#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Hitler will be disappointed.
A day after he engaged in multiple Twitter arguments and called Penn State students “pitiful,” ESPN suspended Keith Olbermann for a week. The global sports network released a statement Tuesday announcing the news, saying Olbermann’s actions were “completely inappropriate and [do] not reflect the views of ESPN.”
So much for saving the news media from the Brian Williams crisis.
Far too many women of my generation were let down by their mothers failing to teach them the one basic skill they actually need in life:
My mother hadn’t felt the need to give me a recipe—she knew that I
had watched her, and before her my Nani, make the same pot of sauce
nearly weekly in my previous 17 years. So many times I smelled the meat,
browning in olive oil before the garlic and onions were added,
intensifying the distinctive aroma of Nani’s kitchen, which lingered
even years after her last pot had been simmered. Yet I didn’t know how
to cook.But what did my mom expect? Both she and my late Nani had always
praised and encouraged my good grades and scholarly instincts, and
neither had encouraged me to do anything in the kitchen other that set
the table. Nani never taught me to forage for burdock or can tomatoes
because “you won’t need to,” she said. Cooking was something else the
modern young woman wouldn’t have cause to do either, it seemed. So, I
focused on my career.What had stuck with me from those hours in the kitchen watching my
mom and Nani cook weekly Sunday dinners or nightly from-scratch meals
was not the recipes for beef bracciole or manicotti, but the
conversation. “Go to college,” I was always told, “have your own money
and don’t rely on a man.”
Let’s not make the same mistake with our daughters and sentence them to a lifetime of bad food, obesity, and culinary frigidity. There is nothing more important than for a young girl to be taught how to be a good wife and mother. Nothing. Because nothing less than civilization and the continued existence of the human race depends upon it.
Don’t raise your daughters to be dead ends.
Zerohedge reports on a world engulfed in debt:
If anyone has stopped to ask just why global central banks are in such a rush to create inflation (but only controlled inflation, not runaway hyperinflation… of course when they fail with the “controlled” part the money paradrop is only a matter of time) over the past 5 years, and have printed over $12 trillion in credit-money since Lehman, the bulk of which has ended up in the stock market, and which for the first time ever are about to monetize all global sovereign debt issuance in 2015, the answer is simple, and can be seen on the chart below.
It also shows the biggest problem facing the world today, namely that at least 9 countries have debt/GDP above 300%, and that a whopping 39% countries have debt-to-GDP of over 100%!
The problem with this can be seen in one of the famous Reinhart-Rogoff papers, Growth in a Time of Debt:
Our main findings are: First, the relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more.
And before you cite the well-known Excel error, that changes nothing substantive. The core cause of the global depression is becoming increasingly obvious to everyone. The root of the problem, as I have been pointing out since about 2002, is that in a credit money system, the central banks cannot print borrowers.
This means their obvious next step will be the usual attempt to move the problem up a level by centralizing internationally and pushing for a global currency that will automatically devalue the currencies being replaced by a factor that will reduce debt/GDP below 90 percent.
Larry Correia fisks Teapot Bradford’s call to not read straight white male authors while Superversive SF takes her SJW reader challenge:
In the spirit of taking this challenge seriously, I will be making an effort to avoid such writers and see what it does for my outlook. So I guess I should make a list of authors that are “acceptable” to read because they aren’t “cis white het males” to make it easier for anybody that wants to join me.
So lets see what is in?
Sarah A. Hoyt – POC Womyn
Larry Correia – POC
L. Jagi Lamplighter – Womyn
Kate Paulk – Womyn
Amanda Green – Womyn
Vox Day – POCand out
John Scalzi – Cis Het White Male
Jim Hines – Cis Het White Male
It really is time that Native American literature finally found its place in fantasy and science fiction after all. It is, frankly, shocking how white women like Catherynne M. Valente are shamelessly appropriating our culture and our legends. I can only applaud Ms. Bradford for encouraging her readers and followers to read my work and I hope they will enjoy it.
Meanwhile, another SJW at File 770 warns about the consequences of the cultural war in SF in light of the attempt to ban Adam Baldwin from a convention in Australia:
This isn’t going to end any better than the rest of these discussions.
Let me ask a question based on two possible thought experiments. Those who want to can ban Adam Baldwin if they want. The right get to ban a person of their choice from an event of their choice. Are we all happier and better people?
Alternatively we allow this sort if banning but to stop people using it capriciously we say you have to pay some amount of money which is not easy to raise in order to do it. The ‘other side’ get to donate it to a non political charity of their choice. In this case I’d guess it would be between a quarter and a half million dollars. Is this issue really that important to people if it comes down to real effort, not just arguing online?
Think up your own method if you like but remember that your opponents get to use the same rulebook.
We can’t go on doing this. It has just about destroyed the gaming community and it could do the same to the SF community. The politics don’t matter. The same situation will crop up sooner or later with different politics. The problem is that neither side respects the process. Whoever amasses the most angry tweets wins but nobody believes that is either just or fair. Nobody has their thinking chaged, simply reinforced. The losers just retreat to reorganise and swear to be more vicious next time.
And now, the punchline, from the same SJW, Martin Easterbrook:
At Loncon last year we had many fans from the Ukraine and Russia, two countries who are effectively at war and who go out of the way to humiliate each others POWs. There were no problems with any of them. They stuck to the fan tradition that, as far as we can, we “leave our guns at the door”. This has become unfashionable lately but for some of us it remains something that is part of the core of being a fan.
Some decisions are difficult, for instance I’ve personally suggested to a convention that they exclude Vox Day because I believe he has personally insulted another author to the point where she would be justified in punching him on the nose if she met him. I would not want to attend a convention that had Orson Scott Card as a goh but neither would I want to go to a convention that excluded him completely.
As I pointed out, by Mr. Easterbrook’s standard, John Scalzi is due enough punches in the nose that he’s effectively given me permission to beat the little creep to death. I wonder, how many insults does Larry Correia have to take before he is justified in playing Mountain to Scalzi’s Viper?
Waging war by proxy runs the risk of being defeated by proxy too:
In less than a year, the United States has toppled the democratically-elected government of Ukraine, installed a Washington-backed stooge in Kiev, launched a bloody and costly war of annihilation on Russian-speaking people in the East, thrust the economy into a downward death spiral, and reduced the nation to an anarchic, failed state destined to endure a vicious fratricidal civil war for as far as the eye can see.
Last week, Washington suffered its greatest military defeat in more than a decade when Ukraine’s US-backed army was soundly routed in the major railway hub of Debaltsevo. Roughly, 8,000 Ukrainian regulars along with untold numbers of tanks and armored units were surrounded in what came to be known as “the cauldron.” The army of the Donetsk Peoples Republic led by DPR commander Alexander Zakharchenko, encircled the invading army and gradually tightened the cordon, eventually killing or capturing most of the troops within the pocket. The Ukrainian Armed Forces suffered major casualties ranging between 3,000 to 3,500 while a vast amount of lethal military hardware was left behind.
According to Zakharchenko, “The amount of equipment Ukrainian units have lost here is beyond description.”
Additionally, the US-backed proxy-army saw many of its crack troops and top-notch units destroyed in the fighting leaving Kiev unable to continue the war without assistance from allies in the US or Europe. The full impact of the defeat will not be known until angry troops returning from the front amass on the streets of the Capital and demand Petro Poroshenko’s resignation. The Ukrainian President is responsible for the massacre at Debaltsevo. He was fully aware that his army faced encirclement but ordered them to remain in order to satisfy powerful right-wing elements in his government. The disaster is even more terrible due to the fact that it was entirely avoidable and achieved no strategic purpose at all. Extreme hubris frequently impacts outcomes on the battlefield. This was the case at Debaltsevo.
Most people outside of Eastern Europe aren’t paying much attention to this, but the fact of the matter is that Russia is militarily obliterating Ukraine and they are mostly doing so by the same sort of war-by-proxy in which the USA is engaged. The DPR is a Russian proxy, but then, the Ukrainian army is a US proxy, and so far, the Russian proxies are winning.
That’s why you’re not seeing much about it on the US news.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there is soon another coup and the US puppet Poroshenko is thrown out of power, whether it is by Right Sector or someone else. The Russians have won on the moral level and now their Novorossiyan proxies are winning on the material level as well. Poroshenko’s failure to withdraw his troops from the Debaltsevo Pocket was a strategic mistake of the sort one usually only sees labeled Fuhrerbefehl; to the left is an image of what the Pocket looked like back on 25 January when 8,000 troops still had the chance to retreat from within that yellow peninsula in the middle.
From Reuters: The loss of Debaltseve is so huge only because Kiev turned it into a symbolic redoubt, said Gustav Gressel, a specialist on Eastern European defense policy and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. Poroshenko’s biggest mistake was not to withdraw earlier, according to Gressel. The battle for Debaltseve is reminiscent of the futile struggle for the Donetsk airport, which Ukrainian forces finally gave up in January after months of bitter fighting.
Larry announces the Sad Puppies 3 Short Fiction Book Bomb:
Mark your calenders. We will be Book Bombing the short fiction categories this Wednesday.
The Novella Category Bomb was a huge success. Thousands of copies were moved. A week later and they’re still on their respective genres bestseller lists. So basically we made sure that these will be the most widely read items in their category.
Now we’re going to do the same thing for the short stories and novelettes. Sad Puppies is all about getting people to nominate based on what they like, as opposed to what they are supposed to like.
Now, there are some differences in the Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies recommendations here, so what we’re going to do in addition to fully supporting the Short Fiction Book Bomb is a) post links to the two Rabid Puppies stories by Steve Rzasa and John C. Wright so people can read them for free, and b) post a link to The Book of Feasts & Seasons which contains two Rabid Puppies recommendations, one for novelette and one for short story, so Book Bombers can bomb it if they wish to do so.
I’ll even throw in a link to a free story that is neither on the Sad Puppies nor the Rabid Puppies list, but is one that some of you might enjoy reading if you haven’t already read The Altar of Hate.
As before, if you’ve previously read the works, we encourage you to post reviews on Amazon.
It’s always nice to see a happy ending where the SJW ends up unemployed, bitter, and alone. Perhaps more SJWs should consider looking into that diversity they cherish and reading up on the concept of “karma” and “minding your own business”. You may recall how Adria Richards got a programmer fired at a tech conference, but what you may not know is that the story had a just and happy ending. From The Guardian:
On 17 March 2013, Hank was in the audience at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, California, when a stupid joke popped into his head, which he murmured to his friend, Alex.
“What was the joke?” I asked.
“It was so bad I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “It was about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle – a ridiculous dongle. We were giggling about that. It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
A few moments earlier, Hank and Alex had been giggling over some other tech in-joke about “forking someone’s repo”. “We’d decided it was a new form of flattery,” Hank explained. “A guy had been on stage presenting his new project, and Alex said, ‘I would fork that guy’s repo.’” (In tech jargon, to “fork” means to take a copy of another person’s software so you can work on it independently. Another word for software is “repository”. Just in case you wanted to know.)
Moments after making the dongle joke, Hank half-noticed the woman sitting in front of them stand up, turn around and take a photograph. Ten minutes later, a conference organiser came down the aisle and said to Hank and Alex, “Can you come with me?” They were taken into an office and told there’d been a complaint about sexual comments.
“I immediately apologised,” Hank said. “I knew exactly what they were talking about. I told them what we’d said, and that we didn’t mean for it to come across as a sexual comment, and that we were sorry if someone overheard and was offended. They were like, ‘OK. I see what happened.’”
And that was that. The incident passed. Hank and Alex were shaken up – “We’re nerdy guys, and confrontation isn’t something we handle well” – so they decided to leave the conference early. They were on their way to the airport when they started to wonder exactly how someone had conveyed the complaint to the conference organisers. The nightmarish possibility was that it had been communicated in the form of a public tweet. And so, with apprehension, they had a look.
They found a tweet from a woman, called Adria Richards, with a photo of them: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘big’ dongles. Right behind me #pycon”.
Anxious, Hank quickly scanned her replies, but there was nothing much – just the odd congratulation from a few of her 9,209 followers for the way she’d “educated” the men behind her. He noticed ruefully that a few days earlier Adria Richards had herself tweeted a stupid penis joke. She’d suggested to a friend that he should put socks down his pants to bewilder security agents at the airport. Hank relaxed a little.
A day later, Hank was called into his boss’s office and fired.
“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” Hank said, “then I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears but…” Hank paused. “When I got in the car with my wife, I just… I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”
That night, Hank made his only public statement. He posted a short message on the discussion board Hacker News: “Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. [But] as a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have three kids and I really liked that job. She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate.”
Ten months later, I was sitting opposite Adria Richards in a cafe at San Francisco airport. She seemed introverted and delicate, just the way Hank had come across over Google Hangout. She told me about the moment she overheard the comment about the big dongle. “Have you ever had an altercation at school and you could feel the hairs rise up on your back?” she asked me.
“You felt fear?” I asked.
“Danger,” she said. “Clearly my body was telling me, ‘You are unsafe.’”
Which was why, she said, even though she’d never before complained about sexual harassment, she “slowly stood up, rotated from my hips, and took three photos”. She tweeted one, “with a very brief summary of what they said. Then I sent another tweet describing my location. Right? And then the third tweet was the [conference’s] code of conduct.”
“You talked about danger,” I said. “What were you imagining might…?”
“Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?” she replied. “So. Yeah.”
‘He’s a white male,’ Adria said. ‘I’m a black Jewish female. He said things that could be inferred as offensive to me’
I told Adria that people might consider that an overblown thing to say. She had, after all, been at a tech conference with 2,000 bystanders.
“Sure,” she replied. “And those people would probably be white and they would probably be male.”
“Somebody getting fired is pretty bad,” I said. “I know you didn’t call for him to be fired, but you must have felt pretty bad.”
“Not too bad,” she said. She thought more and shook her head decisively. “He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different… I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”
On the evening Hank posted his statement on Hacker News, outsiders began to involve themselves in his and Adria’s story. Hank started to receive messages of support, and then insults, from men’s rights bloggers. He didn’t respond to any of them. At the same time, Adria discovered she was getting discussed on a famous meeting place for trolls: 4chan/b/. “A father of three is out of a job because a silly joke he was telling a friend was overheard by someone with more power than sense. Let’s crucify this cunt.” “Kill her.” “Cut out her uterus with an xacto knife.”
Someone sent Adria a photograph of a beheaded woman with tape over her mouth. Adria’s face was superimposed on to the bodies of porn actors. Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if she was fired. Within hours, she was fired.
‘‘SendGrid threw me under the bus,” she later emailed me. “I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.’’
The death threats and rape threats and racist insults continued even after she was fired.
“Things got very bad for her,” Hank told me. “She had to disappear for six months. Her entire life was being evaluated by the internet. It was not a good situation for her at all.”
“Have you met her since?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied.
Ten months had passed since the day Adria took that photograph, so I asked what he thought of her now. “I think that nobody deserves what she went through,” he replied.
“Maybe it was [Hank] who started all of this,” Adria told me in the cafe at San Francisco airport. “No one would have known he got fired until he complained… Maybe he’s to blame for complaining that he got fired. Maybe he secretly seeded the hate groups. Right?”
I was so taken aback by this suggestion that at the time I didn’t say anything in defence of Hank. But later I felt bad that I hadn’t stuck up for him. So I emailed Adria. I told her what he had told me – how he’d refused to engage with any of the bloggers or trolls who sent him messages of support. I added that I felt Hank was within his rights to post the message on Hacker News, revealing he’d been fired.
Adria replied that she was happy to hear that Hank “wasn’t active in driving their interests to mount the raid attack”, but that she held him responsible for it anyway. It was “his own actions that resulted in his own firing, yet he framed it in a way to blame me… If I had a spouse and two kids to support, I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference. Oh, but wait, I have compassion, empathy, morals and ethics to guide my daily life choices. I often wonder how people like Hank make it through life seemingly unaware of how ‘the other’ lives in the same world he does, but with countless fewer opportunities.”
I asked Hank if he found himself behaving differently since the incident. Had it altered how he lived his life? “I distance myself from female developers a little bit now,” he replied. “I’m not as friendly. There’s humour, but it’s very mundane. You just don’t know. I can’t afford another Donglegate.”
“Give me an example,” I said. “So you’re in your new workplace [Hank was offered another job right away] and you’re talking to a female developer. In what way do you act differently towards her?’
“Well,” Hank said, “we don’t have any female developers at the place I’m working at now. So.”
“You’ve got a new job now, right?” I said to Adria.
“No,” she said.
It doesn’t matter if they are anti-Sad Puppies or anti-GamerGate, they are the same sort of liars who will say anything in order to try to discredit the other side. One “Cat”, who may or may not be Cat Rambo, the vice-president of SFWA who recently announced her candidacy to lead the organization, has been running around sites ranging from Larry Correia’s and the Mad Genius Club to Mike Glyer’s File 770, trying to tell everyone she knows what Sad Puppies, and now #GamerGate, are really about. She’s actually jabber-whacking about how Larry Correia’s Book Bomb sold nearly 2,000 novellas and pretty much ensured that the Sad Puppies recommendations, if they are nominated, will be the most widely read nominees on the Hugo ballot.
To get bestseller status you have to start from somewhere and you are using the book bombs to give that start to certain stories that can’t get it on their own. Thus diddling with the bestseller lists, as I said. Meaning the Sad Puppies themselves know that bestseller is not simply a mark of quality.
As for the quality of the Sad Puppies noms, I read them all, and they ended up where they deserved, quality-wise. If “Opera Vita Aeterna” was the best the Sad Puppies had to offer, the Hugos have hardly been missing out on “quality” to this point. (Pro-tip: “quality” stories do not name the woman character after her chest. Not even if there is some marine with a similar nickname for deniability’s sake.)
I see what the Sad Puppies claim they are doing. I just don’t actually care; talk is cheap. Last year’s results make it pretty plain what they’re really doing.
I know what Gamergate is really about, because I pay attention to what they do and who they attack, and who they don’t. Attach Gamergate to your cause if you like being associated with rape and death threats against women who dare to speak about videogames. But in that case you probably shouldn’t get mad when someone points out what you have done.
(Pro-tip: There are no female characters in “Opera Vita Aeterna”. Nor are there any Marines. As it happens, it is a fantasy novelette about a monastery. This tends to raise some serious doubts about Cat’s ability to read, let alone accurately ascertain the quality of what she has nominally “read”.) There were several responses, one of them mine.
You don’t know a damn thing about it, little Kitty-Cat. Because, if
you did, you’d know that I am the Leader of #GamerGate and the link
between #GamerGate and Sad Puppies is considerably more direct than you
believe it to be. #GamerGate is Sad Puppies on nuclear steroids. Everything is bigger.
Literally Who, Literally Who 2, and Literally Wu are scam artists that
make John Scalzi look like a paragon of probity. And you don’t even know
what the issues are.
But here is the similarity. GamerGaters declare we will play the
games we want to play and make the games we want to make. If you don’t
like that, go away and make your own games. Sound familiar?
You do realize that both the Goon Squad and the GNAA, the two biggest ‘professional’ troll organizations on the internet, have admitted to being active in q/ggate correct? As well the only death threat traced back to an actual person was traced back to a Brazilian clickbait journalist, basically another professional troll. So attempting to throw around guilt by association when I
1. am not active on twatter
2. Can process the fact that assholes on the internet lie about who they are and what they believe in on a regular basis
3. am not interested in bringing up similar arguments about MZB and SD
Being a typical SJW, Cat didn’t have the sense to recant or retreat, but instead doubled-down:
Sorry guys, Gamergate got into the regular news. And now we all know
it’s not about ethics in journalism, it’s about targeting women who dare
to make games, or talk about games, with rape and death threats.
Ah, the “regular news”. As in Brian Williams, the hero of Baghdad. I pointed out a few obvious facts, such as that Cat was not only a blatant liar, but her lies didn’t even make sense.
I was the second nationally syndicated game journalist in the USA. I
have written for numerous leading game industry magazines, including Computer Gaming
World, Electronic Entertainment, and Develop. And I can tell you, with
100 percent certainty, that in 2014 there was a MASSIVE ethics problem
in game journalism. And there still is. Any serious game developer will readily
tell you as much.
What are your game industry credentials? What are your game
journalism credentials? What do you know about it beyond watching CSI Law and Order:
SVU?
Best 5 fire-it-up songs:
Best 5 philosophy songs
Best 5 get-off-the-canvas songs
Best 5 romance songs
Steve Sailer observes an almost inexplicable slam on a great American comedian:
Hope is of real value as a chronicle of a career. For even though Bob Hope’s work is no longer capable of holding the attention of modern audiences, it is still interesting to learn the details of how he turned himself into a star and then managed to stay on top of the mass-culture heap long after most of his less-driven contemporaries had vanished from sight. But Zoglin, for all his admirable thoroughness, inexplicably fails to emphasize the central fact about Hope and his career—one that not only goes a long way toward explaining why he was so successful, but also why we no longer find him funny.
Simply: He wasn’t Jewish.
What was missing from his style? Even though Hope was a first-generation
European immigrant, there was nothing remotely ethnic about his stage
manner. He was among the few successful WASP comics of his generation,
and despite the fact that he hired such Jewish writers as Larry Gelbart
and Mel Shavelson, the jokes they penned for him lacked the sharp ironic
tang of Jewish humor that is to this day one of the essential
ingredients in American comedy.During World War II, when Americans shared both a common culture and an
iron determination to prevail over their common enemy, such a comedian
could speak for millions of listeners from coast to coast. But that
America no longer exists, and the Americans of the 21st century demand
more from comedy than mere reassurance. That is why Bob Hope is
forgotten today, and will remain so. All he had to offer were punchlines
that no longer have punch.
As one commenter mentioned, this appears to be an attempt by the Dutch Teachout to curry favor with the inward-focused aging Jews who read Commentary and think Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce are the epitome of humor. Hope held up a hell of a lot better than either Allen or Bruce have, and Allen isn’t even dead yet. Let’s face it, the funniest thing Allen ever produced was his self-parodying, quasi-incestuous marriage.
I’ve never been able to stand what is described as “Jewish humor” myself; I disliked it long before I had any idea that the stupid sort of sex-and-toilet “humor” produced by the likes of Mel Brooks and the whiny tedium of Woody Allen had anything in common, let alone were claimed by a particular ethnic heritage. Later, I tried watching “Seinfeld” and completely failed to see what was supposed to be funny about Jerry Seinfeld whining all the time.
Joan Rivers could be amusing in small doses, but one of the main things I’ve noticed about “Jewish humor” is that it seems to have a strong tendency to beat a joke to death. “Hey, did you think that was mildly amusing? Let me repeat it three more times and that will make it HILARIOUS, right?” Well, no. That’s actually one thing I wish non-comedians would understand. If you told a little story and you found the reaction to be underwhelming, don’t repeat it. It’s not going to be any more amusing the second time.
Now, I’ve always assumed there was a great divide between those who found Monty Python amusing and those who thought Benny Hill was a riot. “Jewish humor” strikes me as being more akin to an American form of Benny Hill, as it tends to involve a lot of mugging and sexual themes.
Then again, the second-funniest comic in the world, Frankie Boyle (Simon Evans, two of whose clips are below, is the funniest in my opinion), utilizes a lot of sexual themes, although usually in a very dark way. “Watching gymnastics is just pedophilia for cowards.” But there is an enormous gap between that sort of black humor and Woody Allen whining to his therapist or Mel Brooks’s masturbating cavemen. I remember people talking about how funny Brooks’s History of the World: Part I was so I rented it one night; I don’t think I made it more than 15 minutes before ejecting the tape from the VCR in disgust. Keep in mind that this scene is supposed to be THE most HILARIOUS one from the movie. Notice, in particular, the repetition I mentioned; The very lame joke on French pronunciations is hammered home no less than TWELVE times at the very start. Yeah, that’s just fucking brilliant. Then contrast that sort of production, complete with writers, sets, and actors, with the following examples of Simon Evans utilizing nothing more than a microphone.
Of course, it’s pretty much pointless to view comedy as anything but subjective, something that is much more apparent when you live in continental Europe. German humor is freaking ghastly, it’s like black comedy without the comedy. Italian humor is bawdy and straightforward; they simply don’t recognize sarcasm at all. French humor is similar to Italian humor, although a bit more relaxed and less silly, and I haven’t figured out Spanish humor yet. It’s no surprise that English humor has such an impact on American humor; it’s not because they speak the same language, but because it’s broad-spectrum humor that is often appreciated by non-English speakers.
“I’m just a comedian goes first!” I would have loved to see Evans skewer the Jon Stewart Show, as Stewart, unlike Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, can be funny, but like Russell Brand, hides behind his comedian’s mask whenever his serious arguments fall short.
UPDATE: I found this pair of Twitter exchanges to be more personally amusing than the entire oeuvre of either comedian mentioned:
Vox Day @voxday
I’m curious how anyone could have ever thought Woody Allen was amusing. The only funny thing he ever did was bang his ugly stepdaughter.
Jackie DeLister @JackieDeeNJ
Yes, Annie Hall won the Oscar for no reason -_-
Vox Day @voxday
So did Titanic. And it had more genuine laughs.
——–
Vox Day @voxday
And who finds Mel Brooks funny? This is said to be
the funniest scene of his funniest movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db3e8Qw9hhs … It’s BRUTALLY stupid.
Jackie DeLister @JackieDeeNJ
@voxday Are you anti-Semitic?