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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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You think Louis CK is highly highly talented? Go check out his first comeback special after he got cancelled. It fucking sucks. The middle of the set joke sequence starts with a Pascals wager joke about how it would suck to be wrong about god existing, then to "jesus wasnt christian he was jewish how would he feel about the cross?' and then finishing up with 72 virgins. After that it's "I hate being the only person in a small restaurant/store" and then jokes about how words like Retard used to be more socially acceptable. These would all be hack bits in like 2008, but in 2020? You can find most of it on youtube if you want to confirm how bad it is: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q_TZWxihabc

Lots of people clearly like his comedy, see: his show selling out. There's no such thing as a comedian who's universally popular. The only fair way to measure how funny someone is is to look at some combined metric of a) the number of people that like them, and b) the amplitude(passion?) of how much people who like them like them. Being able to sell out a large venue is an objective measure they score decently on both metrics.

He's no doubt the biggest and most successful comedian of the past decade (top 3 at least), I just take issue with the suggestion that only highly highly talented and famous people can evade the wrath of cancellation. In my estimation moderately talented people can fare just fine.

I guess it depends on your definition of highly talented then? I'd call just about anyone who can get thousands of people to show up live just for them highly talented. I'd call someone moderately talented if they peaked when they placed top 3 in their high school talent show.