Flair checks out.
If any of these people read about the old guard AIDS activists they love to invoke, they'd discover that "be skeptical of the FDA and maintain independent curiosity regarding yon virus" and "put a condom on you fucking baby" were once considered totally compatible views by people who knew what actual persecution and unfreedom were like.
Lol ACT UP invaded a Catholic church during mass and started tossing the Host around once. Larry Kramer and David Wojnarowicz openly fantasized about infecting George Bush Sr. with a blow dart. They were not easygoing people.
Getting off on a tangent, but if you go back before the year 2000 you can almost always find examples of cis gay and lesbian activists doing whatever it is that only trans activists are supposedly outrageous/petty/crazy/degenerate/hateful enough to do - down to highly specific things like cancelling a celebrated black comedian for mean jokes (those Eddie Murphy standup specials from the '80s are nastier than you remember and, yes, the gays protested him for years.)
ACT UP are heroes of mine, as it happens
[oh wait](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c9f9b99f3e274d029d183f39fa5256e7ddb89007/0_0_1600_1600/master/1600.jpg) it’s almost like there’s a [connection here](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/vgvol637/production/40f31c580a277e9b4fda85746c8e0c6ebe523614-3000x2559.jpg)
I will say that I have an anecdote about homophobia jokes from the Reagan years that I really like: Bob Hope notoriously told a horrific joke at a state dinner for the Mitterands that *horrified* them, but which as expected Ron and Nancy thought was *hilarious*.
> The Statue of Liberty has AIDS. They don't know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island 'ferry'.
The first part I love: that’s not a great joke even on its own terms, it’s not even clear what the punchline is supposed to be, so it shows up just how crass the pair of them were - in contrast to the Mitterands, so say what you like about them. The *second* part I love: apparently Hope’s daughter went fucking apeshit at him for it, and apparently he totally owned it and apologised when she sat him down and explained why it was so wrong to say. So that’s cool.
I knew the anecdote about Reagan laughing but I did not know the mini-epilogue with Bob Hope's daughter - that's totally tubular.
If you check in with the surviving ACT UP people on Twitter, they're mostly focused on making sure the developing world gets the vaccine. They're obviously still upset about the millions of people who died because of the nine-year gap in getting HAART to Africa, and they want to challenge drug companies and bureaucrats to make sure it doesn't happen again. See, you can gleefully chafe against authority well into your sixties and seventies. Yet starting from a place of considering immunocompromised people your moral equals, which AIDS activists learned early and VelveteenAmbush learned never, goes a long way towards having good taste in causes.
I mean, it’s a completely dumb, cruel joke, but the punchline is very clear. It’s just your garden variety pun (the worst of all humor, so they say) that’s vaguely topical. It’s completely in tune with comedy of their era, the whole Borscht belt schtick.
I guess I just don’t really see a punchline in there. And I say that as somebody who has at least a surface appreciation of Bob Hope’s talent for one-liners. The target is AIDS victims and Staten Island (fair enough on the latter, having been to Staten myself), but the lay-up doesn’t set up the finisher beyond shitting on these people so there isn’t really a punchline.
The joke here is so dated it's hard for a contemporary ear to pick up. "Mouth of the Hudson" refers to Rock Hudson, who was then the only celebrity whose death from AIDS was public knowledge. "Staten Island Ferry" is a pun on the old-school homophobic slur "fairy" - Bob Hope was born in 1903, if you're wondering. In the mid-eighties you could still make a joke out of the idea that mere contact with homosexuals could give you AIDS, so if stuff in New York Harbor had a gay vibe the Statue of Liberty had reason to be concerned.
Not to seem to wax rhapsodic about this dumb joke, but “mouth of” is the setup for everything else. It’s not mere contact, but the double-entendre (of oral sex) sets up the idea of explicitly gay contact (and it wasn’t necessarily clear what kind of gay sex was needed at that point, I don’t believe). The double-entendre plus pun format is formulaic, but so much of the comedy of that era is.
I guess I should have been more explicit in explaining the whole thing as just a topical pun. I thought about it, but somehow it seemed gauche to go into it in detail.
If I didn't have a couple early lessons in shop class and boy scouts trips to the shooting range I could see myself in this. Just a tiny bit of exposure to industrial safety culture lets you know that the rules are stupid because stupid people need to be able to follow along.
lol
Over in Kosovo I took a very enthusiastic young friend to the local range because she’d never fired a gun before and I wanted to give her a treat. It rapidly became apparent that not only had she never done gun safety she’d never done any kind of safety training such as I would have had in as you say shop class. Now I’ve been in more than my fair share of sketchy situations, but there are few things scarier than havin to repeatedly ask a 19 year old Albanian girl who weighs 45 kilos not to point a loaded 9mm directly at your face.
Industrial society safety rules seem stupid to you because you (like me and most, if not all, people) can't think big enough to internalize the full picture of even the most routine processes in an industrial society. Oc the average person can see if most foods are good to eat or not by sight with a pretty high accuracy rate. And of course most error you could realistically make don't end in lethal or even severe food poisoning. But when you realize how much the food industry combines stuff in often counterintuitive ways, and the sheer volume of stuff processed, you see that one single error, that for stuff you are about to cook would not even matter, could easily result in thousand of people dying.
The single most important civil right that all right-thinking
Americans hold dear, above all others, is to be left the fuck alone. If
I don’t like you, I shouldn’t have to deal with you, or listen to you,
or think about you, or see you, or (most of all) obey you.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have these packages to mail off to
universities and airlines post-haste.
I am an American. The single most important civil right that all
right-thinking Americans hold dear, above all others, is to be left the
fuck alone.
He (if I may assume) is absolutely right, despite turning some kind
of diagnosable psychiatric disorder into a political ideology. People
should be allowed to lock themselves up in their homes and transact all
their business electronically rather than go out and participate in
society, with all its nagging authoritarian rules about wearing masks
and pants and driving sober on the right side of the road. I am fully
supportive of libertarians’ right to stay home and stop living in our
society.
In context of the rest of the post you could be forgiven for thinking
he was declaring some kind of mental illness rather than his
nationality.
It’s such a strange thing to admit, like ‘I’m an American, and that’s
why I get irrationally angry at public safety precautions’. Maybe try
being a different nationality then?
Also this guy: *wakes up every morning at 7:30 so he can get to work
by 9, buckles his seat belt, drives on the right side of the road, stops
at every stop sign, does everything the boss tells him to do for 8
hours
Me: I hate being told what to do
Also me: avoids driving to minimize police interactions, founded his own companies, does what he wants with his bajillions of dollars. Only sigma males would understand 😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎😎.
This attitude, which is way more common than I think people realize,
is why I say that I’ve had greater culture shock moving to and living in
Texas over the last six years than having moved and lived in South Korea
five years before that.
My job puts me in different manufacturing plants across the nation, nearly every week of the year.
This is the only mentality that is ever spoken out loud by blue collar sorts, and it is by far the majority. Truly one of the worst parts of our culture.
I am an American. The single most important civil right that all
right-thinking Americans hold dear, above all others, is to be left the
fuck alone. If I don’t like you, I shouldn’t have to deal with you, or
listen to you, or think about you, or see you, or (most of all) obey
you.
Ya and u can be left alone if u just stay home. No one is making u
leave the house (tho it is probably a good idea)
>This is a sacred civil right that vests unto every American when they
have completed their education and received their driver's license, and
that lasts as long as they can support themselves and do not get into
trouble with the law.
The phrase "as long as they can support themselves and do not get into trouble with the law" is shouldering at least 400 pounds of irony here.
Not *these* laws (violent oppression, it is patriotic to disobey them), but *other* laws that I agree with ideologically, and likely materially oppress groups that I disdain.
Hey buddy, pretty sure the point of learning to identify cognitive
biases in yourself and others was to try to avoid them, not
lean into them as your most important personality traits.
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This guy: “I hate listening to weird outgroup vengeance fantasies”
Also this guy: visits and posts in TheMotte
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have these packages to mail off to universities and airlines post-haste.
sick flair up for grabs here
holy shit
He (if I may assume) is absolutely right, despite turning some kind of diagnosable psychiatric disorder into a political ideology. People should be allowed to lock themselves up in their homes and transact all their business electronically rather than go out and participate in society, with all its nagging authoritarian rules about wearing masks and pants and driving sober on the right side of the road. I am fully supportive of libertarians’ right to stay home and stop living in our society.
In context of the rest of the post you could be forgiven for thinking he was declaring some kind of mental illness rather than his nationality.
It’s such a strange thing to admit, like ‘I’m an American, and that’s why I get irrationally angry at public safety precautions’. Maybe try being a different nationality then?
This guy: I hate being told what to do
Also this guy: *wakes up every morning at 7:30 so he can get to work by 9, buckles his seat belt, drives on the right side of the road, stops at every stop sign, does everything the boss tells him to do for 8 hours
🎶 You’ve gotta fight 🎶
🎶 For your right 🎶
🎶 To COVID 🎶
What a clown. Imagine feeling anything but rage or embarrassment for a person attacking a worker over mandates.
This attitude, which is way more common than I think people realize, is why I say that I’ve had greater culture shock moving to and living in Texas over the last six years than having moved and lived in South Korea five years before that.
On another note: my cousin has type 1 diabetes, fuck VA for being a child
Ya and u can be left alone if u just stay home. No one is making u leave the house (tho it is probably a good idea)
Hey buddy, pretty sure the point of learning to identify cognitive biases in yourself and others was to try to avoid them, not lean into them as your most important personality traits.
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Those people are embarassing.