Absent President Donald Trump, White House Correspondents’ Dinner Stirs Controversy
What the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Dinner lacked in sitting presidents and celebrities, it more than made up for in controversy, centered around headlining comedian Michelle Wolf:
It was a risque and uneven routine, at first met with laughs but often greeted by awkward silence. Wolf laced into the president and repeatedly brought up his comments from the “Access Hollywood” tape. The performance evinced memories of when Stephen Colbert savagely satirized the Bush administration in 2006.
Wolf opened her act with the line, “Good evening, here we are at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; like a porn star says when she’s about to have sex with Trump, let’s get this over with,” the first of many bawdy insults.
Wolf’s other targets included Vice President Mike Pence, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and the president’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.
But much of the room went silent with Wolf’s personalized attacks — and an abortion joke that wasn’t well received — and after the Comedy Central comedian joked that she wished a tree would fall on Conway, adding that she did not hope that the White House aide would get hurt, but only “that she would get stuck.”
While President Trump did not attend for the second year in a row, holding a campaign style rally in Michigan instead, the Administration did not boycott the event.
Fifteen presidents have attended the correspondents’ dinner since it began in 1921, which has made the event a hot ticket long before the likes of Bradley Cooper and Scarlett Johansson began showing up. The presidents-in-the-house streak ran to 36 consecutive years until Trump pooped out on the party last year. The last time Trump attended, in 2011, he sat stoically as the evening’s entertainer, Seth Meyers, dropped comic bombs on him. The prospect of it happening again seems to have deterred him from returning.
Trump did make one gesture toward press-administration glasnost, encouraging current and former members of his administration to attend (the White House announced last year that no staff employees would attend in “solidarity” with the president’s snub).
And so Kellyanne Conway, Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus showed up. Omarosa Manigault-Newman came, too (accompanied by a fellow who tended to the train of her gown). Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders occupied a seat at the head table at the invitation of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
And it was the White House Press Secretary, seated at the head table at the invitation of the WHCA, at the center of both Wolf’s jokes and the controversy that followed:
NPR:
The criticism was joined by some well-known political journalists who sounded off both about Wolf’s remarks and the nature of the event more broadly. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was the particular target of harsh treatment by Wolf — as Sanders sat on the dais not far from the lectern where Wolf was speaking.
Afterward, some of the journalists from outlets known to spar with the White House or be on the receiving end of pointed attacks directly from the president spoke out on Sanders’ behalf.
“That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive,” tweeted Maggie Haberman of The New York Times. (Haberman said on Twitter that she did not attend the event in person but had watched it on TV.)
“Lots of critics but she has always been decent and professional to me — if not entirely forthcoming,” The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey posted on Twitter about Sanders, attaching Haberman’s tweet about the Trump spokeswoman.
“The spirit of the event had always been jokes that singe but don’t burn,” said Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News, “Reporters who work with her daily appreciate that @presssec was there.” Like Dawsey, O’Donnell included Haberman’s tweet praising Sanders’ composure under fire.
Many of those connected to the administration made a show of walking out during the routine. While there is a fair point of saying the roasting is a known staple of the event, some high-profile journalist, the very people the event is ostensibly about, objected.
NPR:
“The spirit of the event had always been jokes that singe but don’t burn,” said Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News, “Reporters who work with her daily appreciate that @presssec was there.” Like Dawsey, O’Donnell included Haberman’s tweet praising Sanders’ composure under fire.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think we advanced the cause of journalism tonight,” Peter Baker, also of The New York Times, said online.
As Haberman’s tweet had, Baker’s set off a series of responses, subtweets and amens from fellow journalists.
“Couldn’t agree more,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny posted on Twitter, “So much important and amazing journalism this year — that should be the focus, when truth matters and is needed more than ever. It was an embarrassment in the room and surely to the audience at home.”
“He’s talking about the White House Correspondents Assn dinner,” tweeted Fox News political analyst Brit Hume. “He’s right,” Hume said, attaching Baker’s tweet.
“The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is a deeply flawed event that doesn’t do what it aspires to do and is serious need of retooling,” wrote Robert Yoon, a political research expert and former longtime employee of CNN’s political unit in D.C., wrote online, also referencing Baker’s tweet.
Other journalists saw broader political implications stemming from the controversial remarks.
“Michelle Wolf — and the WHCD — really played into Trump’s hand tonight. Trump is vulgar and mean-spirited, but that doesn’t mean that Wolf needed to be the same,” tweeted D.C. fixture and longtime political analyst Stuart Rothenberg.John Ward of Yahoo News called the comedy routine “a political gift to the Trump admin[istration].”
Echoing Ward, Rothenberg and Baker, Meg Kinnard of The Associated Press saw very specific implications for journalists, especially those working and reporting in predominantly Republican states. Saturday night’s event “made the chasm between journalists and those who don’t trust us, even wider,” Kinnard tweeted. “And those of us based in the red states who work hard every day to prove our objectivity will have to deal with it.”
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Good for Michelle Wolf. Seems like she made some powerful people uncomfortable. We need more of that!
The whole event is anachronistic and useless, but if they keep hosting it, comedians should jump at the chance to get a few jabs in.
The president, congress, and the rest of the DC cohort are generally cloistered and nearly impossible to engage with. One of my Senators and my congressman wont even hold an open discussion in the district. They are complete moral cowards, that wont even engage their critics. I wish Michelle Wolf could roast them all!Report
I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED that members of the admin, right leaning, allegedly right leaning, and all who do not share Michelle Wolf’s opinions, would be the butt of her jokes. /sarcasm off. What I’m not shocked about is that certain members of the journalistic crowd would make mild objections. After all, they gotta work with the Trump folks. They need to make just enough noise to give the appearance of complaining, all the while likely snickering their agreement behind closed doors.
I’m not sure why any in the admin would bother showing up. I’d expect the event to be all “trump derangement syndrome” all night.Report
It’s okay because Trump said bad things too.
Here is a list of them.
So, therefore, people complaining about this are hypocrites.
Also people who complain about the media being biased need to read The Nation’s Eric Alterman’s “What Liberal Media?”.Report
All of these are true:
Every Trump supporter/official going knew this is what would be said/tone of evening
Wolf went too far in personal attacks, but if it had been funny would have gotten a pass
The walk-out was probably pre-planned, Schlapp especially it comes off hypocritcal since he is as “washington elite” as it gets
The Left is deluding themselves that they are going to out-vulgar or shame Trump to anyone outside their group
The Right, especially Trump supporters and MAGA-land, is absolutely ate up with woe-is-me self-victimization to the point they seek this out
A lot of journalist who try to be fair and professional are starting to notice and speakout/push back on all of the above.
The pull quote in the post of this playing right into Trumps hands is accurate
WHCA has no one to blame but themselves for turning what was once respectable event into the circus it is now.Report
I will agree with you that the walk-outs were planned, they knew what they were getting into, etc. But “That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive,” [emph added] is more telling, to me at least, than all the other bits. That this comes from someone who has proclaimed “I am a feminist.” shows that the preaching of that idea cannot withstand the current tribalism and the vitriol therein.
This appearance-shaming, for that is what it is, explains why Trump’s vulgarity is so divisive. Not unlike Louis CK and his desire for Sarah Palin to be raped* to many people outside the beltway, it shows that there is a difference between how the two groups are accepted and received. Deplorable indeed.
*Yes, he apologized and she accepted.Report
Marlow Stern makes a very interesting point:
Report
SHS was specifically invited by WHCA but I wouldn’t be surprised a bit if that’s the case. Schlapp and the like absolutely planned to walk out, not a doubt in my mind. Wolf’s comments probably was even more than they hoped for if that was the case.Report
@jaybird I keep telling people to watch this stuff like a wrestling angle. That is what you saw last night, and angle, and WHCA played right into it.Report
You’ve got one side who has spent the last 70ish years bragging about how they know it’s fake.
You’ve got another side that is led by someone who took a Stone Cold Stunner (not particularly well… but we can’t all be The Rock) and shaved the head of Vince McMahon himself.
And, today, Politico is writing articles talking about how “Journalists distance themselves from Correspondents’ Dinner after Wolf routine“.Report
The heel turn when Trump goes full Trump, returns to his pre-2015 stances on everything, and pushes Medicaid for all as he runs as a centrist is going to be epic.Report
“heel turn”
Remember how, in the days following Stone Cold signing his medical waiver with Vince McMahon’s blood, Vince McMahon was rumored to be hurt that everybody was still cheering Stone Cold and booing him?
Imagine a universe where Vince McMahon was not canny enough to say “well, let’s run with that!” but, instead, kept booking himself as the babyface.Report
we don’t have to imagine that…Report
That first quote is especially important since its from Maggie Habernan, who as recently as a few days ago was derided by name by Trump on a Tweet. She is a frequent target of the President, despite knowing him for years and though Trump talks about not talking to her they go back to his NYC days and there are pics of them posing in Oval Office, so for what that’s worth.
Appearance shaming is wrong. It’s one of my own rules for social media I don’t make fun of peoples looks. Sometimes I fail. SHS has been thrown look and weight jokes from day one. Whatabouting and hypocrisy doesn’t make it ok. It is wrong. But its still just words, not an assault on democracy and everyone should calm down. But they wont because outrage sells.Report
I agree with re: words aren’t an assault on democracy. Rather, it’s the idea that feminism only applies to those who hold one set of politics, which as we have seen, aren’t universal. That is doing real damage to the idea that women are more than cultural accessories.Report
@aaron-david Well, and this is sort of almost exactly what you said, but maybe a little different, but the choice to not appearance-shame should be target-independent. Like, feminists should not do that because the BEHAVIOR isn’t feminist, not because of who they are or aren’t talking about. Appearance-shaming just isn’t a feminist thing to do (IMNSHO, feminism isn’t one thing, etc etc.)Report
What criticisms were made of her physical appearance? I’ve looked and haven’t found them.Report
@mike-schilling I will say I went looking, expecting to find them (because the media often *does* say really crude things about her appearance) and .. didn’t really?
I mean
1) comparison to actress playing Aunt Lydia in the handmaid’s tale (which is only a joke about appearance if one assumes that said actress is “ugly”, which… is kind of on the assumer.).
2) something about splitting into softball teams that i thought was about her appearance but having listened to it in context, is actually about her voice/delivery style and something I’d expect to hear about any Press Sec, albeit perhaps with a different sport
3) the “burns facts and turns them into the perfect smoky eye” thing which… I mean Sanders does do the perfect smoky eye IMO, so as an isolated joke I thought it was pretty funny and typical WHCD stuff. On the other hand she has also gotten a lot, a lot a lot a lot of actual shit about her makeup for years now, which is cruddy, appearance-shaming, and frankly sexist BS. And I can’t help but think Wolf was aware of said tradition and making her joke within said context, so I wasn’t a big fan. But that relies on a lot of context.
Not really what I was expecting to find, all around…
That said, for me, having a roast of the President is an important tradition to have. Presidents have a great deal of power and it’s important to undermine that power. Criticizing his minions, particularly spokesperson-not-much-actual-power minions instead, b/c they’re the ones who show up is… playing into the Admin’s hands at best, as @andrew-donaldson says above.Report
99% in full agreement with you. I do think it’s appropriate at the correspondents’ dinner to call out the person whose job it is to lie to the correspondents, whether it’s Spicer, Sanders, or whoever comes next.Report
I thought Wolf said “burns fats and turns them into the perfect smoke [indecipherable]”
That was a much more inappropriate joke than “burns facts”.Report
@murali Yes, were that to have been what she said, it would have been more inappropriate.Report
Oh, good Lord. Schlapp the horribly offended was the one who told Michael Steele to “have some grace” when a CPAC speaker said “We elected Mike Steele as chairman because he was a Black guy, that was the wrong thing to do,”Report
God damn it are right-wingers a bunch of thin-skinned pricks. President Trump has a forty year career making bigoted comments and actions. He mocked a physically disabled reporter during the election. He did this on camera! His audience lapped it up. Huckabee Sanders lies through her teeth every damn day.
And a comedian takes a few jabs at them and then they run like elementary school kids to mommie talking about meanies and how unfair liberals are.
There is a certain kind of argument that goes around the Internet and pundit land. This argument claims that we would not have Trump but for liberal coastal elites mocking the mores and aesthetics of the heartland. Another recent version was Conor F being really upset that liberals like to mock John McNaughton paintings.
This is the Conor F that lived in super-hipster Venice Beach!!!
I doubt this argument. I doubt there is anyone out there who says “I would be a complete supporter of Universal Healthcare but those liberals are so mean…”
I think Matt Y said it best on twitter. There is a tension between the Conor F who calls for a free-wheeling First Amendment and chides the Atlantic for firing Williamson and the Conor F who breaks into hives because liberals like to make fun of dreadful John McNaughton paintings.Report
Would you say that the women who are offended are a crude term for female genitalia or are they covered under the umbrella of the crude term for male genitalia in the same way that Spanish just uses the male term even if there are 99 women and only one guy in the group?Report
@jaybird
In the name of native Spanish speakers everywhere, I definitely do not apologize for having a language that is so well regulated.Report
Yeah but you could also regulate it to the appearance of the group or the majority of the group.
It always did stick my craw that if I’m the one man at the Women’s Right’s March, the group suddenly shifts into the masculine plural.
On the other hand I love that Marriage (which is eternal) uses Ser where as Death (which is only until the Resurrection) uses Estar.Report
“God damn it are right-wingers a bunch of thin-skinned pricks.”
@saul-degraw, this sentence is way too general to be okay. WAY too general to be okay. Please don’t.
This site has very different standards of discourse (regardless of the side) than the WHCD.Report
A few weeks ago it was all about how horrible liberals were for critiquing the Atlantic because of Kevin “Let’s hang all women who get abortions” Williamson because free speech. Now liberals are the bad people for making fun of McNaughton’s art and professional liar Huckabee Sanders.
This is why it feels like a rigged game to us many people on the left. Very much heads I win and tails you lose.Report
Williamson said that?!? I certainly hope he was fired!Report
He did say that. Then, after he was silenced, he walked it back across half-a-dozen high profile opinion outlets.Report
This is why it feels like a rigged game to us many people on the left.
Maybe those “many people” ought to reconsider what game they think they’re playing, what the rules are, and why they’re playing it.Report
@saul-degraw I didn’t have a problem with the rest of your comment, I had a problem with the particular sentence that started your comment. Apparently I wasn’t pointed enough before, Moderator tag and all, so I’ll be clearer this time.
Don’t talk like that again. Be civil. Or else there will be consequences.Report
Everybody is thin-skinned prick, dealing out punishment to those they think are in the wrong but not tolerating the most mild criticism from anybody else. I admit that the American right’s hypocrisy on this issue is particular rich though.Report
@leeesq Well, generalizing it ALL the way to ‘everybody’ is certainly one way to get around it being an overly general insult. Still, I’m not impressed with the “American right-wingers are thin skinned pricks” line of argument generally, it’s way too encompassing of people on this board, and you need to stop the same as Saul does.
Seriously people, not that hard to not fling insults around in ways that smack up against a large chunk of the community here. Particularly not insults that are the obnoxious kind that if someone says “hey, I’m not a (insult)” you get to say “see, you are or you wouldn’t be offended right now”. Those are a pet peeve of mine. Insult entrapment or something.Report
@saul-degraw
Maybe there is a tension, but excepting his columns about 1968, the columns he writes criticizing Trump far outnumber the columns he writes that criticize liberals. (To be honest, though, I don’t know anything about the John McNaughton issue.)
As for the “pricks” comment, two points:
1. I don’t think people should use that language. It’s not “just as bad as” other words used for women (for example), but it’s not okay, either. One of the very few ways in which working with majority female coworkers puts me on the spot is when they casually talk about some people being “dicks.” They do so only rarely, but the few cases I’ve noticed it it was unnecessary and not relevant to things like harassment, which in my opinion would be more understandable. I will say none of that means the language should be banned, just that I believe people shouldn’t say that. I’ll also say that I realize I probably do enjoy a lot of male privilege, even in the majority female workplace.
2. As I’m fond of saying, we’re all snowflakes now. Maybe if we can take up other people’s sincerely-held or sincerely-felt offense and use that as an opportunity to find common ground, we might be able to ratchet down some of the acrimony in our culture wars and perhaps make some advances in our political wars. Of course, “sincerely” is a loaded term, and as some have mentioned here, the walkouts seemed planned ahead of time, so maybe the offense wasn’t all that sincere to begin with. Also, I realize staking out common ground is only one tactic among many to get things done and may not always be the best approach.Report
The problem is that civility gets weaponized by the right. They fully cry foul when liberals strike back or get strident but also cheer on the D’Souza’s and Ingrahams.
This is why Murc’s law exists. No one expects the right-wing to behave but they expect the left to. This looks like getting away with murder.Report
The problem is that civility gets weaponized by the right.
Saul, I’d like to introduce you to the concept of Political Correctness…Report
I assume what you wrote was a response to
and not a response to
But I get what you’re saying that the shibboleth of “civility” a good number of people on the right indulge in is certainly an issue.Report
If “people on the left” impose strict civility standards on discourse which is otherwise viewed as normal by a large part of the population, the left has effectively *created* the group referred to as “people on the right”.Report
Maybe yes and no? It seems you (and maybe I?) are playing a kind of blame game or a tu quoque game? Maybe I’m misinterpreting you, and if so, please let me know.
Granting that a “blame game” or “tu quoque game” might not be what you intended, I’ll riff on the idea anyway and say those games have limited usefulness. And it may be helpful to point out ways in which others or one’s interlocutors cry “civility” when they criticize others for doing so. However, I’m inclined to suggest the main point should be where we go from here and how we can start with where people are.
I personally think civility–or better yet, “decency”*–are important and should be fostered, at least in some environments some of the time. As someone who’s not as likely as others to be victimized in our present era, I need to remember that.
*But darned if I can usefully define either.Report
Yes. Perceptive. I think you’re right.
In the above comment I’m not *intending* to blame anyone for anything but instead merely noting that accusations of how the right uses civility as a sword are a bit hypocritical when coming from the left. But since I’m pretty opposed to PCism in general I probably am in fact blaming the left for creating a bed it doesn’t want to lie in.Report
What do you mean by PC? Because there always seems to be a huge disconnect here.
Does anti-PC mean Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter was okay? Does it mean just accepting the use of derogatory language?Report
Because there always seems to be a huge disconnect here.
Yes, there is. The left uses PC as a weapon but thinks they’re using it as a shield and criticizes the right for using it as a weapon and not a shield when the right actually IS, by their own admission, using it as a weapon.
It’s like the left is criticizing the right for not playing by the PC rules or something…Report
When I read about pre-modern societies, whether from the 19th century or the middle ages, or antiquity, the structures intended to create justice or human flourishing, like courts and churches, often failed in their mission and inflicted as much suffering as they alleviated.
That is, the tools used to enforce social norms were weaponized by those in power to game the system. The unwed mother was shamed, but the powerful father shielded.Report
Has it ever not been that way?Report
Seconded.Report
There is a part of me that wants to lament the coarsening of our civic dialog, and to mourn for the restoration of the era of bipartisanship and polite manners in our political leaders…and then I remember history.
For most of our history American politics wasn’t much different than it is now. Political arguments were always ugly brawls of curses and insults. I remember in college browsing microfilm copies of the LA Times from the 1880s and being shocked as how much they sounded like the National Enquirer.Report
I can see from the preceding comments that last night’s WHCD changed a lot of people’s minds.Report
The point isn’t to change minds. It’s to confirm priors.Report
You mean, to let people who are offended by A in context B even though in context C it’s their favorite thing in the world to get very offended?
I had no idea.Report
See? Priors confirmed.Report
Meta-priors as well.Report
I remember when the comedians would viciously savage Obama and compare Michelle to a cow.
Oh wait. I don’t remember that at all.Report
@george-turner If this is a way of pointing out stuff that used to be said about Michelle that you know you aren’t actually allowed to say about anybody on here, it’s lacking in subtlety.Report
Previously banned commenter, comments removed. – maribouReport
From that Politico article:
This is what I find weird, this protective shielding of the administration from harsh criticism, this time under the cover of the “tradition of comity”.
It fits in with the idea that the social structures of manners and mores are as easily weaponized to inflict suffering at they are to prevent it.
It also supports the image of the Beltway corespondents as those who are detached from the consequences of politics, for whom it is all some sort of game.Report
Tone policing is very much a thing that the right has weapon used. Partially because they know that there are a lot of center-left types who sincerely believe in comity and think we can get back to civil politics. Not because this is a game but they are largely spared the damage of right-wing policiesReport
“there are a lot of center-left types who sincerely believe in comity”
I’d put it at less than 10%.Report
This is unhelpful. Most conservatives support center-left policies on guns, taxes, social programs, ACA provisions, etc.Report
I guess I”m thinking of those people who would identify themselves as center-left.Report
There was a great French movie called Ridicule on the elaborate code of manners at Versailles. It depicts how they were weaponozed by the Court aristocracy against anybody outside their small, privileged, and charmed circle,
Civility, decency, and manners make life more pleasant but they were always used by the inside yo keep those on the outside excluded. The Nouveau Riche, Jews, and everybody else seemed socially unacceptable were seen as gouache because of alleged bad manners. Not getting the most minute forms of etiquette could have serious consequences. The powerful also used it to suppress the powerless.Report
Good comment. Civility *usually* cuts only one way.Report
Can anyone quote specific lines from Wolf’s performance and explain how they are uniquely offensive or inappropriate?Report
Here’s a rundown. I don’t make the lesbian association, but do make the others. Female softball players image as butch, unfeminine, and unattractive. It’s a common enough perception that sitcoms joke about it.
The two violations for me are “Don’t go after people’s innate looks or weight” and “Don’t be sexist” and the softball part breaks those two in my view. Nothing else bothered me. Added to that, comedians are going to cross the lines sometimes. They’re also relatively minor transgressions, which interesting comedians are always going to make, so it’s not too big of a deal.Report
That seems fairly well-reasoned and legitimate.
Which puts it at odds with most of the responses.
Even liberal leaning outlets are going after her but that seems because they didn’t like being targetted as media members.
Overall, it felt kind of “Meh” to me. Is there room for “meh” anymore?Report
The softball joke struck me as being a callback to comments made about Kagan.
Anybody else?Report
I thought the joke with the softball thing was that shs looks like every pissed-off middle-aged white lady whose kids not as good at the game as they thought they were.
And lordy lordy she’s going to let the coach know about it.Report
In that vein, I present this tweet:
Report
Hah! That’s perfect!Report
When the show is on another foot (so to speak), we often say, “If you have to explain the joke that much…”
The joke was either intended to play on homophobic stereotypes or close enough that I don’t give it a pass.
The routine as a whole? The backlash seems disproportionate. But here we are…Report
@kazzy Somehow it feels really weird to me to be (as far as I know) the only person on here who actually fits that particular homophobic stereotype in many ways, and yet also be completely unoffended by the joke in context.Report
Which I suppose circled back to my initial question of, “To whom was this offensive, in what way, and how offensive?”
Helpful perspective, @maribou .Report
Members of a political movement that makes Donald Trump its leader and then the President of the United States have zero standing to complain about civility.Report
@pillsy I don’t necessarily disagree with you on that.
But what about the rest of us?Report
We’ll find some reason to make sure that the rest of you don’t have standing either.Report
@jaybird I wasn’t asking you, and I particularly wasn’t asking you to pretend to hold another point of view than your own. Jeez dear.Report
I’m not sure why the rest of us should care about being civil to someone who tells insulting lies to us, at taxpayer expense, and on behalf of a comprehensively terrible President and White House.Report
I care because being civil is, to me, not about the person one is being civil *to*, but about the community that one chooses to be part of and the standards *of that community*. I mean, on a scale of 1 to 100, I care about the feminism or not, civility or not, etc of mocking Sarah Huckabee Sanders in relation to her perfect smokey eye about a …. 6? (Note this doesn’t mean I care about being *nice* to her in some hospitable sense, just that there are things I think should be offlimits, perhaps *more* offlimits among enemies than among friends, and it bothers me when it turns out “my” side is no more willing to agree on those things than the other one is.)
But within that 6 points I’d say 4 of it is “our principles matter because they are true, not because of who we apply them to” (something I care about a whole lot on its own), 1 of it is long-term strategery, and 1 of it is about her as an individual. If that much.
Still, I wasn’t asking whether the rest of us should care. Given that you were talking about standing, I was asking whether you think the rest of us have standing to care. Because from my point of view, I do have standing to care (a little), even as I acknowledge that it’s a 6/100 for me and there about eleventy-jillion things at 80 or higher. If you don’t think I have standing to care, I’d be interested in you unpacking (not so much asserting) why not.Report
I think you have standing to care just as much as you would care about this sort of joke if it were directed at a member of your in-group as it is towards SHS, in the sense that, sure, “I believe these things are true and good and right so want to adhere to them,” is a standard you’re entitled to have, and unlike the people who’ve embraced Donald Trump, I have no reason to doubt your sincerity.
But this, to my mind, edges right up to the line and maybe crosses it:
To the extent that you’re arguing for being extra scrupulous about SHS because she’s an enemy, I don’t know if you do have standing, because maybe that’s no longer a question of whether our principles are true, but, well, who we’re applying them to.
That might leave you standing to only object at a strength 3 or 4/100, rather than the full 6/100. If you don’t think my reading is ridiculously wrong.Report
@pillsy It’s not that your reading is *ridiculously* wrong, but I do think it’s wrong, or at least not what I intended.
All I meant by that it is that when the “things” in question have to do with speech and conversation, there is a broad assortment of insults that a friend may easily give the most affectionate reading to / let slide when they come from another friend, and that relaxes the standard a little from neutral, whereas with enemies, the tendency to relax the standard is (IMO, and esp when we are talking about my own behavior, but to some degree what I expect from the team I’m on) coming from a different and less good place. It’s not, coming from the philosophical place, that the enemy should be treated better, but that I/we should mistrust ourselves more wrt an enemy than a friend, if that makes more sense to you? Maybe it’s clearer with an example.
For example, I have a friend who teases me about being genderfluid/nonbinary/trans on the regular, usually in oblique ways. (And no, I’m not talking about Jaybird :D). This is his way of communicating that he remembers and is comfortable with it, also that I should remember he likes to poke at people; I know that’s what he’s doing on both counts, and nothing that he says *to me* bothers me. I know what his intentions are and I trust him. I don’t really care when he does it, or really I find it slightly annoying and slightly lovely of him and they cancel each other out. ** If he were doing it in public in a context where there were people who were personally affected, not his friends, I’d make him quit, but one on one, I really don’t care how he teases me because I 100 percent appreciate the context and the sibling-esque relationship that we already have established.
Whereas were my friend to start mocking someone he considered an enemy on the same topic, or were someone to mock me out of enmity on the same topic, I’d be much quicker to care about it.
** I find that mockery between friends usually has this context to it, at least if they’re really friends *and* one person isn’t nursing unspoken pain about the other’s speech.Report
For me it distills pretty simply: If you’re making fun of a bad person for being X, then you’re making fun of X almost every time. While there is some disagreement as to whether or not MW was making fun of SHS’s physical dimensions, I believe she was and I am not okay with that irrespective of my views of SHS because it signals that it’s okay to make fun of that. It’s not about SHS.
But this is why I’m not at all upset about the rest of it. Making fun of her for lying? Well, it’s okay to make fun of liars. The same applies to being an unpleasant person, provided that it’s clear we’re not talking about RBF or drawing from physical dimensions.
It does leave me a little bit torn, as far as this goes. Because I do agree with the Republicans a bit. But only a bit, and on that bit they’re acting pretty disingenuously. (I’ve been making a point of retweeting cases of conservatives being aghast at Friday but having done the same thing, or worse, with regard to HRC or otherwise in the recent past.) But in the process of that, I don’t want to lose sight of where I do draw the line, as far as criticisms go.Report
@will-truman Yeah.
You and I read the jokes differently – I don’t believe she was making fun of her dimensions, I do think she was making fun of her femme makeup in a context where everybody and their dog has been making fun of her makeup – but our opinions about what is and isn’t okay are pretty similar, I think.Report