What views do you currently hold that will look outdated to your grandchildren?

[Gorbles]

Love how all these comments about John Cleese are not remotely addressing anything he was saying in the interview (as reported here), but just bashing him for being an old unfunny man. Is that not the old ad hominem? Kind of looks like it to me.

If he'd said "they're not booking me anymore because my comedy is too edgy" then maybe these would be meaningful retorts, but they're not meaningful retorts to "I'm choosing not to do them because they're getting offended by everything and it's insufferable".

I'm speaking from a personal opinion from following the dude on social media for years. Claims to fallacy notwithstanding (the dreaded fallacy fallacy), what are you objecting to? People having a negative opinion about a famous comedic actor?

I wish that in 50 years time, I would be allowed to criticise a public figure without someone going "umad" or "ad hominem", but I guess given how embedded such a reaction is in society now, I have no realistic hope of that kind of pedantry dying out.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Its even possible that John Cleese has changed over the years. Sometimes he just sounds like a grumpy old man nowadays.

Happens to most of us, if we only live long enough.

Makes me think of the armistice sunday vicar line for the fallen:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

and of the Kenny Everett who fell in the great war against HIV.

Due to such kindness, his fans don't have to defend him against being called a grumpy old man.

 

[amadeus]

Standup comedy?

I guess if it’s something I find offensive, then I can just not watch it.

 

[warpus]

I was watching an interview with John Cleese awhile ago, and he was saying that he won't perform on college campuses anymore because the people there are offended by absolutely everything, and he is just sick of having to tone down his act to the point where he literally can't say anything without fear of reprisal. He indicated that many comedians are coming around to this train of thought. And that is really a shame.

Yeah, I've heard the same thing from other comedians. We are raising a really sheltered new generation, I can't wait for the next couple decades as these morons end up in positions of power and leadership..

 

[Synobun]

Yeah, I've heard the same thing from other comedians. We are raising a really sheltered new generation, I can't wait for the next couple decades as these morons end up in positions of power and leadership..

Most teens and young adults today have done more social activism than the older generations have done in their lifetimes, and are facing a dire future that we'll be too dead to worry about. But because they don't like jokes about minorities, they're sheltered and morons? Sure. I think there's another demographic here facing mental weakness.

 

[amadeus]

Most teens and young adults today have done more social activism than the older generations have done in their lifetimes

Have they?

 

[warpus]

Most teens and young adults today have done more social activism than the older generations have done in their lifetimes, and are facing a dire future that we'll be too dead to worry about. But because they don't like jokes about minorities, they're sheltered and morons? Sure. I think there's another demographic here facing mental weakness.

Where did I mention jokes about minorities? Nowhere.

Social activism is great. Trying to ban comedians because you don't like their jokes is stupid. Some jokes will just be offensive, that's by design. If you don't like that kind of humour, don't listen to it.

 

[Synobun]

Comedians aren't banned. They just can't perform to an audience that doesn't like them. Free market at work, baby.

I love offensive humour and don't pearl-clutch when I hear people use epithets, racial or sexist or otherwise, unless the context calls for it. I am the target demographic for these edgy comedians and dark jokes. But I also realize it's a niche category of comedy, and a population that's starting to care more about punching down on marginalized or helpless groups will naturally be more resistant to humour that punches down.

 

[warpus]

Comedians aren't banned. They just can't perform to an audience that doesn't like them. Free market at work, baby.

That's not what's happening though. A tiny minority of people yell until these sorts of comedians just stop showing up. Meanwhile most other people who attend that university do not really care. It's not any sort of free market principle market at play here, it's just a loud minority of people yelling loud enough until they get what they want. And what do they want? What does it really accomplish? Nothing, really.

I love offensive humour and don't pearl-clutch when I hear people use epithets, racial or sexist or otherwise, unless the context calls for it. I am the target demographic for these edgy comedians and dark jokes. But I also realize it's a niche category of comedy, and a population that's starting to care more about punching down on marginalized or helpless groups will naturally be more resistant to humour that punches down.

Is Russel Peters "edgy" ? Come on.. These people are reaching big time and getting even these mainstream sort of comedians thinking twice about where they perform..

 

[Synobun]

That's not what's happening though. A tiny minority of people yell until these sorts of comedians just stop showing up. Meanwhile most other people who attend that university do not really care. It's not any sort of free market principle market at play here, it's just a loud minority of people yelling loud enough until they get what they want. And what do they want? What does it really accomplish? Nothing, really.

If they can't fill another venue, is their comedy really wanted by the people existing outside of this "loud minority"? This really just sounds like sour grapes that they aren't popular anymore and the world has left them behind.

I haven't watched a Russel Peters clip in over half a decade. Lots of Indian jokes. I wouldn't say he's very edgy, but his humour back then had a single angle to it, which was race. Has he been "cancelled"? Why specifically cite him?

 

[warpus]

If they can't fill another venue, is their comedy really wanted by the people existing outside of this "loud minority"? This really just sounds like sour grapes that they aren't popular anymore and the world has left them behind.

The problem isn't that they can't fill these venues, you know that. The problem is that a small minority has created a situation in which these comedians just don't want to perform there.. or the university itself has been convinced to cancel them.

I haven't watched a Russel Peters clip in over half a decade. Lots of Indian jokes. I wouldn't say he's very edgy, but his humour back then had a single angle to it, which was race. Has he been "cancelled"? Why specifically cite him?

Why do I bring up Russel Peters? His comedy is very race oriented. His material is essentially him making fun of ethnic groups, as he runs through them one by one. This is the sort of comedy that offends these people.

And yet there is no controversy surrounding him in the mainstream. Because most people are sane and understand that this is comedy, meant to be funny, and not a hateful person spreading his hate. This is what the tiny moron minority who wants to ban these sorts of comedians from performing don't understand..

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

I'm not sure what definition of free market is used but if you mean free in that everyone can compete on equal ground, I'm not sure that would apply in many cases. Like take the adult only rating that ESRB which have often been called for an unsellable rating and some games that recived that rating was remade to get the mature rating instead. Many video game stores don't want to be associated with adult only rating and thus don't sell and twitch don't allow streaming of games with adult only rating. So while you are technically free to make and sell an adult only game, such game have a hard time being sold and showcased not due to market forces but due to stuff like morale panic.

However I suspect in the future, more and more violent games may be more acceptable

 

[Socrates99]

I'm not trolling. Trolling is against forum rules.

I actually applaud AOC for her defense in the face of that kind of criticism. She's one of few, I would think, that could actually pull that off. I think you misinterpreted my point though. I was speaking to the fact that it is becoming prevalent in our society to publicly shame people for thoughts and deeds of no real consequence. As a hypothetical example, I could post on FB that I hate oranges. Someone from an orange juice grower's association can read that and attack me. They may also try to have me fired from my job. My employer can get alarmed about the amount of tweets and posts saying that "Lemon is prejudiced against oranges! Boycott Lemon's employer!" and they could fire me. This is obviously hyperbole, but this sort of thing happens all the time lately. People get into a snit over all sorts of inconsequential things that are not important and are often said innocently or are simply misconstrued.

The problem is that everyone is trying to "out-woke" each other and are attempting to be the most righteous. "Look at me, I'm a better person than you are. I got Lemon fired." There is a war on free speech, and we have already lost the first battle. When we have people speaking at a college campus interrupted and prevented from speaking by SJW protestors because they have heard a fraction of the message and disagree with part of it, there is something wrong. It seems these days that everyone has something to be upset about, and now, thanks to social media, everyone has a platform. It seems that everyone has a low threshold for what offends them, and it would seem to be getting lower all of the time. I know for a fact that this post is pissing some people off and I really don't care.

I despise prejudice and hate speech. The problem is that everything today is hate speech, and that just isn't so.

Oh I wasn't saying you were trolling. I meant the "cancelling" is often just trolling. You either handle it or you don't. Bari Weiss was whining about cancel culture but she wasn't getting canceled, just trolled for being...eh not very good.

This is a pretty well moderated forum and theres still backbiting here and there. There are a lot of forums where there's little to no moderation and you either make it or you don't. Kids today aren't any more thin skinned than in the past. They actually might be tougher. That's why I brought up that AOC thing. Its typical for her to be able to make a quip back when someone tries to attack her. She's good at it for the same reason a lot of zoomers/Millennials are good at it. They grew up with social media.

The speakers on campus stuff. Some of it's a publicity stunt. Like Ben Shapiro at Berkley, I mean come on. People like that want to be canceled. They're looking for the most liberal colleges specifically hoping to get protested so they can appear to be edgey. Ann Coulter went and tried to do the same thing a month later and she just looked desperate. Ben's spoken at plenty of colleges so has Ann and a lot of other "canceled" speakers.

Free Speech doesn't mean people deserve speaking gigs. It's not an open mic. Speaking on a campus has nothing to do with free speech. A lot of these people have all the "speech" they could ever ask for on the internet or Fox News.

This also is nothing new. Part of politics is discrediting opponents or ideologies. McCarthyism ring a Bell? The kids are fine. They're tough.

 

[Patine]

I was talking with my wife about a year ago about our grandparents, and how backward and weird some of their views were. Things like their views on marriage and the role of women, race, homosexuality, even how one behaves at work and what sort of behaviour is acceptable from a boss vs what sort of behaviour an employee has a right to challenge. On all of these things, my grandparents had very outdated views that seem at best peculiar and anachronistic, and at worst outright disgusting to me.

It was in discussing this that, just over a year ago, we decided to become vegetarian, as we could both foresee that our grandchildren will look at us eating dead animals, raised in horrible conditions on some industrial farm, injected with various chemicals, killed en mass, and responsible for a huge chunk of our global warming, and imagining them not forgiving us for it.

I often wonder what other views I hold that, in 50 years time, would look as outdated as my grandparents forcing my uncle to chaperone my parents on their first date. I, for example, bought a diamond ring, proposed to and married my wife, and we have a relationship that is well within the parameters of an orthodox, heteronormal Western relationship. My wife even took my surname! I can already hear my grandchildren's gasps echo across time and space.

Obviously conservative-leaning people can play along too but I'd imagine the entire premise of this question subverts the primary thesis of conservativism itself. I would in any case be very interested to hear responses to this either from conservatives personally, or that are based in a conservative ideology!

A disdain for social media, gif meme files, linked video files that aren't official music videos, and most 21st Century Hollywood movies, and American TV series and "humour,", a sense of avoidance of using debit or credit cards unless ABSOLUTELY necessary and unavoidable, a refusal to own a cell phone, a nuanced sense of socio-political viewpoints, and a condemnation of deliberate historical revisionism and a revival of hard, absolutist demographic thinking for both far-left or -right-wing agendas. All of these things becoming outdated is a true tragedy, to be honest, and a world is becoming a crappier place because of it.

 

[warpus]

I bet I will be talking about how Star Wars episodes 7 8 and 9 are not so great, but they will love them and instead will be hating on episodes 15 16 and 17

 

[Socrates99]

I bet I will be talking about how Star Wars episodes 7 8 and 9 are not so great, but they will love them and instead will be hating on episodes 15 16 and 17

The thought makes me sick to my stomach. I hated what they did to Luke so much I will probably never bother to watch 9.

 

[amadeus]

The original Lost in Space TV series had a better robot.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

 

[Synobun]

The original Lost in Space TV series had a better robot.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!

The original? You mean the one from 2019?

 

[amadeus]

You still haven’t answered my other question! I’d say Stonewall was more real activism than twitter hashtags.

 

[Synobun]

You still haven’t answered my other question! I’d say Stonewall was more real activism than twitter hashtags.

It was, but there's a sizable population of late Gen X/Boomer/Greatest Generation people who outright did nothing during the Civil Rights Movement and the like, not even the equivalent of a hashtag back then. You see the "heartwarming" stories of old people marching in Pride or BLM who say it's the first time they've ever done any protesting, when they were relatively grown during previous cornerstone movements. Today, the value of an individual protest is less, but the ability to expose information is vastly improved. Someone who does most of their activism through a hashtag is still exposing the message to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, who will in turn expose the message to their own networks. None of that translates to IRL action, but it's easier to swing sentiment when you're getting eyes on the prize again, and again, and again, and again.

A lot of schools have ongoing protests about various issues, both on the micro and macro scale. Remember that Greta Thunberg rose to fame through a school protest. You saw several schools protest gun law in the US after a smattering of heinous school shootings. Pride every year has a massive youth turnout. I'm on the cusp of Millennial to Gen Z and my high school had nothing of the sort. Protest was a foreign idea. Nobody would ever do such a thing. Gen Z, meanwhile, is solidly in the category of taking action, consistently, as they grow to adults and then through college and university. Activism has become the "thing" to do, it is integral to youth identity now to have a cause. From the moment they're forming thoughts, they're expected by their peers to uphold an ideal of some sort. Most never do more than digital spread, but activism as an idea is almost fundamental to the new generation.

ETA: My hometown, while I was growing up, never had a march or protest. Not one. It was rural, sheltered, conservative. Nobody would dare, not even the daring young people back then. Three years ago they had their first Pride march, entirely organized by teens. There is a swing occurring on the matter of activism, and young people are leading the way in a way that Millennials never could or did. (Millennials are amenable to it, though, and are more capable of putting thought into action, simply due to age and experience. If Gen Z's immediate neighbour were Gen X instead, I doubt the swing would be as pronounced.)