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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.
This was not a microaggression, it was a full-scale insult. I'm not sure what a microaggression towards a MAGA person would be, "Nice Hat", maybe?
Yeah but that’s the same sort of thing someone from 2019 who was pro cancellation would have said about the cancelled party
No, "microaggression" does actually have a meaning. It's supposed to mean those little things a privileged person does or (more often) says to marginalized people that add to their marginalization. It doesn't apply here; suggesting that e.g. black people were desperately trying to avoid responsibility for the Dylan Roof shooting would not be a microaggression.
The best illustration of a microagression I know of was in a Garfield comic, in which a television host asked his two-headed guest whether he had ever heard the expression "Two heads are better than one", to which the guest responded "Ever hear it eight gazillion times a day!?".
Man, this is also the best illustration of my take on the term - that it's just named wrong. It's close; it's very very close to being named correctly, but they just barely missed. What they mean is "microaggravator". An aggravator is something that is aggravating; it's unpleasant or irritating, particularly via the mechanism of happening over and over again. The micro bit is that it's, objectively, a small thing that is irritating, like the tag on your shirt being irritating.
Whereas to call it an "aggression" is just completely unsupportable. No one is committing a forceful attack, being hostile, etc., when they're too dumb to make a unique joke and say the stupid obvious thing for the gazillionth time. Not even a micro one.
I actually think it would be an affirmatively good thing if people talked about "microaggravators". It captures exactly the phenomenon that they claim to be pointing out, that sometimes people can find some things mildly irritating that you might not have realized, possibly due to different cultures or whatever. That seems perfectly fine. It's the bullshit move of trying to turn it into an aggression, a mini act of violence, alongside page after page of other nonsensical claims about what violence is, that, well, aggravates me. If "microaggression" is what they say it is, then using it that way is a microaggression against me, and they're literally committing a little act of violence against me every time they use that term that way. But really, it's just irritating to me; it's a microaggravator.
You're trying to work out the definition based on the etymology. Words generally don't work that way, and especially so for ideologically invented terms like "microaggression." The function of the word "aggression" in there isn't to describe what happened, it's to provide negative affect for anyone listening to the term.
The defining portion of a microaggression is that the microaggressor genuinely has no idea that he's doing anything aggravating to the microaggressed-upon. Their failure to model the other person well enough to recognize that what they said would be aggravating to them is enough to describe as an act of (micro) aggression. Implicit in this is the belief that all of society ought to restructure itself so that people who have been deemed "oppressed" doesn't suffer any sort of annoyance from others that they judge as "oppressive," without limit. This kind of pattern might appear familiar, because it's one of the guiding principles of modern progressive identity politics that you've probably seen play out all over the place.
This is what I'm explicitly against, ideology-based redefinitions that are clear perversions of the words, themselves, generally for the purpose of leveraging positive/negative affect for ideological purposes. War is Peace and all. No, sorry. We already have definitions.
I'm sure they genuinely have no idea that by doing this redefinition, they're microaggravating me. But if their definition holds, then again, they are committing a little act of violence against me every time they use the term that way.
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