The Glade 4.0

You may need a FaceBook account to see this.

http://tinyurl.com/28d5dan

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

gah, that link goes to facebook... booooo :p

Meh. Load of populist nonsense, typical class warfare except he is rich and lumping himself in with the "us" in "us vrs them".

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

The only fine moments George Carlin ever had was narrating "Thomas the Tank Engine."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bill and Ted... OMG

Easier to blame some phantom group and claim there is nothing to be done than it is to actually examine complicated problems.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I would argue overlooking his political naivety (which I believe he did have) and key in on his linguistic acrobatics and the few very funny comedic bits he gave us...one of those without question was the Football vs. Baseball sketch.

George Carlin was one of those comedians you either "got" or "didn't get" as far as humor style goes.

Either his harsh, direct style turned you off or it was a breath of fresh air.

Carlin was the most brilliant comedian to ever exist. I don't feel he was naive about anything, unfortunately. He had no us vs. them mentality, he criticized every part of the human race equally. His rampant misanthropy might turn you off -- he firmly believed we are a species in decline, "circling the drain toward extinction," as he put it. I like to have a bit more hope than that -- that perhaps we can transcend the destructive path we've been on for the last several thousand years. But he was on the right track ... at least with the way things are going now.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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I'd vote for Clemens as the most brilliant. Carlin... I'd say that he's #3 or 4 for the later half of the 20th century, behind Lenny Bruce and Bill Cosby for sure.

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In time, this too shall pass.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CebRfSFnWGM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSqKsHYd ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcTUux-3 ... re=related

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lbruce.htm

Says it better than I can. Bruce was the revolution, the pilgrim, the pioneer of stand up shock comedy.

I love Carlin's routines, but he couldn't have done what he did if Bruce hadn't run point.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Meh, Carlin was OK. Sometimes he was great, sometimes he just plain sucked, and sometimes, late in his career, he was a naive populist pulsing more rhetoric than substance.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I got a few chuckles from Carlin, but I could never stand him for more than a few minutes at a time...

I would never describe George Carlin as naive. His excoriations of the wealthy, of politicians, and of religion were excellent.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

But not his excoriations of government?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

No, those were excellent, to. Thought I covered that under politicians.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Maybe excellent in terms of confirming your beliefs, but the man was a talentless hack.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, lol. Talentless hack? Not even a little. The guy was a genius. He could be truly nasty sometimes. There are times (like immediately after 9-11) where I didn't agree with what he had to say, but the craft was still there.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

As you are so often quick to point out, government is the sum of the individuals who create it, and should therefore be, and typically is, discussed and defined separately.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

This oh so very much. I am only missing the DVD of one of his performances. And they lost something over the years.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

No, he was a talentless hack. All he did was take naive populist rhetoric and present it as a comedy routine. He had nothing to say that wasn't a regurgitation of the oversimplified crap that people repeat to themselves to nurse their own resentments.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If you believe this, you haven't really listened to him. He was nothing like that at all.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I haven't listened to him extensively, but other than the aforementioned "Thomas the Tank Engine" narrative, that's everything I've heard. Claiming that means I haven't really listened to him is essentially just saying "but if you really listened you'd agree with me!"

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The thing is, for the most part, you would agree with Carlin. Certainly not everything, (religion comes to mind. I'd say politics, but you'd agree with some of it. No one party incurred his wrath -- he roasted them all equally) but most of it. His biggest comedic criticisms were reserved for the politically correct movement, social-activist groups (such as feminists and environmentalists), the english language itself (which isn't to single out English, more because it's the only language he spoke), yuppie culture, and the media. He'd have fit in just fine on an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit!, it was probably one of his favorite shows.

If Carlin had a downside, it was his utter nihilism. Of course, through extreme schaedenfreud, he found it all rather funny, but he could not see an upside to anything in human culture--ANY part of human culture. In his later years, he seemed to truly believe that homo sapiens were a species in decline, that we were pretty much devoid of redeeming qualities, and there is little hope left for us. It's a rather depressing view, if you can't sit back and laugh at human inadequacies, (years of reading authors like Douglas Adams makes that easier for some of us than others,) but some of us still hold out hope that we can evolve past our current issues.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I found him funny but over rated. A lot of comedians like him seem to live on the edge and then plummet off. He goes to the fringes, exaggerates for effect and then just goes into some spiral.

I didnt follow his career enough to say if it was a linear progression towards the end or if he was always like that, but it's clear to me when he just resorts to that vapid "everything sucks, we're all doomed" stuff. People suck, there is no god and it's all bullshit, i'm a nihilist, i love it when people die in natural disasters because we deserve it... blah blah blah.

I hate that hubris he shows here, how most people just do x and y but he's trying to wake people up.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe