That’s not quite accurate either, it seems.
I always try to avoid absolute ‘always’/‘never’ statements, because you set yourself up for an easy ‘defeat’ if a single contrary example is brought up.
It’s much more effective to compare per-capita statistics, for example.
If you ignore that different demographics face different issues and that they are valid in bringing them up
Which is irrelevant, because that’s not what I did.
you’re right wing trash as far as I’m concerned.
Since you’ve demonstrated a deliberate penchant for deliberately misconstruing anything short of full-throated agreement, your labeling based on that has no value whatsoever. “Right wing trash” and “person who disagrees with me” are not synonymous.
The fact remains, despite your protest: the attention any given injustice a person has suffered merits, should not depend on any of the victim’s immutable characteristics. It is immoral to believe, for example, that George Floyd and Tony Timpa[1] merit different amounts of sympathy/outrage/etc., just because one is black and the other is white.
↩︎Anthony “Tony” Allen Timpa, a 32-year-old, unarmed white man, was killed in Dallas, Texas by police officer Dustin Dillard. Officers had responded to a call by Timpa requesting aid for a mental breakdown due to the fact that he had not taken his prescription medication for schizophrenia and depression. Dillard pushed his body weight onto Timpa on the ground for around 14 minutes after he was already restrained, and officers ignored pleas from Timpa that he was in pain and was afraid he was going to die. Timpa’s death was ruled a homicide…
You’re equivocating, for no reason, being equally sympathetic to an injustice regardless of the demographics of the victim in any given instance, with treating every case as if it’s identical.
Those are completely unrelated things.
P.S. You ‘may be shocked to learn’ that starting a comment like that just makes you sound like a sanctimonious jerk.
You can interpret that however you want.
Not if you want to be accurate:
“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.
See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.
I’d also include the controversy around “Baby It’s Cold Outside”.
The irony is that in fully understanding the song and the culture of the time it was written in, the song is literally the opposite of what the outrage junkies made of it. They think it’s a song about a guy keeping a woman at his place against her will (the notion that he actually drugged her drink (and in such a way that she could tell by tasting it) is especially hilarious) through subtle intimidation, and that rape is apparently imminent.
But in fact, it’s a very empowering (especially for its time, ~80 years ago) song about a woman who defies social/cultural norms/rules to do what she wants and go ahead and spend the night at this guy’s place:
P.S. Also, the original songwriter wrote the song specifically for him and his wife to perform together for friends at a housewarming party. It wasn’t even considered to be released commercially until it became a huge hit at parties that they were invited to specifically to perform it. The idea that it’s a predatory date rape song is extra ridiculous with that context, aside from everything else.
George Carlin (who is idolized and rightly so, mostly) had a line in one of his standup specials where he said “you show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala”. Homophobia was just so normalized back then (this was the ‘80s).
I don’t think this bit was homophobic at all, and that you’ve misinterpreted it, through omission and otherwise. If anything, homophobia is part of what is being laughed at (and a small piece of the overall joke). I’ll explain.
To begin with, you left out key parts of the joke; he wasn’t expressing that as himself. Here’s the full bit:
I remember something my third grade teacher used to say. She used to say “You show me a tropical fruit, and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.” No, wait… that wasn’t her. That was a guy I met in the Army.
While the joke uses “fruit” as slang for gay as part of it, that isn’t actually even the punchline, the wordplay is just a vehicle for it. The humor primarily hinges on the notion of a grade school teacher saying something that crass (the second part specifically) to a child, coupled with the implication that it was something she said more than once (“used to say” instead of “said”).
Then he realizes it was some grunt who was in the Army with him (who it’d make more sense to say something crass/uncouth like that), which adds another element of humor in ‘how could he possibly mix those two people up?’. If anything, that hypothetical Army guy is being laughed at in part for the homophobic slur usage.
99.55%
The specificity of this made me imagine that you had actually taken inventory of every single time you’ve encountered this in your personal life experience and done the math, lol.
It’s not ironic at all. If someone steals X, it’s not ironic for them to not want that X stolen from them; it actually aligns perfectly with their previous mindset: ‘I want to have this’.
Ignoring key issues of discrimination of marginalised peoples
This is like saying that someone wanting to end all poverty is ignoring and discriminating against the single poorest person.
Stop acting like these things are zero-sum. It takes no extra effort to speak out against all instances of an injustice, compared to doing so only for certain instances of that injustice.
Missing in the post’s title, but not the article’s title. No ambiguity there: