Well others clearly think it isn’t a fair question to ask and are happy to draw conclusions from the fact that I do.
That would not be responding in kind would it? Responding in kind would be writing down an equivalent comical piece about Clarkson. Which people of course do as a matter of course. Witness Stuart Lee’s gleeful (but comical) take on the decapitation of Richard “the hamster” Hammond. Perfectly harmless I’m sure you’ll agree
Deferring to the intent of the speaker has consistently been NB’s central position on all of these matters. If you look back up at the thread I linked, and all the threads linked secondarily therefrom, his defense has invariably circled back to some variation of, “If a remark is condemned as racist (or whatever), but the speaker did not have any such conscious intent in making the remark, well then clearly the accusation is wrong.”
I mean, it’s obviously a stupid argument, but he’s at least been consistent with it.
What was the joke?
I don’t mean, I don’t get the joke. I mean, I don’t see what the joke is.
He said he hated her. He compared his hatred of her to his hatred of two other people, who as it happens were also women which is clearly nothing more than an unfortunate coincidence and cannot possibly be anything else, and then said he lay awake at night fantasising about her being led naked through the streets of Britain while crowds chant “Shame, shame, shame” and throw excrement at her.
So, again, where is the actual joke?
Pretty disgusted to read Clarkson’s non-apology. (paraphrased) “I’m sorry that I said people should throw excrement on her naked body without mentioning it is a game of thrones reference. I don’t hate women, just this one.”
I’m still unclear on anything Meghan has done to warrant any of the hate.
That’s why many of us consider this racism, because the tabloids were clearly racist in the early days, and I don’t understand what can motivate people like clarkson to write this crap now.
To quote a well known Dean, consistently stupid, racist, and misogynist is no way to go through life, son.
To me, this resembles a variant of the Yoko syndrome. Do some Brits blame Meghan Markle for ‘breaking up the band’ (i.e. causing the recent schismatic dramas within the royal family that the [British and American] press seem to obsess over)? There doesn’t seem to be as much hate directed toward Harry, who is at least an equal partner in the decision to pursue/encourage the estrangement. (Or at least any hatred toward Harry is expressed less or very differently, from what I can glean from “man on the street” interviews as currently reported.)
Right. Or blame the royal family or the tabloids.
Even after what happened with Harry’s mother. Nah, the problems started with Meghan, apparently.
Not quite. An accusation of “I find that racist” (or “offensive” or whatever) is never wrong because that comes from a person’s own perception. But a claim of that nature is not automatically valid and the intent involved is a massive part of how those incidents should be judged. To my mind that intent is the most important part.
If you are familiar with Clarkson then it is pretty common. He says things he doesn’t mean and uses immense hyperbole, ridiculous analogies and faked outrage. All the time, it is his thing.
There is a reason why you can do a comedic Clarkson impression by simply appending “…in the world!” to the end of any sentence.
For the sake of clarity, he doesn’t really think Meghan should be forced to walk naked through the streets, he doesn’t really think that Meghan is a worse person than Rose West, nor that Nicola Sturgeon is really West’s equivalent.
You may not get it, you may not like it but there is absolutely no doubt that he is joking when he says such things.
Why paraphrase at all when it is simple enough to read the full thing?
If we are going to throw accusations around then the very least we should do is read the words that have actually been written.
Make up your own minds as to whether it is sincere or not, certainly reads like it to me.
“One of the strange things I’ve noticed in recent times is that whenever an MP or a well-known person is asked to apologise for something, no matter how heartfelt or profound that apology may be, it’s never enough for the people who called for it in the first place.
“So I’m going to try and buck the trend this morning with an apology for the things I said in a Sun column recently about Meghan Markle. I really am sorry. All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head. This is me putting my hands up. Its a mea culpa with bells on.
“Usually, I read what I’ve written to someone else before filing, but I was home alone on that fateful day, and in a hurry. So when I’d finished, I just pressed send. And then, when the column appeared the next day, the land mine exploded.
“It was a slow rumble to start with and I ignored it. But then the rumble got louder. So I picked up a copy of The Sun to see what all the fuss was about.
“We’ve all been there, I guess. In that precise moment when we suddenly realise we’ve completely messed up. You are sweaty and cold at the same time. And your head pounds. And you feel sick. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Had I really said that? It was horrible.
“I knew what had happened straight away. I’d been thinking of a scene in Games Of Thrones, but I’d forgotten to mention this. So it looked like I was actually calling for revolting violence to rain down on Meghan’s head. I was very angry with myself because in all those controversial days on Top Gear, when I was accused of all sorts of things, it was very rarely sexism.
“We never did ‘women can’t park’ gags for instance. Or suggested that powerful cars were only for men. And I was thrilled when Jodie Kidd and Ellen MacArthur set fastest-ever laps in our reasonably-priced car. I’m just not sexist and I abhor violence against women. And yet I seemed to be advocating just that.
“I was mortified and so was everyone else. My phone went mad. Very close friends were furious. Even my own daughter took to Instagram to denounce me.
“The Sun quickly apologised, and I tried to explain myself. But still, there were calls for me to be sacked and chaged with a hate crime. More than 60 MPs demanded action to be taken. ITV, who make Who Wants to be a Millionaire,and Amazon, who make The Farm Show and The Grand Tour, were incandescent.
“I therefore wrote to everyone who works with me saying how sorry I was and then on Christmas morning, I emailed Harry and Meghan in California to apologise to them too.
“I said I was baffled by what they had been saying on TV but that the language I’d used in my column was disgraceful and that I was profoundly sorry.
“Over the last 30 years, I have written very nearly 5,000 newspaper and magazine columns, so it was inevitable that one day, I’d do a Harry Kane and sky one of the damn things. Which is what happened with the piece about Meghan.
“So can I move on now? Not sure. It’s hard to be interesting and vigilant at the same time. You never hear peals of laughter coming from a health and safety seminar. But I promise you this, I will try.
“Who knows? Very soon now I shall be a grandfather, so in future, maybe I’ll just write about that.”
Yes, I know what hyperbole is.
There are lots of ways to be hyperbolic. He particularly chose an image of sexual humiliation and degradation for his comic hyperbole. What’s the joke here?
Oh, so he’s only joking about how a woman should be dragged naked through the streets while people throw shit at her.
Well, that’s okay then.
Or maybe the rest of us think that a person who jokes about attacking women is just as bad as a person who seriously proposes attacking women.
The fact that you don’t find it funny doesn’t mean he wasn’t joking. I’m not sure what else to tell you.
Yes, and by his own admission he thinks he went too far with that image.
well you don’t think so and neither does he
I assume it is now you who are joking and using comic hyperbole.
I mentioned a Mitchell and Webb sketch in which they make fun of the Queen being decapitated. Are they as bad as those on Jan 6th, some of whom had serious intentions to hang people?
Just to be clear everyone, offensive jokes should not be offensive because they’re jokes.
Let’s think of a bunch of pedophile jokes about NB. It’s all harmless, they’re jokes.
Let’s revive NB’s Pit thread and flood it with the most horrible jokes. Or respond to any of NB’s posts anywhere on the board with awful jokes.
NB can’t get mad though, because they’re just jokes.
I love this permission we’re being given, let’s take advantage.
It’s not about whether I find it funny. It’s about what the joke is.
It seems to me that the joke is “Isn’t it amusing to picture this woman who a lot of people don’t like being stripped naked and having shit thrown at her?”.
Is that the joke?
Quite right: most commonly it was racism. With this line Clarkson is effectively saying “I was racist several times - but at least I’m rarely sexist!”. It’s staggering to me because in some respects he seems remarkably self-aware. Which makes this lack of awareness all the more jarring when it appears.
I think he intended his apology to be sincere, but as I said earlier, it makes no difference to me at this point - there are only so many times that you can fuck up in essentially the same way before an apology is pretty meaningless.
I have read the whole thing. I chose not to quote the entire “apology” as it’s unfunny drivel and the paraphrase captures it.
It’s also ugly.
Even in his apology he didn’t get what was ugly about his joke. Everybody knew that he was referencing Game of Thrones, there’s no confusion, no little bit of missed context that would have made it cool and funny. It would have been equally ugly if he had wished to see her reenacting the first scene of The Accused, and it wouldn’t be made better by clarifying that the barroom gang rape he hoped Meghan got was actually a movie reference.
The ugly part is the image and the hate exuding from the comment. The hate that he wants us to share with him, agree with him, and perpetuate.
I’m sorry that your Princeling fell in love with someone who doesn’t fit your model of a proper Princess, but jeezus, do we really need to pour on the hate because of it?
Really? Then why did he write it in such a dickish way? He just can’t help being a dick?