dlowan wrote: Hmm - I am unsure if you will discuss this with me Craven, however, I will discuss it with whomever wishes to answer.....
I ended up being uncivil a few times so I might as well discuss this.
Quote:Is your concern with ANY images of suffering through conflict?
Not at all. My objection is for their use as political rhetoric. My objection is the
appeal to pity fallacy. The images alone do not constitute this fallacy.
I object to the recent use of gore in lieu of actually supporting positions, debate by way of bodyparts is what I object to.
"I meet you two severed limbs and raise you one dead child"
Quote:As you point out, my beliefs/prejudices/inclinations make me less concerned re appeals to pacifism via pictures of awful suffering less distasteful EMOTIONALLY.
Indeed, people say this is "bringing reality" and the problem is that the very notion of what is reality is what is often in dispute.
Instead of making the case for their reality people have been arguing by way of body parts.
Quote:I do have a sense that we ought to be aware of the realities of situations - where we are involved, especially.
I have no objection to "reality", and I have no objection to gore. I have an objection of the use of gore to forward an opinion as this is a cheap tactic and a fallacy in debate.
Quote:"Appeal to pity" - this implies, I take it, appeal to pacifism through pity?
No, an appeal to pity can be used even for an appeal to militarism.
Quote:I think I originally got involved in this shemozzle through feeling that Al Jazeera was entitled to publish photos of the results of the siege - though I was worried about the whole voyeurism thing.
In my opinion someone has the
obligation to publish those photos. This is not about the justification of documenting the tragedies, this is about the fallacy and level of debate.
I'll give another example. On rotten.com (a very very gory site) they have a section on Jenin.
The captions talk of the dispute of whether or not the Israelis committed a massacre in Jenin.
The captions then point you to the images of a few very gruesome bodies and say that you should decide. The implication is that upon the basis of a few very mutilated bodies one should make that decision.
Now whether or not Jenin qualifies as a massacre, the way those photos were captioned were a fallacious appeal to pity. The degree to which several bodies can evoke emotion says nothing about whether or not it was a massacre. Massacres are not decided based on how ugly a corpse is. If that were so a series of "clean" killings would not be a massacre.
Quote: I was not arguing that on the basis of seeing visuals of the carnage as an argument for pacifism - just, I suppose, as presenting a sort of counter to the flatten 'em way of thinking and to what I see as a generally hygienized way of presenting the war in many of the major news sources in the west.
Personally, I prefer the "hygienized" media. I don't see it as "hygienized" but rather more professional.
There is a tabloid nature to the use of "shock jock" media and in my opinion the use of such "news" is very hard to do in a balanced manner.
This is usually a populist appeal. Each side will indulge in a little of the appeal to pity. We, for example, had media outlets using the mutilated Americans.
Whether or not these images should be published is not something I argued about. What I did argue about is the facile nature of emotional whoredom and the fallacy of using it in the manner it has been used here on A2K.
