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Somehow I Became Respectable

theparisreview.org

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#51
post #35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that you mention the Simpsons, which itself used to be so counterculture that you were a bad parent if you let your kid watch it. Now it's so mainstream that they can't find a plot that offends people anymore, not so much because they toned it down, but because society caught up to the Simpsons.

Didn’t people recently freak out about the ethnicity of the convenience store owner?

The controversy wasn't the ethnicity of the character, it was that the character was portrayed in a stereotypical manner by a white guy no less. It is basically the audio equivalent of blackface.

The Simpsons debuted 30 years ago this year and there are plenty of 30 year old comedies that are extremely objectionable by current standards. It isn't always fair to criticize that comedy since it is important to always judge art in the context in which it was originally created. However, The Simpsons is still running and therefore needs to continue to justify these decisions today and into the future. No one was suggesting that the character should be edited out of past shows or anything, but the show shouldn't be immune to present criticisms about shows created in the present just because the mistake originated 30 years ago.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#52
post #41

"First the establishment will ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they crack down on you and then you become part of the establishment." Someone I'm glad everything he represents is now accepted. I remember watching Pink Flamingos in the early 2000s when I was discovering cinematography and understanding the industry and it's evolution. It has shock value, but it was deeper than that. When I saw his film, it rem…

> I truly wonder what's the next set of values to go through this process. One still cannot do a funny movie/work of art about the Holocaust, as far as I can tell that’s one of the most taboo things to work with as an artist. Benigni’s movie was not a 100% comedy and maybe that’s why it eventually worked the way it did, but as far as I know Jerry Lewis’s movie was much more on the comedy side of things. And if the Ki…

Not true! "The Producers"

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#53
Acceptance is a function of how deep you're reading from the Big Book Of Things Too Radical To Say In Public.

The problem is that too far outside the average conception of normality it becomes difficult to judge if your Radical Thing is net-positive or net-negative for society. Gay rights? Yes. Legal incest? No.

Some people can tell the difference. Most can't. And that's why "you can't shock anyone anymore" is exactly as true as it's always been. It's just that radical art 40 years ago and radical art in 2019 look different. Too different for John Waters to tell.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#54

Acceptance is a function of how deep you're reading from the Big Book Of Things Too Radical To Say In Public. The problem is that too far outside the average conception of normality it becomes difficult to judge if your Radical Thing is net-positive or net-negative for society. Gay rights? Yes. Legal incest? No. Some people can tell the difference. Most can't. And that's why "you can't shock anyone anymore" is exactl…

> Gay rights? Yes. Legal incest? No.

Honest question: Why not yes to both? I’m fine with it.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#55
post #8

Compared to our current politics, John Waters is kinda respectable. I saw him at a university auditorium a couple years ago. Entertaining. Plus he was great on the Simpsons. Time seems to take the shock out of things. Maybe its the non-stop access to interesting things on the internet and photos and videos of everything taking the rumor and imagination out of things. GWAR's shows were mythic but now we have a nice wi…

Time takes the shock out of things because people compartmentalize things that they don't think of as recent. I feel like people right now, at least in the anglo-american orbit, are constantly shocked about almost everything, or when not actually shocked, pretending to be.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#56
post #24
post #20

Alice Cooper said years ago that he couldn't shock audiences anymore. Shock just seems not to be a thing audiences do now.

[flagged]

Judging by the tone of the democratic primaries debates, even professing support for such a benighted concept as the sovereign right of your nation to control its border is enough to 'shock' at least a reasonable portion of the public. If you refuse to use someone's chosen pronouns you're going to generate some 'shock' too. The current status quo may like to consider itself having shrugged off the prudishness of the West's Christian tradition, but they remain as easily shocked and offended as ever.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#57
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Asking someone to be tolerant of intolerance seems like some weird thing where you ask a Turing machine if another one will halt. It's kind of paradoxical.

Supporting sensible controls on immigration hardly constitutes 'intolerance'. The framing of anything short of open-borders as 'intolerance' has perverted the entire modern political discussion.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#58
post #46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube didn't "ban" "anything people complain about", they just demonetized it and stopped recommending it as frequently. Still not great, but they're not taking your soapbox away, they're just not paying as much for it. What would you suggest companies like Cloudflare do exactly? There have been talks of 8chan being accessory to literal terrorism; do you think that they really want to be hosting that stuff? Isn't i…

Youtube has removed many videos pushing subversive views[1]. Do I agree with these views (maybe I do, I haven't seen the videos, but I doubt it), no. But that's beside the point. And you're right, youtube and 8chan don't want to be hosting that stuff. If I had the power I would like to think I would act differently, but I understand that the teleological purpose of a company is to make money and if I was in a similar…

>But the way I see it there is only one dimension: oppression and tyranny on one end and free speech and individualism on the other.

Other people don't see it that way, though, and in fact there are a few well-mounted defences from philosophers which define that "other" view. You're arguing for a roughly liberal (perhaps liberal egalitarian) point of view, but we shouldn't act as though this is the only way to conceive a healthy view of liberty and freedom. Liberalism isn't the only game in town any more, and it hasn't been the only game in town (speaking in terms of relief from the oppression of kings and barons) since the 19th century. It is a valid view that is commonly held and argued for, sure, but it is by no means the only coherent view of liberty there is.

>don't recognize the rights to buy and use drugs or consume pornography

Perhaps it's surprising, but there are actually liberal views against pornography, i.e they claim to proceed from core liberal tenets to positions in which pornography would not be permissible - see Rae Langton's work for example. In fact, this caused so much of a storm that liberal philosophers took it upon themselves to try and argue against it precisely because they viewed it as a threat to some traditional liberal opinions. It may further surprise you that some philosophers have argued that J.S. Mill himself(!) would have been against pornography.

>Social and economic freedoms go hand and hand, which is something both conservatives and liberals both seem to be confused about.

This is actually the core of certain 19th c. German critiques of liberalism.

>The only true human right is to live one's own life free from tyranny and oppression.

This is simply one opinion amongst many. Negative liberties, like traditional liberalism, isn't the only game in town any more, even in liberal circles. The idea that freedom is necessarily freedom from is not supported by some major liberal theorists (look at Rawls, or perhaps Habermas). The distinction itself, Eric Nelson argues, may not even be relevant any more.

Perhaps you didn't mean to say that this is what liberty is, but rather you were only stating your own conception of liberty, so my apologies if so - but to say that the only other possible conception of liberty is fundamentally wrong, or worse, that it is "totalitarian" is pretty shabby (as far as political philosophy goes).

>Well, I mean, then maybe we should outlaw animals having sex with each other? It's not like they give consent to each other.

This misses the point which is that most philosophers don't consider animals to be moral agents. Liberal philosophers themselves are divided on the "rights" of animals, however some prominent theorists argue that the property relations of animals should be viewed as custodial/trustee ones[0].

Even on free speech contemporary liberal philosophers are divided, but vanishingly few argue for no restrictions at all on speech, even considering obvious caveats (like threats of immediate violence). The trouble is finding a justification within a given free speech principle for certain restrictions to be permitted. It is a question of why we value free speech at all. For example, one justification for the primacy of freedom of speech is that freedom of speech aids discerning truth from falsehood, however how would this apply to deliberate lies? Surely most upholders of free speech would allow at least some lies to be uttered. So then comes the next free speech justification: that speech is inseparable from thought, but that also has its critics etc. (see Susan Brison on this point)

What I'm trying to say is this: maybe critics of liberalism have a point, and maybe we ought to rationally investigate why we hold certain liberal ideals rather than, in J.S. Mill's words, cling to them as dead dogma. It doesn't take an anti-porn conservative or a pro-universal healthcare progressive to do that.

[0] https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/97...

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#59
post #18
post #8

Compared to our current politics, John Waters is kinda respectable. I saw him at a university auditorium a couple years ago. Entertaining. Plus he was great on the Simpsons. Time seems to take the shock out of things. Maybe its the non-stop access to interesting things on the internet and photos and videos of everything taking the rumor and imagination out of things. GWAR's shows were mythic but now we have a nice wi…

It's funny that you mention the Simpsons, which itself used to be so counterculture that you were a bad parent if you let your kid watch it. Now it's so mainstream that they can't find a plot that offends people anymore, not so much because they toned it down, but because society caught up to the Simpsons.

I see it contrapositively; that they're now so mainstream that they can't find a plot that offends people anymore that they are not also offended by enough to not produce. It's not that society has somehow become unoffendable, but that the people who produce the Simpsons are either 1) people who were hired because they are extremely successful establishment writers, or 2) leftovers from an earlier era of the show who are far more wealthy and establishment than they were then.

It's not completely fair to say they toned it down (although they absolutely did to some extent), it's more that they fell into a establishment rut and repeated themselves endlessly.

You could effortlessly write a humanistic/heartwarming, funny script every week that would deeply offend the powerful. The network that airs the Simpsons wouldn't air them, though. That's not what they're paying for.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#60

Acceptance is a function of how deep you're reading from the Big Book Of Things Too Radical To Say In Public. The problem is that too far outside the average conception of normality it becomes difficult to judge if your Radical Thing is net-positive or net-negative for society. Gay rights? Yes. Legal incest? No. Some people can tell the difference. Most can't. And that's why "you can't shock anyone anymore" is exactl…

He directed a movie where an actor literally ate feces.

Literal shit.

That's still not acceptable in 2019 last I checked. Hell, nearly nothing in Pink Flamingos wouldn't be shocking today, though much of it (like rape or animal cruelty) hasn't aged well.

But you've seen two girls one cup. You've seen people dress in fursuits and fuck, and been fisted, and sounded, and it may not be attractive to you but it's not shocking. That's what he's talking about.

I'm guessing that a minority of people on HN haven't seen video of someone dying in a gruesome manner. Perhaps it was ISIS sawing off someone's head. Perhaps it was someone falling from the twin towers. Perhaps it was somebody murdering a homeless man for fun.

It's not shocking. It's despicable, but it's not shocking.

Nazism and white supremacy and racism and misogyny isn't shocking - it's dismaying, but it's not shocking. It may be socially acceptable, but it's not shocking. If anything, it's hackneyed.

What is this radical art? Maybe 4chan shocked people a decade ago, but goatse/gap3 pranks preceded that, at least in my world.

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