Many things are upsetting to many people. I don't think it's viable to always bow to demands of your most strident members. Chapelle is a dissenter, I think he has as much a right to express his opinion as other provocateurs. We've had shows from Netflix which border on child exploitation and skate somewhat close to CP. So, why would this be out of line?
I watched it and it was biting but wasn't hateful. It questioned certain things. Maybe there was some jealousy and usurpation (in general terms taking over the focus of civil rights).
Chapelle is charismatic and steadfast. It would do no one any service to try to disparage him as I think that would backfire given the reach of his audience.
Things generally upsetting people in general is one thing, but details matter. The reporting describes something more like a question of priorities and ongoing lack of appropriate attention to community dynamics. Worse, it sounds like a situation that could have been avoided.
> Organizers did not specify their demands ahead of the rally, although Preston said the event would call for content that prioritizes "the safety and dignity of all marginalized communities."
> Transgender Netflix employee Terra Field has called on the streamer to add a content warning to "The Closer," and to promote more "queer and trans comedians and talent."
There is a lot of hurt and painful experience inside these messages to Netflix. The demands don't exactly seem extraordinary in that context either.
I don’t really think in the end they would accept a scenario where Chapelle would be free to make any content he wants as long as it has a content warning. That was an “at least you should…” not the actual demand. Though we won’t know until they actually present their demands.
Thats what you claim. If you talk to many Christians, they 100% believe they are being oppressed and that secularists and Atheists are coming to destroy their faith. Who are you to deny their grievances.
As for the CCP, there are plenty that claim that anti-CCP is anti-Chinese racism and has no place on the stage
Someone who looks at them and sees that they are the majority religion in the Western world, and have politicians everywhere pushing their talking points and morals on everybody else.
Once again, that is what you claim, in the same way that right-wingers point to the fact that we have had a black-president so racism isn't a problem anymore.
Why do your claims have more truthiness than theirs?
Christianity accounts for 2.3 Billion people in the world, the next highest is Islam at 1.9 Billion. Unaffiliated (of which Athiests are only a portion) is only 1.2 Billion worldwide. Thus, Christianity is, by definition, a majority.
In one example to prove my second point, politicians in Texas are pushing Christian morality around abortion into laws. This is the opposite of being oppressed.
> Thus, Christianity is, by definition, a majority.
No, its a plurality, which is a minority that is bigger than any other minority when there is bo majority.
OTOH, the popular use of “minority” that is being referenced doesn't mean mathematical minority, it means “historically systematically oppressed group”; it evolved from the language around race in the US, where whites were the majority and minorities (especially blacks) were oppressed on the basis of race, but the key reference is the oppression not the numerical relationship.
Literally every single institutional aspect of the Western World; entertainment, media, education, big business, even the alphabet agencies ... aggressively push LGBTQ/anti-racist grievance theology all day long every day. They never, _ever_ shut up about it (this is why you can't even clone a repo these days without being made aware that BLM exists). The only ones who don't push this constantly are (some) Republican politicians and religious institutions.
So spare me. You are not punching up, or "fighting the power". Your religion is the power.
Paranoia != reality. Just because Christians in the West "100% believe" atheists and secularists are coming to destroy their faith doesn't make it true. Meanwhile this "oppressed group" is slowly but surely making theocracy a reality in the United States.
Christians are most certainly oppressed. It’s totally socially acceptable to mock them, assume all priests are pedophiles, assume they don’t understand science, etc.
What an incredible statement to assert, so confidently and so very wrong.
I am not a Christian, but you are incorrect - Christians are an oppressed minority in plenty places in the world. Persecuted, oppressed, killed. And it’s not a “one off” or an exception, in happens in many countries. A cursory Google will give you many examples.
Downvoted, I presume because I didn't give explicit examples; wasn't able to at the time but here's a list of countries where Christians face persecution from a US report: Burma, China, Eritrea, India, Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Vietnam.
A country I was surprised not to see on that list is Indonesia, which came to mind immediately. Take the conflict in Maluku, where Christians were forced to convert, or the eviction of the Christian minority from Banda. Example article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55140847
Not many Christians are killed in the west, but in Africa and the middle east large numbers are being murdered. Especially in places like Nigeria by militant muslim groups such as Boko Haram or Fulani. You can find references on google from news reports of mass murders if you like, or read the state department reports. E.g.
I find it funny that there's been virtually no discussion about his trans comedian friend (forget their name) and how the bullying they received because she stuck up for Chappelle drove her to suicide. You'd think the trans community should stop and reflect on why this happened. But nope, apparently their death is justified because Chappelle bad!
I have friends involved in the LGBT community since forever, and even them openly admit that the trans community is a cesspool. One thing that has become abundantly clear through history is that even marginalized groups, once empowered, have the potential (and often a vengeful inclination) to make others suffer.
Yes. Empowerment is mistaken to mean power and authority over others instead of power and control over one's own destiny. When so distorted, such a "community" becomes a dominance hierarchy where the most aggrieved wins. History shows it is never healthy, it merely perfects bullying and viciousness.
> I have friends involved in the LGBT community since forever, and even them openly admit that the trans community is a cesspool.
Is there even a "trans community"? As far as I can tell, they try to stick together with the LGB crowd, rather successfully. The groups that are skeptical of T founded their own organizations, but I'd say they're very much a minority. Trans-progressivism is very much main stream, also as far as laws in different countries are concerned.
> and how the bullying they received because she stuck up for Chappelle drove her to suicide
Thats exactly what Chappelle did not say. He said that the bulling might not caused the suicide, but it sure did not help.
I find it baffling that he developed a quite deep relationship with her - a transgender person - gave her a golden ticket (frontrunning for of the biggest comedians) as a token of appreciation and he gets called out as anti trans person.
He deep cuts all of those fake virtue signalling people who do nothing and sacrifice noting for 'the cause', he walked away from the money of questionable hollywood people he took a stand. Maybe thats what irks those people?
> I find it baffling that he developed a quite deep relationship with her - a transgender person - gave her a golden ticket (frontrunning for of the biggest comedians) as a token of appreciation and he gets called out as anti trans person.
As a Black person, the most common and tired defense of White racists has always been “Look at this one Black person I treated well, that proves I’m not a racist.”
I guess its some kind of progress that that's now a defense against charges of bigotry by Black people as well as against them.
You are getting downvoted because you are missing the point so profoundly, that is hard to begin why its wrong.
The 'I am not racist I have a black friend' is used for a token acquaintance 'prove' you cannot be racist.
There were some really deep points made there, my favourite was (I paraphrase) "i dont need you to understand me, I need you to acknowledge my human experience".
Just because Chappelle and others are not 100% OK with everything that X movement/group is saying it doesn't mean he and others are anti-X.
The problem is with people's lack of nuance - the black and white thinking, and not listening/reading actual source of the topic :p when speaking out.
> The problem is with people's lack of nuance - the black and white thinking, and not listening/reading actual source of the topic :p when speaking out.
This is what makes me sad. When someone says, "A is B", they don't just say "A is B", they demand that you accept this view. You cannot say "A is almost B", you cannot ask "is A 100% B?" you can't even say "let's talk about it!" You either agree to a given viewset 100%, or are labelled as an enemy, hater and whatnot.
And we do deal with situations that are nuanced. Not just that, they have real-life implications for the whole society. Jess and Scott Smith are suing Loudoun County because the views that were imposed on them led to a tragedy. It seems as if in a race towards extreme progressivism the common sense has been lost.
If you have an argument to make, make it, but trying to marshal current net voting as evidence of support so that you can make an ad populum argument is kind of dumb, in part because ad populum is a fallacy, in part because there is never any support for your attribution of motive to voting, and also in part because net vote totals are...rather fluid on HN.
I see you got nothing to say so you attack random non points.
Claiming intellectual superiority right after being called out that you make statements on subject you did not bother looking into is actually dumb.
As a matter of fact I did not used actual ad populum rather i pointed out the reason why people downvoted you, I made an argument WHY you were incorrect and not told you that you are wrong because you are downvoted.
This is making it about Chappelle again, but clearly the issue as related in the news reports is more about a past-due dialog between Netflix and those constituent parts it theoretically values. Chappelle is an example but it doesn't seem to be the whole story, intense in various details though it may be.
While I completely agree with the general sentiment of your comment, I believe that it has not been asserted that the bullying was the main factor for her death. At least as far as what Chappelle said during the show.
You make good points. It is also notable that he made fun of just about everyone in that special — from blacks, to whites, to Jews — just to a lesser extent. And I think he did that on purpose. Nobody and nothing is off limits. We all can find relief and humility in comedy.
It’s often the case that minorities wear parts of an identity so as to show some kind of immutable and unique right against prejudice. But the sooner we realize that our differences are opportunities to unite against intolerance and bigotry, the sooner we can stop drawing lines in the same about whose experience is more painful or inequitable than another’s.
I’ve heard rabbis deliver sermons on slavery drawing parallels between the plight of Jews to the African slave trade. The point isn’t that Jews get to say “oh I was enslaved too so whatever.” Rather, it’s an opportunity to say, “Hell yeah, I recognize oppression, and let’s right those wrongs together.”
Not one community and not LGBTQ+ gets to be the sole victim. Nobody gets to dominate the outrage scene on Twitter. Coalition building and tolerance require humility, and pretending like one’s group has a greater need for equality or accommodation defeats the point.
Most things like this are organized by bad-faith actors that know that his skit wasn't hateful. The powers-that-be have learned how to create viral movements. They know how to get would-be-activists spun up until their brains turn off. These are the left-wing equivalent of Trump-supporters.
People got up in arms about his last stand up. It was not offensive at all. But you couldn't say that, because the people had already made up their minds.
Corporations know how to get people spun up, and they're doing it with Chapelle again. They want to cancel him, because he is dangerous to the right wing, because he is charismatic and articulate. He can get points across clearly. If he became the new Jon Stewart, he could siphon a lot of control away from the right. They need to neutralize him before he decides to go political.
> I watched it and it was biting but wasn't hateful. It questioned certain things.
This line of thought is rejected by modern radicals. To question is tantamount to outright hating. Watching Chapelle's special was, for me, a marvelous breath of fresh air and I hope people like him can somehow manage to continue making a living despite not observing radical dogma.
They’ll end up carving out a category of “black people who are white inside” and start putting him and others in this bucket, and slander the bucket as much as possible while running back to their own blackness or whatever.
The Jews use a similar tactic whenever they want to slander whites but still carry an air of “otherness” and claim they’re Jewish. It’s trite, but that’s the game these people play.
There's quite a bit of difference between government-imposed consequences and social consequences. Otherwise in a sense we're all "free" to murder and steal, everywhere, in every country.
Not true. Freedom of speech in the US prevents the US government for levying consequences against you for what you said. This is not the case in North Koreas
That's only because they couldn't care less what you or I say most almost all of the time.
Instead, democratic governments (especially violence-shy Western ones) use the Official Secrets Act [or local equivalent] to prevent the people that are privy to information the governments do care about from ever talking about it.
So, are you saying that people shouldn't be held to the consequences of their actions, because the North Korean government does the same?
Pretty sure that's a logical fallacy: Reductio ad absurdum to be specific. And that's on top of the difference between the State and its power lawfully backed by lethal force and society which lacks the same.
>So, are you saying that people shouldn't be held to the consequences of their actions, because the North Korean government does the same?
No. No one is saying that. No one has ever said that, because it doesn't make any sense. Of course all actions have consequences. Of course saying something hurtful will cause others to react negatively. No one is contesting this. What people are contesting is that a very small but highly vocal group of people who seemingly get offended by everything can demand that the rest of us force consequences on people that hurt their feelings.
Right now, there's a small group of netflix employees planning some kind of protest. That is their right to do, that is a consequence for netflix producing this comedy special. The problem with the "freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" line is that it always seems to be a very small group demanding that some larger group bow to their demands and force consequences on someone that wouldn't receive them otherwise. In this case, this very small group is demanding that dave chappelle or netflix suffer consequences for producing his special. But according to rotten tomatoes, and most of the comments I read on the internet, is that the overwhelming majority of people thought it was funny.
"Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" means that if I call your mother a prostitute, I might get punched in the face. It does not mean that if a digital content producer airs a comedy special you don't like, that anyone who doesn't like it can demand that it be taken down and then say "well those are just the consequences!"
The consequence of netflix airing this special is that some people will get offended and may cancel their subscriptions and some of their employees might protest and/or quit. That's it. Caving to the demands of those offended is not "suffering the consequences."
Netflix has agency, no? If Netflix were to take down the Dave Chappelle episode as a result of "caving to the demands of those offended" that is their right, no? I still retain my agency to cancel my Netflix subscription - I could cancel because I was offended by the episode, I could cancel because I was upset that Netflix pulled the episode. I'm really not seeing how anybody's freedoms are being diminished in this case, regardless of the outcome.
If I held a gun to your head and said "give me your phone or face the consequences," would you claim that me shooting you for not giving me your phone is you "being held accountable"? Because that seems analogous to what is happening to netflix here.
The consequences of them producing this special is that some people are mad. But netflix chose to produce it, and I'm sure they knew full well that some people would get mad. A group of offended people demanding that it be taken down is not a "consequence that must be faced", it's a demand, and netflix not doing so isn't "not being held accountable for their actions."
False comparison. Holding a gun to my head and threatening my life is not a social consequence, it’s assault with the use of deadly force. The fact you gloss over that fact and so glibly make this comparison is rather disturbing.
It's probably for the best you used a throwaway account to say something so profoundly ignorant. The consequences of which the OP spoke are social consequences, they're not legal consequences. In the United States you can say whatever you want without fear of legal reprisal, however the social consequences can be dire. That is to say, I retain the freedom to think you're an asshole and not associate with you in response to something you said. That's my right.
The bit about trans women is unfunny and hurtful and should remain on Netflix. Trans employees should walk out and protest, then decide whether they have the means / network to move on if they don’t want to work there anymore.
I don’t think controversial or offensive-to-me content should be removed. But I also don’t think it should go by unremarked. That’s what democracy is, at the ground level.
Keep in mind that Netflix streams the moving Cruising (1980), widely considered offensive on release and linked to a number of gay bashings back then. True, Netflix didn’t produce that (as it did this comedy special) but at the end of the day, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Comedy is sometimes offensive. Chapelle has an outdated view of trans issues but doesn’t call for violence, which is Netflix’s line.
>Chapelle has an outdated view of trans issues but doesn’t call for violence, which is Netflix’s line.
Chapelle has a logically correct view of trans issues that's up to date. It's probably the view shared by a silent majority but it's politically suicide to even hint at, as he covered in his special. You can rob a pregnant woman at gun point and be considered a saint, but if you hurt a trans person's feelings, you're literally Hitler.
Trans are mentally ill and need to be treated as such, as in they need to seek professional help in accepting biological reality. Encouraging them in their delusions which they will never achieve is only hurting them, not helping.
Please stop posting flamewar comments and using HN for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do those things, regardless of ideology, because they destroy what this site is supposed to be for.
I'm not going to ban your account right now but if you continue to post flamewar comments or ideological battle comments, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and correct this going forward, we'd appreciate it.
Oh, the old silent majority nonsense. You do realize that doesn't exist right and that mindset parallels the beliefs of racists... which.. doesn't surprise me.
The last 50 years of politics across US and Europe have proven over and over again that you ignore "silent majorities" at your peril. They have an annoying habit of making mincemeat of arguments for radical change when you least expect it. I'm sure there are parallel realities where 60s/70s counterculture stops Reagan and Thatcher from winning (twice), but this isn't one of them.
Lay out your case for change, by all means; but you should always assume that you start from a position of minority until proven otherwise.
If you look at the data, it certainly isn't the silent majority, it's the vocal minority. Look at the last US election, they tried to destroy democracy and claim fraudulent elections to uphold these absurd beliefs.
It's so bad, that many states are making it harder for the people to vote just to perpetuate this nonsense.
You are equating "silent majority" and "hardcore right wing". That's not how it works in practice - this is something that both right and left can and do get wrong.
You're assuming left vs right, The only side that feels there is some universality here is the right. The left is HIGHLY fragmented - always has been, always will be. That gives people on the right this messed up "silent majority" notion that just isn't true.
The right has definitely fragmented in the past five years (older conservatives, Trumpers, the alt-right, etc.). You're again getting this wrong and can only think in a "left vs. right" framework (typical of leftists and alt-righters).
The "silent majority" exists in this case especially around wedge issues like trans sports inclusion [0].
If everyone he mocked in his specials walked out of Netflix they would have no employees left. I feel it was exactly his point that only one group continually does that. I also feel that Netflix knows if they remove his stuff he will go elsewhere and people will follow. They might not cancel Netflix but that’s how competition starts and the less competition the better for their bottom line.
I've never seen this effect with programming jokes or jokes about programmers. Typical reactions I've seen are always "yeah, so true". But this is only one anecdote, I may be in a bubble, so I ask others: have you seen programmers getting offended by jokes about programmers?
I think it depends how much a certain label/group is core to one's identity. For many people in the Twittersphere, they worship the idea of labbelling themselves and showing it off to others for some reason.
While this is true, I think it kind of understates the problem. The issue isn't just "a few vain people put too much emphasis on their superficial group identities", but rather they are part of a broader ideological contingent that puts tremendous emphasis on everyone's superficial group identities. These folks generally believe that these identities are useful bases for decision making (i.e., discrimination in the most literal sense of the term) because to know a person's superficial identities is to completely understand that person. It might be controversial to say (i.e., go ahead and take my Internet Points), but it seems to plainly run completely counter to the equality ideology that gave us the civil rights movement and popularized "tolerance" as a virtue.
Well said. I frequently think back to MLK Jr's quote about being judged not by color of skin, but by content of heart, and how appalled he'd be at the contemporary landscape.
Way back before 2010 people would make jokes about every group and most of us handled them pretty well. That was back before the "everything is violence" people came to power.
CEO Ted Sarandos has apologized and claimed fault.
I'm interested to see if this works out for him, in the end.
I believe the general trend is that reversing your position on a big public issue (even if your original position was wrong!) is the end of your authority and career.
I am not making a statement about how this 'should' work!
It's so sad that the great power of collective action is being wasted in these little squabbles that matter to the 0.0000001% of the population. If tech workers now really "understand their labor power" (as some claim [1]), then choosing to deploy it on these trivial matters shows how privileged that group really is.
Dave Chappelle belongs to a minority too. In fact, a minority of a minority (black comedians) - unlike most trans. Watch the show, he talks about this too.
> Dave Chappelle belongs to a minority too. In fact, a minority of a minority (black comedians) - unlike most trans.
“Minority” in the relevant sense is not “group that constitutes less than 50%” but “group that is a historical target of large scale social discrimination inn
the society which is the context of discussion” (the term “minority” is an accident of history; had the language developed first in, say, apartheid South Africa, the term adopted probably wouldn't have been “disadvantaged minority” from which over time the first word usually got dropped.)
And even in the numerical sense, everybody is a minority of a minority if you choose the right set of axes of variation to look at, so in the sense that it is true of Chappelle, it is not “unlike most trans”.
Playing semantics will not change the fact that this political battle is hugely overblown. There is precious little "activism energy" coming from tech people, and what do they spend it on? A campaign supporting "white men who happen to have strong kinks" against a self-made black comedian. And when you point it out, they go "support minorities!" while in fact shooting down actual bona-fide minorities.
> A campaign supporting "white men who happen to have strong kinks"
Transgender people aren't all men (whether you are referring to gender identity or, as seems more likely from the overall tenor of your comment, a bigoted misgendering by sex assigned at birth), and are disproportionately Black and Hispanic compared to the general population.
> shooting down actual bona-fide minorities.
The idea that trans people aren't a bona fide minority whereas comedians are is...odd.
I'm sorry, I'm not enlightened enough to go down a rabbit hole of made-up categories invented by academics trying to justify their salaries in suspect disciplines. It would be like discussing the characteristics of a divinity: just accepting the debate means legitimising the unprovable.
And yes, my guess is that black comedians as a minority are more worthy of protection and support than (activist white) trans people. At least they make me laugh, instead of making problems.
This is a good first step. The second would be for them to remain out after walking off their jobs and never return, so that Netflix could regain something resembling sanity. Maybe then they could stop manipulating ratings, censoring 30 year old movies and pumping out deranged propaganda instead of entertainment. Sadly, this will not happen.
Frankly, I agree with the leftists that Chappelle should retire, or at least stop performing in big left wing cities and states. The disaster America has become doesn't deserve solid comedians like him anymore.
Here's what Dave had to say in The Closer about his friend Daphne, who killed herself six days after being "dragged" on Twitter for defending her friend.
> When Sticks and Stones came out a lot of the people in the trans community were furious with me and apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don't give a fuck 'cause Twitter's not a real place.
> And the hardest thing for a person to do is go against their tribe if they disagree with their tribe, but Daphne did that for me. She wrote a tweet that was very beautiful and what she said was and it's almost exactly what she said.
> She said "Punching down on someone requires you to think less of them and I know him, and he doesn't. He doesn't punch up, he doesn't punch down, he punches lines, and he is a master at his craft."
> Beautiful tweet, beautiful friend, it took a lot of heart to defend me like that, and when she did that the trans community dragged that bitch all over Twitter. For days, they were going in on her, and she was holding her own 'cause she's funny.
> But six days after that wonderful night I [previously] described to you, my friend Daphne killed herself.
> Oh yeah, this is a true story, my heart was broken. Yeah it wasn't the jokes. I don't know if it was them dragging or I don't know what was going on in her life but I bet dragging her didn't help.
> I was very angry at them, I was very angry at her. I felt like Daphne lied to me. She always said she identified as a woman. And then one day she goes up to the roof of her building and jumps off and kills herself. Clearly... only a man would do some gangster shit like that.
> Hear me out. As hard as it is to hear a joke like that, I'm telling you right now, Daphne would have loved that joke. That's why she was my friend.
> I was reading her obituary and I found out she was survived by a daughter.
[... a bit about Anderson Cooper which isn't relevant]
> What I did is I got in touch with her family and I started a trust fund for her daughter 'cause I know that's all she ever really cared about. And I don't know what the trans community did for her but I don't care 'cause I feel like she wasn't [in] their tribe, she was [in] mine. She was a comedian in her soul.
Here's Daphne's sisters defending Dave in the daily beast.
> “Dave loved my sister and is an LGBTQ ally,” Dorman’s younger sister Brandy added in a text message. “His entire set was begging to end this very situation.”
> “At this point I feel like he poured his heart out in that special and no one noticed,” Brandy wrote in a separate Facebook post. “What he’s saying to the LGBTQ family is, ‘I see you. Do you see me? I’m mourning my friend in the best way I know how. Can you see me? Can you allow me that?’... This was a call to come together, that two oppressed factions of our nation put down their keyboards and make peace. How sad that this message was lost in translation.”
`Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system` - Marcus Tullius Cicero. 63 BC
Dave Chappelle and some other comedians like Joe Rogan are "too big to fail". But how many lesser voices get cancelled is the true hallmark of consistency and principles.
In the old days kings cancelled lesser voices by beheading them. Occasionally, the "lesser" voices rose up and beheaded kings (King Charless II, Louis the 16, the Romanovs).
Cancel culture is as old personkind (or is it peoplekind?).
It is just another blunt instrument of intimidation and bullying. The modern version is a performative art to get status by trying to wreck the lives of others without having the legal right to behead people.
Daphne ended up committing suicide but at least that was a self-inflicted death.
-
The mob even accused the comedian Bill Burr, who is married to a Black woman and has a daughter from her, of being a racist.
"...a white man having a non-white wife can sometimes be a sign of racism. So you shouldn't assume someone isn't racist just because they own a minority sex servant. They may very well have one because they're racist."
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadI watched it and it was biting but wasn't hateful. It questioned certain things. Maybe there was some jealousy and usurpation (in general terms taking over the focus of civil rights).
Chapelle is charismatic and steadfast. It would do no one any service to try to disparage him as I think that would backfire given the reach of his audience.
> Organizers did not specify their demands ahead of the rally, although Preston said the event would call for content that prioritizes "the safety and dignity of all marginalized communities."
> Transgender Netflix employee Terra Field has called on the streamer to add a content warning to "The Closer," and to promote more "queer and trans comedians and talent."
There is a lot of hurt and painful experience inside these messages to Netflix. The demands don't exactly seem extraordinary in that context either.
Why did you jump to taking things offline?
Both of those parties represent real power, both politically and financially, in this world today.
As for the CCP, there are plenty that claim that anti-CCP is anti-Chinese racism and has no place on the stage
Someone who looks at them and sees that they are the majority religion in the Western world, and have politicians everywhere pushing their talking points and morals on everybody else.
Why do your claims have more truthiness than theirs?
Christianity accounts for 2.3 Billion people in the world, the next highest is Islam at 1.9 Billion. Unaffiliated (of which Athiests are only a portion) is only 1.2 Billion worldwide. Thus, Christianity is, by definition, a majority.
In one example to prove my second point, politicians in Texas are pushing Christian morality around abortion into laws. This is the opposite of being oppressed.
No, its a plurality, which is a minority that is bigger than any other minority when there is bo majority.
OTOH, the popular use of “minority” that is being referenced doesn't mean mathematical minority, it means “historically systematically oppressed group”; it evolved from the language around race in the US, where whites were the majority and minorities (especially blacks) were oppressed on the basis of race, but the key reference is the oppression not the numerical relationship.
So spare me. You are not punching up, or "fighting the power". Your religion is the power.
What rights are you losing because marketing for companies are pushing shallow lgbtq advocacy?
Not really the same thing, is it? Way to get all faux outraged though.
In some parts of the world they are. We need to stop taking such a Western-view of the world.
I am not a Christian, but you are incorrect - Christians are an oppressed minority in plenty places in the world. Persecuted, oppressed, killed. And it’s not a “one off” or an exception, in happens in many countries. A cursory Google will give you many examples.
Eritrea: where Christians are tortured, arrested, and imprisoned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestantism_in_Eritrea
A country I was surprised not to see on that list is Indonesia, which came to mind immediately. Take the conflict in Maluku, where Christians were forced to convert, or the eviction of the Christian minority from Banda. Example article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55140847
Yemen: where Houthis have targeted Christians. Book burning religious texts, burning down churches, etc. https://www.uscirf.gov/news-room/releases-statements/uscirf-...
You could make a very long list. Just because Christians aren't oppressed in your country does not mean they're not an oppressed minority elsewhere.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/248547/report-17-chr...
https://www.state.gov/reports/2019-report-on-international-r...
Sure, there are places in the world Christians are an oppressed group; all such descriptions are specific to a bounded context.
Is there even a "trans community"? As far as I can tell, they try to stick together with the LGB crowd, rather successfully. The groups that are skeptical of T founded their own organizations, but I'd say they're very much a minority. Trans-progressivism is very much main stream, also as far as laws in different countries are concerned.
Thats exactly what Chappelle did not say. He said that the bulling might not caused the suicide, but it sure did not help.
I find it baffling that he developed a quite deep relationship with her - a transgender person - gave her a golden ticket (frontrunning for of the biggest comedians) as a token of appreciation and he gets called out as anti trans person.
He deep cuts all of those fake virtue signalling people who do nothing and sacrifice noting for 'the cause', he walked away from the money of questionable hollywood people he took a stand. Maybe thats what irks those people?
Mad world, mad world.
As a Black person, the most common and tired defense of White racists has always been “Look at this one Black person I treated well, that proves I’m not a racist.”
I guess its some kind of progress that that's now a defense against charges of bigotry by Black people as well as against them.
The 'I am not racist I have a black friend' is used for a token acquaintance 'prove' you cannot be racist.
There were some really deep points made there, my favourite was (I paraphrase) "i dont need you to understand me, I need you to acknowledge my human experience".
Just because Chappelle and others are not 100% OK with everything that X movement/group is saying it doesn't mean he and others are anti-X.
The problem is with people's lack of nuance - the black and white thinking, and not listening/reading actual source of the topic :p when speaking out.
This is what makes me sad. When someone says, "A is B", they don't just say "A is B", they demand that you accept this view. You cannot say "A is almost B", you cannot ask "is A 100% B?" you can't even say "let's talk about it!" You either agree to a given viewset 100%, or are labelled as an enemy, hater and whatnot.
And we do deal with situations that are nuanced. Not just that, they have real-life implications for the whole society. Jess and Scott Smith are suing Loudoun County because the views that were imposed on them led to a tragedy. It seems as if in a race towards extreme progressivism the common sense has been lost.
If you have an argument to make, make it, but trying to marshal current net voting as evidence of support so that you can make an ad populum argument is kind of dumb, in part because ad populum is a fallacy, in part because there is never any support for your attribution of motive to voting, and also in part because net vote totals are...rather fluid on HN.
Claiming intellectual superiority right after being called out that you make statements on subject you did not bother looking into is actually dumb.
As a matter of fact I did not used actual ad populum rather i pointed out the reason why people downvoted you, I made an argument WHY you were incorrect and not told you that you are wrong because you are downvoted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28930777
https://twitter.com/LilySimpson1312/status/14484175314300149...
It’s often the case that minorities wear parts of an identity so as to show some kind of immutable and unique right against prejudice. But the sooner we realize that our differences are opportunities to unite against intolerance and bigotry, the sooner we can stop drawing lines in the same about whose experience is more painful or inequitable than another’s.
I’ve heard rabbis deliver sermons on slavery drawing parallels between the plight of Jews to the African slave trade. The point isn’t that Jews get to say “oh I was enslaved too so whatever.” Rather, it’s an opportunity to say, “Hell yeah, I recognize oppression, and let’s right those wrongs together.”
Not one community and not LGBTQ+ gets to be the sole victim. Nobody gets to dominate the outrage scene on Twitter. Coalition building and tolerance require humility, and pretending like one’s group has a greater need for equality or accommodation defeats the point.
People got up in arms about his last stand up. It was not offensive at all. But you couldn't say that, because the people had already made up their minds.
Corporations know how to get people spun up, and they're doing it with Chapelle again. They want to cancel him, because he is dangerous to the right wing, because he is charismatic and articulate. He can get points across clearly. If he became the new Jon Stewart, he could siphon a lot of control away from the right. They need to neutralize him before he decides to go political.
This line of thought is rejected by modern radicals. To question is tantamount to outright hating. Watching Chapelle's special was, for me, a marvelous breath of fresh air and I hope people like him can somehow manage to continue making a living despite not observing radical dogma.
The Jews use a similar tactic whenever they want to slander whites but still carry an air of “otherness” and claim they’re Jewish. It’s trite, but that’s the game these people play.
The disparagement is a direct consequence of his speech. He is no more free from that consequence than your or I would be in similar circumstances.
The problem with such a trite comment is that is is just as true in North Korea.
You are complete Free™ to say what you like about Supreme Leader Grand Marshal Kim Jong-un, but you know - there might be consequences.
Instead, democratic governments (especially violence-shy Western ones) use the Official Secrets Act [or local equivalent] to prevent the people that are privy to information the governments do care about from ever talking about it.
Pretty sure that's a logical fallacy: Reductio ad absurdum to be specific. And that's on top of the difference between the State and its power lawfully backed by lethal force and society which lacks the same.
No. No one is saying that. No one has ever said that, because it doesn't make any sense. Of course all actions have consequences. Of course saying something hurtful will cause others to react negatively. No one is contesting this. What people are contesting is that a very small but highly vocal group of people who seemingly get offended by everything can demand that the rest of us force consequences on people that hurt their feelings.
Right now, there's a small group of netflix employees planning some kind of protest. That is their right to do, that is a consequence for netflix producing this comedy special. The problem with the "freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" line is that it always seems to be a very small group demanding that some larger group bow to their demands and force consequences on someone that wouldn't receive them otherwise. In this case, this very small group is demanding that dave chappelle or netflix suffer consequences for producing his special. But according to rotten tomatoes, and most of the comments I read on the internet, is that the overwhelming majority of people thought it was funny.
"Freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences" means that if I call your mother a prostitute, I might get punched in the face. It does not mean that if a digital content producer airs a comedy special you don't like, that anyone who doesn't like it can demand that it be taken down and then say "well those are just the consequences!"
The consequence of netflix airing this special is that some people will get offended and may cancel their subscriptions and some of their employees might protest and/or quit. That's it. Caving to the demands of those offended is not "suffering the consequences."
The consequences of them producing this special is that some people are mad. But netflix chose to produce it, and I'm sure they knew full well that some people would get mad. A group of offended people demanding that it be taken down is not a "consequence that must be faced", it's a demand, and netflix not doing so isn't "not being held accountable for their actions."
I don't recall staff walking out over the Cuties movie. That definitely was pushing the line.
I don’t think controversial or offensive-to-me content should be removed. But I also don’t think it should go by unremarked. That’s what democracy is, at the ground level.
Keep in mind that Netflix streams the moving Cruising (1980), widely considered offensive on release and linked to a number of gay bashings back then. True, Netflix didn’t produce that (as it did this comedy special) but at the end of the day, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Comedy is sometimes offensive. Chapelle has an outdated view of trans issues but doesn’t call for violence, which is Netflix’s line.
Chapelle has a logically correct view of trans issues that's up to date. It's probably the view shared by a silent majority but it's politically suicide to even hint at, as he covered in his special. You can rob a pregnant woman at gun point and be considered a saint, but if you hurt a trans person's feelings, you're literally Hitler.
I'm not going to ban your account right now but if you continue to post flamewar comments or ideological battle comments, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and correct this going forward, we'd appreciate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28375432 (Sept 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28004609 (July 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27715923 (July 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27371845 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Lay out your case for change, by all means; but you should always assume that you start from a position of minority until proven otherwise.
It's so bad, that many states are making it harder for the people to vote just to perpetuate this nonsense.
The "silent majority" exists in this case especially around wedge issues like trans sports inclusion [0].
[0] https://19thnews.org/2021/05/gallup-americans-oppose-transge...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Bill jokes about everyone. Dave jokes about everyone. South Park jokes about everyone. Most are fine with that and are able to laugh at themselves.
I'm interested to see if this works out for him, in the end.
I believe the general trend is that reversing your position on a big public issue (even if your original position was wrong!) is the end of your authority and career.
I am not making a statement about how this 'should' work!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/oct/20/netflix-employ...
/s
“Minority” in the relevant sense is not “group that constitutes less than 50%” but “group that is a historical target of large scale social discrimination inn the society which is the context of discussion” (the term “minority” is an accident of history; had the language developed first in, say, apartheid South Africa, the term adopted probably wouldn't have been “disadvantaged minority” from which over time the first word usually got dropped.)
And even in the numerical sense, everybody is a minority of a minority if you choose the right set of axes of variation to look at, so in the sense that it is true of Chappelle, it is not “unlike most trans”.
Transgender people aren't all men (whether you are referring to gender identity or, as seems more likely from the overall tenor of your comment, a bigoted misgendering by sex assigned at birth), and are disproportionately Black and Hispanic compared to the general population.
> shooting down actual bona-fide minorities.
The idea that trans people aren't a bona fide minority whereas comedians are is...odd.
And yes, my guess is that black comedians as a minority are more worthy of protection and support than (activist white) trans people. At least they make me laugh, instead of making problems.
Frankly, I agree with the leftists that Chappelle should retire, or at least stop performing in big left wing cities and states. The disaster America has become doesn't deserve solid comedians like him anymore.
> When Sticks and Stones came out a lot of the people in the trans community were furious with me and apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don't give a fuck 'cause Twitter's not a real place.
> And the hardest thing for a person to do is go against their tribe if they disagree with their tribe, but Daphne did that for me. She wrote a tweet that was very beautiful and what she said was and it's almost exactly what she said.
> She said "Punching down on someone requires you to think less of them and I know him, and he doesn't. He doesn't punch up, he doesn't punch down, he punches lines, and he is a master at his craft."
> Beautiful tweet, beautiful friend, it took a lot of heart to defend me like that, and when she did that the trans community dragged that bitch all over Twitter. For days, they were going in on her, and she was holding her own 'cause she's funny.
> But six days after that wonderful night I [previously] described to you, my friend Daphne killed herself.
> Oh yeah, this is a true story, my heart was broken. Yeah it wasn't the jokes. I don't know if it was them dragging or I don't know what was going on in her life but I bet dragging her didn't help.
> I was very angry at them, I was very angry at her. I felt like Daphne lied to me. She always said she identified as a woman. And then one day she goes up to the roof of her building and jumps off and kills herself. Clearly... only a man would do some gangster shit like that.
> Hear me out. As hard as it is to hear a joke like that, I'm telling you right now, Daphne would have loved that joke. That's why she was my friend.
> I was reading her obituary and I found out she was survived by a daughter.
[... a bit about Anderson Cooper which isn't relevant]
> What I did is I got in touch with her family and I started a trust fund for her daughter 'cause I know that's all she ever really cared about. And I don't know what the trans community did for her but I don't care 'cause I feel like she wasn't [in] their tribe, she was [in] mine. She was a comedian in her soul.
Here's Daphne's sisters defending Dave in the daily beast.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dave-chappelle-backed-by-famil...
Edit:
> “Dave loved my sister and is an LGBTQ ally,” Dorman’s younger sister Brandy added in a text message. “His entire set was begging to end this very situation.”
> “At this point I feel like he poured his heart out in that special and no one noticed,” Brandy wrote in a separate Facebook post. “What he’s saying to the LGBTQ family is, ‘I see you. Do you see me? I’m mourning my friend in the best way I know how. Can you see me? Can you allow me that?’... This was a call to come together, that two oppressed factions of our nation put down their keyboards and make peace. How sad that this message was lost in translation.”
Dave Chappelle and some other comedians like Joe Rogan are "too big to fail". But how many lesser voices get cancelled is the true hallmark of consistency and principles.
In the old days kings cancelled lesser voices by beheading them. Occasionally, the "lesser" voices rose up and beheaded kings (King Charless II, Louis the 16, the Romanovs).
Cancel culture is as old personkind (or is it peoplekind?).
It is just another blunt instrument of intimidation and bullying. The modern version is a performative art to get status by trying to wreck the lives of others without having the legal right to behead people.
Daphne ended up committing suicide but at least that was a self-inflicted death.
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The mob even accused the comedian Bill Burr, who is married to a Black woman and has a daughter from her, of being a racist.
"...a white man having a non-white wife can sometimes be a sign of racism. So you shouldn't assume someone isn't racist just because they own a minority sex servant. They may very well have one because they're racist."
https://twitter.com/Clayburn/status/1371268469145079809
https://www.indy100.com/ents/bill-burr-wife-tweet-racism-gra...