Some may remember how Tim Hunt was vilified and had his reputation destroyed by idiots who don't understand what jokes are earlier this year. Well, now another person resigned their post in protest over this. The Guardian The statement in full.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33077107 At the link you'll find an interview in which Hunt claims he was joking, but not really, and then goes on to reiterate and defend the "insights" that got him in trouble in the first place. And now @BeamMe will lecture us on the plight of the poor oppressed male until he gets bored and wanders off again.
Where did the idea come from that you can retroactively erase the offensiveness of a remark by claiming it was a joke? Guess what, some jokes are offensive. If you're going to "work blue," as the comedians used to say, know your audience and whatever you do never apologize.
Yeah, he got screwed by a "reporter" who just made things up. Everyone else there, especially the women, said he was hilarious. What we got was a hit piece by a Social Justice Warrior who had absolutely no concern for the truth and who was willing to lie to destroy the career of a Nobel Prize winner just to hang a scalp on her wall. It's like going to a Steven Hawking talk and reporting that he let loose with a stream of vile statements like "All homosexuals must be hunted down and killed to eliminate their genetic defects from the human population" when he really said "Gender orientation doesn't matter in science because only the data speaks and gays have much prettier offices."
Not a dilemma, two seperate questions. I'm really more interested in the idea that claiming a remark was a joke cleanses it of any potential offensiveness. Any thoughts there?
It was a joke, from the get-go. Individual tastes decide whether something is "offensive" or not, and frankly that isn't enough to justify the way this person was railroaded by what was really a libelous hit piece written up by someone with delicate sensibilities.
His jokes were not only less offensive than pretty much anything Eddie Murphy said during his stand-ups, they were so inoffensive that Bernie Sanders could use them in front a Planned Parenthood conference. The outrage started because a Social Justice Warrior rewrote them, rewrote the audience reaction, and feigned outrage so other SJW's would attack and destroy someone they'd been told was a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe Neanderthal who thinks women belong in the kitchen.
My, my. You seem to have more trouble to understand the English language than I do. He did fall in love with his wife in the lab they both were working in. But that in no way would have any effect on his and his wife's work there, wouldn't it? Thank god, the audience understood his joke(s) as what they are: exaggerated anecdotes from his own life - jokes, you know. In the west men aren't oppressed. Neither are women in the west oppressed or marginalized. And, yes, arguing against the tumblr-ist SJW attitude does get grating and boring after a while.
He was joking, and in order to do so, he was being ironic. Jokes and even irony do not "cleanse" all offense, but when the offensive statement is in fact ironic, and everyone present understands that the opposite meaning is thus intended, you are dealing with criticism of offensive gender stereotyping rather than the stereotyping itself. In that case, any offense should not be directed at the speaker, but the attitudes he was speaking about. I wasn't there, but by all detailed and sourced accounts, he was indeed railroaded in reports that attributed to him a position 180° degrees at odds with what he said.
Perhaps what the OP meant to say is, "idiots who don't understand irony." Still, sounds like Hunt's fatal mistake was apologizing. Such unfair treatment calls for a vigorous defense.
