I'm Offended that You're Offended

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Flack
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I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by Flack »

Last, week, University of Oklahoma quarterback Kyler Murray was awarded the Heisman Trophy as the best collegiate football player in the country. Murray played backup quarterback at Texas A&M in 2015, transferred to OU (and sat out a year) in 2016, served as Baker Mayfield's backup (who also won the Heisman) in 2017, and only became the starting quarterback for OU this year. In the off-season, Murray played baseball for OU, was drafted by the Oakland Athletics, and awarded a $4.6 million signing bonus. Football, the sport in which he won the Heisman, is really just his side gig.

Roughly six hours after winning the Heisman, a USA Today reporter tracked down "homophobic tweets" by Murray. In the tweets, Murray referred to his friends as "queers." What the reporter downplayed was the fact that the tweets were seven years old, making Murray "14 or 15" (according to him) at the time.

(Thank god Twitter didn't exist when I was 14 or 15.)

That, of course, was irrelevant. Within 24 hours, this story ran the predictable cycle we are all familiar with. Murray apologized for his tweets, stating that they "didn't represent who he is today." Everybody yawned and went on their way.

Society has raised the bar to such ridiculously unobtainable heights that literally no one can measure up. I'm not talking about 21-year-old college athletes (posting on social media when they were 14) failing social scrutiny (or Miss USA talking about non-English speaking Miss Universe competitors -- I'm talking about motherfucking Ghandi. Yesterday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ghana removed a statue of Ghandi from a university campus after complaints surfaced that Ghandi was racist. (In some of his early writings, apparently Ghandi used a racial slur when referring to South African people.)

Am I defending racial slurs against South African people? No. But this was Ghandi, and if Ghandi doesn't pass whatever test people have established for people who deserve a statue, I'm afraid all others will also fall short.

You don't have to travel to Ghana to find controversial statues. There's one on the college campus both I and Kyler Murray attended. Last month, a statue of a covered wagon was donated to the campus, but many students are calling to have it removed. There's nothing offensive about the statue itself, but who made it: Tom Otterness. In 1977 at the age of 25, Otterness made a short experimental art film called Shot Dog Film in which he adopted a dog from a local shelter and then shot it on film. "Monumentally bad decision," said Otterness, who was attempting to make some sort of statement that isn't quite clear. Since releasing the film, Otterness has donated money to animal rescues and apologized for the film every single time somebody asks him about it. To some, like OU student Abigale Lee, that's not enough.

"Yes, we can forgive it, but I don’t think we can forget it," said Lee, demonstrating a lack of understanding what it means to forgive. I think a lot of people forgot what it means.

Earlier this month, Kevin Hart, after being asked to host the Oscars, was also asked to apologize for a "series of homophobic tweets." When he refused, the Oscars told him to apologize, or step down. He stepped down. The headline (as it ran on Cosmopolitan) was Kevin Hart Steps Down as Oscars Host After Refusing to Apologize for Homophobic Tweets, but that's technically not true. What it should say is that he stepped down after refusing to apologize for homophobic tweets again. If you read the story, you'll see that Hart has already apologized for those tweets, specifically addressing them in a Rolling Stone interview back in 2015. He just didn't want to apologize for them again. How many apologies are enough? One individualized for everybody? Many of the attacks against Hart came because of tweets he made referencing things in his stand up act. I don't have the strength to talk about why comics shouldn't apologize for offensive jokes, but taking things out of context (like a comic's act) and then attacking them personally isn't right.

Speaking of context...

Over the past two weeks, the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside" has come under fire. In the song, a woman attempts to leave a man's home while the man attempts to get her to stay. One line in the song specifically has people up in arms, one in which the woman says, "What's in this drink?" This was a common joke in the 1940s, when this song was written; the answer to the question was "alcohol," and the question was frequently uttered tongue-in-cheek. SNL, who ran a skit with Bill Cosby singing the song, is being blamed for leading the charge against the Academy Award-winning song.

Backlash against the song is no more ridiculous than recent attacks on A Christmas Story (a movie "all about consumerism") and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which Huffington Post called "seriously problematic" and "a parable on racism & homophobia."

On "Does it Hold Up?", a YouTube show in which teens and young adults are exposed to things and asked the titular question, several young adults (ages 18-29) were asked to watch several episodes of Seinfeld and offer their opinions. It's almost enjoyable to watch them cringe, almost unable to speak the term "Soup Nazi" and, in regards to the episode in which Jerry and his friends give a woman NyQuil so that they can play with her vintage toy collection, one kid responds, "if that were to air today, everybody on that show would be fired." He's probably right. By the end of the episode, roughly half of the kids say that Seinfeld -- universally praised as one of the best television sitcoms of all time -- doesn't hold up. Just wait until you hear what they think about the Indian Cigar Store episode!

That reminds me of Crayola's old "Indian Red" controversy. Remember Indian Red? You only got that color in the 128 box of crayons -- maaaybe the 64 pack -- but nothing less. In the late 90s, a group of Native American teachers began complaining about the color, saying that young students found the term "Indian Red" racially insensitive. In 1999, Crayola renamed the color "chestnut," but not without reminding the public in a press release that the crayon was named for a dye commonly used in India, and had nothing to do with Native "Indian" Americans. That was when I learned the lesson that even when people are offended and you weren't being offensive, sometimes you have to apologize anyway.

I guess if Gandhi, Rudolph, and "Baby it's Cold Outside" can all be offensive, it shouldn't be surprising that a crayon color can, too.

My step-grandfather (who once infamously referred to himself as a "sand-n****r" on a Christmas home video) once told me "didn't see anything wrong with black face." I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be a guy who is out of touch with what's legitimately offensive. Meyers-Briggs says I'm a people pleaser to a fault, and that's true -- that being said, Rudolph's still okay in my book, and so are most of those other things. It's hard to know what is offensive and who is offended in a world where everybody is offended by everything all the time.

Baby, it's hot inside, and my blood is turning Indian Red.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by pinback »

Rudolph is only offensive to redheads, because nobody can figure out what's wrong with the doll other than she's a goddamn ginger.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by RealNC »

Just like when Rome was about to fall...

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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

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Image
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by AArdvark »

Is he ok? No broken bones?

Ok back on topic. How much of this outrage is simply people looking for attention. In the day of 'everyone has a voice' its hard to be heard unless you speak loudly or outrageously. Getting followers, like Jim Jones, seems to go to people's heads and bad things happen.

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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by RealNC »

AArdvark wrote: Sat Dec 15, 2018 7:59 amOk back on topic. How much of this outrage is simply people looking for attention.
It's not just attention. These pieces of shit believe that if your opinion is even slightly different than theirs, you deserve to be fired, have your life ruined, end up in a gutter, and commit suicide. And even then it won't be enough for them. They'll want more. Like take a shit on your grave (they're known to celebrate when people die, "good riddance" and such.)

I call it the Blue Hair Apocalypse. These idiots all have blur hair.

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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

The thing I don't get is the people with decision making power when one of these things blows up giving a shit about Twitter, for fuck's sake.

I can't imagine someone rushing into the boss's office and the being told "people are outraged on Twitter!" and having that explained. Okay? So? Sure - let's go take a look. I'll get on my phone. Oh, Echofon once again turned my theme from white to black, like it has done at least 100 times. I'm going to delete the app, surely these outraged people will come here personally and tell me why my employee needs to be fired. Oh they won't? Okay, whatever. I've set the theme back. I'm looking at my feed and I don't see anything. That's it, I guess. Oh, I have to go find this one person and read their tweets? Or I have to search for a hashtag on Twitter? Are you fucking serious?

A lot of this is clueless people, I have to imagine, being told there's a mob on their doorstep.
A lot of it is that people are just fucking on the Internet too much.

This is a terrible thought, but I wonder if sometimes it's an excuse to get rid of low performers or people who are annoying to work for. That's horrible to say because there really are spineless people out there that will fire people because of a hashtag.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by RealNC »

I remember how years ago we were afraid of a Government Surveillance Dystopia. It seems that this is nothing compared to the Political Correctness Dystopia that is in full swing right now.

You said the word "fat". That's body shaming. Fired.
You said "him" instead of "zum." That's misgendering. Fired.
You vaguely looked at the direction of a female coworker for 0.1 seconds. That's rape. Fired.
You thanked a male coworker for doing a good job. That's sexism. Fired.
You made an actually funny joke. You're a nazi. Fired.
You're a white male but don't think of yourself as a piece of shit who deserves eternal punishment. That means you're Hitler. Fired.

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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by AArdvark »

This is why I got off of social media. None of this affects me unless I let it. Wisht everyone else felt that way.

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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by Flack »

A friend of mine once told me that while watching a television show he spotted a boom mic dipping down into the frame. From that point on, he was always skimming the top portion of every shot, even to this day, watching for more boom mics. There are lots of similar examples to this. I once learned that sets built on sound stages rarely have a ceiling and that the corners often don't come together perfectly. After that, no matter what I was watching. I always kept an eye out for those things. I went through a similar obsession with product placement. Once you begin to see all the prominently featured logos both in the foreground and background of films, they begin to jump out at you -- sometimes to the point where paying attention to a film's plot becomes difficult.

I'll tell you how I think all this started. (This is just my personal theory; I could be, and probably am, completely wrong.) I think some of these things started off with good intentions. There really are injustices out there, and there are people out there who know more than I do about those topics that brought them to light. But here's where things start to go wrong. Anything negative -- let's take Blackfish, the documentary that exposed the treatment of Killer Whales in captivity -- is going to get more attention than anything positive. Take all the pro-Seaworld documentaries ever made and combined they had less views and got less press coverage than Blackfish did which, in less than a decade, will probably lead to the fall of Seaworld. I'm not saying Blackfish was the first, but people see those things and go, well, I'm sure they don't treat animals in the circus very nice either, and then all of a sudden circuses were in the spotlight for a few years and a year or two ago, Ringling Brothers (the most famous traveling circus of all time) closed down.

But in today's world, negativity gets you attention, and attention leads to likes, and clicks, and favorites, and retweets. Nobody cares if you think Christmas Story is a good Christmas movie. You're supposed to. But writing a piece about how it's a terrible Christmas movie, and suddenly people are sharing the link and discussing it on internet forums.

When I was a kid, I'm not even sure "offensive" was a thing. My grandma, who was part Polish, loved Pollock jokes. Today, tweeting one could be a career ender. Today people complain that things are offensive -- and not that they themselves were offended, but that somebody "could" have been offended. Start telling a "blonde joke" and the person is liable to stop you, even if they aren't blonde. Try staring a joke off with "A man walks into a bar" and wait for the nearest person to interrupt you, telling you that alcoholism is serious business. It's almost become a game, searching everything for anything that might possibly offend someone, even if they aren't offended. In a world where Jerry Seinfeld and Kevin Hart are considered offensive, I am surprised we haven't circled around to the disco era and begun burning albums from Gallagher, George Carlin, Sam Kineson, and Andrew Dice Clay. (Ironically, the least offensive comedian I grew up listening to was Bill Cosby.) Honestly, I don't know how a stand up comedian can make a living today, unless every performance begins and ends with an apology.

But when I was a kid and someone called you tubby or fatso, there was no recourse. When the guy who owned the convenient store near me called names, I had no recourse. "I'll never buy bubble gum from you again" wasn't a terrible threat. But now we have the internet and a generation of people willing to boycott anything. Now you can go, "we should boycott the NFL because they fired a guy for taking a knee because he hates 'MURICA!" (all of which is wrong) and people will shout "HELLZ YEAH!" Last week I was sitting at a light behind a guy who had a giant sticker on his winder that said he boycotts the NFL. He was talking on a smartphone that was most likely assembled in a Chinese sweatshop.

So I don't know. I'm at the point now where if everything's offensive, then nothing is offensive. I'm just tired of it all. I'm tired of people whining about things being offensive, I'm tired of celebrities issuing fake apologies about being offensive, I'm tired of people boycotting things because they might be offensive to someone... I'm just tired of the word "offensive," I think. When any noun from any sentence can be offensive, I think we've hit the wall.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by pinback »

The tricky part is, it LOOKS like empathy. So one could say, well, it's better to have an annoying excess of empathy than an annoying lack of it. And it does. It looks like empathy. But it isn't, because it is fully in service of the ego, which never tires of pointing out what is "wrong", so it may be right.

It is anti-empathy.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by Tdarcos »

What is amazing are the number of people who take offense to something that does not apply to them or have any effect on them. One time one of the redneck relatives or friends of my girlfriend's family was traveling with us on the way back from her grandmother's funeral. He was talking about something and he starts using "the N-word" several times. Now, I myself have used that word occasionally, once in my blog for the inverse reason: to exclaim disgust for mistreatment of blacks. But this guy, in five minutes, had used it more times than I would in five years. So I spoke up to interrupt him, I said "please do not use that offensive word in my presence." It irritated me and I had little choice; I had at least another 3 hours driving to go and the use of that word as a racial slur bothered me.

This does not change the fact I find what Quentin Tarrantino asked Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction if he had a sign indicating he operated a type of storage facility (and three times) to be hilarious. "Did you see a sign on my garage that said 'Dead n------ storage'? ... You know why? Because storing dead n------- ain't my fuckin' business!"

But for a lot of people it's something they could turn off or doesn't even apply to them. I happen to think the skits using Joe, the handicapped police officer on Family Guy are funny as hell even if some of them might be "picking on" handicapped people or are outrageous exaggerations of either the capacity of disabled people or their disabilities. I mean, I'm in a wheelchair - and have been over 12 years - and I find some of the skits involving a disabled man and his use of his chair to be hilarious.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by Billy Mays »

An organism's single purpose is to replicate itself. Emotions are commands from our brains that occur due to evolutionary advantages we received from our ancestors. Empathy by its very nature is self-serving as it basically acts as an insurance policy against events that could obstruct or prevent your own reproductive success.

I find SJWs comical because it's like watching a dark comedy. Nature decided to roll the dice on the insufferable and generally unfuckable gene and we all get to see if the result will be evolutionary success or boxed wine, prescription medication, and suicide.

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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

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Holy shit, Paul's new avatar is my new favorite thing ever.
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Re: I'm Offended that You're Offended

Post by Billy Mays »

Yeah, I'd like to see Flack put the red Iron Maiden logo across the top of it.

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