https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TucGdMXGzWw

Joe Rogan's take

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin101:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TucGdMXGzWw

Joe Rogan's take

Rogan gets the obvious but knows so much less than he thinks he does. Take him with a grain of salt.

Talking about initial negativity to Chappelle from internet influencers, at 2:04 --

"It's undisguised activism, it's very transparent activism, it's..in (sic) opposed to journalism..."

The guest, Zuby (who?) seems to have a better handle on the topic, the rest of this clip has value for that. Not trying to hijack this thread to bash Rogan, his show can be interesting but he's out in the weeds too often.

Finally watched it last night and LMAO!

New article about the show in National Review.
Link

In the face of critics bent on suppression, he tells it as he sees it
Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special Sticks & Stones came out in
August, the overwhelming response from critics was that it was
offensive, unacceptable garbage.
MAGAZINE | OCTOBER 28, 2019, ISSUE
Defiant Dave Chappelle
By KATHERINE TIMPF
Inkoo Kang of Slate declared that Chappelle’s “jokes make you wince.” Garrett
Martin, in the online magazine Paste, maintained that the special was
“thoughtless” and “terrible” — and that Chappelle was just “acting like an
a**hole” and proving that he was “thoroughly out of touch with today.” In The
Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis called it a “temper tantrum.” Melanie McFarland’s
piece in Salon disparaged it for its “cruelty.”
The “professionals” agreed — the special was trash, worthy of only a pathetic 33
percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The low score really shouldn’t be surprising. After all, Chappelle was making
jokes about untouchable subjects — such as race, the LGBT community, and
school shootings. He literally said he didn’t believe Michael Jackson’s accusers,
and hinted that it wouldn’t matter even if they were right, because, and I quote,
“it’s Michael Jackson!” In a climate where the phrase “you guys” has been
deemed problematic, there is no way a comedian could actually expect to get
away with things like that.
Or could he?
See, while the critics’ response might make you think that the people who
watched it were so traumatized that they haven’t come out from under their
beds since, the Rotten Tomatoes audience score tells a different story: People
liked it. They liked it a lot. In fact, the audience score was a whopping 99
percent.
How can this be? Is this some kind of crazy outlier? Although the super-woke
critics, who no doubt fancy themselves to be the experts on art and culture,
would have you think that it is, all actual evidence points to the fact that it’s not.
In reality, the Problematic Police don’t represent the views of most of the
country — no matter how much their shrill-shrieking tweets and buzzword-salad
blog posts might be drowning out the more tempered views of Regular People.
The truth is, out in the Real World, humor that isn’t afraid to push boundaries
has always been popular. South Park (a show that has joked about subjects
ranging from Mohammed to the Virgin Mary to Caitlyn Jenner to the death of
Trayvon Martin) was just renewed through a 26th season. At the end of
September, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia will begin its 14th season, even
though the last one featured comedic episodes on topics that the Woke Warriors
would certainly say you may not joke about, such as the transgender-bathroom
debate and Me Too.
There’s empirical evidence suggesting that the people who support extreme
levels of political correctness are the ones who are, as Martin put it in his review
of Chappelle’s special, “out of touch with today” — not the other way around. A
study released last year by the international research initiative More in
Common, titled “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,”
found that 80 percent of the population believes “political correctness is a
problem in our country,” including 61 percent of traditional liberals. Like a
beautiful but mean high-school bully after losing the Student Council election,
the PC Police have learned they are not as popular as they thought they were.
How, then, did they get so powerful? It’s simple: Cultural censorship through
fear. The social-justice crowd has become the dominant voice on cultural affairs
not because their views are actually the most popular, but because they are so
good at silencing the others.
For many Americans, the prospect of being called “racist,” “sexist,”
“homophobic,” or otherwise “problematic” has become more terrifying than
death itself. People are afraid of being “canceled”; the Thought Police know that.
They don’t have to worry about finding silly things such as “logic” or “facts” to
prop up their positions — they have a much easier route: your fear.
They’re very, very good at it, too. They’ve somehow made it accepted that if you
are, for example, a man, you may not comment on any accusation of
even if, say, someone makes the claim that the word “too” is “sexist” and hurts
women. (This actually happened a few years ago; the Huffington Post published
a 1,200-word piece on it.) Similarly, if you are white, you can’t comment on any
accusation of racism — even if, say, someone makes the claim that Lord of the
Rings will have “dire consequences . . . for society” because the way it depicts the
orcs will perpetuate racism. (This, too, actually happened; a sci-fi writer made
that exact claim on the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast last year.)
Effectively, you are automatically silenced on a whole host of issues just because
of your identity — logic be damned.
Is this any way for us to live? Why is the majority staying silent for fear of a tiny
subgroup whose only weapon is a handful of hack words?
I understand the fear. I understand why a person might be afraid to speak freely,
knowing that a spurious accusation of racism or sexism could easily result. I also
understand why the easiest response to this sort of accusation would be to
simply shut up or maybe apologize, regardless of whether you actually have
anything to be sorry for. The PC mob rarely stops at calling someone “offensive.”
No — it also wants anyone associated with anything it deems offensive to be cast
out of the public square. It wants “offensive” people to be forbidden to speak on
college campuses and even to be employed.
It’s time for us to stop being afraid.
Yes, racism and sexism are very real, very serious issues. But the truth is, a
culture that accepts an obsession with baselessly, randomly declaring “racism”
and “sexism” where they don’t exist just minimizes the real instances of it. For
example: I’ve experienced sexism countless times in my life. In fact, it’s pretty
much impossible for me to look at my Twitter mentions without seeing someone
telling me that I should stop my life and have kids immediately, or even that
having kids is all that I’m good for because I am a woman. There are still people
out there who do not see women as equal to men, and we should be about that and fighting for it to change. Unfortunately, however, the true
examples of sexism can get lost when you have social-justice warriors screeching
about how, say, the word “manhole” needs to be scrubbed out of city codes (as
the city of Berkeley, Calif., announced it would do in July). Although the
activists behind those sorts of movements might believe they’re helping women,
the reality is that many people are going to hear that and think, “Gee, if that’s all
women have to complain about, this sexism thing must not be as bad as people
say it is.” The glaring irony is that the influence of social-justice militancy ends
up actually hurting the very groups it purports to want to help.
Worse, that impact is only one of many negatives of cultural censorship. An
obvious one is that it makes it difficult for us to have real, open conversations —
which is the only way for us ever to truly understand each other and come up
with the best solutions to our problems. Of course, we might not always agree —
and there are always going to be people who actually think that, say, white
women wearing hoop earrings amounts to “cultural appropriation” (as a
residence assistant at Pitzer College declared in a campus-wide email a couple of
years ago), but evidence suggests that these people are not as common as they
are loud. (Yes: I have enough faith in humanity to claim that most people do not
believe that any culture owns a shape, be it in earring form or otherwise.) We
need to stop allowing incompetent bullies to set the standard for what’s
“acceptable.” We reasonable, well-adjusted folks are the silent majority — so it’s
about damn time we stopped being so silent.
The PC obsession is also detrimental to comedy in particular. The problem with
declaring certain tough or complicated subjects to be “taboo” or “off-limits” is
that comedy is the only mechanism that’s capable of creating laughter or joy out
of tough or complicated situations. I know this from experience: Comedy can
heal like nothing else. For example, some people might say that jokes about
death are “inappropriate” or “not okay,” but those sorts of jokes actually have
helped me cope with my mother’s untimely, sudden death (which happened a
little less than five years ago) more than anything else has. I even have a joke in
my standup routine that mentions both her death and the death of a pet dog. I
remember being terrified the first time I told it, because I was afraid I was
“making light” of something that could be “triggering,” something that was too
“dark” to joke about. I told it anyway, and have continued to do so, and I’m glad
I have — because not only has it gotten laughs, but people who’ve heard it have
told me that they’ve been through something similar and they related to what I
had to say.
Of course, not all “offensive” jokes have this sort of impact; some won’t do
anything but make you cringe. And sure, I can even admit that some of the jokes
in Chappelle’s special were more cringe-worthy than laugh-worthy. The thing is,
though, that the only way for comedians to know if a joke is going to work or fail
is by trying it — and we have to be careful to protect their license to try. If you
think about it, calling for the “cancellation” of a comedian is quite like
demanding that a baseball player be fired because he struck out. Making
comedians too afraid to tell a joke, any joke, could result in our missing out on
some great humor. And for what? For the sake of not having to risk feeling
uncomfortable for the brief time in our lives that we might choose to be at a
comedy club, or watching a standup special on Netflix? I don’t think anyone
with even a moderate level of emotional competence would call that a fair trade.
Chappelle intended his special to be a protest against cancel culture and
oversensitivity. As a comedian, he’s sick of it — and, as the audience response
revealed, they — we! — are too. Chappelle did his job; now it’s time for us to do
ours. It’s time to stop pretending we’re offended when we’re not, and it’s time to
speak up against the loud, self-righteous, whiny few. Speech doesn’t belong only
to them.