Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)
speaker
140 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Jonathan Kieperman (Lomez)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There's this great moment in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Roger is handcuffed to the detective and And this is causing them all sorts of problems. And the detective is trying to saw the handcuffs off. And Roger at one point just slips out of the handcuffs in this sight gag. You know, it's funny. And the detective very angrily says to him, you're telling me you could do that at any time?
And Roger Rabbit says to him, no, only when it's funny. And the upshot of this anecdote is that if it's funny, okay, and funny here now is a stand-in for has artistic value independent of the thing happening, then it's worth preserving and worth participating in. So this Tintin book or Tantan, I don't know. Tantan is the like snobby French way of saying it.
Real Americans. You know, I'm a vulgar populist, you know, Trump supporters.
Yeah. So the operating question for me as a publisher is, is it funny? And again, does it have value? Does it have artistic merit? Then there's also the archival thing. You know, the archival function is very important for a publisher. These are important texts. They tell us something not just about who we were, but in turn about who we are.
And simply forgetting that these things existed does nobody any good at all. I don't think we need to protect people from that kind of offense. The other point, which is, aren't these sort of views bad, though? And so we should disarm on these questions, if I understand what you're putting to me. And I would say maybe kind of.
It depends because these views do have consequences that we need to properly address. And the only way to address them is by being honest about causes. So if we're talking about, for example, crime rates and we see like uneven incarceration rates and our answer is, well, there's over-policing. And then our solution to that is we get rid of police.
Well, that has a that creates an increase in crime. And no, as long as disarming on these questions and not being honest about these questions allows for these kinds of social pathologies to sort of rule over how we function in life, I think is bad. And we need to be honest about them. Right. And it's not yet. But what?
No, not necessarily. I think there are publishers who are already filling that niche, so it's not my responsibility to do that. But also, if you're the kind of person who's interested in that content, it's been there and you can go find it. And I'm glad you can. I think actually these things are important for us to be able to discuss and...
I would say this to your concern about these racial taboos in particular, actually don't treat them any different than any other kind of political or social taboo. There's some added maybe vitriol or sharpness to some of these memes we're seeing now. But that's that's mostly because this is a topic of conversation, a category of conversation that has been entirely verboten. For a while now.
OK, let's let's call it at least several decades. And the problem with this particular topic, in my view, is it starts with the supposition that it's firstly a moral question and any decent person, morally decent person already agrees with these basic sort of anti-racist premises. Right. So to even raise the questions, it's a mark against your character.
And we can't even get to the point where we're having the policy debate. And what that creates then is this environment in which people who want to have this debate have to – Figure out a way to talk about it and get through these filters.
And I think the kind of abrasive meme making that you're identifying when it comes to racial questions is a function of the manner in which this part of the discursive landscape has been previously closed off. And if we open it back up and allow for sober conversation, then it'll lose the power to sort of carry these memes. They just won't be as interesting or funny because they're not as taboo.
Okay, but yeah, I would just ask, what exactly are you worried about? So let me start with this. First of all, lies are brittle. Ultimately, they fall apart. Truth is durable, okay? And to build anything that's lasting, it has to rest on top of truth. And so we have to start there. That's my view. Okay.
And in order to discover truth, we need to be willing to test our assumptions about everything and continuously test those assumptions. And if we don't continuously test those assumptions, we not just forget what we believe, we forget why we believe those things. Okay.
And I think this is actually something the left has fallen in the trap of the left has kind of forgotten how to make the argument for their own beliefs because they've denied anybody who objects to their underlying assumptions about the world. I think it would be a mistake for us.
to erect a kind of discursive force field around certain categories of questions in an effort to preclude the kind of discomfort. And again, this concern that you're articulating to me is very vague. I don't actually know what you're worried about. I mean, people have been questioning these narratives for a long time. You know, David Irving has been challenging the Holocaust for a long time.
Is like it better to not have those conversations? I don't think it is. I think we should just let it out. It can exist in the world.
So I mean, I understand where the concern is coming from, I guess. I think it's I think it's unfounded. I don't think it actually will materialize into something real and something we'll have to worry about. And I think actually the alternative presents a much worse possibility.
And I think we saw some of that with the great awokening or, you know, this sort of post George Floyd's 2020 sort of impulse to not just blame white people for this kind of subordinate position of people of color per se, but then make actual policy choices or institutional choices to try to, you know, level that by harming white people. And so.
What I'd say here is the reason that was bad was not because it pointed to racial discrepancies, but because it was wrong. It didn't pass the test of evidence. The question is not just is the discrepancy exists. The question is why. And if we. don't allow ourselves to have an honest conversation about that, what fills the vacuum is the most incendiary and most harmful explanations.
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