Accountability in Entertainment • Page 46

Ian! I shared a joint with him outside of a Portland open mic a few years ago. Really good guy.

 

I was gonna ask when @iCarly Rae Jepsen was in PDX but I see now that is someone from the tweet lol

 

Love Karmel so much

 

I have to be honest, right off the bat I just don't like Pete Davidson. I don't think he's funny at all and he gets on my nerves. And I know emotions are running really high around these midterm elections, but even still - I think it's very shitty to make fun of a former Navy SEAL's injuries he obtained while serving this country overseas. It's not like he didn't know either, he flat out said "I'm sorry, I know he lost his eye in war or whatever. Whatever."

Not only is he hilarious but he's eloquent too.

 

Fuck Dan Crenshaw.

 

Even if the guy is a complete dick - which it seems like he is - I don't think Pete Davidson should make fun of his war injuries. Write a better joke and hit him on some of the issues you don't like about him. Like I said, I can't stand him to begin with and don't think he's funny at all. Obviously a lot of people disagree, he got on SNL at 20.

 

He's not "a complete dick," he's a bigoted conspiracy theory nut job running for elected office. He's a bad person doing very bad things. I do not give one shit that he was in the military and someone joked about it. A joke about that dude barely registers for any thread outside of the politics, let alone this one.

 

You don't get to pretend you aren't being an asshole just because the dude you're attacking is a bigger asshole.

 

I don’t think attacking racists/bigots with words when they’re harming real people every day is “being an asshole.”

 

Jason, for me, what he said was a big enough deal to go here in this thread but you obviously feel differently and told me so. It's your website. I'm dropping it.

 

This false equivalence between what a politician like Crenshaw **does to people** and words is obscene.

They are not in the same ballpark.

 

No, it's not. But that's not what you're doing when you're attacking someone for what by all means is a disability. I'm not saying "consider this man's feelings" I'm saying consider the feelings of the people who share this man's disability but not his politics and how bad of a look it is to condone this.

 

No, that's not what happened. Not at all.

 

Alright

 

It's not. And it should be stated clearly that it's not. This is a very bad person, who, is doing very bad things, and will do very bad things in the future, and was doing things I vehemently disagree with when he was injured. That is not even remotely in the same world of equivalence to what you've attempted to make it about.

Joining the military to kill people abroad in unjust wars is so completely different that trying to tie this together with anything else just wrong on its face.

 

Yeah, again, I don't give a shit about his feelings. You can still be making a problematic comment even if it's about a shitty person. See, ironically: liberals all the time. The amount of racist, sexist, ablest, homophobic shit that people think is okay to say just because you're saying it about a shitty person is insane. Should we "cancel" Pete Davidson or whatever? No, of course not. But pretending like a dick comment isn't a dick comment because it was said about a huge asshole is just not a healthy or helpful line of thinking. Making fun of someone because they've lost an eye is a dick comment. This feels like a weird thing to have to explain.

 

How did he lose his eye? You keep acting like the circumstances don't matter. They do. They are exactly why it matters. Who he is, what he does, matters. It's not a universal statement. It's about this person. You trying to make it universal and that it's just that he's "an asshole" misses the entire point about who this is, what he did, what he is doing, and what he will do.

 

Because they don't matter. If he was in a wheelchair can we make fun of him for that? Do we just tell people in wheelchairs to what, take one for the team cause the joke is too good?

 

Is he in a wheelchair because he was a thousand miles away killing people for years on end? And now using his time spent doing that murdering to run for office and hurt more people?

Of course they matter.

 

Why do they matter, exactly? We can make fun of people for disabilities because they were in the military? How far does this extend? Clearly it extends to those who need a wheelchair. Do we go further or stop at ableism?

 

Why do individual circumstances matter? Because there's a clear difference between a murdering bigot that's using his position to harm people right now ... and someone with a disability. One's an actual villain. This is very easy to make this distinction. A comment like "he lost his eye in the war or whatever" is not a universal of making fun of people for disabilities. To turn this specific into a universal is to ignore what is being said and why in the first place. You want to change that to argue a different point, but you can't just take who Crenshaw is out of the equation and act like it's the same. It's not.

 

I’ve tried the argument here before that saying demeaning things about awful people is still harmful to those who have the same issue (whether it’s a disability or mental illness or whatever) and should be avoided for the sake of them and NOT for the specific awful person, but it doesn’t seem to stick.

 

The "same issue" in this case is ... injured murdering people in an unjust war. Once again, these are not equivalent to a disability.

 

Because people do not actually care about these things.

 

No, the same issue is having to wear an eye patch because you lost an eye.