Corporations Offer People Jobs to Silence Critics and Shut Down the Opposition.
The other day, I heard a commercial on the radio where Jim Gaffigan was shilling Walmart’s prepaid cell phones, “Straight Talk”.
Even good comedians, like George Carlin, ended up doing advertising. Carlin didn’t apologize for it, nor should he have.
Doing a few commercials for a phone company trying to get people to take their collect call business there wasn’t particularly unethical, and nobody was trying to cancel him or his message.
(Besides, everyone knew how to use collect calls for free. You just hurried up and said the pay phone’s public phone number when it asked for your name and hung up after the other party declined the call. Then they knew which pay phone to call.)
Everyone knew that George Carlin, was a fairly crass comedian, he pissed some people off, but it was the 80s, 90s, 2000s.
So you had comedians like Sam Kinison, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks, and when they pissed people off, nobody cared.
It wasn’t career-ending, and most people just weren’t even pissed off, they shrugged and went about their way, like grown ups used to do before everyone suddenly got so soft.
Even when Gilbert Gottfried had a gaffe, he went to New York City right after 9/11 and said he would have flown, but they wanted to make a quick stop at the Chrysler Building, people shouted “Too soon, man!”, but they took it in stride. New Yorkers used to be tough.
Even though Gottfried would have never worked with material like he had in the 90s, were he to start today, Disney put him in movies. He was the parrot in Aladdin, alongside Robin Williams, who also had “interesting” material.
Jim Gaffigan is one of these “new” comedians. Not that funny.
Not his fault, honestly.
Society has become so thin-skinned that if you tell the wrong joke, you’ll never work again, so “comedy” is very sanitized now, and there’s really nothing out there that will make you fall out of your chair laughing.
Most of the “fall out of your chair laughing” jokes are raunchy, socially inappropriate, a lampoon of someone that is now considered “marginalized” and “needing other people to feel offended for them”.
As a gay man, I say that Married With Children was one of my favorite shows. Still is. It’s held up pretty well.
Al, the every man. Al, with “the Dodge with no upholstery, no gas, and six more payments”. Al where, “I can always have more kids, but we all know that’s the only car I’ll ever be able to afford.”
Al whose life went wrong because he “kept washing out and reusing a condom” which finally broke, causing him to get Peggy pregnant while they were in high school.
Mind you, this was on TV, not even “premium” cable, at a time when the Moral Majority was everywhere and Ronald Reagan was in the White House!
Also mind you, the United States CDC posted to “Twitter” just in 2019, I believe, that “We say it because people do it. Don’t put your condoms in the dishwasher.”
Al Bundy was conveying an important public health message almost 40 years before the CDC would openly talk about condoms.
When Married With Children “finally went too far”, it was the episode where Al and Steve went to a sex shop, and there were some jokes about transvestites and gay men, and I found them absolutely hysterical.
My parents didn’t even care if I watched this show when I was 7-8 years old, you know.
What makes Married With Children so funny is that it was a spoof of the Cosby Show. Where the Cosby Show was wholesome, and Bill Cosby was presented to people as the Moral Majority’s “TV Dad”, Al Bundy was dysfunction as all hell, not that bright, salty, and absolutely not a role model.
Later, we’d find out that Bill Cosby was putting roofies in women’s drinks and raping them while they were unconscious.
It’s always the people who are “too clean” that end up having the most dirty laundry, isn’t it? Bill liked pudding, in the commercials.
Bill Cosby was doing Jell-O and Jell-O “puddin'” commercials.
In real life, Bill liked pudding, pudding his dick where it didn’t belong.
In a statement about how sick the real world actually is, his convictions were overturned by a court and he’ll die a free man while people worry about what jokes a comedian might tell.
The truly great comedians are all gone.
You start saying shit like this, you lose advertisers, you get canceled shows in Vegas (Carlin was in Vegas a lot), and you just “don’t work again”.
So comedy has gotten rather un-funny thanks to “Social Justice Warriors”.
Nobody asked me, as a gay man, if I thought Al’s trip to the sex shop was funny or not. I thought it was hysterical. It wasn’t like, some vicious anti-gay assault. But it wouldn’t have flown today.
Why? Well, we have too many people like “Brandon Lobsta” (as we call him on Techrights, one of the trolls that harasses us…) claiming you can sue people for being impolite.
Anyway, “Brandon Lobsta” and the rest of the modern “Left”, are like that stupid lady in Michigan who complained about “Al Bundy” to the FCC, but even back then, the network just went to the producers and said “tone it down, just a little, okay?” and they went on to make fun of “some lady in Michigan” on a future episode.
But Jim Gaffigan, the closest he got to funny, the thing that made him notable at all, was the Hot Pockets routine.
You can’t roast people, but you can call garbage Nestle “food” products, “Diarrhea Pockets” and go into all sorts of vitriol about how much you hate the barbecue beef.
I read that after he started this routine, Nestle tried to hire him to do Hot Pockets commercials.
Control the opposition. “If we hire him, he’ll stop telling people how bad Hot Pockets are. His routine is bad for the brand. Hiring him will be cheap.”
It reminded me of when Apple tried to hire Linus Torvalds in 2000.
Steve Jobs said they’d give him a lot of money and an important title at Apple, and he’d work on “the UNIX with the largest user base”.
He refused. Linux is the “*nix” with the largest user base now. Across the widest variety of computers. Mac OS is falling apart and many of the people who attempted to use it as UNIX even admit it and switch to Linux.
The stipulation to take the job at Apple was he’d have to quit working on Linux forever.
Steve Jobs realized, years ahead of Android (Linux powers their iPhone competitor and has stopped Apple from gaining the other 86% of the global phone market), that Linux would be a problem for Apple someday and they should nip it in the bud.
It would have been cheap, and it would have been brilliant (for Apple), if he took the bait, and the appeals to ego.
Hell, the Mac might actually be a more serious operating system today if it had an actual kernel programmer that knew what he was doing working at Apple.
The time period also was around the point that Steve Jobs tried to convince Richard Stallman to allow Apple to violate the GNU GPL and create a proprietary Objective-C compiler for GCC. When Stallman refused and told him the FSF would take action, we got a Free Software compiler for Objective-C.
Later, Apple replaced GCC with a different compiler platform that does not generate very good compiled code, but it is under a license that allows proprietary compiler front-ends.
The threat of “controlling the opposition” and keeping things “corporate friendly”, with stuff that seems innocent enough, like “Codes of Conduct” will always be out there.
The powers that be have already done enormous damage this way. Being aware of the problems can help us avoid more.
Apple didn’t manage to kill Linux or GCC, but they tried, through sabotage and appeals to vanity and ego.
Clang has done enormous damage to the goal of having Free Software compiler tools.
Mozilla even defamed the GNU Project, lied and said Clang produced better binaries, and then sabotaged the build environment for Firefox if you use GCC.
(They don’t update the build system for that and so it’s basically lost its optimization options that way.)
While we’re dealing with all of these “Leftist Karens” who get mad about comedy, we face bigger issues. Real issues.
Today, I was listening to NPR while I was bored. They tipped me off to something Home Depot and Lowes are going to do.
They’re going to sell power tools that don’t work if you don’t buy them.
They have “bluetooth” something-or-other, and of course it’s the future so “blockchain blockchain!”, and next it’ll be “AI!”.
Maybe they can bring Microsoft in and create DeWalt 365 or something, where you have to subscribe to your power saw and if you don’t pay them $6.99 a month forever after you buy it, you can’t work.
Also, no work for days when Azure crashes.
It can be just like Microsoft Office.
Sure it could start out as an anti-shoplifting measure, then you’ll have to pay a fee every month to keep using tools you own.
Crazy? Hardly. My mechanic couldn’t do an alignment on my car several months ago because the activation server for the computer that runs the machine from Snap-On wouldn’t respond.
When they called the vendor, Snap-On says “Oh we don’t support Windows XP anymore. So you’ll need a new machine running Windows 11, and we’re going to bill you for all the hardware on the rack, because it won’t work with the new computer. Also, it’s a monthly subscription now.
Their attitude is, you need it to work. What are you going to do about it?
Like Microsoft.
The CEO of Home Depot says that the change is supposed to be less visible than putting the power tools behind locked cases or something. That they don’t want to “Look like an armed encampment” to the customers there to pickup their “hammers and nails”.
The CEOs of the major hardware chains tend to be a bunch of MAGA people, really awful people. You know. “Spike the homeless, cut food stamps, kill Social Security! What? They’re stealing power tools? PRODUCT ACTIVATORS!”
Perhaps, eventually, they can be like Walmart, cutting my spouse’s hours while they pay off duty police officers to stand there and not do anything about the arsonists and looters, but they have plenty of time for writing my license plate in their little clipbook for parking in a yellow zone (not a fire zone, not a handy crapped spot) for 2 minutes.
When I go there to pick him up now, I just circle the parking lot following the arrows, at idle speed. Instead of getting out of the way, I can just let my car loop around a few times real slow until he comes out.
I’m really glad to know they’re paying these people $25 an hour to mind where I idle for a couple minutes, but the CEOs still scream of “shrink”.
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