Do we really need to explain that this cartoon is satire?
the cuck zone campus art was originally created by a left-wing artist to parody what right-wingers think colleges are… and now we're having conservatives take it seriously 🤦♀️ pic.twitter.com/Vl5lbpzaX0
— ⚠️COSMO⚠️ (@cosmoisntme) May 11, 2020
Although, to be fair, parts of it are pretty sweet. Free weed and the interfaith orgy look good, and I could really go for a tofu burger, but most of it is obvious mockery of conservative pseudo-issues, like “grievance studies” and the “oppression olympics”, which are all nutso concepts promoted only by far right wackaloons.
RWNJ’s are sure that they know what “irony” is: it’s like goldy and coppery.
You could a tail on them and call them a weasel, I say, and “it’s weasel stomping day!” also, too.
Honestly, first glance, I couldn’t tell it was parody of right-wing thought. It strikes me as something a right-winger would draw themselves.
Poe’s Law strikes again…
LMAO. This looks like it came from a “Where’s Waldo?” book. A “Where’s Waldo?” book, that’s something else that would have confused !COSMO! I think.
Isn’t calling the fallacy “straw man” sexist ? Should it not be called “straw person” ?
Anyway, that is a lot of straw … persons in that picture…
Odd. Shouldn’t they be burning that american flag they’ve taken down?
The one problem with Cosmo’s comment: “…and now”. Conservatives have thoughts this was the case for ages. They are taking the cartoon seriously because it seems to confirm their biases about university life.
Remember back to my Bad Old Days as a college right-winger, this is EXACTLY how our conservative newspaper would have parodied our campus. (Although, since it was the 90s, we obviously wouldn’t have used modern slang like “cuck,” “triggered,” or “safe space.”)
EDIT: Remembering…
And in the comments, they double down, of course.
The Classics Department looks in better shape than most I’ve seen myself…
I spent five whole minutes looking for Waldo. What a sham.
And who gets their free weed from a booth on the quad? Kids these days….
And who gets their free weed from a booth on the quad? Kids these days….
Yet another malignant effect of 5G towers!!!!1!!
And on the other hand, Liberty University just dissolved its Philosophy department. Love of knowledge literally does not exist there anymore.
@14 – you think it ever did ?
Where are the statues of Darwin ,and that Scopes bloke ?
I had to look up Cuck ,i thought it might have something to do with Chickens .
What’s TITLE IX when it’s at home ? Nice touch having a Mosque across the St from a Bar .
…but…why is Gritty there? Is they Philadelphia Flyers mascot an icon of liberalism? Or of higher education? Or…something other than appalling mascot design by a major sports team?
Hmm, no place for satire now I think.
I think the only thing I would want from that picture would be the white tears live stream.
This may interest you:
This Philosopher Is Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology
All I heard was “free weed”.
@18 Comrade Gritty became a meme almost immediately. https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17990016/gritty-philadelphia-flyers-leftists-activism-protest-symbol
He’s a hooligan for the people.
Challenging All of Evolutionary Psychology
Insufficient demonstration of specific cause and effect; it reasons backwards. Unfortunately impossible at evolutionary scale. Sorry, bye bye.
This just makes a strong case for “conservatives have never attended class at any university”. Like those texts about how an atheist professor thinks and how a humble christian destroys atheism with a few strawman and non sequitur.
Remember that right-wingers have a tendency to repeat Onion stories as if they were real…
When I was at University, a left-wing lecturer in a topic called “New Ethnicities, Old Racisms” set an essay topic: “Is right-wing extremism an irrelevancy in Australian politics, or simply an extreme manifestation of a wider phenomenon of racism, fear and insecurity?”
I refused to take the bait and argued against the premise of the question. In a five year degree and Masters program that had me averaging Dictinctions, this was the only essay and unit I failed, because the lecturer had an axe to grind.
If you don’t think regressive leftism isn’t real and that a parody like this strikes a nerve precisely because it’s truer than you want, then I’m afraid you’re a part of the problem.
@27. Are you sure you were right and not the teacher ? Give us a few excerpts from the essay so that we can judge.
“and now we’re having conservatives take it seriously”
Well that’s never happened before!
I mean, I know we’re somehow supposed to treat right-wingers with respect, and pretend that they just have a different, but still valid, political viewpoint, but try as I might I just can’t see why I should.
They’re wrong. Their ideas are bad ideas, and very harmful. Demonstrably so. Treating them with respect and a presumption of legitimacy would be fundamentally dishonest. This is not a matter of taste or aesthetics. It’s not a case of whether you prefer chocolate or vanilla. It’s about what is good for society and what is harmful. Treating it as a legitimate debate with two sides is conceding far too much ground.
In response to #27 and #28, here’s a representative paragraph drawn from a larger 2100 word essay. Hey, it’s an undergraduate piece.
“In our unit this term, a consistent tension has been the balance between the presence of ideas and the motivations it is fair to ascribe to those who promote them. This author takes exception to the redefining of the epithet “racism” to encompass tensions that go well beyond biological race and into matters of religion, culture, and national identity. The historical experiences of the abolition of slavery, the American civil rights movement, and the Nazi program atrocities in the name racial hygiene are very powerful totems, and the term “racist” is not something some people wish to relinquish because of the power of that word, in the same way an accusation of ‘immorality’, or ‘heresy’ carried power in earlier times. When does a rational concern become a ‘fear’? When does a practical and actual deficiency in security become a “feeling of insecurity” that can be used to accuse a person of acting irrationally? Insecurity is both subjective (“I feel insecure”) and objective (“Afghanistan is insecure”). Why should an argument such as “the social cohesion of the Nation is imperilled if we do not apply more stringent standards upon our immigration program, to ensure that migrants respect and are capable of integrating into society as productive and engaged citizens” be branded as racist? It is . To argue that concerns which are held by a significant proportion of the public are merely a manifestation of racism (in the active, premeditated, and traditional sense), miss an important point, or are a sign of an emotive response (fear) rather than a rational process of discernment. Such characterisations are grossly unfair distortions which are actually more likely to reveal weaknesses in the opposing view. “
“Remember that right-wingers have a tendency to repeat Onion stories as if they were real…”
I have to admit it looked like a Stan Kelly cartoon at first, but I couldn’t find a crying statue of liberty anywhere.
Nathan Zamprogno,
Are you aware that “nationality” has often come into play in the concept of race? The Anglo Saxon race, the Irish race, the Slavic race were all considered valid ideas at one time. And Religion was also tied into it, as the Irish were Catholics, the Slavs Catholic or Orthodox, as opposed to Protestant English. Ever hear of the term WASP?.
Nathan Zamprogno,,
And what the hell is biological race anyways? Most people will assume I am white, whatever that means. My father’s parents did come from Germany, but my mom’s came from Mexico. My sister had a genetic test done and almost a third of her DNA comes from northeast Mexico, not from Europe. So what race am I?
@31. Yep. That’s a big fat “F” from me too. Pathetic dishonest propaganda. Ewww.
Okay, Nathan, let’s go over the inaccurate, contentious or ludicrous problems with just that thesis, shall we?
1) Posing as if everyone who engages in minimization of racism (let’s be charitable and say the people on a continuum of arguing that racism is ongoingly salient who are on the side of the issue saying it is less so) are actually concerned with making sure that the word remains used only for Nazis. Because a lot of right-wingers are happy to use terms like “feminazi” that trivialize Nazism, and make allegations of racism when it applies to white men. You may be a scrupulous person trying to keep “racism” defined to
2) Ignoring that using “racism” only to refer to the extremes of the Tuskegee study and Nazism is entirely a fairly modern, conservative, white phrasing. See Bob Blauner’s work among others: People of color in general, not just the left, are far more likely to see racism in micro-aggressions and more minor acts as well as in institutions, and not just want to define racism as “slavery or nothing”. After all, if we say that we want to retain “racism” as a term to only refer to the Holocaust and slavery, then lynchings and Jim Crow aren’t racist. Defining the concept that way ahead of time, and ignoring the rhetorical dispute readily at hand in the issue, is putting your thumb on the scale ahead of time while actually embodying the right-wing rhetoric your paper tries to deny exists. It’s literally self-refuting.
3) In the same vein, ignoring that your definition of racism is a wholly colloquial, charged one. Instead of being honest enough to try to define racism objectively, you are preemptively cordoning it off as a term that must be used pejoratively.
4) Continuing on in that vein, ignoring that redefining reality doesn’t change it. Fine, you don’t like calling Trumpists racists, I guess. But that’s like saying “The Potomac isn’t a river because only something that is longer than the Flinders River is a river” when the topic is river management. Calling the Potomac a stream doesn’t mean that the fish in it become immune to pollution, and refusing to call the ostensibly lower level of racial animus that the Republican Party and
5) Being so laughably unwilling to admit that right-wing movements are obviously pretty goddamn racist that you are willing to rhetorically obscure the alt-right, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and extremist racists outside of the United States. Remember, the question as you posted it was “Is right-wing extremism an irrelevancy in Australian politics, or simply an extreme manifestation of a wider phenomenon of racism, fear and insecurity?” There have been outright National Socialist parties in Australia, and Saleam leads Australia First at present. So your argument has to disingenuously downplay the actual Nazis who are running, instead of just saying “Australia First doesn’t have any members at the national level, who cares?”
6) Ignoring that real human beings can be afraid of things that are rationally threatening, in favor of trying to imply that using an emotional framing at all discredits real issues.
7) Ignoring that you actually have an array of liberal, left-wing and progressive sources to use that would actually agree that many rational concerns are held by the far-right, so your supposed contrarianism actually isn’t and you could have just answered the goddamn question with the benefits of research.
8) Being 100% fucking disingenuous in trying to pretend that a) the extreme right-wing are always so articulate as you imply they are and b) that there is no broader context for why people would see the rhetoric you describe as seemingly entirely rational as actually a racist dog whistle. This alone is a reason to fail you. You are cherry-picking upon cherry-picking. You not only obscure that there obviously are people on the right who are behaving with insecurity, open racism, supremacism, and venal politics, which means that in your effort to stan for the right-wingers who managed to shave and not say the quiet part loud you are unable to admit that the thugs and idiots can still have an electoral impact, which is just shitty analysis but is really good dishonest partisan rhetoric; you then have to further prop up these arguments by ignoring that there are relevant contexts of colonialism, militarism, etc. My favorite example: Americans in particular, but much of the West in general, refusing to take in Syrian refugees is particularly rich because the crisis in Syria is overwhelmingly caused by the Iraq War and other Western actions that destabilized the region, as well as the cowardice and complicity of countries in the West that failed to do something about brazen American imperialism (so that even the nations who refused to join Bush’s coalition should not escape blame). Ignoring that the people who are trying to come to your country do so because you fucked up theirs is dishonest and evil. Even if you want to dispute that claim, and then you would be far from a scholarly defensible or neutral position and just doing politics, you have to actually do that, not just obliquely brush it over in an opening that strawmans your opposition while adamant-manning the side you obviously empathize with. Again, even if you think the right-wing are right in this debate, you haven’t actually presented the debate as it is occurring or the actual phenomena on the ground. So… for this alone, you get an F.
So maybe the reason you failed is because this is a contentious opening that, instead of trying to reframe the question or point out flaws in the reasoning behind it, just says “Nuh-uh” and refuses to answer it? You could actually have said that right-wing extremism is an irrelevancy because that is clearly your view, but instead of saying that or instead of saying that the right-wing is relevant because of reasons that the question does not ask, you basically tried to do a tap dance around the existence of the right wing as a concept. The simple fact is that you could have actually answered the question entirely with good faith, and you decided not to. You earned that F, and now you are constructing a persecution narrative to defend your mediocrity and dishonesty.
Which is a microcosm of the entire debate about the university: Conservatives and their ideas suck, they can’t hack it outside of their safe spaces, so they have to make their safe spaces and then pretend their failure is someone else’s fault.
Thus taking us neatly back to the OP.
Ugh, didn’t edit #1 and #4:
#1: You may be a scrupulous person trying to keep “racism” defined to a narrow field, but not everyone else does. (This also means that you are fallaciously using an equivocation fallacy. You know how your instructor and the scholarly consensus defines racism, and you could have talked about it in that light, but you decided to reject the word, ignoring that this still means that your opponents can be entirely correct because by their definitions they have made the case, so now you are filibustering in making your paper about how the word racism should be defined instead of actually engaging with the topic).
#4: …the Republicans and similar parties show “racism”doesn’t change that they show a level of racial animus. You do not, and cannot reasonably, defend the proposition that these parties do nothing that isn’t a little bit racist, so you have to define the term as basically being “the worst racists in history”. (Worse, you actually provide no reason why this definition should be used. You imply that it’s to keep the term from being overused, and perhaps you addressed this more in the subsequent paper, but the problem is that there is just no way you are going to make a case for that definition being the only one that should be used in any context, which is what you need to for the debate to proceed. You ignore the obvious tradeoffs in having racism be defined a priori as being only the kind of racism that only happens in the bottom .01% of societies, in that it makes the term essentially useless. And, to reiterate the key point here, it doesn’t matter what you call it, we can call it “eggplant”, once I’ve put forward a definition of “racism” that the Republican Party – or a party in Australia – satisfies, I have shown that they are racist. So you need to actually discuss facts on the ground, not quibble over definitions and hinge your argument on facts not in evidence).