Basically I think it's really hard to sign up for any form of cultural intervention that's based on mockery AND deceit. Mockery alone is one thing; I can see the value there. Mixed with lies and I think we're in place that's almost impossible to defend.

I mean this is effectively the huge sin laid at the feet of Fox News and right-wing media, wherein we sort of acknowledge America is full of racially anxious people and that through 30 years of self-serving lies and deceit for fun and profit, we've turned every day sorta racist people and brewed up millions of blood thirsty savages. Otherwise what are we really saying right-wing media is guilty of? I think it's basically something along the lines of "lies and deceit to push bad people into REALLY deplorable territory, to keep them glued to the TV and voting Republican."

What if Rupert Murdoch came out tomorrow and did a huge face turn and was like, see, see, I did this all to show you how deplorable you are, to show how rotted and garbage Americans are, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are character actors and one big long-form troll to demonstrate how racist I can turn America, hip hip hooray, I'll take my back-pats and Profile in Courage award now.

Would you guys be like "oops yeah you got us, good show, doing what the New York Times didn't!"

No, I think we'd all rightfully be ****ing aghast at what that caused: "interceding to make people better through lying to them to expose their worst impulses" is really hard to justify on any sort of scale, in almost any context. Just worth pointing out SBC is threading a REALLY TIGHT needle here. Mock the rubes with lies, but you know, only a tiny little bit -- seems to be the idea here. I don't think it's an idea worth defending.

Not even close to the same thing. Instead of pretend black crime and islamic terrorism the lie was building a mosque. Maybe a halal restaurant. That‘s what created the outrage.

OK? If the lies are qualitatively muted, then it's fine?

I get it! You can send these racist idiots into space on their lawnmowers with subtly rather than bombast. And? That speaks to the town hall audience's REALLY degraded mindset, sure, but by the same token, it's even more insidious. Now we're saying that to REALLY embarrass these suckers, gotta make your **** believable? Like totally audacious fantasies, OK, fine, you agree THAT'S a problem, so we've gotta really temper our deceits to make the point?

AT SOME POINT I think you guys need to dispense with the debate of the quality of the lie, and engage seriously with the idea whether "deceiving people to manipulate them into some end" is a tactic you want to embrace. Even if the end is valid!

I thought it was staged in the case of the politicians. I figured that they would know that doing something like this would not help their public image. No way did I think that the town meeting was staged.

I think it's important that SBC does this. Too many people think that racists only make up a minority percentage of the people who voted in Trump and the rest voted for him due to the corruption in Washington or economic stagnation. The media rarely outright calls deplorables racists even though that's what they are. In my interaction with Trump supporters in America, I have not run into a single supporter who supported Trump exclusively due to removing political corruption and economic stagnation. Even within the economic realm, racism played a significant role in their opinions about the economy. Whether it was Mexicans taking our jobs or minorities being welfare cheats, there was always a racist element to their support for Trump. They might not lynch people themselves or wear a white hood but they turn a blind eye to it.

I'm shocked to learn that you guys REALLY think to uncover the secret racist, deplorable hearts of Trump supporters, they need to be lied to and manipulated.

Have you guys ever even TALKED to these people? Checked out their Facebook feeds, their comments on YouTube videos, received a chain email from them?

Part of the risk of embracing gonzo journalism that relies on deceit is that it's totally unnecessary.

tldr;, but SBC is a comedian and not the Chair of the DCCC, a political candidate, a serious news pundit or in any way responsible for librul political strategy or messaging. Are we debating whether it's ok to laugh or whether we should boycott Showtime?

I'm gonna leave you guys to it because I'm getting repetitive, but if "lying to the rubes to get them react in a way that ultimately achieves an outcome I want" opens up a huuuuuuge world of bad faith politics. *Forget if these people are ****ty and deserve it*, it's sort of not the point. The world is full of sinners, we'll always find a way to justify why people deserve to be **** all over. In this case maybe they do deserve it but as I said, deceit that builds the collective anxieties of bad people doesn't seem like it does a genuine service.

For the powerful, the lobbyists, the elected -- OK fine, lie your face off to get them to let their freak flags fly and embarrass themselves. I think that really is in service of the leftist tradition and can be in the realm of good politics.

But embarrassing the hoi polloi via lies, even the racist troglodyte ones -- that's a slippery slope, ESPECIALLY because we're not really lacking ways to be righteously outraged about the truth, the empirical world, and their reaction to it.

I don't disagree with this. Seems to me like you're handwringing a bit over what's essentially a one-time stunt at the expense of a roomfull of deplorables. I sort of doubt it would even be funny if SBC did the same thing as a recurring gag. I don't see this as a slippery slope to SBC igniting pogroms across the US.

I wouldn't go that far. It's very funny lowbrow political humor that is at best a bit eye-opening. It's sort of like when Jay Leno does man-on-the-street interviews with morons and we all have a good laugh. I don't know that this is really something that rises to the level of great political satire.


As a frequent cp browser I like to think I'm pretty savvy, but even in 2018 I was very surprised at just how far SBC can persuade people to leap off the edge of insanity. Maybe I just live in a liberal bubble, mea culpa. But I think you're underselling how legitimately shocking this is to most people. I mean, it wouldn't be funny if it wasn't so surprising.

Neither, really. You might laugh at midget porn or a crude joke, but it doesn't mean it's a social good to produce it.

I think we're debating the merits of SBC and whether it's OK for political humor to punch down. Generally, not, I'd say; particularly troubling are the ramifications that whatever social good we think we're producing here ("eye opening!") is based on deceit. It should already be baked in that we know 1) in Trump's America, metric tons of people are super racist and that 2) if you lie to them and trigger their racial grievances, they will trip over themselves as they sputter with rage and fume and work themselves into hysterics.

Not healthy to wallow in #2 for long. Maybe it's OK to laugh but then we should reflect whether it's a good thing to do or produce more of it; I'd say not.

For informed people, that might be the case. That town hall was pretty similar to those Trump focus groups that were once all the rage in liberal media outlets (Oooohh...look how racist they are. Isn't it shocking?) For us, I get it. We know that all Trump supporters are varying degrees of racist. For people who tune out or are substantially misinformed, it does provide some benefit that the racists within Trump's base is not a minority group and that their grossness is shared with all. Even if the racist feelings are provoked disingenuously, the feelings are still real.

FWIW, I get that punching down usually isn't funny. I don't laugh at midget tossing. I watched with interest though didn't laugh at the SBC town hall sketch. I also don't spend a lot of time doing stuff on the forum like making fun of Ins0. I'd rather talk **** about ecriture (unfortunate compliment given here). But, w/e, SBC is funny sometimes and I'm not super concerned about whether the audience singing Throw the Jew Down the Well was treated respectfully or not. Perhaps it's not good strategy in some way, but I don't expect SBC to be held to that standard or presume really to even venture an opinion on what he should or should not produce. It's a free country. Dennis Miller is also free to make that joke about Michelle Wolf as soon as he comes up with it.

Sure, it's ~harmless because it's limited. But I think we need to recognize that the social utility of SBC-style gonzo journalism is pretty limited when the targets aren't the powerful. If people found it shocking and alarming, then I can't really debate that impression. And recognizing a harsh reality is a good thing. It's important not to sugar coat America's deplorables, the depths of their mindset or how many of them there are. I'd only note there are other ways we could do this same things without relying on deceit. Say by recognizing a senile old racist is the leader of our country or that cops shoot lots of unarmed black people or that immigrant babies are separated from their parents for seeking asylum and that all of this is tolerated, if not part of a broad political consensus.

That might even be healthier and better since it confronts the empirical reality rather than the artifice created in a comedy show.

I also agree Sacha Baron Cohen is extremely funny sometimes and I'm absolutely defensive of the good he does clowning on Sarah Palin, NRA spokesclowns and GOP politicians. But "eh don't think too hard about SBC, it's a free country" seems like a moral abdication. Sure, we always have the option to shut our brains off and rely on statutory First Amendment protections.

Still don't think our politics, our comedy, our political comedy should punch down. If you flip that town hall around and populated it with GOP operatives or powerful politicians, now we're talking. It's not hugely qualitatively different because I sincerely think tons of modern GOP politicos are sociopaths, but embarrassing the powerful is better at least. Because it looks like it's a room full of unhinged racist morons without any particular social status, selected and then lied to precisely because the producers know they'll just fly off into a rage. That's not...a healthy thing to do, normally.

DVaut, in all of your alternate hypothetical scenarios you're missing the element where the deplorables are exposed and shamed. The danger in Fox News for example is that there is no point where the viewer is made to feel as if their beliefs are wrong or where they face negative consequences. That makes them entirely different scenarios.

I literally lol'd. I mean literally as in literally I actually did literally laugh out loud in real life.

DVaut1,

Dunno. Bisonbison, a poster I think most of us old timers know, had a thing, I'm sure not original, where he would not say something unless it was true, kind and helpful. That's pretty nice. SBC definitely doesn't live up to that standard.

Forget about SBC for a moment. Closer to home we have people like Ins0 here who are treated like ****. We surely must have more moral responsibility there than with whatever SBC is doing?

I don't know if the standard is "be nice to everyone like Ins0" but that it's a questionable ethical thing to round up normal people, screen-in the really unhinged ones and lie to them for a while until they start yelling and embarrassing themselves.

I think that's pretty different from "be nice to buffoons who show up on an internet message board to argue about politics."

Maybe our ethical calculations change if we discover SBC and his production team got a bunch of volunteers by saying like "who wants to be really racist on TV?" and all those people raised their hands, then we might have to reassess. But we should grapple with what I think is the inherent deceit involved here.

I agree 100% that SBC is an extremely poor substitute for a functioning press. On the other hand, this is America, as Childish Gambino says.

Morally the issue seems to me whether you are being kind or an ahole. I think that gets at whether punching up or down is ok and that applies to Ins0 as much as these people (and of course now I'm actually being a huge ahole to Ins0).

You're right that inviting people to a fake thing is an offense in and of itself. Those people were inconvenienced as well as made fun of and it's entrapment (?). I guess I accept your point for what it is, a minor critique, but I don't think it's a revelation that SBC is a bit of a punk.

And there's some value there. I don't know if people can be so blind anymore, but in the pre-Trump era I have had people in this forum tell me there's basically no antisemitism in the US to speak of.

My opinion is based on clips I haven’t seen the show, but I agree with a lot of what Dvaut said. I’ve seen borat and the dictator though.

I’m still shocked this was real .

I've read (can't find a source now) that SBC sung multiple versions of "Throw x down the well" over the course of the night so that the people in the bar thought it was a running gag. He then just broadcast the bit about throwing Jews down the well. I don't know if this is true or not but it wouldn't really surprise me.

He could do "throw the x down the well" a thousand times and not trick me into a rousing refrain of Jew, Black, Mexican, etc.

For me it's hit & miss & not as funny or good as his earlier work like Borat