About that idiotic Rolling Stone Cover (cross posted)

TSO, you made some good points, and I agree with all of them. However,the only thing you needed to say was that RS glamorized a killer. Without reading the article, the cover screams sympathy for the sweet, sexy murdering little moppet.

…and the only “larger truth,” the only “thoughtful coverage” any journalist in this counttry needed to expound on was the American blood all over Boston streets and sidewalks. THAT was/is the only TRUTH that matters.

Never read it.

Will not start now.

Several of my colleagues were out of work that day, and had driven the hour to Boston from Western Mass to run or to watch a friend run. I will remember that day as clearly as I remember 9-11…. I have to be honest in that I have never read a single issue of Rolling Stone. I think it’s pretty clear from my posts that I don’t give a rat’s 4ss about popular culture and the politics of a magazine that glorifies that culture have zero attraction in my mind. So here goes, Rolling Stone has the right to produce whatever kind of magazine they feel is appropriate to their editorial content. In this case they’ve chosen to make a murderer look like a rock star because that is what they do on their magazine covers. Now apparently they are surprised that acting like a collective of complete douche nozzles has consequences when the general public disagrees…..if they were serious journalists and not just pop culture jerkoffs they would have put that little prick in an orange jumpsuit and ran with the monster in our midst theme, and the article photos could have had him looking like a regular teen and no one would have complained… They chose to exercise their journalistic integrity by creating a cover that would piss people off to generate sales at their crappy magazine that less than 1% of the population ever looks at. Apparently they don’t understand at Rolling Stone that their vendors are not obligated to carry products that the vendor finds objectionable or will create a problem for the vendor. Grocery stores want to sell you bread and milk, if a magazine gets in you in the door to do that great, but Grocery Stores don’t want political firestorms on their shelves….you can create whatever crap you want, but no one has to accept it or purchase it. And if it is offensive enough many people will band together to try and drive your product out of business as is their right. If Rolling Stone ceases production I won’t know unless I… Read more »

What Arendt wrote is certainly true, but nobody did soft-focus cover photos of Eichmann before they took him to the gallows.

No Celtics TSO?!? Back when they had Bird they were the one Boston team I could ever stomach.

@9: I find this cover absolutely disgraceful and I hope the editor is fired for such poor taste and judgement. That said, I DO want to understand the path these terrorists took. Yes, they’re terrorists now -murderers, bastards and more- but they weren’t always, and *understanding* that transition is helpful in preventing these sorts of things in the future. And, as a part of that understanding, you do need to step back in time to when these assholes were, in fact, ‘sweet boys’. It doesn’t change what they are now, but it’s about understanding the process so it can be fought against more effectively.

Has Charles Pierce weighed in on this?

He did…

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Tsarnaev_Cover

If the point is to demonstrate an evolution of a monster, I suppose I don’t actually mind the cover that much. I don’t think it’s particularly brilliant, but it doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would, either.

The Dark Enlightenment folks would tell us that psycho killers make ladies swoon anyway. Adding a fuzzy picture that shows how pretty this little monster was only really works on that crowd.

I’m fond of KMart and other retailers that aren’t going to carry this. Rolling Stone’s McChrystal piece was the same reason I hate them already, and if it takes a glam shot of a murderer/boat lover to punish them for something, I’ll take it.

TSO–I’ve been on Boylston Street more than a few times, and walked from the “Pru” to Fenway to catch a game with a few stops along the way.

To know EXACTLY where those bombs went off and the carnage that resulted hits close to home.

And to see someone wrap themselves in their First Amendment rights to act like a collective bunch of douchetools, well, everyone has a right to be stupid, but those fuckers are abusing the privilege.

An old saying that I apply in cases like this: The First Amendment doesn’t exist for speech you agree with, but that which you disagree with. I’m here in MA and had friends at the marathon that day. I hope this d bag ends up in a deep dark hole, either a cell or underground, doesn’t matter to me. But I will probably read the article. I have it online now, so RS gets no money from me. But I do want to know what motivated this POS to randomly kill. I’m not sure I’ll learn much, since what happened is so far out on my scale of human behavior.

“I was going to become a serial killer but decided against it after I learned that….” Ever see that line? No, I haven’t either. Who gives a rat’s ass what motivated someone to do some horrible crime if knowing comes after the fact and it doesn’t stop the next evildoer? In any event, in sweet pea’s case, his motivation for murdering and maiming is directly traceable to Islam, however corrupt the teachings. And if we later learn that if he was potty trained at gunpoint and forced to have sex with his grandmother, what?

If he had been one of that rat-mouth, snaggle-toothed, cross eyed, tangle-bearded un-photogenic flea infested primates that set road side bombs they wouldn’t have even thought about it.
Scum selling scum. Fucking turds.

Murderers of this sort are motivated by wet-dreams of death, blood, and fear. What got them there doesn’t interest me at all.

@28: Again, I think the cover is a pathetically misguided attempt at being edgy and unequivocally disagree with it. I don’t see it as explicitly giving the asshole a pass, either, but indirectly it does seem to lessen the ‘blame’ a bit. Which I also hate. My fear with the cover is all the nutcases who subscribed to him on Facebook because he’s ‘cute’ or something, and… god, I’m wretching just thinking about it.

Basically, I hate the cover, but I do want information on the path this guy -and yes, other psychopaths, whether serial killers or terrorists- took. I can step back from my emotions and evaluate this because it’s critical we do so – there WILL be others, and if gaining valuable information allows us to either catch them more quickly or reduce the number who turn into monsters like this, that’s worth a little temporary objectivity in my opinion.

I get that it’s not for everyone, though.

And one more reminder, kids: RS feeds, clothes and houses so called “journalist” Matt Taibbi, who blasts other journalists for pro-Government bias against little Bradley Manning, while starring in the “I Am Bradley Manning” series of navel-gazing advocacy spots by and for dipshit elitists. F*ck you, Rolling Stone.

So, where are the pictures of the l’il bass turd when he was a baby?
Boston will name a street after this clown.
Rolling Stone? Dang, I thought that rag was long gone.