Netflix braces for staff walkout and LGBTQ rally over Chappelle special
news.yahoo.com
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I watched it and it was biting but wasn't hateful. It questioned certain things. Maybe there was some jealousy and usurpation (in general terms taking over the focus of civil rights).
Chapelle is charismatic and steadfast. It would do no one any service to try to disparage him as I think that would backfire given the reach of his audience.
It’s often the case that minorities wear parts of an identity so as to show some kind of immutable and unique right against prejudice. But the sooner we realize that our differences are opportunities to unite against intolerance and bigotry, the sooner we can stop drawing lines in the same about whose experience is more painful or inequitable than another’s.
I’ve heard rabbis deliver sermons on slavery drawing parallels between the plight of Jews to the African slave trade. The point isn’t that Jews get to say “oh I was enslaved too so whatever.” Rather, it’s an opportunity to say, “Hell yeah, I recognize oppression, and let’s right those wrongs together.”
Not one community and not LGBTQ+ gets to be the sole victim. Nobody gets to dominate the outrage scene on Twitter. Coalition building and tolerance require humility, and pretending like one’s group has a greater need for equality or accommodation defeats the point.
This line of thought is rejected by modern radicals. To question is tantamount to outright hating. Watching Chapelle's special was, for me, a marvelous breath of fresh air and I hope people like him can somehow manage to continue making a living despite not observing radical dogma.
I don't recall staff walking out over the Cuties movie. That definitely was pushing the line.
> Organizers did not specify their demands ahead of the rally, although Preston said the event would call for content that prioritizes "the safety and dignity of all marginalized communities."
> Transgender Netflix employee Terra Field has called on the streamer to add a content warning to "The Closer," and to promote more "queer and trans comedians and talent."
There is a lot of hurt and painful experience inside these messages to Netflix. The demands don't exactly seem extraordinary in that context either.
Thats exactly what Chappelle did not say. He said that the bulling might not caused the suicide, but it sure did not help.
I find it baffling that he developed a quite deep relationship with her - a transgender person - gave her a golden ticket (frontrunning for of the biggest comedians) as a token of appreciation and he gets called out as anti trans person.
He deep cuts all of those fake virtue signalling people who do nothing and sacrifice noting for 'the cause', he walked away from the money of questionable hollywood people he took a stand. Maybe thats what irks those people?
Mad world, mad world.
As a Black person, the most common and tired defense of White racists has always been “Look at this one Black person I treated well, that proves I’m not a racist.”
I guess its some kind of progress that that's now a defense against charges of bigotry by Black people as well as against them.
Is there even a "trans community"? As far as I can tell, they try to stick together with the LGB crowd, rather successfully. The groups that are skeptical of T founded their own organizations, but I'd say they're very much a minority. Trans-progressivism is very much main stream, also as far as laws in different countries are concerned.
https://twitter.com/LilySimpson1312/status/14484175314300149...
Why did you jump to taking things offline?
Both of those parties represent real power, both politically and financially, in this world today.
As for the CCP, there are plenty that claim that anti-CCP is anti-Chinese racism and has no place on the stage
Someone who looks at them and sees that they are the majority religion in the Western world, and have politicians everywhere pushing their talking points and morals on everybody else.
So spare me. You are not punching up, or "fighting the power". Your religion is the power.
Why do your claims have more truthiness than theirs?
Christianity accounts for 2.3 Billion people in the world, the next highest is Islam at 1.9 Billion. Unaffiliated (of which Athiests are only a portion) is only 1.2 Billion worldwide. Thus, Christianity is, by definition, a majority.
In one example to prove my second point, politicians in Texas are pushing Christian morality around abortion into laws. This is the opposite of being oppressed.
No, its a plurality, which is a minority that is bigger than any other minority when there is bo majority.
OTOH, the popular use of “minority” that is being referenced doesn't mean mathematical minority, it means “historically systematically oppressed group”; it evolved from the language around race in the US, where whites were the majority and minorities (especially blacks) were oppressed on the basis of race, but the key reference is the oppression not the numerical relationship.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/248547/report-17-chr...
https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-report-on-international-r...
Sure, there are places in the world Christians are an oppressed group; all such descriptions are specific to a bounded context.
In some parts of the world they are. We need to stop taking such a Western-view of the world.
I am not a Christian, but you are incorrect - Christians are an oppressed minority in plenty places in the world. Persecuted, oppressed, killed. And it’s not a “one off” or an exception, in happens in many countries. A cursory Google will give you many examples.
Eritrea: where Christians are tortured, arrested, and imprisoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_Eritrea
A country I was surprised not to see on that list is Indonesia, which came to mind immediately. Take the conflict in Maluku, where Christians were forced to convert, or the eviction of the Christian minority from Banda. Example article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55140847
Yemen: where Houthis have targeted Christians. Book burning religious texts, burning down churches, etc. https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/releases-statements/uscirf-...
You could make a very long list. Just because Christians aren't oppressed in your country does not mean they're not an oppressed minority elsewhere.
People got up in arms about his last stand up. It was not offensive at all. But you couldn't say that, because the people had already made up their minds.
Corporations know how to get people spun up, and they're doing it with Chapelle again. They want to cancel him, because he is dangerous to the right wing, because he is charismatic and articulate. He can get points across clearly. If he became the new Jon Stewart, he could siphon a lot of control away from the right. They need to neutralize him before he decides to go political.
The disparagement is a direct consequence of his speech. He is no more free from that consequence than your or I would be in similar circumstances.
The problem with such a trite comment is that is is just as true in North Korea.
You are complete Free™ to say what you like about Supreme Leader Grand Marshal Kim Jong-un, but you know - there might be consequences.
Pretty sure that's a logical fallacy: Reductio ad absurdum to be specific. And that's on top of the difference between the State and its power lawfully backed by lethal force and society which lacks the same.
No. No one is saying that. No one has ever said that, because it doesn't make any sense. Of course all actions have consequences. Of course saying something hurtful will cause others to react negatively. No one is contesting this. What people are contesting is that a very small but highly vocal group of people who seemingly get offended by everything can demand that the rest of us force consequences on people that hurt their feelings.
Right now, there's a small group of netflix employees planning some kind of protest. That is their right to do, that is a consequence for netflix producing this comedy special. The problem with the "freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" line is that it always seems to be a very small group demanding that some larger group bow to their demands and force consequences on someone that wouldn't receive them otherwise. In this case, this very small group is demanding that dave chappelle or netflix suffer consequences for producing his special. But according to rotten tomatoes, and most of the comments I read on the internet, is that the overwhelming majority of people thought it was funny.
"Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" means that if I call your mother a prostitute, I might get punched in the face. It does not mean that if a digital content producer airs a comedy special you don't like, that anyone who doesn't like it can demand that it be taken down and then say "well those are just the consequences!"
The consequence of netflix airing this special is that some people will get offended and may cancel their subscriptions and some of their employees might protest and/or quit. That's it. Caving to the demands of those offended is not "suffering the consequences."
The consequences of them producing this special is that some people are mad. But netflix chose to produce it, and I'm sure they knew full well that some people would get mad. A group of offended people demanding that it be taken down is not a "consequence that must be faced", it's a demand, and netflix not doing so isn't "not being held accountable for their actions."
Instead, democratic governments (especially violence-shy Western ones) use the Official Secrets Act [or local equivalent] to prevent the people that are privy to information the governments do care about from ever talking about it.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/netflix-employ...
/s
“Minority” in the relevant sense is not “group that constitutes less than 50%” but “group that is a historical target of large scale social discrimination inn the society which is the context of discussion” (the term “minority” is an accident of history; had the language developed first in, say, apartheid South Africa, the term adopted probably wouldn't have been “disadvantaged minority” from which over time the first word usually got dropped.)
And even in the numerical sense, everybody is a minority of a minority if you choose the right set of axes of variation to look at, so in the sense that it is true of Chappelle, it is not “unlike most trans”.
Bill jokes about everyone. Dave jokes about everyone. South Park jokes about everyone. Most are fine with that and are able to laugh at themselves.
I don’t think controversial or offensive-to-me content should be removed. But I also don’t think it should go by unremarked. That’s what democracy is, at the ground level.
Keep in mind that Netflix streams the moving Cruising (1980), widely considered offensive on release and linked to a number of gay bashings back then. True, Netflix didn’t produce that (as it did this comedy special) but at the end of the day, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Comedy is sometimes offensive. Chapelle has an outdated view of trans issues but doesn’t call for violence, which is Netflix’s line.
Chapelle has a logically correct view of trans issues that's up to date. It's probably the view shared by a silent majority but it's politically suicide to even hint at, as he covered in his special. You can rob a pregnant woman at gun point and be considered a saint, but if you hurt a trans person's feelings, you're literally Hitler.
I'm interested to see if this works out for him, in the end.
I believe the general trend is that reversing your position on a big public issue (even if your original position was wrong!) is the end of your authority and career.
I am not making a statement about how this 'should' work!
> When Sticks and Stones came out a lot of the people in the trans community were furious with me and apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don't give a fuck 'cause Twitter's not a real place.
> And the hardest thing for a person to do is go against their tribe if they disagree with their tribe, but Daphne did that for me. She wrote a tweet that was very beautiful and what she said was and it's almost exactly what she said.
> She said "Punching down on someone requires you to think less of them and I know him, and he doesn't. He doesn't punch up, he doesn't punch down, he punches lines, and he is a master at his craft."
> Beautiful tweet, beautiful friend, it took a lot of heart to defend me like that, and when she did that the trans community dragged that bitch all over Twitter. For days, they were going in on her, and she was holding her own 'cause she's funny.
> But six days after that wonderful night I [previously] described to you, my friend Daphne killed herself.
> Oh yeah, this is a true story, my heart was broken. Yeah it wasn't the jokes. I don't know if it was them dragging or I don't know what was going on in her life but I bet dragging her didn't help.
> I was very angry at them, I was very angry at her. I felt like Daphne lied to me. She always said she identified as a woman. And then one day she goes up to the roof of her building and jumps off and kills herself. Clearly... only a man would do some gangster shit like that.
> Hear me out. As hard as it is to hear a joke like that, I'm telling you right now, Daphne would have loved that joke. That's why she was my friend.
> I was reading her obituary and I found out she was survived by a daughter.
[... a bit about Anderson Cooper which isn't relevant]
> What I did is I got in touch with her family and I started a trust fund for her daughter 'cause I know that's all she ever really cared about. And I don't know what the trans community did for her but I don't care 'cause I feel like she wasn't [in] their tribe, she was [in] mine. She was a comedian in her soul.
Here's Daphne's sisters defending Dave in the daily beast.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-famil...
Edit:
> “Dave loved my sister and is an LGBTQ ally,” Dorman’s younger sister Brandy added in a text message. “His entire set was begging to end this very situation.”
> “At this point I feel like he poured his heart out in that special and no one noticed,” Brandy wrote in a separate Facebook post. “What he’s saying to the LGBTQ family is, ‘I see you. Do you see me? I’m mourning my friend in the best way I know how. Can you see me? Can you allow me that?’... This was a call to come together, that two oppressed factions of our nation put down their keyboards and make peace. How sad that this message was lost in translation.”
Dave Chappelle and some other comedians like Joe Rogan are "too big to fail". But how many lesser voices get cancelled is the true hallmark of consistency and principles.
In the old days kings cancelled lesser voices by beheading them. Occasionally, the "lesser" voices rose up and beheaded kings (King Charless II, Louis the 16, the Romanovs).
Cancel culture is as old personkind (or is it peoplekind?).
It is just another blunt instrument of intimidation and bullying. The modern version is a performative art to get status by trying to wreck the lives of others without having the legal right to behead people.
Daphne ended up committing suicide but at least that was a self-inflicted death.
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The mob even accused the comedian Bill Burr, who is married to a Black woman and has a daughter from her, of being a racist.
"...a white man having a non-white wife can sometimes be a sign of racism. So you shouldn't assume someone isn't racist just because they own a minority sex servant. They may very well have one because they're racist."
https://twitter.com/Clayburn/status/1371268469145079809
https://www.indy100.com/ents/bill-burr-wife-tweet-racism-gra...
Frankly, I agree with the leftists that Chappelle should retire, or at least stop performing in big left wing cities and states. The disaster America has become doesn't deserve solid comedians like him anymore.