You’ve probably seen that James Gunn (director of Guardians of the Galaxy) was fired by Disney for pedophilic jokes he made on Twitter years back after a campaign by Cernovish and the alt-light. You probably also remember Roseanne getting dumped from her show for a “racist” joke tweet after a campaign by leftists.
You’ve also probably seen many of the same people who supported the Roseanne firing opposing the Gunn firing, including cuckservatives who are nominally on Roseanne’s team and on the other side of Gunn and love to preach decorum when it comes to Trump and his supporters. You’ve also probably notice a surprising amount of people who normally take offense at the slightest slight against women or the tiniest implication that rape is treated in anything less than a grimly serious manner, suddenly leap to the defense of people writing jokes about raping children.
This might seem mysterious given that raping children is generally seen as worse than committing racism, but it’s only mysterious if you think this is about either pedophilia or racism. It is not, those are only incidental issues, the real issue is deeper.
Nobody is truly offended by Roseanne’s joke insult and channers didn’t have a sudden change of heart and conclude that pedo jokes are now out-of-bounds. These are not what’s driving this debate over whose mob gets to have whom fired. The firings of Roseanne (and Dickinson and Derbyshire and Eich and etc.) were never truly about what they actually said or did. The firing of Gunn was not truly about offensive jokes.
The racism, the pedophilia are simply weapons, tools in a power struggle.
Power, nothing more*, is driving these conflicts. Both sides are in a struggle to build legitimacy for themselves and tear down the legitimacy of their enemies.**
Being able to have a mob destroy someone’s career over a few tweets is a display of power, a strong one. It is a display and building of moral legitimacy, which grants power.
Pedo jokes are leftist-affiliated, for the left is the tribe of sexual license, subversive sexual humour, and perversion, which maps somewhere near pedophilia in most people’s minds. Racist jokes are rightest-affiliated for the right are the tribe of patriotism, tribalism, and (white) ethnic interests, which maps somewhere to racism in most people’s minds.
Being able to say “this is off-limits at risk of firing” is not only a display of power, it also a strong strong form of delegimization. By having racist jokes leading to mobs and firing, by making racist jokes taboo, even if the right would say they oppose racism, it by proxy delegitimizes patriotism, white ethnic interests, and everything else that maps near racism in most people’s minds.
Likewise, making pedo jokes taboo delegitimizes the left, even if the left would say they oppose pedophilia. Delegitimizing pedo jokes, by proxy, delegitimizes sexual perversion, sexual subversion, sexual license, and everything else that maps near pedophilia in most people’s minds.
Even better are forced apologies, for they display a power to compel at the personal level, not just the institutional. Having your enemy deny his own words mapping near his own side’s values, delegitimizes the enemy’s side even more than then reinforcing a taboo against them.
The fight over who can legitimately mob and fire whom over what issues, is a fight over power, between two opposing tribes, which is why where most people line up on it it makes no sense in any strictly rational way.
Leftists defend pedophilia and pedophilic jokes, not because they support pedophilia per se, but because even in their own minds it maps closely to other sexual proclivities they support, and too strong a taboo around pedophilia will carry over to those proclivities.**
Knowing this though, makes the cuckservative response even more confusing, as they are turning against the tribe they nominally support, while supporting the tribe they nominally oppose (how often does NRO pretend to rage against Hollywood values and crudity in our culture?) in favour of values, sexual subversion, they’d normally oppose.
The answer once again comes down to power. Since they purged the Birchers from the movement, the NRO have been the gatekeepers of the right. Some, like Rush, Coulter, and O’Rielly, have challenged them with a more Middle America conservatism, but they’ve retained gatekeeping power.
But, the alt-light asserting their power by having leftists fired over mobs, without the blessing of True Conservatism delegitimizes them. It shows that they no longer have power over the right or the legitimacy to dictate to the right. Trump’s victories has delegitimized the True Conservatism from above, but the mob taking action against the left delegitimizes them from below. Seeing the right win fights like this, destroys their power.
Before Trump and the alt-right, True Conservatism may have been the permanent opposition, but they had cultural and ideological power over the opposition. Now, even though their side is taking power, True Conservatism are not the wielders and guides of the permanent opposition power. They have less power than they had when they were the leftist’s patsies. Condemning Roseanne, while defending Gunn, is a desperate power play to maintain a semblance of the power they once had.
All these mob firings have little to do with the nominal reasons given for the mobs, the outrage, and the firings and are almost entirely power plays by the various actors against their enemies.
****
One aside, are those making pedophilic jokes actually pedophiles? Probably not, for the most part. Just like most channers making oven jokes don’t want a second holocaust and Roseanne doesn’t hate black people.
But if you read the pedophilic jokes themselves, there is practically no comedic value in any of them. The jokes are often not even recognizable as jokes and none are anywhere near as funny as you’d expect from professionals paid to make jokes and nowhere near the value necessary to make violating such a firm taboo worthwhile from a strictly comedic standpoint.
The jokes are signalling. The most likely reason, as Hadley noted on Twitter, is that it is signalling to the pedophiles and pedarasts in charge of Hollywood (and that pedophiles and pedarasts hold power in Hollywood is an open secret, just as Weinstein’s perversion was before the dam broke) that although they might not be a pedos or pedarasts themselves, they align with the preferences of the perverts in charge and will not cause trouble.
It is also tribal signalling. “Look, I support sexual subversion too. Even more than you. Give me status.”
****
* There are probably people, likely not many, on each side who genuinely care about pedo or racist jokes in and of themselves (yet somehow not the jokes the other side condemns). They’re being used.
** I should make note here: most of this process is not fully conscious. Almost nobody involved started thinking about how they should respond to pedophilia jokes and racist jokes from first principles; and few made their position based on thinking about how it would effect the power struggle for their tribe. Like most tribal conflict in a democratic society, people are mostly just vaguely aware that, for some reason, certain values need to be defended and certain other values, those held by others, should be attacked, so certain jokes are taboo and certain jokes are not and they need to defend the ones that aren’t from attack, while attacking the ones are. Rarely is ideological tribalism explicitly thought through and fought on tribal grounds, it is generally fought through symbols and ideas from tribalism itself but mapping near the tribes involved and their values.