Posted by Elaine Magliaro
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Picture of the Day for June 8, 2015: The De-evolution of the Republican Party
This entry was posted in Abraham Lincoln, George W. Bush, Political Science, Politics, Ronald Reagan, United States and tagged Dwight Eisenhower, Karl Rove, Republicans, Scott Walker, Teddy Roosevelt. Bookmark the permalink.
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
Very apt.
And the greatest change came about when a washed up actor took on the greatest role of his life, by following the scripts he was given. He could even ad lib at times. Method acting.
Mike,
Yup. Best front man Peggy Noonan ever had.
I like that
Really, B?
you find no humor in a chimp wearing a suit and hat and smoking a stogy?
I especially like his hat, very urbane.
reminds me of Sinatra, in his later years.
He could sing Fly Me To The Moon.
B,
I have a refined sense of humor and a fairly advanced technical understanding of the mechanics. I could explain everything wrong with that picture in detail. I shouldn’t have to. Here’s a hint: any chance that picture had of being funny was ruined by the “chocolate pudding” part of the caption equation. Your homework, should you accept it, is to figure out why.
Seriously, man, it’s more than a wee bit offensive and I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean it that way.
Gene,
An Autistic kid could figure out why that image is offensive as hell. Funny, it is not. Where did it come from, the Klan web site?
By the way, the only pudding I like is chocolate pudding and I see nothing wrong with a monkey agreeing with the idea that the republican party is devolving, especially such a debonair chimp with a really nice hat.
I guess Planet of the Apes was a diabolical racist show to undermine black Americans?
“I guess Planet of the Apes was a diabolical racist show to undermine black Americans?”
Actually, no. Boulle’s original book was social satire to highlight man’s over reliance on technology and the foibles of human nature long before the idea became a science fiction franchise. What is wrong with that caption is that it is simply racist. The proof is in the eating of the pudding regardless of its flavor or – as implied here – its color. Referring to blacks specifically as monkeys is a known racist trope (although I operate under the notion that all humans are basically poo flinging monkeys with technology or as Bill Hicks once put it “a virus with shoes”). Combine the picture and the caption and it is simple racism, B. Remember: all humor is contextual. You seem to have taken the literal denotation of this object and totally missed the connotation.
Bron,
In the racist cartoons of the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s, Black people were always portrayed as monkeys and gorillas. Many racists jokes also made that comparison and have been used in this country as specifically racist since the days of slavery. How could you not know this?
yes, Mike, I do know that.
In the context of the devolution of the republican party, I saw nothing wrong with an “evolved” monkey saying the proof was in the pudding.
if it said vanilla pudding would that have been better? Personally, I despise vanilla pudding. Or maybe I should have found a white faced monkey?
But then that would be racist against white people, vanilla, white, oh my god. and Elaine’s picture? wow, she certainly must be a white hater, showing them as monkeys. oh the humanity.
we are all monkeys or do you not believe in evolution? If someone showed me a picture of a white monkey dressed as a man, I would laugh and say I used to be him.
You miss the point.
The combination of “monkeys” and “chocolate” is the problem, B.
Referring to humans in general as monkeys? Isn’t a problem socially. Referring to blacks in specific as monkeys? Is a problem and precisely for the reasons Mike mentioned.
I understand your point(s) perfectly well.
Although I do find it interesting that all of you jumped on that, even though there was no context for it. It was just one monkey commenting on another monkey. The thought never crossed my mind that the picture would be considered racist in this context which wasn’t about blacks at all.
Bron,
I don’t think you did that deliberately, and believe you when you say, “The thought never crossed my mind..”
You see, that sort of thinking is the problem Elaine and Mike have been pointing out for some time. The ‘tin ear’ of unconscious racism. It comes down to a lack of sensitivity to what is hurtful to others. Not intentional, and I don’t believe for a minute you intended to hurt others, but that kind of thing does.
I used to run sensitivity training groups. Maybe I should start doing that again. Our focus was to get people to understand. Hence, the term “sensitivity.”
Chuck,
Regarding the ‘tin ear’ of unconscious racism. I think it’s called the Paula Deen Syndrome
B.,
I pointed it out because 1) I knew you didn’t mean it that way (we’ve know each other a long time now and while we may disagree on more than a few things I’ve never known you to be racist, quite the opposite in fact) and 2) I knew not everyone reading this blog would know you didn’t mean it that way.
Comedy can be dangerous.
Seriously, man, it’s more than a wee bit offensive and I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean it that way. .
Gene
Of course he did.
Now, now, Blouise. Our Bron may have a few unsavory ideas, but in all fairness I’ve never known him to be racist. Believe me, I’ve cudgeled him over the years on a variety of topics. I wouldn’t have passed up such low hanging fruit if it was there. I like easy.
blouise, That is what I thought, too. I think he was getting in the faces of those that call people out on “white privilege”.
See that I was typing while Gene was posting. I don’t believe for a minute that b is naive about such things.
Nor do I, Smom. But he does have an ear of solid tin and the flaws in his reasoning usually do have a color associated with them. That color though is not a natural skin tone for humans: green.
Dr. Stanley:
So all depictions of monkeys as humans is racist and offensive to blacks? At some point I have to disagree. It seems to me the context is important, if this had been a story about Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or some other Black American, I would never post that picture for the reasons everyone has rightfully stated.
Smom:
White p? how is the devolution of the republican party about WP? And how is a suave monkey commenting on that concept racist? if it is racist, then how is Elaine’s picture not racist as well? Because it was specifically about Scott Walker? Well my monkey is a rich republican commenting on Elaine’s observation. He is saying “we will see if Walker is really one us.”
Blouise/Smom:
This is a good, at least in my mind, description of racism:
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.”
The Virtue of Selfishness
Ayn Rand
It’s wrong, but hey, at least it is a start. It’s also not nearly as complicated as Ayn gyrating to rationalize her hatred for all things bigger than the self.
“Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” is really all that is required.
The rest of what she said was pseudo-intellectual gibberish.
bron,
How is my picture racist? It is not specifically about Walker. It’s about what has happened to the Republican party over the years. The current Republican party is not the Republican party of my youth and young adulthood. Walker is just one example of the new breed of Republicans who have taken the party to the edge of sanity. He’s corrupt as they come and is destroying his state. He is nothing but a whore for the likes of the Koch brothers and their ilk.
SwM,
Bron’s very fortunate he’s not here in Cleveland. I can guarantee you that if he had that picture printed on a t-shirt and wore it to a Cavs game, or a performance at Blossom or a bar down in the Flats, no one would offer him an opportunity to explain … not even the cops.
I entertain myself with that mental picture
I cheered for your Cavs last night, Blouise. The officiating was so poor in the previous game that I decided to be for the Cavs.
Blouise:
I would not own nor wear a t-shirt like that in public for many reasons. But I seriously doubt most Black Americans would say anything to me nor would they beat me up.
“The rest of what she said was pseudo-intellectual gibberish.”
She pretty much nailed the intellectual basis of the National Socialists in Germany. Excuse me, Nazi fascists.
So, no I would not characterize it as intellectual gibberish.
I know you wouldn’t.
Nonetheless, that does not change what it is.
bron,
Uh huh … the mental picture gets better and better.
Bron,
You knew damn well what that picture portrayed and you posted it as an opportunity to tweek “Us libruls” and give yourself another opportunity to quote that dumb novelist.
Speaking of Ayn Rand:
Here are 10 things I learned about the world from Ayn Rand’s insane ‘Atlas Shrugged’
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/here-are-10-things-i-learned-about-the-world-from-ayn-rands-insane-atlas-shrugged/
Excerpt:
Over the past year, I’ve been reading and reviewing Ayn Rand’s massive paean to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged. If you’re not familiar with the novel, it depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends, and basically everyone else — journalists, legislators, government employees, the poor — are the villains trying to drag the rich down out of spite, when we should be kissing their rings in gratitude that they allow us to exist.
Rand’s protagonists are Dagny Taggart, heir to a transcontinental railroad empire, and Hank Rearden, the head of a steel company who’s invented a revolutionary new alloy which he’s modestly named Rearden Metal. Together, they battle against evil government bureaucrats and parasitic socialists to hold civilization together, while all the while powerful industrialists are mysteriously disappearing, leaving behind only the cryptic phrase “Who is John Galt?”
Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction, but as far as many prominent conservatives are concerned, it’s sacred scripture. Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle, and opposed regulation of financial markets because he believed her dictum that the greed of businessmen was always the public’s best protection. Paul Ryan said that he required his campaign staffers to read the book, while Glenn Beck has announced grandiose plans to build his own real-life “Galt’s Gulch,” the hidden refuge where the book’s capitalist heroes go to watch civilization collapse without them.
Reading Atlas Shrugged is like entering into a strange mirror universe where everything we thought we knew about economics and morality is turned upside down. I’ve already learned some valuable lessons from it.
1. All evil people are unattractive; all good and trustworthy people are handsome.
The first and most important we learn from Atlas Shrugged is that you can tell good and bad people apart at a glance. All the villains — the “looters,” in Rand’s terminology — are rotund, fleshy and sweaty, with receding hairlines, sagging jowls and floppy limbs, while her millionaire industrialist heroes are portraits of steely determination, with sharp chins and angular features like people in a Cubist painting. Nearly all of them are conspicuously Aryan. Here’s a typical example, the steel magnate Hank Rearden:
The glare cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice — then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair — then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them; this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five.
2. The mark of a great businessman is that he sneers at the idea of public safety.
When we meet Dagny Taggart, Rand’s heroic railroad baron, she’s traveling on a cross-country train which gets stuck at a stoplight that may or may not be broken. When the crew frets that they should wait until they’re sure it’s safe, Dagny pulls rank and orders them to drive through the red light. This, in Rand’s world, is the mark of a heroic and decisive capitalist, rather than the kind of person who in the real world would soon be the subject of headlines like “22 Dead in Train Collision Caused by Executive Who Didn’t Want to Be Late For Meeting.”
Dagny makes the decision to rebuild a critical line of the railroad using a new alloy, the aforementioned Rearden Metal, which has never been used in a major industrial project. You might think that before committing to build hundreds of miles of track through mountainous terrain, you’d want to have, say, pilot projects, or feasibility studies. But Dagny brushes those concerns aside; she just knows Rearden Metal is good because she feels it in her gut: “When I see things,” she explains, “I see them.”
Sure Mike, whatever you say.
You actually give me too much credit for forethought, thank you for the compliment though.
To be honest, my thought process was this: I thought what Elaine posted was stupid but funny, so I went looking for a monkey picture. So I looked for monkey pictures and I found the one that said the proof was in the pudding, which answers Elaine’s post about Walker being a stupid ape. If he becomes president, the answer will be in the eating of the pudding which in my case would be chocolate pudding.
As far as I was concerned that was a chimpanzee dressed as a human being and not a depiction of a human being. People who think it was, might want to do a little introspection about their real thoughts on the subject of race. Although that introspection might lead to an unsavory realization about themselves.
I truly was not trying to poke you liberals, I thought the post stupid but funny and did not take it as a tweak of us conservatives but rather a comical interlude.
I see, however, that censorship is alive and well here at FFS or as I now say Fascists for Silence (of opposing views) through intimidation.
No bron. No one has “censored” you. If that were the case, Gene or I would have deleted your picture and sent it to the trash. Argument is NOT censorship. If you post something you own it. Since you own your position, be ready to defend it with logical argument or persuasion. If what you post is offensive, even if you cannot see the offense, you can expect to take some heat for it. That is what is happening on this thread. You chose to defend the indefensible. Getting called on weak argument is not censorship.
bron,
No one censored you. Not one of your comments has been deleted. Gene even defended you.
By way of clarification. While this blog does not “censor” in the traditional meaning of the word, we do have our limits. Recall the list of Eight Simple Rules in the tab on the masthead.
We do “censor” spam by deleting what slips through the Akismet spam filter. Akismet seems to be set on “extra grumpy,” so it occasionally snags regular commenters. No one is exempt from that, even editors and administrators. If your comment disappears into the vortex of doom, let us know and one of the editors will retrieve it.
One of the things we won’t tolerate is content-free Gish Gallop flooding of threads. Certain other sites claim it is impinging on commenters “free speech” to limit that. Drowning out rational discussion of issues is what really limits free speech. We don’t put up with that.
We are a lot more tolerant of occasional swearing, and even allow the f-bomb, unlike some other sites.
Advocating violence against persons or property will elicit a warning, and probable deletion of the comment. It is also a good way to get banned. That may be a judgement call, since there is a fine line between the abstract and literal. “So-and-so needs to be shot,” is different than, “So-and-so is a waste of carbon and oxygen.”
I didn’t say you censored me.
I still say, in the context of this thread, that was not offensive. If that was offensive then so was what Elaine posted. The depiction of human beings is only wrong if it is for blacks but not for whites? That idea is the very essence of racism. Whites can take it but blacks cannot?
Who gave you the power to speak for black Americans? Plantation owners used to think of their slaves as children, seems like that is still going on today. Only now its the left which thinks it owns them and is using them for far more insidious purposes than making a few bucks.
Now, that’s funny. Equating standing against racist behavior with slave ownership.
Let me get this right. Scott Walker, the white governor of Wisconsin, is being compared to a minority–black Americans who were once slaves owned and maltreated by white people…who have been discriminated against in this country for hundreds of years…who had to live under Jim Crow laws for decades…some of whom were beaten, mutilated, burned, castrated, lynched…who have often been compared to apes and monkeys. Okay, I get it now. Poor Scott Walker has done nothing to deserve criticism…or to be shown to be a truly low point in the GOP’s history.
Looks like the picture is still here……. therefore,no censorship. A confrontation on the subject matter of one’s post does not equal censorship.