
Why is Rick Santorum Using a Picture of 4Chan Founder Moot on His Website? - gnarls_manson
http://betabeat.com/2012/11/why-is-former-presidential-candidate-rick-santorum-using-a-picture-of-4chan-founder-moot-on-his-website/
======
JonnieCache
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...](http://deterritorialsupportgroup.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/goatse-
as-industrial-sabotage/)

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

~~~
alanh
What a wonderful rabbit hole your link provides. Cheers.

~~~
astral303
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.

~~~
yuchi
Could you point some places where you find such acrobatics?

I found it pretty linear.

~~~
im3w1l
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

~~~
zachrose
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>

~~~
yuchi
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 :)

------
drewmck
Same reason this happened: [http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/on-
politics/2...](http://i.usatoday.net/communitymanager/_photos/on-
politics/2012/05/30/romney-typox-inset-community.jpg)

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.

~~~
mikegioia
That took me way too long to catch.

~~~
Falling3
Care to help me out? I'm not seeing it.

~~~
starnixgod
AMERCIA

~~~
pyre
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...

------
terhechte
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.

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

For the epic lulz, of course.

~~~
mynameishere
Doesn't seem epic enough to get fired over.

~~~
dasil003
Depends how much you value your job. The notoriety could arguably be a net
gain.

~~~
smsm42
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.

~~~
jordanb
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."

~~~
smsm42
Sure. "And we're just firing you because of bad economic situation". Plausible
deniability only works when it's plausible.

------
josh2600
Now I normally wouldn't upvote something like this on HackerNews, but that's
superbly ironic.

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javert
"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.

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
javert
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.

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

~~~
protomyth
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.

~~~
bcoates
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.

~~~
protomyth
"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.

------
JeremyMorgan
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?

~~~
DanBC
> Who's laughing now?

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

~~~
wilfra
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.

~~~
DanBC
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.

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jbooth
Santorum just cannot catch a break on the internet.

~~~
slantyyz
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.

~~~
mirkules
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moot_smiling_at_ROFLCon_II.jpg)

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

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MartinCron
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.

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praptak
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campaign_for_%22santorum%22_neologism)

------
fideloper
#include jokes.h

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

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

------
fnordfnordfnord
trolled softly.

------
algad
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??

------
patrickgzill
LOLWUT

