have some vcards!

@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.

@MentORPHEUS

Rush did NOT, I mean not fucking once EVER, clarify, caveat, offer exceptional or outlier cases, that could in any way get even perceived as "diluting/softening" his hard-line positions on issues, particularly that of drugs.

That sort of shit is supposed to go without saying. Don't be an autist.

The dude trusted his doctor, and his doctor made him an addict.

The drug abusers he spoke about being harsh on were the ones who chose to use drugs which they knew to be illegal. A heroin junky has no one to blame but himself.

That's a big fucking difference.

[the rest]

I admire your passion to a degree, but it's clouding your judgement a bit. Just because a guy, whose primary purposes were first to entertain and second to provide an alternative to the DNC party line propaganda put out by the mainstream, didn't caveat every possible exception to his hard-line stance doesn't mean exceptions didn't exist.

Straight up: you're just a hater, and your hatred for a good but flawed human is keeping you from seeing him as a human, who can also be a victim of a fucked up system.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

His discussions did not include people who were led to addiction by their doctors,

Dude, I was in a position of listening to all three hours of his radio show, every day, for literally half a decade. Therefore, I can say with certainty: Rush did NOT, I mean not fucking once EVER, clarify, caveat, offer exceptional or outlier cases, that could in any way get even perceived as "diluting/softening" his hard-line positions on issues, particularly that of drugs. Even "legal" pharmaceuticals, he stood hard for the for-profit model, and vilified every other alternative as "socialized medicine, a slippery slope directly to full Communist takeover of the USA."

So yes, he was HARD in favor of the status quo that financially incentivizes doctors, hospital systems, and pharmaceutical companies, to push pills for money, and fuck all the guardrails around those with abuse potential. And, he wasn't just speaking in a vacuum. He was nationally syndicated, with an audience of tens of millions, who called themselves "Dittoheads" which as repeated on-air meant "I love you and completely agree with and believe everything you say!"

Thus, he modeled ideas, behaviors, and attitudes for the entire American Right Wing culture. His platform and positions, therefore held a symbiotic relationship with the culture and positions of law enforcement up to and including Federal agencies (classic example Chief Darryl Gates saying publicly, "Casual drug users ought to be taken out and SHOT!"), legislative bodies therefore the drafting, enactment, and enforcement of drug laws and literally tens of millions of dollars per year budgeted for interdiction and enforcement activities.

For my part, I was closely involved with the "legalize hemp/cannabis" movement, therefore a ground level soldier intimately involved in the "Drug War," Immersed in it personally, not a casual pundit on the sidelines with no more skin in the game than agreeing with a fat fuck radio host.

SO, for one of THE. TOP. players in the entire 2 decade drug war vertical industry and legislative machine, who in service of this position expressed the harshest possible treatment of OTHER drug users, to carve out a personal exception, and to selectively do the opposite of the entire corpus of his expressed position on the entire thing, is COMPLETELY out of the fucking question. When it came down to him personally, "falling victim" to the same human foibles and weaknesses he spent literally thousands of hours condemning others for; he deserves ZERO compassion, mercy, empathy, and other such things he also condemned personally, and claimed belonged to his ideological opposites, "The Left", when it suited him and the entire breadth and height of his hard line positions on drugs and their users.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

A victim of the opioid epidemic,

A much more generous excuse than Limbaugh himself used regularly, calling drug abuse a crime and moral failing NOT a disease, and that addicts "should be sent up" when talking about other people. Also much more generous personal accountability-shirking than this community is generally known for...

He didn't get addicted to opioids until after a botched surgery in like 2002 or so.

The surgery was in the '90s. He finally publicly admitted the addiction in 2003, getting out ahead of it getting revealed as he worked his way through the legal system.

So hateful! Such a hater.

Yup, he worked HARD to earn every bit of my hate, for his ongoing lack of compassion and outright hate expressed on-air at groups he deemed political foes. I'll always remember him as a fat fuck hypocrite.

@Typo-MAGAshiv

the polar icecaps increased in size, as did the glaciers being tracked

Are you looking at the big picture, or repeating cherry picked and spoon fed measurement methods? Polar ice and glacier VOLUME, as well as annual sea ice extent, show steady declines since 1979, and the ice of the latter measure, steadily showing long term permanent ice comprising it getting replaced year by year with thinner annual ice.

Because by 1998, he had become quite thin and maintained it for the rest of his life.

Also got addicted to Hillbilly Heroin, and doctor shopped his way to permanent hearing loss. Most compelling argument for existence of a just God, that he lost 0.001dB of hearing ability for each time he uttered on-air, "Long haired, dope-smoking, maggot-infested hippies" as part of his consistent support for the Right-Wing authoritarian "War on Drugs." You're literally admiring drug-addict-thin, not healthy diet and lifestyle thin. I'd also put money on gastric bypass, weight loss prescriptions, and other cheat codes.