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Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep and makes it plainly obvious in his work. If you saw his 'art' on the wall of someone's house, you would immediately assume they're part of some villainous organization, or that they want to look like a villain.
Go look through his Artsy page: https://www.artsy.net/artist/cleon-peterson
It's pretty clear he hates the USA (Destroy America), Donald Trump (Stop the Virus, Useless Idiot and about 1/10th of his portfolio), racists (Practice Intolerance). There's not an apolitical bone in his body. I challenge anyone to tell me that they've looked through 4 or 5 pages of his work and believe he could be altright.
Say I made a painting of a long-nosed, weaselly, greasy, fat, lecherous bastard clutching onto coins being hung from a lamp-post by some stern-faced Teutonic workers - people would quite reasonably assume it was aimed against Jews and that I was a Nazi. I might protest that it was really about destroying the values of greed with hard work - that it was just timeless symbolism. Yet it's pretty obvious that it's not just about that. Images have meaning. Ideas have meaning.
If you make a bunch of paintings about brutish, Uruk-Hai looking blacks slaughtering whites, then people are going to make perfectly reasonable assumptions about the implied meaning, based on context and the clear slant of the artist.
Contra
From here it looks like you were either purposely trying to deceive people here, or are so stupid and incompetent that you cannot be bothered to spend ten seconds looking at an artist's body of work before trying to write intelligently about the topic. I don't want either of those to be the case so I'd really like to hear a good explanation for why you think this is acceptable behaviour in a conversation (not trying to backseat mod or anything, but if somebody did this to me in a real conversation I'd be seriously offended and want to stop talking to them).
"I don't want either of those to be the case" is not enough of a disclaimer for throwing a line like this. Please be less antagonistic even if you think someone is being disingenuous.
I don't understand why the great grandparent post of the chain did not already invite a moderator response. Do you consider referring to public figures as "(outgroup) creep[s]" to be within the rules, conducive to maintaining a good tone of debate here or at all inviting (outgroup) to participate, or do you think there are some extenuating circumstances here that justify it in this particular case? As childish as the impulse is, I'm really finding myself wishing I could go around referring to moderately respected figures on the other side as "rightist creeps" until I find out directly, but I presume that the only thing that would happen would be downvotes and outpourings of organic hostility that would make any modhat warnings on top of them superfluous in broadcasting how one is now okay around here but not the other.
Generally speaking, we'd prefer people not just throw insults, but public figures are more or less fair game as long as there is some substance to the post and not just ranting about how much you hate Trump or Biden or Cleon Petersen. But yes, if you were complaining about, say, right-wing media and called Matt Walsh a "fascist creep," you'd probably get downvoted, but you would not be modded for that alone.
Ugh. I don't think this is a good interpretation of the rules (and I think I explained in a parallel post why I think that). Allowing this sort of insult adds nothing to the discourse, raises the temperature and very likely turns away people in a way that reinforces any existing ideological slant as it simply allows dominant majorities to assert their dominance. Maybe this is wishful thinking on my part but I think we used to be much stricter about that sort of thing, which, yes, resulted in a constant low rumble of discontent -- but it's not like even CWR, which embodied the "we will not stifle your ability to express your righteous feelings" approach and predictably listed right until it capsized for it, didn't have the same amount of malcontents for whom even the little rules that were still enforced were too much.
On that matter, how would you feel about "Jewish creeps"? (I'm now noticing to my dismay that my phone's predictive keyboard app has already learned to suggest the second after the first thanks to this subthread.)
If you can persuade Zorba we should crack down on insulting public figures, we'll do that, but generally speaking, we've never modded someone just for being mean to celebrities and politicians. Only if their entire post is a screed about Person I Hate or general booing. Frankly, I am not willing to go through an election season trying to enforce "charity" towards all political candidates. "Trump is a big orange fat-ass!" is a pretty easy comment to mod because it's low effort and inflammatory for no good purpose, but IIRC you (or someone else) wanted me to mod someone for calling Kamala Harris a "weak candidate." Come on.
The rules against making derogatory generalizations about a broad group of people (which includes posters here) covers that.
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I would consider it bad, but not bad in a way that specifically infringes on the goals of this forum like the political group qualification does. Similarly, it surely would make a difference if someone were called a "Jewish creep" (and probably draw much more mod attention, as they still seem to be interested in keeping the forum from pushing away anyone outside of the "JQ right").
I don't think those are good either, but well. It's already been the case for quite a while that the more intellectual right wingers want to lower Trump's status so as to move on to a better strategy, explaining why organic opposition to anti-Trump posting is lower. Finally, the group identifier really is doing a lot of work. (Compare calling Epstein a "creep" to calling him a "Jewish creep".)
One is just denigrating the person; the other one is suggesting that the imputed negative qualities are related to, characteristic of or even a consequence of being a member of the group in question.
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