"Child abuse is a truly, truly appalling crime." Yes!
"It’s like a murder of the soul where you exterminate the potential of a happy future - or at least make that happy future an almost impossibly difficult place to get to." No! It can be that, but what is almost as appalling as the crime itself is the insistence on it guaranteeing a bleak future for the child. It means condemnation to eternal victim status, which is an undesirable state even in victim-centered societies as ours. Punish the perpetrators, and help the victims get out of victim status. Aim reached when the latter can laugh about Jimmy Carr's joke.
I'll agree that a bleak future is not guaranteed - but achieving 'normalcy' if you've been a victim of abuse is made massively harder, at least in the overwhelming majority of cases. I am not trying to 'condemn' anyone to a bleak future - just *recognizing* that overcoming the abuse can be very difficult indeed.
I was definitely not advocating for anything like permanent victim status at all. I think we can recognize that some people actually have been victims without letting that entirely define them. I'm not even close to being a "professional" in these matters - some personal experience of friends and past partners with issues - but it seems to me that the only way forward is to acknowledge that you were a victim, but not to let that define you.
Easy to say - not even close to being easy to achieve.
Definitely very difficult to achieve - and all the more appalling if people who did achieve it are then publicly vilified. Personal experience aside, consider the example of Milo Yiannopoulos. Whatever one may think of any of his views, he's a remarkable human being. And what they used to bring him down is when he basically talked Jimmy-Carr style about his own experience as a teenager.
That's the joke. The question is asked, "no" is given as the answer, and laughter ensues, because amongst the English with pretensions to the upper class, it is a "well known fact" that no Irishman has the intelligence to become a brain surgeon. Of course, the teller of this joke might have had some knowledge I was not privy to, being a grad of Westminster School, then Cambridge (BA, MA), then University of East Anglia for the PhD... turns out he wasn't a grad of Magdalen College, Oxford, after all, something I just found out looking at his CV. His bitter rival in the group, a British-Pakistani post-doc, with whom I was friends, was a grad of Eton, then Oxford (BA, MA, PhD) - the jealousy was palpable, going to a point where the former called the latter a "goddamned Paki (n-word)"... and the latter laughed at him - and explained to me after precisely why the former had said what he had - and the worse of the insults was "Paki" and not the n-word. Although he had skin as dark as an African, although not so much as one of my colleagues from Ethiopia, he was not of African descent, his features were quite markedly Caucasian - and he spoke English with the Oxbridge accent. To top it off, his family in the UK was quite wealthy, and they had horses they ran at Ascot, amongst other things. It was interesting watching all of that play out on occasion...
Jimmy Carr's joke about gypsies wasn't funny at all. As for the sheep jokes, as a NZr I've heard (that's a cow joke) a few and my normal reaction is to raise my eyebrows and say not again. Are they offensive? No.
Frinstance, Holocaust denial covers a lot of ground: it includes those who deny anything happened and those who say maybe 4 million, not 6 million Jews perished. It includes Prof Norman Davies who wanted to include the millions of other European civilians who were murdered by the Nazis and was denied tenure at Stanford U for his efforts. No one would say they are morally equivalent, but there they are--lumped together and shouted down.
Brexit and Trump's election have given our so-called elites open season on punching down against lesser beings who actually believed they had a say in how their nations were governed. Wokeness helpfully identifies acceptable targets for ridicule. Take the priest joke, for example. The Catholic Church has given comedians 2000 years of material to sift through--mocking the Catholic Church is hilarious and A-OK. But if you follow the joke to the truth it reveals--homosexual priests account for the vast majority of the rape of minors, well, that's when it gets more than a little uncomfortable.
Truth is truth. We must never shy away from it. We must always pursue it. Free speech is essential for determining truth.
I don't like it when comedians demonstrate a clear animus for a single group of people, and by I don't like it, I mean it doesn't make me laugh. I mean, I have comedians I WANT to like because we share the same politics and worldview, but I feel like they're just not funny. If you're not willing to mock something because you take it very, very seriously, you're just not going to be as funny. In fact, I often laugh the most when someone is mocking himself. (For instance, imagine the Welsh or Chinese jokes being told in the first person by someone of that ancestry.)
Then again, my opinions on humor don't really matter. I'm a woman, and everyone knows we can tell jokes about as well as we can drive cars.
As I was reading your post, I started thinking about Ricky Gervais and his show 'After Life'. He's a classic example of pushing the limits with his comedy. This scene is one of the funniest: "I'm not a pedo. And if I was, you'd be safe, you tubby little ginger cunt." https://youtu.be/cUpLwI35t20
In this day and age, comedians get so much flack for pushing the limits on sensitive topics. Remember when Dave Chappelle's Netflix show came out about 3 months ago? So many people went apeshit over that, calling him transphobic and everything.
And now, this whole thing with Joe Rogan and that n-word clip. C'mon. We all know why that's happening.
This little virus has created a whole new world of anything that we didn't know that we didn't know could happen, is happening. Every day I wake up to a new day discovering that nothing shocks me any more.
You covered a lot of territory, with ample humor. My comments are;
Speech is either free, or it isn't. Words are not violence. Some words are not more equal than others. Grow up.
Towards the end you wrote "These things were not accidental but very deliberate and calculated". Quite true even when unplanned. As has been said many times, ..."let no crisis go to waste".
Humor is meant to be an emotional trigger. The more it triggers the more effective it is. Those who object to humor are generally not dealing with whatever it was in their life that created that overly sensitive soft spot and they've not learned to laugh or cry or face the realities they fear.
"Child abuse is a truly, truly appalling crime." Yes!
"It’s like a murder of the soul where you exterminate the potential of a happy future - or at least make that happy future an almost impossibly difficult place to get to." No! It can be that, but what is almost as appalling as the crime itself is the insistence on it guaranteeing a bleak future for the child. It means condemnation to eternal victim status, which is an undesirable state even in victim-centered societies as ours. Punish the perpetrators, and help the victims get out of victim status. Aim reached when the latter can laugh about Jimmy Carr's joke.
I'll agree that a bleak future is not guaranteed - but achieving 'normalcy' if you've been a victim of abuse is made massively harder, at least in the overwhelming majority of cases. I am not trying to 'condemn' anyone to a bleak future - just *recognizing* that overcoming the abuse can be very difficult indeed.
I was definitely not advocating for anything like permanent victim status at all. I think we can recognize that some people actually have been victims without letting that entirely define them. I'm not even close to being a "professional" in these matters - some personal experience of friends and past partners with issues - but it seems to me that the only way forward is to acknowledge that you were a victim, but not to let that define you.
Easy to say - not even close to being easy to achieve.
Definitely very difficult to achieve - and all the more appalling if people who did achieve it are then publicly vilified. Personal experience aside, consider the example of Milo Yiannopoulos. Whatever one may think of any of his views, he's a remarkable human being. And what they used to bring him down is when he basically talked Jimmy-Carr style about his own experience as a teenager.
Lol good jokes! Although you worried me when I saw your title in my inbox!
I'm writing a piece on the online safety bill at the moment, worrying stuff.
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/
I look forward to reading that!
the same people criticizing china et all, taking it one step further than china et all...
Incidentally, have you heard the joke about the Irish brain surgeon? (provenance - one of the UK postdocs in my old research group..)
No - but do tell :-)
That's the joke. The question is asked, "no" is given as the answer, and laughter ensues, because amongst the English with pretensions to the upper class, it is a "well known fact" that no Irishman has the intelligence to become a brain surgeon. Of course, the teller of this joke might have had some knowledge I was not privy to, being a grad of Westminster School, then Cambridge (BA, MA), then University of East Anglia for the PhD... turns out he wasn't a grad of Magdalen College, Oxford, after all, something I just found out looking at his CV. His bitter rival in the group, a British-Pakistani post-doc, with whom I was friends, was a grad of Eton, then Oxford (BA, MA, PhD) - the jealousy was palpable, going to a point where the former called the latter a "goddamned Paki (n-word)"... and the latter laughed at him - and explained to me after precisely why the former had said what he had - and the worse of the insults was "Paki" and not the n-word. Although he had skin as dark as an African, although not so much as one of my colleagues from Ethiopia, he was not of African descent, his features were quite markedly Caucasian - and he spoke English with the Oxbridge accent. To top it off, his family in the UK was quite wealthy, and they had horses they ran at Ascot, amongst other things. It was interesting watching all of that play out on occasion...
Jimmy Carr's joke about gypsies wasn't funny at all. As for the sheep jokes, as a NZr I've heard (that's a cow joke) a few and my normal reaction is to raise my eyebrows and say not again. Are they offensive? No.
I was aware Jimmy had ruffled a few feathers - but didn't see the joke, so can't judge for myself.
One guy online was saying he didn't know which was more offensive, the telling of the joke or the audience laughing at it.
#BaaToo
We either have free speech or we don't.
Frinstance, Holocaust denial covers a lot of ground: it includes those who deny anything happened and those who say maybe 4 million, not 6 million Jews perished. It includes Prof Norman Davies who wanted to include the millions of other European civilians who were murdered by the Nazis and was denied tenure at Stanford U for his efforts. No one would say they are morally equivalent, but there they are--lumped together and shouted down.
Brexit and Trump's election have given our so-called elites open season on punching down against lesser beings who actually believed they had a say in how their nations were governed. Wokeness helpfully identifies acceptable targets for ridicule. Take the priest joke, for example. The Catholic Church has given comedians 2000 years of material to sift through--mocking the Catholic Church is hilarious and A-OK. But if you follow the joke to the truth it reveals--homosexual priests account for the vast majority of the rape of minors, well, that's when it gets more than a little uncomfortable.
Truth is truth. We must never shy away from it. We must always pursue it. Free speech is essential for determining truth.
I don't like it when comedians demonstrate a clear animus for a single group of people, and by I don't like it, I mean it doesn't make me laugh. I mean, I have comedians I WANT to like because we share the same politics and worldview, but I feel like they're just not funny. If you're not willing to mock something because you take it very, very seriously, you're just not going to be as funny. In fact, I often laugh the most when someone is mocking himself. (For instance, imagine the Welsh or Chinese jokes being told in the first person by someone of that ancestry.)
Then again, my opinions on humor don't really matter. I'm a woman, and everyone knows we can tell jokes about as well as we can drive cars.
But you can tell a joke while driving a car, which is impossible for us men.
Speak for yourself.
As I was reading your post, I started thinking about Ricky Gervais and his show 'After Life'. He's a classic example of pushing the limits with his comedy. This scene is one of the funniest: "I'm not a pedo. And if I was, you'd be safe, you tubby little ginger cunt." https://youtu.be/cUpLwI35t20
In this day and age, comedians get so much flack for pushing the limits on sensitive topics. Remember when Dave Chappelle's Netflix show came out about 3 months ago? So many people went apeshit over that, calling him transphobic and everything.
And now, this whole thing with Joe Rogan and that n-word clip. C'mon. We all know why that's happening.
This little virus has created a whole new world of anything that we didn't know that we didn't know could happen, is happening. Every day I wake up to a new day discovering that nothing shocks me any more.
You covered a lot of territory, with ample humor. My comments are;
Speech is either free, or it isn't. Words are not violence. Some words are not more equal than others. Grow up.
Towards the end you wrote "These things were not accidental but very deliberate and calculated". Quite true even when unplanned. As has been said many times, ..."let no crisis go to waste".
Humor is meant to be an emotional trigger. The more it triggers the more effective it is. Those who object to humor are generally not dealing with whatever it was in their life that created that overly sensitive soft spot and they've not learned to laugh or cry or face the realities they fear.