Last week John seemed less than enthusiastic about how this went, but I thought it went well and John came across fine. I sensed his exasperation at one point when he was rapid-fire interrupted, but the format is such that there will be some rough edges. I also liked that the comedians quite frequently spoke seriously rather than merely shoehorning their act into the format.
Okay, one of the underlying ideas of this experiment is that comedians say things that would otherwise go unspoken. I thought the two Kareems bit was such a moment. One of the punchlines was that people reacted to Kareem being shot at school with, "Well, somebody needed to shoot Kareem." Two things jumped out at me, and perhaps Glenn and John could discuss them in the future.
1. Does that same attitude apply to the gang shootings? I've often wondered about that. Many, many years ago, there was a town with a "bully" who terrorized the citizens. (For the record, all involved in this incident were white.) Eventually the townspeople confronted the man. He wound up shot to death. No one would say anything, and that was the end of the story. With the gang shootings, there is a lot of collateral damage, but if you put that aside, does the community react to the shootings with, "Somebody needed to shoot Kareem"?
2. Why does "somebody needed to shoot Kareem" turn into "Kareem was the greatest person in the world" when a cop shoots Kareem? (The Grand Rapids shooting a few months back is an apt example of that, and it looks like the current situation in Ohio may be, as well.)
I had a totally different take on the Kareem joke, which, in my mind, fell flat. I heard it as a kind of comedic punching up, where the point was to illustrate that whites are morally weaker. That is to say that white shooters are crazy and indiscriminate, while blacks kill with a specific target for vengeance or honor. However, unless invoked in clear act of self-defense, the implication that the latter killing is somehow morally justifiable relative to any other killing is absurd. Maybe the humor was lost on me, but it didn't appear that Sharrod was kidding. That is, he intended to line the joke with some basic truths as he understands them.
I'm not sure that whites being over-represented in mass murders is necessarily used to highlight their moral weakness relative to Blacks. If empirically speaking whites are in fact over-represented in such murders, I do think there are probably interesting sociological reasons why the kid who shoots up a school and kills dozens of people is disproportionately more likely to be white than Black. So I think it's an interesting phenomenon worth noting and trying to understand. That's also what I assumed Sherrod was referring to when he tried to deflect some of the criticism of Black violence.
That being said, these mass murders are basically just a drop in the ocean and obviously overall per capita homicide rates are still far higher in this country among Blacks than among whites, the difference being perhaps as high as an order of magnitude.
There's definitely something going on, and I'm sure there is research out there. The mass shooting cases vary, but on the spectrum of murder, the perpetrators skew toward legally insane relative to the more common "cold-blooded" killings that occur in context of poverty or gang activity. I mentioned serial killers in my response to your other comment, almost all of whom are white.
In any case, I'm not inclined to give Sharrod Small the credit needed to conclude that he was attempting to bring awareness to an "interesting sociological" phenomenon, but maybe that's just me. I've heard the argument so many times before as a deflection of criticism, and the notion circulates widely in the form of online memes. We clearly both agree that these mass murders, though horrendous, represent a small percentage of all homicides, the majority of which can be attributed to black-on-black violence, and that the latter doesn't get the scrutiny it deserves. That's where I think the morality play comes in: we are meant to understand that somehow when white people kill, it is much worse, or that poor blacks shouldn't be held to same standards of humanity.
Right, that was the point of the main joke. What struck me was the one-liner within the main joke. It stood out because it's something I've mulled over before, and it's not something I've heard discussed. While in the joke the two Kareems were schoolmates, the point easily translates to regular street violence. Maybe "snitches get stitches" isn't the entire story.
I don't want to overanalyze, but I thought it was a good example of the premise Dr. Loury first laid out when he announced these events.
Gotcha. Yeah, I was disappointed not to see it called out by Glenn. I thought immediately of Sowell's *Black Rednecks*.
Overall, the comics exhibited a kind of hip-hop braggadocio ("I dunked on you and fucked your girl", the constant interjections, etc.) that was difficult to engage with seriously and smacked of a mentality in which street violence might be glorified. I guess I just expected Glenn to have selected comedians who were above it. At the very least, given the popularity of this kind of posturing in comedy and music, it was a good demonstration of how easily honor culture and the ideas that go with it are reinforced.
Last week John seemed less than enthusiastic about how this went, but I thought it went well and John came across fine. I sensed his exasperation at one point when he was rapid-fire interrupted, but the format is such that there will be some rough edges. I also liked that the comedians quite frequently spoke seriously rather than merely shoehorning their act into the format.
Okay, one of the underlying ideas of this experiment is that comedians say things that would otherwise go unspoken. I thought the two Kareems bit was such a moment. One of the punchlines was that people reacted to Kareem being shot at school with, "Well, somebody needed to shoot Kareem." Two things jumped out at me, and perhaps Glenn and John could discuss them in the future.
1. Does that same attitude apply to the gang shootings? I've often wondered about that. Many, many years ago, there was a town with a "bully" who terrorized the citizens. (For the record, all involved in this incident were white.) Eventually the townspeople confronted the man. He wound up shot to death. No one would say anything, and that was the end of the story. With the gang shootings, there is a lot of collateral damage, but if you put that aside, does the community react to the shootings with, "Somebody needed to shoot Kareem"?
2. Why does "somebody needed to shoot Kareem" turn into "Kareem was the greatest person in the world" when a cop shoots Kareem? (The Grand Rapids shooting a few months back is an apt example of that, and it looks like the current situation in Ohio may be, as well.)
Where is Jack Reacher when we need him?
I had a totally different take on the Kareem joke, which, in my mind, fell flat. I heard it as a kind of comedic punching up, where the point was to illustrate that whites are morally weaker. That is to say that white shooters are crazy and indiscriminate, while blacks kill with a specific target for vengeance or honor. However, unless invoked in clear act of self-defense, the implication that the latter killing is somehow morally justifiable relative to any other killing is absurd. Maybe the humor was lost on me, but it didn't appear that Sharrod was kidding. That is, he intended to line the joke with some basic truths as he understands them.
I'm not sure that whites being over-represented in mass murders is necessarily used to highlight their moral weakness relative to Blacks. If empirically speaking whites are in fact over-represented in such murders, I do think there are probably interesting sociological reasons why the kid who shoots up a school and kills dozens of people is disproportionately more likely to be white than Black. So I think it's an interesting phenomenon worth noting and trying to understand. That's also what I assumed Sherrod was referring to when he tried to deflect some of the criticism of Black violence.
That being said, these mass murders are basically just a drop in the ocean and obviously overall per capita homicide rates are still far higher in this country among Blacks than among whites, the difference being perhaps as high as an order of magnitude.
There's definitely something going on, and I'm sure there is research out there. The mass shooting cases vary, but on the spectrum of murder, the perpetrators skew toward legally insane relative to the more common "cold-blooded" killings that occur in context of poverty or gang activity. I mentioned serial killers in my response to your other comment, almost all of whom are white.
In any case, I'm not inclined to give Sharrod Small the credit needed to conclude that he was attempting to bring awareness to an "interesting sociological" phenomenon, but maybe that's just me. I've heard the argument so many times before as a deflection of criticism, and the notion circulates widely in the form of online memes. We clearly both agree that these mass murders, though horrendous, represent a small percentage of all homicides, the majority of which can be attributed to black-on-black violence, and that the latter doesn't get the scrutiny it deserves. That's where I think the morality play comes in: we are meant to understand that somehow when white people kill, it is much worse, or that poor blacks shouldn't be held to same standards of humanity.
Right, that was the point of the main joke. What struck me was the one-liner within the main joke. It stood out because it's something I've mulled over before, and it's not something I've heard discussed. While in the joke the two Kareems were schoolmates, the point easily translates to regular street violence. Maybe "snitches get stitches" isn't the entire story.
I don't want to overanalyze, but I thought it was a good example of the premise Dr. Loury first laid out when he announced these events.
Gotcha. Yeah, I was disappointed not to see it called out by Glenn. I thought immediately of Sowell's *Black Rednecks*.
Overall, the comics exhibited a kind of hip-hop braggadocio ("I dunked on you and fucked your girl", the constant interjections, etc.) that was difficult to engage with seriously and smacked of a mentality in which street violence might be glorified. I guess I just expected Glenn to have selected comedians who were above it. At the very least, given the popularity of this kind of posturing in comedy and music, it was a good demonstration of how easily honor culture and the ideas that go with it are reinforced.