Just got an email from the editorial people Adbusters magazine about my post yesterday. The exchange is below. I will keep you updated if and when I hear back from them. As for the scoundrels who really are merchandising that poster, well, they should be chastised and forced to go away somewhere cold and unpleasant.

From: darren fleet

Message Body:
Hi Ted, this is Darren Fleet, senior editor here at Adbusters.

The email you received inviting you to purchase the Adbusters OWS poster did not come from Adbusters Media Foundation. Rather it came from the group calling itself the “Occupy Solidarity Network.” They run the occupywallst.org web site. Please do not confuse them with us, and also please correct your article accordingly.

Like you, we here at Adbusters were also shocked when we received the poster sales pitch from this group. We sent them the following message via email this morning:

“Priscilla, Justine, Micah,

Are you all seriously doing this? Selling the Adbusters OWS poster? Really? Do you understand how much this undermines the entire message of the movement? Think about all the people who put their asses on the line, risked jail and police brutality, gave their time, energy and reputations … and you’re selling the poster? You’re turning the movement into a parody of itself and proving all of the critics right.

Please stop selling this poster!

Kalle, Darren and all of us here at
Adbusters”

My reply:

Hi, that is good to hear. My apologies for the confusion and I will correct my blog entry.

The people selling the poster used exactly the same greetings that communiqués by Adbusters, and they seem to have used your mailing list as well, so naturally I thought it came from you guys. I’m really glad to hear that you guys aren’t trying to merchandise the Occupy Wall Street poster.

I would, however, also like to hear your take about asking for spec work from workers, namely the request for free writing about people’s experiences with psychiatric treatment and trauma. As you know, workers are under siege. Writers are workers. Workers should always be paid, especially if the people hiring them are drawing a salary.

It’s one thing if an operation is run completely by volunteers and its suppliers provide all of the material for free. Is that the case for Adbusters? I would be very surprised to hear that office space, telephones, printing, and so on are donated, but if that is the case I will happily correct myself on that as well. If you can pay for printers, you should pay for writers.

I look forward to hearing from them.

Very truly yours,
Ted

Updated at 1:48 EST Dec. 11, 2013:

I received the following reply from Darren:

Thanks Ted,

That specific group has poached our language and style a couple of times now, so the initial confusion is understandable. For us here at Adbusters, that OWS poster is sacred . . . it’s the one thing that nobody should ever sell. It belongs to everyone, not just one group, the Occupy Solidarity Network, who now claims to speak on behalf of the entire Occupy movement.

Regarding unpaid writers, we appreciate your concern and questions. Indeed, people are becoming more and more traumatized throughout the world. Financial capitalism is taking a heavy toll. Our intention is not to capitalize on anyone’s misgivings, but rather to give their suffering a voice. But sometimes that means accepting unpaid work. We run on a shoestring budget here at Adbusters. We’re a small not-for-profit organization with less than ten paid staff (that includes art, office, editorial and distribution worldwide), operating out of the basement of a house in Vancouver. We also have a dedicated core of volunteers, interns, subscribers, and the occasional benevolent donor, without whom we wouldn’t be able to operate at all.

When we can pay we do. Though for the specific call for submissions you received, the one for short incisive insights into mental breakdown and recovery, we did not create a budget. When it comes to this specific subject, often recognition, and the chance to at long last have your voice heard, is enough of a reward. Most of the people who send in their stories are not professional writers, they just want to get something off their chests. Also the call went out through our Culture Jammer network, folks who are long time friends of the magazine, and perhaps more inclined than others to volunteer a submission and to have their ideas be part of a larger collaboration. That said, you’re right, we should have been more sensitive and especially in reply to your initial query.

To which I replied:

Hi Darren,

I’ve blogged the correction and also pushed it out through the same social networks where the original post went out. (A pet peeve of mine is people who broadcast something mistaken and then correct it smaller and with less distribution.)

That Occupy Solidarity Network is contemptible. Anything I can do to help get the word out about those assholes, let me know.

I strongly urge you to reconsider your policy about unpaid writing. I understand and am aware of shoestring budgets, especially on the Left and especially in print publishing. However, popular opinion is now moving against, and away from, any kind of unpaid labor for writing, whether it be internships, or spec work, or writing subject to kill fees, or writing for exposure, etc. Work is work and work should be paid for.

Not being able to afford to pay writers is not an excuse. I would love to have an editorial assistant for marketing and other tasks in my studio, and I have been offered the opportunity to “hire” unpaid interns who would receive academic credit for their labor, but I have always turned them down because I can’t afford them. I hope to one day earn enough to hire an assistant at a living wage — ironically, I would be able to do so if magazines like yours were willing to hire more writers and cartoonists like me.

I can’t afford a new car so I don’t buy one. The same rules should govern writers — if you can’t afford writing, you can’t afford to put out a magazine.

Also, as I know you know, “non-profit” is merely a tax status. It is entirely legal for non-profits to pay high salaries to their staffers, and many of them do.

It is easy to do the right thing when times are good and cash flow is strong, but times like these require no less of us.

Sorry to be preachy; it’s something I feel really strongly about, and a lot of progressives agree with me.

Best,
Ted

 

My new smiley-face version of Obama is leaving me with a sick feeling in my stomach. I’ve never given into censorship before, and I wonder if I’m making a mistake, even though it does make Obama look ridiculous — which he deserves. So I’m turning to you, my readers, to help me decide what to do.

How Should Ted Rall Draw President Obama?
	Like before
	As a smiley face
	Using his usual style, but uglier
	Using his usual style, but more flattering
	Other
pollcode.com free polls

This essay by Plexico Gingrich (real name? I know not) about Liberal Puritans explains the motivations and tactics of the identitarian censors at Daily Kos incredibly well. It’s a long read, but well worth it. A sample:

If you’re a Puritan, you want lots of very clear, easy to follow rules so that you have a clear path to superiority. This also makes it very easy for you to characterize others as operating in breach of the rules, and therefore being morally inferior to you. You don’t need to concern yourself with complexities like whether that person does more to improve the lives of others than you do. If they break the rules, they are bad. You follow the rules so you are good.

So “thou shalt not be racist,” as applied by the Liberal Puritan, doesn’t have much connection to stuff like the suffering of people in the real world. It is a game of “I am not a racist. Now let’s go find/invent some people who are racists, so that we can brand them as our inferiors, demonstrating how good we are by comparison.”

The Liberal Puritans don’t care about changing the world. They don’t care about drone murders, or Gitmo, or homelessness or, for that matter, real racism in the world — in prison, in the workplace, etc. They’re into playing “gotcha” politics over PC verbiage in order to destroy down the left heretics who are able to convincingly argue that Obama and the Democrats are not what they pretend to be: left, liberal, progressive, good.

On Twitter yesterday morning I saw that people were trolling me over cartoons I did in the 1990s. Two decades ago! And they weren’t talking about the political topic of the cartoons. They were picking apart the language and accusing me of being insensitive. For example, I’ve been accused of homophobia because I used the word “fag” in a cartoon. Never mind that the character in the cartoon who says the word is a homophobe, and that the cartoon attacks homophobia. That’s how crazy these witchhunters are. They literally turn the point around 180 degrees. Incredibly, a lot of people are stupid enough to fall for it.

Check out, for example this thread at Daily Kos: “Ted Rall is a RACIST. Undeniable evidence (part1).” The evidence pretended in this thread, as well as its followup Racism has no place on the left: Ted Rall edition (part2), is anything but “undeniable.” In fact, by the author’s fourth installment I’ve figured out Daily Kos (part 4 lol), even the militant Obamabots are turning against him. Yet in numbers 1, 2 and 3, numerous long-time Kos commenters are shouting hallelujahs and praise.

Note how dissent is repeatedly stifled and crushed by the Liberal Puritans at Kos. Also note how disinterested they are by actual political policy. They want to mandate codes of behavior (by me and others; they don’t adhere to them themselves) about speaking respectfully, etc.

No doubt, they’re crazy motherfuckers — not everyone at Kos, but certainly most of the loudest commenters. And crazy motherfuckers be dangerous.

DNC blog Daily Kos continuing its rabid campaign to censor critics of Obama. Check out this latest of perhaps 12 posts there. There’s more crazy illogic and smears in there than you’ll see all year. (I love how the “sample” of cartoons includes two by the same cartoonist. Wonder if the Kossacks can tell?)

P.S. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if this anonymous slime bucket were a white guy with an axe to grind…a certain serial identity thief, perhaps?

Check out the pretzel logic and intellectual dishonesty behind the Daily Kos Obama dead-enders in this latest, the 10th or so assault against me, there.

The comments thread is instructive. Note that when reasonable people drive trucks through the holes in their logic, they are ignored and insulted.

Art: Frank Miller |  Poster: Peter Brett

As we’ve seen since last week, it’s not just the Right who wants to censor outspoken cartoonists like me — self-described “liberals” and militant pro-Obama dead-end Democrats want to crush dissent.

These fascists will do and say anything to shut down opposition to Dear Leader — especially from the left, who are trying to hold Dems to their promises to the people, because we expose their bankruptcy. They’ll lie about me and my work. They smear me as racist, even though I’ve been fighting racism my entire life — not because it’s true, but because it’s a great way to make people like me shut up.

But I’m not shutting up.

And if you think this ends in 2016 with the end of Obama’s presidency, think again. If Hillary Rodham Clinton runs, they’ll smear progressive commentators as “sexist” for pointing out that she is a tool of the money classes, an oppressor and a warmonger.

Fortunately, there is something you can do. You can support my work and that of other hard-hitting cartoonists and writers who are refusing to be cowed by the pseudo-Dems’ bullshit.

That’s the flip side of the Great Print Media Meltdown. The good side. I’m no longer at the mercy of one or two editors. Now my career lives or dies based on direct support from you, the people. Subscribe to the Ted Rall Subscription Service and get my work before anyone else. Donate. Buy my books.

It’s not just me. But this week and probably this year, I’m the one who will be on the ropes, pummeled by the Daily Kos censors.

Thanks for reading.

Alex_the_Tired here. Let’s see if the guest blogging thing is working.

Ted’s run into a little kerfuffle. I say “little kerfuffle” because I’m not the one being accused of being a racist sumbitch. What follows is me being just about as angry as I’m able to be on the printed page. I explain all that at the very end. So strap yourselves in.

Many of us have weighed in, and, earlier today, I was perusing the DK site, and I came across this turd. I reference it now because it, almost perfectly, ties in to something I was trying to express about three days ago.

Let me start with the title: “A short rant about the g*dd*mn cartoon, revisited”
That’s how it was typed at DK. “g*dd*mn”

One of the things I hated about the Harry Potter novels was how adults acted like scared little children quaking in their piss-soaked pants. What was the name for Voldemort? He had two: “You-Know-Who” and “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

Let me see if I have it right. You can freeze people in their tracks with a giant toothpick and some fake Latin, and you’re scared to actually NAME someone?

Seriously. I want you to think about that for a minute. I mean, literally, take 60 full seconds to contemplate how idiotically, superstitiously cowardly someone has to be, how fundamentally childish in nature a person must be to be afraid of actually using a name. Isn’t it simply a giant cop-out?

“Oh, but wait,” I hear someone’s adenoidal whine. “Maybe they don’t want to use the L-rd’s N-me in v-in.”

Cut. The. Crap. I have zero, nada, no patience for someone who (falsely) asserts to be an adult and clings to some delusional, partial set of religious fantasies. Unless you’re advocating slavery, selling your daughters as chattel, avoiding clothes made of two fibers, etc., knock off this fetish-sickness about how G-d is sacred. It’s embarrassing. It betrays a cowardly infantile mindset. You want to be a craven little tremblebucket? Fine. Stay out of the deep water then. The adults are talking; know your place. Don’t demand that I play by your lobotomized set of rules, don’t demand a seat at the table, and don’t insist that you be taken seriously.

Now, let’s move on to the body.

Pretty much the entire post consists of a faulty premise slathered heavily with the misdirection of “my pain.” Mixed in with it is the tried (and tired) and true gimmick of dehumanizing the other side:

“People lack the ability to understand. People can’t place themselves in others shoes. They just don’t know how… They lack the genes, or whatever it is that allows people to feel the pain of another. They don’t care. Caring means feeling, feeling means understanding, understanding means standing in someones shoes. It takes imagination.”

Who, exactly, zhenren, the fuck do you think you are? How DARE you assume that I lack empathy. How DARE you de-humanize me in such an arbitrary fashion.

“What is the deepest pain you’ve ever felt? Maybe some physical pain, some break up with a mate, the death of a loved one. Multiply it by a hundred, no, a thousand… torture, endless work, dying under a whip, a noose, the slave ships, the horrors, the domination, endless years of it. Fuck me, do I have to explain this? Fuck…”

Well, “Fuck…” me, zhenren, were you a slave? Then where, exactly, do you get off vomiting all this? You presume, you arrogant nothing, to equate a “break up with a mate” to being whipped and being chained in the hold of a slave ship? Good God Almighty. You are absolutely sickening in your trivialization of slavery. Just. Sickening.

“Dehumanizing a figure with the stature of Obama offends people.”

Stop talking for the whole human race. Obama has NO stature in my estimation. How can I say that? Simple: he’s blown up children. Dropped drone bombs on them that has turned them into bits of bloody hamburger. That’s indefensible. Period. Full stop. Either defend — and agree — with the murder of children or have the basic human decency to shut you flapping mouth.

“Can white people imagine what it means to millions of African Americans to have waited for eons for the moment, the goddamn miracle in white society that enslaved them, when a black person becomes the President? Can any non-black person conceive of this? Remember Jesse Jackson’s tears when Obama became the President?”

Eons? Look it up in the dictionary. One of the standards of oratory (and if you bothered to read the speeches of MLK or Malcolm X — those are two black dudes — you’d have known this) is that you do not exaggerate facts. Lincoln (who wasn’t black — at least as far as we know) started off with “Four score and seven years ago,” not “billions and billions.” As soon as you stray from fact, you open a gap in your credibility.

“It’s all about the people. Mutual aid. I’ve cried tonight.”

I’m sorry, zhenren, but if you cried, you need help. You need psychological counseling and perhaps a few prescriptions. I really, really mean that.

“I have learned that I wasn’t alone, that the depictions have caused far more hurt and gut wrenching pain than I had understood.”

Zhenren. You haven’t lived much of a life if a cartoon — and your flawed, childish, knee-jerk reaction to it — causes you wrenching pain. And that would be okay. But you’re encouraging others to come down to your hysterical level. The world has passed the point of having the luxury of falling out. (It’s a term used to describe an occurrence in some black church services; look it up.) We need people who don’t swoon. We need people who are tougher and more mature than you, Zhenren. People who are able to face the unsweetened reality and not flinch: the world is in terrible shape. We are heading toward the sixth major extinction event. The coastlines are going to disappear. Diseases that used to be treatable with antibiotics have developed resistance. Why? In no small part because, goodness me, some people are so emotionally delicate that they simply can’t cope with a cold and nagged their doctors for antibiotics, even though those pills wouldn’t work on viruses. And that’s the world you’re summoning. A world in which everyone overreacts, all the time. No one takes the long view, and everything goes straight to hell.

We have a partially black president who (off the top of my head):
Has gone after Edward Snowden for telling all of us how every goddamned thing we do online is being recorded.
Has let Chelsea Manning rot in prison for showing all of us how “our” troops laughed and joked about killing people who weren’t a threat.
Has left dozens and dozens of people — some of whom EVERYONE agrees are no threat — rot at Gitmo.
Shall I continue?

Obama isn’t Half-Black Jesus. Nor is he the anti-Christ. He’s a career politician, a constitutional lawyer who wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights because it allowed him to curry favor with the corporate power-elite. And if you, zhenren, are too damned stupid to realize that, well, as Peter, Paul and Mary put it: don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

And, of course, right toward the end of zhenren’s diawy, comes the whole “Oh, I’m a good, good person” bullshit: “Please understand I wrote the comment not to impugn or cast stones, but to express the deep anguish this issue has inflicted on many Daily Kos members, particularly members of the African American community.”

I am so very, very, very, very sick of people who wrap themselves in the cloak of “oh, I didn’t mean to smear this person with one of the worst possible slurs.” If you’re going to stick the knife in, z, have the decency to shove it in up to the hilt without making some coy, false apology. Look your victim in the eye before you take the cheap shot.

And, finally, zhenren’s “diary” ends with a photo of one of those idiotic, Benetton fashion model-quality children from The Hunger Games. The girl in question is holding up three fingers, in some sort of idiotic boy scout salute.

Zhenren. Really. You need to grow up. I don’t know if you’re a boy or a girl. If you’re a boy, try to force your testicles to drop. If you’re a girl, is it possible to achieve menarche as an act of will?

A girl with a bow and arrow in a movie? That’s not reality. To append it to a sewious gwown-up attempt at a diawy is just so wrong, in so many ways. It’s almost as bad as putting in a picture of unicorns crapping rainbows over Grimace (google it).

As I said, I’d explain my anger at the very end. Here it is:
Being called a racist is really about as bad as it gets. It’s like being called a pedophile. Once it’s hurled, it’s almost impossible to take it back. And in the infantile world of DK where everyone’s so busy crying tears of hot rage and sharing emotional catharsis 24/7, it’s pretty pointless trying to take it back, because most of the participants are already on to the next outrage.

I find it highly unsettling that this is, apparently, the current state of discourse in our political society. A bunch of people gathering for the electronic version of a circle jerk, egging each other on to line up to stone Ted Rall for drawing something like the 300th cartoon he’s done in a similar fashion. (Others have addressed this.) But none of these people (probably because they’re too busy doing Hunger Games cosplay) actually do the real work of evaluating Ted’s work as a whole.

I particularly find it disgusting because (when you aren’t iPhoning from slave-produced toys or drinking lattes at $5 a pop) the people making the complaints act like they’re the victim-class. Bull. Fucking. Shit.

Today on a TV screen, I saw a woman who works at McDonald’s who was on strike for a living wage. She looked like the tiredest person I’ve ever seen. Where the hell were you, zhenren? Lining up for a photo-op with Katniss Everdeen? Or were you too busy weeping bitter tears of hot anger (or whatever the hell nonsense you write to make yourself feel important) to actually help out the people who are getting reamed alive by the system Mr. Obama’s masters keep maintaining (and which he’s delighted to help out with)? Perhaps you were at WholeFoods buying organic bell peppers from New Zealand?

We don’t have the luxury of any more time for your stupidity zhenren. You need to start growing up. Right now. You and all your friends at DailyKos.

My latest cartoon for ANewDomain.net is about the revelation that the NSA is spying on Americans’ online sex habits and porn watching histories in order to exploit “vulnerabilities” so they can be blackmailed and/or discredited. Incredibly sleazy and highly reminiscent of the McCarthy era and the Nixon Dirty Tricks of the 1970s — and it’s all courtesy of the Obama Administration.