AIBU to think Gina Carano shouldn’t have been fired?

[NinaMimi]

Apologies if this has been asked before as the story was out yesterday. I did search and couldn’t find it.

I think the actor said some really stupid things and I don’t agree with her politics but I haven’t seen anything that crossed the line. The worse thing seems to have been comparing hating someone for their political beliefs to the persecution of the Jews in Germany- which is monumentally dumb, but that just reads to me like they’re not an intelligent person rather than anti-jewish.

Opinions?

I’m also a big fan of Clint Eastwood who comes across as a right wing nut but I don’t think anyone is going to cancel him. I wonder if there’s a level of fame you need to say dumb things.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/newsbeat-56022084

Despite my user name (I love the character) I would guess my political views are pretty much polar opposites of hers (lefty, anti-death penalty, dislike Trump intensely, do not believe the US election was rigged!)

Having read the antisemitic tweet, I can see you could have two reactions to it. Had she made the same point for instance by invoking the way the Stasi in Communist East Germany got neighbours and children to inform on people (see for instance the "Hate Crimes Bill" currently under discussion in Scotland) I think what she said was fairly unexceptionable - though possibly a bit batshit to compare being monstered on Twitter to being taken off to secret police headquarters in the middle of the night. (Though somehow I doubt she's historically informed enough to make that point - she doesn't strike me as the brightest bulb in the house. However, that in a way is beside the point - in a democracy, everyone gets a voice, even if they're thick, ill-informed, bat-shit, or one group of people who've appointed themselves moral arbiters for society feel their views are "evil.")

The tweet itself was clearly criticising the fact that ordinary people joined in the persecution of Jewish people - not just the SA, Brownshirts, Gestapo. So at no point was she criticising Jewish people; instead the people she was clearly portraying as wrong were the people doing the persecution.

However, it does still leave a nasty taste as a choice of analogy, because the problem with invoking the Holocaust is always that if you use it to say "it starts with [insert fairly trivial point here] and ends with the Holocaust", it's a form of antisemitism because what you are doing is minimising the Holocaust by pressing it into service to support your pretty trivial political point.

Was Disney right to sack her? I suppose Disney has a well-established policy of expecting certain standards of behaviour from their stars (Lindsey Lohan, anyone?), so it's unsurprising. They would see it as reputational/brand damage (though the irony of that from a brand started by a White Supremacist, with a set of deeply racist cartoons among their early output is not lost on me).

I'm disappointed in that I thought she was good in the role, and the character was fantastic.

And yes, there absolutely are double standards. Male stars get away with being rabidly right wing, ragingly, openly antisemitic (thinking of a certain Hollywood A-lister who played Hamlet among other people), openly homophobic, you name it - and no-one bats an eyelid.

I think she should have been fired for her comments about the Nazis. I don’t think she should have been fired for being a Trump supporter, and those calling for that were very much out of line. I absolutely hate the man and all he stands for but the idea that you can only have one set of political views in a certain industry (aka you have to be liberal in show business) is sinister and unhelpful.

She wasn’t fired. Her contract wasn’t renewed. Acting is an unstable job.

From what I've read, the tweet that got her sacked was the latest in a series of questionable opinions and I would presume she'd had prior warning for the others. As a PP said, Disney are a private company who can fire people for breaking their employee rules.

I do agree with others though that if she was a man then we would not be having this conversation as he would be allowed to apologise and then move on lest his career suffer.

There's very little support on Social Media for Joss Whedon- even from the Fan boys.

I was disappointed when Alan Tudyk posted that he "wasn't there, but I have known Joss for 17 years, I honestly can't even imagine it and I have a pretty good imagination" when he could have just left it at "I wasn't there so I have no firsthand experience either way" without the victim blaming part about how it couldn't possibly have happened. Allegedly the Buffy actors had an arrangement where they made sure the then-15yo Michelle Trachtenberg was never alone in a room again with Whedon following an incident of "not appropriate behaviour".

I have no doubt he will issue a bullshit statement about him being passionate about his art, that this passion was sometimes expressed as frustration, he's sorry if his actions were misconstrued by those around him and that it made them feel they were being abused in some way (i.e., their fault for being "soft" rather than his fault for being a dick), donation to a relevant charity and/or for-show-stint in therapy and then his career will carry on as normal, he will be praised for "battling his demons", and those he damaged will struggle to find work because they're "difficult" and "can't cope with the process".

I've not seen anything saying she was sacked. Just that she wasn't currently employed. That suggests she was out of contract anyway. .

The article I read says that her character was supposed to have a bigger role in season 3, but after her tweets Disney let her go and are writing her character out of season 3. It’s not like she would have been let go “anyway”. It is a direct result of her tweets.

She’s entitled to her views however bizarre they may be but she’s employed by Disney so was really, really dumb to put that kind of stuff on a public forum and expect to keep her job.
Shame, I loved her character and love that she’s a big, strong woman in a kick ass role.
It was.

You can't compare the suffering of any other group to that of the Jews in the Holocaust. You are going be called an anti-semite and are going to get fired if you do. It's one of those untouchable subjects, and regardless of whether you think it's just or not, you should know not to go anywhere near it.

You are definitely NOT being unreasonable OP. The analogy that Gina Carano made was correct and to the point. If Disney are so afraid of someone expressing their opinion, then they really have lost the very last dregs of their own.

I cancelled my subscription as of this morning. I only got it for my daughter in the first place anyway, and she never bothered with it. I really hope this brave, intelligent young woman, won’t be swayed by the small-minded attitudes of this vile superficial industry.

OP you may like to look up "the paradox of tolerance".

This is the problem with her defending people who have intolerant beliefs, and why she won't have her contract renewed. This isn't the first time she's posted unpopular (to liberal media types) views.

Gina’s post read: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children.

“Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.

I think she makes a very valid point - can anyone see any parallels with the current cancel culture, old people getting abused while they sit in a cafe because the mob decided they should have been kneeling for BLM, or thousands of women receiving rape and death threats on social media because they express a view, or a real life female politician receiving a vicious and credible rape because she campaigns for women’s rights. The point that Gina makes isn’t that the SNP member who threatened Joanna Cherry with ‘corrective rape’ is like the Nazis it is that Nicola Sturgeon and all the SNP leadership who have not said a word against this are like the Nazi sympathisers, the ordinary neighbours who turned against a group of people purely because of who they were.

The Holocaust was the culmination of years of quiet work slowly dehumanising and positioning a group of people as the enemy in order to achieve their destruction. The neighbours and other ordinary citizens were instrumental in that process.

We are now in the situation as you can see from many threads in here, there is a group of people who are slowly being dehumanised, having their words to describe themselves being taken away and being threatened with sacking, ostracising and violence is they dissent.

I’d say Gina is very much on the money.

Watch the movie JoJo Rabbit and you’ll get the jist.

She’s a terrible actor in at best a mediocre show.

I love how people were comparing this to John Boyega. Literally hilarious.

I agree with gardenbird - go round the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and you will see how early they push to gate Jews began, and how ingrained it was into every day life (a board game called “jews out” that was bought by normal people)...it’s really scary how easy it was for the Nazis to dehumanise the Jews.

GC was right in my opinion and even if Disney think that she isn't, she has a right to express an opinion. FFS, "liberals" in America can talk; they’ve been shrieking ‘Trump is Hitler’ for how many years now ?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Disney, and many other corporations in the near future, required people to identify themselves as having conservative views with say a yellow star armband or something similar.

There are plenty of people on here and all over social media likening the lockdown to the hoocaust - Gina was not making a comparison in any way similar to that, I think that 09ComtesseDeSpair says it better.

If we continue down the route of ‘cancelling’ people simply because they say something we disagree with, we risk eventually ending up in a situation where people are denied a voice and criminalised for having a point of view which goes against the accepted discourse, and this is, historically, how oppressive and dangerous regimes begin to take hold
You see I agree with this. I will look up the tolerance paradox. I'm presuming it's along the lines of if you defend everyone's right to speech/opinions, you have to defend a person's right to hold/express even the most unpalatable of views.
All of which I think is separate to an employer holding employees to a certain code of behavior. Which presumably the employee signs up to when hired.

All of which I think is separate to an employer holding employees to a certain code of behavior. Which presumably the employee signs up to when hired

Well that's a fair point Margot but it’s already been pointed out that one of her co-stars, a couple of years ago, literally compared Trump to Hitler. He was widely praised for this and remains in his job.

Therein lies the problem...

It was a stupid thing to tweet, but I'm concerned that the consequences of posting stupid things on social media have been set so high. An apology should have been enough.

Free speech means you can say whatever you want in the sense that the government cannot imprison you/prevent you from voicing your opinions. It doesn’t mean that you can say whatever offensive bullshit you want and be free of consequences

If the 'consequences', are being 'cancelled' from public life, then you don't have freedom of speech. If you can't work (and therefore survive) because you have expressed an opinion that more powerful people don't like, then you don't need to have a government infringing freedom of speech - the the employer does it already!
No employer should have that power.

@Jaypreen

All of which I think is separate to an employer holding employees to a certain code of behavior. Which presumably the employee signs up to when hired

Well that's a fair point Margot but it’s already been pointed out that one of her co-stars, a couple of years ago, literally compared Trump to Hitler. He was widely praised for this and remains in his job.

Therein lies the problem...

Who is offended by that though? Scratches head

@gardenbird48

Gina’s post read: “Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children.

“Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.

I think she makes a very valid point - can anyone see any parallels with the current cancel culture, old people getting abused while they sit in a cafe because the mob decided they should have been kneeling for BLM, or thousands of women receiving rape and death threats on social media because they express a view, or a real life female politician receiving a vicious and credible rape because she campaigns for women’s rights. The point that Gina makes isn’t that the SNP member who threatened Joanna Cherry with ‘corrective rape’ is like the Nazis it is that Nicola Sturgeon and all the SNP leadership who have not said a word against this are like the Nazi sympathisers, the ordinary neighbours who turned against a group of people purely because of who they were.

The Holocaust was the culmination of years of quiet work slowly dehumanising and positioning a group of people as the enemy in order to achieve their destruction. The neighbours and other ordinary citizens were instrumental in that process.

We are now in the situation as you can see from many threads in here, there is a group of people who are slowly being dehumanised, having their words to describe themselves being taken away and being threatened with sacking, ostracising and violence is they dissent.

I’d say Gina is very much on the money.

Watch the movie JoJo Rabbit and you’ll get the jist.

I couldn't agree more. It's terrifying how much people will accept and support as long as it's not their "side" being shit down. This is going to get worse before it gets better and when it does I do hope that people remembered the warnings.

@TakeTheCuntOutOfScunthorpe

You can't compare the suffering of any other group to that of the Jews in the Holocaust. You are going be called an anti-semite and are going to get fired if you do. It's one of those untouchable subjects, and regardless of whether you think it's just or not, you should know not to go anywhere near it.

Pedro Pascal tweeted comparing illegal immigrant children to Jews in the Holocaust when Trump was president, complete with pictures (even though in fact the picture supposedly from Trump's administration was posted online in 2010 if not earlier).

(I will stress that the treatment of illegal immigrants in the US is horrendous - but also that it wasn't much better under Obama and I don't think it'll be better under Biden either)

But Pedro was supported for this comparison, and Gina lost her job.

I think it's a complete double standard.

I think she was treated badly. Unfortunately some of her views (masks, trump) are so stupid it's going to be hard to defend her.

I liked her character. I like the series.

Who is offended by that though? Scratches head

You do realise that you've just proved my point ?