Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic "Humor" and the political divide

This started out as a reply to the Live Earth thread (I'm not sure about the concert, but I hope they manage to do some good), but the bulk of what I was saying seemed like it belonged elsewhere. So I'm giving it its own thread. I'm hoping, based on past threads, that we can have a civil discussion instead of the flaming snarkfest you could expect on your average message board.

It seems to me that, unfortunately, people these days (on whatever side) just make up their minds about stuff one way or the other and that's about it. There's so much information floating around that you can basically just pick and choose. Stick with the sources that agree with you, and you can justify any belief you want without having to consider the other side. Doesn't help that there only seem to be two sides, which are becoming more and more polarized.

It's unfortunate, and I'd like to talk about that. See if we can, in some small way, change that trend.

But I'd also like to talk about mockery.

This part's kind of tricky. See, I enjoy things like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I find them to be witty and satisfying. Jon Stewart is intelligent, savvy, and well-informed. Colbert... it's hard to tell, sometimes, given all the acting and clowning he does, but I enjoy the show, in any case.

I like laughing about the stupid stuff people (any people) are trying to pull. Much better than getting angry over it (though possibly getting angry would be the more productive course). But I watch those shows at home, and talk and laugh about them with friends who agree with my views.

In non-political spaces, places with "mixed company," like these boards, I tend to either logically disagree with opposing viewpoints or, more and more often, just keep quiet.

I may be biased, but it seems to be the way most of "the left" handles it. Some of "the right" does the same.

But there's another approach. And, again, I may be biased, but it seems like more of the people on "the right" do it than "the left."

That approach is to jump in and mock the things you disagree with, even in "mixed company." Just start snarking away. Sometimes with nothing else to the post. Or maybe with some links to supporting material tacked on.

I don't know which is better. I don't like laughing about people behind their backs, and I guess you could sort of say that's what the former approach is. But I also don't like hurting, insulting, and provoking people.

I laugh at the jokes I agree with, but find the ones from the other side to be obnoxious. (I'm guessing they feel the same.) But I don't want to respond because I don't feel like picking a fight and don't think that, given how entrenched we all our in our views, anything productive would likely come of it. I also find that those posts tend to anger me, and I know better than to post when angry (most of the time...). So I stay quiet, and more snark starts to pour in. (Or just more people who add little more than "Haha! You're so right!")

So... I don't know. I want to promote discussion. Open minds. Get an exchange of ideas going. Fight the polarization. But I don't know how to do it. And it seems like the closest we get to an overture is... open mockery. At least it's a stated view that you can respond to.

There's got to be some better response to the other side than laughing at them and being a jerk about it (in public or otherwise). There used to be, I think, but we seem to have forgotten how it works.

What do you guys think?

Paul

Well, Paul, you're talking about an important matter which, at the same time, is a big problem. If you encounter someone with a view drastically different from yours, it can help if you talk to that person one on one. Unfortunately, you'll both have to keep an open mind and respect the other person's views on things to make it work. This also means that you'll have to be willing to give up part of your belief - it's the old thing with thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

Unfortunately, people get more and more polarized. Be it about "evolution" vs. "intelligent design", "global warming - man made or not?", terrorism and countless other topics. In Germany, we've just entered the next round in the discussion about nuclear power plants, and somehow, it gets tiresome. Because both sides do have a point, a point they can prove. And still, they can't come up with a solution.

Well, Paul, I'm not sure I should post what I'm going to post here at all, but it's been weighing rather heavily on my mind since I discovered it a few days ago. I was just trying to find a column by David Brooks, a conservative columnist in the New York Times. (Since I myself belong to the political left, I usually don't agree with David Brooks, but I almost always find him reasonable, interesting and thought-provoking nonetheless.) These days you can't read David Brooks' columns in the New York Times unless you pay to read them, however, so I was googling for a column by Brooks to see if I could read it for free. And that's when I came across a blog called Brave New World Watch. This blog described itself as something that I started reading the blog simply because it had apparently discussed David Brooks' recent column, the one I was looking for. But before I found the reference to David Brooks, I came across this:

Please note the "literariness" of the text: this was written by a man(?) who knows how to marshal his thoughts and express them very well in written form. This person is well-educated and intelligent. But what does he say about his opponents, the liberals? He really says that a true liberal is a person who considers it his duty to share his sexuality - to have sex, to put it more crudely - with anyone who might want to have sex with him, because refusing to boff around with anyone is, to the liberal and according to this blogger, "judgmental and discriminatory".

How can you talk about other people that way? How can you accuse your political opponents of something like that, which, no matter how you look at it, can't have anything whatsoever to do with how most self-defined liberals would describe themselves and their convictions?

I'm still shaken by having read this. And then, you know, I think of the latest London bombers. The doctors from Iraq and Lebanon and Jordan. They are well-educated, intelligent men, too, just like the blogger from Brave New World Watch. Unlike the bloggers, the London doctors really tried to kill the kind of people that they defined as - well, I don't precisely know how they defined them, but considering they tried to make one car bomb explode outside a nightclub, that says something about how they view Western "debauchery". I'm sure the blogger from Brave New World Watch hasn't tried to kill anyone, but what kind of feelings and gut-reactions toward self-proclaimed liberals can such a text create in people who are already suspicious of liberals?

Ann

Olympe - Yes, respect is very important. And seems to be increasingly left by the wayside. I think that's kind of what I was getting at, but I seem to have somehow left that specific part out. Thanks for saying it, and saying it so well.

Ann - That's an excellent example. A patently ridiculous view, espoused as if it were reasonable and obvious by someone who, by all accounts, should know better. But he doesn't know any better because he probably hasn't had a real conversation with an actual liberal in ages. And, most telling, here you are posting hesitantly about it, as if pointing it out and saying "Uhm... no. That's not how we actually think" was somehow inappropriate or inadvisable.

(Incidentally... have you considered actually paying for the Times? The columnist in question is a professional writer, and the Times is a business. I know it's strange nowadays, but it wasn't so long ago that paying for the paper because you want to read it was taken for granted. A bit much to buy the whole paper for one column, but if you use the site more, maybe it's something to think about?)

I can tell a story about this:

Most of the days I go to Cologne by streetcar/underground. Every now and then I see the same woman there, carrying a bag full of different papers. She talks to everyone, no matter if they're eager to listen or not. All of those papers are not exactly the kind of well-balanced news. She starts a discussion about pollution, global warming or whatever it is that's the temporarily common topic. She has read all those papers, but unfortunately not with an critical eye.

I'm careful with believing what someone has written.

After all, you can find that when the number of storks decreased in western Europe, the number of new born childs decreased as well. Does that mean that we're all wrong and it's true after all that the storks bring the babies?
( hehe, I so love that statistic!)

Another sad example is the 3rd Reich. In our history classes we spent pretty much time with reading propaganda of the NSDAP, particularly the early NSDAP in the 1920's. If you read those texts and if you aren't careful you start nodding, just because the argumentation is logical. But that doesn't mean it is right. I've never been quite so scared in my life when I found myself thinking that those people were right.

You always need to look on both sides of the medal, I think I've learned that in school. But that is something you need to be taught.

This is why I'm not keen intelligent design, or rather what I've heard about it, namely that in some areas of the US pupils are told that it is *right*. Apart from the fact that I believe in evolution, I think it is a mistake to tell children something is right when we don't *know* if it is. But that's the tricky thing about knowledge. There is only very little we *know* for sure.

I've been going back and forth between these two threads, rereading them for the past half hour, and considering the posts people have left. I didn't see anyone flamed or terribly mocked for their beliefs in the global warming thread (I've certainly seen worse on these boards before, particularly about really intense, politically sensitive issues). The general feeling I got from the posts was the general feeling I've gotten from people around me at work, in about the same percentage. The vast majority of my co-workers seem to have been either apathetic or cynical about the event.

Humor has a long-standing tradition in political discussion. Sometimes humor can take the bite out of a political opinion; sometimes it can be particularly biting. I think the perception about whether political humor is funny or not is influenced by how deeply the perceiver holds the beliefs which are being examined.

Sarcasm is particularly dicey in online forums and in writing generally because it's particularly vulnerable to misinterpretation. So much of the humor in sarcasm comes from knowing the speaker and the quality of his/her tone of voice. For example, I had written something in an e-mail to a friend that was completely sarcastic and in jest, and he thought it was hysterical. But he forwarded it to another person who didn't know me, and she got very angry about it because she thought I was serious. I've become aware of the issue since that happened (about a year ago), and now re-read my e-mails and revise them...I will notice something I've written that I know would get a laugh if I said it, but the words on the paper taken literally do not appear funny.

I didn't have a problem with any little posts in the global warming thread either, because I wasn't expecting a serious political discussion on the issue. Posts based on one question in the Off Topic forum on the Lois and Clark boards are naturally going to draw a different reaction than posts to an environmental group's boards or a conservative commentator's boards. Speaking for my own comment, I wasn't looking to get draw into a long discussion; I just agreed with a historical comparison (since I'm a history teacher) and threw in a fictional comparison (tying the discussion back to Lois and Clark). I certainly had no intention of offending anybody (if I did, I truly apologize). I tend to be one of the people you discussed in your post who doesn't offer responses to politically charged threads - I know enough about my own thinking to know that I'm not going to change anyone else's mind.

Susan

Paul, it sounds like you're offended by what was posted in the Live Earth Thread. Since I started the thread and added an additional post I want to assure you that I meant my questions seriously. I'd just been wandering around my usual news sites, looking for some hard stats on the Live Earth concert and not finding any.

I take climate change and environmental irresponsibility very seriously, and so have been concerned with the shallowness of most of the media coverage of Live Earth that I have seen and read. Next to no analysis of the eco-costs of the concert itself but, instead, what appear to be self-congratualtionatory press releases by the organizers.

This is too serious an issue for that.

Unless, of course, I've misunderstood the thrust of your post, Paul, and what you are concerned about is the lack of humor evident in the Live Earth Event? Or our lack of humour in taking the event seriously? Not sure.

Anyway, I didn't mean to offend anyone by asking a few questions. As one of your Presidents said:
A person who asks a question is a fool for a moment but a person who never asks a question is a fool for a lifetime.

c.

Well, finally I've come around to looking through the Live Earth thread. Paul, if I got your meaning correctly, you didn't like the use of humor (or sarcasm) in some of the posts there.

Anyway, those using it are doing so to prove a valid point. I mean, an event like that as a fundraiser for just about anything sure is a good idea - but for environmental causes? If you only add up the countless stars (and their entourages) coming from all over the world, using their private planes... It' a contradiction if ever I've heard one. And if someone makes us aware of this point by using humor (or sarcasm), I think that the situation more or less calls for it.

Anyway, this doesn't mean that being aware of our environment is a bad thing - far from it, if you ask me! But in this case, the means don't justify the end. At least not in my humble opinion. It's like hitting someone over the head in order to protest against violence. (Okay, I'm guilty as charged...)

No, Carol, I didn't mean you. And yes, Olympe, I agree that there's something odd and ironic about the concert itself. That was actually my first thought when I heard about it. But I would hope that the organizers would know enough and care enough to do it right.

While there were a couple of posts in that thread that got me started, I wasn't writing about any one or two posts in specific. I'm talking general trends here. How certain people post... and how certain others don't. It's stuff I've been thinking about, that's been building for a while. That's part of why I gave it its own thread.

It's about how we communicate with each other and what we can do to communicate better. Not being afraid to talk because of the reaction you might provoke. Not being hesitant to talk because you don't think it'll make a difference. Not speaking up in a way that mocks and disrespects people whose viewpoint differs from your own. Those are the sorts of things I'd like to see changed.

I'd also like to hear what people think about this stuff. To learn and discuss and hammer out ideas and chew things over and all that good stuff that we don't really seem to be doing much of lately.

Let's talk about how we talk.

How we talk? Well, I prefer in-debth talks. So, I'm off to chat.

Interesting discussion. I actually thought the thread was pretty harmonious -- people that I know have very different politics seemed to share opinions in this one case. Plus the discussion was not over "global warming," it was about this one particular event, and how well or poorly it was stacking up against its stated views.

But you have a larger point here, of course. Yes, humor is tricky. Even when one isn't commenting on any of the people present, but on a specific issue, the people who hold passionate views about that issue are likely to take personally things which weren't meant that way. In other words, when someone attacks things I believe, I'll not like that much, and it will probably feel like an attack on me. It's quite logical actually -- if a position on an issue is stupid, what does that say about the people who hold that position?

We do need to keep in mind that we're all friends here, and friends can disagree without being disagreeable. Though in general I think the people on this board are fantastic about considering other people's opinions and feelings. I've been on far harsher & more contentious message boards (some of you know what I'm talking about).

Sometimes I wonder if we're *too* considerate, to be honest. People have been known to be over-sensitive (I'm talking in general, not here on these boards). Should we all get better at taking a joke? But then we're back to the question of degree, which is where you started us off, Paul It's the question of a "gentle elbow to the ribs" sort of joke versus the "punch in the head" kind. Or something. It's too late at night for me to be philosophical.

A few specific comments:

Of course you're biased, Paul We all are, I think. Plus, I doubt you and I, for instance, read many of the same blogs. So we're seeing different things. And of course there are bad-tempered jerks all along the political spectrum.

The perception *I* run into most is that "liberals" have a very limited sense of humor. According to this perception, "liberals" are far more likely to demonize their opponents and declare the topic off-limits. So no, they don't use humor (snark, satire, irony, etc) that much, which to some extent dovetails with your perception, Paul. What that means, I haven't a clue

Ann, you found a winner, didn't you? :rolleyes: Even apart from the left/right issue, that position makes no sense. Advocating a freedom does *not* require one to exercise it. I'm in favor of legal alcoholic drinks. Does that mean I'm not ever allowed to drink anything else? Reductio ad absurdium, I think, is the Latin phrase for that.

But see, my first instinct is to make fun of it, not nurse my injured feelings or solemnly debate the implicit premises, or whatever. Again, what this means, I really couldn't say

I think it could be summed up in one word: Infidel. They don't seem to be the "live and let live" type. (I hope that they were better at being doctors than being terrorists, btw, 'cause they were spectacularly incompetent at blowing people up. Thankfully.)

Bakasi said:
Agreed. That's why I don't like it that in most of the US, pupils are told that evolution is *right.* A lot of ID is about saying "hang on, that theory doesn't fit these facts -- it may be time for a new theory." which is the only way science ever advances. Students should hear about the problems along with learning the theory. As you say, there's a lot of stuff we don't *know* for sure.

What about if you want to speak up but are afraid that your comment is going to be condemned as mocking & disrespectful?

PJ
running away to bed now...

That's what I've seen more of as well. Most of the sites I visit have some element of humor, IMAO being my favorite and the owner's got a whole page dedicated to the hate mail he's received from left-thinking trolls that somehow can't fathom that free speech means EVERYBODY, not just people who agree with them. And of course the right-thinking regulars of this forum will often mock and make fun of the invading troll, because the fact is, those that go seeking ridicule get what they deserve.

It's pretty much a gut instinct of human beings to point out a foolish notion when it's so obviously displayed, and an elitest group of hypocritical rich people telling me how to "conserve" is about a foolish as it's gonna get.

What I've also noticed in my net travels is that the ones being mocked are often found too ditzy or rabidly obsessed with themselves to comprehend logic and reason. It's like telling a 3 year old nicely over and over not to stick her finger in an electrical socket, or touch a hot stove. That kid isn't going to get it until they get hurt, so you smack the hand(ie, mocking them) or let them damage themselves.

edit:
Plus... Al Gore is going to be eaten by cannibals.

Um, yeah, but... is that appropriate *here*? None of us are 3-yr-olds. There's no compelling reason to correct "wrong thinking" -- no hot stoves around here that I've noticed -- and a pretty good reason to behave ourselves. It's called politeness and wanting to get along harmoniously in "mixed" company. Besides, being made fun of generally only makes people mad, in my experience. Very few if any opinions get changed.

So a certain amount of self-restraint is called for. There's a fine line between opinionated and obnoxious. We all have opinions. We just have to express them carefully, because this board is not the place to be obnoxious.

PJ

Actually, I find that who gets insulted and belittled more depends on where you are. On tech boards and sci-fi places, conservatives and lambasted. On boards for some tv shows and the like, liberals are lambasted. I live in Alabama - IRL, I hear a lot more of the jokes and insults directed at liberals. I'm a sci-fi fan - online, I hear a lot more jokes and insults directed at conservatives. I guess I'm a moderate - I agree with both parties/viewpoints on different things.