Banter is good

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I am not a destroyer of reputations, I am a liberator of them!

The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that banter, for lack of a better word, is good. Banter is right, it works. Banter clarifies, cuts through the bullshittery and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Banter in all its forms. Sarcasm. Parody. Ridicule. Banter for laughs, to self-aggrandise, to demean, to prick bubbles, to draw the undeserving air from fashionable ideas, has marked the upward surge of personkind, and banter – you mark my words – will not only save Wickliffe Hampton, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

—Gordon Moron, Batshit Street

Chief investment officer Peter Branner complained the press was making “childish” jokes about the change.

He said it would be unethical to treat an individual in the same way.

In an interview with the trade publication Financial News, he said: “I understand that corporate bullying to some extent is part of the game with the press, even though it’s a little childish to keep hammering the missing vowels in our name.”

The Financial Times responded by publishing a post that read ”Lv Abrdn aln” (Leave Abrdn alone), while City AM ran with a front page on Tuesday that read “Abrdn: an apology - sry we kp tkng th pss ot of yr mssng vwls”.

We live in an age of unparalleled stupidity. Charlatanry. Bad ideas — notions that are not just bad, but incoherent — persist: cryptocurrency, stakeholder capitalism, data modernism, techno-utopianism, empathy, critical theory psychological safety.

Some of this we put down to a bullshit detector defeat device: that we must be nice, empathetic, respectful of other’s opinions with the aim of preserving at all costs — on pain of utter evisceration — psychological safety.

Banter — once a productive tension-breaker, a way of building relationships and gently letting each other know when it is time to wind our necks in — is verboten. Certain beliefs are “protected characteristics” and so immune from casual mockery.

Which is why it is such a relief to find a class of persons having no protected characteristics, deserving no compassion, for whom banter is absolutely game on: the financial services corporation. We should at once brush off it's snivelling.

See also

• Banter
• Reasons to hope we are in a post truth world