this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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it's a joke ๐
People joke about genocide and racism. "It's a joke" is not a valid argument against criticism.
Are you actually comparing someone posting an anime girl to genocide and racism
Hi friend. There's two ways to compare things together, using either a simile or metaphor. A simile uses "like" in the sentence to compare two things: hot dogs are like sandwichs. A metaphor is symbolic of something else, commonly also called hyperbolic communication: Elon needs to pull his head out of his ass.
What we have here is called a statement of fact. It is not a comparison to say that I've had both good days and bad days at my work. Do they have the same context (work)? Yes, but most people would compare their good days to other good days, and their bad days to other bad days. What I responded to is called a non-unique argument: i hope this is self explanatory. It is disengenuinous to say that jokes do not cause harm, when there are many types of jokes lead to additional harm through the normalization of stereotypes and rhetoric. In this case, the original commenter called out a joke that could potentially lead to harm
Hope this helped โค๏ธ
How is this going to lead to harm?
And if you're going to answer something like "oh they're going to think we're weird kiddie diddlers", the only person who would look at a meme of someone saying that they want to look like an 18-ish anime girl (especially considering that OP may be around the same age range, for all you know) and conclude that trans people are weird kiddie diddlers ..... are the people who already hate trans people and will come up with other reasons no matter what we do.
My main argument is that "it's just a joke" is bad and shouldn't be used. It's an extremely common right wing talking point used to excuse harmful rhetoric. In the eyes of the original commenter, they are calling out harm. I don't necessarily agree with them. I'm just saying "it's just a joke" is bad.
When one says something, there's always some more information to be gleaned from context. Like yeah, I agree that some people use the phrase "it's just a joke" to be a dipshit, but I'd only bring it up if there was someone is being a dipshit.
By bringing it up in that context, it's giving an implication that you are agreeing with them, and it gives you the bonus of being able to wriggle out and go "oh actually I'm not on their side" once you get criticised.
You can see my response with the original commenter to see that I didn't agree with them, posted before your first comment on this thread.