Chet, I am still failing to grasp why K McM thought she was making any point at all. Beyond the sickitude of what she has done, I just don't see the point. Even if one is on her team, what has she proved, or what did she expect to prove?
The content is an alert, though. There are reasons that people leap to the metaphors that they do.
Just addressed that in an update. Still, you're right.
It was certainly in bad taste, worse taste even than Kinsella's suggestion that Kate committed bestiality with her dogs.*
I think the main point was to mock Kinsella's supposed saviour complex, only secondarily to make him look sloppy.
It also makes Kate look vaguely anti-Semitic; a dumb idea, considering her staunch support of Israel, but you can hear the innuendo gathering steam.
[*Admittedly, this was in anonymous comment from an IP that Kinsella had apparently posted from some time previously. As we all know from the past few weeks, the same IP doesn't necessarily mean the same person. It could have been Richard Warman.]
That last sentence was a joke, btw.
I'm willing to give Kinsella the benefit of the doubt, since, as you say, there's really nothing to connect him to that IP.
I give up. Sure the antics of Kinsella and Warman need to be exposed and mocked, but this way?
Apart from the appalling taste of this prank, all it has done is give those guys ammunition they don't deserve.
There is no limit to the depravity of the far-right.
"exposed"? What part of Kinsella's views or world view or thoughts on, well just about anything, are not already exposed by Warren on a daily basis?
"exposed"?
Excuse me... there must be a bit of wall around here that I haven't beaten my head off of yet...
Kate's actions were disgusting -- and disappointing. I rather like her blog; her occasional excesses in her interminable feud with Kinsella are usually just entertaining. But this was too much, and I don't think I'll go back to SDA.
Kate and Warren -- another mindless, no-account ideologue -- deserve each other; and I suspect that, despite their obvious mutual hatred, they need each other as well, not unlike Cher and David Letterman.
Cameron, I take it you were referring to my post re, er, exposing? If you read it very, very carefully you will notice I wrote antics, not views.
Call me stodgy, but I would consider blowing up a piece of mindless mens’ room graffiti into a modern day Krystallnacht to be an antic. What would you call it?
Sholto,
Again, "expose"? It. Was. On. The. Internets.
His point, that everyone seems to have torqued according to their particular views, was that it was awfully easy for him to find evidence of the existence of racist speech/communications, considering how everyone tells him that it's just a few old kooks who think that way.
(This few old kooks theory reminds me of listening to TV from Detroit etc when I lived in Toronto and what I said to my friends at the time "Those two black youths who are always doing this shit must have amazing cardiovascular systems")
Okay, I will have to own up to being the sociopath personality because if I had have received the email and looked at the picture my immediate response would have been WTF.
I have family members with those tattoos, I grew up seeing them, the youngest family member still living is in his late 70's and that is no 70+ yr old man/women's arm. 2) the tat's are meant to be read by a guard just reaching, grabbing the arm and looking. This tat runs horizontal across the inside of the arm - no way to read it. Of course, those tats also started with the first 2-3 letters of the death camp initials.
WK as a famed Neo-nazi hunter should have clued in from the get go but in his supreme hubris he left himself get carried away....that being said, I fail to see the humour in the "prank". But then again, except for the grace of time, it might have been me and mine marching to the showers of Auschwitz.
The real problem with both WK and SDA is that they are so busy inspiring each other to reach further and higher plateaus of rhetorical excesses that they forget there are real people watching and reading. It’s easy to destroy or the mock someone/something but oh how much harder is it to inspire or lift them upwards.
I guess that would be the only exception: if you're personally familiar with what the real thing looks like.
In the end the fact that Kinsella thought it was a camp tattoo (by the way, the first tow digits look like a badly done A and Y to me) is not the point is it?
See there's two things here:
1) OMG KINSELLA IS DUMB AND HE THOUGHT IT WAS REAL. Yes? And?
2) Hahahha! I made a joke at Kinsella's expense but it was really at the expense of a bunch of dead people. Look how stupid he looks.
So to address those two points:
1) He acted in good faith thinking that he was being sent an image in good faith. He got fooled. Everybody chuckling about this hated him already...
2) Really, the people who pulled this prank look stupid. And petty. In their glee at attacking Kinsella they managed to shoot themselves in the foot and manage to not make any point beyond proving that they are beneath contempt.
Cameron:
I won't defend Kate - you either think she is beneath contempt anyway, and this simply confirms it, or she is wonderful (ditto). I agree that this latest escapade is in questionable taste - although I remind youi that taste is subjective. I do question your first assertion, though, that WK "acted in good faith." Warren jumped onto the moral standing of someone he thought to be a survivor of the greatest known human horror as a silly rhetorical device. I am less concerned with whether he should have known the tatoo was a fake than the propriety of attaching his argument to the horror of such a ghastly crime. What it boils down to is WK jumping up and down yelling "see, a real Holocaust survivor agrees with me!"
Warren was trying to buttress an argument that we need restrictions on our freedom of speech to prevent people from scrawling nasty slogans in washrooms - although WK has yet to say just how §13.1 would help prevent this, nor has he noticed that this egregious human rights assault is happening despite §13.1 being in force today. Or perhaps his point is that blurry slogans on bathroom tile are comparable to the shoah - either way, it is a postion tht doesn't stand much critical inspection.
Warren gave no thought to the juxtaposition of a aged survivor of horrors (fortunately) beyond his experience with a bit of graffiti seen through a 1.2Mp cellphone camera, or to how that might trivialize and minimize such an experience. I think an equally likely reaction to WK's arguments on this issue from a survivor of such a place might be "Get a grip! Graffiti can't scare me after surviving the Gestapo - put it in perspective!" Unfortunately, Warren was too anxious to paint any disagreement with his smug, self-satisfied conclusion as the work of a fascist or 'crypto-nazi' to give any thought to that - indeed, to exhibit any restraint whatsoever.
No doubt, what Kate did was offensive to some, and possibly ill-thought; but was it any less respectful to those who survived the death camps that WK's appropriation of their suffering in the aid of his latest cause, or his periodic debasement of the term "Nazi" to mean "anyone who doesn't like Jean Chretien?"
In good faith refered to his belief that a) the picture was genuine and b) that no one could be so fucking disgusting as to fake something like that to score points.
Chaff, wheat.
Yes - but assuming the picture was genuine, was he acting in good faith to appropriate the sufferings of the holocaust to buttress his paltry argument, even ignoring that he had the (apparently) genuine support of exactly one survivor? The issue isn't whether Kinsella acted "in good faith" but whether he acted like an asshole, good faith or no?
Dean ,
It was sent to him, he asked if he could publish it. He believed it to be real. It proved his point that images have power.
I really don't see how this makes him look bad. I personally think that he can be, I guess abrasive is the proper term (something I've been accused of in the past), but I really don't get how this is on him in the least.
Further, and this is the important bit, if this was meant to prove some grand point, it's failed horribly. Because all anyone is discussing is if the "joke" was a joke, whether it was, in fact, insulting to a myriad of people and how bad it makes the various people involved look.
It did bugger all to advance anyone's point. It did bugger all to make anyone look better. It failed in every possible way.
Oh, I suppose if the point was to accomplish all of that, which I'm waiting for someone to claim was the point, then it worked great.
Cameron:
First, "asshole" was too strong to describe Kinsella - "jerk" is more the term I should have used. Your description as "abrasive" fits as well. In any event, you are right - the point is largely lost in the discussion of the manner of delivery. That being said, I don't see that Kinsella was acting 'in good faith' although I have no doubt that he believed the photo to be a genuine image of a concentration camp tattoo.
It proved his point that images have power.
While true, I don't see that this was WK's point. As I said before, I think his point was that a real holocaust survivor agreed with him, therefore anyone who didn't is a nazi (and possibly, a poopy-head).
You're guessing. As am I. And again, it's based on what we think about Kinsella.
You make it sound like there's something wrong with guessing, Cameron!
6 Visitors Online
Commenting by HaloScan
