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.
I put “you deserve to be murdered” in the death-threat category, thanks. And I can point to at least two of the quoted posts with that exact wording. There’s also at least one, “I wish you had been raped,” line in there, as well.
In addition, what you and every other drive-by troll has missed is that the original situation is as follows:
She made a joke on Twitter. Some folks misunderstood it, some felt that even if you stuck to the original meaning, extra context made it distasteful. Many of them then gave her negative feedback regarding the joke. This feedback can be broadly lumped into two categories:
1: Legitimate critiques, ranging from simply emotional appeals to avoid such jokes to explanations as to why the attempt at humor failed, in their opinion.
2: Rape and death-threats.
Dave’s column was talking about this second category. Not one of the posts quoted above fall into the first category; thus, we can conclude that Dave was not, in any way, shape or form taking any side in the discussion about whether or not the joke itself was funny, beyond his comment about the likely (and later confirmed) context–that it was a dig at the constant references to Vince Foster, etc.
He further did some research to confirm that the people posting were not right-wingers posing as leftists to attack another leftist using unacceptable tactics, but rather that they were sincere supporters of Green and progressive positions who nevertheless felt it was appropriate to make rape-wishes and death-threats to a woman over a joke made on Twitter. This rebuts a rather constant theme lately wherein Bernie Busters, Stein fans and others insist that they would never, ever engage in such conduct and all such behavior must be false flag operations (they don’t use that term, but the claims fit the definition of the term).
When folks come in here to talk about the first, legitimate category of criticism, then, they are at best, utterly illiterate fuckwits with the reading comprehension of a tuna. At worst, they are disingenuous fuckwits who are deliberately intent on derailing the conversation to focus on anything other than another example of willful and deliberate internet misogyny. At the end, like the defenders of Intelligent Design in Dover, the entire group may be safely dismissed as either fools or liars, without further bothering to figure out which one is which.
The only courtesy you, or any of the other fuckwits, is entitled to is the same courtesy that we here are saying Jen was due–none of you, no matter how much of an liar or fool you may be, deserves anything worse than some scorn for your attempts at derailing; there will be no death threats, no wishes for rape, and indeed, no wishes that you be targets for the sort of harassment Jen is getting. This is because we frown on hypocrisy, and any of those sorts of statements directed at the fuckwits would, indeed, be hypocritical of us. Fortunately, most of us are smart enough to figure out how to express fully our contempt for all of you lot without having to resort to such overreach.
@Zatar:
Seriously, the guy can be baited with a single Tweet, and has spent a week trying to ruin the reputations of a Gold Star family.
He will monger all the wars.
The “Berniebros” attacking Clinton for her hawkish foreign policy and support of military coups are pretty much coextensive with the “Emoprogs” who attacked Obama for exactly the same thing four years ago. So yeah, I think your claim that Clinton is being singled out while Obama is given a pass because of misogyny is disingenuous. That’s not to say that a lot of personal dislike for her isn’t motivated by misogyny. But I don’t think she’s being singled out on the drone thing.
Jen Kirkman is “punching down” to the rightwingers who own and operate huge chunks of media in the US and who have promulgated a ridiculous narrative about the Clintons murdering anyone who gets in their way, all the way back to Vince Foster? Kirkman was never talking about people who have died in drone strikes or potential civilian casualties of wars Clinton might start. That was a stupid, transparent feint employed by Twitter “progessives” as justification for being shitty to someone on social media.
Seriously, even the people who’ve spent the last few years sniffing that none of the awesome things Obama’s managed despite the Republicans’ obstructionism really count, because DRONES*, are treating Hillary twice as harshly. Despite Obama being Obama and Hillary not being Obama.
And no, it’s not because they’re disappointed in Bernie’s loss – this started long before Bernie even put his hand up. It’s misogyny.
*Don’t get me wrong, I hate the drones too – and the expansion of the Patriot Act – but compared to same-sex marriage, Obamacare, ending the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, ending the recession, publicly supporting equality of every kind…
@Viscaria, thank you for the kind words, but that section you quoted is by Tragedy of the Commas, not me. I agree with it wholeheartedly, so it’s certainly a flattering misattribution, but I wanted to be sure and give credit where credit is due. 🙂
Just in case anyone STILL doesn’t get this: Kirkman’s joke did not have to be funny, obvious, tasteful, or even moral for the main point of this article to stand: she should not be getting death threats for it. We are not defending her because she is a liberal woman. We are not arguing that she should be spared the wrath of a hate mob because her joke was successful, funny, or appropriate. We’re saying that no matter what kind of joke she made, she does not deserve death threats, because no one deserves death threats. We have on this very website condemned the doxxing of Roosh, for pete’s sake; OF COURSE we’re not going to pretend like Kirkman deserves threats to her life over a bad joke.
Pointing out that the response to her is far more violent than it would be if she were a man is *also* not making a statement about the quality or morality of her joke. It’s not saying that she should be given a break because she’s a woman; it’s saying that she should not be dogpiled because of it, and that those death threats–which are the big problem being addressed in the article–are not just violent, they’re sexist, too.
Dear internet: death threats are not the same thing as criticism. Repudiating the former does not shut down the latter. Someone deserving the latter does not mean they deserve the former.
This is really, really not that hard.
@Kevin – the idea that there isn’t enough criticism of Hilary tolerated among her supporters is simply bizarre to me. I can’t think of any candidate in my long political experience whose fans are more ready to say ‘she’s not perfect, but….’ Certainly compared to the uncritical adulation many Trump and Sanders fans display(ed).
And what we’re seeing in this thread is not being ‘less than enthusiastic’ or ‘commenting’ on her hawkishness. Just look upthread at the level of vitriol – it’s utterly incompatible with a measured exchange of views and deserves be called out.
What gets me is how these critiques of Hillary, like the drone program, aren’t really Hillary critiques but of the Establishment in general. Obama and W are equally responsible, if not more, yet for some reason (j/k misogyny) Hillary gets loads of shit. Hell even Bernie said he wouldn’t stop the drone program. It seems like she’s getting more flack for voting for the war than W got for starting the damn thing. Or you’d think the drone stuff was her personal project she strongarmed and pushed into action.
I wanna know why we can’t just wait until at least Jan 21 to start tearing apart Hillary?
Twitter Left needs to look in the mirror and take stock, making twitter unusable for women (this isn’t the first time) isn’t helping your arguments.
Someone responded to Jen saying they buried family members and this joke was offensive to them, and she told them next time she should hire someone else to bury them so it won’t be as hard. Ha ha! Funny joke, get it? Jen deleted it though, so she gets to look like a hero when some monster uses the c-word, which is way worse than publicly mocking someone’s dead family members.
On the topic of Greens, my friends in Germany have been mightily unimpressed by the Greens who are in control of their local government. The verdict is that they’re far more interested in gesture politics, headline-grabbing projects and passing resolutions on national issues than they are in actually running things effectively. They’re even neglecting what should be bread and butter green issues, like maintaining and expanding the local cycle network.
Turns out actually getting things done when you have power is hard and nowhere near as much fun as complaining from the sidelines. This is why the older I get, the more I prioritise competence over ideological purity. I’ll happily vote for someone who shares 80% of my values and can get results over someone useless who agrees with me on everything.
@Kootiepatra and Tragedy of the Commas
Oof, my bad! Sorry.
Death and rape threats are always wrong, and Twitter needs to address this issue a lot more.
However, this case isn’t so clear cut. Many people – actual progressives, not “progressives” in scare quotes – were legitimately criticizing the joke before the misogynists showed up.
This article assumes that everyone knows her entire body of work and judges her by that. Not everyone does, nor should they need to. People are going to judge someone by their behavior, especially when it comes to personal encounters.
The problem is that there were women on both sides of the issue. It was largely women of color who were hurt by the joke. They weren’t threatening Kirkman’s life or wishing her harm, they were simply voicing their feelings, and got nothing but mockery in response.
Kirkman just published a post where she accuses “social justice warriors” of “saying ridiculous things” and piling up on her. She invites people to see this as a case of social justice gone too far, not as a case of misogynists threatening her life.
People are going to read the post and think that “social justice warriors” flooded Kirkman’s mentions with death threats. They won’t realize there’s a difference between critiques and threats, because Kirkman doesn’t make this distinction in her post. This will only serve to make people more wary of online activism.
The mainstream media will not blame men who threaten women on Twitter. It will blame us. We’re the problem, because Kirkman herself said so.
@Kevin Carson
Nope. A bunch of people I know personally who have always either liked Obama or didn’t have a lot to say about him have been clogging my Facebook feed with anti-Hillary BS.
Dave (I’m not really expecting a reply here, because you’re obviously yet another drive-by fuckwit, but hey, here goes anyway):
Did any of Jen’s posts say that the person she was addressing, or their families, deserve to die? Did she call for any of those individuals to be raped, or say they deserved it?
If not, then please fuck off with all the false equivalencies.
If so, then put up some sort of proof (seriously, folks, screen captures, wayback machine, some sort of evidence should be out there) that she did so, and we will condemn her as round as we’re condemning those who made those comments to her.
And then we’ll tell you to fuck off, because even if she DID make those sorts of comments, it doesn’t make retorting on the same level any less reprehensible. Get it, fuckwits?
To whichever troll implied David is lying, he often does not post the most violent and disgusting examples of harassment women get in social media because they may be triggering or if not triggering, quite upsetting for readers. We don’t need to read graphically violent threats to get the gist.
Kevin: Except that as you note, that was four years ago. Obama had been in office for four years at that point, and had failed to follow through on promises to de-escalate war (or at least, was seen to have done so by the emoprogs). This time, they’re literally condemning Hillary before she’s ever been in the position of making the key decisions about use of force. Having acknowledged her error in voting for the Iraq AUMF, Hillary has already moved away from the one case where she actually did something objectionable on those grounds.
I hope she surprises me and proves my fears groundless.
Okay, so: Somehow, my exchange with Kevin there is a bit garbled–my reply comes before both his rejoinder to my reply, AND his original post, which is last in the list. WordPress, have you finally broken the fourth dimension? Is this how we get Skynet?
Edit: And now his original post is after this one, too. I think the time-stamp on that one is FUBAR.
Thank goodness Kevin is here to tell us what is and isn’t misogyny. It’s not like many of us are and/or present as women and thus would have personal experience with misogyny from which to draw conclusions. I hope he doesn’t waste his talents only telling feminists on the internet where they are and aren’t finding misogyny, I’m sure there are Black Lives Matters protests out there who would be grateful to hear from him what is and isn’t racism.
Don’t waste your gift, Kevin! Run! Run now and spread the word! And don’t worry about coming back when you’re done.
You guys should click my name more often. I change it every once in awhile, mostly music videos and Handsome Jack clips.
Currently, the link is to the trailer of How To Be A Serial Killer, starring Damien Clark, the voice actor of Handsome Jack (talk about being type casted), and, yeah, Matthew Gray Gubler.
So, two things:
1) Jen Kirkman’s tweet was bad. Like, seriously bad. That she doubled -down and joked about dead afghans when called out on it only makes it even worse.
Can we not defend her tweet as being somehow good and just and right? The joke was poorly constructed if it was intended to only reference the conspiracy meme that Clinton has literally directly killed people, or was responsible for the deaths in Benghazi. It’s offensive as well, given that it can very easily refer to Clinton’s policies as Secretary of State, which includes destabilizing Libya and a bunch of other shitty warhawk interventionist policies. It’s straight up an unclear, poorly-worded, offensively-made joke.
Also she literally tweeted a joke about dead afghans during the firestorm that surrounded the tweet, so it’s not like this is just one tweet that went off the rails. She purposefully fanned the flames of antagonism by mocking dead foreigners.
2) Jen Kirkman, even with such a terrible, offensive, disgusting tweet (and follow-up tweets), shouldn’t get death threats. She shouldn’t be harassed, or threatened, or abused. She should be calmly criticized for a joke that could be construed as support for the murder of foreigners. It was a bad joke.
This article conflates defending Kirkman’s tweet and subsequent follow-ups, which are honestly kind of indefensible, with pointing out that she shouldn’t receive death threats for her joke. You don’t need to do that, and by painting most criticism of her as just like death threats you’re doing the same shit you regularly and rightly point out as hypocrisy by the right wing.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m disappointed. I really like your work cataloguing all this alt-right MRA douchebaggery, and it’s troubling to me that you would go to defend a tweet made in very poor taste as “lol u just didn’t get it”. I doubt my approval means anything to you, but I felt the urge to stop lurking and post just to get this off my chest here (I already said all this stuff on Twitter, lol).
Anyway, I’ll still keep reading the site and all, but please do better next time. Don’t condone or excuse tweets that mock the dead. That’s all I ask.
@Drive-by-Dave –
If you’ll notice, the title of this piece is not, “Mean People Drop the C Word on a Totally Sweethearted Comedian”. We are not trying to claim she is an angel. We are saying she does not deserve to get swarmed with death threats.
Continuing to argue that she said awful things does not change the fact that she does not deserve death threats.
She does not need to be a hero in order to not deserve death threats. She does not even need to be a good person in order to not deserve death threats.
Please let Jen know I LIKED her joke. That is all.
Kevin Carson, these people will be chanting “yass slay queen” when Clinton follows through on her promised war in Iran and bombs civilian targets as part of a total war campaign. They’re also perfectly willing to forget that Clinton painted Obama as as an illegitimate Kenyan drug dealer a few years ago, because hey, that’s just politics (like all the brown people’s corpses Clinton and Kirkman are happy to brush under the carpet). They don’t see anything wrong with it, save your breath.
@chop my head off please