<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/10/right-progressive-societies-joke-glastonbury-starve-benefit-rod-liddle-lewis-schaffer>
"Imagine the furore if a
Guardian columnist suggested bombing, say, the
Conservative party conference and the Tory stronghold of Arundel in Sussex. It
would dominate public discussion for weeks. Despite protesting they were “only
joking”, that person would never work in journalism again. Their editor would
certainly be sacked. The police would probably come knocking. But when the
Spectator columnist Rod Liddle speculates about bombing Glastonbury festival
and Brighton, complaints are met with, “Calm down dear, can’t you take a joke?”
The journalist keeps his job, as does his editor, the former justice secretary
Michael Gove. There’s one rule for the left and another for the right.
The same applies to the recent comments on
GB News by its regular guest Lewis
Schaffer. He proposed that, to reduce the number of disabled people claiming
benefits, he would “just starve them. I mean, that’s what people have to do,
that’s what you’ve got to do to people, you just can’t give people money … What
else can you do? Shoot them? I mean, I suggest that, but I think that’s maybe a
bit strong.” The presenter, Patrick Christys replied, “Yeah, it’s just not
allowed these days.”
You could call these jokes, if you think killing people is funny. Or you could
call them thought experiments. Liddle suggested as much in his column: “I am
merely hypothesising, in a slightly wistful kinda way.” This “humour” permits
obscene ideas to seep into the range of the possible.
Academic researchers see the use of jokes to break taboos and reduce the
thresholds of hate speech as a form of “strategic mainstreaming”. Far-right
influencers use humour, irony and memes to inject ideas into public life that
would otherwise be unacceptable. In doing so, they desensitise their audience
and normalise extremism. A study of German Telegram channels found that
far-right content presented seriously achieved limited reach, as did
non-political humour. But when far-right extremism was presented humorously, it
took off.
Humour offers deniability. In his article on 3 July, after floating the
possibility of killing hundreds of thousands of people, Liddle remarked: “I am
not saying that we should do this, of course – it would be a horrible,
psychopathic thing to do.” You can scarcely miss the wink. Such speculations
have anchored misogyny, homophobia and racism for decades: “Lost your sense of
humour, love?” – wink, wink. They distance the writer from the intention, and
provide moral cover for the owners of the platform (the hedge fund
hectomillionaire and evangelical Christian Paul Marshall is both the owner of
the
Spectator and the co-owner of
GB News). Perhaps we could call it wink
murder.
When people become desensitised by ironic calls for violence, the difference
between a humorous position and an ideological conviction can begin to break
down. They are said by some researchers to suffer from “irony poisoning”. If,
for example, people are repeatedly exposed to racial stereotypes in “humorous”
form, they are likely to lose perspective, and start to absorb and affirm them.
The results are anything but amusing."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
