#decency

[krumpkin]

This is great to see 😊

[philosophicalconservatism]

To the people complaining about losing their jobs because of the videos they uploaded after Kirk’s death.

You were not fired from your job over politics, you were fired for not being a decent human being. The fact that there is a thing called human decency which transcends politics is the condition for living together in a civilized society.

[eugenedebs1920]

This is our country! We, the Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, justice, freedom, decency, basic human rights, this is our country.

The loudest, dumbest voices in the room have dominated the narrative. They believe we are weak, that we are submissive, that we will roll over to tyranny.

That is not the case.

Good on San Diego residents for fighting these gestapo traitors! We must all fight back when we see wrong, when we see lawlessness, when we see violations of our Constitution and others rights.

What this administration is doing is wrong. So many don’t see that due to their propaganda intake. It will take the true Americans to stand up to this for it to be stopped.

There are more decent Americans than cruel ones. There are more good people than evil people. There is more kindness than hatred.

I’m not saying we don’t fight fire with fire, I’m saying. DON’T GIVE UP.

We got em on the ropes, keep swinging!!

Fk maga! Fk Trump! And Fk fascism! This is America god damnit!! Let’s take it back!!!

🇺🇸

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

How’s this for a political scouting report? White man in his early 60s from deep-red South Carolina. Progressive views on civil rights and a deeply held Catholic faith. Happily married to one woman for more than 30 years. Three kids. Used to teach Sunday school. Has a loyal dog that sits at his feet when he’s working in his office. Can carry a tune. Speaks from the heart about loss and grief, having lost a parent and two siblings when he was a child. Adept at cracking jokes.

I’m not suggesting that Stephen Colbert run for president. I’m merely pointing out that he embodies the phrase “paragon of decency.”

Decency: it used to be a virtue in the public square. The words that finally squelched Senator Joe McCarthy’s Commie-hunting reign of terror came from a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, who, unable to bear another moment of the senator’s evidence-free bullying, said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?” Thereafter, McCarthy became a pariah, censured in the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22 and getting the silent treatment even from his fellow Republicans.

Now it is Colbert, the paragon of decency, who is getting kicked to the curb. Nominally, it’s because his parent network, CBS, decided that his show, the top-rated in late-night TV, was too expensive to sustain. Realistically, it’s because the network’s parent company, Paramount, sacrificed Colbert to appease Donald Trump when it was seeking federal approval for its merger with Larry Ellison’s Skydance. Spiritually, it’s because we live in a time of inverted norms, where the president can casually post something like “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” yet Stephen Colbert is the one castigated for being divisive.

Of late, there have been signs that inverted-norm fatigue may finally be taking hold. No one really bought the jive of the New York Post when it tried to gin up a new wave of outrage over Jimmy Kimmel, going to elaborate rhetorical lengths to reverse-engineer a joke he’d made about Melania Trump two days before the thwarted assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—“Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow”—into a veiled threat on the president.

The First Lady and the president pretended to be gravely offended, and their lackey at the F.C.C., Brendan Carr, duly ordered an early review of the broadcast licenses held by Disney, the parent company of Kimmel’s network, ABC. But unlike the F.C.C.’s last go-round with Kimmel, when their intimidation succeeded in getting the network to suspend the comedian over a crack he’d made about Charlie Kirk’s killer, Disney did not buckle. Notwithstanding his beer-bloated early years as a co-host of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” the latter-day Kimmel is also a conspicuously decent family man, too menschy to be sold as a dangerous inflammateur.

The F.C.C. has no regulatory oversight of social media, but if it did, Truth Social, owned by Carr’s boss, would be a far more deserving target of high dudgeon and taste-policing. The same December week that Kimmel fought back tears while discussing the recent death of his best friend and bandleader, Cleto Escobedo, the president attributed Rob Reiner’s tragic death to “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction” with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Three months later, Trump observed the passing of Robert Mueller by posting, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Still, any potential turning of the tide comes too late for Colbert. He is losing his show, as Kimmel nearly lost his, precisely because he poses a threat to indecency. It’s akin to how the authors of the Project 2025 playbook proposed to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and succeeded) in part because of its involvement in “Sesame Street,” which they described as “biased to the Left.” I wrote a book about “Sesame Street.” I can tell you that, ethos-wise, it hasn’t changed much since it premiered in 1969 with the enthusiastic support of the Nixon administration. What’s changed is that the decency it represents is an affront to the indecent people now in power.

Last month I attended a taping of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Since the start of this year, the episodes have had an elegiac feel, ever more so as the final broadcast approaches. The day I was there, Maggie Rogers, in a nod to Bette Midler’s serenade of Johnny Carson in his penultimate “Tonight Show” episode, sang a lovely rendition of “One More for My Baby (And One for the Road).”

It was a sweet moment, if of an entirely different energy than the 1992 broadcast. Midler’s choice of a Sinatra-associated saloon song came freighted with Carson’s own dark history: the cigarettes, the bad moods, the divorces, and the D.U.I.’s, all of which were as much a part of his persona as his wit and elegance. (Indeed, Dana Carvey, whose short-lived 1996 sketch show gave Colbert his first screen time, does an inspired bit in which he freestyles impersonations of Carson getting pulled over by a state trooper: “Sorry, officer, I didn’t know I was swerving. I had two Slippery Monkeys at the Hook ’n’ Crook.”)

Whereas Carson was consumed by demons and David Letterman by self-loathing, Colbert is an anomalously wholesome and ministerial figure for late night—more Fred Rogers than Don Draper. When I interviewed him for a magazine feature four years ago, Colbert told me, with the caveat that he knew it sounded pretentious, that his program was a “show about love.” He then quoted E. E. Cummings: “Love is the every only God / who spoke this earth so glad and big.”

Being present for his guests as a good listener, he explained, was an act of love. His house band’s music was an expression of love. So, too, were his monologues, the very material that placed him in his own network’s crosshairs. “What I found after a couple of years of doing the show,” he observed, “is that we often realize we love something as we’re losing it. Many things were lost in the last five years: standards, morals, a shared reality, a shared civic engagement, a lot of friends. So by addressing loss, that’s how the show talks about love.”

Now we must prepare for the loss of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Already, the format it represents—the comforting, lavishly produced late-night talk show with a host, a band, a desk, and a couch—faces potential extinction, what with podcasts, YouTubers, and a weaselly new class of network overlords. The difference is that Colbert’s show was put down pre-emptively, like a dog in the care of Kristi Noem. That being the harsh reality, let us share, in its final days, our love for the show about love.—David Kamp for Air Mail

(The final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will air on May 21.)

Photograph by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images.

James Grissom

[mostly-him]

Decency 😾

[itsmythang]

BREAKING: NFL Legend Jerry Rice and Wife erase $667,000 in School Lunch Debt Across 103 Schools — "A Victory Greater Than the Super Bowl"

Jerry Rice and his wife, Latisha Pelayo, have wiped out over $667,000 in unpaid school lunch debt, benefiting thousands of children across the country.

[owl-house-hot-takes]

I know about the Moringmark and Garth Controversy and all I have to say is NO HARASSMENT.

TOH is, at the end of the day, a fun and enjoyable series that you supposed to watch for good characters and worldbuilding, not a place to play out beef that would be a footnote in the fanfic community.

I am not taking any sides; just note that I condemn harassment of either party and do not want anyone trying to stir up more controversy.

Anyone that tries to stir up or refuses to condemn harassment in the loudest possible words is the bad guy here.

I am not taking any sides aside from the one of basic decency.

Let's just all sit down and enjoy the show, and its fan works without being at each other throats due to petty beef.

[cumbalone]

Political Parody Series:

On the Death of Decency

I think we have to go back to some level of simple human decency in terms of how we treat each other...

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Here @Cumbalone, we don't do politics.

But every so often we have an urge to say something. Which we don't like doing, because we all come here to chill and relax, and its not for us to force our views on anyone.

Cumbalone grew up in a world which wasn't fair, but there seemed to be rules. Many of those rules were very unfair, including to @Cumbalone. Very, very bad things happened in that world too, and that world was unfair and cruel then too.

But there seemed to be rules or at least the pretence that we respected the rules. Because there seemed to be a semblance of striving for decency. There was an honour in trying to be decent and to do the right thing.

There were ways to do things. And right and wrong and the bits in between, seemed a little clearer. And things weren't as much for show or political correctness, or the opposite of political correctness. Lots was done then that was wrong, but most of what was done was for the apparent greater good, even if it wasn't popular.

There seemed to be certain truths, and one of those truths was ordinary human decency. Now I get it that there were just as much lies back then, and there always was and there always will be. But lies when recognised were called out, and called for what they were.

Now, certainly  many of the mistakes that were made back then in that more "order" world, have come back to haunt us. And maybe much of our so called "progress" went too far, and got silly (especially the political correctness), and alienated too many of us - ordinary decent people, and damaged our society - because of how we became so far away and so disconnected from our rulers. We have become so alienated from each other as we live in our bubbles, funded increasing by whichever Corporatocracy we live in, and that we fund. Decency for all doesn’t matter, as long as “I am alright”….

@Cumbalone, we get the allure of power, decisiveness, the attraction of a uniform, the apparent safety of powerful order and control, and the attraction of potency. Heck, thats what @Cumbalone is about in many ways!

But @Cumbalone we know we are a minority too. We know that if utter populism was in charge, then @Cumbalone wouldn't be, and you certainly wouldn't see this.

@Cumbalone worries that we are returning to a world where even the expression of a thought, will condemn you to "them vs us". @Cumbalone worries that there is no longer a middle ground. @Cumbalone worries we are losing the essence of human decency.

All @Cumbalone asks is that we'd remember history. And that we live and let live, and we try to be decent. Democracy won't protect us all, especially as it seems to mean less and less now as any “truth” can be made up. As Churchill paraphrased “Democracy is merely the least worst form of Government”. As @Cumbalone said, Democracy is "dictatorship by the Majority". (well it was really de Tocqueville, but @Cumabalone said it better)

I guess iI’m inarticulate and I don't know how to express it well. But what I'm trying to say is that what the video shows is that "it" could happen again. Decency is failing in how we talk to and deal with each other. @Cumbalone worries, that isn’t happening in just one country, but that it is happening to varying degrees everywhere. And the decency checks and balances that our system had to protect  us all, are being torn up, disregarded, or plain ignored, because it doesn’t matter.

Decency and trying to do the right thing doesn’t seem to matter as much.

@Cumbalone gets that periodically we have to have disruption to make progress. But we can change and disrupt without hurting so much and so many, and with our destroying what we have built that is good.

@Cumbalone asks that we remember certain just goals like decency and honour and doing the right thing as much as any of us can, and trying to be kind as we sail on a rock around a medium sized star in the corner of an insignificant galaxy.

To flagrantly display my sociocultural background, which for better or for worse, shaped, and built the Western World for the last 2000 years and which had seemed to be making some decent progress, all I respectfully ask is that "you'd do onto others as you'd have them do onto you".

So Democracy by itself won’t save us; it relies on habits—decency, honour, humility, a willingness to hear the other side—and on checks and balances that too often get ignored when power feels easier than principle.

We also recognise the allure of order, uniforms, and decisive strength. But real strength is restraint: the courage to live and let live, to disagree without dehumanising, and to remember history before we repeat it. Progress needs disruption, yes, but not demolition. We can change without burning what is good; we can be decent without hurting ourselves, ours and others.

Anyway enough of my inarticulate rant.

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For anyone interested, all of the video work was made in GROK Imagine.

(yeah, I know, Ironic doesn't even begin to describe it)