Omar_Little, you seem to consider these ATMB threads as an indicator of a problem. I see it as the system working well.
Of course there’s not going to be agreement about what is offensive, of course it’s going to be subjective. That’s why you see a mod say something like “I’m going to run it by the mod loop,” and why you see threads like this. Mods get input from across the community, and then make a decision. Some group is always unhappy with that decision.
Well I do think that we as a community have evolved over the last two decades +, some for good and some for bad. For me personally, I prefer when freedom of speech was more allowed, and people didn’t have as thin of skins. But we’re a slowly dying community, teeming thousands vs. millions of days gone by. So making this a safer place for readers, visitors, users is a priority to maintain active users. I get it.
I’ll be honest puzzlegal’s reaction in her modnotes in the two situations discussed above, are a tad over the top and come across very emotional as opposed to a discussion about potential offensiveness.
In this particular example, i hadn’t looked at the thread at all until a member of the community flagged it.
I read the post as saying, “the stunt man would have done better if he’d actually killed himself, and not just done a graphic stunt”. That’s not exactly saying, " he should have killed himself", but it’s certainly in the same neighborhood.
The big one was a mod that decided you couldn’t use variations on the word fuck anymore. AFAIK, no other mods agreed on that.
Whereas I prefer not having my very humanity questioned on the regular. And I’m sure many women prefer not being harassed. But maybe we’re all just thin-skinned.
The good old days of near-unlimited Freeze Peach on this board were shit, and the vastly improved moderation around things like misogyny and racism have made this a better place.
I preferred when we still had posters like @Eve and @Una_Persson before they were driven away by transphobes
Count me as someone who wouldn’t have associated the word ‘uppity’ with a racist undertone. This thread has been educational. Merriam-Webster does a nice job of summarizing the word and its meanings. I was about to post it but Discourse helpfully told me that LHoD had already done so up-thread so I won’t repeat it.
I don’t consider the word banned, but I’ll be extra thoughtful before I use it in a post.
Gotta say, until you posted more I legitimately thought what you were moderating on was it being offensive to make light of the suicide of Thích Quảng Đức. It never would have occurred to me from the note that you were saying that I was saying that the stunt man should kill himself.
Just a datapoint, but that’s exactly how I read your comment.
Just a datapoint but @Darren_Garrison is not new around here and it never occurred to me that intent was to say the stunt man should kill himself.
I saw it as a joke that was never meant to suggest or imply an actual suicide would have been better. I’m amazed anyone else here thought that the stunt man should kill himself was what was intended.
Okay he’s joking that to be taken seriously you have to burn yourself to death? That somehow make it better?
It’s the juxtaposition of their commitment to their cause.
I didn’t say it was a good joke but to think @Darren_Garrison was really suggesting suicide is remarkable to me. I don’t get how that computes in anyone’s mind and illustrates the problem central to this thread.
Edit to add: I will say the image the stunt man evoked was immediately of Thích Quảng Đức and I would think that was his intent. It’s easy to draw that connection.
On this we agree!
This SWM born and raised in the Northeastern US has only encountered the word, “Uppity”, in a racist or more likely referring-to-racism context. “Uppity black” is the usual phrase. Whack-a-Mole’s experience surprises me. Furthermore, the whole idea of condemning someone for acting above their station seems to me to be a pretty dubious and probably dysfunctional perspective. From this thread I understand that it’s sometimes used as a gentle admonishment in some non-racist contexts.
::shudder::
Then what do you interpret it as meaning? Because I can’t see anything else. If you say X did it better, you’re saying Y should have done it like X. If I say, for example, “The Simpsons did it better,” then I’m saying you would have done a better job had you done it like the Simpsons did it.
I ask @Darren_Garren the same thing. What was the meaning of your post otherwise? How would you have communicated the same information if you weren’t turning it into a joke?
It’s a joke. Nothing more than a joke. Perhaps a rather insensitive joke but some folks, myself included, do not mind insensitive humor. Especially not when the people involved are no longer living and can’t be personally hurt by the humor.
It meant the stunt man’s staged, partial, deliberately safe, self-immolation was nothing compared to the real thing. Pulling that shocking image of a real suicide into the readers’ mental model of an abortive movie stunt is the whole point of the humor. It’s unexpected and incongruous. Which is what makes stuff funny.
Folks who can’t see past their own sensitivity about insensitivity can’t see the incongruity → humor; all they see is a reason to be outraged.
Wow…literally ninjaed on this. I was writing something similar when this popped up but you said it much better than I was going to so I’ll not add more except to agree.
But you support the use of karen as a pejorative. Isn’t that hypocritical? Or was it just because I was the OP?
I get your meaning but I still think this joke comes off as more mean-spirited than insensitive. I think the difference is that being lit on fire is a legitimate stunt that stuntmen do. When I heard about it I saw it as a stuntman demonstrating one of his skills to make a memorable point, not as some kind of stolen immolation valor. Comparing what Mike Massa did to what Thich Quang Duc did feels like complaining about a magician cutting his assistant in half because Chandler Halderson did it better. It’s shocking and incongruous, yes, but in a weird and off-putting way rather than a funny one.
And all of this is not to say I don’t think the joke wouldn’t work, if Darren had said something more like “I guess they couldn’t find any Buddhist monks on short notice” it would have drawn the parallel without comparing two specific instances of self-immolation.
I think the issue is not whether @Darren_Garrison made a good joke or a tasteful joke that might have been done better but rather that some read it as literally encouraging the stuntman’s suicide.
NOTE: I am not speaking on behalf of @Darren_Garrison or @LSLGuy. Just my own opinion.