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Comment by syrrim | Hacker News Reader

They filed a lawsuit claiming they didn't know about a single stray sheet of paper in one of the photos of the shoot, which looks entirely innocent on first inspection, but happens to be a court document for a famous child pornography suit. The existence of this document has been claimed by some observers (shoe, for one), to be the "smoking gun" proving that this is all satan worship rather than strange art. So it is perfectly reasonable for balenciaga to assert that they didn't know about this document, and a great deal hinges on this seemingly minor question.

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I suppose the other thing to consider is the (art book in the photos) by an author who regularly depicts children naked, dismembered, and covered in blood.

Please stop engineering doubt. It's absurd to pretend that there isn't a consistent theme of child abuse here.

Not a claim on OP, but in general for this conversation: I find it intriguing that the level of grace and benefit that is given to the people involved in this controversy seems to be at an all time high. I wonder if the same people extending this grace and benefit of the doubt would do so with those opposed to them politically.

The theme is child abuse... Except not in the way that you're thinking about it... It's speaking out against it by showing the extreme depiction of it in a controlled art manner.

That's an interesting take. What leads you to think that the artist is speaking out against child abuse, though? What do you we have to go on here that would allow us to assign that intention to them?

Art is meant to be beautiful, not to crush human spirit.

>Art is meant to be [. . .]

There are literally thousands of years of texts, debates, classes, hell, entire schools based around those first five words.

You simply cannot use them definitively. It's just not that simple.

Nah, I don't think this is the take generally.

There is art that crushes the human spirit. Art about war. Art about slavery. Art about personal trauma. I think if we only depicted pretty war, pretty slavery, pretty rape and genocide, that's pretty disgusting.

I can think of lots of art that are designed to, if not crush the humans spirit, at least call into question the goodness of it. See "Rhythm 0" by Marina Abramović or “Helena & El Pascador” Marco Evaristti are just two examples.

Yep, this insanity is only matched by the deference shown by e.g. the NYTimes to SBF. Compare how Apple is responding to Elon’s political-speech Jihad, vs. the complete lack of response to the child exploitation material that he has been purging from Twitter.

Wake up, you have been conditioned to accept a corrupt, misanthropic oligarchy.

> So it is perfectly reasonable for balenciaga to assert that they didn't know about this document

High fashion photoshoots are a multi layered production. Several people would have viewed these photos, edited, adjusted, filtered out bad shots, etc prior to this campaign being released. The fact that no one seemed to bat an eye at a judicial opinion including the words "child sexualization" seems concerning. No special knowledge is required.

Even after somebody told me it was there, I still had to look really damn hard to find it. I don't think your expectation that people reviewing the shoot noticed it is reasonable.

It seems this belongs to the class of thought which believes that the rich and powerful are literal Satan worshippers and they, for some reason, like to hint at this in public.

For the life of me, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around this particular obsession. The satanic panic sadly never went away, I guess.

It has its roots in old anti-semitic conspiracy theories, particularly beliefs about blood libel (that Jews would kill Christian children in diabolical rituals) and "Cultural Marxism" (a Nazi-born conspiracy theory that academia is filled with ranks of Jews conspiring to indoctrinate people into Marxist/Communist ideology, which feeds into general conspiracy theories about "the elites" plotting to change/take over the world in some nefarious way.)

Basically the modern version just has the serial numbers filed off and doesn't reference Jewish people directly, just "the elites" (note finance, entertainment and academia have long been considered "Jewish" domains for various reasons.) But if you did deeply enough, it's always there.

1. Worse than I thought, somehow. Yay. 2. I really shouldn’t be surprised at anti-Semitic roots, but here I am surprised yet again.

Nothing hinges on this question; nothing illegal was done. You're being trolled by both Balenciaga and the Twittersphere.

That photo [1] with said document looks real enough, what's there to "troll"?

Not sure about the satanic thing, as I'm an atheist myself, but to put that sort of document inside a photo-op that already looks fishy as hell is not ok, to put it mildly.

[1] https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/11/28/20/65014791-11478639...

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