Political and politically incorrect humor

[dteowner]

 

[Ubereil]

The American people hire lobbyist to push their interests in congress.

They finally figured out they need it.

Übereil

 

[peko]

that might actually not be a bad idea

 

[GothicGothicness]

Sounds like a very smart thing to do, IMHO.

 

[dteowner]

That was tremendous. The Onion is usually good, but that's a real gem.

 

[dteowner]

The ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER
This one is a little different ….
Two Different Versions …
Two Different Morals

OLD VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.

The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he
dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE OLD STORY :
Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. CBS, NBC , PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green…' ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, “We shall overcome.” Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper's sake. President Obama condems the ant and blames President Bush , President Reagan , Christopher Columbus, and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight. Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the Government Green Czar and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood. The entire Nation collapses bringing the rest of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY :
Be careful how you vote in 2010.

I’ve sent this to you because I believe that you are an ant–not a grasshopper!

Make sure that you pass this on to other ants. Don’t bother sending it on to any grasshoppers because they wouldn’t understand it, anyway.

 

[Corwin]

VERY clever!!

 

[Ubereil]

Yeah, well, Hitler was clever too.

Übereil

 

[Corwin]

I agree, he was an amazing man. Evil, but still amazing!!

 

[magerette]

Amazing. Humor? Is humor supposed to make you want to throw up? This isn't humor, it's conceit, contempt, arrogance and misinformation taken to the nth power. It's turning one section of society against another, and ripping the fabric of democracy up into little shreds, not to mention glorifying a stunning lack of compassion and tolerance into a moral high ground of misplaced victim-hood.

Ha ha effin ha.

Yep, the left and the poor are the ones who've screwed everything up, of course, because they have so much power.. that they somehow mysteriously got while being stupid stoned grasshoppers sucking off the productive ants…I got so mad reading that post I actually feel ill. And the class warfare is coming from the left???

Why don't you send this to my son-in-law, who got laid off from his job, lost his house, had his kids taken away from him and all, because he was so damn lazy he only worked 90 hour weeks on an assembly line? There's some dead miners' families in Tennessee that probably would get a real laugh out of it, too, and then there's all the fishermen in Louisiana who'd think this was just hilarious.


This is my own fault, though. I thought I'd gotten over this stuff. That'll teach me to even lurk this place.

 

[skavenhorde]

Is humor supposed to make you want to throw up?

No. I also didn't find anything funny about a lot of these "jokes."

Empathy is such a fine trait for human beings. I wish more people had it.

 

[Ubereil]

If you're still here Margaret, you'll like this one.

Übereil

 

[Ubereil]

As for DTE's story, I just read a really interesting article about taxes in America, that said this:

So why are so many Americans passive in the face of years of stagnating wages, reduced benefits, and mounting anxiety about whether work will run out before retirement benefits kick in? Why are the better-than-average-income Tea Partiers kicking up a fuss and not the actual poor, the 120 million Americans who own a small fraction of 1 percent of our wealth?
Ariely sees this as a form of learned helplessness.
What's that? "Imagine you have two dogs in two rooms," he said. "One dog hears a bell followed by an electric shock. This dog has a switch he can press with his paw that stops the shock, and he learns to press it when he hears the bell."
The other dog does not hear any bell to signal that the shock is coming and has no switch to turn it off.
"So now you move the two dogs and put them in two new rooms where they can move from one side of the room to the other over a low partition," Ariely explained. "One of the sides of the new room gives from time to time electrical shocks, but if the dog jumps over the partition to the other side of the room, he can escape the shock. When the shock comes, the first dog quickly learns to jump from one side of the room to the other, but the second dog just lies there and whimpers. This is learned helplessness, because when you cannot make a connection between cause and effect, you become depressed and just take it."
Ariely's theory fits with what my unemployed brother discovered. Eric went out on his own last week among his blue-collar friends in rural Oregon to talk about the severe lack of jobs there, the low wages without fringe benefits for those who do find work, and their concerns about the future.
"The people I live with and work with and talk to work at McDonald's or as security guards or on a road crew — they are high school graduates thinking only about paying their bills and have no idea about politics in this country," Eric told me.
"If you try to engage these people about the state of the economy, just in passing, they have no idea, and they don't care," Eric wrote. "They know bad things have happened to them, they know they can barely pay their bills. They are scared, but they don't know why things have gotten so bad, and they don't know how to find out anything. That's what scares me — they don't want to find out, because they say knowing won't change anything. They say what they know doesn't matter because they can't do anything about it."

Übereil

 

[Corwin]

Mags, I didn't say I found the piece amusing, I said it was clever and it is. You can disagree with something/someone and still acknowledge the skill or cleverness associated with it/him/her!! I certainly don't like or support anything about what Hitler did, but I do acknowledge that in some ways he was a brilliant man. Being able to distance yourself from things/events/etc, is a useful skill that is often needed for survival. As far as humour is concerned, I was once taught in a university course on comedy in English Literature, that we never laugh at anything nice. I find MUCH of the so called humour which abounds highly offensive, but I have learned to simply ignore and/or avoid it as much as possible. Good to see you back posting though!!

 

[pibbur]

I didn't find this funny. I've laughed at other jokes from you dte, but not this one. In fact to me it wasn't much of a joke, more like pure agitation-by-superficial-analogy. And as you (hopefully) know, we stand very far from each other politically. And geographically.

I seldom visit this thread, so I can't say there aren't other similar "non jokes" here, even from lefties, I only comment on this one since I stumbled upon it by reading Magerette's response.

 

[dteowner]

I believe there's a misunderstanding about whom the joke would classify as grasshoppers, but ultimately it's irrelevant. Bottom line, there are folks out there that don't find the Three Stooges hilarious, so clearly even genius-level humor is subjective and some people won't like things that others do. For my part, I learned long ago that getting uptight about jokes/humor, even stuff I personally don't enjoy, is a horrible waste of energy.

Sorry to ruin your lurk, Mags.

 

[magerette]

@Corwin, Sorry I should have made it clearer I wasn't responding to you or the Hitler remarks, but the grasshopper and ant "poor people are lazy parasites who are killing off the rich people" parable from dte. Tried to go back and edit my post to make that clear but obviously I failed. Anyway, apologies. I can see how you might read it that way.

I agree the format of the parable is clever, and uses humor effectively; I also agree it's totally propaganda, so I can see the validity of Uberiel's initial Hitler comment; Hitler used a lot of similar clever propaganda to manipulate by instilling fear and demonizing various groups, and he and Carl Rove, or more likely Goebbels and Carl Rove, could have had some cozy fireside chats about how best to brainwash the masses. It's working very well for the right, but how it will work for the country is something else.

@pibbur: Sorry to drag you into this, but thanks for your perspective, and thanks to all those who have PM'd me with their support and encouragement. I miss you guys too.

 

[magerette]

Sorry to ruin your lurk, Mags.

That's okay. Seemingly you can't help it. My own fault for thinking I had thicker skin.

 

[dteowner]

If you're still here Margaret, you'll like this one.

Übereil

I thought that was quite funny, Ubereil. Obviously, I don't agree with it, but I can still appreciate the creativity and humor behind it.

 

[skavenhorde]

Edit: Got rid of that lame joke.

There's a reason ads like these died long ago:

People grew up and couldn't stomach that kind of BS anymore or at least I thought they did. When America started getting their news 24/7 it all changed. Now it's all about ………I really don't know anymore. Right screams at left dismissing any ideas they have. Left screams at right dismissing any ideas they have. All the while they BLAME each other and get nothing done. It saddens me, but that's the way it is. Maybe it's always been this way. It just seemed like before there was more of a middle ground that people could agree upon. So now I'll leave you with a joke for both dems and repubs.

Joke for the dems

Joke for the repubs

As for myself I prefer jokes like this