New York Times, headline: "Beijing Condemns Pornography as Subversive."
The New China News Agency said that China's legislature was considering the establishment of the death penalty for people who use pornographic materials...
Now that's Jesse Helms' kind of government.
"L.A. Law," two women lawyers saying goodnight kiss“on the lips“longer than a friendly peck“it's a kiss kiss. The Rev. Donald Wildmon went wild and did his usual shtick; boycotts and other stuff. Then he said something that must be considered irrational. Or perhaps his years have exasperated his turbulence:
"We think a lot of people may not have seen the episode. It's important to call something like this to the advertiser's attention."
He is saying that it is offensive to people who were not offended! Because he says so!
The ancient Hebrew prophets knew about freedom of speech. They caviled, complained, crabbed, chided, chastised, carped, castigated and criticized high officials, rabbis, chief rabbis, kings, and the people generally. And they did it with impunity and without the protection of a First Amendment.
They didn't need that protection even though they were considered, by the establishment of the day, politically incorrect.
From the New York Times Book Review, Terry Teachout reviewing From Lenin to Lennon, A Memoir of Russia in the Sixties:
The last paragraph should be memorized by every student through the PhD process. And by every professor and anyone who is a proponent of political correctness:
To read From Lenin to Lennon is to learn an important (and easily overlooked) lesson about life under a totalitarian regime; its most typical horrors are not the methods by which open rebellion is put down, but the daytoday humiliations to which the average citizen is subjected in a society ruled by ideology run rampant. It is a lesson that the selfrighteous prigs of the '90s, WHO MEASURE ALL THINGS AGAINST THE BLUNT YARDSTICKS OF THEIR PREFERRED POLITICAL ORTHODOXIES [correctness!] WOULD DO WELL TO TAKE TO HEART.
[Emphasis mine]
"The teenager gets an image, the tobacco company gets an addict."
Too many writers, especially those with pretensions of intellectuality, use big words and complex phrases to demonstrate that they are W R I T E R S ! They suffer from a serious infectious disease“sesquipedaliitis polysyllabicosis.
Bill Watterson, the artist/satirist who draws "Calvin and Hobbes" makes the point in a recent strip:
CALVIN: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity. With a little practice writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?
HOBBES (reading): The dynamics of interbeing and monological imperatives in "Dick and Jane": A study in psychic transrelational modes.
CALVIN: Academia, here I come!
Another facet of the disease comes from political correctness. Much of the approved terminology is based on the reluctance to use simple, accurate terminology for fear of offending someone or some group. Because the malady has infected the academic community, there is the added motivation to resort to euphemy, to substitute long words and pseudoscholarly vocabulary, in place of accuracy and reality. As...
Driven to a primitive, Neanderthal, concupiscent frenzy engendered by a veritable torrent of priapic stimuli that transcended scopophilia, they volitated onto the cubile proxima and inundated themselves in an alethial Niagara of mad, wanton, frantic, passionate, ecstatic gender.
Four little words would have sufficed: "Got hot, got laid."
So much for the sex vs. gender controversy.
Vietnam. Recognition. American companies poised to move in. Estimated trade worth $8 billion a year. Pepsi hit the spot before the ink was dry in Clinton's statement.
POWMIAs. Common sense tells us that no Americans are still alive. For families still a faint lingering hope.
For twenty years the Vietnamese government played the POWMIA game. Now you see it, now you don't.
Main argument of the letbygonesbebygones crowd is that opening Vietnam to trade will encourage them to cooperate in the search for POWMIAs. Regardless of which side you're on, you should realize that it's a damned shame that the bones of dead Americans have become a national economic asset for Vietnam“and the United States as well.
The Ithaca Journal asked: "Do you think the trial of Lorena Bobbitt received too much coverage by the media?" My answer:
Not the word of the decade, not the word of the century“the media have made "Bobbitt" the word of the millennium. The unauthorized penectomy performed by Lorena Bobbitt in gross violation of the penile code will be immortalized as a verb: to Bobbitt or to Bobbittize.