Dave, by the sounds of it was a kind and gracious friend to Daphne and this was corroborated by her family. He offered her to open for him in a club as well, a great opportunity given his tenure as a comedian. In addition, upon hearing of her passing, setup a trust for her daughter.
The twitter mob on the other hand tried to have her cancelled after she defended him because she knew that he had no ill-intent.
In my opinion, the 1K employees who are walking are doing so on the flimsiest of moral foundations. Dave has done more for Daphne and her family than any of the 1K employees or the twitter mob ever will. Moral outrage is not generous or kind to anyone, period.
Presumably the twitter mob is mad (rightly or wrongly - i havent watched the special) about transphobia by Dave in general. It is entirely possible that Dave could be a great friend to Daphne and be transphobic at the same time. You can be friends with a trans person and transphobic at the same time (just like you can be sexist and friends with a woman at the same time, etc). Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
My mom believes she has an immortal soul that is redeemed by Jesus Christ whose body and blood are present in the Eucharist. I disagree. Does this make me a soulphobe who hates Catholics?
Wokeness is a nasty social virus that has infected the USA, and it slowly but surely is causing the USA to implode.
If wokeism wasn't around, they'd find something else to oppress people. Ironically, these people would've been _great_ racists in a different time.
The problem is bullying. I don't know why it's so hard for people to recognize when they agree with the bully, but these sorts of tactics are never acceptable.
It's incredibly damaging to the cause of social justice. These assholes become the de-facto voice/face of the movement they claim to support, and destroy it.
"Woke" white bullies took over the movement, and are once again telling minorities what's good for them and how they should feel, all while alienating any potential converts. It's actually pretty darkly, depressingly hilarious.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danabrownlee/2021/04/19/why-whi...
Understand that by misusing that slang, you are also assisting them in doing the same. People that understand the actual definition correctly expect there is malicious ulterior intent when it is wrongly invoked, like in your earlier comments.
The woke virus is everywhere now and the only thing it means, to people here in the Netherlands at least, is "being absurdly sensitive about anything that could possibly hurt any groups feelings".
[I'm not making any comment on how right the twitter mob is. Haven't seen the commedy special, no idea what's said in it]
He says as much in the special, but the message that the hyper-offended mob seems to miss is that in the end of the special he realizes that Daphne’s trans identity was secondary and frankly unimportant to her identity as a human and comedian. Basically realizing he came to view Daphne pretty much as Daphne wanted to be viewed and how she viewed herself.
The friendship will tolerate what it will, until it can't. I think situations like these occur all the time, but unless one side shows more empathy or understanding, the friendship doesn't tend to last. I believe Dave's friendship with Daphne changed him. I think this is further supported by him saying at the end of the special that he won't be making anymore jokes about LGBTQ+ people until he knows everyone's laughing together. That to me, sounds like someone who was changed by a friendship. Whether he stays true to his words, we'll have to see.
(personally have no interest in this controversy, or chappelle, who i find angry and unfunny.)
I find this part of the statement to be a falsehood. He did it in a comedic way, which was part of the point he was trying to make. See: https://nypost.com/2021/10/15/airplane-creator-slams-joy-kil...
I am always prepared to be offended by comedy, and if I am, I will keep watching, but only if it is funny enough.
Actually, my understanding is that it's really only the radical activists who insist on that sort of thing. Most real-world trans folks are sensible enough to grok the fact that while they might perform socially as their gender of choice, they don't in fact embody it in the same way as someone who was assigned that gender at birth would.
If the main point was critique with comedy, sure, it makes sense to see through it.
Accredited to Chaucer
But you can't just say "F You!" and say it's a joke. It's not a "free for all" card.
It has to at least try to be funny
I wonder at times how many more people the Twitter mob is going to hurt. So few people are even talking about it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-pur...
P.S. I didn't watch the special but I did watch a pirated clip (audio only) on YouTube from a show called The Closer - which I assume is the special in question.
Even if they were a union, they wouldn't be allowed to strike in order to force their employer to deplatform someone, they could only strike to get a contract. If they have a contract, they can't strike.
Let the 1k go, if they must. They can walk out with their heads high and feeling like they've made a statement. But also let Chappelle continue to earn a living and hold his head high. There's room for both. Let the cancellations cease forthwith.
These sorts of events keep happening. At this point the pattern is very clear: if you hire very left wing employees then you're building the firm on an unexploded bomb. You can't predict what will cause it to go off or when it will occur, but it seems likely that at some point it will. How do you as an executive build robustness to this type of event? You can't simply "do the right thing" because the left's definition of "right thing" changes on a near weekly basis, and is often so outright deranged that doing the right thing would cause you to end up doing quite evil things to other people. Or you can wait then cave, but that just encourages them and means you'll carry the can for the company's performance even though you won't actually have decision making power, and responsibility without power is a terrible place to be.
So there doesn't seem to be an easy fix, except ensuring you never get into that position in the first place by limiting your intake of very left wing employees. In the current environment it's probably enough to simply make yourself unattractive to these people via public announcements and policy, but for example when WhatsApp was rolling out encryption it was doing ideological screening interviews to ensure they wouldn't hire anyone who would freak out over a hardline privacy stance. Such interviews may quietly become more common. At the very least we should not be surprised if we see a raft of Coinbase style "we are a mission focused company" moves in the coming years.
There's a reason why I never post ANYTHING political on my public social media anymore. I keep all my controversial opinions limited to my alternate profiles.
He makes jokes about Jews, and Blacks, and Whites, that are completely overshadowed by Twitter (which is not a real place) claiming it was entirely anti-trans.
No one is claiming it was his funniest, but there was a subtext there. That it wasn’t about them, but about him. He’s not wrong at how successful without violence the trans movement has been compared to civil rights for blacks.
I thought the goal was to be offensive at the beginning and end with the message that canceling comedians for jokes is bad for everyone.
2021 is looking to surpass that...
Part of his criticism was centered around how the 'alphabet people' have made rapid strides, but that conveniently forgets that black people can be gay or trans too, and also haven't made the same gains white LGBTQ folks have.
I'll gladly cede that America is more structurally and culturally anti-black than they are anti-LGBTQ, but that isn't the argument he was making.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but someone actually tell me which millionaire/billionaire actually remained 'cancelled' after being cancelled. As far as I can tell, the only people actually being cancelled are the trans people being fired from their jobs for finding the special distasteful and voicing that publicly.
So 44 trans people were murdered in 2020, out of a total of 21,570 in the US [0]. Estimates for the trans population range from 0.39% [1] to 0.58% [2].
That's about 2-3x lower than we'd expect, as a population of that size with an equivalent murder rate would have 84-125 homicides per year.
If we zoom in on black trans people and compare them to the black population as a whole, 27 were murdered compared to 9,941 for the black population [3]. Doing a bit of napkin math, and with the assumption that the rate of transgender identification is the same in the black and non-black populations, and using 46.9 million for the black population, we get:
21.2 murders / 100k for the black population
16.2-24.1 murders / 100k for the black trans population (using 0.58% for the first figure, and 0.39% for the second).
So the surprising conclusion seems to be that the trans population has a significantly lower homicide victimization rate compared to the general population, and black trans population has a slightly lower rate than the black population.
And if anything, I'd expect this gap to expand once correcting for age (the trans population skews younger) and the rapid increase in trans identification over the few years.
[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/191134/reported-murder-a...
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227946/
[2] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender...
[3] - https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
Additionally, a black trans death is precisely what Chappelle used to justify his own monologue.
Analyses like you just did do feel authoritative, but it is important to remember that HRC only began tracking these things in 2013, and given the state of play in the US, I wouldn't expect it to be a complete survey for quite some time.
Quoting from the nih article you cited about the difficulties collecting data:
*Research has shown that transgender individuals around the world and in the United States are exposed to widespread social stigma, discrimination, harassment, and physical and sexual abuse. Compared with the general population, a national survey conducted in the United States in 2008 found that transgender individuals were 4 times more likely to live in extreme poverty, had double the rate of unemployment, and had almost double the rate of being homeless. In terms of health, transgender individuals had 4 times the rate of being HIV-infected and 28% postponed medical care because of discrimination. Particularly alarming is that 41% of survey respondents reported at least 1 suicide attempt. A barrier to understanding social determinants and health disparities faced by transgender people is the under- or nonrepresentation in a range of demographic and health-monitoring activities,5 which may result from a lack of transgender-inclusive data collection with regard to gender identity.*
3,584 female victims in 2020 vs 14,194 males.
Given that the majority in the murdered trans population we are discussing are black trans women, not factoring that in will give you your counterintuitive conclusion.
44/21570 (0.002) becomes 27/3584 (0.0075)
when viewed through the lens of gender.
I can't make that fbi website spit out better numbers, but the fact that the fbi doesn't even have an incentive to track this kind of thing is telling all by itself.
> Given that the majority in the murdered trans population we are discussing are black trans women, not factoring that in will give you your counterintuitive conclusion.
I deliberately didn't try to break it down by gender because of the inherent issues with comparing someone who has biologically and socially developed as a male (to varying degrees, eg. someone who begins transitioning at 15 is going to be different than someone who starts at 35) to natal women. It is notable though that if you look at the stats, the victimization rate for black trans women falls in between the stats for black men (much higher) and black women (much lower). It would be interesting to look at other indicators like automobile accidents that show significant gender divergence to see if a similar pattern emerges.
> I can't make that fbi website spit out better numbers, but the fact that the fbi doesn't even have an incentive to track this kind of thing is telling all by itself.
Unfortunately I don't think we'll get better stats anytime soon. Race and gender are fairly easy to track because they get marked down on various forms of ID, but there is no equivalent "trans: Y/N" anywhere. And many trans people would vociferously oppose something like that. The result is that police will likely only include trans identification in case documents if it is relevant, eg. with a hate crime.
Even if a community did have a higher homicide victimization rate than average, it could still punch well above its weight in terms of Twitter mobbing.
You needn't look far to find laws being passed that specifically target and exclude the trans community.
Painting a marginalized community as vicious enough to 'eat their own' paves the way for very ugly rhetoric that we've seen with other marginalized groups the world over. Chappelle especially is smart enough to know this.
And indeed, from reading the comments here and elsewhere, it seems that whatever empathy he attempted to bring to the special, the modal comments on his work looks like this:
'I prefer the old skinny Chapelle. Black white supremacist is a killer. However, I must confess, I agree with him and J.K. Rowling on this one. Being trans women doesn’t make you a woman.'
I don't think anyone is disputing that trans people disproportionately struggle with mental health issues and suicide.
This review seems to be speculating in the same direction: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7317390/ Furthermore, compared with trans men, the societal position of trans women is lower (31, 32). In the Netherlands, between 1972 and 2017 suicide rates showed a fluctuating course. Our finding of a slightly decreasing suicide risk in Dutch trans women may confer some hope. Recent studies showed an increase in societal acceptance toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (31), and indications of an increase in social‐economic status over the years (33). ... Although the literature on suicide risk factors is comprehensive, and particular suicidal risk factors like verbal victimization, physical and sexual violence, and the absence of social support (9, 34), may apply for transgender people in all stages of transitioning, it seems clinically highly relevant to understand and explore possible differences in motives and risk factors in the different stages of treatment.
Race and gender are fairly easy to track because they get marked down on various forms of ID
From what I gather, Louis CK and Garrison Keillor are still cancelled (e.g. reduced to releasing stuff on their own personal websites).
Also, the kind of people who get canceled are entertainers and academics, and few if any of those are billionaires. I'm not even sure how "canceling" a billionaire would even work.
Papa John?
https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1199167890370510848
But fair enough, I haven't seen much of him since.
I wonder why only two I could find were trans men, and almost all were in large cities? Is it that much safer to be a trans man than a trans woman?
It’s a shame there isn’t any details at all around the circumstances of their deaths. I wonder if that could have relevant content at all?
I am a southern raised white male. I have seen Dave live. I HAD been a fan of his stuff. I had some issues with his comedy in the past but nothing that made me avoid it.
However, this special rang different to me.
This special felt the same as white dudes I have heard my entire life. White dudes who would say racist shit and turn around to say they aren’t racist because they have black friends.
I felt Dave did the exact same with his trans friend. He used that friendship to try to shield his comedy.
Look, Dave doesn’t need our money. He doesn’t need any fucking person supporting him. Dude has so much money it doesn’t matter. So I do wonder why so many people are so desperately trying to defend transphobic comedy routines?
Stand away from the comedian and take a stand on what Dave’s actual views are. Own them yourself and defend those views. I think in 20 years you will look back and realize you held shitty views or at least society will
> I think in 20 years you will look back and realize you held shitty views or at least society will
I think my views 20 years ago were near exactly what they are now. What if it’s yours that change? Then was Chapelle ok again?
What if your or my or his opinion doesn’t matter and everyone should be free to have their own and that is just ok even if someone else thinks it’s wrong?
Yes I believe people can change.
As for his views, he straight up said he was a trans exclusionary radical feminist.
He said it multiple times in the special.
Go look at what that means. He is AGAINST legislation for trans rights. This is no different than white people saying we didn’t need the black civil rights movement.
Let me put it another way, my mom is an old white women who was alive during integration of the schools. She is racist as shit. She has a black friend. If her black friend dies first, she will absolutely be at her friend’s funeral. She loves her black friend. My mom would say her friend is “one of the good” ones. My mom is straight up racist. Having and caring about an individual in a group she is racist against doesn’t mean she isn’t racist.
Dave cared about his friend. He cares about his family. But he said what he is. No one put those words in his mouth. He said he was a Terf
Anybody who is FOR legislation of "rights" predicated on a non-falsifiable self-proclamation is almost certainly an idiot.
I don't dispute that gender dysphoria is real, it most certainly is. I don't dispute that living this way in a world that doesn't acknowledge who you are is a real bummer.
But advocating for legal recognition of a person's declaration, a word that cannot be objectively falsified, is absolutely a recipe for disaster. For every legitimately gender-dysphoric person, I bet there is a sexual predator rubbing his hands in anticipation for access to womens' spaces. And by what standard can the legal system deny them?
And why stop at gender? What stops me from falsely identifying as Black in order to qualify for scholarships or other programs intended to correct societal imbalances? By what right does a legal system that accepts the premise of subjective declaration as truth stop me from claiming Tribal casino profits or squatting on indigenous land?
It is the very height of idiocy to believe that a system of laws could possibly rest upon non-falsifiable claims.
Does it suck to live with identify disorders of any kind? Yes, absolutely. But should we upend our entire value system of objectivity of law in order to address it? Hell no.
With racism, the racists are denying other people's humanity, based on race. That ideology centres around the notion of a group of humans being somehow subhuman.
This isn't the case with 'terfs' - they're not denying or diminishing anyone's humanity, they're simply saying that whether you're a woman or a man is determined by your biological sex, rather than a proclaimed gender identity.
Its funny, its thoughtful and heartbreaking. You can tell he cared for Daphne and they had a insightful relationship.
Ever wonder why "clean" comics are so rare?
Comedy is offensive by it's very nature.
Yes, there are. Including about the “diversity box” targeted by Chappelle, that are nevertheless appreciated by the people upset at Chappelle.
Not all things that someone slaps the label “joke” on are created equal.
For the record, I agree and I enjoy offensive comedy.
I was simply stating that trans being offended by jokes while also wanting "equality" is impossible. Wasn't attacking your comment.
How so?
[1] And, again, "cancelled by the mob" is a pretty poor summary.
She committed suicide after what appears to be a troubled life, months after being criticized by other members of the trans community on Twitter. Unless you have some special knowledge of her motives beyond what was in the note, it seems exploitative to use it as a vehicle for your political views. Similarly, rather than claiming that people who are reacting negatively haven’t watched Chappelle’s special, it’d be better to try to engage intellectually with what they’re actually saying rather than finding an excuse not to.
https://twitter.com/DaphneDorman/status/1166937728681791488
Maybe that dragged on, maybe there’s some private messages he heard about which aren’t public but the main point was simply that it seems like a politically convenient stretch to state with certainty that the blame goes entirely to an undefined “mob” rather than any of the other factors her friends and family acknowledge. I don’t love mob tactics but to be honest that read more like an an attempt to stir up a reactionary mob rather than calm things down.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Chappelle paid tribute to her in his special, but he did it in an offensive way. But given their relationship, the tribute was probably something she would have approved of and her family has defended Chappelle's tribute: https://deadline.com/2021/10/dave-chappelle-the-closer-defen...
Most of the outrage appears to come from people who haven't actually watched the special and are taking Chappelle's quotes about racism and LGBT issues out of context.