So as to this story...You can see the skit above, unless YouTube removes it, which who knows? I think it's pretty funny. The cop played by Keegan-Michael Key has a lot to do with that, doing a...you know, it's not even a slow burn, just total bafflement with what this guy's deal is.
In a year where nuance seems to have crawled off to join the pile of corpses, it's not too surprising that Netflix has pulled it from their service. What is surprising, and kind of encouraging, is that Cross and Odenkirk have managed not to grovel. They actually expect their audience to show some understanding of where they're coming from. This is more sensible, if less fashionable, than claiming they were ignorant of the existence of racism when they wrote a comedy skit about racism.
2 comments:
The clip was gone by the time I read your post this morning; however, your point that self censorship is worse than censorship is certainly true. At least in Communist Russia people understood they were being lied to by Pravda and Isvestia but Stalin et al could only have dreamed of contemporary mob groupthink. By the time the corporations are lining up to out pc one another you have to wonder what on earth is going on.
When you hear someone saying they're 'offended by something', as if being offended gives them the right to stop the offending party from speaking, what you're listening to is someone spouting nonsense. The only correct response must be 'So what?'
We must always allow for irony. I think it was Mark Twain who said the best defense against tyranny is laughter.
For the sake of my own pride I'd love to be able to claim that Big Brother took down the video after I'd linked to it. Sadly I have only my own stupidity to blame. I copied the embed code from YouTube the first time but apparently forgot to paste it. As far as what the corporations are doing by out-pc-ing each other it's hard to put into words but it's bad faith and I think actual marginalized people know that, but they're not the intended audience. More on this later.
And exactly. One may be right to be offended, or not. But even if you're right to be offended, the thing to do is counter it with something better. The remedy is always more speech.
Mark Twain also said, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Perhaps not directly equivalent, but in the right spirit.
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