#mockery

[itsmythang]

Kenny Loggins took Legal action against Donald Trump, demanding $500 million in copyright lawsuit after his song “Danger Zone” was used without permission in an AI video mocking anti-Trump demonstrators during the No Kings Day March! 👏🏽👏🏽

[mockva]

[philosophybits]

You believe in a crystal palace, eternally indestructible; a palace, that is, at which you could never stick out your tongue furtively, or gesture rudely from inside your pocket. Well, maybe I am afraid of this building exactly because it is crystal and eternally indestructible and that it will be impossible to stick out my tongue at it, even furtively... Laugh as you will. I can take any amount of mockery but still I won’t say that I am satiated when I am hungry; still I know that I won’t settle for a compromise, for a persistent, recurring zero, just because it exists according to the laws of nature and exists in reality.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

[b-arcane63]

Ne pensez-vous pas qu'il convient d'être sincère dans ses partages sur les réseaux (celui-ci en particulier) et s'assurer parallèlement d'étre honnête envers soi dans ses actes (même à l'abri des regards... mais, bien sûr, là aussi tout est relatif...) ?

[veiledbyart]

More art I forgot to put onto tumblr. @greebers and I were hanging out in voice a while ago, talking about a D&D ship of ours - and what their hypothetical child would look like. So here she is!

Don’t use or repost my art without permission.

[sinvulkt-art]

@verso-hell-week , 4th Circle | Mockery

I was thinking about visage island masks mostly.

[llblu-glull]

I've seen alot of hazbin hotel s2 scenes, and ngl, I'm very tempted to break a rule I've placed on myself since this whole editing thing started.

It's not so much a rule as it is just me being broke but the rule is: no editing shows/movies from pay-to-watch streaming apps.

Very tempted (especially the radiosilence scenes).

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Why tyrants hate jokes

From Caesar to Stalin, rulers have revealed their true character by how they respond to mockery.

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Jul 28, 2026

One of the defining characteristics of a tyrant is his or her unwillingness to be mocked. When the poet Osip Mandelstam poked fun at Stalin’s ‘cockroach whiskers’ and his fingers ‘fatty like worms’ he was exiled and eventually sentenced to five years in a corrective labour camp. Within a year of his imprisonment, he had died of malnutrition and was buried in an unmarked grave.

One might have expected that, given its history, Germany would be especially wary of laws that ringfence politicians from ridicule. Yet in 2021, its government expanded Section 188 of the Criminal Code – aimed at protecting politicians from defamation – so that even crude insults could result in prosecution. This draconian law is why the Free Speech Union is now hoping to launch a branch in Germany.

As with all ‘hate speech’ laws, Section 188 is wide open to exploitation by any politician seeking to suppress dissent. In November 2024, Bavarian police raided the house of retired soldier Stefan Niehoff for a social media post in which he had referred to Robert Habeck, then Germany’s vice-chancellor, as a ‘Schwachkopf’ (dummy). That mild insult was all it took to see his liberties violated by the state.

Such legislation is the equivalent of the lèse-majesté laws that still exist in certain parts of the world, designed to punish subjects who denigrate the king. Countries that retain these laws include Thailand, Cambodia, Jordan, Morocco, Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Bhutan. The maximum penalty for insulting the king in Jordan is eerily identical to that prescribed by Section 188 in Germany: a prison sentence of three years.

In Turkey, citizens face similar oppression. Since becoming president in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has relied on Article 299 of Turkey’s Penal Code – a previously little-used offence criminalising insults to the president – to investigate and prosecute tens of thousands of his critics. Former beauty queen Merve Büyüksaraç was convicted and received a suspended sentence for reposting on Instagram a satirical poem about the president that she had found funny.

The case of German comic Jan Böhmermann is similarly revealing. In 2016, he had produced a music video which ridiculed Erdoğan. In response, the Turkish government summoned the German ambassador in Ankara to demand that the video be deleted from the internet. Böhmermann in turn responded with a poem that upped the offensiveness tenfold, including references to Erdoğan having sex with goats and sheep. Turkey then requested that Böhmermann be prosecuted under Section 103 of the German Criminal Code, which protected foreign heads of state from insults.

That law was repealed in 2018, but Section 188 remains on the German statute books in its expanded form and is arguably even more authoritarian. A little knowledge of the history of tyranny would not go amiss, and in particular how this kind of legislation has typically been so vaguely worded. Section 188 contains open-ended concepts such as whether a statement is ‘capable of significantly hindering’ a politician’s public work. In the UK, Section 127 of the Communications Act criminalises ‘grossly offensive’ speech, a categorisation that it makes no effort to define.

Such vagueness is not accidental. It enables the authorities to interpret the law expansively, applying it to whatever speech or behaviour they choose to regard as criminal.

The same was true of Article 58-10 of the RSFSR Criminal Code under Stalin, which prohibited ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ in deliberately broad terms so that it could cover jokes and satirical anecdotes. Many examples are still preserved in archives from the Soviet era and are cited in Jonathan Waterlow’s book It’s Only a Joke, Comrade! (2018). His research shows how, even under the threat of the Gulag, citizens did not stop mocking their leader.

While we would not wish to emulate Ancient Rome in most respects, some of its leaders understood perfectly well that even hurtful invective was necessary for a stable society. The famed triumphs of generals victorious after war – grand celebratory processions through the city – were not devoid of barbed humour. It sounds incredible to us, but it was traditional for the soldiers marching directly behind their leader to sing scurrilous songs about him, well within earshot.

Suetonius has left us specific examples of songs from the triumph of Julius Caesar after his victory in the Gallic Wars.

Gallias Caesar subegit, Nicomedes Caesarem: Ecce Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias, Nicomedes non triumphat qui subegit Caesarem. Caesar conquered Gaul; Nicomedes conquered Caesar. Behold, Caesar, who conquered Gaul, now celebrates a triumph; Nicomedes, who conquered Caesar, celebrates no triumph.

This was a reference to one of the most persistent slanders against Caesar: that he had taken the passive sexual role to King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia while he was residing at his court as a teenager. Here’s another example:

Urbani, servate uxores: moechum calvom adducimus. Aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum. Citizens, guard your wives: we’re bringing home the bald adulterer. You fucked away in Gaul the gold that you borrowed here in Rome.

The joke mocks Caesar’s reputation as a serial adulterer, suggesting that the enormous sums he borrowed to advance his political career and maintain a lavish lifestyle ended up being squandered on numerous sexual liaisons during the campaign.

We might interpret these songs, and the fact that Caesar permitted the soldiers to sing them in public while marching directly behind him, as evidence that he was very thick-skinned and enjoyed a joke at his expense. The ancient sources suggest the opposite. Caesar deeply resented the charge of being fucked by Nicomedes, and found it humiliating that it was so persistently repeated throughout his life.

Caesar was especially sensitive about his baldness. Suetonius writes that ‘he used to comb forward the scanty locks from the back of his head’ (deficientem capillum revocare a vertice adsueverat) and that he was relieved when he was granted the privilege of wearing his laurel wreath at all times because it concealed his receding hairline. Moreover, we are told that his insecurity about his baldness was due to the fact that it ‘often exposed him to the jests of his detractors’ (saepe obtrectatorum iocis obnoxiam).

So why would the most powerful man in Rome, who was soon to be declared ‘perpetual dictator’, tolerate this public abuse if he found it so offensive? In his book Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero (1908), W. Warde Fowler suggests that these songs served an apotropaic function, that they would help ward off the envy of the gods and contain the hubris of the victorious general. It was a reminder that, for all his glory, he was still a man.

Yet it also reflected a broader feature of Roman political culture. Public ridicule of even the most powerful figures was accepted as part of civic life. Compare Caesar’s tolerance for obscene songs to the emperors who treated ridicule or criticism as a crime to be punished. According to Tacitus, the poet Sextus Paconianus was strangled in prison for composing verses against Tiberius. Suetonius writes of a man who joked about Domitian fixing a gladiatorial match; he was thrown to the dogs for his trouble. Both Suetonius and Dio Cassius portray Caligula as violently intolerant of ridicule. He had one comedic playwright burned alive for a double entendre that he took personally. One of my favourite stories about Caligula is that he was so embarrassed by his hirsute body that he made it a capital offence to mention goats in his presence.

The tyrant always kills the clown. The true test of power is not whether a ruler is mocked, but whether he permits himself to be mocked. From Rome to the Soviet Union, history suggests that regimes become most dangerous when they cease to tolerate ridicule. It is a lesson that the German government appears to have forgotten.

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Consider who you're not allowed to make fun of and you'll know who the tyrants are.