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God Bless America
Joseph Biden is now our President. May God continue to bless this great country and keep all of us safe. Were we to descend into depression, we would not be Americans. Faith is a belief in things unseen. Let us have faith in the depth and breadth of the decency of our fellow Americans. To believe that these next four years will be the end of the United States sells us short. We have faced worse before. No fight is ever truly lost because no fight is ever truly won.
Smile. Be not afraid. Draw inspiration from our glorious history. Onwards.
Published in General
Yeah, My money’s on dumbass Max stating He pressed the wrong button, like that last post that got the comments closed in revord time.
He wrote a post during the Capitol Riot that was pretty unhinged, and then the whole thing was deleted. I commented on it. I couldn’t tell if he deleted it or someone else took it down.
Well, that’s not right.
Hug! Don’t get yerself banned, buddy!
I’m with VC on this one. The cheerleaders themselves weren’t creepy. What was creepy was the leering middle-aged dude hanging out on Ricochet with terabytes worth of photos of 18-year-olds in his media library.
Shoot. I need cooler friends.
Plus China is making sure that many of the businesses now floundering due to COVID restrictions are bought up by the Chinese. This is happening across the globe.
Farmland across America is now in the hands of the Chinese.
Meanwhile their economy is growing exponentially, while ours is tanking,especially as far as the restaurant/hospitality sector, and mom and pop businesses.
One of ricochet’s members has a scantily clad or provocatively clad woman as his avatar. I always enjoyed that – knowing up front that this place is not a bunch of stuff shirts.
So exactly what was Ms Berry’s crime in needing to be removed?
So you would like to see a man in a swim suit?
Members post pictures of nude dogs and cats all the time. Go figure.
No, Jack. Modesty is a value that many of us hold. There was absolutely nothing modest about the Berry photo. You used the photo to draw people in. The only reason I’ve read this post is because the photo was replaced.
She is an American, but do you know she is a fine American? Is everyone who is an American “fine”? My critique has nothing at all to do with her being black–that’s a straw man. She would be just as beautiful if clothed more modestly.
I don’t think they were promoted to the Main Feed either, and I didn’t find them amusing.
No.
To me, there is a big difference between movies that are for entertainment. You can depict women just about any way you wish. And the format allows for it, because beautiful women in bathing suits often appear in movies and TV shows.
Ricochet is supposed to be for people serious about politics, although we can have fun and be funny. I think your post was supposed to be serious. Do you expect that people bought in to your “fine American” dressed in a bikini as a serious example of your ideas? Finally, and I’m not going to impose my own beliefs on the rest of you, but for me, more modest dress would represent the class act that Ricochet is supposed to be. If you want to stay on the Member Feed, do whatever. But if you’re going to the Main Feed, try to show a little discretion. She didn’t have to be in a burqa, but something in between would have been nice.
Finally, some of us from religious backgrounds aren’t fond of seeing women barely dressed publicly. They clearly do it to get your attention–the guys like it because it has sexual connotations (and don’t tell me that’s not true). Yes, I know some women are cool and find the photo just fine. Some of us don’t. Call me a prude. I don’t care.
I think you need more pictures of robots.
People would have had the same reaction if it had been a white woman in a bikini. Let’s stop pretending this has a thing to do with race. And yes, Professor Mike LaRoche got away with posting pictures of cheerleaders and perhaps someone should have told him enough is enough. I haven’t done any research but I suspect there are web sites where men can share their pictures of cheerleaders or women in bikinis. Ricochet strives to be a web site for grown-ups.
Is that the one at Wright-Patterson AFB? That is on my bucket list.
Yup, and it’s a great all-day visit. Just about every aircraft the Air Force has ever flown.
Well, maybe.
I didn’t know if I should say who it was, though I’m not sure that was his real name anyway.
Jack, if you had connected Berry to your post, perhaps in a clever way, I’m sure it would have survived. As it stood, it was merely a gratuitous girly pic.
Folks,
Point of order: we did not take down the photo of Halle Berry because it was salacious or because she is Black. We took it down because it is clearly a copyrighted image (owned by MGM). 4 or 5 times a year, we get served with takedown notices for posting copyrighted images. The notices are a pain in the neck to deal with: they require many cycles of our time, and in some cases the time of our lawyer, and in a few instances, we have been required to make some sort of payment. So when we see an image that is clearly copyrighted on the Main Feed (we are admittedly less strict about it on the Member Feed for obvious reasons), we try to be proactive about removing it as it is much easier and cheaper to do that than get caught up in a takedown notice.
As for the racism charge that some of you are making, you’ll notice that we have taken the liberty of swapping out the stunning Rep. Rosa DeLauro and replaced it with a photo of the great Dr. Thomas Sowell (sadly, we could not find a photo of him in a bikini). We hope this demonstrates our commitment to equality and to posting photos that bear no relationship to the content of the post it is attached to.
Thank you for your time and for being a Ricochet member.
Thanks for clarifying, Scott. I still found the photo distasteful and would not have read the post as a result.
The written content of the post was not the problem. The photo of Ms. Berry had nothing to do with the written content. Your response to the first member that criticized the photo was a problem. The second photo you posted has nothing to do with your written content. I’ll leave that one alone as a criticism of the Moderators, a dog whistle if you like. The third photo is fine.
I removed the photo, but I did not edit the text of the post. Promotion to the Main Feed is a decision made by editors. As far as posts disappearing it usually happens because the author reverts it to a draft, and for whatever reason does not hit the update button. As a Moderator I can see drafts that have not been published, but I don’t hit the update button because the author must make that choice. I also do not examine drafts on a random basis. If a reader asks what happened to a post that disappears I’ll look for that one post.
It’s not a choice I would have made either, but we try to respect the choice of the author whenever possible. That includes the decision to post a photo that has nothing to do with the content of the post.
Chopped liver.
Yes it is.
Good to know. Much thanks.
Susan, I happen to believe that every American is my fellow American. And in the absence of any stated hatred of our founding principles, I assume them to be fine Americans. Do you know that Thomas Sowell is a fine American? I suspect you presume him to be so. As do I. But neither of us know his heart.
As for the nature of the photo, an image can express a multitude of ideas and evoke various emotions which cannot be predicted or defined as every viewer is different. I can mentally picture smartly attired young boys and little girls in Sunday dresses playing on a freshly cut lawn while dad mans the barbecue and mom brings out a tray of deviled eggs to place upon the picnic table. That vignette is America to me. If I had a photo of it, I might have posted it.
Halle Berry, like the Varga girl paintings that adorned the noses of the bombers and fighters in WWII in which our brave boys set out, many never to return, is, to me, a beautiful image that captures the freedom, the audacious zest for life and the liberating joie de vivre of the American experiment.
The beach boys painted an image of America in vocal harmonies when they sang “I been all around this great big world/And I’ve seen all kind of girls/Yeah, but I couldn’t wait to get back in the states/Back to the cutest girls in the world.” This is quintessential America. Even if you personally can’t stand their music because of their subject matter. You can travel to the far reaches of the earth and you are much more likely to see a poster of Farrah Fawcett than the Declaration of Independence. And I suspect the former does a better job of expressing in an instant why America is the greatest country on earth.
I take seriously your observation that Ms. Berry’s evident beauty functions to draw people to the post. If you are asserting that I used a photo of a pleasant looking young lady to attract interest to a product, then I plead guilty. Respectfully, the idea that attractive individuals are used to sell products having nothing to do with human beauty is not exactly news. Nor is it, to my knowledge, frowned upon. I’ve never heard anyone say they couldn’t watch a commercial because the spokes model was, well, a model.