many here on the sift find my criticism of over-the-top social justice warriors as ill-thought and offensive,but it is situations that have actual real world consequences,due to mob mentality that can result in the case of justine sacco.which jon ronson retells the sad story with disturbing hilarity:
http://videosift.com/video/jon-ronson-hilarious-and-disturbing-story-on-public-shaming

Nice promote @eric3579

I try to keep the torch alive on this one by incorporating the song (specifically this cover) into English classes for my high school age students in Thailand. Made a worksheet where students try to fill in the blanks, order phrases in the chorus in the right sequence, etc.

The Thai students usually enjoy it -- even the ones that are generally more into Lady Gaga / Justin Bieber. After filling in the worksheet I play the Tool original, but the students find it much easier to hear and identify the words in this cover.

What's up with this music?!

I am a philosopher, I like to provoke,
we live in perverted times,
so let me tell you a perverted joke!

A famous, dirty, horrible joke,
taking place in 15th century Russia.
A farmer and his wife walk along a dusty country road.
A Mongol warrior on a horse stops and says
"I'm gonna rape your wife and you should hold my testicles,
while I rape your wife, so that they will not get dusty."
When he raped his wife, the Mongol warrior went away,
the farmer started to laugh and jump with joy, his wife said
"Hey, how can you be happy?! I was just brutally raped!
And he says: "But I got him. His balls are full of dust."

Well, in reality we only dirty with dust the balls of those in power.
And now comes the dirty conclusion - the point is to cut them off!

Now let me warn you - this isn't Macarena, not Chicken dance,
not Aserejé, not Gangnam style and so on and so on.

We stand no chance, there's no time for romance,
it's time to dance The Perverted Dance™!

Cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
the balls of those in power!
We need to cut the balls
and our faces won't be sour!
Just cut the balls,
make them become Niagara falls.

Cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
the balls of those in power!
We need to cut the balls,
we can train with cauliflower!
Just cut the balls,
make them become Niagara falls.

Oh, my god, why am i doing this?! Singing, dancing?!
I feel like that disgusting guy from Canada, Justin Bieber...

So, the problem with capitalism is that it's in the crisis from its very beginning.
From somewhere, I would say, late 18th century, there are prophets who claim capitalism is nearing its end.
It's like that stupid bird Fenix, the more you, you know, it returns.
I got hungry, let's grab something to eat!
What?! No meat?! Only for vegetarians ?!
Degenerates, degenerates, they'll all soon turn into monkeys.

I dont say let's do nothing,
I say sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.
So cut the balls, just cut the balls!
And racism is also a problem,
so be like Kung Fu Panda - be white, black, asian
and cut the balls, just cut the balls!
They call me The Borat of Philosophy,
The Marx Brother and The Elvis of cultural theory.
Cut the crap and cut the balls, just cut the balls!

Hey, I am Slavoj Žižek!
No, I am Slavoj Žižek!
No, I am Slavoj Žižek,
Fuck that, whatever, let's all be Slavoj Žižek!

Grab and pull the imaginary balls from the sky,
cut through the air and say bye, bye, bye.
Let's join together, let's fall in trance,
let's dance The Perverted Dance™!

Cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
the balls of those in power!
We need to cut the balls.
and then take the bloody shower!
Just cut the balls,
make them become Niagara falls!

Cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
the balls of those in power!
We need to cut the balls,
let them face the final hour!
just cut the balls,
make them become Niagara falls!

Cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls,
the balls of those in power!
We need to cut the balls,
we need to cut the balls!
Just cut the balls,
make them become Niagara falls!

This stupid repetative mechanic music!
Stop it!

Thank you, thank you very much!

The problem is maybe not the big act "Cut the balls",
but you make small changes and all of a sudden, balls are no longer there.
Those in power look down and say "Oh, where are my balls?"
and suddenly their voices get higher and so on and so on and so on.
I stand by my joke. The structure of the joke is that this so called progressive intellectual,
in order to score his small narcissistic point, oh, I dusted the balls,
totally ignores the suffering there and that's the whole point of the joke.
So cut the balls, we need to cut the balls!

He downplayed the boys disabilities as coming down to just being ugly. Not true and kind of mean. Gabriel is a child after all. Thats like making fun of Justin Bieber or Hannah Montana. Wait. So this kid is performing publicly and cant handle mean comments? Really? If he is so fragile and cant laugh idiots off, dont make him do publicity stunts. Id say everybody got what they had coming.

Risque jokes are about the adrenalin of walking the edge, sometimes you just fall off (and get a fine, possibly, or a punch in your stupid face).

Japanese people don't care that the actress is not Japanese. The original creators don't care that the actress is not Japanese. Does no one else see the terrible irony that the people complaining loudest about Scarlett Johansson being cast in this role are mostly privileged white people?

I'd be curious if these same people complained about Tom Cruise being the lead in Edge of Tomorrow or Justin Chatwin playing Goku in the 2009 Dragonball movie. And I'd be more curious to hear what Asian box office star should have been cast in these roles to attract the audiences these movies needed to recoup their production costs.

Sure, Mr. and Ms. educated liberal-progressive might go to see these movies even if they are cast with relatively unknown Asian actors but would that be enough to justify production of the movie in the first place?

This movie is an ADAPTATION. Adaptations are not supposed to be literal translations of the source material. What would be the point in that? I don't think a lot of people who watched the Lord of the Rings films, for instance, could have stomached being bombarded for minutes at a time with bad poetry by Tom Bombadil.

They made the right decision on this film. In this case, people who know nothing about anime are going to show up for this movie just to watch Johansson kick ass. And if they like it a lot they are going to be interested in learning more about the original source material, in which case they'll obtain a lot more Japanese cultural knowledge than they would if some "Asian-looking" person had been cast in the role in the first place.

Whether this movie will actually be any good or not... it's really impossible to tell from this trailer.

Finally, some hope: http://www.politico.eu/pro/belgian-regional-government-set-to-block-eu-canada-trade-deal/

In a sign of increasing frustration on the Canadian side, the normally cheery Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Thursday that not signing CETA would issue a “deplorable” message that Europe is heading towards an “unproductive path” post-Brexit.

Deplorable, you say?

The fact that power over trade — one of the EU’s core negotiating competences — has shifted to Europe’s 38 national and regional parliaments is a major embarrassment for Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. In July, he was pushed by French and German Socialists into designating CETA as a “mixed agreement” requiring ratification in national and regional assemblies.
(...)
The decision was highly controversial, because Juncker and his chief lawyers believed this wasn’t necessary from a legal point of view, but was a gesture of political goodwill.

A gesture of political goodwill. Or as we call it: a Hail-Mary attempt at keeping it alive, because both the French and the German government are facing serious domestic pressure on this issue. If they hadn't acknowledged parliament's vote on this, CETA might have been taken out back and shot in the head already, like it fucking should be.

Justin.... shhhhhh.... shhhhh....

LMFAO

*ban
Justin Anderson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-C5UyR40_w

*Warning I've only gone and done yet another wall of text again! This may or may not get read by anyone on here (good god I wouldn't blame anyone for skipping it), but at the very least it's formed the backbone to a video script so it's not a complete waste of my time! (he tells himself)*

This is as much @bareboards2 as yourself, but he already made it clear he wasn't willing to engage on the issue, so you're getting it instead MWAHAHAHHAHA! *coughs*

I don't wish this to come across as over condescending (though I'm sure it will none the less as I'm in one of those moods). But pretty much every (successful) comedy premise operates on the same underlying principle of irony. i.e. there is an expectation or understanding, which is deliberately subverted, and what results is comedy.

In this case, amongst other things we have the understood premises that:
A. rape is a bad, often horrific thing.
B. that there is an established social taboo about praising such behaviour.
C. that there is a section of society inherently opposed to making light of things of which they do not approve (or in a way in which they do not approve)
D. most words and phrases have an expected association and meaning.

What Jim Jefferies (an accomplished and well respected comedies amongst his peers) has done here, is take these commonly understood premises and subverted the audiences normal expectations in order to evoke a sense of irony, from which the audience derives humour and amusement.

A simple joke might take a single such premise and perform a single inversion of our expectation. e.g. my dog has no nose, how does he smell?....terrible!

By subverting our assumed meaning (that the missing nose refers to the dogs implied lack of olfactory senses), the joke creates basic irony by substituting this expected meaning for that of the odour of the dog itself.

This is of course a terrible joke, because it is as simple as a joke could be. It has only one layer of irony and lacks any sense of novelty which, might tip such a terrible joke into working for any other than the very young or simple minded.

We could of course attempt to boost this joke by adding more levels of irony contextually. e.g. a very serious or complex comedian Like say Stuart Lee, could perhaps deliver this joke in a routine and get a laugh by being completely incongruous with his style and past material.

And herein we see the building blocks from which any sophisticated professional comedy routine is built. By layering several different strands or ironic subversion, a good comedian can begin to make a routine more complex and often more than just the sum of its parts to boot.

In this case, Jim is taking the four main premises listed above, layering them and trying to find the sweetest spot of subverted expectation for each. (something which usually takes a great deal of skill and experience at this level)

He mentions the fact that his jokes incite outrage in a certain section of society because this helps to strengthen one of the strands of irony with which he is playing. The fact that he also does so in a boastful tone is itself a subversion, it is understood by the audience that he does not/should not be proud of being merely offensive and as such we have yet another strand of irony thrown into the mix.

You know how better music tends to have more and/or more complex musical things happening at once? It is the same with comedy. The more ironic threads a comedian can juggle around coherently, the more sophisticated and adept their routines could be considered to be.

Naturally as with music there's no accounting for taste as you say. Some people simply can't get past a style or associations of a given musician or song (or painting or whatever).

But dammit Jim is really one of the greats right now. Like him or lump him, the dude is pretty (deceptively) masterful at his craft.

There are at least 4-5 major threads of irony built into this bit and countless other smaller ones besides. He dances around and weaves between them like some sort of comedy ballerina. Every beat has been finely tuned over months of gig's (and years of previous material) to strike the strongest harmonies between these strands and probe for the strongest sense of dissonance in the audience. Not to mention, tone of voice, stance, timing etc.

I think Ahmed is basically terrible too, but it is because the jokes lack much semblance of complexity or nuance. Jeff Dunham's material in general feels extremely simple and seems like it uses shock as a mere crutch, rather than something deeper and more intelligent.

Taste is taste, but I feel one can to a reasonable extent criticise things like the films of Michael Bay, or the music of Justin Beiber for being objectively shallow by breaking down their material into its constituent parts (or lack thereof).

Likewise one could take the music of Wagner and while not enjoying the sound of it, still examine the complexity of it's composition and the clear superiority of skill Wagner had over most of this peers.

I guess what all this boils down to is, Jim seems to me to be clearly very very good at what he does (as he ought after all these years). Reducing his act to mere controversy feels a lot like accusing Black Sabbath of just making noise and using satanic imagery to get attention (or insert other less out of date example here).

The jokes were never at the expense of victims, they are at the expense of our expectations. He makes his own true feelings on the matter abundantly clear towards the end of the section.

As as he says himself his job is to say funny things, not to be a social activist.

I take no issue with you not liking it, but I do take issue with the suggestion that it is somehow two dimensional, or for that matter using controversy cheaply.

Offensive initial premises are some of the most ironically rich in comedy. It's like deliberately choosing the brightest paints when trying to create a striking painting. Why would you avoid the strongest materials because some people (not in your audience) find the contrast too striking?

Eh, much love anyway. This was more an exercise in intellectual masturbation than anything else. Not that I didn't mean all of it sincerely.

Yeah, sign me up for the "this looks awful" train.

Right now, there is one thing that might make me want to see this and that's the fact that Simon Pegg wrote it.

Because Simon Pegg is awesome and he actually cares about this.

But I can picture the scene now...

INT: PARAMOUNT EXEC's office
SIMON PEGG: "I've just finished the screenplay for the new Star Trek movie"
PARAMOUNT EXEC flicks through script, obviously not reading it

PARAMOUNT EXEC: "Great.. great! great work, Si (can I call you Si?) Now can we add some ninjas and dirt bikes?"

SIMON PEGG: "er, that's not really what it's about. And please don't call me Si."

PARAMOUNT EXEC: "Thanks Si! So we'll have those ninjas and dirt bikes in the next draft. Also good news, you'll never guess who we got to direct it."

SIMON PEGG: "I was thinking maybe Duncan Jones. He did some great sci-fi with Moon."

PARAMOUNT EXEC: "nah, he's off making an extended blizzard cgi sequence! No, even better, we got Justin Lin!"

SIMON PEGG: "The guy from Fast & Furious? Why? why would you...."

SIMON PEGG breaks down crying

PARAMOUNT EXEC laughs maniacally

CUT TO : Ext GENE RODDENBERRY's grave

GENE RODDENBERRYs corpse spins out of grave

I have such a nerd crush on this show. and Amanda, obviously. There used to be a Justin.TV channel that ran the whole thing on repeat 24:7...I'm sad its gone now

You have to hand it to Cruz. It's not easy to make sane people say "Trump is bad, but at least he's not...", but somehow Cruz managed it; putting himself in a rarefied strata of evil alongside Hitler, Stalin and Justin Bieber.

Your video, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Explains Quantum Computing, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

"When someone did shoot Bin Laden, everyone cheered. If someone seriously assaulted Bieber, even people who are annoyed by him would say that's going too far. "

@ChaosEngine

You are waaaay to kind to people...I've said that before, and the answer has always been dismissed, but it seems true.

If Justin was assaulted with a knife in an alley many people would definitely laugh. They almost jizzed when he had shit thrown at his face and I know a few irl who wished it had broken shit on his face.

My own two cents. I wouldn't hurt him personally but I would feel relieved if he were to be struck by a car and seriously hurt. Why? One less self-entitled, whiny, addict, asshole that no longer influence the America my children will be raised in. Hopefully it would happen while he was drunk or stoned so it teaches kids a lesson.

Callus? Of course. Evil? No. But it shows contrasts. Those people who are good I value as very precious, go out of my way to help and more. People like Justin are comparatively worth negative capital. And yes, many would be glad to see him hurt.

so then what is your response to the hundreds of other "face-punch" games?
featuring justin beiber,to hillary clinton,to even jack thompson who was making similar arguments that sarkesian was making.

where was the outrage in those cases?
those people received threats as well.
how come in those cases were viewed as either satirical or just in bad taste,but in sarkesians case it had the possibility of translating to actual violence?

even though there is absolutely zero evidence to substantiate that claim?
couldn't every single one of those face-punch games be viewed as indulgent fantasy?

and if they ARE all viewed as such,how come there was nary a peep in regards to those games,yet the sarkesian one is supposed to be taken as an actual threat of physical violence?

do you not see the hypocrisy here?

this is playing victim to a victimless crime.
it is political theater dressed up as "oppression" using fear as the main driving force.

and it draws attention away from real,actual womens grievances,and THAT my friend,is the real crime.