Woman faces descrimination as police and media refuse to label her crime "rape".

[Batgirl III]

Roseanne's entire career and her entire public persona is built on her being a crude, uncouth loudmouth who says crude and outrageous things. She's literally been doing the same act longer than I've been alive. She dialed it back for her eponymous sitcom in the Nineties, but if that show was considered shockingly rude for its time (until it was topped by Married With Children and the floodgates for vulgar comedy in prime time opened).

Roseanne's claim was that she didn't even know Valerie Jarrett was African-American, which, is actually pretty believable if you ask me. First off, to probably 95% of Americans "Valerie Jarrett" is just a name from the nightly news and not someone they could ever actually put a face to. "Senior Advisor to the President" and "Director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs" aren't exactly offices that attract a lot of attention from the majority of people...

I mean, for crissakes, I'm a huge politics junkie who can rattle off the names of the current and the last five people who held the Senior Advisor to the President post -- Jared Kushner, David Axelrod, Barry Jackson, Valerie Jarrett, Karl Rove, Sid Blumenthal -- but I'll be damned if I could pick any of them out of a line up. Okay, maybe Kushner... although, honestly, he looks pretty much like every other middle-aged Yeshivot lawyer on the planet. Roseanne's tweet was mocking her appearance, so obviously she knew what Jarrett looked like... But did she think Jarrett looked African-American? She says she didn't, and honestly, I believe her. Jarrett has very fair skin and routinely self-identifies as "Iranian-American" or "Iranian" in interviews. A lot of people might assume she's Persian.


Valerie Jarrett is on the left (pun not intended).

Furthermore, both of her parents are apparently bi-racial themselves. Apparently, Jarrett was on a 2014 episode of PBS's show Finding Your Roots, which used DNA testing to show that Jarrett is of 49% European, 46% African, and 5% Native American. So if we're going to play stupid identity politics games, then Jarrett is actually more "white" than she is "black."

TL;DR: The whole shit storm unleashed was dumb.

[Ares]

Yes, but that's really the point: Certain people getting fired over old Tweets while other people can say equally vile things and just blow it off as "I'm a woman of color online, I've been harassed, so I was doing some counter-trolling and didn't really mean it" is stupid and hypocritical. Either everyone is held accountable for their social media statements (in which case social media will get used less, which I'd be happy with) or no one is held accountable. People claiming to be victims while then saying vile things and getting away from it is a kind of hypocrisy you'd think most people could understand.

It's sort of like how a lot of die-hard feminists complained about the Buffy Reboot and the changes it'll make, completely missing that it's the thing they criticize pretty much everyone else for doing.

I wish I could find the exact quote from Babylon 5, where either Sinclair or Sheridan is telling G'Kar that "The Narn are like a bunch of children that have been bullied for so long, the only thing you can think to do is be bullies yourselves."

[Batgirl III]

It was Sinclair, and you're right the whole thing makes a perfect analogy for Feminist, LGBT Activists, Civil Rights Activists and manner of other people who had to struggle for equality... and then turned around to smack other people down.

Sinclair: In order to be free you had to learn to fight. No one questions that. But you've overcompensated. You are like abused children who have grown big enough to do the same thing to someone else as if it would somehow balance the scales. It won't. If you let the anger cloud your judgement, it will destroy you.

[Ares]

Thank you BG. Man Babylon 5 was so good.

[Batgirl III]

Thank you BG. Man Babylon 5 was so good.

I just finished re-re-re-re-re-watching the entire series a month ago.

[Jabroniville]

Funniest thing was ABC knew Roseanne was a lunatic (check out her Twitter war with Ken Levine), but still put her on the air because of ratings. Then they turned around and were suddenly AGHAST at the shocking statements of their big star.

[Ares]

Which is basically like hiring Mike Tyson to be the bouncer at your club and are then shocked when he starts punching and biting people.

[Batgirl III]

Roseanne has always been a "shock comic," it was less then a decade ago that she was dressing up as Adolf Hitler and baking Jewish gingerbread men in the pages of Heeb magazine and joking about thinking she was the reincarnation of Hitler... Yeah, it's a comedy magazine, sort of a Jewish (well, more Jewish) version of Charlie Hebdo or National Lampoon. But, let's face it, this still isn't exactly a "family friendly" image.

"That Oven Feelin'." Heeb. August 11, 2010. Accessed August 04, 2018. http://heebmagazine.com/that-oven-feelin-2/1229.