black people! ha ha!
This negro space program thing is bigger than I thought.The actual name of this page is: Racism isn't cool.
A couple of different things leave a funny taste in my mouth about this. One is that you can say that racism isn't cool and then get away with being racist, which is dumb. Because no one really understands racism, if you say that you get to have it both ways. Rush Limbaugh used to play "movin on' up", the theme song to "the jeffersons" whenever he did a segment about black senator Carolyn Mosely Braun. As a "joke". When you actually state, though, that racism is bad, you're covered with the PC crowd and you're still funny to the white power kids and angry, newly culturally marginalized suburban white males, who know a wink when they see or hear one. When you think about it, racism in the public domain has no consequences; everyone is entitled to be as bigoted as they like, and to not "be" racist is only to acknowledge and stand on shunning the practice of racism. That's all you can do to combat it, and that's not much. In the end, unfortunately, I think anti-racism loses because it's no fun.
Another thing that bugs me is that this dumb shit gets a laugh. The person who ostensibly eschews racism per se who titled the page "Racism isn't cool" is still going for the cheap gag. That bothers me more.
I'm building this idea, and I mean someday to present it in a unified form, but in case I don't get round to it, I'll just say a couple of things about this here. Thesis title: There's a heirarchy of sophistication in humor, and what a person finds funny tells you a great deal about the inside of his or her mind. (To my knowledge, this is just known by everybody and not taught anywhere, but as we can see, for example, by looking to the southern united states, the bible belt, nothing implicit can be taken as read. In this case our (reasonable people's) assumption that people are going to treat creationism as a pleasant bedtime story for children and not a way of life that necessitates the rejection of scientific reality is obviously making a proverbial ASS out of U and ME.)
Cheap stereotyping is just dumb. It's not even funny. It's just repetition of some mean idea. It's more of a social contract between complicit parties making and hearing the joke than anything else. It may be shown someday that this dumb shit serves an important memetic evolutionary need for group loyalty. But anyway, I think whoever runs this site is also dumb. I'll amend that, too dumb or too lazy to make a good joke. This isn't about me, it's about making a joke, but I easily can make a better joke than these guys out of racial stereotyping. For example, to satirize a stereotype of black people, here's an imaginary news headline and lead:
MONEY IS RACIST
In a new study, it has been found that money prefers white neighborhoods to black ones, which has staggering implications. In the same study, it was shown reverse racism is exhibited by crime, which seems to prefer black areas.
See, there's a formula and you drop in different situations and funny-ness comes out the other side. How funny depends on how imaginative the source material is. Take the scientific american article from yesterday. That's about as funny as funny normally gets because it rips on people who aren't happy getting ripped on, and it's also funny because of the discomfort our society is experiencing due to their Christian fundamentalist worldview's clash with our, yes, secular government. A side note, there are such things as "post-modern" jokes that I understand exist and that I know I've heard, but that are very much "in-jokes", I think for people who think about humor too much.
To make a long story short, the bigger your worldview, the funnier everything is. To a person like me, who doesn't believe in spirituality of any kind, almost everything is funny. To claim allegiance to a deity or belief system of someone else's devising (all religions) is to stop thinking something is funny. Christians think it's funny that anyone could be so stupid to think that if they blow themselves up they get to screw virgins for eternity in heaven. People like me think that's funny, too, but we also think Christians are funny for thinking life was created by a supernatural force that has never been shown to exist. I like it this way, and I don't think it will ever be possible for me to shrink my mind down to the size and shape of a god-needer. (I also didn't ever think I'd get married, but the change in this situation was vry different, and if you ask me about it I'll tell you in depth, I don't want to get into it here. And I assure you, the lovely JV isn't pregnant.)
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