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Post by skyfire on Dec 21, 2009 17:42:55 GMT -5
Sadly, this one actually has a ring of truth to it. In July 2004, Whoopi Goldberg was one of several comedians who participated in a controversial fundraiser for John Kerry... a fundraiser so controversial that Whoopi lost a corporate sponsorship deal due to an obscene joke she made. Another comedian at the same event, a Hispanic gentleman, had his routine focus on how a person couldn't be Latino and Republican, and that those Latinos who did vote GOP were effectively race traitors. He actually opened his monologue by discussing the number of Latinos who were moving towards the GOP and saying "Latinos for Republicans? That's like roaches voting for Raid." As with Whoopi's little obscene joke, the people in attendance ate it right up. As such, it would appear that there are at least some liberals who do agree with the sentiment that Latinos who go Republican are traitors. This one also has a ring of truth. Just about every time you see a high-profile incident involving a white police officer and a black victim / suspect / criminal, you'll have someone whining about how the cops are racist bastards and that the black person in question was a saint. The biggest "bloody shirt" so far is the Tawana Brawley case, wherein a black teenager claimed that two white police officers and a white prosecutor kidnapped and gang-raped her. Even after it was later revealed that Brawley and her mother faked the event, people still assumed the accused to be guilty. Al Sharpton, who initially took her side and said some rather hateful things against the accused, has never apologized. Other cases include that of Amandou Diallo (he reached for his wallet in a poorly lit hallway and after the officers told him not to), the recent Times Square case (the deceased pulled a MAC 10 on the cops), and the OJ Simpson Trial (wherein his Dream Team focused their defense on painting the arresting officers as racist rather than countering the evidence). So like with the one above, it would appear that the artist has chosen to distill something that is indeed a political sore spot down to a caricature.
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Post by skyfire on Dec 21, 2009 17:44:01 GMT -5
^ Skyfire... *shakes head* I'm just saying that I can see where the artist is coming from. He's taking his shit to the extremes, but a person who's familiar with the issues raised can at least see what's setting him off.
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Post by skyfire on Dec 21, 2009 17:49:31 GMT -5
What makes this one even worse is that the blog post originally containing it also had a blurb saying "The only thing worse than sharing a tent with a liberal..." or something along those lines. Most likely, the cartoon is a reference to the controversy over the Boy Scouts refusing to have homosexual members or leaders. The argument that the BSA and its supporters put forth was that placing children or teenagers alone - particularly in close confines - with a homosexual adult put them at risk of molestation or even worse. Saturday Night Live controversially opted to poke fun at this with their infamous "Canteen Boy" skit.* I'm guessing that this is the artist's way of poking fun at the other side in the argument. *By "infamous," I mean "several NBC affiliates refused to air SNL after that sketch appeared and at least three affiliates abandoned their affiliate status to go independent, forcing Adam Sandler & co. to offer up a public apology at the start of the next week's episode."
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Post by skyfire on Dec 21, 2009 17:52:13 GMT -5
But seriously, I think some of these can be easily misinterpreted, such as the following. I believe they were attempting to convey the idea that liberals view blacks as "all the same", and have an inability to differentiate a gang member from a non-gang member. But to those who are unable to catch this, it'll most definitely look blatantly racist. In a way, it's almost as if the joke completely backfires: ...that's just my perspective though. I could be wrong. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you there - the joke was supposed to be "liberals live in such a rose-colored world that they assume all blacks are just fine and dandy and thus can't distinguish the bad guys from the good guys" but instead makes it seem like all blacks are thugs.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Dec 22, 2009 1:00:23 GMT -5
And what we're saying is that you're digging your own grave. We can all see what they're TRYING to say, but clearly, it is not working. They just end up spouting a bunh of ignorant bullshit.
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Post by mistermuncher on Dec 22, 2009 5:18:15 GMT -5
"I'm guessing that this is the artist's way of poking fun at the other side in the argument. "
That'd be pretty fucking easy. The other side of the argument, as you term it, doesn't really fucking exist beyond the fevered imaginations of this artist type. And therein lies the rub here.
The artist appears to be attempting some form of castigation of the nefarious Liberal types who refuse to recognise there are bad Black people, gays, muslims, whatever. His response is pure playground. In his art, the only extant examples of any "minority" or "special interest group" is a pig-ignorant, bull-headed stereotype of all the worst things we're apparently "supposed" to think of. As I said before, that's what pisses me off about this bumwad: Not the message or the art, but that it presumes a reader understands it's "underlying message", and find this bollocks acceptable or amusing. Largely, it's impossible to do so unless you're already heavily invested in the author's viewpoint.
There's no reason to propose his world of thuggish blacks, screeching feminist harpies, kiddie-fiddling queers and Muslims with a bomb under the kitchen table and a knife behind every smile is any less naive or patently fucking stupid than what he rails against. Sustaining an argument on a few anecdotes that he might "have a point" or you can see where he's coming from doesn't fucking wash, and certainly doesn't in any way address the universality of negative stereotypes for minority groupings in the cartoons. You can't possibly attempt to sustain any argument of a "ring of truth" for any length of time, or against any criticism if you blithely pretend that this isn't the case.
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Post by Sigmaleph on Dec 22, 2009 14:04:14 GMT -5
I think most of us can see the logic, Sky. We just fail to find it funny.
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Post by terri on Dec 22, 2009 14:08:48 GMT -5
Diversity Lame is more like it...
(oh, and didn't Exxon name one of its tankers the "Condoleezza Rice," but changed it when she became Secretary of State?)
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Post by CtraK on Dec 22, 2009 17:38:45 GMT -5
I thought I'd seen this before, and it turns out I have, because legendary penis-joke repository Cracked.com placed Diversity Lane into the third circle of their Five Circles of Baffling Webcomic Hell.
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