Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Interpretation, Plausible Denial and racially loaded imagery (NYPost cartoon)
Posts
or they could be seeing racism because they are constantly watching for racism due to an oversaturation of racism and culturally taught racism recognition training.
and those few that always see the worst.
edit: bascially what im saying is, you find more pennies (racism) by looking for them, but you also find more bottlecaps (not racism) that way too.
There's nothing homophobic in that comic, stop being so paranoid. Hamsters are common pets, everyone loves disco pictures, umbrellas are common comic props, the author probably slipped while drawing the guys foot and that's why it looks all weird, politicians have wimpy wrists, they need a hankey to blow their noses on, flowered wallpaper is probably just because he likes flowers, that ribbon could be a non AIDS ribbon (you're so paranoid you assume that its an AIDS ribbon!), and everyone loves teddy bears.
Look, if you go and say "that's homophobic!" to every little comic that might possibly be viewed by a brain-damaged person as offensive, nobody is going to take you seriously. The author probably didn't mean anything offensive anyways, and that is what matters!
Let me tell you about video games. Let me tell you about Homestuck
What's he trying to convey with this?
I take back what I said before when I said, "It's unlikely this was meant to carry any racial overtones."
This guy's fucked up, and he very well might have meant Obama. Which makes him racist which he clearly already is and wrong, since Obama didn't write the bill.
Not that anyone would try to argue that "facts" ever deterred the ignorant from making their stupid statements.
Racism is the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
You were right, people just think the definition of racism is "something that might offend somebody, and has something to do with race."
Edit: okay, i didn't realize that discussion ended 10 pages ago.
If the president had any real power, he'd be able to live wherever the fuck he wanted.
This is pretty much what we've been trying to get at. No one knows for sure what he meant, but given his previous work and the proximity of Obama to the stimulus bill, we're not giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Then I looked at a page showing some of the artists more offensive cartoons, and while he may not have been deliberately making a racial joke in this most recent one, the guy is clearly a racist, bigoted scumbag.
I hope his career ends horribly because of this, and it would be the height of ironic justice if that happened in spite of his not actually intending to be racist (this one time. Because he is a fucking racist piece of shit).
Well yes, he hates gays and thinks we're all perverts.
It's almost quaint, in a sort of Fred Phelps lunatic sort of way.
A monkey could have written the stimulus bill.
The Donkeys are generic democrats. He does the same with elephants and republicans.
And hey, Cuomo is clearly labeled.
The middle comic there shows his (consistent) charicaturization of Obama as overly thin with giant ears.
The chimp in the "questionable" strip is fat, and has average to small sized ears.
Is this sarcasm? The guy isn't ACTUALLY trying to be racist because his other comics are worse?
No, it's not sarcasm. It's a rational statement, rather than a knee-jerk emotional reaction.
The cartoonist IS a bigot, and I'm pretty sure that he understands the way that the monkey could be taken, and didn't care if people were offended.
BUT, look at this guy's previous work. If his goal was to call Obama a monkey, he would have come out and done it. He would have tried to be sneaky about it.
No, it's that the trumped-up crime of monkey = Obama doesn't fit his M.O.
The man is not subtle. That's pretty fucking clear.
You're making this out to be some sort of 50/50 thing, where it's plausible that he's being racist given the content of the cartoon.
I don't have to give him the benefit of the doubt to state that he's a bigot. I also don't have to give him the benefit of the doubt that it's a long stretch around at least two corners to turn that cartoon into a caricature of Obama.
No, otherwise those people who see Mary in stains and Jesus in grilled cheese would be considered reasonable. Lots of exceptionally religious people get offended at the drop of a hat. Apparently for a lot of people it doesn't take much to create a lot of umbrage over nothing at all.
The worldview that makes that a reasonable conclusion is a worldview that allows for a lot of unwarranted outrage.
I shudder to think what would have happened if he had made a reference to a million monkeys on a million typewriters drafting the bill. A million times as racist, no doubt!
Yar is indeed correct.
And then spending the rest of the apology accusing people who reacted to the comic of really just being out to get them.
yeah, and it wasn't much of an apology as much as a justification.
Is that unreasonable?
Have you seen the aggressive way "I'm offended" has been used, particularly by those on the right? If the Catholic League gets all offended at something innocuous, I think it's reasonable to tell the Catholics that are genuinely offended that nothing was intended, but that the Catholic League can fuck right off.
This is a sentiment that I can definitely agree with. Mock outrage is something that I could stand to see eliminated from today's political discourse.
I think it is shitty of them to pretend to apologize, only as a facade to proclaim that THEY are the real victims here.
I don't think that they had any obligation to apologize for anything in the first place, mind you.
edit: to clarify, I didn't post about their apology as a complaint. I posted it to show all the people who had been "calling for action" exactly what they got them out of the NY Post. As I was saying yesterday, the people who were upset by this are not the people who regularly buy the Post, so ultimately, the post doesn't care if it upsets you.
They are the real victims here. There aren't any other victims. Maybe they're completely deserving of society coming down on them like a shit-ton of bricks. But not for this innocuous stuff. We've seen the kind of comics the guy puts out on a regular basis, and people are getting offended at this one?
I think if people had come out and made a stink about virtually any of the other cartoons we've seen here, they wouldn't have so much cause to say "fuck off" to the umbrage seekers, "sorry" to the ones with delicate sensibilities. With this though, sorry, they're in the right.
They aren't idiots. They new EXACTLY what people would think when they saw the monkey in the cartoon.
Also, how exactly is this hurting them? It's not like they were being taken seriously by anyone before this point.
As I was saying yesterday, this may have even been a publicity stunt. They've sure gotten a whole lot of attention.
So I, and maybe Jeepguy are idiots for not seeing the connection there? And do you really think the people, the kind of people, at the NYP are going to be more sensitive to this sort of thing than me and him?
Hey, Loren, have you read anything I've posted in this thread, or are you just coming out swinging at everyone?
I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT THE COMIC WAS RACIST. I've said that many times over.
It was, however, a racially insensitive move to use a monkey in a cartoon involving a bill being championed by the first black president. There is NO WAY that at least one person in the process, before this hit the stands, didn't say "hey, people are going to think that this is racist." The Post decided not to care.
And not caring IS a valid choice here. The demographic that actually buys the New York Post is not the demographic that gets offended by racism, so it's not like it would have a significant effect on their sales.
They're not "victims", though. There are ZERO victims in this entire situation.
I've read it. I'm not saying you think the comic was racist. I'm addressing your comment about idiots at the NYP.
I'm saying that it doesn't take an idiot to overlook the potential for people to find racism in the comic. And, given the propensity for the NYP to be bigot douches, I think they might actually be less sensitive to that sort of thing than most about things that could plausibly be construed as racist.
What about the people who felt compelled to examine his earlier work?
If a bigot is attacked for bigotry over a comment that was not bigoted, he's still a victim.
I think that you have to have some kind of harm actually befall you in order to be a victim.