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.
thought experiment time! let’s say it wasn’t Jen Kirkman, let’s say it was Daniel Tosh, and he’d tweeted “I LIKE that Bill Clinton’s raped a bunch of women” and a bunch of people start tweeting back at him saying they hope Bill Clinton rapes him some day etc etc.
Is this still your gut-level response? “Wow, it was obviously a joke, why are all these people so upset?”
I had no idea if you were white, obviously, and was making a more general point about privileged liberals and their denial. I guess I could have omitted the word white entirely.
As for Kissinger, your comparison to Reverend Wright and Obama is totally specious. Kissinger is Hillary’s friend and mentor. She bragged about his praise in a debate. Her record strongly suggests she shares his worldview, and he is a blood-drenched psychopath with a million bodies in his wake. Again, a comparison to Reverend Wright, whatever you think of him, is laughable.
I didn’t have any idea if you were white, black, brown, purple, etc, but, you seem to have illustrated my point quite well. You are either ignorant of or willing to dismiss Hillary’s historical record, which is exactly what I was talking about.
But feel free to ban me for ableism, misogyny, foot odor, or what have you. I have very little interest in this website. I just found the premise of this post idiotic and decided to weigh in. Apologies if my sealion-ness offends.
And yes, your gif is pretty narcissistic. Congrats on your high opinion of yourself, as tenuous as it may be.
That’s funny, Bonobo. I’ve seen misogynist attacks against myself & other Greens for years– from Democrats. I can’t recall too many times where any Democrat (feminist or not) has come to our aid. In fact, in 2012, Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkkala were actually put in jail for the imaginary crime of trying to attend one of the Presidential debates at Hofstra.
Not one feminist blog I know of had diddly to say about that. Not one.
Furthermore, I was never a Sanders supporter, was never going to be one, and I’m not responsible for how badly some of his fans behave. Some of them were nasty to Greens, too. Again, I saw none of you lovely Dem sisters coming to our aid. It wasn’t your problem. But no matter. You can find shitty people in every political movement out there, sad to say. Yes, and HRC’s fans are some of the worst. J.K. is awful, too, and you would never for one minute think of apologizing for her. Would you? Of course not. She’s one of yours, so she gets all the sympathy. The feminists she crapped all over? They’re just silly Greens, or Socialists, or Communists, or Anarchists. I guess they get none.
You can have this place. I’m sorry I ever came here. 🙁
@xeno
*Raises hand*
1)I’m a socialist
2)I voted Green in 2012
3)Bye
Congratulations on your strawman. This is excellent discourse.
I think you make a good point, and there’s truth to this. People are angry, men (especially young men) can be thoughtless and abusive. Extreme frustration leads to counterproductive behavior.
At the same time, I think the flip side of this coin is this argument gets thrown around too easily to dismiss legitimate criticism of horrible shit.
Thank you and you’re very welcome.
Why the hell did David let all these fuckfaces through moderation?
Go away, all of you. Don’t make me get the spray bottle.
How about everybody stay put and actually deal with the issues that will make November something resembling a contest, rather than the one-sided squash match it should’ve been?
Christ almighty (trigger-warning for christian slang, I guess), if twitter-crap is too hard to figure out, the real world is going to kick our asses.
I’m so fed up with these bros. We have a literal fascist running for office and they’re SO ANGRY that the other candidate is a mere woman that they want to burn it all down. They have a whole fantasy world they live in on Twitter, where all US parties are the same, dedicated to stomping out the Communist Revolution that would surely happen if only the two fake parties stopped engaging in fake distractions like civil rights and women’s healthcare access. Ya know, those little side issues. Ugh!!
And I can’t even rant on Twitter about it because then they’re all up in my mentions literally misunderstanding this joke and all jokes of the same type, up in my face. It just needs to stop already.
If we’re assuming that’s true, it’s a fucking bad joke to make considering that Hillary Clinton presided over Obama’s drone war and her unwavering support of the apartheid state of Israel. That’s what people are upset about. You shouldn’t make jokes about Hillary Clinton killing people when she’s advocated for war and “regime change”. But sure, dude, whatever. So intersectional.
You know where I’ve seen this exact same argument time and time again? MRA and MGTOW posts. Misogyny is not thoughtless and counterproductive. Neither are threats of violence. These are not things a decent person who snaps engages in. I’ve been angry and frustrated many times. I’ve never thought to hurl slurs and make threats of violence. These things are choices and dismissing those choices as the fault of the victim for the driving the victimizer to it is victim blaming and it’s the rhetoric used to apologize for the rape, harassment, abuse, and murder of women that occurs every minute of every day all over the world.
Thanks! I thought it was just dandy.
If you can explain what reason you had for bringing up that she is apparently “not a delicate flower”* in your justification of the misogynistic harassment she experienced, and if that reason doesn’t boil down to “harassment is just what you get for being a non-delicate woman,” then I’m more than happy to revise my interpretation of your argument.
*I truly don’t know the first thing about Jen Kirkman, but I’m willing to take your word on it.
@DataShade
No
Kirkman quote-tweeted, “hey @JenKirkman, try to justify this fucking shitty joke to Afghans who have lost loved ones in this heinous war” with, “Afghans who have died can’t see the joke so to justify it would be weird. I’m not gonna talk to a corpse.” but somehow this cold-hearted reply didn’t make it into this blog.
Clinton has authorized counless drone strikes and will likely forever be unaccountable for the hundreds if not thousands of lives killed. The callousness needed to justify this, to make jokes about it, is stunning, a reminder of just how violent we insist on being to “get things done.”
Wow, so funny, right?
Maybe you should’ve lurked around here more before attempting this gotcha.
We oppose that kind of talk about anybody around here and always have. People have been banned from here many times for wishing death, rape or other violence against manospherians.
It’s not actually that hard to disagree with someone, even very harshly without threatening sexual violence.
Pretend the tweet isn’t by who it is by or about what it is about and what? What the fuck point is that supposed to make?
She is a woman. Women are most often and most viciously targeted in this way.
Daniel Tosh was not hounded off of social media for his rape jokes. Men are not hounded off of social media for making rape threats.
Apples to fucking oranges.
Hilary Clinton is not bumping people off like it’s goddamned House of Cards. Denying that is not like calling rape victims liars. Those are different sorts of things to deny entirely.
It tells me so much about you that you can earase those differences so easily.
Grogepi,
We all live in the real world. Getting death threats on twitter, is still receiving actual threats of murder from actual people. It is the real world. Guess what? So is this.
Jen has been doing this for a year, baiting leftists, getting owned, then doubling down and saying a bunch of way dumber and more inflammatory stuff. Then people respond to that abusively, she wakes up the next morning, deletes 80% of what she wrote to provoke people, and yells about misogyny. Some of the stuff that was said to her is inexcusable but she’s not completely innocent.
Did you read my entire post? I thought I explained that it well.
You admit you don’t know anything about Jen Kirkman, so I’m assuming you have no idea of the horrible shit she tweeted, and has now deleted.
Just for context, a little while back Jen made a “joke” about how some women should be able to castrate men a la Lorena Bobbitt. I forget the exact wording.
I would never defend death or rape threats, but is there any part of feminism that suggests women should be tough enough to take the verbal bile they dish out?
If you’re referring to me, I’d be glad to. No need to be insulting or condescending. I return to you your safe space.
I always find it funny when people are like “oh sure, you react this way in this situation, but I bet you’d have a completely different reaction in this totally different situation that I’ve just made up!” Because usually the answer is, uh, yes? I would react differently? Because it’s a different situation??
Course, in this particular case, I actually would react in much the same way. It’s a failure on several levels.
Sam, yeah that could’t possibly be sarcasm from her, she must really think it’s great HRC killed people of color.
Note: What I just wrote is also sarcasm.
Partly because they basically illustrate the point of my post. But I’ll try to catch up on this thread and ban anyone who needs banning. Feel free to offer suggestions.
@carbenozy
Ah, okay. Got it. You are correct, no delicate flower would say such a thing. In that case, targeted misogynistic harassment is warranted.
There is, in fact, no part of feminism that says that, if you choose not to be nice, you therefore have to put up with targeted misogynistic harassment.
Say what?
The Secretary of State does not authorize military action
http://www.state.gov/secretary/115194.htm
Perhaps you were confusing the State department with the Defense department?
http://www.defense.gov/About-DoD
Math time! Word problem: In this thread, I have been sarcastic, and I haven’t offered anyone a hot cup of tea. How many times do I have to put up with being called a c*nt on Twitter in order to prove that I am tough enough to take what I dish out? Show your work.
Edit: Although, of course, I actually am a delicate flower, as proven by my nym and avatar. So maybe the rules are different for me.