let me explain. | ||
| You see, what I would insist upon in a presidential candidate would necessarily mean they'd never have a chance to win. | ||
| The platforms that I would insist upon are so out of sync with the candidates, the left and right paradigm offers, so antithetical to the status quo, so polar and antipodal to most of the brain-dead and brainwashed electorate, that the only candidate who'd even come close to passing my electoral muster would be the candidate everyone would call crazy. | ||
| Just say you like Ron Paul. | ||
| I was going to say. | ||
| Just fucking say Ron Paul. | ||
| Let's just get over this, dum-dum. | ||
| You know who you like. | ||
| The snowball's chance in hell candidate. | ||
| People who want to revolutionize and undo the expected status quo and the usual. | ||
| Those who would retool, revamp, and reconstitute the businesses' usual ways of a torpid, sluggish, and brain-dead Washington. | ||
| That's my guy or gal. | ||
| And for anyone to even think they had a chance at that, that would, by definition, make them crazy. | ||
| I would never vote for a candidate for the left or right side of the identical coin. | ||
| The greatest and grandest of deceptions ever pulled in this country next to the neck tattoo is the myth of true and actual political duality, the fiction that Democratic and Republican policies are substantially and significantly dissimilar. | ||
| The delusion that will and shall always keep this great and grand country from extricating itself from the death grip of the globalist, internationalist... | ||
| Globalists! | ||
| ...stripping bankster cartels, and only someone crazy would dare to go after them. | ||
| The Democrats again have Barack Obama as his candidate, and the GOP as Mitt Romney as theirs. | ||
| The debates are a waste. | ||
| Or as someone said, they're like watching McDonald's debate Burger King over whose fries are out. | ||
| And whom would I have to counter as? | ||
| I call them the identical duality of left and right. | ||
| crazy. | ||
|
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|
Give me a candidate who would demand that the Fed be at least audited, that drug laws would be repealed, that no further wars or kinetic military actions, NATO offensive, nothing would be done without an explosive Oh, that sounds like Ron Paul. | |
| Just to name a few. | ||
| In other words, I want a candidate who's crazy and doesn't have a chance of winning. | ||
| Someone who would be best described as that great line from SCTV. | ||
| Sure, he's crazy. | ||
| But what if he's right? | ||
| Comment as you see fit. | ||
| You're quoting a comedy show? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Also, what if he's not right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| Yeah, that's real fucked up to hear years prior to him supporting Trump and becoming a QAnon guy. | ||
| Like, yeah, you know what? | ||
| I want somebody who's crazy. | ||
| And what it really does... | ||
| You know what else? | ||
| Only three people passed the law to create the Federal Reserve. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Comment as you see. | ||
| That's what a crazy person's brother would say. | ||
| What's really fascinating to me about this is, like, that essay that Webster Tarpley wrote... | ||
| about when Trump started to become ascendant within the GOP. | ||
| That essay that he wrote about how the failures of the Ron Paul libertarianism and the implied... | ||
| Cruelty of that worldview that went unexamined was an opening into the vestibule that is fascism and authoritarianism. | ||
| I don't have any respect for Webster Tarpley's appearances on the Obama Deception or on Alex's show, but that essay was incredibly prescient. | ||
| It really was. | ||
| About the ways in which this fanatical support for Ron Paul And the deterioration of it because Ron Paul had no fucking chance at all the whole time. | ||
| And then once Ron Paul stopped running, Rand Paul comes in. | ||
| He's a more disappointing option. | ||
| He's absolutely not going to do it. | ||
| It leaves this vacuum where people are primed to go in that direction. | ||
| And when I hear Lionel talking about what I want is a crazy person. | ||
| Obviously, he's talking about Ron Paul in 2012. | ||
| He's talking about the disappointment that Ron Paul didn't make it through the primaries. | ||
| That's the subtext of what he's getting at. | ||
| And when you hear that, and you know how things went, it's really easy to see on a certain level, emotionally, that that is the path that Lionel walked on. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It's disappointing. | ||
| It is very much like... | ||
| Now, it may manifest publicly a lot of times as like everything is... | ||
| Whiny bullshit? | ||
| And defending anything but Hillary. | ||
| The status quo and yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It is hard to... | ||
| It's hard to read that Webster Tarpley essay and not be like, oh, I get it. | ||
| It takes one to know one. | ||
| You know, that kind of thing. | ||
| Like the only voice that was really... | ||
| Putting that together in that world at the time was, unfortunately, a bunch of dum-dums like Webster Charlie. | ||
| Well, you know your own community better than external ones, and sometimes you can have a more critical eye on it. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure, sure. | ||
| It's not like Ron Paul's policy set was all bad. | ||
| There are a lot of reasons why you might support him that aren't involved in the Rank cruelty and awful things that he believed in. | ||
| Things like getting out of foreign entanglements and wars is a positive thing. | ||
| That is something that you could gravitate towards. | ||
| In the same way that Tulsi Gabbard talks about wanting to not be in wars. | ||
| And it makes sense to gravitate towards her for that. | ||
| Same way with Ron Paul and his insistence on drug legalization. | ||
| Those are things that you can really get on board with. | ||
| The flip side of the coin with people like Ron Paul is all the stripping away protections for vulnerable communities in the United States, getting rid of all foreign aid, essentially committing a genocide of people throughout the world who rely on our efforts, our humanitarian efforts. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| And I specifically remember around this time because I was just new. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| The point I was trying to make is that... | ||
| I'm not saying this is true of Webster Tarpley, but it is possible that someone of his order could be into the good stuff, recognize as it goes along, oh no, this is metastasizing. | ||
| The negative things are the things that are the focus now, and they can call it out. | ||
| So that might be why what you were saying is the case. | ||
| Yeah, no, I remember this time period. | ||
| I had just been maybe a year or two into stand-up at the time, and... | ||
| There were plenty of comedians, I remember, talking about how much they supported Ron Paul. | ||
| And in retrospect, you look back and you're like, you had no idea about the other shit. | ||
| You only knew about the... | ||
| Because I've known these people for 10 years now, and it's like, they would never support destroying the fucking protections for disenfranchising. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But so much of the bullshit was like... | ||
| Ron Paul cut through it, and that was very appetizing, and just like, yes, somebody's finally saying this obvious thing. | ||
| And it galvanized a lot of the populist feeling of suspicion about, what are these financial institutions doing? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Which is also another... | ||
| Reasonable thing to have concerns about. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| With Ron Paul, it almost always gets funneled into a hard right, conspiratorial version of it. | ||
| Yeah, it's the inverse of the coalition that supported Obama in 2008. | ||
| We're here because we don't trust any of these people. | ||
| We've been fucked over for 10 years. | ||
| You have run on a campaign of we need to take care of all of this shit, and then instead of funneling us into the hard right, he funneled us into the center, and that's just not going to last. | ||
| That's where we fucked up. | ||
| If Obama had... | ||
| Man, it's hard not to look at 2008 to 2010 and think those were the two years where we could have done it and averted all of this disaster. | ||
| It's hard not to look at that. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Well, save that for a book. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| That's an angry scream. | ||
| Someone can write that book. | ||
| That's the Unabomber's book. | ||
| So I think that Lionel being like, I'll only vote for a crazy person, is a representation of the kind of mentality that went wrong in the 2016 election. | ||
| Because what he's talking about is... | ||
| This candidate that fulfills these requirements that I want, that Ron Paul fills. | ||
| Because what he's saying isn't necessarily all destructive, horrible things. | ||
| You know, like auditing the Fed. | ||
| Obviously, there are audits that are done. | ||
| You just don't. | ||
| You pretend there aren't. | ||
| Demanding that be done? | ||
| Alright, I'm not really mad about that. | ||
| Legalizing drugs. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| It's too obvious. | ||
| Those sorts of things that would be deemed crazy by people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what he wants in a candidate. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But where it gets murky is when a real crazy person comes around and you're like, oh, everyone's calling him crazy. | ||
| That must mean that he's a sane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's where the thinking gets twisted. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So we have one last Lionel report. | ||
| And I'll just set this up. | ||
| I'm not going to ask you. | ||
| I'm not going to quiz you. | ||
| I'm just going to go with bees. | ||
| No, I wish. | ||
| Because he and I might find common ground. | ||
| I think we could. | ||
| Suspicion of beads. | ||
| I think we could all find common ground. | ||
| We all saw My Girl. | ||
| They're up to something. | ||
| It'll kill you. | ||
| So this last one is a real misogynist opus. | ||
| It's real bad. | ||
| You always close strong. | ||
| It's real bad. | ||
| He takes pot shots at Gloria Allred. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Hard. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Like, she does nothing. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| It's mostly about this woman who was working at a bank. | ||
| I can't remember the bank, but she was fired, and then she claimed that she was fired because she was too attractive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| It's like a media interest story, but what's behind it isn't really like a potential sexual harassment situation. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Lionel minimizes that, and I don't want to get too bogged down into it, because the way this ends is gorgeous. | ||
| This is Lionel maybe getting his comeuppance a little bit for really trying to be a misogynist asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low, lay low. | |
| A work is a pro-wrestling term that denotes putting something over on the audience who believes it's all true. | ||
| It's an illusion. | ||
| Now the biggest work is that of this genius, Debra Lee Lorenzana, whose name has more alternate spellings than Gaddafi. | ||
| Now, here's the story. | ||
| Debra Lee worked for Citibank and is now suing them because she says they fired her because she was so darn sexy. | ||
| Can you believe this? | ||
| I swear to God. | ||
| Now here's the storyline. | ||
| Debra Lee alleges that... | ||
| I can't help it if I'm a seductress. | ||
| A latter-day siren distracting men. | ||
| Men who lear at me. | ||
| A living testament to the beauteous ex-chromosome. | ||
| Her allegation was actually that her boss said that she was too attractive and too distracting, and that's why she was fired. | ||
| Yeah, that actually sounds... | ||
| Not her saying, I'm too hot to work. | ||
| No, that sounds... | ||
| It's kind of putting the onus on the wrong party here. | ||
| It does seem like... | ||
| Beauty incarnate, a ravishing voluptuous curvilinear goddess of sylph, a libidness and lascivious lass dripping with the concupiscent sensuality that renders men speechless and I'm going to say libidinous is used wrong here. | ||
| Thank you, please. | ||
| It's a gift. | ||
| But wait, there's more. | ||
| Enter legal gadfly, Gloria Allred, whose name should be Gloria Allright for the times it causes people to say, all right, Gloria, all right. | ||
| Alright, Lionel. | ||
| better than Gloria. | ||
| Seem here in a defense lawyer's erotic dream in the midst of auto asphyxiation. | ||
| Now, nobody knows That doesn't sound true. | ||
| That doesn't sound true. | ||
| Scott Peterson murdered his wife. | ||
| Those are the only reasons to get a lawyer? | ||
| Were you injured? | ||
| Scott Peterson murdered his wife. | ||
| Amber was his mistress. | ||
| She was seeing. | ||
| She needs representation so bad. | ||
| The way that you're going to be characterized in the media, you do need somebody. | ||
| So Glory is now representing one of Tiger Woods' shemales that he allegedly... | ||
| Whoa! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| For what? | ||
| Was she hurt? | ||
| Injured? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Who knows? | ||
| Again, it's the same situation. | ||
| You're somebody who's being brought into a story that you don't have the ability to handle. | ||
| Glory Allred is there to be a guide or to help you with the... | ||
| And by the way, that term, the S there... | ||
| Like, that is out of character for Lionel. | ||
| He is generally super... | ||
| I'm really kind of confused by this. | ||
| And it's not that this person was trans or anything like that. | ||
| It's a cis woman. | ||
| I don't know what that is. | ||
| That is just an insult being applied inaccurately and inappropriately. | ||
| I thought that was shocking from Lionel. | ||
| That's Gloria! | ||
| I'd love to see an ad for her. | ||
| Hello, I'm Gloria Allred. | ||
| Have you been injured? | ||
| No? | ||
| Well, has your modeling career fallen flat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| I'll represent you. | ||
| For what? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But if you want to jumpstart that career, call me at 1-800-555. | ||
| I'm a publicity star of nobody whose 15 minutes were over an hour ago. | ||
| Or what if you're the family of Nicole Browns? | ||
| Yeah, I know, right? | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| But now it goes technically into the discrimination suit. | ||
| Oh, come on, please. | ||
| You think this Latter-day Mr. Drysdale wants the bank gig back? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Keep your job, honey. | ||
| I love the nightlife. | ||
| I love the boogie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now... | |
| Maybe I'm acting a bit too harsh. | ||
| Maybe Sarah Lee or whatever her name is. | ||
| It's just a regular... | ||
| Sarah Lee? | ||
| A single mom who just wants the normal life, the ordinary life. | ||
| Maybe we're jumping the gun. | ||
| Let's hear from this victim of corporate terrorism in her own words. | ||
| Crickets. | ||
| How we doing? | ||
| Still going? | ||
| Are you guys going to play the clip? | ||
| Oh, there she is. | ||
| No sound. | ||
| It was that troubling. | ||
| Far too risque for the show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was censored. | |
| Well, let me tell you what she would have said, but I can't. | ||
| If you'd like to find out what she said, call me after the show. | ||
| But in any event, she stands to seek redress in a court in the tribunal. | ||
| As she is entitled to do. | ||
| As every citizen is, Jim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| The best laid plans of mice and men. | ||
| Oh, what a bit this was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She is good looking. | |
| Anyway, thank you a lot. | ||
| You ever had those days, Jim Ward, yet? | ||
| You just said, this is the award show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is the one that's going to put me over the top! | |
| You should know, G. That does it for the fixed news at 6.30. | ||
| That's what we call a big finish. | ||
| See you back here tonight at 10. Oh, man. | ||
| That's a bit deflating. | ||
| That's a gut punch. | ||
| That is a gut punch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He had built up all this, like, misogynist bullshit. | |
| Like, oh, fuck this dumb bitch. | ||
| She's all, like, trying to get this bank job back. | ||
| She doesn't want it. | ||
| And then the clip doesn't play. | ||
| And then when he has to actually just talk, he doesn't know what she says in that clip. | ||
| He can't carry it on his own. | ||
| And he has to be like... | ||
| She deserves legal redress like every other citizen. | ||
| Which kind of invalidates your entire premise and the entire misogynist bullshit that you're doing. | ||
| God damn it, I love it when somebody has the confidence of Icarus. | ||
| No, this is Casey at the Bat, man. | ||
| This is brutal. | ||
| Going for it. | ||
| This will be insurmountable. | ||
| I will stand atop Mount Everest and I will scream from the heavens, it's okay to hate women! | ||
| Again, this is the thing where a little bit of chops would help. | ||
| Because I've been in a number of situations where things have gone very poorly. | ||
| In a live comedy setting. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, you kind of got to just be able to roll with it. | ||
| And I see that, and I see a guy who cannot roll with it. | ||
| That is not an ability to go. | ||
| The clip doesn't play. | ||
| Why are you letting, I don't know, ten seconds of dead air happen, and then, well, she should go to court. | ||
| Everyone can go to court. | ||
| I mean, yeah, Gloria Allred does have a point. | ||
| Within two seconds of there being dead air, you should be Figuring out what's up. | ||
| You're on live TV, baby. | ||
| You have the opportunity to be in this. | ||
| This is the whole thing. | ||
| This is my big argument. | ||
| Lionel had a great privilege. | ||
| He had a great opportunity afforded to him. | ||
| And that was he had a column on a TV show. | ||
| He had three minutes where he could do clearly whatever he wants to do. | ||
| He's like David Brooks. | ||
| If there was any goddamn editor there, they'd be like, this banning dancing bit does not make sense. | ||
| Like David Brooks. | ||
| Fine, yes. | ||
| If David Brooks was trying to be funny and it was audio, we would cover it more. | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| God, if Connor Friedersdorf has a podcast, I'm going to... | ||
| And it was short and trying to be funny. | ||
| Oh, destroy him. | ||
| He has this opportunity in front of him and he... | ||
| Just fails. | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, there's points that he's trying to make. | ||
| They're confusing. | ||
| There's a murky line of, like, is this supposed to be a joke, or are you sincerely making this argument? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| There's unhinged nonsense, and then most of it's just a waste of time. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I kind of love it, because it's exactly the thing you would expect for, like, the previous career of a QAnon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's the kind of trivial, trite, marginally reactionary bullshit, but they let him do it for a while. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| It's just, it is one of those examples of, first, a white dude can fail up so easily, and just second, when the stakes are this low, when the stakes are, I don't like backpacks in the train. | ||
| It's like, What are we gonna... | ||
| Why stop? | ||
| Why stop? | ||
| The guy just doesn't like backpacks. | ||
| We'll give him his three minutes. | ||
| Eventually, he'll go out to pasture and drink bleach. | ||
| We'll call it a day. | ||
| We don't know if he drinks bleach. | ||
| It's just part of the thing that's associated with QAnon. | ||
| I've not heard Lionel actually say he drinks bleach. | ||
| I'm not saying that he drinks bleach. | ||
| I'm saying that as a synecdoche for the entirety of QAnon. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'm tossing in synecdoche now is what I'm doing. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I'll do it. | ||
| How about anastrophe? | ||
| You want some of that shit up in here? | ||
| Now you're just trying to flex. | ||
| Literary terms all day! | ||
| So we reach the end and Lionel has... | ||
| Knocked it out of the park as always. | ||
| I was going to say worn out is welcome. | ||
| Okay, there was that. | ||
| That's one way of putting it. | ||
| I think a lot of people have... | ||
| I get this a lot from listeners. | ||
| They want more Lionel. | ||
| And they question, why has there not been a third Lionel installment, which now there is? | ||
| And one of the reasons is, I can't stress this enough, it's hard to get decent content out of him. | ||
| Even though he has a ton of videos, there are these little three-minute bursts, and you've got to go through tons of them to find anything interesting. | ||
| Here's what I think. | ||
| I think people want the correct amount of Lionel. | ||
| And that needs to be carefully curated. | ||
| Nobody wants too much. | ||
| Too much Lionel is a line that has a very steep drop to it. | ||
| It's much like nitric oxide in Alex's beet pills. | ||
| Too much dangerous. | ||
| CPAs, man. | ||
| CPAs. | ||
| Yeah, and so, I mean, like, it's not something that there is an unlimited, it's not an unlimited resource. | ||
| You have to use it sparingly. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But I think these sorts of circumstances are exactly the times when you need a goddamn little burst of vinyl. | ||
| So, you know, we come to the end, and I guess... | ||
| I think we learned a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think we... | ||
| I think we've grown as people. | ||
| Lionel wants to murder people at Starbucks. | ||
| Very much so. | ||
| You should chill out the fuck about blackface. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Okay, so no nuance? | ||
| And if you report something that ends up stopping a bombing, you will be an asshole if you call yourself a hero. | ||
| You think you're a hero? | ||
| You think you're great? | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| Aliens talk to Ike. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Well, yeah, but that's just common knowledge. | ||
| And your dick, but also, hey, good for you if you like office pools. | ||
| I'm really confused about that one still. | ||
| I'm not sure what his point on snakes was. | ||
| Sneaky. | ||
| That was the point. | ||
|
unidentified
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Fair. | |
| Fair enough. | ||
| Actually, I accept that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, everyone out there, hope you're doing alright in the circumstances that you're in. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Let's all do as best we can to help each other and listen to the advice of... | ||
| The people who are in much better positions to provide that advice for you. | ||
| Yeah, and just so everybody knows, we're very, very grateful to you for listening to the show. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And those of you who donate, we're incredibly grateful. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| We wouldn't be able to survive without that. | ||
| I mean, especially now. | ||
| Like, all of this stuff is entirely because people care and it feels amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It feels amazing. | ||
| To the point where I want you to shut up about it. | ||
| I know! | ||
| It's uncomfortable. | ||
| It's not good for us. | ||
| I appreciate it as well. | ||
| And I was actually reminiscing about this. | ||
| Not reminiscing. | ||
| I was cogitating on it as a cogiter. | ||
| You dancing motherfucker! | ||
| I see you! | ||
| I was thinking about this maybe the other night. | ||
| About how I left my job working at a coffee distribution. | ||
| It was a huge gamble and a stupid risk that I wouldn't advise anybody to do in any circumstance. | ||
| But we did that, and it ended up leading to where we are now. | ||
| And it's overwhelming to think about, well, if I still worked at that coffee distribution place, there's a real decent chance I would be out of a job. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's surreal. | ||
| It's surreal to be in that sort of a position. | ||
| Yeah, it is amazing that we get to do what we do, especially now. | ||
| And I understand how difficult it is for everyone. | ||
| Let's stick together. | ||
| I hope to be able to, as best we can, pay back a little bit through whatever avenues we can. | ||
| And on the most basic Lionel-esque trivial level, do an episode about Lionel for you all to enjoy. | ||
| And we'll be back. | ||
| We may be back on Friday. | ||
| We might be back on Monday. | ||
| It's not entirely sure as we are recording this. | ||
| But take care of yourselves and each other. | ||
| And we have a website. | ||
| Worst, worst, worst. | ||
| We love you so much. | ||
| Thank you very much for visiting knowledgefight.com. | ||
| We're also on Twitter. | ||
| We are on Twitter. | ||
| It's at, we love you so much. | ||
| Thank you very much for following at knowledge underscore fight and I go to bed Jordan. | ||
| We're also on Facebook. | ||
| We are on Facebook. | ||
| We're on iTunes. | ||
| You can download the show. | ||
| We love you very much and thank you so much for downloading knowledge fight and, you know, leave a review. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| We're back, but until then, I'm Neo. | ||
| I'm Leo. | ||
| I'm DZX Clark. | ||
| I'm the guy sitting at a table that Lionel wants at Starbucks. | ||
| Andy in Kansas, you're on the air. | ||
| Thanks for holding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Alex. | |
| I'm a first-time caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a huge fan. | |
| I love your work. |
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