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This equivocation is maddening.
Jimmy Kimmel basically did the equivalent of going on live TV the day after 9/11 and said “Bush did 9/11 and if you think otherwise you are a fucking retard.” and very predictably got shitcanned for it.
This is nowhere near the cancel culture of 2014 - 2022 where leftists were digging up ten year old tweets of jokes in semi poor taste, private conversations or video of teenagers singing along to rap in their car in high school and getting people expelled or fired.
How on earth can you justify this belief?
ABC yanked Bill Maher's show for saying that the 9/11 attackers weren't cowardly.
I looked that it up at one point and its not so straight forward. IIRC, he stayed on the air the rest of the year and just wasn't renewed, and ABC claims that the non-renewal was due to ratings, not what he said. Bill Maher claims that he was canceled for what he says, but he would have an incentive to spin it that way, it looks better for him to be canceled for being edgy than for having low ratings.
I’m not a huge fan of Maher but he’s clearly a lot more talented and intelligent than Jimmy Kimmel.
Not a super high bar, mind you, but I’m not damning Maher with faint praise; I’m sure it explains both his ability to be edgy and escape the worst consequences and not get immediately fired for overstepping the line.
Jimmy’s biggest sin is just being retarded and unfunny. I’m as angry as anyone about Charlie Kirk’s death but even I’ve seen some decent jokes about it, and I’ll give credit where credits due.
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Yep! I remember clearly.
That was rather unwise to say even if it was true. I remember being annoyed by that but not particularly surprised.
What Jimmy Kimmel did was actually much, much worse; dancing on the grave of a recently murdered victim of political assassination and simultaneously spreading an easily disprovable conspiracy theory for obvious partisan reasons immediately after a very tragic event.
Which is why the “Bush did 9/11 also all those firefighters that voted republicans deserved to die” on 9/12 is rather apt comparison, no?
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What I’ve observed over the past 7-8 days has been general insanity everywhere, with people on both sides failing to have any awareness of their own insanity as they use unreliable information or malevolent lies to judge those crazed loons on the other side. This (Kimmel situation, all the over the top responses and false equivalencies) is just another example. Woke left or “woke right”, it looks all the same to me. (European, no US political affiliation, interested observer from afar.)
I'm not sure what unreliable information and malevolent lies the right has embraced- AFAIK the original narrative 'far left shooter, upset about Charlie's stance on trans' was close enough to government work.
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I think this is also a false equivalence: the two sides so-called “cancel culture” aren’t equivalent either.
They actually mirror the limited / unlimited dichotomy between conservatives & progressives basically perfectly.
During the woke left reign of terror of 2014 - 2022 it was an increasingly intense and long list of things that you had to positively affirm or at least not contradict in order to (maybe, possibly) avoid being canceled. It changed day by day, hour by hour, year by year, and grew longer and more complex. Like multiple dials constantly being adjusted.**
In the “woke right reign of terror” that is now being feverishly being dreamed up by people who imagine the current situation is analogous, it’s a bright line to not be crossed; it’s very simple, obvious and easy to know what not to do in order to not incur the wrath of the “woke right” At this current moment.
Step One: Don’t ghoulishly dance on the grave of a recently murdered conservative activist and icon and state that he deserved to be murdered.
Step two: There’s no step two. That’s it.
The “woke right” aren’t demanding performative mourning from people who clearly hate them. They don’t wish to compel speech out of anyone. All these people had to do was not justify out loud the cold blooded murder of their colleagues.
But they simply can’t help themselves.
** An observation is that conservatives view violence / force as a switch and progressives see it as a dial also maps nicely onto this.
I get it, false equivalencies are everywhere (there are probably five or six in this thread) and the general level of doublethink is so extreme it would have made Orwell think twice.
But…
to me is ghoulish in and itself. It’s illustrating a point by selecting language and imagery that bears no resemblance to what it’s trying to describe or critique. Another false equivalency, maybe.
If everyone would just get offline a bit longer, talk to (and listen to) real people in the real world, and see them as more than just 2D avatars or label representations of some oversimplified worldview, things might slowly start getting better for everyone.
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Kimmel disparaged the MAGA base and made a factual error (and there's a possibility he believed it at the time). In no way did he dance on anyone's grave.
That part of the comment was directed more generically at the thousands and thousands of people posting their response to Kirk’s death, often using their real name on social media.
I was addressing Striker’s observation.
Jimmy’s sin was that he was too stupid to understand what he was saying and not funny enough to pull it off anyways. If he believed it at the time, it’s even worse as far as I think.
Fired for incompetence, can’t wait to never see his voice or hear his face ever again. Hope he learns to code.
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