[dmix]

The internet has generated this weird subculture of people who get really really upset at people making jokes. It has a "think of the children" sort of moral panic vibe to it. A lot of it has to do with completely ignoring any context or intention from the source material, which isn't how language works in any other context. Jokes inherently use exaggeration and extreme positions in jest which make them easy targets for misrepresentation.

The even weirder thing is it's finding a reception among weak-willed administrators at various institutions who capitulate under the slightest provocation from these small groups of highly vocal outage mobs (largely because these groups have gotten really good at stirring up controversy, and the low-budget modern internet media is perpetually looking for controversy, legitimate or not).

But if you did a survey of the general population (or the institution's actual customers) instead of just listening to these small mobs you'd find that it really isn't that big of a deal to the vast majority of people. The average person understands context and intent - assuming they heard the original source, not the filtered down unfunny reinterpretations that make the rounds.

I was listening to a "best of Jeff Ross" on Youtube recently and all I could think of was that if any of his stuff had been filtered through these cancel culture people over the last few decades he'd basically be considered the devil instead of one of the funniest people in comedy.

I fear for the future of culture, especially comedy, which thrives in a sort of experimental unfiltered chaos. Maybe it will have to live on in the underground like Samizdat in the Soviet Union.

[Apocryphon]

At what point does criticizing political correctness become as irritating and worthy of shunning as PC scolding itself? Because it's getting to a point where discussions are choked with anti-PC admonishments for every PC statement. It takes two to tangle, after all. Or two to go to culture war.

[0_gravitas]

To be fair in this exchange, the initiating comment was very much a 'pro-PC' statement. The comment got flagged away but it was some strong wording along the lines of "being okay with any politically-incorrect stuff is 'disgusting'". IIRC disagreements and discussions are allowed/encouraged on HN.

[dmix]

We've always had assholes who take things too far in society (Cosmo from Seinfeld/Michael Richards) was one of the first examples. He hasn't had work since and essentially committed social suicide as a response - which I think is becoming the new standard punishment and one that is way out of whack with who we are as humans. We give the appropriate social reaction, but I feel like it goes too far. People make mistakes, they always have.

But we're going through history with a fine-tuned brush and destroying anyone who doesn't fit into our modern conception of socially acceptable.

It'd be dumb to say the PC crowd is always getting it wrong. They do get it right often, but the pitchfork mob career/life ending response is where I part ways.

Where I differ, and I wish more people took a more rational approach to it, is that we're all flawed humans moving through a fucked up world. And we're unfairly destroying manu great minds and contributors in the process using some idealistic and unrealistic standard that none of us will ever achiever.

The end result is that the only people we allow to be leaders are milquetoast, authority-loving, angels who've never experimented in their lives.

This kind of this destroys culture. And the solution is to stop taking these small highly vocal mobs so serious and look at what they are. New idealistic well-intentioned Puritans 2.0.

We need to embrace the chaos and let people get offended again, and move on with our lives, because it really isn't that bad. It's not the way we reach progress.

If you want progress them embrace experimentation of all kinds, not some overton window with an ever growing list of things that are not okay. Or reevaluating the great people in history as if they grew up in the 1990s/early 2000s.

History is littered with mistakes but it's also full of great moments and experimentation and progress. The more we shut down this chaos every time we get offended the less great culture we'll get out of it.

If in the 1700s+ free speech had a clause where no one can get offended ever we'd live in the most boring and backwards world imaginable. The pseudo-progressives are attacking the very freedoms that allows progress to exist. And we need people will balls again to set up and push back. Because we aren't getting it from our university administrators trying to protector their jobs or from corporate pro-diversity divisions that are trying to keep up with culture, so you keep buy their products.

Top-down control of what is and what is not okay from culture is not that solution, period. Not doing that has allowed culture to flourish in the free democratic western states for decades and we're moving backwards, always with the best intentions, but too quickly to realize the side-effects and massive downsides of doing so.

/rant

[Apocryphon]

Every society has different mores and customs, traditions shift over time, and a lot of hand-wringing over PC ends up as tiresome as those who would militantly push PC, cluttering up discussions that have little to nothing to do with these cultural squabbles.