So yesterday comedian Jen Kirkman posted a little joke on Twitter, as comedians are wont to do.
Before we look at what happened after she posted this Tweet (which has now been deleted), let me just say a couple of things about the Tweet itself.
Jen Kirkman does not actually “LIKE that Hillary has murdered a lot of people,” in part because she (Kirkman) does not LIKE murder and in part because she does not believe that Hillary has, in fact, murdered a lot of people.
The joke is a clear reference to the right-wing Clinton-haters who have been trying their best, for the last quarter century, to convince the world that Bill and Hillary have been secretly knocking off their political enemies, mob style, racking up a CLINTON BODY COUNT that is now said to number 48.
In other words, the joke is not actually a joke about murder. It s a joke about the right-wing idiots who think that Hillary goes around offing people like some pastel-pantsuited Tony Soprano.
[UPDATE 8/5 Kirkman herself made clear that’s what she meant in a Tweet today.]
Unfortunately, many of those who encountered Kirkman’s Tweet on Twitter — a large number of whom seem to be former Bernie Sanders supporters who’ve gone over the Green Party’s Jill Stein — have kind of missed the point just a little, misreading it as some sort of creepy celebration of drones murdering children in Afghanistan, or something.
And instead of stopping for a second to ask themselves, “wait, is this comedian lady who does those hilarious yet disarmingly earnest segments on Drunk History really mocking or even advocating the murder of children, why would she do that, that can’t be right” many of these people decided to advocate the murder of her.
Here are a small fraction of the Tweets sent to her.
After Kirkman noted that she would be handing the operation of her Twitter account to someone else because she was tired of reading all the death threats, some of her Twitter, er, critics, did little victory dances of sorts.
And yes, that last dude is using a photo of a young Josef Stalin as his avatar. You know, the Russian dictator whose actual non-fictional not-a-joke STALIN BODY COUNT added up to something close to 20 million.
Someone even took the anti-Kirkman struggle to Wikipedia.
https://twitter.com/lastlivingrose/status/761283232260362240
The people bombarding Kirkman with threats and abuse aren’t Trump fans. They aren’t Trump fans pretending to be BernieBros. If you don’t believe me, go look at the accounts of the people whose Tweets I quoted above, or go directly to @JenKirkman’s mentions now, where you can find hundreds if not thousands more Tweets like this.
These are people who, in many instances, consider themselves progressives, radicals, anarchists, “revolutionaries.” These are, in more than a few cases, proud supporters of Jill Stein, a woman whose presence in the race makes it all that much harder to defeat the unhinged Muslim-hating racist Donald Trump. That strikes me as something of an irony.
In Milan Kundera’s The Joke, set in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a young Czech intellectual and Communist Party member is tossed from the party and sent to work in the mines after he jokingly writes “long live Trotsky” on a postcard.
These days, we’ve got Twitter for that.
NOTE 8/5: Just a reminder for new commenters: defending or excusing harassment is against the comment policy here. I’ve been lax on bans in this thread so far but that’s over now.
If these people aren’t banned, I hate Twitter and believe it should never have existed.
These people are not progressives (of course, we all know that) and never will be when they have so much hatred and sickness in their hearts.
Aw shitballs, I love Jen Kirkman. She does a great job of exposing creepy misogynists who ask her out on her accounts. She already had Bernie Bros threatening violence at a theater in Vermont recently. The joke was actually pretty funny too. I feel like that isn’t always the case with situations like this (ie the South Africa AIDS woman).
Okay, this tweet is baffling to me:
https://twitter.com/timothycraigon2/status/761318989201043456
Because A&C games is in Canada. Like, you don’t have a horse in this fight, guys. Also, now I can’t show at A&C games anymore. Dammit! They are right next to a board game cafe and everything!
Why are you guys so terrible????
I seriously don’t understand what just happened here.
Also I emailed the store. 6___9 We’ll see what type of response I get, I typically don’t engage because I’m afraid of the potential responses….
Progressives can be sexist. Let’s dispel this notion that believing in a leftist ideology means you’re automatically not an asshole.
I remember, several years ago, a college acquaintance getting called out on this on Facebook. He was ranting about the chauvinism of frat guys. Then a woman came in to the thread to point out that, frankly, even some progressive men can be downright sexist and entitled. His response? He said, yes, it’s true that some progressive communities can have problems with drug use and unsafe sex and are, therefore, problematic too. Not even joking, that was his deflection. He’d rather state that some progressives are junkies who don’t use condoms, than admit that people of his political persuasion can be shitty to women, too.
It’s like a male geek claiming he can’t be a bully because he’s not a jock.
Ok Stein voters, tell us again about how much you fear violence from Clinton supporters and how mean they are.
There is a lot more to this. She’s deleted quite a few tweets.
Context matters. A lot.
The initial tweet may have been an attempt at a “joke”, but subsequent tweets were quite distasteful.
She does not deserve to be harassed, and I hope the people harassing her are banned permanently, but a lot of what she said is indefensible.
This is leaving out an enormous amount of context, some of which was particularly racially charged. Kirkman clearly saw and knew that the tweet was calling into question Clinton’s foreign policy in regards to drone strikes and her responses including one that implied she could joke about the innocent victims of drone strikes because, “I’m not gonna talk to a corpse,” were genuinely worthy of criticism. Many people tweeted her, asking whether this joke made their family members, their countrymen and fellow Muslims lives were just a source for a tossed off joke for Kirkman. She dismissed them as “BernieBros” at best and misogynists at worse.
Those calling for death or invoking sexual violence in threats were out of line. Those acknowledging the racism, nationalism and lust for violence, purposeful or inadvertent, in her tweets, were not. Additionally, claiming some political motive in those questioning Kirkman’s tweets is out of line. Last I checked, caring for innocent victims of US missile strikes wasn’t a partisan platform; it was basic, human decency.
More than once this election cycle I’ve gone down a twitter rabbit hole and ended up on a Bernie supporter/leftist’s twitter page that was more or less indistinguishable from a g***g*****’s.
It’s extra disheartening because I agree with Bernie, and presumably these people, on the majority of issues. In the big picture
I hope this infighting (cause duh there are also bad Clinton supporters) is just a blip.
@Rhuu:
That link redirects to ‘this account is suspended’ now.
The threats and misogyny here are real and bad. But I have to disagree that the joke was “a clear reference to the right-wing Clinton-haters…”
We really are at a point now where American “liberals” (or at least people extremely invested in being seen as liberal) routinely give full-throated support to elective US military adventures in an effort to seem as strong as Republicans, or “serious,” or whatever. A Clinton supporter being proud of their candidate being a foreign policy hawk or being “tough on terror” or whatever is really not that weird, and pretty common if you pay attention to this stuff on Twitter.
Given Kirkman’s late performative timeline beefing with anybody even one notch to her left on these issues, her description of concerns about drone warfare as “obsessed with purity” (in a now-deleted tweet), etc. I think the way this joke was going to be taken should have been 100% predictable. Of course, again, it doesn’t justify threats and misogynist slurs, but I think that to a lot of people, the context around the joke is a little different than the description here.
@Rhuu:
And for board game cafes, there’s always Snakes and Lattes (Annex) over on Bloor just west of Markham in Mirvish Village.
Again, lack of accountability on the internet leads to people saying horrible things on the internet. This crosses party lines, ideological lines, racial lines, gender lines, any lines you can think of.
I still have no idea how to fix it, while preserving the internet as a platform for resisting state oppression when needed.
@Tragedy of the Commas:
Agreed. Having a political ideology doesn’t mean you automatically have certain features common to others with that ideology. I’m sure there are some hard right Republicans who aren’t religious at all.
But it is painful when one of the core principles of your ideology (that all people deserve respect) is so easily stepped on and violated by people who claim to be firm believers. Adding insult to injury, I would hazard many of those same people would be quick to judge those of us who aren’t backing Jill Stein to not be progressives also.
Why do so many people (Tweeters in particular) go from zero to death threat as a matter of course? There’s a lot of daylight — and a lot of responses — between apathy and threats.
Wonderful news, those two jackasses were not associated with the store at all! Hooray, no quandries about giving them my money!
I assume that’s why that twitter account got suspended, since i legit thought they worked there. Nice to see that some people get suspensions quickly?
@Jenora: you are right! I love both of them so much. It was the convenience i was sad to lose, haha.
@ kate- I was watching her tweet when she said that joke. She was being bombarded and she snapped a little. it was all meant ironically, and it was directed at people who were saying they wanted to punch her in the face and that she should kill herself. so yeah, it got heated.
Lol. This is fucking idiotic and totally missing the point. I don’t support death threats, but the vast majority of the critical tweets in response to her “joke” were not threatening.
And, as was pointed out above, she’s deleted subsequent tweets that were far more offensive. She’s a twitter coward and deletes anything that gets owned or makes her look bad. She came off as a self-serving narcissist and sociopath, and now she’s cleaned up her TL and scurried away.
Her whole “edgy” shtick is lame and hacky. She’s a shitty comic, and mostly for the weak minded who like easy bullshit that makes them feel controversial. There are about 50,000 randos on Twitter far funnier than Jen Kirkman.
Given the number of times that something like this has happened, I’m pretty comfortable with believing Twitter never should have existed anyway.
It provides a great outlet for people to post whatever they’re thinking, whenever they’re thinking it, and then allows a whole bunch of other people to never let them forget it.
Do we really have to have condescending bullshit about Americans never being true liberals on two separate threads?
Don’t mistake Democratic politicians/pundits for American liberals and don’t assume that all Democratic voters identify as liberal. Some consider themselves moderates. It’s a big tent party and you’re going to get a variety of opinions.
two things.
None of what was said to her is acceptable – it was a hate mob plain and simple
If a website needs to explain your joke in depth to avoid people finding it deeply troubling and upsetting maybe it’s just a bad joke and not a fight for freedom?
There needs to be a term to describe these so called “progressives” that seem to have zero problems harassing women online in the name of “leftism”.
I don’t think “brogressive” does it enough justice.
@wwth
I have never on this thread or any other made the claim that Americans cannot be true liberals. Your liberals are just as much liberals as our liberals are. The point I made was that liberals, of any flavour be they British, American or other are ‘fiscal conservatives’ who put the interests of the moneyed few above the masses, and are not truly Left Wing, left wing being defined as Socialist. Hillary, Obama, Blair, Clegg, whoever are not really left wing. They support mostly conservative financial matters and as mentioned in your quote military misadventures, which makes them little different to the Republicans. Where they are ‘liberal’ is on matters of social justice (within the confines of a capitalist system) and personal liberties. The closest you got to a Socialist was Sanders, the closest we have is currently Corbyn.
Socialism would mean in practice a complete reform of the current political system, which may not be achievable through anything but revolution. Seeing the state both our countries are in, this is looking more and more likely.
Virgin Mary; that’s a great definition for the purposes for maintaining ideological purity. Complete bollocks for actually describing existing politics in any meaningful way.
If knowing context about a random conspiracy theorist group is needed for the joke to work, maybe it would be a good idea to mention it in the joke? The other possible context, that Clinton isn’t shy about having militants kill foreign people, seems like a pretty obvious way to read the words that were written there.