Bill Maher: "It's just a joke."

[ola.]

This is a topic I've been pondering on for a long time, but never really knew how to begin to discuss it but I guess I have an opportunity now.

Recently, Bill Maher (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/05/bill-maher-accused-islamophobia-joke-zayn-malik-boston-marathon-bomber) for some reason took aim at Zayn Malik (the dude from One Direction), of all people, and as a joke, asked "Where were you during the Boston Marathon?" with screenshots of Zayn next to the terrorist, implying that they look like one another.

http://uk.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/201535/rs_560x415-150405093020-1024.Bill-Mayer-Zayn-Malik-Bomber.jl.040515.jpg

A bunch of news outlets have already pointed out that that was uncalled for and going too far "this time".

Don't worry, I'm not here to discuss boybands, but rather this kind of "humour" that Bill Maher and many other liberals love to engage in - the kind that suggests that nothing is off limits and if you don't laugh along, then you're just an oversensitive baby "SJW" who takes things too seriously and needs to look up the word "joke". Where does this idea even come from? That nothing can ever be offensive as long as I say "just kidding" afterwards? It really bugs me. If you point out sexism in a joke, you're some bitter feminazi. If you point out racism in a joke, you're just making everything about race. I wasn't an avid follower of Colbert and Jon Stewart, but hell, they managed to do all this without ever coming off as obnoxious and were actually entertaining for many people, my strong disagreements with their liberalism aside. Maher with his ugly, smug grin though...

Can anyone relate to any of this? Am I making any sense at all? I guess its the "Its not racist if its a joke" attitude among liberals that I'm trying to address, and hoping people here can explain this way better than I can.

[Futility Personified]

I've seen quite a lot of memes comparing the One Direction fellow to young stalin on the basis of his appearance. As for it being racist, i'm not really sure what the fuss is about. It isn't really funny, but they don't look a billion miles apart.

With regards to liberals (or libertarians, or whoever) making the argument that racist or sexist jokes are harmless, liberals are normally middle class types who already have their own privilege secured. The issue is reinforcing a perceived inferiority of anyone who does not have the good fortune to be a white middle class person on a societal level, and they are also pretty weak jokes to boot.

[Antiochus]

Dunno, I can see how it can be offensive. Although as far as I know that Zayn guy's family is from Pakistan and the BM bomber is ethnically Chechen, several thousand kilometers apart. Then again, I don't put anything past morons, so meh, kind of ambivalent.

[consuming negativity]

I agree that generally speaking, it's bullshit the way people will fall back on it being a "joke", but in this specific case I don't think Bill did anything wrong.

I mean an argument can be made that it's crude but it isn't racist to think two people look alike just because they happen to be non-white. it's a far cry from "this is what an X looks like" or some other bigoted bullshit

[Bala Perdida]

Luckily the richies in high school were always to scared to make those jokes around me. However, in some crowds recently sexism and objectification is reppedative and I feel powerless to tell them to shut up with that. Luckily they don't say that shit around my sistas, but they're still spreading that mentality so I sometimes hate myself for not calling them out.

[#FF0000]

I mean an argument can be made that it's crude but it isn't racist to think two people look alike just because they happen to be non-white. it's a far cry from "this is what an X looks like" or some other bigoted bullshit

Well, they don't look alike, though. That's why folks think this is racist. A dude just said these two people look alike because they're both vaguely "foreign" looking or something.

[The Disillusionist]

Well, they don't look alike, though. That's why folks think this is racist. A dude just said these two people look alike because they're both vaguely "foreign" looking or something.

And they have similar curly hair and facial hair patterns. And similar noses. I mean, seriously guys, I don't like Bill Maher either, and obviously I'm opposed to real bigotry, but this is just silly. The two guys look pretty similar, at least similar enough for comedic effect. Can we please quit inventing stupid crap to complain about and focus on actual problems? It's not like there's a shortage...

[Bala Perdida]

And they have similar curly hair and facial hair patterns. And similar noses. I mean, seriously guys, I don't like Bill Maher either, and obviously I'm opposed to real bigotry, but this is just silly. The two guys look pretty similar, at least similar enough for comedic effect. Can we please quit inventing stupid crap to complain about and focus on actual problems? It's not like there's a shortage...
Can you let anyone talk about anything other than your revolution? Come on, nobody even gives a crap about that kid anyway. Most of it is over the masking of bigotry with a joke. That's a problem right there. It's not starvation, but it's still fucked up.

[consuming negativity]

Well, they don't look alike, though. That's why folks think this is racist. A dude just said these two people look alike because they're both vaguely "foreign" looking or something.
well that's just, like, your opinion, man

[Lily Briscoe]

Can we please quit inventing stupid crap to complain about and focus on actual problems? It's not like there's a shortage...

As if a talkinghead making a mildly offensive joke about a member of a boyband isn't an "actual problem" :rolleyes:

It's not exactly surprising coming from people who probably didn't even listen to Emma Watson's speech to the UN

[ola.]

For the record, just to try to explain why this came off as racist: Zayn Malik was known as "the brown kid" within a lily-white boyband and hence was always a target for racist remarks and terrorist jokes, particularly on his twitter, for which reason he's disabled for a while. When Zayn was in Mexico, twitter was filled with "Welcome home" messages, aka "all brown people look alike", and when Zayn was accused of having a drug problem by the media, he was jokingly being compared to Mexican drug dealers. Someone had also written a song called "zayn did 9/11". White british conservatives had accused him of trying to "pimp Islam" and "sell Islam to Britain". When he finally quit the band, twitter was filled with "Zayn left to join ISIS" tweets. And now here he is being compared to another Muslim terrorist. There are racial implications and assumptions behind all these attitudes.

Look, speaking from experience with my own Middle Eastern friends, if you're of Middle Eastern/South Asian background, you're not usually gonna wanna be told by a white dude that you look like a certain terrorist. You're not gonna think "Oh, is it my cheekbones?", you're thinking "Oh, is it cause I'm brown and Muslim?"


Can we please quit inventing stupid crap to complain about and focus on actual problems? It's not like there's a shortage...

Do you have to pull the "there are other problems in the world" shit? I said this was not about Zayn or the boyband itself which I have no interest in, but about a certain racist behaviour among liberals which I can't stand and would like to make sense of. For people who do deal with this kind of bigotry on a regular basis, it is a problem. I get it, this isn't Syria. Doesn't mean we can't talk about other things. If you're not interested, move on to another thread.

[The Disillusionist]

For the record, just to try to explain why this came off as racist: Zayn Malik was known as "the brown kid" within a lily-white boyband and hence was always a target for racist remarks and terrorist jokes, particularly on his twitter, for which reason he's disabled for a while. When Zayn was in Mexico, twitter was filled with "Welcome home" messages, aka "all brown people look alike", and when Zayn was accused of having a drug problem by the media, he was jokingly being compared to Mexican drug dealers. Someone had also written a song called "zayn did 9/11". White british conservatives had accused him of trying to "pimp Islam" and "sell Islam to Britain". When he finally quit the band, twitter was filled with "Zayn left to join ISIS" tweets. And now here he is being compared to another Muslim terrorist. There are racial implications and assumptions behind all these attitudes.

Look, speaking from experience with my own Middle Eastern friends, if you're of Middle Eastern/South Asian background, you're not usually gonna wanna be told by a white dude that you look like a certain terrorist. You're not gonna think "Oh, is it my cheekbones?", you're thinking "Oh, is it cause I'm brown and Muslim?"



Do you have to pull the "there are other problems in the world" shit? I said this was not about Zayn or the boyband itself which I have no interest in, but about a certain racist behaviour among liberals which I can't stand and would like to make sense of. For people who do deal with this kind of bigotry on a regular basis, it is a problem. I get it, this isn't Syria. Doesn't mean we can't talk about other things. If you're not interested, move on to another thread.

I don't care what you talk about (you'll see that I avoided the stupid bronie thread that is currently active), it just drives me crazy when people take minor junk like this that probably isn't even racist on any real level, and try to elevate it to "real problem" status. This is why leftists have a problem with being taken seriously sometimes, I think, because we're too busy nitpicking about this little crap, and it undermines the bigger picture.

That being said, if we want to start a serious thread about what an asshole Bill Maher is, and how liberal media reinforces negative social constructs, I'm all for that. Let's just pick some real examples.

[#FF0000]

well that's just, like, your opinion, man

cool meme but yeah saying two people who don't share any similarities but ethnicity (and not even that in this case) is going to get you some side-eye.


I don't care what you talk about (you'll see that I avoided the stupid bronie thread that is currently active), it just drives me crazy when people take minor junk like this that probably isn't even racist on any real level, and try to elevate it to "real problem" status. This is why leftists have a problem with being taken seriously sometimes, I think, because we're too busy nitpicking about this little crap, and it undermines the bigger picture.

That being said, if we want to start a serious thread about what an asshole Bill Maher is, and how liberal media reinforces negative social constructs, I'm all for that. Let's just pick some real examples

If it drives you crazy, that means you care. And it'd be one thing if you were of the relatively common opinion that people spend way too much time talking about media, but apparently your issue here is that this isn't a "real example" which is just, like, your opinion, man -- isn't it?

[Sea]

Well, they don't look alike, though. That's why folks think this is racist. A dude just said these two people look alike because they're both vaguely "foreign" looking or something.They do. The hair is similar, both have a chinbeard, their noses are practically the exact same shape, their eyebrows both have a similar shape, they both have the same color eyes and they both have peachfuzz.

And for the record, I think the joke is freaking hilarious. Maher is a scumbag anti-vaccine nutter (I'm saying that just to keep ma lefist street cred up) but this shit is funny as hell.
cool meme but yeah saying two people who don't share any similarities but ethnicity (and not even that in this case) is going to get you some side-eye.If they don't even share the same ethnicity and they do totally look like one another, that means that those who are crying "racism" are doing so on the basis of thin air. Tsarnaev never even occoured to me as a "brown person" either. The only thing I remember thinking about his appearance is that he looks a little bit like Bob Dylan with his hairdo.