Madness.
Rising NASCAR driver Noah Gragson was suspended indefinitely for liking a meme on Instagram. The meme was a pun evoking the “Little Mermaid” song “Under the Sea,” sung in all versions by Sebastian the Crab. It showed the crab with George Floyd’s head superimposed with a reference to his demise, like this:
Too soon? Once his politically incorrect sense of humor was brought to its attention, Gregson was suspended indefinitely by his team, the Legacy Motor Club, and by NASCAR as well. “NASCAR fully supports Legacy Motor Club’s decision to suspend Noah Gragson,” the racing association stated. “Following his actions on social media, NASCAR has determined that Gragson has violated the Member Conduct section of the 2023 NASCAR Rule Book and has placed him under indefinite suspension.”
For clicking on a little heart under a meme. Maybe he likes song parodies. Maybe he thought it was a funny pun. Maybe he likes black humor. Punishing Gragson because he doesn’t display the proper amount of mandatory reverence and respect for a man whose life did not warrant any respect or reverence at all represents another nadir in excessive organizational virtue-signalling and pandering to the mob.
Fine, meet with Gregson and explain why people are crazy right now on anything that touches on race, and that the driver would do himself and everybody else a favor if he would steer clear of the topic, even in such a minor matter as “liking” a meme. Treating him as if he had burned a cross outside a racetrack is far worse than the joke Gregson liked.
Sadly, but typically, Gregson grovelled an apology, tweeting, “I am disappointed in myself for my lack of attention and actions on social media. I understand the severity of this situation. I love and appreciate everyone. I try to treat everyone equally no matter who they are. I messed up plain and simple.”
Yecchh. What “severity”? Liking a sick joke is a big deal? Wow, my whole life has been an offense to decency, then. Nothing in the meme suggests that someone who laughs at the joke doesn’t “treat everyone equally no matter who they are.” In Gregson’s case, I bet he would have found the same meme funny if the guy who had perished “under the knee” was white, brown, or fuchsia. The joke has nothing to do with race or racism. It’s a pun.
I don’t care about NASCAR, I never heard of Gregson, and I didn’t find the meme especially clever or amusing. However, the fact that the United States is increasingly nurturing a culture that demands unanimous and vocal agreement on what words, ideas, concepts, positions and jokes can be expressed without severe negative consequences—that I find terrifying.
Ethics Alarms 
This reminds of an earlier post this day.
Maybe, if we had a culture that encouraged “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU”, this sort of thing would not start in the first place. How can coming after people who go after you be possibly worse than groveling?
Evil prevails when good men do nothing.
Wait—why did this post remind you of that one? I see no parallels at all.
If it is unethical to fight back against anything, then the inevitable result is the bullies winning. Bullies don’t magically become ethical because the people they bully do not retaliate.
Positive punishment reduces a behavior. Negative punishment increases it. Ruling all punishment unethical is the same as endorsing unwanted behavior. Operant conditioning doesn’t cease to exist because the victims ethically martyr themselves.
What a straw man! Nobody here has ruled “all punishment unethical” or advocated such a bonkers position. Such situations must be managed by a mix of absolutism and utilitarianism. Mob ethics, which is what the “you hurt me, I hurt you worse” inevitably sinks to, is how terrorists reason, as I recently tried to remind a mouth-foaming Trump apologist here before I had to ban him. (Terrorism is unethical)
I agree that “you hurt me, I hurt you worse” is not a good ethical standard. I don’t understand how equal justice under the law is a bad standard.
When I say i want equal justice under the law, I mean it. There is a ton of insider trading going on amongst members of both parties. Prosecute them all. I wouldn’t have a problem prosecuting Trump for (actual) crimes if the laws were being applied equally. I don’t want tit for tat, I don’t want mob justice, I want a universal standard. I want that standard applied to everyone! Rich, poor, middle class. Elected official or average Joe. Every race, every religion, every sexuality. Everyone subject to the same consequences so we can decide together how tough the punishment for a particular crime should be.
That isn’t what is happening. There are massive carve outs on punishment for entire swaths of the population. Special groups who can do whatever they want and face no consequences.
This particular case, the weaponization of speech, ties directly back to those inequalities under the law. When the legal system tells you it is okay to persecute certain groups, the mob obliges. They start persecuting people. This is mob justice.
I don’t see how it is possible to put equal justice under the law back in place without rooting out the bad actors in the three letter agencies. There is going to have to be a crackdown on the people who are twisting justice into a pretzel, or they will just keep making pretzels. Maybe Trump IS the wrong person to do it, but I don’t see ANYONE else evenly remotely interested in taking any action whatsoever. The entire blobby elite group wants to keep committing crimes at will and don’t want their immunity from justice carve out messed with. They want to bang spies, influence peddle, persecute opposition, store classified documents in their garage with their corvette, insider trade and who knows what else. I am sick to death of it. Sick of it to the point of becoming a little unhinged. Maybe I have unequal justice derangement syndrome. The government is driving me crazy.
First of all, I did not get the pun, so my focus was on the punishment. I have to concur with Michael and NP. My first thought was that this is why so many flock to support Trump. He will be their champion against the existential threat to their rights as they see it.
We will see if NASCAR may have wandered into Bud Lite marketing stupidity by suspending him. I doubt it because the same people that supported Jason Aldean will not support a weenie that grovels an apology to people who think NASCAR fans are racist rubes anyway.
America is still looking for heroes and they will accept even flawed heroes who have the stomach to fight for them.
Addendum: Gregson would have acquitted himself better by filing a civil rights suit against NASCAR. NASCAR took no action against the black driver who falsely claimed a noose was in his garage. This suggests that NASCAR treated black drivers, whose false claims had a far mor deleterious impact on the NASCAR brand, with more leniency.
Well, don’t feel too bad about the pun: the version of that meme that the driver liked had “Under DA Knee,” which is how the song was memorably sung, but I couldn’t find as clear a copy of it to post.
Which works up to a point. That point ends when said flawed heroes can’t handle the consequences of their own flaws, and start threatening revenge on anyone who decides said flaws are no longer worth the benefits, if any.
My comment should not be considered a justification, only an explanation for his continued appeal.
Reprimanding this driver for liking an image critical of Ol’ St. George of the Floyd isn’t the issue. His apology and capitulation to Big Brother are.
I always thought sainthood required two post-mortem miracles. Perhaps the recent peace accords signed by Russia and Ukraine are attritubed to Him, you know the agreement whereby Russia fully recognizes Ukrainian sovereignty, autonomy and independence, Russia apologizes for its belligerent, illegal war and well rebuild the country, and Ukraine agrees to join NATO? Oh, and that little boy who was blind but now sees? Those didn’t happen, either? Huh.
jvb
You’re confusing sainthood with popularity, but, don’t feel bad, it’s a very common mistake. It’s a lot more than just having miracles associated with your name. The first step, which normally can’t even begin until 5 years after the person dies, is an investigation whereby evidence and testimony is gathered to see if the person lived a suitably good and spiritual life. At that point, you are declared a “servant of God,” and the process can continue. After that an exhaustive investigation has to find that you lived a “life of heroic virtue.” Once a miracle is attributed to your intercession, you can then be beatified and called Blessed. A second miracle must be attributed to your intercession before you can be canonized, unless you were a martyr, in which case only one miracle is required.
George Floyd lived anything but a life of heroic virtue. He was a rotten person who squandered what opportunities he did get and turned to petty crime and drugs. The only thing he did that was at all notable was to die at the hands of a heavy-handed but not provably racist police officer while resisting arrest and while high as a kite on fentanyl. He does not qualify as a martyr, a martyr is someone who dies for his faith or for his cause. MLK was a martyr, a tireless advocate for his people and a builder of bridges, killed by someone who did not want to see those bridges built. Arguably Malcolm X qualifies as well, shot dead by radicals of his own cause, just like Michael Collins was gunned down by his own people who didn’t think he went far enough.
A lot of people went into summer 2020 thinking it would become another Summer of Love and we’d be telling our children and grandchildren about that summer when the injustice done one man caused a seismic shift in the relations between the races and justice generally. Only 3 years have passed, and really not much has changed other than a lot of destruction. Like the Soviet Union, the George Floyd freak out is headed for becoming a destructive footnote in history.
Sainthood? Hardly.
He should have stuck with something more innocent, like “Kill the Boer”.
Hasn’t anyone wondered who it is that has that job of scouring social media, not only for posts that can be used to destroy people, but even for liking someone else’s post?
It would be much more efficient for, say, a big tech company that owns the platform to flag certain posts as politically unacceptable, and certain accounts as belonging to celebrities or other important people, and automatically compile “dirt files” every time such an account interacts with such a post. That “dirt” could then be sold, just as marketing research is sold to advertisers, apart from being used as leverage by the company itself.
I’m not saying they do this, necessarily, just that it could be easily done.
They probably have AI doing it for them, whoever “them” is.
Anyone who would give “them” to quote the film Joker, what they “fucking deserve” would be a hero for the ages!
It’s simple…
You will be assimilated! Resistance is futile!
If you do not assimilate, you will be destroyed.
I’m sick and tired of all this woke shit! This action from NASCAR should get the same kind of public boycott condemnation as was evident in the Bud Lite fiasco. Companies kowtowing to the woke totalitarian horde need to be held accountable for their woke actions.
Who could have foreseen that wokesters would model themselves after the Borg, who were ultimately defeated.