vendredi 20 novembre 2009

Why we love Cafe Press

My kitchen cabinet is full of mugs from Cafe Press. I have my Morning Sedition mug, my Cinemarati mug, and a bunch of others from long-gone gimmicks and web sites and other pop culture effluvia. The thing with Cafe Press is it makes it easy to sell swag. WTF Podcast listeners can even get a "POW! I just shit my pants!" coffee mug, which you have to listen to in order to get the reference, and I'm not sure that the good people at Just Coffee really want to be associated with this kind of tag line.

But there are some people out there who wanted to be associated with "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8" merchandise. If you don't know about this, Rachel talked about it the other night in a larger segment on the kind of incitement to violence coming from the right:




Well, it seems that enough folks were offended by the idea of Cafe Press helping to foment violence against Barack Obama to make Cafe Press rethink:

This morning we made the decision to remove all Psalms 109:8 designs from CafePress.

The public debate started with questioning if the design was simply intended to be criticism of the President or something much worse. The discourse was surprisingly civil online, given the heated nature of the topic. Given that, and the positions of groups like the ACLU and the Anti-Defamation League, we decided to let the dialogue play out publicly before making a final decision.

Last night we posted a poll on our blog, read through the emails we’ve received and weighed the nature of the calls we’ve received on the topic. In the process we also learned that many of the original designers of the Psalm 109:8 designs had already decided to remove them on their own.

General consensus has proven that the design does point to a broader interpretation of the Psalm and thus has been deemed inappropriate for sale at CafePress.

We try to create an atmosphere of self-expression. Many of the things we encounter are not black and white, but grey. When the dialogue is civil, we want to let the larger community work things out rather than making an uninformed ruling. The dialogue has played out and common sentiment has reached agreement – this merchandise is not appropriate.

Thank you all for your input.


So what IS Psalm 109:8?

Let his days be few;
and let another take his office


And in case you think it stops there, here's 109:9:

Let his children be fatherless,
and his wife a widow.


Nice. So while the media are in their frenzy to see Sarah Palin become the next President, they might stop to think about just who her frothing, ugly, idiotic minions are -- and whether their fantasies about literally fucking the president, instead of just figuratively doing so, are worth giving power to such people.

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