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June 3, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:50
SJW Experiences Fun, Feels Guilty
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It always makes me laugh when social justice warriors play a game and they suddenly think to themselves, wait, if I was doing this in real life, I'd be a horrible person.
And then from that point on, it completely ruins the game for them.
In this case, the game we're talking about is Cards Against Humanity.
Our poor guilt-ridden author gives us a quick overview of how to play Cards Against Humanity if you're not already aware.
One person throws out a fill-in-the-blank prompt card, and the rest of the players have to supply the missing words with cards bearing phrases like pooping back and forth forever and not giving a shit about the third world.
The founders promised that the game is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends, which is interesting because my friends aren't despicable and awkward, which is probably why we find it so funny.
Cards Against Humanity is remarkably popular, being Amazon's number one bestseller in toys and games.
It's also been described that the humour from Cards Against Humanity is calibrated to startle without being outright offensive.
Because remember, offence is never given, it's always taken.
But the thing is, Nick Suttlers from Business Insider doesn't realise that we are dealing with professional offence takers.
Even when we are dealing with random assortments of words being put together by chance, offence can still be taken.
Our author really sells Cards Against Humanity.
The first time I played Cards Against Humanity, I couldn't remember having ever laughed so hard.
It was at a friend's engagement party with 10 people I knew better than just about anyone.
Our faces turning red and streaming with tears as we envisioned Mopi Zooline, a frolicking gassy antelope, and Micropenis' the musical.
The hilarity lived in the shock and each card had us doubled over almost before we could read it.
Well shit, she makes Cards Against Humanity sound awesome.
At least worth one playthrough.
I mean the secret of humour is surprise, so being familiar with the cards is going to make it less funny, but holy shit, the first couple of times you play this, it sounds awesome.
And you'll notice nobody gets hurt doing this.
There's no victim of Cards Against Humanity.
The second time I played, I still laughed a lot, though I started recognising all the cards.
Here we go, you can see what I'm talking about.
The third time, I realised some made me uncomfortable.
Oh, here we go.
The fifth time, what happened the fourth time?
The fifth time I played, I was thankful my friend had bought an expansion pack, because there are only so many times I can calculate the idea of Glenn Beck balls deep in a squealing hog.
That is quite amusing.
I've played it about a dozen times and now I'm starting to make a conscious effort to avoid it.
Well, I'm not surprised.
It's a game based on shock value and after playing it a dozen times you're gonna know all the cards.
The combinations are simply going to be less surprising.
You don't have to become some sort of goddamn emo over it.
The problems with the game are obvious and two-pronged.
What fucking problems?
The only problem is that you become familiar with things.
On the innocuous side, shock value is a large part of the draw and it gets old fast.
Hence all the expansion packs you're encouraged to buy.
Well yes of course you're encouraged to buy them.
Each promising further blows to the easily offended.
Oh god okay gone.
The white cards are designed as punchlines to the black card setups.
What may be a straightforward concept on its own only transforms into something questionable when paired with instead of coal Santa now gives children blank.
Now you can already see how that's going to be funny.
I hate having to explain jokes but one of the most fundamental parts of humour is absurdity.
This folds into the other issue.
The bar for acceptable crudeness is set by college educated white guys.
I don't even think it's about them being white.
I really just think it's about them being guys.
A big dick would have been a funny enough response card, but Cards Against Humanity opts for a big black dick.
And in the expansion pack, a bigger, blacker dick.
The blackness is supposed to be what sends it over the top.
Oh, you miserable.
Look, right, if you paired that with, instead of coal, Santa now gives children a big black dick, that's pretty fucking hilarious, because it's hard to really envisage a time when Santa is going to give kids a big black dick instead of coal.
And a bigger, blacker dick is a fucking in-joke.
Other white cards considered hilarious include Rufy's a sassy black woman and praying the gay way and two midgets shitting into a bucket.
And our author describes these as plausibly denial punchlines of rape culture, anti-blackness, homophobia, and ableism.
Sorry, let's just quickly go through that.
Rufy's rape culture, maybe.
A sassy black woman is not an anti-black nurse.
Unless you think that there is something inherently wrong with being a sassy black woman.
Just like praying the gay way is not homophobic.
And two midgets just mentioning midgets is not ableism, you fucking idiot.
And our author says, but hey, you're the horrible person who played them in the first place.
It's not the game's fault.
Nothing's happened.
I think the game perpetuates a pretty nasty culture.
Hey, look how enlightened I am because I'm beyond race slash religion and I can make nasty jokes about it, says Adrian Sisky, a game designer.
Sorry, Adrian, that's the point.
These jokes are ridiculous.
The people who find this funny are beyond race and religion, and the people who don't find it funny are not.
You are not beyond race or religion.
Primarily race, I'm guessing.
This is classic, though.
It comes across as a game for overly privileged hipsters who believe they are entitled to this lifestyle where everyone worships them to fill in on the joke.
Never a truer word spoken about overly privileged hipsters, Adrian.
But for the rest of us who aren't comfortable judging people on attributes they can't change, we find this quite amusing because we wouldn't judge people on attributes they can't change.
She also introduced me to the phrase Real Wheaton's Law.
Don't be a dick unless it's being a dick in a certain pre-sanctioned by us situations.
Okay, that doesn't make a lot of sense.
Especially when referring to Cards Against Humanity.
Because to be a dick to someone, there has to be someone to whom you are being a dick.
But it really doesn't surprise me that you guys think that there would actually be pre-sanctioned situations where it's okay to be a dick.
And I know what you're thinking.
Hey, but you're a dick all the time.
Yeah, I am.
And when I'm being a dick, I'm in the wrong as well.
The line amount comedy is that no topic should be taboo.
And I agree with that.
No, you don't.
They've written an article telling us how there are certain subjects that you find fucking taboo.
But the more controversial the subject, the more carefully it needs to be handled.
Yes, but not in the way you're thinking.
So our author goes on to say that the game relies on the concept of the equal opportunity offender.
Someone who makes fun of all religions, races, sexes, and anything else.
Yes, that's called not discriminating.
It also relies on a bit of bullying over the idea of being easily offended.
Bullying, really.
It is not for the easily offended.
It is a political correctness-free zone.
And if you're the easily offended type, you shouldn't even look at the cards.
And you wouldn't want to be one of those, would you?
Well, you fucking shouldn't want to be one of those.
For fuck's sake, do you really want to be a humorless killjoy?
A quick look at the illustrations of the Cards Against Humanity team shows a primarily male, primarily white group.
Well, there's your problem.
White males.
How awful.
Isn't it weird, though, how white males are so creative and industrious?
They just keep making stuff.
They keep inventing and creating.
And then you get people who aren't white males coming along and whining about the things that they've made.
It's almost like these people never make anything of their own.
According to David Monk, one of the game's designers, the team is aware of the cultural power they hold and their own privileged viewpoints.
When we find that our game has bullied or marginalised people in a way that we didn't expect, which would be never, we apologise and amend the game.
Don't you think that's a bit of a silly policy to take when you have professional umbrage takers who are going to whittle your game down to nothing?
We do our best to make jokes about people and institutions and positions of cultural power and not to bully people.
Which is a good thing for sure, but spot fixing things only gets you so far.
There is no pleasing these people.
Even when you are completely agreeing with them and doing everything they want, they're not fucking happy.
But that policy differs from what core team member Ben Hantoot said in 2011.
Several times testing the game, people have left the room crying.
What the fuck kind of people left the room crying?
Jesus Christ, when they're like, well, I really was wondering what Santa was going to get me for Christmas.
And then it turns out he's going to get me a big black dick.
But thankfully Ben was okay with that.
That means the game works.
He suggested removing cards if they're upsetting.
Oh, that places the burden on those playing.
You can't have people doing things for themselves.
That's just another form of victim blaming.
But they say this as if anticipating possible outrage is a waste of the Cards Against Humanity cabals time.
It's the sorry if you're offended of card games.
Yes, it is a waste of their time.
Because the people who enjoy it and buy this game aren't the sort of people who generally are going to get offended by this, unless they're retarded hipsters who get offended after the fucking fact.
It's entirely possible in the three years since Hantoot was interviewed, the designers have internalised that fewer people should leave the room crying when playing the game.
It's hardly their fault if a bunch of fucking social justice warrior hipsters have been triggered.
But the plan still seems to be what they can get away with before enough people speak up.
That's right, why don't you just paint the Cards Against Humanity design team as villains and you, the poor, beleaguered players, as the victims of them?
So what makes the cut?
This year's holiday pack titled 10 Days or Whatever of Kwanzaa was a sort of advent calendar where people were mailed daily Cards Against Humanity themed gifts for 10 days.
I admit it gave me pause as Kwanzaa certainly not in the position of cultural power that Christmas occupies.
I love everything about social justice is about power, isn't it?
You perceive someone else as having power and you want that power.
So you are going to use all of these ridiculous rules that you pull out of your fucking asses to try and get people to bend to your will because then they are under your power and you can make demands increasingly more ridiculous and they have to go along with it or they're in the wrong.
It doesn't matter that Cards Against Humanity donated more than $100,000 to fund public schools.
No, fuck no.
That was a box of bullshit.
Because offense.
But what was meant as a commentary on the type of person who would dismiss Kwanza can simply turn into yet another way to dismiss Kwanzaa.
You know what?
I'm going to dismiss anything I fucking want.
I'm going to dismiss anything that I do not feel that I need to pay attention to.
If I choose to be culturally sensitive to something you care about, not that you care about Kwanzaa, but hypothetically if you did, then it would be down to my discretion.
You are not entitled to have me give a fuck about the things that you want me to give a fuck about.
I especially like these tweets.
Oh good, Cards Against Humanity is a whole campaign based on making fun of Kwanzaa.
That goes real nice with your rape and trans misogyny.
Just don't even bother.
Don't even bother listening to these fucks.
This is where it gets really wacky though.
Cards Against Humanity does seem to understand that comedy still requires social responsibility, especially as people speak out about the cards they find disturbing.
In June, Max Temkin said that he had pulled the Passable Transvestites card after Jonah Miller, a transgender player, posted a photo of himself burning it with the caption death to transphobia on his Tumblr.
It sounds like you've just given in to an Islamic terrorist, mate.
If this person lived in the Middle East, he'd be burning a flag and yelling death to America.
Temkin admitted that he regretted the card and called it a mean cheap joke.
It's embarrassing to me that there was a time in my life when that was funny.
Max, what you've just said there applies to every card in Cards Against Humanity.
But there's nothing wrong with that because the important word here is joke.
Meanwhile, our card-burning transgender person faced backlash from around the web.
Many criticized his choice to burn a transphobic card, but continue playing with cards that were arguably racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive, because you can't fucking please these people.
They can't even please each other.
Miller was, of course, contrite and said, I was only looking at the issues which affected me personally, and I was allowing myself to find everything else funny because I wasn't the person to whom it was directed.
Listen, you can find things funny even if they directly affect you.
You can have a sense of humor about yourself, but this is the point really though, about this whole thing.
No social justice warriors are allowed to play Cards Against Humanity.
It is just ethically wrong.
It is entirely transgressive and because they don't have sense of humour, they're not allowed to fucking play it.
Presumably, Cards Against Humanity should be thinking like Miller, anticipating the pain of seeing a card directed at you and empathising with that, passing the cards which provide a light tease and which are actually hurtful, instead of waiting for fans to force their removal, as if they can tell what you are going to find fucking hurtful.
Good god, I just cannot even.
The list of changes to the lineup is extensive, of course it is, and includes many justified deletions, but an equal number of harmless cards fall by the wayside, and for every dwarf tossing we've lost, there's a robust mongoloid or chunks of a dead prostitute that stays or gets added.
Well, I think that it's all just gotta go.
It's just all of this is going to be offensive to someone, somewhere.
I'm going to read this bit verbatim.
I'm not going to comment on it because it's just too perfect.
It describes everything that is the problem here.
Complicating matters further is an accusation of sexual harassment against co-creator Max Temkin.
In a blog post addressing the topic, Tenkin writes like a considerate, understanding person about sexual assault and rape culture.
He said his lawyer told him he'd have a strong libel case, but he won't take legal action because he's not wild about the precedent that sets for other women to come forward in cases of actual sexual assault.
It's hard to tell if he's a legitimate ally or just looking for feminist brownie points.
Most women I know lose the ability to distinguish having been burned so many times.
In the end, he vowed to keep being a feminist and hire women and reminded us that we removed all of the rape jokes from Cards Against Humanity years ago.
We'll continue to use the game as best we can to punch up and not punch down.
Max, are you fucking serious?
You are under the thumb of these people.
They are puppeteering you to alter your game as they see fit.
And you're telling us that criticizing them is not punching up.
Are you fucking serious, man?
They are exercising power over you.
I mean, look at this last sentence.
As of this writing, white cards still included copping a feel and surprise sex.
I think you'd better change it, Max, because I can hear whips cracking in the background.
When I first began to notice issues with the game's humour, I remember purposefully, smugly, not playing the my black ass card.
I figured I wouldn't play it in front of a black person, so there was no reason for me to play it in a room full of white people.
A. Why were you in a room full of white people?
That's very, very racist.
But B, I really don't think black people are going to be all that bothered about a card that says my black ass on it.
I mean, maybe there are going to be some, there are undoubtedly going to be some that are, but I think most well-adjusted black people probably aren't.
But the point really is that you wouldn't play it in front of a black person.
That is insanely condescending.
That is saying that you don't think that person can control their own feelings.
You don't think that person can laugh at themselves.
If I were that black person in the room, I would consider it a fucking insult.
Which is exactly what our author discovers.
Later that summer, a black friend told me how much she loved the game and how she always picked the sassy black woman card as a winner.
I was reminded that I should never make assumptions, that she wouldn't like the card or that any other black person would.
That goes for everything you fucking said.
Everything that you have complained about so far is utterly undermined by this sentence.
You fucking idiots, honestly.
I was also reminded that it's as easy to ignore racism and sexism as it is to overzealously take up a controversy on behalf of people who don't need you to speak for them.
Listen, nobody needs a pre-chief privileged white girl taking up a cause for them.
In an essay about the rise of the not-all men meme, Times Jess Zimmerman wrote that the stages men must go through to overcome sexism.
I should probably look at that at some point.
Her insights can be applied to other forms of discrimination by those in privileged positions.
Once you've acknowledged that these power structures exist, you can learn how you've been socialized to accept them and benefit from them and then take active steps to work against them.
Listen, right?
Not all power structures are illegitimate.
Some are completely legitimate and are there for fucking good reasons.
This person talks as if every single quote power structure is illegitimate.
The Cards Against Humanity team is stalled in the middle of that narrative.
Understanding that there is a cultural hierarchy that disenfranchises people.
Hang on, we'll stop there right now.
Everything is power games with these people.
Everything.
If they aren't the ones calling the shots, they're not happy.
They are after power and they are using guilt to attempt to get it.
They're no different to the Catholic fucking church.
I mean, you don't want to disenfranchise people, do you?
Well, hang on, let's think about that.
I mean, there are plenty of things that disenfranchise me, and I don't complain about that.
I just go elsewhere.
I take my market power elsewhere.
But that's the thing, isn't it?
It's the entitlement.
You think that everywhere should be inclusive of you and your ideology.
You think that there shouldn't be exclusive places that only certain people can go.
And this translates to you thinking that there shouldn't be certain products that should only be marketed to people who, in the case of Cards Against Humanity, don't get butt hurt about everything all the time.
People will apologise once they know they've done something wrong, but many won't try to avoid wronging in the first place by actively seeking diverse viewpoints and hires.
For example, no fuck you.
Fuck it, it's not up to me to worry about what you or someone else might find offensive.
We've accepted the offence as long as the apologies are good enough.
No one can ever apologise well enough for you people.
Dismantling privilege doesn't matter as long as you've checked yours, of course.
And now we get to the future of Cards Against Humanity and the person begins to lie to themselves.
The hardest I ever laughed in a first cards against humanity game was when a friend answered, What ruined the school trip with soup that is too hot?
That's not funny.
There is no absurdity there.
Nobody laughed at that.
You liar.
It's perfectly absurdist first world problem humor evoking images of finicky fourth graders trying to send their bowls back to the teacher asking to speak to the chef.
Bollocks, is it?
That's not fucking funny.
That's really reaching.
Those are the golden moments when the game becomes transcendent.
When a joke can be understood across contexts.
What are you talking?
How is that understood across contexts?
And nobody has to scan friends' faces for potential blowback over the card they're about to play.
Man, if your friends are so fucking sensitive about this sort of shit, why are you playing Cards Against Humanity with them in the fucking first place?
But what this is, is guilt conditioning.
I am not going to feel guilty because someone else took offense to something I have said, especially as a joke.
They are fucking jokes.
They're not real.
They are not serious statements of fact or opinion about a person.
They're fucking jokes.
These people really are the modern day Catholic Church.
They exactly work on guilt and shame.
Everything about what they do emphasizes you being a bad person unless you do as they say.
And that puts you under their power.
Don't start conceding anything to these people.
If you are not racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, then they can't tell you that you are.
So when they do, you can just turn around and say, no, I'm not.
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