TY for the rep. I grew up in the day when Don Rickels could take to the stage or appear on tv and pull off his "no holds barred across the universe comic smackdown".
I really truly miss those days. When we could laugh at ourselves and others and no one had a thin skin.
"Mockery" was something that happened daily and without malice.
Sheesh. I'm thinking if Fawlty Towers did the "german guest" routine in today's world, Basil would be sued and prosecuted for hate speech.
Thank you for the rep, though you disagree with my paralel, which was more about US politics than Europe, though I suspect their is like some applicability there as well. The Europeans seem to have kept their corporate jins in the bottle, but the partisanship is still thick.
In the US, we have seen the rise of people who specialize in being provocative and rude to the opposite in debate to the point the opponent walks away in anger and the provocateur and his allies celebrate it as a victory and it gets put on UTube.
We no longer see ourselves as one nation in practical terms, but of two armed camps with their own sources of authoritative information, world views, interpretations of history, etc.
This nation is dangerously close to rebellion and civil war, IMO.