Obama slams New Yorker portrayal - Yahoo! News
What is offensive to one may be humourous to another; Do you find this offensive?

What is the standard which describes "offensive" to you? Is it simply because your sensibilities have been affected, or is it because you prefer conformity standards of politeness and civility? Doesn't this lead to fascism?



"Bullies sometimes wear red dresses"
~~carefulcarpenter

__________________
Marerophilia:
A depth of love that youth can seldom appreciate or communicate;
A love that never can die for it is a wild seed living inside us, and it is what it is;
Love: that which bonds the reality of one's being to the mystery of the unknown;
Wildflowers: evidence revealed."
~~carefulcarpenter

It's beyond a matter of taste,
Its not funny seeing that an alarming amount of Americans actually think he's Muslim and buying into islamaphobia.
We can only hope that readers of the New Yorker have sense enough to distinguish what is fact.

well, the 24-hour news networks can breathe a sigh of relief. "let's talk about THIS all fuckin' day! YEAH!!! if there's a chance in hell it's not a big deal, we'll make sure it is by seven/eight central!"

i don't know. i mean it is SO over the top (a portrait of bin laden over the mantle, guys) that if people are going to take it seriously, surely they were stubbornly thinking that way to begin with? maybe i'm overestimating my fellow human, but i really can't see an image like that actually swaying anyone to think anything new about the obamas, so i don't see how it's harmful.

well, is there real harm to be done by just offending people? like "oh my eyes!" stuff? i really don't know. someone tell me.

I think it's offensive because it's false and misleading.

people like feeling indignant and then self righteous and angrily morally superior, it's addictive, so offend them and make them happy.

__________________
she's a haunted house and her windows are broken

Agreed!

"You can't offend a hillbilly just by calling them one, but you can offend one who is in denial"
~~carefulcarpenter


I am a hillbilly, BTW.

__________________
Marerophilia:
A depth of love that youth can seldom appreciate or communicate;
A love that never can die for it is a wild seed living inside us, and it is what it is;
Love: that which bonds the reality of one's being to the mystery of the unknown;
Wildflowers: evidence revealed."
~~carefulcarpenter

I understand that it was satirising Obama's right wing critics, but I think it was irresponsible to put the image on the cover.

Am I right that it's a 'quality' paper that did this? Because I think the people who don't read it, will see the cover, and think they're justified in thinking those things about Obama, and not read the article; and go and read those same beliefs that are being satirised, spouted in a tabloid.

I believe in free speech for everyone, but it comes with responsibility and the understanding that other people have the right to use their right to free speech to criticise ones use of that free speech.

WTF is the big deal?

No one was offended when Vice President Cheney shot some poor SOB in the face at point blank range...

Think about it... Cheney has rifle in his hand.... His finger is in the trigger of a loaded rifle he loaded himself.

He claims he accidently pointed the rifle at the poor SOB face as he pulled the trigger with his finger.....

It’s a magazine, but yes it’s considered to be a ‘quality’ one. Although historically at least, mostly for its literary content (I like it because the articles are very, very long, making it about the only weekly magazine I can’t read in a half an hour). For many years it also employed one of America’s most respected film critics.

I don’t believe there is an accompanying article, the cover usually does not specifically relate to the content. It is actually probably best known for its satirical cartoons, both the covers and the ones scattered throughout the interior.

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i think i see what you're saying, but the thing is, if someone, at this point, is so out of touch that they see a cartoon THAT ridiculous and feel "justified," then i don't see how there was much hope for that person to begin with.

but kesh, if they don't speak out to save the legions of ingnoramuses from themselves, who will?

(whoever takes this thing literally is probably the same person who already wants to believe it anyway)

I think it's great!

I dunno, we tend to be encouraged to believe that you only have the right to be offended by something personally if it's going to severely affect others (like persuading them that you're a Muslim so that they won't vote for you). The implication being that lying is fine as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Which is bad enough if you're just some jerk. But for a press publication to be taking an attitude like that is surely undesirable. Even if Obama wasn't offended, the fact that it's innaccurate (rather than simply caricature, unless differentiating between black people, Arabs and Muslims is truly seen as splitting hairs by the majority of Americans - I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case) is bad enough. A lie is a bad thing in itself. Surely you'd want your media to be aware of that.

Looking at the thing, I can't even work out how you could interpret this to be harmless. I mean, if there's another joke there that isn't racial that would poke fun at all of us silly-billies, I'm not seeing it.

2:1 says that the cartoonist will say at some point that "it was meant to provoke debate" or something. They always do that when they've spewed out some childish sub-series 1 South Park piece of shit five seconds before the deadline in the hope of courting some controversy. I don't think it's harmful in the way people might say it is, but I don't think it's a good thing for the press to be let off scott free for that kind of lazy provocation either.

Only if you believe in a validity of slippery slope arguments which would require the average person to be a docile passive Pavlov's dog, something which might appear to be evidenced in a country like America, where most people aren't under threat from culture beyond a few minor inconveniences and inequities that most of us could be willing to put up with, but which is certainly not shown to be the case world-wide.

To clarify, no, I don't believe that a mutually established set of unwritten social guidelines can be equated to fascism, since each person is free to both interpret those guidelines as they see fit and to decide whether to follow them upon that interpretation.

Most people that I know don't kill each other because it's impolite, not because it's illegal. If a law were introduced to say that murder was not only okay but one's civic duty, I doubt many people would go for it.

But still, we all know that this statement was purely meant as a way for you to indirectly compare anyone who finds you obnoxious to Nazis, so it wasn't really worth the effort of a response :love

I have to say I was pretty dissapointed with the New Yorker when I saw the recent cover. Mostly because most of their covers are either clever, attractive, or both, and this one was none of the above. All the cover does is collect all the rumors already circulating about Obama and his family and put them on one page. That doesn't make it over-the-top enough to be successfully satirical. It falls short and is obnoxious.

On the plus side I went to browse past covers, and that was a pretty good time.

The New Yorker charicature of the Obama's reveals a side to them, as well as to us, that is occult in nature. How we respond tells us much more about the hidden and repressed characteristics to our nature--both individual and collective.

When individual interpretations follow collective imperatives for order and conformity, whether these are spoken or unspoken measures of groupthink or not, the individual no longer has autonomy; this NWO of thinking becomes fascist when the individual's right to personal interpretation is circumvented by inner subtle rationalities which govern one's actions, not by free will and independent inquiry, but by knee-jerk response directed by occult fears of rejection and social alienation. One should be free to interpret politically and socially acceptable memes without fear of loss to personal liberty and collective social benefits.

Movements, both political and community oriented, should not require conformity to unwritten rules and implied interpretations where the individual's faculties for discernment is disadvantaged. Freedom means to me the human right to be weird as well as to be acceptable, without "the finger of blame pointing" at one from the occult narcissistic critics which demand authority via compliance to a hierarchal structure of power. I feel the artist whose work characterized this principle deserves the venue to address this thought; and the viewer has the opportunity, without commentary, to judge for themselves the implied power which is hidden in the message. Only the individual's reaction can reveal the truth behind the image. When we collectively analyze the art do we diminish its potential for illumination of the occult forces which underlie the true fight for individual freedom and liberty.

The public display of humour, and the reactions we observe in others and ourselves, says so much about who we really are as a people. Fascism is a condition where the individual no longer has the right to laugh, or for that fact express personal joy, without be subjected to social repudiation and punishment. In the end the numbers tell the story-- individual votes are counted. Do we vote via our personal conscience or do we follow the trends of social influence?


"Silence is the music of fascism and the anthem of tyranny"
~~carefulcarpenter

__________________
Marerophilia:
A depth of love that youth can seldom appreciate or communicate;
A love that never can die for it is a wild seed living inside us, and it is what it is;
Love: that which bonds the reality of one's being to the mystery of the unknown;
Wildflowers: evidence revealed."
~~carefulcarpenter

i smell a five page ophiel/sophia thing coming on, so i'm going away now.

but on my way out, i will say that i'm still not convinced that the cover is anything to get worked up about. obama himself said he had no comment, and i think more people should have followed suit.

Often analogy is the greater form of argument; although it can be viewed as the weaker to the sophisticated mind. In many ways "no comment" is a comment. Silence too, sends a message-- a passive-aggressive one at that.

I'd prefer that you stay and I'll leave the thread, okay?

__________________
Marerophilia:
A depth of love that youth can seldom appreciate or communicate;
A love that never can die for it is a wild seed living inside us, and it is what it is;
Love: that which bonds the reality of one's being to the mystery of the unknown;
Wildflowers: evidence revealed."
~~carefulcarpenter