Reply #2: over-reaching outrage ... [View All]

[iverglas]

When the "Mr. Dithers" comparison was made, nobody thought that the person who said it meant to convey the idea that Paul Martin made a practice of kicking his employees in the bum and screeching abuse at them. It was a comment on his fussing and fretting, only (which really had nothing to do with the real Mr. Dithers anyhow ...).

The Bin Laden comparison (which would have sounded a whole lot cleverer as "Osama bin Martin", for pity's sake) was a comment on the practice of sending videotaped messages to the media, with the speaker on the tape remaining holed up someplace out of reach of questions. It was not meant, and could not reasonably have been interpreted, as an insinuation that Paul Martin kills innocent children, or wants to institute a theocracy, or is criminally insane.

I get tired of faux outrage flung around by people who really are smart enough to get the joke and too smart to pretend they don't, and who just aren't such tender, sheltered buds that their sensibilities really are shocked by comparisons to odious things/people for obviously humorous effect.

The outrage at Carolyn Parrish's "damned Americans" was faux; everybody who got themselves worked up into it knew that she was talking about the people in the room she had just walked out of, not the entire population of the US, or anybody else. Just another example.

Let's not PC ourselves into oblivion. It was a joke. It was at the expense of someone who deserved it, for the conduct that the joke was aimed at. It was moderately funny, if badly executed.

People used to be able to compare someone to Hitler based on his authoritarian propensities ("my teacher makes us line up to have our fingernails inspected before class and won't allow us to go to the bathroom; she's a little Hitler") without being accused by the humourless-PC crowd of calling him/her a genocidal anti-Semite. Life was better that way.

btw, I have long taken my PC seriously, and there are many things that I regard as very certainly *not* politically correct. But jokes at the expense of pompous / incompetent / insincere politicians that do not belittle or disparage or ridicule them based on their race, religion, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or physical/mental/psychological status are just jokes.


How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

That's . not . funny.