TheAgitator.com
A Philosophical Question
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010I posed this scenario to a political science class last night. I thought Agitator readers would be interested in pondering it, too.
You’re the captain of a small yacht. A group of media elites has rented your yacht for a private party. Mid-cruise, Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann get into a heated argument. Pushing and shoving ensues. Both fall overboard. The sea around them is rough and infested with sharks. Without quick action they’ll surely drown or be eaten. You only have one life preserver.
Hence, the conundrum.
Do you (a) open a nice bottle of wine, or (b) slip below deck to take in a movie?
what kind of wine is it?
Which movie?
Is taking the wine (or better yet, a jay) below deck to enjoy the movie with not an option?
I say open the wine AND enjoy the movie.
Glen Beck would probably refuse your handout.
C). Throw some chum into the water.
Bad joke. For all of Olbermann’s flaws (hot-tempered, judgmental, insufferable baseball geek, so on and so on), at least he tries to be honest and to stick within grasp of reality, even if his biases get the best of him now and then (even leading to Jon Stewart famously calling him out on it). Beck, on the other hand, is the epitome – a living, breathing and insane symbol – of the afflictions plaguing the right-wing media (yes, that’s especially targeting Fox News) and, by extension, US politics in general. At least on the right-hand side of the spectrum.
Olbermann is no model journalist (though neither does he purport to be one), but comparing him in any real way to Beck as if their were equally dishonest, fraudulent or downright crazy is just asinine, or highly foolish at best. I hope that wasn’t your intention, though your scenario leaves little to the imagination as to what alternatives there may be.
C: run for a video camera.
Am I strong enough to throw more of the media elites overboard? If not, then I sink the ship.
wine enhances almost any experience…
Open the bottle of wine, and use the life preserver as a seat cushion while on deck watching the latest episode of Swimming with the Sharks.
D. Chum the ocean to make sure the sharks don’t miss them.
Really, McKen? Really.
#6 is correct.
#5 is deluded (hint: “agrees with me” ≠ honest).
This false equivalency is stock in trade of the right wing. They have to demonize and exagerate liberal examples as a defense. When anyone points out how crazy bad beck, o’reilly, limbaugh, malkin, and what’s her name that blond transvestite are they then jump up and down and say look! look! Olbermann does it too! This allows them to pretend all the crazy s**t is acceptable.
anyone got any weed?
I think Styx had the best answer: “I’m sailing away…”
“Am I strong enough to throw more of the media elites overboard?”
How do you think we ended up with beck, olbermann, o’reilly and the rest? We through the honest media “elites” overboard because they weren’t entertaining enough.
Joe McKen. wow, I bet you’d be a lot of fun to go to a comedy club with.
Um, bob, I think it’s clear from this thread that we pretty clearly think that it’s not okay and that both Beck and Olbermann are useless assholes whose highest use is shark food.
If that’s not clear to this point, then let me say: “Beck and Olbermann are useless assholes whose highest use is shark food.”
Just because someone agrees with you, doesn’t mean you’re right.
I’m no Olbermann fan but this leftist habit of running for sainthood while the right does crazy shit all day every day has to stop. You can’t fight by earnestly explaining how mean your opponent is while he is beating the shit out of you.
The answer is always plausible deniability. Run around screaming in a panic and then throw the bottle of wine at them instead of the life preserver. Oops. So that when you are questioned, you have a good alibi.
You get out your book of accounts and check to see if either has paid his life preserver fees.
If neither has, or both have, you start the bidding.
Fuck that…. Beck makes 10 times what Olbermann makes. Save Beck and ride the gravy train!
What..? You got a problem with that? I thought Libertarians were OK with prostitution and mercenaries….
@bobzbob: Right, because Radley has a strong, on-record vested interest in defending Beck or O’Reilly from criticism. In fact, I’ve grown to suspect that “Radley Balko” is merely a superhero-ish pen name for Rupert Murdock.
Either that, or maybe, just maybe, the doucebaggery has less to do with political affiliation than the tacky, ubiquitous TV “news” lowest-common-denominator pandering.
If it’s the 1998 Barboursville Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve, I go with the wine option.
If it’s Godfathers I and II, I go with the movie option.
If it’s both, I go with both.
I love how some people simply cannot accept that people who happen to agree with them are not just as full of shit as people who don’t agree with them.
You save both if you can, one if you can’t. Throw the life preserver over with rope and pull them in.
And I know it’s a “joke” philosophical question, but it’s not really funny (like the bus full of lawyers/one empty seat going over a cliff). It’s less funny with actual people.
I don’t agree with his politics, but I do enjoy Olbermann when it comes to sports, so I would choose: (b) slip below deck to take in a movie.
I don’t think this has popped up here yet, but apparently, New Haven police were videotaped using excessive force and generally behaving poorly when arresting some Yale students during a night club raid.
The police might be able to get away with bullying regular citizens, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to mess with ivy league students. Parents paying $30k a year for tuition probably already have ivy-league-educated lawyers on retainer and don’t take kindly to their kids being tasered.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/oct/02/video-nhpd-raid-elevate/
You’re the captain of the boat, you have to gun it and steer into the waves to save the boat.
Tragically, while your quick thinking saved the boat, it rendered any attempt to save the two brave souls that fell overboard impossible.
Then, back on dry land… you break out the wine AND watch a movie.
It’s all about spin.
I don’t agree with Olbermann very often but he’s certainly not on par with the crazytrain of Beck.. At least Olbermann gets history right… most of the time..
PTLindy, so basically you think humor is inappropriate.
Considering their relative influence and power it makes some sense to save Olbermann and level the playing field just a tad.
If O & K were pushing each other and fell over, get the bottle of wine & watch. If you were pushing them, try a beer & movie to relax – they aren’t big but they’re feisty and you’re probably a little out of breath.
Kill the messenger. (Probably more like court jester, but what the hey?)
I’d choose the wine.
Besides the basic humanity of the golden rule, ( if you fell into that same water, would you want to be rescued by either Olbermann or Beck), as owner of the yacht in the situation, you would be guilty of the same criminal behavior as the White Star Line when they operated the Titanic without enough life saving equipment.
I also put it to you, sir, that not only would you be in violation of various maritime laws, but that you would legitimately be held civilly responsible for any loss of income potential to their families.
Furthermore, the very idea that you wouldn’t have a boat hook on board as well to fish one out while the other is thrown the life preserver clearly indicates that you have already been drinking too much wine and watching too many movies when you should have been studying the various materials to take the Captain’s exam (and the others that lead up to it) since clearly you are operating the boat on a commercial charter basis, and thus have a higher level of professional responsibility that the average boater.
You know I deeply respect your work, Captain Radley Ahab. I am just trying to prevent you from being enmeshed in our overly litigious society :-)
P.S. By the way, both of these guys are sharks and will do just fine in the water.
Agreed.
I bet you could get a fortune for the video.
And, BTW:
“Won’t someboedy please think of the sharks?”
I think you people are horrid for not considering the potential damage this could do the the sharks’ digestive systems.
You have drank way too much win Joe’ McKen.
I would see which one offered more money. Free Market life saving!
And I do not watch either of them. I have watched only part of each show and both were unwatchable. Surprisingly, Beck’s radio show is actually funny (go figure). But I do not listen to that very often (maybe once a month in flipping channels).
As for the sharks, they have to eat too.
Can we gamble on who get’s munched first?
It’s like an old classic:
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are plummeting out of an airplane without any parachutes — who hits the ground first? Who cares?
No need to save either of them – the sharks would never touch them out of professional courtesy.
Joé McKen,
That was damn funny…Olbermann honest….
Will you be here tomorrow night, I hear the chef does a great veal picatta.
1) Assuming that 1 life preserver cannot support two relatively healthy men
2) Assuming there is no other suitable flotation device on board, including seat cushions and the like
3) assuming that neither man could swim back to the boat, regardless of the seas
4) that I was in rough seas in a relatively small craft, which is bad seamanship
5) Assuming that the men are too far away for a line or grapple
6) Assuming sharks would gather near the surface in rough seas
7) Assuming I allowed guests to be on deck in rough seas in the first place
8) Assuming that neither man desires to be left in the sea
9) Assuming that the one life preserver deters sharks in some magical way
I would:
Throw the preserver to the most distant man, if possible, and dive in after the other, right after I alerted my crew of a man overboard (assuming that I am not at the helm).
The mere consideration that one or two deaths of any human, regardless of the political gibberish they spout, is bad form. One who rails against the death penalty should not be inclined to be judge and jury in such similar matters. You do everything, everything, to save both lives.
First, don’t worry about Beck. If God wants to save him, he will.
Quickly tie a rope to life preserver, throw it over, they can both grab on and drag them back aboard.
To: Wetblankets
Why is a car with three lawyers and one empty seat going over the cliff a crying shame?
Because they were my friends.
I hope we’ve satisfied your stupifying inability to lighten up.
Cappy gets a nod, but Mike Leatherwood is freakin’ committed! Well done.
Open the wine. Throw the cork AND the life preserver in the water. Let King Neptune sort out the rescue operations. If it’s rough seas, going belowdecks to watch the movie will require bonine or compazine.
C.) Charter an ocean liner and fill it with all of Beck’s fans. Then sail it out to where Beck is desperately struggling to keep afloat. Let his fans jump in and rescue him. Then quickly sail off whilst enjoying wine and a movie.
Technically, Megan Kelly has to be on board, there’s wine, and there’s a “below deck”. So there’s your answer.
Nuke the ship from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure…
Leaving someone to die in a joke is not quite the same thing as advocating their death in real life. Heaven forbid that humor should ever be constricted to the realm of “good taste” (whatever that term means).
did some mention beck and olbermann being actual people?
Wine or a movie? Is there not a casino on this damn boat?
Reminds me also of the old Papa Shark and Baby Shark joke.
Papa and baby swim around and around the guys who have fallen overboard before they eat them. Baby shark asks why they always circle the swimmers for so long before they eat them. Papa says because they taste better when there is no shit left in them.
“Leaving someone to die in a joke is not quite the same thing as advocating their death in real life. Heaven forbid that humor should ever be constricted to the realm of “good taste” (whatever that term means).”
Which is pretty much exactly the defense the folks at 1010 tried to muster over their disgusting “No Pressure” video.
I get the joke, classify it as about as funny as dysentery, and (perhaps sanctimoniously) wish there was less of this drivel involved in politics. Especially when it comes from someone I otherwise respect.
Oh well, only human and all that.
Dave K-
No, I get the joke. The joke is Radley’s punchline at the end. And I did snicker…
However-
The scenario isn’t a joke here. It was to contemplate one’s political beliefs (as well as douchebaggery) over the other. I assuming that scenario was how it was presented in the class (minus the funny). And my response is the I would have responded to such thought exercise ;)
“Wine or a movie? Is there not a casino on this damn boat?”
Yeah, well… I’m gonna go build my own boat, with blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the boat!
I don’t think anyone here would pop open a bag of popcorn and crack wise if actually in that situation — in my case, I wouldn’t be on the boat with the media figures in the first place. The moral center of the joke is how hard it is to have pathos for people who lie, spin, and conjure drama to increase their own wealth and notoriety — often at the expense of healthy discourse or good oversight.
Arguing semantics only, I would agree to an extent with Joe McKen; Olbermann and Beck are not equivalent. Olbermann is a vendor of semi-mainstream, sanctimonious, partisan puffery, making his opposite number someone like Bill O’Reilly. Beck’s shtick — outsidery, bugshit paranoid victim-ism anchored in historical illiteracy — is more equivalent to Rev Wright’s ranting (or at least Rev Wright’s public persona’s ranting). My 2 cents only.
Throw the movie in the water, open the bottle, chug precisely 1/3. Pour The rest out. Repeat until satisfied.
C.) You set up a betting pool on the time each will survive.
There are media elites on board? Throw Rush Limbaugh in the water – he should be plenty buoyant for at least one of them to hold onto.
Option G) Throw Mike Leatherwood in after them.
Glenn said to Keith, “Remember all those words we wrote…”
Wait a minute… there is money to be made here.
I would be torn between two options:
A. Throw life preserver to the highest bidder.
B. Throw life preserver in between the two and videotape the fight for sale to the highest bidder.
I sort of think option B would make the most money.
“Do you (a) open a nice bottle of wine, or (b) slip below deck to take in a movie?”
Both!!
“You set up a betting pool on the time each will survive”
So you’ll bet the over on who’ll go under?
*ba-dum-bum*
[Ducks from flying tomatoes.]
@Joe (#41) “You have drank way too much win Joe’ McKen.”
Actually, I think it was Kool-Aid.
FNC has a lot of rah rah America and yay God stuff, but the discerning viewer can get some useful information, particularly from people like Judge Andrew Napolitano and John Stossel. Beck himself offers some salient points, if you filter out all the gawd, faithhopecharity mush. He’s occasionally libertarian in his approach.
MSNBC is just a cesspool. I have to turn off part of my brain to watch them more than 10 minutes. Otherwise, I’ve got a phone-book sized list of objections to the crap they say on there. None of them show any underlying respect for individualism, but an abiding love for Big Government.
Want to take a staunchly cynical view of Glenn Beck? Fine. Just don’t try to sell me on any of the collectivists on the other stations as being better by any rational measurement. You still have to admit that Olbermann has a room temperature IQ when it comes to political analysis.
Let ‘em both go.
Ya see, most folks still buy into the left-vs right, divide and conquer strategies instituted by our political class. As much entertainment as they derive from this Hegelian Dialectic, let’s not play their games anymore, folks. (They say: “Let’s you and him fight, and we keep buying into it, year after year. How’s that workin’ out for us?)
Rush can go in with Arianna.
Murdoch can take a swim with Turner.
Buffet can go in with Gates. (Gates is younger, but Buffet didn’t make his billions by bein’ easy to pound on.)
Boehner goes in with Pelosi.
Reid goes in with Demint.
Pick opposites sides of the same coin and dump ‘em all.
Then, we start on the lawyers and judges.
After that, the bureaucrats can sink or swim.
I guess if I ever wanted proof that most visitors to Radley’s site were really liberals, not libertarians …. I can just look at the number of Olberman apologists in this thread.
Liking Olbermann doesn’t mean a person is liberal, it means a person has no taste.
Throw the preserver halfway between them, forcing the two of them to share it.
That is the same as The old joke.you are in a room with a Lawyer and George bush senior and osama bin laden and you only have 2 bullets left what to do ?
A: Shoot the Lawyer twice..
“I guess if I ever wanted proof that most visitors to Radley’s site were really liberals, not libertarians …. I can just look at the number of Olberman apologists in this thread.”
All one of them?
Anyway, I’d try to save them. Being an asshole, even a famous asshole, even a dishonest asshole, even an asshole who is rich and famous precisely because he is a dishonest asshole, doesn’t mean you deserve to die. Or maybe I’m just a softie.
Shit. We all forgot that everything these two do is theater, so there are no sharks, no danger, and the cake is a lie.
This comment thread was as depressing as some of those comment threads after a policeman shoots someone in a wrong door “no knock”. The absolute insistence to miss the point by some people is staggering. My God, get some perspective people, it’s a joke! I weep for my country.
And we shall christen this ship the Kobayashi Maru.
Or perhaps more simply, the ITSATRAP!
I am reminded of an old Ukranian riddle: You are in the trenches and see a German approaching from the west and a Russian approaching from the east. Whom do you shoot first? Answer: The German. Business before pleasure.
Big Chief “I weep for my country.”
Don’t weep for it mate. Countries come and go, people are the only thing worth caring about.
From listening to Beck’s radio show, he seems to be a right-leaning Christian with some libertarian tendencies (most notably the willingness to enforce the Constitution as written). Rush Limbaugh, who was more of an apologist for Bush than Beck was, does not seem to inspire anywhere near the same irrational dislike.
I can only guess that the dislike for Beck is mostly inspired by religious prejudice. I have the feeling that most of the people giggling about drowning two human beings are not Christians (or adherents to any serious faith).
As to Olbermann, he’s just an angry lefty-statist jerk. But I don’t think that joking about killing him is funny.
Maybe I need to lighten up, but I’ve always thought that one of the things that made the US special was the fact that we don’t go nuts every few years and murder each other over politics.
I prefer option 3…
I’d open a vein and spill some of my blood into the water. I wouldn’t want to risk either one of them surviving the storm. With blood in the water, the sharks will become very interested, almost ensuring both would at least get fatally bitten. I’d enjoy watching that. Hell..i’d pay money on Pay Per View for that.
Funny joke. Made me chuckle. Just like the joke making the rounds in 2008: “If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were drowning in the ocean, who would be saved? America.”
But since you asked for us to comment on your joke, you seem to want us to take it semi-seriously. Or were you expecting a bunch of responses like “Funny”, and “Not funny”?
So I ‘m afraid I’d have to disagree with the premise. If “I” were the captain of a charter yacht, “I” wouldn’t be stupid enough to go to sea without enough life preservers for all on board. It is not only illegal, it shows very poor judgement.
If “you” were a captain who took a group charter out with only one life preserver, I’d say that after doing what #48 above said to do, you should return to port and turn your captain’s license in, with the explanation that you’ve decided that morons shouldn’t have captain’s licenses (which would, at least after the fact, show good judgement).
THEN you should drink the wine while watching the movie.
Really, Radley, the joke was funny. But asking for comments on it invites both bad taste responses, and accusations of bad taste on your part.
But keep it up, I kind of like it.
If the movie is “Jaws,” then the movie takes precedence over the wine. True, partaking of both would be a celebration of the disappearance of these two miscreants, but at least “Jaws” would immortalize this important moment.
Prejudice involves judging before you know the facts. A rational person who learns about religion, discusses topics with religious people, and applies his reason to figure out what makes sense isn’t judging out of ignorance. On the contrary, it’s familiarity with religion that leads me (and I assume many others) to conclude that that religious arguments are illogical and based upon fairy tales.
This is a perfect example of prejudice. I’ve been a Christian and now I’m an atheist. But rather than abandoning any regard for the lives of others, my apostasy has coincided with an increased appreciation for the rational basis of individual rights.
If a Christian needs the threat of eternal damnation to dissuade him from pillaging and raping, then I really don’t trust him. He’s not respecting others because they are rational beings like him. He’s just afraid of hell.
Yeah, Beck has a lot of flaws, but he does more in an hour of his tv show to expose the collectivists than the sex&drugs&openborders ‘libertarians’ do in a lifetime.