The Reason You Suck Speech / Real Life

Oh yeah, people in Real Life have plenty reason to dish out these speeches!

Note: This is not a YMMV page, so please avoid linking to YMMV pages such as Moment of Awesome, even if the speech was awesome. It should also be noted that many of these are matters of opinion, so bias will often come up (especially when politics get involved) and don't automatically represent the opinions of this wiki as a whole.

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Historical: Pre-World War I

• Lucius Sergius Catilina gets a tongue-lashing from Cicero, beginning thus: "Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quamdiu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?". This means: "How long, Catilina, will you abuse our patience? For how long will that madness of yours mock us? To what end will your unbridled effrontery toss itself about?". And then it gets worse for Catilina...
  • Cicero tended to use this tactic a fair amount in his speeches, which tended to be against someone: in Ancient Rome, "orator" meant "lawyer" (and specifically "barrister"); although most of Cicero's cases had him defending, he made his name as a prosecutor, as he was willing to take cases against powerful Senators (in no small part because the lawyer who successfully prosecuted a Senator won the defeated Senator's rank and seniority within the Senate), most famously in trials for corruption and other crimes to do with abuse of power. Saying why the opposing party really, really sucked was part of his strategy (a lengthy explanation of how Verres and his lawyer sucked for trying to game the system allowed him to end the trial after opening arguments), as well as playing up his background (by Roman standards, he was a Simple Country Lawyer, which made him popular among the "New Men" who were more and more often sitting on juries at the time).
  • Cicero really hands it to Mark Antony in the Philippics, a series of speeches against him.
    • Cicero's speeches against Antony were so nasty that Antony had Cicero killed and reportedly had his tongue nailed to the rostra, the platform politicians gave speeches on. Antony didn't take criticism well. Still, at least it was a moral victory for Marcus Tullius.
• During the Fourth Crusade, the Republic of Venice and a crusader army sacked the Catholic city of Zara in what is now Croatia. Pope Innocent III responded with one of these in the form of an excommunication:
  Behold! Your gold has turned into base metal and your silver has almost completely rusted since, departing from the purity of your plan and turning aside from the path onto the impassable road, you have, so to speak, withdrawn your hand from the plough [...] for when [...] you should have hastened to the land flowing with milk and honey, you turned away, going astray in the direction of the desert.
• In 1517, Martin Luther wrote down his 95 Theses, which was essentially this for a Catholic Church that had been perceived by many, Luther included, to have fallen into decadence.
• Anyone at all familiar with U.S. history will recall the highly official one written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, giving 18 reasons (26 if you count the "bullet points" under reason 13) why the 13 American colonies no longer recognize King George III as their ruler.
• The French Revolution was an era that saw several of this. The popular song La Carmagnole is "The Villain Sucks" Song about Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI. The pamphlet "What is the Third Estate?" is one directed against the First Two estates telling them that the Third Estate is the true voice of France and the only ones capable and competent enough to run the nation.
  • Maximilien Robespierre is a man who often invited these speeches but he usually responded back with ones of his own. When representatives tried to introduce legislation to install a defense of slavery in the French constitution so as to protect France's colonial interests. Robespierre replied instead, "Perish the colonies rather than our principles".
• In August 1836, William IV of the United Kingdom said this at his birthday banquet in the presence of his sister-in-law Victoria, Duchess of Kent and Strathearn, and his niece, his 17-year-old heiress presumptive Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent. It's not very complimentary to the Duchess:
  I trust in God that my life may be spared for nine months longer, after which period, in the event of my death, no Regency would take place. I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the Royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady,^note i.e. Princess Victoria, his niece the heiress presumptive to the Crown, and not in the hands of a person now near me^note The Duchess of Kent, who is surrounded by evil advisers and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed. I have no hesitation in saying that I have been insulted grossly insulted by that person, but I am determined to endure no longer a course of behaviour so disrespectful to me. Amongst other things, I have particularly to complain of the manner in which that young lady has been kept away from my Court; she has been repeatedly kept from my Drawing Rooms, at which she ought always to have been present, but I am fully resolved that this shall not happen again. I would have her know that I am King, and I am determined to make my authority respected, and for the future I shall insist and command that the Princess do upon all occasions appear at my Court, as it is her duty to do.
  • TL;DR: "Duchess, you're a terrible person surrounded by terrible people and I hope I live just long enough to make sure that my niece takes the throne without a regency to keep you out of power. Also, Victoria, dear, you can come to my place whenever you like, don't let your mother stop you." He managed it by a few weeks.
• Abraham Lincoln has a quote that is one to slave owners. "Those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it themselves."
• William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state, had one for Lincoln. Specifically about the Emancipation Proclamation, which, contrary to popular belief, did not free a single slave. As Lincoln's goal was not the end of slavery, but the preservation of the union, he specifically notated that any Confederate territory currently held by the Union (specified down to the county) was completely exempt from the proclamation. Seward had this to say about it:
  "We show our symapthy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."
• Rev. Jermain Wesley Loguen was born in slavery but escaped to New York when he was in his early 20s. He went on to become a fervent abolitionist and activist. In 1860, his former "Mistress" sent him a letter demanding he either return so she might sell him or give her $1000 in compensation for stealing... himself. He took exception to that.
  "Yours of the 20th of February is duly received, and I thank you for it. It is a long time since I heard from my poor old mother, and I am glad to know she is yet alive, and, as you say, "as well as common." What that means I don't know. I wish you had said more about her. You are a woman; but had you a woman's heart you could never have insulted a brother by telling him you sold his only remaining brother and sister, because he put himself beyond your power to convert him into money. You sold my brother and sister, ABE and ANN, and 12 acres of land, you say, because I ran away. Now you have the unutterable meanness to ask me to return and be your miserable chattel, or in lieu thereof send you $1000 to enable you to redeem the land, but not to redeem my poor brother and sister! If I were to send you money it would be to get my brother and sister, and not that you should get land. You say you are a cripple, and doubtless you say it to stir my pity, for you know I was susceptible in that direction. I do pity you from the bottom of my heart. Nevertheless I am indignant beyond the power of words to express, that you should be so sunken and cruel as to tear the hearts I love so much all in pieces; that you should be willing to impale and crucify us out of all compassion for your poor foot or leg. Wretched woman! Be it known to you that I value my freedom, to say nothing of my mother, brothers and sisters, more than your whole body; more, indeed, than my own life; more than all the lives of all the slaveholders and tyrants under Heaven. You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "you know we raised you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping-post? Did you raise them to be driven off in a coffle in chains? Where are my poor bleeding brothers and sisters? Can you tell? Who was it that sent them off into sugar and cotton fields, to be kicked, and cuffed, and whipped, and to groan and die; and where no kin can hear their groans, or attend and sympathize at their dying bed, or follow in their funeral? Wretched woman! Do you say you did not do it? Then I reply, your husband did, and you approved the deed—and the very letter you sent me shows that your heart approves it all. Shame on you. But, by the way, where is your husband? You don't speak of him. I infer, therefore, that he is dead; that he has gone to his great account, with all his sins against my poor family upon his head. Poor man! gone to meet the spirits of my poor, outraged and murdered people, in a world where Liberty and Justice are MASTERS. But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than MANNASSETH LOGUE had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle and steal me? If he and you infer that I forfeit all my rights to you, shall not I infer that you forfeit all your rights to me? Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and High Heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man? If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here and lay their hands on me to enslave me. Did you think to terrify me by presenting the alternative to give my money to you, or give my body to Slavery? Then let me say to you, that I meet the proposition with unutterable scorn and contempt. The proposition is an outrage and an insult. I will not budge one hair's breadth. I will not breathe a shorter breath, even to save me from your persecutions. I stand among a free people, who, I thank God, sympathize with my rights, and the rights of mankind; and if your emissaries and venders come here to re-enslave me, and escape the unshrinking vigor of my own right arm, I trust my strong and brave friends, in this City and State, will be my rescuers and avengers. Yours, &c., J.W. Loguen"
  • TL;DR: "Thank you for your letter, and thank you for informing me you haven't sold or murdered my mother yet. The news that you sold my siblings is less well-received, but I take comfort in understanding that, far from satisfying you, it only made you more bitter and broken. I feel bad for you, but not because you recently broke your leg, but because I can't be there to break your other one for you. Bad news about your husband by the way, but I'm sure he's not burning in hell right now or anything. Rest assured I wouldn't step within a hundred feet of his grave, or you, if you were the last drop of water in the desert. I also dare you to try and force the issue, so that my friends and I can get a chance to test our trigger fingers. Die mad, —J.W. Loguen."
• General William T. Sherman is doomed to forever be vilified by the American South for his role in the American Civil War, most notably his infamous March to the Sea. Sherman, however, epically called out Southerners in his letter to the city of Atlanta, which repeatedly proclaimed his hatred for war (Sherman would often declare that "War Is Hell", and begged a graduating officer class at West Point to do everything in their power to never go to war), his absolute determination to end the war as quickly as possible, and the hypocrisy of the South.
  I repeat then that, by the original compact of government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began the war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or tittle of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands and thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance.
  • He gave another one before the war even started, which also counts as a spot-on prediction:
    You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.
• In 1863, Union General David Hunter wrote a letter to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, denouncing the Confederacy for mistreating captured Black Union soldiers, while calling out the hypocrisy of the Confederates who claimed to be fighting for freedom.
  You say you are fighting for liberty. Yes you are fighting for liberty: liberty to keep four millions of your fellow-beings in ignorance and degradation;–liberty to separate parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister;–liberty to steal the products of their labor, exacted with many a cruel lash and bitter tear;–liberty to seduce their wives and daughters, and to sell your own children into bondage;–liberty to kill these children with impunity, when the murder cannot be proven by one of pure white blood. This is the kind of liberty–the liberty to do wrong–which Satan, Chief of the fallen Angels, was contending for when he was cast into Hell.
• After the murder of Abraham Lincoln, Henrik Ibsen managed to write a true "you really suck" poem, directed at every single atrocity done by the European powers over the better part of the nineteenth century. He actually blames the Europeans for the death of Lincoln. "The reason you suck" indeed.
  That crimson rose there whose flowers shock
  and frighten you here at home,
  our Europe supplied the grafting-stock,
  the West its luxuriant loam.
  You planted as seedling that thriving stand
  that reddens the shores of the West;
  it`s you who tied with your own fair hand
  the knightly sash of the martyr's band
  on Abraham Lincoln's breast.
  • The implication for the blame can be summed up in one term: Slave trade! Also monarchy, since every European power without exception was ruled by kings back then.
  • This poem was actually censored on Norwegian television in 1978!
• De Profundis is a long "The Reason You Suck Speech" in written form by Oscar Wilde for his ex-lover Lord Alfred Douglas.
• Jack London's famous poem The Scab is a brutal one of these towards strikebreakers. Whatever one's view of industrial action, it can be appreciated for its sheer malicious invective:
  After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with which he made a scab.
  A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul, a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
  Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
  When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out.
  No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
  Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.
  Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
  Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
  Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British Army.
  The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife, his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled promise from his employer.
  Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country.
  A scab is a traitor to his God, his country, his family and his class.''
• In 1676, Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire wrote an ultimatum to the Zaporozhian Cossacks demanding they submit to his rule after they had already defeated the Ottomans in battle. The Cossacks led by Ivan Sirko replied back with one of the most jaw-droppingly profane and hilariously obscene letters in human history, saving their most vicious mockery for the pretentiousness expressed by his seemingly-never-ending list of royal titles.
  "You Turkish Satan, brother and comrade of the damned devil and secretary to Lucifer himself! What the hell kind of knight are you, that [can't] slay a hedgehog with your naked [butt]? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother. You Babylonian busboy, Macedonian mechanic, Jerusalem beer brewer, Alexandrian goat skinner, swineherd of Upper and Lower Egypt, Armenian pig, Tatar goat, Kamenets hangman, Podolian thief, buffoon of all the world and the netherworld, grandson of the Evil Serpent himself, fool of our God, swine's snout, mare's [asshole], butcher's dog, unbaptized brow, may the devil steam your ass! That's how the Cossacks answer you, you nasty glob of spit! You're unfit to rule true Christians. We don't know the date because we don't have a calendar, the moon is in the sky, and the year is in a book, and the day is the same with us as with you, so go kiss our [butt]!"
  • Complete with dramatic reading by Peter Capaldi!
  • Here◊ is a superb painting showing the Cossacks drafting the letter.
• Lin Zexu, a Chinese official that was in charge of dealing with the opium addiction in China before the first opium war attempted to tell off Queen Victoria.
  "By what right do they then in return use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people? Even though the barbarians may not necessarily intend to do us harm, yet in coveting profit to an extreme, they have no regard for injuring others. Let us ask, where is your conscience?"
• In his journalism, Ambrose Bierce was a master of these. Whether you were a poet who'd published a volume of bad poetry or one of the "Big Five" railroads that held California in their grip, once you were in his cross-hairs, you were in for a thorough, exquisitely phrased roasting.
• Bierce's better-known contemporary, Mark Twain was also no slouch at denunciation of deserving targets. While his efforts in Huckleberry Finn are well-known, he took on other targets than the American South. His The Indignity Put Upon the Remains of George Holland by the Reverend Mr. Sabine was utterly scathing, as were his denunciations of the Belgian atrocities in the Congo Free State and the US war on the Filipinos.
• Hortensia delivered a scathing one to the Second Triumvirate when they tried to impose a one-time tax on the wealthiest women of Rome.
  "As was appropriate for women like ourselves when addressing a petition to you, we rushed to your womenfolk. But we did not get the treatment we were entitled to from Fulvia, and have been driven by her into the forum. You have already stolen from us our fathers and sons and husbands and brothers by your proscriptions, on the grounds that they had wronged you. But if you also steal from us our property, you will set us into a state unworthy of our family and manners and our female gender. If you claim that you have in any way been wronged by us, as you were by our husbands, proscribe us as you did them. But if we women have not voted any of you public enemies, if we did not demolish your houses or destroy your army or lead another army against you; if we have not kept you from public office or honour, why should we share the penalties if we have no part in the wrongdoing? Why should we pay taxes when we have no part in pubic office or honours or commands or government in general, an evil you have fought over with such disastrous results? Because, you say, this is a time of war? And when have there not been wars? and when have women paid taxes? By nature of their sex women are absolved from paying taxes among all mankind. Our mothers on one occasion long ago were superior to their sex and paid taxes, when your whole government was threatened and the city itself, when the Carthaginians were pressuring you. They gave willingly, not from their land or their fields or their dowry or their households, without which life would be unlivable for free women, but only from their own jewellery, and not with a fixed price set on it, nor under threat of informers and accusers or by force, but they gave as much as they themselves chose. Why are you now so anxious about the government or the country? But if there should a war against the Celts or Parthians, we will not be less eager for our country's welfare than our mothers. But we will never pay taxes for civil wars, and we will not cooperate with you against each another. We did not pay taxes to Caesar or to Pompey, nor did Marius ask us for contributions, nor Cinna nor Sulla, even though he was a tyrant over this country. And you say that you are reestablishing the Republic!"
  • This caused a riot in the Forum, and the tax was reduced by up to 70% the next day.
• Oliver Cromwell gave one to the Long Parliament before dissolving them after they attempted to prevent the calling of an election:
  It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.
  Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?
  Ye sordid prostitutes; have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d; are yourselves gone? So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!
• Latter-Day Saint leader John Taylor gave a scathing one to men at a gathering in Columbus, Ohio who were about to tar and feather him. The best part? This was enough to convince them not to do so.
  “Gentlemen, I now stand among men whose fathers fought for and obtained one of the greatest blessings ever conferred upon the human family—the right to think, to speak, to write; the right to say who shall govern them, and the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences—all of them sacred, human rights, and now guaranteed by the American Constitution. I see around me the sons of those noble sires, who, rather than bow to the behests of a tyrant, pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honors to burst those fetters, enjoy freedom themselves, bequeath it to their posterity, or die in the attempt. . . .
  But, by the by, I have been informed that you purpose to tar and feather me, for my religious opinions. Is this the boon you have inherited from your fathers? Is this the blessing they purchased with their dearest hearts’ blood—this your liberty? If so, you now have a victim, and we will have an offering to the goddess of liberty. . . .
  Gentlemen come on with your tar and feathers, your victim is ready; and ye shades of the venerable patriots, gaze upon the deeds of your degenerate sons! Come on, gentlemen! Come on, I say, I am ready!”

Historical: World War I-II

• During the Russian Civil War, General Anton Denikin, commander of the anti-communist White army, forced the resignation of General Pyotr Wrangel, who would later ultimately replace him as commander-in-chief. Wrangel was not happy about this, and wrote a long, detailed letter explaining how all of the White Army's difficulties were all Denikin's fault, with extensive documentation to prove it. The letter can be read in full here; one choice excerpt reads as follows:
  "The enemy’s successes rose and the inefficiency of your strategy and of your politics became more manifest with every day. The Russian society commenced to see clear. Louder and louder grew the voices of those who demanded the replacement of certain chiefs, whose blamable behavior was evident to all, by others, whose names had remained unblemished amidst the general decline of morals. But the poison of ambition had entered your soul, and drunk with power, surrounded by dishonest flatterers, you thought more of safeguarding your power and authority, than of saving your country."
• In the wake of Kristallnacht, Aboriginal Australian political activist William Cooper delivered a petition condemning the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany to the German consulate in Melbourne.
• In many ways, Charlie Chaplin's satirical film The Great Dictator was an extended "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Hitler and Nazism. Chaplin, having studied Hitler's mannerisms and speech patterns, ends the film with an impassioned Patrick Stewart Speech on the bright future of humanity.
• In the Norway Debates in Great Britain at the beginning of World War II, Roger Keyes and Leo Amery gave a pair of these to Neville Chamberlain, with Keyes (a retired naval admiral) appearing in full military dress to excoriate Chamberlain on the behalf of the military for the conduct of the Norway campaign, and Amery criticizing the lack of preparation and general lack of fighting spirit and competence in Chamberlain's government. Amery ended by quoting the aforementioned Oliver Cromwell speech: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."^note This was later itself quoted by David Davis against Boris Johnson after he was found to have violated his own national lockdown regulations during the coronavirus pandemic. The effect of the speeches was only increased by the fact that both politicians were in the same party as Chamberlain, and the speeches are often credited as a large reason for Chamberlain's subsequent resignation. David Lloyd George also made a fairly brutal speech, saying that the best thing that Chamberlain could do for the war effort was to resign. Honestly, May 1940 was not a good time to be Neville Chamberlain.
• British forces that liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had a pretty good one, delivered via loudspeakers to local German officials who'd been taken to witness the camp, and the captured SS troops being made to bury the dead.
  "You, who represent the fathers and brothers of German youth, see before your eyes some of the sons and daughters who bear the direct responsibility for this crime. They are a small portion only. Therefore, it is more than the human soul is able to bear. But who bears the real responsibility? You, who allowed your leader to carry out this horrible madness; you, who couldn't do enough for this degenerate triumph. You, who were a part of this camp..."
  • The whole process of denazification consisted of delivering carefully-worded ones to the German population, through the media and propaganda posters. The western Allied authorities in all sectors pounded it into the Germans that they were all responsible for what happened during the war, including the Holocaust, and that they had better repent and shape up! The plan seems to have worked since most Germans regard No Swastikas and the atrocities of World War II as extremely Serious Business, and are willing to say, to this day, that their country as a whole were the bad guys in the war.
  • After discovering 1016 slave laborers from concentration camp had been burned alive by the SS in Gardelegen, on April 25, 1945, Colonel George Lynch stated the following to the local population:
    The German people have been told that stories of German atrocities were Allied propaganda. Here, you can see for yourself. Some will say that the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither — it is the responsibility of the German people...Your so-called Master Race has demonstrated that it is master only of crime, cruelty and sadism. You have lost the respect of the civilized world.

Politics/Politicians: Cold War Era - Present

• Joseph Nye Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, during the Army-McCarthy hearings: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
• This zinger from Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle in the 1988 Vice Presidential debate still shows up in every Top Ten list of debate zingers.
  Bentsen: Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
• Political party conventions can produce brilliant invective, usually against the opposing party. A truly groundbreaking one was then-Texas treasurer and future governor Ann Richards' keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention, in which she accused the Republican administration, and George Bush Sr. especially, as being completely out of touch with the needs of working Americans.
  Ann Richards: And for eight straight years, George Bush hasn't displayed the slightest interest in anything we care about. And now that he's after a job that he can’t get appointed to, he's like Columbus discovering America. He's found child care. He's found education. Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
• After the Orlando massacre, members of Congress called for a moment of silence. Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), called out members for their failure to address the causes of the massacre.
  Jim Himes: “We meet this tragedy week in and week out with smug, self-empowering moments of silence in the House that do absolutely nothing for anybody.”
• Adlai Stevenson destroying Soviet ambassador Valerian Zorin on the floor of the United Nations Security Council during the Cuban Missile Crisis:
  "Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no? Don't wait for the translation, yes or no?"
• Cambodian prime minister Sirik Matak gave one in 1975 as Cambodia, having been abandoned along with the rest of Indochina by the United States, was falling to Communism. They offered Matak asylum, but he refused and gave one of these to the American people. It is all the more devastating for its faultless courtesy:
  I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave us and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed the mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments. [Emphasis added.]
  • Secretary of state Henry Kissinger had ordered a bombardment of Cambodia in 1970 that exceeded everything dropped during the WWII campaign. No wonder the prime minister was pissed off.
• Barack Obama gave this to Congress for failing to pass a bill on gun control.
• Motti Ashkenazi gave one to Golda "Grandma" Meir on a protest placard after the Yom Kippur War:
  Grandma, your defense minister is a failure and 3,000 of your grandchildren are dead.
• David Cameron, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, is quite fond of these. He doled them out like candy to Gordon Brown ("You're not a leader! You're a loser!") and allegedly gave one to Barack Obama over the phone in the wake of the BP Oil Spill.
  • That was probably because Obama called the company "British Petroleum" despite the company dropping that name. Cameron was not pleased to have the UK government be associated with BP's incompetence, especially by someone who (he felt) should have known better.
• FEAR THE LOUD BLADE OF ANTHONY WEINER.
  • Also a What the Hell, Hero? to those who claimed they'd need a change of procedure in exchange for voting yes on a bill to provide financial assistance for medical treatment of 9-11 first responders.
• Speaking of Congressman Weiner... he himself became the target of Andrew Breitbart's own speech when the latter beat him to the podium to take Weiner to task. Breitbart had been the man responsible for breaking the "sexting" pics scandal—and for a while, Weiner had tried his best to paint Breitbart as a liar. Needless to say, Andrew was not amused.
• In this video, Rep. Tammy Duckworth, who lost both of her lower legs and damaged an arm when the helicopter she was piloting was shot down in Iraq, gives one to an IRS contractor who used his friendship with an IRS official to win contracts reserved for the businesses of service-disabled veterans.
  Duckworth: Shame on you, you may not have broken any laws, we are not sure yet, you did misrepresent to the [Small Business Administration] but you certainly broke the trust of this great nation. You broke the trust of veterans. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans right now are waiting an average of 237 days for an initial disability rating and it is because people like you who are gaming the system are adding to that backlog so that young men and women who are suffering from post-traumatic stress, who are missing limbs cannot get the compensation and the help that they need.
• In 2011, after it emerged that the Vatican had conspired to shelter child sex abusers in the Irish diocese of Cloyne and had even gone so far as to interfere with the investigation of the abuse by Garda Síochána, Enda Kenny, Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, gave the most hostile speech ever given by an Irish politician about the Mother Church in the Dáil Éireann. It was so furious, and so unprecedented in one of Europe's most Catholic nations, and so unexpected of the man who delivered it—whose party, Fine Gael, is the more traditionalist and pro-Church faction in Irish politics—that some commentators have called it "the end of Catholic Ireland". Soon after, the Vatican recalled its papal nuncio to Ireland and Ireland closed its Vatican embassy in Rome.
  Kenny: For the first time in this country, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne report excavates the dysfunction, the disconnection, the elitism that dominate the culture of the Vatican today...I want to make it clear, as Taoiseach, that when it comes to the protection of the children of this State, the standards of conduct which the Church deems appropriate to itself, cannot and will not, be applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic. Not purely, or simply, or otherwise, because children have to be, and will be, put first.
• In October 2012, during a scandal involving the Speaker of Australia's House of Representatives, Julia Gillard (the Prime Minister) delivered a big Reason You Suck Speech towards the leader of the opposition (Tony Abbott), discussing how he said sexist, misogynistic, gender essentialist and just plain rude things, let various actions of his peers slide, and was a hypocrite on the matter.
  "The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the Leader of the Opposition has got a piece of paper, and he is writing out his resignation because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives — he needs a mirror!"
  • Powerful as this speech was to many people, this backfired, as the accusations made didn't reverse Gillard's fall and Abbott's rise in popularity leading up to the next year's election ^note  one in which Gillard didn't run, albeit because unrelated reasons led to her being replaced as leader where Abbott not only won soundly but his remarks against Gillard didn't have a negative impact on his campaign. He then named himself Minister for Women, and his actions in both of his roles over the ensuing two years did a lot to vindicate Gillard's accusations.
  • By August 2018, the Liberal Party was in a prolonged leadership spill, something Australians have gotten sick of after going through five Prime Ministers in just half a decade ^note Gillard was spilled from the Labor Party's leadership in June 2013 by predecessor Kevin Rudd. Rudd went on to lose the election that September to Abbott, who campaigned on a platform of stability... and who lasted almost two years in the office before being knifed by ''his'' party leader predecessor Malcolm Turnbull. The August 2018 Liberal Spills had Turnbull replaced by Treasurer Scott Morrison. Greens leader Richard Di Natale lashed out on the Liberal Party for their infighting amidst other important issues in the country.
  We’ve got 100% of New South Wales that in drought right now. We’ve got a Great Barrier Reef that’s on the brink of collapse. We’ve got floods in India. We’ve got a 12-year-old girl who’s setting herself alight in Nauru, We’ve got kids who are in a catatonic state because they’ve given up hope locked away in those offshore hellholes. What’s the Liberal Party doing? Focusing on vengeance, on payback. Focusing on themselves!
• Elizabeth Warren eviscerated Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf for not being accountable through one of the biggest year-long scams in banking history and firing lower-level employees involved instead of the executives and himself showing responsibility. See for yourself.
  Warren: Since this massive years-long scam came to light, you have said repeatedly: "I am accountable." But what have you actually done to hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned as CEO or chairman of Wells Fargo?
  • She kept going:
    Warren: If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the cash drawer, they probably would be looking at criminal charges for theft. They could end up in prison. But you squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket. And when it all blew up, you kept your job, you kept your multi-million dollar bonuses and you went on television to blame thousands of $12 an hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich. This is about accountability. You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. This just isn't right. A cashier who steals a handful of twenties is held accountable. But Wall Street executives who almost never hold themselves accountable.
• 14 members of the Congressional Black Caucus of 2012 wrote a letter to former Rep. Artur Davis for his opportunistic switch from Democrat to becoming Republican as he had turned his back on Barack Obama after supporting him and called him a friend because of his loss for a Democratic bid for Alabama governor in 2010. Here's the source.
  "We are writing to express our disdain over several recent comments you have made about the important issues facing voters in November, your total distortion of President Barack Obama’s record, and your complete flip-flop on certain core principles you once held dear. Given the magnitude of your recent transformation, we can only conclude that, rather than a true conversion, your actions are the result of a nakedly personal and political calculation or simmering anguish after failing to secure the Democratic nomination for governor of the State of Alabama in 2010.
• New Jersey governor Chris Christie (a Republican) gave one of these to House Republicans who refused to vote on an aid money package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.^note Previous aid bills have passed relatively easily, but some Republicans objected to the bill on the grounds that it contained pork barrel spending. The difference between what qualifies as "pork" as opposed to "indirect aid" or "long-term aid" can sometimes be a matter of debate. Many of the past aid bills also contained what might be considered pork, and they never raised a peep, so some—including Christie, in another speech—accused the House majority of self-interested hypocrisy, as most of the previous aid bills were for damage in the South (where most of the Republican caucus is from), while Sandy hit notoriously non-Republican New York and New Jersey.
  • New York representative Peter King (also Republican) has another one.
• Hunter S. Thompson's 1994 obituary on Nixon.
  Thompson: Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place.
• While Geoffrey Howe resigned as Britain's Deputy Prime Minister on 1 November 1990, his subsequent resignation speech on 13 November in full view of PMQs and a packed House amounted to an extended "The Reason You Suck" Speech against Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister at the time. The speech was so damning, it ignited a leadership contest that ultimately led her to resign just 9 days later.
  Howe: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain."
• On January 27, 1967, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed when a fire broke out in the cockpit during a routine test on the launch pad. The Monday after the fire, Flight Director Gene Kranz called everyone at Mission Control in for a meeting and gave everyone a speech saying that all of them were to blame for the astronauts' deaths. The speech he gave that day became known as the Kranz Dictum:
  "Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, 'Dammit, stop!' I don't know what Thompson's committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job. We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did. From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: 'Tough' and 'Competent'. Tough means we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for. Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write 'Tough and Competent' on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control."

News Programs (including Satire)

• Fear the wrath of Jon Stewart. Crossfire broadcaster CNN was so embarrassed they canceled the show.
  • Another fine Jon Stewart example would be this.
  • There was also the Earth Day special where he insulted Planet Earth for trying to kill the human race time and time again.
  • Then there were the times where he completely demolished both Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck. The best part? Olbermann admitted he was wrong and apologized.
  • And this one, to terrorist group Boko Haram, after they committed the mass kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian girls:
    "You guys are trying so hard to convince everybody that you're such badasses, but all you've done is highlight who the real badasses are — the kids you kidnapped. Compared to a teenager who knows that her desire for an education could get her dragged into a snake-infested jungle to be sold as a bride by some demented stick-chewing cartoon villain, but still gets up and goes to class every day, fully aware of the danger. Compared to their courage, I'd say Boko Haram is a bunch of little girls. But you know what? You don't deserve that compliment."
  • And This one, as he tears into Congress.
• Stephen Colbert also stood five feet from George W. Bush and tore him a new one in the most humiliating but amusing way possible. What's even amusing is that Bush actually laughed too, which is something rare.
  • Also an amazing Take That!, but Stephen's deconstruction of Sarah Palin, and her increased importance in news media after the '08 election.
    "I know you think this story has no purpose other than keeping Sarah Palin’s name in the headlines for another news cycle. I know you think she has nothing to offer the national dialogue and that her speeches are just coded talking points mixed in with words picked up at random from a thesaurus. I know you think Sarah Palin is at best a self-promoting ignoramus and at worst a shameless media troll who will abuse any platform to deliver dog-whistle encouragement to a far-right base that may include possible insurrectionists. I know you think her reality show was pathetically unstatesmanlike, and at the same time, I know you believe it represents the pinnacle of her potential. And that her transparent desperation to be a celebrity so completely eclipsed her interest in public service so long ago that there would be more journalistic integrity on reporting one of the lesser Kardashians’ ass implants. I know, I know that when you arrive at the office each day you say a silent prayer that maybe—just maybe—Sarah Palin will at long last just shut up for just 10 fucking minutes. I know because I can see it in your eyes. Well, guess what, Mika? That’s the gig. And it’s only January of 2011, kiddo. And you have a minimum of two more years of this ahead of you. You want to stay in this game? You dig deep. You find another gear. You show up to work every day and get your hair and makeup done. You slap on a smile, get out there on TV and repeat what Sarah Palin said on Hannity last night right into the lens. You know... news".

Newspapers and Magazines

• Andrei S. Markovits gave one in the middle of his essay about anti-American prejudice by Europeans, specifically in the context of European newspapers expressing Schadenfreude the day after the September 11 attacks:
  “Permit me to submit the following telling counterfactual: had the Air France Airbus A-300 Flight 8969 on December 24, 1994, crashed into the Eiffel Tower in Paris, as the Groupe Armée Islamique wanted it to, I doubt very much that any — let alone many — American intellectuals would have written lengthy pieces in prestigious publications like The New York Times or The Washington Post by, say, December 26 and 27 all but exculpating this crime by invoking France’s many military and political missteps as well as its atrocities, from the Vendée to the Paris Commune, from Indochina to Algeria. Nor would they have invoked all kinds of conspiracy theories involving the French government, the Israeli Mossad or any of the other agents so often mentioned in connection with 9/11. I doubt very much that books purporting that this crime was actually planned and executed by the French president — had this terrible tragedy become reality — would have been written by American intellectuals, let alone become bestsellers in the United States. But all of this has indeed happened in Europe, particularly among social groups from whom one would least expect it by dint of their intelligence and education. Clearly, antipathy, as has often been the case, trumps either and both.”
• The Australian newspaper wrote to all Australian Members of Parliament, demanding to know where they stood on Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, forbidding people to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" on the basis of race. Curiously, they neglected to publish Greens senator Nick McKim's response:
  An open letter to The Australian, regarding their coverage of the 18C debate.
  
  I write to you from a bunker in Tasmania, too afraid to step outside my door as a 50-something white man of some means, worried that the Human Rights Commission will see me and bundle me in a van.
  Presumably they will issue me with several 18C lawsuits and wrap me and my family in red, or heaven forfend, green tape. Maybe they’ll even make me Not Say Really Racist Things.
  But seriously, being a straight white bloke in Australia certainly isn’t getting any more difficult. Not that this fact is often made clear in your newspaper, especially in your coverage of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Which is why I’m writing to you today.
  Honestly. Give it a rest.
  Crikey recently calculated that your newspaper has dedicated around 135,000 words to this topic. Bill Leak has managed to draw 20 cartoons about himself.
  Were one to read those 135,000 words aloud, it would take more than 17 hours to get through them.
  That’s longer than the duration of a flight from Sydney to Dallas/Fort Worth. Imagine someone banging on about the same topic for an entire long-haul flight. That’s how tedious it is to pick up a copy of The Australian these days.
  Your newspaper is now that drunk uncle at Christmas lunch who no one wants to talk to because he gives unsolicited opinions about ‘New Australians’ and ‘women these days’.
  Interestingly, 18C has not led to the mass incarceration of racist uncles. Perhaps you should ponder that conundrum when you’re tucking into your Christmas lunch.
  Maybe, just maybe, you could deploy your newspaper’s considerable resources and very capable journalists into more coverage of other issues.
  Here are a few suggestions:
  — How 2016 is likely to be the warmest year on record and what that means for Australia
  — What to do about rising inequality
  — How we could better treat asylum seekers and refugees who have sought Australia’s protection
  — The need for more investment in productive infrastructure
  But it’s not just the volume of words that prompted me to write this response.
  Your coverage of this issue has been biased and self-serving.
  The sheer vituperation and malice with which you’ve attacked your imagined opponents in this debate, particularly Gillian Triggs, has been shameful.
  You have used your editorial columns as a bully pulpit.
  Indeed, your newspaper’s previously admirable coverage of indigenous affairs has been literally whitewashed by a bunch of blokes who seemingly just want to use racist slurs without consequence.
  You have cherry-picked a few cases to pretend that freedom of speech has disappeared, and that yours is the sole voice of reason in a world gone mad.
  If you were actually the warriors for freedom of speech that you have styled yourself as, you’d be campaigning for a Bill of Rights, defamation reform, abolishing the secrecy provisions of the Border Force Act, and banning SLAPP suits (strategic lawsuits against public participation).
  Instead, the continuing presence of Bill Leak at your paper, not to mention your publication of the frightening eugenicist views of Gary Johns, make it clear that freedom of speech on race issues is under no serious threat at Holt Street, Surry Hills, or anywhere else in the country.
  If you doubt this, spend a few minutes checking out the comments on one of Pauline Hanson’s Facebook posts.
  
  Best,
  Nick McKim
• When James Bloodworth was asked by the Huffington Post to write for them for free, he responded with some choice words on Twitter.
  James Bloodworth: I've just written a book on difficulty working-class kids have breaking into the profession because of proliferation of unpaid work...
  Huffington Post contacted me saying it sounded interesting. They asked me to write something...
  Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to pay me, however — despite being a billion-dollar company.
  So here's my article: 'You are part of the problem, @HuffingtonPost'. The End.

Sports

• ESPN reporter Britt McHenry was the subject of a media frenzy in 2015 when she unleashed a verbal tirade against the employee of a towing company that had towed her vehicle from a parking lot (after illegally being parked there overnight). In her remarks, which were posted to the website LiveLeak, McHenry criticizes the towing company and specifically targets the clerk with a verbal tirade that includes multiple remarks about the employee's appearance, her social class and ability to do her job. Shortly after video footage from the exchange went public, McHenry apologized but ESPN still suspended the reporter for a week for her comments. The public was divided as to what should be McHenry's future: some say she should be allowed back on the air, some thought a bigger deal was made out of it than needed to be or thought that a double standard was being made ... while others thought she should be fired and/or made to work in a job dealing with the public, where sometimes some dissatisfied customers won't hold back in their criticism.
• More than once ESPN host Skip Bayless has been brought down by former and current athletes. Here's one by NFL Class Clown Chad Ochocinco (now back to his original name of Chad Johnson).
• ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith gave one to the New York Jets about how terrible the team was from front office to the field.
  "You don't need to look in Webster's Dictionary to find out what ineptitude means. It's right there with the "Jets."
  • Smith gave a ''huge'' one to 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick after the latter revealed he did not vote in the 2016 Presidential Election despite spending the whole season refusing to stand during the national anthem as part of his activism for black people. Smith expressed that he is uninterested in whatever Kaepernick has to say since his protests come off as shallow after refusing to participate in an action that can bring the change he desires.
• In the last matchday of FIFA World Cup qualifying for the 2014 tournament, Mexico looked like they were going to miss the tournament, losing to Costa Rica while Panama was beating the United States. The US had already qualified and clinched the top spot in the final continental qualifying tournament and were playing with their "B" team against Panama. Costa Rica had already qualified as well. Televisa Deportes had both matches on split-screen in Mexico when, in the final minutes, the US suddenly scored the tying goal against Panama, which would allow Mexico to advance to an intercontinental playoff with New Zealand despite their loss, TV Azteca commentator Christian Martinoli gushed praise on America for granting them a chance, then ripped into the Mexican national team for an absolutely awful qualifying cycle where they had to rely on their rivals to get anywhere and went a pathetically bad 1–1–3 (1 win, 1 loss, and 3 draws, scoring just three goals in five matches) at home, all in the usually-supportive Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. As the US scored one more goal to outright beat Panama, he said the US had finally surpassed Mexico in soccer, and told Victor Manuel Vucetich, the Mexican team's interim manager, to get his act together or resign.^note His predecessor, Luis Fernando Tena, had been sacked during the competition for his team's pathetic performance. Vucetich himself was sacked two days after the match.
  Christian Martinoli (in English): WE LOVE YOU!!! WE LOVE YOU FOREVER AND EVER!!! OHH, GOD BLESS AMERICA!
• Four years later, the USMNT and the US soccer establishment were on the receiving end of an equally epic diss by ESPN analyst and former national team player Taylor Twellman. The US began the "Hexagonal", the six-team final round of World Cup qualifying for CONCACAF, with back-to-back losses to Mexico and Costa Rica, leading to the dismissal of manager Jürgen Klinsmann. With former manager Bruce Arena back in charge, the US righted the ship to some degree, but hit a poor patch later on. Still, they entered their final match at Trinidad and Tobago, by then eliminated from World Cup contention, in the driver's seat for a trip to Russia. Chasing the USMNT were Panama, hosting already-qualified Costa Rica, and Honduras, hosting also-qualified Mexico. For the US, a win would definitely send them to Russia. A draw? Panama and Honduras could catch them on points, but the US was so far ahead on goal difference that it would have almost certainly advanced. Even a loss wouldn't necessarily be fatal. If neither Panama nor Honduras won, the USA would qualify directly. If only one of the two won, the US would have had a final chance in a two-legged qualifier with an Asian team (ultimately Australia). So what happens? (1) The US gives up an own goal 17 minutes in and lets in a second goal before halftime. They pull back one goal but lose 2–1. (2) Panama comes back from 1–0 down to beat Costa Rica 2–1. (3) Honduras comes back from 2–1 down to beat Mexico. Result: Panama qualifies directly, Honduras goes to the playoff against the Aussies, and the USMNT misses the World Cup for the first time since 1986. And Arena resigns. And Twellman goes off.
• Dale Hansen, a sports commentator, has received quite some acclaim in regard to his powerful stances and speeches in regard to several things that occurred in the world of sports, both professional sports and otherwise. He has also gone on record and on air in regards to having a lot of bile towards the Dallas Cowboys for various decisions they've made, most especially their hiring practices. When he learned that the Dallas Cowboys hired Greg Hardy for a contract in upwards of $13 million dollars after Greg Hardy beat up his former girlfriend and Carolina kicked him off their team for it, he had words for the Cowboys coaches and executives. What followed was 3 minutes of perfectly calm verbal thrashing:
  Cowboys will be paying former Carolina defensive end Greg Hardy somewhere between 11 and 13 million dollars next year if he plays every game, and there's a chance he won't. The NFL's Barney Fife will decide that, but when he does play, the defense should be better now. Hardy was a Pro Bowl player two years ago, had 15 sacks, then doesn’t play last year because he beat up his former girlfriend. Oh yeah, there is that. Just when I begin to think the Cowboys can’t possibly sink any lower, they can’t fall from grace any more than they have, they find another shovel and dig a few feet deeper. Hardy's only available because Carolina didn’t want him anymore, and only two or three other NFL teams did – funny how so many teams would pass on such a great talent, only because he beat up his former girlfriend. But your Cowboys didn't, and so many of you are so happy. I don't care how good he is, I don’t care if the Cowboys made a great deal, and I absolutely don't care about the argument so many of you make that what he does off the field just doesn't matter, if he can help you win on the field.

  Is there no line you won't cross? Is there no crime you won't accept? Is there no behavior you will not tolerate? The Cowboys have decided players who use illegal drugs can play. You drive drunk and kill a teammate, putting everyone on that highway at risk, there's a place on this team for you. You could rob a department store and play, and now you can beat a woman and play with a star on your helmet. Hardy's jersey is being sold at the Cowboys' online pro-shop now. You could get one for your sister or daughter and then explain to her that "Hardy beats up women, but we're cheering him now, because he's really good on game day. And game day is all that really matters to me." Your daughter will understand. But the reality is if Hardy knocks on your front door to take your daughter out for a night on the town, the man you cheer now? You would shoot his ass through the glass.

  The irony in this signing? Cowboys Vice President Charlotte Jones Anderson – the owner's daughter – is on the NFL's personal conduct policy committee. It must be quite a committee, and quite a policy. And apparently if Charlotte was ever beaten by a man, the esteemed owner would be OK with that man on his team, if he could play. Cowboys' coach Jason Garrett has been exposed. He's one of two things – he's either a fraud and hypocrite when he talks about having the right type of guys – character guys on his team, or he really has no say in this and he's simply the puppet so many of you think he is. It's one or the other, and I'll let him decide. It was Garrett's dad Jim, a former Cowboys scout, who famously said "This isn't the Boy Scouts, this is professional football." Well it's not Carolina football, Jim, they let Hardy go. The team that knows him best didn't want him anymore. But it is your son's professional football. It's the Cowboys' way now. You taught him well, Jim. You taught him well.
  • Even better? Despite Hardy's promising start, it quickly went downhill. After inappropriate tweets, frequent tardiness, and being a bad influence on the younger players on the team, the Cowboys dropped him after a season.
• Cleveland was for a long time the Butt-Monkey of American sports — if the city's 52-year championship drought between the Cleveland Browns' 1964 NFL championship and the Cleveland Cavaliers' 2016 NBA championship isn't quite the longest in American sports it has certainly been full of pain (see the Cavs' Ted Stepien era, Red Right 88, The Drive, The Fumble, The Shot, The Move, the '97 World Series, the '07 ALCS, The Decision). Of the three, the Browns (American football) are arguably the most pitiful and inept, as while the Guardians (baseball; formerly the Indians) and Cavaliers (basketball) have at least had some measure of success in the 21st century, the Browns have been consistently awful since their reintroduction into the NFL in 1999 (only 2 playoff appearances and 3 winning seasons as of the 2022 season). The city's fans (especially Browns fans) have mostly taken their misery in stride, but after a 30-12 loss to Houston in 2011, comedian and longtime Browns fan Mike Polk^note he who made the "Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Videos", "One Semester of Spanish — Love Song", and "I'm a Stupid Cat!" viral videos ripped into the team('s home stadium) with a mix of anger and humor that has spawned a Memetic Mutation.
  Polk: Hey, Browns! Mike Polk, season ticket-holder. Killer game in Houston today. Well, thank God we built [the Cleveland Browns Stadium]. What a blessing for the community! You are wasting valuable space on our majestic shoreline. And what do we get out of it from you? Ten miserable games a year, including two preseason games that I have to pay for, and one shitty Kenny Chesney concert! Do you understand that it's actually statistically harder for a team to be this consistently bad than it is for them to occasionally, accidentally, be good? The probability is staggering! Did you happen to see that Packers-Chargers game today? It's like they're playing a different sport than you are! and here's what you have to understand: we don't even expect you to be good! We just want you to be watchable! You have any idea how low our expectations are? We don't expect you to win the Super Bowl! We just want you to look better than a division III high school team! And listen, I know that there are way more important things in life than football. But you are supposed to be our pleasant distraction from those things! But all we do is pay you money to put us in a bad mood every week. (Beat) YOU ARE A FACTORY OF SADNESS! ... I'll see you Sunday.
  • In another video, made prior to a game against division rival Pittsburgh, he delivers one to Steelers fans—particularly Cleveland-area Steelers fans.
• On February 2, 2020, the Kansas City Chiefs won Super Bowl LIV in their first league championship game appearance in 50 years.^note Their last appearance was as the AFL team in Super Bowl IV in 1970, the final game before the merger between the AFL and NFL became official. In 2012, the year before they hired Andy Reid, the coach who took them there, they had arguably one of their worst seasons in franchise history, with a 2-14 finish. Kansas City sports radio host Bob Fescoe delivered a scathing speech to the team two weeks into the season, which today measures how far the team has come since then.
  Whose fault is it? To me, the players have to play. You've got to go out there and play football and for eight quarters this season, those guys have not gone out there and played football. Not one of them. They have not gone out there and 100 percent played football and it's quoted by Jamaal Charles: "We just didn't come out and play." Why not? Why didn't you come out and play? To me, that's on you, as a player. Stop embarrassing yourself. You're embarrassing your mother, you're embarrassing your father and you're embarrassing the city. You're embarrassing your wife and your children. And your dog, too — and your cat! [...] You're an embarrassing train wreck to the 2.5 million people that call this metro area home. You've let down all the old ladies that are on life support rooting for you, trying to pull out another day. You give people nothing to live for. You suck. That's what you are right now. You're an embarrassing, sucking trainwreck of a football team from top to bottom, but the onus to me this week is on the players. Get your ass out there and PLAY LIKE A MAN! PLAY LIKE YOU MEAN IT! PLAY LIKE YOU CARE!! [...] EVERY ONE OF YOU SUCKS! And we're tired of paying for tickets and parking and hot dogs and wasting freaking Sunday afternoons watching you play, because you're not playing hard, you're not playing like you care and you're not playing like you want to be there. And you know what, fans are going to stop coming because fans are not going to support your CRAP! We're done!
• Following the infamous "underarm incident" in a 1981 Australia vs New Zealand Cricket match (see Loophole Abuse: Real Life: Sports for details), commentator and former Australian captain Richie Benaud gave one to the Australian team, and in particular captain Greg Chappell, before signing off from the broadcast:
  "Let me just tell you what I think about it: I think it was a disgraceful performance from a captain who got his sums wrong today, and I think it should never be permitted to happen again. We keep reading and hearing that the players are under a lot of pressure, and that they're tired and jaded and perhaps their judgment and their skill is blunted. Well, perhaps they might advance that as an excuse for what happened out there today. Not with me, they don't. I think it was a very poor performance, one of the worst things I have ever seen done on a cricket field. Good night."
• Duke University's football team bailed out of its scheduled game with Louisville, and Louisville sued Duke for breach of contract. The lawyer representing Duke made this argument in court:
  "I think the Court can absolutely positively take judicial notice that Duke is probably the worst football team in Division I football. Everybody knows that. That’s no secret. The longest losing streak, the inability to ever win games. . .We certainly don’t have to go out and take six months of discovery to establish that for you. . .So the bottom line is how much discovery, if any, should anyone have to take, want to take or need to take to make the simple analysis of whether or not that was a team of similar stature? It’s judicial notice that they got beat by Utah. Maybe that’s part of the dispute – that they wish they’d played somebody weaker, like Duke which would have been an automatic W."
  • Duke won the lawsuit with their lawyer making that argument.
  • Making this episode Hilarious in Hindsight: Louisville joined Duke in the Atlantic Coast Conference in July 2014; however, they don't play every year in football. From 2014 through 2022, they were in separate divisions in that sport, and were not designated annual opponents; in the ACC's current divisionless model, they are not guaranteed annual opponents.
• When Delegate Emmett C. Burns wrote to the Baltimore Ravens demanding that they silence one of their players who spoke out in favor of marriage equality the Ravens organization official declined to comment except to say the letter was received and no action would be taken. Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, on the other hand, did comment in great detail opening by advising the Mr Burns that he should have an intern nearby in case he needed help with any of the longer words.
  Chris Kluwe: It baffles me that a man such as yourself, a man who relies on that same First Amendment to pursue your own religious studies without fear of persecution from the state, could somehow justify stifling another person’s right to speech. To call that hypocritical would be to do a disservice to the word. Mindfucking obscenely hypocritical starts to approach it a little bit.
• The Miami New Times recently blasted MLB commissioner Bud Selig after Selig asked to see some of the paper's records:
  "So this is the guy who wants our records? Isn't he the same commissioner who in 2002 approved the complicated deal that gave Loria the Marlins, betrayed the City of Montreal, and caused Loria's partners to accuse the artful merchant of racketeering?"
• When it was revealed that 2020 Arizona Coyotes draft pick Mitchell Miller had bullied an intellectually-disabled classmate (including making the victim lick a lollipop that had been wiped in a urinal), and after Coyotes GM Bill Armstrong had released statements on the matter, the victim's mother released this statement condemning Miller.◊ Within the week, the Coyotes dropped him, as did the University of North Dakota hockey team, whom Miller had committed to play for.
• In 2020, Houston Texans defensive end JJ Watt gave a scathing one to his teammates for a lack of effort after losing to the Cincinnati Bengals, bringing the Texans' record to 4-11.^note It's worth noting that Watt is overwhelmingly known for being the epitome of a Nice Guy, so he must have been really fed up to actually go this far. Watt was traded to the Arizona Cardinals during the 2021 offseason, at his request
  Watt: If you can’t come in and put work in, in the building, go out to the practice field and work hard, do your lifts, and do what you’re supposed to do, you should not be here. This is a job. We are getting paid a whole lot of money. There are a lot of people that watch us, and invest their time and their money into buying our jerseys, and buying a whole bunch of, and they care about it. They care every single week. We’re in week 16 and work four and 11. And there’s fans that watch this game, that show up to the stadium, that put in time, and energy, and effort, and care about this. So, if you can’t go out there, and you can’t work out, you can’t show up on time, you can’t practice, you can’t want to go out there and win, you shouldn’t be here because this is a privilege. It’s the greatest job in the world. You get to go out and play a game. And if you can’t care enough, even in week 17, even when you’re trash, when you’re four and 11, if you can’t care enough to go out there and give everything you’ve got and try your hardest, that’s bull. So, that’s how. There are people every week that still Tweet you, that still come up to you and say, “Hey, we’re still rooting for you. We’re still behind you.” They have no reason whatsoever to. We stink. But they care, and they still want to win, and they still want you to be great. That’s why. Those people aren’t getting paid. We’re getting paid handsomely. That’s why. That’s who I feel the most bad for is our fans, and the people who care so deeply in the city, and the people who love it and who truly want it to be great. And it’s not. And that sucks, as a player, to know that we’re not giving them what they deserve.
• Oklahoma State head football coach Mike Gundy gave a scathing one to the media in response to an article that was originally entitled, “QB Change: All about Attitude”^note It was later modified to “Reid is still the most talented signal-caller, but attitude is reason for change”.
  Gundy: I want to talk about this article right here. If anybody hasn't read this article— I don't read it— this was brought to me by a mother, of children. I think it's worth reading. Let me tell you why I want to talk about this article. Three-fourths of this is inaccurate. It's fiction. And, this article embarrasses me to be involved with athletics, tremendously. And that article, had to have been written by a person that doesn't have a child. And has never had a child that's had their heart broken and come home... upset. And had to deal with the child when he is upset. And kick a person when he's down.

  Here's all that kid did: he goes to class, he's respectful to the media, he's respectful to the public, and he's a good kid. And he's not a professional athlete, and he doesn't deserve to be kicked when he's down.

  If you have a child someday, you'll understand how it feels. But you obviously don't have a child. I do.

  Your child goes down the street, and somebody makes fun of him, because he dropped a pass in a pick-up game, or says he's fat, and he comes home crying to his mom, you'd understand. But you don't have that. But someday, you will. And when your child comes home, you'll understand.

  If you want to go after an athlete— one of my athletes— you go after one that doesn't do the right things. You don't downgrade him because he does everything right and may not play as well on Saturday. And you let us make that decision.

  That's why I don't read the newspaper: because it's garbage. And the editor that let it come out is garbage. Attacking an amateur athlete for doing everything right. And then you want to write articles about guys that don't do things right and downgrade them— the ones who do make plays.

  Are you kidding me? Where are we at in society today? Come after me! I'm a man! I'm 40! I'm not— I'm not a kid. Write something about me, or our coaches. Don't write about a kid that does everything right that's heart's broken, and then said that the coaches said he was scared. That ain't true! And then to say that we made that decision because Donovan Woods, because he threatened to transfer. That's not true! So get your facts straight.

  And I hope someday you have a child and somebody be— downgrades him, and belittles him and you have to look him in the eye and say, "You know what? It's okay. They're supposed to be mature adults, but they're really not." Who's the kid here? Who's the kid here? Are you kidding me?

  That's all I've got to say. Makes me want to puke.

• A Reddit user gave this one to the Chicago Blackhawks organization in the wake of Kyle Beach revealing that he was the anonymous player who was sexually assaulted by former video coach Bradley Aldrich:
  The 2008-2015 Hawks were the defining team of my junior high/high school years. My family had season tickets to them, I watched every game I could (when I wasn't playing myself,) either in person or on the TV, and everyone always knew (teachers, friends, random people) that I'd be down to talk about last nights game, a trade, or whatever regarding the team, or the NHL in general. This whole report, and now this interview, feels like the rug has been pulled out from under me. Someone earlier said these cups have an asterisks[sic], but I wouldn't say that in an Astros way. These cups were won fair and square, but with a stain. A rather large, blatantly obvious stain, made even worse by the players still on the roster from that team refusing to show much remorse or sympathy in interviews given. Here you have it, one of your former teammates, if you don't wanna call him a teammate then maybe coworker, fuck if not that then just say human being, crying his eyes out in an interview about his experience, and our captain, who at this point gives Mark Zuckerburg a run for his money for his roboticness, brushes it off. This team went to great lengths to protect it's[sic] squeaky clean reputation, one that at that age I couldn't help but naively believe, and one that has been shattered here. I already took my flair off, it's gonna be really hard for me to support this team going forward. I told myself before the season started I wasn't going to a home game this year, they don't deserve my money, and if I didn't have two away games booked I probably wouldn't be going to any of those either at this point. Time to reevaluate what being a fan means. Do I like hockey and the city of Chicago? Yes, so what? Can I support the concept of the Blackhawks, without supporting the team and organization and players? I don't know, I really don't fuckin know, and it's gonna take a bit of searching to find an answer

  Sorry for the wall of text, watching this interview really made me feel awful for Kyle. It's easy to read words on a page, but to hear it spoken from the heart, through tears, really had an effect on me I never could have imagined. I also just needed to rant as a fan, I feel like what was a big part of my life, I can no longer support in good conscious.[sic]
• Ottawa Senators forward Brady Tkachuk had this to say about being bitten on the hand by LA Kings forward Brendan Lemieux during a fight.
• When Chris Beard was fired as the men's basketball coach for UT Austin in the wake of being arrested for domestic violence, his lawyer expressed disappointment at the result. The UT administration were having none of it.◊
  Dear Mr. Minton,

  Being a head coach at The University of Texas at Austin is about more than winning games. The privilege of coaching comes with a great responsibility that goes beyond just avoiding improper conduct. A coach is a leader - a leader who develops student athletes' positive character, supports their education, prepares them for success in lives after graduation, and represents the University of Texas with honor and respect. A coach's influence is effected through both professional and personal interactions.

  Chris Beard engaged in unacceptable behavior that makes him unfit to serve as head coach at our university. Instead of immediately terminating Mr. Beard, the university exercised thoughtful restraint to allow time for additional material facts to emerge. Mr. Del Conte supported Mr. Beard and the program by supporting this pause before action and by presuming his innocence while the facts unfolded. But that support was not a determination regarding Mr. Beard's conduct - such a decision would have been premature. It is a mistake to view a manager's support for an employee as a statement of belief in criminal guilt or innocence. We understand that some but not all of the reports of Mr. Beard's behavior were retracted. It is his actual behavior that we consider, not whether some acts also constitute a crime. Whether or not the District Attorney ultimately charges Mr. Beard is not determinative of whether he engaged in conduct unbecoming a head coach at our university.

  There seems to be an incorrect underlying assumption that the criminal process outcome dictates Mr. Beard's employment outcome. But these are different processes, where different decision makers are weighing different factors. My call to you, as Mr. Beard's lawyer, was a courtesy to let you know that Athletics Director Chris Del Conte was prepared to start the termination process of Mr. Beard, that Mr. Del Conte was calling Mr. Beard that morning, and that there was only a short window open for Mr. Beard to resign should he choose to avoid termination. The university does not have a preference for his resignation versus his termination. And again, our evaluation of Mr. Beard's fitness for service is not contingent on whether he is also convicted of a particular crime or whether those charges are dismissed at some point.

  Additionally, your letter this morning reveals that Mr. Beard does not understand the significance of the behavior he knows he engaged in, or the ensuing events that impair his ability to effectively lead our program. This lack of self-awareness is yet another failure of judgment that makes Mr. Beard unfit to serve as a head coach at our university. For these reasons, the university proceeds to terminate Mr. Beard. The attached letter is his termination notice and will be part of his employee file.

• On November 10, 2023, Brian Dameris, the Dallas Mavericks announcer for Bally Sports Southwest, obliterated James Harden in a pregame segment leading up to the Mavericks' game against the Los Angeles Clippers:
  I get on my knees every night and pray for someone to believe in me like Daryl Morey^note the general manager of the Houston Rockets during Harden's peak years, who would later be reunited with Harden as GM of the Philadelphia 76ers believed in you. You wanted a certain coach, they brought in Mike D'Antoni. You wanted a certain style, they played it. You wanted Dwight Howard, they brought him in and got rid of him when you were tired of him. You wanted Chris Paul, they brought him in and got rid of him when you were tired of him. They brought in your old friend Russell Westbrook. You wanted to go to Vegas on off days, they looked away. You wanted the team to stay over so you could go out at night, they changed the schedule and it didn't work. And you know what? You said 'I'm going to break up with my wibbie(?). Not good enough. I see the bright lights of New York. I want to go there with my old pal Kevin Durant. It's gonna work. The big three.' And ohhh – after one year you wanted out. You realize 'Oh my gosh, I took this guy for granted, the guy who believed in me. I want back with Daryl Morey.' They traded Ben Simmons for you — how did they pull that off? And you know what, you went there and you got the partner who got the MVP. He won the MVP. And what did you say afterwards? You said, 'They didn't hand me the reins.' You're the point guard, you're holding the reins. And what did you do when you had the reins? You scored nine points in Game 7 against Boston. You blew a 3-2 series lead. So they - so they fired their coach. Not good enough. You broke up with the guy who believed in you again. You said, 'The bright lights of L.A., that's where I want to go. Let's see if that works.' Listen James, have you ever had those friends who had bad roommates? Over and over, they complained about their bad roommates. 'This guy's terrible, bad roommate here.' They never thought [unintelligible] learn they're the bad roommate. They're the problem. Hey James – you're the problem. If this doesn't work this year, in this system with this team, then you're going to go and point fingers at everybody else. You're going to go back home and you're going to start swiping right for another team and there's not going to be anybody left. Because James — you're not The Beard, you're not the system, you're the problem.
• In 2023, despite going through the regular season undefeated and winning the ACC championship game, the Florida State Seminoles were shockingly left out of the College Football Playoff.^note 2023 was the final season before the CFP expanded from four teams to twelve. When given a chance to redeem themselves in the Orange Bowl against the two-time national champion Georgia Bulldogs, 29 players opted out of the game, including 13 of their starters; as a result, a less-experienced Seminole team showed up to play, and Georgia DESTROYED them 63-3. Chris "Mad Dog" Russo of ESPN's First Take went NUCLEAR on the Seminoles, calling them a disgrace to college football for squandering an opportunity to prove that they belong in the CFP after weeks of complaining about getting snubbed, and his co-presenters agreed.

Judges and Lawyers

For judges, giving these is often part of the job:

• The judge at York Crown Court in 1971 to a defendant called Philip Mccutcheon: "I think you should give burglary up. You have a withered hand, an artificial leg, and only one eye. You have been caught in Otley, Leeds, Harrogate, Norwich, Beverley, Hull and York. How can you hope to succeed? You are a rotten burglar. You are always being caught."
• Judge Craig L. Schwall of Atlanta, who gave child molester Gerrick Jackson a life sentence, had a few scathing choice words to say to the woman who let a rapist into her home and gave him access to the children, allowing them to end up in such a situation after giving the sentence.
  If I sound upset it’s because I have never heard such vile, disgusting, despicable stuff in my entire 20-year career. You are not a victim.
• Judge Samuel Kent gave one of these to two lawyers in his disposition.
• Judge William G. Young gave this one to Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. Young did this as he was sentencing him to life in prison in 2003.
  "You are not an enemy combatant, you are a terrorist" ... "You are not a soldier in any army, you are a terrorist. To call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. (points to U.S. flag) You see that flag, Mr. Reid? That is the flag of the United States of America. That flag will be here long after you are forgotten."
• Ontario Superior Court of Justice judge Joseph W. Quinn has made rather a name for himself by not holding back from using his decisions to deliver scathing, detailed, and amusing "Reason You Suck" Speeches to various deserving parties. Some of his greatest hits:
  • Bruni v. Bruni:
    The source of the difficulties is hatred: a hardened, harmful, high-octane hatred. Larry and Catherine hate each other, as do Larry and Sam. This hatred has raged unabated since the date of separation. Consequently, the likelihood of an amicable resolution is laughable (hatred devours reason); and a satisfactory legal solution is impossible (hatred has no legal remedy).
    ...Catherine and Larry were married on October 7, 1995. If only the wedding guests, who tinkled their wine glasses as encouragement for the traditional bussing of the bride and groom, could see the couple now. [Footnote: I am prepared to certify a class action for the return of all wedding gifts.]
    ...Larry, who regularly drives by the residence of Sam and Catherine, "often shoots the finger" [Footnote: A finger is worth a thousand words and, therefore, is particularly useful should one have a vocabulary of less than a thousand words.] at Sam and, on about three occasions, has yelled, "Jackass, loser." [Footnote: When the operator of a motor vehicle yells "jackass" at a pedestrian, the jackassedness of the former has been proved, but, at that point, it is only an allegation as against the latter.]
    [after 212 paragraphs of trenchant and witty shellacking of both parties]: ...the parties repeatedly have shown that they are immune to reason. Consequently, in my decision, I have tried ridicule as a last resort.
  • Szakacs v. Clarke:
    For best courtroom adaptation of a work of fiction, the award goes to the applicant, Clarissa Olenka Szakacs, who shamelessly feigned what she thought was necessary to convince the court to circumscribe access by the respondent to their almost-six-year-old daughter.
    One could sit in Family Court for many years and not encounter such a callously conniving and mendaciously manipulative litigant. She effortlessly put the “rage” in “outrageous"...
    ...At several points throughout the trial, Ms. Szakacs emphasized that she was a Christian who practiced Christian values. There must be some key pages missing from her copy of the Bible.
  • The Hearing Clinic (Niagara Falls) Inc. v. 866073 Ontario Limited:
    The trial began, quite unremarkably, on a sunny summer day in July of 2011. Storm clouds were not long in arriving and we never saw the sun again.... After four weeks, the first witness, Stefan Fridriksson, was still testifying. Six additional days were needed to complete his evidence. In total, Fridriksson sub-let the witness box for 26 days. He entered the box as an articulate professional with impressive academic credentials, displaying what appeared to be a sound and comprehensive recollection of events. When he stepped down, after more than 14 days of withering cross-examination, he was noticeably dazed, his credibility was reduced to existential confetti and he even appeared to be physically shorter than when the trial began. The case for the plaintiff was leaking oil (at one point, I thought that I saw smoke) and everyone who was paying attention realized that whatever damages were at issue in the trial would be swamped by the costs tsunami that was approaching.
    ...Determining credibility can be a challenge for a trial judge. We have no special powers in that realm and, wherever possible, avoid reliance upon darts, dice and Ouija boards. However, rarely, has a witness generously offered up so many reasons to be disbelieved. Fridriksson was an evidentiary gift who kept on giving. He ignored rule number one in the Litigants’ Credo: “Know thyself, because others soon will.”
  • Pirbhai v. Singh:
    Singh, on the other hand, I found to be a devious man and an unbelievable witness who would do or say anything to advance his position. He was maddeningly unwilling to respond to the simplest of questions and often had to be asked the same question over and over (no doubt using the time gained to visit his pantry of untruthful answers). He was evasive, non-responsive and verbose in his testimony. Throughout the trial, I patiently waited for a Phoenix-like moment that might serve to rehabilitate his credibility: it never came. All in all, he was an exasperating witness who told untruths too numerous to catalogue and insulting in their breadth.
    Singh was evasive as a witness. He refused to acknowledge simple factual matters. He failed miserably in making reasonably diligent efforts to provide documentary disclosure, rendering it obvious that his objective was to divulge only what he wanted the court to see. Singh lied under oath. He tendered forged documents in evidence with the intention that the court act upon them. He perpetrated a fraud upon the plaintiff and his plan was to do the same upon the court. In this trial, he was a one-man crime wave.
• The Alberta case of Meads v. Meads, decided by Justice J.D. Rooke, has become a classic of Canadian law, cited in every province and in a variety of foreign jurisdictions. The Alberta courts had been beset by a number of legal cloudcuckoolanders known by various names including "freemen on the land" and "detaxers". These folks attempt to repel lawsuits and prosecutions for assorted offences by putting forward various ''unusual'' legal arguments by which they hope to coerce the court into recognizing them as beyond the government's jurisdiction just because they say so.^note These range from appeals to irrelevant statutes such as obscure commercial legislation, foreign law, and the freaking Magna Carta, to dark mutterings about convoluted conspiracies involving the Queen, the U.S. government, and the Vatican, to bizarre rituals involving strangely punctuated names, courtroom incantations, incomprehensible pleadings, bloody thumbprints, and still stranger things. It turns out that many of these arguments are being sold, for money, by "gurus" who are conspicuously absent when the time comes to clean up the mess. To deal with this, Justice Rooke took advantage of what would have been a fairly routine family law decision but for the involvement of such a "freeman" to write a breathtaking 736 paragraphs detailing the many varieties of these arguments, providing a helpful reference guide to why all of them are utter gibberish, and finally taking aim at the people who sell these arguments to bilk the uninformed and desperate out of their money and any hope of defending themselves legally:
  In his poem Inferno at Cantos 26-30, Dante placed the “evil counsellors” ‑ those who used their position to advise others to engage in fraud, and “the falsifiers” ‑ alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, and imposters, into the inner canyons of the eighth circle of hell. As sinners, the evil counsellors and falsifiers were matched by those who induce religious schisms, and surpassed only in fault by oath‑breakers.
  Persons who purposefully promote and teach proven ineffective techniques that purport to defeat valid state and court authority, and circumvent social obligations, appear to fall into those two categories. That they do so, and for profit at the expense of naive and vulnerable customers, is worse.
  William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1962, p. 11) wrote: “Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.” I believe that is true for you. At some basic level, you understand that you are selling lies, or at the very most generous, wildly dubious concepts.
  It does not matter whether you frame your ‘business’ as a joke, religion, for educational purposes only, or as not being legal advice; your ‘business’ harms your naive or malicious customers, their families, and the innocent persons whom your customers abuse as they attempt to exercise what you have told them are their rights.
  You cannot identify one instance where a court has rolled over and behaved as told. Not one. Your spells, when cast, fail.
• Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who presided over the case of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, a sports medicine doctor who worked with the USA Olympic Gymnastics team, and who molested hundreds of girls over the course of 20 years under the guise of giving them medical treatment (in fact, the chief prosecutor in the case called Nassar "possibly the most prolific serial child molester in history"), first gave the victims a chance to say their piece (see "Victim Impact Statements"), and then finished things off by giving him one herself.
  This letter [that Nassar read to the court] tells me you have not yet owned what you did. You still think somehow that you are right, you're a doctor, that you're entitled, that you don't have to listen. That you did 'treatment'. I wouldn't send my dogs to you, sir.
• In announcing the federal indictment of a self-proclaimed white supremacist for threatening a Jewish community center in Youngstown, Justin Herdman, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, called out not just that particular defendant but all white supremacists, while also making clear the distinction between freedom of speech and endorsing violence:
  Now let me speak generally to those who are advocates for white supremacy or white nationalism. I am talking directly to you. The Constitution protects your right to speak, your right to think, and your right to believe. If you want to waste the blessings of liberty by going down a path of hatred and failed ideologies, that is your choice.
  [...]
  Threatening to kill Jewish people, gunning down innocent Latinos on a weekend shopping trip, planning and plotting to perpetrate murders in the name of a nonsense racial theory, sitting to pray with God-fearing people who you execute moments later — those actions don’t make you soldiers, they make you criminals. Law enforcement doesn’t go to war with cowards who break the law, we arrest them and send them to prison.
• Youth Magistrate William Hutcheson said the following to Mitchell Miller (mentioned in the Sports category) in regards to Miller's relentless bullying of a developmentally-disabled classmate that led to Miller violating Ohio's Safe Schools Act (including making the poor kid lick a Push Pop that had been wiped in a urinal):
  Mitchell, I'm not sure you still get it. I don't think you like being where you are. But I still don't think you've put yourself in the shoes of not just the one victim but numerous victims. No one should come to school and feel humiliated or intimidated. If this is what you do in school, I wonder what you do outside of school. You're supposed to be on your best behavior in school. So if this is an example of your best behavior, I wonder what your worst behavior is. I don't have a sense of real remorse. But I do feel that you feel sorry for yourself.
• Justice Alan Moses gave one to British child killer Ian Huntley before giving him a life sentence:
  Ian Kevin Huntley, on August 4th, 2002, you enticed two ten-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, into your house. They were happy, intelligent and loyal. They were much loved by their families and all who knew them. You murdered them both. You are the one person who knows how you murdered them. You are the one person who knows why.
  You destroyed the evidence but you showed no mercy and you show no regret. It is plain that once you killed one, you had to kill the other in your attempt to avoid detection. On August 10th, but six days later, you told the BBC that you thought you might be the last friendly face that these two girls had to speak to. That was a lie which serves to underline the persistent cruelty of your actions. On the contrary, one of those girls died knowing her friend had been attacked or killed by you.
  After you had murdered them both, you pushed their bodies into a ditch, stripped them and burned them, while their families searched for them in increasing despair.
  And, as Kevin Wells called out their names, you pretended to join in the search. Three days later you demonstrated the extent of your merciless cynicism by offering that father some words of regret. Your tears have never been for them, only for yourself.
  In your attempts to escape responsibility, in your lies and your manipulation up to this day, you have increased the suffering you have caused two families. But it is not just those two families whose lives you sought to destroy. Your crimes are those for which the community suffer. The children you murdered were children whose lives brought joy to the community and whose deaths brought grief.
  There is no greater task for the criminal justice system than to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. There are few worse crimes than your murder of those two girls.
• Judge Daniel S. White to Daniel Clay while sentencing him to life for the 2014 rape and murder of Chelsea Bruck:
  I spent 10 days in trial with Mr. Clay and I listened to countless hours of him changing his story every time the detectives questioned him or brought up something new… It was very clear to me, Mr. Clay, you are a liar, a rapist and a killer.
• Judge Suzanne Goddard had this to say to Reynhard Sinaga, the UK's worst Serial Rapist:
  You are an evil serial sexual predator who has preyed upon young men who came into the city centre wanting nothing more than a good night out with their friends. One of your victims described you as a monster. The scale and enormity of your offending confirms this an accurate description. Rarely, if ever, have the courts seen such a campaign of rape as this, covering so many victims over a prolonged period.
• Judge Mario F. Mattei gave an epic and deserving one to Michael Sykes, who is responsible for murdering two of his girlfriend's children - Ziana Cutler and Maliyah Sykes - in a rampage inside the Ramada Inn Hotel on February 16th, 2016.
  You have never shown an ounce of regret. You have never shown an ounce of sorrow. The only person you've ever been concerned with is yourself throughout the (sic) case its case and its aftermath. Well, they were rushing lifeless bodies down a hallway and putting every fiber of their being into trying to save lives, you would get high playing video games. You didn't stay to help, you didn't call for help, you didn't alert anyone. You sealed your own daughter's fate. You made sure that if you couldn't have her, your own flesh and blood, no one would.
  And in many cases from Mr. Gucci points out, "justice should be tempered with mercy." I believe this is none of those cases. You slaughtered a two-year-old, a one-year-old, and a four-month-old, the most vulnerable member of our society. And as the verdict attests, you showed no compassion or no mercy to innocent children. You deserve none from the court. You failed as a husband, you failed as a father, you failed as a human being.
• Justice Cameron Mander gave this to white supremacist terrorist Brenton Tarrant who murdered 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand. You can read the entirety of Justice Mander's remarks here.
  You committed mass murder. You slaughtered unarmed and defenceless people. You maimed, wounded and crippled many others. Your victims include the young and the old, men, women and children. At one stage during your online commentary you referred to what was happening as a “firefight” — the absurdity of that lie reflected your need to mask the truth of your cowardly massacre of people who had no chance to protect themselves. It is self-evident that your offending constituted extreme violence. It was brutal and beyond callous — your actions were inhuman. You deliberately killed a three-year-old infant by shooting him in the head as he clung to the leg of his father. The terror you inflicted in the last few minutes of that small child’s life is but one instance of the pitiless cruelty that you exhibited throughout. There are countless more examples. You showed no mercy. Other children were present — a two-year-old boy was shot and a four-year-old girl was another of your victims — as were the elderly. Wounded people who were incapacitated and unable to escape were despatched by you in cold blood, often at point-blank range. You shot people in the back and ignored the pleas of the wounded to be spared. You advanced on them, stood over them, and viciously took their lives. ⁠Most of your victims were at prayer. You violated places of worship where people came together for peace and fellowship. Like the rest of the country, the worshippers had no inkling of the terror and carnage that was about to be perpetrated. It is difficult to look beyond the wicked nature of each murder and the pain and suffering you have caused to individual victims, to their families and loved ones. However, you are not only a murderer but a terrorist. ⁠Your actions go further than demonstrating contempt for the sanctity of life. In the name of a political or ideological cause, you sought to violently intimidate the community, and coerce the country’s peaceable form of government and social order — essentially to attack New Zealand’s way of life. The beliefs upon which you rely to justify your crimes are rooted in religious and ethnic antipathy and intolerance. The hatred that lies at the heart of your hostility to particular members of the community that you came to this country to murder has no place here. It has no place anywhere.
• Judge Michael Russo gave one to Ariel Castro after sentencing him for kidnapping and raping 3 young women a life sentence, plus 1,000 years and no parole.
  Sir, there's no place in this city, there's no place in this country, indeed there's no place in this world for those who enslave others, those who sexually assault others or those who brutalize others. For more than 10 years you have preyed upon three young women. You subjected them to harsh and violent conduct. You felt you were dominating them. But you were incorrect. You could not take away their dignity. Although they suffered terribly, Miss Knight, Miss DeJesus and Miss Berry did not give up hope. They have persevered. In fact, they've prevailed. These remarkable women again have their freedom, which is the most precious aspect of being an American. Mr. Castro, you forfeited that right. You've now become a number with the Department of the Rehabilitation and Correction. You'll be confined for the remainder of your days.
• Justice Taylor gave this speech to the murder duo Allan Baker and Kevin Crump as they were sentenced for murdering and robbing Ian Lamb; kidnapping, raping, and conspiring to murder Virginia Morse^note The court in New South Wales couldn't charge them with her murder because it took place in Queensland; and wounding a police officer while evading arrest:
  For sheer cruelty, for callous indifference to suffering, for a complete disregard of humanity, for the complete absence of a spark of human decency, what you have done to this woman and to her children and to her husband is without parallel in my experience, and I have sat here many times over the years. You have outraged all accepted standards of the behaviour of men. The description "men" ill becomes you. You would be more aptly described as animals, and obscene animals at that.
  You murdered Lamb for $20, the petrol in his car, his clothes and his pitifully poor possessions. You robbed his body, and he was a man you did not even know. You shot him at point-blank range as he was roused from his sleep. Mercifully he was probably not aware of what had happened to him.
  I believe that you should spend the rest of your lives in gaol and there you should die. If ever there was a case where life imprisonment should mean what it says - imprisonment for the whole of your lives - this is it.
  If in the future some application is made that you be released on the grounds of clemency or of mercy, then I would venture to suggest to those who are entrusted with the task of determining whether you are entitled to it or not that the measure of your entitlement to either should be the clemency and mercy you extended to this woman when she begged you for her life.
• When convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef—who was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the bombing of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 as well as a co-conspirator for the failed Bojinka plot—justified his attack as retribution for what he defined as terrorism carried out by the United States (namely the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki among others) as well as its support for Israel, U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy then shot back at him for his cowardice and misuse of Islamic doctrine:
  Ramzi Yousef, you claim to be an Islamic militant. Of all the persons killed or harmed in some way by the World Trade Center bomb, you cannot name one who was against you or your cause. You did not care, just so long as you left dead bodies and people hurt.
  Ramzi Yousef, you are not fit to uphold Islam. Your God is death. Your God is not Allah ...
  You weren't seeking conversions. The only thing you wanted to do was to cause death. Your God is not Allah. You worship death and destruction. What you do, you do not for Allah; you do it only to satisfy your own twisted sense of ego.
  You would have others believe that you are a soldier, but the attacks on civilization for which you stand convicted here were sneak attacks which sought to kill and maim totally innocent people ...
  You, Ramzi Yousef, came to this country pretending to be an Islamic fundamentalist, but you cared little or nothing for Islam or the faith of the Muslims. Rather, you adored not Allah, but the evil that you yourself have become. And I must say that as an apostle of evil, you have been most effective.
• Lord Chief Justice Coleridge had harsh words for murderer Percy Lefroy Mapleton before passing the death sentence.
  You have been convicted on the clearest evidence of a most ferocious murder, a murder perpetrated on a harmless old man, who had done you no wrong; he was perhaps unknown to you. You have been rightly convicted, and it is right and just that you should die.
• Gideon Hauser, Attorney General of Israel, unleashed a brutal Speech (doubling as a Victim Impact Statement as he spoke for the murdered victims of The Holocaust, his fellow Jewish people) on Adolf Eichmann and the Nazis at the former's trial. Full text available here. Hauser, along with his prosecution team, successfully indicted Eichmann, following the precedent set at the Nuremberg Trials that Just Following Orders is not a valid justification if those orders are criminal and illegal.
  When I stand before you here, Judges of Israel, to lead the Prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I am not standing alone. With me are six million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point an accusing finger towards him who sits in the dock and cry: "I accuse." For their ashes are piled up on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, and are strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout the length and breadth of Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is not heard. Therefore I will be their spokesman and in their name I will unfold the awesome indictment.
  [...] Yet never, down in the entire blood-stained road travelled by this people, never since the first days of its nationhood, has any man arisen who succeeded in dealing it such grievous blows as did Hitler's iniquitous regime, and Adolf Eichmann as its executive arm for the extermination of the Jewish people. In all human history there is no other example of a man against whom it would be possible to draw up such a bill of indictment as has been read here. The most terrible crimes of those fearful figures of barbarism and blood-lust, Genghis Khan, Attila, or Ivan the Terrible, the telling of which curdles our blood and makes our hair stand on end with horror, deeds, that have become "a proverb and a taunt" {Jeremiah 24:9} and an "everlasting abhorrence" {Daniel 12:2} to the nations - these almost seem to pale into insignificance when contrasted with the abominations, the murderous horrors, which will be presented to you in this trial.
  In this trial, we shall also encounter a new kind of killer, the kind that exercises his bloody craft behind a desk, and only occasionally does the deed with his own hands. True, we have certain knowledge of only one incident in which Adolf Eichmann actually beat to death a Jewish boy, who had dared to steal fruit from a peach tree in the yard of his Budapest home. But it was his word that put gas chambers into action; he lifted the telephone, and railroad cars left for the extermination centres; his signature it was that sealed the doom of thousands and tens of thousands. He had but to give the order, and at his command the troopers took the field to rout Jews out of their neighbourhoods, to beat and torture them and chase them into ghettoes, to pin the badges of shame on their breasts, to steal their property - till finally, after torture and pillage, after everything had been wrung out of them, when even their hair had been taken, they were transported, en masse to the slaughter. Even the corpses were still of value: the gold teeth were extracted and the wedding rings removed.
  [...] He must bear the responsibility therefore, as if it was he who with his own hands knotted the hangman's noose, who lashed the victims into the gas-chambers, who shot in the back and pushed into the open pit every single one of the millions who were slaughtered. Such is his responsibility in the eyes of the law, and such is his responsibility according to every standard of conscience and morality.
• Her Honour Justice Hallett gave one to Russell Causley when his second trial for the murder of Veronica Packman once again ended in conviction.
  What you did to your wife is beyond the understanding of most normal people. You bullied her and dominated her for years. You moved your mistress into the family home and then involved your very vulnerable daughter in your sordid affair. The damage you have done to your daughter is incalculable, it's a miracle she has turned out as well-adjusted as she has. Not only did you kill your wife and dispose of her body, you have left your daughter in a permanent state of ignorance as to her fate. You don't care about her feelings. The only feelings you care about are yours and Patricia Causley's. When your daughter became too much trouble to you she had to leave home. It's fortunate for her that it wasn't worth your financial gain to kill her. In my mind you are a self-centred and calculating killer. You will do whatever you have to do to make your life easier. Your mistress appears to be of the same mind and I'm not surprised she hasn't dared to show her face at this court. In my judgement you are a wicked pair. This is cold-blooded killing for financial gain. It will be a minimum of 16 years before anybody should even consider you for release. I'm not suggesting you'll ever be fit for release.
• In his closing argument to Chris Watts, district attorney Michal Rouke rips him a new one over the murder of his family.
  If he was this happy and wanted a new start, get a divorce. You don’t annihilate your family and throw them away like garbage. Why did Niko, Celeste, Bella and Shanann have to lose their lives in order for him to get what he wanted?
• Erie County Court Judge Susan Eagan sentencing Peyton Gendron to life in prison for the racially-motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York supermarket that killed ten and wounded three.
  There is no place for you or your ignorant, hateful and evil ideologies in a civilized society. There can be no mercy for you, no understanding, no second chances. The damage you have caused is too great, and the people you have hurt are too valuable to this community. You will never see the light of day as a free man ever again.
• When British serial killer nurse Lucy Letby was sentenced for murdering babies, the judge calmly tore into her for her crimes.
  The defendant, Lucy Letby, has refused to attend court for this sentence hearing. Accordingly, I have to sentence her in her absence. I shall deliver the sentencing remarks as if she was present to hear them and I direct that she is provided with a transcript of my remarks and copies of the Victim Personal Statements read to the court. Lucy Letby, over a period of almost 13 months between June 2015 and June 2016, when in your mid-20’s and employed as a neo-natal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in Chester with specialist training in intensive care, you murdered 7 babies and attempted to murder 6 others, in the case of one of them trying on separate occasions two weeks apart to murder her. You are now to be sentenced for your crimes. I order payment of the statutory surcharge in the appropriate amount. You acted in a way that was completely contrary to the normal human instincts of nurturing and caring for babies and in gross breach of the trust that all citizens place in those who work in the medical and caring professions. The babies you harmed were born prematurely and some were at risk of not surviving, but in each case you deliberately harmed them intending to kill them. In your evidence you said that ‘hurting a baby is completely against everything that being a nurse is’, as, indeed, it should be. You also claimed you never did anything that was meant to hurt a baby and only ever did your best to care for them. That was but one of the many lies you were found to have told in this case. There is no doubt that you are intelligent and, outwardly, were a very conscientious, hard working, knowledgeable, confident and professional nurse, which enabled you repeatedly to harm babies on the unit without arousing suspicion for some time. You prided yourself in your competence. Your fellow neonatal nurses spoke very highly of you, and several of them became your close friends. Having started as a Band 5 nurse at the Countess of Chester in 2012, you became a mentor to student nurses and, in the Spring of 2015, gained the qualification that enabled you to care for the sickest babies on the unit or those requiring the most intensive care. You relished being in the intensive care nursery. Your messages to colleagues revealed an interest in babies that were on or were coming to the unit who had uncommon medical conditions. The methods you employed to carry out your murderous intent were only revealed by the later detailed investigation into the events of and surrounding the collapses and deaths of the babies which commenced in 2018. There was pre-meditation, calculation and cunning in your actions. You specifically targeted twins and, latterly, triplets. Some babies were healthy, others had medical issues of which you were aware. The great majority of your victims suffered acute pain as a result of what you did to them. They all fought for survival; some, sadly, struggled in vain and died. You used a number of different ways to try to kill them, thereby misleading clinicians into believing the collapses had, or might have had a natural cause or were a consequence of a developing medical condition. You took opportunities to harm babies when staff were on breaks or away from babies. On some occasions you falsified records to indicate there were signs of a deterioration before a collapse occurred. You knew that the last thing anyone working in the unit would or did think was that someone caring for the babies was deliberately harming them. As the number of unexpected and unexplained collapses and deaths escalated senior doctors started to ‘think the unthinkable’ and consider the possibility that someone was, in fact, deliberately harming the babies and you were identified as the common factor. You had a detached enthusiasm for the resuscitations and what followed. You endeavoured to impress colleagues and clinicians and sought reassurance from them as to your competence and skills, and would message others to the effect that no-one was at fault. On occasions, your cruelty and callousness was revealed by making inappropriate remarks to some of the grieving parents at the time of or in the immediate aftermath of a death. When the homes of both you and your parents were searched, confidential documents relating to babies, including handover and resuscitation sheets and notes and blood gas readings were found, and there were entries in a diary recording relevant events. Handover sheets relating to all but the first 4 of the babies had been taken from the unit and kept by you. I am satisfied you started to keep these documents after those initial offences in June 2015 as morbid records of the dreadful events surrounding the collapses of your victims and what you had done to them. You had a fascination with the babies and their families, which extended to making repeated searches on Facebook for their parents, sometimes immediately following the events and, on occasions, much later. A piece of paper with dense writing on both sides, setting out your thoughts and feelings, was found in the first search of your home in 2018. Amongst the phrases you wrote were ‘the world is better off without me’ and ‘I am evil I did this’. The impact of your crimes has been immense, as disclosed by the deeply moving personal statements that have been read to the court this morning. The lives of new-born or relatively new-born babies were ended almost as soon as they began and lifelong harm has been caused, all in horrific circumstances. Loving parents have been robbed of their cherished children and others have to live with the physical and mental consequences of your actions. Siblings have been deprived of brothers and sisters. You have caused deep psychological trauma, brought enduring grief and feelings of guilt, caused strains in relationships and disruption to the lives of all the families of all your victims. It is no part of my function to reach conclusions as to the underlying reason or reasons for your actions. Nor could I, for they are known only to you. I must pass appropriate sentences according to law, addressing the seriousness of your offences, the facts of which I now describe briefly. On the evening of 8th June 2015 you murdered ‘A’. He died just over 24 hours after he was born, suddenly and unexpectedly collapsing shortly after you took over as his designated nurse at the start of the evening shift. He was in a nursery with his twin sister, ‘B’. Although he was born prematurely, he had been extremely stable. He died of air embolus as a result of you administering a bolus of air into his venous system which blocked off the blood supply to his heart and lungs. In common with all nurses, you knew from your training the dangers caused by air getting into the venous system and that air embolus was very rarely encountered in clinical practice. You took part in the attempts to resuscitate ‘A’ and claimed you found the process of taking his footprints and handprints, as well as photographs of him after his death, to be quite a nice thing to do for the baby and you saw it as a way of giving parents memories. In evidence, you sought to blame others for his collapse. The following day you searched for ‘A’s mother on Facebook and then, on the ensuing night shift, at shortly after midnight on 10th June, you attempted to murder his sister, ‘B’, by injecting air into her venous system via a long line through which she was receiving nutrition. Fortunately, she was able to be resuscitated and survived. Four days after ‘B’s collapse, in the early hours of 14th June, ‘C’ collapsed and died in the intensive care nursery. He had been born 4 days earlier at 30 weeks gestation in good condition, but was vulnerable; he had a lung infection which was being treated by antibiotics. However, his breathing stabilised. He was being fed by a naso-gastric tube. You messaged a colleague saying you ‘needed to throw yourself back in and take an ITU baby soon’. On that night shift of 13-14th June you were the designated nurse for 2 babies in another nursery. ‘C’ was started on trophic, that is tiny, feeds that night. You were at the side of his incubator when he stopped breathing and his oxygen saturations were very low as a result of you having deliberately infused an excessive amount of air down his naso-gastric tube. Attempts to resuscitate ‘C’ failed and he died some hours later in his parents’ arms. Before he passed away you made an insensitive and inappropriate, but revealing comment to them about them having said their goodbyes and to put him in a ventilated basket. Understandably they reacted to this. Just over a week later, in the early hours of Monday 22nd June, ‘D’, who had been born 36 hours earlier, died in the intensive care nursery. You will have been aware that she was being treated for an infection and were the designated nurse for 2 other babies in that nursery on that night shift. You decided to kill her and administered air into her intravenously, causing her to die from air embolus. You were involved in her resuscitation and, in your messaging with other nurses after ‘D’s death, you described how upsetting it was and how distraught her parents were and referred to thinking an element of fate was involved. Three days after ‘D’ died, you searched for her parents on Facebook and, over 3 months later, on 3rd October you made 2 more searches for her father. Over a month passed before you killed another baby. Again, it was a twin who was selected, ‘E’. He and his brother, ‘F’, were born on 29th July. ‘E’ died in the early hours of 4th August. During the shift that night you were the designated nurse for both ‘E’ and ‘F’. ‘E’ died of air embolus and there was damage to his upper gastro- intestinal tract caused by trauma of some kind inflicted by you, which resulted in significant blood loss. The bleeding started earlier in the shift and was seen by his mother; she was very concerned and you sought to reassure her. The circumstances of the attempted resuscitation and his death were harrowing, with profuse bleeding. At the time the clinicians thought he may have died of necrotising enterocolitis and no post mortem was undertaken. You commented in messages to colleagues that he had a massive haemorrhage and it could have happened to anyone. On the following nightshift, the 4th – 5th August, you turned your attention to ‘F’ and poisoned him by adding manufactured insulin to his intravenous infusions of total parenteral feed. Only very small volumes of insulin needed to be added to the half litre bags of feed; it was not noticeable in the bag, nor would it be apparent that any was missing from the insulin bottle. You infused a bag that was hung that shift and several other stock bags. As a result, when bags were changed, ‘F’ continued to have dangerously low blood sugar levels despite increasing infusions of dextrose. It was only when a bag that had not had insulin added was hung that his levels recovered and he was no longer at risk of the consequences of hypoglaecemia of brain damage and potential death. ‘F’ recovered but has severe learning difficulties. No doubt you were reassured that no-one suspected that insulin had been added and, with this knowledge, you went on to repeat this method of attempting to kill another twin, ‘I’, some 8 months later. Again, you made Facebook searches. On 6th August and 14th September you searched for his mother and you searched for both parents in October. In September you made two attempts to kill ‘G’. She was a very premature baby who was born in Arrowe Park Hospital on 31st May at only 23 weeks and 6 days’ gestation. Although on the margin of survival, she did survive. By 13th August she was stable and was transferred to the Countess of Chester, where the general trend of improvement continued. The 7th September was her 100th day of life; nurses had planned a small celebration, including the display of a banner. On the nightshift of 6th – 7th, you deliberately injected milk and air into ‘G’s stomach down the naso-gastric tube shortly after her designated nurse had fed her, causing her to projectile vomit; her alarms sounded, her heart rate and saturation levels dropped and she required breathing assistance. You were nearby and assisted, and later sought to blame a colleague for potentially over-feeding. In messaging prior to ‘G’ being transferred back to Arrowe Park in the early hours of 8th September, you referred to her being a ‘high risk baby’. Five days after ‘G’s return to the Countess of Chester on 16th September, you made a further attempt to kill her on 21st September by over-feeding her, causing her to projectile vomit again and stop breathing and her saturations to drop. ‘G’ suffered a severe and profound injury to her brain from the first event on 7th September, which may have been added to by your actions on 21st September, and from which she will not recover. She requires constant nursing care and attention and will require surgery and support throughout her life. Just over a month later, on 23rd October, you murdered ‘H’. She had been born at Arrowe Park Hospital on 7th August and had been at the Countess of Chester from 18th August, apart from two short periods in September and October. When at the Countess of Chester she suffered a series of sudden, unexpected and unexplained episodes. On 30th September you infused a large quantity of air down her nasogastric tube into her stomach and bowel, thereby interfering with her breathing, reducing her oxygen saturations and heart rate and causing her to vomit and require oxygen under pressure. It is also likely that, in the early hours of 13thOctober, you infused air into her venous system. The following night she collapsed again but recovered with breathing support and was transferred to Arrowe Park for two days. Six days after her return, on the night of 22nd-23rd October, she suffered her final collapse, crying out in severe pain as a result of air embolus after you had injected air into her venous system. She, too, died in her parents’ arms. Not only was it devastating for ‘H’s family, it was also deeply upsetting for the nursing and medical staff, who had known and cared for ‘H’ for some time and had fought to save her. Again you searched for her mother on Facebook. In early April 2016, you administered insulin to ‘I’ and injected air into the venous system of his twin brother, ‘J’, repeating what you had done eight months earlier to the twins ‘E’ and ‘F’. They had been born on 8th April. You added insulin to the dextrose bag that was set up for ‘I’ within two hours of his birth and to several other bags that were later hung. On 9th April, when ‘I’ was hypoglycemic, you injected air into ‘J’s venous system causing him to suffer a profound apnoeic episode and cardio-respiratory arrest. It took just under 30 minutes to resuscitate him. You were present throughout. A piece of paper towel on which details of the drug administration notes had been noted during the emergency and a blood gas print out which you had retrieved from the confidential waste were found at your home after your arrest, and you also took home handover sheets relating to ‘J’. You made a note of the event in your diary. J suffered irreversible brain damage as a result of his cardio respiratory collapse and, over time, he may well deviate from his peers in relation to attainment and cognitive or motor function. On the 3rd June you attempted to murder ‘K’. He had been born on 2nd June. His mother is haemophiliac. This interested you. When his designated nurse went on a break in the early hours of the night after he was born you inflicted some painful trauma to the oropharynx area causing him to scream, bleed and profoundly desaturate. Fortunately, he survived but could have suffered the consequences of the trauma to his throat. Almost a week later on 21st June 2016 ‘XY’ gave birth to identical triplet boys. Although on holiday at the time, you were communicating with colleagues about the triplets and said you felt most at home in the intensive care nursery. On your first day back at work on 23rd June you were the designated nurse for ‘L’ and ‘M’, who, together with their brother, ‘O’, were all in the intensive care nursery. That afternoon ‘L’ suffered a series of sudden and unexpected collapses as a result of you administering air down his naso-gastric tube as well as into his venous system and you inflicted trauma to his liver causing significant bleeding. The horror of the consequences of your actions and the desperate attempts to resuscitate him and save his life, sadly to no avail, were vividly described by clinicians and his father. The following day you murdered his older brother, ‘M’. You forced air down his naso-gastric tube into his stomach and bowel, and inflicted trauma to his liver but not damaging it as severely as you had in ‘L’s case. The air caused his diaphragm to splint and he collapsed. His life could not be saved. His father remembered him struggling for his life like his brother. ‘O’ was removed to another hospital and to safety. In messages to a friend and colleague, when investigations into the unexpected collapses and deaths on consecutive days were under way, you referred to the risk of air embolus and your having submitted a Datix report, which you did in a totally unrelated case on 1st July, referring to one of the lumens through which intravenous medication was being administered via an umbilical venous catheter being open. The cruelty and calculation of your actions were truly horrific. After these last collapses and deaths, you were suspended from nursing duties but pursued complaints of being treated unfairly. When your home was later searched, as well as your 2016 diary, which contained references to long days on 23rd, 24th and 25th June and to ‘L’ and ‘M’, there were handover sheets over that period with resuscitation notes written on the back. All, I have no doubt, being records that you kept to remind you of the details of the consequences of what you had done to those children. For the offence of murder, the sentence is fixed by law and is imprisonment for life. You are now 33 years of age and were over 21 when you committed the offences. Pursuant to the relevant prevailing statutory regime, by having regard to Schedule 21 to the Criminal Justice Act 2003, I have to determine whether the seriousness of the offences of murder, individually or in combination, is so exceptionally high that I should not make a minimum term order and you should spend the rest of your life in prison. For offences of attempted murder, whole life sentences of imprisonment are reserved for wholly exceptional cases. Over a period of just under 13 months you killed 7 fragile babies and attempted to kill 6 others. Some of your victims were only a day or a few days old. All were extremely vulnerable. They were in a hospital where others were striving to provide them with dedicated medical and nursing care. By their nature and number, such murders and attempted murders by a neo-natal nurse entrusted to care for them are offences of very exceptional seriousness. The damaging impact of your actions on others working at that hospital, including those who numbered you as a friend, betraying their trust and creating upset and suspicion, as well as eroding confidence in clinicians and nurses generally, aggravates their seriousness. This was a cruel, calculated and cynical campaign of child murder involving the smallest and most vulnerable of children, knowing that your actions were causing significant physical suffering and would cause untold mental suffering. You created situations so that collapses or causes of collapses would not be obvious or associated with you; you removed and retained confidential records of events relating to your crimes and checked up on bereaved parents. There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions. During the course of this trial you have coldly denied any responsibility for your wrongdoing and sought to attribute some fault to others. You have shown no remorse. There are no mitigating factors. In their totality, the offences of murder and attempted murder were of exceptionally high seriousness and just punishment, according to law, requires a whole life order. Lucy Letby, on each of the 7 offences of murder and the 7 offences of attempted murder I sentence you to imprisonment for life. Because the seriousness of your offences is exceptionally high I direct that the early release provisions do not apply. The order of the court, therefore, is a whole life order on each and every offence and you will spend the rest of your life in prison.

Victim Impact Statements

Sometimes given by a crime victim to the defendant (in a victim impact statement) after their conviction; this is due to requirement by law in most places: the police have to protect the convicted from physical attacks by victims and/or their families despite their reasons to do so, but verbal attacks are allowed.

• Ohio man T.J. Lane was given the harshest punishment allowed for violent juvenile offenders in 2013: life behind bars; Lane took off his dress shirt that revealed another shirt with “killer” written on it to mock the families of the three fellow students he killed alongside three others whom were injured. Obviously, the family members of the deceased were furious and opted for this as part of their victim impact statements.
• US Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, during his trial for multiple counts of child molestation was (very deservedly) subjected to possibly one of the most epic series of these speeches ever delivered in a courtroom. Over the course of seven days, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina allowed all 156 of Nassar's victims who wished to speak to do so, as well as several others, including the mother of a victim who committed suicide because of Nassar's abuse. (Aquilina had some choice words for Nassar herself, as detailed in the above folder.)
  Kyle Stephens: Little girls don’t stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world.
  Tiffany Thomas Lopez: The army you chose in the late ’90s to silence me, to dismiss me and my attempt at speaking the truth, will not prevail over the army you created when violating us.
  Jordyn Wieber: Even though I’m a victim, I do not and will not live my life as one. I am an Olympian.
  Aly Raisman: We, this group of women you so heartlessly abused over such a long period of time, are now a force and you are nothing. The tables have turned, Larry. We are here, we have our voices and we are not going anywhere...Let this sentence strike fear in anyone who thinks it is O.K. to hurt another person. Abusers, your time is up. The survivors are here, standing tall, and we are not going anywhere.
• Christopher Watts received a devastating and deserving speech from his victim Shannan Watts' family:
  Frank Rzucek: I trusted you to take care of them, not kill them. They were loving and caring people. You may have taken their bodies from me but you will never take the love they had for me. They loved us more than you will ever know because you don’t know what love is or you would not have killed them.”
  Sandra Rzucek: We loved you like a son. We trusted you. Your faithful wife trusted you. Your children adored you, and they also trusted you... I have no idea who gave you the right to take their lives.
• Jaycee Lee Dugard's epic calling out of her former kidnapper Phillip Garrido and his wife:
  I chose not to be here today because I refuse to waste another second of my life in your presence. I've chosen to have my mom read this for me. Phillip Garrido, you are wrong. I could never say that to you before, but I have the freedom now and I am saying you are a liar and all of your so-called theories are wrong. Everything you have ever done to me has been wrong and someday I hope you can see that. What you and Nancy did was reprehensible. You always justified everything to suit yourself but the reality is and always has been that to make someone else suffer for your inability to control yourself and for you, Nancy, to facilitate his behavior and trick young girls for his pleasure is evil. There is no God in the universe that would condone your actions. To you, Phillip, I say that I have always been a thing for your own amusement. I hated every second of every day of 18 years because of you and the sexual perversion you forced on me. To you, Nancy, I have nothing to say. Both of you can save your apologies and empty words. For all the crimes you have both committed I hope you have as many sleepless nights as I did. Yes, as I think of all of those years I am angry because you stole my life and that of my family. Thankfully I am doing well now and no longer live in a nightmare. I have wonderful friends and family around me. Something you can never take from me again. You do not matter anymore.
• Dennis Shepard, the father of Matthew Shepard (a young gay man famously murdered and the subject of the play The Laramie Project), gave a blistering one to one of the men who killed his son, while essentially allowing him to receive a sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty:
  My son, Matthew, did not look like a winner. He was rather uncoordinated and wore braces from the age of 13 until the day he died. However, in his all-too-brief life, he proved that he was a winner. On October 6th, 1998, he tried to show the world he could win again. On October 12th, 1998, my firstborn son, and my hero, lost. On October 12th, 1998, my firstborn son, and my hero, died. 50 days before his 22nd birthday. I keep wondering the same thing that I did when I first saw him in the hospital. What would he have become? How could he have changed his piece of the world to make it better? Matt officially died in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He actually died on the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence. You, Mr. McKinney, with your friend Mr. Henderson, left him there, by himself. But he was not alone. There were his lifelong friends with him, friends that he had grown up with. You're probably wondering who these friends were. First he had the beautiful night sky and the same stars and moon we used to see through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him. And through it all, he was breathing in the scent of the pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind for the last time. He had one more friend with him. He had God. And I feel better, knowing he wasn't alone. Matt's beating, hospitalization, and funeral focused worldwide attention on hate. Good is coming out of evil. People have said, 'Enough is enough.' I miss my son, but I am proud to be able to say that he was my son. Judy has been quoted as being against the death penalty. It has been stated that Matt was against the death penalty. Both of these statements are false. I, too, believe in the death penalty. I would like nothing better than to see you die, Mr. McKinney. However, this is the time to begin the healing process, to show mercy to someone who refused to show any mercy. Mr. McKinney, I am going to grant you life, as hard as it is to do so, because of Matthew. Every time you celebrate Christmas, a birthday, the 4th of July, remember that Matt isn't. Every time that you wake up in your prison cell, remember you had the opportunity and the ability to stop your actions that night. You robbed me of something very precious and I will never forgive you for that. Mr. McKinney, I give you life in the memory of someone who no longer lives. May you have a long life. And may you thank Matthew every day for it.
• Mark Kelly gave one of these to Jared Lee Loughner at his sentencing.
• Nurse Emily Lyons delivered one of these to Eric Rudolph, the serial bomber who gravely injured her in one of his attacks:
  When it was your turn to face death you weren't so brave again... You want to see a monster, all you have to do is look in the mirror. It really doesn't matter what you say because I will go back to my home and you will go back to jail. The clinics in town will still be open and abortion will still be legal.
• Michelle Knight gave one to her former captor Ariel Castro after describing the pain of the separation of her son and her suffering in his hands:
  Ariel Castro, I remember all the times that you came home talking about what everybody else did wrong and act like you wasn't doing the same thing. You said, at least I didn't kill you. For you took 11 years of my life away, and I have got it back. I spent 11 years in hell, and now your hell is just beginning. I will overcome all this that happened, but you will face hell for eternity. From this moment on, I will not let you define me or affect who I am. I will live on. You will die a little every day. As you think about the 11 years and atrocities you inflicted on us, what does God think of you hypocritically going to church every Sunday, coming home to torture us. The death penalty would be so much easier. You don't deserve that. You deserve to spend life in prison. I can forgive you, but I will never forget. With the guidance of God, I will prevail and help others that suffered at the hands of others. Writing this statement gave me the strength to be a stronger woman, and know that there's good, there is more good than evil. I know that there is a lot of people going through hard times, but we need to reach out a hand and hold them and let them know that they're being heard. After 11 years, I am finally being heard, and it's liberating. Thank you, all. I love you. God bless you.
• Sharon Tate’s mother, Doris, became a strong advocate for the rights of crime victims and their families after the horrific murder of her daughter and six other individuals from the Manson Family. She fought tooth and nail to bar them away from winning parole, in turn worked to inspire congressmen into passing stricter criminal laws and the rights of crime victims in their say in sentencing. In short, she IS the reason victim impact statements got created in the first place, so it’s only fitting she should have a mention here. She confronted Tex Watson during his parole hearing in 1991 and gave him a combined Reason You Suck Speech and multiple Armor Piercing Questions over his role in the murders.
  I might say I feel sorry for this man, that he chose this way of life, and once choosing, there’s no going back. You cannot, and society cannot trust you living next door to him. What mercy, sir, did you show my daughter when she was begging for her life? What mercy did you show my daughter when she said “give me two weeks to have my baby and then you can kill me”, what mercy did you show her? In 21 years, I would like to have asked this prisoner why? He did not know my daughter, he had never seen her; not that I know of, she had only been home for 2 weeks. How can an individual, without knowing, without any abrasive feelings, go in and slice up this woman, 8 in a half months pregnant? What about her family? What about the family she was going to have, sir? Is that not a family? I saw how your feathers ruffled when you was talkin' about your family. What about my family? When will she come up for parole? When will I come up for parole? Can you tell me that? Will these seven victims and possibly more walk out of their graves if you get paroled? Yet I feel sorry for anyone who has chosen this way of life. But if you can tell me one person who wants to live next door to you, with your children, or with their children, I’ll eat my hat. You cannot be trusted.

Television Production

• In 1961, Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gave a brutal one to the National Association of Broadcasters. The "Vast Wasteland" speech described in great detail what was wrong with television of the day:
  When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
  But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
  You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.
• Doctor Who was subject to heavy Executive Meddling in the 1980s by BBC Director of Programming Michael Grade, who personally hated sci-fi and wanted to re-direct its budget to drama and comedy. This came to a head at the end of Colin Baker's final season when showrunner John Nathan-Turner rejected a cliffhanger ending for "Trial of a Time Lord" from head writer Eric Saward because he thought it would give Grade the window he sought to cancel. JNT and Saward had been butting heads for a while, and Saward would tender his resignation shortly after sending this memo that told exactly what he thought of Grade, JNT and the BBC...
  "If you think M. Grade will take it off because of what I’m proposing, I think you’re mistaken. M. Grade will take it off, if he so chooses, however it ends. You could have 'See You Next Season' flashing in neon throughout the last episode and he would still cancel it. As you well know, it seems to be down to audience figures and his personal whim. If you don’t like my ending — fine. If you want to suggest an alternative, I will happily incorporate it, but not your current suggestion."
• Talk show host Jeremy Kyle always condemns his guests for their faults when they appear on his show and he condemned his audience for laughing at one of his guests experience with domestic violence.
  Jeremy Kyle: If this was the other way round and a woman was sat here and a bloke had locked her in her flat and she had to jump out and injure herself, you lot would not be laughing, you would be saying that he's a complete nightmare and he should be locked up and that's disgraceful but somehow if it happens to a bloke that's funny, that's not funny is it?.

Other

• This article is a Tranquil Fury deconstruction of an author's controversial book title of "I Wish My Kids Had Cancer: A Family Surviving the Autism Epidemic". After conceding that raising autistic children could be difficult, the writer of the article states how hard it is to have a child with cancer, especially a brain cancer incurable and lethal, and that even surviving is not easy due to the extreme treatments needed for the child and the life problems for the parents.
• This is the experience of some people who go through Basic Training (Boot Camp for Marines) in the armed forces of the United States, although "The Reason You Suck" Speech is only half the deal — it's the prelude to Dare to Be Badass. For recruits, the effect is as such: the drill sergeant has dwelt upon their inadequacies and failures at length. Can they prove him wrong?
  • Once the Drill Sergeant/Instructor gives this speech and actively implements mental and physical activities designed to reinforce it, his task is then to build the recruits up with mental and physical activities and training so that they *will* prove him wrong. The Drill Sergeant Nasties in both real life and fiction tend to forget this part, though, and there is considerable debate as to whether these sorts of "breakings" truly make for the most effective soldiers.
  • One punishment in Basic Training/Boot Camp/OCS is to give a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to yourself.
• Bill Hicks did this a bunch. Most notably, at a show in Chicago when he verbally tore a heckler to pieces. Later during the show, he had a spectacular meltdown because of a bunch of other hecklers, which culminated in him yelling: "HITLER HAD THE RIGHT IDEA, HE WAS JUST AN UNDERACHIEVER!" This in the middle of a blistering seven-minute rant on how the mere existence of the people he was chewing out was a valid argument in favor of exterminating the human race. There's been few people alive who have made such a hardcore "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a person who was standing in front of them.
• Bill Burr had an absolutely epic speech to Philadelphia^note The written transcript of which is here. after they spent the day booing every act before him back in 2006. The speech is a 12-minute rant deconstructing everything about the city, from its sports teams, perceived racism, the fact that Rocky is their hero over actual people (most notably long-time boxing champion Joe Frazier) and anything else even remotely connected to the city (including cheesesteaks, Subway, the Ben Franklin bridge, and the Liberty Bell), all amid Cluster F-Bomb and any other foul word you can think of. Even better is when he repeatedly tells them how much longer his act is, promising that the rest of it is just going to be more of the same. Eventually, some of the crowd starts cheering.
  Bill Burr: Oh, fuck all you people. Ya know what. you fucking losers, I hope you all fucking die, and I hope those fucking Eagles never win the Super Bowl. Go fuck yourselves.
• In 2004, at the height of his career, Dave Chappelle was doing a stand-up show in Sacramento when some of the audience kept interrupting him shouting the catchphrase "I’m Rick James, Bitch" from his self-titled show. After leaving the stage, he said:
  Dave Chappelle: You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you're not smart enough to get what I'm doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.
• Actor and activist George Takei did this in a video he filmed back in 2010 to Clint McCance, a now-resigned Arkansas school board member who posted very homophobic stuff on Facebook about wanting gay children to kill themselves:
  George Takei: Mr. McCance, you are a douchebag. That's right, a douchebag. No person, let alone an elected school official - whatever their personal or religious beliefs - should ever wish death upon another human being. You apologized for your 'poor choice in words', but you are always going to be a total douchebag.
  • Takei then followed up with another speech in which he further explains that he only hopes for McCance to renounce this toxic mentality, and reaffirms that nobody should wish violence upon another human being for any reason:
    Takei: I can only suspect that you have some, shall I say... issues to work out, so I've gone and bought this countdown clock (He holds up a countdown timer). I predict that sometime soon, you will find yourself in the headlines again - this time, caught with a rentboy from some South American country (He then winks), and when that happens, I sincerely hope you do not kill yourself, Mr. McCance, because no one should ever wish that upon someone else.
• This is the point of Attack Therapy. It's extremely controversial for precisely this reason, and it's generally not a recommended form of treatment.
• We have a subverted one that turned out positive from a Nietzsche Wannabe Massachusetts English teacher.
  "The sweetest joys of life, then, come only with the recognition that you're not special. Because everyone is."
• Lindsay Lohan's siblings Ali, Mike, and Dakota all tore into their father Michael after he tried to force Lindsay into rehab, without any proof of current drug use. All three called him a worthless human being and told him to stay out of their lives.
• Upon seeing a few too many comments by Joan Rivers about how Adele is really fat, Australian comedian, host of The Last Leg and all-round nice guy Adam Hills had this to say. And it was fantastic.
  Adam: How dare you make fun of one of the best female role models on the planet for the way she looks. Adele is one of the very few women in pop music that I want my daughter to look up to – and you’re making jokes about the way she looks, when you’re so insecure about your own face, you’ve spent more money on it than the producers of Life of Pi spent on that tiger!
• Fred Thompson gave a suavely understated one to Michael Moore in a YouTube video. Bonus points for delivering it while lounging in his US Senate office and chomping on a Cuban cigar.
• This high school student gives one to his incompetent teacher.
• A four-year-old boy manages to save his mother and his sister in the Westgate mall shootings in Nairobi by telling a terrorist "you're a bad man."
• While it is over the top a sorority girl emailed her sorority sisters stating the faults she finds with them. It even comes with a parody video
• The children of Marianne Theresa-Johnson Reddick gave this as obituary for her. At first, one might think something like this was ungraceful, but as one reads and hears the children's story... who could blame them since they actually suffered at her hands of abuse? They even sang, "Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead" as part of it.
• At Skepticon 4 Greta Christina gave a speech on Why Atheists Are Angry, first she noted that not all atheists are angry. Then she launched into a long list of reasons why she is.
  Greta Christina: I'm angry that in Salt Lake City, 40% of homeless teenagers are gay. Most of them kids that have been kicked out of their house by their Mormon parents. (Beat) Yeah, that's some great family values you got there!
• Azaelia Banks spawned two back-to-back from Iggy Azalea and Action Bronson, both on Twitter. Iggy called Banks a bigot who tries to make everything about race and Bronson called her a wannabe who goes after anyone more successful than her.
  • And they both got speeches right back, where they were accused of being ignorant about white privilege and completely missing the point she was making about it.
• French Montana mocked Tichina Arnold, star of Martin and Everybody Hates Chris. She dresses him down, a bit.
• Quentin Tarantino is another pro at dishing these out. When called into a rather one-sided interview on this Channel 4 News Station, he gives a self-proclaimed movie reviewer several answers that are essentially mini-"The Reason You Suck" Speeches. Highlights include:
  Tarantino: Hey! I saw movies when I was a kid. All the movies I'm basing my movies on I saw as a kid. And yes, kids go to a movie theater and they can tell the difference [between movie violence and real violence]. Maybe you couldn't when you were a kid, but I could!
  Tarantino: I'm having a great time, making a terrific movie that people have fun seeing! Maybe not you, but you know what Jan? I don't think I made it for you.
  • This interview is another great example of what he can do if you get on his bad side.
    Tarantino: [My viewers] know where I'm coming from... [On the topic of film violence vs. real-life violence] And I have explained it. and I've even explained what you're talking about. I'm just not giving it to you.
    Interviewer: Why?
    Tarantino: Because I don't want to, because I've done it already. I have explained this many times in the last twenty years; I just refuse to repeat myself over and over again because you want me to.
• Jimmy Kimmel had this to say to a hunter who illegally killed the beloved lion Cecil.
  • Goodwell Nzou published an article that was essentially a remorseless, Victim-Blaming version of this towards everyone who mourned Cecil, complete with a swipe at the aforementioned Jimmy Kimmel. In his article In Zimbabwe We Don't Cry For Lions, he:
    • Started out by saying the village boy within him rejoiced that a lion had been killed.
    • Explained that in his home village (He is indeed from Zimbabwe) no lion has ever been beloved or given affectionate nicknames; they are viewed with terror.
    • Told of a terrifying few months when a lion stalked his village, killed domestic animals, and injured a family member.
    • Suggested that Jimmy Kimmel had confused Cecil with Simba from The Lion King (1994).
    • Finished off by saying: "And please, don't offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren [. . .]"
  • Just expect him to deliver this to none other than Donald Trump and/or his supporters in every episode possible.
• Minister Johnathan Gentry went on an epic rant against the rioters who burned down Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of Michael Brown's murder and by extension attacked African Americans who create crime in their own neighborhood.
• In the midst of a sex scandal in the Australian Army, Lt. General David Morrison, in a textbook example of Tranquil Fury released a video stating his opinion regarding the personnel who engaged in, encouraged, or ignored the problem of belittling women in the military.
  On all operations, female soldiers and officers have proven themselves worthy of the best traditions of the Australian Army. They are vital to us, maintaining our capability now, and in to the future. If that does not suit you... Then. Get. Out. You may find another employer where your attitude and behaviour is acceptable, but I doubt it.
• Henry Rollins dishes these out a lot. If you ever get the chance to talk to him, whatever you do, don't approach the conversation the way this poor kid did.
• Not Always Right has a lot of examples of idiot customers getting this with both barrels.
• Fox News commentator Andy Levy gave one of these to Chris Brown and his fans regarding his abuse of Rihanna, in the form of a fake apology:
  Andy Levy: I want to take a minute to talk about something that happened Tuesday night. Around 8 o’clock here on the east coast R&B singer Chris Brown tweeted, “No more planking for me unless it’s on a sexy lady. Lol.” So I saw this tweet and I retweeted it adding, “You spelled “punching” wrong.” Obviously in reference to that fact that Brown was arrested in 2009 for assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna.
  But now in the light of day, I’d like to apologize to Chris Brown and to his fans who are known as ‘Team Breezy.’ To Mr. Brown, I apologize for referencing the fact that you beat the crap out of Rihanna. It was disrespectful of me to draw attention to the fact that you put your girlfriend in the hospital. And further, it was not my place to make people remember that you beat a woman with your fists, leaving her with multiple facial contusions, a bloody nose, and a split lip. I know that now.
  I also appreciate the fact that you tweeted me, letting me know that children conduct themselves better than I do. You are correct, and I could only hope to one day mature to the point where I can conduct myself in a more adult manner. Possibly by throwing a chair out of a window and storming out of a building with my shirt off. I ask only for your patience.
  To Team Breezy I would also like to say that I’m sorry, and thank you for your thousands of tweets which taught me a lot about the creative possibilities of spelling, grammar, and syntax. Possibilities I never even imagined before last night. In particular I’d like to thank the female members of Team Breezy, who have taught me that as long as you can sing, you can beat the living hell out of a woman and other women will still love you.
  And lastly, I apologize to everyone for using Twitter to subtly address the fact that I think it’s disgusting that a guy who put his girlfriend in the hospital can, a mere two years later, be warmly welcomed back into society and appear on shows such as Saturday Night Live, as if everything he did magically never happened. It won’t happen again.
• After his daughter wrote a pretty poorly-written one of these to him, Tommy Jordan decided to set the record straight for her.
• Dr. Richard Quinn, a Business professor at the University of Central Florida, makes this into a lecture to his class when a cheating scandal erupts.
• After being asked about "Fake News" articles about him, Denzel Washington had this to say about the media.
• The article "Farewell, My Unlovely" by Caskie Stinnett is essentially this trope to the city of New York; written in 1976 at the height of New York's status as The Big Rotten Apple, it argues that the worst elements of New York City at the time aren't the crime, or the dirt, or the sleaze (since those can be found in any city, to even worse degrees at times), but the hard-hearted, mean, cold, cruel, arrogant and selfish attitudes of the people who live there.
• As seen in the documentary How To Survive The Plague, writer Larry Kramer famously blew up at AIDS awareness activists who fought among themselves and threatened their already fragile reputation.
  "PLAGUE! We are in the middle of a fucking plague!! And you behave like this!! PLAGUE!! Forty! Million! Infected! People! Is a fucking plague! We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever, ever, ever been in! All those pills we're shovin' down our throats? Forget it! ACT UP has been taken over by a lunatic fringe, we can't get together, nobody agrees with anything, all we can do is field a couple hundred people at a demonstration... that's not gonna make anybody pay attention! Not until we get millions out there! We can't do that! All we do is pick at each other and yell at each other! And I say to you in year ten the same thing I said to you in 1981 when there were 41 cases: until we get our acts together, all of us, we are as good as dead."
• YouTuber Lovelyti2002 does this to the Jem and the Holograms movie for wrecking her childhood memories.
• In response to the unprecedented audience backlash against Darren Aronofsky's mother! (2017), Martin Scorsese delivered a scathing rant calling out review aggregation sites such as Rotten Tomatoes for their hand in perpetuating the popular mindset that sees film as a purely commercial venture rather than an artistic medium.
  "Rotten Tomatoes [has] nothing to do with real film criticism. They rate a picture the way you'd rate a horse at the racetrack, a restaurant in a Zagat's guide, or a household appliance in Consumer Reports. They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film. The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer. ... These firms and aggregators have set a tone that is hostile to serious filmmakers-even the actual name Rotten Tomatoes is insulting. And as film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene, it seems like there are more and more voices out there engaged in pure judgmentalism, people who seem to take pleasure in seeing films and filmmakers rejected, dismissed and in some cases ripped to shreds. Not unlike the increasingly desperate and bloodthirsty crowd near the end of Darren Aronofsky's mother!"
• BRIAN BLESSED delivered one to Peter O'Toole when he got fed up with his hedonistic behaviour... and did so while dragging him all over O'Toole's house by his shirt:
  Honestly, Peter, I don’t want to work with someone who behaves like you do. I am ashamed of you as an artist. Actors look after their bodies, they study and study to try and better themselves. Yet you have a God-given talent and all you do is piss on it. You’re either off your face, angry or violent. You bully and manipulate people. You’re marvelous for a time, and then you’re ugly once again. You’re a good-for-nothing shit, O’Toole. That’s what I’ve come to tell you!
• After Kenny G released a track in which he overdubbed himself playing over Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World", the normally mild-mannered and easygoing jazz great Pat Metheny was asked his opinion of Mr. G. Metheny delivered this epic diss. To sum up: If Kenny G had the gall to overdub himself on a song from the Trope Codifier for much of the genre (even if it wasn't one of Armstrong's greatest tracks), then he deserves to be measured by the same standards applied to jazz musicians—on which standards Mr. G, in Metheny's opinion, comes out VERY poorly.
• After one 419 scammer finally figured out that the "reverend" he was corresponding with was a scambaiter, he received this email:
  Hi "Mr. Kuku" or is it Achiu (that's your real name, right?),
  
  I don't usually do this, but as long as you've figured this out, I will make an exception in your case.
  First off, congrats for finally putting it all together. I was starting to think that you were retarded or something. Is it too late to ask for a postcard from Khartoum? Haha, just kidding. Save your money for the trip back. How is Khartoum by the way? I've never been there and I am really curious.
  Second, you asked me why I did all this. I'll tell you why. It's mostly because I hate people that try to scam honest, hard-working people out of their life savings. I hate, even more, people that are willing to steal from priests and from homeless refugees. That's right, fool; I knew you were a scammer from your very first letter you sent last year. Can you believe it? That was 8 months ago. Wow. How time flies by.
  I've got to say this though, you were quite the challenge. I get fools like you to travel all the time but it usually takes less than a month. There were times that I almost gave up on you.
  How do you suppose Oney is doing? He is one of the monkies that you sent to Farchana, isn't he? Do you think that he is still alive or perhaps he is getting regularly ass-fucked by the barbarian horde in some prison in Darfur? It's a shame that you did not go with him and the other guy. I could have gotten three scammers at one time.
  By the way, did you know that you are famous now? That's right Achiu, famous. For the last month or so, I have been sharing every email, every detail with thousands of other people like me that also enjoy messing with stupid little boys like you. We have all gotten a big kick watching this.
  You even caused a bit of a stir too. A moral debate continued for days. Some thought that I was a little harsh on you. Personally, I think that you were lucky that it was only me on the other end of the computer or telephone. There are others out there far more talented at this than I am that could have gotten you to Antarctica by now, which, if I were you, is exactly where I would be headed. I cannot imagine that your family back in Lagos is too happy with you at the moment. Maybe when the boys eventually crawl out from whatever rock they are under, your family will let you go back to Lagos.
  Well, cocktard, I've said just about all that I wanted to. When you get to Antarctica, be sure to stay bundled up. It gets pretty damn cold there you know. And if you find yourself a bit light on cash, give me call. I'll see if I can Western Union some money to you.
  
  Blessings
  Rev. Kuhm Belcher (also not my real name)
• PETA got many of these for their tweet gleefully condemning Steve Irwin and saying he deserved his death on what would have been his birthday, but special mention goes to Drake Bell's absolutely furious reply to it:
  So your response here is this Human deserved what he got and is better off dead?! You are a disgusting organization and should be absolutely ashamed!! He was a FATHER and a HUSBAND and did WAY more for wildlife conservation than the IDIOT INTERN hired to write this tweet!
• Actress Audra McDonald called out an audience member for taking a picture of her during a nude scene in a stage production of Frankie and Johnny.
• Chris Hughes blasted the 2019 cast of Love Island for not being genuine when it came to their relationships.
• Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz delivered one to the Southern Poverty Law Center after they labelled him an "anti-Muslim extremist", pointing out how what they did would only help Jihadis and genuine Islamophobes.
• High school graduate Nataly Buhr uses her valedictorian speech to call out her teachers and staff for being negligent and utterly incompetent at their job.
  To my counselor, thanks for teaching me to fend for myself. You were always unavailable to my parents and I despite appointments. Only in these past few weeks, with the award ceremonies and graduation coming up, did you begin making your appearance. And might I note, you expressed to me your joy in knowing that one of your students was valedictorian when you had absolutely no role in my achievements. To the staff in the main office, thank you for teaching me how to be resourceful. Your negligence to inform me of several scholarships, until the day before they were due, potentially caused me to miss out on thousands of dollars. When applying for a work permit, you repeatedly turned me away despite confirming with my employer and parents that all my paperwork was filled correctly. I’ve had to escalate issues with staff to an assistant principal various times to reach any sort of solution. To the teacher who was regularly intoxicated during class this year, thank you for using yourself as an example to teach students about the dangers of alcoholism. Being escorted by police out of school left a lasting impression. I hope that future students and staff learn from these examples.
  Thank you class of 2019...
• After YouTuber Logan Paul got himself into big trouble after filming a dead body in the Suicide Forest in Japan, people blew up on him. It either ranged from constructive to downright scathing criticism by celebrities and content creators in YouTube. Examples include:
  Aaron Paul (Twitter): How dare you! You disgust me! I can't believe that so many people look up to you. So sad. Hopefully this latest video woke them up. You are pure trash. Plain and simple. Suicide is not a joke. Go rot in hell.
  Sophie Turner (Also from Twitter): You're an idiot. You're not helping. You're mocking. I can't believe how self-praising your "apology" is. You don't deserve the success (views) you have. I pray to God you never have to experience anything like that man did.
  The Anime Man: It's not hard, Logan, to fucking look up BASIC cultural etiquette before going into another country. It's not hard to go to Aokigahara, read up a little bit on the history of the forest, perhaps before it was called the 'Suicide Forest'. It's not fucking hard to shut off your cameras, even for FIVE minutes, Logan! It's not hard to turn off your camera, just for a little bit!... And I'm not gonna be the first one to say this and the last one to say this, but I think I speak on behalf of everybody who lives in Japan, has a Japanese family, everybody who loves Japan, and anybody who has only the most respect for the Japanese people and the culture and the places and the way of life - I think I speak on behalf of every single person in saying Logan, get the FUCK out of my country.
• YouTube's co-founder Jawed Karim, much like other YouTubers, was furious about the removal of the dislike count from the website. He now includes one of these speeches in the description of his video, "Me at the zoo".
  Watching Matt Koval's announcement about the removal of dislikes, I thought something was off. The spoken words did not match the eyes. The video reminded me of an interview Admiral Jeremiah Denton gave in 1966. I have never seen a less enthusiastic, more reluctant announcement of something that is supposed to be great.
  
  Calling the removal of dislikes a good thing for creators cannot be done without conflict by someone holding the title of "YouTube's Creator Liaison". We know this because there exists not a single YouTube Creator who thinks removing dislikes is a good idea — for YouTube or for Creators.
  
  Why would YouTube make this universally disliked change? There is a reason, but it's not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed. Instead, there will be references to various studies. Studies that apparently contradict the common sense of every YouTuber.
  
  The ability to easily and quickly identify bad content is an essential feature of a user-generated content platform. Why? Because not all user-generated content is good. It can't be. In fact, most of it is not good. And that's OK. The idea was never that all content is good. The idea WAS, however, that among the flood of content, there are great creations waiting to be exposed. And for that to happen, the stuff that's not great has to fall by the side as quickly as possible.
  
  The process works, and there's a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds. The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines. Does YouTube want to become a place where everything is mediocre? Because nothing can be great if nothing is bad.
  
  In business, there's only one thing more important than "Make it better". And that's "Don't fuck it up".
  
• Several of teenage Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg's speeches count as these, but most notably this one given to the United Nations in September 2019:
  My message is that we'll be watching you.
  This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!
  You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet, I'm one of the lucky ones. People are dying. People are suffering. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!
  For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are nowhere in sight.
  You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that, I refuse to believe.
  The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.
  Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.
  So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.
  To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.
  How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.
  There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.
  You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.
  We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.
  Thank you.
  • She also gave one to sex trafficker Andrew Tate after he bragged about owning 33 cars. "Yes please enlighten me. Email at [e-mail]." Even better, when Tate tried to respond to her, he ended up accidentally giving away his location to the authorities.
• Professor Gad Saad gave a brutal one to Seth Rogen during their internet feud, calling him out for his hypocrisy and virtue-signalling.
  Thanks for watching. Many young people are socialists when they are driven by immature impulses of utopia. They then grow up. You are a grown man with tons of money. Your current stances are rooted in vacuous empty signalling rooted in a desire to belong in Hollywood. It takes zero courage to hold your stances within the entertainment ecosystem. You espouse bullshit rhetoric that wins you points at the cool kids' parties but you are otherwise as ignorant as my out-of-order toaster. I'd be happy to chat with you on my show as you have a very large platform and as such you have the opportunity to actually make a difference. Stop succumbing to the herd mindset. Learn how to think critically. Learn the meaning and implications of socialism vs. capitalism. You are among the MOST privileged people in the history of humanity. And yet you walk around as though you are a Che Guevara revolutionary. You are the product of capitalism. If you are such a socialist, send me some of your money. I'm trying to build an interdisciplinary research institute. Live out your convictions. If you are a socialist, you have no business being the beneficiary of the most capitalist industry in the most capitalist country in the history of humanity. Don't be a hypocritical fraud. Cheers amigo.
• The Yazidi genocide survivor Ashwaq Hai Hamid had a chance to confront Abu Humam, the ISIS member who enslaved and raped her before being captured alive and put in chains.
  You destroyed my life. You robbed me of all my dreams. I was once held by ISIS, by you, but now you will feel the meaning of torment, torture, and loneliness.
• An NIH reviewer wrote one to her mother on Reddit entitled, "Mom, I am officially employed by the NIH. And you still made fun of me." In it, she details how her mom pushed her to get a doctorate, whilst all the while bemoaning the writer's learning disability, calling the writer the R-word. Here's an excerpt:
  And now I am a reviewer for the NIH, deciding which fancy university or hospital will be receiving millions of dollars of research funding for the next few years. Your response?

  You laughed. You laughed and pointed out how you don't understand how I 'got that gig', and reminded me how I was terrible in math and science due to my learning disability.

  And you know what? That's why they wanted me. That's why the NIH—whom you could never work with—wanted me. One of the top branches of funding from our government wanted me, because my experience made me more knowledgeable about the type of funding that would better our country and our world.

• A youth hockey official wrote the following on Reddit directed at a coach at the 8U match he officiated who abused the 12-year-old assistant ref:
  To the coach that yelled at my 12-year-old officiating partner last weekend... was it worth it?

  Was it worth it to lose your mind over a minor penalty in an 8U game? Was it worth it to scream and make a fool of yourself over 2 minutes?

  My officiating partner came into the rink that day with a smile. Happy to be there, and ready for his first full ice games. The first game went fine, and he had gained the confidence to make a penalty call in your game. Then you decided to do what you did. Scream at him, call him a "travesty to the game" over a minor penalty. His smile went away. His confidence seemed shattered.

  I tossed you, but the damage had been done. I had to keep encouraging him so he could keep his mind off of what you did and finish the game. After the game, the tournament director and myself helped him through what you did to him. Luckily, your disgusting behavior didn't completely shatter him, because after the last game his smile came back.

  So I'll ask again. Was it worth it to yell at a 12-year-old who's learning to officiate the game, just like your 8-year-olds are learning to play? To almost possibly lose yet another official who's just starting their career?

  Remember, your actions have consequences.

• This footage of a teenage boy standing up for himself after a tyrannical school bus driver antagonizes him for hugging his friend.

• Serial killer Gerard John Schaefer, posing as a college student, sent a letter to author Patrick Kendrick, asking for tips on how someone could interview him, describing himself as a deadly killer "worse than Ted Bundy". Kendrick, deeply unimpressed, described Schaefer as hardly intimidating, and as:
  "a middle-aged, pale and doughy wimp, who preyed on victims that were physically and psychologically weaker than him."

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