Political correctness and the stifling of free thought….

As usual per usual on Monday’s at work I play catch up on the previous week’s Anthony Cumia show (the one benefit of being a truck driver, the radio becomes your work partner). Last Thursday he had Jim Norton and Von Decarlo on discussing the upcoming Patrice O’Neal documentary (not to mention a lot of the other issues going on which any O&A fan is familiar with). They played a clip of Patrice on Fox that while years old still resonates today. Ask you take a moment to listen to it. It’s the best argument against political correctness and false outrage I’ve ever heard.

 

 

The right to be offended is a topic that comes up quite often on my podcast. It sickens me every time I look on facebook and see people rallying against someone who said this or did that when it was in the name of humor. You see comedy always comes from a hurtful place. Whether it be your own pain, the suffering of others, ripping on a person, religion, product, or idea, in the end negativity is the birthplace of all humor. Telling a racist joke doesn’t make you a racist. Same goes for a gay, misogynistic, or any other type of joke doesn’t make you against that particular group. We’re so uptight and quick to jump on the anti-bullying bandwagon we’ve forgotten how to laugh. I look at the recent fraternity scandals that have plagued the news lately and am simply disgusted by the outrage towards them. Why? Because this is how they’ve always acted the only difference is now we have big brother (ourselves with cell phone cameras) outing their actions. Without that video it would be a complete non-story. All the students at these schools (or anyone else for that matter) who are shocked at this going on were living in a world of naivety. You get a group of friends together and something awful will be said in the name of humor by someone. Think of the last time you went out with your friends, guarantee a joke in “poor taste” was told by someone, and equally am sure at least one of you laughed (even if it was in uncomfortability). This is how we interact with each other.

All political correctness does is kill creativity. It brainwashes us all into thinking the same way and going along with the status quo ending any chance of free thought. Artistry (whether that be comedy, music, film, writing, whatever) is only created by free thought. It’s by thinking outside the box and doing something different that something new is created. We’re becoming a society of zombies and rats. Either mindless idiots willing to follow whatever is being forced down their throat, or taking great joy in getting someone else in trouble for their actions or words when really no one has gotten hurt. Who knew the most important aspect of Super Bowl XXXVIII wasn’t the final score, but Janet Jackson’s nip slip. That moment was the beginning of this PC movement which has only gotten worse every year since….

A brief history on Vapor Reporter

This all started with a number of phone conversations between myself and good friend SnowDragon back in 2011. Show didn’t even have a name at that point. It was a case where we jokingly said to each other people learn more from listening to us talk vape for an hour than they could by searching the forums out for a week. We recorded 3 episodes (which I still have on my computer and might one day post up), but we had no real place to host it. We let a few of our Skype buddies listen to it and they enjoyed it, but it never found a home. He opened up his shop (Area 51 vapors) and didn’t have the time to record anymore. Fast forward to 2012. I met Willard Roads through a vaping forum I was admin’ing at the time. We got to talking more and more off forum, and found out he played a big part in the .com bubble of the early and mid 90’s. He wanted to create a website and podcast that focused instead on reviewing, on helping new and veteran vapors. We launched Vapor Reporter first here on WordPress (you can still access that page though no one but Will can update it, hasn’t been touched since September of 2013), and then later moved it over to it’s own site. We had recorded 9 shows, though only 5 ever made it on-line, and despite us not being on iTunes or having a RSS feed we were getting 50-200 listens an ep. I went by Joe Friday back in those days because of my position working with a vaping company didn’t want anything to come off as biased (side note Will was not Will’s real name either). It didn’t last long though. Around October of that year we had started having some problems with the direction of the site. He wasn’t updating it enough to my tastes, and when he did post an article I had written it was edited to a point where it was no longer recognizable. It took 3 hours to record each show, he would whittle it down to an hour and add all his post production which would take anywhere between 2-3 weeks. We had a couple of heart to hearts, a very long talk on our way home from VaperCon, but still nothing was moving forward. It all came to a head before the end of the year where personal issues made Will leave the project. He turned the site over to me, and well… I only have basic experience in html, no idea how to tackle the coding he was using on the site, and anytime I adjusted anything it would crash. On top of all that by then through my admin work on the forums and all the bad taste in my mouth from this whole experience was burnt out from doing a vaping show. Mind of Morandir was born, and while I still discussed vaping, it was really for whatever was on my mind at the time. Whether that was news, politics, personal experience, etc. So it was Vapor Reporter was put to bed.

In February of 2014 reconnected with Patrick Duffy. Will and I had met him while touring some of the Baltimore area vape shops the year before hand. He was a big fan of VR, and was wondering what had happened with it. Explained him the story, turns out he has a background in web design and podcasting, so together we started up the Rogue Intel network. MoM came over, as did all the old VR eps, and we tried doing a show called “Duff and Mor”. We both knew he wasn’t the co-host for VR, and at that point I still didn’t want to do it. Duff and Mor failed, we had different views on what we wanted from the show, and it lead to me taking a break from the internet almost entirely for a few months. During that time I stepped down for my “management” position at RI, and seriously debated selling all my podcasting equipment and just being done with it. After a lot of soul searching decided to get back into it. In September returned to doing MoM and Patrick was to do his own show “Rogue Intel Prime” (which I ended up being on far more than I ever should have been). VR stayed retired, that was until we approached December. For my 4th vaping anniversary decided to do a very vapecentric show. Asked my good buddy Rocco if he would join me on it, and he said yes, so when I went to visit him for his birthday we sat down and recorded two hours of us just talking about our vaping journeys and what’s going on in the vaping world. We had a blast doing, and from there was born the current incarnation of Vapor Reporter. Instead of it being an NPR type show that I didn’t enjoy listening to, we made it a much more laid back atmosphere. Our tagline is “I just don’t want to smoke”. It’s a show for people discuss their vaping journey. We’ve had people like SnowDragon, Ms. Stephanie (who has now become a permanent co-host), and our buddy Travis on. We still cover the what’s going on in the vaping world, and do a few reviews here and there, but our goal is to share fellow vapers stories.

Recently we left RI network all together. Patrick and I had very different views on what direction to go, and for the best of all parties involved it was good for us to part ways. He is now free to make RIP into whatever he wants to, and we’re able to keep VR what we’ve always envisioned. The blog was the afterthought. The one added bonus it gives us is when we do any review, it’s always very technical. Something you can’t really convey via video as well as you can in written word and with graphs (though we still might do little product view videos just showing you the dimensions and such on YouTube). So there’s our story. Anyone who wants to join an episode please let us know, we’ll work around your schedule.

New episode of Vapor Reporter is up….

The only issue is as of right now it’s still marked as explicit on the RSS feed. There’s no way I can to see to change it on SoundCloud without making all of the MoM’s clean which well, they aren’t. For now the best I can do is keep listing them in the title as [Clean]. Sorry for the confusion, am working on it…

So, decided on doing a blog after all….

Would do the same for Vapor Reporter, but that WordPress site already exists (and has for a while). Sadly Will still has all the access codes to that account, sent him an e-mail asking for them, but for now this will be the blog home for both. Went back and forth on creating a FB page for MoM… After much internal debate, decided a blog would be better place to scratch the annoying itch so to speak to type up my thoughts. What you’ll find here is whatever I want to type out instead of talking out. Also any technical reviews on vaping products will be done here, much easier to do those in blog form instead of FB post… Will leave it at that for now.  Welcome to the Mind of Morandir…