Ok, here's a thought.
Do you think people should play the game Civilization?
I mean .... there's nukes in the game, mass murder, slavery. Those are also bad, right?
To be clear: I asked some very simple questions, and you don't want to answer them? Instead you're settling for an analogy involving a video game, which is a whole other thing that requires more explanation and more relating back to the simple example of rape jokes.
I didn't feel my questions were bad at all. You yourself were trying to get questions answered previously. This seems a bit different from your usual style of debate, so I'm trying to work out if it's because of my post, or simply because I'm on the other side this time.
This is true, and I feel in such cases it is well worth trying as you may find your feelings of self-evidentiary do not hold up to scrutiny. As a great man once said, "
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
The first problem is, especially in threads like these, "trying to" leads to subpar explanations, which then get picked apart and weaponised. Not by everybody of course, but I'm sure you know as well as I do that this happens.
The second is expert knowledge (for the sake of argument, I'm referring to it as this) is difficult to disseminate by default. Someone intimately familiar with a particular thing but unable to vocalise it (or write it out) effectively doesn't mean that they're not familiar with it. It doesn't mean that they're therefore wrong.
Also I find that Einstein quote funny, because like with all things, even a simple explanation of the subjects he was a master in would require a baseline of familiarity with the topic to understand. Explaining something simply, doesn't
necessarily mean that the resulting explanation therefore has a low barrier to entry (to understand). For example, a "class" is a very fundamental concept in object-oriented programming. I can explain a class simply - it's a collection of properties that describe a specific thing - but then we get onto what properties are, what relevance they have, and so on. And when we contrast "classes" vs. "functions", things get a lot more muddled unless there's some prerequisite knowledge involved.
Something as closely-linked to trauma as rape is similarly-complex. If someone tells (the generic) you they feel you shouldn't be joking about it, you should probably
want to respect their wishes as an individual, unless you prioritise the things you find funny (which apparently include rape jokes)
over any trauma they may be being exposed to. Which people are free to
do, but then they should logically expect others to respond in turn. Some of the problem here seems to be that some folk want the freedom to say these kinds of jokes, but also don't want to hear from the people that don't find them funny. Which seems a bit rich.
I don't understand the controversy in people in this thread saying "you shouldn't say rape jokes". They should be allowed to hold that position. Any criticism of it, to me, if it goes on long enough, tends to end up going down the (ill-advised) route of suggesting the people offended either have "too thin skin", or are "looking to be offended".