1603

Yeah, I wouldn’t call that one recent. I think that was a while back.

1604

Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder (2008)?

1605

So brilliant. And obviously mocking Hollywood casting and method actors, not Black people.

1606

And it was well received.

Proving if you are going to go blackface, you have to go full blackface.

1607

1608

In fairness, there were a ton of people who didn’t get the joke, and actually took offense at a lot of those cases of blackface.

That’s always a danger of complex comedy, in that lots of people have no sense of humor.

“Everybody thinks they have a sense of humor, but then they don’t all!”

1609

You can always find people upset about anything. Whether they constitute some actually meaningful backlash is the real question.

Going with the general theme of “Cancel culture” just means any criticism no matter how small and ineffective.

1610

There’s a clear distinction. Being offended by something is one thing. Being offended and trying to make it so no one else can consume the material that offended you is what people mean by cancel culture.

When I was growing up it was the right that tried to do this. Mostly because they had the power at the time. Comics, music, RPGs, anything that would corrupt young people. Now it mostly comes from the left, because whenever right wing people try to censor anything we all laugh at them.

1611

I can’t really look at American history and decide that boycotts were exclusively a thing of the right. Or that they were always bad.

1612

Hey now, it was fairly bipartisan. ICE-T didn’t make several songs about Tipper Gore for nothing.

1613

You’re right… and I remember Dee Snider humiliating her at a hearing too.

I mean, I don’t actually remember that because I was like 4, but I watched it on Youtube decades later.

1614

You can also always find people calling to ban or boycott something. Calling any and all such criticism regardless of size, scope and effect “cancelling” is what makes the term such a joke.

“Cancel culture” as a term basically exists to equate actually using governmental (or vigilantee) force with randos criticizing things in social media in order to excuse the former and suppress the later.

1615

Petition to replace all instances of the term “cancel culture” with “someone I don’t know was mean to me on Twitter.”

I got cancelled before it was a thing by referring to Call of Duty players years ago as “nerds.” Boy are there some SERIOUS GENTLEMEN who take any such label VERY SERIOUSLY.

1616

I made a guy on XBox Live shriek like a little girl by murdering him in CoD:MW with a knife, over and over again.

I killed him like 15 times in the same game using nothing but the knife.

I also made a guy say he was going to hunt me down and kill me in the real world, because he was yelling at people with a lisp, and I told him we couldn’t understand him because he had too many dicks in his mouth.

Old school XBL was such a great dumpsterfire.

1617

Fucking excellent.

Back in the days of MW2 my crew and I would talk so much shit in the lobbies. It was a game before the game. Like remember that old game Caveman Ugh-Lympics, when your cavemen would grunt at each other before competing to intimidate the opponent? Xbox Live pre-parties was exactly like this.

Then it all got ruined. Probably because of Anita Sarkeesian!

1618

There was something to be said for those days.

Nowadays, my buddies and I generally play in our own party chat, and rarely ever talk to the plebs… but I do miss the days of being able to just fuck with other people.

Like, the people who would just yell at randos and blame them for all their mistakes, they were already on the verge of rage anyway, so it was easy to push them over the edge.

Then there were little kids who would scream curses and stuff. At that point, years of hard drinking and drugs meant my reflexes could no longer compete with some 13 year old kid on that level… but I could break his mind by telling him that if his parents loved him they wouldn’t let him scream curse words online.

I remember once a buddy asked me if he should let his kid play on XBL. I was like, “Oh god no. Don’t ever do that.”

1619

Am I missing something here or are you bragging about making fun of some guy’s speech impediment? And brilliantly connecting his speech impediment to being gay? And getting praised for it? Wtf?

There’s a guy in our WoW guild who stutters and has mostly stayed off online chat due to that level of shittiness.

1620

Technically, I wasn’t making fun of him because of his speech impediment. I was making fun of him because he was screaming at everyone else in the game.

I merely picked his speech impediment as the mechanism for making fun of him, which he deserved.

If you’re going to shout at everyone else on the team, who are people you don’t even know, every time you die in CoD… you can go fuck yourself, and you deserve to be mocked.

1621

I mean sure, mock him for his behavior or what not but seems low to attack him over something out of his control. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to this as one of my daughters had a bit of a lisp issue with her S sounds but just rubs me the wrong way. Like Hannity and others mocking Biden for his own struggles with stuttering.

1622

I understand where you’re coming from, but at that point the goal is to pick the thing that I know is gonna enrage him. The guy was an asshole, insulting everyone else who was playing, and generally making the experience for everyone else worse… So I picked the thing I knew would sting, and booooy did it.

Full disclosure, I actually had the same problem when I was a kid.

Again, the reason for mocking him was because he was an aggressive bully, not because he had a speech impediment.

If you’re a bully, then you don’t get the shield of civil discourse.

It’s like with Trump… when people say, “Oh, don’t mock trump for his appearance!”

Nah, fuck that. I absolutely will mock him for his appearance. He’s a fat fucking pile of garbage poured into an ill fitting trash suit. He looks awful. His appearance is disgusting.

Now, if he was just some random dude on the street? I wouldn’t mock him for his appearance, because he wouldn’t deserve mockery… but he totally does deserve it, and what’s more, he specifically mocks everyone else for that, and so he deserves to have it turned around on him. Further, I know it will fucking piss him off. No one ever actually makes fun of Trump to his face for looking like such a dumpsterfire, but they totally should.