I think I’m beginning to understand why the airlines have that nonsensical demand that we all shut off our electronic devices during takeoff (it’s very annoying when you’re using your iPad just for reading or listening to music) — and I’m beginning to think that maybe they ought to enforce the rule as soon as you step aboard the plane. The reason: have you ever noticed those assholes in first class who order a Scotch as soon as they sit down and then fire up their smart phones? Have you ever wondered what they were doing? They’re apparently doing an inebriated Neandertal in a locker room act.
Some Chicago newspaper columnist named Joe Cowley used that interlude on the runway to unleash his inner jerkwad over twitter. Apparently, he’s sexist and racist.
I’m more likely to see a Squatch before I see a hot flight attendant. Then again, I think the airlines are hiring Squatch’s to do that job.
Chick pilot. Should I be OK with that or am I just a sexist caveman?
Kid next to me looks like “Short Round.” Think I’ll give him a dollar to say to me, “You cheat, Dr. Jones!” #firstclassproblems
It always sets me back a bit to discover that people actually think like that, and worse, that they’ll openly babble that way. At least Cowley has learned that the latter is not OK — he has now deleted his entire twitter account.
It’s too bad his brain is probably still broken.
What’s a “Squatch”?
Kitty, it’s probably short for “Sasquatch.”
“Should I be okay with that?”
Well, fuckwad, what was your verdict? Dd you charge into the cockpit to grab ahold of the stick? Did you stand up and drop trou to demonstrate that you were more than equipped for the job?
Or did you sit back while the the chick pilot flew your dumb ass from where you were to to where you were going?
Y’know, as one who’s previously been somewhat disparaging of the 140-character medium, I have to give it up for the developers of the technology for this one aspect…
… that, coupled with smartphones and scotch, it doth allow the unchecked basal ganglia* of the truly appalling randomly to speak up for themselves with potentially the entire world as an audience, and thus crucify their reputations in public.
(/#technologyroolz)
(*/Yes, I know the triune brain model’s a mite outdated. Please consider this usage poetic license. In my defense, I figure it’s also slightly less dated than referring to it as his ‘id’.)
Here goes Pharyngula expanding my vocabulary again. I hadn’t heard the term “squatch” before either. And I wondered if it might mean sasquatch or something worse, as it is a word with an unfortunate charge to it. Turns out both meanings are, um, correct, or so I gathered when my googlings brought me to the Urban Dictionary. What a hateful site that is! Remind me to never visit it again.
Nothing new, alas.
Long before OJ was tried for murder, my office-mate flew on the same plane with him. He chased *everyone else out of first class*, and the flight crew put up with this because he was famous.
It’s pretty amazing what flight crews have to put up with — if OJ’d complained, they’d have been in deep sh*t. Airline backup of their flight crews has reportedly gotten better, but not a lot.
All of the comments are awful, but the first one I could see someone expecting to get away with. Believe it or not, most people don’t seem to see the misogyny inherent in a comment like that. (Even if it wasn’t misogynist, it’s just mean-spirited, but people don’t seem to mind)
The second comment I could see a non-public figure making and thinking they could get away with it, but a public figure really thought he’d get away with that? I’m almost more astounded by the idiocy than by the misogyny…
1. I’m sure Mr Cowley is a real eye candy and wouldn’t mind if we start discussing his looks as compared to various cryptids, but then if these tweets are in anyway representative of his writing he will probably fare better then if we discussed his columns.
2. That’s an easy one, yes Mr Cowley, you are just a sexist caveman.
3. I didn’t get this one, I assume it’s some cultural reference I’m missing because I’m not an american, but based on the first two I’m probably better off for missing it.
It’s an Indiana Jones reference. Short Round is Indiana Jones’ young chinese sidekick in The Temple of Doom.
Yoav,
Short round was the kid from… one of the Indiana Jones movies, at any rate. The character was Asian with a thick accent.
Who wants to bet that the kid sitting next to this tool box didn’t look a damned thing like Short Round? This fucker probably thinks all Asian people look alike.
What kind of professional journalist pluralises with an apostrophe? That alone should be a firable offense.
“Chick pilot. Should I be OK with that or am I just a sexist caveman?”
Questions you already know the answer to you don’t really need to ask, do you?
Can someone please explain to me how fukk-wads like this get traction?
I wrote a parody song a few years back to the tune of “Maybe next time he’ll think before he cheats”. Mine was “That’s the last time he’ll drink before he tweets”. I should dust it off and send this clown a copy.
He covers the Chicago White Sox. Let’s just say, things can get rather profane and homophobic with Sox fans. While most Cub fans will ignore the Sox, it does seem that quite a few Sox fans would rather see the Cubs lose than to see the Sox win a World Series. ref=”A lot of Sox fans love to make hay out of the fact that Wrigley Field, where the Cubs play, is just a few blocks from Boystown. There is a lot more. This is a typical example.
Joe Cowley has been doing this for years and you can see the base he has been playing to. Nothing new for him, just funny to see it go nation and international.
Though I do not go into it much here, (But I am sure that many of the long term people know that I am a fan of the most rotten of teams, the Cubs.) I love baseball. And this is just an other example of why I question the love I have for it.
But there is this, one of the co-owner of the Cubs, Laura Ricketts, is the first openly homosexual owners of a major league team. Though the Ricketts family is a bit problematic; the father of the owners, J. Joseph Ricketts, is a contributes to Tea Party causes.
Pipenta:
I love Urban Dictionary. I mean, sure, there’s a lot of nasty on there, but there’s also a lot of funny, and it’s a great way to look up some piece of unfamiliar slang. Plus, it can be commandeered For The Greater Good, too.
Rick Schauer:
First of all, you can spell out the word “fuck” here. Second, are you actually surprised to see a fuckwad with a mainstream-media soapbox?
Janine, there’s a certain demographic of sports followers across the U.S. who are misogynist, homophobic, and otherwise assholes. See also “Barstool Sports” in the Boston area.
Yes Joe Cowley, yes you are a Sexist Caveman. If you have to ask something like this chances are pretty good the answer is yes.
Correct pronounciation of said beast…
According to the linked articles at the bottom of the page, he’s been doing this kind of crap for a long time now.
I am all too aware of this. Which is why I tend to be embarrassed by the fact that I care about the Cubs and the Bull. (Micheal Jordan just loves to use homophobic insults. But he is hardly alone in that.) I do not want to get involved in trying to justify my fandom.
sigh
Meh, you can love a fandom without endorsing everything said or done in canon (as it were) or by its other fans.
Sorry, didn’t quite get that.
Somebody here speak fuckwad-ese or point-and-grunt-ese ?
I do (what? I learned from my father). It means “Not enough attention is being paid to me right now, and that frightens me.”
@ 22 – it also means “Chicks can’t drive” Only men are able to do real things involving big machines
@8
The linked Deadspin article makes it clear that yes, he does think he’s eye candy. He uses the hashtag #MrHandsomeProblems
I was thinking the same thing about this story. It absolutely baffles me that people think it’s okay to express these views in public. He did realize that he was putting this out on the Internet, right? Where people from all over the world can see it?
Sexist caveman? No. From what we know about Paleolithic and Neolithic people, they were far less sexist and far more gender equal than this.
@1
I didn’t know what “squatch” meant either. It seems to be a term meaning a large, hairy, unattractive woman. Urban dictionary also lists it as an unattractive hairy vagina.
Nah, he just added an extra “n”. Of course, he also should have used the present tense, “have”, not “has”.
Wow, he’s either an incredibly stupid ass or an incredibly drunk ass.
@2: The answer is yes, and yes.
There’s such a thing?
Eskeptrical Engineer:
While individual sentiments might blow my mind in that they mine new depths of stupidity, I am really not surprised anymore by the fact that people find it okay to say, or do, remarkably shit-brained things in public.
Some people really shouldn’t be let out of the house, or let onto the internet, without handlers.
“Squatch”
At first I thought it was just an ignorant shortening of “sasquatch” (the legendary yeti-like anthropoid critter of the Cascade Mountains). Others’ comments mention the connection with “snatch”, a vulgarism for the vulva, so it can be pronounced to be a neologism combining the two, clearly meaning a hairy, ugly vulva.
From a strictly academic point of view, it’s a good and interesting example of one of the ways in which English forms new words.
From nearly any other point of view, it’s demeaning, misogynistic vulgarity.
Janine
My nephew, who is also a Cubs fan, and I were talking about baseball traditions. He ended the conversation with: “The Cubs have a long-standing tradition, losing.”
First class problems?
Can’t help but think of “Hot Problems”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HeE6NWmDE
What’s wrong with a female pilot??
Does he not watch Futurama?
Twitter is funny.. It’s like giving the idiots all megaphones. It’s somewhat perfect in that sense.
Michael Jordan uses gendered insults. Somehow not surprised, yet sad that I now have to burn whatever respect I had left for him. No one ever said I had to respect him any further than I could throw him, but feh. *takes match to respect and watches it burn to cinders*
HandsomeProblems, my eye. His fuckwittery has made as ugly as Jabba the Hut.
A more accurately descriptive name for the thread title would have, of course, been “no class problems”.
Granted, I live and work in a relatively sheltered portion of the world, but even the most stupid sexist comments I hear in real life, even when it’s all males in a bar environment, don’t come close to being more than mildly offensive.
I know (who couldn’t!) how pervasive this sort of ugliness is, but where does this idiocy and self-embarrassment come from? And why?
Or do I not want to know the answers?
(Well, he evidently is a “sportswriter” and therefore can be assumed to be an essentially shitty human being, only one step above being a “conservative” aide or Faux news employee).
I guess that’s the one good thing about twitter, it allows fester-brained goons show themselves up for what they are.
Assuming that should read “vulva”, some would say that “hairy” necessarily overlaps “unattractive”. According to this article at Salon, a lot of young people — particularly, I think, those victimized by what I call “ignorance-only sex education” — know nothing about sexual anatomy except what they learn from Internet porn. One woman says, “Because {my old boyfriend} had only watched porn, he had never seen a naked woman outside of porn, so he just sort of failed to realize they had pubic hair.” The same woman mentions another guy who told her she was mastu
GOD DAMN IT.
… was masturbating wrong because she was touching her clitoris. Women, he thought, got off entirely from vaginal penetration and nothing else, because that’s what happens in porn.
…
People, I think we’ve found the person who actually inspired Zapp Brannigan.
Put him inside a velour uniform, have him drink some champagen and voilà.
“masturbating wrong because she was touching her clitoris. Women, he thought, got off entirely from vaginal penetration and nothing else, because that’s what happens in porn”
He’s (pretending to have) not watched much porn, then. From what I’ve seen (ahem) there should be an entire generation of boys growing up who know far better than my generation did (a) that the clitoris exists (b) where it is, and (c) that it’s a key point to stimulate.