We Hunted The Mammoth
Last night, Elon Musk, the new Chief Twit, tweeted that under his reign, “comedy is now legal on Twitter.” He did this after reports that his Twitter takeover had encouraged a nearly 500% increase in the use of the n-word on Twitter, as fans expecting looser rules tried out the limits of Musk’s “free speech absolutism” to see how many times they could use the word “n*gger” in a tweet.
The trans panic has reached an alarming stage: transphobes, most notably Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, have escalated their rhetoric and become more obvious about their stochastic terrorism, with Tucker Carlson broadcasting the names and faces of board members of Vanderbilt Hospital, which offers gender affirming care to children. Bill O’Reilly gave the same sort of “publicity” to a prominent abortion doctor years ago; the doctor was murdered by an anti-abortion fanatic.
So Elon Musk, a white dude born and raised in South Africa, has bought Twitter — which means that right-wing Twitterers are flooding the platform with the same witless joke.
“The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood famously said “men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.” She could have added: “every time they go on a date with a man.”
If you have to explain a joke, it either means it’s gone over the head of your audience, or — more likely — that it’s just not a very good joke to begin with.
So this hashtag popped up on Twitter today, a deliberately ironic poke at gender inequality (I asssume). There were a variety of reactions — some funny, some not-so-funny, and some that seemed to have floated in from another dimension.
The Babyloon Bee is an Onion ripoff aimed at conservative Christians. There’s just one little problem: while the Bee writers understand the whole “fake news” aspect of the Onion, they seem to have forgotten to make any of their “satirical” posts even a little bit funny.
By David Futrelle
The Trump stans in Reddit’s The_Donald have responded to the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in what, for them, is an extremely on-brand manner — by making weird and creepy jokes about sexual assault and some sort of forced inspection of Dianne Feinstein’s vagina.
