Personally, i don’t think you even need a pass for simply making bad jokes.
Telling Jokes that offend people isn’t really the same as actually holding the beliefs the jokes are making fun of.
Making jokes about pedophilia is tasteless, but it’s not morally reprehensible.
I read that stuff and think ‘Ted Cruz is a creep, but Gunn is kinda creepy too.’
I have to agree with you on this. Until I actually saw what he had written I assumed it was just some off color weird stuff but he is straight on creepy with most of those tweets. You have to wonder what makes someone write that kind of stuff (is it somehow taken out of context or something)?
Some of the are responses to other people and seem to be riffing on what they said, so you’d have to pull up the original tweet for context.
Those aren’t even exceptionally tasteless jokes. They’re just…early 00’s internet tasteless (as an aesthetic, I know that the tweets themselves are more recent).
Much of what I saw mentioned kids. I think it was on QT3, and the print was very tiny, so it’s possible I saw some replies and not his actual tweets?
A couple of them start with RT, indicating they’re replies.
Also, mentioning kids != Pedophelia. Assuming those are the worst of the bunch, it’s pretty weak sauce.
They are, to borrow a phrase, “locker room talk”.
Yea, I remember the urinating one. Seems he does/did have a thing about pedophilia humor though.
Yeah, that’s clearly in his ouevre. It’s used as a lazy appeal to shock value in lieu of writing an actual joke.
I fear for baby groot.
Just don’t pee in his pot and he’ll be fine.
Yeah, that’s how i read it. They are tasteless jokes, but that’s not really something worthy of taking real offense.
It’s not akin to racist jokes or something, because racist jokes actually require you to be racist to appreciate them. These jokes would require you to have bad taste, but that’s not really as objectively bad a thing as racism.
This is essentially another example of folks on the far right not really grasping what makes something like Rosanne being a racist nut, bad. They are like, “look, both of these people told offensive jokes! They are the same!” But they aren’t.
It’s like when folks said that Trump saying he grabbed women by the pussy was no worse than when other people used vulgar language. They were either unable or unwilling to understand that it wasn’t the mere vulgarity of the language that was the problem.
Vulgar language is distasteful.
Saying that you can abuse women because you are rich and powerful is morally reprehensible.
These are different kinds of things.
This. Exactly and completely this.
Amen.
Except I’ve seen right wingers attacked for mere vulgar language. Obviously there have also been right wingers attacked for outright racism.
It’s the former that is the double standard people are complaining about.
I don’t think Gunn should have been fired, but I’ve seen the same thing happen on the other side plenty of times. The pitchfork and torches brigade care about your politics, the content of any ill advised tweets is just an excuse.
Several of Gunn’s ‘different kind of things’ jokes are directed at trans people, who would surely find them offensive. Others are vulgar, thus offensive, for the pure joy of being vulgar, thus offensive. People who make offensive jokes about one kind of minority will make offensive jokes about another kind of minority. Why not? I wouldn’t hire the guy.
Has there been any kind of LGBT etc outrage on his tweets?
I find entertainers who do this kind of thing being punished “for life” for something they may have said/done years ago interesting when you compare them to how athletes are treated. If you are an athlete, you show contrition, maybe undergo a training class of somekind, serve a probation period and everyone forgets about it.
I don’t want my politicians doing this however, or anyone in government where they can actually do something about their beliefs.
…this is not to the credit of ‘everyone’.
Agreed.
I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve grappled well as a culture with either the permanent or public nature of internet discourse. Social cohesion depends on being able to preset different “faces” in different social contexts and hiding–to some extent–our feelings and perceptions. We have a highly developed facial musculature and vocal apparatus for this purpose, and we are highly attuned to detect slight variations in these for social cues. The internet turns all of that inside out. Everything is public, nothing is contextual, everything is permanent. You need more, not fewer words to provide context without your voice and face as a mediator, but Twitter enforces fewer. It’s awful. I’m not losing sleep over Gunn being ousted, but 1) this was a calculated effort by Mike Cernovich, who is not an ally of anyone you’d want to be an ally of. 2) The internet is full of spiders. Ken White posted this tweet yesterday, someone took it at face value and posted a vituperative response, was immediately dog-piled by Popehat defenders, and nothing constructive at all happened. We’re bad at this, and we should start thinking about the cultural consequences of that.
I think the things people say on social media are often very like the things they say when they’re drunk or otherwise have lowered inhibitions. They’re the things they really believe and normally don’t feel safe saying. I think when people tell us that they are bad people we ought to take them at their word.