Like I specifically said and is obvious, somebody called attention to past Gunn tweets to get at Gunn. Whereas Barr’s tweet gained attention in real time. Yes, that’s different. But no I don’t believe the same people saying it’s ‘fucking ridiculous’ anyone is making an issue of Gunn’s tweets now would think it was ‘fucking ridiculous’ if people made an issue of old tweets by somebody on the ‘right wing’ side of the politico-cultural divide.
We can go around and around on that, if you really think a lot of the reaction is not motivated by politics, OK that’s what you think. I think it’s ‘fucking obvious’ the reactions do have to do with politics, or the tribal divide that’s now beyond ‘politics’ in the sense of something that’s separate from everyday life.
And that’s IMHO only further illustrated by your response, which seems to assume the only issue is how attention was drawn to the statements, but that’s simply not the only issue. The basic issue is how people evaluate the statements, not how they came to know about them, especially not if they were public to begin with. And, what kind of slack they are willing to cut people for saying the statements were a joke, ironic, etc. That’s illustrated again in the next in the series, l’affaire Jeong. Sympathy for the inappropriate tweeter, or none, is all about the societal divide, for a lot of people.
Since you left off the end of the sentence starting with the word “and”, my opinion is that your post deliberately takes my post out of context and as such isn’t really worthy of a response, except to point out why it isn’t worthy of a response.
As I indicated previously (I thought), IMO your basic premise is flawed and is not supportable by actual observable facts. Your premise seeks to retcon what happened with both of these situations to draw parallels that do not exist in fact in order to support a conclusion you desire: that somehow this is indicative of hypocrisy on one side. It isn’t.
By the way, your argument seems to concede that being against racism is strictly a Democratic or Left thing.
I think the bottom line is, telling racist jokes means you’re probably a racist, but telling pedophile jokes doesn’t mean you’re probably a pedophile. The reason, I think, is that racism has always been considered a legitimate point of view by a significant portion of society, which means that telling a racist joke can be seen as advocating for it. Pedophilia, on the other hand, hasn’t been accepted by society at large for a couple of thousand years, so the immediate assumption is that the person joking about it is doing so for shock purposes, and not because he believes in what he’s saying.
This is just changing the subject. It doesn’t matter what the motives of the people who publicized the tweets are. The tweets are either offensive or not, there is no category of not offensive because of the motivations of other people.
No, what matters is what the tweets say about the people who tweeted them. Gunn’s tweets say that has an occasionally tasteless sense of humor and poor impulse control; Barr’s tweets say that she’s a racist. That’s all.
What does James Gunn think about the Polanski case? The issue isn’t just “Is James Gunn a pedophile” so much as “Does James Gunn think pedophilia is not something to be taken seriously?” We know Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t take it seriously, and she still has her job.
As for Roseanne, there’s racism and then there’s racism. Has Roseanne ever been accused of mistreating minorities who worked for her or not wanting to hire them? We need to get past this “saying naughty things about people of color makes you a racist”. IT makes perfect sense to me that if you make racist jokes you aren’t necessarily a racist just as if you make pedophilia jokes you aren’t necessarily a pedophile.