Not quite a liberal

I laughed about an offensive joke today. [If you are easily offended, you might want to stop reading here.] It said "Argueing on the internet is like participating in the special olympics: Even if you win, you are still a retard." I mentioned that I found that joke funny, and immediately got a response telling me that the joke was offensive to our less fortunate mentally handicapped fellow humans. In situations like these, and for example my comments on the gay-friendly WoW guild, some people obviously think I'm a right-wing nutter.

On the other hand I also get attacked for example for defending the European welfare state, or worker's rights. I never mentioned it, but I'm also pro-choice, anti-gun, anti death penalty, and for the right of homosexual partnerships to be legally equivalent to heterosexual marriages (although I would prefer if they wouldn't call it "gay marriage"). So conservatives would probably call me a liberal, or even a commie.

In short, I'm a bit lost in the culture wars, standing somewhere in the middle. Of course a joke about special olympics, or a teenager calling something "gay" is offensive, that is the point of saying it. A totally non-offensive joke wouldn't be funny, and using offensive language to explore social boundaries is a normal part of growing up. Trying to ban everything which is offensive to anybody from the common language is bound to fail, as you could observe over the "happy holidays" debacle.

Calling somebody argueing on the internet a "retard" might be offensive to mentally handicapped people, all mentally handicapped people I know are a *lot* nicer than the average internet forum user. But it doesn't harm the mentally handicapped people much, as they are unlikely to even see that joke. I find current politically correct attitudes sometimes a lot more discriminating and harmful than that joke. For example the current spat over an arab company wanting to buy the facilities of 6 US harbors, where both Democrats and Republicans basically argue that all arabs are terrorists, has a much bigger negative effect than some offensive language in a WoW chat channel.

The culture war also negatively affects the ability of people to come to a compromise. For example I believe both in evolution and in that God created the world. When the bible says he created the world in 7 days, you simply shouldn't take that as the literal truth, God's days during creation were a couple of million years long. So for a christian conservative I'm a blasphemer, and for a die-hard atheist I'm in religious denial of scientific facts. But in fact religion and science are in no way in disagreement with each other, religion by definition looks at the ultimate causes *beyond* what can be explained by science.

Unfortunately it gets more and more difficult to have any opinion on anything, without being classified into some corner. But the good news is that this culture war is perpetrated by a small vocal minority. The large rest of us can laugh about Will & Grace without either worrying that showing homosexuals on TV will corrupt our youth, or that laughing about them might be homophobic.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:04 PM Permanent Link