Absolute nonsense, sadly, retains all of its rhetorical effectiveness on the right. Was that the problem with my gibberish–it wasn’t conservative enough?
Their message in the end of the shorts was that Hitler, Goering and Gobbles should die and have their heads shown as trophies or be eaten by lions depending on the short. A year before America was at war with Germany. And yes, the right-wingers in the US had a beef too then.
You Natzy Spy satirized the Nazis and the Third Reich and helped publicize the Nazi threat in a period when the United States was still neutral about World War II and isolationist sentiment was prevalent among the public. During this period, isolationist senators such as Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye objected to Hollywood films on grounds that they were anti-Nazi propaganda vehicles designed to mobilize the American public for war.
You are wasting your time trying to convince me of things with which I’m already in agreement. And I’m now convinced that I’m wasting my time trying to make you see that I don’t take my cues from right wing propaganda.
As noted in other threads, that argument is just Orwellian. In the end, to counter critical race theory in schools (that is not really taught there) the right-wing politicians in Texas did go ahead and banned what they really wanted, under the excuse of going against “woke” CRT they had to ban the teaching of many inconvenient historical facts since they could not point at specific CRT lessons, therefore anything that they branded as CRT is, because they said so.
Uh, I’m not saying that you are, just that you complained too much about having more troubles defending the “center” of this issue.
Interesting! I didn’t know this, although I did know that the Stooges and their families were all very aware of and horrified by what was going on in Germany at the time.
The problem is that the audience that that is targeted towards in order to undermine legitimate criticism directed at the growing illiberal lunatic wing of the left is shrinking as old school liberals grow increasingly embarrassed with the double think demanded to be Woke.
I am glad you’ve decided to give up on the word salad and pronouns with ambiguous antecedents–otherwise, I’d be worried that you were doubling down on the absolute nonsense that retains such rhetorical efficacy on the right.
From what I have heard the Hollywood Blacklist and HUAC related hearings after the war also labeled some as “prematurely anti-facist” because they were critical of Nazi Germany before the US joined the war.
Also making pro-Soviet films to help sell the wartime alliance was also used against people, even if those films were asked for by the US Government.
(Again, as I understand and simplify it. What a messed up time in history.)
Graham-Dixon’s comments are very clearly impersonating Nazis for the purpose of describing how wrong their position was. Cancelling at its worst.
Cleese was quite right to cancel. Graham-Dixon and Cleese are too good for these people.
Such word salad! Woke Racism by John McWhorter: 9780593423066 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
It’s now in book form.
As I said earlier,
It’s a weird Godwin’s law scenario. The debate was about good taste, decidely not about mass murder or the Holocaust. In order to score points in a debate about good taste, this motherfucker went straight to Nazis and started quoting Hitler. Sure, he had a point, and sure, it wasn’t a pro-Nazi point; but what a goddamned downer it was, in what was supposed to be a light convivial evening.
This is just part of the standard boilerplate from conservatives accompanying their perennial whines about “political correctness”, “PC”, “cancel culture”, “wokeism”, or whatever name is assigned to the imagined enemy in the current iteration of the whining. The perennial conservative script goes more or less like this:
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Back in the (very distant) bad old days, it was the right wing that tried to repress free speech.
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But now, in an unprecedentedly dangerous challenge to freedom, attacks on free speech are coming from the left wing!
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These demands for ideological conformity are paralyzing freedom of expression and endangering the pursuit of truth and knowledge! (It’s not that we like bigotry and oppression, it’s just that it would be very very bad for our society to try to censor them.)
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Fortunately, some brave moderates/centrists/“old school liberals” are starting to see through this oppressive left-wing movement and turn against it!
Recycle every 7-10 years after the “PC hysteria fatigue” generated among conservative audiences by the previous cycle has worn off.
Here, for example, is a version of the exact same script dating back to June 1991, over twenty years ago:
Here’s a sample from about the same time lamenting a particularly nefarious manifestation of the evil “PC of today”:
Oh, the horror, the horror: advocating the use of inclusive pronouns instead of assuming that the masculine pronoun “he” is the default to represent everybody. Twenty years from now, the current cycle of conservative anti-PC hysteria about “woke” pronoun use is going to seem just as trivial and silly as the above complaint about “he and she”. (Well, to reasonable people it already seems trivial and silly, but the point is that by then even the conservatives will have got over it.)
Meanwhile, in real life, the situation is that liberals/leftists are always having disagreements about what types of speech and critiques of speech are appropriate in what circumstances, and always will. Conservatives will never stop trying to paint such disagreements as signs of an imminent profound schism, but they’re like millenialist evangelicals predicting the Rapture: always wrong, never giving up.
So, you’re saying he should be cancelled for being boring? Or for him being in a state of bad taste to illustrate his point in a debate about bad taste?
Because in the end, that’s not what the position of Bradwell seems to be. He’s saying that he was blacklisting Graham-Dixon for using Hitlers speech, which appears to be unacceptable at all, not for being boring or depressing. Heck, most debate subjects are depressing on the face of them.
And in Graham-Dixon’s defense, I don’t know of another way to prove that bad taste exists without exhibiting the bad taste itself. Sometimes you must cross the line to prove it is there, and the rest of us are usually better off for knowing about it, even if the principle participants have a tough time of it.
What absolute revisionist horseshit. They did not say that. They did not mean to say that.
These students are not a bunch of ineloquent numpties. They are the academic crème de la crème of the UK. They are quite capable of expressing what they mean and quite clearly did so. You aren’t going to rescue what they said by pretending they said something else. You are completely kidding yourself. If they thought the guy was just dull and/or a downer, they (a) would at most have said so and (b) would have just never invited him back.
Historically, aren’t kids supposed to be cooler, edgier, wilder, rock harder, do more drugs, and have more sex than their parents (or at least that what their parents will admit too)?
Only in a fairly recent slice of history. Prior to that, there have been plenty of generational cycles fluctuating between more and less permissiveness. The mores of the 1920s tended to be more “wild” than those of the next generation, for example.
And even recently, a lot of the children of sixties hippies did a lot less drugs and sex in their youth than their parents had done.
Which is exactly what’s wrong with kids these days. They don’t get out much.
You could try yelling at them to get on to your lawn! 
I’d be happy if they’d just come out to stand on their own lawn. 