I also am 100% sure that the cartoonist didn’t read the SCOTUS opinion he’s criticizing, and only 50% sure my leftist, Trump Deranged professor friend read it.
The ugly reality is that the only Americans who openly express racist views and spew racist rhetoric are black, in great part because the myth that the Voting Rights Act is still as necessary as it was when the KKK was burning churches has been preserved and weaponized by Democrats for decades. Blacks are also the only American who can do this and not be condemned and shunned.
Here is what one NAACP group tweeted this week:
Its president said it was “seriously disturbing” that white people are being considered for interim mayor. “Why would we replace the Black outgoing Mayor with a white person?”
Gee, I don’t know…the content of their character, maybe?
Post Script: While we’re here, I have one tangential comment on a recent “gotcha” attempt by progressives. In Virginia, Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) agreed when a conservative radio host said that Jeffries should get his “cotton-picking hands off of Virginia.” Naturally Democrats and the Axis media immediately declared that this was a “racist” remark. The NAACP, which, as you can see above, prefers direct and unambiguous racist statements, demanded an apology.
I will contribute to Kiggans’ campaign and personally campaign for her if she refuses to grovel and tells Jeffries, who is also screaming about the use of the idiom, to bite her.
In my many years of arguments, confrontations and fooling around, I have told many people to keep their “cotton-picking hands” off of this or that. I have had the phrase used on me as well. I have heard friends and relatives use the term, usually to express frustration, and never have witnessed it being said to a person of color. But since the phrase has long lost any reference to slavery, and is used as a non-specific and mild rebuke, interpreting its use in this case as racist is contrived, unfair, and unethical.
I put “Keep your cotton-picking hands off X…” in the same category with “pulling your leg,” which originally referred to London pickpockets literally pulling on the legs of victims to knock them over and rob them. “Meeting a deadline” originally referred to an actual line drawn in Civil War prison camps (like Andersonville) where a prisoner stepping across the line risked being shot dead. I must admit, I never associated “cotton-pickin'” with people who actually picked cotton until this controversy surfaced.
Ethics Alarms 
The only response to bad speech is good speech. The only response to a bad meme is a good meme. Ridicule works better than reason against those with closed minds with zealous agendas; it is definitively more fun too.
I think the EA host commenters have a tendency to argue too much about and with memes. That may work at EA as EA functions as a moot court to sharpen our reasoning. In the real world that is a mistake as not all people are reasonable.
Donald Trump is aware of that dynamic as he is a master troll. The skill of trolling may be just as valuable as the skill of reasoning. We do not only need the skills of Plato and Aristotle but also the skills of Diogenes, the greatest troll of all time.
The only response to bad speech is good speech. The only response to a bad meme is a good meme. Ridicule works better than reason against those with closed minds with zealous agendas; it is definitively more fun too.
Here is what I think (and see). You are making a statement that implies that you have in your possession the “good speech”. That is to say 1) the genuine (salvific if you wish) content that can save the day, and 2) the rhetorical embellishment that will ‘drive the message home’.
So, you seem to agree that the cartoon is 1) bad content reflecting bad principle (untruth or mistruth) and 2) lying and deceiving rhetoric. That is a fair, but also pretty convention reading.
But where is the “good speech”? I mean more than simply a defense of the Court in a decision about redistricting. I mean a statement that could oppose the trend in America today, supported by the intellectual class and the business class, that is following through on a wave of political and social transformation of the Nation into something flat and degenerate and fully and ultimately materialistic?
What if, in fact, that is how that Confederate flag is being used. That is, that it is a devious and cynical and fully underhanded thrust and attack against the metaphysical ideal of “America”. How clever and terrifying, then, that the opposition has chosen a symbol (that flag) which we have been conditioned to see as evil emblemized.
But this is my point! That is what the Northern Establishment did when it attacked and destroyed the South. If what I say is true, then everything that has happened in America in the last 160+ years, and what has resulted in the events if today, can be seen and should be seen as historical continuum.
The highly rhetorical and ultra-righteous speech by the North as it readied its armies for an industrialized attack on the South, is reflected today by those youths who went on rampages a few years back and tore down the Monuments. These are continuations of ideological processes begun a loooooonnnggg time ago.
So, what is the “good speech” that has any prospect of achieving any end except that of the radical transformation of America into the world business that it has become and that it IS?!
I think that I am interpreted as some type of a***hole when I take the positions I take. But let us face the facts: the so-called Conservative stance is often pretty stubborn. It does not take criticism very well! My point is that I see NOTHING written in these blog pages that has any power at all to oppose, and certainly not to reverse, the direction of Radical Progressivism that is the established ideology of America at an institutional level. That direction has to be defined by statements, and those statements I do make: The ideology of America is now a bizarre, materialist Americanism. Not determined by the genuine sentiments of people (if anyone were capable of thought!) but a materialistic business ideology by which original America must be transformed. The function of education, and PR, is just in that: solidify and concretize that new definition of citizenship.
A week ago a saw cartoons from George Grosz at the Reina Sophia in Madrid. George Grosz is one of the pre-eminent cartoonist and expressionist painters in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Cartoons and satire are well-respected art forms. Of course the quality varies. The example in this post is not sharp satire, just obtuse and thick as a brick.
A lifelong fan of Bill Watterson and Gary Larson (whose works occupy approximately half my coffee table bookshelf) and having met Chuck Asay and listened to his talk about the importance of political cartooning, I’ll have to disagree.
Indeed, humor is much better conveyed via imagery than political ideas, but this doesn’t automatically make drawing political commentary unethical. The only unethical act would be inaccurate or deceptive depictions, in this case trampling the VRA (which the cartoonist is guaranteed to also not have read) and the association with the GOP and the Confederate flag.
I don’t see fault with anything else. It was a political battle. The judges declared a victor. Territorial boundaries changed.
Bill Watterson previously did work as a political cartoonist. This is a much more accurate, and wholly ethical depiction of the outcome that he drew:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcROP71OPX8TsxrQXTDq0BfccZgdW31h-X-8Q9R5W4mTjMNgarjnra4PAC8&s=10
I said there were rare exceptions, remember. Watterson would be one; so was Bill Maulden. The vast majority have been like Herblock, and today I know of no nuanced, fair, smart political cartoonist.Do you? Cartoons by definition rely on exaggeration and stereotypes as well as simplicity—that means they are ill suited for complex nuanced issues. I’d call the one featured here typical.
Also, memes aren’t political cartoons. They are first and foremost gags. They aren’t on the op-ed pages. All those memes showing Rubio in various costumes to make fun of how he has been the Trump utility infielder are for laughs. They don’t insinuate anything untrue, or imply that he’s not doing a good job at his assignments. The memes aren’t partisan either.
Michael Ramirez is quite good. I think the medium is dying for the same reason journalism in general is–the death of truth for advocacy.
Jack, I remember that a couple of months you had a post filled with cartoons from Legal Insurrection, I have trouble finding the post. I know that I enjoyed that post mightily.
I would not condemn an entire genre because the great majority of what is published under that genre is bad. What can be said about political cartoons can also be said about columns and editorials; it is just the politicized times we live in.
Again, political cartoons aren’t memes. They are visual op eds, and as such they are simplified, knee-jerk, exaggerated op-eds that reduce a complex issue to tropes. Tell you what: I’m going to replace “political” with “editorial” to clarify this.
It may be unethical, it may be wrong, but it (SC justices in the political cartoon) raising the Confederate flag communicates a message that is received and responded to by those with ‘ears’ tuned to it. Is it true? Is it false? It does not matter. It signals a call to respond by way of activism.
What is interesting is that there is no counter-meme that is an antidote. The messages of the DEI Left always link with Marxian praxis — ideological activism — that is related to the process begun 60 years ago of transforming America into a multi-ethnic world-nation.
That is what “Americanism” has come to mean. That is “patriotism”. That is half-time at the football match. It is perfectly mindless. A process of wrecking hierarchies so that American-style businesses can gloriously succeed. The object: turn the world into the perfectly run Americanist Walmart. Where Walmart goes, cultural hierarchies dissolve. Prince, pauper, ruler, ruled, are all anonymously there, chomping on one of those three-days-old greasy hotdogs…
It’s funny, isn’t it? The destruction of the South is seen and represented as the destruction of “evil” so that flag is more or less a Swastika-emblem. Just in the last decade, maybe two, it was consciously transvalued. Major propaganda and PR effort went into that.
But that is what America did to America: destroyed its foundational unity by striking at and killing a part of its own cultural body. The wound is still there, and it is exploited mercilessly by exactly those activists who ride that wave of conquest and destruction.
If you ever could say “We as European Whites and cultural heritors of Europe built this nation from the wilderness! It is ours, we made it!” But you see, you can’t. Why? Because of extraordinarily persuasive propaganda campaigns, designed and determined by the business class, to make “identity” an evil.
Here, sing along!
I wrote previously: But that is what America did to America: destroyed its foundational unity by striking at and killing a part of its own cultural body. The wound is still there, and it is exploited mercilessly by exactly those activists who ride that wave of conquest and destruction.
I have to admit that I struggle to understand the “conservatism” of the majority of those who write on this blog (and so-called Conservatism generally). Do you know that what I wrote here is, to my mind, actually a conservative statement? The implicit question asked is What happened to America? Because that implies the conclusion that something is deeply wrong. Why is it that no one responds? Why do you not say:
“That is a horrible thing to say! It implies that the northern conquest of the South destroyed something good, valuable and original about America! And I deeply resent the implication! That the New America that arose also became an imperial Republic with grand designs, with expansionist ambitions, and that when this happened the original Republican nature of the nation changed, and that it evolved into what it is now: a sad, fallen picture of something it no longer is but is imagined still to be! How can you, you arrogant mouthy little b***tch come here and imply that we, sophisticated intellects of a fairly elite intellectual class, are missing a major point and that our views are those of toothless cowards!”
Why can no one put up a fight?! This is why I refer to The Boomer Truth Regime. You oversee a huge perspective about America. You administer it. But to say you are Conservatives is thoroughly dishonest. At best you (seem to me to be) fully committed Liberals with one degree of shading to the “Right” and the slightest mention of any idea that is actually conservative causes timorous shivering and total silence. Can you not defend yourselves?! Can you not defend your civilization?!
Effectively, the North’s war on the South was a war against the originality of the founding principles. I think the Founders would have sided withe the southern government. But here is the thing: In the Civil Religion formed when the Story of the northern conquest was concluded and became civil history, that is when mis-truths were established. It all seems quite cynical to me — horrifying really. In so many ways America has become a lie. And you-plural think that your cause (a weal Liberal republicanism afraid of its shadow) is going to save the day? It is not. A tidal wave is approaching and you will see it wash over your nation. What was set in motion will continue in motion because there is nothing that has the strength to oppose it.
In actual truth that cartoon could become the point where a ‘genuine conversation’ about America in the present might BEGIN. But there is no one home to have that conversation. What there is, is a focus on the minutiae of symptoms involving breakdown of established principles.
Richard Weaver wrote Ideas Have Consequences after The Southern Tradition at Bay. In one basic sense, Weaver declared that the Southern civilization was the last non-material civilization in the Western world. It makes little sense unless one examines the implication and consequences of having become an utterly materialistic civilization. Higher values and higher ideals do not exist! They are effigies of former entities that like those statues and monuments have been torn down by ravaging mobs! (That was the original sentiment that moved the United States the Right rally at Charlottesville, and just see what American government-corporate media did with that Conservative reaction!)
“For Weaver, more than any other twentieth-century Southerner, saw the struggle as a clash between right reason on the one hand and non-reason or ideology on the other. He saw the breakdown of Western civilization not as the consequence of industrialism and technology (these too are consequences) but rather as the result of faulty thinking.”
And here I must circle back to my criticism of the turn that Donald Trump took. The IDEA in MAGA was just that: an idea about reconstitution, about recovery, about re-grounding within and on American soil. It was about rebuilding and strengthening the Foundations. This bastard lied in so many areas. What he did (I suppose that all saw it coning) was to have EXPLOITED a sentiment among Americans in a genuine sense, or even of original American stock. Effectively heritage Americans.
He “read the room” and then designed a rhetorical discourse to enthuse and capture people. And once he was in what did he do? He violated his commitment and SOLD OUT THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY that was given to him. And he did this through betrayal to a foreign power. Now, if you-refuse to see this, then you yourselves are traitorous in inclination. But if you DO see it, then there is some hope. Simply put (or expressed though a reductive saying) you cannot serve two masters.
I have no idea what you think you’re talking about. For better or worse, President Trump has been consistent with more of his campaign promises than any President within memory, going back at least to Bush I. Foreign affairs literally don’t count. It is like reading palms. All a campaigning POTUS candidate can do is say what he will try to do. Holding to iron-clad ideological cant when circumstances change is just incompetent, a recipe for disaster. Unethical, in fact.
Really, I am simply particularly upset (and to a degree frustrated) about the mess in the Middle East (that will, I predict, cost the Middle East-Terms).
What will you say and do when or if the midterms are lost?
But what I attempt to also do, and I do not think anyone else who writes here does (nor even cares about) is to trace back from ‘effects’ to ‘causes’. See, Richard Weaver (and Robert Bork) were the influences I was under when I first stumbled to EA. Now, having been through a whole circle of events and coming back here, the entire issue of causation comes up again for me. That was Weaver’s entire thesis: we abandoned metaphysical principles for the seduction offered by nominalism, and so have — and must — veer off course. Course correction is innorder. But how?
So there are about three conclusions from this (if indeed it is true) 1) The course of things, though technically alterable, is probably not much alterable in fact. 2) The only thing “alterable” is myself and maybe my immediate circle. So spiritual life (the Benedict Option) is one of the principle alternatives (Weaver also emphasized this). 3) Though this is true, it is still a) intellectually valuable to become clear about the real nature of the situation, and b) fun to try to battle (and battles are what it is about!) with others about the ‘actual status’ of things while, to all appearances, the ship is sinking.
Sadly, no one want to fight. But that is not your fault.
By the way I am curious if you ever have seen the movie Ship of Fools?
What will you say and do when or if the midterms are lost?
I will probably say, as I have before, that people have an obligation to vote intelligently, but when they don’t, there’s not a lot anyone can do about it. It’s not an ethics issue. Any President or elected official who doesn’t have the guts to do what he or she feels needs to be done in the best interests of the nation because they fear what dumb voters will do is an irresponsible, unethical elected official.
I see your point, but my question was: What will you do when the Mid-terms are lost, DT is without substantial power, his ‘agenda’ might be coming to nothing, and the democratic socialistic hordes start up all the revolutionary activism as like a few years back?
It’s a “hypothetical” I guess!
Not an ethics question. But the Executive controls the Executive branch and that’s nothing to sneeze at. And if the Democrats go (more ) nuts, they will lose Congress and the Presidency in 2028
I believe that I understand why it is not a (specific) question of ethics. Fair enough.
The NYTs says this:
Nearly two-thirds of voters said that going to war had been the wrong decision, including almost three-quarters of politically crucial independents. Less than a quarter of all voters thought the conflict had been worth the costs.
Republicans broadly approved of Mr. Trump’s job performance and the war. But most other voters showed serious skepticism of his leadership on other top issues, including the economy and the cost of living. Sixty-four percent of all voters disapproved of his handling of the economy, long a strength for him, and majorities expressed negative views of how he was managing the cost of living, immigration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I understand why the huge issue of starting a war, which then turns into a trap, which then leads to soaring prices, energy issues for countries in Asia, with potential future supply chain issues, which begins to alienate even some of his Republican base, not to mention (crucial) independents, and all of this because of the determining influence of billionaire half-Israeli donors who (to appearances) seem to have BOUGHT the man and influenced a policy of war (which has led to an unwinnable situation) …
… cannot be examined like a typical ethics issue (like the homeless man with a cat in freezing weather and other specific isolated incidents), yet there are certainly ethical issues here. (?)
Do you have no ethical concerns about 1) big money buying influence? and 2) extremely wealthy American pro-Zionists who declare they will buy media corporations so to be able to control and limit negative speech about Israeli policies (and this war, Gaza, Greater Israel, etc.)?
I myself would imagine some of this does involve ethics.