61–70 of 196 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correctness literally doesn't matter in the realm of politics. Only, who is the loudest and most persuasive.
As an aside, is there a latin-based term for this kind of authoritative persuasion? I want to say it's ochlocracy, but generally it's not just any kind of mob I'm thinking of, but the mob that is the loudest. Rule by the loudest voices. A magnaocracy? (not to be confused with the fantastical magocracy)
This reminds me of the famous Muhammad drawings in 2005 in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (JP). Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East. Had it happened again today, the Puritan twittersphere would have been all over it and JP would likely have had to follow same route as NYT. Very sad.
> Back then they were seen as a defence of free speech and our democratic rights, a way of mocking the draconian regimes of the Middle East Was this an universal viewpoint in the West? As a non-Muslim teen in India I saw it as mocking Islam (I get that others' mileage varies).
I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed…
>>A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh or think deeply in years. This probably says more about you than about political cartoons as a medium. Is it possible that you have become so used to over-the-top memes and shallow animated shows with instant-gratification "satire" that you have lost the ability (and/or patience) to pause and ponder the subtler, many-layered messages underneath traditional cartoons?
Here's an article over the cartoon mentioned here that sparked outrage in April which led to this: https://nypost.com/2019/04/28/new-york-times-condemned-for-a...
Can someone explain how the cartoon is antisemetic? Calling it such doesn't make it so. If I blend Putin into a Cassowary crossed with a Peacock would it not be apropos? Cartoons are supposed to be edgy and uncomfortable. It looks like like the NYT succumbed to the mob whipped up by the Trump administration, it meerly doesn't want the criticism.
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Except that the said newsrooms are more often than not the ones that amplify and give a legitimacy to these mobs by printing their reactions as if it was somehow the reaction of the people. The NY Times itself actively participated in many of these lynchings, like the Covington kids. To me it looks more like a newsroom that likes playing with fire, got burned itself, and decides to cut its exposure so it can keep pla…
Yup, media outlets like the NYT did this to themselves really. At some point they decided that a story could be manufactured from a few outraged individuals, even if those sources were random or completely unknown users. Bam...there's your instant moral outrage. It didn't matter that their story might be a grossly inaccurate sampling of readers or have little factual basis, the only thing that mattered was that sudde…
Couple this with the nasty trick of manufacturing the popularity of certain opinions [1] and I wager that it is pretty trivial to get most people to believe in anything and especially easy to make people think fringe opinions are actually widespread and commonplace. Coupled with the emotive fallacious reasoning of "If everyone believes/says it then it must be true" and you can make reality, at least how people see it, however you like.
I am 100% convinced that this has been abused to boost the bottom line of certain media companies because outrage gets clicks and figuring out how to induce outrage means you can farm clicks by outraging people who you've conditioned to become outraged. Increasingly often media-manufactured lynchmobs are formed over topics where you can tell by talking to the outraged people that most of them are misinformed about whatever it is they are all worked up over.
It's like the world's largest (and worst) game of Telephone.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonkblog/ma...
[1] Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2159/
I think this piece is a great example of smug, establishment romanticism which grossly overvalues form over function. A political cartoon hasn't made me laugh, think deeply, or--most importantly--change my worldview in years. It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of. The author's notion that the loss of political cartoons is a serious loss of visual political culture is a self-absorbed…
And now anyone can be a cartoonist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it actually anti Semitic to portray a (Jewish) head of state as a (guide) dog? I'm going by the description here, rather than the actual imagery, but as described it doesn't seem to me to anti Semitic.
I haven't see the cartoon, but the link above describes it as "Netanyahu as a guide dog leading a blind President Trump in a skullcap." If you want to make a statement that the US blindly supports Israel, that is not in itself anti-Semitic. But why put Trump in a skullcap?
To me though, if you go with that interpretation, the cartoon isn't anti Jewish (/Israel), its anti Trump, and a skull cap isn't inherently insulting, unless it's insulting to Jews that Trump is Jewish?
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> It does confuse me that these mobs have such power on decision makers at companies and media outlets like this. The interesting thing about Twitter "mobs" is that if you look away from the computer screen or hit the button on the side of your phone, they are suddenly silent and may as well not exist. If you are a company then bad stories on Twitter could cause a significant drop in business. So if you just choose t…
The angry vocal minority on twitter (people who may not even be customers, perhaps likely are not) really has such an effect on a company's sales? Got any examples?
https://www.dispatch.com/news/20180729/theodore-decker-colum...