I’ve already acknowledged I missed the part about her mocking transgendered use of pronouns, which I agree was out of bounds and should have been confronted. That was probably her cue to stop tweeting about pretty much anything. She didn’t, and she got canned. I get it now. I was reacting to what I saw initially, which were two or three dumb but, in my view, not intentionally offensive posts.
Nah, I was never saying it was okay to say any of that - you’re putting words in my mouth and thougths in my head. My point was that, to some extent, even if something comes out of someone’s mouth or off someone’s fingertips the wrong way, intentions matter. I don’t think Carano’s Holocaust tweet was meant in any way to offend Jews, though I can see how Jews could be offended. It was a lazy, uninformed (as I said, dumb AF) remark.
My understanding is that Disney fired James Gunn in the first place because they were in the middle of acquiring Fox from Murdoch and they had recently fired Roseanne.
Gunn was gracious about the firing. Disney completed the acquisition of Fox. The guy who fired Gunn retired* (I think this is true, didn’t double check). And Disney re-hired Gunn. The apology was less the motivator (he apologized immediately). Gunn’s graciousness and the completed acquisition were key.
This is a bit closer to my thoughts on the matter, too.
I am 99.9% convinced Carano’s dismissal was legally justified. Again, Disney isn’t stupid. What I find puzzling is why anyone gives a shit.
If I was conspiracy-minded I’d think the shadowy rich people who run things pump these “controversies” to keep the masses angry at the wrong things. I’m not conspiracy-minded, but I think the shadowy rich people are probably delighted that, as it happens, the masses ARE angry at the wrong things. The USA doesn’t even have a proper single payer medical insurance system, but let’s all freak out about Gina Carano, the 843rd most famous actor in the world, tweeting asshole/dumb things?
Social media’s a fucking cancer. Not just because Trumpists get a huge megaphone to blatt out their bullshit, but because it obsesses people over the trivial. It’s turning us against one another while the real elites loot the working class.
I think that there is far less “freak out” about her tweets, and far more about her “firing.” It is people complaining about her being fired that is causing this to take up as much bandwidth as it does.
Well, one can’t have happened without another. #firecarano or whatever it was was the big Twitter thing. In any event though that isn’t the point; the point is that the Kochs and Zuckerbergs have us all nattering away at one another over nonsense while they swim in vaults of money and laugh at us.
A) Real human beings in a first world country are dying because they can’t afford insulin.
B) Dumbass writes a Tweet comparing being a conservative to being Jewish in the Holocaust
I don’t disagree. I vote for universal Healthcare whenever it is on the ballot and push for it when it is not.
I also think Disney shouldn’t employee people who make light of the holocaust, and note that making light of such a tragedy is how you normalize it to the point where a decent number of Americans think it is ok to use Nazi imagery.
I feel that allowing people to say divisive things without consequences does a lot more to divide society. Some people only learn when they get pushback.
This is pretty close to the whole, “You can’t go to the Moon until you’ve cured cancer.” argument.
I don’t really do social media, this is the closest that I get. I didn’t see anything about her here, until she was fired and some people came to complain about the firing.
But it certainly sounds like people are far more upset about her firing than they were about her tweets. This “nattering” as you call it, is in response to defending her.
And it is not either or. I can type this message, and I can also go over to a healthcare thread and talk about that.
Personally, I’m spending far more of my time right now on a thread about imaginary characters living in an imaginary world, is that okay, or is that also just nattering away while the Kochs and Zuckerbergs laugh at us from their money vaults?
Not sure if it’s been brought up yet, but a conservative talking point making the rounds yesterday was that Pedro Pascal tweeted out a couple years ago a tweet comparing the “kids in cages” photo from the Mexican border to a “Jews behind a barbed wire fence” photo.
Now, I personally see a big difference between the objecting to the child separation policy and whining about conservatives having their twitters deleted, but at the same time it made me reflect.
Trump’s child separation policy was emphatically not as bad as the systematic execution of 6 million Jews. This is, I hope, not a point of contention. So is making that comparison also diminishing the impact of the holocaust? It seems the answer is yes.
I gotta say, I’ve flipped back over to this particular tweet being moronic but not cancel-worthy.
No it’s not. The point here is not that Disney is incapable of firing Carano or that employers shoudn’t fire anyone until social ills are all solved. Anyway, I have no sympathy for her. She violated the terms of her employment so her employment came to an end. That’s life. It’s how jobs work.
My point is merely that social media’s doing the work of the elites for them. They’ve got us addicted to circuses while they steal all the bread.
Oh, well, sure. After all, that saying comes from millennia ago.
Social media’s a really, really bad add-on. I used to sneer at people who said social media was bad for us. Bunch of old Luddites, I said. I was wrong.
A day late to the conversation, but a few thoughts:
As has been discussed, this was the last in a history of questionable public comments, and not a knee-jerk reaction to a one off event.
There may be a Democrat in office, but Carano is still speaking from a position of power and privilege. There may be a debate to be had about how to protect the truly disenfranchised from oppression from the masses, but this isn’t the story from which to begin.
Deciding to say something on Twitter or Facebook or on your blog is deciding to make a public statement to literally everyone. It’s not a private conversation, and these aren’t your private thoughts. Consequences (in general) are not going to be the same, nor should they be, as if you said something in private, because the impact of those words is going to be different.
I’ve seen this latest issue described as Carano issuing “anti-semetic” remarks. I find this claim highly questionable. Plenty of folks over the last few years have compared the American experience to living under Nazi rule. Pretending that referencing Nazi Germany in a metaphor is anti-semetic or grounds for punishment if the listeners decide it’s a bad metaphor is ridiculous. The fact that all of a sudden a subset of my fellow left-leaning friends are upset that she “cheapened the Jew’s experience” when they spent the last two years insisting that we were literally living in a mash-up of Nazi Germany and The Handmaid’s Tale is eye-rolling.
Yes, I understand that, like a lot of things, the right has adopted an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” approach to any statement about them, and so calling the left Nazis, or authoritarian, or claiming “my body, my choice” wrt wearing masks is an infantile yet effective attempt at feeling self-important while infuriating the left. And yes, the left calling the right Nazis is factors of ten more accurate than the right calling the left Nazis.
I find it distasteful how many folks accept the unwavering truth that this was anti-semetic or “offensive Holocaust victims and Jews in general” and are willing to be outraged on behalf of the Jewish people. It’s also important to remember that, even as a member of a minority group, just because something is offensive to you doesn’t mean you can speak on behalf of your group. [short story: this winter, I was trying to convince an organization I belong to that something they were doing was problematic in its depection of Jews. They also reached out to my Rabbi who disagreed with me, and so things proceeded in what to me was clearly a culturally insensitive way. This stuff isn’t clear-cut or universal.]
As others have said, much of the arts and media industry centers around actors/writers/directors as commodities in and of themselves. As long as part of the paying public cares about the actor (I’m going to see X film because actor Y is in it, and I like them), then their perceived public image might play a factor in hiring decisions.
@steronz is right on. The public way that this (and other related stories) plays out in the moment invites outrage. There is nothing new happening here, and nothing remarkable.
@storyteller0910 is also right on. One shouldn’t let a vague understanding of a specific story stand in as a placeholder for the universal. “We” aren’t doing anything. If you want to talk about Disney, talk about Disney, but don’t be fooled into thinking you can point to this or any specific story as evidence that we are somehow doing something as a culture.
[slightly off-topic]In general, I refrain from voicing disagreement with left-leaning perspectives. Not because I always agree 100%, but because of the reliable and insidious way idiots like @DemonTree (who says “Nowadays it’s one wrong tweet and the social media crowd want to throw the whole person away.”) or @octopus (who just pops in to drop a hot take on “mentally damaged folks of the far left”) eagerly turn any disagreement or lack of certainty into an opportunity not to refine or enhance understanding, but to spew non-sequitur rants while ignoring context. If voicing alternate perspectives means opening the door to the vacuous and fact-impervious comments of the likes of them, I’m generally going to make the choice to keep quiet. The world will be a better place if more ideas of the left get adopted, even if they are imperfectly implemented or come with their own problems. So, why waste finite time and energy fighting against that progress? Because this thread is about a true non-issue, It feels more appropriate to poke at some things.[/slightly off-topic]
I agree with you. My George Carlin reference was praise.
But part of the whole schema is the entire American Dream charade.
Viz:
working too hard at jobs you can’t stand
to buy shit (from Bezos) that you don’t need
to keep up with people that, in truth, you really can’t stand anyway
At the end of the stultifying, grinding day, it’s too difficult and too painful to consider Bezos’s union-busting efforts or starving kids in Yemen and the Central African Republic.
Give me (not me, but …) TikTok and an update on the Kardashians…
I tend to think that, in no small part, this is why anti-choice (“pro-life”) zealots pick what they do: it’s ridiculously simple to defend the innocence of a blastocyst in utero. Once delivered … the shit gets complicated and harder to parse.
This shit – shit, though it is – is low-hanging fruit. “Circus” is a perfectly fitting term, but it’s also understandable.