Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged humor

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Jon Stewart, Religion Teacher Extraordinaire | Religion & Politics - 0 views

religionandpolitics.org/...eligion-teacher-extraordinaire

religion media

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Stewart and his writers do two things that make them unique on popular television. First, they cover — and yes, I would say “cover,” not just satirize or mock — a wide range of religions. If you watched only The Daily Show, you would nonetheless learn, in time, about Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and a whole spectrum of smaller faiths, a category that I would argue includes atheism. And second, they pay attention to points of theology that more traditional news and talk shows skip over. Using chunks of time that would be unthinkable on a network newscast — six minutes for a segment on Mormonism! — The Daily Show teaches the finer points of belief, mining them for humor but at the same time serving a real educational function. 
  • The Daily Show approaches American religion in the spirit of tolerance, but not with the wimpy, eager-to-please hand-wringing that characterizes so much liberal dialogue in this country. Rather, religions are shown to be strange and possibly cringe-inducing: our job is to take an honest look, then tolerate them anyway. It’s a call to rigorous citizenship.
  • There is no apparent ideology, either religious or skeptical, animating Stewart’s treatment of religion. More than anything, he and his writers have the scrupulosity of objective journalists. They win laughs without deforming, or even exaggerating, the religion’s actual beliefs. This is an extraordinary feat. Most religious humor, especially on television or in the movies, depends on stereotypes, which are by definition crude and reductive. Stewart’s writers, by contrast, find humor in the specifics of each faith.
anonymous

George HW Bush apologizes actress he sexually assaulted | Daily Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...sh-sexually-assaulted-her.html

georgebush president assault US Culture

shared by anonymous on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • George HW Bush apologizes actress he sexually assaulted
  • Bush has apologized saying it was an 'attempt at humor.' 
  • President George H.W. Bush apologizes after actress claimed he 'sexually assaulted' her and insists his 'attempt at humor' was misinterpreted
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • President George H.W. Bush APOLOGIZES after actress claimed he 'sexually assaulted' her and insists his 'attempt at humor' was misinterpreted
  • Lind took to Instagram sharing this image along with the photo in question to make the claims against the former president on Tuesday 
  • The incident allegedly happened during a photo-op at a private screening for the AMC series 'Turn'
  • The actress has not offered definitive evidence of the alleged misconduct
Javier E

We're All Just Having Fun Here - Freddie deBoer - 0 views

freddiedeboer.substack.com/...were-all-just-having-fun-here

movement politics leftist socialist disenchanted

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • perhaps we could consider what this means about the larger moment. That is indeed what liberatory politics amount to, now: a joke. It’s a LARP, cosplay, kayfabe. Self-parody. The theater of the absurd. A pastime, a shared bit of gallows humor. Nobody believes in the capacity for actual liberation, in any meaningful sense. It resides entirely in the world of wistful humor. People are defensive about the orcas because they have no actual movement to be defensive about.
  • Though we still live in the same world of rabidly emotional politics, the notion that the unrest of 2020 might lead to lasting material change is now so quaint as to be actively embarrassing.
  • BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a font of petty corruption and chronic mismanagement of funds, while the organic energy it cultivated three years ago has been dispersed into a series of nonprofit jobs and elite college scholarships, into diversity statements and language codes, which obviously don’t threaten the edifice of racial inequality
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • As so many IRL organizing meetings are, the meeting was admirably focused on the here and now. There was little to complain about. But when a speaker closed by saying “All power to the people,” I winced. Because it was emblematic of that inescapable feeling that attends radical politics now - the feeling that it’s all kitsch, like a Googie-architecture portrayal of the space age.
  • The palpable sense that everyone is quietly aware that the whole thing is a type of pantomime, people going through the motions with no real sense of possibility, unwilling to entirely give up on the profound moral necessity of radical change but at this point entirely incapable of lying to themselves about the reality of what’s actually possible
  • you know what would be a much bigger symbol of radical progress than some killer whales attacking a couple dozen random small watercraft? A diverse working-class movement based on shared economic need, coming together across demographic distance and using their labor power to earn a better, more just world for all people, rallying under a banner of shared sacrifice and the universal brotherhood of all. But nobody, nobody believes that such a thing is possible. Not anymore
  • We are all of us at a lefty Renaissance festival, our hammer and sickles no more authentic than Ye Olde Meade Hall, feeling like parents trying to keep the myth of Santa Claus alive to a child that’s probably just too old to keep buying it
  • It’s easier to imagine whales delivering our salvation than it is to imagine us delivering it to ourselves.
  • Yes, enjoying orcas attacking some random boats is natural and funny, and rolling that into a metaphor of radical politics in a humorous way is fine. But that’s not all that’s been happening with this story, is it? I’m not just talking about a few random tweets, here. I’ve been following this story for days now, in various forums, and growing increasingly sad as people seem to invest more and more in this, emotionally. What’s going on here, exactly?
  • I was at an organizing meeting not too long ago, one put together by a good local lefty organizatio
Javier E

Uwe E. Reinhardt: American Health Care as a Source of Humor - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...alth-care-as-a-source-of-humor

hospital prices health care

shared by Javier E on 11 May 13 - No Cached
  • the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of the Department of Health and Human Services delivered a giant spreadsheet on hospital charges and payments.
  • The spreadsheet has data in 65,536 rows and 12 columns. It covers, for each of more than 3,000 hospitals, charges and payments for the 100 most frequently billed inpatient cases, along with the average covered charges hypothetically billed by those hospitals for those cases.
Javier E

New Evidence Indicates Intelligence Not Contagious | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...es-intelligence-not-contagious

trump pandemic intelligence humor

shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • After weeks of near-constant exposure, however, the seventy-three-year-old man appeared “a hundred per cent asymptomatic” of intelligence, the researchers found.
Javier E

The New York Times cuts all political cartoons, and cartoonists are not happy - The Was... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...oons-cartoonists-are-not-happy

cartoon political cartoon nyt

shared by Javier E on 12 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • the Times is nixing “tip of the spear” single-panel cartoons — a form of pointed critique that in American newspapers dates back to the 19th-century work of the legendary Thomas Nast
  • In the insane world we live in, the art of visual commentary is needed more than ever. And so is humor.”
  • Chappatte speculated Monday that his decades of work have been “undone” by the Trump/Netanyahu cartoon. “I’m afraid this is not just about cartoons, but about journalism and opinion in general,” wrote Chappatte, who is in his early 50s. “We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Some political artists view the Times’s decision to end daily political cartoons as a repudiation of the art form.
  • “It is their clarity and pointedness, the sharpness of their satire, that make them such powerful vehicles for expressing opinion,”
  • “There is no ‘on the other hand’ in an editorial cartoon,” the AAEC continued. “This power, understandably, makes editors nervous, but to completely discontinue their use is letting anxiety slide into cowardice.”
  • “The collapsing space for political cartoons and satirical commentary because editors don’t have the spine to stand up to social-media outrage campaigns is bad for free speech, and bad because political debate benefits from a little humor now and again."
  • “By choosing not to print editorial cartoons in the future, the Times can be sure that their editors will never again make a poor cartoon choice,” Cagle said. “Editors at the Times have also made poor choices of words in the past. I would suggest that the Times should also choose not to print words in the future — just to be on the safe side.”
delgadool

World War 3 memes as therapy: Coping with war and crisis through memes - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...2020-saleem-alhabash-interview

shared by delgadool on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • You might think this type of reaction is juvenile or dismissive, but it’s really just human. Memes frequently operate as exemplars of larger trends, as well as stand-ins for cultural anxieties and ways to express and alleviate fears or other emotions through humor.
  • the overall tone of the memes boiled down to a kind of cheerful ambivalence about the prospect of war.
  • The American government eliminated the draft in 1973, but that didn’t matter to the meme makers — which makes sense, because fears about the draft being reinstated have always circulated among teens and young adults. In 2016, a false claim that Trump wanted to bring back the draft circulated around the internet as a part of the larger cultural anxiety over his campaign.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • As it often does, Black Twitter was the first community to drive this meme. That also makes sense, given that a recurrent fear of the draft has been especially prevalent in black culture since the Vietnam War, when black men were disproportionately affected by the draft.
  • Do you have zero skills that can prepare you for battle? Are you learning Persian via Google? The memes tell you you’re not alone in being hilariously underprepared for a real global emergency.
  • These are significantly different ways of framing our relationship to Iran and its people, but they’re both equally important examples of how people are thinking about the war. Because as the memes and their narratives travel and spread, they help shape the larger cultural narrative about Iran itself — just as all memes, from toxic to wholesome, help create cultural narratives.
  • The memes seem to follow a recent trend of viral internet humor as a coping mechanism — memes that are more overtly psychological than the usual wholesome meme, and more upfront about the touch of nihilism that drives them.
  • The basic idea here, as Alhabash points out, is that the World War III meme itself isn’t just about war. It’s about the larger cultural mood and the ways in which we receive, express, and amplify that mood. Alhabash expressed doubts about how self-aware this process was. But for a subset of the meme makers and their audience, the war jokes are helping quell anxiety and keep things lighthearted.
  • It’s worth noting, however, that some situations do seem to be utterly too dark to meme — there are virtually no memes about the Australian bushfires, for example — and that ironically might be cause for hope. If the potential global conflict is something we can joke about, then it might mean that our prevailing emotion is still hope that it won’t happen.
Javier E

How Trump and allies egged on violent scenes - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...egged-violent-scenes-wednesday

trump violence crisis incitement

shared by Javier E on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • After President Trump began raising objections to his 2020 election loss nearly two months ago, his allies repeatedly assured it was harmless. “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully,” was the title of an op-ed from former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. An anonymous senior administration official later assured The Washington Post there was little “downside for humoring him for this little bit of time.”
nataliedepaulo1

Ben Carson Says He Has No Memory of Running for President - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...emory-of-running-for-president

politics memory president

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Ben Carson Says He Has No Memory of Running for President
  • Appearing on the Fox News Channel, Dr. Carson responded to host Sean Hannity’s question about his ten-month-long candidacy by saying, “I do not recall any of that occurring.”
  • “Someone is trying to mess with my mind,” he said. “And when I find out who is doing that I will make them pay dearly.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While Carson insisted that “there is no way I ran for President,” he did not rule out running for the Republican nomination in the future. “I think I’d be really good at it,” he said.
  • nataliedepaulo1 on 27 Oct 16
     
    This is a satirical article about Ben Carson.
Javier E

An Important Message from Mike Pence - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...ortant-message-from-mike-pence

pence vice-president trump politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Another thing I read recently, and it’s probably become my second-favorite piece of reading material right after the Bible, is the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It’s all about how to remove the President and replace him with the Vice-President. I have to admit that it was a kick to start reading the dusty old Constitution for the very first time and see yours truly right in there!
  • It turns out that the Twenty-fifth Amendment says that the country can remove the President if he is found to be “incapacitated.” That can mean anything from physically incapacitated, like being in an irreversible coma, to mentally incapacitated, like being seen raving like a lunatic during a visit to the C.I.A. Either way, if folks decide that it’s time to put a fork in you, see you later, alligator!
  • And so, my fellow-Americans, I encourage each and every one of you, history buffs or otherwise, to read the Twenty-fifth Amendment today—especially Section 4, which is a little complicated but really exciting, too. If you enjoy reading it as much as I did, let me know. I’m in my office in Washington and you can reach me anytime—I’m of sound mind and body.
Javier E

Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ican-julius-evola-fascism.html

white supremacy fascist traditionalist crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.
  • Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.
  • They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.
  • “It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.
  • A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found.
  • The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses.
  • The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion.”
  • Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.
  • Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.
  • A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.
  • Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”
  • “When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”
  • It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.
  • Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”
  • Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.
  • Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.
  • As Mr. Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, he mentioned “Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian Fascism.”
  • In his Vatican talk, Mr. Bannon suggested that although Mr. Putin represented a “kleptocracy,” the Russian president understood the existential danger posed by “a potential new caliphate” and the importance of using nationalism to stand up for traditional institutions.
  • “We, the Judeo-Christian West,” Mr. Bannon added, “really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”
  • As Mr. Bannon suggested in his speech, Mr. Putin’s most influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian Traditionalist and anti-liberal writer sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin.”
  • An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called for a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism” and advocated a geography-based theory of “Eurasianism” — which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin’s expansionism and meddling in Western European politics.
  • Mr. Dugin sees European Traditionalists as needing Russia, and Mr. Putin, to defend them from the onslaught of Western liberal democracy, individual liberty, and materialism — all Evolian bêtes noires.
  • This appeal of traditional values on populist voters and against out-of-touch elites, the “Pan-European Union” and “centralized government in the United States,” as Mr. Bannon put it, was not lost on Mr. Trump’s ideological guru.“A lot of people that are Traditionalists,” he said in his Vatican remarks, “are attracted to that.”
Javier E

HarperCollins Joins Scribd in E-Book Subscription Plan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ption-service-with-scribd.html

book subscription service reading

shared by Javier E on 02 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Scribd, with a generous base of 80 million visitors to its site each month, said it was positioned to become a prominent e-book subscription service, in which consumers pay a flat monthly fee for access to a large catalog of e-books.
  • Oysterbooks.com, a venture introduced last month, offers consumers access to more than 100,000 books for $9.95 a month.
  • Scribd’s e-book subscription service already includes books from smaller publishers, including Rosetta Books, Workman and Sourcebooks. The addition of HarperCollins means subscribers will have access to literary fiction (“The Family Fang: A Novel” by Kevin Wilson), humor (“The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee” by Sarah Silverman) and memoirs
1 - 20 of 77 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page