implying anyone has a sense of humor
You poor damn fool. There aren't enough taped together mile long sticks to touch any subject these days.
While I found @joe_galindez's rant quite impressive, this statement doesn't hold up. There'd be no working comedians these days if this statement were true. Sure, people go after them, but they're still tellin' jokes and they're still gettin' paid. And I think one thing any working comedian will tell you is to know your audience.
Ah, I getcha. It still applies there, I think, but I sense that a master class on comedy is far from the point of this dialogue xD .
...Also, I'm not qualified to give a master class on comedy >_> .
Sees @joe_galindez off color, but still pretty funny joke get flagged.
Really people of Tapas Forums?
This isn't Tumblr. The greater Internet is not your safe space.
Seriously, there was nothing racist about his joke about black women being hard to see in the dark. That goes for anyone with naturally dark skin pigmentation.
But of course, the usual suspects around these parts (and you know who you are) went and put a ka-bosh on what was a harmless joke because as bigots, they can't tolerate jokes other people make because they didn't make them or because they didn't find it funny.
Boo hoo. It's not for any of you sensitive types to decide what's right and what's "wrong" around here
Had he been actually saying something genuinely racist, I would've flagged his comment in a heartbeat, but because he wasn't being such with his joke, this asinine "wrong think" dog piling he suffered is no different than me recieving undue flak over not being that enthusiastic to see Black Panther because of all the progressive shilling being done to that film (which turned out to be an okay Marvel movie btw).
Me and Joe may not see eye to eye, but I will defend his right to make off color jokes. The man's entitled to free speech after all.
We still got stuff to talk about, @Aspie_Gamer, but I appreciate the support on this one. 
As far as I can tell it's at the discretion of the mods.
What's bothering me is that neither of you seem to know. Maybe one person flagged it, drawing the mods' attention and moving them to hide it. Maybe nobody flagged it, but the mods saw it and hid it. Maybe 50 people saw it and flagged it, drawing the mods' attention and moving them to hide it.
We don't know 'cause we can't see the man behind the curtain. What I'm not seeing any dogpiling. The only posts on that post (heh) have been in defense of it aside from mine, which was simply a suggestion that this might not be the right audience for such a post. It's making the defenders look like the ones who are over-sensitive 
. I don't reckon that's what y'all want.
If what you do want is to complain about PC culture, by all means. I imagine this would be the place for that.
I was being petty one time and throwing flags everywhere. A mod told me, "Stop. I know it's you. Don't make my job any harder. I hide all posts manually." I don't know if that means they could actually identify who flags things, or if I was simply being obvious.
Interesting. If that's true, then we at least know that is not the flagging of a post, but the action of a mod that results in the hiding. We can also surmise that it only takes one flag to draw their attention. One would imagine, though, that they could choose not to act on the request. Perhaps there's a "better safe than sorry" mentality afoot. I tend to live by that motto myself 
.
I do imagine that they can see who it is that places a flag. Mods on a forum usually have the ability to see extra bits of information like that.
When you flag a post, it becomes a private message to the moderator team.
They can see the specific individual(s) that made the flags.
A post is automatically hidden after a certain amount of flags. How many I am unsure of but it seems to be around 3-5. It's at least more than 1-2.
I did not flag Joe's original post (as I feel someone attempted to imply.). I only ever skim read this thread since it is too full of negativity for my taste and I have better shit to do. I found Joe's joke to be unfunny firsthand and rather tasteless secondly, but didn't find it to be ill-intentioned enough to flag.
I do flag posts that are very hateful, ill intentioned, or are blatantly trying to pick a fight.
Freedom of speech is primarily a regulation that was created with publication in mind and what that means is that any publication site, company, or site owner, have the full right (and with certain hate crime laws and other privacy laws in mind they also have the responsibility and obligation) to hide any material they find unsuitable. That is part of what freedom of speech is about on a legal level.
Also, this put aside: Freedom of speech may mean you have the right to say almost whatever you want, but it also means people around you have the full right to say "wow, you're a jerk, piss off"
I may have told this mod that I was gonna beat my children on their behalf. I didn't, of course, because I'm not a fucking cartoon villain.
...That's...that's another factor here, man. Your humor skews hella dark 
, and by now, a lot of people know it. A lot of people also don't like it. So, I reckon plenty folk 'round here are keen to assume the worst of anything you put forth (whatever that might mean at the time). I'm afraid you've a reputation, holmes.
It's entirely possible that if somebody else had posted that pun, it would have been just fine. I mean, it's not like I haven't heard it (or similar) a million times. It's about one of the least offensive black jokes one can make.
It was supposed to move on to a bit about how my wife, who is black, can't actually tell black people apart. Every time there's a black actor onscreen she goes, "Is this Eddie Murphy?" And I'm like, "Woman, that is Morgan Freeman and they look nothing alike."
Urgh. I didn't enjoy that x) . I don't find it offensive, but I also don't find it funny. It sounds like your wife just has face-blindness. It might work better if one of the actors actually wasn't black at all; it would subvert audience expectations (helps them laugh with you) and make you both look silly for thinking the non-black actor was, in fact, black (lets them laugh at you). Might work best if you lead or follow up with a joke about you both being colorblind in the more scientific sense.
Really, I'm just describing this as a stand-up routine 
. It reads pretty flatly as text on a screen.
@joe_galindez @Aspie_Gamer can you both chill about that joke being flagged? you can have your opinions on over sensitivity, but in this particular scenario that joke is an old and well-known staple among jokes considered racist. its the exact joke people would repeat at my school if they wanted to tell a story about a teacher being racist. humour can get touchy, and close to the mark, and thats cool, but that joke was just old and hokey to boot.
the community guidelines are as they are, if posts are hidden manually then mods clearly looked at it and said 'yeah thats against the rules.' so hey, offensive or not, it broke the rules. life goes on.
(also, for the record, never flagged it, totally ignored it)
Well, the timing is butchered now. First I was going to go on about how she actually does vanish in the dark. Like, turn down the lights and it's just eyes and a set of teeth. Then i was going to go on about how, even though she's just one Afro wig away from cosplaying Foxy Brown, she actually hasn't spent a lot of time around other black people and consequently has never had to distinguish among them. And that's a thing:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-people-suffer-from-face-blindness-for-other-races/
Is it actually racist though?
general consensus says yes! thats why it was flagged, why the mods decided to block it, and why people refer to that joke as 'a racist joke' basically everywhere. its even a pretty obvious one. as in like, people who like offensive humour and are pretty moderate in every issue will hear that joke and say 'oh, thats racist' (and i know from experience, like i said, ive heard many people, black and white alike, quote this joke as evidence of someone being racist)
you can talk abt the freedom to pick fun at any group, how thats part of being equal, but i dont think predictable, run of the mill jokes about skintone are very high on the list of things that need defending.
Humor is subjective, holmes. In forum form, I wouldn't have found it funny either way; as I said, I've heard that kind of joke a million times, being black myself. I can remember it being truly funny exactly once. I still get a chuckle thinkin' back on that instance.
And that's from someone who doesn't balk at the joke in and of itself. Lots o' folk here do--probably the majority--and not without cause. Like I said, gotta know your audience.