Someone I knew liked a post on Facebook, and since it came across my feed I thought I'd go take a look. Here's what I saw:
That prompted me to ask a simple question: did Morgan Freeman really say that? Here's the exchange that ensued:
Why put Freeman's face on a quote if you're not trying to use Freeman's reputation to add weight to the quote? We all know that's why his picture is there. Hiding behind the "no quotation marks" defense is exceedingly weak.
You might imagine that later comments resorted to calling me names for daring to question this, and you'd be right.
BTW, I can find no evidence (admittedly from just a couple of web searches) that Freeman ever said what is attributed to him (even without quote marks) above.
3 comments:
Darren, I was discussing a similar issue with a friend from high school whom you've recently become acquainted with (You two have been introduced). He puts out 90%+ of lib-dem crap, but he says "I'm an independent..." But I have yet to see him put up anything critical to the current regime. And he says "I don't necessarily agree with it, I put it out to start conversation..." Please...I may be in intelligence but I'm not that dumb.
There's always this:
http://thelibertycaucus.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/hayek-meme.png
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design" ~ Hayek (with a picture of *Salma* Hayek.)
It's not so much the quote/not-quote uncertainty I have an issue with, but more that this is a misuse of the "internet meme" structure. You see a lot of memes use this picture + "quote" that everyone knows is not said by the person in the picture, but the context will still be related to that person. If this quote had something to do with Freeman, or some character he portrayed in some movie, I would see no problem with this, regardless whether he actually said it.
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