MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
27 October 2005
The latest liberal atrocity
Some left-wing stooge at the MSM rag USA Today used Photoshop's sharpen tool to turn Condoleezza Rice into a demon! Will they stop at nothing?
I don't think so, edible. Malkin trades on her dark-skinned appearance to address issues of race; many readers assume she is black. (FYI: She is Filipina.)
pmm, yeah, Malkin specializes in making outrages of outliers. A tiny Maryland scandal becomes "standard Democrat procedure", a bad picture of Condi is racism. Has nothing to do with race, but boy they do play that race card faster than Jesse Jackson.
One of her links leads to the TIME cover on O.J. which is now received-wisdom (for right-wing media critics, at least) "making OJ look guilty for its white readership" -- when that wasn't the intent at all. She linked to the goofy from-the-knees photo of Ann Coulter for TIME ... which was done by a British photog who also did a from-the-knees photo of Clinton for Esquire. It turns out these kinds of angles are his "thing", not any particular commentary on conservative blondies. Will Malkin bring up that angle? Ha.
though when the left pulls that shit it pisses me off even more... the "finding" versus "looting" picture debacle... I've heard it repeated all over (from classrooms to casual conversation to radio) and it's still bullshit, as the Mefi thread that discussed it basically concluded.
Argumentum ad populum -- there was no factual consensus about the photograph captions, and what meager consensus of opinion existed, if any, was still only personal opinion.
I seem to recall that the factual consensus was that the images were captioned by their respective wire services (Agence France Press and Reuters I believe) and used by Yahoo with their original captions.
Sorry, but your "bullshit" claim is about the interpretation of the captions ("finding" vs "looting", to quote you), not a debate about where they came from.
This is the comment that best summed up the situation. To clarify, yes, I do believe there was obviously lots of overt and subtle racism going on in the coverage and discussions of Katrina. What I found was bullshit, was when I would hear my professor (or brian lehrer of npr), or many other people report on how they had heard of/seen two pictures side by side from Yahoo, where one was of white people and stated they had "found" the food, whereas the other was of black people and they were "looters." I heard it many times over (even as of a couple of days ago) presented as cut-and-dry, smoking gun type evidence of blatant racism, when it just wasn't that simple.
That's bullshit. Willfull ignorance of the complexities of life and politics, in favor of bullheaded radicalism.
But it's only your opinion — which I strongly disagree with, granted, given the criteria the mainstream press uses in deciding what stories to report and how to report them — and in any case, interpretation of any photograph is highly subjective in a digital world.
You are applying your personal political criteria to how you are interpreting the Rice photo markups, as you have with the Katrina looting/finding photograph captions.
It's not an entirely outrageous idea that photographs — or the presentation of photographs (by editing or inventing captions) — can be manipulated for whatever ends necessary, given prior evidence.
In any case, Metafilter is the best place to obtain a legitimate consensus on just about nothing. There are people there who will deny that racial classifiers can be useful for legitimate medical and epidemiological research, despite evidence to the contrary, for example. The only consensus to be obtained at Mefi is that opinion will generally rule over rational thought.
Because they cannot be trusted fully, they should be scrutinized carefully, not disbelieved out of hand.
Consensus is sought, not with the purpose of obtaining consensus, but so that in seeking consensus disagreeing parties might see the truth in one another's stance and discover what they share. A course of action is built upon that shared foundation, which is the fruit of consensus.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
