11 ms·

Netflix braces for staff walkout and LGBTQ rally over Chappelle special

48 points by drewcon 5y ago

droopyEyelids 5y ago
CEO Ted Sarandos has apologized and claimed fault. 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!
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Classic CEO error. Stick to your values and principles and never apologies to the mob.
saos 5y ago
Don't bend Netflix. Let them go and hire me!!!
stevespang 5y ago
I stand in solidarity with the guy holding the sign: "We like Dave" - - - cops should have arrested the violator that destroyed his sign
newaccount2021 5y ago
rapidly closing in on Sarandos telling staff they are welcome to vote with their feet
mc32 5y ago
Many things are upsetting to many people. I don't think it's viable to always bow to demands of your most strident members. Chapelle is a dissenter, I think he has as much a right to express his opinion as other provocateurs. We've had shows from Netflix which border on child exploitation and skate somewhat close to CP. So, why would this be out of line? 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.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Things generally upsetting people in general is one thing, but details matter. The reporting describes something more like a question of priorities and ongoing lack of appropriate attention to community dynamics. Worse, it sounds like a situation that could have been avoided. > 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.
  - cassac 5y ago
    Should they take all jokes that hurt Christian feelings offline? Or how about anything that is critical of the CCP? Where does it end?
    - robbintt 5y ago
      > add a content warning Why did you jump to taking things offline?
      - cassac 5y ago
        I don’t really think in the end they would accept a scenario where Chapelle would be free to make any content he wants as long as it has a content warning. That was an “at least you should…” not the actual demand. Though we won’t know until they actually present their demands.
    - falcolas 5y ago
      Christians are not an oppressed minority, in any sense of either word. Nor is the CCP. Both of those parties represent real power, both politically and financially, in this world today.
18009420088 5y ago
The bit about trans women is unfunny and hurtful and should remain on Netflix. Trans employees should walk out and protest, then decide whether they have the means / network to move on if they don’t want to work there anymore. 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.
- 0xebc 5y ago
  >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.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Trans are mentally ill and need to be treated as such, as in they need to seek professional help in accepting biological reality. Encouraging them in their delusions which they will never achieve is only hurting them, not helping.
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      You are mentally ill and need to treated as such, as in you need to seek professional help in accepting biological reality.
      - dang 5y ago
        Please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do those things, regardless of ideology, because they destroy what this site is supposed to be for. I'm not going to ban your account right now but if you continue to post flamewar comments or ideological battle comments, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and correct this going forward, we'd appreciate it.
cassac 5y ago
If everyone he mocked in his specials walked out of Netflix they would have no employees left. I feel it was exactly his point that only one group continually does that. I also feel that Netflix knows if they remove his stuff he will go elsewhere and people will follow. They might not cancel Netflix but that’s how competition starts and the less competition the better for their bottom line.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Bill Burr said it best: everyone always laughs at the jokes about other groups, but when the jokes are about their group, they can never handle them.
- yetihehe 5y ago
  I've never seen this effect with programming jokes or jokes about programmers. Typical reactions I've seen are always "yeah, so true". But this is only one anecdote, I may be in a bubble, so I ask others: have you seen programmers getting offended by jokes about programmers?
  - a_wild_dandan 5y ago
    I've seen programmers get offended by jokes about tools they use. Some folks take such jokes personally, if the vitriol is any indication.
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    I think it depends how much a certain label/group is core to one's identity. For many people in the Twittersphere, they worship the idea of labbelling themselves and showing it off to others for some reason.
    - mbg721 5y ago
      Labeling yourself is something that can be done effectively in 140 characters.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      While this is true, I think it kind of understates the problem. The issue isn't just "a few vain people put too much emphasis on their superficial group identities", but rather they are part of a broader ideological contingent that puts tremendous emphasis on everyone's superficial group identities. These folks generally believe that these identities are useful bases for decision making (i.e., discrimination in the most literal sense of the term) because to know a person's superficial identities is to completely understand that person. It might be controversial to say (i.e., go ahead and take my Internet Points), but it seems to plainly run completely counter to the equality ideology that gave us the civil rights movement and popularized "tolerance" as a virtue.
toyg 5y ago
It's so sad that the great power of collective action is being wasted in these little squabbles that matter to the 0.0000001% of the population. If tech workers now really "understand their labor power" (as some claim [1]), then choosing to deploy it on these trivial matters shows how privileged that group really is. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/netflix-employees-activism-walkout-dave-chappelle-controversy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/netflix-employ...
- falcolas 5y ago
  Yes, how dare we put our political power behind minorities. It's a travesty against the majority, I agree. /s
  - toyg 5y ago
    Dave Chappelle belongs to a minority too. In fact, a minority of a minority (black comedians) - unlike most trans. Watch the show, he talks about this too.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > Dave Chappelle belongs to a minority too. In fact, a minority of a minority (black comedians) - unlike most trans. “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”.
      - toyg 5y ago
        Playing semantics will not change the fact that this political battle is hugely overblown. There is precious little "activism energy" coming from tech people, and what do they spend it on? A campaign supporting "white men who happen to have strong kinks" against a self-made black comedian. And when you point it out, they go "support minorities!" while in fact shooting down actual bona-fide minorities.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
This is a good first step. The second would be for them to remain out after walking off their jobs and never return, so that Netflix could regain something resembling sanity. Maybe then they could stop manipulating ratings, censoring 30 year old movies and pumping out deranged propaganda instead of entertainment. Sadly, this will not happen. 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.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Would be interesting if this ends up exactly proving Chappelle’s point.
- holytoledo 5y ago
  It already has.
dijksterhuis 5y ago
Here's what Dave had to say in The Closer about his friend Daphne, who killed herself six days after being "dragged" on Twitter for defending her friend. > 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-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer 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.”
holytoledo 5y ago
Don’t bother trying to argue with the mentally ill or the stooges of woke. It’s a waste of time.
kklisura 5y ago
I wonder if Netflix will follow Coinbase path on these issues.
1cvmask 5y ago
`Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system` - Marcus Tullius Cicero. 63 BC 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. - 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://twitter.com/Clayburn/status/1371268469145079809 https://www.indy100.com/ents/bill-burr-wife-tweet-racism-grammys-b1817885 https://www.indy100.com/ents/bill-burr-wife-tweet-racism-gra...
CarelessExpert 5y ago
Man I'm really looking forward to this story blowing over so HN can stop being spammed with this flamebait.

48 points by drewcon 5y ago

CEO Ted Sarandos has apologized and claimed fault. 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!

CodeGlitch 5y ago
Classic CEO error. Stick to your values and principles and never apologies to the mob.

saos 5y ago

Don't bend Netflix. Let them go and hire me!!!

stevespang 5y ago

I stand in solidarity with the guy holding the sign: "We like Dave" - - - cops should have arrested the violator that destroyed his sign

newaccount2021 5y ago

rapidly closing in on Sarandos telling staff they are welcome to vote with their feet

mc32 5y ago

Many things are upsetting to many people. I don't think it's viable to always bow to demands of your most strident members. Chapelle is a dissenter, I think he has as much a right to express his opinion as other provocateurs. We've had shows from Netflix which border on child exploitation and skate somewhat close to CP. So, why would this be out of line? 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.

themodelplumber 5y ago
Things generally upsetting people in general is one thing, but details matter. The reporting describes something more like a question of priorities and ongoing lack of appropriate attention to community dynamics. Worse, it sounds like a situation that could have been avoided. > 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.
- cassac 5y ago
  Should they take all jokes that hurt Christian feelings offline? Or how about anything that is critical of the CCP? Where does it end?
  - robbintt 5y ago
    > add a content warning Why did you jump to taking things offline?
    - cassac 5y ago
      I don’t really think in the end they would accept a scenario where Chapelle would be free to make any content he wants as long as it has a content warning. That was an “at least you should…” not the actual demand. Though we won’t know until they actually present their demands.
  - falcolas 5y ago
    Christians are not an oppressed minority, in any sense of either word. Nor is the CCP. Both of those parties represent real power, both politically and financially, in this world today.

18009420088 5y ago

The bit about trans women is unfunny and hurtful and should remain on Netflix. Trans employees should walk out and protest, then decide whether they have the means / network to move on if they don’t want to work there anymore. 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.

0xebc 5y ago
>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.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Trans are mentally ill and need to be treated as such, as in they need to seek professional help in accepting biological reality. Encouraging them in their delusions which they will never achieve is only hurting them, not helping.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    You are mentally ill and need to treated as such, as in you need to seek professional help in accepting biological reality.
    - dang 5y ago
      Please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do those things, regardless of ideology, because they destroy what this site is supposed to be for. I'm not going to ban your account right now but if you continue to post flamewar comments or ideological battle comments, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and correct this going forward, we'd appreciate it.

cassac 5y ago

If everyone he mocked in his specials walked out of Netflix they would have no employees left. I feel it was exactly his point that only one group continually does that. I also feel that Netflix knows if they remove his stuff he will go elsewhere and people will follow. They might not cancel Netflix but that’s how competition starts and the less competition the better for their bottom line.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Bill Burr said it best: everyone always laughs at the jokes about other groups, but when the jokes are about their group, they can never handle them.

yetihehe 5y ago
I've never seen this effect with programming jokes or jokes about programmers. Typical reactions I've seen are always "yeah, so true". But this is only one anecdote, I may be in a bubble, so I ask others: have you seen programmers getting offended by jokes about programmers?
- a_wild_dandan 5y ago
  I've seen programmers get offended by jokes about tools they use. Some folks take such jokes personally, if the vitriol is any indication.
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  I think it depends how much a certain label/group is core to one's identity. For many people in the Twittersphere, they worship the idea of labbelling themselves and showing it off to others for some reason.
  - mbg721 5y ago
    Labeling yourself is something that can be done effectively in 140 characters.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    While this is true, I think it kind of understates the problem. The issue isn't just "a few vain people put too much emphasis on their superficial group identities", but rather they are part of a broader ideological contingent that puts tremendous emphasis on everyone's superficial group identities. These folks generally believe that these identities are useful bases for decision making (i.e., discrimination in the most literal sense of the term) because to know a person's superficial identities is to completely understand that person. It might be controversial to say (i.e., go ahead and take my Internet Points), but it seems to plainly run completely counter to the equality ideology that gave us the civil rights movement and popularized "tolerance" as a virtue.

toyg 5y ago

It's so sad that the great power of collective action is being wasted in these little squabbles that matter to the 0.0000001% of the population. If tech workers now really "understand their labor power" (as some claim [1]), then choosing to deploy it on these trivial matters shows how privileged that group really is. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/netflix-employees-activism-walkout-dave-chappelle-controversy https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/netflix-employ...

falcolas 5y ago
Yes, how dare we put our political power behind minorities. It's a travesty against the majority, I agree. /s
- toyg 5y ago
  Dave Chappelle belongs to a minority too. In fact, a minority of a minority (black comedians) - unlike most trans. Watch the show, he talks about this too.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Dave Chappelle belongs to a minority too. In fact, a minority of a minority (black comedians) - unlike most trans. “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”.
    - toyg 5y ago
      Playing semantics will not change the fact that this political battle is hugely overblown. There is precious little "activism energy" coming from tech people, and what do they spend it on? A campaign supporting "white men who happen to have strong kinks" against a self-made black comedian. And when you point it out, they go "support minorities!" while in fact shooting down actual bona-fide minorities.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

This is a good first step. The second would be for them to remain out after walking off their jobs and never return, so that Netflix could regain something resembling sanity. Maybe then they could stop manipulating ratings, censoring 30 year old movies and pumping out deranged propaganda instead of entertainment. Sadly, this will not happen. 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.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Would be interesting if this ends up exactly proving Chappelle’s point.

holytoledo 5y ago
It already has.

dijksterhuis 5y ago

Here's what Dave had to say in The Closer about his friend Daphne, who killed herself six days after being "dragged" on Twitter for defending her friend. > 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-family-of-late-transgender-comedian-daphne-dorman-from-the-closer 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.”

holytoledo 5y ago

Don’t bother trying to argue with the mentally ill or the stooges of woke. It’s a waste of time.

kklisura 5y ago

I wonder if Netflix will follow Coinbase path on these issues.

1cvmask 5y ago

`Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system` - Marcus Tullius Cicero. 63 BC 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. - 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://twitter.com/Clayburn/status/1371268469145079809 https://www.indy100.com/ents/bill-burr-wife-tweet-racism-grammys-b1817885 https://www.indy100.com/ents/bill-burr-wife-tweet-racism-gra...

CarelessExpert 5y ago

Man I'm really looking forward to this story blowing over so HN can stop being spammed with this flamebait.