>I recognise the fervour in my teenage son, who listens to lots of music, even if I wouldnât call him a music fan: heâs following the new, in technology, in culture, in form and genre, looking at memes on 4chan and Reddit and posting his own. This scares me sometimes, when I read about the way racists use humour and irony to pull in the unwitting, so I asked my son what he thought, and we had a shouting match about how he thinks I think heâs stupid. Is the world any the worse for my son, and millions like him, âshitpostingâ what Iâm told are called âdank memesâ?

We did it reddit, we London Review of Books now.

**matrix07012** · Jul 06, 2019, 07:56

matrix07012 boosted

**orekix** @orekix@aria.company · Jul 06, 2019, 07:56

Jul 06, 2019, 07:56

orekix @orekix@aria.company

"Dirty jokes are ambiguous. On the one hand, of course, I'm well aware they can be racist, sexist, and so on. On the other hand, I hate the term "African-Americans." I prefer black, and they do too. I think African-American as a term is the worst example of apparent political correctness. My best example of this was in Minneapolis, one of the capitals of political correctness [chuckles]. On TV, I saw a debate involving Native Americans, and they referred to themselves as "Indians," and this white, PC liberal said, "No, no, no, don't use that colonialist term. You are Native Americans." And at the end, the poor Indian exploded. He said, "Sorry, I hate that term! Please, give me at least the right to call myself what I want. 'Native American' means that you're making me a part of nature! You are reducing me! What's the opposite of nature? It's culture! You Europeans are culture, then you have horses and us, 'Native Americans' here, with foxes or whatever." So whenever I meet blacks in this kind of situation, I immediately try to break these racist barriers. And what's my measure that we truly broke the barrier? Ok, at one level it's political correctness, but it's absolutely clear that if you play this game, only politically correct terms and ooooh, this fake interest, "ooooh, how interesting, your culture, what a wealth, and blah, blah, blah," it will backfire. Blacks confess to me that they secretly despise this kind of white liberalism. What's the trick? Humor. It's a kind of dialectical double reversal. And this is when they really admit you. That somehow you can return to the worst starting point, racist jokes and so on, but they function no longer as racist, but as a kind of obscene solidarity. To give you an extremely vulgar example, I met a big, black guy, and when we became friends, I went into it like, [assuming a naÃ¯ve, awe-filled whisper] "Is it true that you have, you know [makes gesture signifying a gigantic penis]?" and (this is a racist myth I heard in Europe) "Is it true that you blacks can control your muscles so that when you walk with a half erection and there is a fly here you can BAM! [slaps thigh] snap it with your penis?" We became terribly close friends! Now, I'm well aware of how risky these waters are, because if you do it in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I'm well aware that this is racism.

What bothers me with so-called tolerance is that, if you combine tolerance with opposition to harassment, what do you get? You get tolerance that effectively functions as its opposite. Tolerance means we should tolerate each other, which practically means that we shouldn't harass each other, which means I tolerate you on the condition that you don't get too close to me! [chuckles]. Because, often, the fear beneath harassment is one of proximity. Don't get too close to me, emotionally or physically. We have here, again, the same chocolate-laxative logic, the Other yes, but not too close, deprived of its substance."

https://www.lacan.com/zizekillinois.htm