Jocko Willink Evaluates Celebrities Slapping Each Other. Will Smith and Chris Rock, Oscars.

Chris Rock making the most harmless joke and Jada telling Will to slap him for that is one of the best examples of how thin skinned and sensitive people have gotten today.

 

Will Smith laughed at the joke until he saw his wife did not approve and then felt obligated to slap Chris Rock. So yes, she did for all intents and purposes direct Will to slap Chris. Jada apparently wears the pants in the family.

 

Jocko makes some great points. Especially about a smack being more about humiliation than an attempt to harm. Never really listened to his podcast before. Can’t help feeling that his insights into human interactions might have further appeal. Maybe he should do a guest spot on Ru Pauls Drag Race, if that’s still a thing? THAT would be funny 🙂
Depending on what level Will Smith is in Scientology, this is totally acceptable behavior to display. Leah Remini goes into it pretty deep. G.I. Jane is a strong independent woman who overcomes the odds of adversity in a male dominated military organization within a more male dominated section of the military known as the Navy SEALs. If anything it’s compliment to her resilience and power. Why anybody would take offense to that joke is above and beyond me. It is clearly all her bruised vanity.
Chris Rock behaved like a class-act. I’m impressed with how he handled such a weird situation.
I don’t know man, I really think that Chris Rock putting his hands up defending himself would have actually made him look super weak. The camera showed Will even laughing at the joke at first and Rock saw it, too, so he probably thought Will was in for the joke and just wanted to come up stage and mess with him in a funny and gentle way. In a setting like this (Oscars, roast, high profile) the least you’d expect is an assault. So I don’t know about Jocko’s comment about Chris making a mistake of not defending himself. Were it in a street corner at night and someone would walk to me like this, ok, like bro – chill out. But on a fucking stage, having a celeb coming to you with tons of people watching? You just could’t predict it. What if Will would have actually wanted to just mess around with Chris and then Chris puts his fucking hands up? Then he would look stupid and weak. Summarized, Chris Rock did everything 100% correct in the moment. People now just want to outdo him by adding things that they never would have even thought about in Rock’s shoes so they don’t look stupid lol 😝 Peace out
These are people who know that the world watches them. Will Smith just showed his fans that it’s okay to slap people for what happened. This in a world with increasingly weaker moral values. It’s just waiting for agression to come from this. They should have pulled his awards and fined him for doing this.
Echo was spot on with his assessment when talking about the celebrity class: “You guys couldn’t take a joke cause you guys are all sensitive and weak.” #truth #micdrop
its always easier when its not with your wife
Echo f-ing nailed, on the head, exactly what was going through Will’s mind: I’m not afraid of taking a beating from Chris, I’m afraid of taking a beating from Jada, so I’m clear to walk up there… If it were Joe Rogan?! Forget about it.

How not to talk about African fiction

The history of modern African fiction is essentially 100 years of branding disaster. In marketing African fiction, the conventional practice among publishers both in Africa and the west has been to simply tag a novel to a social issue. “Such and such a novel explores colonialism.” Done. “So and so offers a searing representation of the scourge of misogyny.” Done. “Corruption takes center stage in so and so’s novel.” Done.

African fiction is packaged and circulated, bought and sold not on the basis of its aesthetic value but of its thematic preoccupation.

.. Here are the opening sentences of the Amazon blurb of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

A postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.

Compare this to the only opening sentence of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.

A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun.

.. To reduce all the flirty, humorous beauty of Adichie’s novel to “a tender story about race” is just wrong and borderline patronizing. But it also demonstrates the inherent bias in the way readers are invited to encounter African novels.

..‘I’m wary of “getting tagged”’: author Helen Oyeyemi