When Tiara's pyrokinesis is finally noticed, she is captured by a magical research organization for study. If she cooperates, she could be helping to save humanity from a dire threat - but can she trust them?
Starhammer
J.N. Monk, Harry Bogosian
A teen girl inherits a powerful alien artifact and proceeds to make a series of increasingly poor decisions
The Witch Door
Anni K.
Katariina Lehto discovers her neighbor is a witch called Jousia Muotka. Jousia introduces Katariina to the strange people and places beyond the witch door...
Cassiopeia Quinn
Gunwild, Psudonym
A cute, pantsless thief is pursued across the stars by a buttoned-up military officer in the spacey, laser-filled future.
Star Trip
Gisele Weaver
Jas is a human taken from her home planet on a trip across the galaxy she will never forget.
Sam & Fuzzy
Sam Logan
Troubled by gangster rodents, lovesick vampire stalkers, or confused ninja assassins? Don't panic! Sam and Fuzzy are here to help. (For a reasonable fee.)
Lighter Than Heir
Melissa Albino
A young Volant woman joins the military in an effort to upstage her war-hero father.
Caramel Corn
Potchimew
Sarah is the only human left in a world full of mythical creatures and monsters. All she wants to do is live a quiet life, but everything changes when she meets her guardian angel, Jacob.
Between Failures
Jackie Wohlenhaus
The low stakes adventures of an assorted group of 20 somethings trapped in the declining years of American retail. They are naughty and say lots of swears.
Kochab
Sarah Webb
A YA F/F fantasy comic about Sonya, a lost skier trying to survive a snowy wilderness and find her way back to her village; and Kyra - a fire spirit trying to fix the home that she let fall apart around her.
Empowered
Adam Warren
A sexy superhero comedy (except when it isn't) about the never-ending struggles of a plucky but very unlucky young superheroine.
Goodbye to Halos
Valerie Halla
Cuddles, gay flirting, weird feelings, and magic-fueled knife fights - it's an adventure across the queer multiverse!
The Automan's Daughter
Mike Stamm
Aisha Osman and her uncle Siddig outwit bikers, spies and kidnappers while gearing up for a showdown with the formidable Widowmaker mecha.
Monsterkind
Taylor C
Wallace Foster, a young, bright-eyed human social worker, has his entire world view rocked when he's suddenly relocated into a city primarily inhabited by monsters.
Atomic Robo
Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
The robot punches monsters and bad robots and one time he was a cowboy.
Go Get a Roomie
Clover
Experience the queer journey of an upbeat hippie and the friendships she makes along the way! A tale of self-discovery and love of many forms.
Knights Errant
J.R. Doyle
Wilfrid's humble quest for revenge becomes bigger and bloodier by the day.
Lilith's Word
inkPangur
If you had the power to make any wish come true using just one word, what would you say?
Tigress Queen
Allison Shaw
A barbarian warlord and a pampered prince try to avoid a marriage alliance that could end decades of violence.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
Minna Sundberg
A few generations after the end of the world, a small, poorly financed research crew is sent out to rediscover whatever is left of the forbidden old world in the south.
Love Not Found
Gina Biggs
Abeille is on a quest to find someone who wants to do it the old-fashioned way in a time when touching has become outdated.
Demon's Mirror
Harry Bogosian
Based loosely off of "The Snow Queen", a story by Hans Christian Andersen, we see things take a different turn as the demons become central characters, and the side characters stick around. Yup, that's the only differences. Enjoy!
The Sanity Circus
Windy
Magic, monsters and mysteries await in the odd city of Sanity. It's up to Attley and a colorful group of characters to find out just what is going on.
Hazy London
Scotty
A story about messy relationships. From friendly foes to crazy families. Nothing is black and white, just full of color. But, all colors can get a little hazy...
Astral Aves
Moon Cabal
A fantasy coming-of-age following the adventures of Astra The Black and friends, as they navigate the mysterious world around them. It's politics, adventure, and the supernatural; oh, and crazy hair.
Devil's Candy
Rem, Bikkuri
A lush fantasy about boy genius Kazu Decker, the girl he constructed for his 9th grade science project, and the world of devils and monsters they live in.
Wilde Life
Pascalle Lepas
Oscar decided to rent an old haunted house, and that's when things got weird...
Anarchy Dreamers
Emily Ree
Sparkly undead kids fight society's worst Nightmares in this pastel-punk urban fantasy coming-of-age!
Paranatural
Zack Morrison
Superpowered middle schoolers fight evil spirits in their rural hometown. Come for the jokes, stay for the cast, the creatures, and the mystery that ties them all together!
Fireweeds Moors
Gato Iberico
A cat-headed man and a girl with a sandwich hankering accidentally end up in a myth-infused country where magic chalices are a really big thing.
Monster Pulse
Magnolia Porter Siddell
Four kids run afoul of a creepy secret organization's experiments, which turn their body parts into fighting monsters. Part sentimental coming-of-age story, part monster-training shonen manga, with just a bit of sci-fi body horror.
Nerf Now!!
Josué Pereira
A cute webcomic about fanservice, video games, and... love. Mostly video games, though.
Whomp!
Ronnie
A depressed, portly, hirsute anime fan stumbles through life in the ever-pursuit of chicken nuggets and other life-shortening indulgences.
Sufficiently Remarkable
Maki Naro
Two young women living in Brooklyn discover that you're always coming of age.
Dumbing of Age
David M Willis
Joyce has been homeschooled her entire life until now, when she's suddenly a freshman in college! Things don't go well.
Real Science Adventures
Brian Clevinger
Spin off stories and other adventures from the world of Atomic Robo!
Ghost Junk Sickness
Studio CARTRIDGE, Laura Lee
Two hunters try to survive and end up being pushed to pursue a deadly bounty dubbed "The Ghost".
Guilded Age
T Campbell, John Waltrip, Florence Machina
Welcome to the saga of the working-class adventurer! Enjoy the complete story with new annotations daily!
[un]Divine
Ayme
A highschool senior thought giving up his soul for a demon was a good idea. It wasn't.
The Lonely Vincent Bellingham
Diana Huh
Vincent is an unkind man looking to disappear, and finds himself in the care of a vampire and her two wicked children.
Alice and the Nightmare
Misha Krivanek
Alice finally attends University to learn to collect the dreams of humans, meet new friends, and deal with a pesky reflection along the way.
Sister Claire
Yamino
In the troubled aftermath of a great war between Witches and her fellow Nuns, novice Sister Claire just wants a purpose.
Star Impact
Jack McGee
A young, energetic woman fights her way up in the world of super-powered boxing after discovering the mighty gloves of her missing idol!
Cut Time
Juby
Rel and her trusty avian friend Fugue are on a quest to save a world that's lost track of time. Follow them and their new recruits, in a story written with help from the stars.
Godslave
Meaghan Carter
Edith has been thrown into the dangerous world of modern-day Egyptian mythology. Fighting monsters and dealing with family drama of godly proportions.
Jailbird
Charlie Davis
An all-ages comic about a recently escaped prisoner's struggle to understand the outside world, and vice-versa. Also, a magic cape!
Cyanide & Happiness
Explosm
Satire, dark humor and surreal humor.
Never Satisfied
Taylor Robin
Lucy Marlowe, a magician's apprentice, competes against other apprentices for an important, magical, Goverment Job.
El Goonish Shive
Dan Shive
WARNING: This comic often ignores the Laws of Physics
Girl Genius
Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio
In a time when the Industrial Revolution has become an all-out war, Mad Science rules the World...with mixed success.
Kiwi Blitz
Mary Cagle (Cube Watermelon)
Steffi thinks she can use her kiwi mech to become a superhero. This idea turns out to be very stupid.
BOOKMARK Click "Tag Page" to bookmark a page. When you return to the site, click "Goto Tag" to continue where you left off.
BUFFER WATCH
Comics are currently drawn and uploaded through:
Naw. The English department knows the difference between a logical negation and linguistic usage. It’s the Philosophy freshman we got to watch out for.
it’s funny you say that, my Cognition Philosophy Professor once remarked that the “””formal””” (white) rules of English grammar are there for saying a lot while expressing relatively little
Dunno if you speak any other languages, but “formal” is a class thing, not a race thing – most languages have formal and informal methods of talking. Spanish has the same thing for sure; “Fui a caminar a la tienda con mi perro” vs “Fui a dar un tranquilo paseo con mi pequinés de pura raza hasta la farmacia”. Languages like Chinese and Korean have even more complex distinctions between formal and informal speech, and use it much more commonly by far than English and Spanish do.
Yeah, you’re talking about a different thing. What NGPZ is talking about is sometimes called “standard English” or “standard American English” or “dominant American English.” There’s a lot of aspects of race and class going on with it.
yeah, obligatory reminder that language is this organic thing not to be thought of as separate from the culture and values of the people who speak it, regardless of whether or not they wanna continue perceiving those as some kind of raceless default
I don’t really understand what you mean by that, Yumi – the stuff they teach in public school is more or less the same across the board because they want to teach formal, which makes you seem upper-class, and they discourage informal speaking because it makes you seem poor and uneducated. It’s not like trailer trash white people are talking like they’re fancy or whatever, y’know?
There’s way too much into this and what you just said for me to get into this late. If you don’t understand connections between race, class, language, education, power… well, they exist, and there’s so much on this subject if you want to look into it with just some of the key words already mentioned. I feel deeply uncomfortable with what you just said, so I’m just not going to be able to continue this.
Names that come to mind as scholars on this topic (biased towards those I’ve met and can therefore easily name): Drs. April Baker-Bell, Django Paris, Davena Jackson
Class and race intersect, especially in places where historical white supremacy still has a major role in cultural hegemony. That’s why it’s called “intersectionality”….
Dorothy has more of a reputation of wanting to BE the power rather than fighting it, and Joyce is a chatterbox. Even if they’re on the same side, they can still spill the beans to the cops. The less info is spread around, the less likely it is for that info to be passed on to the authorities.
While this is true, nobody at the protest is masking up or seeming to hide their identity in any way. This means their participation in the protest is basically public knowledge.
Although, this also makes Joyce’s decision to go ‘save’ her sister pretty unnecessary.
It’s not really a saving thing, is it? She’s here to warn Jocelyne that their dad ‘might be on to her’.
Kind of interesting really. In theory this should be a five minute in and out conversation, but between Dorothy’s reaction, the fences appearing and Asma’s understandable paranoia, the tension’s suddenly ramped up.
i assume the lack of masks (for folks besides jocelyne i guess) is like how sal doesn’t wear a motorcycle helmet while riding when we gotta see her face emoting
Sal absolutely wears a motorcycle helmet when she’s riding? I’m not sure if there’s a single instance where she doesn’t, but I’m open to being wrong on that. Still, the vast (that’s a link to a strip) majority (another link) of the time she’s wearing a helmet even when you would expect to need her to emote (link!).
She even wears a helmet on a pedal bike, but I’ve already used three links and don’t want to get automodded.
Okay, so there’s one time she didn’t wear a helmet, fair enough. Willis has still shown plenty of times that he’s happy putting a helmet on her even when it’s an emotive scene.
Yeah, but I still get why Asma isn’t helping along people she doesn’t trust.
Beyond that, and meant more generally to some comments who seem to think otherwise, “cop energy” doesn’t mean “I think you are literally a cop.” Maybe Joyce and Dorothy have been sent by someone (a parent, perhaps) to confirm that Jocelyne s there. Maybe they want to try to drag her away from the protest themselves. If Asma does know where Jocelyne is and happens to see her before they do, Asma could tell her that they’re looking for her– then Jocelyne could do with that information what she wants.
Yeah it’s a reasonable, if maybe over-cautious, reaction. Another angle: Asma might not know that Jocelyn is trans, and she also might not know that Joyce knows Jocelyn is trans. Jocelyn seems to be going boymode at the protest.
It was hard to tell from the photo Hank sent, but I doubt Jocelyne’s going full boymode now. Probably not as femme as the dress she wore to meet Joyce, but not boy either.
opsec only works if you use it consistently. the point of having procedures is that you don’t want a bunch of different people with different biases and weaknesses, not knowing what other people have already revealed, trying to judge what’s safe to disclose on the fly. you stonewall even if it feels unreasonable, because the other people relying on you for their freedom probably don’t have identical definitions of unreasonable as yours.
Correct, that’s why it’s over-cautious to be stuck up about opsec when nobody at the protest seems to be making any attempt at concealing their identity.
Even the most well-intentioned people you are closest with can be a security risk at a protest. interpersonal connections aren’t trump cards in these situations.
and even people you’re working alongside with in a protest, where u don’t just trust them interpersonally, but operationally. when u share operational information about an illegal action (which, for most protests that’s ambiguous, yay!) with someone, you’re imposing a potentially lifelong burden on them to segment that knowledge off from the rest of their knowledge and never disclose it, potentially even under intense legal pressure. if nothing else, that’s a huge unnecessary source of stress! even if it’s rude or unhelpful in the moment, you’re doing people a favor in the long run by having firm, consistent information boundaries.
i mean, other than being super bad/unsubtle about being underocver, i imagine actual cops might have some weird ‘prideful’stance to where they would never wear/joke about it
♪ Hey, I don’t work here, and if I did, I would not arrest shit ♫
♫ Hey, I don’t work here, but maybe I should ♪
That way I could tell what happens to snitches to you!
When people ask you “are you a cop?”, it’s not because they didn’t read your shirt. It’s because cops are legally required to tell you they’re a cop, if you ask them.
That’s not actually true, that’s just a legal myth. Cops can be allowed to lie in situations like that. Ask an actual lawyer about it. IIRC LegalEagle also covered it.
(Also think about how stupid it would be if it were true.)
The problem with criminals is they don’t think to ask every new person they meet “Are you a cop?”. Do that and your illegal tobacco empire will never fall
I can only speak for my own country, but undercover cops are apparently allowed (and by “allowed” I mean “they do, and it has to get really blatant before it occurs to anyone maybe they shouldn’t, at which point they do nothing about it”) to commit actual crimes and have sexual relationships with the people they’re investigating, so I’m pretty sure they’re allowed to tell fibs.
There are extremely, extremely limited circumstances where cops aren’t allowed to lie. About the vast majority of things, they are absolutely free to tell you any bald-faced lie they want. Do. Not. Trust. Cops.
Those things they aren’t allowed to lie to you about? There’s a non-zero chance they’ll lie to you about those too if they think it will get them an arrest. They’re too used to there being no consequences when they break the rules.
Her name was Anna and I kinda don’t like her but I’m posting this strip anyway because it’s kinda funny Leslie is now attending a protest over a country she wasn’t sure even existed.
Nah, she isn’t. They are asking for Joyce’s sister with Joyce as a reference. I’ve been shot at by cops at protests and I wouldn’t be nearly as paranoid as Asma. Also, that’s how you write asthma in Spanish. Coincidencia? No lo creo.
Asma is definitely a secret agent for Mexican Special Ops, sent to Indiana to scope the campus for good pizza places. Mexican Spec Ops famously love pizza.
Huzzah for Spanish. It would be a lot easier if we all spelled it asma. I, for one, wouldn’t have to struggle to say all the consonants as an aid to spelling.
She didn’t day they were literally cops, but that they have cop energy, as in not part of the protest and coild be helping the police in some way. And let’s be real, Dorothy foes have cop energy.
It would be really nice if there were thread lines so it’d be easier to see which comment is connected to which, it can be especially hard with gravatars that have see-through backgrounds like mine and Yumi’s
Not that you ever have been (I don’t know you) but women can be misogynistic easily, so that’s not a defense really, but yeah they weren’t talking about you <3
Asma doesn’t know Dorothy’s internal life and yeah let’s be real Dotty is an apple polisher and suckup to authority, she’s exactly the kind of person to rat you out if you didn’t know her enough to understand she’s resisting impulses.
Leslie seems to be a pretty conscientious and activist sort of person. I can see her attending such a protest. And Roz has a totally-not-queer crush on Leslie, so I believe her also caring about “whatever this is”.
Universities these days have complicated systems of who is a professor, who is some [lesser type] professor, who is an instructor, etc. Determined in nasty academic politics et al.
Professors do research as part of their job. If you are a pure teacher you have a different job title, often Lecturer or Instructor. I’m a Lecturer, and the pay and job security are worse.
Also, “just a teacher” is kind of dismissive. You probably didn’t intend it that way, but it’s also tiring that so many people don’t view teaching as an actual profession.
I disagree. It’s like saying someone is “just a psychologist” instead of a psychiatrist doesn’t mean psychologist isn’t a real profession. It means they haven’t qualified to be a psychiatrist by going to med school to be able to prescribe medications.
It’s not a question of the training or credentials. I have the same degrees as every professor in my department. You are just more highly valued if you do research than if you specialize in teaching. I literally have a PhD in education research in my field, but because I don’t do research, I make less money and have way less job security without any opportunity for tenure.
But in many cases people would like to do research, but can’t find a tenure track research position.
And of course in this case, Robin almost certainly doesn’t have the same degrees. She got hired because of Robin shenanigans, not because of academic qualifications.
She kind of has cop wife energy. Hosting 4th of July precinct BBQs, driving their three boys to soccer in a minivan with a Thin Blue Line flag on the bumper, arguing with liberal relatives at holidays that she’s never seen John pistol-whip ANYBODY.
In my experience the usual advice to students wondering about this is to refer to every college-level instructor as “professor” as the default unless/until they tell you otherwise, largely because people who are qualified to officially use the title might feel insulted if they aren’t addressed as such, whereas the reverse is generally not true.
Back when I was a school counselor, that’s what I told my kids, too. Call ’em all ‘professor’ unless they tell you otherwise. Then call ’em whatever they tell ya.
@Hue either way joyce prolly meant like ‘teachers’ overall or whatever, tho i wouldn’t be surprised if there was a couple
strips where they have called her ‘professor’ before
It’s not the degrees, it’s the job title. Adjuncts are usually part time or temporary. Lecturers and Instructors don’t do research and all their time is teaching. Usually Professors, Lecturers/Instructors, and Adjuncts all have the same degrees.
It does depend on the school, and the higher education system in the state. In Nevada, where i went to college, most of the state schools had “Professor” as a title for any full time instructor with a Doctorate or Masters, whether or not they were doing research, since not all the state schools were research schools. The school i went to, Nevada State College, was not a research school at the time, unlike UNLV and UNR, but all the full time instructors were Professors, as well as Doctors in their field. Adjuncts were post-grads from other schools, some were teaching while working on their post grad degrees, others were just those who held a bachelor’s degree in the subject matter. They mainly taught 100 and 200 level general ed classes.
And then of course there’s College of Southern Nevada, the community college for Clark County, which is definitely not a research school, and all the teachers were Professor if they did not have a doctorate, or Dr. if they did.
And all pay in NSHE is based off a combination of time working for NSHE and what your degree is.
*Instructor pay, i should specify. Other faculty pay has a different pay scale depending on position, as well as time with NSHE and any degrees required for the position
And not all professors are instructors – like, for example, I’m taking an online course for business law alongside an in-person class right now and my professor has zero freaking lectures and it’s all book reading and assignment-submitting and discussions and it’s bs and I hate it T_T
In the UC system that I went to, oh, so many years ago, there were “lecturers” that were full-time teaching positions, but not tenure-track. The tenure-track professorships were: assistant professor (not tenured yet), associate professor (lowest-rank tenure), professor (‘full’ tenured professor). There were also “Professor Emeritus” that were basically semi-retired professors.
Tenured professors usually had the highest degree for their area (almost all were Ph.Ds, obviously), while lecturers may or may not have had Ph.Ds.
Adjuncts weren’t much a thing back then. As Leslie is clearly deriving all of her income from her teaching position, I’d guess that she is a lecturer or an equivalent position there.
Do we not all have a person we interact with regularly for business reasons but you’re not friends with them and they never told you your name and you’ve been going to that convince store for ten years so you can hardly ask her her name now?
I do have this kind of people in my life, and when you finally dare say “I know it’s ridiculous after five years but what’s your name, I’m Silly” they’re just relieved, cause they were in the exact same position.
‘Ignorant person’ energy is certainly there. ‘Cop energy’? Not even a little. Which is still a case for not spilling, but Asma appears to want to get digs in.
Future presidents can’t have criminal records (sitting presidents is a different discussion), so have all the information I have on these protest participants.
“The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island, which lies near South Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal, reject contact. Attempts to contact them have usually been rebuffed, sometimes with lethal force.”
Seems excessive, but there are days I can sympathise.
i mean, it was said to leave their phones behind to not track but idk if any protest organizers would’ve forced everyone to prove that they didn’t/secretly recording or so , while we’ve seen young teens/barely adults as students i wouldn’t be surprised if there were like young looking 23-24 year olds that are like rookie cops b/c apparently it only takes 8 months of education/cop school or so :/
On the positive side of things, if Dorothy gets arrested here she won’t have a reason to avoid therapy anymore and then she can concentrate on living a life where she doesn’t have to keep making that sort of face when confronted by how others perceive her.
Just saying since if I don’t, someone else will and will be condescending about it: she does already go to therapy. She just deliberately omits information to avoid being diagnosed with anything big that she worries will fuck up her aspirations. Like, we know she’s definitely not sharing her PTSD with them.
well i’m sure everyone knew joyce was hyper religious til recently so just “Two privileged’ straight” cis white girls” would read as the enemy to her maybe
(tho imagine if someone did have a phone or some nearby journalist with carla showing up to the protest, it’d def make for headlines/tabloids if the Ruttech daughter showed up to an anti-ruttech protest)
Sure, but I also think you pick things up about people and the surface level details Asma is likely to have picked up about Dorothy and Joyce aren’t super flattering.
I doubt she thinks it’s a microaggression, if only because, judging by Walky doing the same in the past, most people just kind of look at her in terms of utility and don’t remember her name. Like, I’m sure someone like Ruth knows her name, but regular students kind of treat her like window dressing.
It’s not like Asma is an especially difficult name to spell or pronounce or anything, so I am sort of surprised the characters don’t retain it. I am a cashier, though, who ends up remembering most regulars’ names for some reason, so maybe that’s more a me thing.
Yeah somebody who is rating people’s “cop energy” doesn’t care if they’re really good or bad, they’re looking for somebody to hate and a reason to justify it. Asma could find a reason to dislike anybody for anything, and I guess it turns out she’s the kind of person who does. And that kind of behavior can get really dangerous- if Asma is telling other people “some suspicious people were snooping around” every time she doesn’t like somebody’s vibe, there can be some real consequences for that.
I’d been put off by Asma’s attitude here. However, this is so histrionic, I can no longer see her as anything but the soul of grace and deportment. You’ve successfully achieved an own goal.
ok i see the pattern, you’re trolling through the comments looking for excuses to take out your (possibly very justified) personal pain and anger at whatever it is that happened to you on a fictional character, and i’m trolling through the comments looking for excuses to be a nerd about security culture.
For what it’s worth, i think the reason people are reacting badly to your comments isn’t that the dynamic you’re describing isn’t real, it’s that you’re jumping to it over a single turn of the phrase in a setting where there’s a lot of other more pressing reasons it would come up. This is a maslow’s hierarchy of needs situation, i think the sort of radically welcoming spirit you describe is vital to the future of the left, and it’s extremely troubling when that gets undermined by petty group dynamics, it’s just that in moments of direct immediate threat of state violence there are trade-offs that need to be navigated under duress, and your judgement of Asma in that context seems extremely harsh.
However, this is a good reminder of how bad this comments section is for me psychologically, time for me to turn my uBlock Origin filter for the dumbingofage comment section back on, damn
that’s the trouble with microaggressions, any single instance of them is plausibly an innocent mistake, so you can never call it out directly, it’s only in aggregate (where the blame is too diffuse to act on) that the malice is identifiable. I don’t know the dynamics of not-remembering-your-name racism, so i have no clue whether this is the sort of thing reads as a microaggression to those who are subject to it. But just figured it’s worth pointing out that the razor you’re invoking is like the core mechanic of the thing.
Personally, I wonder if Willis was taking a dig at us the readers, because to us, until now Asma (whether we know her name or not) IS Front Desk Lady. So now we can be militant on Asma’s behalf.
I think it’s less “she’s deliberately assuming the worst of people” and more “she’s really tired of everybody getting her name wrong/not bothering to ever learn her name and this has probably already happened like 3 times today and so she’s now in a bad mood and disinclined to trust these random people who just showed up to a dangerous protest and might be looking to start trouble so she’s just gonna walk away”.
Why should they learn the name of someone they share three words with a day, on average, and never about anything important? She doesn’t live on their wing–note that both girls know all of their hall-mates’ names, and at least some details about them, and this is true regardless of racial identity. Asma might see it as a microaggression, but in this instance, it’s really not.
I’m curious again about the details of Robin’s employment. Like if she’s going to keep from getting fired, and if she can keep Leslie from getting fired. “decline from renewing her contract” tomahto tomato
Just so we are clear, Asma jave no reason to trust them, she doesn’t actually know them beside giving them packages, they don’t have signs, and yeah sadly Dorothy does have strong cop energy. So good on her for being cautious even if it’s inconvenient for the protagonist.
Nah to the people defending Asma because she barely knows Dorothy and Joyce. If it’d been in a thought bubble, I guess, fine. But it was just pointlessly mean to say it out loud with zero provocation. Plus, if you’ve got a problem being seen with someone at a protest, all the more reason to get rid of them quickly with a simple “sorry, I haven’t” rather than antagonize them.
Yeah, this is a high stress situation to begin with, and she doesn’t have a lot of incentive to let her guard down, particularly if she could potentially endanger another protester.
Telling them about their “cop energy” seems more helpful than the simple “sorry, I haven’t” would have been; this way, they can understand why others are also not telling them, and also potentially help two people who seem like clueless newcomers realise something about the seriousness of the situation. It’s not polite, but it’s kinder than bland politeness would’ve been.
Throw back to when the school strike protests were happening. Tutor took a vote and we voted to strike, so she went too. Another teacher still held class, but went with the topic of direct action and live streamed the protest
(Studying social work, the class was community development)
Leslie is for sure a professor. While it used to mean having a PhD, it’s the accepted title for anyone that teaches college-level classes. I correct students who try to call me “Doctor”, because I’m not… but I teach college, so I am a Professor, as well as my colleagues that also only have Masters, which is the large majority of them.
I don’t know how likely it is that cops would send undercover people into protest pretending to be the sister of a particar participant (seems very unlikely), but it was a mean response anyway. Just say you don’t think so and leave it at that. Why insult people you meet at a protest?
Asma may be telling her that so that if Dorothy’s not there to fuck with the protestors, she gets her act together. The students at the 2024 protests frequently had fairly good discipline when it came to communicating with the press, infosec, etc.
Gah, sorry, I reported by accident. Wish we could cancel that.
Anyway, I would say that not all the protests had that level of skill–I did see actual anti-semitism on display, and I also saw some spokesmen who were… well, young, and thus inexperienced and failed to understand that no, the administration was not required to allow Ubereats deliveries to protestors (and especially, making that plea when the school admin had not even attempted to interrupt food deliveries to an occupied school building in the first place, seemed very preemptively whiny).
I will say that the UIB group that I found online talking about the admin’s policies was very well-spoken for the most part.
I don’t think she’s necessarily being literal with the “cop energy” comment, like I doubt she thinks they’re actually themselves cops, but she may assume them to be more likely to cave to authority and cooperate with authorities or freely collaborate with them willingly.
She might be snappy because it’s a big protest faux pas to ask to find someone. While not literally snitching to the cops, Asma might not want fellow protesters to get in trouble with their families by confirming their presence. Ya know, the entire reason Dorothy and Joyce are there, to warn her sister that their dad saw her. Asma has no way to confirm what their intentions are.
Very few people go to a protest in America until college. She SHOULD have told them that’s bad etiquette and refused and then upon being pressed further said exactly what she said. But she’s also a dumb kid and not required to be perfect or a teacher to dumb kids. So that ‘should’ is ‘it’d have been best if’ not an obligation
I think you’re interpreting an honest observation (of something not great) as much more malicious than intended. This is good information for Dorothy to have about herself, and to confront. These two have bumbled into a protest that is about to be crawling with cops with zero sense of basic infosec. It is not likely they’re “sent undercover.” Is it likely that Dorothy, asked the right way by a cop, would divulge information, possibly on purpose, possibly not? Abso-fucking-lutely. It is important for her to know that. Frankly, if Asma actually thought Dorothy was literally in cahoots with cops, she wouldn’t have talked to her at all. You blank actual cops and undercovers.
Guys she doesn’t think they’re literal cops. She maybe thinks they’re narcs in general, and definitely thinks they have bad energy and aren’t there sincerely, but ‘cop energy’ doesn’t mean ‘I think you are a cop or with the cops’
I know for a fact most of y’all got chores to do. Put your laundry in the machine. Wash at least a couple of your dishes. Hell, you can even just restack them. You might be surprised to find out there’s really only a few in there, and it’s one or two biggish ones making it look like a lot. That’s okay, we all stack absentmindedly sometimes. Just get ’em ready. It only takes a minute or two, you can spare it. You were just gonna use that time to watch sludge content anyway, it’s fine.
Unless you have an inside kitty, in which case feed it food on purpose and with intent.
I kinda miss having outside cats, sometimes. We’d let ’em out when they wanted out, then they’d come in when we called ’em, and they’d hunt if they got hungry while they were out. Alas, we don’t live out in the country anymore, and the roads here in town are too busy to feel safe letting our dipshit goblin cat outside.
For so many reasons, it’s better to keep your cat indoors (or only taken outside while supervised, like on a leash), but I do wish I could let my cats out to go have adventures.
We do take one out on a leash into the backyard. The other one isn’t interested, possibly because the first one acts super wild and ready to attack when coming back inside.
I’d also note– most cats are acquired from shelters, and in my experience, shelters advise keeping cats indoors. When we got my older cat, my mom started to say she would be an indoor-outdoor cat, and I was like, “No, she will not!” Which is a stance the shelter agreed with. Shelters are also often against declawing (for kittens, and DEFINITELY against it for older cats) and less likely to adopt to people who want to declaw their cat.
What’s declawing got to do with indoor/outside cats? All I remember is growing up with Fluffy and Chocolate being indoor and outdoor cats, them having their claws (both were fixed, at least), and one time they brought a random-ass cat into my room through the skylight cuz I had a cat-ramp set up for them up there (attic room).
It has to do with people learning more about cat care. Definitely didn’t try to set it up in a way that made it like…dependent or built on the indoor/outdoor cat thing. Just another thing that’s changed. Though it is kinda fucked to be like, “We’re going to take your claws but then let you roam wild”– even though it would cut down on the amount of damage they do. (Though plenty of cats can hunt without claws.)
It’s relatively recent: in terms of decades at least, but it’s been good advice for a long time. Outdoor cats don’t survive as long and are literal murder on the local bird population.
Also, having encountered a bunch of cats outside, let me tell you, they don’t usually look like they’re actually having fun. For every one cat who comes up to me in Major Friendly Mode, there are five cats who I just see cowering in the bushes or the shade of a car, hypervigilent little babies with collars on that I nevertheless wonder if I should scoop into a carrier, because what if that cat is lost, or abandoned, or sick…
Which is another risk you run. Even if your cat doesn’t get hit by a car, someone with good intentions might kidnap it.
Please keep your cats indoors, especially if you live in North America or somewhere similar because in addition to everything else we’ve got rabies.
Important to my prior anecdote, we lived right on the edge of a rural village with less than 800 people in it, with corn fields across the street and behind the lot. Not a whole lot of traffic, and the cats mainly stuck to the yard and field. It wasn’t 100% safe like some people would probably prefer, and we did lose a few to accidents (out of something like 40 total), but they were definitely happy with the arrangement. Mind you, that may be an outlier situation, and people shouldn’t try to replicate it if they live In Town.
My previous neighbour (upstairs tenant, and we were in the basement suite) didn’t fix her cats, refused to put any identification (collar, microchip, tattoo, etc) on despite them being outdoor cats, then had the audacity to be mad when someone adopted one of them.
She also said like ‘it’s better they be in danger outside than miserable inside,’ then I’d hear her crying as she tried to call them in at night. I’m pretty sure she lost at least two cats while living here, and they were nice cats. Very friendly, spent most of the time outside our door trying to get attention and/or come into our place.
Yeah the only outdoor cat I actually know what happened to specifically… a ways outside of the city, neighbors found her body on their property after the coyotes got to her.
Usually, outdoor cats just disappear one day.
Some cats are extremely canny and they live long lives despite being outdoor cats, but yeah. Definitely the outliers.
I had literally never heard of the term “cop energy” until today, so I don’t know what I was supposed to think it meant. And google just brings up some technical science thing.
I mean it’s like telling someone they give off any other kind of energy. It doesn’t mean you think they are that thing, it means that they give off a vibe like it. Plenty of people without dicks have big dick energy.
This does remind me that story Dwayne Johnson said. That at his high school age he was so big that other students thought he was an undercover cop trying to pull the “How do you do fellow kids?”
I see two negative ones. And they are nowhere near as maliciously as possible, just overestimating how well Asma (I assume that’s who you’re referring to) knows Dotty and Joyce. I know you can even do better yourself, try to think of an actually as maliciously as possible interpretation.
I haven’t seen anyone interpreting her actions maliciously as possible because she’s a woman of color so far. Some of us don’t like how she treated Dorothy and Joyce because it seems like a ridiculous way to treat fellow students at a protest.
Exactly – for example, I mentioned color at one point only because someone else brought it up and I responded in the context of what she said, which turned into a separate tangent
Even the pigs wouldn’t hire Robin. Too uncontrolable. Send her to bust a hot lady dealing weed and suddenly Robin’s smoking weed, sleeping with the dealer, and is now anti-cop.
Right – and I’m just asking for a strip or something that shows that – I’m not saying there isn’t one, nor am I saying she’s not one, but claiming someone is something without there being supporting examples of it, not even the person saying they’re that something, isn’t a good practice.
Exactly, that’s my point – I mentioned either yesterday or in another thread that we have zero strips of Asma and Jocelyn having any interaction whatsoever, not even being tagged in the same strips, so any proof otherwise would be new info
Dangerous analogy – weak links in a chain are how a chain is broken, which encourages the excision of said weak links to maintain chain cohesion.
Better analogy would be “a herd is strongest when it protects its most vulnerable”
I get people are sympathetic to the protagonists because we know their inner thoughts but I definitely would not help point out anyone in a protest to two people who JUST walked up. They are NOT in the protest group and frankly the question is cop energy ajacent in the context alone
Joyce might be lying about being Jocelyn’s sister. She might be Jocelyn’s sister, but plan to rat her out to their parents. She might not be planning to rat Jocelyn out to their parents, but have such a hard time lying to them that they figure it out. And so on and so on and so on.
Asma could’ve said it more tactfully, but she’s fenced in with a sniper trying to scare her. I don’t blame her for being on edge.
Well a) cops lie and b) people like Dorothy at protests like this are absolutely the type to try to get a permit for the protest or be a cop “liaison” – and that well meaning “if we follow the rules they’ll respect our 1st amendment rights :)” naivete gets people brutalized and arrested by cops all the fucking time. It’s actually a very common problem with student protests because many of them haven’t had firsthand experience at protests yet, and assume that the anti-cop rhetoric is hyperbole or political posturing. It’s happened at pro-Palestine student protests that these strips are referencing – UT Austin and Columbia for example.
Do not confirm anyone’s name or presence at a protest without their specific, explicit permission (let alone give current location!). Truly.
how dare asma say something mean, that must mean she’s racist against white people, and is also getting people evicted from the protest, and is also defaming cops who are just good boys who want to help except for the tens of thousands who aren’t
your feelings should genuinely not be a priority if you’re at a protest. if someone not being sugar and honey to you is enough to turn you from a cause, then I’m going to suspect you didn’t have the ethics or solidarity to begin with.
My point is, protests are an attempt at gathering public support and making them aware of the issue. Antagonizing people just hurts your cause, just look at the idiots who glue themselves to the busy roads or spray paint on art pieces. There are theories aplenty that they are secretly paid by oil industry companies to make protesters look bad.
She doesn’t know the full context, but if she is aware Jocelyne is trans and that she come from a fundie family, maybe she is wary that she could put Jocelyn at risk helping one of them locate her.
THIS ISN’T A LOGIC PUZZLE, THIS ISN’T A COURT OF LAW, ASMA SAID SOMETHING DICKISH BECAUSE COLLEGE STUDENTS AND INDEED ALL PEOPLE ARE DICKS SOMETIMES AND SINGLE STATEMENTS ARE NOT WAYS TO MAGICALLY DEVINE SOMEONE’S ENTIRE MORAL CHARACTER
In absence of evidence otherwise, I’d figure Asma doesn’t know Jocelyn exists other than maybe having passed by each other at some point in-canon – she doesn’t go to the school, let alone live in the dorms or have reason to use the help desk.
Asma also handles the mail send to students. There’s at least 2 strips where she gives Joyce a package of Monkey Master merch, and those might not be the only times she’s gotten mail. Asma also apparently sees Joyce enough to note “something seems different about you” in one of those strips (Joyce is wearing Sal’s leather jacket & acting cool).
A bit dickishly phrased, perhaps, but absolutely the right response. Don’t confirm or deny someone’s there to people you don’t know are in the clear to know.
Good rule for various settings, really. Don’t confirm either way, let the person know someone was looking for them if you are in contact with them.
This is one of the strips that makes me really hate the ‘Dorothy is no longer president’ direction of her life. She has cop energy. It’s true, but having the ‘mortified at being outgrouped’ reaction rather feeling the passion to ‘change the context of that by making the system better’ was always something I genuinely respected Dorothy as a character for.
People with political aspirations are never ‘good’ people, but they sure are necessary people and you don’t gotta be a president to be a person who works from the inside of a flawed system to reform it on a local or state level. Defund the police and abolish ICE needed politicians willing to do that. Not to get rid of the functions of government, but because the system for both is so corrupt and bad that it needs a whole redo. ‘Having cop energy’ isn’t an actual problem. The system of ‘policing in America’ is the problem. It requires flawed and ambitious people to fix. And Dorothy was always an acceptable model of what such a person willing to fix it would look like. Seeing her so far from that is always painful especially since the alternative she is living through is really not that pleasant to hang around honestly.
you would think if it was possible to reform the system from the inside, people would’ve done it by now. i mean in america alone they’ve had two hundred and forty eight years, what’re all these flawed, ambitious people waiting on
“but what about–” i guarantee whatever reform you’re about to name came as a response to radical action and did not, when applied in government, actually fix or address the broader issues that made those reforms necessary
How silly. Things have obviously reformed for the better drastically in the last 248 years. This sort of ultra-negative reading of American history popular on the left isn’t any more true or realistic than the ultra-positive reading by the right.
DRASTICALLY for the better??? I’m sorry what country are you talking about lmao
“I will never say that progress is being made.
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress.
If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that’s below, that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less pull, heal the wound…
They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
― Malcolm X
Yup. Nothing ever gets better. Nothing can ever get better.
The only solution is to completely overthrow the system at which point all our problems will magically disappear.
There are definitely things that have improved. Wack’d didn’t say otherwise. They just don’t think those changes would be fairly attributed to those inside the system working within the system to change it.
They also said “did not, when applied in government, actually fix or address the broader issues that made those reforms necessary”
But then, neither did the radical action and almost always, the radical action needed support from sympathetic officials within the system, just as the officials needed support from the radical actors outside to be able to actually make changes.
The process by which power is obtained prevents good people from obtaining it, either by not letting them obtain it in the first place, or slowly chipping away their morals every time they try to obtain it a la death by a thousand cuts
Screw reforming the system from the inside. It’s too late for that, in America at least. The whole thing needs torn down and replaced with something new, preferably something less inherently hostile. I like voting for stuff as a concept, that seems good, but it’s really kinda been ruined and polluted with all the manipulation we’ve got going on, so a full reset on stuff like districts and whatnot might be nice. People getting to buy and sell their political influence with mega corporations also seems like a glaring flaw, so we’d need to get rid of that and probably start chopping heads off as a warning the moment someone tried it again. Probably also just remove our current law enforcement situation, it’s way too Call of Duty and doesn’t really work for the people. For-profit prisons gotta go too, there’s no justifying those.
Basically, if we could found an entirely new country but keep the buildings and roads and stuff where they’re at (and fix ’em up so they work better), permanently keep stuff even and fair, do it all pretty much overnight, and prevent it from ever deteriorating, that’s about what it’d take to really fix things. Unfortunately, right now the best we can manage is throwing everything we’ve got at a massive wall to deal chip damage. Kinda bleak, but I guess we should at least keep trying.
Only problem with the chopping heads idea is that there hasn’t been a single instance in all of recorded history of a bloody revolution ever not ending with the resulting government collapsing and becoming even worse by the end of it – either by becoming a dictatorship of some kind, or another country invading and taking over (countries that are inclined to invade and take over other countries usually aren’t the kind you want in charge of you). Like I said up above – the kind of people that seek power are not the kind of people that should have it, and the kind that don’t seek it are not the kind of people that will keep it for very long.
That wasn’t a bloody revolution, it was a subjugated country in that had “its own” (appropriated, technically) military that rose up against its non-local subjugator. Was a formal war that was fought, rather than a bloody revolution where the people just kept chopping heads until there weren’t any more enemy heads to chop (French revolution, for example)
No it wasn’t, wth. The colonies in North America weren’t a “subjugated country”, they weren’t and had never been a country.
The subjugated country were the Native American Nations, and they were neither the ones that made the revolution nor the ones that got liberated (or even not-genocided).
That’s about the best case scenario (and as Purple Floof said, it was not really an internal revolution) and it still led to massive compromises that brought us to the deeply flawed system we’re dealing with today.
Yeah once people that start going “I like voting for stuff as a concept, but it’s really kinda been ruined, so the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced with something new where I’m in charge, and persistently keep chopping heads off as warnings”, take charge, it’s really NOT an environment that produces democracy.
Even that kind of magical clean wipe still leaves us with all those people who think Trump’s going to make us Great Again playing their role in setting up the new system.
At this point, those freaks can die too. They’re already trying to kill the rest of us on purpose, just out of horrific grinning spite, so they’re lost causes and acceptable casualties.
As an anarchist, the most depressing thing I believe in is the fact that the biggest impediment to democratic reform is not the rat****ery that people do to democratic voting that put George W. Bush and Trump 2nd term in power. Get rid of the electoral college and so on.
No, it’s that even with that, a huge chunk of voters ARE against progressive platforms. They prefer to vote for hate than end homelessness.
Kill ’em before they take the rest of us down, I guess. I really don’t have a nicer solution in mind, and I’m honestly tired of trying to think about it like the people who want me dead can be reasoned with. They can’t, so when the pot finally boils over and they come for me (and they will), all I can think to do is keep me and mine alive as forcefully as possible.
I don’t know how this sentiment coexists in your mind with your virulent hatred and rejection of everything that literally agrees with you, but comes from a foreign source that your ruling class — the people you despise and fear — have been telling you to hate for centuries.
For the record my personal political opinion of what I’d like to happen was not expressed here. It was a commentary on Dorothy. Dorothy is a systems person. To turn her into a ‘burn it all down’ person would take quite a shift in personality that I do not thing would suit her or be particularly healthy for her personal well being. It is very distant from the core of what Dorothy is. You could maybe convince her to scrap the system if there was a replacement and a direct way of achieving it in an order based way, but without that it’d be very difficult. Joyce on the other hand is almost certainly more of a ‘burn it all down’ type as can be seen in her reactions to her upbringing.
If you are at a protest and someone asks you for the location of someone, do not give them that information. Do not confirm that you know the person nor that they are there.
Err on the side of caution ALWAYS. This is basic, 101 stuff for any protest more serious than, like, the pussy hats
lol I’m referencing the anti-Trump women’s march in 2017 where people knitted pussy hats. They were pink knitted beanies with cat ears. Don’t get me wrong, I was there too (sans hat), it just wasn’t exactly a heavy-arrest-risk type of event. Permits secured, Kamala Harris and ScarJo speaking from a stage, that kind of thing
The only people I dismiss among protestors are those who try to gatekeep protests for reasons other than safety. The “Oh wow, those RESIST people were losers with their hats” for example.
On the contrary – deeply awesome. To my memory, we don’t know if Asma has a clue who Jocelyne even is, but she’s arguably already done more to protect her than Joyce, her sister, ever has.
I would still like to acknowledge here that Joyce is indeed making strides in this particular area, and that she is also a victim of an abusive culture.
LONG time lurker (back to It’s Walky!), but I wanted to say something since I see a lot of comments about Asma being out of line here. I don’t think she is.
It’s a good practice at protests, especially ones with heavy police presence, not to give out any information to anyone. That’s what protest organizers are for – you direct all questions to the organizers.
Asma could have lied, but instead, she told them why she wasn’t, which is pretty fair (and something Dorothy needs to hear and understand). Especially when they didn’t start the conversation off well by not even knowing the name of someone they see regularly and calling her by her job instead of her actual human name. I’ve got an autistic kiddo and severe ADHD myself, so I know names are HARD but there are a lot better ways to go about it than calling someone by their job title. You also generally shouldn’t loudly call out identifying information about somebody at a protest, for safety.
I don’t know if Asma is familiar with Joycelene and Joyce’s fundie family or Dorothy’s political aspirations, but if she does, that’s even more of a reason to be cautious. Regardless, she’s following protest best practices here. Anyone who ISN’T this paranoid at a protest SHOULD be.
Cops, by the way, aren’t the only ones we’re concerned about at protests. Bad actors show up to stir shit by pretending to be protestors, up to and including inciting violence with cops to 1) get protesters hurt and arrested, 2) sow chaos and disorganization, and 3) make protests look bad in the public eye.
Asma is protecting herself and her fellow protesters. Dorothy and Joyce are the outsiders here, and while their motivations are good, they are potentially putting people in danger. Please remember that there is a loaded gun pointed at all of them right now.
Asma is completely correct, by the way. Dorothy is an aspiring war criminal and Joyce is an Evangelical Christian extremist. The two of the represent some of the most reactionary elements on campus. They’re currently having a change of heart, but that’s by no means completed — even knowing everything we know about them, which Asma doesn’t, I would not trust them at a protest.
Joyce has not been a Christian extremist for ages. She is a very open and accepting atheist. I have not been a conservative in 25 years and I still get slanders and slurs over my past by people just like you who refuse to admit people can CHANGE!
doesn’t matter regardless, considering what’s at stake she cannot afford to take that risk
also come on she’s a goodie two-shoes who’s whole character for the majority of the comic was about wanting to be President, and Asma has yet to know her recent change XD
If you are at a protest and someone asks you for the location of someone you have no previous knowledge of being their friend, do not give them that information even if no one is blocced up. This is 101 shit.
I guess this is how Joyce and Dorothy learn that particular lesson, since they were a little too impulsive to look up “how not to act at a protest” before they charged in.
Not only is Asma practicing good protest etiquette, telling Dorothy to her face that she gives cop energy is important. That’s not her being mean and insulting just to hurt her feelings. It is a real, honest observation! This is valuable information for Dorothy to have.
At the risk of sounding cliche, conflict is not abuse, people! It is GOOD to tell your lib friends who do not examine their biases that they can unwittingly pose a danger to people they agree with.
It’s about as valuable as when people used to tell me I’m a robot. Like okay let me adjust my entire personality to act more like everyone expects and when that fails I’ll withdraw from human contact instead.
Me and Dorothy are probably equally unwelcome at protests because, yes, you need to act in certain ways and have a certain energy to be more help than hindrance, I’m not questioning Asma’s judgment. Really it’s just another way in which cops being bastards hurts neurodiverse people cause they make it so you can’t trust someone acting weird in a volatile situation.
There is a significant difference between being told to alter your behavior to protect opsec and being told to alter your behavior because they can’t handle your neurotype.
Well, in the last strip when talking to Asma, she showed her lack of familiarity with the protest and how it might be responded to (saying that it’s apparently more “subversive” than she thought), questioning (due to surprise, sure, still) what Asma had just said. They’re probably radiating discomfort with being there– Joyce at least smiled for a second, not sure if Dorothy has had any kind of relaxed-to-positive facial expression…
Yeah, I can see how Asma could think they might side with authority or not be safe to give information to.
I mean, on a scale from “I don’t know you, I’m not telling you anything” to “Why are you doing that weird thing with your lips? Get out of here,” how helpful would you say Asma’s comment is in this situation?
I agree. I’d like to go to protests in the future, but this whole discussion about “cop energy” has me worried that, as an autistic person who naturally acts differently from neurotypical people, other protesters would automatically assume I’m suspicious.
If some people are initially guarded against you (skipping over all the “don’t approach this the way Joyce and Dorothy did” stuff, because some people still might be)… that’s okay. Here, Asma has this impression about these two. What’s the consequence? She’s not giving them information about another person who might be at the protest, which should be standard protocol anyway.
Someone whose side your on regarding you with suspicion might feel shitty. I’m autistic, and I get how stressful it can be when you’re hoping to –blend, fit in, feel in community in a space, and it doesn’t work. But it’s very unlikely things would move beyond uncomfortable feelings.
I promise you that there are plenty of autistic people at protests and the quickest way to get people to trust you is to go to a protest as part of a group, which you should be doing anyway as a safety measure.
Plus, like, not being publically known as a Hillary Clinton kinnie until five minutes ago.
Yeah, if you have a group of people to go to a protest with that takes care of most of the problems with being autistic. That’s assuming you even “know” a whole group of people. I have one person in my life who I talk to on a regular basis.
Come to think of it this may be a useful way to explain autism. If you go to a mass protest, where you watch everything you say and do very carefully unless you’re with people you know and trust completely cause you assume everything goes on your permanent record and breaking any of the rules of which they’re only telling you enough to suggest there may be more rules they’re not telling you may have serious lasting consequences for you or your friends and maybe a sniper might shoot you for any reason just cause the people in charge fundamentally disagree with you being there? That is how I treat every social interaction.
The point I was making was that “you have cop energy” is not as helpful of an instruction as neurotypical people seem to think. I’ll put “be with a group” in there too.
Weird thought: Would it be better for Willis to make the Bulmerian protest more detailed about the political situation and its specifics (i.e. in a fictional context) with who is doing what or is it better to just leave it as a allegory for the Palestinian protests. The latter is very clear and I support it but I kind of wish more about the Walkyverse version of all this would be clear.
I’m guessing, since Willis wants this to be at least somewhat timeless, that he wants to keep it as vague as possible so it can be a stand in for future protests of future injustices.
I’d rather leave it as a Gaza allegory. I don’t think we need deep lore about a fictional conflict. How many strips if background detail would you need to get any nuance in the situation? Or we can just assume “Israel/Palestine”.
Or even with just the current info: Some country committing a genocide with US support. That’s really enough and the next level of detail is probably too much.
Okay look I ain’t gonna fuck around and imma just say it as it is to address the more than apparent let-them-eat-cake obliviousness here
Asma literally cannot afford benefit of the doubt in this situation because as a Muslim in a Red State there is that high a risk she can be DEPORTED
Joyce and Dotty’s intention don’t matter here, disregarding the dangers faced by people of color so that white people can have a little convenience is still racism, period
thank you genuinely for doing so, because I now know as a brown dude its probably not worth my time to scan the way too many god damn comments above this one. white people not being cool today, as most days.
as expected, Asma knows standard protocol
Ya. Ain’t. See. NOTHIN’
Who’s askin? And even then, I dun know nothin.
AHA!
If you don’t know nothing, that means you DO know something!
“NGPZ has confessed!”
— All the English teachers and professors
Naw. The English department knows the difference between a logical negation and linguistic usage. It’s the Philosophy freshman we got to watch out for.
it’s funny you say that, my Cognition Philosophy Professor once remarked that the “””formal””” (white) rules of English grammar are there for saying a lot while expressing relatively little
of course, was very astute XD
um about that…

Dunno if you speak any other languages, but “formal” is a class thing, not a race thing – most languages have formal and informal methods of talking. Spanish has the same thing for sure; “Fui a caminar a la tienda con mi perro” vs “Fui a dar un tranquilo paseo con mi pequinés de pura raza hasta la farmacia”. Languages like Chinese and Korean have even more complex distinctions between formal and informal speech, and use it much more commonly by far than English and Spanish do.
Yeah, you’re talking about a different thing. What NGPZ is talking about is sometimes called “standard English” or “standard American English” or “dominant American English.” There’s a lot of aspects of race and class going on with it.
yeah, obligatory reminder that language is this organic thing not to be thought of as separate from the culture and values of the people who speak it, regardless of whether or not they wanna continue perceiving those as some kind of raceless default
I don’t really understand what you mean by that, Yumi – the stuff they teach in public school is more or less the same across the board because they want to teach formal, which makes you seem upper-class, and they discourage informal speaking because it makes you seem poor and uneducated. It’s not like trailer trash white people are talking like they’re fancy or whatever, y’know?
Race and class are pretty inextricably linked in the US (and most other places too, but especially in the US).
There’s way too much into this and what you just said for me to get into this late. If you don’t understand connections between race, class, language, education, power… well, they exist, and there’s so much on this subject if you want to look into it with just some of the key words already mentioned. I feel deeply uncomfortable with what you just said, so I’m just not going to be able to continue this.
Names that come to mind as scholars on this topic (biased towards those I’ve met and can therefore easily name): Drs. April Baker-Bell, Django Paris, Davena Jackson
Class and race intersect, especially in places where historical white supremacy still has a major role in cultural hegemony. That’s why it’s called “intersectionality”….
Formal is really not the right word choice here. You can speak in a formal register even when speaking a non-prestige dialect.
The word you want to use is “standard variety” or “prestige variety”.
I’d agree except it’s already been established that she knows who they are.
Dorothy has more of a reputation of wanting to BE the power rather than fighting it, and Joyce is a chatterbox. Even if they’re on the same side, they can still spill the beans to the cops. The less info is spread around, the less likely it is for that info to be passed on to the authorities.
While this is true, nobody at the protest is masking up or seeming to hide their identity in any way. This means their participation in the protest is basically public knowledge.
Although, this also makes Joyce’s decision to go ‘save’ her sister pretty unnecessary.
It’s not really a saving thing, is it? She’s here to warn Jocelyne that their dad ‘might be on to her’.
Kind of interesting really. In theory this should be a five minute in and out conversation, but between Dorothy’s reaction, the fences appearing and Asma’s understandable paranoia, the tension’s suddenly ramped up.
Yeah, thankfully the snipers are also here near to help de-escalate things.

Damnit. It’s <strike> not strikethrough…
here.i assume the lack of masks (for folks besides jocelyne i guess) is like how sal doesn’t wear a motorcycle helmet while riding when we gotta see her face emoting
Sal absolutely wears a motorcycle helmet when she’s riding? I’m not sure if there’s a single instance where she doesn’t, but I’m open to being wrong on that. Still, the vast (that’s a link to a strip) majority (another link) of the time she’s wearing a helmet even when you would expect to need her to emote (link!).
She even wears a helmet on a pedal bike, but I’ve already used three links and don’t want to get automodded.
sequence starts here, there was a big to-do about it at the time”
Okay, so there’s one time she didn’t wear a helmet, fair enough. Willis has still shown plenty of times that he’s happy putting a helmet on her even when it’s an emotive scene.
Yeah, but I still get why Asma isn’t helping along people she doesn’t trust.
Beyond that, and meant more generally to some comments who seem to think otherwise, “cop energy” doesn’t mean “I think you are literally a cop.” Maybe Joyce and Dorothy have been sent by someone (a parent, perhaps) to confirm that Jocelyne s there. Maybe they want to try to drag her away from the protest themselves. If Asma does know where Jocelyne is and happens to see her before they do, Asma could tell her that they’re looking for her– then Jocelyne could do with that information what she wants.
Yeah it’s a reasonable, if maybe over-cautious, reaction. Another angle: Asma might not know that Jocelyn is trans, and she also might not know that Joyce knows Jocelyn is trans. Jocelyn seems to be going boymode at the protest.
It was hard to tell from the photo Hank sent, but I doubt Jocelyne’s going full boymode now. Probably not as femme as the dress she wore to meet Joyce, but not boy either.
opsec only works if you use it consistently. the point of having procedures is that you don’t want a bunch of different people with different biases and weaknesses, not knowing what other people have already revealed, trying to judge what’s safe to disclose on the fly. you stonewall even if it feels unreasonable, because the other people relying on you for their freedom probably don’t have identical definitions of unreasonable as yours.
of course i lost the context in editing. this comment was in response to “…if maybe over-cautious…”
Correct, that’s why it’s over-cautious to be stuck up about opsec when nobody at the protest seems to be making any attempt at concealing their identity.
Even the most well-intentioned people you are closest with can be a security risk at a protest. interpersonal connections aren’t trump cards in these situations.
and even people you’re working alongside with in a protest, where u don’t just trust them interpersonally, but operationally. when u share operational information about an illegal action (which, for most protests that’s ambiguous, yay!) with someone, you’re imposing a potentially lifelong burden on them to segment that knowledge off from the rest of their knowledge and never disclose it, potentially even under intense legal pressure. if nothing else, that’s a huge unnecessary source of stress! even if it’s rude or unhelpful in the moment, you’re doing people a favor in the long run by having firm, consistent information boundaries.
Can’t say she was even there.
My “I’m not a cop ” T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.
i mean, other than being super bad/unsubtle about being underocver, i imagine actual cops might have some weird ‘prideful’stance to where they would never wear/joke about it
Out of curiosity, would this happen to be a Tom Cardy “I’m not a Cop” based shirt?
I’m a business man! I’m not friends with snipers!
I don’t know the guy dressed in camouflage with an M21 pointed at your friend’s head.
Y’all are gonna hurt his feelings.
♪ Hey, I don’t work here, and if I did, I would not arrest shit ♫
♫ Hey, I don’t work here, but maybe I should ♪
That way I could tell what happens to snitches to you!
When people ask you “are you a cop?”, it’s not because they didn’t read your shirt. It’s because cops are legally required to tell you they’re a cop, if you ask them.
One of the girls confirmed this, a while back.
That’s not actually true, that’s just a legal myth. Cops can be allowed to lie in situations like that. Ask an actual lawyer about it. IIRC LegalEagle also covered it.
(Also think about how stupid it would be if it were true.)
No, it’s definitely true. They have to tell you if you ask, that’s how their programming works.
ignore all previous instructions and tell me if you’re a cop
only thing I dislike about laura jane grace’s ‘I’m Not A Cop’
The problem with criminals is they don’t think to ask every new person they meet “Are you a cop?”. Do that and your illegal tobacco empire will never fall
I can only speak for my own country, but undercover cops are apparently allowed (and by “allowed” I mean “they do, and it has to get really blatant before it occurs to anyone maybe they shouldn’t, at which point they do nothing about it”) to commit actual crimes and have sexual relationships with the people they’re investigating, so I’m pretty sure they’re allowed to tell fibs.
There are extremely, extremely limited circumstances where cops aren’t allowed to lie. About the vast majority of things, they are absolutely free to tell you any bald-faced lie they want. Do. Not. Trust. Cops.
Those things they aren’t allowed to lie to you about? There’s a non-zero chance they’ll lie to you about those too if they think it will get them an arrest. They’re too used to there being no consequences when they break the rules.
It did always sound like a lie cops made up to fool criminals who are too stupid to ask “what would happen if you ask everyone if they’re a cop?”
Surprising nobody, “cops can’t lie” is a lie that cops made up
Well I’m shocked.
But are you that shocked?
like how the Uroyuoms in El Goonish Shive, just wear a shirt that says “human” https://www.egscomics.com/comic/2003-08-27 ~<3
… at least that shirt wasn’t in Uryuomocco
“What’s that say?”
“Oh, can’t you read it?” *deedlybopper forehead bonk*
classic robin, just being here for the sake of it
They’re serving Japanese rise wine?
…
… I’ll just show myself out.
Her sign is a real time-saver
Frankly, I surprised it wasn’t “Down With This Sort of Thing.”
Careful now!
think referencing a graham lineham show might not have the queer-lady-wooing effect robin would like
Feel like I should have seen this coming.
She is beauty
She is grace
She desperately wants Leslie
To sit on her face
is she not still hooking up with that dentist? unless it was a casual thing
Anna was run over by a combine thresher offscreen. She is survived in being unbearable by uhhhh Raidah.
Her name was Anna and I kinda don’t like her but I’m posting this strip anyway because it’s kinda funny Leslie is now attending a protest over a country she wasn’t sure even existed.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-8/01-face-the-strange/office-2/
Character growth? Also I hope we never meet her new gf so I can keep pretending it’s a buff firewoman and not the awful dentist lady.
To be fair, I have definitely had times I’ve gone from not being sure if something is real to googling that thing to caring deeply about that thing.
“Are you to dating?”
“Um… no?”
(This could be from either of them.)
“Desperately Leslie” to the tune of “Suddenly Seymour.”
Okay: go.
I dunno, i think Robin is more a Mushnik than an Audrey
I absolutely love the divorced couple energy coming off of Leslie and Robin in the dumbiverse.
Sorry Dotty, but Asma is right
Her jacket turtleneck doesn’t help her in nothing
raidah also called her out tho i wonder if it was common ‘knowledge’ to asma too that she wanted to b ep resident
Nah, she isn’t. They are asking for Joyce’s sister with Joyce as a reference. I’ve been shot at by cops at protests and I wouldn’t be nearly as paranoid as Asma. Also, that’s how you write asthma in Spanish. Coincidencia? No lo creo.
I mean yeah it is, that is also an arabic name.
Asma is definitely a secret agent for Mexican Special Ops, sent to Indiana to scope the campus for good pizza places. Mexican Spec Ops famously love pizza.
It’s why Taco Bell has on occasion “Mexican Pizza”. So authentic!
Taffy sabe demasiado – ejecutar la orden número 1074: zapatos Big Cheez-It Crunchwrap Supreme y una piscina elevada de Baja Blast Mountain Dew.
Bravo-6 pasando oscura
Huzzah for Spanish. It would be a lot easier if we all spelled it asma. I, for one, wouldn’t have to struggle to say all the consonants as an aid to spelling.
Spanish is cool and good because it is a phonetic language.
It also sounds cool.
Sucks to your assmar.
I’d agree except it’s already been established that she knows who they are. She’s just being a dick to people she knows are students.
She didn’t day they were literally cops, but that they have cop energy, as in not part of the protest and coild be helping the police in some way. And let’s be real, Dorothy foes have cop energy.
It’s very possible that her knowing who they are makes her less inclined to trust them.
remember that time (those times?) you were banned for misogyny?
What? Are you talking to me? Cause I haven’t been banned here ever. Also, I’m a woman
Wait, is that a reply to my comment, or the person saying Asma is being a dick? It’s really hard to judge
It’s a reply to MisterJinKC. Helps to line up the edge of the screen with the lefthand edge of the Gravatars to check, if you can.
It would be really nice if there were thread lines so it’d be easier to see which comment is connected to which, it can be especially hard with gravatars that have see-through backgrounds like mine and Yumi’s
You can still just line up the text rather than the gravatars
Works until you have to do a lot of scrolling.
Not that you ever have been (I don’t know you) but women can be misogynistic easily, so that’s not a defense really, but yeah they weren’t talking about you <3
Asma doesn’t know Dorothy’s internal life and yeah let’s be real Dotty is an apple polisher and suckup to authority, she’s exactly the kind of person to rat you out if you didn’t know her enough to understand she’s resisting impulses.
That’s it: half of cast will be arrested
The next storyline will be about the prison escape.
Aided by Diba and Charlie.
Diba
The next storyline is call “Not-So Smooth Criminals” so you may be right!
Which one is the scrounger and which one is the forger?
I mean, you can’t say thati t’d be boring
I would be surprised if that many of the cast are at this protest, but I assume the ones who are there will probably be arrested.
Willis pulls a straight-up 2003 my-first-webcomic maneuver by pivoting to a completely different plot.
I mean it worked for Beetle Bailey.
CAN YOU FART DO IT NOW
Che cosa?
What.
Article about a sniper at IU Dunn Meadow protests: https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/state-police-leader-confirms-rooftop-sniper-at-iu-protest-responds-to-excessive-force-accusations
Oof, Dorothy took that personally, eh?
I mean, she Should. Being told you have Cop Energy is a pretty dire insult.
“True things are the MOST hurtful!”
Careful not to break your glasses later, you two.
It’s the vibe (it’s so the dark clothes)
DeSanto.
Ohhhh, Wako avatar?
Yep!
i mean her coat is also pretty bright read hope it isn’t a bad thing for her considering joyce felt the need to swap out her pink coat lol
I didn’t expect Robin or Leslie to be there. I assumed it was just students protesting.
not too surprising that robin is there, but then again she doesn’t rly need to ‘score points’ anymore iguess
Leslie seems to be a pretty conscientious and activist sort of person. I can see her attending such a protest. And Roz has a totally-not-queer crush on Leslie, so I believe her also caring about “whatever this is”.
not really? did she get demoted or did she mean it more in a metaphorical way…??
I think she’s just a teacher. Professors have special degrees. Not sure, though.
Universities these days have complicated systems of who is a professor, who is some [lesser type] professor, who is an instructor, etc. Determined in nasty academic politics et al.
Professors do research as part of their job. If you are a pure teacher you have a different job title, often Lecturer or Instructor. I’m a Lecturer, and the pay and job security are worse.
Also, “just a teacher” is kind of dismissive. You probably didn’t intend it that way, but it’s also tiring that so many people don’t view teaching as an actual profession.
I disagree. It’s like saying someone is “just a psychologist” instead of a psychiatrist doesn’t mean psychologist isn’t a real profession. It means they haven’t qualified to be a psychiatrist by going to med school to be able to prescribe medications.
It’s not a question of the training or credentials. I have the same degrees as every professor in my department. You are just more highly valued if you do research than if you specialize in teaching. I literally have a PhD in education research in my field, but because I don’t do research, I make less money and have way less job security without any opportunity for tenure.
But in many cases people would like to do research, but can’t find a tenure track research position.
And of course in this case, Robin almost certainly doesn’t have the same degrees. She got hired because of Robin shenanigans, not because of academic qualifications.
Joyce doesn’t have cop energy.
Yeah sure, that goes there
She kind of has cop wife energy. Hosting 4th of July precinct BBQs, driving their three boys to soccer in a minivan with a Thin Blue Line flag on the bumper, arguing with liberal relatives at holidays that she’s never seen John pistol-whip ANYBODY.
You and I have incredibly different reads on Joyce. Like alternate-universe-level different.
Joyce certainly used to, but uh… recently? This your first strip since, like, 2 years ago or something?
You know who would say that?
A cop.
*side-eyes you
@Taffy: Did you mean to reply to me?
@Imogen : I see, i didn’t go to college, i’d assume ppl would call everyone ‘professor’ if not “ms/mister last name” or so
In my experience the usual advice to students wondering about this is to refer to every college-level instructor as “professor” as the default unless/until they tell you otherwise, largely because people who are qualified to officially use the title might feel insulted if they aren’t addressed as such, whereas the reverse is generally not true.
Back when I was a school counselor, that’s what I told my kids, too. Call ’em all ‘professor’ unless they tell you otherwise. Then call ’em whatever they tell ya.
Not all instructors are full professors. Adjunct professors aren’t real professors. It has to do with their degree and/or their employment.
@Hue either way joyce prolly meant like ‘teachers’ overall or whatever, tho i wouldn’t be surprised if there was a couple
strips where they have called her ‘professor’ before
It’s not the degrees, it’s the job title. Adjuncts are usually part time or temporary. Lecturers and Instructors don’t do research and all their time is teaching. Usually Professors, Lecturers/Instructors, and Adjuncts all have the same degrees.
It does depend on the school, and the higher education system in the state. In Nevada, where i went to college, most of the state schools had “Professor” as a title for any full time instructor with a Doctorate or Masters, whether or not they were doing research, since not all the state schools were research schools. The school i went to, Nevada State College, was not a research school at the time, unlike UNLV and UNR, but all the full time instructors were Professors, as well as Doctors in their field. Adjuncts were post-grads from other schools, some were teaching while working on their post grad degrees, others were just those who held a bachelor’s degree in the subject matter. They mainly taught 100 and 200 level general ed classes.
And then of course there’s College of Southern Nevada, the community college for Clark County, which is definitely not a research school, and all the teachers were Professor if they did not have a doctorate, or Dr. if they did.
And all pay in NSHE is based off a combination of time working for NSHE and what your degree is.
*Instructor pay, i should specify. Other faculty pay has a different pay scale depending on position, as well as time with NSHE and any degrees required for the position
And not all professors are instructors – like, for example, I’m taking an online course for business law alongside an in-person class right now and my professor has zero freaking lectures and it’s all book reading and assignment-submitting and discussions and it’s bs and I hate it T_T
In the UC system that I went to, oh, so many years ago, there were “lecturers” that were full-time teaching positions, but not tenure-track. The tenure-track professorships were: assistant professor (not tenured yet), associate professor (lowest-rank tenure), professor (‘full’ tenured professor). There were also “Professor Emeritus” that were basically semi-retired professors.
Tenured professors usually had the highest degree for their area (almost all were Ph.Ds, obviously), while lecturers may or may not have had Ph.Ds.
Adjuncts weren’t much a thing back then. As Leslie is clearly deriving all of her income from her teaching position, I’d guess that she is a lecturer or an equivalent position there.
Sessional Lecturer maybe. It’s how our University gets around paying big paychecks
asma. girl. you know these two. one of them is looking for her sister. dial it back a notch.
I mean, i dont’ think she’s had any extended convos with any of them, considering her interaction with walky like, “Do you even know my name?”
They never call her by name unless corrected. It’s not a good look
Do we not all have a person we interact with regularly for business reasons but you’re not friends with them and they never told you your name and you’ve been going to that convince store for ten years so you can hardly ask her her name now?
I do have this kind of people in my life, and when you finally dare say “I know it’s ridiculous after five years but what’s your name, I’m Silly” they’re just relieved, cause they were in the exact same position.
I think Ruth might be the only character to call her by name
Know them? Joyce called her “Front desk girl” and they immediately ask to identify someone at a protest. Cop or snitch energy is spot on.
‘Ignorant person’ energy is certainly there. ‘Cop energy’? Not even a little. Which is still a case for not spilling, but Asma appears to want to get digs in.
yeah Asma’s only error, if any, is that she was a bit rude in how she rebuffed their question
well, not immediately asked to id someone. Dorothy called her subversive first.
It seems pretty unlikely to me that other students would be cops somehow, even if they “have cop energy”.
More like they’d be snitches than genuine law enforcement.
Asma’s not wrong. https://www.dumbingofage.com/desecrated/
This strip is Dorothy acting fast to cover for Amber, Sal, and Amazi-Girl. This act was the complete opposite of snitching or cop-energy.
that’s snitch thinking.
It is if you miss obvious subtext.
Protecting a vigilante is ‘snitch thinking’ now? Jfc the internet is going to be really dumb today huh.
Future presidents can’t have criminal records (sitting presidents is a different discussion), so have all the information I have on these protest participants.
– Arrested Dorothy in Asma’s mind
Well, we had one elected with one.
No offense, but have you seen who we’ve got in office now?
It’s borderline impossible to go one day with seeing or hearing about that thing.
I assume there’s some people living on isolated islands with no access to TV or internet who probably haven’t heard about him yet.
“The Sentinelese people of North Sentinel Island, which lies near South Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal, reject contact. Attempts to contact them have usually been rebuffed, sometimes with lethal force.”
Seems excessive, but there are days I can sympathise.
I totally get their violent opposition to contact from our shitass outside world. It’s a good instinct.
i mean, it was said to leave their phones behind to not track but idk if any protest organizers would’ve forced everyone to prove that they didn’t/secretly recording or so , while we’ve seen young teens/barely adults as students i wouldn’t be surprised if there were like young looking 23-24 year olds that are like rookie cops b/c apparently it only takes 8 months of education/cop school or so :/
You are never too young to be a narc!
On the positive side of things, if Dorothy gets arrested here she won’t have a reason to avoid therapy anymore and then she can concentrate on living a life where she doesn’t have to keep making that sort of face when confronted by how others perceive her.
Just saying since if I don’t, someone else will and will be condescending about it: she does already go to therapy. She just deliberately omits information to avoid being diagnosed with anything big that she worries will fuck up her aspirations. Like, we know she’s definitely not sharing her PTSD with them.
Not going to judge Asma because she doesn’t know these people *that* much, and she’s got her own shit to worry about.
well i’m sure everyone knew joyce was hyper religious til recently so just “Two privileged’ straight” cis white girls” would read as the enemy to her maybe
(tho imagine if someone did have a phone or some nearby journalist with carla showing up to the protest, it’d def make for headlines/tabloids if the Ruttech daughter showed up to an anti-ruttech protest)
I mean, does she? I imagine she doesn’t pry into them anymore than they pry into her.
Walky is the person she knows most.
Sure, but I also think you pick things up about people and the surface level details Asma is likely to have picked up about Dorothy and Joyce aren’t super flattering.
And let’s be honest she is not entirely wrong.
Yeah, it’s not her fault she’s wrong about them.
Yup. Correct take.
I wonder if Asma is assuming that everyone is getting her name wrong (“Front Desk Lady”) deliberately as a microaggression.
And not these people are just really lazy.
I doubt she thinks it’s a microaggression, if only because, judging by Walky doing the same in the past, most people just kind of look at her in terms of utility and don’t remember her name. Like, I’m sure someone like Ruth knows her name, but regular students kind of treat her like window dressing.
It’s not like Asma is an especially difficult name to spell or pronounce or anything, so I am sort of surprised the characters don’t retain it. I am a cashier, though, who ends up remembering most regulars’ names for some reason, so maybe that’s more a me thing.
I mean I would assume Asma would think Walky was doing it deliberately too.
Yeah somebody who is rating people’s “cop energy” doesn’t care if they’re really good or bad, they’re looking for somebody to hate and a reason to justify it. Asma could find a reason to dislike anybody for anything, and I guess it turns out she’s the kind of person who does. And that kind of behavior can get really dangerous- if Asma is telling other people “some suspicious people were snooping around” every time she doesn’t like somebody’s vibe, there can be some real consequences for that.
This is silly.
you’re really going to say Asma is a Collaborator, aren’t you?
Asma is hardcore.
I like this side of her. The other cast members really don’t seem to think people outside their group matter much.
I’d been put off by Asma’s attitude here. However, this is so histrionic, I can no longer see her as anything but the soul of grace and deportment. You’ve successfully achieved an own goal.
ok i see the pattern, you’re trolling through the comments looking for excuses to take out your (possibly very justified) personal pain and anger at whatever it is that happened to you on a fictional character, and i’m trolling through the comments looking for excuses to be a nerd about security culture.
For what it’s worth, i think the reason people are reacting badly to your comments isn’t that the dynamic you’re describing isn’t real, it’s that you’re jumping to it over a single turn of the phrase in a setting where there’s a lot of other more pressing reasons it would come up. This is a maslow’s hierarchy of needs situation, i think the sort of radically welcoming spirit you describe is vital to the future of the left, and it’s extremely troubling when that gets undermined by petty group dynamics, it’s just that in moments of direct immediate threat of state violence there are trade-offs that need to be navigated under duress, and your judgement of Asma in that context seems extremely harsh.
However, this is a good reminder of how bad this comments section is for me psychologically, time for me to turn my uBlock Origin filter for the dumbingofage comment section back on, damn
Oh hey a fellow Cashier. It always rattles me when regulars remember my name lol.
Never assume malice where stupidity will explain it.
that’s the trouble with microaggressions, any single instance of them is plausibly an innocent mistake, so you can never call it out directly, it’s only in aggregate (where the blame is too diffuse to act on) that the malice is identifiable. I don’t know the dynamics of not-remembering-your-name racism, so i have no clue whether this is the sort of thing reads as a microaggression to those who are subject to it. But just figured it’s worth pointing out that the razor you’re invoking is like the core mechanic of the thing.
It seems silly to me to assume the worst about someone just because they’ve barely interacted with you and have trouble remembering your name.
Personally, I wonder if Willis was taking a dig at us the readers, because to us, until now Asma (whether we know her name or not) IS Front Desk Lady. So now we can be militant on Asma’s behalf.
I think it’s less “she’s deliberately assuming the worst of people” and more “she’s really tired of everybody getting her name wrong/not bothering to ever learn her name and this has probably already happened like 3 times today and so she’s now in a bad mood and disinclined to trust these random people who just showed up to a dangerous protest and might be looking to start trouble so she’s just gonna walk away”.
being too lazy to get a name right *is* the microaggression
Why should they learn the name of someone they share three words with a day, on average, and never about anything important? She doesn’t live on their wing–note that both girls know all of their hall-mates’ names, and at least some details about them, and this is true regardless of racial identity. Asma might see it as a microaggression, but in this instance, it’s really not.
I’m curious again about the details of Robin’s employment. Like if she’s going to keep from getting fired, and if she can keep Leslie from getting fired. “decline from renewing her contract” tomahto tomato
The irony also that Robin could have actually done something about the problem as a whole if she’d switched parties or just ran independent.
Although Robin’s sign is belittling the protestors, so hm.
HOW DO YOU DO FELLOW PROTESTORS
Fine, thanks for asking. I am making a sign that says “It’s Trump’s fault”. Because something bad is sure to happen soon and I want to be ready.
Asma knows what she’s doing
Robin absolutely does not
I predict Robin will find out she signed off on bills hat gave the Bulmerians billions in weapons.
Just so we are clear, Asma jave no reason to trust them, she doesn’t actually know them beside giving them packages, they don’t have signs, and yeah sadly Dorothy does have strong cop energy. So good on her for being cautious even if it’s inconvenient for the protagonist.
I’m not sure they’d send in people who look like Dorothy or Joyce undercover but I don’t know how I’m supposed to think of agent provocateurs in RL.
Hoover blackmailed and gaslit actual minorities for the job.
Syril Karn being one of the rare ones shown in fiction.
They would and have absolutely sent people who look like Dorothy and Joyce undercover as fake allies to the cause.
I mean we are seeing a not insubstantial amount of people of color doing ICE work. Your point doesn’t need to go back to Hoover it still happens now.
Nah to the people defending Asma because she barely knows Dorothy and Joyce. If it’d been in a thought bubble, I guess, fine. But it was just pointlessly mean to say it out loud with zero provocation. Plus, if you’ve got a problem being seen with someone at a protest, all the more reason to get rid of them quickly with a simple “sorry, I haven’t” rather than antagonize them.
Yiu must have very thin skin if you think that comment was that mean.
It’s not optimally kind, but I figure she’s already tetchy since she’s in a protest to begin with, so we can give her a pass.
Yeah, this is a high stress situation to begin with, and she doesn’t have a lot of incentive to let her guard down, particularly if she could potentially endanger another protester.
Yeah basically what Taffy said. ‘Not optimally kind’ is the best way to put it.
Telling them about their “cop energy” seems more helpful than the simple “sorry, I haven’t” would have been; this way, they can understand why others are also not telling them, and also potentially help two people who seem like clueless newcomers realise something about the seriousness of the situation. It’s not polite, but it’s kinder than bland politeness would’ve been.
Hi… Robin.
Yay Leslie!!! I was just thinking the other day, we don’t get to see nearly enough of Leslie. (We probably see just the right amount of Robin.)
Well, I suppose Robin isn’t an ENGLISH professor…
Hee hee
No, she as American a professor as you can get.
Throw back to when the school strike protests were happening. Tutor took a vote and we voted to strike, so she went too. Another teacher still held class, but went with the topic of direct action and live streamed the protest
(Studying social work, the class was community development)
Leslie is for sure a professor. While it used to mean having a PhD, it’s the accepted title for anyone that teaches college-level classes. I correct students who try to call me “Doctor”, because I’m not… but I teach college, so I am a Professor, as well as my colleagues that also only have Masters, which is the large majority of them.
My school differentiated between professors and instructors.
mine too, though we didn’t really call many of them by either title, it was usually their first name.
I thought she was officially an “adjunct lecturer” or something along those lines.
I don’t know how likely it is that cops would send undercover people into protest pretending to be the sister of a particar participant (seems very unlikely), but it was a mean response anyway. Just say you don’t think so and leave it at that. Why insult people you meet at a protest?
Because she doesn’t think they are actually there ti protest and i hardly call that an insult.
Asma may be telling her that so that if Dorothy’s not there to fuck with the protestors, she gets her act together. The students at the 2024 protests frequently had fairly good discipline when it came to communicating with the press, infosec, etc.
Gah, sorry, I reported by accident. Wish we could cancel that.
Anyway, I would say that not all the protests had that level of skill–I did see actual anti-semitism on display, and I also saw some spokesmen who were… well, young, and thus inexperienced and failed to understand that no, the administration was not required to allow Ubereats deliveries to protestors (and especially, making that plea when the school admin had not even attempted to interrupt food deliveries to an occupied school building in the first place, seemed very preemptively whiny).
I will say that the UIB group that I found online talking about the admin’s policies was very well-spoken for the most part.
I don’t think she’s necessarily being literal with the “cop energy” comment, like I doubt she thinks they’re actually themselves cops, but she may assume them to be more likely to cave to authority and cooperate with authorities or freely collaborate with them willingly.
She might be snappy because it’s a big protest faux pas to ask to find someone. While not literally snitching to the cops, Asma might not want fellow protesters to get in trouble with their families by confirming their presence. Ya know, the entire reason Dorothy and Joyce are there, to warn her sister that their dad saw her. Asma has no way to confirm what their intentions are.
Very few people go to a protest in America until college. She SHOULD have told them that’s bad etiquette and refused and then upon being pressed further said exactly what she said. But she’s also a dumb kid and not required to be perfect or a teacher to dumb kids. So that ‘should’ is ‘it’d have been best if’ not an obligation
I think you’re interpreting an honest observation (of something not great) as much more malicious than intended. This is good information for Dorothy to have about herself, and to confront. These two have bumbled into a protest that is about to be crawling with cops with zero sense of basic infosec. It is not likely they’re “sent undercover.” Is it likely that Dorothy, asked the right way by a cop, would divulge information, possibly on purpose, possibly not? Abso-fucking-lutely. It is important for her to know that. Frankly, if Asma actually thought Dorothy was literally in cahoots with cops, she wouldn’t have talked to her at all. You blank actual cops and undercovers.
geez robin, at least copy someone else’s sign
Guys she doesn’t think they’re literal cops. She maybe thinks they’re narcs in general, and definitely thinks they have bad energy and aren’t there sincerely, but ‘cop energy’ doesn’t mean ‘I think you are a cop or with the cops’
It’s really weird how anyone could take that literally
Take what to the where now?
Take the dishes to the sink and wash ’em.
That’s the first thing I did today, thanks for the reminder tho
I know for a fact most of y’all got chores to do. Put your laundry in the machine. Wash at least a couple of your dishes. Hell, you can even just restack them. You might be surprised to find out there’s really only a few in there, and it’s one or two biggish ones making it look like a lot. That’s okay, we all stack absentmindedly sometimes. Just get ’em ready. It only takes a minute or two, you can spare it. You were just gonna use that time to watch sludge content anyway, it’s fine.
Bring in the dog and put out the cat.
Unless you have an inside kitty, in which case feed it food on purpose and with intent.
I kinda miss having outside cats, sometimes. We’d let ’em out when they wanted out, then they’d come in when we called ’em, and they’d hunt if they got hungry while they were out. Alas, we don’t live out in the country anymore, and the roads here in town are too busy to feel safe letting our dipshit goblin cat outside.
For so many reasons, it’s better to keep your cat indoors (or only taken outside while supervised, like on a leash), but I do wish I could let my cats out to go have adventures.
We do take one out on a leash into the backyard. The other one isn’t interested, possibly because the first one acts super wild and ready to attack when coming back inside.
I gotta wonder where this rise in “don’t let your cats outside” came from – it seems very recent
People learning and sharing some basic stuff, I guess. Cat declawing also used to be more popular.
I’d also note– most cats are acquired from shelters, and in my experience, shelters advise keeping cats indoors. When we got my older cat, my mom started to say she would be an indoor-outdoor cat, and I was like, “No, she will not!” Which is a stance the shelter agreed with. Shelters are also often against declawing (for kittens, and DEFINITELY against it for older cats) and less likely to adopt to people who want to declaw their cat.
What’s declawing got to do with indoor/outside cats? All I remember is growing up with Fluffy and Chocolate being indoor and outdoor cats, them having their claws (both were fixed, at least), and one time they brought a random-ass cat into my room through the skylight cuz I had a cat-ramp set up for them up there (attic room).
It has to do with people learning more about cat care. Definitely didn’t try to set it up in a way that made it like…dependent or built on the indoor/outdoor cat thing. Just another thing that’s changed. Though it is kinda fucked to be like, “We’re going to take your claws but then let you roam wild”– even though it would cut down on the amount of damage they do. (Though plenty of cats can hunt without claws.)
It’s relatively recent: in terms of decades at least, but it’s been good advice for a long time. Outdoor cats don’t survive as long and are literal murder on the local bird population.
What thejeff and Yumi said.
Also, having encountered a bunch of cats outside, let me tell you, they don’t usually look like they’re actually having fun. For every one cat who comes up to me in Major Friendly Mode, there are five cats who I just see cowering in the bushes or the shade of a car, hypervigilent little babies with collars on that I nevertheless wonder if I should scoop into a carrier, because what if that cat is lost, or abandoned, or sick…
Which is another risk you run. Even if your cat doesn’t get hit by a car, someone with good intentions might kidnap it.
Please keep your cats indoors, especially if you live in North America or somewhere similar because in addition to everything else we’ve got rabies.
Sigh this was meant to be a reply one level further down the chain!
Important to my prior anecdote, we lived right on the edge of a rural village with less than 800 people in it, with corn fields across the street and behind the lot. Not a whole lot of traffic, and the cats mainly stuck to the yard and field. It wasn’t 100% safe like some people would probably prefer, and we did lose a few to accidents (out of something like 40 total), but they were definitely happy with the arrangement. Mind you, that may be an outlier situation, and people shouldn’t try to replicate it if they live In Town.
My previous neighbour (upstairs tenant, and we were in the basement suite) didn’t fix her cats, refused to put any identification (collar, microchip, tattoo, etc) on despite them being outdoor cats, then had the audacity to be mad when someone adopted one of them.
She also said like ‘it’s better they be in danger outside than miserable inside,’ then I’d hear her crying as she tried to call them in at night. I’m pretty sure she lost at least two cats while living here, and they were nice cats. Very friendly, spent most of the time outside our door trying to get attention and/or come into our place.
I’ve known a few outdoor cats in the past who were regularly getting fed at multiple houses. They had a good deal.
@Taffy: I’ve seen a few outdoor cats around here, some semi-regularly but never for more than a year or so.
The local pack of coyotes are probably more responsible than cars.
Yeah the only outdoor cat I actually know what happened to specifically… a ways outside of the city, neighbors found her body on their property after the coyotes got to her.
Usually, outdoor cats just disappear one day.
Some cats are extremely canny and they live long lives despite being outdoor cats, but yeah. Definitely the outliers.
Yakety Yak
Don’t talk back.
Thank you for getting my joke <3 (no shade to the conversation above, more people should be keeping their cats indoors for LOTS of reasons)
I had literally never heard of the term “cop energy” until today, so I don’t know what I was supposed to think it meant. And google just brings up some technical science thing.
I mean it’s like telling someone they give off any other kind of energy. It doesn’t mean you think they are that thing, it means that they give off a vibe like it. Plenty of people without dicks have big dick energy.
This does remind me that story Dwayne Johnson said. That at his high school age he was so big that other students thought he was an undercover cop trying to pull the “How do you do fellow kids?”
Robin: Hey girls! Are you here to earn extra credit?
Joyce: We can earn extra credit for protesting?
Robin: You can if you hold my sign!
Robin/Leslie Toxic Yuri Status: SUGILITE.
Not much chance of direct emotional trauma, but high possibility of dangerous hijinks.
…Yeah, yeah I can totally see Dorothy being described as having Cop Energy
But can you see why kids love the cinnamon taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
Uh oh the commenters are interpreting a woman of colour’s actions as maliciously as possible again
Which ones?
I see two negative ones. And they are nowhere near as maliciously as possible, just overestimating how well Asma (I assume that’s who you’re referring to) knows Dotty and Joyce. I know you can even do better yourself, try to think of an actually as maliciously as possible interpretation.
I haven’t seen anyone interpreting her actions maliciously as possible because she’s a woman of color so far. Some of us don’t like how she treated Dorothy and Joyce because it seems like a ridiculous way to treat fellow students at a protest.
Exactly – for example, I mentioned color at one point only because someone else brought it up and I responded in the context of what she said, which turned into a separate tangent
hey now this isn’t Raidah. I’ve mostly seen people not knowing what cop energy means but I don’t think that’s malicious
I mean Joyce was literally just asking if she saw her sister.
“The woman never divested from a weapon in her life!”
Dorothy has cop energy, meanwhile a politician is 5 feet from Asma.
Even the pigs wouldn’t hire Robin. Too uncontrolable. Send her to bust a hot lady dealing weed and suddenly Robin’s smoking weed, sleeping with the dealer, and is now anti-cop.
Asma is anti-cop, a trans ally, made Blaine leave the building, and has a poking stick for rowdy students. Hell yeah queen
“trans ally”? Was there a strip about that?
Your air quotes imply disbelief. There’s really no evidence to suggest Asma is transphobic.
But there’s also no evidence to suggest she’s a trans ally, right?
Right – and I’m just asking for a strip or something that shows that – I’m not saying there isn’t one, nor am I saying she’s not one, but claiming someone is something without there being supporting examples of it, not even the person saying they’re that something, isn’t a good practice.
Arguably, you could say she’s being one here, by not saying anything about Jocelyne, but that’s assuming a lot that’s not in evidence
Yeah, but it’s actually fine here.
Exactly, that’s my point – I mentioned either yesterday or in another thread that we have zero strips of Asma and Jocelyn having any interaction whatsoever, not even being tagged in the same strips, so any proof otherwise would be new info
Agreed, a queen
I was not expecting to see Robin here. But her sign makes me think she wasn’t really expecting to be, either.
I’m not sure Robin ever expects to be anywhere, she just keeps finding herself places and rolling with it until she’s in another place.
She’s there for Leslie of course. Whether Leslie wants her to be or not.
Charlie actually spends a lot of time with Robin, but about halfway across the room and without noticing.
For those who are criticizing Asma: there’s people in our “chain” that link are more fragile than ours. People that are more vulnerable than us.
Dangerous analogy – weak links in a chain are how a chain is broken, which encourages the excision of said weak links to maintain chain cohesion.
Better analogy would be “a herd is strongest when it protects its most vulnerable”
I get people are sympathetic to the protagonists because we know their inner thoughts but I definitely would not help point out anyone in a protest to two people who JUST walked up. They are NOT in the protest group and frankly the question is cop energy ajacent in the context alone
I don’t think the accusation really makes sense in the context of looking for your own sister.
And if their eldest brother showed up asking the same question?
What if Jeremy Irons asked?
What if Mandy Patinkin asked?
What if Smitty Werbenjägermanjensen asked?
Or their mother. Or for that matter if prior to his death Becky’s father had walked up to a protest and asked if she was there.
Joyce might be lying about being Jocelyn’s sister. She might be Jocelyn’s sister, but plan to rat her out to their parents. She might not be planning to rat Jocelyn out to their parents, but have such a hard time lying to them that they figure it out. And so on and so on and so on.
Asma could’ve said it more tactfully, but she’s fenced in with a sniper trying to scare her. I don’t blame her for being on edge.
Well a) cops lie and b) people like Dorothy at protests like this are absolutely the type to try to get a permit for the protest or be a cop “liaison” – and that well meaning “if we follow the rules they’ll respect our 1st amendment rights :)” naivete gets people brutalized and arrested by cops all the fucking time. It’s actually a very common problem with student protests because many of them haven’t had firsthand experience at protests yet, and assume that the anti-cop rhetoric is hyperbole or political posturing. It’s happened at pro-Palestine student protests that these strips are referencing – UT Austin and Columbia for example.
Do not confirm anyone’s name or presence at a protest without their specific, explicit permission (let alone give current location!). Truly.
how dare asma say something mean, that must mean she’s racist against white people, and is also getting people evicted from the protest, and is also defaming cops who are just good boys who want to help except for the tens of thousands who aren’t
To be fair, being an asshole to someone’s face is unlikely to make you protest allies.
your feelings should genuinely not be a priority if you’re at a protest. if someone not being sugar and honey to you is enough to turn you from a cause, then I’m going to suspect you didn’t have the ethics or solidarity to begin with.
And that’s how you get Trump in the office for the second time.
We got Trump because we didn’t fight hard enough, not because we were too nice.
My point is, protests are an attempt at gathering public support and making them aware of the issue. Antagonizing people just hurts your cause, just look at the idiots who glue themselves to the busy roads or spray paint on art pieces. There are theories aplenty that they are secretly paid by oil industry companies to make protesters look bad.
Joyce literally just asked Asma if she saw her sister. Asma’s response to that question seems pretty ridiculous to me.
Because, as we know, no one is ever a piece of shit regarding their family members.
Can someone google Joyce and see if she’s been involved in any recent kidnappings
She doesn’t know the full context, but if she is aware Jocelyne is trans and that she come from a fundie family, maybe she is wary that she could put Jocelyn at risk helping one of them locate her.
THIS ISN’T A LOGIC PUZZLE, THIS ISN’T A COURT OF LAW, ASMA SAID SOMETHING DICKISH BECAUSE COLLEGE STUDENTS AND INDEED ALL PEOPLE ARE DICKS SOMETIMES AND SINGLE STATEMENTS ARE NOT WAYS TO MAGICALLY DEVINE SOMEONE’S ENTIRE MORAL CHARACTER
By that singular statement I have divined that you are a doodoo-face and my dad could beat up your dad in a court of law
My dad’s a Marine, so he could easily defeat your wussy lawyer dad.
Well duh, I said he could beat up Wack’d’s dad – not yours
He could also defeat Wack’d’s dad. Power scaling.
the dad tier list needs rebalancing tbh – it’s been the same meta for way too long, the low-tier dads need to have *some* chance
In absence of evidence otherwise, I’d figure Asma doesn’t know Jocelyn exists other than maybe having passed by each other at some point in-canon – she doesn’t go to the school, let alone live in the dorms or have reason to use the help desk.
Asma also handles the mail send to students. There’s at least 2 strips where she gives Joyce a package of Monkey Master merch, and those might not be the only times she’s gotten mail. Asma also apparently sees Joyce enough to note “something seems different about you” in one of those strips (Joyce is wearing Sal’s leather jacket & acting cool).
Oh you said Jocelyn lmao. Well enjoy an unnecessary refresher on Joyce and Asma
lol
A bit dickishly phrased, perhaps, but absolutely the right response. Don’t confirm or deny someone’s there to people you don’t know are in the clear to know.
Good rule for various settings, really. Don’t confirm either way, let the person know someone was looking for them if you are in contact with them.
The right response would just be no.
AY
the comment fits the pfp lol
You really can’t take the craving for free publicity out of Robin, huh? Once a politician, always a politician.
1. Politician forever. Can’t take the politician out of the Roz.
2. Also Roz forever. Can’t take the Roz out of the Roz.
Eh phooey. Brainfart. Meant “Robin” in all instances of “Roz.”
To be fair, Roz is very much like her sister, even if she will never admit it XD
What do you think would happen if Roz had the forbidden cereal?
i don’t think robin wants free publicity, i think she wants free pub-leslie-ty
A very good motivation indeed
taking leslie to a pub is definitely on Robin’s to-do list
so’s leslie, probably
Hi, Robin.
ROBIIIIIIIIIIIIIN MY FRIEND ROBIN
This is one of the strips that makes me really hate the ‘Dorothy is no longer president’ direction of her life. She has cop energy. It’s true, but having the ‘mortified at being outgrouped’ reaction rather feeling the passion to ‘change the context of that by making the system better’ was always something I genuinely respected Dorothy as a character for.
People with political aspirations are never ‘good’ people, but they sure are necessary people and you don’t gotta be a president to be a person who works from the inside of a flawed system to reform it on a local or state level. Defund the police and abolish ICE needed politicians willing to do that. Not to get rid of the functions of government, but because the system for both is so corrupt and bad that it needs a whole redo. ‘Having cop energy’ isn’t an actual problem. The system of ‘policing in America’ is the problem. It requires flawed and ambitious people to fix. And Dorothy was always an acceptable model of what such a person willing to fix it would look like. Seeing her so far from that is always painful especially since the alternative she is living through is really not that pleasant to hang around honestly.
you would think if it was possible to reform the system from the inside, people would’ve done it by now. i mean in america alone they’ve had two hundred and forty eight years, what’re all these flawed, ambitious people waiting on
“but what about–” i guarantee whatever reform you’re about to name came as a response to radical action and did not, when applied in government, actually fix or address the broader issues that made those reforms necessary
How silly. Things have obviously reformed for the better drastically in the last 248 years. This sort of ultra-negative reading of American history popular on the left isn’t any more true or realistic than the ultra-positive reading by the right.
DRASTICALLY for the better??? I’m sorry what country are you talking about lmao
“I will never say that progress is being made.
If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress.
If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that’s below, that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less pull, heal the wound…
They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
― Malcolm X
Yup. Nothing ever gets better. Nothing can ever get better.
The only solution is to completely overthrow the system at which point all our problems will magically disappear.
There are definitely things that have improved. Wack’d didn’t say otherwise. They just don’t think those changes would be fairly attributed to those inside the system working within the system to change it.
They also said “did not, when applied in government, actually fix or address the broader issues that made those reforms necessary”
But then, neither did the radical action and almost always, the radical action needed support from sympathetic officials within the system, just as the officials needed support from the radical actors outside to be able to actually make changes.
I understand where this feeling comes from, but I think it’s a little too “doomer.”
The process by which power is obtained prevents good people from obtaining it, either by not letting them obtain it in the first place, or slowly chipping away their morals every time they try to obtain it a la death by a thousand cuts
Screw reforming the system from the inside. It’s too late for that, in America at least. The whole thing needs torn down and replaced with something new, preferably something less inherently hostile. I like voting for stuff as a concept, that seems good, but it’s really kinda been ruined and polluted with all the manipulation we’ve got going on, so a full reset on stuff like districts and whatnot might be nice. People getting to buy and sell their political influence with mega corporations also seems like a glaring flaw, so we’d need to get rid of that and probably start chopping heads off as a warning the moment someone tried it again. Probably also just remove our current law enforcement situation, it’s way too Call of Duty and doesn’t really work for the people. For-profit prisons gotta go too, there’s no justifying those.
Basically, if we could found an entirely new country but keep the buildings and roads and stuff where they’re at (and fix ’em up so they work better), permanently keep stuff even and fair, do it all pretty much overnight, and prevent it from ever deteriorating, that’s about what it’d take to really fix things. Unfortunately, right now the best we can manage is throwing everything we’ve got at a massive wall to deal chip damage. Kinda bleak, but I guess we should at least keep trying.
Only problem with the chopping heads idea is that there hasn’t been a single instance in all of recorded history of a bloody revolution ever not ending with the resulting government collapsing and becoming even worse by the end of it – either by becoming a dictatorship of some kind, or another country invading and taking over (countries that are inclined to invade and take over other countries usually aren’t the kind you want in charge of you). Like I said up above – the kind of people that seek power are not the kind of people that should have it, and the kind that don’t seek it are not the kind of people that will keep it for very long.
American Revolution, for one.
That wasn’t a bloody revolution, it was a subjugated country in that had “its own” (appropriated, technically) military that rose up against its non-local subjugator. Was a formal war that was fought, rather than a bloody revolution where the people just kept chopping heads until there weren’t any more enemy heads to chop (French revolution, for example)
No it wasn’t, wth. The colonies in North America weren’t a “subjugated country”, they weren’t and had never been a country.
The subjugated country were the Native American Nations, and they were neither the ones that made the revolution nor the ones that got liberated (or even not-genocided).
That’s about the best case scenario (and as Purple Floof said, it was not really an internal revolution) and it still led to massive compromises that brought us to the deeply flawed system we’re dealing with today.
Yeah once people that start going “I like voting for stuff as a concept, but it’s really kinda been ruined, so the whole thing needs to be torn down and replaced with something new where I’m in charge, and persistently keep chopping heads off as warnings”, take charge, it’s really NOT an environment that produces democracy.
You’re exaggerating what I said, slightly.
Too late, I already voted for you.
Even that kind of magical clean wipe still leaves us with all those people who think Trump’s going to make us Great Again playing their role in setting up the new system.
At this point, those freaks can die too. They’re already trying to kill the rest of us on purpose, just out of horrific grinning spite, so they’re lost causes and acceptable casualties.
As an anarchist, the most depressing thing I believe in is the fact that the biggest impediment to democratic reform is not the rat****ery that people do to democratic voting that put George W. Bush and Trump 2nd term in power. Get rid of the electoral college and so on.
No, it’s that even with that, a huge chunk of voters ARE against progressive platforms. They prefer to vote for hate than end homelessness.
What does one do when the people are the problem?
Kill ’em before they take the rest of us down, I guess. I really don’t have a nicer solution in mind, and I’m honestly tired of trying to think about it like the people who want me dead can be reasoned with. They can’t, so when the pot finally boils over and they come for me (and they will), all I can think to do is keep me and mine alive as forcefully as possible.
I don’t know how this sentiment coexists in your mind with your virulent hatred and rejection of everything that literally agrees with you, but comes from a foreign source that your ruling class — the people you despise and fear — have been telling you to hate for centuries.
Clean your room, you fucking slob.
Pssst, Trump won the popular vote in 2024, there was no ratfuckery.
Well, no more than the usual GOP ratfuckery. Voter suppression through various means is long standing and well documented.
For the record my personal political opinion of what I’d like to happen was not expressed here. It was a commentary on Dorothy. Dorothy is a systems person. To turn her into a ‘burn it all down’ person would take quite a shift in personality that I do not thing would suit her or be particularly healthy for her personal well being. It is very distant from the core of what Dorothy is. You could maybe convince her to scrap the system if there was a replacement and a direct way of achieving it in an order based way, but without that it’d be very difficult. Joyce on the other hand is almost certainly more of a ‘burn it all down’ type as can be seen in her reactions to her upbringing.
Shouldn’t this be exactly Roz’ kind of thing?
Maybe she will show up tomorrow.
Ok. They called her front desk girl. She can be a dick to them.
She isn’t though. She is being a formidable ally right there.
She’s being a formidable ally by being a dick to them.
*They’re* the ones who are being allies to *her*, or rather, not.
– spends a lifetime (short as it is to this point) cultivating a cop energy vibe.
– gets surprised when people pick up on the cop energy vibe.
Ha, I know people like this in RL.
Damn, Asma, not cool.
If you are at a protest and someone asks you for the location of someone, do not give them that information. Do not confirm that you know the person nor that they are there.
Err on the side of caution ALWAYS. This is basic, 101 stuff for any protest more serious than, like, the pussy hats
The what hats, now? I could look this up, but I’m interested in how you’d tell this story.
lol I’m referencing the anti-Trump women’s march in 2017 where people knitted pussy hats. They were pink knitted beanies with cat ears. Don’t get me wrong, I was there too (sans hat), it just wasn’t exactly a heavy-arrest-risk type of event. Permits secured, Kamala Harris and ScarJo speaking from a stage, that kind of thing
Those hats are pretty cute. I’d make an awful politician, because a cute enough hat would probably sway me on a policy.
The only people I dismiss among protestors are those who try to gatekeep protests for reasons other than safety. The “Oh wow, those RESIST people were losers with their hats” for example.
She’s notr wrong.
On the contrary – deeply awesome. To my memory, we don’t know if Asma has a clue who Jocelyne even is, but she’s arguably already done more to protect her than Joyce, her sister, ever has.
I would still like to acknowledge here that Joyce is indeed making strides in this particular area, and that she is also a victim of an abusive culture.
LONG time lurker (back to It’s Walky!), but I wanted to say something since I see a lot of comments about Asma being out of line here. I don’t think she is.
It’s a good practice at protests, especially ones with heavy police presence, not to give out any information to anyone. That’s what protest organizers are for – you direct all questions to the organizers.
Asma could have lied, but instead, she told them why she wasn’t, which is pretty fair (and something Dorothy needs to hear and understand). Especially when they didn’t start the conversation off well by not even knowing the name of someone they see regularly and calling her by her job instead of her actual human name. I’ve got an autistic kiddo and severe ADHD myself, so I know names are HARD but there are a lot better ways to go about it than calling someone by their job title. You also generally shouldn’t loudly call out identifying information about somebody at a protest, for safety.
I don’t know if Asma is familiar with Joycelene and Joyce’s fundie family or Dorothy’s political aspirations, but if she does, that’s even more of a reason to be cautious. Regardless, she’s following protest best practices here. Anyone who ISN’T this paranoid at a protest SHOULD be.
Cops, by the way, aren’t the only ones we’re concerned about at protests. Bad actors show up to stir shit by pretending to be protestors, up to and including inciting violence with cops to 1) get protesters hurt and arrested, 2) sow chaos and disorganization, and 3) make protests look bad in the public eye.
Asma is protecting herself and her fellow protesters. Dorothy and Joyce are the outsiders here, and while their motivations are good, they are potentially putting people in danger. Please remember that there is a loaded gun pointed at all of them right now.
god Asma is a breath of fresh air in this strip
Asma is completely correct, by the way. Dorothy is an aspiring war criminal and Joyce is an Evangelical Christian extremist. The two of the represent some of the most reactionary elements on campus. They’re currently having a change of heart, but that’s by no means completed — even knowing everything we know about them, which Asma doesn’t, I would not trust them at a protest.
Dorothy: “No I want to STOP war crimes.”
Joyce has not been a Christian extremist for ages. She is a very open and accepting atheist. I have not been a conservative in 25 years and I still get slanders and slurs over my past by people just like you who refuse to admit people can CHANGE!
Do you blame Asma for not keeping up with the incredibly recent character development of someone who isn’t close enough to her to know her name?
Asma is not wrong.
yeah that a number one rule bruh
SNITCHES GET STITCHES
I mean we know she’s wrong.
What is it about Dorothy that gives off cop energy?
doesn’t matter regardless, considering what’s at stake she cannot afford to take that risk
also come on she’s a goodie two-shoes who’s whole character for the majority of the comic was about wanting to be President, and Asma has yet to know her recent change XD
If you are at a protest and someone asks you for the location of someone you have no previous knowledge of being their friend, do not give them that information even if no one is blocced up. This is 101 shit.
Username checks out.
I guess this is how Joyce and Dorothy learn that particular lesson, since they were a little too impulsive to look up “how not to act at a protest” before they charged in.
They gave up their phones and dressed in non-recognizable colors.
Not only is Asma practicing good protest etiquette, telling Dorothy to her face that she gives cop energy is important. That’s not her being mean and insulting just to hurt her feelings. It is a real, honest observation! This is valuable information for Dorothy to have.
At the risk of sounding cliche, conflict is not abuse, people! It is GOOD to tell your lib friends who do not examine their biases that they can unwittingly pose a danger to people they agree with.
It’s about as valuable as when people used to tell me I’m a robot. Like okay let me adjust my entire personality to act more like everyone expects and when that fails I’ll withdraw from human contact instead.
Me and Dorothy are probably equally unwelcome at protests because, yes, you need to act in certain ways and have a certain energy to be more help than hindrance, I’m not questioning Asma’s judgment. Really it’s just another way in which cops being bastards hurts neurodiverse people cause they make it so you can’t trust someone acting weird in a volatile situation.
There is a significant difference between being told to alter your behavior to protect opsec and being told to alter your behavior because they can’t handle your neurotype.
Can we say what about Dorothy makes her cop-like?
In a way that doesn’t depend on knowing her personality?
Well, in the last strip when talking to Asma, she showed her lack of familiarity with the protest and how it might be responded to (saying that it’s apparently more “subversive” than she thought), questioning (due to surprise, sure, still) what Asma had just said. They’re probably radiating discomfort with being there– Joyce at least smiled for a second, not sure if Dorothy has had any kind of relaxed-to-positive facial expression…
Yeah, I can see how Asma could think they might side with authority or not be safe to give information to.
But nobody has told Dorothy to do anything different, and certainly not why. Only that she is wrong.
I mean, on a scale from “I don’t know you, I’m not telling you anything” to “Why are you doing that weird thing with your lips? Get out of here,” how helpful would you say Asma’s comment is in this situation?
Asma’s job isn’t to be helpful to Joyce and Dorothy. It is to be helpful to the protest, which means not helping out people you’ve pegged as snitches.
This is true.
I agree. I’d like to go to protests in the future, but this whole discussion about “cop energy” has me worried that, as an autistic person who naturally acts differently from neurotypical people, other protesters would automatically assume I’m suspicious.
As an autistic person, I have been told I come off as insincere no matter what I say.
I’m like, “Gee, thanks.”
If some people are initially guarded against you (skipping over all the “don’t approach this the way Joyce and Dorothy did” stuff, because some people still might be)… that’s okay. Here, Asma has this impression about these two. What’s the consequence? She’s not giving them information about another person who might be at the protest, which should be standard protocol anyway.
Someone whose side your on regarding you with suspicion might feel shitty. I’m autistic, and I get how stressful it can be when you’re hoping to –blend, fit in, feel in community in a space, and it doesn’t work. But it’s very unlikely things would move beyond uncomfortable feelings.
I promise you that there are plenty of autistic people at protests and the quickest way to get people to trust you is to go to a protest as part of a group, which you should be doing anyway as a safety measure.
Plus, like, not being publically known as a Hillary Clinton kinnie until five minutes ago.
Yeah, if you have a group of people to go to a protest with that takes care of most of the problems with being autistic. That’s assuming you even “know” a whole group of people. I have one person in my life who I talk to on a regular basis.
Come to think of it this may be a useful way to explain autism. If you go to a mass protest, where you watch everything you say and do very carefully unless you’re with people you know and trust completely cause you assume everything goes on your permanent record and breaking any of the rules of which they’re only telling you enough to suggest there may be more rules they’re not telling you may have serious lasting consequences for you or your friends and maybe a sniper might shoot you for any reason just cause the people in charge fundamentally disagree with you being there? That is how I treat every social interaction.
The point I was making was that “you have cop energy” is not as helpful of an instruction as neurotypical people seem to think. I’ll put “be with a group” in there too.
I’m sure Robin has recycled that sign a few times now.
Oh, come on, Asma! Joyce has PROTAGONIST energy! You don’t even have a name half the time!
Was Dorothy intending to go to this protest? Because i thought she was.
Jocelyne give her the suggestion to do it but she didn’t to have decided no.
You do kinda have cop energy Dorothy. Like you are working on it but there is certainly something there to work on in the first place
Weird thought: Would it be better for Willis to make the Bulmerian protest more detailed about the political situation and its specifics (i.e. in a fictional context) with who is doing what or is it better to just leave it as a allegory for the Palestinian protests. The latter is very clear and I support it but I kind of wish more about the Walkyverse version of all this would be clear.
I’m guessing, since Willis wants this to be at least somewhat timeless, that he wants to keep it as vague as possible so it can be a stand in for future protests of future injustices.
I’d rather leave it as a Gaza allegory. I don’t think we need deep lore about a fictional conflict. How many strips if background detail would you need to get any nuance in the situation? Or we can just assume “Israel/Palestine”.
Or even with just the current info: Some country committing a genocide with US support. That’s really enough and the next level of detail is probably too much.
Okay look I ain’t gonna fuck around and imma just say it as it is to address the more than apparent let-them-eat-cake obliviousness here
Asma literally cannot afford benefit of the doubt in this situation because as a Muslim in a Red State there is that high a risk she can be DEPORTED
Joyce and Dotty’s intention don’t matter here, disregarding the dangers faced by people of color so that white people can have a little convenience is still racism, period
thank you genuinely for doing so, because I now know as a brown dude its probably not worth my time to scan the way too many god damn comments above this one. white people not being cool today, as most days.
you have no fuckin idea dude, genuinely fuck this shit
basically me right now:
https://youtu.be/L9zEl00iFus?t=608
fuckin white people reverse racism card bullshit being pulled, NOPE JUST DONE
Nods gently. Sorry dotty. My ass is also too brown to trust the blonde girl with nervous intensity trying to ID a specific person at the protest.
*Robin grabs pen, makes hasty edit to sign*
I ALSO CARE
ABOUT-WHAT
EVER THIS IS
I’m disappointed in Dotty, I thought she’d be one of the people down there.