The latest show on Tenacious D’s Australian tour has been postponed after senator Ralph Babet demanded the pair be deported following an apparent joke about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
American comedy rock duo Jack Black and Kyle Gass were due to perform in Newcastle on Tuesday evening, but the show – part of the band’s Spicy Meatball Tour – was cancelled without notice on Tuesday afternoon.
Concert promoter Frontier Touring said on social media that it regretted “to advise that Tenacious D’s concert tonight at Newcastle Entertainment Centre has been postponed”.
Video from the event showed (Kyle) Gass being presented with a birthday cake and told to “make a wish” as he blew out the candles. Gass then appeared to say “don’t miss Trump next time” – just hours after the shooting at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania that left the former president injured.
Many political leanings are based on morality, so when making a judgement on morality, saying they shouldn’t be involved is nonsense. It’s not hypocritical to say joking about Klansmen dying is cool and good, but joking about BLM protesters dying is fucked up. There’s no enlightened objective viewpoint where you just pretend that there’s no moral difference in the targets because believing racism is evil is “political”.
Sure, but it’s equally as unenlightened to say that politics hasn’t devolved into tribalism.
And let it not be missed that your example has one group actively participating in illegal and violent activity and one group that isn’t. The two groups aren’t equivalent on their face.
A more apples to apples comparison would be joking about people at a Trump rally getting killed vs BLM protestors getting killed.
And it absolutely would be hypocritical to joke about the one and not the other, and justifying it to yourself as being fine because people who go to Trump rallies are racist is in fact just tribalism.
To phrase it another way, it sounds like you are saying, to some greater or lesser degree, that, “it’s fine because my morality is perfect, and therefore anyone not on team ‘me’ is obviously pure evil and therefore anything said about them or done to them is clearly and perfectly justified as they aren’t people deserving of moral consideration.”
Sure, if you change the morality of a question, it changes the morality of the question. And it’s not illegal to be in the Klan. And BLM protesters did break laws. But the point was not that it’s ok specifically to joke about the Klan getting killed, it’s to illustrate that morality is clearly relevant and intertwined with political belief. People are joking about Trump simply because he’s a Republican. No one’s saying Susan Collins is fair game. It’s because he’s done serious harm and will continue to do serious harm.
Moral relativism is not morality. It’s not “enlightened” to think that because some other people have terrible morality that your own morality shouldn’t guide your beliefs and actions.
I think you’d be surprised at the number of people who would in fact say that Susan Collins is fair game, but that’s neither here nor there.
I think we’re largely on the same page honestly. I think our difference, if there is one, is the degree to which we think morality vs tribalism is the true influencer.
And this is a bit of a tangent, but I think this is exacerbated by the fact that morals are held to varying degrees of closeness. As an example, everyone agrees that cheating on your SO is wrong. Everyone also agrees that punching someone in the face is wrong. But if a husband cheats on his wife, and she slaps him, you will have people take (often very vehement) different sides on the issue, depending on which “sin” they consider to be worse.
And so, expanding that to the tribalism issues at hand, the majority of people on both sides are attempting to stand for and push for virtues that they believe are most important. Sometimes that’s inclusivity and caring for the poor. Sometimes it’s family unity and economic security.
And don’t hear me wrong, while any of that can be turned towards hate by malicious actors, it is clear that that is occuring on one side more than the other. But that doesn’t make the virtues themselves invalid.