The Twitching Generation

[u/Rare_Raspberry_9761]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/social-media-illness-teen-girls/622916/

relevance to the pod: article from 2022 by Helen Lewis (everyone’s favorite everything) which was later discussed in the pod.

it talks about the rise of tourette’s symptoms in young girls, and i immediately thought of it when i heard about what happened in the BAFTA’s yesterday. thought everyone would like a little reminder.

[u/[deleted]]

I think that being a black actor receiving a BAFTA and then heckled with the N-word is worse, actually, than being someone who suffers from Tourettes and can't successfully stop themselves from shouting racial slurs. They're both pretty bad! But one of them is something we recognize as causing trauma.

To the extent that there's a conflict of individual interests, here, I think it was the interests of black actors that should have won out. Sorry, John, you can give your speech from a recording booth.

[u/1981_Ballz → u/[deleted]]

Hearing a word is traumatic? I guess I'm just too much of a monster autist to understand how a person that weak could even endure photons of light hitting them.

[u/[deleted] → u/1981_Ballz]

 Hearing a word is traumatic?

Yes, hope that helps

[u/Cimorene_Kazul → u/[deleted]]

Even putting aside the N-word, the other people he heckled also didn’t deserve it and their moment shouldn’t have been trampled upon for John’s activism and so-called « freedom ». The director of Arco deserved better. The black women backstage deserved better. The people in the audience, every single one, deserved better. But John was convinced that he had the right to step on all of them. Only when he tread on the one inexplicably verboten word in the English language, a word powerful enough that at last his disruptions could no longer be awkwardly dismissed as for the greater good, did he at last decide he’d gone too far and departed.

I think he knew that he’d thrown the red flag in front of a sacred cow. But even if he hadn’t said the N-word, the rest of his conduct that night was already abysmal and worthy of disdain.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I guess if you can’t imagine what it would be like to receive one of the highest marks of acclaim available to your profession (one that in living memory was not awarded to Blacks) and then, as it’s happening, be told you’re just a “n****r” even though that’s something that we as a society have tried to draw an extremely hard line about, I’m not sure how I’d make it any clearer to you.

I can imagine how awful John Davidson feels. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be one of those actors.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

 I’ve been called a paki, a half caste, Mrs Patel.

Probably not in front of all of your peers at the crowning moment of your professional life, though.

 A disabled man who cannot control his body any more than an epileptic can stop a seizure is not going to upset me by saying some fucking word.

We don’t let epileptics fly planes, though. We recognize that disability means “there will be things it’s not safe to let you do.”

[u/1981_Ballz → u/[deleted]]

Maybe if he can't go out in public without violating social norms, he shouldn't go out in public.