Jeremy Clarkson's "The World According To Clarkson" is one of Penguin's "best books of its kind to be published in recent years"

nah, he's come out with some unpleasant shit. Stewart Lee's comment is probably right, he has controversial opinions for money, but every now and then he throws something genuinely mean out there. plus, y'know, it's the less the man's shtick itself than the fact that he's an aspirational figure for a lot of wankers

I don't live in UK so I miss a lot of what he does/says, but seems obv that he says stuff just to wind people up. Getting wound up by someone like that is nagl. He's (partly )trying to show that left-thinking people are hypersensitive and humorless, and that just bears evidence to it. (I disagree w/virtually everything he says, but hardly seems worth the energy to despise him...yeah maybe if his wanker disciples were everywhere here)

i can honestly believe he's a personable guy in private, he seems to get on with people who you wouldn't think wd tolerate assholes. like i say the big difference is probly just that he's everywhere over here, plus he works for Murdoch so

and maybe it's cause I'm accustomed to way more heinous right wing nutjobs in the US that I can just laugh off whatever nonsense he says. oh that Mr Clarkson, the loveable scamp etc.

he's not even in the top 5 most evil rightwing pundits over here, i think it's the insidiousness. he certainly is nowhere near a guy like Richard Littlejohn who, after a serial killer murdered several prostitutes, wrote a column about how they were "whores" who'd brought it on themselves, essentially

we have fewer libertarian-y pundits than you guys so that might be part of why Clarkson raises hackles

I call bullshit on the whole "you peacenik hippies have no sense of humour" canard: you would have to be some braindead neanderthal to find Clarkson's brand of obvious button-pushing and tiresome, rote right-wing blether "funny". Praps he's a lovely open-minded dude in "real-life" but all the evidence I've seen suggests a man in pale dad jeans who smells of wank and pipe tobacco who holds boring and small-minded opinions for money, and who fraternises w/Dcam and Rebekah Wade for kicks and who runs his bloated form up the flagpole for moronic indexes of prejudice to march behind. You're really no smarter for "seeing through" his schtick, which stinks badly whether he means it or not.

NV is right there are much worse people out there, but that doesn't mean Clarkson's continued popularity doesn't make me despair on some level.

i think Clarkson comes across buffoonishly cos he's essentially an old school Tory/fogey, there's probably not much than a rizla between most of his opinions and somebody like Ian Hislop's, he just plays "man of the people" better. that doesn't make him not suck, but i don't hate Hislop all the time either.

who are the most personable tories in the firmament?

god knows, i was drawing up a shortlist for a rightwing pundits poll in my head and there was nothing personable about the candidates i came up with

Yr right NV but I guess there's less of the "celebration of philistinism" groove w/hislop (but I could barely watch that season of hignfy where hislop thought it was enough to just throw up his arms and say "gordon brown?!" in an exasperated manner)

xp

My internal thoughts about Cristina Odone are dark and sinister. Soz.

― dociah t. azzahole (Noodle Vague), Monday, 27 September 2010 16:01 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no idea what Cristina Odone had said that week to prompt that but let's be honest, it cd've been any week.

Kelvin Mackenzie, now he might be the worst human being ever

^^^this

no wait i've just remembered Toby Young exists.

tomorrow i'm gonna do a throwdown on the hardcore dirtbags i think, exclude Clarkson so's not to skew it.

yeah it's not so much clarkson the man that most decent people rage against, it's the fact he's given a voice to every hateful, low-level racist/sexist bants-chatting, arrogant, greed-riddled, anti-discourse LAD out there. if there wasn't a vocal majority calling this guy out then he'd slide into that avuncular 'national treasure' role with ease, and fuck that

weird to be amused by an deepdown unpleasant man rising to a position of influence in a country though, granny? what's next on the lol list? i hear there's an ilx street fight thread with a vid of a woman being hit in the face, fancy that?

*hit in the face by a man

Kind of feel his power has waned, largely because he's not swimming against the political tide any more. It's tough to maintain the pro-car, anti-pc thing when the government is significantly more right wing than you are.

He seems like a relic of the Blair years, though I can imagine his book will still fund a hundred obscure Penguin Classics this year.

yeah stevie i'm so wrong to find someone like you who despises him humorless and hypersensitive

good lord

Clarkson's brand of obvious button-pushing and tiresome, rote right-wing blether

so obv and tiresome yet it still manages to push your buttons, idgi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3ahWLLmLR8

so obv and tiresome yet it still manages to push your buttons, idgi

i dunno if someone punched me in the face i wouldn't brush it off on account of their tired old take on casual violence.

sorry, I didn't know Clarkson has been punching stevie

obvious, tiresome stuff is often the MOST likely thing to push my buttons

It's worth looking at the role Clarkson plays and asking who it actually represents, if anyone.

Saying he represents the motorist or tabloid readers or unilads or people who have barbecues isn't a good answer to this, because all those groups are themselves stereotypes, themselves as fictional as 'Clarkson'.

yeah stevie i'm so wrong to find someone like you who despises him humorless and hypersensitive

yeah i choose not to be insulted by someone who was suckered in by "luna" tbh but keep pretending your sharper than the game yeah?

forgot about oops

He's a prick who loves cars and can talk about them entertainingly and write about them very well -- I grew up around these people (except for the writing part) due to my father's work in the automotive industry, thus I can find him funny and loathsome AND be dismayed by UK Lefties getting their panties in a bunch about such a harmless dude.

http://sharetv.org/images/posters/renaissance_man_1994.jpg

He's a prick who loves cars and can talk about them entertainingly and write about them very well -- I grew up around these people (except for the writing part) due to my father's work in the automotive industry, thus I can find him funny and loathsome AND be dismayed by UK Lefties getting their panties in a bunch about such a harmless dude.

This is true if you emphasise the 'cars' part, but I dunno, doesn't he appear more often and to more people as a newspaper columnist/talking head than as a Top Gear presenter?

... because there are all sort of people who are good at one thing - obviously people in music but also actors, comedians, etc – who you find more or less lovable for that one thing, whilst knowing that you would not vote for them, agree with what they would write if they had a column, or even really want to be in a lift with them or spend any time with them personally.

But they mainly do the one thing they're good at/that you like them for, so yeah, you don't sweat the things you don't or wouldn't like them for. Not that big of an issue.

But with Clarkson, with all these columns and books, surely he's long since branched out from just being an entertaining car guy whose opinion you might value if you were buying a car?

Most of his books are about cars. Why read the other ones?

Dom-worthy off-topic meta ad-hom itt, n'est pas.

no greek pls dmac

have no practical use for car journalism personally but 'got into' PJ O'Rourke age 17 or so, when (iirc) Clarkson was still basically a motoring journo who peppered his columns with the odd right-wing quip, and from reading the former's writing about test drives etc it seemed immediately apparent to me that the latter was the mere inelegant Britisher knockoff. obv this has kind of atrophied in the 15 years hence but that's still p much how I think of Clarkson

all flippancy aside, the comment i made to oops earlier is possibly the shittiest i've made on ilx, and i apologise unreservedly for it. it was uncalled for, and spiteful, and i regretted it almost the moment i made it.

such compassion - would it have been so difficult to say "terrible timing, sorry"?

https://twitter.com/JeremyClarkson/status/448099234290864128/photo/1

@JeremyClarkson
The oxygen masks have deployed. Goodbye everyone. pic.twitter.com/AjqxckFgln

@villaforrent
@JeremyClarkson pretty poor timing! Will give you the benefit of doubt that you didn't know about the recent announcement

‏@JeremyClarkson
@villaforrent Right. And you thought it had been flying around for the last 3 weeks?

all for an all out war between these two

‏@piersmorgan
Utterly shameful > RT @JeremyClarkson The oxygen masks have deployed. Goodbye everyone. pic.twitter.com/IaYEop7UcJ

‏@JeremyClarkson
@piersmorgan If you don't shut up, I shall start to reveal details of your past life that would make you VERY unhappy.

would be happy if they both disappeared off the face of the earth tbh

he is a complete and utter berk

when Piers Morgan is making you look bad, you have a problem

I wonder if this might finish him off

Jeremy Clarkson N-word shame: Top Gear presenter caught on camera using racist rhyme

literally no surprise that he's that type of racist who actually uses the n word

i dream of seeing him destitute and publicly humiliated and this gives me so much hope that i might get to one day see it

Clarkson is torn between a Toyota and a Subaru would be an acceptable end

the sort of ppl who normally bombard the BBC with complaints won't want to be infringing on a man's right to use racial slurs on unaired footage and the sort of ppl who want Clarkson off the air won't want to be seen acting like the former group so I strongly doubt this will blow up enough to come to anything