Suey Park aside (she acts crazy), I personally believe many of you would be well served by thinking about this situation more critically before you jump on the defend Colbert bandwagon. Colbert is a funny satirist, but is not without flaw, and in my mind this bit on his show was at best a shitty joke and at worst completely unnecessarily racially insensitive (i.e. even as satire, it did not serve his point well). An article here talks about it in a more articulate way than I probably can:
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/04/colbert-white-racial-satire-dont-need/

This is somewhat tangential (I'll tie things together later), but based on my readings it seems Chappelle may have grappled with whether some of his skits were having net positive social impact, especially near the tail end of the show's run. From Chappelle's wikipedia entry (way more context there) --- "Chappelle said that he felt some of his sketches were "socially irresponsible." ... "According to Chappelle, during the filming of the sketch, a white crew member was laughing in a way that made him feel uncomfortable and made him think. Chappelle said, "It was the first time I felt that someone was not laughing with me but laughing at me."
--- For me, coming from somebody like Chappelle, that's pretty heavy stuff. if Dave Chappelle -- IMO quite brilliant both comedically and otherwise, and has personal experience being an oppressed minority -- struggles with what makes good socially responsible satire, that probably means it's hard. Really hard. Yet there are many people far less qualified than Chappelle in the area of satire creation and firsthand experience of racial oppression using "Colbert is satire, don't you know what [good, socially responsible] satire is?" (I'll answer that rhetorical -- No I don't, nor do probably most people) as a bit of a rubber stamp for Colbert being totally justified in doing this bit.
In my opinion, if there were ever a time for Stephen to totally break character for a second and just say "I'm sorry. Satire can be very difficult at times and we make mistakes. This was one of them. We've got to try harder.", now would be the time. As Chappelle pointed out, some people could be comfortable in laughing for the wrong reasons and not realizing it ... those people need a bit of a reality check. As the person everybody is rushing to protect, Colbert would be the best one to deliver it. In doing so, this could even more powerfully (than his satire) make people come around to the idea that racism is not just a switch you can turn off and be done with it (a la Stephen Colbert the *character*), it's a constant maintenance process like brushing one's teeth ( a la Jay Smooth -- Great talk here by Jay on just this topic ). "Wait.... even Stephen Colbert (the person) satirist master extraordinaire needs to think about race issues!? Hmmmmmmm..."

I suppose you could consider it going on a tangent but I think it's more escalating the topic to the point of being interesting. Anyone who has been around computers for a long time knows how file deletion works and all of us have seen video or movies about people piecing together shredded documents.

The connection to life and information is quite relevant to the topic of deletion. In fact I believe even Stephen Hawking concerned himself with the concept of information loss (deletion) with regards to blackholes and the problems with conservation of energy (energy in the form of entropy). The resolution he came to involved the outer edge of a blackhole maintaining a version of this information forever.

If you expand the scope of the definition of information to be a specific state of the universe at a point in time, including its complex members (ie us and our consciousness), and remove the temporal importance of "now" then we are all information about states of the universe at varying points in its existence.

The point at which even that basic information (the current unique state of the universe) becomes erased or irrelevant (ie heat death when there is a perfectly homogenous distribution of energy throughout the universe) is quite interesting and depressing. At that point any record of the past and the ability to discern one moment of time from the next is gone. With no variation in the universe even time itself becomes impossible to measure unless your an objective viewer of the universe (God?).

Well I was born on a farm and my family trained horses for decades soo I guess I don't find Horse shit that bad. It's better than Dog Shit though...even Stephen Fry says so.

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^Opus_Moderandi:
>> ^ForgedReality:
Ooh that gives me an idea: Why doesn't someone take Hawking's voice engine, and autotune it, and create the next big music fad?

Are you being facetious?

I'm being half-facetious. I think it could be interesting to see once. Auto-tune could make even Stephen Hawking seem talented (musically).


lol, well in that case, the 1st thing that came to my mind was Squarepusher's Red Hot Car. Maybe Aphex Twin's Windowlicker (if he was a pimp daddy)...

>> ^Opus_Moderandi:

>> ^ForgedReality:
Ooh that gives me an idea: Why doesn't someone take Hawking's voice engine, and autotune it, and create the next big music fad?

Are you being facetious?


I'm being half-facetious. I think it could be interesting to see once. Auto-tune could make even Stephen Hawking seem talented (musically).

Heh, just quoting TDS's Even Stephen
>> ^thinker247:
Better than vomiting in someone else's mouth, I guess.
>> ^RedSky:
You just made me vomit in my own mouth!

>> ^Nithern:
Mr. Cooper does maintain a cool and calmness that is his hallmark and style of jounralist. He does not take a side, but down provide a forum for different sides to argue an issue and let the public decide on the merits of such words and concepts. That is Freedom of the Press in action.

No, I'm sorry... that's not the purpose and function of a journalist. It is HIS responsibility to ensure that the public is informed about the facts. Giving this Mark Williams (who I should point out is hardly paranoid but very calculated and coherent in his political strategies) a public forum to spout his in-factual rhetoric unchallenged serves to only spread his ideas to more misinformed people. This man is on air because he's controversial and a ratings grabber.

It cannot be assumed that the public is already fully informed and able to dismiss Williams out of hand for the snake-oil salesman he is. Anderson offers up one critisism of his public statements, then barely counters his pathetic wiggle out response before moving on.

If the American press had done it's bloody job informing the public, groups like his would not even be political powers. When he talks about "the corporate take-over of Washington D.C.", he's actually right and his followers know this in their gut, but no one in the press EVER calls out politicians on this. Neither Democrat nor Republican! Indeed, why doesn't Cooper explain in detail who the corporate entities funding these 9/12 Tea-Party protests are?

So much of the US corporate media is bent on presenting 50/50, even-Stephen reporting. What they are supposed to be doing is broadcasting what is reality and what is lie.

Hey now! Don't misconstrue my words...:)

Even Stephen Hawking speaking through a monotonic machine inspires many a chelloveck including myself...I don't see how someone's voice has any bearing on what they're actually saying with it.

Am like meh on the Colbert/Daily Show issues. There are some clips that are just great (like Even Stephen) but there is alot of clips that just there because it's Colbert or Daily Show.

Personally I think what needs a rework is the Queue system we have in place. I think videos should be chronologically posted from Oldest to Newest. Because I see so many videos that get 4 or 5 votes, then get drowned out by new sumbissions and get left behind all the way back in the queue eventually dying because most people don't go further then the 2nd page in the Queue.

Even Stephen couldn't keep a straight face at that animation.
And I predict "Welcome Jesus" t-shirts any day now at CafePress. Might buy one, myself.