There was a period of like 2 years when I was a kid where chuck Norris jokes were all the rage on the playground and I made an iPhone app that listed them all.
Jokes like “Chuck Norris is able to slam a revolving door.”
Anyway, I “built” this stupid app when I was like 13, copy-pasted like 300 jokes in there and a random one would show every time you tapped the screen.
Chuck Norris’s estate blocked the app from going live. I wish I had printed that rejection out and framed it.
For the first time in over a decade he was suddenly relevant in a way. People remembered he existed, and they were playing off his tough guy image.
And what did he do? Try and shut it down and start suing people. Stupid.
It took him a couple of years to come around to it. If it wasn’t for those jokes would he be remembered anywhere as well? Or would he be a much more obscure celebrity by now?
You underestimate how popular Walker, Texas Ranger was. It wasn't pulling ratings like Seinfeld, ER, or Friends, but it was a solid primetime staple for almost a decade.
I never watched it myself, but the 50+ demo loved it.
Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
We used to watch lot's of chuck Norris films back then here in Nigeria, I can't even remember the titles, but all we knew was chuck Norris alone can defeat a whole country's army. We used to think one American soldier can defeat a whole army.
WTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).
As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
If you like MwC, look up episodes of Unhappily Ever After on Youtube, it's sort of the second-generation MwC. Same sort of humour but taken even further, I can easily re-watch Unhappily but MwC is sort of a once-you've-seen-it...
I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.
Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.
Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content.
The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.
There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.
It was a syndicated show, the goal is to license it to as many companies as possible. It was never a network TV show like Seinfeld, those syndication rights are way more expensive than created for syndication shows like WTR.
Personally I was at a prime age watching a lot of Conan O'Brien's Late Night show and one of his best skits was the Walker Texas Ranger Lever. They would pick the most ridiculous clips from the show and just run them out of context. IIRC Chuck Norris even showed up on the show one time to give him a "stern talking to".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpIEyn9G6_8
The only time I ever saw Walker,Texas Ranger was when I was living in Italy for a few months in the aughts. It was dubbed in Italian. Apparently it was popular there.
> You might be able to argue he was a bigger star than any of them.
I think that's a hard argument to make.
Candace Bergen's career was just as long. Her first movie role was 1966, she was nominated for an Oscar in 1979, and she was on a popular sitcom from 1988 to 1998 that won her five Emmies and attracted national commentary after criticism from the Vice President.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s and to me even then Chuck Norris was a B-movie self-parody joke character. He was not an A-list "action star" in the sense that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or even Van Damme were.
The dude was a badass, 6 time undefeated karate world champion (!!!), created his own variant of karate mixed with korean martial arts, was a good friend with Bruce Lee and that scene in Colloseum - probably the coolest thing I saw as a kid growing up behind iron curtain... not many actors can have such a resume on top of their acting career.
Those who cared would/will know him regardless. But obviously those people would be relatively few and far apart.
An immense amount of time, dedication and talent must have went into all those achievements. This requires mastery of body and mind at an exceptional level. Putting aside all jokes and acting roles, the martials arts is where he earned my full respect and that will also stick in my memory about him.
"World champion" is an embellishment, but he was a strong point fighter within North America. His six championships were for a tournament that crowned self-titled "Professional [weight class] Karate Champions", with the "World" embellishment added later. To be fair, people from other countries did occasionally appear at these tournaments, but there weren't Japanese fighters there, and Japan dominates the gold medal count for the WKF World Karate Championship that started in 1970.
That is hands down one of my ATF scenes in any movie. Expendables 2 was IMO just about the most "fun" movie I've ever seen as well. It wasn't great cinema, or a specific classic.. but it was fun. I have similar feelings about Gremlins 2 as well. We need more fun movies, but too many people seem to have not been issued a sense of humor these days.
Found out about his passing from my teenage kids. They knew him as some legendary tough guy based solely on the jokes, but had no idea who he actually was. To be fair, looking at some other comments here about his political and personal leanings, I didn't know who he actually was either.
> Isn't that an obligation when you own a trademark? That you sue people, or else you may lose the trademark?
It's not quite as cut and dry as you suggest. Besides, in which way was a trademark being violated? Last I knew merely talking about and referencing a celebrity by name was not a trademark violation.
Is it trademark, or IP. If someone made a list of Mickey Mouse jokes, Disney's law department will send them a letter too. Chuck Norris is a person/name but also a persona.
His proximity to Bruce Lee earned him more or less permanent kung fu cinema fame. Walker,Texas Ranger and other work he did definitely boosted it, but the memes clinched it.
>> If it wasn’t for those jokes would he be remembered anywhere as well?
You’re assuming the jokes make people dive deeper. In reality I know the jokes and didn’t have a clue who he was and never cared enough to find out. The reality is the probably didn’t make much of a difference to how well he or his work was actually known.
The Ruby gem "Faker" is used for generating fake data for testing, like legit-looking names, emails, phone numbers, lorum ipsum text, etc. About 10 years ago I was working on a messaging app, and wanted some real messages to see in the UI while I was developing it. One of the best engineering decisions I've made in my career was to pick the Chuck Norris Facts generator for the messages, so every time I re-seeded my local db or looked at a review app on staging, I was greeted by two fake people sending a half-dozen Chuck Norris facts to each other.
If you're curious, maybe you can look into Chuck's lawsuit against Penguin's book of Chuck Norris facts. He would eventually "co-author" his own book. The obvious guess here is trademark infringement (over use of Chuck's name/likeness) and/or copyright (if some of these facts were lifted from his book).
For better or worse, in the US you can pretty much sue anyone for anything. A court certainly requires more evidence to declare liability than Apple would to remove an app.
As far as copywriting facts, are you really under the impression that Chuck Norris is the only man who can factually slam a revolving door? :)
> Chuck Norris’s estate blocked the app from going live. I wish I had printed that rejection out and framed it.
Seeing the youthful spirit run headfirst into the corprocracy of locked down devices and app stores is depressing. Twenty years ago you would have made a webapp or flash animation, most likely avoided scrutiny and not even been shaken down. Thirty years ago you would have made a QBasic program and floppy/email/dcc it to your friends, completely illegible to the corprocracy. But these days simply trying to publish through the common channels, and you're immediately subject to restrictions made for businesses.
I did something similar when Microsoft gave away Windows Phones for every app published on the app store. I used the Chuck Norris API though. The one I used is sadly no longer available (I think it was called CNDB). But there's a new one: https://api.chucknorris.io
In India, we have Rajni (Rajnikanth) jokes that keep increasing in number and are still pretty popular...
I remember reading 'The Vinci Code' in college which was very popular those days and getting a SMS from a friend almost the same day, "Rajnikanth gave Monalisa that smile!".
Having been near the epicenter, I recall that Vin Diesel jokes (same format) pre-dated Chuck Norris ones. I always found it a shame that the Chuck Norris ones caught on; Vin Diesel is, imo, a better role model.
The Vin Diesel jokes I remember had an absurd quality to them beyond "He's really tough." One I recall fondly was "Vin Diesel writes Donkey Kong Fan Fiction."
I think that comparison is quite unfair to Teddy, and overly flattering to Chuck Norris.
Historian, sheriff, war hero, governor, explorer, and a successful President who reshaped America largely for the better. While Roosevelt was human, he led a life that very few have ever matched.
It is funny because you usually think of Death as something inevitable and people just accept it but then ... some of these guys put up a fight. Mega-LMAO!
I don’t age. I level up.
I’m 86 today! Nothing like some playful action on a sunny day to make you feel young. I’m grateful for another year, good health and the chance to keep doing what I love. Thank you all for being the best fans in the world. Your support through the years has meant more to me than you’ll ever know.
God Bless,
Chuck Norris
I can only assume Chuck has decided to relieve the grim reaper of his duties, leaving us all here to meet our own end not with a scythe but a roundhouse kick.
If you're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_a_Velvet_Cloak - note that it was written a couple decades after the prior books of the series, for a different publisher, to a different length. Those would be yellow flags with almost any author.
While normally making jokes after a person's death would be socially questionable, in this case Chuck Norris himself loved the Chuck Norris jokes. For me at least, a good sense of humor is maybe the most endearing personality trait. RIP
Fundamentally, I'd argue that very little should ever be unreasonable or out of bounds to make jokes about; what is important is that it's good humour.
> Fundamentally, I'd argue that very little should ever be unreasonable or out of bounds to make jokes about; what is important is that it's good humour.
On a personal level, I couldn't agree more. I do hope that culturally we get to that point at some time :-)
I mean, jokes are made to uplift, intent in joking is important and punching up is preferable to punching down, this being said this didn't apply to chuck Norris that would have already got to the punchline without throwing a single fist.
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days. — from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
Jokes aside, this octogenarian was living his golden years enviably. He was summiting peaks last fall, doing 500 lb barbell curls, and still sparring in his birthday video just 10 days ago. We’ve all gotta go sometime, but the way Chuck Norris went out was the way I’d want to go—able to do it all right up until the end. He was a lot of folks’ childhood hero, but that title is freshly renewed in my eyes. I have new inspiration in my fitness endeavors going forward.
He forgot to actually curl it. Like someone else said, the weights are almost certainly not actually 500lbs. Even elite bodybuilders and strongmen in their prime don't come close to curling 500lbs, let alone an old man.
Looking at the video, if it was legitimate, it would be 585lbs (6 45lb plates on each side plus a 45lb bar), which is even less believable.
From Reddit: "I heard that the opening 27 minutes of Saving Private Ryan were loosely based on a game of dodgeball played by Chuck Norris in 2nd grade." ;-)
I had no idea he was in his 80s (older than my parents would be), and that he did Walker, Texas Ranger when he was in his 50s. The final episodes aired when he was 61! That's nuts.
Not a fan of him in real life (based on how he portrayed himself publicly), but I do find his level of physical fitness even more impressive back in the 1990s (and even up until his death), given his age.
I remember trade chat (/2) in wow on the Medivh server would often turn into Chuck Norris jokes. There were always about how bad ass Chuck was. How tough and impossibly manly.
One of my favorites.
Chuck Norris jumped into a lake. Chuck Norris didn't get wet. The lake got Chucked.
Trade chat (like /b/) was never great, but one of the first WoW addons I developed was designed to filter out garbage like this, and make idling with your guildies in Ironforge tolerable.
It's funny for a while, in measured amounts, and then it becomes tiresome.
17 years ago we launched the first "Chuck Norris Facts" app for Android (March 2009). It was a big success until end of 2010 when Chuck Norris sent his lawyers after us to get the app removed from the Android market. Chuck Norris won, we took the app down
So I guess Chuck Norris has now keys for the Pearly Gates and is the one who gets to pick the heavenly club members. I'm sure roundhouse kicks are somehow part of the process.
He was a hero in tech and science as well. I recall during my PhD studies, we always create new memes on our field that Chuck can finish things in no time. In loving memory of Chuck Norris.
Oh wow, coincidentally I watched a Chuck Norris film recently with my (90 year old) grandmother, which resulted in me diving down a bunch of Chuck Norris memes for the first time in more than a decade.
Chuck Norris (and Michael Landon) were golden age role models for young men. Strong but thoughtful, firm but compassionate, and deeply principled but also practical. Yes, these were acting roles but they picked those roles for a reason. Rest in peace, Chuck.
I am not a scholar in general, or of Chuck Norris specifically. I only have the impressions I have from the pop culture I've consumed. Like most people. And for us, Norris represents something wholesome.
For others, those who've read something, or know more, or think they know more, that symbol, that myth, has been ruined. The illusion pierced, the ugly reality revealed. They then look with pity, disdain and contempt at those who still admire the person. Or worse, they make the bad faith argument that to admire him is in fact to embrace those ruinous facts of which most are still ignorant.
Frankly, I think what you're doing is a farce. You're showing the world how smart you are and how dumb everyone else is. Ultimately you're trying to prove how dumb it is to believe in anyone or anything. If you look closely enough you'll find dirt on anyone. There is a contradiction: you claim a moral stance, but your "moral" position degrades the very idea of role models, heroism, and admiration itself. With enough scrutiny, admiration tends to zero.
The reality of the person is irrelevant. What matters is what they mean, what they symbolize, and the kind of archetype they represent. This is of course not true universally; some mythological people are alive, powerful, and dangerous and we cannot afford such kayfabe. But some are harmless and imply no endorsement of their misdeeds. Especially for actors, storytellers, artists, scientists and perhaps a few others we not only CAN afford it, we SHOULD do it, because these role models (or symbols of role models) are what make up the beating heart of a coherent culture.
I choose to admire Chuck Norris, Michael Jackson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Gahndi, Isaac Asimov, even if some deeds of theirs were wicked. I prefer to go through life admiring symbols of people even knowing that these are constructs. To do otherwise is to recognize the futility of admiration, and I choose not to live that way.
That's a lot of words to say "I prefer to ignore the evil that men do if I find them entertaining enough, and I think it's silly that anyone does otherwise."
The Chuck Norris you admire is a figment of your imagination. He was a product created by capitalism. He never actually fought Bruce Lee. He was never really a Texas Ranger. He was never in the real Delta Force. Putting him on the same cultural level as actual leaders who at least fought for something in the real world is risible. Holding such deep admiration for the things he pretended to do that you feel compelled to insult someone's character and intelligence for judging him as a human being is a far less than admirable moral stance.
The reality of the person is not irrelevant, the reality of the person is all that matters at the end of the day.
Reading this thread has definitely sheared off a few of my brain cells seeing people so collectively deluded about Chuck Norris. As you said he was a totality of capitalism, a product wrapped in human skin. He's only truly notable for the jokes people made (myself included) at the dawn of the early internet. As a person, what he actually accomplished is nothing at best and at worst actively damaging to multiple groups that didn't deserve the heat.
The only good thing out of this mess is that the universe felt cosmically aligned to have his death occur on the same day as Mr. Rogers birthday, someone who genuinely did fight for a better world.
The Internet has a fairly long memory and a lot of research on topics like this, and it does not agree that Hillary ever tried such a thing. Ample evidence that GOP politicians, including Trump, tried to claim she did. And late in the primary season a few of her supporters made some sounds like that. But nobody has ever found any shred of evidence her campaign made any accusations, or started any rumors.
Whatever the reason, it wasn't because his characters were "openly maga and a homophobe and a transphobe," because they weren't. Bruce Lee movies and Texas Ranger didn't address those issues at all.
And in spite of his flaws, it's possible that he had some good qualities as well, or at least aspired to them. So maybe those other qualities were what he looked for in the characters he played.
Doesn't seem like he aspired all that hard, since instead of expressing empathy for people who weren't like him, he continued to be a bigot in nearly every aspect. But sure, if you were a white cis straight guy I'm sure he was perfectly kind.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become a Faceboot psychosis villain. It's basically the politics version of "Why is everything so cold?"
I think you forget that Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and put in the policy of “Don’t ask don’t tell” and Obama supported it originally.
Of course they both had a change of heart- was it true change or they saw the direction of the political winds? Who knows?
I don’t know Chuck Norris’s views on LGBT. But if he was a self proclaimed “born again Christian” and a rabid Trump supporter, I can only guess. But I no more expect people who were insulted by what he said (which I personally don’t know) to give him more grace or reverence than I do is a Black man who couldn’t give two shits about a dead racist podcaster.
Other people no more need to “contextualize” homophobia than I feel a need to “contextualize” the racism of a dead podcaster.
DADT was a significant improvement over the status quo of "we ask, you tell, and then you get dishonorably discharged". Considering it evidence of homophobia is revisionism. Did it go far enough? No. Was it a good step towards where we wanted to go? Yes.
> It passed both houses of Congress by large, veto-proof majorities. Support was bipartisan, though about a third of the Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate opposed it. Clinton criticized DOMA as "divisive and unnecessary".
Again he still signed it. It’s like Susan Collins who always has “serious misgivings” about things that her fellow Republicans do and then votes the party line anyway trying to stay in her party’s good graces while at the same time not pissing off her liberal constituents
It was gonna be law either way; signing it removed a political weapon from the folks pushing its passage. Arguing this is something Clinton did to gay people is counterfactual.
That’s a really poor excuse to sign on to something that you disagree with. I would not sign a petition for making the “Confederacy Day” law if I lived in Mississippi just because it would become law anyway. You have to stand for something.
Would you think it was okay if Tim Scott signed such a law just so his fellow Republicans couldn’t hold it against him in the primary? Well actually I wouldn’t be surprised if he did…
> I don’t get to praise Chuck Norris because of his anti-racism stances but then dismiss his stances against non straight people.
Sure, but I think it's fair to praise people when they do good things, and criticize them for the bad that they do. That's true fir Chuck Norris, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama... anyone.
Totally agree, though, that it's bullshit to think that having positive views on some issues wipes away the bad.
My charitable interpretation is that it was political winds, but possibly not in the way you're implying.
I do believe that Obama was 100% cool with gay marriage, but believed it was politically foolhardy to admit that publicly and in policy positions, but was able to advocate for his true feelings once the political climate changed. Still not awesome, but understandable from an electoral perspective.
I'm not really sure about Clinton. I would guess he's personally in favor of gay marriage and gays in the military today, but hard to say what his views might have been in the 90s (as I was a teenager at the time who wasn't all that interested in politics).
Also on supposedly-liberal people doing homophobic things: let's also not forget that California voters banned gay marriage statewide in 2008. 2008! And this was a ballot measure where all voters got a say, not something passed by the legislature.
Half the country didn't vote for Trump. Not quite 2/3rds of the voting eligible people in the country voted to begin with, and not even half of those people voted for Trump.
Less than 1/3rd of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Not all people that voted for Trump consider themselves Republicans, much less MAGA, when MAGA is only 50-60% of Republicans.
So in reality less than 1/6th of the US voting-eligible population is MAGA. Not half.
And that was at the election - roughly 20% of Trump voters now openly profess regret in voting for him, though I don't think we have data breaking that down as self-proclaimed MAGA vs. otherwise. I suspect if you were not self-proclaimed MAGA you're more likely to be open to regret, but I'm sure at least some of them were MAGA.
Unless poll after poll is contacting and registering answers from 100% of people in the country, that's only 35-40% of the people who answered the poll, which is a much, much smaller number.
None of that changes the fact that the statement that half the country is MAGA because half the country voted for Trump is untrue.
Significantly less than half the country voted for Trump. This is objective fact.
Significantly less than 100% of Trump voters identify as MAGA. This is objective fact.
Approving of Trump as President is also not the same thing as being MAGA, though the overlap is quite likely reasonably high at this point.
You can make an argument that there are more MAGA people than I estimated, but the argument I was referring to was basing it all off of voters for the 2024 election. If you want to make a different argument, we can look at it on its merits.
I gave an analogy earlier that if you have 10 friends and asked them where they wanted to eat dinner and six said let’s get Italian and the other 4 said “Let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, you still have a shitty friend group.
If 40% of the country still supports everything that’s going on, that tells you a lot about this country. Especially seeing that because of the 2 Senators per state regardless of population, gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college, they have outsized influence on the government.
Exactly how can you approve of what Trump is doing and not be MAGA?
A surprising amount of people are single issue voters and will vote for and support someone that supports that single issue. They might not care at all about the entire rest of the issues at all as long as their single issue is fine, and a lot of those single issues, like guns, long predate maga or the tea party.
I'm not saying that makes them good people, I'm just saying I don't think it's the same thing as maga.
2 senators per state isn't really the issue, but the cap on the house is. The senate was built to be population independent, and the house was built specifically to be population dependent, where yes if you had more people you had more power. Then they... voted to cap it, because it was going to give too much power to states with more people. Dumb. EV also tied to the house, so uncapping it unfucks a lot of that, too.
The Senate though also decided the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thats the major issue - especially the Supreme Court.
To your other point, I’ve met some Bush/Romney type Republicans who hold their nose and voted for Trump because the Democrats did go to far on social issues and I say that as a Black guy.
When I was at BigTech in 2020 I thought all of the videos we had to watch on “micro aggressions”, continue announcements on “ally programs”, “Latinx” instead of Latino/Latina (that every single Latino person I spoke to thought was ridiculous), the “how do we feel” meetings about Floyd, and the kind of liberals I met when I flew out to Seattle and other west coast offices (I worked remotely the entire time) were just weird. Not to mention being chastised if you didn’t put your preferred pronouns under your name.
Part of the problem is we changed the senate selections to votes. Originally state legislature picked their senators. That's an amendment that I think is a mistake and should be reverted.
The different chambers are supposed to represent different interests and instead we've made both halves of congress effectively the same thing.
There's deeper rot with the system besides these things - like the apparent lack of safeguards against the executive branch just... ignoring everything, including sometimes even the supreme court... but I don't think the framer's original intentions for the house and senate are fundamentally incorrect.
How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.
You're looking at how things are now with a situation totally fucked from the things being set up to be totally fucked for decades.
The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a fundamental disconnect between how they are selected, how that power balance lies, and what their intended purpose is.
The House is supposed to represent the people. That's the job. Being answerable to their constituents makes sense. The Senate is supposed to represent the States - including as long-lasting entities that will exist before and after the current constituents. The legislature selected them because they were supposed to be more knowledgeable about the issues pertaining to the state, etc. They were to be tasked with doing the necessary thing and not necessarily the popular thing - people can always vote out the state legislature if the senators truly are hated, but having some insulation from the ever changing whims of the general public was a feature.
A lot of the rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric around the electoral college - preventing humans, which can be very dumb en masse, from doing dumb things. That has obviously not been the case, since unfaithful electors just haven't been a thing in quantities that have mattered, but I would argue that when we have found that things didn't work the way the founders intended, the correct option would generally be to make them work the way the founders intended and then only move away from that if we find that it doesn't work. Instead, we've frequently moved away from those things even when they were working.
Gerrymandering is an issue that doesn't have to exist either - it already doesn't in some states, and there's no reason it couldn't be implemented in all of them in this scenario where we're just wholesale changing how the government works.
You’ll have to forgive me as a Black guy whose still living parents grew up in the segregated South and seeing that four of the southern states still consider “Confederacy Memorial Day” a state holiday and two others combine “Confederacy Day” with MLK day for not trusting the good will of the state governments - especially with gerrymandering.
If enough people in any state are bad actors then no solution under democracy is going to resolve the issue without moving away from a system that invests so much power in the states.
But then if enough people in the overall country are bad actors you're back to square one.
I don't have any proposals on how to fix some people just deciding they want to be shitty people. But all of this discussion involves a significant amount of hand waving solutions into place - discussions on getting them implemented, the likelihood of that happening, etc., are all separate and not anything we've talked about from any of the positions.
I am only arguing that state legislatures can gerrymander districts that give them more votes than the population voted for. But it is really hard to gerrymander an entire state and split it up so two Senators can win of their preferred party.
Would GA have two Democratic Senators with a Republican control state government? On the other hand would Susan Collins be a Senator from Maine?
Given the choice of trusting the people of Mississippi to do the right thing and the electorate of the US to do the right thing. The entire US has been more on the side of the angels than the southern states - yes that’s a very low bar.
It's easier (or as easy) to change gerrymandering as it is to change the senate back to it's intended purpose. If you want to argue that an amendment to make gerrymandering unconstitutional should be a prerequisite to returning to state legislatures selecting senators, I'm fine with that - because it's also a much more likely amendment to pass. A big chunk of Americans dislike gerrymandering. Only a tiny fraction of Americans know or care about the different chambers of Congress being intended to serve very different purposes.
Well he was against gay marriage and against the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay kids.
If I have 10 friends and ask them all where they want to eat for dinner and 6 said let’s go to this nice Italian spot and the other 4 said “let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, that still means I have a shitty friend group.
It's more like 3 say "let's get Italian", 3 say "let's get Mexican", 3 say "I'm not hungry", and 1 says "let's kill Ralph, and eat him seasoned with Italian spices". Then the first 3 say "great idea!".
I'm not american but I see technically nothing wrong with MAGA for me. it doesn't mean you must be transphobe or homophobe etc. but what people do under MAGA is another thing. sometimes it feels like for them it means "run america into the ground" or "get rid of all the best about america". GRABA if you like
Being maga is diametrically opposed to supporting your country, as we've seen in particular this time around, but was also clearly visible in 2016-2020.
Rampant abuse of the legal system to target individuals, despite claiming (without evidence) that that was that the Democrats did against them
Total disregard for the constitution
Threats towards the judiciary
A million other things that I can list - but I'm sure you've heard them all and just don't care, so there's probably not much use in me continuing.
The entire point of MAGA is that they see “their country” as one where uppity negroes like Obama should have known his place, it’s DEI whenever a minority has a position of influence and power yet they keep lowering the standards for both ICE and the DOJ and RFK JR with no medical knowledge is the head of HHS.
America won’t be “great” until minorities, non Christians and non straight people know their role.
To believe in "Make America Great Again" you have to believe that America is not great, and this implies you are ashamed of your country. Shame is built in to MAGA.
Those points are fine, but not the root of what makes MAGA shameful. You can go about having that opinion and take actions towards it without being racist, anti-LGBT, generally hateful, and backing an administration that has been proven time and time again to be deceitful in every facet and tuned to the interest of the wealthiest.
You have a very narrow and rose colored view of what maga is. To us living in the US, maga stands for pedophilia, misogyny, racism, fascism, homophobia, transphobia, corroption and much more.
It absolutely has nothing to do with putting america first, it has everything to do with putting trump first. Im afraid you have made the mistake of listening to a politicians words instead of watching his actions. Every word from his mouth is a lie.
I know he's a liar. He is probably mentally ill and definitely not very bright. But I was not talking about Donald Trump. I was talking about the principle of wanting to make one's country "great."
> To us living in the US maga stands for...
This is not true. The GOP won the popular vote, centrists see some advantages in MAGA, and even some Democrats are against MAGA without going to the extreme of painting them all as pedophiles and corrupt.
Just out of curiosity, could you (or anyone else) give a couple of examples of what you would consider "great role models for real men"? Or "good role models for well-adapted men", if you'd rather use less inflammatory language.
I think Cavill has a fair point - I generally support MeToo, think it was very important, but I can understand how being a fairly big name in Hollywood can result in hesitation around pursuing women. Especially now that he's got a lot of power for a whole franchise, with the Warhammer 40k stuff.
Steve Irwin I don't think what he did was a particularly big deal with the kid.
I don't really like celebrities as role models though. They have to have public personas as a matter of course. I would instead try to point to specific behaviors from real people. I also don't think people have to be perfect. But I do think there are some deal breakers that would mean I would never point my kids towards them as a role model. Racism and homophobia are among those things. I think believing that whole classifications of people are lesser is disqualifying.
Oh I think all of those guys have fair points. I was trying to illustrate how you could make a hero or a villain out of anybody if you cherry pick incidents, decisions or opinions.
Just like the parent comment was trying to do with Chuck Norris. (Which was probably way worse than any of these examples)
Ironically, the very concept of a “real man” is founded on the idea that a man should be defined by stereotypes rather than by sex, which puts manosphere enthusiasts and gender enthusiasts in closer epistemological proximity than either would care to admit.
I meant male role models for men (I'm sure you could find one). Not every man aspires to be the mother of 7 and go to the gym. (Because: remember that gyms are classist by design. [1])
But maybe lets talk about how Amy got called out by The Human Rights Campaign and 185 LGBTQ organizations for her "disturbingly anti-LGBTQ past writings, rhetoric and association with extremist groups." [2]
Or how about when The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights described her record as "fundamentally cruel," arguing she frequently sides with corporations over individuals and shows hostility toward established precedents like the Affordable Care Act.
At least Chuck Norris had no real impact on policy with his bigotry.
Why does a role model for a man have to be a man? Besides, she's an exceptionally good role model even for traditionalist views of what makes a man, by virtue of being so accomplished in her career and still making time for family and health. Her record poses the question: what's your excuse? Men who are all-in on hyperfocus should wither before her.
Sure, there are people that hate her. Her own patron, our Dear Leader, probably hates her when she rules against his interests. All the more reason to respect her.
In this context, a "real man" is probably someone who conforms to the traditional role of a male (physically strong, emotionally restrained, a provider and protector of women, children, and weaker men, etc.).
Of course, "real men" can be just the opposite, depending on who you ask. So, it's really a subjective issue.
I don't think every man should be like that, but I also don't think any of those qualities are bad. In fact, I think they're pretty admirable.
Do you have issues with the fact that some men conform to that type?
Being physically strong is a good thing, and regular resistance training is a huge gap for overall health for quite a lot of people today - men and women.
Being able to provide for someone is an admirable quality, man or woman
Same for being able to protect someone.
I don't think being emotionally restrained is a good thing - and I say this as someone who was raised to be emotionally restrained. I've had to specifically work as an adult to be less emotionally restrained. I think there's a very wide gap between being emotionally restrained and letting emotions rule over you.
Imagine having a lot of people you once admired and looked up to as role models, from actors all the way to even your parents, suddenly all within a decade or so take their masks off and reveal that they are actually villains.
I don’t think this is about nit picking some small detail that causes them to fail a quality/belief checklist. It’s not like finding out your hero picks his nose or doesn’t like chocolate ice cream. When someone goes mask-off as MAGA, they are revealing fundamental core beliefs and values that totally flip the kind of person you might have thought they were.
I have friends and family who I never thought had a hateful, cruel, or belligerent bone in their bodies, suddenly start acting like totally different people, in the span of a few years. This isn’t me holding them to some purity checklist!
It's an object lesson on how certain historical things happened. We go, oh no how could those people have all been inhuman monsters? If only we understood what made them like that.
Agreed. Additionally, when someone says something latently bigoted or hateful, it's easy to just let it slide because we all have our failings and societal progress is slow. Whereas maggotry is about openly embracing those failings, taking on additional types of failings from other people, and then socially validating it all as a purported political movement. But the only real thing tying it together is frustration with the world culminating in lashing out, which is why when they get into power there are no actual constructive policies in any political framework [0]. (apart from lining the preachers' pockets of course, and now apparently a holy war)
nit: I wouldn't call it "mask off" though, as if it's been there the whole time. I'd say it's more like there is tiny a kernel of that (and let's be honest, who doesn't have this in some form or another?), combined with a lack of willpower and critical thinking, that causes them into give in to the siren song of easy answers from mass-personalized propaganda.
[0] ancap and religious fundamentalism are the only frameworks I've been able to find that fit the maggot movement, and they're not particularly constructive.
Fred Rogers was the same kind, thoughtful person in everyday life as he was when he acted on his show. You can watch the congressional tapes of him testifying on increased funding to PBS and also testifying on not making VCRs illegal.
That's a little bit of a false dichotomy, though. I agree that it would be rare, even impossible, to find people who match every quality I imagined they had.
But some of those failings are forgivable, others are not.
Getting genuinely confused about pronouns sometimes: forgivable.
Being a loud, public MAGA homophobe transphobe: not forgivable.
I stopped being a Chuck Norris fan when I learned he was a frequent contributor to WorldNetDaily, that he actively campaigned against gay marriage, and that he advocated for the theory that Obama was not born in America and saying shit like 'Electing Obama will plunge America into a thousand years of darkness.'
Him liking Trump was a symptom of his regressive, homophobic, and racist beliefs.
I hear you and it is sad Norris had the views he did.
BUT, I was in karate as a kid in the prime of his sponsorship of tournaments, and he was indeed a role model then. He was a good guy in that field, promoting martial arts and the discipline, fitness and respect that goes along with it. I can vouch that having him promote hard work, training and respect in martial arts at age 10 did not turn me into a Christian nationalist.
I love that both my post truthfully describing Chuck Norris’s abhorrent views and the reply expressing regret that my post was flagged have now both been flagged. Stay classy, HN.
Remember the good ol' days when people just didn't discuss politics or religion out of decency? There was a reason for that, both bring out the worst in people.
Suddenly I'm reminded of the decent (grown) people who yelled in six year-old Ruby Bridges' face when she was merely attending elementary school. So if that was 1960, I'm just wondering when those good ol' days you're referring to where.
That’s not what whataboutism is; it requires the “what about when” to be followed by a change of topic, to distract the other party from the original topic.
The problem is that living life is inherently political. Being able to ignore politics, not having to feel the need to discuss them, is a sign that you are inherently better off than a good chunk of this country.
A lot of people spend most of their waking hours having to deal with or at least keep in mind the fall out from regressive politics. Asking people to not discuss politics is like asking someone living in fear for their safety to not try and improve said safety. You're asking to not have to be bothered by something that annoys you to talk about in exchange for someone not being able to advocate for their life and livelihood.
I agree with the sentiment. My point was more people used to have a common understanding that there was a time and place for political (and religious) discussion - and that those beliefs were deeply personal, shaped largely by experience, and not meant to be held against one another in the broader judgement of their character.
Somewhere along the way we lost that idea, not all cultural changes are for the better.
I see, so from this reply I gather that your parent post was not “just an expression” as you claimed elsewhere, and you just got snippy when someone pushed back against your obviously out-of-touch assertion of fact.
Do you honestly think that falsely calling out an (informal) fallacy counts as “intellectual sparring,” whatever the fuck that is? What is wrong with you?
For a simple political disagreement? Absolutely; I completely agree. But to believe that a certain class of people shouldn’t exist is not a run of the mill political belief, and treating it that way normalizes the behavior and contributes to the problem.
Not sure why you're downvoted. The disagreement was not on tax policy or where to build what. I don't understand why both this and "some people shouldn't exist" are both labeled with the same word "political".
Despite how much they would have you believe it, human rights are not a political issue. Politics are used to expand practiced rights (or abused to reduce them), just like politics are involved with providing you access to water.
Sorry you don’t get to say “Well this person doesn’t think I have the right to exist and be respected as a person. But I’m sure glad he saved a puppy once.”
Total Gym XLS has a 1-1.25" carriage bar for adding weight. 5gal bucket weights are the correct diameter to leave a gap between the weights and the floor.
My mother told me, "Chuck Norris passed today at 86" and my mind immediately went to, "I would never expect him to pass anyone on the sidewalk at any slower speed."
I even remember the times he was not vintage yet, but the real thing. Maybe even watched his famous fight scene with Bruce Lee on the cheap cinemas back in the day. Good days. RIP .
The thing about Norris is that this isn't just generic policy stuff. I think pretty much all politics has impact on People and therefor matters, but you can abstract a whole lot away on a lot of policies in economics, etc. I think empathetic and caring human beings can disagree on many things.
But racism and homophobia aren't areas where I think empathetic and caring people can disagree, and I don't think those should be legitimatized by calling them political. He wanted to strip rights from gay people and propped up all sorts of racist rhetoric and birtherism against Obama. That's not political. That's being a shitty person.
Not even every important influential person in tech gets the black bar. You think an actor who is mostly known for low-effort internet memes and pretending to be a cowboy on tv deserves it?
>He was a typical pro-gun anti-abortion homophobic and racist MAGA Christian conservative.
Sure, but let's be real: people here are hardly mourning the man himself, so much as a few ideas of him from media they loved, and the cultural impact of Chuck Norris memes from their childhood and such.
He's not around anymore to bolster any hateful messages. Let people have a moment of nostalgia for memories watching him roundhouse kick bad guys with their grandma, or dumb Chuck Norris memes on the playground. That's what people remember.
> He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point.
In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on this planet to make mistakes and have views that some other people will dislike. If these are the worst things we can accuse him of, while acknowledging all his charitable work, I'd say he fared OK compared to many other role models we have.
This is a tough thing. I do believe in moral relativism to a large extent, but I also think there are some things that are really just objectively morally and ethically "right" or "wrong".
Hating on LGBT folks and trying to restrict their rights is one of those things that is wrong no matter how you dice it. People who believe otherwise are wrong, full stop.
So it's not really so much about people thinking someone else's views are awful. It's about whether or not those views truly are awful. And I feel very safe in saying that if someone thinks my support of LGBT folks is pretty awful, they're in the wrong, not me. And I'm in the right to think their hateful views are awful.
(Yes, I realize how arrogant that sounds, but I have to stand by it.)
I think this is something that transcends politics or culture wars or anything like that. Having these sorts of hateful views are actively harmful to humanity's and society's future. That doesn't mean I think we should censor people (rampant censorship is also actively harmful to our future), but it does mean we need to somehow fix people and shift the culture toward one that lets people live how they want in cases like this where doing so doesn't actually hurt anyone else. I have no idea how to accomplish this, though.
There's disagreement then there's being an outspoken supporter of systematically trying to strip rights away from others because of your religious beliefs. It's much deeper than having differing views on fiscal policy.
Liars according to who? Who gets to say what's a lie? This would still be just as pointless of an argument IMO... I think parent commenter is saying that you simply can't play the same game they are because you look identical to them from the outside; you're both saying the same thing.
Left says you're trying to take rights away... Right says you're trying to take rights away.
This does nothing to educate anyone or try to find a mutually agreeable solution... your arguments carry no more weight than theirs do. You both think you're "right" and the other is "wrong".
Those are pretty wild accusations from someone who doesn't know me or my beliefs. I definitely have not been calling for those things, especially not through the lens of religion.
Everything I said here in regards to his beliefs can be easily verified. It's crazy to me to respond "well you're doing the same to them" as a retort. I'm not?
I'm fine with people disagreeing with me. I'm not fine when that disagreement results in campaigning for legally restricting the rights of others. There's a huge difference.
If every racist, homophobe, and transphobe (and others) would stop trying to enshrine their views into law, I'd have much less of a problem with them. I wouldn't want to hang out with them, but I could safely ignore and not care one bit about their views.
Disagree? I think it's safe to say that someone who campaigned to ban same sex marriage is more than just disagreeing. He's trying to ruin millions of lives.
He was an Obama birther conspiracist.
He thought gays shouldn't be allowed to join Boy Scouts.
He was a big supporter of Netanyahu.
This aren't things that are even remotely in the same ballpark as disagreement. If someone is using their celebrity status to cause harm to millions or tens of millions, I think we can say a few unkind words about them when they go.
And Chuck Norris was brought up to believe that gay people are the devil. I was conditioned to not take my parents traditions as gospel. The taboo against speaking ill of the recently deceased is not universal as we saw after Khamenei's death, and it is possible to debate whether we should discuss the failings of the recently deceased dispassionately, as newspaper obituaries usually do, and whether the impact on society of those critiques is net negative or not. There is the famous case of a premature unflattering obituary of Alfred Nobel upon the death of his brother possibly inspiring Nobel to think about his legacy, for example.
All this to say that I don't think it's necessarily problematic for you to mention that he had and shared some pretty awful views.
There are good people whose politics I disagree with. If you are using your celebrity status to cause harm to millions on the international stage, systematically attempting to strip their rights, I think it's fair to say they weren't a good person.
> Does being a good person also mean agreeing with your politics?
Can we stop framing human rights as "politics"? People hating on others because they don't like that they're gay or trans or black or brown... that's just people being fundamentally awful people, and has nothing to do with politics.
The fact that they are then taking their awfulness and engaging politically to enshrine their awful views into law just adds another dimension to it.
I said this in another comment: if these people with awful views would stop trying to make those awful views laws, then I'd have much less of a problem with them; I could at least just ignore them.
> Is there one way to be a good person?
What a useless, one-dimensional take on the problem.
That's the thing: you can be a perfectly pleasant person to interact with, and people can genuinely enjoy interacting with you.
But then you can start actively using your celebrity status to advocate for legally restricting the rights of people you don't like. That's the real problem, and that's why I wouldn't want to look at people like Chuck Norris as role models.
Being polite doesn't make you a good person. It just makes you tolerable, or even pleasant, in personal interactions.
Sure, we can talk about things like your dad's experience. But there's more to it than that.
> Or was it when he said that a Black president would bring "1000 years of darkness"?
I looked this one up. It's true. He's been going out of his way to be a political firebrand and claiming milquetoast Democrats are Satan for decades. It wasn't some offhand comment when cornered on stage. He's pushed white christian nationalism hard for quite some time.
Sad, because it was so unnecessary, divisive, and crazy--a black mark on his legacy.
But it's not true the way GP phrased it. Norris did not say if a black man was elected then there would be 1000 years of darkness, he said it about a specific man who happens to be black. It's silly, but unless you're claiming that black politicians get special exemptions, his race is immaterial to this quote.
That's true. These days it seems the ideal conservative man is more like a caveman eating steak off the bone versus a thoughtful caring Atticus Finch type.
I would welcome collective responsibility only if it means collectively acknowledging the harm that was done, listening to those who were harmed, and committing to repair, not just punishing those in power. Restorative justice asks each of us to examine how we contributed to or normalized the conditions that allowed this harm, and then to take concrete, shared steps to repair relationships, redistribute power, and change the structures that made the reckoning necessary in the first place.
Unlike penal justice, restorative justice is idempotent and we shouldn't fear its application.
So many commenters here are, or choose to be, completely obvlivious to the fact that Chuck Norris was a racist little man who decried Obama becoming president, supported Trump through both campaigns, and openly hated muslims and gay people.
I think the weakly efficient market of mortality is the only fix here. Dead attitudes and mindsets need their advocates to die of natural causes for society to advance IMO. Also known as "blank advances one funeral at a time."
You're probably right, but that's not the usual wording you hear. Of course, when grieving, proper proofreading may not be (nor should it be) at the top of anyone's list.
Very cool thread. Middle school jokes and culture wars. I’m so glad we don’t allow political threads on here and can instead bask in the intellectual might of people talking about TV man the did/didn’t like.
There was a period of like 2 years when I was a kid where chuck Norris jokes were all the rage on the playground and I made an iPhone app that listed them all.
Jokes like “Chuck Norris is able to slam a revolving door.”
Anyway, I “built” this stupid app when I was like 13, copy-pasted like 300 jokes in there and a random one would show every time you tapped the screen.
Chuck Norris’s estate blocked the app from going live. I wish I had printed that rejection out and framed it.
It was so funny how that whole thing happened.
For the first time in over a decade he was suddenly relevant in a way. People remembered he existed, and they were playing off his tough guy image.
And what did he do? Try and shut it down and start suing people. Stupid.
It took him a couple of years to come around to it. If it wasn’t for those jokes would he be remembered anywhere as well? Or would he be a much more obscure celebrity by now?
> would he be remembered anywhere as well?
You underestimate how popular Walker, Texas Ranger was. It wasn't pulling ratings like Seinfeld, ER, or Friends, but it was a solid primetime staple for almost a decade.
I never watched it myself, but the 50+ demo loved it.
Maybe for people in the US. Internationally? I haven't watched a single episode of WTR, I don't know anyone who has, but everyone knows who Chuck Norris was.
In France, it was popular enough that everybody knew Texas ranger before the Chuck Norris jokes.
We used to watch lot's of chuck Norris films back then here in Nigeria, I can't even remember the titles, but all we knew was chuck Norris alone can defeat a whole country's army. We used to think one American soldier can defeat a whole army.
Same in Italy, it was prime time TV for a few years.
Not overly popular, but many people already knew him from the Bruce Lee era, so it had a following by default.
Lots of fans in the Philippines, apparently.
Same in Hungary.
India too!
Same in Slovakia
Seinfeld wasn't at all well known in Italy when I lived there, but WTR was.
IIRC Seinfeld aired on Tele Montecarlo/La 7, while WTR aired on Italia 1, the difference in audience was massive.
I seem to recall it aired at some kind of weird time too. It didn't seem to be very widely known or watched.
I'm Swedish and I was only vaguely aware Chuck Norris even had a career outside the jokes.
WTR did air here in Sweden in the 90s. From a quick search in the news archives, it was on late at night on tv3 in the late 90s and then it ran on that or/and some other cabel channels in the 00s as well (reruns?).
Belgian here, only thing I ever watched that had Chuck in it was Way of the Dragon.
As a gent born and raised in Texas, and has never seen the show - I am pleasantly surprised to see these comments about how popular WTR was internationally. If I had been asked to bet, I would have lost money on this one.
As others have said, WTR is very well-known in France while most people have never heard of Seinfeld.
Same with Dallas and The Dukes of Hazzard.
Assuming this sort of phenomenon extends further than France, this quite well explains many of the misconceptions Europeans have about the US.
Thinking WTR, Dallas, or TDoH are representative of American culture is... hilarious.
But I guess shows that hit the big American cultural stereotypes hard are maybe the ones that do better abroad?
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
that's america for me when I was a kid
If you like MwC, look up episodes of Unhappily Ever After on Youtube, it's sort of the second-generation MwC. Same sort of humour but taken even further, I can easily re-watch Unhappily but MwC is sort of a once-you've-seen-it...
> that speaking car one
Knight Rider.
> that dog playing basketball
Air Bud.
I think Hazard didn't sound stereotype at all, like, nobody had a clue why the car was called General Lee, or what the confederate flag meant.
It was just a fun show. Magnum PI, Different Strokes, McGiver.. were just as popular.
> Thinking WTR, Dallas, or TDoH are representative of American culture is... hilarious.
I’m not aware of a single person who thinks that, and neither was that the claim of your parent comment.
People understand TV shows are fiction.
dallas was huge in dubai in the 80s. like to the extent that people would plan to sit home on the evening it was on.
(I didn't watch it; my parents believed soap operas were unsuitable for kids)
I've got the impression that the big US exports are ones that play into big American stereotypes, e.g WTR, Baywatch, Friends. Not even that they see these shows and get programmed with these stereotypes, but that they have these stereotypes (Texas, California, NYC) and shows like this feed their imaginations and give them detail.
Exported media is weird. Like the huge proportion of British/BBC output (usually period, but also often detective in a way redolent of Christie) that is made primarily for export to foreign consumers who think of British upper-class culture as aspirational.
Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were both created by non-network studios as syndicated shows, they weren’t prime time network shows. The budgets for syndicated content is a lot lower than network produced content.
The rights to air these sorts of shows are dirt cheap compared to Friends or Seinfeld, so it makes sense that cheap syndicated garbage like Walker, Texas Ranger and Baywatch were popular internationally, the rights were cheap.
There is US exported media that just randomly becomes popular in a specific demographic. Case in point: Adventures of Ford Fairlane, a flick with Andrew Dice Clay that got a razzie the year it came out. IIRC it got a cult following in Norway because the voice over was done by a popular radio DJ.
It was a syndicated show, the goal is to license it to as many companies as possible. It was never a network TV show like Seinfeld, those syndication rights are way more expensive than created for syndication shows like WTR.
The show was also incredibly popular in Germany in the 90s.
Yeah. As an American I would’ve absolutely never guessed it was that popular.
> Maybe for people in the US. Internationally?
It was big internationally. But the jokes made Norris known to a whole different generation than the one watching WTR.
I loved WTR as a child in Spain! (This was like 15 years ago tho)
WTR was still on air 15 years ago? I'm getting old.
It was extremely popular in Russian-speaking areas in the late 90s.
Yes! Oldfagi remember. Also, he was just called "Cool Walker", which was appropriate.
I would even say that the connotation was more like "Badass Walker", which indeed further cemented his reputation.
Czechs love Chuck Norris and WTR. It aired between 1995 and 2012. The series is still occasionally rerun.
Yeah, everyone is talking about it here - especially how Death must have screwed up to get Chuck Norrissed.
So Chuck Norris is an Anna Kournikova, famous for having been moderately famous and monetized ad infinitum?
I remember watching a few episodes on TV as a kid but I could not have told you who acted in it
In Spain it was on the TV also for like a decade, and everybody knows who he is. Also in France.
I watched it all the time in Canada.
Lies. Everyone knows The Red Green Show is the only television program legally allowed in Canada.
Not just Canada. Never screened here AFAIK so I had to buy it on DVD.
Haven't watched it and first time hearing about it too. But I knew who Chuck Norris was.
It was very popular here (Czech Republic). Not prime-time popular, but popular enough.
It was quite popular in France.
Huuuuuuuuge in South Africa.
Personally I was at a prime age watching a lot of Conan O'Brien's Late Night show and one of his best skits was the Walker Texas Ranger Lever. They would pick the most ridiculous clips from the show and just run them out of context. IIRC Chuck Norris even showed up on the show one time to give him a "stern talking to". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpIEyn9G6_8
Also, he fought Bruce Lee! One of my favorite face-offs ever filmed, esp in the martial arts movie genre. Not many actors who could say that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlTyJhbTxxo&pp=ygUZY2h1Y2sgb...
Any person from South Africa from that era will have a certain tv announcement permanently etched in their memories. It goes something like:
"Friday night is action night with Walker Texas Ranger"
Somehow, I don't think he'll be remembered for Karate Kommandos ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6hb602588
The only time I ever saw Walker,Texas Ranger was when I was living in Italy for a few months in the aughts. It was dubbed in Italian. Apparently it was popular there.
I can report that french reddit thread all mention Walker Texas ranger all along the page. These Sunday lunch shows hit different.
I loved that show! I was a teenager. Peak 1990s.
Never heard about this series in France. I discovered him through the jokes. I am 55
And he would be known by those people. I remember him being famous in the 90s.
Would the people who grew up in the early 2000s, or especially 2010s, know much of anything about him?
I mean how much do younger people know about Scott Baio or the Corys or Candice Bergen these days?
You might be able to argue he was a bigger star than any of them.
His career lasted far longer. He had big movie appearances for 30 years, none of those people accomplished that.
Norris' first movie role was in 1968, first big credited appearance was 1972, Walker Texas Ranger finished in 2001.
> You might be able to argue he was a bigger star than any of them.
I think that's a hard argument to make.
Candace Bergen's career was just as long. Her first movie role was 1966, she was nominated for an Oscar in 1979, and she was on a popular sitcom from 1988 to 1998 that won her five Emmies and attracted national commentary after criticism from the Vice President.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s and to me even then Chuck Norris was a B-movie self-parody joke character. He was not an A-list "action star" in the sense that Schwarzenegger, Stallone, or even Van Damme were.
The dude was a badass, 6 time undefeated karate world champion (!!!), created his own variant of karate mixed with korean martial arts, was a good friend with Bruce Lee and that scene in Colloseum - probably the coolest thing I saw as a kid growing up behind iron curtain... not many actors can have such a resume on top of their acting career.
Those who cared would/will know him regardless. But obviously those people would be relatively few and far apart.
An immense amount of time, dedication and talent must have went into all those achievements. This requires mastery of body and mind at an exceptional level. Putting aside all jokes and acting roles, the martials arts is where he earned my full respect and that will also stick in my memory about him.
"World champion" is an embellishment, but he was a strong point fighter within North America. His six championships were for a tournament that crowned self-titled "Professional [weight class] Karate Champions", with the "World" embellishment added later. To be fair, people from other countries did occasionally appear at these tournaments, but there weren't Japanese fighters there, and Japan dominates the gold medal count for the WKF World Karate Championship that started in 1970.
Reminds of King of Kong and those arcade and video game "World Championships" in 80s/90s basically only involving Americans.
He had is own line of denims, with extra stretchy crotches. Makes roundhouse kicking baddies in the face easier.
Haha haven’t heard of either of those but I do know that when Chuck Norris does pushups he pushes the Earth down
We all do. That’s the only way you can do a pushup.
It would be more impressive to say that when Chuck Norris does pushups, he violates conservation of momentum and the Earth does not move.
It was super popular in Portugal.
Chuck Norris made a Chuck Norris joke in one of the Expendable movies, and for that I'm willing to forgive all his indiscretions.
That is hands down one of my ATF scenes in any movie. Expendables 2 was IMO just about the most "fun" movie I've ever seen as well. It wasn't great cinema, or a specific classic.. but it was fun. I have similar feelings about Gremlins 2 as well. We need more fun movies, but too many people seem to have not been issued a sense of humor these days.
X1 is also great imo. Just the perfect blend of action, self awareness and cheese.
Absolutely.. loved X1, I just think X2 was just a bit more fun... X3 was a bit of a backslide though.
Maybe https://youtu.be/OBGtINJmFto?t=79
Yep, this is the one
Found out about his passing from my teenage kids. They knew him as some legendary tough guy based solely on the jokes, but had no idea who he actually was. To be fair, looking at some other comments here about his political and personal leanings, I didn't know who he actually was either.
> And what did he do? Try and shut it down and start suing people. Stupid.
Isn't that an obligation when you own a trademark? That you sue people, or else you may lose the trademark?
> Isn't that an obligation when you own a trademark? That you sue people, or else you may lose the trademark?
It's not quite as cut and dry as you suggest. Besides, in which way was a trademark being violated? Last I knew merely talking about and referencing a celebrity by name was not a trademark violation.
Is it trademark, or IP. If someone made a list of Mickey Mouse jokes, Disney's law department will send them a letter too. Chuck Norris is a person/name but also a persona.
Also, perhaps it was Norris' lawyer acting on behalf of him. Maybe he didn't even know about it.
Chuck Norris was and is still an international sensation. Chuck Norris is right up there with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean Claude Van Damme.
His round kick, Walker Texas Ranger and his fight with Bruce Lee. In Africa, to this day, some TV channels still play his stuff.
His proximity to Bruce Lee earned him more or less permanent kung fu cinema fame. Walker,Texas Ranger and other work he did definitely boosted it, but the memes clinched it.
Maybe not as well, but between the "Walker gave me aids" clip and Conan's Walker Texas Ranger lever, he'd still have been known well enough.
The quote is “Walker says I have AIDS”
Oh good point.
This post certainly wouldn't be here right now.
If it weren’t…subjunctive mood. Sorry, it’s Pedantic Friday in my small world.
>> If it wasn’t for those jokes would he be remembered anywhere as well?
You’re assuming the jokes make people dive deeper. In reality I know the jokes and didn’t have a clue who he was and never cared enough to find out. The reality is the probably didn’t make much of a difference to how well he or his work was actually known.
No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant they wouldn’t even know the name.
Not that they actually know about him past the tough guy persona of the jokes.
The Ruby gem "Faker" is used for generating fake data for testing, like legit-looking names, emails, phone numbers, lorum ipsum text, etc. About 10 years ago I was working on a messaging app, and wanted some real messages to see in the UI while I was developing it. One of the best engineering decisions I've made in my career was to pick the Chuck Norris Facts generator for the messages, so every time I re-seeded my local db or looked at a review app on staging, I was greeted by two fake people sending a half-dozen Chuck Norris facts to each other.
https://github.com/faker-ruby/faker/blob/main/lib/locales/en...
I'm pretty sure they were all the rage when _I_ was at school, but that was long before the iPhone.
I'm curious on what grounds they blocked the app.
> I'm curious on what grounds they blocked the app.
The app probably used his pictures or his name, which are easy candidates for copyright or trademark-claims.
If you're curious, maybe you can look into Chuck's lawsuit against Penguin's book of Chuck Norris facts. He would eventually "co-author" his own book. The obvious guess here is trademark infringement (over use of Chuck's name/likeness) and/or copyright (if some of these facts were lifted from his book).
Interesting. I get the likeness thing, but surely one could publish jokes about anyone they wish and that would be satire or fair use or something?
Facts and copyright is an interesting one, because I'm surprised a fact can be copyrighted, unless it's the wording specifically.
For better or worse, in the US you can pretty much sue anyone for anything. A court certainly requires more evidence to declare liability than Apple would to remove an app.
As far as copywriting facts, are you really under the impression that Chuck Norris is the only man who can factually slam a revolving door? :)
> are you really under the impression that Chuck Norris is the only man who can factually slam a revolving door? :)
Face palm I hadn't realised we weren't talking about _actual_ facts about him, this makes a lot more sense now.
Mentioned below in a few comments but it was on the grounds of using his name/likeness.
(Not the parent poster) I found out about them in 2008-2009, and they were quite popular online and offline.
> Chuck Norris’s estate blocked the app from going live. I wish I had printed that rejection out and framed it.
Seeing the youthful spirit run headfirst into the corprocracy of locked down devices and app stores is depressing. Twenty years ago you would have made a webapp or flash animation, most likely avoided scrutiny and not even been shaken down. Thirty years ago you would have made a QBasic program and floppy/email/dcc it to your friends, completely illegible to the corprocracy. But these days simply trying to publish through the common channels, and you're immediately subject to restrictions made for businesses.
The "slam a revolving door" one was absolutely one of my favorites. Also "Chuck Norris doesn't do push-ups; he pushes the Earth down".
I loved "chuck norris had a fight with superman. loser had to wear their underwear outside their pants."
Jeff Dean got his Chuck Norris app published by Chuck Norris.
I printed out all the jokes on my dad's home office printer and sold copies at school. This was pre smartphones.
Was this before or after Mike Huckabee started publicly offering Chuck Norris as his solution to "border security" on the campaign trail?
John Wick wears Chuck Norris pajamas. RIP to a legend.
I did something similar when Microsoft gave away Windows Phones for every app published on the app store. I used the Chuck Norris API though. The one I used is sadly no longer available (I think it was called CNDB). But there's a new one: https://api.chucknorris.io
The expendables had a scene that was basically the meme in live action, highly recommend. It’s all over YouTube.
That scene makes the movie one of the few 10/10 movies in my opinion. It's perfect for the target audience.
Seeing my dad, who grew up on these actors' action flicks, laugh himself to tears when Chuck Norris appears is one of my favourite memories.
In India, we have Rajni (Rajnikanth) jokes that keep increasing in number and are still pretty popular...
I remember reading 'The Vinci Code' in college which was very popular those days and getting a SMS from a friend almost the same day, "Rajnikanth gave Monalisa that smile!".
I'm still enjoying the Nolan jokes / memes, but in a weird way because of course, via https://www.reddit.com/r/CroppedNorrisJokes/
Only God could defeat Chuck Norris.
Well, that remains to be seen
Chuck Norris did not die. He was just sick of death being too afraid to come for him, so he went to meet it. I just wonder... what if he killed it?
Having been near the epicenter, I recall that Vin Diesel jokes (same format) pre-dated Chuck Norris ones. I always found it a shame that the Chuck Norris ones caught on; Vin Diesel is, imo, a better role model.
I bet Vin wouldn't have blocked your app.
I knew of "Walker, Texas Ranger" but the jokes definitely kept him relevant to my generation (age: 49) for a resurgent period of time.
The only one I remember offhand:
"Chuck Norris doesn't do pushups, he pushes the world down."
In had one app like that from Cydia Loved it.
i created a Facebook App that did something similar, it posted random jokes on your wall
This was like 2005-2006
His estate? While he was still alive?
Death had to take Chuck Norris sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.
Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep. He waits.
Chuck Norris didn't die. He just let everyone else live.
Chuck Norris never slept, he just waited
And yet death was defeated. And with that, Chuck Norris took up its mantle.
they were better when they were Vin Diesel jokes.
The Vin Diesel jokes I remember had an absurd quality to them beyond "He's really tough." One I recall fondly was "Vin Diesel writes Donkey Kong Fan Fiction."
Chuck Norris jokes were making rounds well before Vin Diesel was even born.
The Chuck Norris fact page that really kicked this all off started as a Vin Diesel fact page.
Most of the original funny Chuck Norris facts were from the original Vin Diesel ones.
The kids today don't know their internet lore. smh.
Is this a joke?
Haha, good one.
I will have to steal this one for my upcoming valedictorian speech.
The crowd is going to love it.
I believe it's stolen from a quote said about Teddy Roosevelt
https://markloveshistory.com/2018/01/06/death-had-to-take-ro...
Except is was said by Vice President Thomas R. Marshall upon Theodore Roosevelt’s death and co-opted as a Chuck Norris joke.
Teddy Roosevelt was the Chuck Norris of his day. It is appropriate.
I think that comparison is quite unfair to Teddy, and overly flattering to Chuck Norris.
Historian, sheriff, war hero, governor, explorer, and a successful President who reshaped America largely for the better. While Roosevelt was human, he led a life that very few have ever matched.
That said, the line does fit them both.
Literally saved Football.
All due respect, no comparison, teddy is a real legend not just cinema. Lets not conflate the two. Much love to chuck though.
It's a kickass obituary, no matter the subject!
I agree!
It is funny because you usually think of Death as something inevitable and people just accept it but then ... some of these guys put up a fight. Mega-LMAO!
from his instagram for his last birthday ( https://www.instagram.com/p/DVtiSHbETbX/ )
Literally 10 days ago
Good health just doesn't mean what it used to.
He was supposed to die last year, but death took a while to muster the courage to call him.
Death once had a near-Chuck experience
Chuck Norris once slapped Pi so hard it became rational for a moment.
RIP dude, we’d continue the jokes, may your soul laughs as hard as we do.
Chuck Norris once bet 42 is a prime. He won.
Sorry, but these Chuck Norris jokes are more like Bruce Schneier facts: https://www.schneierfacts.com/
I used to love the Schneierfacts, I mean I still do, but I used to as well.
They were obviously a bit more niche, but that made them funnier to my mind.
> For Bruce Schneier, all zeros of the Riemann zeta function are trivial.
Oh! I didn't know that was a thing! hahaha love it!
I can only assume Chuck has decided to relieve the grim reaper of his duties, leaving us all here to meet our own end not with a scythe but a roundhouse kick.
Shades of Piers Anthony's "On a Pale Horse," Death showed up to take Chuck Norris and Chuck killed him, taking his place.
I loved that series, until the last book. Maybe the novelty had worn off.
It's been a long time since I read it, but didn't the current Death decide to retire and pass the role on?
If you're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_a_Velvet_Cloak - note that it was written a couple decades after the prior books of the series, for a different publisher, to a different length. Those would be yellow flags with almost any author.
In "On A Pale Horse," Zane kills the current Death and assumes the role. I don't recall that he then steps down in a later book.
He finally defeated life
While normally making jokes after a person's death would be socially questionable, in this case Chuck Norris himself loved the Chuck Norris jokes. For me at least, a good sense of humor is maybe the most endearing personality trait. RIP
Fundamentally, I'd argue that very little should ever be unreasonable or out of bounds to make jokes about; what is important is that it's good humour.
Case in point: https://theonion.com/hijackers-surprised-to-find-selves-in-h...
And, as you say, in Chuck Norris' case, it's virtually obligatory.
> Fundamentally, I'd argue that very little should ever be unreasonable or out of bounds to make jokes about; what is important is that it's good humour.
On a personal level, I couldn't agree more. I do hope that culturally we get to that point at some time :-)
I mean, jokes are made to uplift, intent in joking is important and punching up is preferable to punching down, this being said this didn't apply to chuck Norris that would have already got to the punchline without throwing a single fist.
Giving people reason to laugh while you are old and dying is a superpower. I wish i will have it, too.
I'm sure he'll get better soon
Chuck never dies.
one of my favorite stack overflow questions: Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color?
https://stackoverflow.com/q/8318911
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that early browser developers must have really been on quite a lot of drugs.
And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days. — from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
No, it was just there were no PM filters.
Some recent discussion on that one a couple Advents ago:
https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/20/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42468318)
Jokes aside, this octogenarian was living his golden years enviably. He was summiting peaks last fall, doing 500 lb barbell curls, and still sparring in his birthday video just 10 days ago. We’ve all gotta go sometime, but the way Chuck Norris went out was the way I’d want to go—able to do it all right up until the end. He was a lot of folks’ childhood hero, but that title is freshly renewed in my eyes. I have new inspiration in my fitness endeavors going forward.
> 500 lb barbell curls
?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-2-oV5vk8q/?igsh=MWFtZmR5MHl...
EDIT: acknowledged. fake.
To be clear, this is 100% a joke.
The world (at least as of a few years ago), was about half that weight.
https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/pdklnx/le...
He forgot to actually curl it. Like someone else said, the weights are almost certainly not actually 500lbs. Even elite bodybuilders and strongmen in their prime don't come close to curling 500lbs, let alone an old man.
Looking at the video, if it was legitimate, it would be 585lbs (6 45lb plates on each side plus a 45lb bar), which is even less believable.
Those are... very fake weights. Or AI. But probably just fake weights.
At long last, Bruce Schneier is now the mightiest man alive.
https://www.andrewhay.ca/archives/661
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1057708-bruce-schneier-kn...
From Reddit: "I heard that the opening 27 minutes of Saving Private Ryan were loosely based on a game of dodgeball played by Chuck Norris in 2nd grade." ;-)
I had no idea he was in his 80s (older than my parents would be), and that he did Walker, Texas Ranger when he was in his 50s. The final episodes aired when he was 61! That's nuts.
Not a fan of him in real life (based on how he portrayed himself publicly), but I do find his level of physical fitness even more impressive back in the 1990s (and even up until his death), given his age.
I remember trade chat (/2) in wow on the Medivh server would often turn into Chuck Norris jokes. There were always about how bad ass Chuck was. How tough and impossibly manly.
One of my favorites.
Chuck Norris jumped into a lake. Chuck Norris didn't get wet. The lake got Chucked.
Trade chat (like /b/) was never great, but one of the first WoW addons I developed was designed to filter out garbage like this, and make idling with your guildies in Ironforge tolerable.
It's funny for a while, in measured amounts, and then it becomes tiresome.
Anal [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]
I fear the crime wave as the thugs hear about this and take the streets back. Be careful out there people.
17 years ago we launched the first "Chuck Norris Facts" app for Android (March 2009). It was a big success until end of 2010 when Chuck Norris sent his lawyers after us to get the app removed from the Android market. Chuck Norris won, we took the app down
chuck norris roundhouse kicked it so hard it became an iOS app!
Chuck Norris didn’t die, we simply phased out of his reality.
It's a trick; he will come back unscathed in the next episode.
There's not a body inside Chuck Norris's casket, there's just a fist.
Clickbait. He is not dead, he just decided to retire from the world of mortals.
So I guess Chuck Norris has now keys for the Pearly Gates and is the one who gets to pick the heavenly club members. I'm sure roundhouse kicks are somehow part of the process.
Why do I feel like an era has ended...
Rest in peace.
The Grim Reaper wished that Chuck Norris had only come to play chess with him!
He was a hero in tech and science as well. I recall during my PhD studies, we always create new memes on our field that Chuck can finish things in no time. In loving memory of Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris dominated WoW Barrens chat back in the day. It was kind of weird and amazing at the same time.
Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.
The earth was too scared to have him on it anymore...
At my country we produced some weakness jokes: When Chuck opens the fridge, he finds the jelly trembling.
CN might be the only favourite person in HN that has protected his IP by lawyers. THAT is an achievement.
Wishing him speedy recovery! Legend
Chuck Norris let him win
This just means we're in a simulated universe. He's respawned elsewhere.
Oh wow, coincidentally I watched a Chuck Norris film recently with my (90 year old) grandmother, which resulted in me diving down a bunch of Chuck Norris memes for the first time in more than a decade.
RIP
Chuck Norris (and Michael Landon) were golden age role models for young men. Strong but thoughtful, firm but compassionate, and deeply principled but also practical. Yes, these were acting roles but they picked those roles for a reason. Rest in peace, Chuck.
"Deeply principled" really doesn't describe Obama birther conspiracists.
I am not a scholar in general, or of Chuck Norris specifically. I only have the impressions I have from the pop culture I've consumed. Like most people. And for us, Norris represents something wholesome.
For others, those who've read something, or know more, or think they know more, that symbol, that myth, has been ruined. The illusion pierced, the ugly reality revealed. They then look with pity, disdain and contempt at those who still admire the person. Or worse, they make the bad faith argument that to admire him is in fact to embrace those ruinous facts of which most are still ignorant.
Frankly, I think what you're doing is a farce. You're showing the world how smart you are and how dumb everyone else is. Ultimately you're trying to prove how dumb it is to believe in anyone or anything. If you look closely enough you'll find dirt on anyone. There is a contradiction: you claim a moral stance, but your "moral" position degrades the very idea of role models, heroism, and admiration itself. With enough scrutiny, admiration tends to zero.
The reality of the person is irrelevant. What matters is what they mean, what they symbolize, and the kind of archetype they represent. This is of course not true universally; some mythological people are alive, powerful, and dangerous and we cannot afford such kayfabe. But some are harmless and imply no endorsement of their misdeeds. Especially for actors, storytellers, artists, scientists and perhaps a few others we not only CAN afford it, we SHOULD do it, because these role models (or symbols of role models) are what make up the beating heart of a coherent culture.
I choose to admire Chuck Norris, Michael Jackson, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Gahndi, Isaac Asimov, even if some deeds of theirs were wicked. I prefer to go through life admiring symbols of people even knowing that these are constructs. To do otherwise is to recognize the futility of admiration, and I choose not to live that way.
That's a lot of words to say "I prefer to ignore the evil that men do if I find them entertaining enough, and I think it's silly that anyone does otherwise."
The Chuck Norris you admire is a figment of your imagination. He was a product created by capitalism. He never actually fought Bruce Lee. He was never really a Texas Ranger. He was never in the real Delta Force. Putting him on the same cultural level as actual leaders who at least fought for something in the real world is risible. Holding such deep admiration for the things he pretended to do that you feel compelled to insult someone's character and intelligence for judging him as a human being is a far less than admirable moral stance.
The reality of the person is not irrelevant, the reality of the person is all that matters at the end of the day.
Reading this thread has definitely sheared off a few of my brain cells seeing people so collectively deluded about Chuck Norris. As you said he was a totality of capitalism, a product wrapped in human skin. He's only truly notable for the jokes people made (myself included) at the dawn of the early internet. As a person, what he actually accomplished is nothing at best and at worst actively damaging to multiple groups that didn't deserve the heat.
The only good thing out of this mess is that the universe felt cosmically aligned to have his death occur on the same day as Mr. Rogers birthday, someone who genuinely did fight for a better world.
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He was openly maga and a homophobe and a transphobe. I wouldn’t consider these qualities for a role model.
Many like myself did not know this as a kid in the 80s-90s. Some of the movies he made like "sidekicks" left a positive impression at that age.
In the 80s-90s his positions would have aligned fine with the center left.
Forget the 80s-90s - Even California passed prop 8 in 2008.
Some of them, perhaps. I don't think the center left would ever have been into the birther conspiracy.
No, I'm pretty sure they would have. I remember during the primaries, Hillary tried to attack Obama by showing him in a "Muslim" garment.
The Internet has a fairly long memory and a lot of research on topics like this, and it does not agree that Hillary ever tried such a thing. Ample evidence that GOP politicians, including Trump, tried to claim she did. And late in the primary season a few of her supporters made some sounds like that. But nobody has ever found any shred of evidence her campaign made any accusations, or started any rumors.
There were conspiracy theories in the 80s and 90s too.
There is a huge difference between general conspiracy theories and the birther lie which was more racist astroturfing than a legitimate conspiracy
GP said "these were acting roles." They were talking about the characters, not the actors behind them.
But then he said he "picked them for a reason" implying that he chose those characters based on the characteristics he shared with them
Whatever the reason, it wasn't because his characters were "openly maga and a homophobe and a transphobe," because they weren't. Bruce Lee movies and Texas Ranger didn't address those issues at all.
And in spite of his flaws, it's possible that he had some good qualities as well, or at least aspired to them. So maybe those other qualities were what he looked for in the characters he played.
Doesn't seem like he aspired all that hard, since instead of expressing empathy for people who weren't like him, he continued to be a bigot in nearly every aspect. But sure, if you were a white cis straight guy I'm sure he was perfectly kind.
You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become a Faceboot psychosis villain. It's basically the politics version of "Why is everything so cold?"
I think you forget that Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act and put in the policy of “Don’t ask don’t tell” and Obama supported it originally.
Of course they both had a change of heart- was it true change or they saw the direction of the political winds? Who knows?
I don’t know Chuck Norris’s views on LGBT. But if he was a self proclaimed “born again Christian” and a rabid Trump supporter, I can only guess. But I no more expect people who were insulted by what he said (which I personally don’t know) to give him more grace or reverence than I do is a Black man who couldn’t give two shits about a dead racist podcaster.
Other people no more need to “contextualize” homophobia than I feel a need to “contextualize” the racism of a dead podcaster.
> put in the policy of “Don’t ask don’t tell”
DADT was a significant improvement over the status quo of "we ask, you tell, and then you get dishonorably discharged". Considering it evidence of homophobia is revisionism. Did it go far enough? No. Was it a good step towards where we wanted to go? Yes.
And the Defense of Marriage Act?
> It passed both houses of Congress by large, veto-proof majorities. Support was bipartisan, though about a third of the Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate opposed it. Clinton criticized DOMA as "divisive and unnecessary".
Sure doesn't seem like a Clinton issue?
Again he still signed it. It’s like Susan Collins who always has “serious misgivings” about things that her fellow Republicans do and then votes the party line anyway trying to stay in her party’s good graces while at the same time not pissing off her liberal constituents
> Again he still signed it.
It was gonna be law either way; signing it removed a political weapon from the folks pushing its passage. Arguing this is something Clinton did to gay people is counterfactual.
That’s a really poor excuse to sign on to something that you disagree with. I would not sign a petition for making the “Confederacy Day” law if I lived in Mississippi just because it would become law anyway. You have to stand for something.
Would you think it was okay if Tim Scott signed such a law just so his fellow Republicans couldn’t hold it against him in the primary? Well actually I wouldn’t be surprised if he did…
> That’s a really poor excuse to sign on to something that you disagree with.
It's a pragmatic excuse.
Not signing changes nothing; clear statements that it's bad law; avoid giving the assholes pushing it more likelihood of winning the next election.
A clear statement of it being a bad law is not signing it. Should he not do anything that would give assholes an excuse to argue with him?
Am I suppose to be okay if he signed a law overturning “Brown vs Board of Education” because it would become law anyway?
Was the fact that he signed off on executing a mentally retarded man because it would show he was “tough on crime” just him being “pragmatic”?
https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rickey-rector-death...
Getting back on topic, I don’t get to praise Chuck Norris because of his anti-racism stances but then dismiss his stances against non straight people.
> I don’t get to praise Chuck Norris because of his anti-racism stances but then dismiss his stances against non straight people.
Sure, but I think it's fair to praise people when they do good things, and criticize them for the bad that they do. That's true fir Chuck Norris, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama... anyone.
Totally agree, though, that it's bullshit to think that having positive views on some issues wipes away the bad.
My charitable interpretation is that it was political winds, but possibly not in the way you're implying.
I do believe that Obama was 100% cool with gay marriage, but believed it was politically foolhardy to admit that publicly and in policy positions, but was able to advocate for his true feelings once the political climate changed. Still not awesome, but understandable from an electoral perspective.
I'm not really sure about Clinton. I would guess he's personally in favor of gay marriage and gays in the military today, but hard to say what his views might have been in the 90s (as I was a teenager at the time who wasn't all that interested in politics).
Also on supposedly-liberal people doing homophobic things: let's also not forget that California voters banned gay marriage statewide in 2008. 2008! And this was a ballot measure where all voters got a say, not something passed by the legislature.
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Half the country didn't vote for Trump. Not quite 2/3rds of the voting eligible people in the country voted to begin with, and not even half of those people voted for Trump.
Less than 1/3rd of eligible voters voted for Trump.
Not all people that voted for Trump consider themselves Republicans, much less MAGA, when MAGA is only 50-60% of Republicans.
So in reality less than 1/6th of the US voting-eligible population is MAGA. Not half.
And that was at the election - roughly 20% of Trump voters now openly profess regret in voting for him, though I don't think we have data breaking that down as self-proclaimed MAGA vs. otherwise. I suspect if you were not self-proclaimed MAGA you're more likely to be open to regret, but I'm sure at least some of them were MAGA.
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Unless poll after poll is contacting and registering answers from 100% of people in the country, that's only 35-40% of the people who answered the poll, which is a much, much smaller number.
Statistical sampling has been an accepted technique for over a century now
None of that changes the fact that the statement that half the country is MAGA because half the country voted for Trump is untrue.
Significantly less than half the country voted for Trump. This is objective fact.
Significantly less than 100% of Trump voters identify as MAGA. This is objective fact.
Approving of Trump as President is also not the same thing as being MAGA, though the overlap is quite likely reasonably high at this point.
You can make an argument that there are more MAGA people than I estimated, but the argument I was referring to was basing it all off of voters for the 2024 election. If you want to make a different argument, we can look at it on its merits.
I gave an analogy earlier that if you have 10 friends and asked them where they wanted to eat dinner and six said let’s get Italian and the other 4 said “Let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, you still have a shitty friend group.
If 40% of the country still supports everything that’s going on, that tells you a lot about this country. Especially seeing that because of the 2 Senators per state regardless of population, gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college, they have outsized influence on the government.
Exactly how can you approve of what Trump is doing and not be MAGA?
A surprising amount of people are single issue voters and will vote for and support someone that supports that single issue. They might not care at all about the entire rest of the issues at all as long as their single issue is fine, and a lot of those single issues, like guns, long predate maga or the tea party.
I'm not saying that makes them good people, I'm just saying I don't think it's the same thing as maga.
2 senators per state isn't really the issue, but the cap on the house is. The senate was built to be population independent, and the house was built specifically to be population dependent, where yes if you had more people you had more power. Then they... voted to cap it, because it was going to give too much power to states with more people. Dumb. EV also tied to the house, so uncapping it unfucks a lot of that, too.
The Senate though also decided the cabinet and the Supreme Court. Thats the major issue - especially the Supreme Court.
To your other point, I’ve met some Bush/Romney type Republicans who hold their nose and voted for Trump because the Democrats did go to far on social issues and I say that as a Black guy.
When I was at BigTech in 2020 I thought all of the videos we had to watch on “micro aggressions”, continue announcements on “ally programs”, “Latinx” instead of Latino/Latina (that every single Latino person I spoke to thought was ridiculous), the “how do we feel” meetings about Floyd, and the kind of liberals I met when I flew out to Seattle and other west coast offices (I worked remotely the entire time) were just weird. Not to mention being chastised if you didn’t put your preferred pronouns under your name.
I was like can I just do my damn job?
Part of the problem is we changed the senate selections to votes. Originally state legislature picked their senators. That's an amendment that I think is a mistake and should be reverted.
The different chambers are supposed to represent different interests and instead we've made both halves of congress effectively the same thing.
There's deeper rot with the system besides these things - like the apparent lack of safeguards against the executive branch just... ignoring everything, including sometimes even the supreme court... but I don't think the framer's original intentions for the house and senate are fundamentally incorrect.
How would taking away voting power from the people have been better? Especially now that while the state houses can get super majorities via gerrymandering but Senators have to appeal to a much wider base. There is a reason that you have more crazies in the house than the Senate.
You're looking at how things are now with a situation totally fucked from the things being set up to be totally fucked for decades.
The House and Senate fundamentally do not operate in the way the founders intended them to at the moment. Both are elected based on popular votes within their district/state with the expectation that they are representing their constituent voters, all while population capped. There's a fundamental disconnect between how they are selected, how that power balance lies, and what their intended purpose is.
The House is supposed to represent the people. That's the job. Being answerable to their constituents makes sense. The Senate is supposed to represent the States - including as long-lasting entities that will exist before and after the current constituents. The legislature selected them because they were supposed to be more knowledgeable about the issues pertaining to the state, etc. They were to be tasked with doing the necessary thing and not necessarily the popular thing - people can always vote out the state legislature if the senators truly are hated, but having some insulation from the ever changing whims of the general public was a feature.
A lot of the rhetoric is similar to the rhetoric around the electoral college - preventing humans, which can be very dumb en masse, from doing dumb things. That has obviously not been the case, since unfaithful electors just haven't been a thing in quantities that have mattered, but I would argue that when we have found that things didn't work the way the founders intended, the correct option would generally be to make them work the way the founders intended and then only move away from that if we find that it doesn't work. Instead, we've frequently moved away from those things even when they were working.
Gerrymandering is an issue that doesn't have to exist either - it already doesn't in some states, and there's no reason it couldn't be implemented in all of them in this scenario where we're just wholesale changing how the government works.
You’ll have to forgive me as a Black guy whose still living parents grew up in the segregated South and seeing that four of the southern states still consider “Confederacy Memorial Day” a state holiday and two others combine “Confederacy Day” with MLK day for not trusting the good will of the state governments - especially with gerrymandering.
If enough people in any state are bad actors then no solution under democracy is going to resolve the issue without moving away from a system that invests so much power in the states.
But then if enough people in the overall country are bad actors you're back to square one.
I don't have any proposals on how to fix some people just deciding they want to be shitty people. But all of this discussion involves a significant amount of hand waving solutions into place - discussions on getting them implemented, the likelihood of that happening, etc., are all separate and not anything we've talked about from any of the positions.
I am only arguing that state legislatures can gerrymander districts that give them more votes than the population voted for. But it is really hard to gerrymander an entire state and split it up so two Senators can win of their preferred party.
Would GA have two Democratic Senators with a Republican control state government? On the other hand would Susan Collins be a Senator from Maine?
Given the choice of trusting the people of Mississippi to do the right thing and the electorate of the US to do the right thing. The entire US has been more on the side of the angels than the southern states - yes that’s a very low bar.
It's easier (or as easy) to change gerrymandering as it is to change the senate back to it's intended purpose. If you want to argue that an amendment to make gerrymandering unconstitutional should be a prerequisite to returning to state legislatures selecting senators, I'm fine with that - because it's also a much more likely amendment to pass. A big chunk of Americans dislike gerrymandering. Only a tiny fraction of Americans know or care about the different chambers of Congress being intended to serve very different purposes.
Stating objective facts is not "copium".
It is simply false that "half the country [voted] for Trump".
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Well he was against gay marriage and against the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay kids.
If I have 10 friends and ask them all where they want to eat for dinner and 6 said let’s go to this nice Italian spot and the other 4 said “let’s kill Ralph and eat him”, that still means I have a shitty friend group.
It's more like 3 say "let's get Italian", 3 say "let's get Mexican", 3 say "I'm not hungry", and 1 says "let's kill Ralph, and eat him seasoned with Italian spices". Then the first 3 say "great idea!".
> You say "openly MAGA" as if it were a crime or something to be ashamed of.
maga is absolutely something to be ashamed of
It is absolutely something to be ashamed of, and a moral crime.
> You say "openly MAGA" as if it were a crime or something to be ashamed of
Can you explain why it's not something to be ashamed of?
I'm not american but I see technically nothing wrong with MAGA for me. it doesn't mean you must be transphobe or homophobe etc. but what people do under MAGA is another thing. sometimes it feels like for them it means "run america into the ground" or "get rid of all the best about america". GRABA if you like
You mean things done under MAGA led by a president who said on national TV that Haitians are eating pets and led the “birther” conspiracy ?
Yep exactly what I mean
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Being maga is diametrically opposed to supporting your country, as we've seen in particular this time around, but was also clearly visible in 2016-2020.
Rampant abuse of the legal system to target individuals, despite claiming (without evidence) that that was that the Democrats did against them
Total disregard for the constitution
Threats towards the judiciary
A million other things that I can list - but I'm sure you've heard them all and just don't care, so there's probably not much use in me continuing.
The entire point of MAGA is that they see “their country” as one where uppity negroes like Obama should have known his place, it’s DEI whenever a minority has a position of influence and power yet they keep lowering the standards for both ICE and the DOJ and RFK JR with no medical knowledge is the head of HHS.
America won’t be “great” until minorities, non Christians and non straight people know their role.
Indeed. And supporting MAGA is supporting the destruction of your country.
To believe in "Make America Great Again" you have to believe that America is not great, and this implies you are ashamed of your country. Shame is built in to MAGA.
That's some grade AAA ignorance hard at work. Or did you mean supporting Israel?
My country is not a cult of personality.
MAGA is not "the country". It's a collection of disgusting people that will take everything for themselves, even from others "in the group".
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Those points are fine, but not the root of what makes MAGA shameful. You can go about having that opinion and take actions towards it without being racist, anti-LGBT, generally hateful, and backing an administration that has been proven time and time again to be deceitful in every facet and tuned to the interest of the wealthiest.
You have a very narrow and rose colored view of what maga is. To us living in the US, maga stands for pedophilia, misogyny, racism, fascism, homophobia, transphobia, corroption and much more.
It absolutely has nothing to do with putting america first, it has everything to do with putting trump first. Im afraid you have made the mistake of listening to a politicians words instead of watching his actions. Every word from his mouth is a lie.
I know he's a liar. He is probably mentally ill and definitely not very bright. But I was not talking about Donald Trump. I was talking about the principle of wanting to make one's country "great."
> To us living in the US maga stands for...
This is not true. The GOP won the popular vote, centrists see some advantages in MAGA, and even some Democrats are against MAGA without going to the extreme of painting them all as pedophiles and corrupt.
You are in the minority with that opinion.
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That's absolutely what it stands for. To see this you need only listen to what they say and observe what they do.
"Make America Great Again" is propaganda and you're analyzing it as if it were a truthful mission statement.
Or more aptly, you're commenting on the title instead of reading TFA.
MAGA does not mean what you think it means for the people who actually live here.
MAGA isn't a political platform, it's a cult of personality.
Witness the abrupt reversal in public opinion on foreign wars in the last month.
Anyone not ashamed to be MAGA is a psychopath. It absolutely is a shameful, hateful stance to embrace.
He was vocally against gay marriage
He was a vocal proponent of the birther conspiracy theory about Obama
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Real men don't hate gay people and aren't scared about where people pee
Masculine, kind, and fatherly. What a man. I want to be more like Chuck.
What part about Chuck was a great role model for real men?
The homophobia? The racism? The infidelity? The conspiracy theories?
Or just because he was a martial artist and actor that had a bunch of low effort memes?
Just out of curiosity, could you (or anyone else) give a couple of examples of what you would consider "great role models for real men"? Or "good role models for well-adapted men", if you'd rather use less inflammatory language.
Fred Rogers, Terry Crews, Lin Manuel Miranda, Henry Cavill, John Cena, Steve Irwin and Dave Grohl to name a few.
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I think Cavill has a fair point - I generally support MeToo, think it was very important, but I can understand how being a fairly big name in Hollywood can result in hesitation around pursuing women. Especially now that he's got a lot of power for a whole franchise, with the Warhammer 40k stuff.
Steve Irwin I don't think what he did was a particularly big deal with the kid.
I don't really like celebrities as role models though. They have to have public personas as a matter of course. I would instead try to point to specific behaviors from real people. I also don't think people have to be perfect. But I do think there are some deal breakers that would mean I would never point my kids towards them as a role model. Racism and homophobia are among those things. I think believing that whole classifications of people are lesser is disqualifying.
Oh I think all of those guys have fair points. I was trying to illustrate how you could make a hero or a villain out of anybody if you cherry pick incidents, decisions or opinions.
Just like the parent comment was trying to do with Chuck Norris. (Which was probably way worse than any of these examples)
Ironically, the very concept of a “real man” is founded on the idea that a man should be defined by stereotypes rather than by sex, which puts manosphere enthusiasts and gender enthusiasts in closer epistemological proximity than either would care to admit.
I saw this coming, that's why I made this point, which you ignored:
> Could you give a couple of examples of what you would consider > "good role models for well-adapted men" ?
I'm actually curious.
Amy Coney Barrett.
Supreme court judge, mother of 7, still finds time to go to the gym.
I meant male role models for men (I'm sure you could find one). Not every man aspires to be the mother of 7 and go to the gym. (Because: remember that gyms are classist by design. [1])
But maybe lets talk about how Amy got called out by The Human Rights Campaign and 185 LGBTQ organizations for her "disturbingly anti-LGBTQ past writings, rhetoric and association with extremist groups." [2]
Or how about when The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights described her record as "fundamentally cruel," arguing she frequently sides with corporations over individuals and shows hostility toward established precedents like the Affordable Care Act.
At least Chuck Norris had no real impact on policy with his bigotry.
[1] https://www.leeboyce.com/truth-the-fitness-life-is-a-relativ...
[2] https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/the-human-rights-campaign...
[3] https://civilrights.org/resource/oppose-the-confirmation-of-...
Why does a role model for a man have to be a man? Besides, she's an exceptionally good role model even for traditionalist views of what makes a man, by virtue of being so accomplished in her career and still making time for family and health. Her record poses the question: what's your excuse? Men who are all-in on hyperfocus should wither before her.
Sure, there are people that hate her. Her own patron, our Dear Leader, probably hates her when she rules against his interests. All the more reason to respect her.
Sure, a woman can be a role model for a man.
Just out of curiosity, could you think of one man that could also be a role model for men and women?
Real men say fuck.
Real men have culture and don't have to say that.
what are "real men"?
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You just told us you don't give a flying duck, so I guess thanks for answering a question with a question...?
It wasn't really a question.
Guess I'll never know?
In this context, a "real man" is probably someone who conforms to the traditional role of a male (physically strong, emotionally restrained, a provider and protector of women, children, and weaker men, etc.).
Of course, "real men" can be just the opposite, depending on who you ask. So, it's really a subjective issue.
I don't think every man should be like that, but I also don't think any of those qualities are bad. In fact, I think they're pretty admirable.
Do you have issues with the fact that some men conform to that type?
Being physically strong is a good thing, and regular resistance training is a huge gap for overall health for quite a lot of people today - men and women.
Being able to provide for someone is an admirable quality, man or woman
Same for being able to protect someone.
I don't think being emotionally restrained is a good thing - and I say this as someone who was raised to be emotionally restrained. I've had to specifically work as an adult to be less emotionally restrained. I think there's a very wide gap between being emotionally restrained and letting emotions rule over you.
Imagine basing your entire opinion on a man about how they feel about that other man.
Imagine having a lot of people you once admired and looked up to as role models, from actors all the way to even your parents, suddenly all within a decade or so take their masks off and reveal that they are actually villains.
Is it revelatory that human beings having a quality you admire aren't the ideal person you projected them to be?
I'd reckon you'd be hard pressed to find a single person that matches every quality/belief you imagined them to have.
I don’t think this is about nit picking some small detail that causes them to fail a quality/belief checklist. It’s not like finding out your hero picks his nose or doesn’t like chocolate ice cream. When someone goes mask-off as MAGA, they are revealing fundamental core beliefs and values that totally flip the kind of person you might have thought they were.
I have friends and family who I never thought had a hateful, cruel, or belligerent bone in their bodies, suddenly start acting like totally different people, in the span of a few years. This isn’t me holding them to some purity checklist!
"Good People" suddenly going all in on racist rants and hard-core misogyny is never going to stop being disturbing.
Some of them taught me how to behave!? Did they just not believe any of those things?
MAGA is a horrifying movement.
It's an object lesson on how certain historical things happened. We go, oh no how could those people have all been inhuman monsters? If only we understood what made them like that.
And the monkey's paw curls…
Agreed. Additionally, when someone says something latently bigoted or hateful, it's easy to just let it slide because we all have our failings and societal progress is slow. Whereas maggotry is about openly embracing those failings, taking on additional types of failings from other people, and then socially validating it all as a purported political movement. But the only real thing tying it together is frustration with the world culminating in lashing out, which is why when they get into power there are no actual constructive policies in any political framework [0]. (apart from lining the preachers' pockets of course, and now apparently a holy war)
nit: I wouldn't call it "mask off" though, as if it's been there the whole time. I'd say it's more like there is tiny a kernel of that (and let's be honest, who doesn't have this in some form or another?), combined with a lack of willpower and critical thinking, that causes them into give in to the siren song of easy answers from mass-personalized propaganda.
[0] ancap and religious fundamentalism are the only frameworks I've been able to find that fit the maggot movement, and they're not particularly constructive.
Fred Rogers was the same kind, thoughtful person in everyday life as he was when he acted on his show. You can watch the congressional tapes of him testifying on increased funding to PBS and also testifying on not making VCRs illegal.
That's a little bit of a false dichotomy, though. I agree that it would be rare, even impossible, to find people who match every quality I imagined they had.
But some of those failings are forgivable, others are not.
Getting genuinely confused about pronouns sometimes: forgivable.
Being a loud, public MAGA homophobe transphobe: not forgivable.
"Never meet your heroes."
This goes double when your heroes are actors, i.e. people who lie for a living.
I stopped being a Chuck Norris fan when I learned he was a frequent contributor to WorldNetDaily, that he actively campaigned against gay marriage, and that he advocated for the theory that Obama was not born in America and saying shit like 'Electing Obama will plunge America into a thousand years of darkness.'
Him liking Trump was a symptom of his regressive, homophobic, and racist beliefs.
A kind person with humility would never say this.
Incomprehensible levels of based.
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I hear you and it is sad Norris had the views he did.
BUT, I was in karate as a kid in the prime of his sponsorship of tournaments, and he was indeed a role model then. He was a good guy in that field, promoting martial arts and the discipline, fitness and respect that goes along with it. I can vouch that having him promote hard work, training and respect in martial arts at age 10 did not turn me into a Christian nationalist.
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And it is not as if he was great at acting or as martial artist.
Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan were in a completely different league.
I’m used to it by now, but thanks.
I love that both my post truthfully describing Chuck Norris’s abhorrent views and the reply expressing regret that my post was flagged have now both been flagged. Stay classy, HN.
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it's possible to disagree with someone politically and still acknowledge their positive aspects.
Remember the good ol' days when people just didn't discuss politics or religion out of decency? There was a reason for that, both bring out the worst in people.
Suddenly I'm reminded of the decent (grown) people who yelled in six year-old Ruby Bridges' face when she was merely attending elementary school. So if that was 1960, I'm just wondering when those good ol' days you're referring to where.
It is an expression, you needn’t interpret it literally.
Oh, okay. I guess that's a convenient excuse to not have to back up your words.
This is hn not reddit, do you really expect a response to your whataboutism?
His reply was not whataboutism; it was a legitimate and direct retort to your post that exposes that what you asserted was false.
You can literally replace the first four words in their sentence with “What about when”.
That’s not what whataboutism is; it requires the “what about when” to be followed by a change of topic, to distract the other party from the original topic.
Like when I made a comment on general etiquette and someone else shifted the conversation to one of the worst moments of the civil rights movement?
Nope.
"Whataboutism" is just asking you to validate your claims, I guess.
You don’t need me to validate it for you, search “never discuss politics or religion in polite company” - it was a common maxim.
What, exactly, was the expression in your post that was not meant to be interpreted literally?
“Good ol’ days” is an idiom.
The problem is that living life is inherently political. Being able to ignore politics, not having to feel the need to discuss them, is a sign that you are inherently better off than a good chunk of this country.
A lot of people spend most of their waking hours having to deal with or at least keep in mind the fall out from regressive politics. Asking people to not discuss politics is like asking someone living in fear for their safety to not try and improve said safety. You're asking to not have to be bothered by something that annoys you to talk about in exchange for someone not being able to advocate for their life and livelihood.
I agree with the sentiment. My point was more people used to have a common understanding that there was a time and place for political (and religious) discussion - and that those beliefs were deeply personal, shaped largely by experience, and not meant to be held against one another in the broader judgement of their character.
Somewhere along the way we lost that idea, not all cultural changes are for the better.
I see, so from this reply I gather that your parent post was not “just an expression” as you claimed elsewhere, and you just got snippy when someone pushed back against your obviously out-of-touch assertion of fact.
As stated elsewhere, “good ol’ days” is an idiom. That was the expression. The point I was making was independent of the idiom/expression.
Goddamn, I wish I could block users on HN.
Just some intellectual sparring mate, no ill will intended.
Do you honestly think that falsely calling out an (informal) fallacy counts as “intellectual sparring,” whatever the fuck that is? What is wrong with you?
> What is wrong with you?
My mother denied me the teat.
> not meant to be held against one another in the broader judgement of their character
Really? When was that time? 1000 BC?
Was pretty common with my grandparents generation so… mid 20th century? I know it can be hard to believe post-internet.
For a simple political disagreement? Absolutely; I completely agree. But to believe that a certain class of people shouldn’t exist is not a run of the mill political belief, and treating it that way normalizes the behavior and contributes to the problem.
Not sure why you're downvoted. The disagreement was not on tax policy or where to build what. I don't understand why both this and "some people shouldn't exist" are both labeled with the same word "political".
Thanks, but I’m used to being downvoted and flagged for speaking truthfully about fascism on this site.
Despite how much they would have you believe it, human rights are not a political issue. Politics are used to expand practiced rights (or abused to reduce them), just like politics are involved with providing you access to water.
What positive aspects are there for someone who supported racist birther conspiracy theories and supported Benjamin Netanyahu?
To Godwin a little, Hitler's veganism doesn't make him a "role model", even if you think veganism is a good thing.
Fortunately Godwin's law was only an observation of a tendency and, as Godwin himself clarified, not a proscription against an apt comparison.
Sorry you don’t get to say “Well this person doesn’t think I have the right to exist and be respected as a person. But I’m sure glad he saved a puppy once.”
Chuck Norris does not go to heaven, heaven comes to him.
Chuck Norris doesn’t die. Death gets Chuck Norris.
Total Gym XLS has a 1-1.25" carriage bar for adding weight. 5gal bucket weights are the correct diameter to leave a gap between the weights and the floor.
Chuck Norris facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris_facts
> "Chuck Norris actually died 20 years ago, but Death hasn't built up the courage to tell him yet."
Death finally worked up the nerve.
"The Official Chuck Norris Fact Book" (2009) https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Official+Chuck+Norris+Fa... re: Official Chuck Norris Facts #1 - #101 w/ scripture:
> #1: "Chuck Norris was bitten by a cobra, and after five days of excruciating pain ... the cobra died."
Of this list of martial arts films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_martial_arts_films
Which are similar in plot and character arc to
"Man of Tai Chi"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Tai_Chi
Which Chuck Norris films are also similar?
> Forest Warrior, A Force of One, The Octagon, Forced Vengeance, Sidekicks,
Which "hacker films" are also similar?
I grew up watching action films in the 80s and 90s. I always like Chuck Norris ones as they had a humour and ridiclousness about them
Films like Missing in Action ,or delta force where the motorbike fires a rocket were just great at the time
I get he had some funny views later in life - but the films were a laugh at the time
What a legend.
I enjoyed reading the comments here. RIP.
From one of my friends:
"Chuck Norris didn't die. Death had a near-Chuck Norris experience."
RIP
My mother told me, "Chuck Norris passed today at 86" and my mind immediately went to, "I would never expect him to pass anyone on the sidewalk at any slower speed."
I even remember the times he was not vintage yet, but the real thing. Maybe even watched his famous fight scene with Bruce Lee on the cheap cinemas back in the day. Good days. RIP .
He immediately asked the ferryman for a coin to get to the other side.
Chuck Norris didn't die -- Death just became Chuck Norris
Death did not come for Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris came for Death.
Death will soon realize that he messed with the wrong man.
He'll be missed. I basically grew up on his movies.
"Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In some ways men can be immortal."
― Chuck Norris
I remember having a "Chuck" plugin installed on our Jenkins back in mid 2010's. Gave me a Chuckle every time i forgot it was there.
Walker told me I have AIDS https://youtu.be/pQZX0nzvMag
Chuck Norris hasn’t died, he summoned the death. RIP.
Chuck Norris haven't died, he just went to carry out the Last Judgement of God (ant probably torture Satan on the way).
The headline is incorrect. Chuck Norris didn't die, he transcended.
Also, the grim reaper hasn't yet gathered the courage to tell him.
I'm surprised Chuck Norris agreed to this.
Chuck Norris doesn't upvote on Hacker News. His presence alone sends posts to the front page. No more.
Chuck Norris decided to take the final sleep on his own. Death tried years ago, but Chuck didn't feel like it.
First Wade Boggs and now this. Just awful.
Wade Boggs is very much alive. He lives in Tampa Florida. He's in his late 60s.
A part of internet dies with him. RIP.
Chuck Norris never dies. Culmination of Human sprit.
He fought Bruce Lee in the film way of the dragon
Chuck Norris doesn't die. He prepares himself for the next battle, with Jeff Dean.
Chuck Norris didn't die. He simply moved to a parallel Earth that needed him.
What in the Hell could possibly take down Chuck Norris??? We are all DOOMED!!!
He hasn’t died, he’s just moved on to an eternity of roundhouse kicking Satan.
The Grim Reaper requested permissions from Chuck Norris to take his soul.
He wished the death on himself because he couldn’t bear witness to trump being alive.
RIP legend
https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/01/13/chuck-norris-homophob...
Chuck Norris promising the USA will have 1,000 years of darkness if Obama wins in 2012 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ae9b-B_EQ0
Still 986 years to go!
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It's an objective fact. He said it.
The thing about Norris is that this isn't just generic policy stuff. I think pretty much all politics has impact on People and therefor matters, but you can abstract a whole lot away on a lot of policies in economics, etc. I think empathetic and caring human beings can disagree on many things.
But racism and homophobia aren't areas where I think empathetic and caring people can disagree, and I don't think those should be legitimatized by calling them political. He wanted to strip rights from gay people and propped up all sorts of racist rhetoric and birtherism against Obama. That's not political. That's being a shitty person.
Why are you afraid of the truth
Death has Chucknorrised?
Chuck Norris didn't have a near death experience, Death had an experience near him.
Commander Sam Vimes would like a word.
Chuck Norris died? I didn't think that was possible...
My condolences, he was one of my favorite childhood actor :(
The only person that can train LLMs with his mind.
Strange if you never heard about Bruce <s>Lee</s> Schneier.
Chuck Norris didn't die, Death chucknorried.
Wouldn't be suprised, if he dies back and announces a film for next year.
He made it that far in life, that even if you might disagree with him on all and everything, you would still like him.
Just like Val Kilmer?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/mar/18/val-kilmer-resu...
RIP both...
he's not really dead, one of his morning push-ups just launched him into a new universe.
Godspeed. ;~;7
Oh this guy is a legend. Did he do anything with tech peripherally? I hope we can put up a dark top for him as an exception.
Not even every important influential person in tech gets the black bar. You think an actor who is mostly known for low-effort internet memes and pretending to be a cowboy on tv deserves it?
I guess it’s a generational thing, because I shouldn’t actually be surprised that someone would know so very little about Chuck Norris.
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>He was a typical pro-gun anti-abortion homophobic and racist MAGA Christian conservative.
Sure, but let's be real: people here are hardly mourning the man himself, so much as a few ideas of him from media they loved, and the cultural impact of Chuck Norris memes from their childhood and such.
He's not around anymore to bolster any hateful messages. Let people have a moment of nostalgia for memories watching him roundhouse kick bad guys with their grandma, or dumb Chuck Norris memes on the playground. That's what people remember.
You must be fun at parties.
Unlike Chuck Norris I'm the life of the party.
nvm just a thought.
Anyone remember barrens chat?
Chuck Norris doesn’t die.
Death becomes Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris disagrees.
he has become death.
death had a near chuck norris experience
How did he die?
Boredom, last enemy to defeat was life itself.
He was 86 years old
How do you know that? Scientists tried to measure Chuck Norris’ age. The number refused to exist.
The headline is inaccurate. Chuck Norris is alive and kicking in another dimension.
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He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point.
However, so as not to speak (purely) ill of the dead, I will say that he was an accomplished martial artist with a prolific film career.
> He had some pretty awful views that he was pretty loud about, especially later in life. He also cheated on his wife at one point.
In 1961, in his early 20s. You get ~80 years on this planet to make mistakes and have views that some other people will dislike. If these are the worst things we can accuse him of, while acknowledging all his charitable work, I'd say he fared OK compared to many other role models we have.
The Obama Birtherism nonsense was certainly not in this dude's 20s
Apparently much more recently too:
https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/01/13/chuck-norris-homophob...
Turns out he was a MAGA Christian homophobe. That’s … disappointing. But I guess I was naive to expect something different.
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To be fair, you probably have some views some people think are pretty awful.
Oh, for sure. MAGA types think some of my views are absolutely abhorrent. I'm pretty sure there are a few cultures that would kill me for my views.
Just because they hate me, though, doesn't mean I can't disagree with their position.
This is a tough thing. I do believe in moral relativism to a large extent, but I also think there are some things that are really just objectively morally and ethically "right" or "wrong".
Hating on LGBT folks and trying to restrict their rights is one of those things that is wrong no matter how you dice it. People who believe otherwise are wrong, full stop.
So it's not really so much about people thinking someone else's views are awful. It's about whether or not those views truly are awful. And I feel very safe in saying that if someone thinks my support of LGBT folks is pretty awful, they're in the wrong, not me. And I'm in the right to think their hateful views are awful.
(Yes, I realize how arrogant that sounds, but I have to stand by it.)
I think this is something that transcends politics or culture wars or anything like that. Having these sorts of hateful views are actively harmful to humanity's and society's future. That doesn't mean I think we should censor people (rampant censorship is also actively harmful to our future), but it does mean we need to somehow fix people and shift the culture toward one that lets people live how they want in cases like this where doing so doesn't actually hurt anyone else. I have no idea how to accomplish this, though.
I don't see how this matters. Whoever thinks I'm horrible is 100% allowed to say this after I'm dead.
Or, another option is that we could all give grace to others, even (especially) if they disagree with us.
There's disagreement then there's being an outspoken supporter of systematically trying to strip rights away from others because of your religious beliefs. It's much deeper than having differing views on fiscal policy.
Your political opposite can and does say the exact same thing about you.
Yeah, Nazis in the 30s and people opposing them were just the same. They could have used all the same arguments!
They would be liars, then.
Liars according to who? Who gets to say what's a lie? This would still be just as pointless of an argument IMO... I think parent commenter is saying that you simply can't play the same game they are because you look identical to them from the outside; you're both saying the same thing.
Left says you're trying to take rights away... Right says you're trying to take rights away.
This does nothing to educate anyone or try to find a mutually agreeable solution... your arguments carry no more weight than theirs do. You both think you're "right" and the other is "wrong".
Those are pretty wild accusations from someone who doesn't know me or my beliefs. I definitely have not been calling for those things, especially not through the lens of religion.
Everything I said here in regards to his beliefs can be easily verified. It's crazy to me to respond "well you're doing the same to them" as a retort. I'm not?
Who are you granting grace to? Who are you denying it to?
We know the answers to these questions for Norris.
I'm fine with people disagreeing with me. I'm not fine when that disagreement results in campaigning for legally restricting the rights of others. There's a huge difference.
If every racist, homophobe, and transphobe (and others) would stop trying to enshrine their views into law, I'd have much less of a problem with them. I wouldn't want to hang out with them, but I could safely ignore and not care one bit about their views.
Disagree? I think it's safe to say that someone who campaigned to ban same sex marriage is more than just disagreeing. He's trying to ruin millions of lives.
He was an Obama birther conspiracist.
He thought gays shouldn't be allowed to join Boy Scouts.
He was a big supporter of Netanyahu.
This aren't things that are even remotely in the same ballpark as disagreement. If someone is using their celebrity status to cause harm to millions or tens of millions, I think we can say a few unkind words about them when they go.
Don't give grace to racists who spout birther conspiracy theories. Don't give grace to homophobes.
Me 5 years ago did. I agree with all my views today. Who knows about me 5 years from now
There's a solid difference between 'awful' and just plain 'dumb'.
"Don't speak ill of the dead"?
How about "Don't be a bad person when you're alive"?
Something I was brought up to believe was that you shouldn't speak ill of the recently deceased. A courtesy to those in mourning.
I struggle with that rule sometimes.
And Chuck Norris was brought up to believe that gay people are the devil. I was conditioned to not take my parents traditions as gospel. The taboo against speaking ill of the recently deceased is not universal as we saw after Khamenei's death, and it is possible to debate whether we should discuss the failings of the recently deceased dispassionately, as newspaper obituaries usually do, and whether the impact on society of those critiques is net negative or not. There is the famous case of a premature unflattering obituary of Alfred Nobel upon the death of his brother possibly inspiring Nobel to think about his legacy, for example.
All this to say that I don't think it's necessarily problematic for you to mention that he had and shared some pretty awful views.
Great advice. Do you follow it?
Is there one way to be a good person?
Does being a good person also mean agreeing with your politics?
There are good people whose politics I disagree with. If you are using your celebrity status to cause harm to millions on the international stage, systematically attempting to strip their rights, I think it's fair to say they weren't a good person.
> Does being a good person also mean agreeing with your politics?
Can we stop framing human rights as "politics"? People hating on others because they don't like that they're gay or trans or black or brown... that's just people being fundamentally awful people, and has nothing to do with politics.
The fact that they are then taking their awfulness and engaging politically to enshrine their awful views into law just adds another dimension to it.
I said this in another comment: if these people with awful views would stop trying to make those awful views laws, then I'd have much less of a problem with them; I could at least just ignore them.
> Is there one way to be a good person?
What a useless, one-dimensional take on the problem.
If I can quote Chael Sonnen, I’d like to say ”you absolutely suck!”
My dad was a film reporter in the late '70s/early '80s, and told me that Chuck Norris had been one of the friendliest celebrities he had ever met.
My dad had some antiquated views himself too. People can have/be both, I suppose.
That's the thing: you can be a perfectly pleasant person to interact with, and people can genuinely enjoy interacting with you.
But then you can start actively using your celebrity status to advocate for legally restricting the rights of people you don't like. That's the real problem, and that's why I wouldn't want to look at people like Chuck Norris as role models.
Being polite doesn't make you a good person. It just makes you tolerable, or even pleasant, in personal interactions.
Sure, we can talk about things like your dad's experience. But there's more to it than that.
"Class act" is doing a lot of lifting there
As far as I can tell he was an incredible person in life, people only spoke well of him. Sad to see him go, although happy he lived a full life
Yeah, his support of the Obama "birther" conspiracy was super classy.
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> Or was it when he said that a Black president would bring "1000 years of darkness"?
I looked this one up. It's true. He's been going out of his way to be a political firebrand and claiming milquetoast Democrats are Satan for decades. It wasn't some offhand comment when cornered on stage. He's pushed white christian nationalism hard for quite some time.
Sad, because it was so unnecessary, divisive, and crazy--a black mark on his legacy.
But it's not true the way GP phrased it. Norris did not say if a black man was elected then there would be 1000 years of darkness, he said it about a specific man who happens to be black. It's silly, but unless you're claiming that black politicians get special exemptions, his race is immaterial to this quote.
If you look at the wider context, it's harder to deny the racism.
Nah. The part where his name was relevant again because of the jokes and he started the eating and suing people over it.
It was the part where he didn't say things like this about other people.
Looked it up and he did say these things, pretty shocking how racist he was. RIP, hope he finds peace in the afterlife and leaves the hate behind.
Except he did worse by his actions. And did say that about other people. Like Obama being born in Kenya. Dude was racist
this is class act for 1/2 of america
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They're not that far apart, honestly.
That's true. These days it seems the ideal conservative man is more like a caveman eating steak off the bone versus a thoughtful caring Atticus Finch type.
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> What a load of horseshit. Government is "what we do." It's not imposed by alien pod-persons.
On the other hand, when eventually the reckoning for this administration comes, would you welcome the idea of collective responsibility?
I would welcome collective responsibility only if it means collectively acknowledging the harm that was done, listening to those who were harmed, and committing to repair, not just punishing those in power. Restorative justice asks each of us to examine how we contributed to or normalized the conditions that allowed this harm, and then to take concrete, shared steps to repair relationships, redistribute power, and change the structures that made the reckoning necessary in the first place.
Unlike penal justice, restorative justice is idempotent and we shouldn't fear its application.
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He was known to be racist (at least in later life), so a black mourning ribbon wouldn't be appropriate.
Racist? That's new. Because he's conservative?
In the 90s he sued one of his franchisees for defamation of character because they were racist.
So many commenters here are, or choose to be, completely obvlivious to the fact that Chuck Norris was a racist little man who decried Obama becoming president, supported Trump through both campaigns, and openly hated muslims and gay people.
Yeah, really tough guy.
Yeah, I was pretty bummed with how Chuck Norris and Hulk Hogan turned out in the end.
Mankind will help restore your faith in mankind. https://youtu.be/7ssDFzesdn4
I think the weakly efficient market of mortality is the only fix here. Dead attitudes and mindsets need their advocates to die of natural causes for society to advance IMO. Also known as "blank advances one funeral at a time."
“We’d like to keep the circumstances private”
Yes, but now I’m like, super suspicious.
He was defeated by Mr Rogers in a blood-stained sweater. Understandable they're keeping that quiet.
(Ok, ok, technically it was Gandalf the Gray and White, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight)
And Benito Musollini, and the Blue Meanie. And Cowboy Curtis and Jambi the Genie
And Robocop, Terminator, Captain Kirk and Darth Vader. Lo-Pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger.
And Bill S. Preston, Theodore Logan, Spock, The Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan.
There is nothing suspicious about a celebrity's family just wanting to deal with death in private.
You're probably right, but that's not the usual wording you hear. Of course, when grieving, proper proofreading may not be (nor should it be) at the top of anyone's list.
They usually don't put it like that, though. It's usually just "please respect our privacy during this difficult time", etc.
He kicked it, but the consequences of his long-standing support of the march toward hatred and division linger on.
The section on his Wikipedia page is helpfully succinct if you want to understand the basis of my not joining in the japes and jokes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris#Political_views
Very cool thread. Middle school jokes and culture wars. I’m so glad we don’t allow political threads on here and can instead bask in the intellectual might of people talking about TV man the did/didn’t like.