Rush Limbaugh has died | Hacker News Reader

Rush Limbaugh has died

rushlimbaugh.com

42 pointsecommerceguy35 comments

Rush created a market for his product. He offered his show for free to AM stations in exchange for leaving open breaks for commercials aired by the program. This at a time when AM radio was dying due to it being supplanted by the superior fidelity of FM stations. The station owners were happy to fill up the time slot of 12-3PM EST when no one was listening. He was able to open a market and create opportunity where no one else saw it.

Brilliant!

that guy was a true startup founder that created demand for his products and found the ultimate product market fit...

/semi-serious sarcasm... his product was essentially populism as a service

Rush sold material that populists wanted to consume, and now social media is selling the impression that certain material is popular.

My office mate in grad school listened to it religiously. I still remember ads for Snapple and "Hooked On Phonics."

Jumping back into abandoned media/technology can work out well because you have no competition - for our IT company we get a lot of value from our USPS letter advertising.

Another example is bands selling LP records at their shows. They're cheap to make and hard for people to copy.

I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh in the 90s as my dad had it on. My dad traveled 100% of the time and it was awesome as a kid to go with him, even though I had to listen to boring talk radio for 3 hours ;-)

I have quite a few political differences with Rush (especially on social issues), but although I disagree with him on a lot and haven't listened to his show in probably 25 years (other than a few radio surfing moments during the day here and there), the man made a huge impact on history and the culture.

From a hacker perspective he's fascinating because he was a captivating radio presence. Even when I found myself disagreeing with him, there's something about his voice and projection that makes you want to listen, and makes you feel like if you change the channel you'll be missing out. It would be fascinating to study how he was able to do that, to the extent that "art" can be studied of course.

When I saw [flagged] I thought, "come on, this community can surely discuss somebody like Rush Limbaugh without it turning into a partisan flamewar."

Then I read many of the comments and realized I was wrong. We can do so much better than this.

I flagged it because honestly I think it's off-topic for the site. I realize that HN isn't great about that in general but I really struggle to think of anything less geared towards intellectual curiosity (what this site is hypothetically about) than "Polarizing figure dies expectedly".

What a wonderful man...remember that time he made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson? Good times... Many laughs...

"This is really shameless folks"... the perfect phrase to sum up his life. "Shameless."

https://twitter.com/SageRosenfels18/status/12249020924579430...

“In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease,” Rush said in the 2006 broadcast, while mocking Michael’s tremors. “He is moving all around and shaking and this is purely an act. I have never seen Michael J. Fox display any of these symptoms of the disease. He can control himself enough to stay in the frame of the picture and he can control himself enough to keep his eyes on the lens, the teleprompter. But his head and shoulders are moving all over the place. This is really shameless, folks. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting.”

May he rest as peacefully as he lived.

I remember I was maybe 13 or 14. I had my first bass guitar, and I was a huge Rush (the band) fan. I somehow came across these "Rush Is Right" bumper stickers and put it on the instrument case. I was too young to know about the man.

While I have no respect for his words, or his work, I respect him as a human. RIP

The man sowed hate. That's his "legacy". Here's to a collective forgetting.

While he had some controversial views and opinions, that's quite a blanketed statement. Painting everyone you don't like with arbitrary claims is not how you deal with polarizing individuals. I did not agree with him on ~70% of what he had to say but will defend the fact that a lot of things he said were taken out of context.

Such as? Every time I heard a Limbaugh quote that sounded absolutely outrageous, then listened to the audio in context, it was as bad if not worse than the summary.

Was broadcasting this to an audience of mostly old impressionable people who looked up to him 'taken out of context' as well?

Do you really think saying the below did not result in greater illness and/or death of at least some people and greater spread?

>RUSH: Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. (interruption) You think I’m wrong about this? You think I’m missing it by saying that’s… (interruption) Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.

OP was talking about "sowing hate"; the topic was not on unpopular opinions or view points. "...mostly old impressionable people" is a bit of an oxymoron; it's a bit arrogant that you would try to assert that "old" people are not capable of forming their own opinions or seeking out others. There will come a point in time where applying labels where they don't belong will no longer work to silence opposing views that you don't like.

> RUSH: Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. (interruption) You think I’m wrong about this? You think I’m missing it by saying that’s… (interruption) Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.

Your quote from Rush is actually one of the few things that I actually agree with. The better response to this would have been to do absolutely nothing at all.

>it's a bit arrogant that you would try to assert that "old" people are not capable of forming their own opinions or seeking out others. There will come a point in time where applying labels where they don't belong will no longer work to silence opposing views that you don't like.

It's a fact that older people tend to fall victim to false information disproportionately at higher rates than younger people.

https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2019/10/scams-and-older-co...

>Your quote from Rush is actually one of the few things that I actually agree with. The better response to this would have been to do absolutely nothing at all

Ironic given the above, because now you're saying it's worth killing a lot of old people for some economic gain, not to mention hospitals getting overloaded resulting in deaths of younger people from road accidents and other treatable illnesses etc.

The link you provided does not support your statement.

It is about financial scams, and not disinformation per se. Specifically it reports, "Older adults were the least likely of any age group to report losing money to scams. But when older consumers experience consumer fraud, their reported financial losses were greater than what younger consumers reported.".

They also report on the specific scams older people tend to fall prey to, namely: "older adults were more likely than younger consumers to report losing money on tech support scams, prize, sweepstakes & lottery scams, and family & friend impersonation. Phone scams did the most financial damage. And while gift cards became the payment of choice for scammers, wire transfers still take the top spot for total dollars paid.".

How did you generalize all of this into saying that "older people tend to fall victim to false information disproportionately at higher rates than younger people."? Do you have direct evidence for that?

I think we have to be careful when trying to paint an entire group of people in this discriminatory way, especially without evidence, which is probably what parent comment was getting at.

> Ironic given the above, because now you're saying it's worth killing a lot of old people for some economic gain, not to mention hospitals getting overloaded resulting in deaths of younger people from road accidents and other treatable illnesses etc.

It's not "...worth killing a lot of old people for some economic gain..." and it was never about that. The unintended consequences of this circus brought on by both parties has resulted in more death. We've allowed politicians and prominent figures to make negligent decisions that have resulted in deaths that could have been prevented.

People die from a wide range of things, some preventable and some not so much. Keeping everyone inside and preventing them from socializing has resulted in more deaths than a virus with a significantly low mortality rate. Why don't we shut the world down for other causes of death that have been happening in greater numbers? The sensible thing would have been to isolate populations with compromised immune systems and maybe make vitamin D supplementation a priority.

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

I've heard plenty of him due to close relatives refusing to turn him off in my presence. They called it "education".

The most specific thing I remember was somewhat subtle, and incredibly insidious: Almost always, he would refer to Barack Obama using first and last name. However during one show where Muslims were in context (probably terrorism, but I don't remember specifically), he consistently used "Barack Hussein Obama". I don't remember him actually calling Obama Muslim directly in that episode, but he clearly wanted to both paint being Muslim in general as evil, and associate the (then current) president with Muslims.

This is a man who not only spread hate, but did so intentionally and effectively.

> "I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

Brilliant quote illustrating schadenfreude: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude

Life is short, political leanings aside, Rest In Peace rush

Well I guess to make this somewhat tech relevant he was a pretty big Apple and Mac fanboy despite not liking the company's politics.

I think the only thing interesting about this is to reflect on the culture of the late 80s and early 90s. It seems to me that there was a transition from the litigious nature of the US to "political correctness" to the culture we have today that can be viewed as accountability or "cancel culture" depending on your point of view.

Limbaugh played a big role in politicizing that process. He was probably also one of the main drivers of the populist right movement that ultimately turned into Trump.

Disclosure: my politics don't match the mainstream and I'm not a liberal/democrat/republican/far-right, this is just my observation from someone who grew up in the 90s.

EDIT: if you're down voting this I would love to know why. I'm not even sure if it's pro-Rush or anti-Rush people doing it as I thought my statement was pretty neutral.

I don't understand what you mean by transition from the litigious nature of US to "political correctness". I think the convention definition of litigious nature is to be "quick to litigate/sue people in court".

I don't see what that has to do with political correctness. Political correctness was a term invented in the late 80s early 90s, but I think America was litigious before that and continues to be litigious today.

And if you disagree with that, I'll see you in court.

I think political correctness was born of the litigious culture. There was a pivot in the 80s in the US from focusing on the individual to that of the systems the individual interacts with. The locus of control flipped and in my opinion this was due to culture, especially workplace culture, becoming more litigious.

This manifested in increased awareness of discrimination and HR in general, which led directly to "political correctness".

I personally agree that systems play a huge role in a person's life trajectory and that "rugged American exceptionalism" was always a myth unless you were white, but that's beyond the scope of my point here.

That's an interesting point. I hadn't thought of that. Thanks for explaining that because it's not an obvious connection.

You might be correct.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com