News talk 2013-12-22: “insensitive” tweet sinks exec

Conversation is dying. It’s a cruel death by torture. The terrorists of political correctness wield sadistic weapons against random victims, just to see them suffer.

Justine Sacco, looks too pretty to be tortured in this way. (Yes, that was a deliberately provocative and politically incorrect statement. And, gosh darn it, I’m proud.) Anyway, she’s a PR exec for IAC (headed by Barry Diller) and tweets: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Now, you’re welcome to do a double take and think, wow, I wonder what this probably liberal chick meant by that. But you’ve got to let people speak their minds. You’ve got to understand that things said or typed quickly aren’t always carefully structured. Nothing she said was untrue or unreasonable for a quick quip.

There is a terrible AIDS epidemic in Africa. It mostly affects blacks. Oh, wait, I meant African Americans. No, wait again, I guess I did mean blacks, because it’s Africa. Oh, shit! I don’t know what I mean.

And I don’t know what Sacco meant, either. Did she intend to make a sardonic comment about the world not paying enough attention, because the horror wasn’t happening to whites? Was she tipsy on wine and giggly about serious things? We don’t know. But it’s conversation, people. And when you talk, you say stuff. And you modify what you said. And you retract. And you rephrase. And you sometimes stick to you guns. You crawl out by amending. Or you dig your hole deeper. Or, like Sacco, you get scared and apologize to the torturers.

It’s time for us to stop yielding to the PC terrorists. I stopped a long time ago. — MC