Disney = thought control

I keep reading that Disney uses that as an excuse. Why would they go out looking for an excuse to fire someone delivering good movies? As a Disney exec I'd rather pissed to have to fire Gunn. Guardians are the best the MCU has to offer (well, that just my very personal opinion of course).

If your goal is to make good, profitable movies - of course. But if your priority is to propagate certain ideologies and valies and so called creative talent is in the way, then current situation is exacly the opportunity to get rid of unwanted asset without explaining exactly what you said "why to kick out a guy, who brings you money and critical praise?".

Note, that this is not the first example. A while ago Joss Whedon, who basically created the Avengers franchise, had to leave Disney because his creative vision of Black Widow diverged from what some feminists wanted her to be. Sorry, I can't find link now, but I remember there was quite a stir about it and Joss thought that it is simply better to go away.

No link needed; I remember enough of dumb hate posts on the prospect of Whedons Batgirl which I was looking forward too. I can imagine the same with Black Widow easily.

Its not like its unknown that Disney has these strong sterile clean 100% perfect family friendly values image the try to keep up at all costs. Sure it would be greater if they would show some actual family holding together situation and going on a Gunn redemption campaign (that is if there is a clean cut between that past ..."humor" they can work with); but with the amount of public made jokes like these he had to know that he is fired already the moment a company like Disney hires him.

It half-happened, but he's still with the network, last I knew.

That, or I'm out of the loop too.

What is at stake here is something that remotely intelligent people understand easily, that imbeciles don't grasp, and that manipulative politicians exploit. It's the actual intent, content and meaning of a joke or a provocation. And the joke or provocation itself doesn't often provide enough info on it, hence the need of contextualization and familiarity with the originating subculture. Which is lost in the age of knee-jerk factoïds reactions.

In short, a racist joke in militant antiractist circles is a joke on racism and on the racist mindset. The very same joke in racist political rally is a joke on the targetted ethnicity. It operates at a different level, conveys a different message. This message is determined by the adjacent discourses (whether it's surrounded with stigmatization of racism, or stigmatisation of foreigners). This environment makes the implicit, shared knowledge and values that the joke refers to.

That is why humour requires confidence. That's why, as Desproges famously said : "you can laugh about everything, you should laugh about everything, but not with everyone". That's why all the shocking humour of the Hara-Kiri and Charlie Hebdo gang, since the 60s, were both cruel and humanist. It was a movement that strongly denounced the situation that it caricatured, mocked, derided, or represented the most crudely cynical ways. Nowadays, the reaction would be "how dare you disrespect this drama" or "how dare you laugh with this subject". It'd skip the point made by the joke and by its context (who it comes from, what discourses accompany it). It'd ignore the content to react to the form.

But this goes both ways. Because the exact same superficiality (ignoring the meaning given by the context) is used by propaganda apologists to justify their messages if they take the form of a "joke". The two -immensely hypocritical- excuses that are geing given are "but hey look, those other guys made a similar joke" and "but lol it's only a joke don't look at a message". They know it's not true. If you look at this stupid polemic around Postal3's grave gif, you see both the "it's just a joke" rhetoric and the "they are censoring our message" one. And the same goes whenever an extreme-right leader feels victimized because some hate speech gets denounced even though it was framed as a racist joke. They are suddely aware that the stake is the serious, toxic messages implicitely carried by them, and not the form of entertainment that it was shaped as. Their excuse requires exactly what I am criticizing about our knee-jerk superficial reactions to decontextualized factoïds. They require not to take in account the underlying meaning of that form of discourse.

So, decide if you want to deny or to consider the meanings and purposes of a joke :

If you don't, then the Hara-Kiri, Charlie Hebdo, Racist Party, James Gunn, and Gamergate humour are to be treated the same way, at the most superficial, knee-jerk level (like "oh no, a bad word", "oh no a blasphemy" or "oh no a disrespect"). It can be as convenient or inconvenient as any mask, denial and misunderstanding. But don't complain if people don't care to evaluate who was talking to who, and what was the actual intent behind the seemingly shocking form.

And if you do, then accept that endorsements and criticisms depend on the message, worldview and ideology conveyed by the joke, and not on the joke itself (as an independant sentence or image). And don't assume that humour will matter more than other cosmetic aspects (phrasing, font, whatever) on the evaluation of that message.

But what I expect, is that, like most people, you'll just hop back and forth between these two modes of interpretation, depending on how convenient they'll sound at the time for the ideology that you're supporting or fighting. And that's what the public has been doing after the Charlie Hebdo massacre (of its most talented and clever authors) has given a new visibility to the journal. One minute defending it as innocent humour, the other minute decrying its shocking iconography, or going back to being outraged by the jokes which content were targetting their part of the political spectrum.

And that sort of incoherence is exactly what makes the snowflake/broflake symetry so amusing.

____
tldr :
Form. Content. People tend to only focus on whichever is the most convenient at a given time, and to deliberately obfuscate one with the other. They get very confused when someone doesn't. Fuck form.

You still don't get it. Yes, the same joke can be made for different reasons and with different intents. But how can you discern which intent in which joke? Do you really believe that it is enough to be "remotely intelligent" person to see what was the purpose of one speach or the other?!

You say that "environment" makes the implicit message. But how do you learn about environment? How do you learn if a person who made a joke is a racist? Is he a racist because he makes racist statements? And his statements are racist because he is racist? Because he is surrounded by "racist circles" whose racism is determined the same way?

You still don't see that this is exactly the circular reasoning that eventually makes you to identify "racism" as simply what you don't like. You don't like Trump? So you search for any "racist, sexist and other type of bigotry" in his speach, and of course you find it. And since you found racism and sexism in his words and actions, he is definitely racist and sexist.

But, as you have said, this kind of reasoning (if you call that reasoning) goes both ways. So if someone doesn't like James Gunn, Anita Sarkeesian, Carl Benjamin, you name it - that someone will find racist intent in their jokes and speeches. After all, they are racists egro intent of their statements is racism, which proves that they are racists.

Though in reality it all stems from simple dislike for certain person. And since you dislike that person, this person is a racist, sexist, homophobe, pedophile, anything you want this person to be - all you need to do is find statements that prove your initial suggestion. And since in your view context defines intent and you already know the context there is no problem to find that proof - it stems from your suggestion.

And you can talk about "snowflake/broflake symmetry" all you want (in fact there is indeed no difference between alt-right trolls and SJWs - case of James Gunn is a proof of that), but that doesn't change the fact that it were people like you, self-righteous and presuming they know people's mind by their sheer high morality, who introduced that kind of reasoning based on one's offended feelings to the world and made it a norm.

How about I can joke about whatever I like and in whatever company I like and there's nothing you can do about it?

Those tweets were from over 10 years ago....parties who dug them up had vested interest in making them known now???


Obviously Disney thought their family friendly image (its a bit over the top in certain ways....) was worth more than the hit in profits they will receive from Vol3 down the track . What was said in those tweets were in poor taste but FFS it was 10 years ago and plenty of people joke around at some point with stuff like that whether at school with friends or at work...

That's what James Gunn thought too 10 years ago.

Fortunately I'd rather commit suicide than actually have anything to do with disney capeshit movies so I think I'll be fine.

Not all of them were 10 years, some as recent as 2012. The video was shared by another actor who has been convicted of possession of child porn (pled down from from felony intent of unlawful contact with a minor). Maybe I have different friends, but I don't recall jokes about getting golden showers from a 3-year old or turning kids movie characters into something giving a b.j.) I do remember dead baby jokes, but here's the thing, people don't really go around deliberately killing babies, but child abuse is very real.


Maybe I'm bit oversensitive about the topic, but when you've had a friend that you thought was a wonderful person, volunteered his time and money to help children from broken homes and you look up to him....

Then a couple years later, when he's arrested for vacationing to Florida trying to buy sex with a minor that he had been pursuing for months online, you start to wonder what might have been happening with the children he'd been volunteering to help for years. He sure was going out of his way for some of them including buying them their first car and giving them spare cash...

I'm not sure now that was just generosity. Y

You may think those were "harmless" jokes, but at least one of those who shared the video seemed to be doing so because he was a real creep.

Pretty much this, yes. You have the answer here. If a "racist joke" is made by a person who routinely expresses racist opinions and adresses a crowd of people who routinely exchange racist statements, then the "racist joke" conveys an unironically racist worldview. So, to understand the meaning of a Le Pen declaration, for instance, you don't simply over-analyse this statement and its implications in isolation, you analyse the corpus of discourses that accompany it. And you do what we all do in everyday interactions : you assume coherence. This is how irony functions. If someone says "A" all day long, and suddenly declares "non-A" with a laughter, you assume that "non-A" is sarcastic or ironic. In order to know how ironic or sarcastic it is, you have to know the content of the usual everyday discourses.

Or, more in details, in order to decypher the meaning of a sentence within a subculture, you have to evaluate the meanings, values, and representations attached to its component words within that subculture. You have to know how loaded these words are amongst the interlocutors, what images and feelings they evoke. And you determine this by checking how they pop up in the shared discourses in general, how they are used, what they are attached to. "Multicultural", "feminist", "jewish", "rich", "nationalist", "russian", "muslim", etc, are loaded very differently in different circles (and different epochs), and this changes the meaning of a statement that uses them within the circle.

So, roughly, if you make one very dark joke about a humanitarian crisis, while you're fully invested in relief efforts, it conveys more of a denunciation of the situation than the same joke uttered by someone who's opposing relief efforts (and from whom the joke would be dismissive of the crisis). Same thing in other contexts. A joke minimizing mass murders during a genocidal process is part of the violence normalization, but when uttered by human right activists it conveys outrage and bitterness for this violence. And a racist joke based on the association of an ethnicity to a derogative trait works differently in circles that keep associating this trait and this ethnicity in their serious discourses, and circles that debunk this essentialist association (and see the joke as a denunciation of the illustrated prejudice). It's a matter of underlying beliefs, as already expressed in the surrounding discourses. Is the joke a reinforcement of this belief, or a caricatural illustration of the opposite belief.

And sometimes the frontier is thin, actually. There was an excellent pair of muslim and jewish comedians, in France, that used to make stand-up routines about the mutual prejudices between both communities. They eventually split, because one of them was becoming much much less ironical about this humour than the other (and he eventually continued a radicalized career where his jokes were part of a serious derogative discourse on the other religion). There was also (more creepily in this Gunn context) a very provocative french comedian whose outrageous jokes on pedophilia turned out to be pretty close to his own tendencies. So there are cases where denunciation jokes mask endorsement jokes, in ambiguous contexts. Maybe also contexts where the locutor is unsure of their own position.

But still, yes, the environment is knowable. Especially when it's as public as political rallies, discourses, and rhetorics. It's not always quite as straightforward as the national statements and mediatic apologies, but political sciences and discourse analysis usually go deeper, at local and comparatively less public rallies (where discourses get a bit more raw), and social sciences can go even deeper into individual level worldviews. There's an array of material to contextualize jokes and statements. Generally, trials are supposed to take these in account. It's when people's statements are judged (in all meanings on the word) as "in the void", with no consideration of who talks to who with what background, that results get erratic and abusive.

But if your question is merely some more specific and vaguely defensive "how do you define a racist discourse", that is another matter altogether, which has less to do with context (because discourse here would be already taken as a broad corpus), and more with the belief system (racialist pseudo-sciences, or cultural essentialism, ethnicist ostracism and scapegoating, etc).

Precisely.

george carlin said fuck the children once. good thing he's safe from the sjw pitchforks.. for now.
kinda funny that those people are so busy flipping out about the things someone says that they have no time left for the people who actually do these things. but that would require a spine and work.