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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
#112I 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 It's the most self-satisfied, pretentious, and outdated medium I know of.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…
"Political memes" is the new "political cartoon". And now anyone can be a cartoonist.
This is similar to comics and webcomics. It turns out that if you have your own website, you don't have to satisfy the censors in order to post anything.
Sometimes editors have good reasons not to let cartoonists put anything they like in the funny pages or the political cartoons, but the end result is usually very sterile. There's a lot of things you can say in that medium (e.g. the work of Bill Watterson or Gary Larson), but also a lot of things you can't.
That's a problem especially for political cartoons, because they usually poke fun at specific people, but you can't poke fun at just anyone because readers might get mad. The idea that there's an Overton window for people it's socially acceptable to ridicule should make us at least a little bit uncomfortable. Sometimes it'll be the emperor with no clothes and that's fine, but we might want to include the guy that sold him an invisible robe (but they own the newspaper too), and to exclude the kid who told everyone the emperor wasn't decently attired.
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#113[flagged]
What does any of that have to do with the article?
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#114Yes, this.
Politically correct mobs are changing the world for the worst. In today's world, Eddie Murphy wouldn't make it out the door. And we would be worse off for it.
The great irony is that the very comedians who are being retroactively condemned were cutting-edge for breaking barriers in their day. John Cleese is a glaring example.
I have high hopes the pendulum will some day swing back the other way, and we will all be able to laugh at today's overzealous critics.
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#115"We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in." This is a significant problem, not ju…
Sure there is ridiculous posturing and fake outrage on Twitter....
But this is the NYT (who stood for journalism at one point) and political cartoons — which is satire and lampooning of the political class and politics.
Shying away from that is indicative of something gone wrong.
I know the NYT only started political cartoons in the last few decades, but this can’t be good for political freedom.
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#116"We are in a world where moralistic mobs gather on social media and rise like a storm, falling upon newsrooms in an overwhelming blow. This requires immediate counter-measures by publishers, leaving no room for ponderation or meaningful discussions. Twitter is a place for furor, not debate. The most outraged voices tend to define the conversation, and the angry crowd follows in." This is a significant problem, not ju…
The underlying issue is the assumption that nobody may have their views put to doubt, or worse, criticized. The right not to be offended, not written anywhere, somehow became holy.
Not that I would offend people on purpose: it usually hampers real discussion and leave people more polarized and striving less for understanding.
But for some, feeling offended and demonstrating that feeling as loudly as possible became an easy publicity tool. It exploits the natural propensity of people to help those who are hurt.
It's very sad that few (or no?) large media ever was able to say: "Suck it up. Your opinion and this guy's opinion are different. This is how freedom works: by giving equal rights to people you don't like." (But freedom is not very valued by many, it seems; often definitely not as much as being right, or at least having the upper hand.)
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#117The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti...
Thanks! Overall, this seems fairly tame to me. What am I missing? I'm honestly at a loss here.
it reminds people of this https://mobile.twitter.com/kishkushkay/status/11222905077141...
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's been linked before on HN but The Century of the Self is very eye-opening in this regard and available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Apparently the very first act of Public Relations was in renaming Propaganda to Public Relations.
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#119The actual cartoon, in case anyone (like me) is missing context: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ny-times-deeply-sorry-for-anti...
Thanks! Overall, this seems fairly tame to me. What am I missing? I'm honestly at a loss here.
Caricatures that exaggerate various racial features are fairly risky these days. I have no idea if they stepped over the line here, but you get away with a lot less than you could in the past.
Re: The End of Political Cartoons at The New York Times
#120Non political comic about political comics that I think about sums up the value of political comics (language warning, I guess)