It's okay! He was TRYING to be offensive!

I don't understand this.

Elderly English millionaire Jeremy Clarkson, the big ugly one on the BBC series Top Gear, went on TV and called for striking public workers to be murdered in front of their families. He went on to say that trains shouldn't stop if they've killed someone on the railroad tracks.

There were tens of thousands of complaints phoned in. One person asked if Clarkson wanted to murder the first responders who treated his scumbag co-host after he was in an accident and had to be airlifted to a hospital.

Clarkson himself is paid over a million pounds a year in public funds.

I listened to a story about this on the radio, on the BBC World Service. For some reason they interviewed an American comedian about it. And here we see the idiocy of this kind of crap.

The comedian, who I never heard of before and whose name I didn't bother remembering, made the standard argument----that Clarkson was TRYING to be offensive, and therefore, no one should be offended. In fact, the comedian was rather disparaging of those who are offended when people who make a specific effort to be offensive.

Apparently the trick isn't to be funny and it isn't to offend your own audience, but it's to make your audience revel in how offensive you are to other people. Look at how many Christians and Jews think they're being incredibly clever and daring by drawing cartoons of Muhammad.

In Clarkson's case, one listener phoned in to complain and said that, yes, he understood that he was joking, but Clarkson's been making the same "joke" for about forty years.