Carol Marks: The Young Republican's Chat Scandal--Dumb, Disgusting, and Definitely Not the Apocalypse

I haven't read nor thought enough about this to have much to say about it. It's mostly dark humor--anyone who thinks that "I love Hitler," for example, was a serious comment is nuts.

   The Jay Jones texts were much worse. Vicious, even. Murderous...maybe.

   I argued that Jones should be cut slack for the well-known joke template You're in an elevator with x and [two of the most evil people in history, y and z [e.g. Hitler, Stalin]] and you only have two rounds...who do you shoot? Answer: shoot x twice.

   See, that's humor. It's a well-known template. It's probably never been uttered seriously.

   But Jones went way, way beyond that.

   And it wasn't funny.

   And it didn't seem to be exactly intended to be funny...

   How bad the YR's chats are depends, in large part, on the details...which I just can't bear to dig into.

   But as someone or other was arguing the other day, Vance's defense seems pretty lame. He's right about the sickness/madness of "cancel culture" (stupid term), and in particular right about the twisted practice by the left of destroying the lives of kids who did something innocuous ten years ago when they were 13 or whatever.  HOWEVER: these aren't kids. They're apparently 20-somethings and even people in their 30s (is that right?) And, though it might not be reasonable to trash someone's life for dark humor, it doesn't seem obviously unreasonable to refrain from hiring someone as e.g. a political consultant on such grounds.

   Anyway, I just don't know. I'm a big fan of dark and un-PC humor...but I do have my limits.

   Also, this is the kind of thing that's so impressionistic that political biases matter a lot--and I'm not exactly neutral these days.

   One last point of comparison: conservatives are still getting trashed for humor that it actually much less bigoted than things many leftists say openly and seriously--e.g. all whites are racist (in fact: to be white is to be racist), all men are sexist, all non-leftists are fascists, "whiteness" must be destroyed/"dismantled, etc.

   But, anyway, these are general thoughts, and they won't give us determinate answers to specific questions about how mad the chats are. Me, I'm open to them being terrible or completely innocuous. I don't have a pre-determined position. Largely because I don't care much.