RoguePlanet

And I thought blogfights were vicious

Jeff Goldstein and Deb Frisch got nothing on these guys:

Near the end of our conversation, a television in Kevin Liles’s office, tuned to BET, showed a press conference on the steps of City Hall, where a woman named Gia Casey—the wife of Hot 97’s DJ Envy—was standing beside several councilmen, calling for the arrest of a rival d.j., Troi Torain, who goes by the name Star. Star was fired from Hot 97 in 2003, after more than a dozen suspensions. (He referred to the station’s general manager, Mayo, as “Benson,” and to his bosses at Emmis as “the big Jew engine.” [again with the Jews! - kc]) He then promised to visit “doomsday” on his old employer, and was eventually hired by the competition, Power 105. In the preceding week, that doomsday plan had taken the form of berating his ex-colleague Envy, whose given name is Raashaun Casey, and his family, in spectacularly vile fashion, vowing, Mike Tyson style, not only to come after the Caseys’ child but to eat her; he made reference to spreading mayonnaise on her rear, as a dressing. He’d also indicated that he wished to “tinkle” and “skeet” on the girl (“your seed”), who is four, and offered five hundred dollars to any listener who could tell him which preschool she attended.

But hey, Star was provoked:

Hot 97 had not sat idly by. Star’s defense—other than his sworn allegiance to an Ayn Rand-inspired philosophy he calls “objective hate”—was that Envy’s on-air partner, Miss Jones, had spent the same first few days of May calling Star an “alcoholic,” a “faggot,” a “spermless dwarf,” and the son of a white prostitute “who got knocked up by the blackest, blackest, blackest nigger—and then the coochie must not have been that good because he left her.” Jones, who is black, invoked her own child—a one-year-old son—for the purpose of comparing penis sizes with Star; they were, she said, “about the same.”

Have Confederate Yankee and Patterico* condemned these vile statements yet? No? Their silence speaks volumes, wouldn't you say?

Elsewhere in the July 10 & 17 New Yorker issue, there's a Tad Friend article (I couldn't find it online, alas) about the self-proclaimed blue-collar comedians - you know, Larry the Cable Guy & Jeff Foxworthy & them. Their manager, J.P. Williams, boasts about verbally abusing Lloyd Braun, then president of the studio producing Foxworthy's show:

During a conference call, he screamed at Braun, "I hope you and your family die of ass cancer!"

There's also this:

During one conference call, Williams became so enraged by a credit-hogging television agent that he flung his Rolodex at the wall (hitting a junior agent), then hurtled over his desk and began throttling the offender. "If you can jump your desk, you ought to be allowed to strangle somebody," he explained."

There must be something about working in the entertainment bidness that turns people into sociopaths. Or maybe it just attracts people who are already sociopaths.

Anyway, I note, more in sadness than in anger, that Confederate Yankee and Patterico have failed to denounce Williams's vile words and deeds. Of course, as I understand the philosophy of Patterico, as articulated in the comments to this post, Williams, Star, and Miss Jones are all people of some courage, because they weren't anonymous when they made their mayonnaise-spreading, coochie-dissing, hope-your-family-dies-of-ass-cancer comments. Whereas I, according to Patterico, am a "huge pussy" with no "balls" because I choose to comment pseudonymously. Well, let Patterico think what he wants - let the record reflect that I , unlike Mr. Patterico, at least have the courage and decency to denounce the appalling comments of DJ Star.

*Be warned before you click on Patterico's site: He doesn't seem to respect the anonymity of people who disagree with him.

Update: Goodness. The whole time I was gathering links for this post last night I was unaware Patterico was being a busy little bee over at tbogg's.

And the party is nonstop at SadlyNo!

Honestly, I DO feel guilty for reading (and commenting on) silly blogfights. Especially in light of, um, all the really serious stuff that's happening in the world that I haven't gotten around to blogging about. Oh well . . .