Say what you want, link what you want. Self-linking is the stuff.
By the way, the bad news is I’ve been posting less often because I’m working hard on the Hereville graphic novel. The good news is, I’m working hard on the Hereville graphic novel.
Via LL, Eugene on My Modern Met writes:
The sculpture “What You see Might Not Be Real,” by Chen Wenling, was displayed at a Beijing gallery Sunday. A bull, meant to represent Wall Street, is seen ramming the biggest con man of all time, Bernie Madoff, into a wall. Totally deserving, if you ask me.
The huge cloud coming out of the bull’s rear not only refers to the end of a greedy era, but also symbolizes the danger of virtual bubbles in international financial markets. In a society based on desire and money, some people choose to create many false impressions, while others sadly fall for them.
* * *
- A defense of gender-neutrality in early childhood.
- Tiger Beat Down on Polanski excusers. (Via)
- Reading about this case of a couple kept apart as one of them died reminds me: People who are against same sex marriage are hateful and cruel. That’s all they are, that’s all they’ve ever been.
- Oh, and they’re insincere about not being bigots, too.
- $41,000 to $470,000. That’s the lifetime financial cost of being a same-sex, rather than opposite-sex, couple.
- Controversial All Black School Opens in Ontario
- CBS Feeling the Pressure to drop Lou Dobbs. (This alternet story on the same subject is interesting, as well.)
- The Right’s Smear Campaign Against Kevin Jennings.
- Life In Four Bottles Bint quotes a correspondent, who says “Damn! I’m already on the third one!” Sometimes I feel like I’m not even at bottle two yet.
- Racism or Free Speech? Maybe both. An Asian student puts up a racist flyer full of “funny” racist jokes about Asians.
- Is mandating that Americans buy health insurance Constitutional?
- Looking at this chart of job loss in this recession, compared to past recessions, may make you weep. And if you’re an elected Democrat, it should definitely make you weep, and perhaps panic.
- Disclosure is not information.
- Texas prepares to cover up the execution of an innocent man.
- Rabbi Brant on the Goldstone Report, and why he finds it trustworthy.
- Why women have sex, why men have sex, and why the hell is the media so determined to pretend that the reasons are vastly different?
- How “paper sons” were part of the Chinese American immigration experience. (And by the way, go welcome back Reappropriate to active blogging!)
- Glenn Sacks, the least horrible MRA, is hosting a debate on his blog between two scholars, one from a feminist perspective, one from an MRA perspective, about domestic violence.
opposite-sex, couple.
I’m surprised to see you use this term.
Um, I looked at that image, and then looked up some alternate-perspectives of the same image, and I am now certain: Madoff has HORNS in that sculpture.
Um, you know, HORNS? The Jews-as-devils motif? Like here and here?
Surprised to see you display this antisemitic image, Amp. Stunned, actually.
BTW, came here to plug my “Real Housewives of Atlanta thread”… pay no attention to my pesky Second Amendment trolls determined to derail my trash-TV discussion! (sigh)
Amp, one of my comments was marked as spam, trying again.
I have inspected that image carefully from a variety of perspectives, and I am certain Madoff has horns in that sculpture.
You know, HORNS? The Jews-as-devils motif? Like (most famously) here and here?
Stunned that you posted this antisemitic image, Amp. (and I’m stunned that no one else seems bothered by it.)
I am also sensitive to antisemitism, but I’m not sure this is it: lots of people considered madoff’s behavior to be of the worst kind, and devil horns are often placed on people’s head both jewish and non.
Daisy, I think the statue of Moses is a bad example. My understanding of this is that there was a mistranslation – that Moses had something like light or a halo or something coming from his head, and it got mistranslated as horns for several centuries. But it strikes me as absurd to think that in that statue, Michaelangelo is trying to depict Moses as a devil.
I was kind of puzzling over the horns in the Madoff/bull piece. The horns look a lot like the bull’s horns. I was wondering if there was supposed to be some sort of parallel in the bull and Madoff or some sort of reference to the market.
Hmmm … I agree with Sailorman that use of devil horn’s is pretty widespread and not necessarily antisemitic. If I was coming up with general rules, I’d say to avoid depicting Jews with horns, just as one should not depict black people as apes, even if you think the way you’re doing it steers clear of traditional racist tropes, but this image just didn’t really get my spidey-senses tingling.
Chingona, I am aware of that–but I am also aware of how the statue of Moses was presented to ME as a child, a sort of riff on (Jewish) original sin: No matter how cool Moses was, he STILL had horns.
It may not have been intended that way, but was used that way.
It probably depends on how much antisemitism you were raised with, and what forms it took.
It jumped right out at me. Horns on Jews is never okay–on Madoff or anyone else. (And I have to disagree w/Sailorman, if Bernie had been named “Dennis Jones” –I don’t believe the horns would be there. I just don’t.)
I would like to plug A Skeptic’s Creed as a good blog to check out.
I don’t subscribe to the concept of special protection, i.e. that it’s OK to put horns on people in general but never on Jews, or that it’s OK to release monkey dolls in all skin colors but black (to use two recent examples.) I simply don’t think that any group is entitled to that much deference.
Horns on Jews because they’re Jewish and/or the artist is trying to be antisemitic are never OK. Horns on someone because he’s an asshole are OK, even if he happens to be Jewish, as is Madoff.
We’ll never know the artist’s intent here, I suppose. but as for this:
You seem to be saying only Jews get depicted with horns. Not true: Example
It didn’t set my antisemite senses tingling, although maybe it should have. (It still doesn’t, frankly.)
It may well be entirely unintentional — I think there are obvious reasons to depict the dude with horns entirely aside from his being Jewish — but you’re right, the sculptor still should have skipped the horns. (ETA: Ideally.)
OTOH, I think I find this much more of a borderline case than you do. It’s my impression that the “Jews have horns” trope is actually relatively obscure, and something that I’d buy that the sculptor simply may not have known about at all. (ETA:) I didn’t even know about it until I was 16 or 17, when a charming elderly couple in Maine told me and a friend that they were surprised we didn’t have horns.
I’d find unintentional use of a antisemitic trope, a lot more forgivable than intentional use of an antisemitic trope. This sort of contradicts some things I’ve said in the past — I’ve said that intent doesn’t matter — but maybe that’s a bit too black-and-white. Intent does matter, a little, but it’s not everything.
ETA: And context matters too, as Sailorman said.
So horns on Jews are never okay even if the person is indeed evil, but they are okay for non-Jews?
Another blogger has made me hyper-sensitive about the fact that Madoff is Jewish, so I was peering at the picture of the sculpture with an eye toward any anti-Semitic tropes (though I was trying to inspect his nose and thus totally missed the horns). Since at least some folks seem to be very aware of Madoff’s Jewishness, I think the horns in this case were inadvisable.
But why should this artist be obliged to think about what “some folks” are or not aware of, much less how those same folks might somehow interpret his work?
What You See Might Not Be Real, indeed
Daisy,
Your post suggests that you think Alas readers have, here, said or implied
and
and
Which makes me wonder: what kind of disagreement, exactly, would you find to be acceptable?
I’m not asking because you called me a Head Patronizer, whatever the freak that is. I’m asking because you appear to have posted about people saying things which–read it again!–they didn’t actually say.
I thought the same thing when I read Daisy’s post, Sailorman. I felt that she was reading things that I didn’t see in the thread.
Thirded.
I’m sure I’d feel comfortable walking onto a blog where a good number of posters were members of a particular oppressed group and telling them that I was SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED! that they fight their oppression in all the worst ways when it’s glaringly obvious to out-group member me that they’re 9 kinds of wrong.
Wait, no I wouldn’t.
Thank you for the link!
I’d be cautious about assuming that the libels assigned to Jews in the West are known to a Chinese artist. He’s clearly an artist interested in engaging the West (why else would he be making art about an American businessman, using the Western tropes of bull and bear markets?), so I think it’s incumbent upon him to learn a bit about how the symbols he chooses might be interpreted in another culture. But I wouldn’t presume malice or pre-existing knowledge on his part. He doesn’t seem to have tried to give Madoff any sort of stereotypically Western Jewish appearance; indeed, it looks like he gave Madoff’s eyes an epicanthic fold.
Why are we arguing about intent? Why are we judging probable malice? The fact is that the Jews-have-horns thing exists, and whether or not the artist had any idea of it, the depiction of Madoff with horns resonates in a particularly unpleasant way for some people here – Jewish or not.
Seconding or thirding an argument against its offensiveness doesn’t mean you WIN. It just means that you think differently. That’s ok, it really is, but I’m getting the sense people want to WIN.
What I was thirding is that Daisy seems to be making allegations about the content of this thread that just aren’t here. Nobody lectured. Nobody sneered. Nobody told anybody to get lost. People just disagreed. That seems to bother her. A lot.
I’ve seen pictures of that sculpture a few times now. It didn’t set off any anti-Semitic bells to me. But then I didn’t have any awareness that Maddof was Jewish until this thread. Yeah, I know, “Bernie Madoff” isn’t exactly Greek, but I just didn’t think of it. I also think that horns-on-Jews is not a particularly widespread trope in America these days.
Followed you over here from Daisy’s site.
She just banned me for pointing out exactly what you said here
Plus pointing out a depiction of Trotsky as the devil just MIGHT depict him as a Marxist, and not a (non-practicing) Jew, and Marxist Secularist.
http://brianakira.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/trotsky-demonic-peace-and-war-in-sovdepiya-1919.jpg
“The poster of Trotsky as the devil (a pentagram around his neck, in place of another kind of star) is regarded as a pretty famous example of the antisemitic campaign waged against Trotsky. If you can’t see this, again, you are not welcome to post here, because it tells me quite a lot about you.
Again, all further comments will be deleted.”
Odd how the universal symbol of the pentagram is suddenly a brand of Antisemitism I’m a bit at a loss, but it appears she doesn’t want me commenting anymore.
[One line deleted by Amp for name-calling — that’s against this blog’s rules, W.B.. –Amp]
I started yesterday on no bottle. Then I spent a few hours on the 4th bottle. But I’m feeling much better now and will spend some of this evening on the 3rd bottle, thank you very much.
I go back to the days when the fourth bottle was an actual bottle.
#11 talks a lot about other issues surrounding what people have been saying about proposed health care change legislation, and it offers some opinions about why the author thinks that the Congress has the power to regulate health care nationwide, but I don’t see where the issue of whether requiring people to buy health care insurance is Constitutional is really treated with much rigor at all. And I would like to see such. It’ll certainly be challenged in court if that passes.
The one thing I can think of is that pretty much every state requires all car owners to buy some kind of liability insurance for their cars. But even that’s an incomplete analogy.
Why are we arguing about intent? Why are we judging probable malice?
Because I think that’s relevant to whether a piece of art should be “boycotted” (i.e. not re-posted, discussed, etc.) in liberal/ progressive circles for being racist or anti-Semitic. The fact that the art has uncomfortable resonance for some Westerners is something that I think the artist ought to be aware of if he is making art that is about Westerners. But given that Madoff is a bad guy, and bad guys regardless of ethnicity are often regarded as devils, and devils in many cultures including non-Western ones are depicted with horns, it seems a bit over the top to respond to the posting of a picture with the conclusive judgment that the sculpture is “anti-Semitic.” That’s very different from saying, “To me, personally, this is offensive.”
I’m really confused about this thread. The concept of Jews depicted with horns is an anti-semitic trope, regardless of how widespread it is, the intent of the artist depicting it, where it came from or if some of us who it targets noticed it or were offended by it. Someone who isn’t a Jew noticed it and she gets the tone argument for pointing it out? Would it make a difference if I told you all that I am a jew, I am offended by it and I have been asked where my horns were by classmates who grew up in the Philadelphia/New York area as recently as the 1990’s? Would that change the reaction?
Daisy is reacting out of a feeling of general disregard for her that has been displayed here before. Why is that also a difficult concept?
RonF,
it offers some opinions about why the author thinks that the Congress has the power to regulate health care nationwide, but I don’t see where the issue of whether requiring people to buy health care insurance is Constitutional is really treated with much rigor at all. And I would like to see such. It’ll certainly be challenged in court if that passes.
The one thing I can think of is that pretty much every state requires all car owners to buy some kind of liability insurance for their cars. But even that’s an incomplete analogy.
There are two pieces here. The one you seem to be focused on is whether any government — local, state, federal, whatever — can require people to carry health insurance. Given that the U.S. Constitution does not include a right to be free of health insurance, the state and local governments do have the power to make such a requirement.
Note that in cases where a state or local law requiring businesses to cover their employees or else pay into a government fund has been challenged by those businesses, the winning argument has not been about whether there’s a Constitutional right to avoid insurance coverage, but rather about whether at a statutory level, the federal government has “occupied the field” of regulating employment benefits through its ERISA law.
The piece that most lawyers focus on is whether the federal government, specifically Congress, has the power to make such a requirement. Does the power to regulate interstate commerce, which is enumerated in Art. I, extend to the power to require people to carry insurance? I think it does, and I doubt that the Supreme Court will disagree. Health care is a significant percentage of our economy and is actually being pushed by conservatives to be even more a matter of interstate commerce than it is today (e.g. Republican tort reform demands for federal regulation of medical malpractice lawsuits; Republicans calling for state regulations to be overridden so insurance can be purchased across state lines; Newt Gingrich’s dreams of internet-based medicine).
But even without the changes Republicans are advocating, medicine is already practiced at an international level these days. Some radiologists in the U.S. have worked out deals with their counterparts in Australia, so that the American radiologists cover the Aussies’ radiology needs when it’s daytime in America and nighttime in Australia, and vice versa when it’s nighttime in America and daytime in Australia.
And of course, many Americans who currently go without insurance do have jobs through which they could obtain it, if they were willing/ able to pay the premiums. So there’s already an ERISA aspect to this.
Most of us who disagree with daisy (including me) don’t disagree with that. Putting horns on Jews because they’re Jews is improper and antisemitic.
What you seem to be ignorning is that there are multiple ways to depict someone with horns. It can be based on antisemitism (jews have horns!) which is bad. Or it can be because you’re trying to depict them as devilish (bad people have horns!) which seems perfectly OK.
People can disagree about whether a particular instance is #1 or #2, without rejecting the existence of #1.
Well, some people including me would disagree with you about that. In fact, that is mostly the basis of the disagreement, as set forth in a variety of posts.
She gets the tone argument because of her tone, not because she takes a different position. You are also taking her position, and you’re not getting the tone argument ;)
Not to me. I’m jewish too. I don’t believe that being jewish grants me any particular authority in this matter, and I apply the same standard to you or anyone else.
Your horns example is a problem: horns on Jews because they’re jews are bad. this is a different example.
I would be curious to know your response to the counterargument: (1) horns also get put on people as a marker of their being evil; (2) Madoff is widely regarded as being incredibly evil; (3) madoff’s evilness is IMO much more a part of his public personal than is his Jewishness; so (4) it seems reasonable to depict him with horns.
She can have whatever feelings she wants. but if those feelings mean that she is going to interpret any disagreement as “silencing” or what have you, then I am not sure that is our problem.
Dori,
Someone who isn’t a Jew noticed it and she gets the tone argument for pointing it out?
You think the difference between conclusively declaring a piece of art to be anti-Semitic, and saying that you personally are offended by any depiction of a Jewish person with horns regardless of the artist’s intent or own cultural background, is a difference of tone?
Daisy is reacting out of a feeling of general disregard for her that has been displayed here before. Why is that also a difficult concept?
I don’t understand where this alleged disregard was displayed in this thread (I won’t try to figure out which other threads you’re referring to, since you weren’t specific).
disregard
–noun
3. lack of regard or attention; neglect.
4. lack of due or respectful regard.
Daisy received a great deal of attention: the comments @ 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, and 12 all engaged her statements. So there certainly has been no neglect here. You’re presumably claiming that she hasn’t been accorded the respect that is due to her. Yet no one has said, “Daisy, you’re ignorant and wrong.” All the disagreement has been quite mild: Sailorman saying, “I am also sensitive to antisemitism, but I’m not sure this is it”; chingona pointing out that Daisy’s example of Michelangelo’s Moses is a bad example because of how those “horns” came about; chingona, Ampersand and I all saying that it would be better if the sculpture didn’t have the horns.
Heck, the extent of this polite disagreement has mostly been about whether the artist ideally ought to have left off the horns (chingona, Amp, PG), or if depicting any Jewish person as a devil with horns is so fraught that we ought not republish that image regardless of the artist’s knowledge/ intent (Daisy, Katie, Dori).
I’m really confused by the people that think Daisy got a “tone” argument here. It’s like somehow the thread is a completely different thread with different comments in it. In her post, she flat out fabricated opinions and attributed them to me and to other commenters. So yeah. I object to having opinions fabricated and attributed to me. That’s not a “tone” argument. That’s a don’t make up stuff I didn’t say argument.
I could be entirely off, but when I saw that statue (especially with the bull horns and the man’s somewhat hunched back), I interpreted it as a real bull destroying a false bull. That is, it wasn’t Madoff’s Jewishness that was under attack, but his promises of stable and high returns on his investments. If I hadn’t known the man was meant to be Madoff, I would have thought he was a general Wall Street fat-cat.
While I don’t feel this statue is anti-Semitic, I’m not Jewish, and I don’t know what it’s like to experience anti-Semitism.
While I don’t feel this statue is anti-Semitic, I’m not Jewish, and I don’t know what it’s like to experience anti-Semitism.
It appears that having experienced antisemitism isn’t a very good indicator of how one interprets the statue.
And Weer’d Beard … I think the Trotsky image is blatantly and grotesquely antisemitic.
Really? I’m sorry to hear that. I’m glad you’re feeling better, though.
So horns on Jews are never okay even if the person is indeed evil, but they are okay for non-Jews?
I would say, in general, the answer to this rhetorical question is yes. I apologize for the “substitute black” feel to this analogy, but it’s a bit like how it wouldn’t be really a good idea to depict Obama as a monkey, even if he were acting incredibly foolishly whereas it’s ok to depict Bush as one: sometimes the history overwhelms the individual meaning so much that racism/anti-semitism appears even when it isn’t intended. Surely there are other ways of depicting someone as evil besides the use of horns.
Though it also occurs to me that one could intepret the statue in a different way…Wall Street isn’t ramming the evil con man but rather the scapegoat. Madoff was by no means innocent (or if he was then he’s the victim of the most successful conspiracy ever–by several orders of magnitude). However, he was by no means the only con man on Wall Street. Wall Street punishes Madoff not to rid itself of corruption and greed or to avenge victims of his con, but to make a show of how virtuous they are–in order to have an easier time convincing their next set of victims. In this context, the horns make sense: they’re a symbol of how Wall Street demonizes its chosen scapegoat before ramming him. And going back to their usual, smelly activities without qualm. (Of note, the bull is the symbol of a growing market, which I think supports my interpretation.)
I could be entirely off, but when I saw that statue (especially with the bull horns and the man’s somewhat hunched back), I interpreted it as a real bull destroying a false bull.
FWIW, I did initially interpret the Madoff figure as a minotaur. (Before reading the description.)
I’m not much of a visual artist, but if I were creating a portraiture of Madoff and wanted to make him demonic, I’d use horns. I’d be sorry that would make some people uncomfortable because they thought I was trying to allude to the old Jews=horns meme, but if access to motif is to be restricted on the grounds of potential hurt feeling, then we might as well just all start printing out copies of the blue duck right now.
Your right to be offended ends where my pen begins.
I’m neither Jewish nor familiar enough with the Jews=horns trope to have an opinion on that issue, but I did want to say that:
is pretty clearly nonsense. Of course people can be offended at things other folks write, draw, say, etc.
That’s not a special right that anyone acquires, that’s just how the universe works. Sometimes people find stuff you do offensive. Sometimes it’s reasonable, sometimes it’s not.
—Myca
Anyone can be offended at anything they want. And, it seems, often are. That, however, does not give the offended party the right to change the meaning of the thing for a) the originator or b) other observers. You are perfectly welcome to tell everyone that you are offended, and why. But the fact that you are offended because to you the art conveys a particular meaning doesn’t fix the meaning or message of that piece of art for everyone else, and doesn’t mean that the piece of art should therefore be banned or suppressed.
It’s not clear to me that it’s possible to create and communicate a message that is not offensive to someone. I don’t think that the objective of offending people in and of itself is a worthwhile objective – a philosophy that put me at odds with a number of artists, apparently. But if the best way you can see to make your point also offends some people, then while it may be regrettable I don’t see it as a reason to not make the point.
Yeah, thanks, Amp. I had been having some very disturbing symptoms for the last few weeks. The upshot was that yesterday I got intimately acquainted with about 6 feet of fiber optic cable directed into a bodily orifice that otherwise I only have things coming out of. The news was thankfully and quite surprisingly good. I often say that God always answers prayers, it’s just that sometimes the answer is “No.” Well, yesterday against my expectations the answer was an unqualified “Yes” and I thank Him for that.
Your right to be offended ends where my pen begins.
If I may suggest an edit, I’d say that my right to st0p you from creating something because I find it offensive ends where your pen begins. If that’s a fair restatement then I agree. You’ve got the right to draw pictures of Obama as a monkey sharing a meal of (white, Christian) babies with Golda Meir’s ghost (wearing horns) if you so chose to*. But I’m not even sure how to stop myself from being offended at art or other work that I see as racist, sexist, or in some other way offensive.
* I feel dirty for even having written that sentence.
Pimpin my links:
Maria Gurrolla’s child was kidnapped once by a stabby kidnapper lady, and once found, again by the state of Tennessee.
I SeE GhEy PEOplE, the Rep. Daryl Metcalfe story. It’s chilling.
Yes, that’s a fair restatement, Dianne. But my original formulation is much more dramatic and poetical.
This, I agree with.
—Myca
But my original formulation is much more dramatic and poetical.
Definitely. And has a literary reference. But mine’s more accurate and I’m a nerd so I win.
I banned Weerd beerd for trolling me for a WEEK, not (only) for the reason he says. He has been pestering me nonstop since I wrote (negatively) about assault rifles. Which should tell you all you need to know.
And Sailorman, I posted those comments on my blog, not here. If I wanted them here, I would have posted them here, okay? Out of line.
I answered you over there, not here.
And Sailorman, I posted those comments on my blog, not here. If I wanted them here, I would have posted them here, okay? Out of line.
This is a different blogging/ commenting convention than I was aware of. I thought that if you posted a link to your blogpost on someone else’s blog, it was appropriate to respond to that blogpost at the place where it had been linked as well as in the comment section on your blogpost. This seemed particularly true when the link was posted on an “open thread,” which inherently is set up for conversations that aren’t on a specific topic.
I’ve often written a blogpost in lieu of leaving a comment when the comment would have been lengthy and included links or other formatting that the comment section on the blog to which I was responding didn’t support, and then linked that blogpost on the relevant comment section. While I’d probably be more responsive to comments left on my own blog than to those left on another blog, I wouldn’t consider it “out of line” for someone to respond to me where I’d left the link.
Then again, I’ve been blogging since 2002 and not particularly within the feminist sector of the blogosphere (more like the moderately liberal/ law student/ Texpatriate areas), so my norms may be outdated or inappropriate for Alas, a Blog. Any input on this from moderators or from other folks who blog and take an interest in online etiquette?
I felt Sailorman was trying to rile everyone up, and that is what I felt was out of line. Not simply the fact of reproducing my words.
I did not want to derail the thread with my emotions, and then, he went and did exactly that.
I see nothing wrong with what SM did. Daisy posted her comments in a blog where anyone can read them; quoting and responding to them on another blog is fair game.
(Just as Daisy quoted some bits of what I and others wrote here on “Alas” on her blog, in order to respond on her own blog. Which I also see nothing wrong with.)
***
Sorry, the above was cross-posted with Daisy, who explained that she meant that quoting her remarks was intended by SM to rile everyone up, and that was out of line.
Daisy: If your words rile people up, in the end I think that’s your fault, not SM’s.
Why am I not surprised that the commenters to this WaPo piece about the CBO’s saying the Senate health care bill will reduce the deficit are now convinced that the CBO doesn’t know how to do math, whereas when the CBO was saying that the House bill would increase the deficit, the CBO was a fount of budgetary wisdom?
Amp, in any event, I wanted comments here to stay focused on the art.
If I want to talk about me, I go to my blog. My point: I did not want this to be about me and my wounded fee-fees, but Sailorman was making my wounded fee-fees the subject.
If you want to diss my writing and my fee-fees, feel free to do so… I promise not to ban you, unless you start ruining every thread talking about assault rifles.
Since I’m not sure it’s on-topic for the other thread, I’m going to post this link here, to Ezra’s post on the question of Medicare underpayments.
I’ll quote some of it:
I find it curious that the one thing “conservatives” are absolutely against is any measure that 1) has any chance of passing congress, and 2) would lower costs. Apparently they think that a system in which Americans have to pay two or three times as much for healthcare that’s no better than the much cheaper healthcare available in almost all other wealthy nations, is good.
And this is making the rounds on Twitter, take a look:
DeLay: “No idea” if Obama is a citizen
….it just gets worse, people.
Daisy, you should admit that what you talked about at your blog was not only yourself and your own fee-fees. You also said that I and a lot of the other folks who post comments here suck, are snobs, are fools who only care about degrees, etc..
You’ve made comments like that about me before. It makes me wonder, first of all, where you think my degree is from and how much money you imagine I make?
And second of all, if I’m such an asshole, why on earth do you keep posting comments here?
I’d like to point out that some of us have no degrees at all.
Daisy @ 53,
I see what you’re saying about wanting to avoid derail (though I think it is less of a concern on an “open thread” than it would be on other posts), but I am confused by why you would post a link to your blog’s discussion of your feelings if you didn’t want people on this comment thread to be aware of that post.
Amp @ 54,
So apparently there is money to be made on Medicare patients if you just know how to keep your costs down? Makes sense to me, although I’m skeptical of Klein’s analogizing capital expansion to a banker’s lifestyle costs. I consider capital expansion to be closer to the banker’s obtaining an MBA — an investment in the future that may turn out to be a waste (if, say, the finance jobs market dries up like it did last fall), but that is not made for frivolous reasons.
Several years ago, my dad made a capital expansion: his practice was outgrowing the space he had. So he built a new clinic that is much bigger and that allows him and his staff to perform tests and procedures for which he’d previously had to send patients to the hospital. In 20/20 hindsight, I’m not sure this expansion was financially ideal. His partner and another doctor in the practice left and took many of the patients with them, and he’s had trouble attracting replacements (both of physicians and of patients). But that doesn’t mean his capital expansion was unnecessary thing to do from where he was standing at the time he made the decision. At the time, it made sense to take out the loan, build the new clinic, buy the machines.
As I mentioned in the current health care thread, I am skeptical of claims that Medicare is a money-loser for physicians, but I don’t think Klein is correct to categorize “capital expansion” as some sort of frivolous expense. So long as medicine is a for-profit enterprise in a capitalistic system, providers will be looking for ways to make more money, and you can’t make money without spending money — you can’t get greater returns without making an investment.
no one’s pleased to see a horny madoff
I think the “Jews have horns” trope is as problematic as the “blacks are apes” trope, and just as I reacted negatively to the “Obama as an ape” cartoon and “LeBron James (?) as King Kong” picture, I react negatively to this. I do believe intent doesn’t matter, and that accidentally stumbling onto a piece of racist (or sexist, or homophobic) imagery, that you didn’t know would have those connotations, is just something that happens sometimes but when it does happen, the more helpful response is “oh shit, I didn’t know” or “oh geez that didn’t even occur to me” or “dang, that might have been a good idea but it falls apart when you think about the implications” or “oh, sorry that was insulting/hurtful” or something in that area.
I liked the piece overall – when I originally saw images of it, I couldn’t make out that it was a specific person (I, too, saw minotaur) and it didn’t have the explanatory context about Wall Street. I liked it better after I saw the explanation. I like the “real bull rams false bull (market)” interpretation. But I don’t like the stumble (even if accidental) into imagery that overlaps with anti-Semitism.
I agree, finding a way to portray a Jewish person as evil or devil-ish without stumbling into “Jews have horns” territory would be a challenge. In fact, the whole devilish metaphor could be difficult territory as the equation of Jews with Satan is rhetoric used in anti-Semitic circles. It would require creativity. Fortunately, “creativity” is on the job description for “artist.”
Maybe it would require not portraying Madoff specifically. Maybe it would require coming up with another set of visual rhetoric other than “devil” to connote “evil.” There’s a reason I’m not an artist. Fortunately, the creator of the piece, is. Unfortunately, the piece is created already.
I do think Daisy Deadhead has gone way over the top in her “poor me, I’m the victim of the mean blog” rhetoric, and is absolutely attributing responses that no one here has made. But ultimately putting her at the center of the conversation is a de-railing.
The piece was an interesting idea, and is strikingly carried out. But it’s undermined by its ethnic insensitivity. It illustrates why representing “the other” is so tricky when you’re trying to portray a member of a group you don’t belong to.
Yes, Hayek would be all over the government helping to organize social insurance. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The part where you go to jail if you decide you don’t want the social insurance, that’s where he parts ways.
Elusis,
The piece was an interesting idea, and is strikingly carried out. But it’s undermined by its ethnic insensitivity. It illustrates why representing “the other” is so tricky when you’re trying to portray a member of a group you don’t belong to.
But does your statement still apply if the artist isn’t even aware that Madoff is Jewish? I didn’t know that he was until the NYT ran an article about the impact his meltdown had on Jewish charities and individuals. Before that, Madoff was just another old white Master of the Universe and/or Manhattan type to me.
Suppose I wanted to make a piece of art negatively depicting the “Girls Gone Wild” guy and I depict him as a pig slurping up a wounded young woman’s blood from a trough colored like a $100 bill. I’m not thinking of Francis’s racial/ ethnic/ religious identity at all; from my perspective as a brown woman, he’s just another white dude whom I am picturing with the old “male chauvinist pig” trope, a pig that fattens itself on young women’s bodies.
Is Francis “the other” to me? Sure, he’s a white male. But I know that most of my audience will be white, and if I want to sell my art for a substantial amount, many of my potential buyers will be male (since men are disproportionately represented among the people with large sums of disposable income). So I’m not trying to “other” Francis in my art based on his being a white male; I’m emphasizing his disgusting actions.
Then I find out his background is Irish Catholic. Having been raised in the West, I know that Catholics have been slurred as actually using the “body and blood” in Communion, and that the Irish were often depicted as pigs by the English. Does this mean my art is undermined by its ethnic insensitivity, because I failed to find out what Francis’s background is? Does it matter that the reason I didn’t try to find out is that it was irrelevant to the point I was interested in making, because all I cared about was Francis’s persona as the Girls Gone Wild guy, and not about where his ancestors immigrated from, or which private schools he went to?
The part where you go to jail if you decide you don’t want the social insurance, that’s where he parts ways.
Robert, do you not feel even slightly embarrassed about this sort of fudging? You don’t “go to jail” if you decide not to purchase insurance.
HR 3200 says,
Do you see anything in there about going to jail? I don’t. I do see something about a tax, and if you willfully fail to pay your taxes, you are subject to criminal penalties including imprisonment, but I never heard that Hayek said people who disagreed with a tax ought to be exempted from paying it.
Don’t pretend I’m an idiot, PG. They’re mandating that you get the coverage, if you don’t they charge you a fee/tax/does it matter what the label is, and if you don’t pay you go to jail.
I can invent as many formalizing layers and abstractions as you want to iterate through, but a mandated tax if I don’t buy a consumer product is damn sure yes the exact same thing as “buy this or go to jail”.
Robert,
I’m actually doing my best not to treat you like an idiot, but you’re making it difficult by your repeated insistence that the entire set of options is “buy insurance” or “go to jail.”
In fact, if you fail to buy insurance, you pay a tax. The tax does not insure you. You do not buy insurance by paying the tax. You just pay the tax. If you willfully refuse to pay your taxes as assessed by the IRS, you are subject to penalties, which may include prison time. You seem to be operating under the false belief that the tax is really a fee that then buys you insurance. You’re wrong. It doesn’t.
So the set of options is actually:
(1) Get “acceptable health care coverage”; or
(2) Pay a tax for the failure to have obtained such coverage; or
(3) Go to jail for being a tax-dodger.
See? That’s three options. You would like to vanish (2) out of existence because it’s so much more rhetorically stirring that way, and also it is unpleasant to think of oneself as a tax-dodger, but (2) persists in existing. (1) and (2) are the only ones explicitly noted in the new legislation; (3) is the penalty that has existed for almost 100 years for the failure to pay taxes as assessed by the IRS and thus goes unmentioned in the proposal.
OK, so my aggrieved cry should actually be “mandating that I buy a consumer product, go to jail, or pay a punitive fine for disagreeing with Congress about how I should spend my money.”
Big improvement to the palatability of your proposal.
PG – like I said, the piece is made. So, did the artist know Madoff was Jewish before he made it? I have no idea. Might’ve been good to do a little research about him before representing him, and it’s in the very first sentence of the “personal life” section of his Wikipedia entry, but not everyone is going to approach their art with an eye on the specific and historic. Might be smart to do so if you’re going to represent a specific person from a culture very different from yours, but not everyone is going to agree with that either.
If the artist did know, and went ahead anyway, I think it’s a pretty ignorant choice. If the artist didn’t know, it shows a different kind of ignorance (a more forgivable kind I’d opine) but I’d hope he’d respond by acknowledging his ignorance.
But it’s really not the artist who’s become the subject of the discussion here. It seems that community responses to the piece are at issue, particularly this community’s, perhaps more generally communities like “those interested in art” or “those who often speak out about racial and ethnic stereotyping.” I would agree with the observation that there seems to be a striking contrast to the responses I recall seeing about the Obama/ape and LeBron James/King Kong images, and this image, and I wonder why that is.
Your hypothetical about representing someone who is “the other” to you is interesting, but I guess I’m more interested in talking about this actual work than a hypothetical one? And the differences and similarities between Irish people and Jewish people as oppressed/powerful groups might make for an interesting conversation, but it’s not one I feel qualified to lend a terribly in-depth or informed opinion to… and I think it would come to bear if one were to make any serious effort to ask “well would PG’s work have a similar effect to this piece, and on whom, and what does that mean?”
And I’m still in the “intent isn’t actually that important” school when it comes to responding to, critiquing, or analyzing art (or interactions, or rhetoric). I’m assuming the artist likely has neutral or benign intent, though maybe as an agnostic I can afford to assume that.
But there is no perfect set of actions one can take to make 100% sure one will never, ever, ever fall afoul of some kind of -ism, maybe even an -ism you didn’t know existed or had no idea you might be accidentally referencing. You can’t take out an insurance policy to make sure your impact always matches your intent perfectly. So if you made that piece of art, and someone said “look, Irish people were depicted as pigs by the English for a long time and I find it offensive that you used that imagery,” I guess my hope would be that you’d say something along the lines of “wow, I didn’t actually realize he was Irish, I wasn’t going there in my head when I came up with it, that’s not part of my history so it didn’t even occur to me, but I’m sorry if the unintentional reference to some painful history that is important to you was upsetting” instead of “I didn’t know! I never heard that! Are you calling me racist?” or whatever.
Probably because Obama and LeBron James are ordinary (famous) people who were unjustifiably attacked, and Madoff is an evil asshole who everyone despises.
At least, that’s my bet.
a mandated tax if I don’t buy a consumer product is damn sure yes the exact same thing as “buy this or go to jail”.
If so then the problem goes far beyond health insurance or lack thereof. Your taxes also go to building roads whether you use them or not, paying farmers whether you buy the food they raise or not, subsidizing companies whether you buy their products or not, etc. If you can refuse to pay the part of your taxes that go toward your health insurance, I want at least to be able to refuse to pay for the bail0ut of American auto manufacturers since I never have and probably never will buy an American made car.
New topic:
President Obama co-sponsors U.N. resolution on speech that would violate the First Amendment
From The Weekly Standard
We’ll see. In my own personal opinion, the various Islamic states will see this as capitulation by the Obama administration and another indication that they can get things from him for nothing. The European states have their own internal problems, with a large and growing minority that agrees with the Islamic states. I personally see it as a violation of at least the spirit of the oath that he took to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. We should be looking to encourage the spread of the protections of the First Amendment worldwide, not their erosion.
Um, where is this in my post? I did not use the words suck, snob, fools or degrees a single time.
I think they call that a lie, don’t they?
Where did I call you an asshole? I don’t recall ever doing so. (And I don’t think this about you, so where are you getting that?) Just like Chingona’s comment at my blog, totally out of left field.
But yes, I guess this is my point. Instead of taking my criticisms of classism for what they are, I am instead accused of saying and doing things I never said or did. (The “tone” argument again.)
Is classism not considered real or genuine enough to confront on this blog? If not, pardon me for bringing it up. I won’t do it again.
Daisy,
I’ll rephrase and repeat my earlier question to you, because I think it’s an important one and you haven’t answered it yet:
How exactly would you prefer to be disagreed with?
I ask because your post seems to take a perspective which I don’t understand. How could we disagree with you in a manner that wouldn’t make you feel the way you feel now? What exactly was so offensive?
It would be really helpful if you would use quotes so that there’s no confusion. If you think people talk down to you, insult you, etc… where exactly are you getting that?
ETA: and as for classism:
Just as “disagreeing with a Jew” is a poor description of anti-semitism, “disagreeing with someone of a different class” is a poor description of classism.
Sure, you haven’t accused anyone of that directly. But as it happens, not a single one of the comments says “you’re wrong because you’re of some unknown lower class.” Instead, they say, “I think you’re wrong because _____” and actually address the argument. So if you think this is a classism issue I have to assume that you’re basing it on the disagreement thing. (Which comes back to my question above: how SHOULD we disagree?)
I disagree with your stated position, not with you personally. Change your position and perhaps we’ll agree. Find someone else with your position and I’ll disagree with them, too.
It is your position and your statements which led to this discussion, not your class.
Daisy, I thought this passage pretty clearly implied that this blog (and the folks who run it, which obviously includes me) is a place for snobby fools:
No, you didn’t use the word “snob” or “fool.” But what I said was a reasonable interpretation of what you wrote. Only snobs and fools would react to a name like “Oxfordgrad” the way you suggest we would.
RonF @70,
I thought I’d try looking for an original source that would back up the assertions from your sources, both of which are highly biased against Obama. Let’s see here:
The resolution in question is, as noted above, mostly about the importance of protecting freedom of expression. The only bit that I saw going at all the other way was the following:
So having the government “condemning and addressing” my “advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence” violates my First Amendment rights? Howzat? Are you under the impression that if the government says, “Neo-Nazi rallies are bad, mmmkay” that this is a violation of the neo-Nazis’ First Amendment rights?
The resolution is specifically conditioned on any “condemning and addressing” being within “obligations under international human rights law,” and international human rights law, as the rest of the resolution goes on at great length about, protects freedom of expression.
I can’t tell if the folks at Weekly Standard and Human Events are ignorant or malicious here in claiming that the resolution criminalizes hateful speech. Or maybe I’m just reading it wrongly — can anyone point to me where the resolution says governments must criminalize?
[Cross-posted with PG.]
Ron, did it set off any sense of skepticism in you, at all, that the article you quoted nowhere linked to the resolution in question?
For those who are curious, you can read it here (that’s a .doc file). It’s only 8 double-spaced pages, so read the whole thing, or do a text search. Try and find the word “criminalize,” or anything like the word “criminalize” anywhere in the document.
You won’t find it anywhere, because the document doesn’t call for criminalization. The main thing the document does is call for free speech. For instance, here’s a quote from page one:
And from page 2:
It goes on and on about free speech for most of the document, in fact. The idea that this is some radical anti-free speech document is a lie. (For contrast, check out how this human rights website reported the same event.)
The main conflict between some Islamic states and the US (and others) regarding the contents of this document was that many fundamentalist Islamic states, such as Pakistan, fought hard to include language condemning “defamation of religion.” Since the Islamic fundamentalists in fact lost the main thing they were fighting for, it’s unlikely that they’ll see this as “capitulation.”
Another reason this isn’t a capitulation: It was actually strategically smart of the US to push for this to happen this year, rather than next year, which would have been the default scenario.
The writer of the articles you linked to don’t seem aware of these elements, Ron. But I assure you that the government of Pakistan (for example) is very aware of what just happened, and it wasn’t capitulation.
Finally, on the most important issue, it’s simply not true that the first amendment can be undone by a UN resolution. Even if the UN condemned all free speech and the Obama adminstration signed on (both incredibly unlikely scenarios), we would still have the First Amendment. You can’t overturn the US Constitution by a UN resolution.
Ironically, the name “daisydeadhead” sounds to me like a “high class” name, indicative of someone with the wealth and social power to spend their time following the Grateful Dead around rather than worrying about little things like having a job. Oh, I know it’s not the most posh lifestyle on the planet, but if you can find the time and money to just hang out following a band you’re probably not destitute or completely without resources. (Not that I know that Daisy has ever been a deadhead in real life or anything.)
OTOH, my first impression of sailorman was that he might be in the Navy or something. Yeah, I know now he’s really a lawyer but my first impression was blue collar rather than yacht.
Also, I can’t help but wonder if there is some unconscious anti-semitic bias in this feeling of being talked down to because of lack of wealth or education? There is a stereotype that Jewish people value education. So maybe there’s some subconscious feeling that if someone who is Jewish is disagreeing with you, particularly in a way you see as condescending, it might be because they don’t respect you because you don’t have the right education and/or class status?
I certainly don’t think Daisy is consciously anti-Semitic and I really only mention it as an opportunity to examine underlying biases. I DO NOT mean it as an accusation. I don’t know what’s going on in Daisy’s head and I could be completely wrong.
“Also, I can’t help but wonder if there is some unconscious anti-semitic bias in this feeling of being talked down to because of lack of wealth or education? ”
This occurred to me as well.
And I’m not even going to touch her bigotry against atheists and agnostics.
I wondered why the difference in response to racist images versus this image, and Sailorman siad…
LeBron James’ depiction as King Kong wasn’t an attack. It was a fashion spread.
Let me rephrase that:
There is a balancing issue with the Madoff thing that didn’t exist with LeBron.
First, there’s the “happens to non___” balance. If Vanity Fair had a history of putting men in that stance on their cover no matter the race, then it might still have been racist but there would have been a discussion about intent, etc. Same thing if a cartoonist had a penchant for depicting uncontrolled or brutish people as monkeys, and had done so for a variety of other people of all races.
Here, unlike LeBron and Obama, the ‘horns as evil asshole” meme extends beyond jews. that extension is a crucial part of my argument.
Second, there’s the “…and it’s undeserved” balance. Obama isn’t uncontrolled and brutish, and neither is LeBron. So not only was the use of the reference problematic in terms of racism, but it’s not even accurate.
Here, unlike LeBron and Obama, the reference to devilish/evil/sinful behavior is perfectly matched to Madoff. That is also a crucial part of my argument.
Hope that explains my position better.
Might’ve been good to do a little research about him before representing him, and it’s in the very first sentence of the “personal life” section of his Wikipedia entry, but not everyone is going to approach their art with an eye on the specific and historic.
To the extent that the art is symbolic (and I think we can assume it is, given the use of the bull and the pun in the Chinese version of the title) rather than literal, I don’t think it’s necessary a good idea for an artist to do a lot of research on a famous person. I doubt the guy who made this sculpture has even read the SEC report on the red flags that the regulators missed, despite that report having a great deal of information about what Madoff did rather than about his personal life, and Madoff’s doings, not his personal life, are why he is infamous. When I want to do something creative using material from real life, I often will deliberately avoid learning a lot about a specific person because I don’t want my work to be overly influenced by that; I want the work to be coming from inside my head as much as possible.
I would agree with the observation that there seems to be a striking contrast to the responses I recall seeing about the Obama/ape and LeBron James/King Kong images, and this image, and I wonder why that is.
Aside from Sailorman’s point, at least for me there’s also a difference because the Obama/ape and LeBron/Kong images are produced by people within this culture, who are aware of both their subjects’ race and of these racial cliches.
“wow, I didn’t actually realize he was Irish, I wasn’t going there in my head when I came up with it, that’s not part of my history so it didn’t even occur to me, but I’m sorry if the unintentional reference to some painful history that is important to you was upsetting” instead of “I didn’t know! I never heard that! Are you calling me racist?” or whatever.
Which is fine on an individual level, but doesn’t address whether other viewers have an obligation to be critical of that aspect even if they aren’t upset, or if they should avoid praising or reproducing the art due to its upsetting some people. Daisy’s initial comments, after all, were calling out Amp for “display[ing] this antisemitic image.”
To me, intent is important in this kind of context; I deliberately bought a copy of the New Yorker magazine that had the cover satirizing rightwingers’ fantasies about the Obamas (he as an Islamic jihadist, she as a Black Panther type), because I thought it made a clever point about how far the mental image conservatives had of the Obamas was from any reality of them. In contrast, if I had seen that cartoon on a rightwing blog where it was not satirical and was instead meant to be a sincere representation of what the blogger thinks of the Obamas, I would find it stupid because of the intention of the blogger in posting it. In a world overrun with satire, irony, exaggeration, symbolism, etc., I’m not sure how we can completely disregard intent in determining whether a work is anti-Semitic.
With regard to the UN HRC resolution, note that our government is pretty careful to specify that the First Amendment will still protect freedom of speech and conscience when we pass a new law that penalizes certain motives for crimes:
Elusis said:
I would agree with the observation that there seems to be a striking contrast to the responses I recall seeing about the Obama/ape and LeBron James/King Kong images, and this image, and I wonder why that is.
…
And I’m still in the “intent isn’t actually that important” school when it comes to responding to, critiquing, or analyzing art (or interactions, or rhetoric). I’m assuming the artist likely has neutral or benign intent, though maybe as an agnostic I can afford to assume that.
I’m generally in the intent isn’t that important camp, as well (if you step on my toe, even if it was an accident, you still say sorry, blah blah blah). But one reason we tend to assert that is that intent is impossible to know – even a racist or an antisemite will usually claim to not be racist or antisemitic, and we can’t prove what’s in someone else’s head or heart. So we focus on the impact or effect of the image or words because that’s something we can more effectively evaluate.
That’s why I don’t think Sailorman’s formulation that horns on Jews because they’re Jewish is never OK but horns on Jews because they’re bad people is OK is particularly useful. Our chances of knowing why the horns were put on the Jews usually is pretty slim.
However, I don’t think intent is irrelevant, and I think it becomes more relevant when we’re talking about horns because depicting someone bad as a devil is a very widespread practice, much more widespread than any non-racist use of monkeys or apes as symbols I can think of. What do we do with newspaper pictures or yearbook pictures of people we don’t like? We draw devil horns and a sinister mustache. It’s practically a cliche to do this. Meanwhile, the Jews with horns thing is much less widely known than it used to be and much less widely known than comparisons of blacks to apes.
Let’s say some middle school kid gets his yearbook and draws devil horns on pictures of four kids he doesn’t like. Two of them are Jewish and two of them aren’t. The kid doesn’t know the kids he doesn’t like are Jewish, and he’s completely unaware of the Jews with horns thing, even in the most subconscious way. I’m just not willing to say that the yearbook defacement is now rendered antisemitic.
I think there has to be some allowance for the particulars of a case. I didn’t think the New Yorker cover was racist. I thought it was clearly satire. Yes, if the image had appeared on the cover of National Review, it would have had a completely different meaning. But it didn’t appear on the cover of National Review. It appeared on the New Yorker. That mattered.
And in the case of this particular statue, I think the disagreement is not over just the intent of the image but also the content and impact of the image. I’ve been trying to figure out why I just don’t get an antisemitic vibe from the piece. When I compare it to the image of Trotsky that Daisy linked, this piece doesn’t have the really exaggerated Jewish features that you often see in antisemitic propaganda. The image as a whole doesn’t add up to “evil Jew” for me.
Also, I’m not even convinced the horns on Madoff are there primarily to indicate that he’s a bad person. I inclined to take Virago’s reading that the horns are meant to draw a parallel between Madoff and the bull, that the profits he returned for his investors were part of the same ephemeral bull market that ultimately led to his downfall. And I’m inclined to this reading because the horns look like bull’s horns, while devil horns usually are more like goat horns, and because the portrayal of Madoff doesn’t seem to exaggerate his Jewish features (such as they may be).
This is an entirely subjective judgment on my part. I think a reading of the piece as antisemitic is valid or legitimate or whatever word you want to use, but there are so many mitigating and confounding factors that I don’t think the piece is objectively antisemitic because Madoff has horns and Madoff is Jewish.
or that it’s OK to release monkey dolls in all skin colors but black (to use two recent examples.) I simply don’t think that any group is entitled to that much deference.
What equivalent animals for other races would require this ‘deference’?
For instance, if they were releasing say, pigs as a toys, would they have to be in every colour but pink to ‘spare’ white folks the inability of non white folks to stop thinking of them as pigs?
@76 & 77
I think the idea that valuing education is somehow intrinsically Jewish, is pushing it.
And some of us make no money.
Dianne:
Speaking as someone who both sympathises (It’s clearly unfair) and empathises (I’ve been on the recieving end of similar from her) with the Alas feminists in response to Daisy’s entirely unwarranted attack, and also also as someone who holds you in particular regard, I am astounded to see such an ad hom from you.
Are you seriously suggesting that followers of rock bands are solely, or even typically drawn from the ranks of the idle rich?
Daran: If I understand the Deadhead lifestyle correctly (and maybe I don’t) then they spent a significant amount of their time simply following the Grateful Dead around, going to concerts wherever they were. That implies a group of people without a regular job. Which implies an independent income somewhere. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think you can make enough money to follow a rock band around by spare changing. And even if your regular source of income is selling pot to the tourists, the pot has to come from somewhere, implying connections. So maybe not the rich per se but certainly not the poor. People with resources if not cash.
If it helps any, my baseline for “poor” is someone who isn’t sure if they’re going to have enough to eat tomorrow and don’t have anyone they can turn to to ask for food if not. I’ve never been poor but both my parents grew up that way. Actually, both grew up in rural poverty. One set of grandparents still qualified for free cheese from the government and foodstamps when I was growing up-at a time when they considered themselves to be “rich” by comparison to their earlier state. I can’t imagine my parents or aunts and uncles becoming deadheads. If for no other reason than that the Dead didn’t play small, small towns like they lived in and they’d have little recourse for getting to a concert and discovering that they wanted to do it.
It seemed to me that Daisy was claiming to be persecuted because she was from this same ethnic and socioeconomic group and that people knew that she was from this group because of her screen name. This seemed unlikely to me. It certainly wasn’t my impression of the screen name.
I think the idea that valuing education is somehow intrinsically Jewish, is pushing it.
Without speculating about Daisy’s conscious or subconscious motives, I don’t think either Dianne or Mandolin was suggesting valuing education IS intrinsically Jewish but that it’s a common stereotype about Jews, the same way it’s a common stereotype about Asians. I think that’s true enough. I’m also completely comfortable saying that Jewish culture, in general, values education. That’s not the same thing as saying Jews look down on people without formal education.
I don’t think Daisy thinks we know about her background because of her handle. We know about her background because she talks about it a lot. Which is fine. That’s the same way people here know I’m Jewish (to the extent that people keep track of personal info about other commenters, which some do and some don’t).
(And just as an aside, I think it’s really stretching to say that people who earn their living selling pot are “connected.”)
But I also thought Sailorman was in the Navy.
Could I suggest two things here.
Firstly, reasonable, non-willful ignorance is a moral defense for the creator of offensive speech, imagery, etc, while being irrelevant to the issue of whether it is offensive. So for example, it is offensive that a racist chant is a ubiquitous children’s counting game, but you cannot blame the children if they do not even know what the words mean.
Secondly, lack of intent is irrelevent. Positive intent might be.
In this picture, I’m inclined to the view that the artist’s positive intent was to depict Madoff as a bull – symbolically an investor who does well in a rising market. If that’s correct, then his positive intent is not antisemitic.
Similarly in Hereville you said that you deliberately used antisemitic tropes in your depiction of a non-Jewish troll. That’s not the only interpretation though. There’s nothing (that I can see, perhaps others can) to indicate that the troll isn’t Jewish. It’s choice of language implies that it’s not of Mirka’s community, but that doesn’t resolve the issue. A reader might reasonably interpret the tropes as implying that the troll is perhaps also Jewish. That wasn’t the interpretation you intended, but it is there in the work. Still, your clear positive intent wasn’t antisemitic.
Thoughts?
There’s nothing (that I can see, perhaps others can) to indicate that the troll isn’t Jewish.
When the grandfather asks what a troll is, Fruma says it’s a goyishe monster. That implies the troll isn’t Jewish, though I suppose it’s not definitive – that it’s a monster that gentiles tell stories about and that Jews don’t wouldn’t be some sort of halachic determinant of the monster’s Jewishness or lack thereof.
But anyway …
Similarly in Hereville you said that you deliberately used antisemitic tropes in your depiction of a non-Jewish troll. That’s not the only interpretation though. … A reader might reasonably interpret the tropes as implying that the troll is perhaps also Jewish.
And I (reasonably, I think) didn’t even realize that imagery was in play. I did think the troll looked different in a number of ways that one usually imagines a troll, but I just thought that was reflective of the fact that nobody really knows what one looks like. Like Mirka has a certain idea, but just like she doesn’t fight him with the baseball bat, he doesn’t look like what she expects.
So if there is one sort of intent, and some people (reasonably) interpret it in a way that is offensive and some people (reasonably) don’t even realize those tropes are being invoked, what are we left with?
I have a vague memory of Amp saying something or another that made me think that the troll was Aryan. I can’t remember what exactly any more though. Uh…want to comment, amp, or is this the sort of thing that an artist doesn’t commit on because it’s much better to let the readers interpret it in their own way?
i’m not in the Navy. i’d probably get kicked out for insubordination (or thrown in the brig) in short order.
I do sail a lot, though. Not yachts, but little boats, like my 20 year old Laser. And i couldn’t think of some cooler handle like Ampersand.
At least on a single pass through, I think I entirely agree with you here. :)
I’m not sure the image is anti-Semitic. I think it may accidentally venture into territory that evokes (or is within a hair’s breadth of evoking) anti-Semitic images or stereotypes, and stuff that is not just “that was then, this is now” history, but stuff that still gets bandied about today (I grew up in the 70s and 80s in the Midwest in a fairly decent-sized smallish city. My family didn’t teach me the “Jews have horns” trope, in fact they condemned it, but I knew people who believed it). Where I’m at right now is that I’m uncomfortable with it because of that, even though I feel mostly positive about the overall message of the piece itself.
And I am uncomfortable that, though the disagreement with Daisy was respectful and mild, I still don’t agree with the analysis that this is wholly and clearly different than the King Kong and ape images that were so upsetting to so many more.
When I compare it to the image of Trotsky that Daisy linked, this piece doesn’t have the really exaggerated Jewish features that you often see in antisemitic propaganda. The image as a whole doesn’t add up to “evil Jew” for me.
Exactly — as I mentioned @12, I have become sensitized to the fact that Madoff is Jewish, and was looking for stereotypical Jewish features (particularly a large or “hooked” nose). Instead, as I said @20, as best as I can tell the artist actually gave him sort of Chinese looking features, particularly around the eyes, which made Madoff look like demons as portrayed in a lot of Chinese art. And this sculpture may be a subtle criticism of China’s own economic bubbles — like saying, “You think he’s an ‘other,’ a Westerner, but there’s a Chinese version of this guy too.”
it’s a common stereotype about Jews, the same way it’s a common stereotype about Asians
It would have to have a strong enough or specific association to Jewish people to form a basis of anti semitism, surely? I mean it’s an association that applies to so many different groups, that it’s hard to see it as specifically Jewish enough. It works better as a class stereotype.
Incidentally, I thought sailorman’s moniker was somewhat whimsical, for some reason, I thought he dreamt of (owning) a yacht!
“It would have to have a strong enough or specific association to Jewish people to form a basis of anti semitism, surely? I mean it’s an association that applies to so many different groups, that it’s hard to see it as specifically Jewish enough. ”
It’s a Jewish stereotype, B.adu. It’s not a class stereotype. It applies to Jews and Jewish immigrants specifically.
Jews and Asians have been subjected to a number of similar stereotypes as both of us have been cast in the model minority role. That does not mean we aren’t being stereotyped based on our ethnicity.
The idea of classing Jews as upper class is also –and obviously — an ethnic stereotype.
B.Adu,
Indeed, in the stereotype’s application to Asians as a model minority, the whole point is to emphasize how they “started with nothing” yet their children were able to become successful in America. There’s no “model” in starting in the upper class and staying that way; it only works as a reprimand to other minorities if you claim that the Asians started in the lower class and were able, while in the lower class, through their valuing education, to help their children to a better future. So there’s a class element there, but it’s actually about the possibility of movement between classes, not about “you value education ergo you are upper class.”
Manju ran the model minority cliche for Jews just recently in arguing why anti-discrimination law isn’t necessary in the absence of government-mandated segregation: the Jews became big bankers before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because Jim Crow law didn’t apply to them, so what minorities need is to stop whining about discrimination and instead focus on lifting themselves despite it.
Is this still an open thread?
Via figleaf (whose blog’s name is NSFW, though the content usually is)
The folks at Conservapedia want to undertake a conservative Bible translation that would remove liberal bias that infects many Bible translations (according to them).
They also they want to remove the story of Jesus sparing the adulteress by saying “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” and the bit from Luke where Jesus says “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.”
As far as I can tell from the project description, it seems like they only want to do the New Testament.
Even the Skeptics Annotated Bible acknowledges that there is some good stuff in the Bible. So the Conservapedians want to expunge it all? Good for them, I say. The words “enough”, “rope” and “hang themselves” come to mind.