They did and said some shitty things, though I wouldn’t group them together, because Ghandi’s work was much more important and far-reaching than Teresa’s. But yes, I would mock them. They were human beings like anyone else.
Also:
The dude had a sense of humor.
I’ve been trying to process this most of the day. This phrasing of it makes the most sense. Thanks. I think what’s throwing me off is that SJW is generally a pejorative used against people who care, and (in many cases) the use of that label marks the speaker as someone who thinks them worthy of pejoratives. And so the coining of ‘Social Justice Kittens’ (combined with some really obnoxious and non-representative quotes) makes it sound like its making fun of the same people that the people who use SJW as a pejorative are trying to mock.
And I can see the difficulty. I mean, I don’t know of a phrase that’s used exclusively for the people who take things to the extreme that the quotes in the calendar do. If there were, that hypothetical label would be the obvious choice to riff off of for this. And so absent that ideal launching point for the riff, it means that I just don’t find this funny. Fortunately, not everyone has to have the same sense of humor. So for those of you who do find it funny, congratulations!
I’m with you. LiarTown’s mockery of “social justice”, for me, was always a blot on something I otherwise loved.
There are people whose anxiety, shame and hurt leads them to always look for others to blame, to shift that hurt onto. You can find them in every political party, every religion, every demographic. But they are far more concentrated in conservatives and supporters of the status quo. It should be obvious that scared people more commonly flock to established ideas than radical ones. Also, those scared supporters of the powerful are far more likely to be violent in defense of their hurt feelings. For every laughably preachy left-winger there at 10 angry authoritarians who are so scared by life that they will punch you in the face.
Like when people mock vegans for being preachy. Maybe many people have had an experience with a preachy vegan that stuck with them. I’ve been vegetarian and vegan in my life. During that period I was regularly lectured by people about how I should eat meat. Like I would order a veggie burger and strangers would spontaneously tell me about how there is nothing wrong with eating meat. Black people get lectured about what they ought to do to stop being the target of racism way more than white people get lectured about not being racist. Women get advised about how to avoid being raped way more than men get told not to rape them.
Lots of comedians complain about political correctness and how you can’t say anything anymore. If you say something racist or sexist then you get criticized on social media, you might lose advertisers and gigs. But the reality isn’t as bad as people portray it. Check out Michael Richards’ imdb page. Compare the gap before the laugh factory incident to the one after. Saying racist shit seemed to revive rather than kill his career. Generally people apologize and get past it. Roseanne lost her spot on her own show, but her net worth is $80M. She’ll be fine.
Kathy Griffin did an apparently line-crossing picture with a severed Trump head. She also appears to be doing okay now after an initial backlash, but try searching “Roseanne death threats” and “Kathy griffin death threats” on google. The risk of offending conservatives is bombs. The risk of offending the social justice crowd is posts like the ones highlighted in the calendar.
Chris Rock said that comedy is 80% noticing things. To me this is reinforcing rather than noticing a fairly obvious inversion of truth that our culture widely props up. Unless including “It’s not my problem if you are offended by the truth” is an insane meta-joke mocking the people who enjoy the calendar for having that precise attitude towards people who would be offended by the calendar. The irony of that one is dizzying.
If it’s good enough for Frank Drebin, it’s good enough for me:
Yep. I know what she needs, and it ain’t social justice, now what I’m saying! /s
I’d argue that this silly calendar is making fun of that poor woman to the same extent Portlandia’s Women and Women First sketches make fun of Christine Blasey Ford. I just don’t think those are the targets.
I think it’s dangerous to place human beings in a category beyond satire. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, should all be fair game. Same for the Pope, Einstein, Steinem, and Gandhi. Sacred cows should be poked from time to time, I think, lest we forget that human beings (and political movements) are all imperfect in some respects.
This is intriguing…
“Social Justice Kittens” is basically another version of the Simpsons character Mrs. Lovejoy and her “who will think of the children??!!!” It’s not mocking social justice, it’s mocking SJWs who are unbearable. I have friends who fit that category, but I’m still their friend. I put up with their occasional ridiculousness and don’t shun them, even as they shun other mutual friends over misunderstandings and zealotry.
Yes, the problems of the right are far more concerning and dangerous than the occasional SJW going too far, but that doesn’t mean anyone on our side is allowed to be a dick or a fool in the pursuit of the higher goal.
Humour can be a very personal thing and disagreeing that something is funny can feel like a personal affront. I think you are making the point that humour is unaccountable, sort of like sexual attraction or preference of ice cream flavours. I don’t think I agree with that, but I’m not going to go on excessively about it either.
I don’t think that laughing at this tells me you are a “bad person” or that you lack empathy. I’d be willing to wager if you met a person who genuinely did find their masculinity to be like a disease (e.g. they had attempted suicide to escape it) you’d be very sympathetic to them.
So if you read that and think of Fred Armisen saying it in a sketch, sure, it’s funny. But if you read that and think of real people who feel like parts of their own psyches are diseases, it’s sad. Whether it comes across as funny or not has a lot to do with how charitable we are to the complete anonymous people who said these things in an unknown context.
I don’t like that the piece, funny or not, primes us to think uncharitably of other people by (not meant to be exhaustive):
That’s not quite it. To be clear, I was more pointing out that finding this thing funny, or not, doesn’t necessarily tell us something about one’s character. Someone can find it funny because they love mocking SJWs in all their forms and just want to be an asshole, or they might find it funny because they think it pokes gentle fun at some of their own excesses. Someone can not find it funny because they are a self-righteous prig, or because they are empathizing with some of the underlying sentiments and putting them in different contexts.
For context, this piece reminds me of some extremely silly people I’ve had to deal with over the course of my life who were in need of satire (as well of some my own more cringey statements as a youth who knew everything about everything). The college sophomore holding court at the coffee shop about colonization and communism while his parents paid for his tuition and car, the neighborhood crank who wanted to insert a plank about boycotting Israel into the school board meeting minutes, we’ve all either dealt with them or been them at one point, and that’s who I choose to chuckle at when reading this.
But, to be even more clear, I understand your point and where you’re coming from, so I appreciate the thoughtful conversation.
Interesting Twitter thread.
Plus I’d never heard of him before, nicely done.
Why is this somehow “very silly”? Should privileged people not support more equitable economic systems? Should they not be concerned about colonialism and neo-colonialism? Should they not argue that collage tuition should be free for everyone, even though it is not personally a problem for them? Is accepting free tuition and a car for yourself some how contrary to those opinions? Something like, “put on your own hairshirt first”. Or, live in poverty in solidarity with those worse off until we can achieve a more equal system?
This is a silly way of thinking! Like people mocking as champaign socialists and somehow considering them irrelevant because they don’t personally suffer from the problems that they worry about on a wider scale in society. I want people who are well-off arguing for higher taxes for themselves and for redistributive policies. Politics should see further than to the end of you own nose. Not just a question of “how could I be better off.”, but “what kind of society would I like for everyone to live in.”
Perhaps you and I have different life experiences and you never encountered the kind of person I was referencing, with all the zeal of the converted, the self-righteousness of youth, enough slogans and buzzwords to choke a camel, and all the intellectual depth of a sidewalk puddle.
ETA: Sorry, TB, I clearly hit “reply” to the wrong comment.
Yep. Carry on, don’t mind me.
Sure I have. Plenty even. The self-righteousness of youth, as you say, exceedingly annoying. But why mention that the guy got his tuition and car paid for by his parents? That’s really rather irrelevant, and shades into considering everyone who is leftist and rich as somehow hypocritical.
Same reason you mentioned youth, even though not every young person is necessarily a self-righteous know-it-all. But it’s part of a package of traits I was referencing that are sometimes found together and produce a certain result I think most of us are familiar with.
Well, not all youth, for sure. But most of the worse ones are young and get over it in time. So, really, no big deal. It is important for wealthier people to support politics that are not “in their own economic self-interest”. I’m all for that. Better to have the annoying, young, rich socialist/communist/SJW, than the annoying, young, rich libertarian. (They exist too, and are just as insufferable)
Um… okay. How is that bad? Do you have equal contempt for a Rand follower pontificating about the morality of the markets, too?
Not at all equal contempt, tenfold. I’d take a hundred of the annoying doofuses cloaking themselves in caricatures of social justice for every horrible Randian jerk who is also a caricature but won’t even accidentally do some good at some point. The leftist caricature makes me roll my eyes and chuckle at some of their excesses, but the wannabe fascist doofus makes me fear for our country and wish things upon them that I can’t say here.
Please, please don’t misunderstand me: I am not taking some above-it-all bullshit position that the left and right are equally silly, or that they’re just two sides of the same coin They most definitely are not. I am simply addressing the point of discussion about whether one can poke fun or satirize folks who espouse some of the more caricatured social justice sloganeering.
Some folks I agree with politically also happen to be self-serious caricatures, sometimes, and that is funny to laugh at, sometimes. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that.
