You are. Because the evidence you’re relying upon is apparently: Republicans WOULD do something like that!
Sure, let’s stipulate for this discussion that Republicans are amoral, power-hungry bastards, who would cheat their mothers out of an election if they could.
THAT’S NOT ENOUGH. You also have to show some actual evidence. Not anomalies, not suspcions, not suppositions. Actual evidence.
I must strenuously object to your co-opting the term Whiny Ass Titty Babies (WATB) and applying it to the Left. WATB has a specific use - those skirt-clutching weenies of the Right who regard the sacrifice of liberty for the sake of a sense of security as a reasonable trade. Those who would give carte blanche to Bush in order to be saved from “freedom haters” around the world. Those who whine and cry about the criticism of the fearless misleader, proclaiming it to give aid and comfort to the enemies lurking around every corner. (Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that the more corners we turn in Iraq, the more there seem to be new dangers waiting around the next? Maybe we have been turning these corners, just in the wrong direction.)
So, may I respectfully ask that you return to leading up the search for a cure for CD in our lifetime, and stop abusing our terms of abuse?
Clearly her librul slander of Bush is just the tip of the iceberg - this woman is obviously using her career in art to push the femilitant evolutionist agenda down our throats! Dittos! Mega-dittos!
… So Ms. Greenberg, what do you think of the sentiments expressed in this thread’s OP?
Haw, haw! Pipe down, Hillary! Meow!
… That’s all the time we have, folks! … Next time, what the mainstream media isn’t telling you about Iraq, with our guest - three million crying Iraqi babies! Also: we talk with Bill Bennett how the painting Dogs Playing Poker encourages gambling!
I beg to differ. It most certainly IS his call to make. As I pointed out to you in the last whiny debate about the “stolen election” he didn’t even register a protest vote against the election when Congress certified it.
Again, if you have a quote from Kerry saying he did the same thing, then we can talk. If not, then the comaprison is irrelavent.
He was my candidate, too. Unfortunately, he lost.
Well this certainly seems to be a reasonable response.
You can be quite reasonable when you’re not looking for knee-jerk anti-Bush responses from Democrats.
I’ll bet that you might not have gotten such a hostile response if you’d written the OP something like, “I think it was cruel of the photographer mentioned in this article to deliberately cause children to cry just so she could take pictures of them doing so. Does anyone else agree?”
From the progress of the thread so far, it depends on the political project.
If it is anti-Bush, it is either OK, or at least very much trivial, or trivialized. A few posters have managed a fairly tepid attempt at condemning the photographer, for whatever that is worth. Nothing like the venom reserved for Bricker for daring to broach the subject, of course, but I doubt anyone is surprised by that.
An unexceptional display of the usual tactics from the Usual Suspects, IOW.
Regards,
Shodan
Stupidest pitting EVER. OMG, babies crying!!! Oh the humanity! People who don’t like Bush are child abusers! Wahhh!
:rolleyes:
Who gives a damn about her politics…those photographs are fucking hideous. They’re worse than those stupid “big-eyed waifs” paintings from the '70s.
What I’m wondering: do you think that it was a big deal, or a particularly bad thing?
One of my all-time favorite movies is City of Lost Children (minor spoilers follow). The movie has a wonderful sequence in it wherein the sad villain, in an attempt to cheer up a roomful of kidnapped toddlers, dresses up in a Father Christmas outfit, decorates the nursery in a Christmas theme, puts on a scratchy record of carols, and goes around to each crib singing to the children. The toddlers start off amazed at this bizarred display, and then one starts to cry, and then one by one they all start to cry, as the villain himself gets more flustered and more angry at the uncooperative brats. The scene is pitiful and hilarious.
After having seen the movie several times, it occurred to me that those were really crying children, and that they appeared all to be crying together, and that the director must have done something to make them cry. And yeah, it’s not my favorite thing in the world.
But if those kids got something afterward–maybe they all got ice-cream afterward that they wouldn’t otherwise have received–I’m not at all convinced it was a real problem. And I don’t boycott the movie because of this one scene.
These pictures? The one titled “torture” impressed me. The rest don’t do much for me. Her tactics to obtain them are mildly unethical, but if the kids got some reward afterward that they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, that balances the sheets in my book. And in no way do I see this a big deal or a particularly bad thing.
Daniel
Is that your judgement of the OP, of the entire thread thus far?
I agree that the OP might have benefitted from more detail and nuance. But if this is your reaction to the entire thread, I believe that you’ve missed the boat.
One problem with this discussion is that there’s no Saffir-Simpson scale for badness the way there is for wind. I think her conduct is mean and cruel enough to deserve a mention in the Pit. It’s not as bad as poking the tots with a pin. They probably get more pain from a vaccination, but of course a vaccination is done for a worthy cause, not to fuel the political agenda of the doctor. (I am aware that there is a vocal minority that would outright disagree with that statement as regards vaccinations).
As I say, though, I don’t really know what the standard, accepted practices are for a director to get toddlers to cry on cue. If it’s simialr to the tactics discussed here, I’d think it was similarly cruel and mean.
So – I’d call it enough of a big deal to warrant a critical comment, enough of a bad thing to justify an angry paragraph in response.
In fact, here’s a “Saffir-Simpson” comparative: I’d say it’s WORSE - more of a bad thing - than my own actions were in starting this thread. Yet the level of angry words and vituperation directed against me in response to this thread have generally been stronger than those directed at her.
Meh. I really wonder whether you would have brought this up if she were taking the pictures and titling them, say, “Bad hair day” and “Dropped ice cream.” Honestly, do you think you would have?
I don’t think so, and I wouldn’t have done it myself. Other folks’ vituperation? I can’t take credit for it, and certainly some of it is over the line–but there’s a difference between the two, inasmuch as you’re here to answer charges and she’s not.
Daniel
It’s not at all clear to me that the photographer’s motivation was to fuel her political agenda. She saw the initial photograph as a powerful expression of distress, decided to do a series of similar photograph, applied a series of horrid photoshop filters to them, and then inserted captions referencing things that she finds distressing, which, as it turns out, happen to be some of them political. But the political nature of those seems entirely incidental to her motivation, so far as I can tell. Her motivation seems to have been “This is a powerful expression of emotion, worthy of pursuing in an artistic manner.”
By describing it as “fueling the political agenda of the photographer,” you seem to be suggesting that the photographer’s initial goal was to create an anti-Bush work, and then decided that screaming kids would be a good way to achieve that goal. That seems like a significant distortion of what happened given the descriptions in the article. I too find the OP to be without much merit.
Incidentally, I’ve witnessed nieces and nephews do a convincing impression of geniune distress upon being given juice in the yellow cup instead of the red cup. I’m going to have to come down in the politics is irrelevant here camp, and secondarily in the taking candy from a toddler builds character camp. Okay, so I’m being slightly facetious on the second count. But only slightly.
I might well have. I don’t tend to do a lot of Pit ranting, but there’s something about the meanness of making toddlers cry that irks me.
Actually, it’s a very fair description:
Fair enough. It’s something I find mildly distasteful, but roughly along the lines of people who run into crowds of pigeons to make them scatter: the harm caused is really minimal.
Daniel
Actually, I think you’re interpreting it exactly backwards. She’s seeing the emotion, then she’s tagging it with a political caption. She’s not deciding upon a political message, and then going out to look for the most potent expression for it. I think you’re viewing the story through red-tinted glasses.
Me? I’m just extremely weary of observing the extremely partisan politics you folks have developed down there, and quite frankly you, Bricker, appear to be every bit as blindly partisan as the usual suspects on the left. It saddens me to see one of the world’s greatest democracies reduced to shouting back and forth “Is not!” “Is too!” “Is not!” “Is too!”
Well they started it!
Wait, Wait. Let me get my camera! 