Why is Rick Santorum Using a Picture of 4Chan Founder Moot on His Website? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Rick Santorum Using a Picture of 4Chan Founder Moot on His Website?

betabeat.com

233 pointsgnarls_manson53 comments

Because, class war. (Obviously for "goatse" read "moot's face")

"In this scenario, the dialogic image must be reduced to a short-hand: Goatse, the in-joke, provides that. Within Goatse, the dialogic image is covert; unable to exercise any significant level of authorial control within the design process, the designer forces the critical dissonance by tapping into the in-joke. Rather than a critical dialogue between worker and employer being an open one, it has become a secretive conflict; rather than a critical design image being a conscious attempt to demystify design as a mediated process, it becomes an attempt to undermine and destroy the design process. Adopting the supposedly most efficient working process for capital has pushed design to eat itself. The dialogic image has become the weaponisation of ridicule; the designer has become a postfordist saboteur of the industrial process, and the ever-present spectre of sabotage as the unspoken clot of class-war clogs another artery of capital."

http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/go...

for the record I like this article more because it amuses me than because I agree with it. although it is a good point.

What a wonderful rabbit hole your link provides. Cheers.

I love a comment in that link: "This is the most wordy, pretentious way to say 'they do it for the lulz.'"

What a contrast in the writing style! Whereas I normally toil to be most concise, to pack the most semantic value into a sentence, this article dishes out a marathon of Olympic-strength verbal acrobatics.

Could you point some places where you find such acrobatics?

I found it pretty linear.

He refers to unrelated, poorly explained concepts: dialogic image, emancipatory media, criticality.

He has important hypothesis that he doesn't provide support for:

>it is a secretive conflict

>Goatse acts as a rejection of ... an ideology of post-fordist labour

See also: International Art English

"IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visual becomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes...experiencability."

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/international_art_english

I'm italian, so I can not feel it. Also latin-derived languages like italian passed a process where longer words (visuality vs visual) were considered the most elegant, if you say that that article uses such kind of deformation... well, it means that it looks like italian :)

Thank you for sharing.

Back in the old days when the web was young and goatse was still shocking, I famously predicted one evening after one too many beers that one day, goatse would be discussed in the same multiloquent, academic tones commonly reserved to describe the baroque period or neoclassicism.

I do believe I've just witnessed it.

Same reason this happened: http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/on-politics/2...

His website was designed by agency. The agency tasked a designer to create layout, including 'patriot' photos. The designer, perhaps someone who disagrees with Santorum's politics, decided to add a photo of Moot as their own personal jab.

That took me way too long to catch.

Care to help me out? I'm not seeing it.

Amercia != America

"America" is misspelled. Took me a while, too.

Are you guys joking? I find it hard to believe someone doesn't catch it instantly i.e. in less than a couple of milliseconds.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNStNUizxhE

To sum up the video: We're able to read the paragraph I posted because of the context of the words, the letters weren't so jumbled up, not all the words were jumbled up and the 4 letter words were easy to read.

Good points and it's important to be clear about that.

No.

AMERCIA

A BETTER ONE!

FCUK YEAH!

Well, you could read it as "America is going to the Latinos" therefore 'Americia' is the Latin-ification of "America" (really the US, as Central/South America are also 'America'). There is also the tinfoil hat interpretation:

  AmeriCIA... They're watching you...

I don't know how long that's already been there, but if it's been some time than that's quite telling. Because then it took a long time until a person who knows the face of Moot dared to step onto Santorum's website. Says a lot about the visitors of his website.

"Why does Rick Santorum have a pic of 4Chan's Moot on his website?"

For the epic lulz, of course.

Doesn't seem epic enough to get fired over.

Depends how much you value your job. The notoriety could arguably be a net gain.

Whatever the politics is, I would never hire a designer that would use my site as a platform for his jokes. It is a breach of trust. If you hate him, don't take the job. If you take the job, do it honestly.

The designer has plausible deniability though: "I didn't know who that guy was, I was just looking for photos of clean-cut Republican-looking white people."

Sure. "And we're just firing you because of bad economic situation". Plausible deniability only works when it's plausible.

Presumably because he uses the same PR firm as Osama bin Laden:

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.asp

Now I normally wouldn't upvote something like this on HackerNews, but that's superbly ironic.

"It’s hard to believe that anyone working at such a well-established Republican media arm would be outwardly anti-Santorum."

That's a pretty ridiculous and insulting thing to say, betabeat. There are lots of Republicans who are not major proponents of violating womens' rights and other nasty socially conservative measures.

I don't think your reading that correctly. The important point is 'outwardly' and 'well-established Republican media arm'. Overall the Republicans have been vary good about staying on message and even if they don't support a candidate will vary rarely badmouth a fellow republican outside of primary's.

You're probably right about how the sentence should be read. Of course, under that logic, the incident at hand was not "outward," anyway. It was subtle. So, yeah... poor writing.

I'm not at all clear on why this is at the top on HN. This triviality is more appropriate for other forums.

As MartinCron pointed out, it is important to know the source of your images when farming out work. This article is a topical demonstration of that principal. It will cause some embarrassment. It is also a great way, in this soundbite culture, to dismiss a person without having to actually go through the motions of a debate. This same thing can happen to your startup. Imagine some designer not liking your business and slipping in a photo of a serial killer on your site. Or if you're running an amusement park and a photo of a child molester is on your site.

Given all the things that can happen with stock photos, I believe folks should probably hire a photographer or get the photos from staff that swears they took them themselves. Get some releases signed if people are in the photos and be done with it.

Why? It's one thing if it can be framed as something you intentionally did, but as long as it's deniable, there's lots of folks for whom there's no such thing as bad publicity. As a politician trying to stay in the limelight Santorum qualifies.

"As long as its deniable" "no such thing as bad publicity"

Neither of those are actually true in politics. Any slip, any misstatement, any gaffe can be used multiple times in short soundbites. Bad publicity sinks campaigns and denials are not often heard. If you aren't well liked by the press expect the incident on page 1 and explanation to be buried in the home and garden section. Heck, look at all the total BS we have heard about birth certificates and Mormonism. People catch the soundbite and believe this crap.

Maybe they knew 4chan, Reddit and the rest of the internet would start linking to his site once they found it.

Who's laughing now?

> Who's laughing now?

Whoever charges them for the bandwidth used to serve pages to people who have no intention of voting Santorum?

Santorum has said it is his hope this election cycle would push his websites above the frothy mix in search engine rankings. This would seem to be aiding that.

Until it gets out, and every website then posts links to his website, and to the frothy mix websites, thus boosting those and reinforcing the santorum frothy mix meme.

Santorum just cannot catch a break on the internet.

It would be even funnier if Moot and/or the original photographer sued Santorum because the site published a photo without his permission or a model release.

They already have permission -- I believe Wikipedia content is licensed under the CC Attribution license.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moot_smiling_at_ROFLCon_II...

On a related note, I didn't see any attributions.

The more serious lesson to take from this is that you should make it your job to know how your graphic designers are sourcing the images used in high-profile public-facing web sites. So often, the directive is just "get me happy old people" or "get me people who look patriotic".

This can also keep you out of hot water with copyright issues, where the production graphic person just does a Flickr search to find the pictures to use.

Maybe it is someone's followup on the campain for "santorum" neologism, which was a revenge for his gay bashing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neo...

#include jokes.h

But seriously. The world has no sense of humor anymore?

Yeah... I'm pretty the world does otherwise nobody would care about this. It's pretty funny.

trolled softly.

Why the fuck should I care about what is on Rick Santorum's web site??

And why the fuck should this be on Hacker News??

LOLWUT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com