cyberbrain | Mr. Bean spitting tea

Jokey title aside, I wanted to share these serious videos because they resonate with my feelings.

Big thanks goes to my father who, about a month ago, I caught watching a video of Rowan Atkinson give this speech and sparked my interest in looking up the full thing. I'm embedding it below, but for anyone that doesn't feel like watching a video, here's a transcript.

A couple of quotes that stood out to me:

a culture that...with the reasonable and well-intended ambition to contain obnoxious elements in society, has created a society of an extraordinarily authoritarian and controlling nature.

We need to build our immunity to taking offense, so that we can deal with the issues that perfectly justified criticism can raise. Our priority should be to deal with the message, not the messenger.

And then youtube recommended me the following short video. For anyone who prefers to read, check out the transcript on youtube, it's accurate.

I particularly liked the closing lines.

You put something out there, you paint a watercolor, you make a joke, you make a television show, whatever it is. If people are offended, that's their problem. It's not yours. You've done your bit. [...] I'm a great believer that if a joke has an appreciative audience, no matter how small, no matter who they are, then it is worthy. It should be, as it were, allowed.

Obviously, the first is aimed at the British government and the second is mainly about comedy but I feel like they still apply to art and writing in a broader sense.

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N.b. Racism is bad and ao3/otw should do better to take care of its volunteers and the people reporting they were harassed. However a campaign that strongly and immediately turns against and alienates anyone who questions even small parts of it is flawed.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ratbones

Yeah. As I said to you privately, the first one concerns how we deal with others' offensive speech, and the second one concerns how we deal with being told we've been offensive, and we all need to think about that from both sides, because all of us will offend someone if we talk long enough. And of course it's complicated -- the line between being told "your work is hurtful to me" and "your work is factually wrong" is sometimes way less obvious than we might like it to be, for one, never mind "your work is objectively over the line of civil discourse" (I don't think objectivity even exists on that...see "titan sub omegaverse fic"...*headache*)

But I think we need thicker skins all around. We need to learn to hear stuff we find really objectionable and let the natural wave of righteous fury pass over us before deciding how to react, and we need to hear people telling us we've said something objectionable and not immediately go on the defensive. In general, a lot less "how could you say that?!" and a lot more "I'd like to understand why you're saying that" would be good for all of us. Me included. God knows you know I have my own knee-jerk responses. (It is also often useful to just Ignore Takes and Touch Grass, lol.)

It's wild that this is a concern involving the real actual government in the UK. Americans can't boast about much, but it is definitively legal to call a horse gay here :D

EDIT: Also, "if a joke has an appreciative audience, no matter how small, no matter who they are, then it is worthy". Yes. Sometimes some jokes, stories, movies, whatever, aren't for us because they're...for someone else, and we need to just let them be.

Edited (i had another thought) Date: 2023-06-29 11:54 pm (UTC)

cyberbrain

Fully agreed with everything you're saying! Thank you for pointing out that the two videos are like opposite sides of the same coin, I hadn't quite realized that when I first linked them to you in the chat 🙈

the line between being told "your work is hurtful to me" and "your work is factually wrong" is sometimes way less obvious than we might like it to be, for one, never mind "your work is objectively over the line of civil discourse"
Yeah, exactly this. For one, it can be tricky to first just express your position on a story, but then it's also tricky to understand someone's position on *your own* story (or art or joke or whatever).
And then, civil discourse has a bit of a nonexistent line, imo, because it's going to vary from person to person. Sooo, I suppose, hold y'all's horses and chill out, not everyone is out to get ya! :D ...But internet fandom circles (as opposed to the—admittedly tiny—real life fandom circles I've seen) sort of seem to be out to get someone every now and then. ...In which case, they need to ~~hold~~ clutch their horses for dear goddamn life. oop i'm rambling, okay moving on (something something touch grass)

see "titan sub omegaverse fic"...*headache*
+1 headache

Re: defensiveness, so I don't copy-paste the whole paragraph :D
You're right, it's way too common that we all go on the defensive at even the slightest hint of—not even criticism—just simple push-back or inquiry. I think it's very rarely necessary, because, I think, it's rare that anyone actually means to criticize harshly.

Ignore Takes and Touch Grass
words of wisdom right there! 😁

Sometimes some jokes, stories, movies, whatever, aren't for us because they're...for someone else, and we need to just let them be.
Very much so. I keep trying to remind myself of that when I see stuff that's just,,,obviously not for me.

Edited (oopsie html) Date: 2023-07-04 09:45 pm (UTC)

But internet fandom circles (as opposed to the—admittedly tiny—real life fandom circles I've seen) sort of seem to be out to get someone every now and then. ...In which case, they need to hold clutch their horses for dear goddamn life.
Yeah, the witch hunt behavior that people are scared of is absolutely real. I want to say we're all algorithm-trained, but the ugly fact is, we trained the algorithms first. (It does seem particularly bad in online fandom spaces which I think is at least partly because they tend to be very politically lefty, and the left is notorious for this shit.)

You're right, it's way too common that we all go on the defensive at even the slightest hint of—not even criticism—just simple push-back or inquiry.
Yep! Even if it comes from a legitimate fear, it just escalates the temperature of the conversation more; cooler heads tend to just dip because they don't want to deal with it, and the overly-invested just feel more and more persecuted on both/all sides. Don't know how to fix it. Humor helps somewhat but people can get real humorless about it all.

Vaguely related: remember when Godwin's Law was a joke and you'd get memed on for reductio ad Hitlerum? People do be referencing the Holocaust over someone calling them a stupid muppet on the internet these days without a trace of irony.

I want to say we're all algorithm-trained, but the ugly fact is, we trained the algorithms first.
Yeah, oof :/

cooler heads tend to just dip because they don't want to deal with it, and the overly-invested just feel more and more persecuted on both/all sides
*nodnod* It's no good if you dip ("You don't care, you're horrible!") but it's also not good if you're overly invested ("You're too intense, you're horrible!") so you just get burned at the end anyway. Don't know how to fix it either, oof

remember when Godwin's Law was a joke and you'd get memed on for reductio ad Hitlerum?
Hee, yeah! I just have to look,,,six years or so back :D