“Gradually, a lot of Dunham’s material has come to reflect his exhaustion with political correctness.”
Can we please not pretend like this is a thing? The fight against political correctness is such a nonsensical throwback argument to the early-’90s. No one is pushing for “political correctness” as a decontextualized blindly dogmatic philosophy. What people are pushing for is not pretending that racism and homophobia and misogyny and anti-semitism don’t exist, or trying to camouflage these things as “jokes.” Suggesting that hate speech is offensive and upsetting and dangerous if used in an unilluminating and…well, hateful way is not “politically correct,” it’s just correct. If Jeff Dunham wants his puppets to “say” the word nigger, or whatever, he should just do it. That’s his constitutionally-protected right. But please, let us not pretend that it has anything to do with a non-existent, hyperbolic, media-created movement from 15 years ago.
-Gabe, What We Talk About When We Talk About Jeff Dunham
I don’t know who Jeff Dunham is, but this quote is so on point. Guaranteed, 90% of the time someone says “I hate political correctness,” they’re really saying “I hate being called out on being a gigantic asshole.”
Dunham trotted out his dummy for whoever would hire him, or at least tolerate it: doing an oral book report on Hansel and Gretel in third grade or retelling bible stories at church; performing at Six Flags as a summer job, or at fund-raisers for the Christian summer camp his mom sent him to. In high school, he did commercials for a Datsun dealership and each year posed for his yearbook photo with one of his dummies. He and a dummy named Archie Everett also co-wrote a column for the school paper.
-NY Times
Actually, I seem to remember this being the synopsis of a Goosebumps book.
SADY: Yowza. I mean: leaving aside this dude’s one (RESTAURANT-SPECIFIC) rape fantasy, I get that people’s fantasies, in general, are weird. I knew a girl who worked at a phone sex operation and one guy would call her up, constantly, to discuss his fantasies about the cast of “Friends.” She would play Rachel, and sometimes maybe Phoebe; he would be Chandler.
AMANDA: wow. this guy fantasized about being chandler! chandler would make some hilarious ironic comment about this, were he here.
This exchange is better than about 90 per cent of “Friends.”
(From here)
The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe.
Steven Pinker, “Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective,” The New York Times
This concept — the Straw We — is something every writer should be wary of; I’m sure I use it too often. Whenever we say “we,” we should be thinking, “Do I really mean ‘I’?” (Whenever I say “we,” I should be thinking, “Do I really mean ‘I?’”) Our (my) experiences aren’t universal and we (I) should not try to pretend they are.
Yet I must defend Gladwell here; these do actually seem to be examples of received wisdom.
(h/t justinlam)
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge
from a comment on this post Tenacity
(via fred-wilson, via amyd)
This is all fine Cal, but that’s how you get that banal bureaucratic evil of the hard worker, the Lumbergh type, the Rawls (“The Wire” ) type. Let’s hear it for us genius* fuck-ups, y’all.
*Yes, I said it. I don’t deny my arrogance.
