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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
Once again, I'm seeing the center left Ryan Grim types run with "Jimmy Kimmel was fired for a joke! What, is comedy illegal now?"
I have to ask, what was the joke? What was the setup? What was the punchline? If this were a rant Tim Dillon were delivering, and the context is we are laughing at what a sociopath Tim Dillon is, and that he's saying shit no human being could possibly believe with a straight face, ok. Has that become Jimmy Kimmel's act? Was the joke that he's so retarded and Trump Deranged that this is funny?
Falling back on "It's just a joke" is the bully behavior of people who abuse you. When you get upset at being punched, called a faggot, and having you D&D books stolen, they go "It's just a joke, lighten up". "It's just a joke" is always the last defense of the bully when the bill finally comes due.
It’s so weird seeing the left switch back to defending free speech and offensiveness in comedy and the right now justifying firings over microaggressions.
I guess I got too used to the brief span of time between 2008-2024 and should just expect this kind of reversal in things I assumed were stable to happen several more times across my lifetime.
Nybbler is correct that it's not a microaggression. A microaggression is similar to a backhanded compliment - "You're pretty hardworking for a black guy."
That said, there is nothing new under the sun. Cancel culture is nothing but the current iteration of wanting bad things to happen to people you dislike and the people you hate to have no power to do the same to you. One side may have more influence at any given moment, but even the minority will try and fail at it.
I always thought that was flicking someone's nipple. You learn something new everyday.
I remember Thomas Hobbes made the interesting analogy of how the Leviathan pacifies the worst impulses and instincts in men and how that deceives them into thinking this veil of civility has made man less barbaric than he otherwise is. In reality, it hasn't. The legal code has just become the new battlefield and substitute for one man to conduct warfare against another. Inter-tribal political warfare has never stopped and will likely never not remain an intrinsic feature of human beings.
Even in ideologically purist societies like Communist China, there are massive internal divisions and all manner of factional infighting between different power brokers and their respective spheres of influence. The Jiang Zemin faction and Xi Jinping faction hated one another. The Hu Jintao faction was independent of both. And all these parties try and use the organs of the CCP to gain leverage and assume power over their rivals. To this end cancel culture is nothing new and I fully agree with you. It may be an anathema to how we conduct our politics in the west but even so, it isn't new.
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