Roger Ailes Dead at 77

[beero1000]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/business/media/roger-ailes-dead.html

Roger E. Ailes, who shaped the images that helped elect three Republican presidents and then became a dominant, often-intimidating force in American conservative politics at the helm of Fox News, which he created with Rupert Murdoch’s money and guided for two decades until he was forced out in a sexual predation scandal, died on Thursday morning. He was 77.

 

[Bronzeage]

His golden parachute failed to fully open.

 

[untermensche]

Big fat slobs die in their mid-70's every day. Skinny people too.

Good we are rid of him.

Maybe the big fat slob pretending to be president will be next.

 

[starwater]

This is what happens when the mighty fall. They have no more reason to live.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

Probably had a massive MI while chasing the maid.

 

[Playball40]

Good riddance. This is pretty much how I feel about him.

Jeffrey Jones, the director of the Peabody Awards, said in a statement, "No single individual has done more harm to American democracy in the last generation than Roger Ailes. He ushered in the post-truth society. Through a constant drumbeat of fear, anger, and hatred, he turned citizen-on-citizen. He helped craft an enormous gulf of distrust between people and news."

 

[prideandfall]

Good riddance. This is pretty much how I feel about him.

Jeffrey Jones, the director of the Peabody Awards, said in a statement, "No single individual has done more harm to American democracy in the last generation than Roger Ailes. He ushered in the post-truth society. Through a constant drumbeat of fear, anger, and hatred, he turned citizen-on-citizen. He helped craft an enormous gulf of distrust between people and news."

to be fair to ailes though, none of that would have worked if human beings weren't so god-awfully fucking stupid.
unless the argument is that a respectable majority of the adults living in the US are literally, physically, retarded there is no excuse for their behavior, and i can't really find a justification to blame the guy clever enough to manipulate them for his own ends.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Damn. Everything he did to try and get rid of that death tax before he died...all to no avail. Well, pass on his vast wealth to other, rich, entitled assholes. Maybe the Ailes and Walton families can play life size chess with the undocumented workers that landscape their yards.

 

[abaddon]

Good riddance. This is pretty much how I feel about him.

to be fair to ailes though, none of that would have worked if human beings weren't so god-awfully fucking stupid.
unless the argument is that a respectable majority of the adults living in the US are literally, physically, retarded there is no excuse for their behavior, and i can't really find a justification to blame the guy clever enough to manipulate them for his own ends.

Taking advantage of human stupidity is called con artistry. So to be fair this human-shaped slug was a despicable con artist on a mass scale. Can he rightly be reviled for taking advantage of stupid people? Yes, of course he can, and fucking duh. Anybody manipulating anybody is hard to justify; how can it not be found blameworthy?

 

[prideandfall]

Taking advantage of human stupidity is called con artistry.

respectfully, i disagree - that's taking advantage of human gullibility, sure, but "conning" someone involves specifically tricking them because if you weren't deceiving them they wouldn't buy your idiotic bullshit.
i don't see fox news having ever conned anyone because they never tricked anyone - they didn't carefully and meticulously craft an imitation dragon claw and then try to convince an elderly lady that it was the last true claw of zion or something, they just stood on a picnic table at a park and then squatted down and took a shit in front of everyone, then pointed at it and screamed "BENGHAZI!" and everyone watching blamed hillary.

So to be fair this human-shaped slug was a despicable con artist on a mass scale. Can he rightly be reviled for taking advantage of stupid people? Yes, of course he can, and fucking duh. Anybody manipulating anybody is hard to justify; how can it not be found blameworthy?

because he didn't really con anyone, he just set up a channel where a bunch of fuckwads in ties went "LIBRULS ARE EATING BABIES AND NIGGERS RAPED YOUR GRAMMA" and millions of people went "holy shit they're right both of those things JUST HAPPENED" - fox news from the word go just stood up and started screaming incomprehensible bullshit, and people firmly believed in it either because they're too fucking stupid to be capable of critical thinking, or they're so biased they're devour anything that confirms their prejudices.

i mean really, what did fox ever do that subversively or deceitfully tricked bystanders into swallowing their bullshit?
what trickery did they ever use? i can't think of any... they just stood up, like a snake handler on live TV, and screamed "THE BOOGEYMAN IS RIGHT THERE BEHIND YOU RUUUUUN" and millions of people shit themselves and started running.
that's to the point where i don't see how you can really blame fox anymore, at that point.

 

[abaddon]

Ok con artistry was a mistaken description.

What's bugging me in your posts is you say manipulating people's stupidity isn't blameworthy.

That the audience are idiots and that's their own fault isn't in dispute. But Ailes using that (and escalating the divisiveness and hate) is something we can blame him for.

 

[prideandfall]

Ok con artistry was a mistaken description.

fair enough.

What's bugging me in your posts is you say manipulating people's stupidity isn't blameworthy.

well, to be more specific, i'm saying that you can't blame fox for the fact that stupid people are stupid.
stupid people have created a post-truth society where facts don't matter, because facts don't matter to stupid people.
stupid people have created a politically divisive climate of partisan hackery because stupid people vote based on stupid criteria.
everything wrong in the US is directly because most of the population is pants-on-head retarded, not because one news channel told them that they were right about how dumb they were.

That the audience are idiots and that's their own fault isn't in dispute. But Ailes using that (and escalating the divisiveness and hate) is something we can blame him for.

yeah i'll totally agree to that, it's not like what he and fox news did on a cultural level isn't insanely disgusting, not to mention horrifying in an anthropological sort of way.
but fundamentally the issue that i have with making fox out to be a boogeyman is it means acting like people couldn't help but be tricked by them, or that fox did something that bent the people to their will.

i just think that blaming fox for the state of the country (rather than recognizing it as being a symptom) is like blaming alex jones for the existence of the belief in lizard people.

 

[Opoponax]

to be fair to ailes though, none of that would have worked if human beings weren't so god-awfully fucking stupid.
unless the argument is that a respectable majority of the adults living in the US are literally, physically, retarded there is no excuse for their behavior, and i can't really find a justification to blame the guy clever enough to manipulate them for his own ends.

Taking advantage of human stupidity is called con artistry. So to be fair this human-shaped slug was a despicable con artist on a mass scale. Can he rightly be reviled for taking advantage of stupid people? Yes, of course he can, and fucking duh. Anybody manipulating anybody is hard to justify; how can it not be found blameworthy?

I have to disagree. He was slug-shaped human.

Seriously though, taking advantage of the dim and vulnerable is despicable in itself. But what's worse is that what Ailes did. He wasn't original, but he hypnotized The Stupid through the TV, which has a much more extensive reach than all the a.m. radio fascists combined. A 24/7 visual operation with hot women, loud raving assholes in suits, and a writing staff incredibly adept at willful misleading.

The motherfucker can't be dead enough.

 

[LordKiran]

I wonder what it feels like to die a public disgrace.

 

[barbos]

Speaking of stupid, I was reading wikipedia on the deceased and apparently FoxNews demographic has median age of 70 (!!!) and predominantly white male. Deceased himself falls nicely in this demographic.

 

[blastula]

remembrances

Susan,* 66
Former model

I was 16 years old, living in Radnor, Pennsylvania. I was sent over for a walk-on part on The Mike Douglas Show in the winter of 1967. It was 6:30 in the evening and the place was totally closing up. Ailes took me into this big office and locked the door with a key. He reclined on a couch in a seating area under a map that had flags of all the cities they were syndicated in. He proceeded to pull down his pants and very gingerly pull out his genitals and said, “Kiss them.” And they were red, like raw hamburger. He was pretty meticulously dressed, with long white shirttails coming out. It was like he was just at the end of a long day and I was supposed to know what to do. I was a kid — I’d never seen a man’s privates before. I jumped up, but the door was locked and nobody was out there. He chased me around the office, and at some point it dawned on him that this just wasn’t going to happen. He finally pulled up his trousers. He was very angry and rushed over to his desk, pulled open a door, and had a reel-to-reel tape recorder going. He said to me, “Don’t tell anybody about this. I’ve got it all on tape.” I think he knew I was 16.

 

[laughing dog]

I think Fox News should show respect and go off the air for a week.

 

[Cobalt]

I wonder what it feels like to die a public disgrace.

I almost wish he felt worse than the average dead person, but I don't think it works like that.

 

[bilby]

I wonder what it feels like to die a public disgrace.

I almost wish he felt worse than the average dead person, but I don't think it works like that.

Well, that's the problem with reality.

I can see why it's so popular to believe in an afterlife. I mean, the idea of my own death being final is one thing. But the fact that awful, evil, despicable people often die without ever being punished for their crimes, is far more upsetting.

If one were inclined towards wishful thinking, then the idea of hell would be very beguiling.

But sadly, he's just dead, like anyone else who isn't breathing anymore.