[thelastaelor]

>I don't think teenagers being racist is a normal activity that is whimsical fun.

Well you're wrong. Allow me to lay this out as thoroughly as I can: Teenagers love being edgy, i.e. they love outrage for the sake of outrage. Hitler is outrageous (and well-known), thus he features prominently in "rebellious" humor. There's nothing wrong with this, because the premise of the joke rests precisely ON the fact that associated atrocities are inappropriate, or perhaps the logic is absurd. The jokes only work because Hitler, or more generally racism, or whatever, is wrong, furthermore that the general consensus is indeed that is is wrong. In fact, the more you kvetch, the funnier it is (to a teenager).

Now, perhaps modern "jokes" have you confused into thinking that comedy is just a smug-and-response between some wank and the audience, but this is not so. Personally I want grit, I want ambiguity, I want the full range of human experience out of life. Humor is many things, but it is at least a way of getting a handle on the unsavory inevitabilities of life. If you want to succumb to a fear-based ideology and spend your life constructing an unlivable, bureaucratic tangle of anti-boogeyman legislation, go ahead, but do the humans a favor and leave us out of it.

>There are actual consequences to people.

No, there aren't. No child is being unknowingly radicalized by inappropriate jokes (except maybe as a response to the twits taking up arms against them).

[Larrikin]

Most teenagers are rebellious in that they don't want to listen to their parents, drink and try drugs, stay out past curfew

Most teenagers aren't advocating that Hitler had good ideas and that all black people should be lynched. Just because you have experience with these racists (hopefully you weren't one as a teenager) does not mean its ok to pretend that its fine to normalize this behavior

It used to be considered "normal" to bully and ruin the lives of gay people as a teenager too. Now you'll be hard pressed to find anybody under eighteen that would willingly do that to a classmate. Society has changed and shitty behavior like racism, antisemitism, and homophobia get called out as they should.

When they don't you end up with groups like the proud boys and closet white supremacist like the grad student in the article.

[thelastaelor]

>Most teenagers aren't advocating that Hitler had good ideas and that all black people should be lynched.

You're right, they aren't.

>the proud boys

ah yes, the infamous multi-cultural white supremacist group who marry black women

[jgwil2]

>>There are actual consequences to people.

>No, there aren't. No child is being unknowingly radicalized by inappropriate jokes (except maybe as a response to the twits taking up arms against them).

OP already provided an example of consequences. Not radicalization of white kids but racial trauma to black kids.