She agreed to a gig to perform for a dangerous white supremacist organization. I’m okay mocking her horrible performance based on that alone; she’s no innocent here.
Yes, but I’m cutting her some slack for being young and naïve. Although she has to accept responsibility for the eight-second “FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”.
I really wonder what elevated her to their attention. Her YT page had three songs (the one I half-listened to was not good), plus a “rant” about how America isn’t safe because Song of the South references were purged from Splash Mountain. She must’ve had some kind of patron…Rick Scott maybe?
In any case, she knew the kind of group she was performing for, and in fact was most likely a fan.
But she’s not being bashed for her beliefs.
Those are fair game, sure.
She’s an inexperienced singer who didn’t realize she was way over her head. The CPAC organizers deserve blame for putting her in this position – and also for not cutting her loose after a rehearsal – but what is being mocked is her performance. If she were a highly talented star who just didn’t rehearse properly or something like that, maybe she would deserve some mockery. But a teenager who got in over her head on hard song, and had a brutally bad but widely seen performance doesn’t deserve to have thousands of people mock her for that performance. She deserves some compassion for that.
She decided to perform for a white supremacist extremist organization. My tear ducts are all dried up.
So what’s fair game to mock about her because she decided to perform for a white supremacist extremist organization? Because that’s not really connected to her singing ability.
Her competence at the job she signed up for is fair game to mock. If she made a golden statue of Trump and it looked stupid, I’d make fun of that. If she made a sign for CPAC and misspelled Conservative, I’d mock her for that.
She signed up to do a job for a super shitty organization, and she did the job incompetently, and she’s being made fun of. I’m really not feeling the sympathy.
Do you feel the same way about people mocking Rick Perry for being unprepared for his job at the department of… uh, uh, what was it again?
And it is entirely about the context and her beliefs.
If she sang that way before a little league game, or in front of her church, then people would be supportive of her courage, and mocking her would be an asshole move.
She’s being mocked for the union of (her beliefs) and (her singing ability). If we just talked about her beliefs, we would still mock her, but not as much. If we just talked about her singing ability, we would chuckle a bit, and maybe even feel sorry for her, but not as much. Blend (being showcased at a racist event) with (remarkably bad singing) and you have a mockable entity that stands distinct.
Not an entity. A person.
No, I don’t.
Definition. A person or organization possessing separate and distinct legal rights, such as an individual, partnership, or corporation. An entity can, among other things, own property, engage in business, enter into contracts, pay taxes, sue and be sued.
I fail to see how your “correction” makes any sort of useful distinction.
Are you citing a law dictionary? Because in common parlance, an entity is “a thing,” which is in every dictionary definition in the first page of Google results I see, except for the one law dictionary, which is giving a legal definition, naturally.
She was chosen because of her ability-The ability to be a singer that is far right wing. She was applauded loudly after her performance because her ability to be of their political persuasion while singing pleased them. They approve of right wing thieves, right wing liars, right wing bullies, right wing grifters etc. for pretty much the same reason-when the politics are right wing that automatically makes what you do with those politics “great”.
A person is an entity.
Most 19-year-olds are idiots. If we committed, for example, to mocking every college freshman who reads half of Atlas Shrugged and suddenly knows how to fix the world, we’d never have time to get anything done.
But this particular idiot wanted to be a public figure. She made that decision when she jumped into the YouTube cultural commentary pool, and she doubled down when she accepted this gig. If she’d killed the performance - rather than murdering the song - she’d have 50k subscribers. Instead, she got mocked and shut down her channel. Gambled and lost. It happens. And when it happens to somebody who is presenting themselves to the world as a commentator, as a standard-bearer of an ideology, as a public figure, they get mocked. Oh well. Live and learn and use some backing next time.
Rick Perry is a fully-formed adult who has had much experience in government to see how things work or don’t. That he holds not just severely conservative views and elected to serve Trump, but also made efforts to actually dismantle the agency he oversaw is inexcusable.
The young lady in the video is a teenager, even if of majority age. I don’t know her background or why she holds her beliefs but I shudder to consider what people would think of me based upon my views at that age (much less my vocal range). The performance is awful as is the company she has chosen to keep but I can still express sympathy that a bunch of bigots used her as a stooge to headline their conference, and hope that she recovers from both the embarrassment of her performance (assuming she feels some) and her support for these narfs.
Oddly enough for how often it is cited by Randites as their essential bible of conservatism, reading that ‘novel’ (I use the term loosely; it is more of a pseudo-philosophical pamphlet of epic length) was the turning point for me in realizing how bankrupt hardcore conservatism was. Ayn Rand goes to such effort to make pasteboard villains to establish the heroism of her protagonists that it is just painful to read and feels like the worst kind of narrative manipulation. I can’t believe people actually read that book repeatedly; I struggled to finish the last half of it, and then immediately threw it in the trash because I didn’t even want to use it as a door stop.
Stranger
The big difference is that Rick Perry is (chronologically) an adult. He’s a big boy who has been in the public spotlight for a while. He even ran for President once. He took a job as head of a department that he SPECIFICALLY wanted to eliminate. Yeah, he deserves mocking, as well as the person who put him in that position. We have whole threads dedicated to them.
The singer does not deserve to be mocked for anything other than a typical youth being in over their head. The performance was bad. CPAC should be mocked as ruthlessly as possible for putting that girl in a horrible situation, knowing that she would fail (and, if they didn’t know she would fail, then they are horrid organizers). BTW - the “8 second FREEEEE” - at any live performance, that’s where the crowd starts cheering, so you get used to holding that longer.
Well said.
For myself, I just don’t want to be the kind of person who makes a national laughingstock of a 19-year-old who overestimated her singing ability, even if the way it was revealed was by her showing support for an organization I abhor. I have hope she might recover from both the mocking and the support.
And my view of people who revel in such mean-spirited mocking is affected.
Not in common parlance, no.