The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

To clarify, I'm not questioning the right to blasphemy. I just wanted to see how it was perceived in the West.

Although, having lived in the West for the better part of a decade, I don't see what progress we have made as society that you are so confident that right to blasphemy is no big deal. I am not saying we live in medieval England, but speech with zero consequence is not a thing yet.

> And it is not easy to figure out if someone is genuinely distraught at seeing a cartoon like that (or anything really) or they are just claiming they are

We should just not care. Somebody is always going to be offended with something. You can't please everyone. Somebody being offended in not an excuse to publish something. That's what's wrong with the present expectations -- the acceptance that "offending" someone is an excuse enough not to print something.

We should simply stop accepting that somebody being "offended" is enough to produce a veto to publish anything.

If anybody is scared they should also just admit that. But not accept that those who threat him or her have any right to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everybody_Draw_Mohammed_Day

"Molly Norris drew the original, poster-like cartoon on April 20, 2010, which declared May 20, 2010, to be the first annual "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day". The drawing showed various anthropomorphized objects, including a coffee cup, a cherry and a box of pasta, each claiming to be the likeness of Muhammad."

"FBI officials reportedly notified Norris warning her that they considered it a "very serious threat."[143][144]

"Norris has since changed her name and gone into hiding. According to the Seattle Weekly (her former employer), this decision was based on "the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI.""

"As of 2015, Norris is still in hiding and jihadist threats against her life continue."

We should publish exactly what is "offensive" until there is enough of it that nobody's life can be threatened.

Otherwise we accept to be bullied.

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting

"The gunmen burst into the meeting room and called out Charb's name to target him before opening fire. The shooting lasted five to ten minutes. The gunmen aimed at the journalists' heads and killed them."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_(film_director)

"Van Gogh was shot with a HS2000 and stabbed by Mohammed Bouyeri while cycling to work on 2 November 2004 at about 9 o'clock in the morning."

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/24/vangogh_2/

"On the morning of Nov. 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn't make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, "We can still talk about it! Don't do it! Don't do it." But the Moroccan didn't stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh's throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said. "Cut like a tire," said one. Van Gogh, the Dutch master's great-grand-nephew, was 47 years old."

> Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context.

Not the good ones. As with everything, the good ones are rare and difficult. On occasions, the form even raises to an art form. Also, the point of a good political cartoon is usually not to influence of skew your opinion.

> either way I don't read them, but standing up for political cartoons as being a thing worth defending, I don't think it is. I think they hurt more than they help.

I don't understand how you can understand their effects without reading them. What exactly brings you to this conclusion?

Social media isn't the problem, low-information mob behavior has always been a thing. Pretty much all of the lynchings that ever happened in the USA occurred way before Jack Dorsey was a twinkle in his father's eye.

The problem is the structural flaws built into our brains.

Consider vision. If I showed you a wall of visual noise with a human face somewhere in the middle, you'd likely pick out the face in an instant. That's because we have physical structures in our visual cortex that specifically filter the information coming down the optic nerve for human faces.

What's funny is that higher judgement seems to work the same way. For most of the history of homo sapiens, we've lived in relatively small groups, and only interacted with comparatively limited amounts of information (compared to the typical internet feed). Think about all the things represented by scrolling down instagram: products and their place in your life, hundreds of people you've met over many years, trends and fads and memes which are themselves complex multi-layered ideas requiring lots of insider knowledge to grasp.

All of this is way more information than what a typical person had to deal with until about 100 years ago at the earliest.

So what's a brain to do? Our minds filter the incoming information until it's distilled down to the simplest possible version, the one with little nuance and zero subtlety. That's the idea that catches, because we lack the machinery to process 10,000 minor details for every little thing we do all the time.

Apply this to political discourse and you'll see why major political candidates spend precious minutes arguing over whether "socialism is bad," or "capitalism is bad." I'm sure many here understand it's way more complicated than that, but if you tried to get a real discussion going about nit-picky policy stuff, it'd go nowhere.

I'm not about to decry "attention spans these days" or anything, because frankly I don't think people are any different than they were 500 years ago, not really. And that's the problem. The only thing that's changed is what amounts to "common knowledge" these days, which is usually also an oversimplification of scientific reality.

The problem is that the world is just too big and too complex for our ill-adapted chimp brains to fully grasp, at least at the population scale, and Twitter and the like amplify this effect.

I don't have any solutions. But I know that we should keep doing the one thing humans are good at: building better tools. We can't exactly make society less complex, but we can probably make tools to understand it without losing (as much) nuance.

That's the only option I can see for fixing this sort of thing in the near-future, because even if these social media problems created selection pressure on humans (which I doubt), it'd be a long long time before we were cranking out baby Homo Interneticus.