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.
@Viscaria
Thank you for that link.
Stein is a delusional crank. The issue has nothing to do with the FDA or ‘Big Pharma’. The issue is the entire antivaxx stance is based on a known medical fraud perpetrated by Andrew Wakefield:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield#Fraud_and_conflict_of_interest_allegations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy
If Stein can’t figure that out, she’s too dumb to be in politics.
Yeah she didn’t say a damn thing about vaccines causing autism. She’s addressing in a ham-handed way the involvement of corporations in the healthcare industry. You know, like JK really meant the Vince Foster thing and not lol dead Afghanis. Or dead Pakistanis cos fuck them for harbouring bin Laden, right Axecalibur? A+ progressiveness everybody.
Also, a big part of feminism is that women aren’t perfect – they shouldn’t be hated or discriminated against because of their gender, but they shouldn’t be shielded, either. Benevolent sexism is still sexism. So, somebody’s failed Feminism 101 here, but it ain’t David.
Also also, aren’t you anti-Hillary trolls constantly shouting “You’re only defending/voting for Hillary because she’s a woman”? Turning around with “You’re not allowed to criticise Stein because she’s a woman” is beyond hypocritical.
If you think that being a feminist means all women should be immune to criticism, then you’re not one. Simple as that.
Where exactly does feminism say women shouldn’t be criticised?
@Kettle
She’s an antivaxer, who says stupid shit about autism. That’s bad, whether or not the former causes the latter
She’s running for President. Perhaps, she should quit being so hamfisted and say what she means. Unless it is what she means, in which case she can have a seat
I could not possibly care what she meant. She could have said literally anything. Still, don’t threaten her. Not that difficult
Fuck dead Pakistanis just as much as dead Iraqis or Afghanis. That is not at all. What I said was that, on a visceral, desensitized, 9/11 happened before I had most of my permanent teeth level, drones in Pakistan don’t phase me. It’s normal. It’s bad, and I don’t like that it’s normal for me, but it is. Take note of the doubtful, introspective tone of the comment you obviously didn’t comprehend
Gold stars for everyone, on Kettle
Yeah, most of these anti-Hillary ideological purity obsessed people that have come out of the woodwork recently seem much more concerned with feeling right than with any actual political or policy goals.
I’d like to know where all these Bernie or bust and/or Jill Stein people were in 2014, 2010 or hell, even odd number years have local elections. Local politics and midterm elections are so much more important for advancing progressivism. I can’t take seriously the people who only get fired up every four years for a candidate that does not have an even remote chance of winning. If people care more about the causes than getting the opportunity to be smug, they’ll put the work in on the non-presidential years too. But I never see it.
Wow, are the people harassing Jen Kirkman taking time out of their busy hate-barrage schedule to try to convince people to vote for their candidate? ‘Vote Stein, the candidate for the sociopathic troll!’
@repentantphonebooth: Well, some folks just have more energy!
I don’t know who Jen Kirkman is, but I’m instinctively on her side.
Folks “progressively” making those twitter threats, with those words, and simultaneously not getting the (older than the Internet) joke liberals have been making* since Newt Gingrich was on his first wife? I’ve seen enough to decide.
(*I’m so old I remember who Hillary Clinton was before she murdered Vince Foster!)
(Also anyone who’s been on Drunk History? Bonus points.)
@kadeko- that made me lol!!
Jen Kirkman is a lefty sort of comic. She used to have a great twitter account to follow, too. Sad.
@kettle
So are you going to respond to the point that others have made about you sizing the symbol “female” in order to shame someone when you are yourself using it in a bigoted manner? You never did flesh out “imply” and until you do you are useless to me.
I’m breaking my promise and returning to share this with y’all. You see, I’ve been made aware of the truth that everyone here at WHTM who has ever criticized Stein, Sanders, or either’s supporters are savage bullies who love to nutpick, taunt, misrepresent, and humiliate like Regina George.
I found this out after reading the following op-ed:
Take that, weirwoodtreehugger, Scented Fucking Hard Chairs, Paradoxical Intention, Johanna Roberts, and others including me!
Of course, this is Paste Magazine, which also had a recent piece on why Clinton can’t be trusted to appoint a better Supreme Court nominee than Trump (mostly due to her VP Kaine and because of Citizens United: “Equally distressing to this half-measure talk is the reality that without the controversial 2010 court ruling there would be no Hillary Clinton nomination.”).
Oh wow, it is true- you really think the best time to talk about your favourite candidate is during the harassment campaign of a female comic by your fellow bernie bros. Even if that op ed from a little known blog was convincing, consider on that list of tactics not one of them was threaten a comic who happens to support the opposing candidate en masse. What are you hoping for, that someone is going to feel sorry for bernie supporters? Why? Look what they are doing now.
Or maybe that entire thing was meant ironically? If so, oops, sorry, hugs, love you!
If I may suggest a moment of honest reflection here….
The next time your read or hear something talking about all the “hatred” and “vitriol” coming from the right, keep this little incident in mind. It is just one of many which show there is some serious, SERIOUS hatred and violence infused rhetoric on the Left.
The Left loves to point to things on the Right which show hatred and the like (sometimes legit, sometimes not) and yet tends to ignore the seething, ugly morass of it underneath it’s own feet. In fact, pointing to the Right continually seems often like a distraction from the hatred on the Left.
The Left is, in fact, in denial about the amount of hate which exists in it’s ranks.
Just sayin’.
I thought Hillarys body count was 75
@ repentantphonebooth
Oh, yes, I meant that ironically. It’s why I included myself as one of people hit by the “take that”. I’ve criticized Sanders and Stein before and am therefore one of the “mean girls”. I shared to mock (especially in contrast with what we’re seeing here and in the anti-Semitic and misognist memes against Clinton seen in other WHTM posts), not praise. We’re good, man.
You sounded so reasonable until you hit the “unhinged-Muslim-hating-racist-Donald-Trump” macro. Unhinged, very possibly, but the rest of it is lazy. I suggest substitution with cynical. I doubt Trump hates; he simply loves himself more than anyone else.
Ok, I am blushing a lot now. Sorry!!
In today’s anti-intellectual environment, anything that causes “uneasy feelings” is attempted to be suppressed. This cultural trend means: Abandon your minds, sheeple, and do not independently asses the ideas put forth by others. Instead, accept “the consensus,” and be driven by your feelings; human whim will lead to a better world; majority whim, “democracy,” is the ideal. And people wonder why the world is crumbling. Liberty is all but dead.
Liberals don’t have a real sense of humor. They just laugh at ridicule of people or causes they don’t like.
Most people in the US are moderately liberal even if they vote for Republican candidates for other reasons. But they’re not so far to the left that they will rally behind an ideologically pure progressive candidate.
A lot of “progressive” people online can be a little out of touch with reality and fall into what’s historically been considered “ultraleft” in communist circles. So, e.g., putting having an idealized vision of how things should be over getting stuff done, opposing the Democrats just as much as the GOP, criticizing feminism and other forms of identity politics “from the left,” etc. They’re a bit like the people who thought Stalin was too lax in the forced collectivizations and wanted the USSR to get more serious about violently spreading revolution to other countries.
@kettle- Irony is when the intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning. Hope that helps!!
Leftists have no sense of humor.
http://i.imgur.com/vB8YFim.gif
That’s… Still a sense of humour, dude. And I can’t even say “It’s just not your sense of humour,” because it is, you just replace “Laughing at ridiculous, hateful, idiotic conspiracy theorists” with “Laughing at women, PoC, LGBT+ people, poor people, overweight people, etc.”
Also, I totally recognise Hoving’s name as being a literal neo-Nazi, but I can’t track him down on WHTM. Were his previous posts deleted, or did I see him elsewhere? o.O
Hillary and Obama went to war in Libya without congressional approval. How did that turn out?
It lead to the rise of ISIS, sex slavery, genocide, religious persecution, hundreds of thousands dead, millions displaced, a refugee invasion of Europe, hundreds of terrorist attacks, dead Americans in Benghazi, dead Americans in Europe, and misery and suffering in general.
If Hillary wasn’t a Democrat, Democrats would be calling for her imprisonment.