6mo ago

Just a reminder

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<rant>
I watched this standup special (Chad Daniels) and I found myself getting annoyed at the premise of most of his jokes.
The premise is that there is a far left and a far right and both sides are bad and need to move closer to the middle.
A joke he made, for instance, boiled down to far right were racists while the far left is overly compassionate to living things. See, both sides are bad!
First, his far right example was not an exaggeration. That is literally how people on the far right think. The far left example was a funny exaggeration that almost nobody on the left believes.
Second, even with his exaggeration, the 2 extremes are in no way equivalently extreme. The far right needs to come over significantly before it is equally extreme as the far left.
Anyway, I felt like this whole special was an example of what is wrong with the way society talks about the right and left.
I made a graph:
FL—-——|M|—————————————-FR
</rant>
- This is exactly it.
  <rant>
  Another comment the comedian made was that he can hold both liberal opinions and conservative opinions at the same time. For instance, he thinks school lunches should be free. That’s a liberal opinion. And for his conservative opinion, he thinks if a student attacks a teacher, the teacher should be able to defend themselves…. Bro, that is not a conservative opinion!
  I should let it go as it’s just a comedy special, but I think many people make similar arguments. Also, after making all the jokes he says he’s surprised that liberals don’t laugh as much as conservatives… Like a liberal can’t laugh at themselves the way a conservative can.
  </rant>
  I apologize for the rant, I was triggered, but I can move on with my life now…
  
  Maybe it's just me, but I don't see most of the "both sides are bad" posts as a push toward the center, I see them as a "both sides are too far right" telling people to vote blue now, but to also fight for a far more left-leaning candidate by the next election, since we shouldn't be settling for someone like Biden long-term.
  
  Except that's being utterly disingenuous by picking a left wing view that most folks are going to agree with except the far right and the very most extreme right view that all but the most extreme right are going to oppose.
  I mean it would be just as easy to look at left wing vs right wing views on guns: Left wing: No one should have guns unless they have them to resist right wingers, because they might shoot minorities! Right wing: Everyone should have guns, so long as they mostly use them legally because statistically the ones who don't will shoot more minorities and poors than whites and rich and a majority of those doing the shooting will be minorities, providing a pretense to demonize them for it!
  Or speech: Mainstream left: Speech should be controlled to silence my opponents! (Meaning right wingers generally and the far right especially) Mainstream right: Speech should be controlled to silence my opponents! (Meaning LGBTQ+ stuff aimed at minors and left wing protests) Centrists: I literally cannot tell you two apart.
  
  I respect that you have a different perspective about the current and future impacts of Republican policies than I do. I respect that your opinion is likely valid from your perspective.
  
  My whole point was it's an unfair comparison. Imagine you have a political scale that runs from -10 to 10, where -10 is plotting to overthrow the government to establish Handmaid's Tale meets ethnic cleansing of the "impure" and 10 is plotting to overthrow the government to establish anarcho-communism.
  The original image is like comparing a -9 on one issue to a 3 or 4 on an entirely different issue while pretending that both represent the extremes. "Maybe people shouldn't starve or die of exposure" is not remotely as extreme a position as "exterminate the impure" and also don't represent views on the same issue making it an apples to oranges.
  If you compare views on the same issue, it's at least a more fair comparison and there are some issues where the differences aren't that big (aka speech, where seemingly everyone wants to silence at least some of their opposition). Pretty sure I pegged the right wing view on guns dead on, for example.
  
  So what you are telling me is that this is going to lose the election for the Republican presidential candidate this year, because mainstream Republicans won't support someone who voluntarily associates with people like this, right?
  Donald Trump shares stage with rightwing activist who’s discussing stoning gay people to death
  A rightwing activist whose rally Donald Trump spoke at last week in Arizona is now telling his podcast audience that the Bible calls on Christians to stone gay people to death and saying that being gay is “an error” and compared homosexuality to drug addiction and alcoholism.
- This whole comment is an example of how some people don't understand that the fundamental point of actual comedy is to elicit laughter, not clapter for confirming the audience's biases with a jovial tone.
  If you watch stand-up to hear your political team's talking points in 'joke' form, you're just insecure.
  
  I think you misunderstood my actual complaint. I was not bothered that he disagreed with my opinions. As a matter of fact, I’m willing to bet he was in agreement with everything I believe.
  The logic this comedian used as the basis for his entire set didn’t match with reality. It’s hard to find the jokes funny when they aren’t based on anything true.
  This isn’t specific to politics either. There’s plenty of comedians that use faulty logic as the set ups to their punchlines, and if you don’t think about that too much, you may find the punchline funny. For me, all I can think is that the punchline would have been funny if anything that led up to it was true.

762 comments