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Walt Palmer, a dentist from Minnesota, and his bow and arrow are about to have an interesting week

Why couldn't Walt be happy humping dead deer like his next-door neighbors in Wisconsin?
 
That outrage is conditional.

Easy to hate on this guy, but my favorite author. I still love that guy. He was awesome.

Its a different forking time.

At one time, I could say the word "colored" person, and nobody would bat an eye.
My parents took the family on trips where I would sit in the back well of the 1969 Ford Country Squire LTD station wagon for hours. No seatbelt, no nothing.

Hemingway's hunting was a long time ago, in a different era. Stop comparing it to today.
 
Its a different forking time.

At one time, I could say the word "colored" person, and nobody would bat an eye.
My parents took the family on trips where I would sit in the back well of the 1969 Ford Country Squire LTD station wagon for hours. No seatbelt, no nothing.

Hemingway's hunting was a long time ago, in a different era. Stop comparing it to today.

Sure, it's a different time, but we've gon back in time and retroactively declared some of our Founding Fathers to be terrible people based on today's standards.

80-year-olds who aren't in favor of gay marriage are terrible people.

Can we at least declare Hemingway retroactively to be a terrible person?

And, regardless, the point remains that outrage is selective.

Whether it's the Duggar kid vs. Lena Dunham, or Bill Cosby vs. Bill Clinton, people get outraged based on factors beyond the facts of the story.

If murdering a lion caused you to go on a social media meltdown, but Kermit Gosnell, or Planned Parenhood's harvesting and selling baby parts didn't, you might want to examine why that is.
 
Abortion is a terrible comparison, YF, particularly the Planned Parenthood story. People have a legitimate philosophical difference regarding when life begins.

That said: It's not just that Hemingway wrote in a different time that we accept his big game hunting and such. That's a cop-out. His big-game hunting and such is one of the primary reasons that we elevate him. Bull-fighting and big-game hunting aren't peripheral to his work. It's all front and center. It's the heart of it. It's used as an expression of manhood.

There's an elemental draw to what the Good Doctor did here. We can condemn him for doing it, but to pretend that it's completely unrelatable borders on intellectual dishonesty.

If, say, William Faulkner wrote short stories that were basically odes to the primal beauty in enforcing Jim Crow laws, he would be expelled from the canon. We haven't done that to Hemingway. Because, to steal from Chris Rock a little: I'd never shoot a lion. But I understand.
 
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His big-game hunting and such is one of the primary reasons that we elevate him. Bull-fighting and big-game hunting aren't peripheral to his work. It's all front and center. It's the heart of it. It's used as an expression of manhood.

100 percent.

Kimmel went off on the dentist last night, questioning if he had to shoot lions because he couldn't get an erection.

But, part of why Hemingway is such a hero -- is such a masculine figure -- is because he led this adventurous life of travel, of drinking, of bull fighting, and of big game hunting, and many of his stories revolve around these tales.
 

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