The right to be offended

I just read this post at thelasthacker on 'The Chasers War on Everything' which I find more sad that the Chaser is Australia's 'Edgiest' comedy rather than the censorship issues, which in light of it being Australia's edgiest comedy then censoring it is really sad.

But it all reminds me of a joke:

Q: 'What did the blind quadraplegic kid get for Christmas?'

A: 'Cancer.'

I find this joke really funny, and that is because of the anatomy of the joke. It plays on human sympathy, and its okay to laugh at it. What generally happens in your head that makes the old Q&A format of joke so effective is that it engages your rational mind. SO anyone who hears the question has the part of their mind engaged in trying to predict what kind of thoughtful kind gift might alleviate the suffering of this poor hypothetical kid. Failing to imagine the kind of contraption that might help someone who can't see and can't walk and can't use their hands.
At which point the brutal answer is revealed, which is the joke, who would want to hear a story so sad? The expectation that the kids situation can't get worse is what allows the joke to work.

And yet...

I have made I believe this joke, and somebody in earshot tried to tell me off because they (presumably) knew someone dying of Cancer. And I stood my ground, for the first time, in the past I've backed down in the face of someone sensitive. I'm not sure what I said, but I didn't keep digging, which is I think a bad response. I merely pointed out to the effect of 'you don't have the right not to be offended, you only have the right to be offended.'

Which is pretty much the greatest freedom anyone can ever aspire to. Southpark did a great Christmass special about avoiding offense, where they removed all religious iconography to the point where they took down the lighting because it was 'offensive to people with epilepsy'. Which made an excellent satirical point of just how unworkable the 'keeping mind of peoples sensitivities' is.

Offense is a moving target, and where most people get run-of-the-mill narcissistic about it is that they believe that some tyrannical hitler needs to be offended by people standing up to their personal convictions, but that they are so sensible and normal that they should not be offended.

In short usually people can dish it but they can't take it. Perhaps I'm unusual being a person that when I went to my first public bathroom in China was highly amused when some military official called me 'guilo' or however its spelt and spat as he walked past me.

That attitude I'm sure rests on the fact that white people are far more likely to dish out the meaningful racism than recieve it, being that we have a stranglehold on most of any power structures that matter.

But alas it remains, and I will say, there is no line. It is simply that. Thomas Jefferson would say:

I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? and are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read, and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.
Letter to Nicolas Gouin Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller (1814) who had been prosecuted for selling the book Sur la Création du Monde, un Systême d'Organisation Primitive by M. de Becourt, which Jefferson himself had purchased.