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The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

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Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#91

Post by sonnyblarney »

praneshp wrote: post #18
hestefisk wrote: post #12

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).

" As a non-Muslim teen in India I saw it as mocking Islam (I get that others' mileage varies)"

Yes, it kind of was.

But should people be able to 'mock' a religion?

Should they face death threats becauase they 'mocked' something?

This is the whole point.

I have a slight inclination towards a specific religion and I can assure you it's 'mocked all day' and I don't care, as long as it's not done in a vile way. And even when it is, I'm not calling for suppression.

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#92

Post by humanrebar »

trehalose wrote: post #43
781 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mocking is still legal in the West. But not for long. Mocking anything but white men/Christianity creates huge uproar today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/09/1...

Mocking white men/Christianity doesn't create huge uproar? Hasn't there been a huge uproar about a "War on Christmas" for years where people get mad when baristas say "happy holidays"? Hard to believe that something so innocuous could generate Christian outrage but mocking Christianity couldn't.

"Happy Holidays!" maps to "But All Lives Matter!"

Being generic and being inclusive aren't the same thing.

And, besides, most of the anger was at public and private policymakers, not nice people wishing each other well.

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#93

Post by sonnyblarney »

mevile wrote: post #23

Political cartoons are, in my opinion, reductionist garbage that fail to take into consideration nuance and complexity and context. The caricature that inflate the size of ears and chins and lips and noses is not dignifying and doesn't add any value to whatever argument is being made, and can sometimes even be racist. There's no rebuttal to a political cartoon, there's no dialogue. They're cheap and easy to make and…

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

They don't have to.

They can just be stupid and funny (to some) as well, that's fine too.

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#94

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #90
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi... Criticising Israel and pro-Israel policy != antisemitism > https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump... I don't see how it's homophobic. The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. If the cartoon were portraying e.g. Merkel and Putin, in similar role…

> The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay". That makes "being gay" an active of derision or humour, which is an attack on gay people.

>It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay".

No, the punchline of the joke is "they're so close it's almost like they're in a relationship". Of course it has to be a gay relationship, because they're both men.

As I said before, the joke would work just as well if the cartoon depicted a woman and a man.

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#95

Post by jmbi »

trehalose wrote: post #43
781 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mocking is still legal in the West. But not for long. Mocking anything but white men/Christianity creates huge uproar today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2018/09/1...

Mocking white men/Christianity doesn't create huge uproar? Hasn't there been a huge uproar about a "War on Christmas" for years where people get mad when baristas say "happy holidays"? Hard to believe that something so innocuous could generate Christian outrage but mocking Christianity couldn't.

See the thousands of conversations on Twitter that end in "it's not possible to be racist against white people."

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#96

Post by dragonwriter »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #90
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/new-york-times-antisemi... Criticising Israel and pro-Israel policy != antisemitism > https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/new-york-times-trump... I don't see how it's homophobic. The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. If the cartoon were portraying e.g. Merkel and Putin, in similar role…

> The cartoon portrays Trump and Putin as lovers, supposedly to mock their alleged closeness. It doesn't attack homosexual people. It does attack homosexual people. You can't use "gay" as a slur or as a punchline to a joke anymore. The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay". That makes "being gay" an active of derision or humour, which is an attack on gay people.

> The punchline of the joke isn't "they're close", its "they're so close they're gay".

Equally, the implicit punchline could even read as “Trump’s cheating on America with Putin”. It would work just as well with leaders of any combination of genders.

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#97

Post by [deleted] »

praneshp wrote: post #71
cm2187 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Charlie Hebdo the intention was clearly to mock Islam indeed. But I am mystified that we are questioning in 2019 the right to blasphemy in a modern, western, free, secular society.

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.

[deleted]

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#98

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Nadya wrote: post #65
Chazprime wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Humans are bad at figuring out the popularity of hats [0]. 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…

>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.

I'd wager you can find plenty of examples of that on HN.

Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times

#100

Post by hybrids »

enraged_camel wrote: post #47
NE2z2T9qi wrote: post #27

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?

Putting giant labels on top of everything and making grotesque caricatures of political figures is not what I would call subtle
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