In my view, taking the Spartan myth down a few pegs is redemptive - for those of us who have not benefited from the fraud. It’s nothing but false machismo and literal rape culture that have only served to give comfort to societies built on cruelty and inequality.

You’re not wrong to feel that humans can be tiresome in their follies, but charitably, some of that must be caused by familiarity. We’re the species whose entire evolutionary niche is cooperation and friendliness. Most of the animal kingdom are jerks by any fair comparison. If we had lived as ants, our grievances about our peers would be all the more bleak.

It’s the crazy little details that feel carefully chosen to make us sound crazy. It’s really galling.

Usually when he’s done fucking something that means it’s dead so

I don’t say this lightly about a person, but I truly believe rape is at the very core of his being.

Well yeah, anything that weakens NATO is red meat for him. So to speak.

It’s regrettable to give Putin any comfort, but I don’t think Canadians are wrong here. The US is firmly in its ‘flailing and desperately externalising’ phase of imperial decline, and I think a GB-style “soft landing” of the American empire is too much to hope for.

I don’t know, I think any linguistic coinage that gets Americans in general to finally get that the rich hate and want to destroy them, the better.

ES6 is powered by shutting up and going away

They’ve Syndrome monologued us 😦

Oh, dear. There’s been a huge misunderstanding. You’re thinking of objectivity. Jokes are not objects, they’re sub-

Look, I can’t do everything. Dear reader, please look into this and report back with your findings.

Exactly, that’s… That’s exactly how subjectivity works. Is there a problem?

If I pulled that off without cracking up, I’d feel ten feet tall for a week.

Start the little devils running boxes of punch cards, then make them sneak into the lab at night to write their own punch card software for games and secret messages. How else are we going to get them ready for the real world?

I really don’t care to litigate anyone’s comedy, it’s the reaction that damned him. The simple truth is that if someone doesn’t like your joke, they’re right.

Nobody has ever seriously defended or explained a joke so well that it eventually became funny, and every professional comedian knows it. You either spin it into a different bit or apologise and move on. You’ve got to be a real prick to be that rich, privileged, safe, and still think you have to defend a joke that hurt someone’s feelings. “Sorry that one sucked, no hate.” How hard is that?

If a veteran comedian like him chooses to get serious and defend a joke, that tells me they weren’t joking or they have a different motive than mere entertainment. Trust is built slowly, quickly lost. Especially among persecuted groups.

Yeah you are, you’re fucking off!

His older work stands up mostly, but lately he has thrown in with the wave of “anti-woke” comedians, repeatedly doubling down when criticised for making transphobic remarks.

A comedian these days has a very difficult choice to make, it must be said. I fully admit it! They have to do a lot of emotional and mental labour to make light of the very dark times we live in, or they can just side with far-right billionaires and culture war reactionaries and just make easy punch-down jokes about people who already face incredible violence. It’s got to be so hard!

If you like

Ricky Gervais

you can fuck off

That’s really sweet.

I think they win this one

Hottest pick-up line imaginable tbh