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The Michael Shermer Show, 293. An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (6)

293. An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West (6)

2 (54m 21s):

And one of the worrying things to me as well is that we've seen not only the introduction of speech codes and political correctness, but a very rapid substitution of meaning Rogan. And I talked about this, you know, when we talk about safety now, safety doesn't mean what safety used to mean. Safety has a very normal definition. The absence of physical violence is what safety means. However, if you can rephrase the reframe safety to mean the absence of opinions you don't like, it becomes very, very easy to enforce speech codes and censorship on people, because you are no longer saying you are saying something I don't like shut up you, which nobody would respect.

2 (55m 1s):

You are saying you are making me unsafe and you must be prevented from speaking. That is a much more persuasive argument and all sorts of other things. Inclusion is my favorite as well. We talk about, you know, we must have an inclusive space. Well, people like me and you and Francis and Rogan and whoever else, wouldn't be all that included in one of these inclusive spaces. In fact, you might find yourself rather excluded if you were to show up and perhaps even somewhat unsafe in the old definition of the term and whatever, wherever you look, the, this is happening. I, I give the example in the book of a member of parliament here in the UK, who said that we must not fetishize debate. And what she meant by that is we shouldn't debate things.

2 (55m 43s):

Even though she's a member of parliament, the British parliament, the oldest, or one of the oldest debating chambers in the world, because she'd rather people didn't have conversations because then maybe some of her terrible ideas would be exposed. And so we are redefining language to facilitate this cultural revolution that is happening under the surface.

1 (56m 4s):

So I, I love this section in your book here. I famously lost a standup comedy gig with the university of London in 2018 because I refused to sign a safe space agreement, which banned me from making jokes related to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, homophobia, biphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion, and anti atheism. What left is there to do for a standup comedy routine, if you can't touch any of those

2 (56m 31s):

Well, right. And yeah. And you left out ableism as well. So you're a big at Michael. Yeah. That's yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, of course it's absurd. And I, you know, I turned it down cause I just thought this was silly. And what, what was interesting about that story is I kind of thought that I'm one of these like weird comedians with my Soviet background. Who's really hypersensitive to all this stuff. And really most of the public couldn't care less and don't give a shit and whatever. But what happened is I tweeted about it to like a thousand people at the time I had like a thousand followers or something, you know, very, very low number. If you got picked up, you got picked up in America, then here then around the world.

2 (57m 13s):

And before I knew it, it was the second most red story on the BBC news website on the day that the prime minister of our country was nearly removed from office by her own party. So that would be the equivalent of the Democrats impeaching Joe Biden right now. And the second story on CNN and Fox is like comedian. No one's ever heard of turns down unpaid gig from some, no name university. And that's when I realized Michael that it's not just silly comedians like me, or, you know, former Soviet citizens like me who care about this issue, actually the general public really do feel very strongly about this issue.

2 (57m 59s):

And that is because, and I give this, these numbers in the first, in the preface to the book, most people in our society, in the United States, in the United Kingdom now live as if they've signed that contract. And they're careful about what they say, the 77% of Republicans, nearly 60% of independents and over half of Democrats in the United States, according to the polling that I include in the book, feel unable or fearful of expressing their political opinions in public over half, including over half of Democrats and nearly 80% of Republicans and in the UK, the situation is very similar and the trend is worrying as well because the number of people who feel restricted is rising.

2 (58m 44s):

The number of people who feel able to say what they think is falling. So we are implementing some of these ideas and people are seeing the result. People are worried in the UK. We have laws on the books now that say that it is illegal to be grossly offensive. For example, and people are regularly investigated and prosecuted and convicted by the police of speech offenses, comedians are investigated for their jokes and the police literally will turn up at a comedian's door and say, we are investigating whether your joke is illegal. I mean, what world are we living in?

1 (59m 19s):

Well, as you know, one of the pushbacks against that argument from progressives is that you just don't like being told you can't be racist, homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic, and so on. These are just normal trends that we should implement because this is good for moral progress.

2 (59m 35s):

Well, they're right. You know, I do wanna advance my Jewish Nazi agendas as somebody has accused me of in the past. But the, this is the, the cheap argument that people always wheel out when they're, and, and by the way, this argument's been made hundreds of times by people on the, on this side, that side of the argument in the past, it's not just progressives. People have made it all along. You know, you just wanna violate all our moral codes and that's why. No, no, yes. Some the idea of free speech allows some people to say things that we would all dislike, but that is the price we pay for living in a free society. It's the price we pay for the scientific progress for the technological progress that we've made.

2 (1h 0m 15s):

It is the price we pay for living in one of the most prosperous societies in the world. And if you compare us to societies that do restrict what comedians are allowed to joke about to societies that do restrict what people are allowed to say about politics in public that do restrict the opinions that you're allowed to have, or try to force certain opinions, Daniel throat, which of those societies would you like to live in? And if you would like to live in North Korea or modern Russia or China, by all means, I, I will personally fund your ticket to go and live in those societies as long as it's one way. And the problem I have with these people is none of them ever volunteered to do this. None of them ever volunteered to go and live in these ideal societies, like the ones that they want because in their mind, these things that not connected, but they are connected.

2 (1h 1m 2s):

They are connected. If you restrict people's freedoms, you will also end up in a society where their freedoms are restricted. It's not rocket science,

1 (1h 1m 9s):

Right? So as a comedian, where do you draw the line of the kind of language you would use, the obvious one being, would you use the N word in a routine as a white guy? I don't even like to use the word ever. And I think that's okay, but maybe that's the only example where we should have restrictions. Are there others? I don't know. How do you think about just kind of personal self-regulation of language?

2 (1h 1m 33s):

I think it's up to each individual comedian to decide what they think they should and could do because comedy is a very powerful tool and you can use it to set things up. So I, for example, would never use the N word ever, but in my last hour special that I did, I had a 20 minute routine, which culminated with me using it in a very specific context, which I, in which I illustrated that just cuz a word is offensive. Doesn't mean it can never be used by person of a different color. And I did it deliberately and it takes 20 minutes. It takes 20 minutes and a lot of Goodwill from people and a lot of jokes and a lot of explanation to get to the point where people will go along with you on that.

2 (1h 2m 13s):

Right? It's not because I was trying to justify people using the N word. I think people who, who, who would use that word in, in everyday life are wrong. And, and frankly, I do think it would be racist to do that. But if you're a comedian on stage as part of a comedy routine, different things are possible. So I think it's up to each individual comedian to draw the line for themselves. I mean, famous George Carlin, one of my great heroes, a a very progressive and left wing guide, by the way, he had a whole routine about how you should be able to use the N word. If you remember now, would he be able to do that now? Probably not. Should he be able to do that now? Well, I think it should be up to him, right? And by the way, this is what people never understand about comedy.

2 (1h 2m 55s):

Comedy is incredibly self-regulating unless you're doing gigs to the annual meeting of the KKK, which I don't believe has standup comedy, that then you are going to be in a position where you're playing to a general mix of the, the general public. And they are going to let you know pretty quickly if you've crossed a line and that's how comedians learn. You might say something that's over the line. You go, oh, they didn't like that. Okay. I need another joke to follow this up or I need to pull back or I need to reword or I need to rephrase, or I need to maybe cut that bit. If, if it's, if I can't get it to work, that is the process of comedy. You go out, you say some stupid shit. Some of it works.

2 (1h 3m 35s):

You go out and you make it slightly less stupid and slightly more funny, try it again and on and on it goes and that's the process of comedy. So the problem we have, and you know, when we spoke to Lionel Schrier, the, the, the brilliant author on trigonometry, she made the point that we don't even know what books aren't being written, what comedy routines aren't being performed, because everyone is fearful of crossing that line now because you cross it once someone puts it out on YouTube and you are, you are done as this racist guy, you know, the famous routine that Chris rock had about black people versus the N-word right? You remember this? Well, he, he talks about how he took a month, I think, to get that to work.

2 (1h 4m 16s):

So he had to go out month after month and die on his ass. As we say, in the British comedy industry, doing that routine, being misunderstood, potentially liable to being misrepresented. But if he was living just through the smartphone, social media age, I don't even know that that routine ever gets made. And what a great loss that would've been to, to, to the, the history of comedy.


293. An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West (6) 293. Carta de Amor de um Imigrante ao Oeste (6)

2 (54m 21s):

And one of the worrying things to me as well is that we've seen not only the introduction of speech codes and political correctness, but a very rapid substitution of meaning Rogan. And I talked about this, you know, when we talk about safety now, safety doesn't mean what safety used to mean. Safety has a very normal definition. The absence of physical violence is what safety means. However, if you can rephrase the reframe safety to mean the absence of opinions you don't like, it becomes very, very easy to enforce speech codes and censorship on people, because you are no longer saying you are saying something I don't like shut up you, which nobody would respect.

2 (55m 1s):

You are saying you are making me unsafe and you must be prevented from speaking. That is a much more persuasive argument and all sorts of other things. Inclusion is my favorite as well. We talk about, you know, we must have an inclusive space. Well, people like me and you and Francis and Rogan and whoever else, wouldn't be all that included in one of these inclusive spaces. In fact, you might find yourself rather excluded if you were to show up and perhaps even somewhat unsafe in the old definition of the term and whatever, wherever you look, the, this is happening. I, I give the example in the book of a member of parliament here in the UK, who said that we must not fetishize debate. And what she meant by that is we shouldn't debate things.

2 (55m 43s):

Even though she's a member of parliament, the British parliament, the oldest, or one of the oldest debating chambers in the world, because she'd rather people didn't have conversations because then maybe some of her terrible ideas would be exposed. And so we are redefining language to facilitate this cultural revolution that is happening under the surface.

1 (56m 4s):

So I, I love this section in your book here. I famously lost a standup comedy gig with the university of London in 2018 because I refused to sign a safe space agreement, which banned me from making jokes related to racism, sexism, classism, ageism, homophobia, biphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion, and anti atheism. What left is there to do for a standup comedy routine, if you can't touch any of those

2 (56m 31s):

Well, right. And yeah. And you left out ableism as well. So you're a big at Michael. Yeah. That's yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, of course it's absurd. And I, you know, I turned it down cause I just thought this was silly. And what, what was interesting about that story is I kind of thought that I'm one of these like weird comedians with my Soviet background. Who's really hypersensitive to all this stuff. And really most of the public couldn't care less and don't give a shit and whatever. But what happened is I tweeted about it to like a thousand people at the time I had like a thousand followers or something, you know, very, very low number. If you got picked up, you got picked up in America, then here then around the world.

2 (57m 13s):

And before I knew it, it was the second most red story on the BBC news website on the day that the prime minister of our country was nearly removed from office by her own party. So that would be the equivalent of the Democrats impeaching Joe Biden right now. And the second story on CNN and Fox is like comedian. No one's ever heard of turns down unpaid gig from some, no name university. And that's when I realized Michael that it's not just silly comedians like me, or, you know, former Soviet citizens like me who care about this issue, actually the general public really do feel very strongly about this issue.

2 (57m 59s):

And that is because, and I give this, these numbers in the first, in the preface to the book, most people in our society, in the United States, in the United Kingdom now live as if they've signed that contract. And they're careful about what they say, the 77% of Republicans, nearly 60% of independents and over half of Democrats in the United States, according to the polling that I include in the book, feel unable or fearful of expressing their political opinions in public over half, including over half of Democrats and nearly 80% of Republicans and in the UK, the situation is very similar and the trend is worrying as well because the number of people who feel restricted is rising.

2 (58m 44s):

The number of people who feel able to say what they think is falling. So we are implementing some of these ideas and people are seeing the result. People are worried in the UK. We have laws on the books now that say that it is illegal to be grossly offensive. For example, and people are regularly investigated and prosecuted and convicted by the police of speech offenses, comedians are investigated for their jokes and the police literally will turn up at a comedian's door and say, we are investigating whether your joke is illegal. I mean, what world are we living in?

1 (59m 19s):

Well, as you know, one of the pushbacks against that argument from progressives is that you just don't like being told you can't be racist, homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic, and so on. These are just normal trends that we should implement because this is good for moral progress.

2 (59m 35s):

Well, they're right. You know, I do wanna advance my Jewish Nazi agendas as somebody has accused me of in the past. But the, this is the, the cheap argument that people always wheel out when they're, and, and by the way, this argument's been made hundreds of times by people on the, on this side, that side of the argument in the past, it's not just progressives. People have made it all along. You know, you just wanna violate all our moral codes and that's why. No, no, yes. Some the idea of free speech allows some people to say things that we would all dislike, but that is the price we pay for living in a free society. It's the price we pay for the scientific progress for the technological progress that we've made.

2 (1h 0m 15s):

It is the price we pay for living in one of the most prosperous societies in the world. And if you compare us to societies that do restrict what comedians are allowed to joke about to societies that do restrict what people are allowed to say about politics in public that do restrict the opinions that you're allowed to have, or try to force certain opinions, Daniel throat, which of those societies would you like to live in? And if you would like to live in North Korea or modern Russia or China, by all means, I, I will personally fund your ticket to go and live in those societies as long as it's one way. And the problem I have with these people is none of them ever volunteered to do this. None of them ever volunteered to go and live in these ideal societies, like the ones that they want because in their mind, these things that not connected, but they are connected.

2 (1h 1m 2s):

They are connected. If you restrict people's freedoms, you will also end up in a society where their freedoms are restricted. It's not rocket science,

1 (1h 1m 9s):

Right? So as a comedian, where do you draw the line of the kind of language you would use, the obvious one being, would you use the N word in a routine as a white guy? I don't even like to use the word ever. And I think that's okay, but maybe that's the only example where we should have restrictions. Are there others? I don't know. How do you think about just kind of personal self-regulation of language?

2 (1h 1m 33s):

I think it's up to each individual comedian to decide what they think they should and could do because comedy is a very powerful tool and you can use it to set things up. So I, for example, would never use the N word ever, but in my last hour special that I did, I had a 20 minute routine, which culminated with me using it in a very specific context, which I, in which I illustrated that just cuz a word is offensive. Doesn't mean it can never be used by person of a different color. And I did it deliberately and it takes 20 minutes. It takes 20 minutes and a lot of Goodwill from people and a lot of jokes and a lot of explanation to get to the point where people will go along with you on that.

2 (1h 2m 13s):

Right? It's not because I was trying to justify people using the N word. I think people who, who, who would use that word in, in everyday life are wrong. And, and frankly, I do think it would be racist to do that. But if you're a comedian on stage as part of a comedy routine, different things are possible. So I think it's up to each individual comedian to draw the line for themselves. I mean, famous George Carlin, one of my great heroes, a a very progressive and left wing guide, by the way, he had a whole routine about how you should be able to use the N word. If you remember now, would he be able to do that now? Probably not. Should he be able to do that now? Well, I think it should be up to him, right? And by the way, this is what people never understand about comedy.

2 (1h 2m 55s):

Comedy is incredibly self-regulating unless you're doing gigs to the annual meeting of the KKK, which I don't believe has standup comedy, that then you are going to be in a position where you're playing to a general mix of the, the general public. And they are going to let you know pretty quickly if you've crossed a line and that's how comedians learn. You might say something that's over the line. You go, oh, they didn't like that. Okay. I need another joke to follow this up or I need to pull back or I need to reword or I need to rephrase, or I need to maybe cut that bit. If, if it's, if I can't get it to work, that is the process of comedy. You go out, you say some stupid shit. Some of it works.

2 (1h 3m 35s):

You go out and you make it slightly less stupid and slightly more funny, try it again and on and on it goes and that's the process of comedy. So the problem we have, and you know, when we spoke to Lionel Schrier, the, the, the brilliant author on trigonometry, she made the point that we don't even know what books aren't being written, what comedy routines aren't being performed, because everyone is fearful of crossing that line now because you cross it once someone puts it out on YouTube and you are, you are done as this racist guy, you know, the famous routine that Chris rock had about black people versus the N-word right? You remember this? Well, he, he talks about how he took a month, I think, to get that to work.

2 (1h 4m 16s):

So he had to go out month after month and die on his ass. As we say, in the British comedy industry, doing that routine, being misunderstood, potentially liable to being misrepresented. But if he was living just through the smartphone, social media age, I don't even know that that routine ever gets made. And what a great loss that would've been to, to, to the, the history of comedy.