Interesting Links for 16-07-2012
Jul. 16th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- Forget teenagers, toddlers are the most terrifying creatures on Earth
- 15 Rape Jokes That Work
- Coalition to unveil biggest investment in rail since Victorian era. But not until 2015. Can we not move faster?
- MPs who repaid expenses got money back in secret deal
- The World’s Last Guinea Worm: A Dreaded Disease Nears Eradication
- London 2012: 32 mile queue as first Games lane opens
- What Google Is
- O2 handled the Twitter rage over their outage magnificently.
- In the Current System, I’d Be Corrupt Too:An Interview with Bao Tong (one of China’s best-known political dissidents)
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no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 11:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 12:01 pm (UTC)Also, jokes about the culture are fine, so long as there's a basis in fact, and it's about the culture, not the individual (so far as I'm concerned).
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 01:46 pm (UTC)I'm not triggered by it, mind, and I don't find it offensive, but I wouldn't laugh.
The World’s Last Guinea Worm: A Dreaded Disease Nears Eradication
Date: 2012-07-16 12:18 pm (UTC)Re: The World’s Last Guinea Worm: A Dreaded Disease Nears Eradication
Date: 2012-07-16 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 12:23 pm (UTC)£9bn well spent as far as I’m concerned. Except the bit of it spent in the Welsh valleys, where nobody important lives.
15 Rape Jokes That Work
Date: 2012-07-16 12:54 pm (UTC)In fact, I was rather shocked by some of the 15. It seems there's several different ways a joke can "not work":
It can actually be wrong, independent of its humour value: eg. jokes involving actual violence or actual threats of violence, or (in this case) threats that someone who's not a tool would see would be more intimidating than they are funny. These are generally not funny, but unless they're happening to people who don't mind or actually deserve it (which is vanishingly rare), they're unnaceptable even if they are funny.
It can endorse an offensive topic. This is obviously somewhat subjective, since jokes relying on the idea of "lets go out and kill X people" can be funny if you know there are people who want to do that, even if you don't want to yourself, but are *more* funny if you do. I think this is subtly different than jokes *about* people who want to blah, and it's confusing because the same joke may actually work for both (one of the jokes linked could be taken as either endorsing, or making fun of, if you didn't know the context).
Those can be ok, but only if you're not endorsing, so they're risky even if you're edgy.
Some "edgy" humour is here, if it's about things lots of people might like but don't want to admit, eg. jokes that assume that male listeners all want irresponsible sex with good-looking people, or all women listeners want romance-novel-heros. And how acceptible it is depends on how acceptible the ideas are.
And some jokes don't endorse anything bad, but squick listeners because they mention something people find very sensitive. Ideally no-one thinks these jokes are bad, they're just bad to spring on people without warning (like a joke about funerals may not inherently be offensive, but is offensive to tell to someone who's had a relative just die). Sort of "unoffensive edgy jokes". Unfortunately, there's a massive overlap with the previous category, and it's hard to see how much the offensiveness is inherent, and how mcuh the joke is not inherently offensive, but is offensive in almost any company.
I'm not sure how accurate that taxonomy is, but it's how I thought about it. So none of the jokes linked that I saw I thought were inherently offensive (in that, none seemed to be endorsing rape), but unrelated to them being jokes, there's still a difficult line to walk with something like rape, between "aknowledging how common it can be" and "avoiding implicitly endorsing it as normal" -- eg. there's significant problems with advocating punsihment rape, even in jest, even of Hitler... :)
Re: 15 Rape Jokes That Work
Date: 2012-07-16 01:13 pm (UTC)I am very glad that we've gotten beyond the "It's not funny" to "Here are ways of doing it well, to counteract the ways of doing it badly."
Which reminds me of the feminist porn makers out there, trying to make _good_ porn to counteract the stuff they don't like, rather than trying to get it shut down.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 02:28 pm (UTC)I have a two year old son and a fourteen year old daughter. They day to day management of the teenager is much easier. She can understand instructions and can agree to carry out tasks she doesn’t want to in the common interest or for longer term gain. She doesn’t want to play in the traffic.
Granted, she is quite a reasonable teenager, appears to have a good handle on her own long term interests and her own view of her long term best interests is in the same grain as my view of her long term best interests and, I think, also reality (i.e. she is hoping to go to a good university and earn her living with a combination of knowledge thus acquired and intelligence rather than make her living becoming Cheryl Tweedy.)
The toddler, The Captain is full of enthusiasm for stuff, which is both beautiful and bizarre. He can and will spend a long time looking at a bee collecting pollen. A walk out can often turn into an expedition to count all of Edinburgh’s motor cycles. He asks Why? all the time. It’s really just a way of saying “Say More About That.”
He has no concept of danger or of time. Last week we took him to a children’s adventure playgroud in East Lothian and he climbed up a rope scramble net to a height of three stories. Yesterday, we took him out for a ride on his scooter and he ended up circumnavigating Marchmont and then was both baffled and dismayed to return home to discover that CBeebies had stopped transmitting and that it was bed time.
The thing I notice about toddlers that isn’t picked out in the article is how they play back at you what they observe in you. The Capt’s current catchphrases include “Hang on a minute.” And “Ummmm, No.” both things that MLW and I find ourselves saying all the time.
He’s started reading his stories to us which is revealling the connections he is making in his own head about how the world is and works.
I personally think we have to go with him. It takes longer but it’s more fun.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 05:33 pm (UTC)...probably because my own sensibleness/logic/controlfreakery often disconnects me from that and I need the reminders!
I'd also say that as a teenager I should probably have followed a path guided by what I loved rather than railroading myself so hard into a sensible one. I think I'd have been happier and actually achieved more. Easy to say, not so easy to do - at any age. Takes a shitload of proper courage.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-17 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-20 05:28 pm (UTC)But Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler" (The Producers) is hysterical, and he covered a LOT of ground in "Black Bart" (Blazing Saddles). Dick Gregory titled his autobiography "Nigger" and dedicated it to his mother: "if you ever hear that word again, you'll know they're advertising my book".
So I was willing to accept the theoretical possibility of a funny rape joke. It's not surprising that a plurality are from The Onion, but the Silverman near the end is the winner for savagery.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-22 02:51 pm (UTC)Frankly, I think you can make any subject funny - the question is whether you're also upsetting part of your audience, and that comes down to the audience, the joke teller, and what tradeoffs they're happy to make.