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OK, the Doe Friendship is an awesome name! And I love how his greeting is crafted to meet Dina with her style. Seriously, how much growth did Joe experience during the skip?
Joe was never the monster he’s made out to be in the comments, sometimes. He was just unthinking. Pieces of this have been there as far back as the first year. I think having the list outed and talking to Joyce about it made him start to re-evaluate a lot of things.
Let’s not overlook Joe’s character arc in favor of thinking the commentariat was just overreacting. It’s not like he didn’t have plenty of defenders even when he was at his worst either.
I thing the revealing part in your comment, is that either he would need, or someone would think he needs, ‘defenders’ at all.
not his behaviours, HIM.
as in “Joe” needing defenders. Joe did something that people don’t like, therefore he is forever ‘surprising’ when he does something reasonably intelligent or even sensitive, right?? because obviously you can only be a certain way and frozen in time forever on your worst action, right?? I mean, if you go back to that storyline and wander through the comments, that’s the majority view. The entirety of the character is the ‘do list’.
The “defenders” I meant weren’t saying “Yeah, Joe’s got some problems, but he’s also got some good points.” They were straight up dismissing his problems. Especially before the list was revealed to everyone, but even after that arc.
He’s great on consent. He always takes no for an answer. The list isn’t a big deal, every rates people.
My opinion of him went up a lot when we found out he was just boasting about a lot of the sex – particularly about using alcohol to get threesomes. Of course, portraying yourself like that isn’t a good look, but it’s better than actually doing it.
Again, the whole point of the character arc is Joe overcoming actual real problems that he had. Ways that he was hurting people – as Joyce pointed out in their conversation after the donuts. Whitewashing that just kills his growth and his struggle.
Doesn’t mean he didn’t have good moments even before then, but they were often lost in the performative objectification he was trapped in.
Joe is surprisingly conscious of fashion. He dressed up specifically for his date with Joyce, so he knows what’s flattering for him. And otherwise he as has a fairly regular colour scheme – greens and purples – that even extends to his underwear. And his masculinity’s not so fragile that he doesn’t subscribe to Walky’s ‘only men have one pair of shoes’ policy.
Why can’t more conversations go like this in life. Really feels like Joe and Dina know how to cut out the bullshit pleasantries around each other. Very efficient conversation. Very good.
Not quite. I think Dina actually enjoys spending time with Sarah as long as that time is productive and not in the action of encouraging magic based beliefs.
This feels more like they’re not really friends and not trying to be but that doesn’t mean we can’t be civil and engage in polite and concise discussion when social cues obligate such.
On the other hand, Dina’s the one who keeps the conversation going in panel 4, which clearly wasn’t necessary; panel 3 took care of all the necessary social cues (equivalent to “Hi, how’s it going?” “Good, thanks, how about you?” “Good, thanks.”)
I knew a guy in college who was very Dina-like in mannerisms. He worked at the computer lab, and I was CS so I talked to him a lot.
We’d converse a lot like this. “Pleasant afternoon or evening, state your purpose for this encounter.” “I require no less than 2 hours access to one of your devices with Emacs installed upon it, please direct me to a suitable station.”
He’d do this with everyone. Could never tell if he was doing it for fun, or if he was just like that. Perfectly nice guy, once you got used to him.
I personally go back and forth on this. Very often I’d very much like to skip the obligatory social niceties and get to the point, but sometimes I like them, when I’m out of RAM and I don’t have much brain left it’s good to have an easy script to fall back on.
If you do this as a running bit IRL (with a sneaky smile that suggests that yes, you know it’s odd, but no, you’re not going to stop), most people adjust surprisingly quick.
…Okay, I wish more people could understand “performative eye-contact” and be equally cool with me just… not wanting to do it at some moments. Also, I want Joe’s shirt, ngl
Seriously, that is one wonderfully straightforward interaction.
Gotta say, seeing Dina just… exist, autistically, in a social circle that accepts her without question by now is one of my favorite things. The last Danny/Sal interactions were adorable, but the Dina/Becky strip after Ross’s death where Dina uses her own lack of outward expressions to give Becky permission not to do performative grief, because she knows Becky’s feeling a mess of things? Not just my favorite moment of theirs, but probably a contender for my favorite DoA strip ever.
Then again…I have social anxiety, but I don’t really recognise myself in Dina at all. Apart, perhaps, from the quite rare occasions when she gets overwhelmed, which may be anxiety but not necessarily.
I’m an autistic who recognizes myself in Dina so consistently and constantly I just consider it canon or all but. It’s the sensory things, it’s the considering eye contact performative and being read as ‘unexpressive’ and thus unemotional, it’s the specificity of her speech, it’s the special interest – hell, even things like joint hypermobility are associated with autism way more often than would be expected randomly.
(I’m much more split on Joyce, but that’s because Willis has discussed the ‘am I autistic or traumatized with obsessive behaviors as a result’ thing more than once, so it feels way more like diagnosing WILLIS than a fictional character who seems to have been written with some degree of conscious intent as autistic. Some Dina strips are based off Willis’s life, but she doesn’t feel quite as close a match to him as Joyce. But at the same time… yeah Joyce has a lot of behaviors that feel familiar to me in that specific way as well.)
The reflection of Willis is part of the reason why I pointed this out. As interesting as your train of thought may be, I speak from experience when I say that it’s much too easy to get wrapped up in a false diagnosis. Focusing too much on a label may lead us to infer behaviors that don’t exist. Even if Willis did have something along those lines, we may very well be looking at a combination of conditions, or even just a collection of “symptoms” like the ones you described with differing, weakly related causes.
The difference here is, Dina isn’t real, even if she’s based partially on certain aspects of her author’s real life. It’s 100% harmless and not remotely risky in any way to analyse her behaviors and character traits, see that they’re basically 1:1 with a lot of autistic people, and then consider her autistic based on that. It feels like you’re treating that identification and projection as something that could lead to some kind of roadblock or problem.
I just think it’s presumptuous and even a little offensive to throw around labels like this. Behaviors are one thing. But it’s really the behaviors and the nature of what drives them that determines any condition, if there’s any at all. Only a doctor can really diagnose them, and for good reason too.
Presumptuous, maybe. But when you’ve got two autistic people both telling you their lived experience aligns with a character whose portrayal leans heavily into neurodivergence tropes, it might be better to leave it be.
I don’t have much to add after Delicious Taffy’s excellent discussion, but yeah. Dina’s traits are written with what appears to be a conscious eye towards ‘this is, specifically, autism,’ as evidenced by the sheer number of distinct character traits that are stereotypically and recognizably autistic. Joyce is somewhat ambiguously neurodivergent (in that she’s definitely neurodivergent, starting with the fact that we know she has PTSD, but there’s also an ambiguity in some of her quirks – food not touching, for example – and which particular combination of brain chemistry would have produced them.) Dina, like Amber, didn’t map 1:1 to a particular diagnosis at comic’s start, but gradually her traits got more and more specifically autistic as autistic readers told Willis ‘hey we see ourselves in this character.’ That talk with Becky, or her talk with Joe here, are pretty dang ‘an autistic person who doesn’t feel the need to mask, because her friends are attuned to her.’ (Acknowledging the greeting as obligatory but the words themselves are immaterial, calling the eye contact performative, Becky’s line about how Dina feels things strongly and other people don’t know how to read her so they misinterpret her, they’re pretty specific autism feels.)
Amber’s not diagnosed with anything either, but by now the comic’s been so blatant that it’d be a bad faith argument to say she’s not plural. Dina is about that level of blatant to autistic readers, in specific ways that don’t seem to be drawn from Willis’s life (like inverting your hypermobile joints to imitate a special interest) but have unusually high correlations that aren’t widely talked about outside our overlapping communities. That suggests research. Hell, when Niantic partnered with Autism Speaks for an event, Willis did a whole Twitter thread about how Pokemon was created by an autistic man with a highly autistic fanbase and AS is our community’s supervillain, so it was a particularly offensive action to use Pokemon Go for this purpose. Autism Speaks puts so much money into generating good publicity from non-autistics, and has such overwhelmingly bad reception from us, that I don’t expect anyone to know that who hasn’t done specific research on the subject. Anyone looking at our community hubs for the first time will pick it up in about twenty minutes, anyone just Googling autism will get about nine hits from them above anything led by autistics. If a character shows very regular autistic traits, from an author who’s said she’s not diagnosed but acts in very autistic ways, they agree, and the author seems very likely to have actually researched things about the autistic community, I feel pretty comfortable saying ‘she’s autistic.’
He has said specifically that the kinds of social debilitating he had were most likely due to the way he was raised. He said that he didn’t want to label her like that specifically because it wasn’t his original intention with those traits in her, and because by doing so he may very well be misrepresenting those kinds of people.
Yeah, and then the very last bit of that post straight-out says “But yeah, Dina probably is Aspergery. Undiagnosed.”
It really seems like you’re intentionally leaving out the parts you don’t want to acknowledge. You’ve got multiple people saying they identify with the character, plus explicit (albeit out-of-comic) text on the subject, and you’re still treating it like some “well, we don’t have all the information here” hypothetical scenario in which Someone might get offended. Is it you? If it’s you getting offended by us referring to this fictional teenager as autistic, just say so. Otherwise, stop talking for and over the actual fucking autistic people telling you it’s fine.
Look, I just don’t want people using these psychological labels so casually; not just autism but psychological labels in general. For instance, as hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when “psychotic”, “sociopath”, and “psychopath” were very specific, distinct things. Now altogether, they mean no more than “undesirable”, because of a process that I think needs to stop (as much as people can realistically help themselves).
By the way “Aspergery” does not mean “aspergers”. It just means having traits that are common to aspergers and many other types of neurodivergence.
The way you write these replies comes off as incredibly condescending, whether you intend it or not. I’m well aware of how harmful it can be to use psych terms pejoratively and how easily they can be used to other people. Y’know, there’s a certain slur that starts with the letter R, which wasn’t always considered a slur and used to be downright clinical. It gets thrown at people like me pretty much constantly, along with just about anyone else on the spectrum. In fact, there’s an instance of that slur in this very comic, directed at the most ND-“coded” character. That’s an example of the concept you’re essentially NT-splaining to an ND person, and it’s also another parallel between Dina and the ND people who identify with her. In short, you don’t need to explain this very basic concept to me, because I understand it perfectly, having lived with it as the target for decades.
You’re applying it too broadly, in this instance. It will never be a problem for ND people to recognise ourselves in a fictional character, or to use our own terms in reference to those characters. If a neurotypical appropriates those terms and uses them pejoratively, then they are the problem and I agree they should stop that, but that’s not what’s happening here, so it’s irrelevant. Again, you’re talking over and for people who haven’t protested, and you need to knock it off, please.
If you didn’t mean to be condescending, you can internalize what I’m saying, apply it to future interactions, and we can leave it at that. If you did mean to, even as a schtick, you can just not respond at all, because nobody has ever accused me of being patient with that behavior and I’d rather not get banned from the only decent, welcoming online community I’ve ever been part of.
Sorry. I really didn’t mean to be condescending, and I especially didn’t mean to make you feel unwelcome. I have a psychology major friend who also views labels this way, so I’m used to thinking of them as terms of rigorous science.
The jargon treadmill is a tough thing to stop, ’tis built into how humans use language. Even how it is used in medicine has expanded, as more people are diagnosed who might not have been a generation ago.
But if you want to keep the usage clear, consider: it’s easier to convince people to do a different thing instead, rather than to not do a thing. I mean, you might ask people to say “Dina is on the spectrum, sure, but without a diagnosis it’s best not to call her a specific medical term.” You have provided a replacement word, not just taboo’d a useful term.
But at the same time, trying to police the language of people who do have the lived experience is maybe not the best use of anyone’s time. If the goal is to stop irresponsible use of terms, maybe the focus should be on people who don’t have context and knowledge to use it correctly, as opposed to folks who have the most direct context and knowledge possible which is what’s happening in this thread.
And even then we run the risk of insisting on people volunteering potentially sensitive information about themselves in order to validate themselves and their experiences. That’s a delicate balance to maintain, and I’m not saying that no attempt should be made, but what’s happened here has been no balance at all. The level of policing of people who understand the life experiences of autism is dismaying to me, and is all too familiar from a slightly different perspective.
Treating medical conditions that real people live with as rigorous science first has the effect of treating real people as secondary, which is what I see happening here.
Medicine is a science like any other, and like any other science, there needs to be room for honest doubt.
Saying that science doesn’t “put patients first” is really attacking a straw-man. Let’s face it, the human body is complicated, and even where the best evidence and techniques available can give us a prediction only slightly better than a blind guess, it’s thanks to rigorous science that patients still have a better chance of getting treated effectively today than they did 100 years ago. If that’s not treating people as primary, I don’t know what is.
But of course, the acknowledgement of uncertainty in something like medicine is socially unacceptable; acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution, with very impeding consequences. Doctors who acknowledge the full extent of their empirical uncertainty may expect to be replaced with those who can better gain the trust with patients with the lure of tentative certainty. Lowering the standard like that only means that modern day snake oil salespeople can use the exact same lure to scam patients who would have the best chances with medicine that’s been rigorously tested.
In addition to the points Devin made, the points Taffy made, and basically everything else: Fun fact! There’s a known and significant problem with autism, in particular, being extremely underdiagnosed in formal psychiatric settings due to biases by the psych professionals doing the diagnosing. In particular, it’s very common for AFAB people, people of color (especially BIPOC,) and adults who managed to fly under the radar until they were out of the 8-year-old-who-likes-trains stereotype range to be misdiagnosed. Sometimes AFAB autistics are told they can’t be autistic because only boys are. Frequently adult autistics struggle to find someone who’ll diagnose them because they’ve spent childhood brute-forcing coping mechanisms until they can mask, and sometimes the psychologist won’t believe adults can be autistic. Meltdowns and overload in black and brown kids are frequently misdiagnosed by white professionals as ‘behavior issues’ or more pathologized disorders (which is an issue in its own right.) I’m a white femme who was diagnosed at age 10 by the most reputable center in the region (and one of the best-known in the country,) and I STILL had a psychiatrist try to change my diagnosis and insist I couldn’t be autistic because I could talk and have some coping mechanisms as an adult.
Self-diagnosis is widely accepted by autistics as a whole because we recognize there are so many obstacles to diagnosis for basically anyone who’s not a white AMAB 10-year-old or younger with VERY stereotypical behaviors. Even if you can get diagnosed formally, discrimination against diagnosed autistics is a known issue (to name a topical example, doctors in the UK pushed DNRs on autistics and others with developmental and intellectual disabilities last year. That’s likely a factor in how two-thirds of UK COVID deaths were disabled people as of March. I’ve also heard quite a few stories about things like difficulty getting organ transplants due to ‘quality of life’ concerns that basically amount to ‘well they’re autistic, so,’ even pre-pandemic strain on the system.) Formal diagnosis can be a double-edged sword.
So one, you’re talking over autistic people, and two, you’re doing so on a subject that most of the community has a stance on, and that stance is VERY DIFFERENT from yours because of known medical gatekeeping issues.
Those are some very real problems with the medical system right now in regards to autism, and I am well aware of them. While self-diagnosis has noble intention (I respect you and your entire community for it), I really don’t think it should be treated as a permanent solution. But if it’s necessary for now to make sure autistic people are treated fairly, so be it, I guess.
Just want to make the comment that Dr. Asperger was looking for people who could still work with their divergence in Hitler’s concentration camps, so using his diagnosis has negative connotations to some on the spectrum as “He’s not so broken that he still can’t be useful.”
Yeah, I believe Willis’s comment was made before the full depth of his collaboration was publicly known and the autistic community started shifting away from the term as a whole (having previously been considered a ‘it’s removed from the DSM because it really is just autism presenting slightly differently, but some people who were previously diagnosed that way still use it’ by and large.)
Because for the record, it’s not Godwin’s Law, that is in fact a conversation our community’s been having in recent years. You’re being super condescending here, Wagstaff. Knock it off.
Sorry if I’ve been condescending; I didn’t mean to be unwelcome to those who want to see themselves in the characters here. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that you are throwing around labels irresponsibly. I’m just concerned that using to them may cause more problems then they solve if we’re . Even many therapists agree that it’s good practice to refrain from telling patients what they have unless it’s really necessary.
By the way, Godwin’s Law has been notoriously misconstrued in recent years, and its creator stated that he didn’t intend it to be a conversation ender as much as a conversation starter. I was using it in the former sense.
“I just think it’s presumptuous and even a little offensive to throw around labels like this.”
“Look, I just don’t want people using these psychological labels so casually…”
Assuming the absolute best here, you’re communicating your intent very poorly. At this point you’ve been told multiple times that you’ve been condescending and asked to knock it off, and you’ve said sorry but you haven’t stopped.
I think you should strongly considering just letting this one go, please.
So I’m definitely absolutely not trying to criticize this comic or David Willis in all by saying this, nor am I trying to be mean or dogpile you, just to make it clear–
But this is seriously the problem with media in general not saying autism (or ADD) out loud or making it explicitly canon. There are so many characters who seem pretty clearly autistic, but when autistic people point that out or want to identify with them everyone comes out of the woodwork to say you can’t because that character isn’t diagnosed and it hasn’t been said out loud.
On the one hand I get what you’re saying–I personally HATE that people armchair diagnose everyone on the internet. It drives me nuts that any time someone talks about someone being a jerk everyone says they’re narcissistic or have BPD.
I feel like this is different, though. Not just because of all the great points already made about getting an official diagnosis of autism being a fraught thing, but because…I don’t know. It feels like when people say “no you can’t say that character is autistic unless it’s explicitly stated!” It feels like you don’t want that character to be considered autistic because in doing so you’re denigrating that character somehow? When what you feel as an autistic person identifying with them is just about the opposite of that? It seems completely different to me to think a fictional character is autistic than to “diagnose” real people with personality disorders when you don’t know wtf you’re talking about. Actual autistic people recognizing it in others–I just don’t think it’s the same thing at all.
Thank you. You have done what evidently I have failed to do.
But it still begs the question. How do we know someone is autistic? Working with self-diagnosis may be the only solution for now, but even with good intentions it may suffer from at least a few of the same basic problems as armchair diagnosis in general. How we go about addressing these problems is a whole can of worms I’m not really gonna get into for now.
And by the way, Dina is really more the exception than the rule in the sense that Willis stated that she was designed to be like him when he was a kid. I guess you could say I wasn’t necessarily against preemptively diagnosing Dina as much as I was against preemptively diagnosing Willis. Looking back, I really didn’t make that very clear, and I’m sorry if that caused any confusion.
Given how you’ve composed yourself in general on this topic I think that’s a can you should maybe just not get into at all, certainly not without learning a bit more about either the actual experiences of the people involved. Or maybe figuring out how to better communicate your intent.
I also want to note that once you put an “if” after “I’m sorry”, it undercuts the apology greatly. Be sorry with conviction, don’t hedge. See more.
and as we all know, being wrongly diagnosed as autistic is actually the greatest possible crime so much that we have to relentlessly shout down everyone else on the goddamn internet just in case they further propagate this blight upon our civilization, jesus christ
I understand that my behavior regarding misuse of labels was overzealous, and I’m sorry.
At the same time, if one is willing to reject the defense of preventing perpetuation of social damage with those labels in favor of discouraging their use in ordinary conversation, regardless of the speaker’s intention, they also have to reject that same defense from people who want to do away with words like “primitive”, “black sheep” or “king”, under the premise that their usage alone fuels long term social damage, regardless of intention.
Not that I’ve completely made up my mind on the latter issue. And let it be known that I am NOT accusing anyone here of doing the things just described. Just something I noticed and wanted others to notice.
I definitely did not intend to make myself look more correct there. I just left it there as an interesting starting point for future intellectual discussions. I don’t think I need to get involved in all of them, just so you know.
I’m of two minds about making it explicit in the source material, because something like that is very easily done clumsily or flat-out badly. In this case I favor showing over telling, and addressing the problem you’ve described in fandom.
Because you’re absolutely right, there’s a huge difference between talking about a real person and a fictional character. The idea proposed that only a real doctor can say for sure when we’re talking about a fictional character is patently absurd. It’s also pretty absurd to say that people who have direct lived experience are incapable of reliably recognizing it in others.
As someone who’s not been formally diagnosed but has all the symptoms of what the DSM used to call Asperger’s, I agree with this very much. I can hear what people who are talking with me are saying just fine without ever having to look them in the eyes. I’m not blind, I just find eye contact uncomfortable.
I feel that I should warn you that staring at me for a length of time might be damaging to your eyes and possibly your brain as well. So best not bother.
This is based on documented camera breakage, and after all, the eye is a camera.
Wait wait wait wait wait! How could the ark crash into a volcano 4 million years ago when the earth was only created 6000 years ago? Stick to the facts, blasphemer!
Yeah, even as a kid who opened to random pages in the Bible and tried to make things all make literal sense I don’t remember trying very hard with the Ark.
I wonder if Joe’s grimacing because he doesn’t like the half-truth of not explaining the context of mentioning Noah’s Ark per Joyce’s request to keep up the she’s-still-a-Christian charade.
Or I’m just shipping* really hard.
*: Relationship for Joeyce, friendships for Joe and Joyce’s friends
I think he’s more just grimacing about the concept. He’s been pretty wince-y about evangelical teachings in the past, so I think he was never a particular brand of that kind of thing. It makes it kind of amusing to consider that his best friend is one of the more devout Christians on the cast, and his other most notable relationship is trying to emerge out of the vestiges of a more extreme version of it into a, I dunno, atheist moth.
Given Joe’s Jewish, he probably has a lot of experience recognizing the point where Biblical literalism meets creepy antisemitic premillennial dispensationalist bullshit about Israel needing to exist so that Revelations can happen.
I have very fond memories of my Cousin who got the dimensions of the Ark as their Bar Mitzvah passage and had to figure out how to talk about the moral lesson it taught him.
“Cubits are a really stupid form of measurement, because no two arms are the same length.”
I suppose that’s not a moral lesson…
Oh God, there have been evangelicals who’ve tried to make Noah’s Ark work on the grounds that people were bigger in those days, so the cubits were actually really long, haven’t there?
That really wouldn’t help. In fact, it would make things even worse. Even given the most common definition of a cubit, the Ark would have been bigger than the largest known wooden ship. It would almost certainly have been hopelessly unseaworthy even if it could have been built in the first place.
It’s kind of funny, I hadn’t really thought about it, but that both of them are kind of pulled into Amber’s inner circle by circumstance, though I don’t know if they have ever really interacted much as any consequence of that.
I teach religious school, and for the 4th Graders, I had some kids who were sick of all my art projects but super loved math, so I made them an optional math worksheet all about Noah’s ark, designed to lead them to the conclusion that it was super duper impossible to fit all these plants and animals in there.
(Unfortunately, they took too long converting units into cubits, so they didn’t quite get that far.)
Cubit=18″ or a foot and a half, what’s hard about that for 4th graders with a calculator?
Or did you make them figure it out on paper without calculators? I mean assuming a big rectangular prism it’s just a few quick multiplications and divisions to get to a volume that can’t possibly support or contain that many animals or provide a way to feed them or dispose of their wastes.
Becky says that!
She definitely didn’t mean that she and Dina were smooching though. Becky doesn’t do blink-and-you’ll-miss-it double-entendres. She is innocent of innuendo and is not suspect of subtext.
In fact I am. I’ve decided today I will celebrate by NOT drawing any DOA fanart hahahahaa
No but for real I’m going to have crab dinner with my mom. Crab is my favorite food in the whole world. I ALWAYS eat it on my birthday cuz it makes me happy.
In 8 days I intend to celebrate my birthday with non-fish based sweet cake. Possibly chocolate but my 6 year old and 3 year old may have other suggestions. (The 15 month old will basically communicate without words, yet very effectively “I would very much like cake too. I like cake! Please do not forget to give me cake! In fact, if you just put it where I can reach it I will do my utmost to transfer all cake to my mouth all by myself!”
Who is the one? The one we cheer? The one this party’s for?
It’s Yotomoe, in their (mumbles)th year, and we wish them many
many more. So happy, happy, happy birth day to You, Yotomoe!
Are people taught that things like Noah’s Ark were factual history, like as a widespread thing I mean in Evangelical and Fundie America?
Because as a Raised-Catholic forced to go to Sunday School intermitdly(My Father eventually converted from Baptist to Catholic and my Mother went through “phases” of getting deep into the Church and going every Sunday) and having gotten my Confirmation, we were **always** taught that things like Noah’s Arc were parables. Across Parishes this remained the same.
Not to be taken literally or at face value.
And to comment on the actual comic itself. . . this is a super cute interaction with Dina and Joe, and I don’t really remember many incidents of them interacting in the past. But this interaction is SUPER cute and also super relatable.
The one that comes to mind offhand was talking to an adult member of an otherwise-pretty-standard United Methodist Church when I was ten or so (wasn’t a member, but family friends were so we’d go to non-service events on occasion.) The chicken or egg question came up, I said egg because chickens evolved after dinosaurs, adult was… not rude in their response, but clearly not expecting the certainty of a 10-year-old dinosaur nerd. Something to the effect of ‘and what if you don’t believe in evolution?’ or ‘and how do you know they evolved?’ as I recall. To my knowledge it wasn’t the doctrine of the church as a whole, but some leave the kind of vague ‘well some people believe this’ where that happens.
It’s not a majority of Americans, or even a majority of American Protestants, but yes.
Google Ken Ham if you want to know more and/or have brains ooze out of your ears.
The worst part is that they have outsized political influence in our government. As in, the own roughly 50% of the power. A lot of the Trumpocalpyse was wrapped up and fed by them — they literally had (self-proclaimed) prophets naming him God’s anointed, depicting him as being (metaphorically or figuratively, it’s hard to tell where the line is) the old testament Cyrus, and declaring that the election must be fraudulent because God had already declared that Trump was the rightful winner of the election (because that’s how elections work).
That’s the same crowd (or at least a large subset) as the Genesis-is-literal evangelicals. Get people believing that a literal reading of the Bible is infallible, get them having blind faith in the preachers that explain the Bible to them, get those preachers almost owning one of our two major political parties, and get this crowd carrying on so crazy that they alienate themselves from everyone else, normalizing it so that everyone in their close circles believes exactly as they do…
I agree, it’s definitely very fine and not remotely terrifying that these absolutely unhinged freaks have so much power over this country. Very fine and good and cool, and I’m glad neither of us is being sarcastic about the matter.
I have no anxieties whatsoever about the fact that an active death cult has outsized political power in our government! The people who really want to bring about the End Days so the Rapture can happen inspire no terror, and I sure don’t want to scream whenever I think about it.
The Ark specifically, no. But I do remember being sat in front of a video explaining how the 6 days thing worked as fact. But doctrine like that didn’t really come up often enough to get much notice, in my church.
I found an article that linked to several polls on U.S. residents’ views on young-earth creationism, which is perhaps a useful proxy. It’s roughly a 50/50 split between those who believe God created humans and the planet 6-10 thousand years ago, and those who accept reality. Even a majority of believers in evolution and a 4+ bya Earth think God did it.
A not insignificant amount of fundamentalist sects believe the bible is 100% literal fact. And yes, they teach that to their children who tend to be home-schooled or in attendance at a “Christian school” who supports that doctrine. If you have brain cells left after looking up Ken Ham, use a couple of them to look up “Accelerated Christian Education” and the pure garbage they teach kids from K-12.
^^ what Clif said. but also, someone who makes it their personal mission to disabuse people of irrational beliefs. if i wrote a dictionary, i’d put it in there (cos why go to the trouble of writing a dictionary if you can’t just add in your own invented words) and put your picture in lieu of definition =P
Viewing this all zoomed in on mobile I thought Dina immediately said “do not tell me more,” and the explicit “this is not a question just a formal politeness” explicitness greatly amused me
I think what they meant was that when zoomed in on mobile Joe’s reply to her inquiry about his experience with Joyce was cut off and it looked like Dina immediately said “Do not tell me more” without waiting for a reply.
Joe and Dina talking to each other with such a friendly and polite understanding is a nice surprise. I’ve never thought of Joe as a scientific person before. Now I can really see it. Can’t wait to see what presentation he and Joyce have done.
I actually think that’s been a thing ever since Joe got that whole lecture from Joyce. That’s the big moment where he realized his actions have real consequences.
I wonder, Joe is wording it in a way which will feed into people’s “Joyce is a fundie” belief. Is he doing that jokingly or in order to cover up how Joyce is breaking down her programming.
We know nothing about his mom but his dad is a doctor so IQ wise he has to be pretty well off. Not to mention that Jews generally score very high on IQ tests. Joe’s issues are personal/emotional rather than intellectual.
so, i don’t know much about IQ measurement except that it was criticized for being turned into a proxy for racist and classist discrimination because of built-in assumptions in testing; is that not the case, or no longer? is it therefore a relevant metric to apply here?
[shrugs] Don’t know about negative side but to my knowledge both Jews and Asians, who are known to score higher than white people, are disproportionally more successful in life ((to the point where Harvard had to start discriminating against Asians, demanding higher scores from them, because they were taking more spots than they should based on their population percentage) so there is probably something to IQ.
It has been empirically proven that no IQ above 120 will help you any more in that regard when it comes to school and career success. Those things are much more dependent on things like mental health and organization skills.
I can even more or less debunk any notion that race has anything to do with IQ with a single phenomena. In the Flynn Effect. IQ scores increased in the United States and many other places at a rate that was so high it couldn’t have been down to genetics. It was determined that scores increased because of better education, nutrition and the like.
An IQ score, if I ever got one, would be nothing more to me than the educational/employment equivalent of a tea leaf on a cake to impress some misguided judge on a cooking show. Think along the lines of those businesses in Russia and Asia that brag about the IQ scores of their employees.
@milu, welcome back!!!! How was your time in the mountains?
hey Wagstaff! thanks!! it was really nice! i didn’t even realize until i woke up in the middle of the night how badly i’d missed the stars! yeah i live in a city and i hadn’t slept outdoors since last summer.
also, i was woken up by a bunch of horses lol. i had to leap up and grab all my stuff and run away to sit on some elevated rocks cos they were definitely trying to eat my backpack hahaha. i’m a bit scared of horses.
@milu, sounds wonderful. I too do enjoy gazing with awe and wonder at the cosmos.
Unfortunately, there was so much overcast the last few days where I live that I didn’t even get to see the moon. However, I did have fun in a few ways.
Just yesterday I made my own confectionary cannabis concoction which I call a Shmoe. It’s like a smore, but it’s made with buttered oat waffles instead of Graham crackers.
Also, regarding your question a few days ago, I was actually talking about gender orientation. Before you ask me, I am one who identifies with my mind, and mind knows no gender. I don’t really see myself as conforming to any gender in any culture within any time period. But anatomically, I guess you could call me a male.
ugh this is awkward because while i enjoy our sweet little chat and would love to just carry on right here i also, since writing the comment you’re responding to now, read what was going on in that other thread and mate. right now i’m not liking you very much i have to say? i don’t have the literacy or experience to agree or disagree with anyone in that discussion, but you really haven’t been mindful of people’s feelings. however valid your points may have been (or not—again, not my place to judge) on some lofty intellectual level, i don’t think the stakes were high enough to justify repeatedly pushing back against points made by people with strong feelings on the issue.
i mean, it’s got nothing to do with me, but it’s still left me feeling a bit queasy? and this is sort of a personal conversation, so it does feel relevant somehow, and so i think i’d rather time out for now. so, see you tomorrow or the day after that if you’re around? sorry, it’s just. yeah. it’s where i’m at rn. take care
honestly wtf are we doing having private conversations out here.
here’s a temporary email address (should be valid for a few hours)
earther.b3 at litermssb dot com
send me your email if you like and i’ll respond with mine and we can pick it up from there yeah?
i feel like this is a situation i have no pre-existing etiquette to deal with.
still. this feels wrong, and i’m sorry
@milu, I’m sorry about that. For good reason, science intends to cut out all personal feelings and biases so we can help people with the best evidence we have. That definitely does not mean that feelings and people are not to be respected at all, especially given how strongly people feel about their experiences like this.
At the same time, I do not subscribe to the belief that ideas and beliefs (distinct from people) deserve automatic respect. I give no special regard to my beliefs, or anyone else’s. Beliefs always stand or fall on their own merits.
If you need some time away to process all this, I totally respect that. At this point, I’m used to people not wanting to talk to me, at least for brief periods.
That is the case. The IQ test is not and was not even made to be seen as an intelligence test.
It tells you how well this person is picking up information and whether the teaching methods you are using are efficient. So when teachers were barely paying attention to black kids, they would score like 70-80. While white kids were getting 100+. Does this mean black kids are less intelligent? NO. It means they weren’t being taught effectively and weren’t being given enough help.
Asian countries like Japan meanwhile have cram schools, high expectations and social pressures to perform well in school. So they might score very high on an IQ test but the term ‘tiger mum’ literally exists because of very strict and demanding parenting methods of Asian cultures to achieve high academic performance. Which obviously creates other problems.
An IQ test literally means nothing of any real importance about anyone. Even if Joe’d dad did score high on an IQ test, there is no guarantee that such a thing would then reflect on Joe or his abilities as kids are never guaranteed to be reflections of their parents in these ways.
@Sam: thanks!
i’m also very wary of the concept of intelligence itself. not that i have anything deep to say about it or wish to deny that it’s a thing that can be studied, but i feel like it’s good to be skeptical of any claim regarding intelligence as it seems so charged with unexamined assumptions a lot of the time
Intelligence is not a single monolithic thing. Rather it is a large cluster of many different abilities. It is only crudely measured by IQ tests. It’s only when you try to create software that can act intelligently do you get any inkling of just how diverse a skill set it is.
Joe’s actually a pretty smart cookie when it comes to social and emotional awareness, his glaring toxic-masculinity-induced blindspots aside. He’s been helping Joyce through her family shit for months, ever since they started texting after the shooting, and it’s definitely helped him cultivate his horndog persona. He just didn’t really apply that social knowledge in healthy ways due to aforementioned toxic blind spots mixed with his own heaping helping of personal baggage regarding his parents’ divorce.
That’s a part of what makes their friendship so fascinating, even taking out the “now kiss” factor for me. For all of Joe’s insistence that getting emotionally attached is Asking To Be Hurt, his friendship with Joyce shows just the opposite, by revealing how considerate and understanding Joe can be when he does allow himself to care.
I have so many questions about eye-contact that I can never really ask of people without getting weird looks. So, instead, I mask and attempt to make eye contact at the usual intervals while my anxiety assures me I look like an idiot.
same !! and what’s funny is as i get more comfortable around people i tend to *decrease* the eye contact, since i’m letting my mask “slip” as i get more comfortable, and then people get confused and it’s like no i promise you, less eye contact means i like you cuz im letting myself be myself around you
Joe interacts with Dina really well! He meshes with Joyce’s friend group just fine. I would love to have an interaction with Joe like that. Or observe (another) one.
Not everyone wants to be viewed as sexy, especially to people they aren’t attractive to. (Besides, that last panel indicates Joe’s hitting on Ruth and therefore seeing her as available specifically because she’s single, and Dina is known to be in a relationship. And Joyce points out immediately after that strip that Joe’s doing the horndog thing there performatively.)
I would 300% prefer a genuine friendship where someone wasn’t trying to bang me to a superficial, performative hitting on that I didn’t want. Especially since we know Dina’s some stripe of asexual.
I’d say it’s more of a Joe problem than a problem for Dina. He can’t allow himself decent interactions with women unless, for one reason or another, he’s written off any potential sexual interest.
As someone well on to the spectrum (as diagnosed by two independent neuropsyc’s, re: earlier comments about the misuse of labels), although my mannerisms are not very similar to Dina’s, I still identify with the character. I interpreted Joe’s interaction as a sign of respect for Dina. No implication of friendship or of sexual rejection, just respect. Which I believe she knowingly reciprocated with her offer of later eye contact.
I also ack that I could be entirely oblivious and totally missed the entire point.
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Aww now they’re buds!
/unironically wanting Doe to become BFFs
OK, the Doe Friendship is an awesome name! And I love how his greeting is crafted to meet Dina with her style. Seriously, how much growth did Joe experience during the skip?
Probably one of my favorite panels in the entire comic
me too, I literally LOL’d
Joe was never the monster he’s made out to be in the comments, sometimes. He was just unthinking. Pieces of this have been there as far back as the first year. I think having the list outed and talking to Joyce about it made him start to re-evaluate a lot of things.
Agree. old joe was even funny at times and comment people often just overreacted alot to his antics.
I mean at times Joe can be a real prick
He’s not malicious and he usually means well, but he can still be a prick who deserves to get yelled at sometimes
Let’s not overlook Joe’s character arc in favor of thinking the commentariat was just overreacting. It’s not like he didn’t have plenty of defenders even when he was at his worst either.
I thing the revealing part in your comment, is that either he would need, or someone would think he needs, ‘defenders’ at all.
not his behaviours, HIM.
as in “Joe” needing defenders. Joe did something that people don’t like, therefore he is forever ‘surprising’ when he does something reasonably intelligent or even sensitive, right?? because obviously you can only be a certain way and frozen in time forever on your worst action, right?? I mean, if you go back to that storyline and wander through the comments, that’s the majority view. The entirety of the character is the ‘do list’.
The hell?
The “defenders” I meant weren’t saying “Yeah, Joe’s got some problems, but he’s also got some good points.” They were straight up dismissing his problems. Especially before the list was revealed to everyone, but even after that arc.
He’s great on consent. He always takes no for an answer. The list isn’t a big deal, every rates people.
My opinion of him went up a lot when we found out he was just boasting about a lot of the sex – particularly about using alcohol to get threesomes. Of course, portraying yourself like that isn’t a good look, but it’s better than actually doing it.
Again, the whole point of the character arc is Joe overcoming actual real problems that he had. Ways that he was hurting people – as Joyce pointed out in their conversation after the donuts. Whitewashing that just kills his growth and his struggle.
Doesn’t mean he didn’t have good moments even before then, but they were often lost in the performative objectification he was trapped in.
My spanish brain read Doe as “Dumbing of Age” because of pronunciation instead of “Dinna and Joe”
Joe’s surprisingly good at speaking Dina. No “Hompk!”s, but I guess he just isn’t fluent yet.
Wow this whole strip is oddly wholesome is so many different ways.
You only say that because there are no hostages or handcuffs involved.
There aren’t any hands on panel, so we don’t know what’s on them yet
There is one of Becky’s, but I’m suspicious at the absence of her other. I theorize that she handcuffed herself to her chair.
Very little about the Jason and Ruth thing is wholesome.
I know he’s in the process of shedding it, but man, dark jacket with that pink shirt over a red shirt is not a good combo.
He said himself he is “already trying to forget it.” Also, he did dress quickly cuz of needing to meet with Joyce re: biology.
Joe doesn’t seem like he would care that much, unless it cost him a chance at getting laid.
It’s actually a cunning plan. The idea is that it will cause fashion-conscious women to strip him, which will (theoretically) lead places.
Joe is surprisingly conscious of fashion. He dressed up specifically for his date with Joyce, so he knows what’s flattering for him. And otherwise he as has a fairly regular colour scheme – greens and purples – that even extends to his underwear. And his masculinity’s not so fragile that he doesn’t subscribe to Walky’s ‘only men have one pair of shoes’ policy.
Joe can be fashionable, but he did not really dress up for their date way back when. He wished he had when she arrived, though!
I did not realize Joe was mainly in villian coded colors until you mentioned green and purple.
Villains are required to wear color coded outfits to let you know they’re villains? Those who wear green and purple aren’t to be trusted?
Chromaphobia wears a black hat.
I don’t think that’s surprising at all for the character.
Why can’t more conversations go like this in life. Really feels like Joe and Dina know how to cut out the bullshit pleasantries around each other. Very efficient conversation. Very good.
It’s almost the same level of friendship she has with Sarah.
Not quite. I think Dina actually enjoys spending time with Sarah as long as that time is productive and not in the action of encouraging magic based beliefs.
This feels more like they’re not really friends and not trying to be but that doesn’t mean we can’t be civil and engage in polite and concise discussion when social cues obligate such.
On the other hand, Dina’s the one who keeps the conversation going in panel 4, which clearly wasn’t necessary; panel 3 took care of all the necessary social cues (equivalent to “Hi, how’s it going?” “Good, thanks, how about you?” “Good, thanks.”)
I knew a guy in college who was very Dina-like in mannerisms. He worked at the computer lab, and I was CS so I talked to him a lot.
We’d converse a lot like this. “Pleasant afternoon or evening, state your purpose for this encounter.” “I require no less than 2 hours access to one of your devices with Emacs installed upon it, please direct me to a suitable station.”
He’d do this with everyone. Could never tell if he was doing it for fun, or if he was just like that. Perfectly nice guy, once you got used to him.
“Please state the nature of the technical emergency.”
At least it sounds like his bedside manner was better than the Mark I EMH’s…
I personally go back and forth on this. Very often I’d very much like to skip the obligatory social niceties and get to the point, but sometimes I like them, when I’m out of RAM and I don’t have much brain left it’s good to have an easy script to fall back on.
If you do this as a running bit IRL (with a sneaky smile that suggests that yes, you know it’s odd, but no, you’re not going to stop), most people adjust surprisingly quick.
…Okay, I wish more people could understand “performative eye-contact” and be equally cool with me just… not wanting to do it at some moments. Also, I want Joe’s shirt, ngl
Seriously, that is one wonderfully straightforward interaction.
Gotta say, seeing Dina just… exist, autistically, in a social circle that accepts her without question by now is one of my favorite things. The last Danny/Sal interactions were adorable, but the Dina/Becky strip after Ross’s death where Dina uses her own lack of outward expressions to give Becky permission not to do performative grief, because she knows Becky’s feeling a mess of things? Not just my favorite moment of theirs, but probably a contender for my favorite DoA strip ever.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/widelysaid/
As much as I tend to discourage people using psychiatric labels so casually, I think this kind of acceptance is also rather beautiful.
People are autistic, Steven.
Steven who?
Dina may have social anxiety and such, but that does not necessarily connotate autism.
Then again…I have social anxiety, but I don’t really recognise myself in Dina at all. Apart, perhaps, from the quite rare occasions when she gets overwhelmed, which may be anxiety but not necessarily.
I’m an autistic who recognizes myself in Dina so consistently and constantly I just consider it canon or all but. It’s the sensory things, it’s the considering eye contact performative and being read as ‘unexpressive’ and thus unemotional, it’s the specificity of her speech, it’s the special interest – hell, even things like joint hypermobility are associated with autism way more often than would be expected randomly.
(I’m much more split on Joyce, but that’s because Willis has discussed the ‘am I autistic or traumatized with obsessive behaviors as a result’ thing more than once, so it feels way more like diagnosing WILLIS than a fictional character who seems to have been written with some degree of conscious intent as autistic. Some Dina strips are based off Willis’s life, but she doesn’t feel quite as close a match to him as Joyce. But at the same time… yeah Joyce has a lot of behaviors that feel familiar to me in that specific way as well.)
The reflection of Willis is part of the reason why I pointed this out. As interesting as your train of thought may be, I speak from experience when I say that it’s much too easy to get wrapped up in a false diagnosis. Focusing too much on a label may lead us to infer behaviors that don’t exist. Even if Willis did have something along those lines, we may very well be looking at a combination of conditions, or even just a collection of “symptoms” like the ones you described with differing, weakly related causes.
The difference here is, Dina isn’t real, even if she’s based partially on certain aspects of her author’s real life. It’s 100% harmless and not remotely risky in any way to analyse her behaviors and character traits, see that they’re basically 1:1 with a lot of autistic people, and then consider her autistic based on that. It feels like you’re treating that identification and projection as something that could lead to some kind of roadblock or problem.
I just think it’s presumptuous and even a little offensive to throw around labels like this. Behaviors are one thing. But it’s really the behaviors and the nature of what drives them that determines any condition, if there’s any at all. Only a doctor can really diagnose them, and for good reason too.
Presumptuous, maybe. But when you’ve got two autistic people both telling you their lived experience aligns with a character whose portrayal leans heavily into neurodivergence tropes, it might be better to leave it be.
Alright, then.
But keep in mind that while all autistic people are neurodivergent, not all neurodivergent people are autistic.
I don’t have much to add after Delicious Taffy’s excellent discussion, but yeah. Dina’s traits are written with what appears to be a conscious eye towards ‘this is, specifically, autism,’ as evidenced by the sheer number of distinct character traits that are stereotypically and recognizably autistic. Joyce is somewhat ambiguously neurodivergent (in that she’s definitely neurodivergent, starting with the fact that we know she has PTSD, but there’s also an ambiguity in some of her quirks – food not touching, for example – and which particular combination of brain chemistry would have produced them.) Dina, like Amber, didn’t map 1:1 to a particular diagnosis at comic’s start, but gradually her traits got more and more specifically autistic as autistic readers told Willis ‘hey we see ourselves in this character.’ That talk with Becky, or her talk with Joe here, are pretty dang ‘an autistic person who doesn’t feel the need to mask, because her friends are attuned to her.’ (Acknowledging the greeting as obligatory but the words themselves are immaterial, calling the eye contact performative, Becky’s line about how Dina feels things strongly and other people don’t know how to read her so they misinterpret her, they’re pretty specific autism feels.)
Amber’s not diagnosed with anything either, but by now the comic’s been so blatant that it’d be a bad faith argument to say she’s not plural. Dina is about that level of blatant to autistic readers, in specific ways that don’t seem to be drawn from Willis’s life (like inverting your hypermobile joints to imitate a special interest) but have unusually high correlations that aren’t widely talked about outside our overlapping communities. That suggests research. Hell, when Niantic partnered with Autism Speaks for an event, Willis did a whole Twitter thread about how Pokemon was created by an autistic man with a highly autistic fanbase and AS is our community’s supervillain, so it was a particularly offensive action to use Pokemon Go for this purpose. Autism Speaks puts so much money into generating good publicity from non-autistics, and has such overwhelmingly bad reception from us, that I don’t expect anyone to know that who hasn’t done specific research on the subject. Anyone looking at our community hubs for the first time will pick it up in about twenty minutes, anyone just Googling autism will get about nine hits from them above anything led by autistics. If a character shows very regular autistic traits, from an author who’s said she’s not diagnosed but acts in very autistic ways, they agree, and the author seems very likely to have actually researched things about the autistic community, I feel pretty comfortable saying ‘she’s autistic.’
Willis has said that Dina probably has undiagnosed Aspergers, which is a form of autism.
He has said specifically that the kinds of social debilitating he had were most likely due to the way he was raised. He said that he didn’t want to label her like that specifically because it wasn’t his original intention with those traits in her, and because by doing so he may very well be misrepresenting those kinds of people.
Yeah, and then the very last bit of that post straight-out says “But yeah, Dina probably is Aspergery. Undiagnosed.”
It really seems like you’re intentionally leaving out the parts you don’t want to acknowledge. You’ve got multiple people saying they identify with the character, plus explicit (albeit out-of-comic) text on the subject, and you’re still treating it like some “well, we don’t have all the information here” hypothetical scenario in which Someone might get offended. Is it you? If it’s you getting offended by us referring to this fictional teenager as autistic, just say so. Otherwise, stop talking for and over the actual fucking autistic people telling you it’s fine.
Look, I just don’t want people using these psychological labels so casually; not just autism but psychological labels in general. For instance, as hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when “psychotic”, “sociopath”, and “psychopath” were very specific, distinct things. Now altogether, they mean no more than “undesirable”, because of a process that I think needs to stop (as much as people can realistically help themselves).
By the way “Aspergery” does not mean “aspergers”. It just means having traits that are common to aspergers and many other types of neurodivergence.
The way you write these replies comes off as incredibly condescending, whether you intend it or not. I’m well aware of how harmful it can be to use psych terms pejoratively and how easily they can be used to other people. Y’know, there’s a certain slur that starts with the letter R, which wasn’t always considered a slur and used to be downright clinical. It gets thrown at people like me pretty much constantly, along with just about anyone else on the spectrum. In fact, there’s an instance of that slur in this very comic, directed at the most ND-“coded” character. That’s an example of the concept you’re essentially NT-splaining to an ND person, and it’s also another parallel between Dina and the ND people who identify with her. In short, you don’t need to explain this very basic concept to me, because I understand it perfectly, having lived with it as the target for decades.
You’re applying it too broadly, in this instance. It will never be a problem for ND people to recognise ourselves in a fictional character, or to use our own terms in reference to those characters. If a neurotypical appropriates those terms and uses them pejoratively, then they are the problem and I agree they should stop that, but that’s not what’s happening here, so it’s irrelevant. Again, you’re talking over and for people who haven’t protested, and you need to knock it off, please.
If you didn’t mean to be condescending, you can internalize what I’m saying, apply it to future interactions, and we can leave it at that. If you did mean to, even as a schtick, you can just not respond at all, because nobody has ever accused me of being patient with that behavior and I’d rather not get banned from the only decent, welcoming online community I’ve ever been part of.
Sorry. I really didn’t mean to be condescending, and I especially didn’t mean to make you feel unwelcome. I have a psychology major friend who also views labels this way, so I’m used to thinking of them as terms of rigorous science.
The jargon treadmill is a tough thing to stop, ’tis built into how humans use language. Even how it is used in medicine has expanded, as more people are diagnosed who might not have been a generation ago.
But if you want to keep the usage clear, consider: it’s easier to convince people to do a different thing instead, rather than to not do a thing. I mean, you might ask people to say “Dina is on the spectrum, sure, but without a diagnosis it’s best not to call her a specific medical term.” You have provided a replacement word, not just taboo’d a useful term.
But at the same time, trying to police the language of people who do have the lived experience is maybe not the best use of anyone’s time. If the goal is to stop irresponsible use of terms, maybe the focus should be on people who don’t have context and knowledge to use it correctly, as opposed to folks who have the most direct context and knowledge possible which is what’s happening in this thread.
And even then we run the risk of insisting on people volunteering potentially sensitive information about themselves in order to validate themselves and their experiences. That’s a delicate balance to maintain, and I’m not saying that no attempt should be made, but what’s happened here has been no balance at all. The level of policing of people who understand the life experiences of autism is dismaying to me, and is all too familiar from a slightly different perspective.
Treating medical conditions that real people live with as rigorous science first has the effect of treating real people as secondary, which is what I see happening here.
Medicine is a science like any other, and like any other science, there needs to be room for honest doubt.
Saying that science doesn’t “put patients first” is really attacking a straw-man. Let’s face it, the human body is complicated, and even where the best evidence and techniques available can give us a prediction only slightly better than a blind guess, it’s thanks to rigorous science that patients still have a better chance of getting treated effectively today than they did 100 years ago. If that’s not treating people as primary, I don’t know what is.
But of course, the acknowledgement of uncertainty in something like medicine is socially unacceptable; acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred solution, with very impeding consequences. Doctors who acknowledge the full extent of their empirical uncertainty may expect to be replaced with those who can better gain the trust with patients with the lure of tentative certainty. Lowering the standard like that only means that modern day snake oil salespeople can use the exact same lure to scam patients who would have the best chances with medicine that’s been rigorously tested.
Way to ignore the solid points Devin was making about the damage you were doing to go off on some tangent.
This is the language police. You’re all under arrest. Sargent drag them away to the dungeons.
No! Not me. Stop. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Aaaaaaaaa…
In addition to the points Devin made, the points Taffy made, and basically everything else: Fun fact! There’s a known and significant problem with autism, in particular, being extremely underdiagnosed in formal psychiatric settings due to biases by the psych professionals doing the diagnosing. In particular, it’s very common for AFAB people, people of color (especially BIPOC,) and adults who managed to fly under the radar until they were out of the 8-year-old-who-likes-trains stereotype range to be misdiagnosed. Sometimes AFAB autistics are told they can’t be autistic because only boys are. Frequently adult autistics struggle to find someone who’ll diagnose them because they’ve spent childhood brute-forcing coping mechanisms until they can mask, and sometimes the psychologist won’t believe adults can be autistic. Meltdowns and overload in black and brown kids are frequently misdiagnosed by white professionals as ‘behavior issues’ or more pathologized disorders (which is an issue in its own right.) I’m a white femme who was diagnosed at age 10 by the most reputable center in the region (and one of the best-known in the country,) and I STILL had a psychiatrist try to change my diagnosis and insist I couldn’t be autistic because I could talk and have some coping mechanisms as an adult.
Self-diagnosis is widely accepted by autistics as a whole because we recognize there are so many obstacles to diagnosis for basically anyone who’s not a white AMAB 10-year-old or younger with VERY stereotypical behaviors. Even if you can get diagnosed formally, discrimination against diagnosed autistics is a known issue (to name a topical example, doctors in the UK pushed DNRs on autistics and others with developmental and intellectual disabilities last year. That’s likely a factor in how two-thirds of UK COVID deaths were disabled people as of March. I’ve also heard quite a few stories about things like difficulty getting organ transplants due to ‘quality of life’ concerns that basically amount to ‘well they’re autistic, so,’ even pre-pandemic strain on the system.) Formal diagnosis can be a double-edged sword.
So one, you’re talking over autistic people, and two, you’re doing so on a subject that most of the community has a stance on, and that stance is VERY DIFFERENT from yours because of known medical gatekeeping issues.
Those are some very real problems with the medical system right now in regards to autism, and I am well aware of them. While self-diagnosis has noble intention (I respect you and your entire community for it), I really don’t think it should be treated as a permanent solution. But if it’s necessary for now to make sure autistic people are treated fairly, so be it, I guess.
Just want to make the comment that Dr. Asperger was looking for people who could still work with their divergence in Hitler’s concentration camps, so using his diagnosis has negative connotations to some on the spectrum as “He’s not so broken that he still can’t be useful.”
Anyone want to use Godwin’s Law here?
You Nazi!
Coles law is far superior and tastes better.
Yeah, I believe Willis’s comment was made before the full depth of his collaboration was publicly known and the autistic community started shifting away from the term as a whole (having previously been considered a ‘it’s removed from the DSM because it really is just autism presenting slightly differently, but some people who were previously diagnosed that way still use it’ by and large.)
Because for the record, it’s not Godwin’s Law, that is in fact a conversation our community’s been having in recent years. You’re being super condescending here, Wagstaff. Knock it off.
Sorry if I’ve been condescending; I didn’t mean to be unwelcome to those who want to see themselves in the characters here. I definitely didn’t mean to imply that you are throwing around labels irresponsibly. I’m just concerned that using to them may cause more problems then they solve if we’re . Even many therapists agree that it’s good practice to refrain from telling patients what they have unless it’s really necessary.
By the way, Godwin’s Law has been notoriously misconstrued in recent years, and its creator stated that he didn’t intend it to be a conversation ender as much as a conversation starter. I was using it in the former sense.
I mean the latter sense! Damn!
“I just think it’s presumptuous and even a little offensive to throw around labels like this.”
“Look, I just don’t want people using these psychological labels so casually…”
Assuming the absolute best here, you’re communicating your intent very poorly. At this point you’ve been told multiple times that you’ve been condescending and asked to knock it off, and you’ve said sorry but you haven’t stopped.
I think you should strongly considering just letting this one go, please.
So I’m definitely absolutely not trying to criticize this comic or David Willis in all by saying this, nor am I trying to be mean or dogpile you, just to make it clear–
But this is seriously the problem with media in general not saying autism (or ADD) out loud or making it explicitly canon. There are so many characters who seem pretty clearly autistic, but when autistic people point that out or want to identify with them everyone comes out of the woodwork to say you can’t because that character isn’t diagnosed and it hasn’t been said out loud.
On the one hand I get what you’re saying–I personally HATE that people armchair diagnose everyone on the internet. It drives me nuts that any time someone talks about someone being a jerk everyone says they’re narcissistic or have BPD.
I feel like this is different, though. Not just because of all the great points already made about getting an official diagnosis of autism being a fraught thing, but because…I don’t know. It feels like when people say “no you can’t say that character is autistic unless it’s explicitly stated!” It feels like you don’t want that character to be considered autistic because in doing so you’re denigrating that character somehow? When what you feel as an autistic person identifying with them is just about the opposite of that? It seems completely different to me to think a fictional character is autistic than to “diagnose” real people with personality disorders when you don’t know wtf you’re talking about. Actual autistic people recognizing it in others–I just don’t think it’s the same thing at all.
Thank you. You have done what evidently I have failed to do.
But it still begs the question. How do we know someone is autistic? Working with self-diagnosis may be the only solution for now, but even with good intentions it may suffer from at least a few of the same basic problems as armchair diagnosis in general. How we go about addressing these problems is a whole can of worms I’m not really gonna get into for now.
And by the way, Dina is really more the exception than the rule in the sense that Willis stated that she was designed to be like him when he was a kid. I guess you could say I wasn’t necessarily against preemptively diagnosing Dina as much as I was against preemptively diagnosing Willis. Looking back, I really didn’t make that very clear, and I’m sorry if that caused any confusion.
Given how you’ve composed yourself in general on this topic I think that’s a can you should maybe just not get into at all, certainly not without learning a bit more about either the actual experiences of the people involved. Or maybe figuring out how to better communicate your intent.
I also want to note that once you put an “if” after “I’m sorry”, it undercuts the apology greatly. Be sorry with conviction, don’t hedge. See more.
and as we all know, being wrongly diagnosed as autistic is actually the greatest possible crime so much that we have to relentlessly shout down everyone else on the goddamn internet just in case they further propagate this blight upon our civilization, jesus christ
Thank you.
I understand that my behavior regarding misuse of labels was overzealous, and I’m sorry.
At the same time, if one is willing to reject the defense of preventing perpetuation of social damage with those labels in favor of discouraging their use in ordinary conversation, regardless of the speaker’s intention, they also have to reject that same defense from people who want to do away with words like “primitive”, “black sheep” or “king”, under the premise that their usage alone fuels long term social damage, regardless of intention.
Not that I’ve completely made up my mind on the latter issue. And let it be known that I am NOT accusing anyone here of doing the things just described. Just something I noticed and wanted others to notice.
can you like ever say “sorry, i’ll cut it out” without then doing like sixteen paragraphs about how actually you were right
I definitely did not intend to make myself look more correct there. I just left it there as an interesting starting point for future intellectual discussions. I don’t think I need to get involved in all of them, just so you know.
Once more, I’m sorry.
I’m of two minds about making it explicit in the source material, because something like that is very easily done clumsily or flat-out badly. In this case I favor showing over telling, and addressing the problem you’ve described in fandom.
Because you’re absolutely right, there’s a huge difference between talking about a real person and a fictional character. The idea proposed that only a real doctor can say for sure when we’re talking about a fictional character is patently absurd. It’s also pretty absurd to say that people who have direct lived experience are incapable of reliably recognizing it in others.
I didn’t mean to invalidate anyone’s experiences with the disorder. It definitely wasn’t my intention, and I’m sorry.
Please forgive me, because apparently I didn’t know what I was doing.
As someone who’s not been formally diagnosed but has all the symptoms of what the DSM used to call Asperger’s, I agree with this very much. I can hear what people who are talking with me are saying just fine without ever having to look them in the eyes. I’m not blind, I just find eye contact uncomfortable.
*I’m not deaf is what I meant to say, not blind.
I don’t find it uncomfortable*, I just don’t get what the point of it is supposed to be, so I don’t think of doing it much either…
* I can actually stare people in the eyes for minutes, till my eyes dry out, but obviously there’s no point in that either…
I feel that I should warn you that staring at me for a length of time might be damaging to your eyes and possibly your brain as well. So best not bother.
This is based on documented camera breakage, and after all, the eye is a camera.
Clif is absolutely an SCP.
This is cute! I like friendship strips. We don’t get enough of those here. <3
Seconded!
Dina is adorable here and I like that she and Joe tolerate each other if nothing else.
Also the idea that someone would try to describe the “Ark” in any realistic way sounds like it would drive me insane.
Right? It crashed into a volcano 4 million years ago, who cares how big it was.
It was clearly bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.
Ok but was Dr Who involved in its designs or…
Wait wait wait wait wait! How could the ark crash into a volcano 4 million years ago when the earth was only created 6000 years ago? Stick to the facts, blasphemer!
Duh, the volcano was on Cybertron
I am very, very sorry, but this : https://arkencounter.com/about/
It’s a 50/50 chance Joyce’s family took a road trip to see it.
That doesn’t look at all like the space ark that delivered us from the water world and then crashed into a volcano 4 million years ago.
Watch Robin replace another professor
Considering how many times I have had this interaction (both the Joe side and the Dinah side) with various friends and coworkers, I feel seen.
*plays Shirley Temple’s “Animal Crackers” on the hacked Muzak*
Yeah, even as a kid who opened to random pages in the Bible and tried to make things all make literal sense I don’t remember trying very hard with the Ark.
I mean it’s not like trying hard would help.
Especially considering that there’s more than one mathematical contradiction in that story. *shivers*
Talking about lunch didn’t help with how I keep thinking those barriers are sneeze guards because they’re in line to get food.
Ditto!
I wonder if Joe’s grimacing because he doesn’t like the half-truth of not explaining the context of mentioning Noah’s Ark per Joyce’s request to keep up the she’s-still-a-Christian charade.
Or I’m just shipping* really hard.
*: Relationship for Joeyce, friendships for Joe and Joyce’s friends
I think he’s more just grimacing about the concept. He’s been pretty wince-y about evangelical teachings in the past, so I think he was never a particular brand of that kind of thing. It makes it kind of amusing to consider that his best friend is one of the more devout Christians on the cast, and his other most notable relationship is trying to emerge out of the vestiges of a more extreme version of it into a, I dunno, atheist moth.
Given Joe’s Jewish, he probably has a lot of experience recognizing the point where Biblical literalism meets creepy antisemitic premillennial dispensationalist bullshit about Israel needing to exist so that Revelations can happen.
Israel doesn’t just have to exist, it has to exist as a theocracy for Revelations to happen. Yeah, lots of bovine by-product involved.
I have very fond memories of my Cousin who got the dimensions of the Ark as their Bar Mitzvah passage and had to figure out how to talk about the moral lesson it taught him.
“Do yoir math kids, or people will be laughing at your mistakes for millenia!”
“Cubits are a really stupid form of measurement, because no two arms are the same length.”
I suppose that’s not a moral lesson…
Oh God, there have been evangelicals who’ve tried to make Noah’s Ark work on the grounds that people were bigger in those days, so the cubits were actually really long, haven’t there?
That really wouldn’t help. In fact, it would make things even worse. Even given the most common definition of a cubit, the Ark would have been bigger than the largest known wooden ship. It would almost certainly have been hopelessly unseaworthy even if it could have been built in the first place.
also it has to be able to support two of every kind of animal
this would be challenging to construct using modern materials and fabrication
Less so if you get as creative as creationists tend to with the term “kind”.
At least two. Some (I believe the unclean animals) were seven of every kind depending on the verse.
Well, it didn’t have to sail. Just to float. So the definition of “seaworthy” is broader than one might think in this case.
Surely the International Standard Cubit is based on Adam’s right arm.
And I thought it was 14 on every clean animal. Only the unclean animals are limited to two refugees.
I like that an understanding has been reached.
It’s kind of funny, I hadn’t really thought about it, but that both of them are kind of pulled into Amber’s inner circle by circumstance, though I don’t know if they have ever really interacted much as any consequence of that.
Well they’ve been in surprisingly few strips together, although that may be mostly because Joe’s been in surprisingly few strips since the first book:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/tag/joe+dina/
I teach religious school, and for the 4th Graders, I had some kids who were sick of all my art projects but super loved math, so I made them an optional math worksheet all about Noah’s ark, designed to lead them to the conclusion that it was super duper impossible to fit all these plants and animals in there.
(Unfortunately, they took too long converting units into cubits, so they didn’t quite get that far.)
Cubit=18″ or a foot and a half, what’s hard about that for 4th graders with a calculator?
Or did you make them figure it out on paper without calculators? I mean assuming a big rectangular prism it’s just a few quick multiplications and divisions to get to a volume that can’t possibly support or contain that many animals or provide a way to feed them or dispose of their wastes.
“Lunch ran long” = “We had many smooches to take care of.”
Dunno. Nothing about her currently suggests that was the case.
Well she DID just jettison a huge additional chunk of her puritanically evangelical upbringing.
Becky says that!
She definitely didn’t mean that she and Dina were smooching though. Becky doesn’t do blink-and-you’ll-miss-it double-entendres. She is innocent of innuendo and is not suspect of subtext.
….
… okay, I know this LOOKS bad, but I’m just going to say it’s your fault for even pointing it out and thereby salvage my not-at-all delicate ego.
“Sorry we’re late, getting our marriage license took longer than I thought.”
“You don’t know how good you have it, kid. When I was young, I had to wait decades for a marriage license. Took me until 2015 to get it.”
Dina and Joe having a friendship is cute and I hope it continues.
Oh, unrelated to the comic but today’s my birthday. Happy Older to me.
Happy Birthday! Do you intend to celebrate with anything special?
In fact I am. I’ve decided today I will celebrate by NOT drawing any DOA fanart hahahahaa
No but for real I’m going to have crab dinner with my mom. Crab is my favorite food in the whole world. I ALWAYS eat it on my birthday cuz it makes me happy.
Awwwwwe that sounds sweet. Or rather, savory!
Well then, have a delicious birthday!!!
It can be both.
Happy birthday, Yoto!
Awesome plan!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear Yotomoe!
Happy birthday to you!
And many more!
Excellent! The proper celebration for Cancers everywhere. (Also a Cancer, also a lover of delicious crustacean.)
Not a Cancer, but also love delicious crustacean.
You are what you eat, that’s what I say.
As a Pisces who loves fish and chips (and other seafood), I have made so many cannibalism jokes.
… actually, mostly just the same one over and over.
Cake.
For you birthday, you should eat cake. Happy birthday Yotomoe.
Crab cakes for Yotomoe? (Happy birthday!)
In 8 days I intend to celebrate my birthday with non-fish based sweet cake. Possibly chocolate but my 6 year old and 3 year old may have other suggestions. (The 15 month old will basically communicate without words, yet very effectively “I would very much like cake too. I like cake! Please do not forget to give me cake! In fact, if you just put it where I can reach it I will do my utmost to transfer all cake to my mouth all by myself!”
Happy early birthday, may the tiny one be successfully distracted or contained until cake is made and distributed.
I also went to crab cakes but was late to the party. Happy B-Day Yotomoe!
Time for crab! Happy birthday! I appreciate you!
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday, may your drinks be cold, your food be hot and your butt be in a comfy chair.
Happy birthday, Yotomoe!
Happy birthday!! <3
Who is the one? The one we cheer? The one this party’s for?
It’s Yotomoe, in their (mumbles)th year, and we wish them many
many more. So happy, happy, happy birth day to You, Yotomoe!
Have a happy birthday, you! Eat as many crabs as you can.
Hey happy b-day!
Yo, Happy Cake Day!
Happy birthday, Yotomoe, the hidden hero of Dumbing Of Age.
Happy Birthday!
A Very Merry Unbirthday to You!
…i know. it was yesterday. sorry
May you devour many crabs.
Happy birthday, Yotomoe. We share a natal day, though mine came much, much earlier than yours, I suspect.
My present appears to be what may have instantly become my new favorite DOA strip. Thank you very much, Mr. Willis…
Happy birthday. May your crabmeat always be delicious.
I didn’t know I needed Dina and Joe to have a friendship!
. . . So a genuine question.
Are people taught that things like Noah’s Ark were factual history, like as a widespread thing I mean in Evangelical and Fundie America?
Because as a Raised-Catholic forced to go to Sunday School intermitdly(My Father eventually converted from Baptist to Catholic and my Mother went through “phases” of getting deep into the Church and going every Sunday) and having gotten my Confirmation, we were **always** taught that things like Noah’s Arc were parables. Across Parishes this remained the same.
Not to be taken literally or at face value.
And to comment on the actual comic itself. . . this is a super cute interaction with Dina and Joe, and I don’t really remember many incidents of them interacting in the past. But this interaction is SUPER cute and also super relatable.
Some of them indeed are. I dunno how widespread but definitely a real thing.
Probably as common as believing evolution isn’t real because that goes against Genesis.
Which is disturbingly not nearly as fringe as you’d think. I’ve met people from non-cult denominations who believe it.
Care to name some of those denominations?
The one that comes to mind offhand was talking to an adult member of an otherwise-pretty-standard United Methodist Church when I was ten or so (wasn’t a member, but family friends were so we’d go to non-service events on occasion.) The chicken or egg question came up, I said egg because chickens evolved after dinosaurs, adult was… not rude in their response, but clearly not expecting the certainty of a 10-year-old dinosaur nerd. Something to the effect of ‘and what if you don’t believe in evolution?’ or ‘and how do you know they evolved?’ as I recall. To my knowledge it wasn’t the doctrine of the church as a whole, but some leave the kind of vague ‘well some people believe this’ where that happens.
Since Wagstaff is offering, I would like to name one of those denominations Fred.
You mean that squeaky voiced teen from the most bizarre Nickelodeon series ever?
Yes.
It’s not a majority of Americans, or even a majority of American Protestants, but yes.
Google Ken Ham if you want to know more and/or have brains ooze out of your ears.
The worst part is that they have outsized political influence in our government. As in, the own roughly 50% of the power. A lot of the Trumpocalpyse was wrapped up and fed by them — they literally had (self-proclaimed) prophets naming him God’s anointed, depicting him as being (metaphorically or figuratively, it’s hard to tell where the line is) the old testament Cyrus, and declaring that the election must be fraudulent because God had already declared that Trump was the rightful winner of the election (because that’s how elections work).
That’s the same crowd (or at least a large subset) as the Genesis-is-literal evangelicals. Get people believing that a literal reading of the Bible is infallible, get them having blind faith in the preachers that explain the Bible to them, get those preachers almost owning one of our two major political parties, and get this crowd carrying on so crazy that they alienate themselves from everyone else, normalizing it so that everyone in their close circles believes exactly as they do…
… this is fine. It’s fine. Everything is fine.
I agree, it’s definitely very fine and not remotely terrifying that these absolutely unhinged freaks have so much power over this country. Very fine and good and cool, and I’m glad neither of us is being sarcastic about the matter.
I have no anxieties whatsoever about the fact that an active death cult has outsized political power in our government! The people who really want to bring about the End Days so the Rapture can happen inspire no terror, and I sure don’t want to scream whenever I think about it.
The Ark specifically, no. But I do remember being sat in front of a video explaining how the 6 days thing worked as fact. But doctrine like that didn’t really come up often enough to get much notice, in my church.
I found an article that linked to several polls on U.S. residents’ views on young-earth creationism, which is perhaps a useful proxy. It’s roughly a 50/50 split between those who believe God created humans and the planet 6-10 thousand years ago, and those who accept reality. Even a majority of believers in evolution and a 4+ bya Earth think God did it.
My countryfolk scare me.
A not insignificant amount of fundamentalist sects believe the bible is 100% literal fact. And yes, they teach that to their children who tend to be home-schooled or in attendance at a “Christian school” who supports that doctrine. If you have brain cells left after looking up Ken Ham, use a couple of them to look up “Accelerated Christian Education” and the pure garbage they teach kids from K-12.
Biblical literalists are a tiny portion of Christians in America and the world as a whole.
However, the Far Right loves them.
And thus they have disproportionate political influence.
Biblical Inerrancy is the concept that every word in the Bible is literally true, even the parts that directly contradict other parts.
They also ignore the parts on when you can get an abortion, which is to say you can.
Dude! Do you have a reference for that?
It’s not exactly as described, but the Freedom From Religion Foundation article: What Does the Bible Say About Abortion” is a solid write up.
Basically it comes down to “My interpretation is the literal reading of the text.”
oh i like this friendship.
I have had conversations like this. . .
I’m weirder than I thought.
Hey, hey, hey! Since when do we have good, supportive contact between Joe and Dina?
I like it, which surprises me.
well, i hope you like surprises then
Joes doin’ good
I really like Joe’s understanding of Dina here.
They bond over The Joyce Encounters
And likely compare notes re: deprogramming Becky and Joyce.
Now that’s an epic school assignment.
Now would it necessary be a school assignment? You can’t get to the top of your intellectual game if you only view studying as a chore.
Well it Is happening at school :-3
Also Dina and Joe clearly see it as unpleasant XD
for sure. not everyone experiences the calling to be a counter-missionary like you Wagstaff ^^
What do you mean by “counter-missionary”?
They’re probably just focusing on their individual cases, that’s all.
I can tell that for Dina, the steadfast search for truth and promotion of scientific literacy is more than just a job.
A counter missionary is kind of like a shelf elf, but without a direct line to Santa.
^^ what Clif said. but also, someone who makes it their personal mission to disabuse people of irrational beliefs. if i wrote a dictionary, i’d put it in there (cos why go to the trouble of writing a dictionary if you can’t just add in your own invented words) and put your picture in lieu of definition =P
@Wagstaff:
I believe “counter-missionary” is commonly know as “cowboy.”
I assume that reverse cowboy is heretical counter-missionary.
Viewing this all zoomed in on mobile I thought Dina immediately said “do not tell me more,” and the explicit “this is not a question just a formal politeness” explicitness greatly amused me
i believe she’s genuinely asking Joe to stop telling her about his conversation with Joyce
…is that what you meant, i’m not sure
I think what they meant was that when zoomed in on mobile Joe’s reply to her inquiry about his experience with Joyce was cut off and it looked like Dina immediately said “Do not tell me more” without waiting for a reply.
heh that makes sense. thanks
Joe and Dina talking to each other with such a friendly and polite understanding is a nice surprise. I’ve never thought of Joe as a scientific person before. Now I can really see it. Can’t wait to see what presentation he and Joyce have done.
In another universe, Joe was a prolific engineer and inventor.
Absolutely loving that interaction between Joe & Dina! Is it just me or does Joe seem to be actively trying to … not be a jerk any more?
I actually think that’s been a thing ever since Joe got that whole lecture from Joyce. That’s the big moment where he realized his actions have real consequences.
With Sarah, with Joyce or with Dina, Joe knows how to adapt super well to his interlocutor
I really like this friendly interaction between Joe and Dina here.
I wonder, Joe is wording it in a way which will feed into people’s “Joyce is a fundie” belief. Is he doing that jokingly or in order to cover up how Joyce is breaking down her programming.
Yes.
I’m impressed to the fact Joe is smart enough for this.
We know nothing about his mom but his dad is a doctor so IQ wise he has to be pretty well off. Not to mention that Jews generally score very high on IQ tests. Joe’s issues are personal/emotional rather than intellectual.
so, i don’t know much about IQ measurement except that it was criticized for being turned into a proxy for racist and classist discrimination because of built-in assumptions in testing; is that not the case, or no longer? is it therefore a relevant metric to apply here?
[shrugs] Don’t know about negative side but to my knowledge both Jews and Asians, who are known to score higher than white people, are disproportionally more successful in life ((to the point where Harvard had to start discriminating against Asians, demanding higher scores from them, because they were taking more spots than they should based on their population percentage) so there is probably something to IQ.
wow ok. that sounds like a can of worms i have no competent handle on, i’m just gonna say that correlation is not causation, just in case
I’m no expert either, it’s just things I skimmed through.
Don’t even get me started on IQ….
It has been empirically proven that no IQ above 120 will help you any more in that regard when it comes to school and career success. Those things are much more dependent on things like mental health and organization skills.
I can even more or less debunk any notion that race has anything to do with IQ with a single phenomena. In the Flynn Effect. IQ scores increased in the United States and many other places at a rate that was so high it couldn’t have been down to genetics. It was determined that scores increased because of better education, nutrition and the like.
An IQ score, if I ever got one, would be nothing more to me than the educational/employment equivalent of a tea leaf on a cake to impress some misguided judge on a cooking show. Think along the lines of those businesses in Russia and Asia that brag about the IQ scores of their employees.
@milu, welcome back!!!! How was your time in the mountains?
I see
hey Wagstaff! thanks!! it was really nice! i didn’t even realize until i woke up in the middle of the night how badly i’d missed the stars! yeah i live in a city and i hadn’t slept outdoors since last summer.
also, i was woken up by a bunch of horses lol. i had to leap up and grab all my stuff and run away to sit on some elevated rocks cos they were definitely trying to eat my backpack hahaha. i’m a bit scared of horses.
@milu, sounds wonderful. I too do enjoy gazing with awe and wonder at the cosmos.
Unfortunately, there was so much overcast the last few days where I live that I didn’t even get to see the moon. However, I did have fun in a few ways.
Just yesterday I made my own confectionary cannabis concoction which I call a Shmoe. It’s like a smore, but it’s made with buttered oat waffles instead of Graham crackers.
Also, regarding your question a few days ago, I was actually talking about gender orientation. Before you ask me, I am one who identifies with my mind, and mind knows no gender. I don’t really see myself as conforming to any gender in any culture within any time period. But anatomically, I guess you could call me a male.
ugh this is awkward because while i enjoy our sweet little chat and would love to just carry on right here i also, since writing the comment you’re responding to now, read what was going on in that other thread and mate. right now i’m not liking you very much i have to say? i don’t have the literacy or experience to agree or disagree with anyone in that discussion, but you really haven’t been mindful of people’s feelings. however valid your points may have been (or not—again, not my place to judge) on some lofty intellectual level, i don’t think the stakes were high enough to justify repeatedly pushing back against points made by people with strong feelings on the issue.
i mean, it’s got nothing to do with me, but it’s still left me feeling a bit queasy? and this is sort of a personal conversation, so it does feel relevant somehow, and so i think i’d rather time out for now. so, see you tomorrow or the day after that if you’re around? sorry, it’s just. yeah. it’s where i’m at rn. take care
honestly wtf are we doing having private conversations out here.
here’s a temporary email address (should be valid for a few hours)
earther.b3 at litermssb dot com
send me your email if you like and i’ll respond with mine and we can pick it up from there yeah?
i feel like this is a situation i have no pre-existing etiquette to deal with.
still. this feels wrong, and i’m sorry
sorry, bad idea. that’s an insecure email address, you may not want to send private data there.
use this one instead:
miluburner at protonmail dot com
@milu, I’m sorry about that. For good reason, science intends to cut out all personal feelings and biases so we can help people with the best evidence we have. That definitely does not mean that feelings and people are not to be respected at all, especially given how strongly people feel about their experiences like this.
At the same time, I do not subscribe to the belief that ideas and beliefs (distinct from people) deserve automatic respect. I give no special regard to my beliefs, or anyone else’s. Beliefs always stand or fall on their own merits.
If you need some time away to process all this, I totally respect that. At this point, I’m used to people not wanting to talk to me, at least for brief periods.
Here I reckon that truth is wealth indeed, but at what cost.
Adieu, adieu, parting is such bitter-sweet sorrow.
That is the case. The IQ test is not and was not even made to be seen as an intelligence test.
It tells you how well this person is picking up information and whether the teaching methods you are using are efficient. So when teachers were barely paying attention to black kids, they would score like 70-80. While white kids were getting 100+. Does this mean black kids are less intelligent? NO. It means they weren’t being taught effectively and weren’t being given enough help.
Asian countries like Japan meanwhile have cram schools, high expectations and social pressures to perform well in school. So they might score very high on an IQ test but the term ‘tiger mum’ literally exists because of very strict and demanding parenting methods of Asian cultures to achieve high academic performance. Which obviously creates other problems.
An IQ test literally means nothing of any real importance about anyone. Even if Joe’d dad did score high on an IQ test, there is no guarantee that such a thing would then reflect on Joe or his abilities as kids are never guaranteed to be reflections of their parents in these ways.
That’s fair.
@Sam: thanks!
i’m also very wary of the concept of intelligence itself. not that i have anything deep to say about it or wish to deny that it’s a thing that can be studied, but i feel like it’s good to be skeptical of any claim regarding intelligence as it seems so charged with unexamined assumptions a lot of the time
Intelligence is not a single monolithic thing. Rather it is a large cluster of many different abilities. It is only crudely measured by IQ tests. It’s only when you try to create software that can act intelligently do you get any inkling of just how diverse a skill set it is.
Joe’s actually a pretty smart cookie when it comes to social and emotional awareness, his glaring toxic-masculinity-induced blindspots aside. He’s been helping Joyce through her family shit for months, ever since they started texting after the shooting, and it’s definitely helped him cultivate his horndog persona. He just didn’t really apply that social knowledge in healthy ways due to aforementioned toxic blind spots mixed with his own heaping helping of personal baggage regarding his parents’ divorce.
That’s a part of what makes their friendship so fascinating, even taking out the “now kiss” factor for me. For all of Joe’s insistence that getting emotionally attached is Asking To Be Hurt, his friendship with Joyce shows just the opposite, by revealing how considerate and understanding Joe can be when he does allow himself to care.
Square footage because only godless heathens use the metric system.
There are, in fact, many christians outside of the USA.
But are they Imperial Christians or Metric?
Joe being empathetic?
What the hell happened in the last Halloween?
Ah yes, “Performative Eye-Contact”, the latest modality added to the Olympics.
i wish i’d had Dina’s confidence to be so frank about stuff like how i find eye contact performative and a bit exhausting to remember to do.
and i also wish i had more joes in my life that took my eccentricities in stride and didnt take it personally
hes a good egg at the end of the day, that joe
I have so many questions about eye-contact that I can never really ask of people without getting weird looks. So, instead, I mask and attempt to make eye contact at the usual intervals while my anxiety assures me I look like an idiot.
same !! and what’s funny is as i get more comfortable around people i tend to *decrease* the eye contact, since i’m letting my mask “slip” as i get more comfortable, and then people get confused and it’s like no i promise you, less eye contact means i like you cuz im letting myself be myself around you
Well that is a nice interaction between Joe and Dina. Them just being buds
Joe interacts with Dina really well! He meshes with Joyce’s friend group just fine. I would love to have an interaction with Joe like that. Or observe (another) one.
This is a really good strip.
Gravatar buddy! Also same
As I loving Joe being so kind to Dina, everybody who knows him can guess that Dina is not sexy enough to his radar (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/03-see-you-in-the-funny-page/spookyvoice/).
Kinda funny, kinda sad…
Not everyone wants to be viewed as sexy, especially to people they aren’t attractive to. (Besides, that last panel indicates Joe’s hitting on Ruth and therefore seeing her as available specifically because she’s single, and Dina is known to be in a relationship. And Joyce points out immediately after that strip that Joe’s doing the horndog thing there performatively.)
I would 300% prefer a genuine friendship where someone wasn’t trying to bang me to a superficial, performative hitting on that I didn’t want. Especially since we know Dina’s some stripe of asexual.
* Attractive to – attracted to. Big difference there.
I’d say it’s more of a Joe problem than a problem for Dina. He can’t allow himself decent interactions with women unless, for one reason or another, he’s written off any potential sexual interest.
So, is Joe just helping Joyce keep up her front, or did she really go on about that?
Yes and yes.
I LOVE Dina and Joe talking about Joyce’s views of Science. I’d take a whole series of strips on that lmaooo
As someone well on to the spectrum (as diagnosed by two independent neuropsyc’s, re: earlier comments about the misuse of labels), although my mannerisms are not very similar to Dina’s, I still identify with the character. I interpreted Joe’s interaction as a sign of respect for Dina. No implication of friendship or of sexual rejection, just respect. Which I believe she knowingly reciprocated with her offer of later eye contact.
I also ack that I could be entirely oblivious and totally missed the entire point.
I like this Joe and Dina interaction… he’s adapting to her own mode of talking, and it doesn’t seem disrespectful or disingenuous.
I do hope Dina gets challenged soon in her area of expertise. I feel like this class could be the one where Dina gets genuinely angry.
This one strip has made me go from kinda liking Joe a little to actually liking him and i don’t know how i feel about that
Joe has always had a bit of place in my heart despite his… tendencies. But now he’s really growing on me.
this one strip has got me platonically shipping joe and dina now
Joyce took extreme joy on calculating the exact height and measurements of the hypotetical arc didn’t she?
I find Joe’s sincerely efforts at non-horndogness highly endearing.