The Return of Humor

I prefer racist humor to Rocket humor.regards,
Esteban "Forgot to Laugh" Hambre

I'm so glad there are people like contracycle to protect us from the specter of bad humor. It says in the Constitution (somewhere in the back) that people have free speech unless they might say something that will offend someone. After all, being offended is the same as being physically attacked, except for the physical part. And the attack. Everyone knows that gays, women, and members of various ethnic minorities would gladly continue to suffer violence and discrimination as long as people would stop telling jokes about them.So please, people, enough of this joke-violence. The words you say can hurt people. You think it's funny that there's not one black person in the US Senate? That won't change if you keep telling racist jokes, you genocidal maniacs.regards,
Esteban "Snow White" Hambre

Contracycle,It takes a special sort of stupidity and callousness, a superhuman ignorance, to accuse those of us who tell bad jokes of being in league with those who shove innocent people in cattle cars and ship them off to their extermination by the millions. You seem to possess just that exact measure of stupidity.There's a relationship among someone's intelligence, his ability to deal with ambiguity, his tolerance of the views of people who don't think exactly the same way he does, and his fitness to function in a free society. I'm not ashamed to be able to deal with the thoughts and views of people I don't agree with, and maybe I get a kick out of feeling superior to those I consider less enlightened than myself. However, I can't imagine how stunted and bigoted someone has to be if he can't bear to hear views expressed that aren't absolutely identical to his own.In assuming that the only aim in telling racist or sexist jokes is to dehumanize (and later exterminate) the targets of these jokes, you are making an oversimplification so sweeping it boggles the mind. I'm impressed both by how lacking you are in imagination and how fearful you are of other people's freedom to think for themselves. There are those who aren't equipped to deal with the complexity of human society, and the moral intricacies of freedom of expression. You seem like a perfect example of someone who resents being in a world of people with the audacity to be different from him.In short, I guess you only support diversity as long as everyone thinks the same as you. How typical.regards,
Esteban Hambre

contracycle,You're obviously a cookie-cutter version of a petulant busybody. But I had no idea you were so intellectually unequipped to deal with the notion of humor, ambiguity, and freedom of speech.I love how you simply assert that the conflation of stupid-joke-telling with genocide is "realism," and offer nothing other than that bold statement as support. You claim that I resented being called on telling racist jokes, even though I never told any racist jokes. Quite aside from painting us all as genocidal maniacs, you refer to those of us who disagree with you as "scumbags" and "fuckwits," though we don't have the right to use 'hate speech' against others. Then you dismiss my claim that you only respect the free speech of those you agree with as being beside the point, even though it in fact is exactly the point.You're not the first person to become enamored of fashionable nonsense perpetrated by censorship-crazed idealogues. You'll get over it and feel embarrassed someday. Part of growing up.regards,
Esteban Hambre

Gasp! How long are we going to have to take this Hate Speechtm from you nasty free-speech abusers? Scum are people too!regards,
Esteban "Scum of the Earth" Hambre

Correction, I'm not an advocate for scumism, I'm an apologist for it. And who are you to criticize me? Obviously you have no respect for the rights of the billions of protozoans, microscopic crustaceans, and various other organic and inorganic matter that make up the algae canopies atop our fine waterways. You and your buddy contracycle can take your obvious Darwinist ideological bias and go away.regards,
Esteban "Nuisance Algae" Hambre

Q: What do you have when you've got a pandering PC busybody buried up to his neck in sand?A: Not enough sand.regards,
Esteban Hambre

It's not often I put down the bong and type with both hands, but your refusal to deal with my argument is typical of racist scum. Okay, calling my ill-informed collection of non-sequiturs, insults, and rhetoric an "argument" is like calling a puddle in a parking lot "Lake Champlain." But it's all I've got.I find your joke offensive. I have e-mailed the administrators and their parents to complain about this board being used as an outlet for joke-terrorism, and someone wrote back and told me to piss up a rope. I assume this means they agree with the gist of my claim.The South African Nautical Commission (formerly Krazy Klauss's Cash and Carry, Ltd.) reports that the overwhelming majority of victims of sunken-ship-related hate crimes are wet. Your type of joking only further entrenches the dry power elite and serves as reinforcement and legitimization of the systematic dehumanization of a historically oppressed minority. Ditto for the ship-in-a-bottle manufacturers, who are similarly contributing to the oppression of drowning victims everywhere.regards,
Esteban "Hey, Sailor" Hambre

I'll have you know that I would have aced that intermediate course in Half Baked Rhetoric if the campus of Johannesburg Community College hadn't been flooded with that cheap dope back in '91. All right, the typing course was a washout, but what can I say.However, your assertion that I'm ignoring the complexities of the issue is absolutely untrue. I have always maintained that intent is irrelevant, and if you don't take my word for it you're a fuckwit. Since I got kicked out of the library for tearing up copies of Tom Sawyer, I can't and won't provide backup for any of my claims. You think you're such a bigshot for having read Swift and Voltaire, but I assume they either don't exist or they're racists who hide behind that Manichaean "satire" excuse. If Henry Louis Gates disagrees with hate-speech legislation, he's either an Uncle Tom or he's white. I don't live in America, so free speech has nothing to do with this issue.Did I call you a Nazi yet in this post? Well, you're a Nazi.regards,
Esteban Hambre

1) Calling someone a bigot makes him a bigot.2) It's dehumanizing to use racist terms even if your intent is not to offend, because intent doesn't matter. However, if your intent is to take the moral high ground, you can use racist terms because your intent matters.3) Humor and violence are so inextricably related that no one should dispute the dehumanizing effect of jokes, even if there's no evidence to support that relationship. Laughing makes you a bigot. (See #1)4) You have the right to free speech as long as no one can conceivably hear what you have to say. Corrolary: Racism goes away when no one talks about it.5) Both Imperial and Weimar Germany had incitement-to-hatred statutes to stifle hate speech.* Some things those Nazis did right.regards,
Esteban Hambre*Doskow & Jacoby (1940), p.508; Borovoy (1988), p.50.