There is no double standard. If the right wants her fired go ahead and call a boycott, nothing is standing in the way.
In both cases the outcome will be determined by the level of outrage the comment produces and how it impacts the advertisers and owners.
But Sam B isn’t going to lose any viewers because righties don’t like it because righties don’t watch. It’d be like the left boycotting Fox News, why would they care? Their outrage isn’t really gonna make a difference. That’s not a double standard, that’s demographics.
It’s the actual viewers that need to be outraged, not snowflakes who raised not a peep when trump was dropping F bombs during the campaign or calling innocent people rapists. Hard to hold the moral high ground when you didn’t care about that racism or those slur attacks. He spent years broadcasting a racist lie about a sitting president’s birth details. Y’all didn’t have anything to say then so it’s kinda hard to take y’all seriously now. Ooh, suddenly offensive language is giving the right the vapours!
The right has: President “Grab Them Right By The Pussy” doesn’t like the mysoginistic (not his word, too many syllables and letters) way in which his daughter (who he’d like to fuck) was described.
I don’t think you can create a universal standard for this sort of thing. Everyone’s going to have different things that they consider okay or not okay, and everyone has an equal right to voice their displeasure with what other people are doing. I don’t think you can reasonably say to someone, “You have to be as offended by the word ‘cunt’ as you are by the word ‘nigger,’ or you don’t get to voice your opinion.”
Sure. And while it’s not possible to know the contents of another person’s mind, we can make some pretty reasonable assumptions based on what they say or do, and the context in which they say it. A white guy in a white robe standing in front of a burning cross using the word “nigger” is a very different context than when its used between two black people who are friends with each other. The former, it’s pretty clearly being used out of racial animus. The latter, obviously not.
Given Barr’s over all history, I think it’s fairly clear that she has problems with non-white people. When she called Valerie Jarret an ape, I think there’s sufficient evidence (her history of using that particular slur against black people, her use of other racial slurs, her general comments about other racial minorities) that it was racially motivated. When Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a cunt, I think there’s sufficient evidence (her own gender, her general support for feminism) that she’s not a misogynist. So, I’m okay with Barr being punished more harshly than Bee, because I’m okay with racists being punished more severely than non-misogynists. I do not see how this constitutes a double standard.
Which is exactly the argument you’ve been fighting against: context matters, and a white person calling a black person an ape is a very different context from a woman calling another woman a cunt.
I’m flabbergasted that anyone needs the difference between “cunt” and calling a black person an ape to be explained.
As I tried to get across earlier, “cunt” falls into the broad category of “words meaning that someone is a shitty person”. It’s a word that describes someone with an unpleasant personality, or characteristics that the person using the insult perceives to be unpleasant.
Calling another person after an animal is one of the worst things you can do to someone of a different ethnic group - it’s part of a very long and nasty legacy of dehumanization that has been used to justify horrific atrocities for thousands of years. It’s not comparable.
And I think an important step in not being an idiot is realizing that racially charged comparisons have different connotations when the target has more melanin than milk. Especially, when attempting to pass off said comparison in order to attack a liberal comedian.
That is ridiculous. Why is it high status to be a man, or to be white? That is a racist and sexist idea.
The idea that Barr is punching down is ridiculous. Firstly because she was not punching, she was making a joke. Jokes are not punches. Secondly, Barr is the daughter of poor Russian immigrants. She has been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder which is usually the result of severe childhood trauma. She had a baby at 17 and ran away at 18. Valerie Jarrett’s parents were a wealthy physician and an educator who attended Sarah Lawrence college. She attended a prestigious prep school, then Stanford, and then got her JD at Michigan. She was one of the most powerful politicians in the country as the principal advisor to Obama. To say that she is beneath Barr is crazy.
Going high got Trump elected while Republicans threw feces. Going high has resulted in “teaching the controversy” putting oil industry hacks on the same footing as 97% of climate scientists.
I didn’t call you an idiot. But you haven’t exactly shown yourself to be of high intellect, as you continue to defend the use of “ape” to define black people.
My wife disagrees with this and considers it sexist, comparable to the level of what Roseanne said and “not a word reclaimed by the victims” as other words have been.
My thoughts are: I’m not really sure. I listened to what she had to say. Still not sure, but I get her point. She can’t say the word and is disgusted by it. I’m certainly not aware of any women who go around using it as an endearing term. I understand it’s a more common saying in the UK, but I’m not in the UK. We are 40s white people in the US Midwest.
Note: It’s not just “Whataboutism”. This follows a well established propoganda method. For example:
Problem: Minorities are treated horribly, even killed, by police.
Action: Kneel during the national anthem.
Propaganda: Rant about patriotism. Do not talk about The Issue being raised. The “why” must be avoided at all cost.
For Samantha Bee:
Problem: ICE is separating kids from parents. Putting a lot of them into foster care. Recently revealed that they lost (!) about 1500 of these kids in the past year.
Action: Contrast to things IT has said and done.
Propaganda: Focus on a phrase used by Bee. Do not talk about The Issue being raised. The “why” must be avoided at all cost.
It is really, really sad and amazing how easily people can be lead by the nose away from talking about and understanding serious problems by these expert propaganda artists.
[Moderating]
On reflection, this thread might have started as being about an entertainer (Samantha Bee is an entertainer of some sort, right?), but it’s really more about what language is and is not acceptable for whom, which has a lot more scope. Moving from CS to GD.
I’m going to briefly hijack this thread to mention that a friend of mine, Kim Olson, is running against this guy in November on the Democratic ticket. So if you live in Texas, vote for her. She’s ex-military and a centrist ( more so than me). She once told me a cool story about slipping Rick Perry a challenge coin when she received an award from him. It made me dislike Perry a little less.
Not being the one who said that, I’d just say for me that it is much worse to compare someone to an animal, especially an animal that has a long and racist history of being used to humiliate and disparage certain people of color, than it is to call another person a word with ugly, but not inhuman, connotations.