Social Justice

[Gormongous]

So, the children are punished for their terrible parents? I don't understand what the crime is they actually comitted. Not wanting to see their father?

 

It's hard to put together from the statements, but it seems from the "Charlie Manson" and "brainwashed" remarks as though the judge is convinced that the mother has programmed her children to hate their father and that she's willing to put them in jail to remove them from her influence. Statements like this make me really doubt the validity of the judge's actions:

 

[The fifteen-year-old] alleged his father was violent and said he had seen him hit his mother, "so I'm not going to talk to him." Gorcyca reminded the boy that his father had never been charged with any offenses and that he loved his children and wanted to spend time with them.

 

The extensive court file indicates Eibschitz-Tsimhoni, 40, sought a personal protection order against her husband in 2010, claiming he threatened her and the children. The allegations were never substantiated and the petition was rejected without a hearing.

[Zeusthecat]

Also worth pointing out, the father seemed to have no objection to this and can't be reached for comment because he's in Israel right now. Giant fucking red flag if the dad is totally okay with his kids being placed in juvenile detention and then just goes back to Israel.

 

Good for all three of those kids for standing up to their piece of shit father and that piece of shit judge.

[Ozzie]

Yeah, that's a telling detail!

I edited my post a thousand times before I saw what you two posted in the meantime. I definitely got also the impression that the father is the shitty one of the two parents.

My judgment of the judgment:

[Mangela Lansbury]

I've heard all kinds of bad things about that county's court system -- everyone I know whose had to deal with it has said most judgments come down to whose bank account is bigger and who keeps their lawn tidier. Big commitment to keeping things Stepford.

But that judge, man. That's just disgusting. I hope someone gets some expedited action in there to get them out and get that judge off the bench.

[Bjorn]

Hmm, each of the kids has their own lawyer, and none of the three lawyers for the kids objected to the placement.  Which is...something.  I agree that dad sounds pretty shitty, but everything about that case looks like a trainwreck. 

[clyde]

Here's a short documentary (15min) about how market forces and the political scenario in the regiont is fueling the Thai slave-trade that was providing the labor for the the Thai fishing-industry but which is now becoming cargo-ships full of people being held for ransom now that fishing is becoming less profitable. I've heard that similar things are happening with South American, Central American, and Mexican immigrants trying to come into the United States.

Trigger warning: first-hand accounts of rapes and beatings and also lots of matter-of-fact accounts of how disposable these people are to the human-traffickers.

 

[Bjorn]

‘Angry’ man with loaded AR-15 terrifies bystanders in quarrel with black protester at Confederate statue

 

Thankfully the police intervened and gave the man tips on how to more comfortably carry his weapon in the future. 

[Smart Jason]

Troy Baker tweets a transphobic joke and quits Twitter over people "choosing to be offended" about it.

 

GamerGate journalist Erik Kain, whom I obviously have a hate-crush on, thoughtfully opines: "If you can’t joke about a particular demographic, you’re basically saying that demographic isn’t equal. I don’t know about you, but I find that pretty terrible."

[feelthedarkness]

i appreciate that to support his argument he references another article he wrote. 

[Ninety-Three]

The joke in question: 

 

Brett Michaels looks like Mickey Rourke tried to become Caitlyn Jenner.

 

Is it possible to tell a trans joke without it being transphobic? Because that joke doesn't seem like it stigmatizes, stereotypes, or otherwise does anything bad regarding trans people. "Person X looks like Y + Z" is a standard joke formula, are we just not allowed to plug trans people into that formula?

 

I'm not trying to argue in defense of the joke, I'm genuinely asking. I can imagine being told "You're never allowed to make trans jokes" the same as "White people are never allowed to say nigger".

[jennegatron]

I can imagine a joke about the monetary privilege that Caitlyn Jenner experiences or her white privilege being delivered by a poorer trans woman or trans Woman of Color, but I think it would be very hard to construct a joke about any trans woman's looks that isn't transphobic, because that joke is about her trans-ness & attempts to conform to the beauty standards created with cis white women in mind.

We talk a lot about how good humor/satire should punch up, and I think it's hard to find an axis to punch up on as a cis white dude instead you need to make fun of yourself and your own experience as a privileged person, so it's okay to make fun of Brett Michaels or Micky Rourke. Like substitute Jenner's name for Fabio, and I think that joke becomes instantly more palatable.

 

edit: I think Bjorn is right that it's a bad and lazy joke that wouldn't really benefit from swapping in someone else.

[Bjorn]

I think context matters a bunch, and given the extreme vitriolic rhetoric floating around Jenner specifically, common sense would probably dictate that there are better outlets for your humor.  I'm sure it's possible to tell jokes about Jenner that aren't transphobic.  But if you're drawing entirely on how she looks for the joke, you're likely to cross a line regardless of what your intent was. 

 

Plus there's also something about that joke that still feels wrong to me.  In that it's going after how, "Isn't it funny when men kinda have feminine features" humor.  Which isn't particularly funny, and in context, is trying to reinforce what a man is supposed to look like.  People have made fun of Michaels for a long time for not adhering to male image expectations. 

 

So it's a bad joke, that's unoriginal, about reinforcing society's gender and beauty norms, that uses a recently out trans woman for the hell of it.  There's nothing good or defensible about it (speaking more to Kain than Ninety-Three). 

[BusbyBerkeley]

Yeah, the joke is "lol this dude looks like if this person was trans. How embarrassing for them! They are ugly and look like a girl!" It's shitty and definitely transphobic. You don't need to play devil's advocate for everything.

[BobbyBesar]

The thing that joke confirms for me is that for many people, Caitlyn Jenner is simply the first trans person they're familiar with*. I don't think there's anything specific about Jenner's appearance for that joke, so her inclusion is either arbitrary or simply taking a swing at a recently out public figure.

 

*Younger people wouldn't, but I suppose that people familiar with Jenner as an athlete might also be familiar with Chas Bono? I wasn't really aware of it at the time, but I wonder how the public reaction to Bono's outing differed from Jenner's. For instance, if transitioning from female-to-male is generally more acceptable to our culture because 1) "of course everybody wants to be a man" and 2) it doesn't make men feel icky about possibly wanting to have sex with him.

[Bjorn]

I don't feel like Bono was anywhere near as high profile.  Bono hasn't had a years long TV show dedicated to following his family around.  If it weren't for the Kardashians, Jenner wouldn't have a tenth of the name recognition that she does.  And that carries with it all of the baggage of how people feel about her ex and her step-daughters. 

 

I also remember some pretty shitty things being said about Bono around the time of his transition.  That would have been at the earlier edge of social media though, so you wouldn't have had things be nearly as visible to as many people. 

 

Edited: Grrr, managed to switch pronouns halfway through a paragraph.

[BobbyBesar]

Hmm...actually, I didn't realize that Bono transitioned so recently.

But yes, Jenner's increased visibility (and the context for that visibility) certainly had something to do with it.

[Zeusthecat]

Somewhere in my brain, I feel a little bit of sympathy for people that unwittingly say shitty things like these and then react poorly to getting called out for it on a place like Twitter (although that sympathy isn't there for the shithead type of people that do it habitually).

 

I'll be honest, what Troy Baker said is the type of thing that I might have said as a joke in the very recent past and thought nothing of it. And if someone called me out for it in a Twitter type of format, I would have most likely reacted in a similar manner and thought of the other people as over-reacting. The only reason that isn't the case any more is because I just happened to join this community and over time, was fortunate enough to get a lot of really good perspective from many different people on why these things are harmful and how my personal perspective in some of these areas was lacking.

 

There are a couple of unfortunate things about this situation. One is that Twitter exists to amplify everyone's inane thoughts to everyone else in the world. And for some reason, a lot of people seem to not be able to grasp that spur of the moment random thoughts that you might normally say to a close group of friends or a smaller community take on a hell of a lot more weight when they are posted on a service for millions to see for all of eternity. As frustrating as that is though I do still feel some sympathy for people when they do stumble and then immediately have a bunch of people jumping down their throats and telling them how offensive they are being, but also doing so in a 140 character format. So yeah, these people should know better than to just impulsively post whatever they are thinking at any given time, but at the same time, I think it only exacerbates the problem to have millions of voices shouting this person down in bite-sized tweets. We were discussing how hard it can be for some people to admit fault in another thread and when it comes to this specific situation, I can kind of understand how someone's gut reaction would be to get defensive, not feel inclined to apologize and then get the fuck out. I'm not saying he is in the right in any way but I don't think he's necessarily an evil shithead for this either.

 

And that is the other unfortunate thing about this situation. I don't know Troy Baker and I've never heard of any kerfuffle involving him before this, but because of this slip up he will forever be labeled as a shithead by a lot of people. There is a very real possibility that he is a shithead, and maybe there is stuff he's said/done in the past that I'm not aware of, but it is highly likely that he will forever be condemned by a lot of people just because of this one fuck up. And it's pretty clear he realizes this. It's just unfortunate that there isn't a clear avenue for people to actually give him constructive criticism and perspective like I've been able to get from Idle Thumbs forums.

 

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I don't mean to say Troy Baker is in the right and I don't mean to say that people dogpiling on him is wrong. I just wanted to lament how frustrating it can be to watch this type of stuff go down in a cesspool like Twitter. Nobody seems to learn anything and it just ends in people often needlessly turning other people into enemies if they display any errors in judgment.

[clyde]

I don't know who Troy Baker is, but I was tempted for a moment to make a faux-account so that he could show up in the New People Say Hi thread.

"If only I had found y'all sooner. So... i got some jokes I was thinking about tweeting, any opinions?"

[JonCole]

He voices like every video game protagonist. He's pretty much the only voice actor as prolific if not more prolific than Nolan North. He also seems like a nice guy in interviews and podcasts I've listened to, but this definitely is a fairly indefensible, unfortunate thing he's said. 

[Gormongous]

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I don't mean to say Troy Baker is in the right and I don't mean to say that people dogpiling on him is wrong. I just wanted to lament how frustrating it can be to watch this type of stuff go down in a cesspool like Twitter. Nobody seems to learn anything and it just ends in people often needlessly turning other people into enemies if they display any errors in judgment.

 

The worrisome thing for me is that the quasi-respectable parts of #GamerGate like Erik Kain now exist, in a very visible way, to passively or actively reassure any video game figure who says something dumb or mean that it's really everyone else's fault for not seeing the logic or humor behind what they said. I know, in the past, when I've said awful stuff, it's only taken one voice telling me that all the rest are wrong for me to double down, and a lot of those voices were not nearly as well-spoken as Kain, who has proven to be as much a disappointment for me as for SmartJason.

[Badfinger]

Somewhere in my brain, I feel a little bit of sympathy for people that unwittingly say shitty things like these and then react poorly to getting called out for it on a place like Twitter (although that sympathy isn't there for the shithead type of people that do it habitually).

 

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I don't mean to say Troy Baker is in the right and I don't mean to say that people dogpiling on him is wrong. I just wanted to lament how frustrating it can be to watch this type of stuff go down in a cesspool like Twitter. Nobody seems to learn anything and it just ends in people often needlessly turning other people into enemies if they display any errors in judgment.

 

I can tell you that the people I work with crack jokes at lunch much worse than this on a daily basis. They are, in general, caring and nice people. But they are wholly ignorant that the shit they're spewing is on par with racial slurs, and it's so frustrating. Here's the thing: they're old. The world I live in where this is normal and people are people and you don't say that shit isn't their world. I am not excusing anything they, or Troy Baker, have said. But 5 years ago, that was a socially acceptable joke. It's a joke like I might have made 10 years ago. I'm truly sorry about it. It was never not horrible, but at the same time late night TV hosts could probably pretty easily shoot the breeze with "tranny" jokes and be completely fine. The world is changing in ways they don't understand, and we (especially in my mind, people who are like them and not the target of shitty jokes (aka me, I have to do a better job of this)) have to do our best to educate that jokes like that are not ok. Because I don't think, at least in the case of my coworkers, they are meaning to say hurtful things, and don't think those things when they are cracking jokes. So it's on someone who knows better to educate in a way that makes them allies and not enemies. Unfortunately, one of the things about ignorance is you don't know you are.

[BobbyBesar]

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent. I don't mean to say Troy Baker is in the right and I don't mean to say that people dogpiling on him is wrong. I just wanted to lament how frustrating it can be to watch this type of stuff go down in a cesspool like Twitter. Nobody seems to learn anything and it just ends in people often needlessly turning other people into enemies if they display any errors in judgment.

 

This isn't necessarily a perfect fit for it, but this reminds me of a popehat post that I bookmarked so that I can re-read it everytime there's a twitter "thing":

 

http://popehat.com/2014/11/17/shirts-and-shirtiness/

 

 Twitter lets us reach all of our followers instantly, and potentially be repeated to thousands or millions more. But it lets us do it in an instant, with very little thought or effort — really no more effort than it takes to speak it. Yet when it serves our individual narratives, we tend to assign a level of intentionality to Twitter and other social media that we would normally reserve for planned, deliberate, formal expression. A tweet might be a throw-away, a vent, a yawp, but we interpret it as "this person carefully formulated this statement and deliberately transmitted it to thousands of people, intending that it be passed on, showing how important they think it is."

 

Yes, the joke was tasteless, but it was a throwaway retweet and who knows what the intent was, if any? It's probably worthy of a "hey, that's not cool" followed by a "You're right, my bad", rather than an escalation of dog-piling and twitter-quitting.

[Reyturner]

Today I learned the definition of the word "cuckservative" (hint, it's exactly what you think it means) and I want to barf with laughter. Basically, disconcertingly large segments of the GOP base are not satisfied with racism being concealed under fig leaves and transmitted though dog whistle and are demanding full frontal white supremacy blasted from bullhorns before they'll be satisfied that they're not being "fooled". I wonder how much longer pundits and GOP leadership can keep pretending that Trump's popularity is a side show before they're forced to start dealing with the serious and surging appeal of crazy go nuts, snarling racism amongst red state voters. 

[Ben X]

That term makes zero fucking sense.

[Bjorn]

It makes perfect sense that it would emerge as a word.  Cuckolds have long been one of the gravest insults that the wacky right have reserved for men they view as betrayers to their own gender.  Of course they would start trying to cram that idea into other words to give it even more ways of being used.