Everyone involved in something like this should be sacked immediately, but I have very little hope that voters are going to punish egregious misbehavior like this as long as it's "their" side doing it.
If you had told republican voters in 2016 that within the decade, there were going to be widespread searches/arrests by federal agents without warrant or trial, unapologetic image falsification by the White House and even killings of unarmed civilian protesters: They would have gone absolutely ballistic- rightfully so.
This is what America voted for.
Sadly, I disagree here. They would have qualified their reaction by asking who would be in power. If it was a GOP held white house, they'd probably rationalize it and say it's good.
Partisanship rot goes very deep on the republican side. Granted, the democrats suck, but the republicans fall in line every time without question.
I think one is true of the representatives - Democrat constituents generally fall in line without question; whereas I think the other is true of the people - Republican voters generally fall in line without question.
The rot is deep for the constituents on either side, however. There's a LOT of incentive to preserve party/ideological status quo regardless of where you land.
It’s repeating history. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So... with, for example
“On May 5, 1920, Lenin gave a famous speech to a crowd of Soviet troops in Sverdlov Square, Moscow. In the foreground were Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev. The photo was later altered and both were removed by censors.”
Any lawyers in the USA getting off their assess to fight stuff like this? (Sorry if you are). There's the Good Law Project in the UK that takes up causes.
This is kind of like the difference between not polluting water and hoping that people will use filters.
I recall, however, and this may be apocryphal, that one woman went to the stand screaming and crying and begging for mercy. This humanized her. The crowds, soured to their revelry, went home.
I am curious if her pleas were heard because those people were better than we are today, or because social media amplifies our cruelty beyond even that of our darkest modern histories.
But this is all irrelevant to the article at hand
I don’t think it is. The White House describes the image as a meme because it’s designed to go viral. It’s made for the algorithms to boost to specific audiences.
... I don't think there was much "humanizing" going on at all.
The fact that the Bourgeois of France were growing in real power, but completely unrepresented in the formal political systems in France, was one of the major pressure points that caused the entire system to explode into Revolutionary violence.
I think you're right to point out the irony that revolutionary violence mostly affected the common man, and not the aristocracy, but the "enemies of the revolution" were nobles, clergy, and their sympathizers (perceived or otherwise), not "the bourgeoisie".
Proletarian revolutions against the Bourgeois don't really happen until there IS an urban proletariat in the first place- in pre-industrial 1789, the bourgeois and the sans-culottes were grouped together socially in the "Third Estate".
The Whitehouse thinks digitally altering photos of people it arrests is a "meme"?
That's just as perverted an understanding of a "meme" as their understanding of "law". Namely: the law protects but does but bind the in-group, and binds but does not protect those in the out-group. Thus the January 6 insurrectionists get pardons, and the killer of Renee Good has the automatic internal investigation cancelled.
"Meme" my ass.
It’s made to go viral. They’re signaling intent. This is where algorithmic, ad-fueled social media leads a republic.
Now we come to graphic design. It used to be only smart people knew how to use photoshop to manipulate images, but now we have given any idiot the power to manipulate images with AI and this is where we are.
Don’t think anyone would care if they photoshopped something ugly or inconvenient out of a picture.
This is signally more “look we’re traumatising people” which means they think there is an audience that wants to see that. Dark AF
I would love to be able to take photos that our government posts at face value.
I find any defense of this kind of wild. These are the people in power? Even if it is a joke is this how we want the powerful treating us?
But today, we know this administration will openly lie, and double down in the face of any refutable proof. Literally since DAY ONE they tried to push a crowd size narrative that we all saw in real time was a lie.
In fact, his rise to power in the Republican Party was primarily due to his ability to demean his opponents. He’s an insult comic, and enough people were fed up that they wanted this to happen.
RugnirViking•1h ago