@MentORPHEUS

turned iconic Gramophone advertisement

BMG music group or whatever!

They and Columbia House used to do that "15 CDs for 1 penny!" bait-and-switch trap back in the 1990s.

I joined one of them at 12 or 13, and received numerous CDs. When it came time to pay for the ones that weren't free, including all the "monthly selection" CDs they'd automatically send once a month if you didn't return the card declining it, the bill was pretty high.

...and my mom beat me to the mail that day.

She got me out of it easily enough by calling them and telling them I was a minor and couldn't legally sign a contract.

But she took away a lot of my CDs, which I never got back.

I don't know how she missed the "Use Your Illusion" both I and II CDs from Guns N' Roses, though. Heh.

@MentORPHEUS

Rush declared repeatedly that he was possessed of "talent on loan from God "

If you listened to him as much you claim to have, you'd have to have heard him explain that joke thousands of times.

Life is temporary. God is the source of his talent. Therefore, his talent was on loan from God.

My mom thought this was hubristic on Rush's part as well, and much like you, the explanation did nothing to assuage her hate-boner.

[Rush's not seeking help]

...premium we supposedly place on personal agency.

You do realize that addicts cease thinking for themselves, and that the chemical dependency takes over, right? His personal agency was compromised, and again, through no original fault of his own. He trusted instructions from an authority figure: a doctor.

The heroin junkies he was talking about, again, exercised personal agency to use and abuse a substance widely known to be addictive and widely known to be illegal.

Big difference. Important distinction.

But your personal animosity towards him blinds you to that, and so you just relish in his suffering much like all those sickos who celebrated when Charlie Kirk was murdered.

@Typo-MAGAshiv you're missing my fundamental point, that Rush fell out of the fundamental attribution error tree and hit every branch of it on the way down; and reinforced and baked this into American Right Wing culture, to the advantage of his ratings but to the harm of right culture's capacity for empathy and compassion, on the condition of individuals' membership in their conservative tribe. There's the actor-observer bias, where your personal and tribal tribal foibles get dismissed as circumstantial and reactive, while those of the entire outgroup get attributed to intrinsic and intractable moral and character flaws.
This reinforced and metastasized the reflex to presume everyone on "the Left" is irrational and unreachable to their core, acting as a thought and effort terminating barrier to understanding the positions and their underlying reasons of everyone outside the ingroup of conservative Republicans.

A comorbidity is the Just World hypothesis where everyone outside the ingroup bubble inherently "deserves " bad circumstances that befall them, while hypocritically carving out special exemptions for Ingroup members. Rush declared repeatedly that he was possessed of "talent on loan from God " which reinforces this bias.

So no, I absolutely do NOT have a solitary mitigating fuck to give Limbaugh, who KNEW Doctor Shopping in conspiracy with a third party personal assistant was illegal, and did it anyway to get The Precious opioids, rather than seek help through legitimate channels that were available to him at the 99th percentile of the population at large due to his massive wealth.

Yet a large measure of his shtick, was to brook NO such humanizing compassion for the masses, that their shortcomings and foibles weren't forgivable due to external circumstances like a legal and medical system stacked against their favor and corrupt players within that, but PERSONAL flaws they held full agency over but casually CHOSE the less ethical options.

This conversation seems particularly poignant, happening in this community given the premium we supposedly place on personal agency.