Crackstarter - Gawker crowdfunding the Rob Ford crack tape: good or evil?

sooooo stoned in this clip:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/02/10/john-tory-rob-ford-mayor-election-city-council_n_6655166.html

Had his surgery today.

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2015/05/11/rob-ford-in-hospital-for-cancer-surgery-today.html

Apparently they got the entire tumor out--10 hours. Good for him. Which also means we can all go back to attacking him guilt-free (the illness was always a complicating factor for me--I know for many people it wasn't).

The guy who shot the video that started all this was sentenced today.

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/2015/07/21/creator-of-rob-ford-crack-video-sentenced-to-eight-years-for-trafficking.html

this is how dude looked when he showed up to cast the only vote in favor of a stop and frisk law

http://i.imgur.com/0DMAvJH.jpg

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/507000356271042560/ar741Yoo.jpeg

lol

(xpost) I love Tory in that photo. "Please--disappear. (Closes eyes, opens them.) Damn."

stay classy, crackhead.

Latest round of chemotherapy has not worked out, going back for more.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/rob-ford-condition-1.3498155

RIP:
https://twitter.com/jpags/status/712294380841934848

what a life story

http://media.giphy.com/media/3xz2BPbIqcqpFDKXsI/giphy.gif

astonished to learn how young he was. not only was he a fixture for what seemed like a long while, but he /looked/ a lot older, even before his recent battle with cancer.

rip big man

xpost Yeah, no kidding. I'd never paid attention to his age before, so learning that he was less than a decade older than me is mindblowing. I clearly have some hard living to do.

Terrible mayor, but I can't take pleasure in this--the great majority of the harm he did was to himself. The city will go on.

rip. always sad to hear about someone dying from cancer at 46 with two young kids.

what a wild ride though. he was so clearly out of control of his life, i don't understand how he or anyone around him thought he was fit to continue being mayor.

We'll not see his like again. I'd say he was basically a Chris Farley skit come to life except Chris Farley already was that.

He almost outlived the website that crowdsourced a video of him smoking crack.

Things you would have expected Rob Ford to die of other than cancer:

- cirrhosis
- overdose (cocaine)
- heart explodes
- car off a bridge
- knifed by a hooker

at least he lived to see gawker dealt a fatal blow

who knows if he was following that news. I'd imagine he had many other things on his mind!

Things you would have expected Rob Ford to die of other than cancer:

- cirrhosis
- overdose (cocaine)
- heart explodes
- car off a bridge
- knifed by a hooker

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Tuesday, March 22, 2016 1:35 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

or somehow, all of the above at once

(i challenge you all to write a screenplay that culminates in such an event)

Basic Instinct 2 already exists.

RIP Big Homie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EykpGoXyKVg

One thing where I'm torn was his decision to run for council after he dropped out of the mayoral race. I volunteered for his main opponent, who did end up finishing second. It was selfish for Ford to run, everyone knew that, but I can also understand that in his circumstances, maybe he or his family felt that remaining active would have some therapeutic value. I wonder how Andray Domise is feeling today. (He tweeted something very gracious, but I'm sure there are mixed feelings there.)

According to some narratives, Ford's true plunge into the deep end of substance abuse came in the wake of the death of his own father. I can't help but feel that somewhere in this timeframe Ford became aware of his own mortality, not in the abstract grief counselling sense, but in the very real sense that cancer already had its hooks in him.

I disliked Ford immensely, but he joins the pantheon of fellow Toronto artists who truly succeeded at exposing something of the city's hidden history, a city often noted for the safe, polite narratives of its elites and its media. As an artist, he joins David Cronenberg in chronicling the seething body horror of sprawling 1980s Toronto. He joins the band Rush in documenting the hodgepodge of Tolkien, Ayn Rand, and suburban teenage loneliness that, for those of a certain age, may have stood in for coherent politics (and what's more, possibly fed anxiety about the Cronenbergian horror at the limit case of all politics, coherent or otherwise).

if you ask me, he ran for reelection because a) he needed a paycheck while he probably wouldn't be able to work much b) Deco (his family business) did not want him and is likely not doing well financially C) it's all he really knows D) he wants to stay in any kind of limelight he can.

got to wonder if the constant media hype and clickbait idolization didn't drive him further into addiction.

Gawker is basically an enabler but worse than just an enabler one that doesn't even try to be your friend but wholly profits off your self destruction

Gawker totally helped kill this guy early, I don't think there can be any doubt about it

I like the way Tory is handling this. (I do like Tory so far; I think I'm incapable of ever actually voting for a conservative, but I think he's our version of John Lindsay on the spectrum, at least socially.) Whatever the family wants in the way of a civic ceremony, sounds like he's talking to them and deferring to their wishes.

Gawker is not responsible for anything ford wasn't already way ahead of them in doing to himself.

Right. Gawker went to crazy lengths to blow that shit up into the public sphere, and doing so put that guy's demons on full display for the world. I remember how we all laughed at him falling apart. Well, not me, it made me sick to my stomach. Now he's dead.

"So? That's not going to affect anyone, especially a guy who's clearly struggling with some deep shit. Bring on the LOLs!"

there can and is and should be doubt about whether gawker killed rob ford early, what the fuck

had cbc on in the background last night and caught a little bit of the news and the national, both mentioning ford's death obviously, and just found that both were way too deferential. they don't need to do a hatchet job on a guy who just died but casting it as an almost purely human interest story with the only marginally critical elements of the broadcasts being referring to him as "polarizing" or mentioning that he "struggled with substance abuse issues" is just way too polite, even for canada.

xp

Why? I've seen people get similar treatment and it, oddly enough, led to things like suicide, death from excessive drug and alcohol use, etc. Treating people like sacks of garbage for personal amusement ... ehhh, tends not to be something that has a positive or neutral impact on the life of another.

guy was a huge drug addict with an exploding scandal whether or not gawker -- and a whole shitload of other US based media -- decided to take an interest in toronto politics all of a sudden

i don't think cancer cares much about any of that. if you want to make a case that the added ridicule led to increased stress which sapped his body's ability to fight, idk, maybe talk to his doctors and see if you're on the right track

You know I'm at least little right, you just don't want to admit to yourself, because it's pretty sick stuff.

my god

xp lol. you're not right. if the mayor of the fourth largest by population city in north america has substance abuse issues it's a perfectly legitimate story for press to cover. the press coverage was even fairly sympathetic, i.e. "lol look at this incorrigible mayor who boozes like crazy and smokes crack"

You know I'm at least little right, you just don't want to admit to yourself, because it's pretty sick stuff.

― larry appleton, Wednesday, March 23, 2016 4:00 PM (7 minutes ago)

sick stuff. sad!

he wasn't exactly going to rehab and cleaning up his act before anything was published

he died of cancer. cancer doesn't read gawker.

cancer stopped reading after caity left iirc

gawker is cancer