Thursday, September 20, 2012

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"And no, I am not offended by jokes about lynching the President, who among other things routinely orders the assassination of our enemies via drone strikes and is thus not much of a candidate for victimhood."

Really? That's kind of gross, John.

To take another example, Bibi may be a warmongering nut job, but it would still be offensive to joke about gassing him in the showers. Shame on you.

September 20, 2012 at 10:52 PM
John said...

Well, you're probably right, but I still thought it was clever. A more serious answer would be that the one thing American conservatives hate most about liberalism is the insistence that some things should not be said or even thought because they are too offensive. The discourse over what is acceptable to say is fraught with political peril. In the long run making it impossible to say some things decreases their social prominence, but sometimes in the short run it leads to an angry backlash from people who hate to be told that they can't say what they think. My basic impulse is to be as tolerant of offensive speech as possible.

September 21, 2012 at 9:58 AM
Anonymous said...

I certainly don't think that there should be legal sanctions on offensive speech. Formal speech codes are also pretty gross, even when they're imposed by non-state institutions like colleges. But as a cultural phenomenon, I think one of the most salutary developments of the last thirty years has been the new offensive speech etiquette, that racial jokes etc. need to be exercised with caution; it's an etiquette, meaning the main punishment for violating it is that the violator is thought uncouth, rude, unsocial; and it's a good thing, because the last century certainly proved how very, very dangerous that kind of rhetoric can be if it enters a culture's mainstream.

September 21, 2012 at 11:36 AM

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