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

http://betabeat.com/2012/11/why-is-former-presidential-candidate-rick-santorum-using-a-picture-of-4chan-founder-moot-on-his-website/

by gnarls_manson • 14 years ago

233 53 14 years ago

betabeat.com

josh2600• 14 years ago

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

fideloper• 14 years ago

#include jokes.h

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

veb• 14 years ago

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

georgemcbay• 14 years ago

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

For the epic lulz, of course.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

Doesn't seem epic enough to get fired over.

dasil003• 14 years ago

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

jgw• 14 years ago

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

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

JeremyMorgan• 14 years ago

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?

DanBC2• 14 years ago

> Who's laughing now?

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

wilfra• 14 years ago

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.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

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.

alanh• 14 years ago

What a wonderful rabbit hole your link provides. Cheers.

astral303• 14 years ago

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.

yuchi3• 14 years ago

Thank you for sharing.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

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.

drewmck• 14 years ago

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.

mikegioia• 14 years ago

That took me way too long to catch.

Falling3• 14 years ago

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

jbooth• 14 years ago

Santorum just cannot catch a break on the internet.

slantyyz• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

terhechte• 14 years ago

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.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

LOLWUT

fnordfnordfnord2• 14 years ago

trolled softly.

javert2• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

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.

javert2• 14 years ago

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.

praptak• 14 years ago

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...

intropic• 14 years ago

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

protomyth2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

MartinCron• 14 years ago

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.

algad• 14 years ago

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??

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

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