But as I mentioned, Taxi Driver undeniably also caused harm. The point I feel I’ve clearly made is, if the standard is just that media can cause harm, you’re talking about way more than just media that “attacks an innate characteristic” or that “activists tell you is harmful.” And unfortunately, your criteria are inherently subjective. “Do the activists tell you it’s harmful” for example, raises the question: what activists, on what issue, and what is their basis for telling you that? You understand activists exist for issues outside of sexuality, right? Some of those activists have goals that many people would view as antithetical to society at large. “Is there a consensus among that minority that it is harmful?” How exactly would you determine that? Just defining the minority is hard. A large portion of Latino people have said they dislike Latinx being used, and actually are strongly opposed to it being used, but I note most media outlets, especially left of center ones, are now using Latinx as a standard in spite of that. And “study after study” proving that it is harmful is an example of lazy thinking. For an individual media production, there is not going to be study after study proving anything. There may be studies that may have some applicability to a specific piece of media, but maybe imperfectly, or maybe they really don’t have much applicability.
FWIW, a much easier standard would be “is the material offensive to a large portion of viewers”, and there’s even a business argument for just not having offensive speech on a big media platform. In fact, that’s largely how network TV has always been ran. It does limit the sort of things that can appear on network TV, for good and for bad. But there is a clear business sense in avoiding offensive material–it has a chance of turning people off your platform. If Netflix stated it had a policy against “egregiously offensive material”, I would say it probably wouldn’t be bad business sense, or even necessarily a bad idea. But it would mean less content on Netflix, but the model has worked for network TV for many years. The problem with the “offensive to a large portion of viewers” standard, is it’s obviously majoritarian, what defines offensiveness is the majority’s tastes, not anything intrinsically right or wrong, but it does avoid controversy and probably keeps things like network TV able to appeal to a broad range of people by avoiding the most offensive ideas and language.
But I actually think simply saying “content that is harmful” is a poor standard, because almost any content can cause harm.
I’m not deeply familiar with the TERF movement, but you need to quit saying it’s the KKK equivalent, largely because it is a very stupid and very wrong thing to say.
FWIW I had incidentally canceled Netflix about 2 months ago, mostly because I found myself lazily subscribed to like 7 streaming services, most of which I wasn’t actively watching, so I basically canceled every service that didn’t have content on it I was actively watching and resolved to not resubscribe unless I became aware of content on that service justifying it. I’ve started/stopped Netflix many times over the years when I felt like it had run out of content I was interested in.
So I haven’t seen the special. Historically I’ve liked stand-up, and even liked Dave Chappelle, but his last Netflix special was kinda meh to me, and to be honest none of his Netflix specials have seemed quite as good to me as his earlier standup. Back in the early 2000s when he had his Comedy Central show, I think he was one of the funniest standups in comedy, and while the Netflix specials I’ve seen of his are pretty good, they aren’t quite as good as his older stuff. I’ve always said it’s unfortunate he had what seems to have been basically an emotional/mental breakdown at the end of his Chappelle Show run, and we lost years of his career, because I think that would’ve been his golden age.
I generally like stand up, and I think the comic tradition calls for and allows the comic breathing room to violate social mores and taboos, which includes saying offensive things. But what I don’t like is the trend I see with a lot of big-name comics that last 3-5 years: Jerry Seinfeld [it’s funny Seinfeld feels so strongly about it because his comedy tends to be fairly “clean”], Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, time after time many of them have “pushed back” against criticism that comics get for jokes they make, basically saying the criticism is invalid. I entirely disagree with that. I think a comic should be willing to give offense, and it’s an important part of comedy. But I also don’t think being a comic is a “Get out of Jail Free Card” for receiving public criticism. No one is taking away Ricky Gervais or Dave Chappelle’s freedom to give offense, but they don’t get to take away society’s freedom to decide to say they don’t like their offensive jokes, it’s a two-way street.
“The Closer” is the first and only full DC comedy special I’ve ever watched. I’ve seen short clips of his various performances in the past but his style of comedy never compelled me to watch more of him than that. The only reason I watched this special is because of this thread and the controversy that prompted it. I’m unfamiliar with his earlier act. My take away from this special is that he’s a “meh” comedian who says somewhat inflammatory things because that’s his schtick. For controversial comedy, I’d rather watch Gervais, Jeffries, Wolf and CK, among others.
If there is any criticism I would gladly offer of DC from this special is the self-serving manner in which he made sure to tell the audience that he created an education fund for the daughter of the trans-woman comedian he befriended. That was by far the most crass thing he said in the show and I’ve yet to hear anyone criticize him for that in major media articles (though I’m sure others have).
I’m not sure any comic has said to date that their acts cannot be criticized. Gervais explicitly stated that not every joke is going to work for everybody. They may not think that the criticism is fair, but none as far as I know, have insisted on special protections from criticism.
Given the considerable issues of attempted and successful suicides amongst transgendered people, as already raised in this thread, this hyperbole is in particularly poor taste.
Yeah–TERFs are terrible and an awful force for ill in our society, and there’s a good chance that their efforts have increased suicide risks for plenty of trans people. But the Klan were an organized terror group that deliberately and explicitly murdered people in order to maintain their reign of terror, over the course of decades.
Right, J.K. Rowling has written and said a lot of hateful and shitty things about trans people. She hasn’t gotten on horseback with a band of her TERF friends, ridden around lynching trans people and burning down trans people’s homes, churches, businesses etc, and used fear and violence to make sure trans people can’t participate in the political system. It’s honestly fairly insulting to label something as being akin to the KKK when there’s nothing like the scale or depravity of Klan crimes involved, it waters down the truth of how nasty the Klan was.
That’s why I mentioned the CCA (in pulling up links I came across Thurgood Marshall calling them the “Uptown Klan”). They were incredibly harmful and dangerous for Black Americans when they were active, possibly causing more suffering than the Klan, even though–perhaps because–their methods were very different.
Trans people being mean to other trans people online = directly and unambiguously causes a person’s suicide, as any decent person would recognize.
Dave Chapelle being mean to trans people on a comedy special watched by millions and millions of people = totally fine, absolutely no harm here, you’re a “bluenose” if you think differently.
I would sum it up as a comedian makes people uncomfortable for a living. But when liberals were made uncomfortable they found such misbehavior inexcusable. They screamed and drove a woman to her death.
Daphne Dorman, the trans woman Chapelle briefly associated with about a month before she took her own life, and who now is being used as proof that Chapelle can’t be transphobic.
Is there any reasonable take where it was Liberals who drove her to suicide? What percent of Liberals were even aware of her? (I know that you were only clarifying what Paul said @Miller and it’s not what you think)
Not a strong one, from what I can see. She tweeted support from Chapelle after his last special and got some amount of push back on it, although I haven’t seen exactly what sort of grief she was getting. Chapelle implied that she might have killed herself because of the online criticism, but didn’t state it outright. The shittier corners of the press, like Daily Mail, aren’t mincing their words, though they still don’t make an actual case for linking her suicide to being bullied by the “woke mob,” The article quotes her siblings as saying they think the suicide was more due to childhood trauma and PTSD, and wasn’t related to the noise around Chapelle.
I’m glad I haven’t had time to apologize for misunderstanding him.
With the infective against bluenose liberals, I took him to be hyperbolically claiming that criticism of Chappelle and Sarandos amounted to “hounding people to suicide”. I was evidently wrong about that, but what he’s claiming about Daphne Dorman’s death is little better.
I generally think as a rule one shouldn’t attempt to ascribe the reasons a person in the public sphere commits suicide to known “public” troubles they’ve had. Any sort of celebrity / public figure (and I’m not sure really where Dorman sits on that spectrum, it seemed like she had just kind of started to become known right as she died) is only showing us a small sliver of their “real” personality and life. We have no idea at all what demons she was dealing with or how much any public controversy she was involved in might have affected her.
I remember a lot of people speculating when Anthony Bourdain committed suicide that it was because of the seedy drama his girlfriend Asia Argento was involved in specifically–she had sex with a young man who played her son in a production ten years prior, so it was a bit icky because she’d known him since he was like 9 and she was 25+ years older than him, and technically he was a year below the age of majority in the jurisdiction where they did the deed–Bourdain ended up paying him $400,000 on her behalf to try and make it go away. Bourdain was found dead not too long after this all went down. But the reality is Bourdain had mental health issues his entire life, on top of drug addiction issues that he had fought for something like 20 years. We may feel like we know someone because we are very acquainted with their public work, but we have no grounds to really know why they may have committed suicide.