I think it's insane to suggest regular name calling (however profane) is even similar to racist comments. Just nuts. But this is the year (or 4) of false equivalencies, so there you have it.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. ~ Desiderata
Well it worked, people are talking about Samantha Bee for some fucking reason...
So do we all agree that if she says something like this again she should be fired?
Freedom of speech laws exist so that there there can be no fear of legal persecution to sharing of public opinions, and are foundational to the federal republic of the USA. On the other hand, socially people have always spoken through actions about what words should be tolerable, and they've always set those standards rather arbitrarily, and historically not always correctly. This is why women who wanted to work while their female peers chose the then-expected housewife career were ostracized by women. This is why white people historically congregated with white people predominantly while interracial marriages were abhorrent to some. This is why the Church acted within fair free speech policy by condemning Galileo and ridiculing his name when he shared his opinions (though later betrayed those ideals and showed the need for freedom of speech laws upon his legal persecution).
Freedom of speech laws make it all the more critical for society to socially persecute when necessary in all cases (due to the fact that freedom of speech laws effectively forbid legal persecution for any sharing of opinion), but to expect absolute behaviours from a contextual judgment (i.e. a true democracy) isn't realistic in my opinion. The social court will always evaluate what is worthy of social persecution in a case-by-case, contextualized manner.
'05 - TO, '06 - TO 1, '08 - NYC 1 & 2, '09 - TO, Chi 1 & 2, '10 - Buffalo, NYC 1 & 2, '11 - TO 1 & 2, Hamilton, '13 - Buffalo, Brooklyn 1 & 2, '15 - Global Citizen, '16 - TO 1 & 2, Chi 2
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
Roseanne Barr’s Right to Offend and Our Right to Say No Lindy West
By Lindy West
Contributing Opinion Writer
May 30, 2018
Image Roseanne Barr in March.CreditVera Anderson/WireImage, via Getty Images
On Tuesday, ABC canceled its “Roseanne” revival, the network’s first No. 1 show in 24 years, after its star Roseanne Barr referred to Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, as the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
The decision prompted surprise, relief and schadenfreude from many on the left, who already regarded the sitcom — in which Barr’s character, like Barr herself, is a supporter of President Trump and his radical racist authoritarian ideology — as an alarming bellwether of Trumpism’s slide into normalcy.
Meanwhile, the right-wing backlash is unfolding as scripted: the usual cries of censorship, the usual recriminations about liberal celebrities who once said something mean, the usual lamentations about politically correct overreach, the usual free-market fetishists suddenly oppressed by the marketplace of ideas.
Barr attributed her gleeful antebellum-vintage racism to the sleep aid Ambien and played down her comment as a joke (yes, we know, a racist one). Trump — who himself referred to some immigrants as “animals” this month — predictably joined in, whining that Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, “never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”
Right-wing Twitter (including Barr’s own feed) is now thick with similar sentiments: Here is Joy Behar saying something cutting about Trump. Here is Jimmy Kimmel. Here is Michelle Wolf. Why didn’t the outrage mob come for them? One important difference is that it is possible, or at least up for debate, for Trump’s decorum, health care plan, tax bill or hair to deserve mockery. It is not possible, and well beyond the realm of debate, for black people to deserve five centuries of racialized brutality and dehumanization.
Chattel slavery in America ended 153 years ago. I am only 36 years old, and when my father was born, there were black Americans alive who remembered being the property of white people. Slavery is not our distant past; it is yesterday. Descendants of slaves (again, only a few generations removed) have never been compensated for the hundreds of years of unpaid forced labor upon which white Americans built generational wealth and economic stability. The culturally and legislatively enforced poverty, subjugation and mass incarceration of black people continue to this day, while white supremacist violence saturates our news media, whether it’s identified as such or not.
The Parkland, Fla., high school gunman Nikolas Cruz “talked about killing Mexicans, keeping black people in chains and cutting their necks,” according to CNN. The gunman at Santa Fe High School in Texas, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, posted photos of himself in Nazi regalia. Alek Minassian, who drove his van into a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10, was a member of the “incel” (or “involuntarily celibate”) community, an online misogynist hate group with roots in white supremacist male entitlement.
Elliot Rodger, an incel hero who killed six people in a 2014 rampage, wrote repeatedly about his rage at the sight of white women socializing with black men. In Charlottesville, Va., last year, Heather Heyer was killed by the self-professed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr., one of Trump’s “very fine people.” The stories of black people murdered by the police could fill a library.
Racism is America’s defining sickness, and comparing black and brown people to animals is one of its most pervasive pathogens — a rationalization that, even in 2018, kills people every day. Flint still doesn’t have clean water.
“Roseanne” was not canceled because it is mean or “HORRIBLE” to compare a black person to an ape (though it is both of those things). It was canceled because it carries the weight of both historic horrors and current atrocities — because comparing a black person to an ape nods to a historically rooted yet increasingly emboldened far-right hate movement whose chosen figurehead, Donald Trump, is the president of the United States. Because it is our collective responsibility to not let that movement win, to fight to be a better country, and right now cultural power is all we have.
Perhaps more significantly, “Roseanne” was canceled because it is bad for business (for now) when your prime-time family sitcom’s star sounds like David Duke — just as it will eventually become bad for the N.F.L.’s business to punish black players for protesting police brutality.
Disclosure: I had my own bizarre and unpleasant run-in with Barr in the summer of 2013. I’d appeared on a TV show to talk about political correctness (specifically rape jokes) in comedy, and Barr became convinced that I was the P.C. police. She tweeted a video I’d made about the online harassment that I was receiving (sample: “This big bitch is bitter that no one wants to rape her”) and described me as a “female advocating censorship of comedy.”
I tried to explain, it didn’t work, and things devolved from there in the way they typically do on Twitter. Eventually, in disbelief, I had to block Roseanne Barr. I loved Roseanne Barr. This was not how I’d imagined our first encounter. And she never forgot. Every once in a while, even five years later, she occasionally tweets, “Lindy West is a fat bitch.”
The term “political correctness” (much like the slimy “pro-life”) is a right-wing neologism, a tactical bending of reality, an attempt to colonize the playing field, a bluff to lure dupes into dignifying propaganda. True to form, the credulous left adopted it wholesale in the early ’90s, electively embroiling us in three decades of bad-faith “debate” over whether discouraging white people from using racial slurs constitutes government censorship. Of course it doesn’t. Debate over. Treating anti-P.C. arguments as anything but a shell game props up the lie that it is somehow unfair to identify and point out racism, let alone fight to eradicate it. Pointing out and fighting to eradicate racism is how we build the racism-free world that all but racists profess to want.
The anti-P.C. set deliberately frames political correctness as a sovereign entity, separate from real human beings — like an advisory board or a nutritional label or a silly after-school club that one can heed or ignore with no moral implications — as though if we simply reject political correctness we can still have “Roseanne.” But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness — it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.
What we have here, really, is a person, Roseanne Barr, who called a black person an animal, a comparison that directly refers to and reinforces our country’s genocidal past — a past that still hinders black life in devastating ways, and that good people have been fighting to not just leave behind but repair for generations. Understandably, many people (including the people who worked on the show and paid to make the show) did not like hearing this from Barr, so people at ABC decided to cancel the show.
Political correctness is just people reacting to other people; parents protecting their children; the oppressed and underserved advocating for themselves. Canceling “Roseanne” is not society regulating “mean” speech; it is us regulating our collective morality, so that we don’t atrophy into a moral vacuum. It is saying no, because we are more than animals.
Lindy West is the author of “Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman” and a contributing opinion writer.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Ugh I’m tired of hearing that they aren’t equivalent. No shit. But they are both bad, one worse than the other for sure. And Rosannes show was canceled already what more do you want? You can’t ignore Samatha Bees stupidity just because Barr was stupider
Ugh I’m tired of hearing that they aren’t equivalent. No shit. But they are both bad, one worse than the other for sure. And Rosannes show was canceled already what more do you want? You can’t ignore Samatha Bees stupidity just because Barr was stupider
What more do we want? For people to understand the difference between the two situations. And for Team Trump Treason to get a moral compass.
Ugh I’m tired of hearing that they aren’t equivalent. No shit. But they are both bad, one worse than the other for sure. And Rosannes show was canceled already what more do you want? You can’t ignore Samatha Bees stupidity just because Barr was stupider
I agree. I haven’t seen anyone say they are the same. No one was saying it was equal. Just that there seems to be a difference in how people respond. And the responses pretty much support that claim, no one seems to care and defend it by saying Tosanne was worse. I have little doubt if Ivanka said it about Bee the response would be muxhblarger.
Sorry Brian, I couldn’t find the Pee Wee thread. But do you really want to know what he’s doing right now? I don’t.
0
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,310
Ugh I’m tired of hearing that they aren’t equivalent. No shit. But they are both bad, one worse than the other for sure. And Rosannes show was canceled already what more do you want? You can’t ignore Samatha Bees stupidity just because Barr was stupider
I agree. I haven’t seen anyone say they are the same. No one was saying it was equal. Just that there seems to be a difference in how people respond. And the responses pretty much support that claim, no one seems to care and defend it by saying Tosanne was worse. I have little doubt if Ivanka said it about Bee the response would be muxhblarger.
Sorry Brian, I couldn’t find the Pee Wee thread. But do you really want to know what he’s doing right now? I don’t.
Damn! I fail at sarcasm every time!
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Ugh I’m tired of hearing that they aren’t equivalent. No shit. But they are both bad, one worse than the other for sure. And Rosannes show was canceled already what more do you want? You can’t ignore Samatha Bees stupidity just because Barr was stupider
Then why are we here talking about it on the Roseanne Barr is a racist thread?
If people want to start a thread about Bee, they should go right ahead. The obvious purpose of bringing up Bee in this thread was to try and make the two equivalent. And when someone tries to make a comparison that stupid they sure as hell should be called out on it.
It is so fucking hilarious that the repubes are seeking respect and dignity of the office. Geeze, anyone remember Rushbo denigrating a 12 year old child of the White House when he had an audience of 20 million listeners? Remember that? It’s hilarious that some cringe walking the path covered in broken glass. Waaaaaa. Bunch of snow flakes.
So since it appears people on AMT have lost their collective minds due to trump overload... let me run it down for you:
1) you can be upset/outraged whatever you want to call it about Rosanne and believe it was a racist tweet and... 2) still think Samantha Bee using the c-word on TBS in reference to another woman is horrible and.... 3) think it was terrible when Rush and others attacked a young Chelsea Clinton in horrible ways and... 4) think that the US needs gun control.
I would have thought it was obvious but since everyone is deflecting maybe it wasn’t.
Ugh I’m tired of hearing that they aren’t equivalent. No shit. But they are both bad, one worse than the other for sure. And Rosannes show was canceled already what more do you want? You can’t ignore Samatha Bees stupidity just because Barr was stupider
Then why are we here talking about it on the Roseanne Barr is a racist thread?
If people want to start a thread about Bee, they should go right ahead. The obvious purpose of bringing up Bee in this thread was to try and make the two equivalent. And when someone tries to make a comparison that stupid they sure as hell should be called out on it.
Automatic weapons? At least know what you are talking about before making a tweet. And yes there are such things as cultural differences, that's why the word cunt as always been a very offensive word to me and a hell of a lot of people living here in the states. His tweet is apples and oranges.
Comments
But she didn’t, which is why the “apples and oranges” comments.
Freedom of speech laws make it all the more critical for society to socially persecute when necessary in all cases (due to the fact that freedom of speech laws effectively forbid legal persecution for any sharing of opinion), but to expect absolute behaviours from a contextual judgment (i.e. a true democracy) isn't realistic in my opinion. The social court will always evaluate what is worthy of social persecution in a case-by-case, contextualized manner.
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
Lindy West
By Lindy West
Contributing Opinion Writer
May 30, 2018
Image
Roseanne Barr in March.CreditVera Anderson/WireImage, via Getty Images
On Tuesday, ABC canceled its “Roseanne” revival, the network’s first No. 1 show in 24 years, after its star Roseanne Barr referred to Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, as the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”
The decision prompted surprise, relief and schadenfreude from many on the left, who already regarded the sitcom — in which Barr’s character, like Barr herself, is a supporter of President Trump and his radical racist authoritarian ideology — as an alarming bellwether of Trumpism’s slide into normalcy.
Meanwhile, the right-wing backlash is unfolding as scripted: the usual cries of censorship, the usual recriminations about liberal celebrities who once said something mean, the usual lamentations about politically correct overreach, the usual free-market fetishists suddenly oppressed by the marketplace of ideas.
Barr attributed her gleeful antebellum-vintage racism to the sleep aid Ambien and played down her comment as a joke (yes, we know, a racist one). Trump — who himself referred to some immigrants as “animals” this month — predictably joined in, whining that Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, “never called President Donald J. Trump to apologize for the HORRIBLE statements made and said about me on ABC.”
Right-wing Twitter (including Barr’s own feed) is now thick with similar sentiments: Here is Joy Behar saying something cutting about Trump. Here is Jimmy Kimmel. Here is Michelle Wolf. Why didn’t the outrage mob come for them? One important difference is that it is possible, or at least up for debate, for Trump’s decorum, health care plan, tax bill or hair to deserve mockery. It is not possible, and well beyond the realm of debate, for black people to deserve five centuries of racialized brutality and dehumanization.
Chattel slavery in America ended 153 years ago. I am only 36 years old, and when my father was born, there were black Americans alive who remembered being the property of white people. Slavery is not our distant past; it is yesterday. Descendants of slaves (again, only a few generations removed) have never been compensated for the hundreds of years of unpaid forced labor upon which white Americans built generational wealth and economic stability. The culturally and legislatively enforced poverty, subjugation and mass incarceration of black people continue to this day, while white supremacist violence saturates our news media, whether it’s identified as such or not.
The Parkland, Fla., high school gunman Nikolas Cruz “talked about killing Mexicans, keeping black people in chains and cutting their necks,” according to CNN. The gunman at Santa Fe High School in Texas, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, posted photos of himself in Nazi regalia. Alek Minassian, who drove his van into a crowded sidewalk in Toronto, killing 10, was a member of the “incel” (or “involuntarily celibate”) community, an online misogynist hate group with roots in white supremacist male entitlement.
Elliot Rodger, an incel hero who killed six people in a 2014 rampage, wrote repeatedly about his rage at the sight of white women socializing with black men. In Charlottesville, Va., last year, Heather Heyer was killed by the self-professed neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr., one of Trump’s “very fine people.” The stories of black people murdered by the police could fill a library.
Racism is America’s defining sickness, and comparing black and brown people to animals is one of its most pervasive pathogens — a rationalization that, even in 2018, kills people every day. Flint still doesn’t have clean water.
“Roseanne” was not canceled because it is mean or “HORRIBLE” to compare a black person to an ape (though it is both of those things). It was canceled because it carries the weight of both historic horrors and current atrocities — because comparing a black person to an ape nods to a historically rooted yet increasingly emboldened far-right hate movement whose chosen figurehead, Donald Trump, is the president of the United States. Because it is our collective responsibility to not let that movement win, to fight to be a better country, and right now cultural power is all we have.
Perhaps more significantly, “Roseanne” was canceled because it is bad for business (for now) when your prime-time family sitcom’s star sounds like David Duke — just as it will eventually become bad for the N.F.L.’s business to punish black players for protesting police brutality.
Disclosure: I had my own bizarre and unpleasant run-in with Barr in the summer of 2013. I’d appeared on a TV show to talk about political correctness (specifically rape jokes) in comedy, and Barr became convinced that I was the P.C. police. She tweeted a video I’d made about the online harassment that I was receiving (sample: “This big bitch is bitter that no one wants to rape her”) and described me as a “female advocating censorship of comedy.”
I tried to explain, it didn’t work, and things devolved from there in the way they typically do on Twitter. Eventually, in disbelief, I had to block Roseanne Barr. I loved Roseanne Barr. This was not how I’d imagined our first encounter. And she never forgot. Every once in a while, even five years later, she occasionally tweets, “Lindy West is a fat bitch.”
The term “political correctness” (much like the slimy “pro-life”) is a right-wing neologism, a tactical bending of reality, an attempt to colonize the playing field, a bluff to lure dupes into dignifying propaganda. True to form, the credulous left adopted it wholesale in the early ’90s, electively embroiling us in three decades of bad-faith “debate” over whether discouraging white people from using racial slurs constitutes government censorship. Of course it doesn’t. Debate over. Treating anti-P.C. arguments as anything but a shell game props up the lie that it is somehow unfair to identify and point out racism, let alone fight to eradicate it. Pointing out and fighting to eradicate racism is how we build the racism-free world that all but racists profess to want.
The anti-P.C. set deliberately frames political correctness as a sovereign entity, separate from real human beings — like an advisory board or a nutritional label or a silly after-school club that one can heed or ignore with no moral implications — as though if we simply reject political correctness we can still have “Roseanne.” But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness — it’s a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.
What we have here, really, is a person, Roseanne Barr, who called a black person an animal, a comparison that directly refers to and reinforces our country’s genocidal past — a past that still hinders black life in devastating ways, and that good people have been fighting to not just leave behind but repair for generations. Understandably, many people (including the people who worked on the show and paid to make the show) did not like hearing this from Barr, so people at ABC decided to cancel the show.
Political correctness is just people reacting to other people; parents protecting their children; the oppressed and underserved advocating for themselves. Canceling “Roseanne” is not society regulating “mean” speech; it is us regulating our collective morality, so that we don’t atrophy into a moral vacuum. It is saying no, because we are more than animals.
Lindy West is the author of “Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman” and a contributing opinion writer.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
self hating racism is a little known side effect, but it normally hits me in a big way.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Sorry Brian, I couldn’t find the Pee Wee thread. But do you really want to know what he’s doing right now? I don’t.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
If people want to start a thread about Bee, they should go right ahead. The obvious purpose of bringing up Bee in this thread was to try and make the two equivalent. And when someone tries to make a comparison that stupid they sure as hell should be called out on it.
Anyways, I agree with this tweet.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_equivalence
1) you can be upset/outraged whatever you want to call it about Rosanne and believe it was a racist tweet and...
2) still think Samantha Bee using the c-word on TBS in reference to another woman is horrible and....
3) think it was terrible when Rush and others attacked a young Chelsea Clinton in horrible ways and...
4) think that the US needs gun control.
I would have thought it was obvious but since everyone is deflecting maybe it wasn’t.
And yes there are such things as cultural differences, that's why the word cunt as always been a very offensive word to me and a hell of a lot of people living here in the states.
His tweet is apples and oranges.