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>But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will

by slg 5y ago

>But IMO the larger issue of cancel culture, is it makes people less likely to say edgy jokes or borderline politically-incorrect statements for fear they will also get "cancelled". This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. Just look up someone like Anthony Jessolnik. Here is his most recent joke on Twitter[1]. Mocking both pedophilia and the death of a 4-year-old. This guy has 1.2m followers and plenty of those are liberals. A talented comedian can joke about anything. I think this narrative comes from the fact that many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke. They see someone "canceled" for a transphobic joke and take it to mean we can't joke about trans people. It isn't the case. I have seen comedians kill with material about trans people in front of young leftist crowds. It is possible. I see the value in joking about these issues. I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life. [1] - https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/1504683841595719681 https://twitter.com/anthonyjeselnik/status/15046838415957196...

ungamedplayer 5y ago
No skin in this race. Perspective is the mechanism that changes the perception of a joke, that's not something the joke teller can influence. Anyone can take offense to anything. Only when it gains critical mass will it be cared about.
javajosh 5y ago
And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here. Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)
- slg 5y ago
  Maybe this reply to my comment wasn't directed specifically at me, but I want to make it clear you are arguing against points I didn't make. I wasn't saying cancel culture doesn't exist. I wasn't saying people don't self-censor. I was instead saying that people who complain about self-censorship often don't understand the reason behind why some things are now objectionable. This results in them painting with too broad of a brush when they talk about that self-censorship and cancel culture. You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.
  - vimy 5y ago
    > You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right. Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything. Take non-binary for example. I’ve looked into it, read the studies and my conclusion is that it’s pseudoscience that deserves to be mocked. But you probably think it’s real so if I joke about it you think I’m a bigot. From my perspective, joking about it is like when we used to mock people who believed in creationism. So what is doing it right if we both have two fundamentally different positions about a subject? ——- I’m not gonna get into a debate over non-binary. That’s not the point here, it’s an example.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      So were you against mocking people who believed in creationism? It sounds like you’re fine with shaming people when you’re in the ingroup, while at the same time you don’t want to be shamed for being part of an outgroup.
      - vimy 5y ago
        I mocked creationism too. You can mock my dying mother for all I care. I wouldn’t like it but believe in your right to say whatever you want.
        5y ago
egypturnash 5y ago
Man that joke’s fucking tasteless. Bonus points for the icon of an impeccably-coiffed white dude sitting above the photo of a black lady he’s making fun of.
irrational 5y ago
But, that is someone who makes a living from making edgy jokes. I think OP was talking about random plumber/professor/programmer Joe/Jill making an edgy joke.
jchw 5y ago
The point wasn’t that saying something racist was acceptable, it’s that a single tweet sent before taking off with racist overtones should not result in losing your career and 50,000 people screaming at you when the plane lands. A Disney star should not openly lambast a 14 year old kid in front of their entire Twitter audience for an edgy ironic tweet. These are real things that happened. To quote Anthony Jeselnik himself, “I get away with it because I’m just the guy who does it.” Anthony built a brand around saying horrible things. I admit he is a talented comic, but that’s not the point; even when South Park misses, people don’t suddenly turn on it and start feigning surprise about how crude it is. “Of course it’s crude; it’s South Park, you idiot.” People say stupid stuff all the time. Read my HN comment history and tell me how long it takes you to get to something I’ve said that’s stupid. I try to self-censor rather heavily by simply trying not to engage in too many controversial topics and I’m sure there’s still some statement or other in this entire corpus of my own comments that would appear pretty ugly in a decontextualized light (and perhaps even with context, I dunno.) Well, thanks to context collapse, that happens all the time. It’s almost the default and exceedingly few people care to check. And if the mob winds up being wrong, do 50,000 people apologize? Do you get your job prospects back? OR: does it get ignored, you get a permanent set of headlines in the search results for your name, and your mere association with unscrupulous topics limits your potential indefinitely? Yeah, I am pretty sure I already know the answer here. And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once. Even if you did feel it was a proportionate response, somehow, it’s hard to argue that it actually accomplishes much of value. However, it has lead to some documented suicide attempts! So that’s just peachy. Maybe people should stop trying so hard to justify vigilante internet mobs. Even if its not exactly a lynching, it certainly is character assassination, harassment, and frankly, disgusting shitty human behavior that is hard to justify.
- nandhinianand 5y ago
  Okay.. this comment finally got me to login and chime-in on this topic. > And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once. Completely agree... No arguments with this .. And as always there is a but.. (Note: following is not a personal or specific counter-argument to this comment). The general calling it "cancel-culture" or "leftist political correctness forcing it's way (Aka fascist-leftist" narrative misses the point as much as the common "it's rare, but these people deserve it. They're horrible people" narrative. The way i look at it "freedom to innovate, and have a system that sets up a market that encourages innovation" has brought us this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage centered way of connecting to people. Those employers are "free-to-fire" as much as each person in the mob that responds with rage is free to express their opinion and the one person who uncensoredly tweeted something is free to make mistakes. So what's the solution, I don't know anything specific outside of going all mystic/mythic/wishful saying we should all practice empathy better, we should find better ways of connecting to each other and may be (social networking and recommendation) algorithms that can help deeper connections than shallow ones. To be honest, there's a skeptical(and pessimistic and fearful) side of me that thinks that's not gonna happen and we'll end up in a divergent world(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/). The other solution proposed is (completely free speech with pure anonymity based protection from society based outlash) also suffers from the problems like minority voices getting drowned out. Majority opinions and stereotypes being elevated to "The capital "T" Truth"(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-is-about-life-before-death-it-is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-...) rather than being viewed in perspective.. > “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is a noble sentiment, but I do wonder how much this is true in what we have managed to implement and wonder if we would ever be able to implement something like this without going to "minority report" level extreme censoring and monitoring. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9252490 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=925249... ) or with some humour(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0).
jacquesm 5y ago
> many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke Many people don't see the difference between a joke about racism and racism.
- swores 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's true <edit, snipped out a preface I had about my not-racist self, as after writing the whole comment I don't think I need to fear looking like a racist justifying their jokes, though perhaps I will look like someone who can't write a funny joke> A joke about racism could be in the form of a story where "Person A says racist thing (that we don't get to hear), then Person B hits them". Sure, that's nowhere near funny enough to be called a joke, but it is simultaneously about racism while surely not being remotely racist? I appreciate that a lot of the time people will define a joke as "about racism" while ignoring the fact that it ALSO contained racism - after all, if the actual racism in the joke isn't funny then why are you making the joke be about racism at all? - but I've definitely heard off-hand jokes that were about racism without having any racism in them (either in content or intent). Not to mention that if you make a joke about racism that gets directed against your own race, it's hard to see many people viewing that joke as racist in itself.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I'm not saying that people that can see the difference don't exist. I'm saying that many people exist that don't see that difference.
    - swores 5y ago
      Ah, sorry for misunderstanding, that is indeed what you clearly wrote I just interpreted it without thinking as including yourself in the 'many people'.
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        No problem!
scns 5y ago
Can parents laugh about a joke like this?
AussieWog93 5y ago
>I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life. I don't think the average non-"woke" person sees much value in transphobic/racist jokes either - at least not in public. That said, I don't think there would be anywhere near the level of backlash if the average activist simply aired their disapproval in a normal way (ie, expressing discomfort at a live show, or leaving a comment online calling a comedian a talentless hack for making shit transphobic jokes) rather than vindictively trying to destroy their entire life.
snomad 5y ago
> This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. What would be your explanation for Nimesh Patel being removed from stage at Columbia? https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/former-snl-writer-nimesh-patel-kicked-off-stage-columbia-university-inappropriate-standup-set-181726667.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/former-snl-writer-nimesh...

by slg 5y ago

ungamedplayer 5y ago

No skin in this race. Perspective is the mechanism that changes the perception of a joke, that's not something the joke teller can influence. Anyone can take offense to anything. Only when it gains critical mass will it be cared about.

javajosh 5y ago

And I'm so tired of people responding "nope, there's nothing to see here, [good] people aren't being cancelled, and no-one is afraid to speak their mind." It's dehumanizing. Or maybe gaslighting. You're telling them that they aren't seeing and feeling the thing they are seeing and feeling. You're not arguing against their take, just denying their experience. Cancel culture exists. It hurts people, and it generates fear. Heresy exists and it is punished. Most people are self-censuring heavily now. I have experienced it myself in personal and professional contexts, and I am a moderate liberal. The OP mentions the fact that both sides always have truthful anecdotes to support their positions, and use it to attack the other. And that is what you've done here. Regardless of the details of cancel culture, how could you think a system like that could ever possibly work? When there is status to be gained from making an allegation then they'll be made, true or not. When allegation is enough to generate a mob, which affects your employer, your friends and family, you're entire life, this is a disproportionate punishment even if the allegation were true. But the accused rarely, if ever, even gets to speak in their own defense. It's called "social justice" but it's not a court, there are no rules, and the judge jury and executioner feels just fine if they never take a dispassionate look at facts. This system, applied to anything, is the opposite of justice. To believe otherwise is to reveal a deeply flawed understanding of how human beings respond to incentives. (Of course, one way to get around this problem is to redefine "guilt" to require only that the victim feel bad. But again, this incentivizes victims to feel bad, and somehow everyone forgets that people feel bad for all sorts of reasons, sometimes having nothing to do with the accused.)

slg 5y ago
Maybe this reply to my comment wasn't directed specifically at me, but I want to make it clear you are arguing against points I didn't make. I wasn't saying cancel culture doesn't exist. I wasn't saying people don't self-censor. I was instead saying that people who complain about self-censorship often don't understand the reason behind why some things are now objectionable. This results in them painting with too broad of a brush when they talk about that self-censorship and cancel culture. You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right.
- vimy 5y ago
  > You can still make edgy and politically incorrect jokes today if you do it right. Not really. Doing it right means adhering to the left’s idea of what is right. Your whole position is based on the left being correct about everything. Take non-binary for example. I’ve looked into it, read the studies and my conclusion is that it’s pseudoscience that deserves to be mocked. But you probably think it’s real so if I joke about it you think I’m a bigot. From my perspective, joking about it is like when we used to mock people who believed in creationism. So what is doing it right if we both have two fundamentally different positions about a subject? ——- I’m not gonna get into a debate over non-binary. That’s not the point here, it’s an example.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    So were you against mocking people who believed in creationism? It sounds like you’re fine with shaming people when you’re in the ingroup, while at the same time you don’t want to be shamed for being part of an outgroup.
    - vimy 5y ago
      I mocked creationism too. You can mock my dying mother for all I care. I wouldn’t like it but believe in your right to say whatever you want.
      - 5y ago

egypturnash 5y ago

Man that joke’s fucking tasteless. Bonus points for the icon of an impeccably-coiffed white dude sitting above the photo of a black lady he’s making fun of.

irrational 5y ago

But, that is someone who makes a living from making edgy jokes. I think OP was talking about random plumber/professor/programmer Joe/Jill making an edgy joke.

jchw 5y ago

The point wasn’t that saying something racist was acceptable, it’s that a single tweet sent before taking off with racist overtones should not result in losing your career and 50,000 people screaming at you when the plane lands. A Disney star should not openly lambast a 14 year old kid in front of their entire Twitter audience for an edgy ironic tweet. These are real things that happened. To quote Anthony Jeselnik himself, “I get away with it because I’m just the guy who does it.” Anthony built a brand around saying horrible things. I admit he is a talented comic, but that’s not the point; even when South Park misses, people don’t suddenly turn on it and start feigning surprise about how crude it is. “Of course it’s crude; it’s South Park, you idiot.” People say stupid stuff all the time. Read my HN comment history and tell me how long it takes you to get to something I’ve said that’s stupid. I try to self-censor rather heavily by simply trying not to engage in too many controversial topics and I’m sure there’s still some statement or other in this entire corpus of my own comments that would appear pretty ugly in a decontextualized light (and perhaps even with context, I dunno.) Well, thanks to context collapse, that happens all the time. It’s almost the default and exceedingly few people care to check. And if the mob winds up being wrong, do 50,000 people apologize? Do you get your job prospects back? OR: does it get ignored, you get a permanent set of headlines in the search results for your name, and your mere association with unscrupulous topics limits your potential indefinitely? Yeah, I am pretty sure I already know the answer here. And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once. Even if you did feel it was a proportionate response, somehow, it’s hard to argue that it actually accomplishes much of value. However, it has lead to some documented suicide attempts! So that’s just peachy. Maybe people should stop trying so hard to justify vigilante internet mobs. Even if its not exactly a lynching, it certainly is character assassination, harassment, and frankly, disgusting shitty human behavior that is hard to justify.

nandhinianand 5y ago
Okay.. this comment finally got me to login and chime-in on this topic. > And I don’t care how rare it is. It’s not rare enough. It’s not good if it happens once. “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” And again, I agree that sometimes people just said something shitty or at least that got interpreted shittily, but I have never seen something even once where it didn’t feel like a horridly disproportionate response. Not even once. Completely agree... No arguments with this .. And as always there is a but.. (Note: following is not a personal or specific counter-argument to this comment). The general calling it "cancel-culture" or "leftist political correctness forcing it's way (Aka fascist-leftist" narrative misses the point as much as the common "it's rare, but these people deserve it. They're horrible people" narrative. The way i look at it "freedom to innovate, and have a system that sets up a market that encourages innovation" has brought us this current social media centered around outrage, fear, anger and rage centered way of connecting to people. Those employers are "free-to-fire" as much as each person in the mob that responds with rage is free to express their opinion and the one person who uncensoredly tweeted something is free to make mistakes. So what's the solution, I don't know anything specific outside of going all mystic/mythic/wishful saying we should all practice empathy better, we should find better ways of connecting to each other and may be (social networking and recommendation) algorithms that can help deeper connections than shallow ones. To be honest, there's a skeptical(and pessimistic and fearful) side of me that thinks that's not gonna happen and we'll end up in a divergent world(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/). The other solution proposed is (completely free speech with pure anonymity based protection from society based outlash) also suffers from the problems like minority voices getting drowned out. Majority opinions and stereotypes being elevated to "The capital "T" Truth"(https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-is-about-life-before-death-it-is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/224865-the-capital-t-truth-...) rather than being viewed in perspective.. > “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” This is a noble sentiment, but I do wonder how much this is true in what we have managed to implement and wonder if we would ever be able to implement something like this without going to "minority report" level extreme censoring and monitoring. (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9252490 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=925249... ) or with some humour(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXPOw2unxy0).

jacquesm 5y ago

> many people don't see a difference between a joke about racism and a racist joke Many people don't see the difference between a joke about racism and racism.

swores 5y ago
I'm not sure that's true <edit, snipped out a preface I had about my not-racist self, as after writing the whole comment I don't think I need to fear looking like a racist justifying their jokes, though perhaps I will look like someone who can't write a funny joke> A joke about racism could be in the form of a story where "Person A says racist thing (that we don't get to hear), then Person B hits them". Sure, that's nowhere near funny enough to be called a joke, but it is simultaneously about racism while surely not being remotely racist? I appreciate that a lot of the time people will define a joke as "about racism" while ignoring the fact that it ALSO contained racism - after all, if the actual racism in the joke isn't funny then why are you making the joke be about racism at all? - but I've definitely heard off-hand jokes that were about racism without having any racism in them (either in content or intent). Not to mention that if you make a joke about racism that gets directed against your own race, it's hard to see many people viewing that joke as racist in itself.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I'm not saying that people that can see the difference don't exist. I'm saying that many people exist that don't see that difference.
  - swores 5y ago
    Ah, sorry for misunderstanding, that is indeed what you clearly wrote I just interpreted it without thinking as including yourself in the 'many people'.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      No problem!

scns 5y ago

Can parents laugh about a joke like this?

AussieWog93 5y ago

>I don't see the value in making a racist, sexist, transphobic, or overall bigoted joke made at the expense of innocent people simply trying to live their life. I don't think the average non-"woke" person sees much value in transphobic/racist jokes either - at least not in public. That said, I don't think there would be anywhere near the level of backlash if the average activist simply aired their disapproval in a normal way (ie, expressing discomfort at a live show, or leaving a comment online calling a comedian a talentless hack for making shit transphobic jokes) rather than vindictively trying to destroy their entire life.

snomad 5y ago

> This comes up all the time that "you can't make edgy jokes anymore", but it isn't true. What would be your explanation for Nimesh Patel being removed from stage at Columbia? https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/former-snl-writer-nimesh-patel-kicked-off-stage-columbia-university-inappropriate-standup-set-181726667.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/former-snl-writer-nimesh...