Oooooooooooooooooooooooo, Such wit!
A bit odd, though, I’d say. As you seem to be the one isolated in your insistence of “racism!”. But you keep pluggin’ away, champ.
Is this anything like your power to declare that “fag” is no longer homophobic?
What the hell do cigarettes have to do with homophobia?!
IOKIARDI? Seriously, guys–it’d be real easy for you to be consistent on private property rights here, real easy to establish some credit toward not being what Shodan calls “The Usual Suspects.”
Go away. I believe that is not the subject. If you do not know that you are lost.
Noted, and I appreciate this acknowledgment :).
Actually, I think it now is. I think its safe to say, based on a pretty good consensus, that the joker poster can not reasonably be classified as racist. You seem to insist that it is. So the degree to which your judgement should be considered representative of what most reasonable think is in the single digits, at best.
Like I’ve said more than once, you may want to readjust your “RACISM!” meter.
I consider it a bonus that you demand that those who hold a light up to your poor judgement “go away”. Tell me, how do you type with younger fingers in your ears?
The simple fact is that I showed you the genesis of the racism of the past and how that poster hearkens back to it. I showed how movies and entertainment depicted blacks that way. I provided you with information you were apparently unable to understand. Your recalcitrance in no way shows thought processes are active. You just say it isn’t true and you reject it . You apparently are unable to imagine that before your limited little .veiled time , that things were a bit different in regards to race and especially the crude depictions of their “watermelon grins”. Sad you are too pig headed to learn. But you are.
I think your clearly demonstrated double standard is pretty relevant, actually. You’ve previously expressed the opinion that you get to decide that something is not offensive by imperial fiat. Now that someone else is declaring something is not offensive (and with far more evidence than his own simple say-so) he’s being “pig headed” and “unable to learn.” I think it’s entirely valid to ask why it’s okay if you do it, but not okay if someone else does it.
Wrong. Maybe you can get someone to read the posts to you.
Given your habitual mangling of English syntax, spelling, and punctuation, that’s not a bad idea. Still, I doubt any such aid could help me in understanding how you resolve your behavior in this thread, with the behavior in the thread I linked to earlier.
In this thread, you’ve claimed that this image is unquestionably racist, and have provided links to other sources using the same imagery in a racist manner. Anyone who does not agree with you that the Obama poster is therefore unquestionably racist is, therefore, some sort of mental defective. But in the thread I linked to earlier, people took you to task for using the word “faggy” in a pejorative manner, calling it an anti-gay slur, and linked you to other sources using the same word in an anti-homophobic manner. In that thread, anyone who thought that “faggy” was homophobic was, once again, some sort of mental defective.
What we have here is a pretty clear double standard. In this thread, if an image has ever been used in a racist manner, then any further iteration of that image must, by definition, also be racist. Yet in the previous thread, despite the fact that the term had a clear anti-gay pedigree, the only thing that mattered in determining if it was anti-gay was the user’s intent. Which, you assured us, could not possibly be anti-gay.
So which is it? Is the offensiveness of a given image or word determined purely by historical usage, or is it determined by intent entirely separate from its history? While there certainly is a middle ground between the two poles, you cannot argue both extremes at once - but that’s precisely what you have done in this thread, and in the previous thread. I think it’s entirely fair to ask you to resolve this discrepency, or else we have no choice but to conclude that your decision about what is and is not offensive is purely a matter of whose ox is being gored, and that there is no objective standard or attempt at consistency in your pronouncements.
I think it could be reasonably classified as racist, although that was probably not the artist’s intent. But if the question is not what was in the mind of the anonymous artist but instead whether a reasonable person could look at the poster and interpret it as an image of Obama painted up like a minstrel show performer, my answer is yes.
I never said it was intended to be racist. I doubt that it was. It was probably due to the fact that his background and experiences of the creator did not include those images as insulting. That is the same problem MILLER and a couple others are apparently unaware of. It is not that the image is racial. it is that they do not know that it is. Then they declare since it is not for them ,it is not for anyone. That is when arrogance and stupidity creep in.
I guess I am just dense then. Dumb it down for me. To borrow from my old AD&D days, the Joker is chaotic evil. He doesn’t give a damn about race, he’ll kill anyone, and as randomly as possible. He sees civilization and the rule of order as a thin veneer that he wants to peel away. He wants total unrestrained anarchy. That’s the Joker.
Would you agree, Lamia, that said reasonable person, on having their ignorance of Heath Ledger’s Joker dispelled, would no longer make such an interpretation?
I cannot see how a reasonable person aware of both minstrel shows and Heath Ledger’s Joker could look at the poster and conclude it’s referencing the former.
I could believe that even a reasonable person who’d been told about the Joker reference would assume there must be something more to the poster than that, because Obama as Heath Ledger as the Joker with a caption that says “Socialism” doesn’t make any sense. Reasonable people have been known to search for meaning where there is none. A poster of Obama as a minstrel would make more sense than Obama as the Socialist Joker. It would be racist, but there would at least be some kind of coherent thought process behind it. I don’t think it’s the viewer’s fault that the poster doesn’t have a clear message.
A poster of Obama as a minstrel would make more sense–but if you’ve seen Heath Ledger’s Joker, and you’ve seen minstrel makeup, this poster clearly references the former. Look at the edge of the lips, the complete pancake whiteface, the dark hollows around the eyes, and especially the stitches on the cheeks. There’s no way this is referencing minstrels instead of the Joker.
It doesn’t make sense, sure; it’s stupid, sure; but concluding that it’s therefore referencing minstrels is unreasonable. Why, if it’s referencing minstrels, are there the cheek stitches?
Well, the blogger quoted in the article seemed to think the slashed and stitched mouth suggested violent intent against Obama, maybe a warning the he should keep his mouth shut.
Either way you look at it the poster doesn’t make a lot of sense, so the argument that there’s no good reason for Obama to be Heath Ledger as the Joker as a minstrel as a Socialist isn’t as compelling as it might be otherwise. There was no good reason to create a poster of Obama as Heath Ledger as the Joker as a Socialist either. I wouldn’t necessarily expect a puzzled viewer to go :smack: and say “How could I have thought he was a minstrel, he’s obviously just the JOKER!” when that makes if anything even less sense than their original idea. I’m not going to call people unreasonable because they didn’t understand a poster that doesn’t make sense in the first place.
Weird. I’d absolutely expect the puzzled viewer to do that, given that it has all these traits unique to the Joker. The blogger quoted above is making an argument even more strained than the poster’s argument is: someone needs to introduce that blog to Occam’s Razor.
Similarly, if the poster showed Obama with yellow feathers, a giant beak, and an invisible fuzzy elephant friend, and said, “Socialism,” it’d be ridiculous to assume that the artist was referencing tarring and feathering a cowardly jungle-dwelling primitive, even though you could find such symbolism in there. The artist would clearly be referencing Big Bird in an incoherent piece of satire.
Well, I’m not willing to call someone unreasonable because they didn’t understand an incoherent piece of satire.