David Zucker reflects on "Airplane!" in 2021
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> I couldn’t help myself. I jumped in immediately. “Charles, for example, you’re at this party and everyone is sucking d—k. What are you going to do? You have to resist the temptation.”
> Charles laughed. His mom shook her head. And I found a way to not be bored.
This strikes a cord with me. As a kid/teenager I learned some lessons a lot better because they came in the form of offensive humor. I still remember some of them word for word 20+ years later. I worry about this in the context of current day puritanism a lot more that I care about movies, TV, social media, etc. I think we're raising generations of stuck up people who will fall even harder in puritan extreme.
Edit: in fact, there is much more to that, now that I think about it: in the past few years, I have met a large number of people who, somehow, basically cannot read: they have the text in front of them, but cannot interpret it, if it is not literal. It surely must be lack of exposure to intellectual challenge, even to phenomena that some would have called "normal daily experience". And they have degrees. How did those "cannot make any sense of it" people emerge? Lack of exposure to differentiated stimula is certainly part of it.
"Not understanding metaphor is a real handicap."
"Are you calling me disabled?!"Even if a lot of them do need electric mobility aids....
No. I think the problem here is that some metaphors are used so often that people forget it is a metaphor and take it literally. You seem to inject the meaning (physical?) "disability" into the word "handicap"... are you aware, for example, of the practice of handicapping race horses, i.e. inserting weights into their saddles?
If your brain can't understand metaphors, you could say this common ability for you is disabled.
Also since most people do understand metaphors it can be interpreted that the poster is calling them lower in intelligence than most people which could fall into the zone of intellectually disabled.
Being handicapped (at something) does not make one disabled. Words have more than one meaning they also have context. The fact I cannot speak French, for example, is a handicap to me when I am in France but not when I am in England.
Assuming that the listener/reader has some level of comprehension (and things are not literally lost in translation) my personal experience of situations like this is often more of a problem of the listener/reader's insecurities.
It's not the end of the world but as a shy extrovert who does enjoy talking about things I enjoy I do really like it when I say or show something to someone and they just get it.
Reading little blurbs on social media and having to make the most toddler'ish value judgments on the spot about them? Everything is assessed by its literal value, and whether it's good vs bad, for vs against, etc.
Like this reply of mine, for example...
Could it not be the case that these social norms are taken a bit to the extreme? I do not call it wokeism myself since that encourages easy labeling and dismissing of ideas. But I do think it has been taken too far.
Profane language and offensive jokes have always been offensive, yes. That is why I called them offensive... They have to be used sparingly and with care. But not being able to use them anywhere anytime is too much. That is my opinion for what it is worth.
A few years ago during some discussion about Africa a guy (who apparently turned on his wokeness to 11) called people there African Americans - people who lived all their lives in Africa and have nothing to do with America.
Amen, brother! As a parent of a middle schooler, I have this exact worry. At his age, I was much more offensive and crude, but I like to think I turned out ok. Meanwhile he’s growing up in an era where the language has been ultra gentrified.I went to school in the 90s, when professors cursed freely & wrote “shaft the customer!” on the blackboard to express their solidarity with Alan Perlis, with no consequence of repercussion. No way you can get away with that today in a CS class. These days there are actual rooms called Salesforce Lab & Infosys Building in a university nearby, because of the funders. When I worked at Sun, Scott McNealy sent an email that said “we are at war” and pointed out it took 13 bytes to send those utf8 chars as a txt file on unix but 1.5MB to do the same as a doc file on Windows. It got a lot of offensive “fucking micro$oft” replies & forwards complete with the dollar sign throughout the company wide network - imagine if such a thing is possible today. I took my kid to the hospital for the flu shot & routine annual. So the doc walks up to him with a very serious expression and tells him in a somber voice - “Now I am going to take a look at your private parts, and that’s ok only because your dad is here, otherwise we both know nobody is supposed to look at your private parts. ok ? “ I was drinking a cup of starbucks & spilt coffee all over the fucking floor doubling in laughter. He was not amused. Afterwards, he said, in my time we’d just say drop your pants & show me your dick motherfucker. But those days are gone :(
It's pretty cool to watch The High and Mighty after Airplane and recognize so many of the scenes, including the sweating pilot, the little life stories of the characters, the operations manager (Regis Toomey) pacing back and forth in the control room, etc.
So they made them talk in a very thick Bavarian dialect, which made the whole thing absurd on a higher level.
The 70s and 80s had some great talent behind German dubs.
Of course the joke mostly works because it lampshades bigoted cultural assumptions about race in Germany: a lot of Germans in the 1990s said "Afro-Amerikaner" when they meant Black (regardless of nationality, even Germans) because they thought it was more "politically correct" and the thought a Black person might be a native citizen never occurred to them. This has improved somewhat over the years but since the film was originally released in 1980, I doubt the cultural awareness was any better at the time.
To be clear: I'm not saying the joke is bigoted, I'm saying the joke worked because it played off bigoted assumptions.
I don't think I heard the phrase "Afrodeutsch" (Afro-German) until well into the 2000s and one of the kids in my class in the 1990s was Black. I even remember thinking he must be American because of that.
I think there was a period of general confusion in the 1980s and 1990s around what language to use as the German words "Mohr" (originally from "Mauretania") and the German equivalent of the n-word became socially unacceptable and there was a widely held belief that referencing skin color directly was also unacceptable because of a lack of understanding about the actual underlying reasons for this language change (i.e. bigotry and power structures). There's a general sense of detachment I think because this discussion is usually framed in terms of language use rather than actual oppression because Black people are rarely even acknowledged to exist.
I find it absurd, a ridiculous beat about the bush, that was never necessary growing up having friends who were 'black' and that was a fine description just like I'm 'white', what of it, and indeed closer back to (what was then at least) the out of favour/racist/not politically correct 'coloured'.
But as I said, I'm white, so it's not up to me, and if that's really what people prefer then fine - but I have the impression that it's a predominantly American (I mostly only 'hear' it online) turn of phrase, that's spilled over a bit sure, but generally not used/preferred here?
Who is "white" has changed throughout history.
Is Obama black or white?
As a father to a mixed race son, where people draw the line on whether it's "OK" for someone to self-identify or be described as black vs. white is a topic that interests me, and it's wildly inconsistent (but leaning strongly towards it taking far more white ancestry for most people to "accept" that people call themselves white than the reverse), and highly politicised, and there are absolutely no clear lines.
EDIT: I've spoken to my son about answering the inevitable "but where are you really from originally" with "Norway" for example, if he feels safe doing so (and safety is a real concern with that), since I'm Norwegian. It's just as accurate as answering Nigerian (his mother is Nigerian), which would be the answer most people asking that question would be looking for, but would hopefully make at least some people stop to think why they were asking it.
But really these things are not really logical in most cases. Ad es. blacks are blacks, but then you have "asians" who are not "east-asians" nor "south-asians", "latinos" that definitely did not originate from anywhere near the Italian peninsula, "white-irish" as different from "white-british", etc etc. In the inevitable public-authority forms, these days I'm often tempted to just tick "Mixed-other" - I'm whiter than daisies, but in my blood there are probably a dozen different "types of people" who invaded Italy through the centuries (africans, germans, etc etc).
I'm light-skinned enough to be close to ginger, for instance, and this subject has both practical, conversational and occasionally humoristic value when the subject of being outside in the sun comes up. If I'm planning any sort of trip with someone who even has southern European ancestry, not to mention Middle-Eastern or African, it's hardly an unnatural subject to show up in passing.
From that context, it seems incredibly silly that the whole subject just be taboo and remain unmentioned.
Establishing that trust can sometimes take a while, but it tends to help a lot to simply ask about which terms someone prefers etc. if unsure, because just expressing a willingness to adjust tends to be a good sign.
If you mean re 'mixed other', I think the point was just that the categories don't apply well, and 'mixed' is technically true of essentially everyone so eh why not. (I believe 'white - other' is an option though, if that's applicable.)
But it'll depend on background, age, and attitudes, and really the best approach is to just ask people if unsure, as some terms are wildly offensive to one group and not at all to another (prime example of that is that is how "oriental" is deeply offensive to many in the US, while it's not at all uncommon for people to describe themselves as oriental in the UK)
In other contexts it is more precise to say Black because Black people experience a specific form of oppression by being Black, not just non-white. The same is true for other identities (like Indigenous) that are also part of the BIPoC umbrella, of course, but this is why it is often rendered as BIPoC rather than simple PoC.
I think the latter two can also be applied to 2nd, 3rd, etc. generations, so there's no assumption about native citizen or not.
Slurs like Goombah, Kraut, Mick are also applied to later generations (according to Hollywood movies).
The implicit assumption was that because they were Black they couldn't be German. "Afrodeutsch" ("African-German") came significantly later.
In Germany (and I know the equivalent is true for many other countries) the term "German" is racialized and often used in a way that Americans use "white". Americans are far more willing to call an African or Asian American simply "American" than Germans are to call an African or Asian German simply "German". Also nobody will care more about your distant ancestors being Italian or Norwegian than they will care about them being Swabian or Bavarian, but if you are non-white, you will always be treated as a foreigner even if you have a Bavarian accent.
For instance in Fawlty Towers Manuel (the much put-upon waiter) was from Barcelona, often said in a mildly derogatory (silly foreigner) manner as in “don't mind him, he's from Barcelona”. When translated to Spanish, Manuel was renamed Paolo and his origins were moved to Naples.
Just watching his facial expressions as his character tries to make sense of things, he has no capacity to process is priceless. Then ofcourse he proceeds to come up with the most ludicrous answers to whatever problem with all the overconfidence in the world. That routine has me literally rolling on the floor.
I dont think the woke/anti woke bs matters. There are really lots of ways to make people laugh if you really want too imho.
Martin Short is amazing in this series! Actually all 3 of the main characters are great
There's an episode called '200'; (or something) where 'Family Guy' creator Seth MacFarlane discusses the show along with many of its voice actors, producers, etc.
He mentions that 'Family Guy' is absolutely not meant to be a high-brow humour show; and that part of the technique of the writing of 'Family Guy' is, in his own words; guided by how many jokes a minute they can get - how many times they can make the audience laugh.
If we have a casual pause in a show; someone looks to the camera, dead-pan, and just, quite seriously - says, 'penis' - out of the blue - I'm gonna laugh my ass off. I love intelligent humour as much as the next girl, but there is a nuance to some of the low-brow humour in 'Airplane!' that is just as complex to pull off effectively as a well-told and intelligent joke by Bill Maher, Norm MacDonald, or George Carlin.
We are talking about a 41-year-old film, in a genre (comedy) that famously doesn't age well. 'Airplane!' probably shouldn't come off well today, if it follows our previously established rules of comedy.
That being said, it's still hella funny.
This is amazing. I have to imagine this inspired one of my favorite jokes from Naked Gun:
> Frank: [looking into microscope] I-I can't see anything.
> Ed: Use your open eye, Frank.
It's a pizza the moment you put your fists in the dough!
This is the meaty bit right here. Because you have people who tell jokes that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, ageist (normally wouldn't include that but I gotta play to the HN crowd), etc. and either 1) go out and actually do bigoted things/maintain relationships with outwardly bigoted people, or 2) the people who enjoy the jokes go out and do bigoted things and use the joke as cover.
If you want to test this, go on 4chan right now and ask people how they feel about the difference between "black people and niggas" (Chris Rock) or "how white people are better" (Louis C.K.). (If you argue that 4chan isn't representative of the general public, you can try Facebook, but, uh, you're taking your life into your own hands with that crowd.)
The problem may very well be less that people won't tolerate transgressive humor today, as it is that people can't be trusted with transgressive humor today. Some people see it as rhetoric, not humor.
As an ageing HNer, I liked that last bit because it reads like a joke, made me laugh, and consequently enabled my trust in what you say. I don't think you are ageist simply because you understand that some people can be mean to older people. Reality is fucked up. Being able to find humor in this reality isn't necessarily a sign of also being morally bankrupt.
The ability to produce humor is a sign of intelligence. And laughing to it is but an expression of understanding.
People know the difference, and will mostly do it whether or not the comedy exists.
Man, I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back the other way and bring back comedy everybody is offended by (in equal doses) and laughs at honestly. Hollywood has to go un-woke first, though.
I'm not offended by any of the jokes, and I still laugh at some of them, but mostly because of nostalgia. If you're reacting poorly to people being offended by some of the crude race/sex based humor, I hate to break it to you, but you're getting offended in an even worse way than them.
That's the joke.
I don't even think they are "stupid" jokes.
When was the first time you watched this movie? Was it as an adult? Recently? If you watched it when you were young, and you're not young anymore, that's nostalgia. It has nothing to do with when the movie was produced.
And we both recognize humor at the expense of the other, but that simply isn't what 90% of the humor in Airplane! is. Compared to what came later in the 80s and 90s it was quite self-aware.
You look at the pebbles and have not spotted the cathedral. You overworked the left analytic hemisphere and left the right synthetic one bumping for attention, you "I will only do pecs at the gym because legs are for losers" pedestrian you, comma slash jay.
The architecture is pure genius, the jokes serve it.
Comedy doesn't get enough respect because "it's just laughs", but this shit is hard. To pack so many accomplished jokes in such a short movie is genius - particularly in 1974.
I now call myself a socialist, have an interest in social justice causes and intersectional feminism and am as leftist as I can get. I still can't laugh about any of the jokes.
I think the biggest factor is that the movie plays off tropes of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood movies and this creates a massive cultural disconnect since I have barely watched any of those and the few I did I deliberately watched as an adult.
For similar reasons most of Mel Brooks' movies also never did it for me. I grew up in the 1990s and at the time prime time television happily recycled movies only a few years old rather than digging through the archives.
Airplane! is still funny to me but I've never looked at it as anything more than a well delivered (almost) 90 "anything for a laugh" reel.
In fact, the world building part where they establish the backstory is the weakest part for me as structurally it serves as a pause from the non-stop schtick for most of the present day sections, but the differences are very prolonged jokes that don't survive a first watch in my opinion.
The genius isn't so much the architecture it's the delivery and the speed. You don't get time to fully think through everything that happens and the actors play it straight for the most part. There is comedy atop a functional parody and as soon as the gag is done it moves on to the next progression.
In general I like Zucker and his movies but I think here both he and you misunderstand why his movies worked then and which elements worked. The scene with the kids and the lame "like my coffee" joke is not a good scene not because of the joke's adherence to puritán values, but because the entire joke is "look these young kids are saying things adults should." They can't deliver the lines with the same commitment to the short term deviation from reality and it falls flat.
The joke Zucker references in the article about sucking dick again falls flat for me not because of inappropriateness but because it's a lousy joke for someone not in the room or having that relationship dynamic, it's a weak joke without much substance besides the shock of "[Dad] said suck cock".
It's not about right vs left here, it's about understanding what's funny and why stuff is funny. The discussion earlier on this thread about the German dub is a perfect example where the idea of the funny is what makes it work, even if there is no such thing as jive in German; the core logic of the joke is understoodand that's why the dub worked. Comedy has a logic to it and if it's understandable immediately, it's funny because we get how they got to that point. Even early 2000's random humor had a logic to it, albeit a little out there, but there's a reason that it worked for some flash vids and not others.
Comedy is all of the brain, and arguably even more logical part as you have to get the joke to laugh at it. I think we all know a time when someone got the joke way later because they just didn't process it or couldn't process it.
Why should it be «Comedy»? Maybe it can be just a big construct using jokes. (The intention of the creator does not matter.) Maybe just the "simple" development of absurd over deadpan - which is not "comedic" - defines a core for that cathedral.
I'd say there's more to it than what you saw.
Looking at some YT reaction videos of that movie, that line always get people laugh ting. It gets some of the best laughs of the movie in fact.
I love comedy. I like some of the jokes in Airplane. I think most of the jokes are dated and the movie hasn't aged well.
Shirley you can't be serious? The word play and visual comedy in the movie is classic. The Roger/Clarance/Ouver take-off sequence, Leslie Neilsens deadpan "Dinner was the chicken or the fish? - yes I remember, I had the lasagne", the guy waiting in the taxi, "everything is ok" as the pilots are dragged down the corridor, Stiker being stationed outside of Drambuie. Hell I think Airplane has the first dramatic double-sunglassed removal.
There is so much clean, zany humour in that movie - the idea that you can claim classic, surrealist comedy is dated makes me question whether you believe that statement at all.
I don't think you have to be too challenging funny.
This scene still makes me smile a decade later:
Interesting, I wouldn't summarise it that way at all.
If I had to characterise it so succinctly I'd say many of them play on language, and I think it's as funny now as when I first saw it (probably early 2000s).
"How soon can we land?"
"I can't tell."
"You can tell me, I'm a doctor."
As you said in another comment I suppose, it's a lot of 'dad jokes', but I don't know why you think it hasn't aged well.
Slapstick, highly visual comedy, and 'dad jokes' is hardly a massive on-screen genre; I might agree it hasn't done well over time if there was more of it, modern stuff, more developed somehow. But it's still so unlike most comedy films to me that I think it'll always make me laugh.
Because it could be bullying.
In the Airplane! cockpit scene the joke isn't that the pilot makes the stewardess and kid uncomfortable by sounding like a pedophile, the joke is that he's supposed to be a heroic character but acts like a total creep. It's a subversion of expectations based on the tropes of 1950s/1960s Hollywood movies.
Likewise the scene with all passengers lining up to slap the woman while shouting at her to calm down doesn't make fun of women for being hysterical. It makes fun of the sexist trope of women being hysterical and needing to be "calmed down" with physical violence. The sexism isn't what's funny, the sexism is what's being made fun of.
The problem with modern comedy is that a lot of political punditry has moved to taking the form of comedy and "it's just a joke" (or for a few years on YouTube "it's just a prank") has become a way to defend actual bigoted statements.
When a conservative pundit who is opposed to gay rights calls a gay person a homophobic slur or follows a mention of them with a caricature of them wanting to have oral sex with a lot of men, the "joke" only works if you share the idea that gay people are sexual deviants and bad. It isn't really a joke, it's just mockery.
The reason a lot of older comedians find it hard to adjust is not that comedy has changed. The mechanics of humor have largely remained the same, it's just cultural attitudes and politics that have changed. If your politics have remained the same, you'll find it harder to do comedy expressing those politics now than when they were more closely aligned to mainstream.
In other words, if you used to have a close circle of friends with misogynist opinions a misogynist joke may have gotten a few laughs out of them. If they've all grown out of it and matured in their understanding that women are actual persons rather than just objects of sexual attraction, your old jokes will no longer work on them. They may not actually get offended, but they won't be amused.
Jokes work because they carry a message through a combination of context, content and subtext. If that message is expressing support for an oppressive social dynamic, it can be bullying. It's that simple.
Making jokes about Jeff Bezos is punching up. Making jokes about the homeless is punching down. The reason so many people got mad at Dave Chapelle is not just that he mocked trans people (which is a marginalized identity) and is cis (which isn't). It's that he thought being Black (which is also a marginalized identity) excused it because he completely ignored that Black trans people even exist. He assumed that as a Black comedian he was always going to be punching down regardless of whom he ridiculed.
The term "political correctness" among conservatives is often an expression of the assumption that everyone else is hypocritical and bigotry is the norm. But it's not about hiding your bigotry, it's about actually holding a different opinion. Political correctness is good in so much as it makes it harder to promote bigoted views, but it's insufficient when it comes to solving latent bigotry in a society or subculture.
I've tried to express this to my teenager - that sometimes these jokes that seem racist/sexist/ist are actually making fun of the absurdity* of racism/sexism/ism, but it can also be hard to tell sometimes, and many jokes truly are bigoted. As someone who hears an off-color joke, try to cross examine it before knee-jerking taking offense (although, often offense is warranted), and as someone telling an off-color joke, be very careful* in your delivery.
For jokes, there's a time and a place, and the flip side to that is that there's a wrong time/place too! For example, I like the joke "I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather.... not screaming like the passengers in his car" - but I would never tell that to someone grieving the recent loss of a grandfather or someone who passed in a car accident. And given the current BLM movement and the anti-Asian sentiment - this is definitely not the time for some jokes. My teenager is mixed race, half Asian (prefer not to say which), and they and their friends sometimes feel like they have the green light to make certain Asian jokes. I've told them these are not the times to make those; in other times, it might be okay, but keep a lid on that stuff until some of this passes, because this is serious - it's not the time.
And very importantly: just because you find an off color joke funny as opposed to taking offense, it doesn't mean that you're a racist/sexist/etc... and it doesn't mean that you have a character flaw. But just because you find the humor in it, doesn't mean your insensitive or bigoted. As a society, we shouldn't be afraid to laugh and we shouldn't virtue signal by jumping to offense. But if someone takes offense to a joke that you make, you're almost always the one in the wrong (not always, but almost always, so do some self reflection).
This is especially relevant for in-group jokes and self-deprecation. A Black person performing for a Black audience can poke fun at Black culture as a form of self-deprecation, but if a white person tries to perform the same joke to the same audience the intention will get muddled, and if the audience is white it quickly turns from laughing at yourself to laughing at a marginalized group.
This effect is also why there is no such thing as the "n-word pass": even if a Black person tells you as a white person that they're okay with you using that word and even if they're honest, that only makes it okay in the narrow context of conversations between you and them. Even having another person around can quickly get messy.
Likewise "Karen" originating as a pejorative against white women "playing the victim" sounds very different coming from a Black person or a white man.
Language and communication are complex and jokes are just another way to communicate ideas with language, even if the ideas may be somewhat non-obvious.
0) «bullying»?! A joke - irony, something intended not to actually state the literally expressed? You really should explain yourself. That idea of bullying is unclear.
Society is a messy place - and has and always will have roughness where its edges meet. Some entertain an understandable fantasy that a perfect one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, that will make the messiness go away, is to be found in trying to force other people to do something different. Ie, by bullying them.
That's not where the solution is found. It's just the same problem repeated back.
I've been bullied, and it absolutely does not happen anymore. The bullies didn't change - I did, and I'm much better off for it. To put it another way: I hold the power.
When enough people realise that, that's when these problems end. If you look throughout history, nothing else works - it just leads to more bullying back and forth, and eventually, war.
Zucker is right, one component of this is not taking ones-self too seriously - the one thing uniting all bullies, all those who commit atrocities, is they take themselves too seriously. They are incapable of accepting the possibility they could be wrong. So high they elevate themselves on a pedestal of self-righteousness in service of some ideal utopian vision that they eventually lose all compassion and ability to empathise. This prevents the realisation of any such vision.
If anything, it's laughable.
Being able to laugh at ourselves is not just important, its essential. The current state of the world is testament to that. Granted, at the other extreme, where comedy knows no bounds and anything can be called funny - even watching people suffer - is just as bad.
And it's a domain entered by those who didn't check themselves at bullying, and went on to atrocity, and progressed to the final stage - sadism - as they push toward an ideal dream of a future perfect, above the reality of the dysfunction that push is creating right in front of them.
Damn you my chicken just died! Offensive!
3 men walk into a bar.
Damn you my son died in a bar brawl. Offensive!
If you do, or say anything, ever, someone will be offended. It’s really best to ignore them.
Saying some general, non-specific words, is not “bullying”.
> The root of the problem is a loss of trust. Comedy is ultimately about trust. The TreePeople audience laughed at my joke because they trusted that I hadn’t actually molested young boys. My kids laughed at my jokes because they love me, and they know they’ll be beaten senseless if they don’t. Without trust, audiences begin to question the intentions behind every joke, they take jokes literally, and they use their collective voices to bully comedians and pressure studios against taking any comedic risk.
Nope. Can’t think of anything. Must be the woke mob again.
I won't argue these movies are as good as Airplane! or the Naked Gun series but as someone who basically only watch comedies, he has a point, it's a sad state of affair you get in America, and by extension the Western world.
What recent (non-animated) funny movie or show have you seen that is not "feel good" or filled with sexual jokes?
I don't really watch comedy films but I watch a reasonable amount of comedy shows:
It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, 30 Rock, Atlanta, Avenue 5, Fleabag, The Good Place, Silicon Valley, Resident Alien, Barry, Home (UK), Mythic Quest, AP Bio, Tacoma FD, Ted Lasso, Russian Doll, Veep, You're the Worst, Better Things·
I'm not sure what your qualifier for "recent" is so feel free to ignore some of those.
Sure a lot of these aren't farces like Airplane or Scary Movie but it's not all feel good or dick jokes. There is plenty of comedy out there for all types of tastes.
And Ted Lasso is actually feel good (s1) or not really a comedy anymore (s2) ;)
The comedic writing of this show is superb and though it involves some blue humor, it’s hardly reliant on it.
Hello to Jason Isaacs.
The only difference is the publication - previously a Murdoch-owned conservative rag and now a self-declared neocon publication.
Furthermore, this “take” requires a level of historical naïveté that borders on pure narcissism. A lot of social “fixing” looks like an “over correction” in the short term, but in the long term that’s just how things get dealt with.
As a loose metaphor, If you put your hand on a stove you don’t lift it a millimeter off the heat source, right? That would “fix” it.
Surprising no one, I couldn’t find a single essay from this concerned citizen about the death of George Floyd, or anyone else for that matter.
But he found plenty of outrage and cultural commentary for the temporary death of the commercial viability of his outdated sense of humor.
That IS funny, actually.
If anything can be deemed offensive (and it will be, because there are people who profit from scolding others), and nothing is ever forgotten in the internet age, the eventuality of your mentality is no one being allowed to communicate about anything at all.
What's worth doing is making fun of you, ironically. Because making fun of people like you is, historically, how flawed ideologies are cast aside.
Exactly.
You don't get to determine the rules and context of communication for other people, you only get to determine them for yourself. I don't mean rules and context in a modern political and/or cultural sense, I mean them in a basic interpretive sense.
The text is in the eye of the beholder. Not in the eye of the mob who didn't read the text.
Why is he obligated to write something about George Floyd? This touches on compelled speech.
are you sure? In regards to HN, are there no negative stereotypes of nerds, geeks, computer programmers out there? How about those with autism, or ADHD - I mean I find myself insulted quite a lot in life, never mind in just the media.
There are many cases of people using autism as a justification for reactionary behavior but the people I see most loudly attacking them for it are other autistics.
Shows like The Big Bang Theory which undeniably make fun of autistic traits usually also carry a lot of other messaging progressives find distasteful (e.g. in this case, misogyny framed as "charming" and "dorky" because the characters are portrayed as unthreatening or downright impotent). Nerd culture especially of the late 90s and early 00s is also rife with sexism, racism and ableism while especially nowadays also undeniably having extremely progressive spaces within its subculture (e.g. TTRPGs in particular are a space for experimenting with identity and gender expression which can make them especially appealing to queer people).
The negative treatment of nerds, geeks and programmers in popular media (which has btw massively declined since the 1980s and especially within the dot com era) in my experience also doesn't come from "woke progressives" but rather neatly follows anti-feminist ideas of masculinity, ridiculing these groups for failing to satisfy gendered expectations. "Woke" critique usually focusses on the sexist, racist and generally bigoted attitudes often still present in wide parts of those cultures but even more so in gaming (which is so widely acknowledged even within gaming culture that "heated gamer moment" has become a popular phrase to refer to someone openly spouting bigotry).
>Do you have any evidence that the majority of autistics are complaining about "woke" culture?
You're right that is probably the weakest part of my response, since I don't have any particular evidence.
On the other hand the disproportionate members of groups seemed specifically in reference to people on HN who are likely to be in the group of nerds, geeks, programmers group. So if those groups are among the ones on HN complaining about wokeness, then I guess it doesn't really matter that the parts of the media they are getting insulted in are parts getting attacked as non-woke.
The original argument was that groups (on HN) complaining about wokeness are comprised of people not insulted by media. I suppose there are people on HN who find wokeness distasteful even if they are among groups that might be helped by it in some contexts.
So basically: you are in front of a phenomenon of corrupt police and its relative systemic acceptance, all of which is rooted in mental pauperty, and your idea of «fixing» is to restrict artistic expression?
And would be a duty of any creator to write articles about any occurrence or phenomenon!?
«outdated»!? Masterpieces and milestones get «outdated» in which sense? Do you mean "then rejected by some society" for some reason outside inherent quality? Arbitrary filters of cultural contribution, according their special state and needs?
"Zucker" is also a Jewish name, so his ancestors will have experienced a fair share of racism.