{"id":32603,"date":"2015-09-04T02:00:38","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T06:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32603"},"modified":"2015-09-04T09:01:38","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T13:01:38","slug":"the-problem-of-moral-pornography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/09\/04\/the-problem-of-moral-pornography\/","title":{"rendered":"The problem of moral pornography"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the <em>Spectator<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.spectator.co.uk\/coffeehouse\/2015\/09\/sharing-a-photo-of-the-dead-syrian-child-isnt-compassionate-its-narcissistic\/\" target=\"_blank\">Brendan O&#8217;Neill<\/a> explains why sharing a photo of a dead Syrian child is a symptom of moral pornography:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Have you seen the dead Syrian child yet? Look at his lifeless body. His head buried in the sand. His sad, resigned posture after he and his family made the treacherous journey from Syria to Turkey only to wash up dead on a Turkish beach. Isn\u2019t this just the saddest photo you\u2019ve ever seen? And gross too? Quick, share it! Show it to your friends \u2014 on Twitter, Facebook \u2014 so that they will feel sad and grossed-out too. Gather round, everyone: stare at the dead Syrian child.<\/p>\n<p>We all know about the problem of sexual pornography on the internet. Now we need to talk about the problem of moral pornography. And nothing better illustrates it than the photo of Aylan, a three-year-old Syrian who drowned alongside his five-year-old brother Galip, his mother and others fleeing the hell of Syria.<\/p>\n<p>The global spreading of this snapshot \u2014 which appears on the front page of the <em>Independent<\/em> today and inside the <em>Guardian<\/em>, and is even callously being turned into a meme by sections of the weeping Twitterati \u2014 is justified as a way of raising awareness about the migrant crisis. Please. It\u2019s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Did the newspapers who put this kid on their front pages contact his remaining family members in Syria to seek their permission? Doesn\u2019t look like it. When it comes to producing moral porn for the right-on, it seems the normal rules of journalism \u2014 and civilisation \u2014 can be suspended. And he\u2019s only Syrian, right? It\u2019s not like his poor, war-battered next of kin will be looking at the internet. Except the <em>Guardian<\/em> has now discovered that he has family in Canada, so they will very likely see the photo. Oh well, no matter: crack on, publish it, marvel at the purity of your emotional response to it, and be sure to tell everyone what your emotional response was. \u2018I cried so hard\u2019 thousands of tweeters are saying. The operative word here being \u2018I\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Spectator, Brendan O&#8217;Neill explains why sharing a photo of a dead Syrian child is a symptom of moral pornography: Have you seen the dead Syrian child yet? Look at his lifeless body. His head buried in the sand. His sad, resigned posture after he and his family made the treacherous journey from Syria [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,370],"tags":[424,139,558,593,694,249],"class_list":["post-32603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-middle-east","tag-morality","tag-psychology","tag-refugees","tag-socialmedia","tag-syria","tag-turkey"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8tR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32603"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32618,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32603\/revisions\/32618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}