Dave In Champaign wrote:
Curious Hair wrote:
No, he wants the game to be as brutal as it's ever been, which means he's rooting for brain damage for his entertainment, but let's not get lost in semantics here: anyone wishing for Dan's career to be derailed by this isn't actually offended by it and just wishes him an inordinate amount of ill.
There's nothing inordinate about it. Dan is a bad person who publicly espouses socially toxic views.
He does publicly espouse socially toxic views, but -- and this is ironic given, as Telander pointed out, the moral arbitration the show doles out on a regular basis -- I'm not ready to declare him a Bad Person for this. I think he's fundamentally a decent person who wants the best for his loved ones and to leave the world in a better place than he found it, as most people do, but he kinda gets tripped up on the second part and does a really shitty job of it because being a middle-class white guy with college funds and a mortgage to worry about overshadows whatever good intentions he may have lying around. He basically bit off more than he could chew the second he uttered the words "rape culture."
He has said a lot of stuff that really pissed me off on what I'd like to think are higher levels than your average "I hate dat Bernstine guy" schmo can muster, things where I have felt like this guy is a pretty shitty human. Allow me to list!
1) Congratulating his boss on the air for not renewing the contract of a co-worker with mental health and family issues
2) Wanting to breed a black athlete with his child
3) Recalling antisemitic stereotypes by postulating that Jewish businessmen and politicians will make clandestine deals in their synagogue
4) Fetishizing black athletes' bodies
5) Assorted instances of neoliberal shittiness
But now that people from well outside the Chicago Sports Fan Message Board are calling him out and shit is getting real, I don't want to see the guy ruined forever. I just want him to go back to not being so shitty all the time! So I do think that whatever your feelings are on Dan, "I hope he loses his job and his home and has to live under a bridge" is wildly disproportionate to his transgressions and his full body of work as an entertainer. I guess I never
really resigned from the ALS, huh.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
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