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She’s a balancing influence the same way Dina is to Becky.
I do hope we actually learn a bit more about her, I’d like to explore a bit more of her identity beyond just Carla’s absent-minded girlfriend, the same way Dina gets some interactions with Joyce and Joe.
I suspect that this wasn’t meant to be a morally ambiguous storyline with Bulmeria’s genocide being an obvious RL stand-in and pure evil. A lot of people brought up the OTHER arms supplying event going on, though, that hasn’t been referenced in the comic, though. I.e the Eastern European crisis where the LACK of US support is a moral deficiency. I don’t think that’s going to come up, though. I think the Ruttech storyline will solely be about Carla confronting her parents are involved in something pure evil not gray.
Could be a case where Ruttech doesn’t make weapons directly but they make a specific useful thing that has multiple applications, including weapons, and they just don’t really care what people do with the thing once they’ve sold it.
Actually… You should know the USG can and does sanction possible sales of dual use computer tech to nations it considers hostile. NVIDIA is forbidden from selling certain GPUs to china for example
I think saying the lack of US arms is a moral deficiency is kinda missing the point. The US has had multiple opportunities to facilitate the end of the conflict but has instead chosen to prolong it with arms support. While withdrawal of that support and outright surrender is not a good result, I think we, as citizens and sometimes activists, must maintain a dedication to peace and life, which means fighting for and end to military profiteering, not just when the people on the other end of those weapons are non-belligerents. The protection racketeering and hyper militarization from the US must stop if atrocities like these are ever going to end.
There has been no opportunity to end the Ukraine conflict on any terms what would be remotely acceptable. Anything offered by Russia has been designed both to keep conquered territory and prevent Ukraine from being able to defend itself should Russia choose to attack again. OTOH, greater support early on, might have enabled Ukraine to push Russia out of it’s territories and strike an actual deal. “Might have” – there are a lot of complexities in all of that.
There’s no sense in which “protection racketeering and hyper militarization from the US” caused the invasion of Ukraine. Other countries like Russia have agency too.
I actually love the way Palpatine’s return recontextualizes the earlier movies.
He was obviously intending to steal Luke’s body in Jedi, and even more obviously trying to push Anakin to the same point in Sith, so he could steal the most force-capable body ever.
Rise of Skywalker extremely sucks, but it’s too pathetic to truly hate.
The real venom should be reserved for Force Awakens, which in hindsight basically burned the future of the franchise for a short-term nostalgia hit and left it’s sequels to try to cook with the ashes.
See, this is a take I can’t personally understand. Force Awakens is what it is, but Last Jedi was already unwatchably bad. I have tried a few times and it is just impossible to get through the movie. And everyone I’ve ever heard say anything about the movies has said that Rise is even worse.
But of course everyone can like what they want, I’m sure I love many movies that others would hate.
To be perfectly honest, “Last Jedi,” while having MANY flaws, remains my favorite of the sequels, mainly because they tried something new. Rey’s parents being nobodies were supposed to show that you didn’t need to have “Chosen One” blood to be a great Jedi. When Luke fought Kylo Ren he moved completely defensively, the perfect example of how a Jedi was supposed to fight. Kylo killing Snoke and taking his place, despite being a repeat of “Return of the Jedi,” did show that Kylo was SUPPOSED to be irredeemable and I MUCH would have preferred him to be the final boss of the trilogy instead of Palpatine, especially since his final battle as a villain was the ONLY part of “Rise of Skywalker” I LIKED. But what I loved about “Last Jedi,” more than anything else in the trilogy, was Ghost Yoda burning the Jedi Library and telling Luke that the ancient Jedi weren’t saints and they made mistakes, same as Luke, and he needs to stop romanticizing the past and try something different; to teach Rey about his failures and see if she can find work-arounds so that the next generation wouldn’t be bound to repeat them. I found that message to be directed at the audience, who were getting tired of “Star Wars” repeating the same plot but at the same time thought the original trilogy was sacred and didn’t want ANYTHING re-contextualized, but unfortunately the fans rejected the message and we had Rey being part of a literal Royal Bloodline and Kylo being Anakin 2.0. Rise of Skywalker threw out EVERYTHING Last Jedi attempted to dish out and replaced it all with “safe” nostalgia and it just didn’t work.
I agree with your take on Last Jedi’s themes and intent. Unfortunately, I am also forced to admit that there were several aspects of the film’s crafting that were just plain bad. Pacing was a problem in particular (the casino/race arc should’ve been one, maybe two scenes in their entirety–constantly cutting back to it and trying to build it up was just a mistake). Rose’s “Love, love, love” dialogue was also in need of a serious re-write; again, the message is sound, but if you can’t make the dialogue itself compelling, the message is going to be lost for most folks.
Basically, my issue with Last Jedi is that whenever I see it, I think about the movie it should have been (which, again, would still have all the same themes).
Nah, it’s a reasonably popular opinion. Folks who think that just aren’t anywhere near as loud as the people for whom it ruined their childhoods.
I also feel bad for the people who didn’t like Last Jedi for perfectly normal reasons, because they’ve gotta deal with the embarrassment of sharing an opinion with some of the Worst People on the Internet.
There’s problems everywhere, but what is unforgivable to me, is after Han’s death, when the Falcon returns from the battle in TFA, Chewie and Leia — Han’s closest companions — just… walk past each other like they don’t even know they exist, never mind the grief they both carry.
Say what you want about the prequels, at least they were about something (how democracies become facist dictatorships)
The only thing the sequels were about was recouping the costs of Disney buying Star Wars (except The Last Jedi but of course that’s the one everyone hates)
Rise of Skywalker is a Sequel and also absolute total trash. Ep VII is serviceable if uninspired, VIII is a dumpster fire of not following established lore and physics and IX is trying to retcon VIII while not doing it well and also bringing every bad idea from the EU in. The Last Jedi is a bad movie and a terrible Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker is a huge mess that should have never been released.
The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars movie and I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can be a Star Wars fan and not like it because it is the most Star Wars one
Last Jedi is very clearly the good one of the sequels, but only like a third of it is actually firing on all cylinders and it’s sandwiched between 7 and 9, which both suck.
It goes in with Revenge of the Sith in the messy but compelling camp.
I don’t like Last Jedi all that much, it’s like a high 6/10, but it did convince me that under better circumstances Rian Johnson could have made a damn good Star Wars and I would very much like to visit the alternate universe where he got to direct Episode 7. Ideally the entire trilogy, but even just the first one being done by someone with a vision who could lay a better foundation than just doing the originals again
Force Awakens basically invalidates the ending of the original trilogy by having the empire come right back and also Luke Skywalker doesn’t care about that for reasons Rian Johnson has to figure out.
There’s about 10-15 minutes of Last Jedi that’s phenomenal but the climax of the Poe/Holdo storyline is Leia shooting Poe for his insubordination that got the whole rebellion killed and then her and immediately Holdo start fangirling about how cool Poe is and that’s maybe indicative of some issues with that storyline…
Rise of Skywalker is just Force Awakens again except more obviously.
Last Jedi is so bad it’s physically impossible for me to get through it, without being tied down. I have tried several times. It’s horrid. The Room is unironically a better movie than Last Jedi, and most of the oeuvre Neil Breen is more watchable.
My favourite thing about The Last Jedi is how every trailer had the shot of Luke saying “This isn’t going to go the way you think” and then all the fans got mad it didn’t go the way they thought
Last Jedi is the franchise equivalent of staggering six paces forward after being cut in half by a samurai sword by the previous movie before exploding into a gory mess in the sequel. I don’t think I like it very much but it’s about as good as it could reasonably be expected to be.
Fuck, Carla’s never been more relatable to me. Not even with regards to her gender identity (whole different can of worms), but having these pillars of support you wouldn’t be around to complain about if they hadn’t been there for you when no one else was.
Then they do and believe things that run counter to what you’ve grown to believe is right and just.
What point does gratitude and love become subservience and weakness of character?
This is so interesting because we’ve heard Carla say her parents are great, and that she loves them, but for her to be so scared to express her thoughts to them… maybe they aren’t so perfect. I can speak my mind with my father and express myself knowing that he’ll sincerely love me no matter what. I’ve actually had very lovely and enlightening conversations with him about my gender expression and sexuality (and learned in turn that if my dad were born in a more current generation, he’d probably consider himself bi). Not everyone has that, not every parent is safe to do that with. Let alone something as delicate as the way they make money.
Could be several things:
– could be that Carla’s afraid they’ll get mad
– could be that Carla’s afraid they won’t get mad, but she won’t like their answers.
Sometimes it’s less about “I’m secretly afraid of the person I love” and more about “I’m secretly afraid to lose faith in/respect for the person I love”
Also, sometimes you’re afraid of how someone will react for rational reasons and sometimes you’re afraid of how someone will react because of clinical anxiety. Growing up with your parents as “the only friends you had” is a good recipie for less than rational fears about losing their aproval for disagreeing with them.
This. It’s important to remember that a lot of times anxiety tells you that people will leave you for very minor offenses even though that makes zero sense given what you know of them rationally.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve been afraid to come forward about something (that in hindsight was actually pretty dang minor) to my mom, my family, a friend, and when I finally “cave” and tell them, their response is always “wait, you thought I’d be mad about that?”
My mom, my friends, my family, all are wonderful people who have my back through thick and thin. Anxiety does not care. It will still make you paranoid that some tiny disagreement or transgression will be the “last straw” and ruin everything.
Carla’s parents may similarly be wonderful, but I don’t doubt that experiencing that rejection from her peers that she mentioned resulted in a measure of hyper-awareness and fear of losing the little support she *did* get.
When people hurt or betray you, it can sometimes result in you being paranoid even of those who stuck by you. You start to wonder how transient *any* love and support really is. The more precious and vital such love and support she did receive made her that much more frightened about its fragility.
It is absolutely possible that her parents have not made it okay to question them about certain things, but it is also equally possible that it has more to do with Carla’s trauma dealing with literally everyone else she’s ever trusted where she has repeatedly discovered that there exists a line that has on one side love & support and on the other side disgust and condemnation. Even if her parents have never given any indication that they have such a line…. Neither do other people, until you cross it.
I think it’s more that she’s built them up in her mind to be perfect, and she’s afraid to confront the possibility that they are, in fact, merely human beings.
Carla’s parents have been great to her so far, but there’s always a chance they won’t react well to her bringing up concerns about how they’ve gotten their money, and the things her parents’ company does to make money.
I could absolutely talk to my mother about difficult subjects. I just didn’t, because they were dificult subjects. I remember one occasion when she suggested we should shut a conversation down, not because she was upset I disagreed with her, but because doing so was making me upset.
Okay, I’m looking at that first couple of sentences, and it’s kind of nonsense? Clearly I couldn’t talk to her about difficult subjects, but the point is that wasn’t because of anything she was bringing to it.
I can completely understand that. For me and my mother, sometimes the subjects were things that were difficult for me to talk about, and my mother made them even more difficult to talk about by getting angry. I’m glad that your mother was more understanding about your emotions and looked out for you.
Which also isn’t to say my mom never could. She was a good mother. But when her anger was triggered, all bets were off on having a calm conversation. Now that she’s gone that’s something that I have to contend with, is making peace with all the things I wished I could say that now I never can.
This looks familiar. The sideways glance + uncomfortable question. Charlie Sánchez, everyone: Latina, queer, neurodivergent, and sister of a nonbinary sibling — Of course she was gonna have Political Opinions.
Man, this is the second most awkward conversation in a webcomic about well-meaning kids and their billionaire industrialist CEO parents I’ve seen all week…
If I had a nickel for every webcomic having a storyline about a billionaire heiress having to confront their parents running currently I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice
Okay it’s not actually that weird considering the politics of the authors but I had to finish the quote
It also depends how much she retains attention; a lot of characters eventually fade out once they become less interesting for him to write (Raven, Brun, Penelope) but they might pop back in once in a while to remind people they exist.
I hope Elliot gets more relevance again though, it’s like the only M/M ship he writes and Elliot’s anxiety issues are much more relatable personally.
Yeah Jeph writes a fun story, but he’s not good on any kind of main-cast diversity. I can’t get excited about Anh because so far every non-white cast member ends up disappearing from the main cast so I fear her fate is sealed. Would love to be wrong.
I wish QC released every day like this does. Jeph consistently has those cliffhangers before the weekend, and I end up rereading the previous 50-100 pages multiple times while I wait for the next strip.
You know I really didn’t like Carla in the beginning, but she has really grown on me over the years. I hope her parents are understanding, and even if they don’t change anything I hope Carla, and her parents, will still be a close family.
Also Charlie has been good for Carla; Carla is chaotic, and needs someone to help focus her actions, and thoughts.
You see i was close to replying with “your mom is deep” but that was too close to actually making sense as a your mom joke snd that would against my entire philosophy.
Yeah. She’s so uncomfortable with the entire thing, she can’t even make excuses for them: She’s outright saying she doesn’t feel comfortable questioning her parents in anything. Including participating in a genocide.
Let’s see what happens. I don’t wanna get out my “Booster Was Right” shirt this soon, I’ll look biased.
She seems to have been unaware of some of the more terrible things Ruttech does. Now that she is aware, I hope Carla decides to take a stand against what her parents’ company is doing in some meaningful way.
I think its reasonable for an 18-or-so year old young woman to not have considered the implications of it all that much thus far.
“Arms trade = bad” is an oversimplification of things. It’d be wonderful if guns weren’t required sometimes, but they kinda are, Ukraine’s been surviving for the past three years and change thanks to foreign governments being willing to ship billions of dollars of merchandise to them. It’s a very ugly business, but not an inherently evil one.
It becomes quite evil, though, when you’re shipping arms to countries that aren’t using them for mere self-defense, but instead aggressive expansion.
But is it reasonable to expect Carla to have gone down a line-item list of her family’s military export contracts to discern between defensive nations and offensive ones?
Not to mention any other casually-evil-billionaire-class-horrors that the gig-industrialist executives are perpetuating?
This is the age where you really can start to look at your parents as being People instead of Pseudo-Deities. As much as I love making jokes about Carla’s parents being the first against the wall when the revolution comes (but they get a blindfold for being genuinely good parents), and as much as I bristle against Carla’s… Carlaness in more comedic scenes…
…yeah, I’m not going to blame her for being a very young woman who didn’t look deeply into her loving parents’ business and is feeling very conflicted over that at the moment.
I agree with what Li said almost all the way. That being said I was a fairly politically precocious child and was thinking deeply about these things since I was like what, 12? 18 feels way too old relative to when I first questioned my parents and considered my self political. I think part of that was my mother. She was a fairly aggressive TERF. Whenever asked me who my like ‘role model’ was, it was never my parents or people on TV it was civil rights figures from the history books I read voraciously. I thought that was normal (it wasnt).
I feel like part of peoples reaction is just how different a life one can lead. Carla was pretty sheltered and her life was smothered by a singular issue for a very long time. But other people weren’t and I think that is partially the lense others are judging her from right now.
From the few hints we’ve been given, it looks like Ruttech makes computer systems used in missiles rather than the missiles themselves. That probably makes them a sub-contractor with no control (and probably not even any knowledge) of where the arms are exported to. They don’t have “export contracts” of their own.
I don’t know if that makes things better or worse, but they almost certainly can’t say “We’ll sell these to Ukraine, but not Israel.”
Carla is obnoxious and shameless. If she was in favor of it we would have heard her brag about her parents role in it if anything.
The whole conflict only exist because she can’t bring herself to criticize her parents. If she agreed with them, or even if she was neutral about it, we wouldn’t hear the end of it.
I’m glad that Carla’s parents are supportive of her when lots of parents of trans kids are not. But that doesn’t change the fact that they own a company that’s helping create weapons fueling a genocide, and nobody becomes a billionaire by being a good person. Billionaires generally get that wealthy by a combination of exploiting the working class and being lucky enough to be born to parents who were already wealthy. Gonna be interesting to see how Carla handles the fact that while her parents were great to her, they have been pretty terrible for many other people.
Nobody is complaining about Israel killing Hamas members, Everybody is complaining about Israel killing children directly, by blowing schools children’s hospitals, refugee camps, children who try to get the aid that is meant for them, and doctors treating children. Everybody is also complaining about Israel arbitrarily murdering Palestinians, taking their rights away, using aid to lure them in so they can kill them, bulldozing entire neighbourhoods, leveling everything even vaguely looking like infrastructure, commerce, industry, residential, and any other buildings. Everybody is complaining about Israel driving Palestinians out of one part of Gaza after the other. Reporters get hunted down and murdered, IDF soldiers sing mocking songs about exterminating all Palestinians. You know… genocide.
If the IDF were hunting Hamas and they occasionally killed a child we would call it sloppy and a war crime and we would want that specific soldier to be arrested. But that’s not what’s happening, more children have been killed by the IDF than there are Hamas members. The IDF is obviously trying to commit genocide, and they’re not even trying to hide it.
You’ve fallen for the Israeli propaganda that equates Hamas to the Palestinian people. Never forget that Hamas has no child members. Never forget that most Palestinians are not in Hamas. Never forget how many children Israel has blown up and starved intentionally. These were not accidents, they actively aimed for these children.
I tried to say it to my mother, “Netanyahu has been supporting illegal settlements and displacement for decades now as well as trying to force a war with Iran. He’s a bad man. When Israel and a lot of Americans were attacked, he immediately started bombing to force mass displacement in hopes of getting rid of Palestine’s population. He did nothing to try to rescue the hostages or keep the civilian deaths to a minimum.”
It’s probably much worse than that.
Netanyahu is in deep shit with the Israeli court system. Lots of heavy allegations that could put him in prison for the rest of his life if he were to lose the immunity that comes with his position.
He was facing those allegations And heavy protests before the October attack because he was trying to mess with the court system for his own benefit.
Then the attack happened and he’s been picking fights with anyone he could find, Hamas, Hesbollah, Iran, now he’s bombing Syria. All so he could claim that he can’t address the court summons because “There is a fucking war on, you know!?”
Now they added allegations that he knew the October attack was coming and let it happen so he could start this whole mess and be able to avoid facing the courts. He straight up let his own countrymen get killed and started attacking everyone around ISrael to avoid jail.
It’s even worse in some ways and not so personal – though all of that is true as well.
Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has always relied on extreme right-wing anti-Palestinian and settler support, both for its own voters and as coalition partners. No long term peaceful settlement is in their political interest.
But simultaneously, Hamas also relies on the conflict and the anger it generates among both Gaza populations and other Muslim populations in the region for support. A peaceful solution isn’t in their interest either.
In a way the two groups are in a weird partnership to keep the conflict going and thus maintain their own power. Netanyahu has helped to keep Hamas propped up against the West Bank based Fatah, because the real threat to Likud’s power and ambitions is any potential of a peaceful Palestinian state.
Another huge annoyance is how Netanyahu’s administration + the Israeli ultra-right wing like to paint it that being anti-whatever Israel is doing equates to anti-semitism. I have nothing against Jews or the Jewish people whatsoever; heck, I have Jewish friends in Israel and abroad who broadly condemn what their own government is doing. But just because your people were gravely wronged in the past doesn’t give you a blank check to commit atrocities of your own.
One thing that massively complicates the whole situation is that there is a lot of pressure from different angles to equate being anti-Israel with being antisemitic. As you say, Israeli propaganda does so to block criticism, but simultaneously both Hamas and western homegrown antisemites do the same, but with the intent of using anger at Israel to make people more antisemitic.
Israel as a whole positioning themselves as a representation of the entirety of the world’s Jewish population is a huge part of this problem. Not every persecuted Jewish person chose to settle on illegally-seized land during/after the war (and in fact many couldn’t even afford to), but Israel would have you believe this because it’s better for their image.
The Jews as a rule had no choice at all, it was Palestine or death. The immigration blocks against Jews in the 1920s-30s are like nothing a modern American can imagine, with entire continents fully succeeding in blocking immigration altogether. At Evian 1938, every sovereign country in the world got together and fully understood all the Jews were about to be slaughtered, and all but one refused to let in any more to escape (thank you Dominican Republic). Britain surrendered to terrorism by Palestinian Arabs in 1939 and forbade Jews fleeing into Mandate Palestine, which was a violation of the terms of the Mandate under international law and absolutely nobody cared. After the war hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees languished in displaced persons camps for YEARS. Jews still in Dachau until 1951. Their prior home countries refused resettlement. Anyone trying to sneak back home would likely be murdered on the spot by their neighbors (see the end of “Maus”). There were large scale massacres of Holocaust survivors after the war in Ukraine and Poland late 1945 into 1946. America of course kept its doors happily sealed, Canada said “zero is too many.” And the Arab League countries seized the property and bank accounts of their Jewish citizens and declared they would be treated as enemies of the state unless they enlisted to join the armies and march to Palestine and kill all the Jews there. I’ve got receipts for all of this but it seems replies here with external links get auto-blocked, so, please, experiment with actually listening to Jewish people about Jewish history.
The choice was Israel or death. A lot of people are mad it was ever Israel instead of death.
I once read a graphic novel by an American jew who did that thing where she visited Israel and they rolled out the red carpet for her to learn her “heritage”. I think at the end she tried to share her newfound perspective on the conflict with her Egyptian American boyfriend and he (probably justifiably so) said she’d been propagandized.
..I think it was tacitly implied they broke up after.
This. Was the founding of Israel as an ethnostate in Palestine a mistake? Yeah, but it was, from the Jewish diaspora’s PoV, a necessary one, and the only one to prevent the Nazis’ work from being completed. Blame the countries that put them in that position–the ones that initiated the pogroms, and the ones that turned Jews fleeing those pogroms.
Now, does that absolve Israel for actions taken since the end of the 1968 Arab-Israeli War? Not in the least. This period has been marked with a move towards fascism and an accelerated program of lebensraum and ethnic cleansing.
Further complicating the issue: Israel is a nuclear state (albeit not ‘officially’). This means that if the US and the West were to cut military support, and Israel’s enemies were to decide that this meant it was open season, the first time an invading soldier stepped a foot over the 1968 borders, Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut would be mushroom clouds. Likely Mecca and Medinah, too, just on principle. And the odds of tactical nukes being used against Gaza and the West Bank is definitely non-zero. (When I say a lot of Israel’s critics don’t realize just how monstrous Netanyahu is, this is what I’m talking about.)
I will say there’s one major change I’d want to see in US policy–remove our objections in the UN, and before the Hague, to Israel being called out for war crimes. This is a savagely realpolitik position, but telling Israel, “We’ll keep providing you weapons, but from now on, you have to answer diplomatic challenges on your own,” may be the best way to amp up pressure without triggering a genuine apocalypse.
Nukes against Gaza and West-Bank are very VERY unlikely since the Israelis want to take that land for themselves, they wouldn’t poison the place like that, they are too small a country to deny themselves extra land.
Even “first time an invading soldier stepped a foot over the 1968 borders, Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut” is unlikely. They’d be used eventually, but it would be more of last resort than that. Unless Israeli forces had already been decimated to get that far.
Modern nukes are air-burst and also produce most of their explosions by fusion, so they produce way less radioactive fallout than the old style ones.
I think the main reason Israel doesn’t nuke Palestine is because almost every nation in the world would prefer if nukes remained a form of insurance rather than a tactical option. If they don’t go for an immediate hostile response, they are tacitly accepting that it would be an acceptable thing for their enemies to do to them.
I… unless things have changed considerably that’s not how nukes work, certainly not “tactical nukes”. Fusion nukes are Thermonuclear weapons, the next step up from regular Fission nukes. They use the energy of the initial fission to start the fusion process to produce a CONSIDERABLY more powerful detonation. Like, I can imagine that they worked on making them cleaner but it’s definitely not through fusion.
And air-burst is just how they are programmed to detonate. That’s how the two nukes dropped on Japan detonated as well.
Why would they nuke Gaza? Anything they could accomplish in a military sense with a nuke, they can achieve with conventional arms. Even ignoring the concerns with fallout and the even more disastrous PR than their current genocidal campaign, what would they gain?
This is wrong. Zionism as a political movement to settle and colonize Palestine began in the 1880s and 1890s, long before the Holocaust. The Jews absolutely did not have to choose between settling and colonizing and stealing land from the indigenous Palestinians or death. And many Jews back then and now felt that Zionism was wrong and has been for many years now just as bad as what was done to them in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe.
Referring back to the timeframe of the Dreyfus Affair and nonstop Russian pogroms shortly before the Holocaust (and I mean SHORTLY before; Dreyfus lived through the rise of Nazism and his wife lived to the end of it) supports my argument, not yours.
The Jewish people are indigenous to the Levant; if not, the term “indigenous” cannot apply to any people anywhere.
Really re-examine whether your goal is to help Palestinians or to convince other non-Jews that everything Jews say about themselves is a lie. Historical negationism is not going to confront the life threatening problems Palestinians face.
I don’t agree that “indigenous” can apply to Jews and Israel. I don’t think it can apply over thousands of years. I don’t think it should apply if you have to drive out others with their own centuries of history to retake the land you’re supposedly indigenous to. History cannot be undone.
I don’t think it can apply at all to a region like the Levant that was a crossroads of empire and migration for long centuries even before the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Zionism did begin long before the Holocaust. Of course, so did antisemitism and pogroms against Jews. It’s hard to say whether late 19th century Zionism really counts as colonialism, since Jews moving there were buying land and living under Imperial Ottoman rule. Hopes of a Jewish state on the ancient land of Israel certainly existed, but those hopes had existed for centuries.
It was only really with the end of the Ottoman Empire in WWI that a state became a viable possibility, even as a colonial enterprise.
There were certainly other options, but the late 19th and early 20th century made those options look bleak. Remaining second class oppressed minorities in nations with long histories of persecution, expulsion and pogroms is an option.
OTOH, though Jews were an oppressed minority in much of Europe, European Jews were still European and thus not only had some access to the wealth and power of colonialist Europe, but also absorbed many colonialist attitudes.
The Zionist enterprise was both settler colonialism and a bid for freedom and autonomy by a marginalized people. Both can be true.
That the Jews had been oppressed in Europe of course meant nothing to Palestinians pushed out of their home and denied their own government.
So, while what led to Zionism and to the establishment of Israel is understandable and sympathetic, it also led inevitably to where we are today.
What a fascinatingly one-sided comment that conveniently leaves out the Zionist response to the British overarching policy of ‘If you want to put your Israel in Palestine, you need to do so in a way that doesn’t inconvenience the Palestinians.’
Or are we supposed to forget the Irgun and act as though it was only ‘Palestinian Arabs’ doing terrorism against the Mandatory government in the 1930s?
Yes, actually. The Irgun did not start to target the British until after the aforementioned 1939 surrender to Palestinian Arab terrorism and illegal banning of Jewish immigration. And of course, all of that was after the genocidally antisemitic riots and massacres in 1936, 1929, 1922, 1920….
British suggestions on how to handle things were mooted after Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin Al-Husseini firmly threw in with Nazi Germany, incited the Farhud pogrom, recruited Arab troops to join SS units and exterminate Jews from Tunisia to Bosnia, and diplomatically intercepted and canceled attempted Red Cross evacuations of Jewish orphans out of the killing zones. They were CERTAINLY mooted after the Secretary General of the Arab League promised in late 1947 “a war of extermination and momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
Here is an excerpt I rather like, concerning the British Mandate:
“The British military in Palestine disliked the Jews from the beginning, even when it was the Arabs who were giving the trouble. And this attitude subsisted right through the Arab Revolt, in which the Jews helped the British. In the mess of the Palestine Mobile Force in 1945, journalist Richard Grossman was told: ‘All through the Arab revolt, when our men were being shot in the back and protecting the Jews, most of them liked the Arabs… The old Arab will take a shot at you in the night, but he’ll offer you coffee the next day when you come to investigate. The Jew doesn’t offer you coffee, even when you’re protecting him.’
People who disliked the Jews before the Holocaust generally didn’t dislike them any the less because of the Holocaust. On the contrary: the Jews were seen as more pushing, strident, and demanding than ever – and cashing in cunningly on their new asset of enhanced entitlement to sympathy.
Dislike of the Jews was existential. If they conformed to the traditional stereotypes – pushy, acquisitive and so on – they were disliked for that. But if they departed from the stereotype, they were felt to be cheating. Thus one of the most cherished of the stereotypes was that the Jew was un-warlike. This had never been regarded as a point in his favor: Joseph Chamberlain thought they were ‘cowardly’; Treitschke, ‘lacking in the martial virtues.’ But for the Jew to become warlike was regarded as a monstrous mutation. It was all right for ‘the old Arab’ to ‘take a shot at you,’ but for the Jew to do so was contrary to the law of nature.”
There you go again, describing an attempt to mediate a discussion and impose a compromise if none could be reached naturally as ‘surrendering to terrorism’, which is doubly strange when that compromise was in line with their earlier position. Is it surrendering to not change your mind about whether people living in an area take priority over people who’d like to live in that area?
Also people need to remember that this genocide didn’t start two years ago. Israel has been doing this since 1948, it’s just more open and obvious now than it was before. People can record what’s happening there with smartphones now and post it online for all to see.
An AP article about the October 7, 2023 attack mentioned it was in retaliation for an Israeli attack three months earlier and had a link to that story. The attack three months earlier was retaliation by Israel for a Hamas attack two months earlier and linked to that story. The third story mentioned retaliation for an attack by Israel four months earlier, etc., etc. I followed the links back every two to four months to 2019 before I got disgusted and quit. It was like two kids having a slap fight, except people were dying.
Yeah you could pick a random newspaper from any decade in the past half century on IvP and you’d only need to change a few words for them to basically tell the same story.
I’d say it’s more like how the US treated the native tribes for centuries than two kids having a slap fight. One side has been settling and colonizing the area for many decades while the other side is the indigenous people who have been trying to stay on their homeland.
If you think the story of Jews in Israel is a match for that of Englishmen in the Americas, I have very bad news concerning the likelihood you could ever drive positive change on this issue.
The better analogy would be Taiwan. There had always been ethnic Han Chinese people in Taiwan, but a death-level crisis in the 1940s saw a huge population influx that totally changed island demographics and government. The Formosan aborigines did not get a vote. And there are now several hundred million people surrounding Taiwan who want it erased.
That’s an interesting patch of whitewash there. What sort of government did the 2 million Kuomintang soldiers and officials enforce on the 6 million pre-existing Taiwanese people?
It’s more whitewash by exception, I suppose. Saying ‘Israel is just like Taiwan!’ and leaving out the whole ‘ethnonationalist state that was under martial law for several decades and extrajudicially imprisoned or murdered over 140 000 people’ bit, you know?
Charlie, I really like your style. Lovingly but firmly pushing your SO to be a better person, supportive but not enabling? 10/10, no notes.
Carla, you’re doing good too. What you’re expressing here is fully human, and not too dumb a coming of age, in fact. You’re feeling the pain but for once not deflecting, admitting and explaining, not getting defensive, it’s admirable.
… something bad is gonna happen to balance out the wisdom, isn’t it.
This is more complicated than just supporting someone with ideals contrary to yours; confronting people you love with a different set of ideals is never easy, and I would never expect someone to completely cut those people out.
Carla is struggling to come to terms with that, so if she is “ruined” for you then clearly you aren’t interested in the growth of people for better, or worse.
“This is more complicated than just supporting someone with ideals contrary to yours; confronting people you love with a different set of ideals is never easy, and I would never expect someone to completely cut those people out.”
Honestly? Incorrect, its VERY easy to confront people you love who are actively supporting and profiting from a genocide. I mean most of us can confront them for things far less terrible than genocide and war profiteering. Its PURE greed on the part of her folks (nobody needs government contract and millise system money, they chose to sell their tech to the government and to the military) and her not telling them its pathetic vile behaviour is 100% on her. Sure it might take her a bit of time to get off their ass and shout at the parents, but shes been confronted with it now, any continued excuse is rationalising how itsok for HER to profit from genocide, not just her parents.
“so if she is “ruined” for you then clearly you aren’t interested in the growth of people for better, or worse.”
Not at all, she is ruined until she takes her stand against her folks(I dont recall saying shes irredeemable, but close), but again, shes coming up to 20 years old and cant decide “supplying arms to help a genocide is evil” so maybe her growth over her entire life is to blame, and isnt easily fixed. Not to mention we have had her (since her comic intro) going on and talking about how superior and amazing she and her wealth is, when it seems it comes from absolute evil on her folks part. Somewhat taints the entire characters past for me.
Same with Joyce and dorothy, their recent besexual cheating nonsense kinda makes their entire characters look like frauds, especially Joyce going form abstinant jesus freak to literally cheating on her BF within what, a month of leaving the church?
Eh, most members of the human population are ideologically willing to kill millions of people. It’s just that the people with industry power have the ability to. Walk into any Walmart during the Bush years, and listen to people telling their friends that they would solve the middle east by just nuking the entire region. I wouldn’t say they don’t deserve their friends for these beliefs, just that the human brain isn’t designed to have power over such a large group of people.
Jesus, let her have a fucking minute to deal with the cognitive dissonance that people can be good To Her and not Good People. She’s 19 and it’s the first time she’s been confronted with this concept. She’s allowed to struggle for a second.
Empathy isn’t just a concept for large-scale terrors, you’re supposed to have it for the small shit too.
shes 19 and trans, shes well aware that people can be good to others and not be good people to you/people they dont care about, I guarantee Carla has dealt with it for years (ask any trans person really)
It really gives that “My friend cant be a predator/abusive, they are SO NICE to me” energy that people on here would fully (and rightfully) call bullshit. It’s really not hard to.
Empathy is something saved for people and things that deserve it. “Tech billionare heir sad her folks are actively supporting genocide so feels conflicted” isnt worthy of empathy to me.
Except she id not doing that at all, dhe is not saying “My parents can’t be bad people” she is saying she fell that because they di so much for her she doesn’t have the right to call them out in this issue. Very different things, which you get if you actually care and not just wanted to ride a moral high horse.
They’re not her friends though, they’re her parents? Way different dynamic there, it’s much easier to drop a friend who’s displaying problematic behaviors than your parents who raised you. Not saying she shouldn’t reckon with it, just that it’s obviously a difficult situation to be in and she can feel conflicted about it.
I asked myself (a trans person) and I told me that sometimes people come to those realizations late. Even if they’ve been dealing with it their whole life, it might not occur that it’s true of everyone they meet. Not everyone’s experiences are the same. Shocker.
Sorry you lack empathy for a young woman finding out her parents kinda suck even though they weren’t cruel to her personally. The idea that her sadness over finding that out isn’t worthy of empathy because she was born into wealth with a roll of the dice is just… weird to me, I guess.
Well to be fair to Balger, they lack empathy for a fictional character finding out her parents kinda suck even though they weren’t cruel to her personally.
As Carla said, her parents have been literally her only support in life. It’d be one thing if she’d already graduated, had a job, and wouldn’t be at any risk of y’know, becoming homeless if her parents suddenly decided to disown her. I doubt they would, but they do have power over her, and that’s intimidating.
Saying that Carla’s parents are helping to commit genocide is an extreme exaggeration. From what we’ve been told, they sell computer systems used in weapons to the US government. What the US government does with those weapons afterwards is not something they can control. It’s entirely possible that their contract with the government predates the Bulmeria situation entirely.
Almost certain. (Well, if Bulmeria is really meant as a full I/P analogy, not before the beginnings of the situation generations ago, but certainly before the latest flare up.)
Government military contracts have long lead times and it’s very unlikely any systems developed in the last few years are being sold to Bulmeria.
I don’t think Carla is saying that at all. She’s realizing that her parents who treated her well and who she long thought were good people have been, through their company, helping others do terrible things to other people. I’m waiting to see how she reacts to that in future strips before I decide Carla if is a completely terrible person.
AND she is actively opposed to free school lunches, the color green and those videos of dogs waiting on the porch to get treats from the mail carrier. What a monster.
I think she likely just hasn’t thought about it, and likely doesn’t want to think about it.
Worst case scenario would be she doesn’t like XYZ but she likes that her parents are rich and if XYZ is the price she’s willing to accept that.
I don’t think Carla has ever said she supports that. More like she’s now realizing that her rich parents, who she though were good people because of how they helped her, have actually been terrible towards a lot of other people. And I’m gonna wait and see how she reacts to that information in future strips before I decide how I feel about Carla.
oh this hits. deeply close to home as a trans girl with parents in the ic. spend so long being drenched in what seems completely normal and then you get out into the world and start forming your own opinions on things and have to deal with the messy consequences of realizing you might need to morally oppose your parents and being absolutely afraid of what that might entail. for me it meant cutting contact for years but hopefully carla is able to sort out her feelings and have this conversation
Man Charlie is a good girlfriend. That was a wonderful way to put it and the fact that Carla got to the heart of the issue immediately instead of fucking around was really refreshing. A+ for both of them so far.
While “Contractors” can certainly refer to PMCs I think here she meant the people and companies who produce gear for the military. The whole military industrial complex.
Which is a common talking point in some circles – that the profits the military industrial complex makes are actually what drives wars. It’s a pretty hard on to make in the Israel/Gaza situation. You can certainly argue that Israel wouldn’t be able to do what it’s doing without access to weapons from US manufacturers (which might be all Jocelyne meant there), but it’s pretty clear that the motives behind it aren’t really tied to military/industrial complex profits.
It does depend on the situation I guess, some countries might feel emboldened by the superior gear they get. With Israel… I don’t think so, they don’t really need advanced weaponry for that so they’d do it regardless of US involvement. It might keep them from starting fights with the neighbours though, they certainly wouldn’t be able to strike at Iran without advanced US planes.
Quite possible, but if you’re going back that far, you’re now not so much asking “would a lack of weapons stop the genocide”, but would such a lack have led to Israel being destroyed.
@thejeff well that’s the rub isn’t it. There’s much more to the problem than “arms industry giving the IDF weapons=bad”.
But of course an IDF without military superiority would adopt a different posture and *not* engage in genocide. If Syria, Egypt and Lebanon as well as iraq, Iran were not kneecapped different choices would have to be made too.
There’s an incredibly fine balance here between Israel has to adopt a different posture for lack of military superiority and Israel isn’t strong enough to defend itself.
It is one of the bigger motivations for America to provide them with the weapons in that the government would rather spend money making weapons than on helping people.
i think it’s really cool that carla’s having this change in perspective, but i also do get why some folks are mad at her. the fact that she gets to feel conflicted about this at all is a huge privilege that none of the people who are being killed have, so if you view it from their perspective, every moment she spends puzzling over this is another moment ruutech bombs could be dropped on them.
that being said, i think it’s important to remember that 1. this isn’t real life, it’s a fictionalized representation of real-world issues, 2. this is a 19-year-old girl and we can’t expect perfection from her, and 3. this is an ongoing story, and we have to wait and find out what will happen next. i personally have a lot of mixed feelings about drawing inspiration from a real-life ongoing genocide to fuel character development in your webcomic, but i’m waiting to see what comes of it before i pass any real judgement. maybe we can all sit and finish watching the movie before saying a character is ruined forever?
I love DoA and QC accidentally hitting a similar story point at the same time… rich parent(s) running big corporation doing bad things, and child having to risk their parents’ wrath & their ‘allowance’ to stand up for what’s right.
When it comes to Carla, we’ve been told that her parents were very supportive every step of the way about Carla’s gender and they have looked out for her. Carla’s individuality seems to be something her parents support. It’s a different matter entirely if Carla starts asking them questions about their business.
“Mom, dad, I’m not the gender I was born as.”
versus.
“Mom, dad, do you make your money ethically? You have made no business deals with any unsavory characters? Is all of the money you earn clean and bloodless?”
I’m old and jaded enough to have a sinking feeling that, even if Carla does voice her objections, her parents might make sympathetic noises but go “This is the price we pay to keep you safe, sweetie.” >.<
I enjoyed parts of Episode 9.
And I’m always a sucker for a “common people band together to put their lives on the line against a greater evil”.
Especially if we know a good few.
Carla is my favorite character in this comic. Which is why this panel hits me far more than normal.
I agree with Charlie. Carla’s parents sound awesome. I really think Carla would be better off letting her parents know her feelings on this issue. Not demand that they drop the military contracts, but simply let them know what decisions she would make in this situation. Even if it’s that she has no idea what decision she would make. After all, dropping the contracts would affect stockholder earnings, people’s jobs, etc. It’s not a simple issue.
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🥺
*plays Hanezeve Caradhina by Takeshi Saito on hacked muzak*
charlie is a good partner for carla. well said
I am loving to see this side of Charlie
She’s bringing out the parts of Carla that we almost never get to see, and that she works so hard to hide.
I’m loving this dramatic horror-movie lighting, too.
She’s a balancing influence the same way Dina is to Becky.
I do hope we actually learn a bit more about her, I’d like to explore a bit more of her identity beyond just Carla’s absent-minded girlfriend, the same way Dina gets some interactions with Joyce and Joe.
Charlie continuing to prove they are the better sibling lol
I suspect that this wasn’t meant to be a morally ambiguous storyline with Bulmeria’s genocide being an obvious RL stand-in and pure evil. A lot of people brought up the OTHER arms supplying event going on, though, that hasn’t been referenced in the comic, though. I.e the Eastern European crisis where the LACK of US support is a moral deficiency. I don’t think that’s going to come up, though. I think the Ruttech storyline will solely be about Carla confronting her parents are involved in something pure evil not gray.
Especially complicated if Ruttech isn’t a direct supplier, but sells to the US, which then might send to A (good) and B (bad)
Or if refusing to sell to B means the US revokes permission to sell to A, arms exports being a rather _controlled_ market.
Could be a case where Ruttech doesn’t make weapons directly but they make a specific useful thing that has multiple applications, including weapons, and they just don’t really care what people do with the thing once they’ve sold it.
Specifically, computer systems FOR missiles.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/kerning/
And I just re-read your comment and realized I misunderstood it. Sorry.
” ‘Once rockets go up
who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department‘
says Wernher von Braun.”
Tom Lehrer
At some point I’d say it stops being their problem. Like if missiles were built using civilian Nvidia GPUs, that’s not really an Nvidia issue…
Actually… You should know the USG can and does sanction possible sales of dual use computer tech to nations it considers hostile. NVIDIA is forbidden from selling certain GPUs to china for example
They can make ’em, but they can’t have ’em.
I think saying the lack of US arms is a moral deficiency is kinda missing the point. The US has had multiple opportunities to facilitate the end of the conflict but has instead chosen to prolong it with arms support. While withdrawal of that support and outright surrender is not a good result, I think we, as citizens and sometimes activists, must maintain a dedication to peace and life, which means fighting for and end to military profiteering, not just when the people on the other end of those weapons are non-belligerents. The protection racketeering and hyper militarization from the US must stop if atrocities like these are ever going to end.
There has been no opportunity to end the Ukraine conflict on any terms what would be remotely acceptable. Anything offered by Russia has been designed both to keep conquered territory and prevent Ukraine from being able to defend itself should Russia choose to attack again. OTOH, greater support early on, might have enabled Ukraine to push Russia out of it’s territories and strike an actual deal. “Might have” – there are a lot of complexities in all of that.
There’s no sense in which “protection racketeering and hyper militarization from the US” caused the invasion of Ukraine. Other countries like Russia have agency too.
we can forgive aiding and abetting genocide and ethnic cleansing but unironically enjoying the star wars prequels is a step too far
The whole world except the United States:
“How is it that those words can even go together like that in a sentence???”
Charley speaks with wisdom far beyond her years, again
Hey the prequels have issues but I like them. The sequels are an absolute mess, though.
Oh, I loved the sequels!
I actually love the way Palpatine’s return recontextualizes the earlier movies.
He was obviously intending to steal Luke’s body in Jedi, and even more obviously trying to push Anakin to the same point in Sith, so he could steal the most force-capable body ever.
I loved episode 7! Too bad they never continued that timeframe, though.
Two of the sequels are very good. Unfortunately though, somehow Palpatine had returned
Rise of Skywalker extremely sucks, but it’s too pathetic to truly hate.
The real venom should be reserved for Force Awakens, which in hindsight basically burned the future of the franchise for a short-term nostalgia hit and left it’s sequels to try to cook with the ashes.
See, this is a take I can’t personally understand. Force Awakens is what it is, but Last Jedi was already unwatchably bad. I have tried a few times and it is just impossible to get through the movie. And everyone I’ve ever heard say anything about the movies has said that Rise is even worse.
But of course everyone can like what they want, I’m sure I love many movies that others would hate.
To be perfectly honest, “Last Jedi,” while having MANY flaws, remains my favorite of the sequels, mainly because they tried something new. Rey’s parents being nobodies were supposed to show that you didn’t need to have “Chosen One” blood to be a great Jedi. When Luke fought Kylo Ren he moved completely defensively, the perfect example of how a Jedi was supposed to fight. Kylo killing Snoke and taking his place, despite being a repeat of “Return of the Jedi,” did show that Kylo was SUPPOSED to be irredeemable and I MUCH would have preferred him to be the final boss of the trilogy instead of Palpatine, especially since his final battle as a villain was the ONLY part of “Rise of Skywalker” I LIKED. But what I loved about “Last Jedi,” more than anything else in the trilogy, was Ghost Yoda burning the Jedi Library and telling Luke that the ancient Jedi weren’t saints and they made mistakes, same as Luke, and he needs to stop romanticizing the past and try something different; to teach Rey about his failures and see if she can find work-arounds so that the next generation wouldn’t be bound to repeat them. I found that message to be directed at the audience, who were getting tired of “Star Wars” repeating the same plot but at the same time thought the original trilogy was sacred and didn’t want ANYTHING re-contextualized, but unfortunately the fans rejected the message and we had Rey being part of a literal Royal Bloodline and Kylo being Anakin 2.0. Rise of Skywalker threw out EVERYTHING Last Jedi attempted to dish out and replaced it all with “safe” nostalgia and it just didn’t work.
I agree with your take on Last Jedi’s themes and intent. Unfortunately, I am also forced to admit that there were several aspects of the film’s crafting that were just plain bad. Pacing was a problem in particular (the casino/race arc should’ve been one, maybe two scenes in their entirety–constantly cutting back to it and trying to build it up was just a mistake). Rose’s “Love, love, love” dialogue was also in need of a serious re-write; again, the message is sound, but if you can’t make the dialogue itself compelling, the message is going to be lost for most folks.
Basically, my issue with Last Jedi is that whenever I see it, I think about the movie it should have been (which, again, would still have all the same themes).
I thought I was the only one that also think Last Jedi is the best one
Nah, it’s a reasonably popular opinion. Folks who think that just aren’t anywhere near as loud as the people for whom it ruined their childhoods.
I also feel bad for the people who didn’t like Last Jedi for perfectly normal reasons, because they’ve gotta deal with the embarrassment of sharing an opinion with some of the Worst People on the Internet.
There’s problems everywhere, but what is unforgivable to me, is after Han’s death, when the Falcon returns from the battle in TFA, Chewie and Leia — Han’s closest companions — just… walk past each other like they don’t even know they exist, never mind the grief they both carry.
Say what you want about the prequels, at least they were about something (how democracies become facist dictatorships)
The only thing the sequels were about was recouping the costs of Disney buying Star Wars (except The Last Jedi but of course that’s the one everyone hates)
I see you, Britta.
Rise of Skywalker is a Sequel and also absolute total trash. Ep VII is serviceable if uninspired, VIII is a dumpster fire of not following established lore and physics and IX is trying to retcon VIII while not doing it well and also bringing every bad idea from the EU in. The Last Jedi is a bad movie and a terrible Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker is a huge mess that should have never been released.
The Last Jedi is the best Star Wars movie and I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can be a Star Wars fan and not like it because it is the most Star Wars one
Last Jedi is very clearly the good one of the sequels, but only like a third of it is actually firing on all cylinders and it’s sandwiched between 7 and 9, which both suck.
It goes in with Revenge of the Sith in the messy but compelling camp.
I’d love to read the novel that The Last Jedi is a jank adapatation of, if we’re assuming that that carries over
I don’t like Last Jedi all that much, it’s like a high 6/10, but it did convince me that under better circumstances Rian Johnson could have made a damn good Star Wars and I would very much like to visit the alternate universe where he got to direct Episode 7. Ideally the entire trilogy, but even just the first one being done by someone with a vision who could lay a better foundation than just doing the originals again
Force Awakens basically invalidates the ending of the original trilogy by having the empire come right back and also Luke Skywalker doesn’t care about that for reasons Rian Johnson has to figure out.
There’s about 10-15 minutes of Last Jedi that’s phenomenal but the climax of the Poe/Holdo storyline is Leia shooting Poe for his insubordination that got the whole rebellion killed and then her and immediately Holdo start fangirling about how cool Poe is and that’s maybe indicative of some issues with that storyline…
Rise of Skywalker is just Force Awakens again except more obviously.
Because they are all boomers.
Last Jedi is so bad it’s physically impossible for me to get through it, without being tied down. I have tried several times. It’s horrid. The Room is unironically a better movie than Last Jedi, and most of the oeuvre Neil Breen is more watchable.
Fascinated to explore why you think that. What’s so wrong with it that it’s worse than Neil Breen and The Room?
it’s less fun to joke about with your friends. It’s not even so bad it’s good.
That said, it is far from the worst movie I’ve sat through.
My favourite thing about The Last Jedi is how every trailer had the shot of Luke saying “This isn’t going to go the way you think” and then all the fans got mad it didn’t go the way they thought
Last Jedi is the franchise equivalent of staggering six paces forward after being cut in half by a samurai sword by the previous movie before exploding into a gory mess in the sequel. I don’t think I like it very much but it’s about as good as it could reasonably be expected to be.
Rise of Skyw
Which one was the one with the whales, again?
Free Willy’s Wonderland
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But there was only one whale.
There was a Star Trek movie about a whale, is that what you’re thinking of?
That’s the joke.
Ahhh, fair enough carry on.
You forgive what now?
Sad to think that there’s people who really do believe that.
This is a very hard conversation but it’s one Carla needed to have
That said I will be very annoyed if the whole protest storyline is revolved with a call to her parents (note that I do not think Willis would do that)
Fuck, Carla’s never been more relatable to me. Not even with regards to her gender identity (whole different can of worms), but having these pillars of support you wouldn’t be around to complain about if they hadn’t been there for you when no one else was.
Then they do and believe things that run counter to what you’ve grown to believe is right and just.
What point does gratitude and love become subservience and weakness of character?
Charlie is a lot more insightful that people give her credit for.
She seems like a very wise soul.
She interacts with the world at a 5000 ping, but that doesn’t mean she’s dim.
This is so interesting because we’ve heard Carla say her parents are great, and that she loves them, but for her to be so scared to express her thoughts to them… maybe they aren’t so perfect. I can speak my mind with my father and express myself knowing that he’ll sincerely love me no matter what. I’ve actually had very lovely and enlightening conversations with him about my gender expression and sexuality (and learned in turn that if my dad were born in a more current generation, he’d probably consider himself bi). Not everyone has that, not every parent is safe to do that with. Let alone something as delicate as the way they make money.
Also Charlie looks so pretty here.
Could be several things:
– could be that Carla’s afraid they’ll get mad
– could be that Carla’s afraid they won’t get mad, but she won’t like their answers.
Sometimes it’s less about “I’m secretly afraid of the person I love” and more about “I’m secretly afraid to lose faith in/respect for the person I love”
Also, sometimes you’re afraid of how someone will react for rational reasons and sometimes you’re afraid of how someone will react because of clinical anxiety. Growing up with your parents as “the only friends you had” is a good recipie for less than rational fears about losing their aproval for disagreeing with them.
This. It’s important to remember that a lot of times anxiety tells you that people will leave you for very minor offenses even though that makes zero sense given what you know of them rationally.
I cannot count the number of times I’ve been afraid to come forward about something (that in hindsight was actually pretty dang minor) to my mom, my family, a friend, and when I finally “cave” and tell them, their response is always “wait, you thought I’d be mad about that?”
My mom, my friends, my family, all are wonderful people who have my back through thick and thin. Anxiety does not care. It will still make you paranoid that some tiny disagreement or transgression will be the “last straw” and ruin everything.
Carla’s parents may similarly be wonderful, but I don’t doubt that experiencing that rejection from her peers that she mentioned resulted in a measure of hyper-awareness and fear of losing the little support she *did* get.
When people hurt or betray you, it can sometimes result in you being paranoid even of those who stuck by you. You start to wonder how transient *any* love and support really is. The more precious and vital such love and support she did receive made her that much more frightened about its fragility.
In some ways it’s like coming out; there’s always the chance that the other person isn’t what you hope them to be.
It is absolutely possible that her parents have not made it okay to question them about certain things, but it is also equally possible that it has more to do with Carla’s trauma dealing with literally everyone else she’s ever trusted where she has repeatedly discovered that there exists a line that has on one side love & support and on the other side disgust and condemnation. Even if her parents have never given any indication that they have such a line…. Neither do other people, until you cross it.
*shrug* one of the weirdest things I’ve discovered about “adulting” is that people in general don’t like communication as much as they say they do.
I think it’s more that she’s built them up in her mind to be perfect, and she’s afraid to confront the possibility that they are, in fact, merely human beings.
Carla’s parents have been great to her so far, but there’s always a chance they won’t react well to her bringing up concerns about how they’ve gotten their money, and the things her parents’ company does to make money.
I could absolutely talk to my mother about difficult subjects. I just didn’t, because they were dificult subjects. I remember one occasion when she suggested we should shut a conversation down, not because she was upset I disagreed with her, but because doing so was making me upset.
Okay, I’m looking at that first couple of sentences, and it’s kind of nonsense? Clearly I couldn’t talk to her about difficult subjects, but the point is that wasn’t because of anything she was bringing to it.
I can completely understand that. For me and my mother, sometimes the subjects were things that were difficult for me to talk about, and my mother made them even more difficult to talk about by getting angry. I’m glad that your mother was more understanding about your emotions and looked out for you.
Which also isn’t to say my mom never could. She was a good mother. But when her anger was triggered, all bets were off on having a calm conversation. Now that she’s gone that’s something that I have to contend with, is making peace with all the things I wished I could say that now I never can.
Carla doesn’t deal well with complex emotions
Shouldn’t have picked Booster’s sister, then
Right?? Sorry, I know I look biased but.
This looks familiar. The sideways glance + uncomfortable question. Charlie Sánchez, everyone: Latina, queer, neurodivergent, and sister of a nonbinary sibling — Of course she was gonna have Political Opinions.
Charlie is much less of a chaos gremlin about it, but the sibling resemblance is definitely showing beyond just looks now.
Man, this is the second most awkward conversation in a webcomic about well-meaning kids and their billionaire industrialist CEO parents I’ve seen all week…
If I had a nickel for every webcomic having a storyline about a billionaire heiress having to confront their parents running currently I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice
Okay it’s not actually that weird considering the politics of the authors but I had to finish the quote
Do you think they planned this?
We already know Willis is guilty of participating in the hoax of landing on the moon; what else could he be hiding?
Willis runs a healthy buffer, I dont know how far ahead Jeph plans his story
I’d say better odds on it being a coincidence
Pretty sure Jeph did not originally plan for Anh to be more than a one-week character originally, so I’d definitely say coincidence is the way to bet
It also depends how much she retains attention; a lot of characters eventually fade out once they become less interesting for him to write (Raven, Brun, Penelope) but they might pop back in once in a while to remind people they exist.
I hope Elliot gets more relevance again though, it’s like the only M/M ship he writes and Elliot’s anxiety issues are much more relatable personally.
Yeah Jeph writes a fun story, but he’s not good on any kind of main-cast diversity. I can’t get excited about Anh because so far every non-white cast member ends up disappearing from the main cast so I fear her fate is sealed. Would love to be wrong.
I miss Brun and Elliot a bunch!!!
Brun! I was pretty bummed when one of his notes during the reruns confirmed that he basically had no further plans for her.
Yeah, same
Didn’t he take his first holiday in years a few months ago and straight up say he had no actual plans for when he came back?
(That might have been a Patreon thing)
My best bet is that Willis and Jeph are a couple
oh a QC reader huh?
I wish QC released every day like this does. Jeph consistently has those cliffhangers before the weekend, and I end up rereading the previous 50-100 pages multiple times while I wait for the next strip.
It has been kinda interesting seeing similar stories in two different webcomics I read.
Funny how the only two serialized dramedy webcomics I follow have very similar arcs at the same time.
You know I really didn’t like Carla in the beginning, but she has really grown on me over the years. I hope her parents are understanding, and even if they don’t change anything I hope Carla, and her parents, will still be a close family.
Also Charlie has been good for Carla; Carla is chaotic, and needs someone to help focus her actions, and thoughts.
she is growing it is nice
I like Carla better when she’s less of a performative asshole. When she’s actually reflective and introspective she’s a cool character.
When she’s doing wacky hijinks just to remind people she exists, it’s relatable but less fun for me (outside of dunking on Mary).
Charlie is sanguine and wise. She’s the opposite of Booster’s style meddling
I love seeing this side of her
Considering our introduction to her was her saying the right thing, but way too late, this timing is hitting just right
That’s deep
You see i was close to replying with “your mom is deep” but that was too close to actually making sense as a your mom joke snd that would against my entire philosophy.
Your mom is against my entire philosophy
That was beautiful.
… you know, I’m not hearing Carla say that she IS against the arms dealing.
Yeah. She’s so uncomfortable with the entire thing, she can’t even make excuses for them: She’s outright saying she doesn’t feel comfortable questioning her parents in anything. Including participating in a genocide.
Let’s see what happens. I don’t wanna get out my “Booster Was Right” shirt this soon, I’ll look biased.
You’ve got a Booster Sicko as your grav. You already look biased.
That is implicit?
She seems to have been unaware of some of the more terrible things Ruttech does. Now that she is aware, I hope Carla decides to take a stand against what her parents’ company is doing in some meaningful way.
I think its reasonable for an 18-or-so year old young woman to not have considered the implications of it all that much thus far.
“Arms trade = bad” is an oversimplification of things. It’d be wonderful if guns weren’t required sometimes, but they kinda are, Ukraine’s been surviving for the past three years and change thanks to foreign governments being willing to ship billions of dollars of merchandise to them. It’s a very ugly business, but not an inherently evil one.
It becomes quite evil, though, when you’re shipping arms to countries that aren’t using them for mere self-defense, but instead aggressive expansion.
But is it reasonable to expect Carla to have gone down a line-item list of her family’s military export contracts to discern between defensive nations and offensive ones?
Not to mention any other casually-evil-billionaire-class-horrors that the gig-industrialist executives are perpetuating?
This is the age where you really can start to look at your parents as being People instead of Pseudo-Deities. As much as I love making jokes about Carla’s parents being the first against the wall when the revolution comes (but they get a blindfold for being genuinely good parents), and as much as I bristle against Carla’s… Carlaness in more comedic scenes…
…yeah, I’m not going to blame her for being a very young woman who didn’t look deeply into her loving parents’ business and is feeling very conflicted over that at the moment.
Agreed to all of this.
God, 18 is when you start realised *you* have political opinions let alone that your parents have them and their opinions might be bad actually?
Eh, my political opinions started in the 11-13 range. Little teenage libertarian, unlike my parents.
I agree with what Li said almost all the way. That being said I was a fairly politically precocious child and was thinking deeply about these things since I was like what, 12? 18 feels way too old relative to when I first questioned my parents and considered my self political. I think part of that was my mother. She was a fairly aggressive TERF. Whenever asked me who my like ‘role model’ was, it was never my parents or people on TV it was civil rights figures from the history books I read voraciously. I thought that was normal (it wasnt).
I feel like part of peoples reaction is just how different a life one can lead. Carla was pretty sheltered and her life was smothered by a singular issue for a very long time. But other people weren’t and I think that is partially the lense others are judging her from right now.
I didn’t mean Li I meant Wraithy, but no, dumb brain sees the same gravitar as Li’s and does stupid short cut. Well whatever.
I’m gonna take credit anyway.
From the few hints we’ve been given, it looks like Ruttech makes computer systems used in missiles rather than the missiles themselves. That probably makes them a sub-contractor with no control (and probably not even any knowledge) of where the arms are exported to. They don’t have “export contracts” of their own.
I don’t know if that makes things better or worse, but they almost certainly can’t say “We’ll sell these to Ukraine, but not Israel.”
Carla is obnoxious and shameless. If she was in favor of it we would have heard her brag about her parents role in it if anything.
The whole conflict only exist because she can’t bring herself to criticize her parents. If she agreed with them, or even if she was neutral about it, we wouldn’t hear the end of it.
I’m glad that Carla’s parents are supportive of her when lots of parents of trans kids are not. But that doesn’t change the fact that they own a company that’s helping create weapons fueling a genocide, and nobody becomes a billionaire by being a good person. Billionaires generally get that wealthy by a combination of exploiting the working class and being lucky enough to be born to parents who were already wealthy. Gonna be interesting to see how Carla handles the fact that while her parents were great to her, they have been pretty terrible for many other people.
“I can forgive genocide, but I draw the line at Rise of the Skywalker.”
“You can forgive genocide?”
“Mom, dad, could you stop enabling genocide because it’ll REALLY annoy a transphobe at my school?”
That’s honestly an amazing flex.
This Carla stuff showing up right as I’ve finished reading Rain, it’s very convenient for me specifically.
I wonder if Rain and Carla would get along…
Actually liking and respecting your parents runs into one small snag — confronting them sucks.
I find it really spooky how, sometimes, the topics of DoA and QC crossover like this, despite having months of buffer strips!
Just… random observation…
Move along… Move along…
Nobody is complaining about Israel killing Hamas members, Everybody is complaining about Israel killing children directly, by blowing schools children’s hospitals, refugee camps, children who try to get the aid that is meant for them, and doctors treating children. Everybody is also complaining about Israel arbitrarily murdering Palestinians, taking their rights away, using aid to lure them in so they can kill them, bulldozing entire neighbourhoods, leveling everything even vaguely looking like infrastructure, commerce, industry, residential, and any other buildings. Everybody is complaining about Israel driving Palestinians out of one part of Gaza after the other. Reporters get hunted down and murdered, IDF soldiers sing mocking songs about exterminating all Palestinians. You know… genocide.
If the IDF were hunting Hamas and they occasionally killed a child we would call it sloppy and a war crime and we would want that specific soldier to be arrested. But that’s not what’s happening, more children have been killed by the IDF than there are Hamas members. The IDF is obviously trying to commit genocide, and they’re not even trying to hide it.
You’ve fallen for the Israeli propaganda that equates Hamas to the Palestinian people. Never forget that Hamas has no child members. Never forget that most Palestinians are not in Hamas. Never forget how many children Israel has blown up and starved intentionally. These were not accidents, they actively aimed for these children.
I tried to say it to my mother, “Netanyahu has been supporting illegal settlements and displacement for decades now as well as trying to force a war with Iran. He’s a bad man. When Israel and a lot of Americans were attacked, he immediately started bombing to force mass displacement in hopes of getting rid of Palestine’s population. He did nothing to try to rescue the hostages or keep the civilian deaths to a minimum.”
It’s probably much worse than that.
Netanyahu is in deep shit with the Israeli court system. Lots of heavy allegations that could put him in prison for the rest of his life if he were to lose the immunity that comes with his position.
He was facing those allegations And heavy protests before the October attack because he was trying to mess with the court system for his own benefit.
Then the attack happened and he’s been picking fights with anyone he could find, Hamas, Hesbollah, Iran, now he’s bombing Syria. All so he could claim that he can’t address the court summons because “There is a fucking war on, you know!?”
Now they added allegations that he knew the October attack was coming and let it happen so he could start this whole mess and be able to avoid facing the courts. He straight up let his own countrymen get killed and started attacking everyone around ISrael to avoid jail.
It’s even worse in some ways and not so personal – though all of that is true as well.
Netanyahu’s party, Likud, has always relied on extreme right-wing anti-Palestinian and settler support, both for its own voters and as coalition partners. No long term peaceful settlement is in their political interest.
But simultaneously, Hamas also relies on the conflict and the anger it generates among both Gaza populations and other Muslim populations in the region for support. A peaceful solution isn’t in their interest either.
In a way the two groups are in a weird partnership to keep the conflict going and thus maintain their own power. Netanyahu has helped to keep Hamas propped up against the West Bank based Fatah, because the real threat to Likud’s power and ambitions is any potential of a peaceful Palestinian state.
Yeah there is apparently a pattern where every time Netanyahu is in political trouble, Hamas jumps out with some new bullshit.
Is this supposed to be a reply to someone?
Yep, there was a post just above Regret’s that got removed.
Another huge annoyance is how Netanyahu’s administration + the Israeli ultra-right wing like to paint it that being anti-whatever Israel is doing equates to anti-semitism. I have nothing against Jews or the Jewish people whatsoever; heck, I have Jewish friends in Israel and abroad who broadly condemn what their own government is doing. But just because your people were gravely wronged in the past doesn’t give you a blank check to commit atrocities of your own.
One thing that massively complicates the whole situation is that there is a lot of pressure from different angles to equate being anti-Israel with being antisemitic. As you say, Israeli propaganda does so to block criticism, but simultaneously both Hamas and western homegrown antisemites do the same, but with the intent of using anger at Israel to make people more antisemitic.
Israel as a whole positioning themselves as a representation of the entirety of the world’s Jewish population is a huge part of this problem. Not every persecuted Jewish person chose to settle on illegally-seized land during/after the war (and in fact many couldn’t even afford to), but Israel would have you believe this because it’s better for their image.
The Jews as a rule had no choice at all, it was Palestine or death. The immigration blocks against Jews in the 1920s-30s are like nothing a modern American can imagine, with entire continents fully succeeding in blocking immigration altogether. At Evian 1938, every sovereign country in the world got together and fully understood all the Jews were about to be slaughtered, and all but one refused to let in any more to escape (thank you Dominican Republic). Britain surrendered to terrorism by Palestinian Arabs in 1939 and forbade Jews fleeing into Mandate Palestine, which was a violation of the terms of the Mandate under international law and absolutely nobody cared. After the war hundreds of thousands of homeless refugees languished in displaced persons camps for YEARS. Jews still in Dachau until 1951. Their prior home countries refused resettlement. Anyone trying to sneak back home would likely be murdered on the spot by their neighbors (see the end of “Maus”). There were large scale massacres of Holocaust survivors after the war in Ukraine and Poland late 1945 into 1946. America of course kept its doors happily sealed, Canada said “zero is too many.” And the Arab League countries seized the property and bank accounts of their Jewish citizens and declared they would be treated as enemies of the state unless they enlisted to join the armies and march to Palestine and kill all the Jews there. I’ve got receipts for all of this but it seems replies here with external links get auto-blocked, so, please, experiment with actually listening to Jewish people about Jewish history.
The choice was Israel or death. A lot of people are mad it was ever Israel instead of death.
I once read a graphic novel by an American jew who did that thing where she visited Israel and they rolled out the red carpet for her to learn her “heritage”. I think at the end she tried to share her newfound perspective on the conflict with her Egyptian American boyfriend and he (probably justifiably so) said she’d been propagandized.
..I think it was tacitly implied they broke up after.
This. Was the founding of Israel as an ethnostate in Palestine a mistake? Yeah, but it was, from the Jewish diaspora’s PoV, a necessary one, and the only one to prevent the Nazis’ work from being completed. Blame the countries that put them in that position–the ones that initiated the pogroms, and the ones that turned Jews fleeing those pogroms.
Now, does that absolve Israel for actions taken since the end of the 1968 Arab-Israeli War? Not in the least. This period has been marked with a move towards fascism and an accelerated program of lebensraum and ethnic cleansing.
Further complicating the issue: Israel is a nuclear state (albeit not ‘officially’). This means that if the US and the West were to cut military support, and Israel’s enemies were to decide that this meant it was open season, the first time an invading soldier stepped a foot over the 1968 borders, Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut would be mushroom clouds. Likely Mecca and Medinah, too, just on principle. And the odds of tactical nukes being used against Gaza and the West Bank is definitely non-zero. (When I say a lot of Israel’s critics don’t realize just how monstrous Netanyahu is, this is what I’m talking about.)
I will say there’s one major change I’d want to see in US policy–remove our objections in the UN, and before the Hague, to Israel being called out for war crimes. This is a savagely realpolitik position, but telling Israel, “We’ll keep providing you weapons, but from now on, you have to answer diplomatic challenges on your own,” may be the best way to amp up pressure without triggering a genuine apocalypse.
Unfortunately there’s the very plausible chance that Trump is on the verge of pulling America out of the UN altogether.
that would be hilarious because it would remove Israel’s surrogate veto power.
Nukes against Gaza and West-Bank are very VERY unlikely since the Israelis want to take that land for themselves, they wouldn’t poison the place like that, they are too small a country to deny themselves extra land.
Even “first time an invading soldier stepped a foot over the 1968 borders, Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut” is unlikely. They’d be used eventually, but it would be more of last resort than that. Unless Israeli forces had already been decimated to get that far.
Modern nukes are air-burst and also produce most of their explosions by fusion, so they produce way less radioactive fallout than the old style ones.
I think the main reason Israel doesn’t nuke Palestine is because almost every nation in the world would prefer if nukes remained a form of insurance rather than a tactical option. If they don’t go for an immediate hostile response, they are tacitly accepting that it would be an acceptable thing for their enemies to do to them.
I… unless things have changed considerably that’s not how nukes work, certainly not “tactical nukes”. Fusion nukes are Thermonuclear weapons, the next step up from regular Fission nukes. They use the energy of the initial fission to start the fusion process to produce a CONSIDERABLY more powerful detonation. Like, I can imagine that they worked on making them cleaner but it’s definitely not through fusion.
And air-burst is just how they are programmed to detonate. That’s how the two nukes dropped on Japan detonated as well.
Okay so yeah they ARE cleaner but they are also much more powerful. So dropping them on what is basically Next Door is Unlikely to the Extreme.
Why would they nuke Gaza? Anything they could accomplish in a military sense with a nuke, they can achieve with conventional arms. Even ignoring the concerns with fallout and the even more disastrous PR than their current genocidal campaign, what would they gain?
This is wrong. Zionism as a political movement to settle and colonize Palestine began in the 1880s and 1890s, long before the Holocaust. The Jews absolutely did not have to choose between settling and colonizing and stealing land from the indigenous Palestinians or death. And many Jews back then and now felt that Zionism was wrong and has been for many years now just as bad as what was done to them in the 1930s and 1940s in Europe.
Referring back to the timeframe of the Dreyfus Affair and nonstop Russian pogroms shortly before the Holocaust (and I mean SHORTLY before; Dreyfus lived through the rise of Nazism and his wife lived to the end of it) supports my argument, not yours.
The Jewish people are indigenous to the Levant; if not, the term “indigenous” cannot apply to any people anywhere.
Really re-examine whether your goal is to help Palestinians or to convince other non-Jews that everything Jews say about themselves is a lie. Historical negationism is not going to confront the life threatening problems Palestinians face.
I don’t agree that “indigenous” can apply to Jews and Israel. I don’t think it can apply over thousands of years. I don’t think it should apply if you have to drive out others with their own centuries of history to retake the land you’re supposedly indigenous to. History cannot be undone.
I don’t think it can apply at all to a region like the Levant that was a crossroads of empire and migration for long centuries even before the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
Zionism did begin long before the Holocaust. Of course, so did antisemitism and pogroms against Jews. It’s hard to say whether late 19th century Zionism really counts as colonialism, since Jews moving there were buying land and living under Imperial Ottoman rule. Hopes of a Jewish state on the ancient land of Israel certainly existed, but those hopes had existed for centuries.
It was only really with the end of the Ottoman Empire in WWI that a state became a viable possibility, even as a colonial enterprise.
There were certainly other options, but the late 19th and early 20th century made those options look bleak. Remaining second class oppressed minorities in nations with long histories of persecution, expulsion and pogroms is an option.
OTOH, though Jews were an oppressed minority in much of Europe, European Jews were still European and thus not only had some access to the wealth and power of colonialist Europe, but also absorbed many colonialist attitudes.
The Zionist enterprise was both settler colonialism and a bid for freedom and autonomy by a marginalized people. Both can be true.
That the Jews had been oppressed in Europe of course meant nothing to Palestinians pushed out of their home and denied their own government.
So, while what led to Zionism and to the establishment of Israel is understandable and sympathetic, it also led inevitably to where we are today.
What a fascinatingly one-sided comment that conveniently leaves out the Zionist response to the British overarching policy of ‘If you want to put your Israel in Palestine, you need to do so in a way that doesn’t inconvenience the Palestinians.’
Or are we supposed to forget the Irgun and act as though it was only ‘Palestinian Arabs’ doing terrorism against the Mandatory government in the 1930s?
Yes, actually. The Irgun did not start to target the British until after the aforementioned 1939 surrender to Palestinian Arab terrorism and illegal banning of Jewish immigration. And of course, all of that was after the genocidally antisemitic riots and massacres in 1936, 1929, 1922, 1920….
British suggestions on how to handle things were mooted after Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin Al-Husseini firmly threw in with Nazi Germany, incited the Farhud pogrom, recruited Arab troops to join SS units and exterminate Jews from Tunisia to Bosnia, and diplomatically intercepted and canceled attempted Red Cross evacuations of Jewish orphans out of the killing zones. They were CERTAINLY mooted after the Secretary General of the Arab League promised in late 1947 “a war of extermination and momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongol massacres and the Crusades.”
Here is an excerpt I rather like, concerning the British Mandate:
“The British military in Palestine disliked the Jews from the beginning, even when it was the Arabs who were giving the trouble. And this attitude subsisted right through the Arab Revolt, in which the Jews helped the British. In the mess of the Palestine Mobile Force in 1945, journalist Richard Grossman was told: ‘All through the Arab revolt, when our men were being shot in the back and protecting the Jews, most of them liked the Arabs… The old Arab will take a shot at you in the night, but he’ll offer you coffee the next day when you come to investigate. The Jew doesn’t offer you coffee, even when you’re protecting him.’
People who disliked the Jews before the Holocaust generally didn’t dislike them any the less because of the Holocaust. On the contrary: the Jews were seen as more pushing, strident, and demanding than ever – and cashing in cunningly on their new asset of enhanced entitlement to sympathy.
Dislike of the Jews was existential. If they conformed to the traditional stereotypes – pushy, acquisitive and so on – they were disliked for that. But if they departed from the stereotype, they were felt to be cheating. Thus one of the most cherished of the stereotypes was that the Jew was un-warlike. This had never been regarded as a point in his favor: Joseph Chamberlain thought they were ‘cowardly’; Treitschke, ‘lacking in the martial virtues.’ But for the Jew to become warlike was regarded as a monstrous mutation. It was all right for ‘the old Arab’ to ‘take a shot at you,’ but for the Jew to do so was contrary to the law of nature.”
–“The Siege,” Connor O’Brien, 1986
There you go again, describing an attempt to mediate a discussion and impose a compromise if none could be reached naturally as ‘surrendering to terrorism’, which is doubly strange when that compromise was in line with their earlier position. Is it surrendering to not change your mind about whether people living in an area take priority over people who’d like to live in that area?
Also people need to remember that this genocide didn’t start two years ago. Israel has been doing this since 1948, it’s just more open and obvious now than it was before. People can record what’s happening there with smartphones now and post it online for all to see.
An AP article about the October 7, 2023 attack mentioned it was in retaliation for an Israeli attack three months earlier and had a link to that story. The attack three months earlier was retaliation by Israel for a Hamas attack two months earlier and linked to that story. The third story mentioned retaliation for an attack by Israel four months earlier, etc., etc. I followed the links back every two to four months to 2019 before I got disgusted and quit. It was like two kids having a slap fight, except people were dying.
Yeah you could pick a random newspaper from any decade in the past half century on IvP and you’d only need to change a few words for them to basically tell the same story.
I’d say it’s more like how the US treated the native tribes for centuries than two kids having a slap fight. One side has been settling and colonizing the area for many decades while the other side is the indigenous people who have been trying to stay on their homeland.
If you think the story of Jews in Israel is a match for that of Englishmen in the Americas, I have very bad news concerning the likelihood you could ever drive positive change on this issue.
The better analogy would be Taiwan. There had always been ethnic Han Chinese people in Taiwan, but a death-level crisis in the 1940s saw a huge population influx that totally changed island demographics and government. The Formosan aborigines did not get a vote. And there are now several hundred million people surrounding Taiwan who want it erased.
That’s an interesting patch of whitewash there. What sort of government did the 2 million Kuomintang soldiers and officials enforce on the 6 million pre-existing Taiwanese people?
A Han nationalist dictatorship? It didn’t sound like he was whitewashing the KMT there.
It’s more whitewash by exception, I suppose. Saying ‘Israel is just like Taiwan!’ and leaving out the whole ‘ethnonationalist state that was under martial law for several decades and extrajudicially imprisoned or murdered over 140 000 people’ bit, you know?
“Nobody is complaining about Israel killing Hamas members”
Uh…
Charlie, I really like your style. Lovingly but firmly pushing your SO to be a better person, supportive but not enabling? 10/10, no notes.
Carla, you’re doing good too. What you’re expressing here is fully human, and not too dumb a coming of age, in fact. You’re feeling the pain but for once not deflecting, admitting and explaining, not getting defensive, it’s admirable.
… something bad is gonna happen to balance out the wisdom, isn’t it.
Let’s shake the Willis-Ball© and find out!
*shakes the Willis-Ball© vigorously*
And our answer is… *shows answer* “The bad thing is already started.”
Well that’s enough use of the Willis-Ball© for one day.
Chekhov’s sniper
“IM not in favour of genocide, just the peope helping to commit it” man this weeks comics are REALLY ruining characters for me, we’re up to 4 now.
This is more complicated than just supporting someone with ideals contrary to yours; confronting people you love with a different set of ideals is never easy, and I would never expect someone to completely cut those people out.
Carla is struggling to come to terms with that, so if she is “ruined” for you then clearly you aren’t interested in the growth of people for better, or worse.
“This is more complicated than just supporting someone with ideals contrary to yours; confronting people you love with a different set of ideals is never easy, and I would never expect someone to completely cut those people out.”
Honestly? Incorrect, its VERY easy to confront people you love who are actively supporting and profiting from a genocide. I mean most of us can confront them for things far less terrible than genocide and war profiteering. Its PURE greed on the part of her folks (nobody needs government contract and millise system money, they chose to sell their tech to the government and to the military) and her not telling them its pathetic vile behaviour is 100% on her. Sure it might take her a bit of time to get off their ass and shout at the parents, but shes been confronted with it now, any continued excuse is rationalising how itsok for HER to profit from genocide, not just her parents.
“so if she is “ruined” for you then clearly you aren’t interested in the growth of people for better, or worse.”
Not at all, she is ruined until she takes her stand against her folks(I dont recall saying shes irredeemable, but close), but again, shes coming up to 20 years old and cant decide “supplying arms to help a genocide is evil” so maybe her growth over her entire life is to blame, and isnt easily fixed. Not to mention we have had her (since her comic intro) going on and talking about how superior and amazing she and her wealth is, when it seems it comes from absolute evil on her folks part. Somewhat taints the entire characters past for me.
Same with Joyce and dorothy, their recent besexual cheating nonsense kinda makes their entire characters look like frauds, especially Joyce going form abstinant jesus freak to literally cheating on her BF within what, a month of leaving the church?
Your horse is very tall.
Eh, most members of the human population are ideologically willing to kill millions of people. It’s just that the people with industry power have the ability to. Walk into any Walmart during the Bush years, and listen to people telling their friends that they would solve the middle east by just nuking the entire region. I wouldn’t say they don’t deserve their friends for these beliefs, just that the human brain isn’t designed to have power over such a large group of people.
Yup. Unfortunately a lot of modern politics boils down to “this subset of people should be killed one way or another and that will solve our issues”.
Of course they never mean those members of that subset that they love.
Jesus, let her have a fucking minute to deal with the cognitive dissonance that people can be good To Her and not Good People. She’s 19 and it’s the first time she’s been confronted with this concept. She’s allowed to struggle for a second.
Empathy isn’t just a concept for large-scale terrors, you’re supposed to have it for the small shit too.
shes 19 and trans, shes well aware that people can be good to others and not be good people to you/people they dont care about, I guarantee Carla has dealt with it for years (ask any trans person really)
It really gives that “My friend cant be a predator/abusive, they are SO NICE to me” energy that people on here would fully (and rightfully) call bullshit. It’s really not hard to.
Empathy is something saved for people and things that deserve it. “Tech billionare heir sad her folks are actively supporting genocide so feels conflicted” isnt worthy of empathy to me.
Except she id not doing that at all, dhe is not saying “My parents can’t be bad people” she is saying she fell that because they di so much for her she doesn’t have the right to call them out in this issue. Very different things, which you get if you actually care and not just wanted to ride a moral high horse.
They’re not her friends though, they’re her parents? Way different dynamic there, it’s much easier to drop a friend who’s displaying problematic behaviors than your parents who raised you. Not saying she shouldn’t reckon with it, just that it’s obviously a difficult situation to be in and she can feel conflicted about it.
I asked myself (a trans person) and I told me that sometimes people come to those realizations late. Even if they’ve been dealing with it their whole life, it might not occur that it’s true of everyone they meet. Not everyone’s experiences are the same. Shocker.
Sorry you lack empathy for a young woman finding out her parents kinda suck even though they weren’t cruel to her personally. The idea that her sadness over finding that out isn’t worthy of empathy because she was born into wealth with a roll of the dice is just… weird to me, I guess.
Well to be fair to Balger, they lack empathy for a fictional character finding out her parents kinda suck even though they weren’t cruel to her personally.
True, but since we’re talking about the comic I didn’t think I had to specify I was talking about the comic, you know?
As Carla said, her parents have been literally her only support in life. It’d be one thing if she’d already graduated, had a job, and wouldn’t be at any risk of y’know, becoming homeless if her parents suddenly decided to disown her. I doubt they would, but they do have power over her, and that’s intimidating.
Saying that Carla’s parents are helping to commit genocide is an extreme exaggeration. From what we’ve been told, they sell computer systems used in weapons to the US government. What the US government does with those weapons afterwards is not something they can control. It’s entirely possible that their contract with the government predates the Bulmeria situation entirely.
Almost certain. (Well, if Bulmeria is really meant as a full I/P analogy, not before the beginnings of the situation generations ago, but certainly before the latest flare up.)
Government military contracts have long lead times and it’s very unlikely any systems developed in the last few years are being sold to Bulmeria.
I don’t think Carla is saying that at all. She’s realizing that her parents who treated her well and who she long thought were good people have been, through their company, helping others do terrible things to other people. I’m waiting to see how she reacts to that in future strips before I decide Carla if is a completely terrible person.
There’s your problem. Others decided she’s a completely terrible person a long time ago and are just shoehorning this in as more “evidence”.
The only reason she isnt outright saying she supporters what’s being done to the Bulmerians is because it’s so unpopular to do that on campus
Wow, huge reach there, with no basis in the text.
You really think Carla has enough awareness and interest in things that aren’t herself to even have an opinion on that?
Yeah? The fact that she is clearly having conflict about her parents involvement showd that she has thoughts about it.
Yeah, thoughts that were brought up like… 10 minutes earlier I guess.
AND she is actively opposed to free school lunches, the color green and those videos of dogs waiting on the porch to get treats from the mail carrier. What a monster.
I mean, if we’re just making things up…
Fanfiction is tomorrow’s cannon
That interpretation would require Carla to have, like, any shame whatsoever.
I think she likely just hasn’t thought about it, and likely doesn’t want to think about it.
Worst case scenario would be she doesn’t like XYZ but she likes that her parents are rich and if XYZ is the price she’s willing to accept that.
I don’t think Carla has ever said she supports that. More like she’s now realizing that her rich parents, who she though were good people because of how they helped her, have actually been terrible towards a lot of other people. And I’m gonna wait and see how she reacts to that information in future strips before I decide how I feel about Carla.
oh this hits. deeply close to home as a trans girl with parents in the ic. spend so long being drenched in what seems completely normal and then you get out into the world and start forming your own opinions on things and have to deal with the messy consequences of realizing you might need to morally oppose your parents and being absolutely afraid of what that might entail. for me it meant cutting contact for years but hopefully carla is able to sort out her feelings and have this conversation
Man Charlie is a good girlfriend. That was a wonderful way to put it and the fact that Carla got to the heart of the issue immediately instead of fucking around was really refreshing. A+ for both of them so far.
They are good kids. Sounds like those are good parents, as well.
I think Jocelyne said that the mercenaries employed by whoever were the ones perpetrating the genocide in Bulmeria.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2024/comic/book-15/02-the-one-where-jocelyne-returns/divest/
That is not what is stated in that strip that you have linked, no.
While “Contractors” can certainly refer to PMCs I think here she meant the people and companies who produce gear for the military. The whole military industrial complex.
Which is a common talking point in some circles – that the profits the military industrial complex makes are actually what drives wars. It’s a pretty hard on to make in the Israel/Gaza situation. You can certainly argue that Israel wouldn’t be able to do what it’s doing without access to weapons from US manufacturers (which might be all Jocelyne meant there), but it’s pretty clear that the motives behind it aren’t really tied to military/industrial complex profits.
It does depend on the situation I guess, some countries might feel emboldened by the superior gear they get. With Israel… I don’t think so, they don’t really need advanced weaponry for that so they’d do it regardless of US involvement. It might keep them from starting fights with the neighbours though, they certainly wouldn’t be able to strike at Iran without advanced US planes.
One might even want to question if the Yom kippur war or the six day war would have ended the way they did without superior western military hardware…
Quite possible, but if you’re going back that far, you’re now not so much asking “would a lack of weapons stop the genocide”, but would such a lack have led to Israel being destroyed.
It’s the same weapons and the same IDF, and those past conflicts are the foundation to where they are today
I mean yes, but also a different situation.
Unless your answer is just that Israel should have been destroyed then.
@thejeff well that’s the rub isn’t it. There’s much more to the problem than “arms industry giving the IDF weapons=bad”.
But of course an IDF without military superiority would adopt a different posture and *not* engage in genocide. If Syria, Egypt and Lebanon as well as iraq, Iran were not kneecapped different choices would have to be made too.
There’s an incredibly fine balance here between Israel has to adopt a different posture for lack of military superiority and Israel isn’t strong enough to defend itself.
It is one of the bigger motivations for America to provide them with the weapons in that the government would rather spend money making weapons than on helping people.
I’d really like to know what the Bulmeria situation is aside from a Gaza stand in.
Oooof, yeah. It’s tough when you realize that being good parents doesn’t necessarily mean being good people.
That is a tough knot to detangle.
OK, the alt-text got me.
i think it’s really cool that carla’s having this change in perspective, but i also do get why some folks are mad at her. the fact that she gets to feel conflicted about this at all is a huge privilege that none of the people who are being killed have, so if you view it from their perspective, every moment she spends puzzling over this is another moment ruutech bombs could be dropped on them.
that being said, i think it’s important to remember that 1. this isn’t real life, it’s a fictionalized representation of real-world issues, 2. this is a 19-year-old girl and we can’t expect perfection from her, and 3. this is an ongoing story, and we have to wait and find out what will happen next. i personally have a lot of mixed feelings about drawing inspiration from a real-life ongoing genocide to fuel character development in your webcomic, but i’m waiting to see what comes of it before i pass any real judgement. maybe we can all sit and finish watching the movie before saying a character is ruined forever?
Alt text is valid
I love DoA and QC accidentally hitting a similar story point at the same time… rich parent(s) running big corporation doing bad things, and child having to risk their parents’ wrath & their ‘allowance’ to stand up for what’s right.
I was going to say the exact same thing before I saw your comment.
I believe there was some really good parents to their children in territories occupied by Bulmeria, but it’s not my business…
Dick Cheney is by all accounts a loving and supportive father.
Too bad he is a torturer and monster.
Basically, I see him like Gul Mandred from the Four Lights episode.
That is true. And hopefully Carla is gonna realize soon that just because her parents were good to her, that doesn’t mean they’re good people.
Dang. Mike is rubbing off on her
Mike is rubbing off on your mom
For a nickle
Who? I see nothing remotely what Mike had ever said her.
Goddamn, as a trans woman who has to listen to her parents spewing right-wing rhetoric today, this one hits hard.
Uhhhh?
Then how did the whole transition thing go?
“Yeah yeah, here’s your first appointment, I’ll talk with the dean.”
And that was that?
There was a whole point about how her parent did a legal battle to change laws so Carla could dorm in live in the girls dorm.
When it comes to Carla, we’ve been told that her parents were very supportive every step of the way about Carla’s gender and they have looked out for her. Carla’s individuality seems to be something her parents support. It’s a different matter entirely if Carla starts asking them questions about their business.
“Mom, dad, I’m not the gender I was born as.”
versus.
“Mom, dad, do you make your money ethically? You have made no business deals with any unsavory characters? Is all of the money you earn clean and bloodless?”
I bet they do care what she thinks.
She doesn’t want to tell them what she thinks.
I’m old and jaded enough to have a sinking feeling that, even if Carla does voice her objections, her parents might make sympathetic noises but go “This is the price we pay to keep you safe, sweetie.” >.<
I enjoyed parts of Episode 9.
And I’m always a sucker for a “common people band together to put their lives on the line against a greater evil”.
Especially if we know a good few.
Carla is my favorite character in this comic. Which is why this panel hits me far more than normal.
I agree with Charlie. Carla’s parents sound awesome. I really think Carla would be better off letting her parents know her feelings on this issue. Not demand that they drop the military contracts, but simply let them know what decisions she would make in this situation. Even if it’s that she has no idea what decision she would make. After all, dropping the contracts would affect stockholder earnings, people’s jobs, etc. It’s not a simple issue.