Umm...it's a dragon and a tiger and they aren't tattoos!!

Reread the part in my message where I talk about the branding scene in the opening credits.  But good point, dragon and tiger.  I plan to get them as tattoos, and no, I don't feel like manning up for a branding.

I think shaolin monks have a celibacy requirement  .

Running away from persecution. Landing in the West (California). Proly Hollywood. Yes. I see the win/win situation. But then there is a risk of going from this:



To this:



... which is OK I guess. But scary for some.

^ Poll added! 

I have a feeling he'd get more use out of the cord.

Hello! Someone just linked me to this thread. I've wanted to make an account on CS for a while (some of these usernames are quite nostalgic), though this is probably not the best first impression to make.

Firstly, I just want to say that the OP is right. I should have actually gone and messaged Moffat and picked his brain instead of spouting off on Facebook. I thought about sending an email, but I impulse got the better of me. I will send him a message because I'd still like to hear his thoughts.

As I expressed in my original post, I'm not so dense that I don't understand that the joke was ironic; ie: that Moffat was parroting some silly stereotype of Mac users. I like satire. This is going to sound like a classic, "some of my best friends are X", but really some of my favourite comedy comes from the skewering that's performed by Louis CK and South Park. I know there is a distance between parodying an attitude and embodying it, and as I said, I don't really think there was any ill intent behind Moffat's joke.

Really simply put, my concern about Moffat's joke was this: I thought it was a cheap shot that traded on some cruel stereotype about the LGBT community, where a joke about hipsters would have made the point. Somehow LGBT folk got pulled into the punchline for no apparent reason. If it had been other groups of people that were swapped into the joke, I'm sure more people would have just thought it was a plain weird thing to say.

What do I mean by that? Well let's repeat the joke:

You have just completed your male to female sex change, and you want a socially acceptable computer within your new LGBT community.

Now as an exercise I wrote up a bunch of jokes that relied on the same kind of humour:

You’re a ditsy broad and thought the iPad was a tampon.
Everyone at the country club thinks your Dell is ‘too urban’.
You’re being bullied and you need Safari to post suicide notes to Livejournal.
You saved on Matzo crackers this year so you can afford to splurge a little.

I think it would have seemed weird if Mike was casually employing stereotypes about women, or Jews, or some other group, even if there was some ironic distance that allowed him to claim that he was just channeling the thoughts of some obnoxious Apple hater. I don't really see how it made sense in the context of a bunch of other generalised stereotypes about Mac and PC users to lead with a joke about someone going through a sex change operation, in the same way it would seem crazy if someone shoehorned in a joke about abortion when talking about reasons why people prefer Android or iOS.

I'm not saying that the LGBT community are precious flowers. I wouldn't for a second insist that you can't make jokes about sex changes or abortion or the Holocaust or any other topic, and I'm not declaring myself the sole arbiter of what makes for good satire. But you have to be aware that there is a gravity when talking about certain topics, and that gravity sort of demands that you should think carefully about who and what you are satirising before reaching for a punchline.

A sex change operation is not a frivolous thing. It's a multi year process that involves hormones and therapy, and its a decision that often comes after a great deal of anxiety and trauma. I'm not sure how it works outside of Australia, but here Doctors often require you to live as your self-identified gender for up to a year before they'll even prescribe you hormones. Some people can't imagine living like the opposite gender when they don't look anything like it, so instead they self-medicate and risk liver damage just so they don't have to go through a humiliating Doctor's gauntlet.

When I think sex change operation I don't think about choices in personal electroni cs, and maybe this is a cultural disconnect of mine but I wasn't aware that there was a trope about transgender folk using Macs to impress their friends.

I'm not a spokesperson for the LGBT community but I've had my own distress and confusion about my gender identity. Call it a bias of mine, but I think it's a grave topic that should be approached with some degree of thoughtfulness. Again I'm not saying you can't make jokes about certain topics, but honestly I don't expect to find casual jokes about sex change operations in discussions about a DAC's operating system compatibility on a public forum, as if it was part of Schiit's edgyasfuck™ marketing strategy to make jokes about excrement and occasionally trannies.

Mike can make whatever joke he wants, and by the same token I think it's fair for me to call him out on making a clumsy and insulting one.

But you're right. The fair thing to do would have been to call him out directly.