The Gaming Den

Al Gore: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Now Increasing Temperatures on the Sun

New York- “We all know that the planet has a fever. But now it turns out that it is far worse than we could ever have imagined. This fever is contagious. It has traversed the great darkness of space. It has traveled the unfathomable distance of 450 miles to settle on the surface of sun. It has now infected earth’s nearest neighbor. And if we don’t do something about it within ten years all of the sun’s solar ice caps will have melted and she will no longer be able to sustain the myriads of plant and animal lives that make the region so vitally important to our fragile cosmic ecosystem.”. So began former vice president, and part-time human being, Albert Gore Jr. III’s address to the New York City chapter of the environmental action group People Establishing Nature In Society. The famously eloquent statesmen kept the audience in rapt attention for nearly three hours and forty five minutes with a detailed outlining of his theories concerning anthropogenic global warming of the sun, vibrant readings of his environmental poetry and heartwarming anecdotes about his childhood servants being made to wait in the car so that he could eat his dinner without the awful distraction of people that were beneath him.

"Seriously folks, no plants on the sun? Maybe someone should ask that flat-earther where he thinks sun flowers come from."

This... isn't funny.

I'm not even sure whether you think this is a good joke, in which case I pity your sense of humour, or if you actually believe it, in which case I pity your intelligence. Your "stupid funny" makes me think you didn't notice the "Not Really the News" tag at the top and that it's the latter.

Please stop littering the forum with things like this.

Global warming is not a "make cute little jabs at the other side" issue. It's a "massive social and ecological upheavals" issue.

Some dude wrote:"The Lunatic Fringe" as his name

Your name makes everything you say funnier for everyone else.

Parthenon wrote:This... isn't funny.

You bruise too easily. Good thing you are a progressive, and not used to the heat in the bad joke kitchen.

Seriously, it's got "People Establishing Nature In Society" ... that's got to be funny, right? OK, I wasn't serious there either.

Hicks wrote:

Some dude wrote:"The Lunatic Fringe" as his name

Your name makes everything you say funnier for everyone else.

I can think of several possible interpretations regarding this statement, but am having trouble finding the correct one.

In other words: "Please explain".

As to Tzor: Dude, read some cognitive linguistics. When you make use of a particular frame, such as "Al Gore = Alarmist", you reinforce that frame in the minds of your audience (though this is counteracted when said audience has previous opinions regarding that frame). This joke is as much an attack on climate science as your actual arguments.

Now, normally I have no problem with the use of framing in political discourse - indeed I sincerely wish that liberals throughout the 20th century had been better about this. However, this board is not a press release or pamphlet. It is expected that, regarding serious issues such as Global Warming (or even less serious ones), posters will provide actual, debatable arguments. You can make these arguments funny, but there has to be some substance.

Good jokes often make some sort of topical commentary, but you should never make the mistake of assuming that commentary to be anything less that a particularly witty argument.

Everything that you post comes from "The Lunatic Fringe". Every topic you venerate and decry comes from "The Lunatic Fringe". Is the views of a Lunatic Fringe representative of the majority, or even sanity? No! because its from "The Lunatic Fringe"! I find it hilariously ironic that Tzor, of all people, has "The Lunatic Fringe" responding to him in this thread with:

The Lunatic Fringe wrote:[global warming is] a "massive social and ecological upheavals" issue.

Even the Quote tags are more funny!

---

Now, I don't mean "funny" as a put down to you or your chosen handle, but as a statment of irony that makes all your posts inherently more awesome, regardless of topic or content!

Bottom Line: I find that your name = .

Thanks Hicks.

Upon further thought, I have come to the depressing realization that as an atheist and a socialist most people in my country probably do consider me to be in the actual lunatic fringe.

It isn't funny. It's just a waste of time, honestly.

It wouldn't surprise me that no definition of funny would even cover that paragraph as being funny.

Also, yes, that 'the lunatic fringe' is espousing totally mainstream sensible reactions makes it ironically hilarious.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote: Also, yes, that 'the lunatic fringe' is espousing totally mainstream sensible reactions makes it ironically hilarious.

Though I agree with your other point, I award you ten Internet points here (redeemable in any argument) for correct use of the term irony.

Parthenon wrote:This... isn't funny.

I'm not going to comment on the politics of this at all - I'm just curious what gives you the right to decide if something is intrinsically funny or not. Maybe it's not funny to you, but a flat statement like that is a bit presumptuous to make. In situations like this, I always think of the words of the immortal George Carlin [On people who think rape isn't funny]:

"I say fuck you! I think it's hilarious, how do you like that? I can PROVE to you that rape is funny! Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd!"

CryptoSolipsist wrote:I can PROVE to you that rape is funny! Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd!"

That's horrible...

@CryptoSolipsist: I agree that what is funny can vary a huge amount between audiences and timing, but in this forum, with tzor's history, phrased that way, it wasn't funny.

And your quote didn't really help since my mind goes blank on who Porky Pig is. In fact it helps my point: that would be harrowing to rape victims and their families- wrong audience. And the same with this: to this audience its not funny. In other forums I frequent it would be hilarious to some, but we're talking about this forum.

So I stand by my point. This... isn't funny.

CryptoSolipsist wrote:In situations like this, I always think of the words of the immortal George Carlin [On people who think rape isn't funny]:

"I say fuck you! I think it's hilarious, how do you like that? I can PROVE to you that rape is funny! Picture Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd!"

I agree with George Carlin on many things, but this is not one of them. We make far too many rape jokes here in America as it is.

tzor wrote:You know, I just saw this animation on the NPR website, mocking tea baggers, “How to speak Tea Bag,” but I know you won’t find it funny. I didn’t find it funny either, but you don’t see me pissing on your parade. Considering that you don’t find these things funny I’m not going to include the link.

I'm going to post the link and let the free market decide whether it is funny or not. I personally think it's less "funny" and more along the lines of "deadly accurate". And if you read the comments, you can see real teabaggers use these language principles in a real world setting!

It's easy to say rape is funny if you've never been raped. If you haven't, the best you can do is offer you support for those who have-not to say what was done to them was funny. Doing the first makes you a human, doing the second makes you a monster.

I love this one

Waclaw Polawski (ReaganiteRepublican) wrote:

Shame on you, NPR- what a reprehensible bit of blatant propaganda. Fits right-in with your "just follow Dear Leader/he knows best" thinking though.

Enjoy your ride on the Hindenburg, toadies- the new GOP administration will be cutting your funding to zero... or perhaps you already sense that?

complaining about a video that says teabaggers just call the other guys Nazis and Socialists.

Steve Bensen (RelaxedMax) wrote:

Newly Pubescent Radicals are taught by NPR to mock political adversaries instead of addressing issues and concerns of those who disagree with them. Why do angry black SEIU thugs beat up a black man who happens to be selling gadsen flags at a political rally? Because they learn their disrespect from NPR. Gladney was taking advantage of the crowd and had been seen selling items at Obama rallys. But to Obama's SEIU thugs he was a target because the day before Obama said about these town halls, "Hit them back twice as hard." And NPR is right here doing Obama's bidding by mocking instead of addressing the fears of these crowds about the incredible massive spending which primarily goes into Obama's cronie's pockets instead of doing any good at all for people looking for jobs. Good job NPR. Way to teach people to behave like juveniles. I cannot listen toe the extreme left NPR site and I will probably never be able to hear it for more than a minute or so before they start premoting social fascism again. Like this clever little cartoon here. It isn't funny. It teaches nothing about the issues. It teaches leftists that people with a differing opinion are not human. Next NPR will be promoting 'camps' for tea partiers.

Emphasis mine. Given that was just off page 1 of the comments, we can see that emprically, this isn't satire, it is measurably and factually true

It's also false equivalence to say that the mental image of Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd being funny proves that rape is funny.

Because first of all, not everyone finds that funny, as has been pointed out.

Second, to those who do find it funny, it's not the rape that's funny but rather the lines the mind makes up because of the characters involved. Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd, and the things they would say are funny, rape is not funny, but can be surrounded by funny or absurd things. Like a cowboy raping a clown or something...

I think that Carlin's point was more that anything can be made fun of, and thus found to be funny, when divorced from its proper context and taken to a ludicrous extreme. Actual humans raping other actual humans is certainly not funny; it's horrendous. But the concept of rape, when applied in a preposterous setting, can be made to seem funny. I personally don't feel that it detracts in any way from the plight of actual rape victims - they are so vastly different that I would call it a case of apples and oranges.

I would point out that, yes, anything can be made funny.

In Kingdom Hearts 2, I and my two sisters all routinely refer to run-of-the-mill Nobodies as 'rapists' because of the weird ways they move.

And the jagged light effects they produce are called 'rape tentacles'.

"Rape tentacles"? Sounds like a bad translation of some Japanese manga title.

"You can joke about everything, but not with everyone"

I'm going to have to side with George Carlin here too. You can make jokes about anything, and if done well, it can be very funny. Atrocity humor is still humor, and can be hilarious.

The problem with Right Wing humor is not the subject matter, John Stewart makes fun of Obama and Clinton all the time. It's that right wingers tend to not be very funny. The half hour newshour, despite having a great name, is fucking awful. I genuinely gave it a chance, not despite the fact that it promised to make fun of liberals non-stop but because of that fact. I can take a joke. I can take a joke where I'm the punchline.

But... I had to shut off the Half Hour Newshour. Not because it was offensive, I knew it was going to be offensive. I had to turn it off because it was painfully bad. I was hoping for a bunch of mean spirited jokes about people like me. Instead I just got a bunch of mean spiritedness pointed at me with basically no jokes at all.

And that's the problem with Tzor's quoted tirade at the beginning here. There's no comedy. It's not a joke. It's not funny. The closest thing to a joke in the whole thing is basically "I don't like Al Gore!" and that's not funny. You have to have some sort of shock, some sort of punchline, something to provoke a reaction from the audience. Tzor is already known to dislike Gore and the name of the thread already gave away the whole Anthropogenic Solar Warming strawman. So there's no punchline there either. It's just bad. Like the Halfhour Newshour.

-Username17

tzor's quote wrote:And if we don’t do something about it within ten years all of the sun’s solar ice caps will have melted and she will no longer be able to sustain the myriads of plant and animal lives that make the region so vitally important to our fragile cosmic ecosystem.

In an informal poll taken around my household, three out of three people agreed that "solar ice caps" is not just funny, it's frickin hilarious. But to each his/her/its own I suppose.

Maxus wrote:In Kingdom Hearts 2, I and my two sisters all routinely refer to run-of-the-mill Nobodies as 'rapists' because of the weird ways they move.

And the jagged light effects they produce are called 'rape tentacles'.

We have one of those vertical chicken roasting device thingies, and my husband - completely frustrated by what to call it one night - dubbed it the chicken raper. Which, considering how you use it, seems pretty damned accurate to me.

CryptoSolipsist wrote:In an informal poll taken around my household, three out of three people agreed that "solar ice caps" is not just funny, it's frickin hilarious.

My husband and I both thought that funny, too.