Making fun of mentally retarded people isn't funny. They are victims of circumstance, and its sad that they'll never be productive, self-supporting individuals.
Making fun of people like Sarah Palin, who believe that they are virtuous because they choose to bring mentally retarded people into this world, is funny. In this case, the comedian attacks a cruel ideology that puts pain and suffering on a pedestal.
Sarah Silverman should have made it more clear who she was making fun of. Her audience was uncomfortable because they thought that she was making fun of retarded people.
Making fun of people like Sarah Palin, who believe that they are virtuous because they choose to bring mentally retarded people into this world, is funny.
Sarah Palin is an idiot, but people who don't kill their own children merely because they have some issues are relatively virtuous.
Thanks for replying. I completely disagree with the premises behind your statement that "people who don't kill their own children merely because they have some issues are relatively virtuous." But I know better than to argue with anti-abortionists.
But I know better than to argue with anti-abortionists.
Shame on you. Without that sentence, your comment would have been cool - instead you patronize me.
I'm an atheist, liberal (mostly), and almost certainly not one of the typical "pro-lifers" you're looking down your nose at. My distaste of laissez-faire abortions does not make me "anti-abortionist."
I believe abortion should be very much a "last choice" that's heavily regulated. In the standard terminology that makes me more "pro life" than "pro choice" - yet if someone makes a long, hard decision to have an abortion, I'm in support of them being able to effect that. It just shouldn't be easy to do.
> I completely disagree with the premises behind your statement that "people who don't kill their own children merely because they have some issues are relatively virtuous."
Fair enough. So, let's find out what issues qualify and how this all works.
Let's start with the obvious - are fetus' special and when? For example, if a pregnant woman doesn't find out about the issues until a week before birth, do you think that it's wrong for her to not abort? How about if she finds out a week after birth? Should the kid be killed?
Now let's talk about issues. How retarded is too retarded to live? Is retarded the only issue? How about blind, deaf, missing a limb or two? What about the mother's circumstances? Suppose she's a crack addict. Or, just incredibly poor. Or retarded? (There's progressive supreme court decision arguing that "three generations of imbiciles is enough" - the case involved forcible sterilization.)
Me - I'm pro-abortion. (Yes, I know that pro-choice folks say that folks like me don't exist. Unlike some of them, I'm just honest.) However, I'd never tell someone that they're obligated to have an abortion.
Have a baby if you feel like having a baby, but there's lots of great reasons to have an abortion; almost 100% of them are none of our fucking business, unless we're involved in the fucking.
That's nice, but the claim was that there was something wrong with not having an abortion in certain circumstances. I'm trying to nail down some of those circumstances.
My guess, no one thinks she was making fun of retarded people and everyone knows she was making fun of Sarah Palin and her campaign to neuter the english language.
In a poll taken earlier this month, 55 percent of the people surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Palin, and 71 percent said she was not qualified to be President. I don't know why the media still treats her every tweet as newsworthy, because as a national political figure, she's a joke.
And I'm not sure she wants to become President. She can continue to have a lucrative career on the lecture/pundit circuit, playing to that sliver of the population that does consider her to speak for Real True American Common-Sense Values. Why ruin such a good thing by seeking votes from more moderate voters or, heck, actually trying to run a country?
The disturbing thing is that some 30% of the electorate think she's so great she should run the country, 45% think she's pretty swell and some similar number didn't think she wasn't an automatic disqualification for the McCain campaign. More amazing is that these numbers are the numbers after the election, when she was revealed to be a dimwitted, incurious, manipulative, unethical and generally dishonest person of the highest caliber.
She's had the traditional upward trajectory of a shooting-star politician: local council, mayor, governor, and VP candidate (notice mostly executive positions, not legislative). At each stage she could have backed out and gone to the simple life of fishing and hunting while her husband ran snowmobile races or whatever in between trying to get Alaska to succeed from the Union. But she didn't, she kept stepping up and up and up, demonstrating a near limitless ambition. This is not the kind of thing one can indefinitely keep at bay with a few speaking gigs and some TV time on Fox.
She's not an ideals person (she can't even get through an interview without reading notes off of her hand), or somebody of a unifying or consistent internal vision, what she has is limitless ambition.
Considering that most people had never even heard of her before the election, and she still has this kind of following afterwards (despite these obvious shortcomings) would make me want to get her out on speaking engagements and doing favorable TV spots as much as possible for the next couple of years.
Mark my words, she will be a candidate for President in the next election cycle starting in a year or two.
Observe how her unfavorable ratings have been going almost monotonically upward since the election. The more people hear about Palin, the less they like her.
I hate to write a political comment, but looks like a slow day on HN.
Palin is like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, or Pat Robertson. She is famous and popular among a measurable slice of voters, so she speaks to/for those voters.
I strongly doubt she has a future as a presidential candidate. But as a political figure and news magnet? She's probably just getting started.
One of the interesting things about Palin is that the more she is trashed, the more she is loved by her supporters. So there's a feedback loop going on there. If you really don't like her the best thing to do is simply to stop talking about her.
Palin is not campaigning against the word. Rather, Rahm Emmanuel, the White House Chief of Staff (who, in general, has a reputation for cursing like a sailor), described certain political opponents as “retarded”, and Palin, whose son has Down’s Syndrome, criticized him for it. If you think Palin was purely motivated by compassion for the developmentally disabled and not at all by the fact that the person she lambasted hails from an opposing political party, then I have a bridge to sell you.
I think that she was making fun of both people like Sarah Palin and retarded people. See this quote: "The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded"
That's the set-up. The joke is that to fix this "problem", she is only going to adopt a "special needs" child who is also expected to die soon, thus negating the "problem" (that the child will still have "special needs" when you are 80), while being in our paradoxical cultural calculations even more praiseworthy than adopting a "special needs" child who is going to continue to be just as needy for much longer.
It can't really be parsed as mockery of "retarded people" unless you believe she was being earnest and sincere in her calculation and really believed what she was saying. She wasn't. She is a comedian.
How is that making fun of anyone? It's true, and people who actually take care of retarded children and adults have to come to terms with it. Who's going to take care of them when you can't anymore?
The shock comes from finding selfishness in something that isn't selfish at all. How many people would volunteer to take care of retarded children they don't know for even a day?
Comments
Making fun of mentally retarded people isn't funny. They are victims of circumstance, and its sad that they'll never be productive, self-supporting individuals.
Making fun of people like Sarah Palin, who believe that they are virtuous because they choose to bring mentally retarded people into this world, is funny. In this case, the comedian attacks a cruel ideology that puts pain and suffering on a pedestal.
Sarah Silverman should have made it more clear who she was making fun of. Her audience was uncomfortable because they thought that she was making fun of retarded people.
To anyone who down-voted, I'm curious to know why. There have been at least 5 down-votes, but no replies.
Because this reads like a pro-choice joke:
Making fun of people like Sarah Palin, who believe that they are virtuous because they choose to bring mentally retarded people into this world, is funny.
Sarah Palin is an idiot, but people who don't kill their own children merely because they have some issues are relatively virtuous.
Well you asked..
Thanks for replying. I completely disagree with the premises behind your statement that "people who don't kill their own children merely because they have some issues are relatively virtuous." But I know better than to argue with anti-abortionists.
But I know better than to argue with anti-abortionists.
Shame on you. Without that sentence, your comment would have been cool - instead you patronize me.
I'm an atheist, liberal (mostly), and almost certainly not one of the typical "pro-lifers" you're looking down your nose at. My distaste of laissez-faire abortions does not make me "anti-abortionist."
I believe abortion should be very much a "last choice" that's heavily regulated. In the standard terminology that makes me more "pro life" than "pro choice" - yet if someone makes a long, hard decision to have an abortion, I'm in support of them being able to effect that. It just shouldn't be easy to do.
I'm sorry I offended you. I should have said that I don't want to get into an argument with an anti-abortionist about abortion.
> I completely disagree with the premises behind your statement that "people who don't kill their own children merely because they have some issues are relatively virtuous."
Fair enough. So, let's find out what issues qualify and how this all works.
Let's start with the obvious - are fetus' special and when? For example, if a pregnant woman doesn't find out about the issues until a week before birth, do you think that it's wrong for her to not abort? How about if she finds out a week after birth? Should the kid be killed?
Now let's talk about issues. How retarded is too retarded to live? Is retarded the only issue? How about blind, deaf, missing a limb or two? What about the mother's circumstances? Suppose she's a crack addict. Or, just incredibly poor. Or retarded? (There's progressive supreme court decision arguing that "three generations of imbiciles is enough" - the case involved forcible sterilization.)
Me - I'm pro-abortion. (Yes, I know that pro-choice folks say that folks like me don't exist. Unlike some of them, I'm just honest.) However, I'd never tell someone that they're obligated to have an abortion.
Have a baby if you feel like having a baby, but there's lots of great reasons to have an abortion; almost 100% of them are none of our fucking business, unless we're involved in the fucking.
That's nice, but the claim was that there was something wrong with not having an abortion in certain circumstances. I'm trying to nail down some of those circumstances.
I don't see that claim anywhere. I only see the claim that not having an abortion in certain circumstances is not more virtuous than having one.
My guess, no one thinks she was making fun of retarded people and everyone knows she was making fun of Sarah Palin and her campaign to neuter the english language.
I'm not from North America and as such wasn't aware of Sarah Palin's campaign against the word "retard."
In fact, we happen to find Sarah Palin a bit of a comedian herself... And don't take her seriously.
Yes, she's a joke.
But you won't be laughing when/if someday she ends up President with the nuke codes on her desk.
In a poll taken earlier this month, 55 percent of the people surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Palin, and 71 percent said she was not qualified to be President. I don't know why the media still treats her every tweet as newsworthy, because as a national political figure, she's a joke.
And I'm not sure she wants to become President. She can continue to have a lucrative career on the lecture/pundit circuit, playing to that sliver of the population that does consider her to speak for Real True American Common-Sense Values. Why ruin such a good thing by seeking votes from more moderate voters or, heck, actually trying to run a country?
Turn those statistics around,
The disturbing thing is that some 30% of the electorate think she's so great she should run the country, 45% think she's pretty swell and some similar number didn't think she wasn't an automatic disqualification for the McCain campaign. More amazing is that these numbers are the numbers after the election, when she was revealed to be a dimwitted, incurious, manipulative, unethical and generally dishonest person of the highest caliber.
She's had the traditional upward trajectory of a shooting-star politician: local council, mayor, governor, and VP candidate (notice mostly executive positions, not legislative). At each stage she could have backed out and gone to the simple life of fishing and hunting while her husband ran snowmobile races or whatever in between trying to get Alaska to succeed from the Union. But she didn't, she kept stepping up and up and up, demonstrating a near limitless ambition. This is not the kind of thing one can indefinitely keep at bay with a few speaking gigs and some TV time on Fox.
She's not an ideals person (she can't even get through an interview without reading notes off of her hand), or somebody of a unifying or consistent internal vision, what she has is limitless ambition.
Considering that most people had never even heard of her before the election, and she still has this kind of following afterwards (despite these obvious shortcomings) would make me want to get her out on speaking engagements and doing favorable TV spots as much as possible for the next couple of years.
Mark my words, she will be a candidate for President in the next election cycle starting in a year or two.
Sorry, I forgot to post the link to the poll numbers themselves:
http://www.pollingreport.com/p.htm#Palin
Observe how her unfavorable ratings have been going almost monotonically upward since the election. The more people hear about Palin, the less they like her.
Thank you. You've singlehandedly renewed my faith in humanity.
I hate to write a political comment, but looks like a slow day on HN.
Palin is like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, or Pat Robertson. She is famous and popular among a measurable slice of voters, so she speaks to/for those voters.
I strongly doubt she has a future as a presidential candidate. But as a political figure and news magnet? She's probably just getting started.
One of the interesting things about Palin is that the more she is trashed, the more she is loved by her supporters. So there's a feedback loop going on there. If you really don't like her the best thing to do is simply to stop talking about her.
My grandmother absolutely loves her and I fear if I discuss Palin with her, she'll just like her even more!
Palin is not campaigning against the word. Rather, Rahm Emmanuel, the White House Chief of Staff (who, in general, has a reputation for cursing like a sailor), described certain political opponents as “retarded”, and Palin, whose son has Down’s Syndrome, criticized him for it. If you think Palin was purely motivated by compassion for the developmentally disabled and not at all by the fact that the person she lambasted hails from an opposing political party, then I have a bridge to sell you.
I think that she was making fun of both people like Sarah Palin and retarded people. See this quote: "The only problem with adopting a retarded child is that the retarded child, when you are 80 is well, still retarded"
That's the set-up. The joke is that to fix this "problem", she is only going to adopt a "special needs" child who is also expected to die soon, thus negating the "problem" (that the child will still have "special needs" when you are 80), while being in our paradoxical cultural calculations even more praiseworthy than adopting a "special needs" child who is going to continue to be just as needy for much longer.
It can't really be parsed as mockery of "retarded people" unless you believe she was being earnest and sincere in her calculation and really believed what she was saying. She wasn't. She is a comedian.
How is that making fun of anyone? It's true, and people who actually take care of retarded children and adults have to come to terms with it. Who's going to take care of them when you can't anymore?
The shock comes from finding selfishness in something that isn't selfish at all. How many people would volunteer to take care of retarded children they don't know for even a day?
It's making fun of them because she's doing it in the context of a comedian on a stage telling jokes.