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Somehow I Became Respectable

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Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#81

Post by dang »

mruts wrote: post #24
sp332 wrote: 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]

If you keep posting ideological flamebait to HN we will ban you. We've asked you this several times already.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following the rules when posting here? Note that they include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#82

Post by hdfbdtbcdg »

jedberg wrote: post #18
acomjean wrote: 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.

Wasn't there a huge fuss about one of the Simpsons characters last year?

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#83

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

merpnderp wrote: post #43
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they can't find a plot that offends people anymore, I doubt that is true. I bet that it is more like the people they offended could not really do much about that offense other than yell about it which just made the sows writers more popular in Hollywood. Now, if they come up with a plot that offends, they are likely to get de-platformed and lose their ability to find a job in Hollywood.

Do people not get your point or are they proving it with the downvotes? Just the thought of poking fun at any modern movement enough to cause anger?

Yes. Even a distant hint of thoughtcrime must be punished.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#84

Post by tomlockwood »

romaaeterna wrote: post #33

Didn't this man direct the movie with the child rape mattress and the unfeigned consumption of dog feces? He didn't become respectable. His mental illness became mainstream. I wish I knew how this happened. Maybe the mechanism was a combination of internet porn and the destruction of real life social spaces. Maybe it's something else. But people should perhaps spend some small fraction of the time that they spend fre…

Did you know in Rome they didn't really have a rigid conception of heterosexuality? There were really only active, and passive partners in the sexual act. That was the distinction that mattered, and Hadrian was just seen as having "Greek taste". Also romans shat in public prolifically, as seen in the many pieces of graffiti warning people against doing it near shopfronts and people's homes. People shouldn't romanticise what they don't understand :)

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#85

Post by cm2187 »

acomjean wrote: 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…

I don’t know. The dog scene in Pink Flamingos still feels a bit on the edge to me.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#86

Post by cm2187 »

whatshisface wrote: post #3

If you really want to shock everybody, and become a highly respected artist known for redefining the modern gallery in ten to thirty years, you should probably paint some nice landscapes or portraits.

Or a pro-Trump statue. That would reliably get you kicked out of every art gallery.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#87

Post by paganel »

fortran77 wrote: post #52
paganel wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Sure, The Producers is a great comedy but it doesn’t take place in the actual camps themselves, that’s what I was trying to suggest that it is now taboo, i.e. that doing almost slap-stick comedy having the Holocaust camps as a background has become culturally out of reach.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#88

Post by tomhoward »

merpnderp wrote: post #43
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they can't find a plot that offends people anymore, I doubt that is true. I bet that it is more like the people they offended could not really do much about that offense other than yell about it which just made the sows writers more popular in Hollywood. Now, if they come up with a plot that offends, they are likely to get de-platformed and lose their ability to find a job in Hollywood.

Do people not get your point or are they proving it with the downvotes? Just the thought of poking fun at any modern movement enough to cause anger?

The comment isn't downvoted. I'm sure it was when you commented, but this is why the guidelines ask us not to go on about downvotes; a downvoted state of a comment is often temporary, whereas comments it are permanent, and always uninteresting.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#89

Post by masonic »

duncan-donuts wrote: post #71
slg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

Well said. I watched Blazing Saddles last night and that film flat out couldn’t be made today.

Yet Blazing Saddles used epithets and parody as weapons against racism, ultimately, with all races unifying to fight the racists and building a new town together.

Re: Somehow I Became Respectable

#90

Post by rxhernandez »

slg wrote: post #51
weberc2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ju…

> 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.

I strongly disagree. I very much remember how my dad (an immigrant to the US) felt about it when he saw the Simpsons in the 90s; I remember how obvious the racism was when he pointed it out. Just because you were oblivious to how it made people feel doesn't mean it didn't make people feel horrible.

This historical relativism crap is really just a cheap copout for not taking the time to ask: "is what I'm doing going to hurt or demean someone?" If the answer is yes, dont do it, it doesn't matter how many people are accepting of it at the time. If the answer is "I don't know", ask the person it might hurt.

The reality is, people largely didn't care how others were impacted by the things they did and giving them a lazy and thoughtless copout is nearly just as demeaning as the original actions.

(Think about it, all those guys getting negatively swept up in the metoo movement claiming that they didn't know any better with regard to sexual harassment sounds absolutely absurd; putting "historical context" on racist things is equally as absurd)

(People who are not minorities usually dont come close to understanding how racism feels; I look and sound "white" and it was always troubling to see how my dad who doesn't look or sound "white" was treated relative to me; it's painful to see all the microaggressions that my friends deal with on a daily basis (in a place as liberal as socal) and to see comments like this trying to invalidate the damage done because of copouts like historical context is incredibly disheartening because it makes me realize how far away we are from the point where we no longer treat people like second class citizens because of their grouping)

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