Daily Kos removes anti-vax cartoon

28 thoughts on “Daily Kos removes anti-vax cartoon”

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2. With all the heat in the comment section, I think it would have been best left up. Now it’s just gone like it never happened.

   1. Yes. Now it is proof of the power of Big Pharma to silence dissenting voices.

   2. Yeah, this move does not scream “integrity” to me.

      If I were in charge, I’d have put up a message explaining what was deleted and why.

   3. exactly

   4. ‘Now it’s just gone like it never happened.’

      Hear that suckin’ sound? That’s the “memory hole” at work, son.

      Just wait till the cartoonist’s picture starts disappearing from old staff photographs.

3. I would like to take some credit for that, Jerry. I take that back. You should take all the credit: I sent Knight a link to your piece from yesterday. I’m sure it embarrassed him into doing the right thing.

   Also, there was an egregious typo in the third panel. I hope he didn’t take it down simply because of that.

4. Hopefully Daily Kos has a link to the retracted cartoon. Not that I would like to see it again, but it feels like censorship-the-other-way. It’s like some crappy science un-peer reviewed paper. It can still sit in an archive somewhere for critical thinkers to mock, if they choose. Further, not all bad ideas lead to more bad ideas. There is an appeal to honing one’s skills at assessing truth by making as many (relevant) observations as possible until a judgement mandates that something is just not reasonably justified, like maintaining that vaccinations are more bad than good.

5. Unfortunately, this will only confirm the antivaxers in their view that they’re the victims of “the new McCarthyism,” their views censored and quite unreasonably barred from the mainstream of scientific discourse . . . and all the usual science-denialist yadeyadeya.

   As Justin Zimmer says, it would have been better had it remained in place complete with the demolition in the Comments section.

   1. I agree!

   2. +1.

      It’s bad form to take it down for the reasons you say.

6. I would’ve preferred they left it up (comments and all), and then have some smart person comment on what was wrong with it.

7. Another win for Freeze Peach! I shall toast you with my “Male Tears” coffee cup.

   /snark

8. A bit more info from the Daily Kos would have been welcome. Did they simply remove it themselves or did the cartoonist realize he’d made a mistake?

   1. As I understand it, anyone who opens a Daily Kos account can post a diary. My guess is that the author removed his own diary. To say Kos published the article isn’t quite the case. What Daily Kos did was host the diary, which was then thoroughly criticized by other readers of the site.

      1. Correct.

         Daily Kos is a community site. There is not really a “they”. There is no editorial board, and while the site is owned by one person (Markos Molitsas, who says the site’s raison de etre is “to elect more and better Democrats”), his approach is strictly hands-off, leaving it to members to decide about what they’ll put up with, which is not very much. It is a very civil place for the most part, with zero tolerance for conspiracy theorists, bigots, right-wing trolls, religious zealots, and the like. (You can, however, post as many diaries about cats as you like, and these are fondly regarded.)

         Anyone can post a diary within 24hrs. of registering, so the community endures a tremendous amount of nutball stuff, which it does its best to remove as soon as it can.

         The reason the members do this, of course, is because someone will come along, read a diary that was posted an hour ago by a cretinous, racist, anti-vaxxer, for instance, and then characterize the site as a forum for cretinous, racist, anti-vaxxers.

         1. Thanks for the info Keith and Marta.

            To be honest though, it would ahve been easier for everyone here if the Daily Kos put that information on that notice on their site.

            1. Yes.

         2. I’m glad this incident brought out this explanation of Daily Kos. I had no idea it was anything at all like it is. It’s encouraging to learn of a self-policing online community that maintains the sort of standards you describe.

9. In the previous thread on this Marta explains why it was removed. Apparently, this is not uncommon.

10. ‘…now the cartoon is gone. It rests in peace and sings with the choir invisible: it is an ex-cartoon.’

    So, it is, perhaps, tripping the light fantastic on the banks of the fjords with pining budgies?

11. I think it’s a loss for free speech more than it is a loss for anti-vaxxers. At least the latter get to claim to be the martyrs.

12. I’m having problems. Why is the removal of an original(?) cartoon by Daily Kos because of protests not censorship and why is the University of Michigan cancelling their showing of ‘American Sniper’ because of protests (which did not in fact happen) censorship? Just asking.

    1. One is about viewpoints on a war, which always will be differing. The second is about taking on mainstream science without any evidence.

       1. So censoring anti-science views is ok?

13. via <bthe raw story:

    Knight has been drawing his black-and-white K Chronicles since 1993, and he’s plenty used to controversy. We wanted to know if DailyKos had pulled down the cartoon, and so we sent him a message.

    But Knight assured us that he himself made the decision to pull down the strip.

    “I took it down myself. A few comments crossed the line with me, so I took it down,” he told us in an email. We asked if by “crossing the line,” he meant that there had been personal threats. But he said, “I can take the personal threats … but once it goes beyond that — ”

    He didn’t provide further explanation, and the comments were taken down with the cartoon.

    professor ceiling cat gets a big hat tip and link in the article.

    1. also too, for those pining for the original daily kos page, the internet archive wayback machine managed to preserve it and the first 25 comments.

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