Hellenologophobia
Registered Senior Member
Spoiled Americans just don’t get it, SAM. :shrug:
Egyptian girl strips to protest; western media censors her photos
- Thread starter S.A.M.
- Start date
Ah indeed, as I recall they can't receive infractions or bans anyway, only warnings from above. They usually recommend the report button, but I guess there's little point. If you can't beat them, join them.
The Neurotic American, and Other Notes
There is no connection, then, between the asserted moral evil of a woman's breasts (as, say, opposed to a man's chest) and misogyny?
Or are you saying the misogynistic aspects of various international cultures associated with Islam are not among common Western complaints about those portions of the world?
The very fact that the one is acceptable while the other isn't. Acceptability and obscenity are subjective, and culturally defined. I would note, for instance, that many of our European and Australian neighbors, at least, scratch their heads over the American neurosis about potentially sexual content compared to our market-driven permissiveness toward astounding violence and human destruction.
Question: Why censor the images if there is no context of offense?
Subsequent question: What is the context of offense?
Any casual observation of the relevant tracks within the American public discourse should at least suggest a trend. A more detailed examination brings deeply seated neurotic conflicts about sexuality in our culture to the fore.
Enough people are willing to acknowledge some degree of these conflicts that the social standard finds potentially sexual content, such as the sight of a naked breast, offensive.
I remember laughing at the people on CNN and MSNBC for how gleefully they told us the following pictures reported to be a dead Qadafi might be too graphic for some, but they were important enough to show.
The ironic juxtaposition evolves when one considers that, in seeing both the living and dead Qadafi on television, we have been witness to a war crime.
And, yes, the idea that it is a man's genitals censored out of a picture of torture, because those genitals likewise fall into the category of what people are willing to acknowledge is somehow problematic according to our cultural neurotic conflicts, and are therefore offensive?
To the one, this is as prima facie as it gets. To the other, I think it stands up under scrutiny: the psychoanalytic meaning of American history is brilliantly insane. We make no sense. And that is how one makes sense of us. We get so much done, for good or ill, because we don't need anything to make any real, substantive sense. And so we become accustomed to it. But we cannot extinguish that flicker of doubt permanently, lest we become downright sociopathic. The result of this tension is found in the neurotic conflicts by which we make absolutely no sense.
When we repress our most basic desires, be they for sex or food or power or even basic order that we can take a breath and make sense of, those desires find alternate routes to gratification.
Some of these alternate routes are fairly straightforward, but they pertain to very specific repression. More often, the alternate routes hide from us. Depending on the arrangement of neuroses within an individual, the alternate manifestations might range between subconsciously containable, and therefore unnoticed despite being observable to nonsensical to dangerous, and all imaginable degrees between.
We have televised gladiator fights in the U.S. It's a huge business. And, yeah, there is something pretty primally cool about watching two trained thugs beat the hell out of each other. The bloodletting is on par with what professional wrestling tried to imitate. And sure, some of those guys used to slice themselves with razor blades for effect, but that only reinforces the point. It's not that violent movies, sports, video games, comic books, and all of that create violence in our culture, but that they reflect the station of violence in our culture.
That some of that violence contains gratuitous sexuality or even elaborate sexual violence is also telling.
Any bullet point phrasing—
—is open to some kind of objection, but please, man—
—you must be fucking with me on that question.
Considering the broader behavior of the American culture, which can to some degree be said to represent the results of behavioral averages, what is the most likely reason for blurring the breasts, if not the obvious?
Aye.
Yes. If we had a shred of moral fiber, it would at least flit about in whatever direction the winds blow it. But our "moral" code is largely a permanently transitional ethical code. And that is actually just fine with me; I think we're better off that way according to abstract theory. The challenge is to accept that there is a certain fluctuation about morality in order that we can objectively identify it, test its apparent boundaries at least in open discourse, and actually try to find our cultural footing in this tangle of neuroses° we've spun ourselves.
I would also note that within that challenge seems to be a reckoning with Original Sin. The mythical, seemingly authoritative presumption that human beings should look at each other in potential of the worst possible expectations must answer for its age. As the world becomes more interdependent, we must find a way to overcome our underlying, perhaps instinctive, fear of other people. Our neighbors on the street, or around the world. That fear drives so many of our neuroses that we can, indeed, doom the entire species by it. And, to be certain, I don't expect that outcome. But—
—I don't think I'm stating anything unkind about a collective that insists on fighting with itself as well as many of our international neighbors. If truth is unkind, we must change the circumstances that truth describes. Because truth is truth. And there is no prevailing moral plank about which our culture is absolute. We assert our moral components in order to accommodate our desires, so there are inherently limits of application; we can exclude from our moral consideration whomever or whatever we want.
Doing so builds neurotic conflicts, though. And those conflicts are not easily resolved, especially as the paths neuroses travel remain hidden.
As Emir Ali Khan explained:
Our Western psychoanalytic outlook would agree in abstract theory. Whether or not we can apply the theory is an open question, but we do find hints toward the answer in the fact that we so resent such challenging scrutiny of our basic functional assumptions.
We don't really have a good explanation of the difference between one and the other, so people get angry.
____________________
Notes:
° tangle of neuroses — I would only add, for the purposes of clarification, that the question of the vast majority of the world's population is separate from the question of Americans insofar as each various culture entertains its own set of conflicts. The inflation to the vast majority of the world's population is at once obvious and inappropriate; that is, while the human condition demands a dialectic of neurosis, the inflation of the rhetorical point about American moral fiber into a question of the world's population is post hoc, and thus does not necessarily fall under the rubric of the preceding paragraph, nor any that follow; I am examining the American condition, and refusing any potential dodge into the broader consideration without some reasonable consideration of how the thesis might change according to any given cultural paradigm.
Quadraphonics said:
There is no connection, then, between the asserted moral evil of a woman's breasts (as, say, opposed to a man's chest) and misogyny?
Or are you saying the misogynistic aspects of various international cultures associated with Islam are not among common Western complaints about those portions of the world?
The very fact that the one is acceptable while the other isn't. Acceptability and obscenity are subjective, and culturally defined. I would note, for instance, that many of our European and Australian neighbors, at least, scratch their heads over the American neurosis about potentially sexual content compared to our market-driven permissiveness toward astounding violence and human destruction.
Question: Why censor the images if there is no context of offense?
Subsequent question: What is the context of offense?
Any casual observation of the relevant tracks within the American public discourse should at least suggest a trend. A more detailed examination brings deeply seated neurotic conflicts about sexuality in our culture to the fore.
Enough people are willing to acknowledge some degree of these conflicts that the social standard finds potentially sexual content, such as the sight of a naked breast, offensive.
I remember laughing at the people on CNN and MSNBC for how gleefully they told us the following pictures reported to be a dead Qadafi might be too graphic for some, but they were important enough to show.
The ironic juxtaposition evolves when one considers that, in seeing both the living and dead Qadafi on television, we have been witness to a war crime.
And, yes, the idea that it is a man's genitals censored out of a picture of torture, because those genitals likewise fall into the category of what people are willing to acknowledge is somehow problematic according to our cultural neurotic conflicts, and are therefore offensive?
To the one, this is as prima facie as it gets. To the other, I think it stands up under scrutiny: the psychoanalytic meaning of American history is brilliantly insane. We make no sense. And that is how one makes sense of us. We get so much done, for good or ill, because we don't need anything to make any real, substantive sense. And so we become accustomed to it. But we cannot extinguish that flicker of doubt permanently, lest we become downright sociopathic. The result of this tension is found in the neurotic conflicts by which we make absolutely no sense.
When we repress our most basic desires, be they for sex or food or power or even basic order that we can take a breath and make sense of, those desires find alternate routes to gratification.
Some of these alternate routes are fairly straightforward, but they pertain to very specific repression. More often, the alternate routes hide from us. Depending on the arrangement of neuroses within an individual, the alternate manifestations might range between subconsciously containable, and therefore unnoticed despite being observable to nonsensical to dangerous, and all imaginable degrees between.
We have televised gladiator fights in the U.S. It's a huge business. And, yeah, there is something pretty primally cool about watching two trained thugs beat the hell out of each other. The bloodletting is on par with what professional wrestling tried to imitate. And sure, some of those guys used to slice themselves with razor blades for effect, but that only reinforces the point. It's not that violent movies, sports, video games, comic books, and all of that create violence in our culture, but that they reflect the station of violence in our culture.
That some of that violence contains gratuitous sexuality or even elaborate sexual violence is also telling.
Any bullet point phrasing—
But we're going to show you censored versions of the pictures, because her tits are more offensive to us than a murdered or mangled corpse.
—is open to some kind of objection, but please, man—
"Where is your support for the attribution of motive there?"
—you must be fucking with me on that question.
Considering the broader behavior of the American culture, which can to some degree be said to represent the results of behavioral averages, what is the most likely reason for blurring the breasts, if not the obvious?
Aye.
Yes. If we had a shred of moral fiber, it would at least flit about in whatever direction the winds blow it. But our "moral" code is largely a permanently transitional ethical code. And that is actually just fine with me; I think we're better off that way according to abstract theory. The challenge is to accept that there is a certain fluctuation about morality in order that we can objectively identify it, test its apparent boundaries at least in open discourse, and actually try to find our cultural footing in this tangle of neuroses° we've spun ourselves.
I would also note that within that challenge seems to be a reckoning with Original Sin. The mythical, seemingly authoritative presumption that human beings should look at each other in potential of the worst possible expectations must answer for its age. As the world becomes more interdependent, we must find a way to overcome our underlying, perhaps instinctive, fear of other people. Our neighbors on the street, or around the world. That fear drives so many of our neuroses that we can, indeed, doom the entire species by it. And, to be certain, I don't expect that outcome. But—
—I don't think I'm stating anything unkind about a collective that insists on fighting with itself as well as many of our international neighbors. If truth is unkind, we must change the circumstances that truth describes. Because truth is truth. And there is no prevailing moral plank about which our culture is absolute. We assert our moral components in order to accommodate our desires, so there are inherently limits of application; we can exclude from our moral consideration whomever or whatever we want.
Doing so builds neurotic conflicts, though. And those conflicts are not easily resolved, especially as the paths neuroses travel remain hidden.
As Emir Ali Khan explained:
The members of all communities, including nations and whole civilisations, are infused with the prevailing ideologies of those communities. These, in turn, create attitueds of mind which include certain capacities and equally positively exclude others.
The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.
Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.
The ideologies may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large. In this case they are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities.
Such challenge, description, or questioning, often the questioning of assumptions, is what frequently enables a culture or a number of people from that culture to think in ways that have been closed to most of their fellows.
Our Western psychoanalytic outlook would agree in abstract theory. Whether or not we can apply the theory is an open question, but we do find hints toward the answer in the fact that we so resent such challenging scrutiny of our basic functional assumptions.
We don't really have a good explanation of the difference between one and the other, so people get angry.
____________________
Notes:
° tangle of neuroses — I would only add, for the purposes of clarification, that the question of the vast majority of the world's population is separate from the question of Americans insofar as each various culture entertains its own set of conflicts. The inflation to the vast majority of the world's population is at once obvious and inappropriate; that is, while the human condition demands a dialectic of neurosis, the inflation of the rhetorical point about American moral fiber into a question of the world's population is post hoc, and thus does not necessarily fall under the rubric of the preceding paragraph, nor any that follow; I am examining the American condition, and refusing any potential dodge into the broader consideration without some reasonable consideration of how the thesis might change according to any given cultural paradigm.
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*tosses nutshells*
I imagine because that would be really unpleasant when perusing frozen foods...open freezer door...sudden attack of beachweenie...(Of course, that does not mean I go to supermarkets naked.
Again, I don't have a television.
It was important to show Gaddafi's summary (and pretty well earned) execution...but showing US war crimes isn't important enough to offend our sensibilities with?
I would actually think the fact that we're responsible for torture, in a systematic and ongoing way...should be a bit more important to show than the death of one man.
Except that showing that torture would be "letting down our side..."or some weird $hit...
Mmhmm, because a flaccid penis is so much more disturbing than a man writhing in terror and pain...
Our tax dollars at work.
:wallbang:
Ti, I think you just encapsulated why I feel so alienated in America...in a nutshell. One of the more predictable effects of my childhood is that I need for things to make sense. And they do not make sense here.
James Baldwin said something like "Americans, they are so...innocent," in one of his essays. He was being sarcastic. We put on blinders, we accept bald-faced lies from our government, we swallow simple explanations because it warms our childlike cockles. We don't know, we don't want to know.
Unless you're some sort of fancy-pants inteleckt-shul or sumpin'.
my this is so messed up, i wonder if she'll manage to escape somewhere before they slaughter her out in the streets, speaking of which, as per sam's point, the pics of the charred bodies of the CIA agents(or what's left of them), being burned and beaten then hanged in iraq weren't censored either..
so what the thread is saying is that the west condones censorship in the ME while it practices said censorship itself? cuz i couldn't follow correctly..
so what the thread is saying is that the west condones censorship in the ME while it practices said censorship itself? cuz i couldn't follow correctly..
Trouble is SAM those pictures are all pre the Soviet Invasion.
Why not show some pictures dated after that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan
I could hazard a guess.
Ummm, yeah.
Good luck with that "making sense" thing. I haven't been able to grasp hide nor hair of it in half a century in America. I really have naught else to add - Tiassa expresses things so much more eloquently than I - whether during heated debate or enthusiastic agreement.
In this case, I happen to agree.
Lord, kum ba yah...
No, I don't think I did.
But give it a shot Tiassa and try explaining what point I missed.
Simple, because TRUTH is still important?
Yeah Chimkin, but not YOU of course.
You're so much smarter that YOU wouldn't fall for the lies or swallow the simple explanations that all us Sheeple do.
Damn I wish I was as smart as YOU.
It's likely a lost cause. I just live in the open-air looneybin of the planet.
That does not make me think I'm superior, you know. It just makes me more strange and alienated and miserable. Doesn't change a gods' d@mned thing.
I'd rather be able to believe the dominant cultural narrative.Then I could comfily sit in front of a TV and munch junkfood and be frakking happy.Ignorance IS bliss!
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Really? (or, re: Gustav ....)
Seriously?
No, really, I owe you that courtesy: You really don't comprehend the problem?
The thing is, Arthur, that you can pretend you're stupid to your heart's content; just don't complain when people call you out for your idiocy.
But if you really want us to believe you are that delayed, dysfunctional, or otherwise handicapped, I really need you to state it explicitly.
Adoucette said:
Seriously?
No, really, I owe you that courtesy: You really don't comprehend the problem?
The thing is, Arthur, that you can pretend you're stupid to your heart's content; just don't complain when people call you out for your idiocy.
But if you really want us to believe you are that delayed, dysfunctional, or otherwise handicapped, I really need you to state it explicitly.
SAM:
I'm not sure what you're snidely trying to imply here.
You can explain to me why you think I'm on a "rampage" about these photos. I thought I'd made myself quite clear previously, but obviously you think I have some ulterior motive or something. So, instead of slinking around casting aspersions, say what you have to say openly.
People should be forced to view whatever imagery you think will be good for them.
Well, that's a change of tune from the sentiments you expressed when you started this thread.
It seems you're now agreeing that media sources have a right to "force" things on their readers. Or is it just you who has that special right?
Would you show your favorite Abu Graib torture photos to a 2 year old child? A 7 year old? A 15 year old?
Where do you draw the line. At what age should people be forced by you to see the images you want them to see, SAM?
Is it your opinion that everyone should be forced to view all images of graphic violence, or only particular ones that you condone?
Or must the images be selected to accord to some view of what you think is politically important, SAM?
I'm not sure what you're snidely trying to imply here.
You can explain to me why you think I'm on a "rampage" about these photos. I thought I'd made myself quite clear previously, but obviously you think I have some ulterior motive or something. So, instead of slinking around casting aspersions, say what you have to say openly.
People should be forced to view whatever imagery you think will be good for them.
Well, that's a change of tune from the sentiments you expressed when you started this thread.
It seems you're now agreeing that media sources have a right to "force" things on their readers. Or is it just you who has that special right?
Would you show your favorite Abu Graib torture photos to a 2 year old child? A 7 year old? A 15 year old?
Where do you draw the line. At what age should people be forced by you to see the images you want them to see, SAM?
Is it your opinion that everyone should be forced to view all images of graphic violence, or only particular ones that you condone?
Or must the images be selected to accord to some view of what you think is politically important, SAM?
Maybe you should quit reading motives into my words, yes? Obviously the pictures make a difference. Hence your linking of the pictures of starvation and napalm bombing followed by bland textual commentaries like "Pictures of people suffering, Click at your own risk"
Not at all. I am completely against censorship. Note that this thread is about a woman stripping naked to protest. And censorship of parts of her body by the news media.
No I think the media does not have the right to decide what the people should or should not see. Which is why pictures of Abu Ghraib were published in CNN [I mistakenly said that they were not, but when I checked, I found out that CNN did show them, because the people wanted to see them]
I think we can safely leave parental supervision to the parents. However, if it comes to that, would you subject a two year old to torture at Abu Ghraib? A 7 year old? A 15 year old? Were the children evacuated from Iraq before NATO went in?
I draw the line at the age where people are old enough to be subject to the stuff that goes on in the pictures. At what age should you warn children of sexual predators?
I think pictures like the ones I have shown should be viewed more, yes. Because we are complicit in those atrocities and grabbing the smelling salts or pandering to our delicate sensibilities is less important than acknowledging reality
I think awareness is important. Views like this: "To deny that naked images have a sexual impact is naive" reflect a strange reality where social conditioning caused by censorship becomes a reason for that censorship to be further imposed.