James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

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James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby KleinerKiller » Fri Jul 20, 2018 10:19 pm

James Gunn has been fired by Disney over resurfaced Twitter "jokes" from 2008/9, after said tweets were "unearthed" by the Daily Caller and spread by noted alt-right assholes Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobeic.

On the one hand, much as I like Gunn and much as I absolutely despise outrage culture and the increasingly violent ideological purity tests the left gleefully wallows in to shunt off our own, I can't exactly defend many of the tweets themselves as just jokes. They're provocative and inflammatory for the sake of it, and most aren't particularly clever; some of them don't even have proper punchlines. And there are a lot of them. Coming from a guy who used to work for Troma, this is no surprise, but still, Disney is within their rights to keep up an image.

On the other hand, Gunn has already apologized for them in the past, including around the time the first Guardians came out and a minor controversy brewed over that. This is transparently an alt-right hit job using tactics they know work almost every time, fueled by fake moral outrage and malicious hypocrisy, and it worked perfectly. And it just reinforces the terrifying fact that no matter how old something is and how much you've tried to make amends for it, it can and will be used against you by both your enemies and your supposed allies.

So there is absolutely nothing good about this story.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Fri Jul 20, 2018 10:43 pm

Once again, the alt-right have decided to piss in the internet's cheerios. I am firmly on the side of your other hand.

Because why should the alt-right have a coherent ideology aside from "fuck the libs." It's not like they actually give a shit about the faux-outrage they stoked. Anti-PC is their bread and butter. If it were one of their own saying those things, they'd not have said a damn thing.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Absentia » Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:09 pm

Remind me again why we're better off because Twitter exists?
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby sunglasses » Fri Jul 20, 2018 11:41 pm

Because of Krang T Nelson
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby JamishT » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:27 am

sunglasses wrote:Because of Krang T Nelson


And WeRateDogs


But yeah, I didn't know the tweets were old, or anything about the backstory. The jokes weren't great, but I think people are reading into them in the wrong way.

You know the saying, "there's a grain of truth in every joke", right? Most of the "problematic" jokes have something about boys and sex, and some people are reading into it and thinking he may be a pedo (to be fair, most people just think it's not something that should be joked about, which is a different story). I think it's more likely that he was thinking of the worst thing possible, and the grain of truth is elsewhere.

Also, I've made some pretty bad jokes on Twitter, but I don't plan on joining "The LIBS", but we'll see where we all are when I'm famous.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby iMURDAu » Sat Jul 21, 2018 1:17 pm

He should've been fired for GOTG 2 having too many callbacks to the first movie. You can't capture the same lightning in a different bottle, James.

I love sjw politics. There's a high road and it is totally unoccupied. No traffic. Everyone instead is racing to find any reason to get someone fired. It is justified in some cases though. Thankfully this is only a celebrity/athlete problem. I'd hate to find out a regular schmuck lost their job and subsequently their place to live over a bad joke they posted on twitter. Maybe with the 5G revolution we can have bots scrape a person's entire internet history and have them publicly shamed for it.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby blehblah » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:26 pm

Archives of deleted Twitter posts are the kompromat of the West.

Discuss...
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Sat Jul 21, 2018 7:33 pm

iMURDAu wrote:I love sjw politics.


How about no?

The big scary ess-jay-dubbayu boogeyman didn't push for this. It was the Daily Caller.

And it looks like their hit piece is working. I see Facebook inundated with complaints about PC culture and sjws, when it was the fucking alt-right behind this. Disney just does what corporations do when bad press hits.

The alt-right's bullshit disruption tactics WORK. And it's distressing to see people blaming "the sjws".
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby KleinerKiller » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:04 pm

Ceiling_Squid wrote:
iMURDAu wrote:I love sjw politics.


How about no?

The big scary ess-jay-dubbayu boogeyman didn't push for this. It was the Daily Caller.

And it looks like their hit piece is working. I see Facebook inundated with complaints about PC culture and sjws, when it was the fucking alt-right behind this. Disney just does what corporations do when bad press hits.

The alt-right's bullshit disruption tactics WORK. And it's distressing to see people blaming "the sjws".


To be fair, I have been seeing a lot of people on the left refusing to defend or side with Gunn because his words are "indefensible" (as I stated, I'm not going to go to bat for the tweets because they're not even clever black comedy and in a vacuum I can understand Disney not wanting to be associated with them, but they're old news far outweighed by the context of how they were dug up and by whom). The alt-right shitheels lit the flame and fanned it around, but the people who are supposed to be standing in opposition to that generally aren't, at least in the circles I observe, because that's the culture that the Caller and Cernovich accurately exploited.

Whether that's what MURDA was actually referring to, I dunno.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Aquila89 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:08 pm

iMURDAu wrote:Thankfully this is only a celebrity/athlete problem. I'd hate to find out a regular schmuck lost their job and subsequently their place to live over a bad joke they posted on twitter.


It already happened. Haven't you heard about the Justine Sacco controversy?

In December 2013, Justine Sacco, a woman with 170 Twitter followers, tweeted acerbic jokes during a plane trip from New York to Cape Town, such as "Weird German dude get some deodorant" and, in Heathrow; "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just Kidding. I'm white!" [...] Sacco slept during her 11-hour plane trip, and woke up to find out that she had lost her job and was the number one Twitter topic worldwide, with celebrities and new media bloggers all over the globe denouncing her and encouraging all their followers to do the same.


And that's just the most famous example.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:10 pm

In a world with legit proto-fascists running around, who hold real state power, I'm finding it really hard to give a shit about "PC" or "sjw culture" anymore. They ring very hollow as bogeymen exploitable by far worse people.

If PC culture really does exist, it sure as hell doesn't wield the kind of real, frightening power that the alt-right does as a subset of ascendant Trumpism.

Edit: I'm not saying Gunn's tweets are defensible...but this was already apologized for. And it's another distraction tactic to keep people pissed at the common "PC" scapegoat. Essential fuel and redirected focus for assholes.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Crimson847 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:31 pm

Sacco was the PR director of a major international firm, so it actually made sense to me that she lost her job for committing an unforced PR fuckup. I think a great boss would have forgiven the error and understood it was unlikely to happen again given the personal fallout for her, but sadly we can't always expect great bosses. I'll happily condemn the folks on Twitter who were thrilling to the idea of her life being ruined, though.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Sat Jul 21, 2018 8:47 pm

And reading more, now I'm afraid of what this means for his cancelled Sony panel announcement.

It looks like, based on the teaser image, it might be a film adaptation of Grant Morrison's trippy occult horror comic Nameless.

https://twitter.com/MinovskyArticle/sta ... 96512?s=20

If the Daily Caller sinks this film too, I will be even more pissed. I liked that comic a lot.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby iMURDAu » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:33 pm

Aquila89 wrote:
iMURDAu wrote:Thankfully this is only a celebrity/athlete problem. I'd hate to find out a regular schmuck lost their job and subsequently their place to live over a bad joke they posted on twitter.


It already happened. Haven't you heard about the Justine Sacco controversy?

In December 2013, Justine Sacco, a woman with 170 Twitter followers, tweeted acerbic jokes during a plane trip from New York to Cape Town, such as "Weird German dude get some deodorant" and, in Heathrow; "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just Kidding. I'm white!" [...] Sacco slept during her 11-hour plane trip, and woke up to find out that she had lost her job and was the number one Twitter topic worldwide, with celebrities and new media bloggers all over the globe denouncing her and encouraging all their followers to do the same.


And that's just the most famous example.


I forgot about that. Fuck this world.

And imo sjw is a term that isn't exclusive to left or right. They're both warriors for their brand of social justice. Daily Caller is just as sjw as the people their readers claim to be against. You can't fight in a "war" and claim you're not one of those warriors.

Liberals aren't the only social justice warriors. Plenty of whiny prudes occupy the right side of the political spectrum. Protesting Planned Parenthood is sjw behavior. They're fighting for their brand of social justice.

Problem is the masses see that term and associate it with strictly leftist behavior. Which is strange to me. The President is an incredibly fragile snowflake and he's a Republican. He got a lot of support by being a whiner. Waawaa Obama, waawaa Mexicans, etc.

Help me take back the word and use it to shame all these fools. I'd love to help but I can't drag myself onto the social medias. I'll do my part in comment sections.
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Re: James Gunn fired from GOTG 3 over old tweets

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Sat Jul 21, 2018 9:35 pm

The thing is, "SJW" as a pejorative has been so associated with toxic elements on the right that it can't be taken back. Trying to use it just propagates it further and legitimizes it at this point.
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