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Found out Chuck Norris passed on earlier while I was at work. Definitely respected this guy and Godspeed to you on your new destination.
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Sorry, can’t agree.
Norris was a racist, made attacks on LGBT rights, single sex marriage and fulminated against the Boy Scouts of America allowing gay members.
He was a birther whose comments about a 2nd Obama presidency included the warnings that the country “could be lost forever” and that another Obama win would lead to “1,000 years of darkness.”
Have to agree to disagree, Colin. 
I quite enjoyed reading this article
On top he was a fundamentalist, who negated scientific facts and he was a conspiracy theories supporter.
You make a valid point, but a more gentle reading is that he grew up in a country where his family and social background usually does not predict good educational outcomes, and like other people in similar situations, ideas like this found him.
It is still possible to respect what he has achieved as martial artist.
I do respect what he achieved on martial arts, that’s by far more than I ever achieved on ANY field. Anyway I can’t respect his view on the world. Saying that the ideas FOUND HIM is too simple in my opinion. Yes he had probably not the best background and yes this IS somehow/partly a valid excuse, but there are many people, which have an even worse background and are still able to think on their own.
That said, I think, we talked already too much about him. He is dead, and he shall rest in peace. He had for sure a very strange sight on some things. That doesn’t mean he had a strange view on every thing and not that he was a bad person.
I don’t know his particular upbringing, but is that a statement about the US in general or Norris in particular? It’s true we’re no more perfect than anyone else, but it sounds a tad sweeping to me. Then again I come from “a social background usually does not predict good educational outcomes” as well, I guess.
I think human learning is largely supported by categorization. Thing is, categorization really sucks us into all sorts of supposition that don’t apply to the individual case.
In the US, Chuck Norris became a sort of demi-god, one that couldn’t be destroyed. Mostly, centering around jokes and memes that portrayed such, e.g., “bullets don’t bounce off Chuck Norris, they’re too afraid to approach” and such. Ten minutes watching him in most any of his movies would give one an appreciation, or maybe just realization, for such.
I wouldn’t want to suppose too much about his private life, same as I would for any other individual. He probably ascribed to at least some of what would popularly be called “MAGA”, based on what’s reported in the media, but I wouldn’t want to use that to tease any sort of inference about each and every thing he considered. Really, individuals’ lives are too complicated to bucket into coarse categorizations…
There are people who achieve great things. That may be writing a book I like, walking on the moon, or embodying martial arts like few others. These achievements are worthy of celebration, even if the people behind them may have less wholesome traits.
I tip my hat to Chuck Norris. May he rest in peace, and may he be remembered for his achievements, not his missteps.
I prefer to remember people the way they were with all the good and evil traits they had. Everybody has both sides, this make us human in the end. The question is which side weighs heavier when we remember a person.
It may just be me and my cynical outlook on the world as of late but in general at least here in the west where I have lived my entire life we seem to reward in a massively disproportionate way with our money and our time the importance and relevance of sports figures, actors and many others that seem to find there way into popular culture. They are often propped up and marketed into a money generating enterprise and this somehow makes them great. Often looking under the covers reveals a less than “great” person.
For me the real heros operate on children and make them whole, care givers that heal and take care of us and school teachers that educate and shape our children, dedicated, trained community law enforcement that give us a safe place to live and play and you could go on.
You could take away most of these so called icons and the world would not be markedly different. Heck, in the blink of an eye most are replaced or come and go.
I think recently one coach in college basketball in the US was being paid 12 million dollars a year or something… good on him for getting to that point and I’m sure it took hard work but these days I just struggle with what has “value” and what gets air time and exposure when so many truly valuable, essential and spectacular people seem to be taken for granted and overlooked…
I never really though much about Chuck, but he found great success with his genuinely impressive martial arts skills, and while some of his business ventures like his karate studios didn’t do so well he was able to keep himself relevant to some people with his peculiar opinions. All in all, not bad for a guy who was otherwise as dull as dishwater.
So RIP Chuck. Wherever you are, I hope you can meet up with Bruce Lee
Never meant to be a controversial thread. All I do have to say is no one’s perfect and no one will meet the expectations of all. Still, I believe Chuck was more good than bad. That’s my opinion and I’ll stick with that. No reason for me to argue further about this one.
When it comes to ethics, I tend towards the contractualism of John Rawls. Part of this are a couple of principles, one of which is that everyone should have maximal liberty, insofar as it does not impinge on the liberty of others.
Now, I have no idea what Norris actually did, but the politics he espoused definitely does impinge on the liberty of others. My neighbours are gay, I have lived and worked in areas with a high proportion of non-white people, a section of which are Muslim. I have female relatives who, for a number of reasons, have had to have abortions. All of these would be subject to condemnation and possible abuse by those who follow the same kind of politics that Norris embraced.
On the contrary, Lyle, I think your thread perfectly illustrates one of the most frustrating aspects of social life today: constantly having to deal with “know-it-alls.”
Your intention was simply to pay tribute to someone who has just passed away and who had an influence—perhaps on your cinematic culture—who may have brought you a certain kind of joy when you were a child, by nurturing your imagination and taking you on journeys through his films.
And for all that, it ultimately doesn’t matter if that person expressed opinions that may not have aligned with yours, or with those of others.
The simple fact that he was a figure from your childhood, and that he bring back fond memories, should be enough to allow you to pay tribute to him.
But these days, just doing that is enough to bring out the “know-it-alls”, who’ll tell you, “Yeah, but he was a jerk (meaning: he doesn’t agree with me on this or that political issue), so he doesn’t really deserve this tribute. He was a bad person.”
This world has become a painful place.
Do you really think there’s a right way and a wrong way to think, and that it’s necessarily up to you to decide which is right and which is wrong?
Is it really too much to ask to just let Lyle pay his tribute, without telling him he’s wrong to take any interest in his childhood hero just because that guy is anti-LGBTQ?
You have no idea how many of the artists you admire are probably total jerks. You just don’t know it yet because they haven’t said anything. They’re human beings just like everyone else, with opinions that may differ from yours. Does that make them people you should blacklist when you become aware of their opinion ? If you think so, you’re completely off base.
I’ve been doing software development since I was 8 or 9 years old, and I can say I have a pretty good grasp of binary, but seeing the world itself become that binary (everything is either “good” or “bad”) over the past few years saddens me deeply.
It seems like the game today is to put people into categories, so that each category can then wage war against the others (Nazis against far-leftists, men against women, vegetarians against meat-eaters, and so on, the list is infinite). It’s at the level of a elementary school playground—it’s pathetic.
We are witnessing the total disappearance of all nuance and subtlety.
Under the pretext of wanting to be considerate of everyone, some people really become intolerant of any idea that differs from their own way of thinking. They are the real nazis.
Let’s be clear: I have absolutely no sympathy for the political views expressed by Chuck Norris. But I understand that he may have left a lasting impression on a generation of children (my own, in this case, though I wasn’t part of it—I didn’t have a TV and never had the chance to see any of his movies).
Similarly, when I was a young adult, I really liked a French rock band that was somewhat trendy at the time, until the singer killed his girlfriend and served a prison sentence (he’s now blacklisted from all festivals).
Well, you know what? I still listen to that band’s music today. And that doesn’t mean I condone femicide. I’ve never known this singer outside of his musical work, and no matter what he did or said later in his life, it won’t change the fact that I enjoy the songs he created, which remind me of a certain vibe from my youth.
Now, I’m not a particularly religious person (I believe in some god or another). That being said. I can accept that many religions have much to offer us. For example, from the New Testament of the Christian bible:
John 8:7
And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
As a culture, we have gotten bad at holding simultaneous conflicting ideas. Chuck Norris was a beloved figure, and a racist. Both things are true at the same time. We are all diverse and complex.
It is sadly a sign of our times that reductio ad absurdum has been promoted as the only viable way to judge things. And yet, a conflict of ideas is usually just a sign of incomplete understanding; a need to learn more, not a prompt to reduce further.
Ah well, we’re mostly intellectuals here, I’m likely preaching to the choir.
Can you please cite some primary sources for this?
I tried to look up various claims made in this post about Chuck Norris, but ended up going in circles (sites referencing each other, or the same person, who has no sources). I found various secondary reflections about what Chuck Norris ostensibly did or said, but very little concrete stuff.
To me, having the freedom to air grievances is a blessing but also a curse. When all we have are grievances, nothing good comes out of that. Such is our culture.
For the record, I am on team Bruce Lee (perhaps due to my heritage and likely due to my aversion to the negative aspects of his rival) but did enjoy Chuck’s works: to the extent I encountered both. Not an avid movie, television or culture observer.
@lylejk Nice render!
