Whats This? Photography!? By God, that’s un-American!!! What kind of Godless Commie Bastard would threaten the security of America by actually taking pictures???
coming up later: The ‘Digital Pictures Are Stealing’ thread :rolleyes:
Or Boston.
I’m wondering whether people feel that it’s wrong to cause children to cry to take pictures period or only if the purpose is for a political project (but it’s OK otherwise). Because I’ll bet that people cause children to cry all the time for photographs or filming. The artist in this case is a commercial photographer, so perhaps she’s taken photos of crying children for advertisements or stock photos. Is that more or less wrong than this project?
Well, obviously. Because it makes Democrats look bad. And as long as you can find trivial things that make Democrats look bad, you can make a big deal about trivial things that make Democrats look bad. And as long as you can make a big deal about trivial things that make Liberals look bad, you don’t have to think about the handbasket you’re riding in, or where it’s headed. And as long as you don’t have to think about the handbasket you’re riding in, or where it’s headed, you don’t have to deal with the fact that you chose to ride in it.
I raised a similar point earlier in the thread about young children crying in movies and on television. Given the cost of shooting these productions, does everyone really think they stand around for hours on the set just waiting for the kid to spontaneously burst into tears?
What about adults? Is deliberately making an adult unhappy for no necessary purpose cruel?
Well, now, what a delightful cup of tea friend Bricker can serve when he elects to leave out the teaspoonful of rat poison. You see, its all about how reasonable people can disagree as to the meaning of cruelty. And not, as one might surmise from the title of the thread, about what reprehensible slime balls the “anti-Bush” crowd are. I suspect interference and alteration by anti-Bush hamsters.
Bricker has boldly taken a forthright stand against child cruelty, and stands ready to endure the storm of criticism sure to be flung against him. Low Profiles in Courage, due out this fall from Remainder House.
I think it’s uncool to make children cry in order to make art out of it. (I also have a rule about using fictional children’s deaths for dramatic purposes, but that’s a different story). I’m just not sure that it’s all that interesting or compelling or insightful to see a photo of a child crying. Linking it to political statements is just another step by this woman that is lost on me. What is the statement supposed to be? Horrible governance makes children cry? I’m a bit like Jon Heard or Tom Hanks in Big: I don’t get it.
Having said that, I must confess to knowingly making my own child cry in the past. When my oldest was a toddler, I found that my singing the chorus of “Roxanne” by the Police made him cry. I don’t know why for sure. Perhaps it was my singing. Perhaps it was the sudden and relatively high pitched noise. But the thing is, it was funny! I did it a couple of times after discovering this - once to show my wife and another during one of the hours and hours of videotaping him.
I wouldn’t do it for art’s sake or for general distribution, and I don’t defend it as a nice thing to do, so I remain unsympathetic to the artist. By the same token, I’m not that worked up about the artist taking a lollipop away, and so it is hard to see why this matter should be: 1) of general interest, 2) likely to be defended by “Bush bashing” liberals, or 3) representative of “Bush bashing.”
(On a separate topic, how long can criticism of Bush continue to be dismissed as mere “Bush bashing,” as if it were only founded in mindless criticism. Frankly I cannot think of any “Bush bashing” that ended up being incorrect, and the sum total of his incompetence and ineptitude sort of suggests that it isn’t a matter of cherry-picking some anomalous event or misstep. To paraphrase Bricker, “What, are y’all mad 'cause we’ve been right?”)
Yes you did. At least twice. Perhaps the response to Bricker should be along the lines of “It happens all the time, for very mundane purposes. What is it about this gets you so worked up?”
RESOLVED: It should be illegal to enhance profits by scoring points off an unpopular Republican President.
Oh, fuck you. I haven’t “positioned” myself as anything.
You obviously haven’t participated in any of the GD threads where the party faithful have claimed that the 2004 election was stolen. If Bush won, it couldn’t have been fair.
I guess i thought that question was implied in my, and in Dewey Finn’s post. I’d be interested to hear whether or not the OP thinks it’s a valid question.
That’s the nub, isn’t it?
The Universe isn’t that black-and-white. It isn’t in any meaningful way divided up into People Who Love Freedom and Terrorists Who Hate Our Freedom. It isn’t in any meaningful way divided up into People Who Deliberately Run Red Lights, and People Who Only Run Red Lights By Accident.
Neither of these is something reasonable people can disagree on, yet Bush and I disagree on the former, and you and I disagree on the latter.
Baselessly, I presume? There are no reasonable ground for suspicion? None whatsoever? The GOP has conducted itself to a stringent standard of utterly blameless behavior?
Really, John?
Whaaaaaaa!!!
Just out of curiosity: if there were fraud involved, would there be any way to make inquiries about it that wouldn’t be subject to this type of response from you?
And quite frankly, I’ve never really thought about it. To the extent that I gave it any thought, I always imagined that to get really young kids captured crying for, say, a scene in a movie, they waited until the kid started crying. I didn’t really imagine that parents would bring their kids onto a movie set for the purposes of letting some starnger deliberately make them cry.
Now, maybe that was hopelessly naive. But I can point to some thing that formed this opinion. I’ve read numerous interviews with young actors, who say that they make themselves cry by recalling old, painful memories - loss of a pet, or something. Obviously that doesn’t apply directly to toddlers, but it gave me the general idea that producing a required emotion is up to the actor.
I also remember a story in Patty Duke’s autobiography. Her youngest son, Sean Astin, had been bugging her to let him try acting. She relented, and he was cast as her son in a TV movie she was doing that dealt with child abuse: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.” She relates that while filming, he couldn’t react properly to her; her character was so outrageously bad that he started laughing when he should have been terrified. After several spolied takes, she says that just before they started rolling, she gave him a genuine “I’m furious” glare – not as her character but as herself. Sean was appropriately petrified, and the take went well. But after that, she told him she’d never do something like that to him again – that she was sorry she did it and it was wrong, and that he was on his own for coming up with the requisite reactions. (Given his successful career, I guess it worked).
So based in part on those stories, I always thought of reactions from child models and actors as not being forced, and to use tactics like she used here is not right.
At least some other photographers agree with me. Jeremiah McNichols, a professional photographer, writes in his blog the following:
First, to establish his political position, let me quote him as he says:
He’s obviously not a Bush fan.
He goes on to say:
It seems reasonable to assume that her tactics are not so much “…It happens all the time, for very mundane purposes…”
I await education to the contrary, however. If it turns out that this DOES happen all the time, and is a perfectly normal and accepted part of child modeling or acting, then I will be happy to withdraw the bulk of my criticism. I’ll still personally believe she’s being cruel, but I’d be forced to admit that she’s acting within normal, accepted standards. I don’t see that yet.
Look, we’ve had dozens of debates about this in GD, and I’m just sick or it. Kerry had every opportunity to challenge the election results. If you can show me a quote from him saying he thought he lost the election thru fraud, then let’s open it all up again. If he’s satisfied, I’m satisfied. Case closed.
Subject to misinterpretation, Bro’ Hentor.
Yes, it could be taken as the cry of the Whiny-Ass Titty Baby, baselessly and needlessly implying that those paragons of civic virtue and justice, the GOP, might ever manipulate a position of power to retain said power. This is, of course, absurd and any such insinuation as well.
The other possible interpretation: a John Stewart type “Whaaaaa?!”, the kind that expresses wide eyed shock and dismay at newly revealed information. He acknowledges that a debate exists: on the one side, reasonable and sober analysts, and on the other, rabid and frothing anti-Bush partisans.
'Struth, friend John has shown remarkable progress as he responds to our gentle guidance away from the paths of political error. He doesn’t like Bush, he simply dislikes us more. An entirely reasonable position, seeing as we are…well, like we are. Whiny Ass Titty Babies.
Not his call to make, John. If he was robbed, we were all robbed.
Nixon, you will recall, made a similar decision as regards the Kennedy victory. We are given to understand that he nobly demurred, refusing to make a crisis that would undermine the body politic.
Those of us with a less forgiving view of Nixon tend to think he was more concerned that a thorough investigation would reveal his own Party’s shenanigans, so he took the best face he could put on it.
Still, most important - not his call. Joh Kerry was my candidate, not my Leader.