Mr. Bean spitting tea

[cyberbrain]

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.

-

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.

Comments

[ratbones]

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.

[cyberbrain]

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