Discussion > Stewart Lee on killing climate deniers
The BBC won't be laughing so loud if non-payment of the TV licence fee becomes decriminalised, as is being considered by ministers. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26492684
Mr Lee will then be able to make jokes about schadenfreude denial.
michael hart
No Richard, it is not hate speech. It is a figure of speech that you hate, mainly because it is effective at pigeon-holing you and your friends in a way that lets the public know broadly where you stand on the issue. It is arguably inaccurate, climate science denial being better. The public at large don't care whether it is called denial or scepticism or anything else and they make no connection with Holocaust denial until you tell them to.
Why do you start so many threads? Nobody likes you here but you seem determined to try to out-sceptic the sceptics, trying to prove how devoted to the cause you are.
Chandra
Pity the trolls, and be thankful you are not trapped in the fantasy world of their psychosis.
- It can't be nice for them to feel such hate and bile.
Lee's item is hatespeech against a racial minority maybe ? As it demeans people who don't have green-skin.
stewgreen
stewgreen
Thanks very much stewg. I think I did take a look at that very interesting piece by Ben Pile in October. I'd like to grasp Lee better though. His riff on his right as a Londoner to be served the cheapest possible tea or coffee by a massively-overqualified Bulgarian professor of Philosophy I found very amusing. But I was genuinely shocked and chilled by the ending. He and some acolytes would really like to do what the sea monster does - decapitate the smug and stupid UKIP person. As they imagine him to be - and the similarity of the video caricature to the one in the New York Times cartoon only increased the sense of menace. We shouldn't see everything in terms of the 10.10.10 No Pressure disaster movie, not least because Curtis is so different in style than Lee. But this latest batch of hate humour is retchingly similar.
Richard Drake
standard empathy test is to imagine the role reversal
- would the BBC allow a prog to be aired where greens , and warmists are decapitated ?
(EM's view is I am bad, cos apparently I ask rhetorical questions)
stewgreen
I have a soft spot for Stewart Lee, because I spent a day with him recording a BBC a few years ago. Like many metropolitan arties, I suspect he just goes with whatever the trendy-crowd says is so. He does also specialise in mock shock stuff, he doesn't mean any of it, just there for comic effect if you like that sort of thing.
TheBigYinJames
Hmm..This is a tricky one for sure.
Humour is a much barbed thing. Very much a matter of taste I would guess with each taking that which panders to their own prejudice possibly.
As an aside, one of the funniest jokes I have ever heard was from Bernard Manning (and no, I don't generally like his stuff) which he recounted in an interview. The joke was delivered in a Jewish club and if I was to be asked for advice beforehand I would most certainly have counseled against it but Mannings point was that it was simply a joke whilst very clearly and without artifice acknowledging that his personal view was very much in opposition to the nature of what he was joking about.
Was bloody funny though.
I dunno.
By the way, I also would not categorise being called a "denier" as hate speech per-se. It is, in my view, clearly intended to evoke the concept of "Holocaust Denial" in the mind of the recipient but then virtually ANY use of language is intended to evoke some thought or other. This is also in the area of neurolinguistics and can be a potent tool (to use or misuse).
With respect to "offence" I have formed the view that it is actually impossible to give offence in any area.
Offence can only be TAKEN.
In my view.
But what do I know?....
A
jones
I watched a bit more Stewart Lee since putting up this thread. There always seems to be a surreal ending of some sort. I still find some aspects of his humour amusing and insightful - I generally enjoy the segments where he talks through the set with a critic, typically giving a damning verdict on what he's been doing. There's some honesty about modern standup and culture there. But the killing of the UKIP buffoon by the sea monster at the end of episode 2 (available on iPlayer for another eleven days, for those in the UK) still disturbs me. Everything is context dependent but we have enough latent violence in the climate debate already, not least in 'denier', without this. Other off-key jokes in very different contexts don't seem particularly relevant.
Richard Drake
Absolute Stewart Lee fan here. Can't see the BBC 2 stuff due to iplayer limitation.
shub
I have watched Stewart Lee quite a few times. Though he can have his moments, and there definitely is a talent there, he does fall into the modern idea of humour, which is generally just a bilious hate-fest, with its generous use of four-letter swear-words (I mean, how can you be “cool” if you don’t say “f**k” a lot?), against the selected target for the time (UKIP and “deniers” being in season, at the mo).
There does seem to be a growing call for criminalisation (dreadful word) of sceptics, which does fit in nicely with the idea of AGWism becoming a religious cult. How it develops has yet to be seen, but I do hope that basic human decency will prevail, and “deniers” do not have to wear armbands, or get sent to “rehabilitation” camps, as has happened at other times in history. Mind you, if that does happen, it will probably come as a bit of a shock to many people, when they find that the definition of “denier” means anyone who has never expressed anything but full agreement with the entire CAGW cult, and those who have just got on with their lives find they are up against the wall with the more vociferous sceptics. Of course, that could also be part of the plan – after all, how can you indulge in proper depopulation of the globe without having a suitably large class of “vermin” to eradicate?
Interesting to note in the NYT cartoon that the “denier” is a fat-cat businessman, complete with cigar, suit and slick hair. While I have not knowingly met any of you, I have seen BH on TV, as well as Profs. Bob Carter and Lindzen; none seem to be of that mould. I look at my siblings; neither are they. I look in a mirror, and neither am I. Where does this idea come from to sit in the minds of the AGWistas? Particularly as it is the likes of Cam-moron, Milipede and Clogg, as well as Kerry and Gore, all in their slick suits, polished fingernails and coiffured hair (no cigar, of course.. oh, no, no…), that are doing a lot of the shouting about impending catastrophe.
By the way, AJ, I am in full agreement, there, and have stated it on other occasions – offence cannot be given, it can only be taken. That is why I say that it is not possible to offend an Englishman (ignore the gender; “Englishperson” sounds too, too PC for me).
Radical Rodent
But I'm welsh going back to the ice-age......father couldn't even speak English until he was a teenager....
I am one of five sibling three of whom have Welsh as a first language....
You have just soooooo offended me Rodent.....
Don't suppose you have a couple of million to have sued off you via the offences industry?....No?.....Ah bugger it then....
;-)
A
jones
In fact I am so sensitive a soul that I am offended that the righteous are trying to deny me my right to be offended......
Who do I sue?...................
jones
That is why I said English, AJ; there is only one way (and it is a sure-fire way!) to offend the Welsh, the Scots or the Irish, and you have proved it – call them English!
Radical Rodent
Nobody likes you here ....
Mar 9, 2014 at 1:41 PM | Unregistered CommenterChandra
Chandra, what you said there is untrue.
Richard's Mum
Making this about offence is misdirection. I never said I was offended by Lee's ending on 9th March. I also note that some anonymous joker at 9:25 AM wishes to put me in the same category as Phil Jones. I'm not offended by that either but I assert my right to note it. Some people were I think displeased last night, not by the amount I wrote, but by the content. Their plan is to keep the 'growing call for criminalisation' going, as Radical Rodent puts it, without prompting a really united response from the victims, who they wish to think are too pathetic for that. I've think they've chosen the wrong group.
Richard Drake
You can all relax. No climate deniers will be killed, unless they want to do something silly like standing in the path of a storm surge they don't believe in.
In these enlightened times those with a tenuous grip on reality are given care in the community. :-)
Entropic man
When my son was at university he used to wind up one of his Scottish friends by referring to Scotlandshire.
Messenger
I like Richard..
I just disagree sometimes.
Barry Woods
"Richard's Mum" was just replying to Chandra, who is rapidly developing the more extremely rabid behaviours of a troll. I suspect there is the desire just to be noticed on here, hence the more vituperative comments, all without a shred of evidence to back them.
I agree with perhaps everyone else – and disagreement is NOT a sign on not liking (it wasn't so, even in the school playgrounds of my youth. Have times changed? Or is Chandra losing all touch with reality?).
Radical Rodent
Talking of Richard's Mum I spoke to her at the end of Mother's Day and she expressed her appreciation for something I'd said recently by email: that the details of her revised will seemed small beer compared to bringing me into the world. Apparently a few people in the church have been told about that. Her short-term memory isn't what it used to be though. This can have its uses. The last time I visited the West Country, in the car on the way to my sister's, she asked me a rather pointed and frankly annoying question, as mothers can. I did my best to answer honestly, without losing my cool. Her reply: "I'm afraid I forget what I asked!"
The real Richard's Mum defies easy categorisation but I accept the key point that, despite all, she seems to like me.
Richard Drake
Could explain some things?
Martin A
Compulsions included checking and rechecking pet water bowls, light switches, taps, stoves, skirting boards, pipes, roofs and wooden structures. While these behaviours are not particularly unusual for people with this condition, it was the rationale they provided for carrying them out that was surprising. Instead of checking and rechecking so as to prevent fire or flood, the rituals were specifically performed so as to reduce their global footprint, or respond to climate change-induced negative events.
Wow. I think that's one for Jiminy's thread on the cult-like qualities of CAGW. It's always the weakest, whether in possessions or in mental faculties, that are most badly affected by such cynical deceptions.
Richard Drake
When a Scotsman* moves to England the average intelligence of both nations rises.
* substitute any nationality you like in this sentence.
sandyS
A bit like the recent cartoon where an icicle was thought to be a fun thing to be put through the heart of a climate change denier I know this is only a bit of harmless comedy. Stewart Lee on BBC Two tonight was mainly a lengthy diatribe making fun of UKIP's Paul Nuttall and his comments about Bulgarian immigrants at the end of last year (with which I personally also didn't agree and which have so far turned out to be wrong as far as massive numbers are concerned).
Lee can be genuinely funny and that is true for me in some of the segment leading up to 20m30s where he says it isn't fair to make fun of Nuttall and goes on to list 'homophobia and climate change denial' as part of what UKIP stands for. Cut to the surreal ending at 26m and you see the man from UKIP trying to fight against evolution in 400 million BC then meeting a sticky end when he returns in his time machine to 2014 AD.
But point one: the phrase 'climate change denial' is hate speech. Point two: the Nazis were also very good in using surrealism against their enemies and they went on to murder them for real. Clean it up, please, BBC and Mr Lee.