![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's Called IRONY, Brenda! Look It Up.
Sep. 12th, 2019 09:13 amA pal of mine recently ran afoul of the Facebook Thought Police.
He was commenting on an article some earnest progressive had posted about white-winger pols and drug abuse. How remarkable it was that members of this fraternity were largely ignored by the cops while black people etc etc etc.
Well, that’s because white skin has a special hormone that makes white people nice, my friend wrote. Black people lack this hormone, so long prison sentences are justified.
I thought this remark was hilarious, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
But, of course, in the world of political correctness where irony is suspect, it was a big transgression, and he was put in the Internet equivalent of lockdown.
###
I thought of my pal this morning while spending part of my 30-minutes-of-FB-a-day reading through volumes and volumes Dave Chappelle denunciations, which had seemingly sprung up over night.
(What’s behind these spurts of Internet vituperation? They're always so sudden! What spurs them? A question for another time, I’m afraid.)
—Have you seen the new Chappelle special? Victim blaming, trans-phobic, hateful, dismissive, painful to watch.
—It’s not “edgy” to attack marginalized people; it’s called being a bigoted asshole.
—Transphobia sucks. Period.
—All the worst white people love Dave Chappelle.
Note: I'm fairly sure all the people who contributed to the thread above are white.
###
Of course, this was enough to make me watch Sticks & Stones, even though I’ve never been what you might call a Dave Chappelle fan. I’ve just never found Chappelle particularly funny. I didn’t find Sticks & Stones particularly funny either, but I certainly didn’t find it offensive.
LGBT self-stylers are alphabet people—I, for one, am always getting the order of the letters mixed up. What’s the matter? They can’t laugh at themselves? Sensitivity on this issue, it seems to me, is not sensitivity on behalf of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender individuals—of whom I’m certainly one—but sensitivity on behalf of some megalithic collective called the LGBT community that wants to suck up social and political clout so it can bully you into lockstep with its agenda.
Fuck that.
And the most controversial quip, Chappelle’s tongue-in-cheek contention that Michael Jackson’s victims should be grateful that they got their underage dicks sucked by a big celebrity, seemed quite obviously to me to be a 21st century variation on Jonathan Swift’s contention that the Irish could solve their famine problems by eating babies.
It’s called irony, Brenda! Look it up.
###
Of course, irony doesn’t play well on the Internet. Sans facial expressions, sans I’ve-been-in-a-room-with-them context, you can’t ever really know who you’re playing with on the Internet. Literal interpretation is the cyber-default.
And insofar as an ever larger number of social interactions take place online so that online social interaction is increasingly becoming the template for all social interaction, literal interpretation has become the default for all social communication.
UGH.
Just UGH.
Who wants to live in a world filled with concretistic-thinking Social Justice Warriors?
Not me.
He was commenting on an article some earnest progressive had posted about white-winger pols and drug abuse. How remarkable it was that members of this fraternity were largely ignored by the cops while black people etc etc etc.
Well, that’s because white skin has a special hormone that makes white people nice, my friend wrote. Black people lack this hormone, so long prison sentences are justified.
I thought this remark was hilarious, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
But, of course, in the world of political correctness where irony is suspect, it was a big transgression, and he was put in the Internet equivalent of lockdown.
###
I thought of my pal this morning while spending part of my 30-minutes-of-FB-a-day reading through volumes and volumes Dave Chappelle denunciations, which had seemingly sprung up over night.
(What’s behind these spurts of Internet vituperation? They're always so sudden! What spurs them? A question for another time, I’m afraid.)
—Have you seen the new Chappelle special? Victim blaming, trans-phobic, hateful, dismissive, painful to watch.
—It’s not “edgy” to attack marginalized people; it’s called being a bigoted asshole.
—Transphobia sucks. Period.
—All the worst white people love Dave Chappelle.
Note: I'm fairly sure all the people who contributed to the thread above are white.
###
Of course, this was enough to make me watch Sticks & Stones, even though I’ve never been what you might call a Dave Chappelle fan. I’ve just never found Chappelle particularly funny. I didn’t find Sticks & Stones particularly funny either, but I certainly didn’t find it offensive.
LGBT self-stylers are alphabet people—I, for one, am always getting the order of the letters mixed up. What’s the matter? They can’t laugh at themselves? Sensitivity on this issue, it seems to me, is not sensitivity on behalf of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender individuals—of whom I’m certainly one—but sensitivity on behalf of some megalithic collective called the LGBT community that wants to suck up social and political clout so it can bully you into lockstep with its agenda.
Fuck that.
And the most controversial quip, Chappelle’s tongue-in-cheek contention that Michael Jackson’s victims should be grateful that they got their underage dicks sucked by a big celebrity, seemed quite obviously to me to be a 21st century variation on Jonathan Swift’s contention that the Irish could solve their famine problems by eating babies.
It’s called irony, Brenda! Look it up.
###
Of course, irony doesn’t play well on the Internet. Sans facial expressions, sans I’ve-been-in-a-room-with-them context, you can’t ever really know who you’re playing with on the Internet. Literal interpretation is the cyber-default.
And insofar as an ever larger number of social interactions take place online so that online social interaction is increasingly becoming the template for all social interaction, literal interpretation has become the default for all social communication.
UGH.
Just UGH.
Who wants to live in a world filled with concretistic-thinking Social Justice Warriors?
Not me.
