I found this awesome presentation/essay on tumblr on super-heroes as an anti-collectivist power fantasy on paper vs how we actually engage with these fantasies
TL;DR
“The superhero myth, as a text, isn’t collectivist. But that’s not why we keep coming back to it. That’s not why children read it. We keep coming back to it to learn one simple lesson…
The best thing we can do with Power, is give it away.“
Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good take on super-heroes and an angle I hadn’t really seen before. It covers a lot of the appeal and why they’re more of a positive influence than they might seem.
OTOH, that all falls apart if you try to analyze them more seriously. To ground them more in reality. To look at how they’d work in something more like the real world. That’s why deconstructions of the genre can be good, but almost invariably get really dark. The whole thing only works because of the genre conventions. And that’s great, those conventions can be inspiring. They can make people want to be heroic.
And they can of course also be twisted – there’s definitely right wing appeal to the trope of fighting endless criminals in a decaying urban environment, even if the right sees that very different from how Batman or even the Punisher does.
Fundamentally though, it’s a fantasy not a system. AG’s system doesn’t work as a model, since it relies on individuals with great power or skills doing the right thing without oversight and usually at great personal cost.
turns out completely self-interested people, who literally have no firmly-held beliefs beyond enriching themselves, are not actually cut out for bringing change to the system
Ehhh… realpolitick sucks. Yes, it’d be wonderful to stop Netanyahu’s willful genocide. But there’s a very plausible chain of events that starts with, “US cuts military aid to Israel,” and ends with 12 million dead Arabs. I don’t agree with maintaining the status quo–Biden should’ve not blocked the UN resolutions or disputed the ICJ rulings, in particular. But a full-stop on military aid could be disastrous in ways a lot of folks just don’t want to seriously consider.
Part of the issue I have is that, ironically, a lot of progressives don’t seem to get just how monstrously evil Netanyahu is. Ten minutes after the US cuts aid, Bibi would be on the phone with China. “Hey, yeah, it’s me. Look, we need a new source of loan guarantees for our attempt to finally quell the Palestinians. You know, like you’re trying to put down those seditious Uighurs? Yeah, yeah. Look, I know you can’t provide the level of funding we were getting, but even a modest line of support at this point could let us bring this to a close, especially since we won’t have to pay lip-service to Western namby-pamby-ism any more. Now, of course, in exchange, I’d be happy to formally recognize your claim to, what’s that island again? Right, right, East China. Of course, so you can have a better idea of what we need, we’d let you have your technical experts examine all that hardware we got from the US–you know, let them examine them in close detail so you can really see how they work.”
And here’s the thing–the really nightmarish scenario can occur whether or not China bites. Because cutting off US aid would absolutely encourage Iran, Lebanon and possibly Syria to kick off another round of warfare. Either they’d fail miserably, in which case Israel still kills/removes all the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and then the fighting sort of dies down eventually just because there’s nothing left to save, OR… they manage to seriously press Israel, finally getting troops (rather than just terrorist fighters) into Israel’s official borders–at which point, mushroom clouds appear over Tehran, Beirut and Damascus. Maybe even tactical nukes on the Palestinian territories, to boot.
Because Netanyahu is absolutely evil enough to initiate a nuclear exchange if he think Israel might actually be defeated.
I just finished a 4-day full archive binge of this and the entire Walkyverse in time for the new strip, I wanna be an early commenter for once.
It’s honestly amazing how much stuff gets buried in your brain reading a daily strip for 15 years straight. I completely forgot about Amber stabbing a dude, Carla is a lot more likable in binge form (especially her prank on Mary), and yeah, all that Joyce and Dorothy shipteasing my dumb straight brain just dismissed as “gals being pals” years ago. I can’t believe this comic’s been going nearly half my life. When DOA started, it was kismet, because I was just starting college myself. Here I am years later, and my life’s had a lot of ups and downs. Honestly, mostly downs. But all these dumb college kids are still here entertaining me and keeping me invested in their weird drama, even if they do drive me nuts half the time.
I guess I just wanna say, thanks, Willis. I’m so glad you decided to experiment with an every-day release back in like year one and then built a massive buffer and kept going and never ended the experiment. DOA’s been one thing I can always look forward to. Life doesn’t have a lot of that kinda thing, so the ones that do exist are a real treasure.
Not… necessarily? I mean a bit yeah, that’s definitely in character for her and I think we are gonna see more of that as she starts butting against the system more. But also she *is* right; taking political science courses is still useful in the sense of knowing more thoroughly what you’re up against and how it works, and I think that’s more what she’s talking about here
The reason you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools is that as long as they are in his possession, he commands them. However, if you take his tools from him, if you make them yours, then they act in accordance to your will rather than his. Dorothy is after knowledge, and knowledge is a tool that can be wielded by anyone, for ignorance is an ally only to those who would rule you. Karl Marx knew this, that is why his magnum opus was Das Kapital, a decades long project to understand and critique political economy.
Historically there comes a time when you stop trying to dismantle the house and dismantle the owner instead, with his own tools if necessary. Not saying that’s Dorothy’s intent here but it happens a bit too frequently to ignore.
At least the bar has been raised from Committing Something Mildly Subversive Which at Worst Will Serve as a Humanizing Anecdote and not as Anything Truly Threatening to the Power Structures at Hand.
Well Dorothy I hope you’re ready to also get disillusioned with the idea of dismantling the system from within. Learn from my mistake and just go ahead and switch to a history major early.
nah, girl needs to join a progressive side of whatever party exists in this universe and experience the soul-crushing work that is dragging the center kicking and screaming into the light.
Oh Lord yes. For several years I was one of two non-college-aged non-accelerationist-anarchists at my city’s Food Not Bombs chapter.
Do you know how hard it is to cook food for the homeless when only two of you are aware how to sharpen knives and/or how not to “vote for Trump because he’ll tear the system down faster”?
I hate to be snarky but every “leftist/socialist/anarchist” org I’ve ever worked with followed the pattern of the membership being basically the follows:
1) a couple of grumpy older leftists who sick of discussing whether the system needed to be reformed or destroyed and just wanted to get something useful done. (75% of the productive work, 5% of the members)
2) a squad of 20-something leftists who didn’t know what they were doing but knew they wanted to help (usually women, 30% of the work, 60% of the members)
3) a squad of 20-something anarchists who didn’t know what they were doing but knew they wanted to talk the most performative nonsense about tearing everything up and building a world where the anarchists would be followed out of the rubble into a shining new future (usually men, -5% of the work, 35% of the membership, half of them were of no specific actual politics but assumed lefty women were sluts and that’s why they were here)
That type of anarchist has entirely too much in common with the people who daydream about zombie apocalypses (and are just SURE they’ll not only be among the survivors but also finally be appreciated by their families and friends and coworkers), or, you know, the rapture.
We literally need both people working within the system and people working outside of it, and people who sneer at folks who go into politics as inevitably corrupt are so exhausting. Sorry that I like having legal rights, I guess.
It’s always deeply funny to me, and this is also related to the Great Comment Schism, because the D&D heads at these gatherings invariably end up identifying me as the paladin of the group after being weird for a meeting or two because I do frankly have cishet white cop energy IRL until I open my mouth.
I’ll be the one kicking the levers of the system (or throwing wrenches in the gears, as appropriate) after talking my way in the front door while y’all build the better way outside. 😉
I’d assumed she meant she was gonna learn how it works to dismantle it from the outside. I’d hope she’s not naive enough to think she can effect change from within without being tainted
I don’t think there is any quality about Dorothy that leads me to believe she will attempt external reform without being horribly disillusioned about internal.
Unless you are planning a violent revolution, you need people on the inside to affect any change. Every progressive legislation we have ever had required actual legislators to draft and vote for it. Enacting positive change that improves people’s lives is far more important than maintaining your personal purity. Also, even if you are planning a violent revolution, once it is done and a new system is in place you will still have to get your hand dirty with politics to protect the vision from those who would hijack it. So either way, there is no escaping the necessity of doing politics.
“Having people on the inside” is the exact thing the far-right has been achieving, in aim of their goals, literally longer than most of us commenters have been alive. I’ll never fully grasp how there’s supposed to be zero-value in normal, non-monstrous, non-corrupt, non-fascist citizens infiltrating the system, and holding positions of power. Yes, the system itself is inherently bad, but every non-Nazi in a position of power, is one less person who will wield the unjust power of the system as a Nazi; and, actual citizens will have a marginally lower chance of being forced to be vulnerable under the power of a Nazi. That is a good thing. That will always be a good thing.
It’s nice when people who want to accomplish good get their hands on the levers of power, and when they do they can accomplish real good in a tangible way.
But then they let go of the levers and go retire.
Meanwhile, the people who want to have power grab the levers and don’t ever let go.
Every system will eventually succumb to this until it’s part of praxis that you need to have people who aren’t particularly power-hungry continually going in and grabbing the levers of power as a spoiler/blocker if nothing else, which is hard because running for office and/or being a bureaucrat is a lot of hard work for much less reward than a private-sector career — things were designed that way to try to only give power to people who weren’t motivated by personal gain, but ended up (due to lax enforcement of rules and norms) so that the only people who are consistently willing to do it are the “wants power for power’s sake” and “the blatantly corrupt” and “both!”.
She’s defo gonna try dismantling it from the inside, but even if you’re dismantling it from the outside having extensive knowledge of how it all works will certainly help
I really want her to do the politics and end up meeting/joining up with anarchists. Shes got the mind for understanding politics and power, great with coordination and planning, and actually seems like she needs/wants to do something practical for the good of others and just doesn’t quite know how. A collective would benefit from her skills and also give her the direction she needs to grt out of her funk.
There’s just no characters I can think of that might be believably connected to an anarchist collective.
I’m hoping this strip (and previous strips where she’s touched on this topic) means Dorothy is learning that the system can’t be changed from within. It has to be dismantled and replaced with a better system, one that benefits the workers instead of the wealthy.
Fighting the system requires emotional resilience, gay sex with your girlfriend gives emotional resilience, therefore Joyce and Dorothy having sex is an integral part of their fight against the system!
If it’s seriously burned, I hope you’re receiving medical help. I don’t like drugs messing with my brain, but when it comes to pain, go for the good stuff.
The methods I use to deal with pain would be useless to you, but if you want to go for distraction, reading through the archives is a good thing. Beyond that, the best I can offer is soothing virtual hugs.
Oh, yeah. And whatever you did – please don’t do it again.
It’s second degree, but I’ve got basic first aid medical supplies at my house and no money for an ER visit. It didn’t occur to me to take pain medicine though. I’m on a lot of meds for various reasons, so I never know what I am allowed to take.
Really? So the parts of the system that actually succeed, and help people are also bad? The system was originally designed to help, but it was initially flawed and has only gotten worse. However there are parts that are still good in intention even if they aren’t as good as they could be.
Everybody wants to overthrow the system, nobody wants to think about the reality that the system is what’s sending grandma her diabetes meds. It’s doing a bad job of it, sure, but nothing will be doing it in the interim, if you fully collapse the house of cards all at once.
The French Revolution, imo, speaks quite eloquently about the effectiveness of DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM!! DESTROY EVERYTHING!! when no one has any good ideas for replacing/improving it.
The french revolution might have gone the way of so many revolutionary movements – got pushed and invaded by reactionary forces from all neighbouring states, which pushed the most agressive and authoritarian leaders to the top.
Same as happened to the social reformers revolution in russia, btw, its doubtful if the bolsheviks would have had the support to coup the liberal forces, had not britain, france, the US and Japan invaded them and armed the white insurrection to the teeth, forcing the civil war to become a bloodbath.
But in the long view?
Napoleon and his revolution-coded code civil laid the groundwork for all of modern law-based democracy in europe.
But I agree that a vision for the time after IS a good idea, and be it only to unify the resistance forces. I heartily recommend a social democracy.
Its not like there are no models that have been developed in the last 250 years that could be used to update US constitutionalism.
Your view of the French and Russian Revolutions are both backwards. The French Revolutionary Wars were kicked off when the French declared war on Austria and then followed that up by declaring war on everyone else and invading in every direction. It’s true that the Reign of Terror started when the French Republic started losing, but that’s no excuse for it or for the atrocities committed during the War in the Vendée. The Bolsheviks didn’t take over because of the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks staged a coup called the October Revolution and that is what would kick off the Russian Civil War. Less than three weeks later the Bolsheviks lost the elections for the Constituent Assembly, so they dissolved it and centralized power around themselves. Foreign intervention was after that.
The problem with the popular notion of revolution,
1. BURN IT ALL DOWN
2. ???
3. Utopia!
is that most people have no actual plan for Step 2, and there is absolutely no guarantee of that result for 3.
The second problem is that, historically, “Step 2” hurts the poor and downtrodden FAR more than it hurts the wealthy and powerful, even when the latter are the specific targets of Step 1 — see also Revolution, The French.
I think ‘designed’ is a strong word. So is ‘system’, really. It’s really all a jumble of stuff that some people thought was smart at the time and future generations rolled with it.
I don’t think we get to start over from scratch. The only civilizations that were ever truly erased and replaced were in the New World, and look how well that turned out. We can get rid of bad things and bring in new things, and maybe that means revolution, but I don’t think completely replacing The System with something else is in the cards.
Even if it is in the cards, it’ll still be a jumble of stuff that people thought was good at the time – particularly the people who had or were able to get power in either the old system or during the revolution that destroyed it.
and it will still be messy and there will still be ways for people to gain more power/influence and exploit the weaknesses and loopholes.
It’s true. The real problem is people, and there’s no system that people can design that won’t be vulnerable to abuse by corrupt or ambitious people. Of course, we can and should still try to make things better, and though it can be hard to remember, things often do get better. Most people reading this live under vastly better systems today than their ancestors did 500 years ago. If you’re living in the US or most of Europe, the same system is much better today than it was 100 or 200 years ago. The idea that we can burn everything down and build something perfect on the ruins is a tempting fantasy, but that’s all it is. All that burning things down guarantees is that a lot of vulnerable people are going to get hurt in the process, and you may very well not end up with a better system in the end at all.
Yup, this. As bad as the system is, if that’s where the levers of power are, then everyone’s better off if you have competent and fair operators in there to try to put governors on ’em and keep the orphans out of the crushing gears until they can be dismantled and replaced with a universal basic income distributor etc.
You can’t necessarily reform the system all the way from within, but on the other hand you build an airliner and a combat drone with a lot of the same parts, so you might as well disassemble the drone carefully and reuse what you can.
That’s pretty close to my take on the problem. And my problem with a lot of online leftists, who seem to think the problem lies entirely in the bad system of capitalism and if we simply end that and replace it with the good system communism, then we don’t really need to worry about the fussy details of keeping the corrupt greedy bastards from figuring out how to exploit the new system.
Could we maybe rev up a play list from something that dosen’t end with everyone dead and the forces of opression victorious? I really hate protests using that particular musical.
Listen kids, I dont know what you’re up to, but I do know this. Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean? Ya wanna make some bacon?
I’d be careful with any comments about “making bacon”. Those pieces of shit on the subreddit night dox you and send a cop to your house like they did to me.
Confused, mainly. Turns out, when you call the cops on somebody about a woman being battered and then the person who answers the door clearly just woke up and nobody else is even fucking home, it’s not gonna be considered a credible fucking complaint.
And on the off chance it wasn’t one of those worthless sacks of garbage, it’s a hell of a coincidence it happened right after they were talking about me probably beating my girlfriend (because I’m rude to people online, which is a fuckin’ stretch) and I told them I wasn’t their personal Chris-Chan.
Be nice if I could fuckin’ prove it, but goddamn if the timeline don’t line up. Whatever though. If it all turns out to be a perfectly timed coincidence, the scumfucks get free fuel for their parasocial obsession and I get the comfort of knowing I probably won’t get a bomb in the mail or someshit.
Malicious use of the police is a sociopathic and nasty thing to do.
That said, so is trolling, insulting and antagonising people for your own amusement. When you manage to drive somebody to depression or self harm, are you pleased with yourself Taffy? How are you on the side of angels with your behaviour?
Oh, you said a second thing, too. Look, if I really have somehow harmed you, I may not remember doing it but I’m genuinely sorry if it happened. All I remember about you is an argument we had once where you were basically blanket shaming people for issues it was obvious they had no control over, and I’ve kind of avoided you since then when I notice your username. That doesn’t make it acceptable to say whatever it was I said that harmed you to the point you’re bringing up depression and self-harm. Don’t ever hurt yourself because of something my volatile ass said, I’m not worth all that.
I’m sorry you felt shitty that day, but you weren’t a poor little lamb being picked on. You said a bunch of really shitty things while posturing to be an expert on multiple things you don’t actually seem to know anything about, and then you got upset when people calling you out on the shitty things you were saying weren’t all perfectly polite about it.
Meanwhile, Taffy got SWAT’d by people on Reddit that Taffy has never even talked to, who just really don’t like the way they comment on this webcomic.
Well hang on, Li. It wasn’t a SWAT-ing situation. If it was, I’d have been way more aggressive about the topic from the start. It was one cop who was just as confused as I was. He was young and seemed nice (I hope he quits soon), and when I asked him to double-check his info he called in and verified everything. Still had his hand on his gun in case I acted out of line, but… At least he had a civil conversation and left. A SWAT team would have just busted the door down and been shouting and screaming, all that rigmarole. We don’t need to exaggerate this one for effect, it’s scary enough as-is.
To the point of Adept maybe not being a little lamb, I think right now I’d rather take the depression/self-harm/suicidality part at face value, assume honesty, and accept whatever part I may have had in that. It feels like a good habit to get into.
(Also, like…….. that first link? I’m pretty sure the meanest thing I said was “Cool, so you definitely haven’t read it, much less any of their other texts. But you still feel like you can speak not only authoritatively but condescendingly about that religion. Interesting.”
Again: I’m sorry the thread was overwhelming for this person, but a super hostile comment section? Taffy, personally, bullying them? I don’t think so????)
If I’ve singlehandedly caused anyone to become depressed or to self-harm, I’ve yet to hear about it, but if it ever comes up I’ll probably feel pretty bad about that, so I guess the quick answer to your question is “No”. I never claimed to be “on the side of the angels” though, so idk what you’re on about with that part. Anyways don’t you have a homeless person to blame global warming on?
Taffy doesn’t have to be “on the side of the angels”, a perfect victim, or even a good person (I don’t know them, so I can’t speak to that) to deserve a world where the cops aren’t called to their house by random internet idiots. Bringing up their trolling in the same vein as this assault (an action aimed at causing fear) really is a messed up thing to do.
I’m gonna be so real right now, it’s become increasingly clear the past few months just how bad of a reputation I’ve built for myself, and it’s 100% earned through my own behavior. It’s something I’ll probably never shake, so I have to just accept that people will assume they’re dealing with the worst version of me at any given moment and learn to be fine with that. While I appreciate the sentiment, you don’t need to defend me. If somebody’s mad at me or rightfully apprehensive, I’m completely fine to just take that.
Nah, Adept is not someone you’ve hurt. Adept is someone who keeps swanning around claiming to have credentials for various fields and saying embarrassingly wrong things and then being upset when the embarrassingly wrong thing gets pointed out.
IIRC, Adept also did a whole thread about a month ago shitting ignorantly on Jewish and Muslim beliefs in specific? People called them on it, not particularly politely, en masse, and then the next day they turned up and said that they’d been made to feel suicidal by the responses.
You weren’t the only person responding to them and it’s extremely weird that they’ve both fixated on you as the sole “perpetrator” of that particular response thread AND that they’re calling it bullying now and pretending they didn’t say a bunch of super offensive shit in that thread about marginalized religious and ethnic groups.
Like it was typical “I’m glad I’m an atheist and not an idiot” stuff but Adept went out of their way to make it clear they were pretending to know about All Religions instead of just the specific sect of Christianity America makes so inescapable.
People pointed out that they clearly didn’t know what they were talking about, sometimes rudely, and somehow that became you specifically bullying and trolling Adept, I guess.
I remembered the gist of the incident. Link in an earlier comment. Hilariously Taffy only replied to the thread twice. Just. What in the selective memory hell, honestly.
Oh thank goodness somebody watches Dimension 20. I was almost losing my faith in humanity, and not just because of swatting. I’m not keen to have some sort of incident happen because I was quoting a halfling mailman with a lit molotov cocktail in his mailbag.
And of course through my back. That way the food isn’t going in the same hole that the words are coming out of.
Dorothy has some privilege protecting her but Jocelyn and Asma are very vulnerable to retaliation. 10 years ago, I’d have never imagined it but now protesting “Bulmeria” could get you dropped off in…I dunno…East Ruritania.
Jocelyne is super vulnerable as a trans woman and Asma as a Muslim woman of color.
I am willing to give them some grace, baby steps from the cis white people who as far as I know are not neurodiverse. If you are part of any marginalized group you tend to learn quickly that the system is a mess and that dismantling it is the least one could do, when you are in a position where you have some privilege going on sometimes it takes something to open your eyes, be it seeing first hand how bad the system is (like being at a protest that was peaceful until the police violently cracked down on) or finally seeing the suffering around you by those cast to the periphery of society. Give Dorothy and Joyce some time, while they may be white liberals now they have a chance if they listen to the marginalized and work beside them (not try and play the savior) they might grow into good comrades.
This is the thing that’s weird to me – when people in the comments are happy to demonise Dorothy and Joyce for the events of the last arc or so, suddenly it’s entirely about them being white liberals, most criticisms boiling down to selfish and cruel, and not about them both being clearly neurodiverse.
The trouble in their recent background and their traumas, the demons they’re overcoming, all fade into the background. Suddenly they’re two completely well-adjusted, disaffected wealthy white women. That they’re barely 18 is also ignored, even though in criticism of age gap relationships people are happy to point out that the human brain doesn’t finish developing until 25. Why do they suddenly have full mental and emotional faculties? Even if they hadn’t been kidnapped by friends’ parents, watched one of their friends die from trying to defend them while trying to comfort their friend through the gruesome death of her father, who was also their kidnapper? To say nothing of the earlier kidnapping instance where he came onto campus with a gun, which was after one of them was nearly date raped.
It’s so bizarre the myopia I see often in the comments here, that they don’t get to be fully realised, complicated people with the human tendency to lose sight of others in the face of their own desires, troubles, and fears, because they kissed one another at a protest while they both had boyfriends. “They need to leave their boyfriends!” They leave their boyfriends. “How heartless they are just dropping them like that!” And yet the story moves on, because life moves on.
“When can we get to anybody else/when will they face proper consequences??” And yet in the storyline we addressed how Walky was handling the breakup, what Asma and Raidah thought of their stunt at the protest, what Sarah and Joe were thinking about it, a confrontation with Daisy over the paper, having to confess to a conservative parent in a bid to save Joyce’s trans sister from having to come out under duress. Also Becky’s feelings, how Becky was after their conversation and how Dina felt about how Becky was, as well as how Amber is holding up. We also had Billie jumping in to be support for Walky, and Alice discussing with Ruth about Billie. In retrospect, we covered a ton of ground! Joyce is and has always been the main character, Dorothy has been a close second main character since they met, and as Willis has alluded, them getting together was built up throughout the duration of the comic. I loved Joe/Joyce, I would have loved to see more of them. That isn’t what we got, and that isn’t unrealistic – this kind of thing happens all the time in high school and uni. I witnessed it myself a couple times between mutual friends. We want the best for Joe as reward for changing himself for the better, but girlfriends aren’t rewards.
Maybe it’s about time to stop expecting perfection of two traumatised neurodiverse girls under extremely challenging circumstances.
Fun fact! “…the human brain doesn’t finish developing until 25” is a myth, and actually we think the human brain never really “finishes” developing. Or, if it does, it happens much later. This myth came around and started to be quoted by literally everyone based on a study that just… didn’t include any participants older than 25. It wasn’t that their brains stopped developing, it was that the scientists didn’t look at, so didn’t include any information about anyone older than 25.
yeah, it’s clear that journalists in corporate news media have no real business interpreting the results of actual scientific research (-_-)
even in something like, astronomy, if a recent discovery involves figures of “millions” or “billions”, when it’s reported by popular news outlets, the two are mixed up at LEAST 50% of the time X-X
As I understand it, it was a long-term study that followed a group of kids of the same age, which ran out of funding when the kids were 25. Brain development showed no signs of stopping when the study ended, so their conclusion was that brain development continued until at least 25, but when it entered the public consciousness it was misinterpreted to mean basically the opposite.
Would like to point out that they can be white liberals AND neurodiverse at the same time. These are not in any way mutually exclusive things. Speaking as an autistic POC, neurodiverse white liberals are perfectly capable of the same levels of selfishness and cruelty that neurotypical white liberals are.
Not to say Dorothy and Joyce are being outright cruel, because I don’t feel that they are (though I do think that’s arguable). But, selfish? Pretty sure even the writing in the story itself, which is pretty firmly on their side, is at least acknowledging that they are in fact being selfish. Neurodiversity does not justify this.
to be clear, I am not holding their recent actions against them, what’s done is done and given how events played out while not optimal I can see why they made the moves they did, my comment is more on the fact that it tends to take some longer then others to see the system for what it is, and that one always has a capacity to grow, and part of me looks forward to seeing how Dorothy and Joyce will grow from this.
It can’t be that short. There’s
Sal probably,
Marcie maybe,
Does Ruth count,
you’ve got Billie,
I guess Mary,
we could assume Roz,
Nothing’s been confirmed or denied about Hot Rachel,
Asher is in the Mafia which I don’t think counts,
Meredith is just high all the time,
Jacob maybe
Sarah’s never really given the vibe
Ken isn’t anything
Jason’s just British
Might be more.
I feel like Sal’s got ADHD like Walky, if only because like him, she too requires doodling dinosaurs on her paper to concentrate (same queen), also definitely PTSD from the hand stabbery. Honestly if we count PTSD as a neurodivergence (which I tend to do because it does rewire the brain) then that also affects a bunch of characters but if we’re fair and don’t count PTSD…
Ruth has depression she’s being medicated for
Billie, I don’t know what exactly I’d say she’s got, but she’s got SOMETHING going on.
The rest, honestly you right. Marcie (if we ignore any potential PTSD from the attack that made her mute), Mary, Roz, Hot Rachel (she’s just got a case of the big mad), Asher (like you said he’s just a mafia bro), Meredith (Mary Jaaaaane), Jacob, Sarah (she’s just a misanthrope), the guy from Street Fighter, and Jason are all gifted the badge of ‘probably maybe neurotypical’.
Hot Rachel would be a fantastic date, I think. She seems like she’d enjoy picking up something quick and cheap from a local place and taking it to the park to chat about whatever-the-fuck. My fanfic only gets more explicit from there.
Angry Rachel would insist on somewhere nice, and when you got there she’d complain about the decorations like you picked them. And then when somebody came by to ask what drinks you wanted, she’d memorize their face and voice, and if anybody but that person came to take your meal order, she’d lecture them about “You can’t change who you are”, under the impression it was the same person who’d just shapeshifted while you were deciding what to eat.
Also, when you tip the waiter, Angry Rachel rebuffs the gesture no matter how much you tip, because “you are only tipping to make yourself feel better, you’re doing this for self-gratification”. If you throw your hands up and decide not to tip, she’d be like “oh, so you CHANGED your mind? Sorry, nobody can really change” and she tips the waiter instead, but only with a nickel she had in the bottom of her purse.
You gotta have an OS to do all that, but past a certain level, it doesn’t really matter which. It spends a ridiculous amount of compute on making the user interface look pretty; sure, fine, whatever.
Specific conservative church folk will say the system is bad when it’s not 100% always working in their favor. They prefer to be the ones running it even though the constitution and the Bible itself says the separation of church and state is vital.
Needs more punk rock, monsters and thigh highs, also making estrogen in your bath tub to fund the revolution. will give this current angle a “promising but need work”
I only just now caught the reference you were going for, so I stand by most of it, just change the making bathtub estrogen from funding the revolution to showing more people how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Step 3 is realizing that’s not even possible, and instead you have to artificially prop up capitalism, constantly, by nonstop trust-busting and all sorts of heavy regulations. Left to its own devices, competition disappears, and capitalism becomes feudalism.
Is Step 4 realizing that capitalism isn’t the problem and that the same kind of people who gain power by exploiting others under capitalism will find ways to do so under whatever system you come up with.
That, whatever your basic system, the key is that people have to stay constantly engaged to stay ahead of those trying to exploit it. In industrial capitalism, as you say, that’s things like trust-busting and regulation and unions.
And Step 5 is understanding that not only is Step 4 necessary, but on top of that, as someone observed above, there is no “the system”, there’s a bunch of fixes to issues that have been kludged together. There are multiple systems, some of which work better than others – the penal system, for instance, could use a lot of work, or possibly just being torn down in its entirety and rebuilt along the lines of northern Europe, while the social-welfare systems just need to be bolstered and properly funded. (Food banks supplied entirely by voluntary donations, for example, shouldn’t be necessary. They are currently, but they shouldn’t be.)
I’m reminded of a friend of a friend who wrote the only realistic anarchist novel I’ve ever read. The protagonist followed a pattern more than once of the following:
1) move to new, uncharted planet, set up a colony beacon and a private police/security subscription service and a set of rules that boil down to “no government, no rules, anarchy forever”.
2) lots of people move in, everyone’s being good little ancaps about everything.
3) enough people move in that there are competing police/security companies who all are willing to charter with each other on investigations, how to handle criminals who are someone else’s client, etc.
4) one of the other companies (or a group of them) ends up being more than the majority of the planet’s police/security, at which point they say “actually, we’re the government now and we are writing a new constitution, and also building some goddamn non-toll roads and such”.
5) populace mostly shrugs, because hey, taxes-for-infrastructure and “use fees” are about the same thing in the end, in wallet terms.
6) protagonist grumbles angrily and moves on, go to step 1.
Step one shows a complete misunderstanding of anarchisim. Sorry that I’m not going to be able to see any replies to this but I’m xurrently on public wifi and will have to leave soon. My internet is not due to be fixed until Monday.
However in short anarchy does not mean no rules, it means no rulers. Coming together as a collective and establishing the rules your collective lives by is an anarchist system.
Step two explains the problem. Fucking ancaps. It’s debatable wheather they even count as anarchists. Closer to American Libretarians who in my experience absouly do want there to be rulers, as long as it’s people other than themselves being ruled by them.
I mean, I don’t make up the definitions, and I’m not especially comfortable moderating the old “are left-anarchists or right-anarchists the REAL anarchists” debate. 😛
Before Joyce figures out what Dorothy thinks about this, she needs to figure out what Joyce thinks of this. And to figure that out, she needs to figure out at least what the initial situation is with Dorothy. Because for all she knows, after some days, she’s gonna go ‘actually, no, I don’t think this would work for me’, in which case there’s little reason for her to go ‘Dorothy, Joe asked me to go Poly, but I don’t want to do that, so don’t worry about it’
Joyce should handle that stuff when she’s ready for it. And that includes she gets some time to bask in the relation she currently has, and set it up to be stable, before she thinks about proposing a serious change.
Is that fair to Joe? Yes. Joe is not entitled to a fast answer. He’s not tied down. If he is tired of waiting, he absolutely has the right to move on. But he can’t demand Joyce to answer a question like that on his schedule.
Is that fair to Dorothy? Yes. Joyce isn’t doing anything, not even flirting with Joe. She should absolutely talk to Dorothy before taking actual steps towards creating a polycule, but if she’s in the ‘I’m not sure I even want this’ step, she’s not obligated to report every last thing to Dorothy. Making up her own mind will also means that if and when she should talk to Dorothy, she goes in with some ability to communicate her own desires. (Is this only Joe? Would she be alright if Dorothy were to bring in someone? etc)
Maybe. OTOH, if Joyce is really still considering continuing her relationship with Joe in some poly form, I think that’s information Dorothy should have. It would be different if this was an entirely new offer and not from the person she was with when she hooked up with Dorothy and who Dorothy thinks she’s made a clean break from.
This is closer to “I don’t actually want to break up with Joe” and that’s not really report every last thing.
Don’t agree there. Just because a couple is a couple doesn’t mean they’re entitled full access to every last half baked thought and ‘I don’t know’ consideration. You are allowed to keep something in your inner kitchen to cook, and either decide to serve it later, or just discard it discreetly. (For example, if Joyce ends up deciding she’s not into it and tells Joe no, then she’s not obligated to tell Dorothy at all in my book)
Again, it’s not “just because a couple is a couple”. As I said, this would be different if they were an established couple and this was an entirely new offer from some other guy or even an ex-boyfriend, that would be a different story.
It’s because this happened when she went to break up with Joe and she let Dorothy think it was a clean break that makes it different. “I don’t really want to break up with Joe, can we try poly?” is a very different situation.
If she’s already rejected the idea, then it doesn’t matter. If she ends up rejecting it, it’s probably fine, though I think Dorothy would still have a right to be upset if she learned Joyce was seriously considering it when they first got physical and she thought Joyce was fully committed. If she does end up wanting to stay with Joe in a polycule, then it’s a lot harder bringing that up with Dorothy now.
The problem with this is assuming that Joyce doesn’t think she HASN’T made the decision already. She’s not CONSIDERING herself in a poly relationship with Joe and Dorothy. She IS in one but just hasn’t told Dorothy.
I can easily see that becoming the next evolution of toxic fandom. Instead of misinterpreting existing characters in as bad of faith as possible, they will create entire personas that supposedly exist on the margins like Rosencratz and Guildenstern, and project all their rage, cruelty, and malice upon them.
Rice Phillip’s had it coming. And Becky was still reeling from her best friend’s betrayal. But she shouldn’t have just repeated Irving’s comments like that.
Amazi-girl mention! Does this mean we might finally get to check in on Amber & learn what caused her injury?
…also, what store were Joyce & Dorothy trying to go to? Was the leather jacket thing from yesterday’s strip meant to be “I need to buy you a leather jacket RIGHT NOW”? These two have a strange manic energy lately & I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It occurs to me that I don’t think we’ve ever heard Dorothy discuss political theory/philosophy in a more sophisticated way than basic electoral politics. Is there a way to send a fictional character a copy of Das Kapital?
If there was a way to send fictional characters to an entire website full of Marxist literature, I would send Dorothy and Joyce the link to marxists.org.
That is fine as long as youo also account for the millions murdered by reactionary, antisocialst interventions all over the world.
Dont forget that Borlshevism, Maoism, even the islamic revolution, late Chavism or the Sandinistas started out as more or less social reformers. And only turned to the most ruthless leadership and police-state methods after being put under enormous, often external antirevolutionary pressures.
Its not like there have never been reforms, rebellions and revolts against the brutality of authoritarian forces which havent led to better societies.
Oh I’m not denying that. The issue with communists in particular is a mix of ideological malice and sheer stupidity. They push policies that are just plain dumb and then are surprised when the world verifies their idiocy. Like Mao’s War on Sparrows which resulted in a mass starvation in China (made worse by the fact that he kept insisting on exporting the grain they had too little of)
Oh Trump… he just jumped out with this new Peace Deal for Ukraine that’s just more Putin ass-kissing… at least from the looks of things his popularity is dropping like a rock so he might get kneecapped in the Mid-Terms.
The fundamental key, I think, is how you organize the parts of the system that function to keep the fascists/authoritarians at bay, not so much the underlying system. The checks and balances, if you will.
Pretending that system itself will inevitably prevent them is a quickly fatal flaw.
Gonna remind everyone that Da Boy (IIRC) lived under Soviet Authoritarianism, and is coming at this from a vastly different place of personal experience than most.
This is important context, thank you. Frankly I suspected as much when they said “my people.” I am always willing to lend grace to people who despise certain words and concepts when they have been weaponized against them. It’s adjacent to why despite my own faith, I have zero quarrel with people who disavow Christianity because of past abuse. While the pedant in me could argue that those deeds were not truly and accurately Christian, that the language of faith had been taken in vain… that doesn’t matter to most people hurt by the system.
Ayup. I’ve had similar talks with my current boss, who’s very confused by the online left’s willingness to adopt “Communism” and not “Democratic Socialism” or something… but he’s also from Poland, and his parents were members of Solidarity when that wasn’t a thing you could legally be, so yeah.
Yeah this baffles me so much. Western Europe actually Functions and protects people’s rights. Communists states were FAILURES. They did not provide prosperity for the people, they did not provide freedom, all they provided was repression. Why would you pick such abject failure when there is an actual proven and successful alternative Right Next To It.
Mostly, it’s an artifact of right-wing propaganda — the right-leaning media in the US and much of the least English-speaking first world, at least, spent DECADES referring to every single social democratic or socialist policy as “COMMUNISM!”, and so people who grew up in that system end up with the idea that “Communism” means “basically Norway, right? It’s a synonym for social democratic policies?”
Which is why you’ll see so much insistence that the Soviet/ChiCom problem is AUTHORITARIANISM rather than Communism, which is really just a truism because the problems with EVERY system are basically “Authoritarians, the Greedy, or both can capture control of it”, and in the long run the main thing is the systemic resistance to that.
Marx had his heart in the right place, and his warning was timely.
Every time some revolution has taken him up as their banner, we have gotten something like Lenin’s equally-dystopic rebranding of the Russian empire. I’d enjoy seeing some modern, academically sound take on communism, but as things stand the writings of Marx are not a paths to a sane future.
The best we have got so far is Nordic style social democracy, heavy on the democracy. A dicatorship of the proletariat is not a sound goal.
Agreed.
But one has to remember that Marx was 150 years ago.
A lot of thought and statecraft practice has been developed since then.
Not all social reform neccessarily leads to right-wing coded police states painted with leftist talking points.
None the less, power never concedes without pressure. In some cases mass protests and strikes are enough. In some cases the powers that be must be frightened somewhat harder.
Not all social reform certainly. But social reform usually involves working within the system. Or at least with the system from outside – mass movements can both win their own gains and pressure politicians to change laws.
Leftist revolutions do not exactly have a great track record of reaching the lofty goals they aim for.
I know, I know.
On the other hand leftist reform movements using mass mobilisation and electoral processes?
Sadly also tend to get supressed in fire and blood quite regularly. Often in this one continent, how was ist called – Monroe-land? 😥
Especially when they try to control large natural resources.
Its troublesome.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the government functionaries were told “Come in for work tomorrow as usual. OR ELSE.” They kept the machinery running. Then, bit by bit, they changed what they didn’t like.
That goes beyond the System. Taliban could do that because they had a quiet support of the rest of the society. Americans were never going to last, much like Soviets. You can’t just kick the door in and change a society that existed like this for centuries if not millennia without it being willing to change.
Technological conditions have changed too. Remember that Marx was writing during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. No one at the time could predict what would come later (have you seen some of the projections of The Future from around that time? Apparently we’re all supposed to be traveling around on bicycles suspended from dirigibles by now). The factory floor Marx wanted to free people from is seldom seen outside the third world these days, at least in part due to his work in establishing labor unions (credit where it’s due!).
We do have contemporary academic work with ties to marxism, though none of it is as high-profile as the Frankfurt School guys. Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher was my introduction, the nonfiction literary style is far less impenetrable than Horkheimer/Adorno jargon. I was in film school, so most of my leftist reading came in the form of culture industry studies or historical materialist nonfiction.
Social democracy is probably the best option for achieving a long term, fairly egalitarian system. That said, the model has been under attack from people who believe it is too centrist and still empowers the bourgeois elite through compromise. There is some truth to that criticism.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have outright populist bigots trying to dismantle social democracy by appealing to racist fears, claiming that immigrants and minorities are “stealing” social benefits while secretly planning to eliminate those benefits if they gain power.
But you need to know how the System is running everything so that you can build a different System that won’t crash and burn. Just because you can smash a house down with a hammer doesn’t mean you know how to build a better house.
So for starters I wanna say that sometimes what you want is not necessarily the knowledge to build a better orphan-chewing machine. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that nobody wants or needs an orphan-chewing machine.
That said, Dorothy is very much someone who would fall into the trap of “We have to replace it with SOMETHING.”
Oh I know what they want to do. Tear down the socio-economic system and replace it. I’ve seen it happen in Soviet Union and Maoist China. You kill or displace all the people who actually know how things work and replace them with ideological morons more interested in obeying the ideology than actually running things.
Look up Lysenkoism, dude actually believed that if you plant crops closer next to each other they will do The Communism Thing and share resources. To no one’s surprise Soviet Union got hit with a famine.
In Maoist China you had the War on Sparrows because they hate grain. Not long after a massive locust disaster hit and another famine happened.
When people tell me that they are interested in busting the old system down without talking how to replace the Functioning of that system I know it’s going to end in a famine and disaster.
I’m from a post-Communist country. The desired conclusion you speak of was piles of corpses of my people and enslavement for half a century under an incompetent foreign imperial boot.
Then what is the “system” you want to smash? The government? The economy/capitalism? American hegemony?
Whatever it is, something will replace it. Probably best to know how to go about designing it before we start smashing.
You don’t want a better orphan-chewing machine, so maybe learn what makes the machine chew the orphans so that you can build a new machine that doesn’t. Because so far in history, “smash the orphan-chewing machine” without planning further than that has a tendency to just make bigger, better orphan-chewers.
Not to mention the simple fact that the thing that makes “a powerful motor, a funnel, and a pile of sharpened gears” a hamburger mincer, a wood chipper, or an orphan-chewing machine is HOW you operate it, not what it fundamentally IS.
Well, political science as a topic isn’t really even about the political system as it exists, even in law school you don’t learn so much about the actual laws that exist or court procedure as you do about theories of jurisprudence and argument construction. So that topic is definitely useful for some people to know, just like it’s useful for some people to know how to farm or keep the power grid online or keep a logistical network running. Those people will all retain their knowledge after any upheaval though, the important thing is to make sure they’re able to keep doing what they do, preferably without all the various capitalist leeches and religious extremists that impede them today.
I guess my point is that if your goal is to destroy ICE, you don’t need to know everything about the history of the DHS and its specific internal workings, you need to know how to get away with crimes.
If you want to get away with crimes, join ICE.
But doing crimes isn’t going to destroy ICE. If you want to do that, you need to either destroy the current system and rebuild it without an ICE or use the levers of power within the current system to remove it. Either way, knowledge of the current system will still be needed.
Awwww. :O
So nice when a plot point and a storyline make everything feel earned.
The college protest, the girls being there, Dorothy seeing clear as day the evil of a system she didn’t know if she wanted to do anything with anymore. (something she knew ofc but it’s always different up close and personal).
She is healing… and I truly think in their world, she will one day be the best President ever.
Even, why not, a United Earth President! 😀
And having Joyce, her wife, with her in all of this, so much better!
Two earth shattering revelations, in one moment! Now that’s a good story! 😉
A World Empress would be more appropriate. Why be a mere president at risk of being voted out every four years when you have a DIVINE RIGHT to rule the planet forever?
It would also be ironic that the World Empress and the Empress Consort would believe in the Divine Right to Rule even though they’re both atheists.
Just make sure to tell her not to make any deals with emotion-fuelled eldritch gods or create 20 half-daemon daughters who’ll lead her armies in the Galactic conquest. You should be fine otherwise.
This may be the first strip focused on Joyce and Dorothy in a long time that I’ve actually liked. Glad to see both of them finally realizing that the system is bad and needs to be dismantled.
I’m kind of amused by this reaction, not just from you but more generally.
“Look at these idiots blundering around causing trouble, disrupting protests they’re not even committed to and screwing up their own social circles.
Oh, they’ve stated a political opinion I agree with, they’re obviously the voice of wisdom now.”
Welcome to the world of complicated and interconnected relationships where everyone is trying to get ahead. Or as they used to say, Welcome to the Jungle.
The downside is that Amazi-Girl’s system is only good as long as the people with all the power are good and fair and don’t have biases of their own. You could easily see a good-intentioned dictator overreaching and doing things like banning recreational drug use (including cannabis, tobacco and alcohol), or instituting something like “parenthood licenses”, which though they do have good arguments for them at times, can be EASILY abused or used to target demographics the person in power doesn’t like.
Well, that’s one description, but that’s only half the system. The other half is to write fan/fic and avoid people while changing tiny bits of the world that you don’t like with leat computer skills. Both sides depend on being an extraordinary individual. It’s actually a pretty good system, but as I say, it doesn’t scale.
“The Joyce is GROUNDED. We installed this light switch so The Joyce could turn the lights on and off. Not so you could overthrow the carceral state. Now let’s go take that glow stick and pour into Paul’s Mountain Dew. I heard they have to pump your stomach or something…”
(sorrynotsorry that Strong Bad lives rent free in my brain 20 years after it was relevant)
Oh good, Dorothy is going from being a confidently centrist liberal to being a terminally online ‘leftist’. Can’t wait for her to add a hammer and sickle to her bluesky handle and start sanctimoniously lecturing everyone about voting for the Democrat/harm reduction while she pops up to vote for the DSA candidate every 4 years. #TheRevolutionStartsSomedayWhenSomeoneGetsAroundToIt
In my defense, while I’m aware of the other meaning(s), I was also referring to what I recall Willis admitting in a previous interview – that they’re sometimes torn between keeping the plot going in a reasonable (or comedically unreasonable) direction vs. succumbing to the cathartic impulse to have A-G just hit people Willis thinks need to be hit.
Folks on any fringe always have some inkling of the fact the world is messed up. The problem arises when they get fed the wrong solutions to the world’s ills…
I’m not actually sure how it could be sarcasm, but yeah serious and vaguely referencing the comments (in that a lot of comments had the word in them). I was just in a place where I read the word “system” so many times it stopped looking real.
I don’t see how that’s what’s happening here, to be honest. The word is popping up specifically so much today because it’s the name of the comic, the subject of the comic, and the subject of the alt text.
In no way was I commenting on it like it was something other people were doing wrong, just making a comment about how words can get a little meaningless if you say them or see them over and over.
Yes the system is bad, but mainly for the exact opposite reasons that your church said! And also said church (well, people with the same philosophies of that church) are in charge of that system! All while claiming they’re fighting the system and that they’re the underdogs, somehow. Very straightforward stuff.
Oh man, if I had a nickel for every first year student who thought they were gonna change the world… It’d do me no good because that’s not legal tender here. But I’d definitely have a lot of them.
Then Dorothy creates twenty genetically modified superhuman Primarchs to lead her legion of enhanced warriors to unify the fractured human race against the Lords of Disorder. These Primarchs are based on her and Joyce’s DNA, but Joyce becomes afraid that Dorothy intends to turn their children into weapons. In response, Joyce launches the Primarchs into space through the Immaterium, scattering them and leaving Dorothy to search for her lost children as she begins her great unification campaign (since “crusade” has extremely negative connotations).
Dorothy’s most favored daughter, whom she named Amber, eventually betrays her, falling to Disorder and killing Dorothy’s most loyal daughter, Dina, who is part raptor and pterodactyl and has feathers. Dorothy is forced to kill Amber, but she is mortally wounded in the process and becomes confined to a reinforced aluminum chair, sustained by the psychic essence of one thousand individuals per day. Meanwhile, the atheist Empire she founded on truth and logic slowly rots and decays as she is worshipped as a god.
You know, when I saw this strip I expected most of the political discussion under it to be insane. I feel like I’m used to people online (including in this comments section) being disproportionately system bad take it apart without engaging in any real way with tradeoffs or the inherent difficulties of organizing people (let alone societies). Instead it has been majority very reasonable people reckoning with how messy it is. Comment section award for being way way better than expected.
I am just going to say this. Social democracy, which some might call socialism lite, has from what i have seen has been the least harmful system practiced on the scale of a nation state. Given that post scarcity has not been achieved and market forces are still relevant in the production of resources, social democratic systems have done the most to restrain the worst impulses of capitalism. In my opinion, until true post scarcity is achieved and we become significantly less racist as a species, social democracy is probably the best system we are going to get.
It is also worth remembering that many nineteenth and early twentieth century utopian political philosophies assumed industrialization would create post scarcity. What they failed to anticipate were the devastating environmental consequences and the globalized expansion of capitalist exploitation.
This is simply my opinion, based on what I have observed and on various data sets related to governance, economics, and social wellbeing.
I m not saying its flawless beacuse it isn’t but i dont see us as species forming the UFP anytime soon.
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“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”
Amazi-Girl’s system is amazingly effective.
I’m just not sure it scales.
I found this awesome presentation/essay on tumblr on super-heroes as an anti-collectivist power fantasy on paper vs how we actually engage with these fantasies
TL;DR
“The superhero myth, as a text, isn’t collectivist. But that’s not why we keep coming back to it. That’s not why children read it. We keep coming back to it to learn one simple lesson…
The best thing we can do with Power, is give it away.“
oh wait i found the link last minute lo XD
Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good take on super-heroes and an angle I hadn’t really seen before. It covers a lot of the appeal and why they’re more of a positive influence than they might seem.
OTOH, that all falls apart if you try to analyze them more seriously. To ground them more in reality. To look at how they’d work in something more like the real world. That’s why deconstructions of the genre can be good, but almost invariably get really dark. The whole thing only works because of the genre conventions. And that’s great, those conventions can be inspiring. They can make people want to be heroic.
And they can of course also be twisted – there’s definitely right wing appeal to the trope of fighting endless criminals in a decaying urban environment, even if the right sees that very different from how Batman or even the Punisher does.
Fundamentally though, it’s a fantasy not a system. AG’s system doesn’t work as a model, since it relies on individuals with great power or skills doing the right thing without oversight and usually at great personal cost.
The joke about AG’s system was about her DID not about her methodology
This ^
Or more specifically, it’s a pun based on both meanings.
very excited for more Activist Dorpy Arc
I admit, I kind of expected Robin to become the AOC of the DOA verse with Becky’s help.
Then she just…didn’t.
turns out completely self-interested people, who literally have no firmly-held beliefs beyond enriching themselves, are not actually cut out for bringing change to the system
After AOC ran cover for Biden’s Israel policy last year the Robin parallels may not be entirely off anymore
Ehhh… realpolitick sucks. Yes, it’d be wonderful to stop Netanyahu’s willful genocide. But there’s a very plausible chain of events that starts with, “US cuts military aid to Israel,” and ends with 12 million dead Arabs. I don’t agree with maintaining the status quo–Biden should’ve not blocked the UN resolutions or disputed the ICJ rulings, in particular. But a full-stop on military aid could be disastrous in ways a lot of folks just don’t want to seriously consider.
Part of the issue I have is that, ironically, a lot of progressives don’t seem to get just how monstrously evil Netanyahu is. Ten minutes after the US cuts aid, Bibi would be on the phone with China. “Hey, yeah, it’s me. Look, we need a new source of loan guarantees for our attempt to finally quell the Palestinians. You know, like you’re trying to put down those seditious Uighurs? Yeah, yeah. Look, I know you can’t provide the level of funding we were getting, but even a modest line of support at this point could let us bring this to a close, especially since we won’t have to pay lip-service to Western namby-pamby-ism any more. Now, of course, in exchange, I’d be happy to formally recognize your claim to, what’s that island again? Right, right, East China. Of course, so you can have a better idea of what we need, we’d let you have your technical experts examine all that hardware we got from the US–you know, let them examine them in close detail so you can really see how they work.”
And here’s the thing–the really nightmarish scenario can occur whether or not China bites. Because cutting off US aid would absolutely encourage Iran, Lebanon and possibly Syria to kick off another round of warfare. Either they’d fail miserably, in which case Israel still kills/removes all the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and then the fighting sort of dies down eventually just because there’s nothing left to save, OR… they manage to seriously press Israel, finally getting troops (rather than just terrorist fighters) into Israel’s official borders–at which point, mushroom clouds appear over Tehran, Beirut and Damascus. Maybe even tactical nukes on the Palestinian territories, to boot.
Because Netanyahu is absolutely evil enough to initiate a nuclear exchange if he think Israel might actually be defeated.
I just finished a 4-day full archive binge of this and the entire Walkyverse in time for the new strip, I wanna be an early commenter for once.
It’s honestly amazing how much stuff gets buried in your brain reading a daily strip for 15 years straight. I completely forgot about Amber stabbing a dude, Carla is a lot more likable in binge form (especially her prank on Mary), and yeah, all that Joyce and Dorothy shipteasing my dumb straight brain just dismissed as “gals being pals” years ago. I can’t believe this comic’s been going nearly half my life. When DOA started, it was kismet, because I was just starting college myself. Here I am years later, and my life’s had a lot of ups and downs. Honestly, mostly downs. But all these dumb college kids are still here entertaining me and keeping me invested in their weird drama, even if they do drive me nuts half the time.
I guess I just wanna say, thanks, Willis. I’m so glad you decided to experiment with an every-day release back in like year one and then built a massive buffer and kept going and never ended the experiment. DOA’s been one thing I can always look forward to. Life doesn’t have a lot of that kinda thing, so the ones that do exist are a real treasure.
I love having the time to binge-read this comic and my loved others.
the treasure is the journey itself
and same here, I look forward to more plot from this comic always
and more Dina T~T <3
and more 3D printed cast models, those are also cool
too early huh
Don’t trust the system. Real low hanging fruit there.
at least its better than bein one of those apolitical “we live in a society” folks lol
I’m convinced Willis wrote this one specifically for you.
Dorothy thinks she can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.
Oh poor thing.
Not… necessarily? I mean a bit yeah, that’s definitely in character for her and I think we are gonna see more of that as she starts butting against the system more. But also she *is* right; taking political science courses is still useful in the sense of knowing more thoroughly what you’re up against and how it works, and I think that’s more what she’s talking about here
The reason you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools is that as long as they are in his possession, he commands them. However, if you take his tools from him, if you make them yours, then they act in accordance to your will rather than his. Dorothy is after knowledge, and knowledge is a tool that can be wielded by anyone, for ignorance is an ally only to those who would rule you. Karl Marx knew this, that is why his magnum opus was Das Kapital, a decades long project to understand and critique political economy.
Historically there comes a time when you stop trying to dismantle the house and dismantle the owner instead, with his own tools if necessary. Not saying that’s Dorothy’s intent here but it happens a bit too frequently to ignore.
The system. Is down.
The system. Is down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1TlbLfaJp8
At least the bar has been raised from Committing Something Mildly Subversive Which at Worst Will Serve as a Humanizing Anecdote and not as Anything Truly Threatening to the Power Structures at Hand.
Joyce, I’m POSITIVE your church said the system is bad for ENTIRELY DIFFERENT reasons than what’s ACTUALLY bad about it. Like, Zero overlap.
And also, Joyce, you were right, your church is bad.
This is where we insert the “Why not both” meme GIF. 😀
Give them some credit; they probably agree the system is corrupt. They just do not feel the same parts are corrupt.
Spoiler: Most of it is, probably on everyone’s sides.
“The government is corrupt, evil, and oppressive with a tyrannical police state just around the corner!”
*institutes police state*
“Finally, THOSE LIBERALS ARE GONNA GET IT!”
A police state? In this economy?!
Just like a thief thinks everyone else wants to steal from him, a Conservative thinks everyone else wants to oppress him.
And in fact they are both bad for very similar reasons!!
Oh there’s overlap. It’s called hypocrisy and it’s a feature.
They’ve changed…
Wait until she finds out how entangled the church is with the system
I didnt mean for this to be a reply
This.
Well Dorothy I hope you’re ready to also get disillusioned with the idea of dismantling the system from within. Learn from my mistake and just go ahead and switch to a history major early.
nah, girl needs to join a progressive side of whatever party exists in this universe and experience the soul-crushing work that is dragging the center kicking and screaming into the light.
Dorothy has a strongly worded letter ready for the President!
Better yet, join up with your local leftie org and experience interpersonal drama and burn-out like you never have before
Oh Lord yes. For several years I was one of two non-college-aged non-accelerationist-anarchists at my city’s Food Not Bombs chapter.
Do you know how hard it is to cook food for the homeless when only two of you are aware how to sharpen knives and/or how not to “vote for Trump because he’ll tear the system down faster”?
I hate to be snarky but every “leftist/socialist/anarchist” org I’ve ever worked with followed the pattern of the membership being basically the follows:
1) a couple of grumpy older leftists who sick of discussing whether the system needed to be reformed or destroyed and just wanted to get something useful done. (75% of the productive work, 5% of the members)
2) a squad of 20-something leftists who didn’t know what they were doing but knew they wanted to help (usually women, 30% of the work, 60% of the members)
3) a squad of 20-something anarchists who didn’t know what they were doing but knew they wanted to talk the most performative nonsense about tearing everything up and building a world where the anarchists would be followed out of the rubble into a shining new future (usually men, -5% of the work, 35% of the membership, half of them were of no specific actual politics but assumed lefty women were sluts and that’s why they were here)
That type of anarchist has entirely too much in common with the people who daydream about zombie apocalypses (and are just SURE they’ll not only be among the survivors but also finally be appreciated by their families and friends and coworkers), or, you know, the rapture.
We literally need both people working within the system and people working outside of it, and people who sneer at folks who go into politics as inevitably corrupt are so exhausting. Sorry that I like having legal rights, I guess.
For years, I didn’t identify as an anarchist because I was like, “Do I REALLY want to be associated with these guys?”
Yes, I was a hipster anarchist.
It’s always deeply funny to me, and this is also related to the Great Comment Schism, because the D&D heads at these gatherings invariably end up identifying me as the paladin of the group after being weird for a meeting or two because I do frankly have cishet white cop energy IRL until I open my mouth.
I’ll be the one kicking the levers of the system (or throwing wrenches in the gears, as appropriate) after talking my way in the front door while y’all build the better way outside. 😉
I’d assumed she meant she was gonna learn how it works to dismantle it from the outside. I’d hope she’s not naive enough to think she can effect change from within without being tainted
I don’t think there is any quality about Dorothy that leads me to believe she will attempt external reform without being horribly disillusioned about internal.
Unless you are planning a violent revolution, you need people on the inside to affect any change. Every progressive legislation we have ever had required actual legislators to draft and vote for it. Enacting positive change that improves people’s lives is far more important than maintaining your personal purity. Also, even if you are planning a violent revolution, once it is done and a new system is in place you will still have to get your hand dirty with politics to protect the vision from those who would hijack it. So either way, there is no escaping the necessity of doing politics.
“Having people on the inside” is the exact thing the far-right has been achieving, in aim of their goals, literally longer than most of us commenters have been alive. I’ll never fully grasp how there’s supposed to be zero-value in normal, non-monstrous, non-corrupt, non-fascist citizens infiltrating the system, and holding positions of power. Yes, the system itself is inherently bad, but every non-Nazi in a position of power, is one less person who will wield the unjust power of the system as a Nazi; and, actual citizens will have a marginally lower chance of being forced to be vulnerable under the power of a Nazi. That is a good thing. That will always be a good thing.
The real trick, it seems to me, is this:
It’s nice when people who want to accomplish good get their hands on the levers of power, and when they do they can accomplish real good in a tangible way.
But then they let go of the levers and go retire.
Meanwhile, the people who want to have power grab the levers and don’t ever let go.
Every system will eventually succumb to this until it’s part of praxis that you need to have people who aren’t particularly power-hungry continually going in and grabbing the levers of power as a spoiler/blocker if nothing else, which is hard because running for office and/or being a bureaucrat is a lot of hard work for much less reward than a private-sector career — things were designed that way to try to only give power to people who weren’t motivated by personal gain, but ended up (due to lax enforcement of rules and norms) so that the only people who are consistently willing to do it are the “wants power for power’s sake” and “the blatantly corrupt” and “both!”.
She’s defo gonna try dismantling it from the inside, but even if you’re dismantling it from the outside having extensive knowledge of how it all works will certainly help
I really want her to do the politics and end up meeting/joining up with anarchists. Shes got the mind for understanding politics and power, great with coordination and planning, and actually seems like she needs/wants to do something practical for the good of others and just doesn’t quite know how. A collective would benefit from her skills and also give her the direction she needs to grt out of her funk.
There’s just no characters I can think of that might be believably connected to an anarchist collective.
I mean, if any of the characters in this strip are, maybe they’re just good at it, and that’s why we don’t know they are?
I’m hoping this strip (and previous strips where she’s touched on this topic) means Dorothy is learning that the system can’t be changed from within. It has to be dismantled and replaced with a better system, one that benefits the workers instead of the wealthy.
It’s easier to break things when you know how they go together.
Climbing ladders is exhausting.
Breaking stuff can be fun!
Well, yes but you have to time it right. If you break stuff faster than it can be built, you run out of stuff to break.
Great idea, Elon.
So yes, Joyce, the church is bad and the system is bad, but at least you’ve still got gay sex with your girlfriend, and that’s very, very good.
Fighting the system requires emotional resilience, gay sex with your girlfriend gives emotional resilience, therefore Joyce and Dorothy having sex is an integral part of their fight against the system!
it’s exercise too, so it’s also physical resistance! most fun kinda cardio you can do!
also, bluntly speaking, living a happy queer life is a radical act when society wants you alone, miserable, and dead!
I think this is the first time I’ve enjoyed a Joyce and Dorothy strip in months. More of this, please.
The system is more complicated, and in dire need of reform more than it is strictly good or bad, but that’s too much for many college students. .
In other news, I seriously burned myself so if anyone has any good things to help improve my night, please feel free to share.
Vibes and good will toward you! Heal well!
If it’s seriously burned, I hope you’re receiving medical help. I don’t like drugs messing with my brain, but when it comes to pain, go for the good stuff.
The methods I use to deal with pain would be useless to you, but if you want to go for distraction, reading through the archives is a good thing. Beyond that, the best I can offer is soothing virtual hugs.
Oh, yeah. And whatever you did – please don’t do it again.
It’s second degree, but I’ve got basic first aid medical supplies at my house and no money for an ER visit. It didn’t occur to me to take pain medicine though. I’m on a lot of meds for various reasons, so I never know what I am allowed to take.
I’m 12 hours late, but still: COLD WATER. Running cold water. Lots and lots and lots of it.
No, the system is inherently bad
Really? So the parts of the system that actually succeed, and help people are also bad? The system was originally designed to help, but it was initially flawed and has only gotten worse. However there are parts that are still good in intention even if they aren’t as good as they could be.
Everybody wants to overthrow the system, nobody wants to think about the reality that the system is what’s sending grandma her diabetes meds. It’s doing a bad job of it, sure, but nothing will be doing it in the interim, if you fully collapse the house of cards all at once.
The French Revolution, imo, speaks quite eloquently about the effectiveness of DOWN WITH THE SYSTEM!! DESTROY EVERYTHING!! when no one has any good ideas for replacing/improving it.
The french revolution might have gone the way of so many revolutionary movements – got pushed and invaded by reactionary forces from all neighbouring states, which pushed the most agressive and authoritarian leaders to the top.
Same as happened to the social reformers revolution in russia, btw, its doubtful if the bolsheviks would have had the support to coup the liberal forces, had not britain, france, the US and Japan invaded them and armed the white insurrection to the teeth, forcing the civil war to become a bloodbath.
But in the long view?
Napoleon and his revolution-coded code civil laid the groundwork for all of modern law-based democracy in europe.
But I agree that a vision for the time after IS a good idea, and be it only to unify the resistance forces. I heartily recommend a social democracy.
Its not like there are no models that have been developed in the last 250 years that could be used to update US constitutionalism.
Your view of the French and Russian Revolutions are both backwards. The French Revolutionary Wars were kicked off when the French declared war on Austria and then followed that up by declaring war on everyone else and invading in every direction. It’s true that the Reign of Terror started when the French Republic started losing, but that’s no excuse for it or for the atrocities committed during the War in the Vendée. The Bolsheviks didn’t take over because of the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks staged a coup called the October Revolution and that is what would kick off the Russian Civil War. Less than three weeks later the Bolsheviks lost the elections for the Constituent Assembly, so they dissolved it and centralized power around themselves. Foreign intervention was after that.
The problem with the popular notion of revolution,
1. BURN IT ALL DOWN
2. ???
3. Utopia!
is that most people have no actual plan for Step 2, and there is absolutely no guarantee of that result for 3.
The second problem is that, historically, “Step 2” hurts the poor and downtrodden FAR more than it hurts the wealthy and powerful, even when the latter are the specific targets of Step 1 — see also Revolution, The French.
I think ‘designed’ is a strong word. So is ‘system’, really. It’s really all a jumble of stuff that some people thought was smart at the time and future generations rolled with it.
I don’t think we get to start over from scratch. The only civilizations that were ever truly erased and replaced were in the New World, and look how well that turned out. We can get rid of bad things and bring in new things, and maybe that means revolution, but I don’t think completely replacing The System with something else is in the cards.
Even if it is in the cards, it’ll still be a jumble of stuff that people thought was good at the time – particularly the people who had or were able to get power in either the old system or during the revolution that destroyed it.
and it will still be messy and there will still be ways for people to gain more power/influence and exploit the weaknesses and loopholes.
It’s true. The real problem is people, and there’s no system that people can design that won’t be vulnerable to abuse by corrupt or ambitious people. Of course, we can and should still try to make things better, and though it can be hard to remember, things often do get better. Most people reading this live under vastly better systems today than their ancestors did 500 years ago. If you’re living in the US or most of Europe, the same system is much better today than it was 100 or 200 years ago. The idea that we can burn everything down and build something perfect on the ruins is a tempting fantasy, but that’s all it is. All that burning things down guarantees is that a lot of vulnerable people are going to get hurt in the process, and you may very well not end up with a better system in the end at all.
Yup, this. As bad as the system is, if that’s where the levers of power are, then everyone’s better off if you have competent and fair operators in there to try to put governors on ’em and keep the orphans out of the crushing gears until they can be dismantled and replaced with a universal basic income distributor etc.
You can’t necessarily reform the system all the way from within, but on the other hand you build an airliner and a combat drone with a lot of the same parts, so you might as well disassemble the drone carefully and reuse what you can.
That’s pretty close to my take on the problem. And my problem with a lot of online leftists, who seem to think the problem lies entirely in the bad system of capitalism and if we simply end that and replace it with the good system communism, then we don’t really need to worry about the fussy details of keeping the corrupt greedy bastards from figuring out how to exploit the new system.
I am totally here for Revolution Dorothy.
REV UP THAT LES MISERABLES PLAYLIST!
Could we maybe rev up a play list from something that dosen’t end with everyone dead and the forces of opression victorious? I really hate protests using that particular musical.
System is bad. The church is bad. Lots of bad all around. So whaddaya both gonna DO about it?
You begin by taking care of each other.
*rubs chin thoughtfully
Well, it’s a crazy idea, but it just might work.
Wait until she finds out how entangled the church is with the system
I’m here for those two fighting the imminent Theocralypse.
Hey for that one person that was mad Dorothy not longer had an ambition. Here you go!
Joyce is correct that the System is corrupt like her church said. However, I suspect they’d elect the worst person in the world to “fix” things.
Nail / head
I suspect they already have.
As Dorothy enters her archvillain arc
She already attempted to destroy Joe because he accidentally took “her” girlfriend.
Yes, Dorothy is the Mad Hatter.
re: alt-text: it’s more morally dubious because one half keeps shipping real people and that’s a whole can o’ worms to unemployed weirdos on twitter
There is no such thing as The System.
There are MANY systems, and they are ALL bad.
*but some are better than others, and we have yet to fully conceive of better ones and improvements to existing ones
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Listen kids, I dont know what you’re up to, but I do know this. Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic-ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence that’s enacted and the police are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean? Ya wanna make some bacon?
I’d be careful with any comments about “making bacon”. Those pieces of shit on the subreddit night dox you and send a cop to your house like they did to me.
I trust the cop was suitable appalled?
Confused, mainly. Turns out, when you call the cops on somebody about a woman being battered and then the person who answers the door clearly just woke up and nobody else is even fucking home, it’s not gonna be considered a credible fucking complaint.
And on the off chance it wasn’t one of those worthless sacks of garbage, it’s a hell of a coincidence it happened right after they were talking about me probably beating my girlfriend (because I’m rude to people online, which is a fuckin’ stretch) and I told them I wasn’t their personal Chris-Chan.
jesus i’m so sorry.
Not like you did it.
Jeez, that’s horrible. Hope you’re okay.
Be nice if I could fuckin’ prove it, but goddamn if the timeline don’t line up. Whatever though. If it all turns out to be a perfectly timed coincidence, the scumfucks get free fuel for their parasocial obsession and I get the comfort of knowing I probably won’t get a bomb in the mail or someshit.
dafuq.. why?
Maybe they got bored, idk. Fuck ’em.
Malicious use of the police is a sociopathic and nasty thing to do.
That said, so is trolling, insulting and antagonising people for your own amusement. When you manage to drive somebody to depression or self harm, are you pleased with yourself Taffy? How are you on the side of angels with your behaviour?
I’m sure this comes across as harsh, but you have harmed me, and I’d bet good money I’m one among many.
Oh, you said a second thing, too. Look, if I really have somehow harmed you, I may not remember doing it but I’m genuinely sorry if it happened. All I remember about you is an argument we had once where you were basically blanket shaming people for issues it was obvious they had no control over, and I’ve kind of avoided you since then when I notice your username. That doesn’t make it acceptable to say whatever it was I said that harmed you to the point you’re bringing up depression and self-harm. Don’t ever hurt yourself because of something my volatile ass said, I’m not worth all that.
Adept, shut up.
I’m sorry you felt shitty that day, but you weren’t a poor little lamb being picked on. You said a bunch of really shitty things while posturing to be an expert on multiple things you don’t actually seem to know anything about, and then you got upset when people calling you out on the shitty things you were saying weren’t all perfectly polite about it.
Meanwhile, Taffy got SWAT’d by people on Reddit that Taffy has never even talked to, who just really don’t like the way they comment on this webcomic.
You are not the same.
Well hang on, Li. It wasn’t a SWAT-ing situation. If it was, I’d have been way more aggressive about the topic from the start. It was one cop who was just as confused as I was. He was young and seemed nice (I hope he quits soon), and when I asked him to double-check his info he called in and verified everything. Still had his hand on his gun in case I acted out of line, but… At least he had a civil conversation and left. A SWAT team would have just busted the door down and been shouting and screaming, all that rigmarole. We don’t need to exaggerate this one for effect, it’s scary enough as-is.
To the point of Adept maybe not being a little lamb, I think right now I’d rather take the depression/self-harm/suicidality part at face value, assume honesty, and accept whatever part I may have had in that. It feels like a good habit to get into.
@Taffy: I fully acknowledge the first part.
But I stand by what I said about Adept/Adeptus, because I remember the incident, and you were barely involved. I was much more heavily involved.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/outed/#comment-1926924
I know it was this conversation, because they came back the next day to say so:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-16/01-not-so-smooth-criminals/missing-them/#comment-1927614
So if Adept/us wants to be mad at anyone for that, it should be at me.
(Also, like…….. that first link? I’m pretty sure the meanest thing I said was “Cool, so you definitely haven’t read it, much less any of their other texts. But you still feel like you can speak not only authoritatively but condescendingly about that religion. Interesting.”
Again: I’m sorry the thread was overwhelming for this person, but a super hostile comment section? Taffy, personally, bullying them? I don’t think so????)
If I’ve singlehandedly caused anyone to become depressed or to self-harm, I’ve yet to hear about it, but if it ever comes up I’ll probably feel pretty bad about that, so I guess the quick answer to your question is “No”. I never claimed to be “on the side of the angels” though, so idk what you’re on about with that part. Anyways don’t you have a homeless person to blame global warming on?
Oooh victim blaming vibes, yummy.
Taffy doesn’t have to be “on the side of the angels”, a perfect victim, or even a good person (I don’t know them, so I can’t speak to that) to deserve a world where the cops aren’t called to their house by random internet idiots. Bringing up their trolling in the same vein as this assault (an action aimed at causing fear) really is a messed up thing to do.
I’m gonna be so real right now, it’s become increasingly clear the past few months just how bad of a reputation I’ve built for myself, and it’s 100% earned through my own behavior. It’s something I’ll probably never shake, so I have to just accept that people will assume they’re dealing with the worst version of me at any given moment and learn to be fine with that. While I appreciate the sentiment, you don’t need to defend me. If somebody’s mad at me or rightfully apprehensive, I’m completely fine to just take that.
Fair enough, it was still an incredibly gross sentiment from Adept so I wanted to point that out.
Nah, Adept is not someone you’ve hurt. Adept is someone who keeps swanning around claiming to have credentials for various fields and saying embarrassingly wrong things and then being upset when the embarrassingly wrong thing gets pointed out.
IIRC, Adept also did a whole thread about a month ago shitting ignorantly on Jewish and Muslim beliefs in specific? People called them on it, not particularly politely, en masse, and then the next day they turned up and said that they’d been made to feel suicidal by the responses.
You weren’t the only person responding to them and it’s extremely weird that they’ve both fixated on you as the sole “perpetrator” of that particular response thread AND that they’re calling it bullying now and pretending they didn’t say a bunch of super offensive shit in that thread about marginalized religious and ethnic groups.
Like it was typical “I’m glad I’m an atheist and not an idiot” stuff but Adept went out of their way to make it clear they were pretending to know about All Religions instead of just the specific sect of Christianity America makes so inescapable.
People pointed out that they clearly didn’t know what they were talking about, sometimes rudely, and somehow that became you specifically bullying and trolling Adept, I guess.
I remembered the gist of the incident. Link in an earlier comment. Hilariously Taffy only replied to the thread twice. Just. What in the selective memory hell, honestly.
Adept, I’m sorry you have no sense of humor. It must make dealing with life difficult.
absolutely insane take but ok
What the fuck is wrong with you.
I’m sorry about it. Fucking pigs
Please enjoy your celebretory almonds. I assume you’ll want them shoveled into the hole in your back?
Deep cut reference for a deep cut reference!
Although that particular speech should definitely have been made into a shirt if it wasn’t.
the shirt should also have a hole in the back
Oh thank goodness somebody watches Dimension 20. I was almost losing my faith in humanity, and not just because of swatting. I’m not keen to have some sort of incident happen because I was quoting a halfling mailman with a lit molotov cocktail in his mailbag.
And of course through my back. That way the food isn’t going in the same hole that the words are coming out of.
Okay I wanna commend your taste in DND actual play podcasts but holy shit, what taffy said. Hope you’re okay big dawg 🙁
Dorothy has some privilege protecting her but Jocelyn and Asma are very vulnerable to retaliation. 10 years ago, I’d have never imagined it but now protesting “Bulmeria” could get you dropped off in…I dunno…East Ruritania.
Jocelyne is super vulnerable as a trans woman and Asma as a Muslim woman of color.
This just might be the most white conversation ever uttered. Real “no shit” energy radiating off these two! Joyce really should give that medal back.
some of us take longer to wake up to the Matrix than others. some never wake up at all.
I am willing to give them some grace, baby steps from the cis white people who as far as I know are not neurodiverse. If you are part of any marginalized group you tend to learn quickly that the system is a mess and that dismantling it is the least one could do, when you are in a position where you have some privilege going on sometimes it takes something to open your eyes, be it seeing first hand how bad the system is (like being at a protest that was peaceful until the police violently cracked down on) or finally seeing the suffering around you by those cast to the periphery of society. Give Dorothy and Joyce some time, while they may be white liberals now they have a chance if they listen to the marginalized and work beside them (not try and play the savior) they might grow into good comrades.
Joyce is pretty much confirmed autistic and while Dorothy is not so much dhe exibit a whole lot of similar traits. Just so you know.
This is the thing that’s weird to me – when people in the comments are happy to demonise Dorothy and Joyce for the events of the last arc or so, suddenly it’s entirely about them being white liberals, most criticisms boiling down to selfish and cruel, and not about them both being clearly neurodiverse.
The trouble in their recent background and their traumas, the demons they’re overcoming, all fade into the background. Suddenly they’re two completely well-adjusted, disaffected wealthy white women. That they’re barely 18 is also ignored, even though in criticism of age gap relationships people are happy to point out that the human brain doesn’t finish developing until 25. Why do they suddenly have full mental and emotional faculties? Even if they hadn’t been kidnapped by friends’ parents, watched one of their friends die from trying to defend them while trying to comfort their friend through the gruesome death of her father, who was also their kidnapper? To say nothing of the earlier kidnapping instance where he came onto campus with a gun, which was after one of them was nearly date raped.
It’s so bizarre the myopia I see often in the comments here, that they don’t get to be fully realised, complicated people with the human tendency to lose sight of others in the face of their own desires, troubles, and fears, because they kissed one another at a protest while they both had boyfriends. “They need to leave their boyfriends!” They leave their boyfriends. “How heartless they are just dropping them like that!” And yet the story moves on, because life moves on.
“When can we get to anybody else/when will they face proper consequences??” And yet in the storyline we addressed how Walky was handling the breakup, what Asma and Raidah thought of their stunt at the protest, what Sarah and Joe were thinking about it, a confrontation with Daisy over the paper, having to confess to a conservative parent in a bid to save Joyce’s trans sister from having to come out under duress. Also Becky’s feelings, how Becky was after their conversation and how Dina felt about how Becky was, as well as how Amber is holding up. We also had Billie jumping in to be support for Walky, and Alice discussing with Ruth about Billie. In retrospect, we covered a ton of ground! Joyce is and has always been the main character, Dorothy has been a close second main character since they met, and as Willis has alluded, them getting together was built up throughout the duration of the comic. I loved Joe/Joyce, I would have loved to see more of them. That isn’t what we got, and that isn’t unrealistic – this kind of thing happens all the time in high school and uni. I witnessed it myself a couple times between mutual friends. We want the best for Joe as reward for changing himself for the better, but girlfriends aren’t rewards.
Maybe it’s about time to stop expecting perfection of two traumatised neurodiverse girls under extremely challenging circumstances.
Fun fact! “…the human brain doesn’t finish developing until 25” is a myth, and actually we think the human brain never really “finishes” developing. Or, if it does, it happens much later. This myth came around and started to be quoted by literally everyone based on a study that just… didn’t include any participants older than 25. It wasn’t that their brains stopped developing, it was that the scientists didn’t look at, so didn’t include any information about anyone older than 25.
yeah, it’s clear that journalists in corporate news media have no real business interpreting the results of actual scientific research (-_-)
even in something like, astronomy, if a recent discovery involves figures of “millions” or “billions”, when it’s reported by popular news outlets, the two are mixed up at LEAST 50% of the time X-X
As I understand it, it was a long-term study that followed a group of kids of the same age, which ran out of funding when the kids were 25. Brain development showed no signs of stopping when the study ended, so their conclusion was that brain development continued until at least 25, but when it entered the public consciousness it was misinterpreted to mean basically the opposite.
Would like to point out that they can be white liberals AND neurodiverse at the same time. These are not in any way mutually exclusive things. Speaking as an autistic POC, neurodiverse white liberals are perfectly capable of the same levels of selfishness and cruelty that neurotypical white liberals are.
Not to say Dorothy and Joyce are being outright cruel, because I don’t feel that they are (though I do think that’s arguable). But, selfish? Pretty sure even the writing in the story itself, which is pretty firmly on their side, is at least acknowledging that they are in fact being selfish. Neurodiversity does not justify this.
to be clear, I am not holding their recent actions against them, what’s done is done and given how events played out while not optimal I can see why they made the moves they did, my comment is more on the fact that it tends to take some longer then others to see the system for what it is, and that one always has a capacity to grow, and part of me looks forward to seeing how Dorothy and Joyce will grow from this.
The list of neurotypical characters in this comic is a short one.
It can’t be that short. There’s
Sal probably,
Marcie maybe,
Does Ruth count,
you’ve got Billie,
I guess Mary,
we could assume Roz,
Nothing’s been confirmed or denied about Hot Rachel,
Asher is in the Mafia which I don’t think counts,
Meredith is just high all the time,
Jacob maybe
Sarah’s never really given the vibe
Ken isn’t anything
Jason’s just British
Might be more.
I feel like Sal’s got ADHD like Walky, if only because like him, she too requires doodling dinosaurs on her paper to concentrate (same queen), also definitely PTSD from the hand stabbery. Honestly if we count PTSD as a neurodivergence (which I tend to do because it does rewire the brain) then that also affects a bunch of characters but if we’re fair and don’t count PTSD…
Ruth has depression she’s being medicated for
Billie, I don’t know what exactly I’d say she’s got, but she’s got SOMETHING going on.
The rest, honestly you right. Marcie (if we ignore any potential PTSD from the attack that made her mute), Mary, Roz, Hot Rachel (she’s just got a case of the big mad), Asher (like you said he’s just a mafia bro), Meredith (Mary Jaaaaane), Jacob, Sarah (she’s just a misanthrope), the guy from Street Fighter, and Jason are all gifted the badge of ‘probably maybe neurotypical’.
Hot Rachel isn’t the big mad one, she’s the short one with purple hair.
The big mad one is Angry Rachel
Oh shit, my bad. You’re right, I’d take Hot Rachel out to dinner anytime.
Hot Rachel would be a fantastic date, I think. She seems like she’d enjoy picking up something quick and cheap from a local place and taking it to the park to chat about whatever-the-fuck. My fanfic only gets more explicit from there.
Angry Rachel would insist on somewhere nice, and when you got there she’d complain about the decorations like you picked them. And then when somebody came by to ask what drinks you wanted, she’d memorize their face and voice, and if anybody but that person came to take your meal order, she’d lecture them about “You can’t change who you are”, under the impression it was the same person who’d just shapeshifted while you were deciding what to eat.
Also, when you tip the waiter, Angry Rachel rebuffs the gesture no matter how much you tip, because “you are only tipping to make yourself feel better, you’re doing this for self-gratification”. If you throw your hands up and decide not to tip, she’d be like “oh, so you CHANGED your mind? Sorry, nobody can really change” and she tips the waiter instead, but only with a nickel she had in the bottom of her purse.
Kinda hard to write NTs if you’re not one yourself. All characters are shot out of your brain, and if you’re neurospicy there’s gonna be some residue
Source: I plop out OCS as a hobby and had the slow realization that they’re almost all autistic and/or adhd
Tis true.
I look forward to the 20 year timeskip and the end of the webcomic in which Dorothy is the Castro of the Great Lakes Autonomous Region
Only a little disillusioned, wake me when she’s very disillusioned if ever.
yeah it sucks, microsoft isn’t putting the operating in operating system these days
Meh, I’m over caring about OS. Today is about how fast you can do matrix multiplications and handle massively parallel operations.
gotta have an OS to do all of that, though. Some matrix multiplier companies don’t even bother putting out drivers for Windows any more.
You gotta have an OS to do all that, but past a certain level, it doesn’t really matter which. It spends a ridiculous amount of compute on making the user interface look pretty; sure, fine, whatever.
Specific conservative church folk will say the system is bad when it’s not 100% always working in their favor. They prefer to be the ones running it even though the constitution and the Bible itself says the separation of church and state is vital.
Leather? Talk of destroying the system? Throw in some sunglasses and submachine guns and you got a trans allegory going baby.
Needs more punk rock, monsters and thigh highs, also making estrogen in your bath tub to fund the revolution. will give this current angle a “promising but need work”
I only just now caught the reference you were going for, so I stand by most of it, just change the making bathtub estrogen from funding the revolution to showing more people how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Those pills they hand out gotta come from somewhere.
God Emperor Dorothy will purge the xeno, the heretic, and the psyker.
The pills are just representations of code injection packages, so… no, not necessarily?
tgirl dorothy stocks are on the rise
Step 1: Solve Capitalism
good luck
Step 2 is realizing you can’t solve capitalism and that we need to end it instead.
Step 3 is realizing that’s not even possible, and instead you have to artificially prop up capitalism, constantly, by nonstop trust-busting and all sorts of heavy regulations. Left to its own devices, competition disappears, and capitalism becomes feudalism.
Is Step 4 realizing that capitalism isn’t the problem and that the same kind of people who gain power by exploiting others under capitalism will find ways to do so under whatever system you come up with.
That, whatever your basic system, the key is that people have to stay constantly engaged to stay ahead of those trying to exploit it. In industrial capitalism, as you say, that’s things like trust-busting and regulation and unions.
And Step 5 is understanding that not only is Step 4 necessary, but on top of that, as someone observed above, there is no “the system”, there’s a bunch of fixes to issues that have been kludged together. There are multiple systems, some of which work better than others – the penal system, for instance, could use a lot of work, or possibly just being torn down in its entirety and rebuilt along the lines of northern Europe, while the social-welfare systems just need to be bolstered and properly funded. (Food banks supplied entirely by voluntary donations, for example, shouldn’t be necessary. They are currently, but they shouldn’t be.)
I’m reminded of a friend of a friend who wrote the only realistic anarchist novel I’ve ever read. The protagonist followed a pattern more than once of the following:
1) move to new, uncharted planet, set up a colony beacon and a private police/security subscription service and a set of rules that boil down to “no government, no rules, anarchy forever”.
2) lots of people move in, everyone’s being good little ancaps about everything.
3) enough people move in that there are competing police/security companies who all are willing to charter with each other on investigations, how to handle criminals who are someone else’s client, etc.
4) one of the other companies (or a group of them) ends up being more than the majority of the planet’s police/security, at which point they say “actually, we’re the government now and we are writing a new constitution, and also building some goddamn non-toll roads and such”.
5) populace mostly shrugs, because hey, taxes-for-infrastructure and “use fees” are about the same thing in the end, in wallet terms.
6) protagonist grumbles angrily and moves on, go to step 1.
Step one shows a complete misunderstanding of anarchisim. Sorry that I’m not going to be able to see any replies to this but I’m xurrently on public wifi and will have to leave soon. My internet is not due to be fixed until Monday.
However in short anarchy does not mean no rules, it means no rulers. Coming together as a collective and establishing the rules your collective lives by is an anarchist system.
Step two explains the problem. Fucking ancaps. It’s debatable wheather they even count as anarchists. Closer to American Libretarians who in my experience absouly do want there to be rulers, as long as it’s people other than themselves being ruled by them.
I mean, I don’t make up the definitions, and I’m not especially comfortable moderating the old “are left-anarchists or right-anarchists the REAL anarchists” debate. 😛
Nah capitalism is definitely a very major problem. But, markets themselves are not a problem.
girl, it all sucks because it fails to keep up with the times, so the cracks start to become more and more visible
Hey Joyce, this downtime is the perfect chance to discuss Joe with Dorothy. Just saying.
She’s never going to talk to your OC.
Before Joyce figures out what Dorothy thinks about this, she needs to figure out what Joyce thinks of this. And to figure that out, she needs to figure out at least what the initial situation is with Dorothy. Because for all she knows, after some days, she’s gonna go ‘actually, no, I don’t think this would work for me’, in which case there’s little reason for her to go ‘Dorothy, Joe asked me to go Poly, but I don’t want to do that, so don’t worry about it’
Joyce should handle that stuff when she’s ready for it. And that includes she gets some time to bask in the relation she currently has, and set it up to be stable, before she thinks about proposing a serious change.
Is that fair to Joe? Yes. Joe is not entitled to a fast answer. He’s not tied down. If he is tired of waiting, he absolutely has the right to move on. But he can’t demand Joyce to answer a question like that on his schedule.
Is that fair to Dorothy? Yes. Joyce isn’t doing anything, not even flirting with Joe. She should absolutely talk to Dorothy before taking actual steps towards creating a polycule, but if she’s in the ‘I’m not sure I even want this’ step, she’s not obligated to report every last thing to Dorothy. Making up her own mind will also means that if and when she should talk to Dorothy, she goes in with some ability to communicate her own desires. (Is this only Joe? Would she be alright if Dorothy were to bring in someone? etc)
Maybe. OTOH, if Joyce is really still considering continuing her relationship with Joe in some poly form, I think that’s information Dorothy should have. It would be different if this was an entirely new offer and not from the person she was with when she hooked up with Dorothy and who Dorothy thinks she’s made a clean break from.
This is closer to “I don’t actually want to break up with Joe” and that’s not really report every last thing.
Don’t agree there. Just because a couple is a couple doesn’t mean they’re entitled full access to every last half baked thought and ‘I don’t know’ consideration. You are allowed to keep something in your inner kitchen to cook, and either decide to serve it later, or just discard it discreetly. (For example, if Joyce ends up deciding she’s not into it and tells Joe no, then she’s not obligated to tell Dorothy at all in my book)
Again, it’s not “just because a couple is a couple”. As I said, this would be different if they were an established couple and this was an entirely new offer from some other guy or even an ex-boyfriend, that would be a different story.
It’s because this happened when she went to break up with Joe and she let Dorothy think it was a clean break that makes it different. “I don’t really want to break up with Joe, can we try poly?” is a very different situation.
If she’s already rejected the idea, then it doesn’t matter. If she ends up rejecting it, it’s probably fine, though I think Dorothy would still have a right to be upset if she learned Joyce was seriously considering it when they first got physical and she thought Joyce was fully committed. If she does end up wanting to stay with Joe in a polycule, then it’s a lot harder bringing that up with Dorothy now.
The problem with this is assuming that Joyce doesn’t think she HASN’T made the decision already. She’s not CONSIDERING herself in a poly relationship with Joe and Dorothy. She IS in one but just hasn’t told Dorothy.
We’ve been over this. Joe does not exist until biology class.
Who is this “Joe” you speak of. Joyce’s love is Dorothy. Only Dorothy exists in Joyce’s universe…
People just inventing new characters to complain about, I guess to avoid repetition.
I can easily see that becoming the next evolution of toxic fandom. Instead of misinterpreting existing characters in as bad of faith as possible, they will create entire personas that supposedly exist on the margins like Rosencratz and Guildenstern, and project all their rage, cruelty, and malice upon them.
Frothing with rage over Becky’s transphobic comments toward Rice Phillip.
Rice Phillip’s had it coming. And Becky was still reeling from her best friend’s betrayal. But she shouldn’t have just repeated Irving’s comments like that.
Finally, the sleeper has awakened !
And she’s gone jogging!
LISAN AL’GHAIB!!!
Turn out, the system *was* bad, only not in the way your church said.
Time for them to become The Beastie Boys.
Amazi-girl mention! Does this mean we might finally get to check in on Amber & learn what caused her injury?
…also, what store were Joyce & Dorothy trying to go to? Was the leather jacket thing from yesterday’s strip meant to be “I need to buy you a leather jacket RIGHT NOW”? These two have a strange manic energy lately & I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It occurs to me that I don’t think we’ve ever heard Dorothy discuss political theory/philosophy in a more sophisticated way than basic electoral politics. Is there a way to send a fictional character a copy of Das Kapital?
Dystopian Sci-Fi from the early industrial revolution? How will that help?
It depresses me how few ideas we seem to have about how to improve societies.
If there was a way to send fictional characters to an entire website full of Marxist literature, I would send Dorothy and Joyce the link to marxists.org.
Send her stuff about Holodomor and Great Leap Forward/Great Falling on Your face too
Should we account for every crime against humanity facilitated by capitalism as well or do you only keep score for internet points?
I keep score for all of my people murdered by communists.
That is fine as long as youo also account for the millions murdered by reactionary, antisocialst interventions all over the world.
Dont forget that Borlshevism, Maoism, even the islamic revolution, late Chavism or the Sandinistas started out as more or less social reformers. And only turned to the most ruthless leadership and police-state methods after being put under enormous, often external antirevolutionary pressures.
Its not like there have never been reforms, rebellions and revolts against the brutality of authoritarian forces which havent led to better societies.
Oh I’m not denying that. The issue with communists in particular is a mix of ideological malice and sheer stupidity. They push policies that are just plain dumb and then are surprised when the world verifies their idiocy. Like Mao’s War on Sparrows which resulted in a mass starvation in China (made worse by the fact that he kept insisting on exporting the grain they had too little of)
I still remains to be seen how we end up handling Trump.
*It
Oh Trump… he just jumped out with this new Peace Deal for Ukraine that’s just more Putin ass-kissing… at least from the looks of things his popularity is dropping like a rock so he might get kneecapped in the Mid-Terms.
We can hope, but it’s far from a done deal.
You know what? Nevermind, I always get into these fights on here, I think I’ll skip this time after all.
Every system of economic/political organization has been captured by fascists/authoritarians at least once, film at 11.
The fundamental key, I think, is how you organize the parts of the system that function to keep the fascists/authoritarians at bay, not so much the underlying system. The checks and balances, if you will.
Pretending that system itself will inevitably prevent them is a quickly fatal flaw.
Gonna remind everyone that Da Boy (IIRC) lived under Soviet Authoritarianism, and is coming at this from a vastly different place of personal experience than most.
This is important context, thank you. Frankly I suspected as much when they said “my people.” I am always willing to lend grace to people who despise certain words and concepts when they have been weaponized against them. It’s adjacent to why despite my own faith, I have zero quarrel with people who disavow Christianity because of past abuse. While the pedant in me could argue that those deeds were not truly and accurately Christian, that the language of faith had been taken in vain… that doesn’t matter to most people hurt by the system.
Ayup. I’ve had similar talks with my current boss, who’s very confused by the online left’s willingness to adopt “Communism” and not “Democratic Socialism” or something… but he’s also from Poland, and his parents were members of Solidarity when that wasn’t a thing you could legally be, so yeah.
Yeah this baffles me so much. Western Europe actually Functions and protects people’s rights. Communists states were FAILURES. They did not provide prosperity for the people, they did not provide freedom, all they provided was repression. Why would you pick such abject failure when there is an actual proven and successful alternative Right Next To It.
Mostly, it’s an artifact of right-wing propaganda — the right-leaning media in the US and much of the least English-speaking first world, at least, spent DECADES referring to every single social democratic or socialist policy as “COMMUNISM!”, and so people who grew up in that system end up with the idea that “Communism” means “basically Norway, right? It’s a synonym for social democratic policies?”
Which is why you’ll see so much insistence that the Soviet/ChiCom problem is AUTHORITARIANISM rather than Communism, which is really just a truism because the problems with EVERY system are basically “Authoritarians, the Greedy, or both can capture control of it”, and in the long run the main thing is the systemic resistance to that.
Marx had his heart in the right place, and his warning was timely.
Every time some revolution has taken him up as their banner, we have gotten something like Lenin’s equally-dystopic rebranding of the Russian empire. I’d enjoy seeing some modern, academically sound take on communism, but as things stand the writings of Marx are not a paths to a sane future.
The best we have got so far is Nordic style social democracy, heavy on the democracy. A dicatorship of the proletariat is not a sound goal.
Agreed.
But one has to remember that Marx was 150 years ago.
A lot of thought and statecraft practice has been developed since then.
Not all social reform neccessarily leads to right-wing coded police states painted with leftist talking points.
None the less, power never concedes without pressure. In some cases mass protests and strikes are enough. In some cases the powers that be must be frightened somewhat harder.
Not all social reform certainly. But social reform usually involves working within the system. Or at least with the system from outside – mass movements can both win their own gains and pressure politicians to change laws.
Leftist revolutions do not exactly have a great track record of reaching the lofty goals they aim for.
I know, I know.
On the other hand leftist reform movements using mass mobilisation and electoral processes?
Sadly also tend to get supressed in fire and blood quite regularly. Often in this one continent, how was ist called – Monroe-land? 😥
Especially when they try to control large natural resources.
Its troublesome.
Tearing down a functioning (if flawed) system and having no idea how to build a functioning one usually has this result.
When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the government functionaries were told “Come in for work tomorrow as usual. OR ELSE.” They kept the machinery running. Then, bit by bit, they changed what they didn’t like.
That goes beyond the System. Taliban could do that because they had a quiet support of the rest of the society. Americans were never going to last, much like Soviets. You can’t just kick the door in and change a society that existed like this for centuries if not millennia without it being willing to change.
Technological conditions have changed too. Remember that Marx was writing during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. No one at the time could predict what would come later (have you seen some of the projections of The Future from around that time? Apparently we’re all supposed to be traveling around on bicycles suspended from dirigibles by now). The factory floor Marx wanted to free people from is seldom seen outside the third world these days, at least in part due to his work in establishing labor unions (credit where it’s due!).
We do have contemporary academic work with ties to marxism, though none of it is as high-profile as the Frankfurt School guys. Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher was my introduction, the nonfiction literary style is far less impenetrable than Horkheimer/Adorno jargon. I was in film school, so most of my leftist reading came in the form of culture industry studies or historical materialist nonfiction.
Social democracy is probably the best option for achieving a long term, fairly egalitarian system. That said, the model has been under attack from people who believe it is too centrist and still empowers the bourgeois elite through compromise. There is some truth to that criticism.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have outright populist bigots trying to dismantle social democracy by appealing to racist fears, claiming that immigrants and minorities are “stealing” social benefits while secretly planning to eliminate those benefits if they gain power.
Knowledge of The System doesn’t automatically give you a tool to take it apart. In fact in many ways you don’t need to know more than the basics.
But you need to know how the System is running everything so that you can build a different System that won’t crash and burn. Just because you can smash a house down with a hammer doesn’t mean you know how to build a better house.
So for starters I wanna say that sometimes what you want is not necessarily the knowledge to build a better orphan-chewing machine. Sometimes you have to acknowledge that nobody wants or needs an orphan-chewing machine.
That said, Dorothy is very much someone who would fall into the trap of “We have to replace it with SOMETHING.”
And then everyone dies because no one knows how to produce, process and transport food.
I think you are either grossly misinformed on what people who want to smash the system are talking about, or you are arguing in bad faith.
But for the benefit of the doubt, “the system” is not “civilization.”
Oh I know what they want to do. Tear down the socio-economic system and replace it. I’ve seen it happen in Soviet Union and Maoist China. You kill or displace all the people who actually know how things work and replace them with ideological morons more interested in obeying the ideology than actually running things.
Look up Lysenkoism, dude actually believed that if you plant crops closer next to each other they will do The Communism Thing and share resources. To no one’s surprise Soviet Union got hit with a famine.
In Maoist China you had the War on Sparrows because they hate grain. Not long after a massive locust disaster hit and another famine happened.
When people tell me that they are interested in busting the old system down without talking how to replace the Functioning of that system I know it’s going to end in a famine and disaster.
Ah crap, EAT grain, not hate grain.
So much for the benefit of the doubt.
Your course of study seems to have worked backwards from a desired conclusion.
I’m from a post-Communist country. The desired conclusion you speak of was piles of corpses of my people and enslavement for half a century under an incompetent foreign imperial boot.
You’ve just spent considerable effort and words talking past me and arguing against things I haven’t said.
Touch grass.
Then what is the “system” you want to smash? The government? The economy/capitalism? American hegemony?
Whatever it is, something will replace it. Probably best to know how to go about designing it before we start smashing.
You don’t want a better orphan-chewing machine, so maybe learn what makes the machine chew the orphans so that you can build a new machine that doesn’t. Because so far in history, “smash the orphan-chewing machine” without planning further than that has a tendency to just make bigger, better orphan-chewers.
Not to mention the simple fact that the thing that makes “a powerful motor, a funnel, and a pile of sharpened gears” a hamburger mincer, a wood chipper, or an orphan-chewing machine is HOW you operate it, not what it fundamentally IS.
Well, political science as a topic isn’t really even about the political system as it exists, even in law school you don’t learn so much about the actual laws that exist or court procedure as you do about theories of jurisprudence and argument construction. So that topic is definitely useful for some people to know, just like it’s useful for some people to know how to farm or keep the power grid online or keep a logistical network running. Those people will all retain their knowledge after any upheaval though, the important thing is to make sure they’re able to keep doing what they do, preferably without all the various capitalist leeches and religious extremists that impede them today.
I guess my point is that if your goal is to destroy ICE, you don’t need to know everything about the history of the DHS and its specific internal workings, you need to know how to get away with crimes.
If you want to get away with crimes, join ICE.
But doing crimes isn’t going to destroy ICE. If you want to do that, you need to either destroy the current system and rebuild it without an ICE or use the levers of power within the current system to remove it. Either way, knowledge of the current system will still be needed.
Awwww. :O
So nice when a plot point and a storyline make everything feel earned.
The college protest, the girls being there, Dorothy seeing clear as day the evil of a system she didn’t know if she wanted to do anything with anymore. (something she knew ofc but it’s always different up close and personal).
She is healing… and I truly think in their world, she will one day be the best President ever.
Even, why not, a United Earth President! 😀
And having Joyce, her wife, with her in all of this, so much better!
Two earth shattering revelations, in one moment! Now that’s a good story! 😉
A World Empress would be more appropriate. Why be a mere president at risk of being voted out every four years when you have a DIVINE RIGHT to rule the planet forever?
It would also be ironic that the World Empress and the Empress Consort would believe in the Divine Right to Rule even though they’re both atheists.
I used to know what a sequitur was.
Just make sure to tell her not to make any deals with emotion-fuelled eldritch gods or create 20 half-daemon daughters who’ll lead her armies in the Galactic conquest. You should be fine otherwise.
This may be the first strip focused on Joyce and Dorothy in a long time that I’ve actually liked. Glad to see both of them finally realizing that the system is bad and needs to be dismantled.
I’m kind of amused by this reaction, not just from you but more generally.
“Look at these idiots blundering around causing trouble, disrupting protests they’re not even committed to and screwing up their own social circles.
Oh, they’ve stated a political opinion I agree with, they’re obviously the voice of wisdom now.”
I don’t think you could have made this comment more reductive if you tried
Wow that sure is a lot of stuff me and a bunch of others in these comments didn’t actually say.
I wasn’t paying enough attention. Which part wasn’t said?
Fair I guess. It was really more a vibe from the comments in general than you specifically.
RIP good faith (-_-)
I know it’s fun to assume what other actual real people mean in the worst way in these comments, but like…. please don’t.
fun?
HA! I’d rather play video games XD
Welcome to the world of complicated and interconnected relationships where everyone is trying to get ahead. Or as they used to say, Welcome to the Jungle.
We got fun and games!
All systems are bad! Anarchy is the only freedom! Money shouldn’t exist! Everyone should do whatever they want with no consequences!
That’s what DoJo has taught me. Thank you girls for opening my eyes!
Well, I guess as long as you learned something.
The downside is that Amazi-Girl’s system is only good as long as the people with all the power are good and fair and don’t have biases of their own. You could easily see a good-intentioned dictator overreaching and doing things like banning recreational drug use (including cannabis, tobacco and alcohol), or instituting something like “parenthood licenses”, which though they do have good arguments for them at times, can be EASILY abused or used to target demographics the person in power doesn’t like.
I’m not even sure what Amazi-Girl’s system is supposed to be.
Find the person responsible for [problem] and punch them until change, or at least catharsis, is achieved.
Well, that’s one description, but that’s only half the system. The other half is to write fan/fic and avoid people while changing tiny bits of the world that you don’t like with leat computer skills. Both sides depend on being an extraordinary individual. It’s actually a pretty good system, but as I say, it doesn’t scale.
Her DID system, so Amazi-girl and Amber sharing the same body.
“The Joyce is GROUNDED. We installed this light switch so The Joyce could turn the lights on and off. Not so you could overthrow the carceral state. Now let’s go take that glow stick and pour into Paul’s Mountain Dew. I heard they have to pump your stomach or something…”
(sorrynotsorry that Strong Bad lives rent free in my brain 20 years after it was relevant)
Joyce is grounded grounded grounded grounded grounded grounded for one million years
Joyce furiously researching “Can I still have sex with my girlfriend if I’m grounded?”
That’s the best time to have sex with your girlfriend, because now it’s forbidden.
As soon as I read this I was like “Gasp STRONGBAD”?!
Joyce is half right. Her church is also bad because the church is also apart of the system.
Yeah before I read this, my comment was going to just be “Joyce has learned two things can be true at once.”
Welcome to the revolution, Comrade.
Maybe don’t go all Marxist-Leninist on us and we’ll be fine
Oh good, Dorothy is going from being a confidently centrist liberal to being a terminally online ‘leftist’. Can’t wait for her to add a hammer and sickle to her bluesky handle and start sanctimoniously lecturing everyone about voting for the Democrat/harm reduction while she pops up to vote for the DSA candidate every 4 years. #TheRevolutionStartsSomedayWhenSomeoneGetsAroundToIt
Hey, did you know there are more than two positions a person can take, politically speaking?
Her utterly botching a political awakening would actually be something I’d love to read.
Swift Wind: “I kicked open as many stall doors as I could…”
Conversely, Amazi-Girl doesn’t have a system and what she does do is one bad decision away from being a bad guy.
The joke was that Amazi-girl/Amber have DID and different personalities sharing the same host body are called a system.
I am astounded by how high over people’s heads this flew.
In my defense, while I’m aware of the other meaning(s), I was also referring to what I recall Willis admitting in a previous interview – that they’re sometimes torn between keeping the plot going in a reasonable (or comedically unreasonable) direction vs. succumbing to the cathartic impulse to have A-G just hit people Willis thinks need to be hit.
Folks on any fringe always have some inkling of the fact the world is messed up. The problem arises when they get fed the wrong solutions to the world’s ills…
The word “system” doesn’t even look like a real word to me anymore. It’s a nonsense letter-salad.
I can’t tell if this is supposed to be serious, sarcasm, or a reference to a lot of comments today.
(genuine ask)
I’m not actually sure how it could be sarcasm, but yeah serious and vaguely referencing the comments (in that a lot of comments had the word in them). I was just in a place where I read the word “system” so many times it stopped looking real.
be it “woke” or “Karen” or “system”, so often we find the (mostly white) internet just taking a word and running with it
ah well, wat ya gonna do 9-9
I don’t see how that’s what’s happening here, to be honest. The word is popping up specifically so much today because it’s the name of the comic, the subject of the comic, and the subject of the alt text.
In no way was I commenting on it like it was something other people were doing wrong, just making a comment about how words can get a little meaningless if you say them or see them over and over.
It’s called “semantic satiation”.
I made a post the other day where I actually had to stop and check Wiktionary to make sure “distance” was a real word before I hit Post.
ooo ty! It’s nice that there’s a word for it.
Like the system I develop. A true salad.
Yes the system is bad, but mainly for the exact opposite reasons that your church said! And also said church (well, people with the same philosophies of that church) are in charge of that system! All while claiming they’re fighting the system and that they’re the underdogs, somehow. Very straightforward stuff.
Oh man, if I had a nickel for every first year student who thought they were gonna change the world… It’d do me no good because that’s not legal tender here. But I’d definitely have a lot of them.
Still potentially useful though. If you combine them with potatoes, you can build a battery.
And it’s not like you can still buy something for a nickel here. Or at least not since Mike died.
You can also put them in a sock and start swinging
Time Skip: This is actually the Willisverse Dune timeline.
God Emperor Dorothy will unleash the Butlerian Jihad after accidentally posting about how she doesn’t approve of AI art.
Billions die.
Prescience locked her into the timeline!
I mean it only makes sense this is the direction the story would take
Then Dorothy creates twenty genetically modified superhuman Primarchs to lead her legion of enhanced warriors to unify the fractured human race against the Lords of Disorder. These Primarchs are based on her and Joyce’s DNA, but Joyce becomes afraid that Dorothy intends to turn their children into weapons. In response, Joyce launches the Primarchs into space through the Immaterium, scattering them and leaving Dorothy to search for her lost children as she begins her great unification campaign (since “crusade” has extremely negative connotations).
Dorothy’s most favored daughter, whom she named Amber, eventually betrays her, falling to Disorder and killing Dorothy’s most loyal daughter, Dina, who is part raptor and pterodactyl and has feathers. Dorothy is forced to kill Amber, but she is mortally wounded in the process and becomes confined to a reinforced aluminum chair, sustained by the psychic essence of one thousand individuals per day. Meanwhile, the atheist Empire she founded on truth and logic slowly rots and decays as she is worshipped as a god.
All roads lead to 40k
The Joyorothy Heresy begins.
You know, when I saw this strip I expected most of the political discussion under it to be insane. I feel like I’m used to people online (including in this comments section) being disproportionately system bad take it apart without engaging in any real way with tradeoffs or the inherent difficulties of organizing people (let alone societies). Instead it has been majority very reasonable people reckoning with how messy it is. Comment section award for being way way better than expected.
Probably because the truly bad ones get reproted out.
I am just going to say this. Social democracy, which some might call socialism lite, has from what i have seen has been the least harmful system practiced on the scale of a nation state. Given that post scarcity has not been achieved and market forces are still relevant in the production of resources, social democratic systems have done the most to restrain the worst impulses of capitalism. In my opinion, until true post scarcity is achieved and we become significantly less racist as a species, social democracy is probably the best system we are going to get.
It is also worth remembering that many nineteenth and early twentieth century utopian political philosophies assumed industrialization would create post scarcity. What they failed to anticipate were the devastating environmental consequences and the globalized expansion of capitalist exploitation.
This is simply my opinion, based on what I have observed and on various data sets related to governance, economics, and social wellbeing.
I m not saying its flawless beacuse it isn’t but i dont see us as species forming the UFP anytime soon.
Well, of course we’re not; we’d need to invent FTL and replicators first.
post scarcity is already possible; we have enough food and housing for everyone. it’s just not shared equally because it’s used for profit.
Bunch of Roz’s up here.
Nature started to heal, when Dorothy finally kissed Joyce