The great thing about the freedoms bestowed upon us as American citizens is that we are all allowed to like or not like different things. We should also be able to like things without being judged, but that’s not going to happen because those American freedoms also give others the right to mock us for taking pleasure in certain activities, movies, or other interests.
Take for instance, Fox News, which has every right to poke fun at “space nerds” or introduce a discussion of the new
Star Wars trailer on their show
Red Eye w/ Tom Shillue in a stereotypical, reductive way that pits “nerdy fanboys” against “the jocks that beat them up in high school.”
National Reviewwriter and Fox News contributor Katherine Timpf even has the freedom to cruelly dismiss those who might enjoy
Star Wars, as she did during that segment.
“I have never had any interest in watching space nerds poke each other with their little space nerd sticks, and I’m not going to start now. You people are crazy. You
Star Wars people are crazy. Yesterday, I tweeted something, and all I said was that I wasn’t familiar with
Star Warsbecause I’ve been too busy liking cool things and being attractive — people threatened my life.”
Okay, well, that’s a crappy, dismissive way to describe
Star Wars, but
it’s no excuse to threaten her life. However, radical
Star Wars fans — who are not representative in any way of the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of
Star Wars fans — have spent the last couple of weeks tweeting rape and death threats at Timpf, which is
not okay.
what was tweeted is right, ya know?
