Come roll with us with our heads towards the future

Everything is subjective my friend. Is it a carnival? Are they being attacked? Is it a prank? and lastly will that image offend someone? :man_shrugging:

Thank you. I learned something new today.

2 Likes

That’s true, a lot of people have lost their minds for a lot of different reasons, what’s going on is very far from relatively normal live we all get used to! :expressionless:

Well, you may want to learn about it though, it’s good concept to grasp, which could help you a lot in life :slight_smile:

Sure, i do too (emotionally and on personal level) that is what most of us (outside of fringe lunatics) would want to see in each other! :slightly_smiling_face:

But Freedom of speech itself, like Freedom of association - are rights, not feelings.

It’s not the most intuitive things in the world too, i haven’t grasped it from a day i was born as well, because civics and philosophy ain’t usually taught in schools. Your morals telling you that something is bad, and something is good, therefore what’s bad - must be stopped, it’s pure simple logic.

Thing is, if you restrict or stop any form of speech (for a sake of argument, let’s put Freedom of association aside, and think of just in general as a society), for example radical religious or other hateful groups which clearly call for violence, outcomes are always:

  1. It will amplify those voices, as those who are banned quickly become martyrs and will always gain momentum to actually radicalize.

  2. They will get underground and radicalize, as before on open and free to speak society - their views was extremely fringe and defused, because they was actually seen as they are.

  3. Since in 99% of cases, such restrictions and censorship are made actually by the government and not people - it’s extremely dangerous and usually pretty quickly spiral down to censorship of a very reasonable views of yesterday be it personal, religious or any other (usually examples of such are hardcore like China, but it’s actually always the case - you can see signs of it today all around the World).

  4. “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”


Those concepts of Freedom of speech and Freedom of association are made to prevent actual issue that none of us would want to see - aggression in a form of physical violence.

Coz there are plenty of ways to avoid speech that you don’t like, but no ways to avoid harm from restricting it.
And of course, once you get violent - you should go to jail and loose any form of credibility in society.

Surely it’s not panacea, as we’re all people and not robots, of course any rights should be actually agreed and followed, but i think that generally speaking it’s best available path to freedom and not in the other direction! :slight_smile:

1 Like

That seems reasonable, superficially. But then you realise that there is no such joke that will not offend anyone.

Also, being hurt and having one’s feelings hurt are two entirely different things. Nobody gets hurt by a joke, no matter how disgusting and offensive that joke is (unless maybe people who are genuinely mentally ill and have severe psyhological trauma that hearing or reading a joke is literally causing them harm). Jokes can be insulting (and often are), and people might react negatively to them, be saddened by them, or even enraged. There certainly exist jokes in bad taste, which should not be said. But they are not hurt by it. Telling a joke is not an assault.

People who got offended by a joke mentioning an anonymous rich gay celebrity (who, by the way, was not the butt of the joke, no pun intended), also made jokes that were significantly more hideous, but mature people know that a joke is a joke, and is not meant to be taken seriously.

1 Like

Have you met dad jokes?

Bad humour offends me :wink: No, actually it doesn’t. But yeah, dad jokes are the bottom of the barrel.

How dare you?! How else am I gonna get my kid to cringe around her friends?

4 Likes

This seems like a fairly narrow definition of “hurt”. I have pretty thick skin but that doesn’t mean I am not hurt when others say hurtful things to me or about me. It just means I can handle it.

Not everyone can.

What that means is that I am now much more judicious than I once was about who I joke with and on which topics. I think it is sad that I need to act like that but I also think it is better to err on the side of kindness.

6 Likes

Surreptitious advertising for a sports goods manufacturer.

That’s a good thing, don’t get me wrong. If you have a choice to make and one option is kinder than the other, the former is always the better one. I also try to not intentionally insult anyone.

But when it is done unintentionally, and the response to it is, in my opinion, excessive, then I start to lose empathy for the offended party. Imagine you stepped on my toe, unintentionally, and I started screaming at you and demanding that your legs be chopped off… Who deserves empathy in that case? Would it be reasonable to say: “well, not everyone’s toes are tough”?

2 Likes

I would argue that both parties deserve it.

1 Like

So you’d chopped both your and @Kresimir legs off? :laughing:
Fair enough! :upside_down_face:

Perhaps, but for entirely different reasons.

:man_shrugging: For me, this is one of those questions that has no “right” answer. All we can do is try to understand each others positions even if we don’t agree with them.

For what it is worth, I am fairly certain I was arguing a different position than I am today on a similar issue 18 months ago. It was that discussion that opened my eyes to another way to look at it.

The real shame is that so many people on both sides of the discussion took a hard stance and it is causing discord in the community instead of it being an opportunity for us to discuss and grow together. But that is another unfortunate reality of the world we currently live in.

8 Likes

I agree. Though perhaps this is one of those topics that is better left not discussed (just like religion and politics) because it just makes obvious the differences between people.

For what it’s worth, even though I am a very opinionated person, I have no hard feelings towards anyone on this forum.

5 Likes

Will do. I’m all for learning new things.

Well to be fair, I did study A Level philosophy, but we focused more on kantian ethics and Utilitarianism. I don’t recall coming across Freedom of Association. I’ll have to look into it in some point.

4 Likes

That’s a shame. I think both are extremely important for the general knowledge of everyone.

2 Likes

OMG can we a just put a lid on it? I think this issue has been resolved and everyone can move on. We are not the internet psycho therapists here. Let’s just call it what it is a lesson learned. Right or wrong it is what it is. No offense. :wink:

7 Likes

I wrote a long reply in the other thread, before deciding not to post.

We are not in the 20th century any more, we do not make “jokes” about things we do not understand. Everybody is equal and has the right to decide for themselves what they are and want to be.

Humour can and has been used as a form of oppression against the BAME and the LGBTQ+ communites.

A line has to be drawn.

3 Likes

No more vim jokes? :disappointed_relieved:

4 Likes