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.
Actually, it all started with the joke *i think it would be fun to go to war with iran. we always go to iraq. try something new for once* which bares an uncanny resemblance to *Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran*, the actual policy of the neocons supporting HRC, her preferred candidate. When people called her out on this point as well as HRC’s role in the Iraqi invasion & support for a harder line stance with Iran, she doubled down with the joke *I LIKE that Hillary has murdered a lot of people* & *Afghans who have died can’t see the joke so to justify it would be weird. I’m not gonna talk to a corpse*. So it’s not clear that it was related to Vince Foster, but it was safe to assume it was related to HRC’s foreign policy. Newspapers from the NYT, to the Economist, New Republic, have all pointed out how HRC is more hawkish than Obama and is looking forward to being a war president. It’s not really controversial. A thought experiment would be, what if Don Rickles, for example, had said similar things about Nixon, that it was time to move from bombing Vietnam to bombing Cambodia and that he liked that Nixon killed a a lot of people. Think even in the 60’s, when there wasn’t Twitter & outrage, people would’ve called him on it, especially when comedians like Dick Gregory were fasting against the war. The misogynistic & death threats were beyond the pale and while I don’t feel Jen Kirkman is funny, she didn’t deserve such abuse. But at the same time, I remember when Michael Richards lost his career after a racist tirade so there are some lines comedians can’t cross nowadays. Think the lesson is don’t crack controversial jokes on twitter because the 140 limit prevents context.
Yeah, the Twitter “Progressives” have been at this for months. They can’t handle women making jokes any more than the alt-right can handle women making jokes. I have lost so much respect for people I used to follow. Turns out gamer gate tactics are good as long as you like the right politician.
Pfff, thought experiment: change literally everything about the situation and pretend that “Don’t violently threaten to kill a woman in large groups” is equivalent to “Why are you so upset”. I’m not sure why your imagined situation would warrant death threats any more than the real one, but okay.
@ treehugger- I wish these folks were 4/8 chan types, but out on twitter they have active accounts with lots of lefty type tweets. These guys just genuinely want to spend their time harassing a female comic whose opinion differs from theirs. And don’t let them fool you- jen had been dealing with trolls for days before her Hillary joke. It kept coming across my feed.
Important note if some of thoses guys still read the comments : if you send death threat to *anyone*, even Trump, even Milo, even Pol Pot if he was still alive, you’re in the wrong, and no justification will ever make you right.
In other word, discussing whether it was a joke or not is a red herring.
Well, there’s one part of this that’s really funny, at least: All the douchetools spamming David’s Twitter with “UNFOLLOWED!!!”
They’re unfollowing a guy who made his name by standing up and saying that harassing women is wrong… For standing up and saying that harassing women is wrong.
http://replygif.net/i/166.gif
Sam
I am skeptical of tweets like that even being real after what happened to Leslie Jones, but in any case it seems like obvious sarcasm. As in “yes, that’s totally what I said and not a bizarre misinterpretation”.
Grogepi,
You’re just making shit up. I dare you to make less sense.
If bad jokes, unfunny satire, or terrible, in your opinion, tweets are enough “context” to justify sexist reactions, death and rape threats, or otherwise flooding someone with harassment, you were never really all that feminist or progressive to begin with, yeah?
Disagree with Futrelle’s defense of the joke or Kirkman, if you want to. Not everyone needs to agree that Kirkman is funny or clever. But it’s not really the point. Turning to the same violent responses one sees from the red pill right, while using support for Jill Stein as a shield from criticism for said responses and ignoring how others find this very uncomfortable, isn’t defensible because the speaker is also being awful. When Tosh.0, who came up earlier, made his rape jokes, feminists like Jennifer Pozner wrote thoughtful responses, not threats.
(Also, another discussion about why or why not Hilary Clinton is evil, when we just had one? Seriously?)
Rev. Magdalen
Me too! She has not been in the position to order, or authorise military action, including drone strikes, in her entire career. She is yet to be president, was never an employee of the Department of Defense, and yet these people act like like she started the War on Iraq (ironically, the person who IS actually responsible is not on the receiving end of any of that shit. Maybe because he is a white man). She is not a perfect person, but she is no war hawk and she would make a fine president. Much better than Trump, at least. It was also obvious to me that was what Ms. Kirkman was referring to, that ridiculous trend of blaming Hillary Clinton for a war she never was involved in, and I never even heard of Kirkman before tonight.
For whatever it’s worth, I had zero clue who Jen Kirkman was before this post. Her tweet at the top of the article is the first time I’ve knowingly read a word of hers. And I thought it was blazingly obvious sarcasm, especially with the capitalized “LIKE”. I figured the options were:
A) People accuse her of being fond of murder, but it should be obvious she’s not;
B) People accuse her of being uncritical of Clinton, but it should be obvious she’s not;
Or C) People accuse Clinton of literally murdering people, and it should be obvious she hasn’t.
Whether or not the joke was tasteful or her responses were acceptable is a side point, and I join with everyone else in firmly and unambiguously condemning the death threats she has received. But I think it’s worth noting that I, with no context to know who she is or how she talks, and no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt, could immediately tell that she wasn’t cheering for actual death.
I’d never heard of her either, and my first thought was “Oh God, that fucking Vince Foster thing again? I’ll never understand why the brogressives are so happy to accept a right-wing conspiracy theory that literally requires Hillary to be a telepathic wizard. Well, misogyny, of course, but still.”
If you really think she was misunderstood, perhaps you should explain her follow-up joke about dead Afghans.
https://twitter.com/SeanMcElwee/status/760990290681487360
she followed it up by complaining that she was being attacked by “Social Justice Warriors” and directly mocking someone who said they had had to bury family members, telling them that they would have to do it again soon. Really good business all around
Just FYI, GamerGhazi has a thread about this post – and they don’t seem to like it, not one bit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/4w7ixr/twitter_progressives_bombard_jen_kirkman_with/
Also, to the victim blaming arseholes-go fuck yourselves. Seriously. Men make rape jokes, celebrate genocide, make sexist and anti-Semitic memes, stalk and harass women for fun (men do all this online on a daily basis and dp not receive rape and death threats). That’s totes ok with you, but god forbid a women makes a statement about the ridiculous and groundless vilification of Hillary Clinton!!! Jen Kirkman deserves all the rape and death threats and harassment she gets!!!/sarcasm. Making a sarcastic, ironic joke is no justification for death and rape threats. I don’t care if you didn’t find it funny, I don’t care if you THINK it could be taken out of context, I don’t care if you think it was in poor taste, no-one, NO-ONE deserves this torrent of rape and death threats for making a fucking tweet, especially one as innocuous as this. You saying that she deserves this is not cool. Also women have frequently been the victims of this type of abuse, often from men. It is not the first time a woman said something innocuous and had a barrage of abuse thrown at her. For example:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/06/19/bigots-swarm-an-american-muslim-writer-after-daily-caller-attacks-her-for-innocuous-tweet/
People who abuse women online are looking for anything, no matter how small or innocuous, to take out of context and use it as an excuse to harass, threaten and frighten women into silence. It is obvious that this is what happening to Jen Kirkman. To victim blame those on the receiving end of this behaviour only makes things worse for women. It also makes you complicit in the abuse. Just stop it already.
I interpreted it as an in-your-face response to left-wingers who object that Clinton killed a lot of foreign people of color via military attacks — which is, in fact, true.
I just let a bunch of mostly shitty comments through moderation for the same reason I let shitty MRA comments through, mostly just to demonstrate how shitty they are, and even though some of them are apologias for harassment and that violates the no-victim-blaming comments policy here.
After this point, though anyone defending the harassment of Jen Kirkman in any way will be banned.
Quoting the unassailable Kootiepatra:
Yes. Exactly. I have no idea if Jen Kirkman is the very worst person in the whole wide world. It’s still not okay that she be the victim of misogynistic abuse. Condoning targeted misogynistic harassment of the “bad” women who “deserve it” hurts all of us. It says that our humanity can be revoked if we don’t follow the rules. It makes not being targeted with misogyny into a privilege, when it should be a goddamn right.
So don’t a) come in here with your harassment apologetics, and b) bring up the shitty things she’s done, and then say that opposition to a) means we obviously agree with her on b). You may have connected the two. I am fervently opposed to connecting the two.
What amazes me is how the regulars are excusing what Jen said. Even more surprising is David whitewashing Jen’s actions, when his central point would still stand even with her more awful tweets included.
I enjoyed lurking here and I’ve enjoyed the comments, but I really don’t think this is the place for me.
I see the “actually it’s about ethics in comedy” brigade kept up while I was sleeping.
I’m guessing that a lot of these harassers would like to make rape and death threats to Hillary Clinton. But they know she’s one of the few women for whom law enforcement would take those threats seriously. So, not wanting to take the chance of facing real world consequences, they go after a lower level target.
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: We don’t care. If you (general you) think that harassing and threatening women is ever justified, for any reason, then you don’t belong here. Leaving will make us glad to have one less troll, not beg for you to come back and grace us lessers with your glowing presence or whatever it is you want. Okay?
Plus, the whole “We don’t even know who you morons are” thing.
Or even “harassing and threatening *anyone*”. Privileges make it so that, as usual, it’s women, poc, and the like who get most of it. But there is never, ever a moment where death threats is an appropriate answer.
(it’s just in case some morons believe that SFHC is advocating a special shield for women, when the goal is just that the protection priviliged men get be extended to everyone, most notably women)
Respect isn’t just for people you agree with, and a society is built upon a social agreement that some things aren’t acceptable. Political fight against something is authorized, mean personal accusation that are designed to make people get a depression aren’t.
Just FYI, everyone, Jen has now explicitly said that the joke was indeed about the Vince Foster et al “Clinton body count” crap that started in the 90s.
I added an update about that in the piece.
@Ohlmann
Oh, absolutely – you’re right, with all these drive-by dumbasses looking for screenshot fodder, I should be more specific. ^^;
@drive-by dumbasses
I said “Women” because this (and almost every other) case is about women, but as Ohlmann said, nobody deserves this bullshit. Ever.