Unless you have the verbal flare to pronounce Dormitory to rhyme with Amber. In which case, you can probably pull it off by slurring the syllables together.
Kitchen Doc will patch you up tonight
Just lay on his kitchen island
Kitchen Doc will get you by tonight
Just a little stitch, and you’ll be smilin’
Oh, yeah
Do cops bring knives to protests? Like clubs and rubber bullets have that slight air of less than lethal optics that let cops justify their violence. A knife is just like yeah I’m killing. Just have the sniper start headshotting students at that point.
There was a theory going around that Amber/AG had run into Incelerator or some other chud bastard after the protest, and that was the cause of the injury. We’ll see in due time, I suspect.
Honestly? Do yourself (and your blood pressure) a favour and opt out. I can guarantee no one, myself included, will have any take that is worth upsetting yourself over.
I’m very upset my 10th grader has to read Anthem for ELA this year, but I’m against censorship so I don’t want to be as bad as the book banning parents. Still, once they start that one I am having at home discussions. The sophomore year class is about individualism and community and what our obligations are to society.
I mean sensitivity reading the curriculum aint censorship, it’s about social obligation to not condone bigotry posing as intellectualism
You’re not as bad as the book banning parents for this resentment, context is everything, you can’t just paint stuff like this over with oversimplified sentiments like “censorship bad” and “nothing should be off limits in the free marketplace of ideas”; that’s literally what internet nazis are counting on 👀
Nothing should be off limits in the free marketplace of ideas, but maybe wait until college before tossing all ideas, both enlightening and toxic, up against the wall to see what sticks. It’s part of the Dumbing of Age process.
Rand was about as far from being a “Nazi” as you can get. Any Nazis or Nazi-adjacent types who claim to admire her either never read a word she wrote or else completely failed to understand it. Many of her critics badly misunderstand, but it’s depressing just how many self-proclaimed fans do as well.
And once you put any subject off limits for discussion, those who have or seek power are going to try and turn it to their advantage. This isn’t hypothetical, just look at current efforts to brand any criticism of the Israeli government or support for Palestinians as antisemitism.
Rand was a rabid ”greed is good, cooperation and empathy are bad” right wing ideologue. She couldn’t live up to her own so called ideals at all, but it didn’t stop her from being a moderately successful pseudo-philosopher and B-grade Sci-Fi writer.
Any adult who worships at the altar of Ayn Rand marks themselves as not worth a grown-up discussion. They won’t be able to engage with it in good faith.
I have the displeasure of knowing person with a masters degree in philosophy, who wrote their thesis on her and still gulps her BS. He is a supremely self-centred and self obsessed individual, who would not be alive without a ton of ”socialist” medical and psychotherapy services. The irony is utterly lost on him.
Ayn Rand, at the end of her life, still took out Social Security. Despite saying throughout her life saying it should be abolished. Her entire ethos wasn’t “liberty” or “self-sufficiency” it was simply “fuck you, got mine.”
You can be anti-Israel’s right to exist without being antisemitic, just like you can be a white separatist without being a white supremist. But in neither case is that the way to bet. “From the mountains to the sea” is calling for the destruction of Israel. It is hate speech and should be treated as such.
Criticizing the government of Israel is fine. Being hypocritical about it is being hypocritical. If you are a citizen of the US, your government has done far worse. If the US had an equal proportion of it’s citizens murdered, raped and tortured, I think you would see just how restrained Israel is being in comparison.
I refer you to an incident where the US had a number of ships bombed. Two large Japanese cities filled with civilians, women and children, effectively disappeared from the face of the Earth. More recently, two building in the US and part of a third were destroyed and the face of the Middle East was changed forever while the US sent a military force into an allied country to assassinate the leader of those responsible. I don’t think you want to see what would happen if the US took the kind of hit that Israel did.
If you are actually concerned about the people in Gaza and not just hating on the Jews, for crying out loud make a donation to a reputable organization like the World Food Program as I have done; they have a ShareTheMeal app that makes it very easy. The food will take a round-about and less than ideal route to get there, but it will get there and help. Do something that will actually be effective, and while you’re at it, treat antisemitic racist crap the same way you would treat any other kind of racist crap.
There are definitely cases you could make for the US being worse than Israel – and not even just because the US operates on a bigger scale.
WWII is not one of those cases. Certainly not reduced to “we nuked to cities because we had a number of ships bombed”.
The other case is more reasonable. Some of us in fact wanted Israel to learn from our example and not over-retaliate the way we did after 9/11 because of how badly that went for everyone, including us.
I don’t think Clif was talking about “WWII”, I think they were very specifically talking about that time that we chose to drop nukes on two civilian population centers “to end the war” when we knew perfectly well that Japan was ready to surrender, and would have surrendered easily, had we just been willing to promise not to execute their emperor.
That part is not defensible. Nothing else that was going on makes it defensible. And it’s also not really arguable — we didn’t drop those bombs because we “had” to, we did it because the people involved wanted big impressive blast sites to show off the power of our new toys, and we were also eager to crush Japan specifically before Russia could get involved, because we didn’t want to owe them anything.
I’m not “reducing” America’s involvement in WWII to these two bombs, though our long reluctance to get involved and the part where our own eugenics movement was admired by Hitler and we literally had newspaper articles early in the war lamenting that the Germans were “beating us at our own game”, like, none of that is admirable either.
We like to think of ourselves as just the soldiers on D-day. We don’t so much like to remember any other part of America’s participation (or lack thereof).
And that is why I’m not complaining. (To Wizard’s comment). I want to try and trust the process, I just wish I could remember what book the teacher wants to replace A Clockwork Orange with.
The Ayn Rand Foundation does some pretty skeezy marketing to get her books into middle and high schools. Some English teachers don’t read all the material that they have their students read. (Not to mention those who like her crap.)
Arizona passed a law a couple of years back that all lesson plans have to be written to the day a year in advance. Even if I wasn’t disabled I don’t think I could handle teaching here anymore just because of that. The district is also pretty strict and each grade level teaches the same texts/projects (only one high school so maybe 2 or 3 English teachers for each grade?) I like and trust the teacher enough to hope it’s compared and contrasted to the other books.
My kid had to read a book I thought was pretty questionable in 8th grade (something PragerU-adjacent, as I recall, but I don’t remember the exact book) but it turned out it was part of the unit on propaganda and most of the pedagogy was pointing out the ways in which facts/statistics/etc were distorted and rhetoric was deployed in place of facts.
They’ll probably read the entire book, but then do a in depth critical analysis. The district is pretty good at balancing opinions and letting students gather their own ideas. The whole year is focused on community vs individuality and they’re reading The Hunger Games, too, but The Cheese knows enough people have misinterpreted those books.
I had 7th grade students post The Bee Movie script as answers to their ReadWorks assignments. When I scored them low they were very upset I actually read work they turned in, unlike other teachers.
Yeah, like. I’m not sure if there’s a minuscule part of her trying to find a minuscule thread of… justification, maybe, to understand why her dad was a piece of shit. Definitely it’s Amber self-flagellating, but I wonder if there’s a tiny add-on.
… But Blaine?? BLAINE getting a “start of darkness” fighting for other people?? That’s one hell of a reach to make. It’s really sad she heard “mob doctor” and that’s where her brain went but, what’s new 🙁
Yeah I think it’s fine to have Blaine start off as not quite that shitty shitbag who got involved with the mob, and only got worse the deeper he got. Better than just shitty all along, but commenters hate nuanced character
Fine if he got worse as he got deeper, but I’d still want him to start out shitty. Like if he was a lousy business man who borrowed from the mob to keep going, thinking he could pay it back and then wound up laundering money and stuff for them, that’s great.
I don’t think Blaine started out his mob connections needing a favor to help someone else
…I dunno Amber, even minus the comic book costume thing I find it difficult to believe that Blaine’s path to owing the mob favors started with “getting injured while trying to help a group of protesters evacuate”. He really didn’t seem like that kinda guy.
He honestly strikes me as the type to be so blatantly narcissistic as to think he was smarter than the entire mafia, and so saw taking assistance from them not as owing favors but as in “I can’t believe these idiots let me grift them time and again.”
I have zero evidence for this, but from what we know of him, it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. There are people that self-deluded as to think they are smarter than literally everyone. I know because I’ve met them. They’re insufferable. Which might mean I’m projecting personal experience onto the character (or lack thereof) of Blaine.
Asher does seem like the type who is ready to call in the favor when it is time. Though so far, based on his character, it seems like it would be for himself more than for the mob.
honestly i actually could see him calling it in to help someone else entirely, like gets sal to help him get a cousin or mom out of the mob so they can attend his and ethan’s wedding. or he witnesses a person of lesser means in medical distress and gets sal to taje them to mob doctor on her bike so as to get them treatment, fully completing his redemption arc a la Zechs in Gundam W endless waltz (i’ve been playling the SD gundam mobile game, and am addicted)
I think after yesterday’s comic I’ve realized why the comment section gets so heated.
There’s a lotta mean people here. Like I dunno how else to put it. People are just not kind to one another. It’s not so much an exchange of ideas so much as it’s a game where there are “winners” and “losers”. And I think a lotta people don’t realize how antagonistic/condescending they come off. I think a lotta that behavior has been kinda normalized so it’s hard to be objective about this sorta thing.
The DoA comments have definitely gotten a lot more toxic lately. I try to avoid arguments, but when people come in here posting comments mocking others for being against cheating, or trying to imply that anyone who disagrees with them is some sort of bigot, I find it hard to resist replying to them.
I don’t think anyone is against you having an opinion about ‘cheating’, nor about you expressing it. But repeatedly expressing it is kinda tedious. And by ‘you’ i mean all the people who keep repeating their opinion. There are now several people whose name means I don’t read their comments…
I feel the same way about many of the people who are fine with the cheating, or even gleefully cheering it on. And there are definitely several people who, partly because of their opinions on this issue, I try to avoid replying to their comments when I see their names.
I feel as though saying people are “fine with cheating” because they’re enjoying it in a comic might be part of the problem here. That’s like saying someone’s fine with murder because they enjoyed watching Pulp Fiction. The relationship drama, seeing characters interact in fresh new ways, grappling with the taboo of homoeroticism, these are all things we can enjoy in media as part of storytelling without it reflecting on what we’re like in our day to day lives.
I suspect, in retrospect, that the “fine with cheating (in the comic, for dramatic purposes)” equivalence “fine with cheating (in general)” at least partially comes from a conflation of some long, occasionally-heated arguments about what precisely the boundaries of “cheating” even were — some folks were making real-life arguments of the form “a kiss isn’t cheating” and “it’s not cheating until your partner disapproves” (both, circumstantially, reasonable) and that might have got conflated in.
There are for sure some gleeful contrarians at this point who are pretending to be fine with cheating IRL, and tone is hard online, so even though I think the trolling is obvious, I’d understand if someone missed it.
The other thing sucks! But I do think the context that some folks have also said, “If you don’t think this is cheating, you’re a freak,” is important.
There’s a lot of mud slinging going on all over the place.
I don’t even object to the ‘fine with cheating” camp (I don’t agree with them, but I’m willing to either discuss it reasonably or just agree to disagree, as the individuals prefer)–until some of them start, without being VERY precise and targeted, declaring that the only reason people are objecting to cheating is because it’s a gay couple cheating on their straight beaus. (“precise and targeted” is necessary here, because when it’s just a general comment, with no reference to the specific post or poster displaying such an attitude, it immediately comes off as a universal attack against anyone who is not thrilled with the characters cheating).
I do get that. I’ve definitely held my tongue about stuff that’s bothered me about this comic before because I didn’t think it would be worthwhile to litigate in the comment section. Nobody needs me complaining about the supervillain stuff in a comic that’s had a superhero in it since the first chapter.
But at the same time you can’t expect people to not want to share their opinions about an ongoing tension about the main character. This isn’t a comic where threads get introduced and then conclusively resolved in a single strip
idk, I genuinely think that was a self-report by him, and by anyone who swears by it. If being anonymous on the internet “makes” you an asshole, the only thing holding you back in real life is consequences.
Heh. Let me reply to myself to clarify more kindly!
— I do think that it’s possible to get caught up in the performative aspect of social media, and there’s a line between “snappy comeback” and “asshole” that can get blurry.
— I also think that it’s easier to depersonalize online. You see an anime avatar with a bad political take on Twitter, it’s easy to just kind of simplify it down so that anything you say to the avatar is a response to the political ideology expressed, and NOT a response to an actual human being. Which isn’t advocating being kinder to Nazis or whatever, so much as remembering that what you say is going to wind up in a real person’s notifications.
— Modern social media has done a real number on all of us. It’s so easy for the algorithm or a series of reblogs to serve up what is essentially someone else’s shower thought or a snippet of their diary, cropped out of context, and to mistake that for a thought they intended to offer up for wide public consumption.
It looks like a metaphor intended to be a political statement from an adult to you. It was actually some fourteen-year-old reflecting on something that literally happened to her, and it’s not her fault it went mega viral. Your critique of her word choice is weird, actually!
…….so yeah, those are all ways I do think the internet can lead us to be jerks.
I think Gabe of Penny Arcade is just a natural fuckwad, tho.
Heck yeah, don’t they know that debate is supposed to be like Bakugan? I mean BeyBlade? Come on! These people are savages. (To be honest, while I was never into it, I think BeyBlades were pretty rad idea for a toy line).
I have never played Stardew Valley, but I think I am picking up what you’re putting down: Debate is about synchronizing ideas, sharing and compiling knowledge, and bettering those involved rather than winning. Our society suffers, in part, because we have ceased to think about debate as it was used by Socrates (or at least as it was used as a literary device in the works of Plato) and started to think about debate in terms of judged High School Debate teams and the petulant, self-aggrandizing circuses our presidential candidates put on. It is no longer about having the patience and humility to guide another betterment by helping them confront themselves, instead it is about confronting others to prove one’s self their better and bathe in the vain victory through self-righteous displays of dancing logic and oratory. Did I understand you meaning correctly? Did I sufficiently dazzle you with my needless and vain displays of self-aggrandizing literary flamboyance? Would you recommend Stardew Valley – I know you have mentioned it some before?
Also I brought up StarDew valley because farming IRL is a collaborative effort from a bunch of people working towards a productive goal
I never actually played StarDew valley but it sure seems popular, I’m more into Don’t Starve personally, but the challenge aint quite everyone’s cup of tea XD
Part of the problem is that there’s not really any truth to be had for some of the most contentious debates (lately, for example, if you strip away the angry and the trollish, the big debate is fundamentally “Cheating in a storyline does/doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the storyline” and “my ship should be the thing happening”) so it’s not like there’s any objective thing to reach for.
There might well be some underlying truth to be discovered in “the actions you support fictional characters taking do/do not say something about you as a person”, but I can’t imagine it being found on a comic message board.
No no no, debate is like Yu-Gi-Oh!, specifically the Duelist Kingdom arc, where the rules were often vague and you could kinda just do whatever and still win.
honestly want to jumb in with Medabots as whet it should be, but really Digimon is a better example for cooperating towards a goal, see also the monster rancher anime.
but GUNDAM MOTHERFUCKING WING, (yeah it could be said in EW that Wufei and Char swap roles and sides) the series itself, you get all kinds of the meaty grey areas of friendship and ideals and cooperation and uniting towards truth and a peaceful future. and Duo Maxwell forever!
I think part of the issue is fandom arguing is taken as personal by many people while others just enjoy arguing as a fun pastime. It’s an irreconcilable take on the subject you can’t know the feelings of via text.
Oof, think I see myself in this comment and I don’t like it. Definitely never the intent when writing the post, but it does end up that way sometimes by mistake.
I never intend it either… and, unfortunately, can’t really tell whether my comments ended up seeming that way. This’s why I often limit myself to just posting links to strips people have mentioned, but sometimes I attempt jokes, with mixed success.
To add to that: my post yesterday about speculation on Danny and Walky possibly being trans started out as my being interested in how people might take the idea, but ended up probably ruining the possible fun by being overly wordy. Sorry.
Maybe I should hire an editor to check over my comments.
Aww I really liked your post about Danny and Walky potentially being trans yesterday. Also, having seen and written some MUCH longer posts than that, I promise no one was bothered by how many words you used.
Certainly not to the point you should apologize for it.
I think no one responded because it was good on its own and didn’t really need engagement with in a meaty way. I’m sure plenty of people (like me) read it, smiled, and went on about their day.
I’ve noticed the trend too (and occasionally get dragged into it), but I haven’t found many places to talk about this comic that are much different. External chat spots tend to have the “Ha ha, Willis can’t block me for shit-talking him, neener neener!” undertone and honestly less focus on positivity that’s not “Man, this used to be so good, I wish it’d be good like this part I liked.” On this site at least, you get a mix of things that’s more balanced.
Yeah, god, I joined the discord once and it’s just fucking vicious. I’ve never understood reading something that makes you venomously mad. Anything I hate-read is something that makes me laugh because it’s awful, not something that makes me rip every little piece of it apart and talk shit about people who like it.
Frankly this has been my experience every time I’ve joined a niche fandom discord. The culture of “closed community for topic” just really seems to skew towards spleen venting and #critical posting.
That’s why I’ve ended up deleting every social media and most forum accounts I’ve had. I’ve come to realize that not only is the format of those sites very conducive to this sort of thing, especially ‘microblogging’ like mastodon and bluesky, but I also seek it out for the thrill of getting in an argument.
The comment section of this comic is very similar in spirit, although the format is much more restrictive. So, for me, engaging with this comment section is almost like a restricted version of a self-destructive behavior. Like only drinking on weekends.
The reason? I guess I like arguing, but I don’t like starting petty bullshit with people I actually know and have a real relationship with.
I have a theory: people are just trying to cope.
The themes are hard stuff we all have difficult to deal (cheating, police violence, Bulmeria). I think a comment board could serve as a cheap therapy.
It annoys me, too, but I’m learning to focus in read and follow only nice people and good content, like yours.
okay sorry once again for the off topic post but this really needs to be said in light of Willis’ recent efforts
RE: “SO as i open up Asma narratively, uh, I am quickly going to hit the wall of “oh jeez am I allowed to depict her without her hijab within her own dorm room and other female-only spaces, is that okay, would she be mad at me”
“I GET that [Willis] doesn’t want to learn the hard way after the fact, but my honest answer to that would be, maybe make an effort to knowing more Muslim people and show interest in their community FIRST, and THEN represent what you learn from that on your strip, instead of just asking on the internet so you can do A Representation without actually having any interest in the community.”
Is that gonna be a lot more work? Of course.
But OH WELL I guess.
Let’s face it, progressive causes are ALWAYS at this natural disadvantage to conservative ones, it’s a big reason our entire country is in this giant mess, really.
In the end, it will always take a relatively large amount of time and effort to be factually and morally right, for the sake of social progress and a more equitable society.
By contrast, it will always take a relatively small amount of time and effort to remain wrong, but nonetheless be satiated with quick answers and quippy rhetoric which FEELS as though it’s correct and easily absolves guilt regardless of what’s actually true and morally right.
that’s… a pretty shitty simplification of what NGPZ (or, by proxy, their friend) has been talking about, but sure. like I don’t know if you bothered reading their whole post but your quippy retort reads very strange place under the comment(s) talking about like, a pretty complex issues & someone’s personal relationship to that
I’m not disagreeing with the poster. I’m saying that it is a complex and hard issue but we should also not be harsh on people who are making an effort as well. It’s not meant to be “quippy.”
My apologies for not having that more clear.
Also, I take the subject of researching respectful portrayal very seriously. Shitposting is not something that should be used to dismiss my sincere statement.
Indeed they were. What I posted was a gross simplification, but was still at the core of what they posted.
Look, I think you can want to know enough to not be a jerk, without wanting to commit to making a career out of it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Willis may want to commit to making an extensive and sensitive cultural study, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.
See, that’s a much better comment than your quip! I still don’t agree, but it’s at least an argument worth engaging with rather than something to sort of squint at because the tone sounds off to me.
“I appreciate that he’s trying, I just think he’s trying from the wrong angle — ya can’t throw a question like that into the corporate internet landscape or social media ether and just hope for a good answer! In the end that’s basically an atheist praying for a quick answer, and ultimately, an optimization to a chore about mitigating guilt.
Actually interact with us and our culture first, THEN represent it.
I mean, I’m kind of fine with his effort in the sense that you can’t cover EVERYTHING in depth, it’d end up a mess, or if you do try to cover everything you’re probably end up glossing over most of it.
And this webcomic, as much as some part of it is also kind of an ensemble cast work thing it is still ultimately about Joyce. Disappointing? Yes, but also, I get that’s not really the point of the comic.
Of course that does bring the question of “well then what’s the point of mentioning it”.
But he *technically* did not; because Bulmeria isn’t real LMAO”
C.T. Phipps – I don’t think any apologies are called for or needed. I’m not really sure what you would apologize for.
NGPZ – There seems to be a couple of assumptions in what you’ve written, and maybe I’m not understanding them. But what I am hearing is that Willis should feel guilty about not providing more representation of Muslim characters and should not provide representation of any cultural group, particular Muslims, without significantly interacting with and studying that group first and that asking for help with it on the Internet is a bad thing because it’s just optimizing a chore. Obviously you said other quite reasonable things as well, but that’s the set things that taken together sets my teeth a little bit on edge.
he shouldn’t feel guilty about it, hell what we sayin is the opposite? — or rather
that he lapsing back into old white Christian habits which are making him frame the problem as though assuaging guilt is the priority / goal, without even meaning to, without realizing this is a problem (a lotta white people tend to do this if only because our society founded by white colonists is based on a confessional model)
The goal should be to encourage interaction across cultural boundaries for the sake of a better society — if you show that you can just skip over that step and still make good representation, that’s basically showing that you can be a good ally without actually, you know, being a good ally, and ultimately defeats the purpose of representation in the first place.
And the very point is that it SHOULDN’T feel like a chore where you study a book or some shit to make a slideshow to impress other white folk or some shit, but enriching as you make friends from lots of other cultures and walks of life
like
Muslim or not, it ain’t fucking hard to have a diverse set of friends on the internet???
I literally met Lur (whose Hibaji Muslim and also autistic) right here in the comments section because she’s also a Dumbing of Age fan and shared an interest in making fan games because she also a musician, we share a lot of interests in common and I really appreciate our friendship.
the internet has GREAT potential as a multicultural frontier, it’s just in paying attention to how we use it for this sake which can make an important difference in all of our lives
yeah I was replying to Clif rather than you. fwiw I mostly agree with you though I think it’s still somewhat misplaced under that comment. Sometimes getting feedback feels bad! And sometimes you just have to sit with that & think on it.
It’s an issue close to me because I knew very little outside of my own fundamentalist world that research really opened my eyes on but it wasn’t until meeting actual people that I learned a lot of what I did. I feel like online communities can treat questions really hostily and I believe its important to welcome them–even if its not anyone’s responsibility to help people on their journey. It’s nice when they do.
It’s going to be a lot more work and it basically means putting adding more Muslim representation to the strip is going to be on hold while that work is being done, which has its own problems.
Better and more honest than representing something you know jack about!
Like Charles Schulz was more than happy to create Franklin in response to feedback from one of his black readers, but was also up and front about the fact that he knew basically nothing about black culture and thus wasn’t sure what he was gonna do with the character.
But to his credit, when papers in the South begged him to remove Franklin to not “offend” their readers, he said “either keep it the way I wrote it, or you don’t get to print it at all.” Honestly, the writers who are trying to add representation but do so imperfectly are better than those who just never include other demographics at all, right?
But at the same time, why does the bar have to be set there?
However well you mean, that’s still making the issue about how good white people are about it, the point is that people of color should be the ones getting to decide how they are represented in our media.
Also unlike Charles Shultz’s time, we live in the day and age of the internet, a multicultural frontier greater than ever, so what’s really stopping someone like Willis (or any other white comic creator) from interacting with the culture before representing it in his strip?
Lur had the answer to this to:
“Like get to the root of the problem. A Muslim Arab friend of mine once tweeted that in the age of internet, living somewhere with a predominantly white Christian population is no excuse for not having non-white or Muslim (or other belief systems) friends.
If you still somehow have no muslim friends? (muslim/non-white/etc.), then usually what that says about you is that you probably haven’t made an effort to be a safe person for them. There’s a LOT of people on the internet, odds that you haven’t engaged with any of them are rare, if you haven’t made any Muslim friends over the internet, well either you subconsciously avoid them or they consciously avoid you.”
(Sobering reminder of why it’s for the best to just NOT argue with bigoted white dudes on the internet.) 👀
All I meant is the old phrase “perfect is the enemy of good.” Yes, folks are going to screw it up. No one is going to pretend that Tonto (from the original black and white Lone Ranger, lord knows I ain’t praising Johnny Depp) was a particularly nuanced interpretation of the First Nations experience but hey, he was an actual member of that community… that’s a hell of a lot better than casting Rob Schneider (or again, Johnny Depp) in red-face.
Yes, the bar should be higher, yes; in an ideal world folks wouldn’t have to settle for crumbs… but I’d rather have crumbs (crumbs that have been slowly getting more substantial) than what we used to have, which was corpos pretending everyone was WASP rather than risk bad publicity.
Just because we still have further to go does not mean we can’t celebrate what progress we have made. If anything, it’s important to remember that progress has and can be made, even in my short lifetime, so that people do not lose hope that change is even possible.
Would I like for my Muslim friends to get more and better representation? Absolutely, but at least folks are trying. It is my opinion that it is better to encourage those who are making a genuine effort rather than lambast them for missteps. It all just stinks to me of the infuriating tendency of progressives to cannibalize their own.
At no point has Willis or anything they wrote ever given me cause to believe they are malicious or a bad actor or against the demographic in question. I’ve seen what that looks like. How’s the saying go? Better an imperfect friend than a deadly enemy?
At least empathetic and humanizing examples of representation, however inexpertly applied, will serve as pushback of the negative stereotypes and cliches.
Just my thoughts. You are of course free to take ’em or leave ’em, just thought I’d throw my two cents in, however much that’s worth…
You really think I and Lur are lambasting Willis here???
Did you even read what they said???
Nobody here is calling Willis a bad actor, as much as he is anti-racist, he is still an ex-fundie white dude and that continues to inform a lot about how he interacts with the world at large,
I mean… that’s how it read to me at first blush, but I’m open to the possibility that I misread what was written. A lot of tone and subtlety present in verbal communication definitely gets lost when transferred to written. Wouldn’t be the first time I completely misread the vibe of someone’s writing… hell, I misread the vibes of speech sometimes too.
So maybe it was just a miscommunication. If that’s the case, then mea culpa.
like this isn’t “progressives cannabilizing their own” or whatever you call it
it’s white authors being made aware that they have privilege, that the stakes of getting our representation right are much lower for them
in the end, white/cis/het/normie/default settings folk should not really be the ones who get to set the bar on whether any given representation of us is “good enough” — otherwise that literally defaults the purpose of doing it in the first place
like there’s nothing stopping the “”Bulmeria”” conflict from coming back up again in the story with characters affected by the conflict overseas going in-depth if Willis so chooses, of course preferably when Willis is more informed on it,
as disappointing as it is for have missed an opportunity with the recent protest storyline proper being over, that doesn’t disappear people being affected by the genocide overseas, and does not cease to be relevant anymore than queer people have to become irrelevant outside of pride month
and yeah at the same time he has to juggle a bunch of other plates in a romcom story, and if that, a romcom story that’s ultimately about an ex-fundie girl living in the United States
all in all, here’s my take on what was going through his mind:
He noticed that there was a lack of things which a comic featuring freshmen University students in the modern day outta have, and at the time thought that featuring something vaguely referencing the Palestine Protests at IU was as straightforward way to make it more relevant to an intended audience.
His intentions were good but still screwed it up when trying to balance a blooming romance with a very serious issue but wound up trivializing the issue in the setting without even meaning to.
There ain’t no ill will, but this is still frustrating to people like me with friends and family who are affected by the conflict overseas.
Whether it comes back up again in the comic or not, in any case we just wanna help Willis learn from his mistakes.
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
She had it from the start… of this day’s storyline, anyway. She (or AG, rather) probably had it stashed somewhere prior to beginning the previous day’s activities.
I know that Sal is doing very well with Danny and I don’t want that to end, but there’s so much messy yuri in this strip lately that I almost expect these two to kiss soon
Look, I’ve been wanting them to kiss for about 10 years at the very least. You’re not off base, I just know it’ll happen sometime in the future. Maybe the far future but the future
If Sal’s going to be kissing any girl in this comic, that girl had better beMarcie. (…who hasn’t been seen at all in this comic for over a year now, and who hasn’t been actively involved in a storyline for over six years now. This must be corrected, and the sooner the better.) Anyway, I guess it would depend on how into Malaya Marcie still is, but I would guess that she’d drop Malaya like a hot potato if a genuine chance with Sal ever came up.
Yeah, that’s true. I read it in a tongue in cheek shipper way but it definitely can also give similar vibes as those ‘Becky has dibs on bi Joyce’ kinds of comments.
Wait, there are people who thinks Becky has “dibs?” Putting aside the fact that I doubt Becky sees it that way, just… ew, gross. This is coming from someone who is an absolute sucker for the “childhood friends” trope, but I’ve never looked at it in a “dibs” kinda way. The fact that some people look it that way is very unsettling.
Yes, many, but I’m not sure how many of them were sincerely of the mind that Becky had dibs.
I’m sure at least some of these comments are just people feeling bad for Becky and not thinking through the implications of “dibs”.
I also suspect that a not-insignificant portion of the comments weren’t even really concerned about Becky, and were actually trying to use her imagined hurt feelings as a bit of a cudgel — either to convince themselves that Becky’s existence was proof that Joyce can’t be bi, or in an effort to kinda… logic them out of shipping Joyce with girls.
“Come on, you don’t want Becky to be sad, do you?” sort of a vibe, in the most generous interpretation (where it’s not a deliberate guilt-trip, heh).
*kinda… logic other commenters out of shipping Joyce with girls.
(Btw, this sort of appeal to logic will never work. Very few people actually operate with a mental spreadsheet to determine which ships are the most rational. Mostly what we do is rationalize our ships after the fact.
Which isn’t something to feel guilty about! Rationalizing ships is fun! Digging in to a canon to mine it for evidence is fun! It’s just not how 95% of people start shipping. 95% of us pick up on or imagine a chemistry that we find appealing and go from there.)
Yeah, my only criteria for championing a ship is basically “do I they’d be cute together?” and “can I see their current relationship blossoming into something romantic*, assuming there aren’t signs of it doing so already.”
*I try to avoid the terminology “something more” because I feel like that language implies that platonic friendship is some kind of silver medal or not as valuable. Friendship is also love, not better or worse, just different.
Good comment, well-said. I especially like the second paragraph. 🙂
Also, while it’s not how I do it, shout out to people who’re like “those two will get on like a house on fire (derogatory)” and ship it gleefully. “Character X would make Character Y so much worse” is absolutely a valid shipping dynamic.
Hmm, that reminds me. Amazi-Girl may already be on the mob’s radar AND they know her secret identity. Blaine told the dirty cop right before the cop offed him.
I’m reminded of the Tropico series of games; they’re about being a dictator in a banana republic, with things like assassinations and electoral fraud being readily available tools, and large-scale embezzlement is one of the major goals of the game.
Yet they also have government funded universal healthcare and education, because these things just make your struggling economy work better.
Eventually, currently I’d guess it’s subpar stitches. Not intentionally, I’m sure there is room in the mob for people who appreciate a good cop-face-kicker.
I somehow got the impression that it was being held together with super glue and not stitches. Goes back up to see if there is obvious stitching. Damn you lack of infinite resolution.
I love the lighting on this strip! The sunrise looks so pretty!
We don’t often get Amber feeling reflective so this is interesting to see her exploring her feelings on this. This could indeed be a big shoe that can drop later.
I had a little bit of an insight yesterday regarding some differing perceptions of the comment section.
Li, in the course of one of the threads about overt homophobia in the comments, mentioned a username (SailorCakes) that I have never seen.
This leads me to wonder how much of a given individual’s perception of the homophobia or hostility in the comments is tied to “when they typically read/post” vs. “when Willis et al. typically nuke particularly bad comments” — I had been thinking I haven’t seen any overt homophobia here in a while… but specifically, that correlates pretty well with my work meeting schedule shifting a bit such that I now read here at a much different time of day.
That’s an interesting line of thought. I hadn’t considered that angle before. Honestly, it sounds more pleasant to hang out after most of the worst crap has been deleted. Less mile-long threads of “I am being attacked for saying I’m being attacked for saying I was being attacked for saying I didn’t say I said you said I attacked me”, at least.
It ALMOST makes me want some kind of “Thread/Post Deleted” marker in the threads so that people can get a sense that they missed something, although Reddit has shown us that often leads to a different kind of weird behavior.
Wow, this comment feels like I’m being attacked for saying “I am being attacked for saying I’m being attacked for saying I was being attacked for saying I didn’t say I said you said I attacked me”.
I think an evil clown in a regular circus might be a little too obvious, if that makes sense. Like “Wow, I expected to have fun and I got fed to the Vore Demon by Cracko the Clown. Never seen that one before.”
A regular clown in an evil circus is a lot more fun, to me. I could still be mischievous and mislead the protagonist in some ways, but I could also subtly help them in other ways, all while being charismatic and off-kilter.
I asked for examples of people being called homophobic for no reason, though as I asked, I thought it might be a mistake for me to be the one asking specifically of Derek.
(Second link is not to her link of the website, I think THAT comment must have been deleted, probably for…… linking to that website. Instead it’s to one of the threads where she and Taffy talk about her link and she makes up weird lies to defend why she thought it was a legit source, eventually landing on “I found it when I did a google search on an old work computer”. For the unaware, mask-off “””alt-right””” websites don’t come up in Google results unless you search for that kind of content a LOOOT.)
Huh, and now I’m wondering when I would have been looking at this that I glazed over SailorCakes posts entirely, because I swear I’d remember that avatar but I’m also commenting on some of those comics (but not in those threads).
(although I notice also that SailorCakes is mostly interacting with posters that I try not to — notably, Taffy, who I’m sure is a fine person but who posts in such a way that I often read their tone and intended hostility level as wildly different than probably intended)
Taffy is acerbic and sarcastic. They’re also actually a kind person imho, but I get why the communication style rubs some people the wrong way.
It doesn’t help that there’s a fair few commenters who have decided they’re the biggest jerk in the comments, which results in some returned energy on both sides.
My issue with Taffy is mostly that sometimes they seem chill snd then suddenly can become incredibly hostile and i have no idea what would trigger it. So i don’t like that felling of having to walk on eggshells around someone so i just stopped interacting with them altogether.
See, without specific examples, and not being Taffy myself, though perhaps we’re all Willis’s sock puppets who can say for sure — I will still go out on a limb and say most of that is jokes.
What I can think of that I don’t think was a joke is almost always returning energy (which might sometimes involve Taffy misjudging the energy of what they’re responding to — I’ve seen them say as much and apologize at least once), or else having a really bad day (which I’ve also seen them cop to a couple of times).
Like I’m not saying they’re an innocent lil lamb, no one here is, we all seem to be adults and responsibility for what we say to other posters stops with us! But I kind of think a lot of Taffy’s aura comes from their tendency to employ hyperbole, their specific sense of humor, and their high visibility, not only bc they’re one of the more prolific commenters but because they’ve got a unique profile pic and a unique “voice”.
So I think when they’re having a bad day, people see it and remember. When they make a joke that doesn’t land, people see it and remember.
I stand out enough already for being so long-winded, heh. If I had a unique avatar, I’m sure more people would have stronger opinions on me as a poster, and not all of them would be flattering.
Ironically, and I hope you don’t take offense to this, I perceive you as exactly the same way — there have been a few occasions in the last month where I perceive you as tossing off a one-liner that’s WAY more hostile than the situation seems to warrant.
Yeah in the times i mesn they weren’t jojes, or if they were they very much didn’t fell like it. One specific time they called me “not a person” among other things. It is hard for me to fuve the benefit of the doubt after that
Msybe it is just that i don’t get their “style” or whatever it is, but at the end of the fay i still left a good chunk of interaction woth them felling awful, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference to me.
Ok. Accept that apology. I also offer an apology if anything i have said provoque you.Still i rather we don’t interact if possible, i don’t think we bring out good things from ecah ither.
TBH, it’s a little weird how often my name comes up as a topic of discussion lately. I’m used to being That One Person With The Funny Changing Icon™, not the subject of a conspiracy meme and A Person To Avoid.
I’m gonna take it as a sign to pump the brakes and cool off, maybe read some comments a second time assuming their tone is kinder than it seems, before I go quipping through a mouthful of potato chips about it. Couldn’t hurt, right?
Avatar-wise, my hands moved on their own. It’s already a fairly gay panel in isolation, all it needed was a slight change to fulfill the prophecy and keep The One Below from rising.
Something I should do too. Frankly something we should ALL be doing more of, it would make a huge difference in the general meanness of the comment section.
Yeah, I wanna be absolutely clear that this is purely a perceptual thing on my end, as far as I can tell you’re on the snarky end of fine when I stop and objectively re-read.
She’s prolific but contained. She tends to only pop into one thread at a time, where she’ll then comment like 30 times, heh, but it’s easy to just not see that part of the page.
There was nothing deleted here, so when she says that “everyone” is “attacking” her for her opinions, know that she’s talking about a thread where she and one (1) other person took turns attacking each other. I wouldn’t call all or Annarchy’s responses to her polite or anything, I just think it’s a conversation that devolved equally on both sides, and definitely not harassment in any way.
* Also at one point she makes a nasty jab about how this comment section is why [famous unrelated suicide happened], so. Just something to be aware of before you click.
And I will point out that comments with in that thread that spawned other things did get deleted, so there are still worse things said that didn’t make it past the mods.
Yeaahhh, if you’ve never seen that particular DELIGHTFUL (heavy sarcasm) commenter or their ilk, I can imagine it looks like some of us are wildly overstating how rough the comment section can be.
On days where I come by late (because work/family/or I just didn’t remember this place existed) I assume there have been bad threads I missed. Especially if people are heated about it. But I only assume that because I’ve been here early a bunch of times and seen the shit that ends up deleted, and some of that is seriously gross and upsetting.
Yep. I’m in UTC -5, my main body of work meetings used to start at 10am, so I was reading right after midnight until maybe 2AM.
Now my work meetings start at 8AM, and I start here at either 7:30AM or 9AM depending.
And since there’s no visibility into moderation action aside from seeing a thread disappear after a refresh, I kinda got suckered into the unexamined belief that the comment section was getting less horrible (as opposed to more aggressively policed) — granted, this opinion also was informed by a significant portion of the “post all day” folks dialing some of the argument intensity back, which is a good thing.
it’s always an interesting experience to be told a place has a huge problem with some shit you’ve never seen because you’re not about at that specific time
and then sometimes you have to be like “damn I’m not advocating for the return of slavery I really do like cupcakes, I didn’t know there was a faction of racist cupcake likers here” or some shit (this is an example unrelated to this website)
the transience of experience can be pretty profound but it can also be really really fucking stupid
She’s definitely not the only one but she is a stand-out. It helps that she’s got a very recognizable Sailor Moon avatar. And yeah, her threads do keep getting deleted.
I know it’s not how the report function works, but I do wish we had like, This comment/thread was removed for homophobia/racism/whatever, just because I do think it would help with a shared sense of reality.
If you’ve legit never seen people like her, it must REALLY feel like the comments about lesbophobia etc are projecting.
I think there’s also some bleed, i.e. when all someone says is “aw!” but you’re used to that comment being accompanied by some gross comment about cheating, or when all someone says is “ugh”, but you’re used to that comment being accompanied by whatever gross sentiment about Joyce’s sexuality. It can start feeling like a more neutral comment has a tone. Dog whistles we may or may not be imagining.
(I really tried to phrase that neutrally bc I genuinely think we’re all doing it.)
There’s definitely bleed, but at least that can usually be talked out — I’ve had it happen twice where I got into an argument where I wasn’t sure WHY I was being argued with until I either realized or had it pointed out that my interlocutors were more engaging with “the jerks who hold superficially similar positions” and as I’m admittedly the kind of person who will toss off some less-than-carefully-phrased stuff when I’m just casually posting…
Not only does it seem like the “other side” is reacting to posts that don’t exist (either because they’ve been deleted or because they’re just buried in comment landslides we’ve missed), they’re also visibly overreacting to some of the posts that do exist… and all of this is before you get to regular ole confirmation bias!
It’s easy to wind up feeling like “man those people are so unreasonable”.
Yeah, my sleep schedule has shifted such that I am no longer awake when this comic is posted and I’ve been less engaged with the comments as a result. Much easier to miss discourse if you’re skimming the thread in the late morning than it is if you’re participating as soon as the strip’s posted
Okay, just a quick PSA. Yes this is based on something specific. Don’t wanna put em on blast but I’m not making up a guy to get mad at:
I do not care how much you don’t like the cheating. That’s fine. If you really wanna believe that it’s being excused by more people because it’s a wlw couple — I encourage you to go back and read the Jacob/Joyce arc because we had a very similar divide back then in terms of supporters and decries, despite everyone involved being straight. I think Dorothy/Joyce has more long-term shippers because their dynamic has been a part of the comic for a long time and has read as potentially queer for 15+ years, so we’ve been waiting for our flowers for longer than Jacob/Joyce shippers and had more time to build up excitement.
But if you wanna believe it’s getting more of a pass for being gay rather than for just having more shippers — fine, I guess I can’t stop you.
I am however begging you not to say “it feels fetishizing”.
First of all because you will embarrass yourself. I promise you the overwhelming majority of people who ship the girls are ourselves queer. (Which is not the same as saying no one who’s against the ship or against the cheating is queer, that’s a weird thing that keeps getting tossed out! Stop saying that, it’s not true.)
Second of all, because “aw they’re so cute” isn’t fetishizing, no matter who says it. Because “oo Slipshine when” about fictional characters isn’t fetishizing, no matter who says it.
It wasn’t fetishizing when Joe/Joyce shippers wanted a Slipshine, it’s not magically fetishizing now because it’s gay, stop it.
Li mentioned the Jacob/Joyce Arc and it reminds me: Joyce is such a cheater omg. Why is Dorothy getting so much hate on reddit and tumblr when Joyce is the one who keeps encouraging cheating?
(I don’t care about characters cheating, they’re not real. It’s just odd to me)
As I understand it, the reasoning is that Joyce experiences consequences and should have learned her lesson last time.
I think that’s taking a rosy view of the arc itself, which actually ended on this note.
Like, yes, Jacob didn’t get together with Joyce, and their friendship scaled back significantly, but the next time Joyce saw him, he wasn’t even cold to her or anything.
Joe basically took it as the exact opposite, really, and I wonder if Jacob will say anything about it turning out to be different from inside the situation after all?
Like on the one hand, Jacob genuinely has no room to talk here: Joyce didn’t cheat WITH Joe, she cheated ON him, it’s a completely different experience.
On the other hand, Joe was SO dismissive of Jacob’s disappointment and discomfort, I’m sure that at least internally, some small part of Jacob’s brain will be like, “is she perfect yet?”
(And then he’ll probably crush it, because he’s a good guy and he won’t want to ACTUALLY make Joe feel worse!)
Ah, the previous Joyce cheating episode, which IMHO differs on the following semi-salient points:
– people tend to perceive “emotional” cheating as less significant than “physical” (I don’t really agree with this here)
– no one likes Raidah and anything that takes her down a peg is going to register on most people as “yeah, that’s okay” (kinda agree here)
– at the time of the arc ending, Joyce WAS experiencing consequences in terms of Jacob being unhappy about it (and I’m kinda annoyed he wasn’t cold to her or anything, to be frank, but I wasn’t commenting much then).
– the narrative never framed this as anything other than what it was (Joyce trying to get Jacob away from Raidah) — there were no unambiguously cute moments for the Joyce x Jacob shippers.
That all said, I think the actual answer to Mym’s question is that for whatever reasons, people like Joyce better than Dorothy. (Personally, I’m irritated at Joyce because I HAD been identifying with both her and Joe’s growth arcs, and now she’s kinda off that track in a way that sinks my ship AND is gonna hurt my other favorite character.)
I should clarify that in the second point I am agreeing with “it’s nice to see Raidah get taken down a peg”, not “Joyce was justified in trying to facilitate cheating”.
— no one likes Raidah and anything that takes her down a peg is going to register on most people as “yeah, that’s okay”
You’d think, but there really were a lot of people pointing out that what Joyce was doing was wrong the whole time.
— the narrative never framed this as anything other than what it was (Joyce trying to get Jacob away from Raidah) — there were no unambiguously cute moments for the Joyce x Jacob shippers.
Agree to disagree on what counts as unambiguously cute?
(There were actually a lot of moments imho from the second we learned Jacob was Raidah’s girlfriend, but for some of that, Joyce was at least unaware of her attraction to Jacob and nominally trying to talk Sarah up so that Jacob would leave Raidah for her… there’s at least some sort of deniability there, so I went for a strip from right in the middle of Joyce and Jacob’s “sorta fake but not really fake” date.
There IS a reason why some readers got really excited when Jacob kissed Joyce — there WERE moments where the focus seemed to be on what great chemistry they had, not on how wrong what they were doing was.)
Clarification: you genuinely don’t have to like, concede either point, I am engaging in cheerful intellectual debate here, no big emotional investment. I’m personally kind of torn between agreeing with Jacob’s final assessment of the whole thing and agreeing with Joe, in that it IS sitcom hijinx-y but of course that can still be a lot less fun from the inside, and Jacob was within his rights to reject Joyce for literally any reason.
Yeah, I will clarify: When I say “unambiguously cute”, I mean two things:
– the characters are having a cute moment
– there’s no other story beats or such happening.
In that case, yeah, it’s cute, but we’re also at the point where Jacob is aware of what’s going on and he’s kinda already (IMHO) decided that Joyce is not for him, AND Joyce is having a baby moment but also talking about some heavy stuff. But to me, it’s really the foregrounding of “Talking about the kidnapping” that counteracts “unambiguously”.
I don’t even disagree with you on Raidah, necessarily, I feel like I could downgrade that pretty easily to “on average, people like Joe now more than they liked Raidah then”.
But also honestly? I think people like Joe more than they like most of the rest of the cast. Even the folks who regularly try to remind the comment section that he used to suck are coming at it from the angle of “don’t deny him his hard-won character arc”.
There are a couple of commenters now and then who will assert that they don’t like Joe at all, but I think he’s probably the most sympathetic guy Joyce could possibly be cheating on right now.
It’s been my experience as a writer of homebrew RPG settings that nothing gets players to like a character more than “character is VISIBLY on an arc of self-improvement”… and conversely, the easiest way to make players dislike a character is make sure they routinely make self-defeating decisions.
If you squint, could be Joe and Dorothy.
I woulda said the first was also Joyce, for a while there.
Oh, people don’t just dislike Dorothy because she self-sabotages. A lot of folks have convinced themselves she also thinks she’s majorly self-righteous and manipulative. She threw away Danny and Walky like trash because she didn’t think they were good enough for her [citation needed], and generally she’s just some sort of egomaniac who doesn’t actually like any of her friends.
Meanwhile, I’m like. This sad wet cat of a woman. She puts so much pressure on herself all the time and her sense of self-worth is extremely fragile. She “mom friends” people out of a deep-seated desperation to be useful. She’s always been that girl whose best friend was a teacher. Her parents probably told her and themselves that she’d be okay once she got to college, she’d find other young people with similar goals, and there’d be people for whom her intense focus on school was admirable instead of freaky loser stuff.
Like, I genuinely don’t think Dorothy had any friends when she arrived at IU, but I don’t think she let it bother her because I think she thought she’d find Her People eventually: at Yale if not at IU, and hey, that would be even better, because she was planning on leaving IU pretty quickly! And friends at Yale would double as good networking for once she graduated.
I don’t think her lack of social graces ever actually bothered her until she tried to run for RA against Roz and discovered that, oh, actually, when I’m not burying myself in extra credit assignments and pretending that having a boyfriend is the same thing as having a social life, I am bad at this. The harder she tried, the worse it got.
(And I don’t think she’s completely gotten over that temporary rivalry with Roz, either; I’m pretty sure that’s part of why it bothered her so much when Roz specifically accused her of slut-shaming Joyce, heh.)
As I argued at the time, that was pretty clearly set up to be a deconstruction of the usual rom com tropes and particularly of Joyce’s own particular version of them. And it was.
It had it’s cute moments of course – you need to in order to make it work, but it didn’t lean into the grand romance in anything like the way this arc has. To me, that romance was doomed from the start and you could tell by the way the narrative framed it. Obviously that wasn’t true for everyone. 🙂
This isn’t the same.
Of course that’s a potential factor (I think that link is literally Jacob’s reappearance after the timeskip!), but my point remains. I don’t think Joyce experienced significant consequences.
Dorothy told her she was better than that (insert favorite ironic meme); Becky dismissed Dorothy’s concerns entirely, saying “Joyce is horny” (this apparently made it okay); and, of course, Sarah just felt guilty for her own part in things. I don’t think anyone else ever even found out.
I haven’t seen anyone mad at her on tumblr and i check the tag regularly now that people actually post. Mostly is people enjoying the development. (It’s honestly nicer that over here)
That’s tricky, because I genuinely do believe some people need killing. Your Ted Bundys, your Jeffrey Dahmers, every single currently active human trafficker, I really don’t think they deserve to live, even in permanent solitary confinement. I think there’s a place for the death penalty when it comes to that level of harm, because I don’t think there’s any coming back from it once you’ve done it. They shouldn’t be accepted back into society, and we should be burdened with keeping them alive in our already-overcrowded prisons.
The tricky part comes in when you think about who else would get the penalty. Maybe someone who doesn’t really deserve it, like someone who was framed extremely well, or someone the government decided was a threat to their power and wanted to use them as an example. Open-secret disappearings are one thing, but legally executing a political opponent through the same official means we’d use to get rid of Ted Bundy? That’s a powerful tool to spread fear in your population. And I don’t trust our government not to abuse that, especially not right now.
Basically, while I think there are genuinely good uses for the death penalty, it’s also way too easily exploited as a fear tactic.
Oh yeah, the jury angle is also worth considering. Unless I’m mistaken, isn’t a typical American jury composed of basically random people with no relation to a given case, who are handed some stuff to go over and encouraged to pick something quickly? That’s the impression that I get.
Not quite. They sit and watch the trial as it happens. Which doesn’t help when your public defender falls asleep and isn’t able to object to the prosecutor breaking rules.
Your defense attourny falling asleep during the trial was ruled to not be grounds for a mistrial.
It’s not just easy for juries to screw up. It’s also easy for police to obtain false confessions (See the Central Park 5 for one of the more prominent cases of police obtaining a false confession) and for prosecutors to absolutely railroad innocent people.
There’s even been at least one case where someone on death row was proven to be innocent and it was ruled that being innocent was not grounds to not execute the person that was on death row.
You read that right, at least one person who was known to be innocent was given the death penalty because being innocent wasn’t good enough to get them off death row.
Whether some people deserve the death penalty or not it’s been objectively shown that the government can not be trusted with that power.
I… reading that gave me the vibes of that one “Malcolm in the Middle” quote. I expected nothing, and still end up disappointed. How in the bleeding hell is “this guy didn’t do it” not good enough to… what are you even punishing them for if they’ve been proven to not have done the thing you’re punishing them for?!
I’m going to go play Warframe before my head explodes. Warframe’s plot, involving time travel, parallel universes, ancient gods outside causality, immortal robots, and talking goldfish? Even that’s easier to parse than the absurdity I just read.
Normally I’d ask for sources… but you know what, Verhoeven? No. No I would NOT “like to know more.”
It’s simple, and stupid: “The RULES say that appeals are for errors of law, not for errors of fact. Proof of innocence is an error of fact, and unless you can prove that the prosecution deliberately and unlawfully hid that proof, it’s not the state’s fault you were convicted and therefore it’s not right to let you free.”
WOW that is ridiculous. What legal mechanism do the various nonprofits use to get innocent people off death row then? Is it just throwing enough lawyers at the problem until the prosecutor decides it’s not worth the effort any more?
As I understand it, mostly, it’s either “prove that the prosecution DID have evidence that would exonerate the subject but unlawfully hid it from the defense, police coerced a confession, etc” (in other words, proving that the error in question was an appealable one) or else “amassing sufficient proof that the governor of the state and/or the parole board pardon/commute sentence on/release the subject rather than continue their death row sentence”.
It is, as usual, one of those things — originally, the “rule” (and to be clear, it’s more “defer to the original court’s finding of facts” than a strict rule as written) was intended to make sure that everyone aired all evidence at the first trial rather than holding something back to sweeten an appeal attempt, which makes sense on its face. Appeals courts typically only rule on facts when the trial involved a judge rather than a jury making declarations of fact, on the assumption that juries are generally impartial.
Link is to Shaun’s video on the death penalty, which I think is excellent, and also contains a lot of original research. The specific cases covered are also really interesting.
Related question: given the problems with the death penalty, would mutilation be an acceptable substitute? It leaves the opportunity for someone to clear their name while they’re still alive, and a person can still turn it around and lead a good life with their eyes gouged out or something. It sounds gruesome, but honestly if I was given the opportunity of life in prison or having my hand chopped off, I’d go for the hand.
Not whether it should be considered ‘cruel and unusual’, although I think that prison and execution are both more cruel, but whether it should be unconstitutional.
The entire point of the question is, it is expressed often in this debate that there are some people who really do deserve to be executed, but the death penalty is still wrong because the ruling cannot be reversed in any way. Mutilation doesn’t have this problem, especially now that we have prosthetic limbs and even blindness can be cured to an extent. In many ways it’s a lighter sentence. So, why do we have a taboo against it but not the death penalty?
I am begging you to consider people who live with the disabilities you’re discussing when you talk about them as punishments this flippantly. That’s the last I’ll say on it. Yikes.
Well, the point was to provoke discussion of why people think the death penalty *could* be acceptable in principle, if not for all the false convictions. Personally I believe that even many punishments we consider barbaric are better than the death penalty, so the death penalty is unacceptable in principle and in all circumstances.
I realize most of the people replying to this post are probably not the ones the question is meant to get at, which is people who think that execution could be warranted in some situations. In this way the whole project has been a failure.
My own feelings about the death penalty are complicated, I don’t think it’s a one and done approval. However, I think at least with the death penalty, it is final. The person is dead, they’ve passed, and if people believe in an afterlife, then the person is now contending with whatever that looks like.
Whereas mutilation is willfully giving someone a disability. That person now has to live with whatever mutilation they have. If they remain imprisoned, is the prison system going to properly care for that prisoner? Providing prosthetic limbs? Will they just leave someone to crawl? And what about when they are released? Will they be given care?
You also have to keep in mind that for this thought experiment, there are people with disabilities that match whatever mutilation you imagine in this scenario. People who’re missing their limbs, blind, deaf, mute, etc. By looking at someone with a disability and going “hmmm that’d be a good thing to do to someone else” that only serves to further dehumanize people with disabilities. They go from a person to a cautionary tale, “ooh you don’t wanna murder someone or else you’ll be blinded like that guy” and that’s just terrible.
My question for you, and I’m asking this because I’m curious not to demonize you or attack you, but why is it that you think punishing someone in such a way is a lighter punishment? Prosthetic limbs don’t change the fact that that person no longer has that missing limb. Hands are still very difficult (and expensive) to replicate in prosthetics. Often people with missing limbs have phantom limb syndrome. Chronic pain is a common affliction that impedes everyday life. Blindness is a tricky subject because it depends on how one is blinded.
For example, my mother lost vision in one of her eyes due to being electrocuted. For a while, the possibility of a transplant was considered, but in the end was deemed not viable because the source of her blindness wasn’t damage to her eyeball, but was optic nerve damage. That cannot be replaced or replicated. Also keep in mind that because my mother was disabled (partially blind and deaf), I have the first person view of what life was like for her and how difficult getting around could be at times. I often was her second pair of eyes and ears whenever we were out or when she was driving. My mother did the best she could, to the point that many of her coworkers were actually unaware she had these disabilities, but it still impeded her life in many ways. She had dreams of being a pilot.
I’m going to mostly stay out of the entire discussion, because I have BIG feels about it given the rate of innocent people who have been put on Death Row, but I just… yikes to this additional question.
This made me physically recoil. It’s so unnecessarily cruel, and does absolutely nothing to rehabilitate criminals. Pure punishment, pain, and vengeance. That’s a yuck from me.
Well, the whole point is that for some reason the death penalty is something that we entertain as something that can be just in some situations. This is despite the fact that in every way, it is worse than mutilation, especially when done incorrectly (which it very often is). The main difference is that if someone is dead they cannot continue to harm others, which implicitly is enough to overcome the fact that otherwise it is just torture with no purpose.
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Now back to the good part!
FROM THE DAY HE WAS BORN
HE YEARNED FOR ADVENTURE
OH CAPTAIN JACK
GIVIN THEM WHAT FOR
THIS IS THE TALE
OF AMAZI-GIRL / AMBER
A HERO SO BRAVE
ON THE ROOFS OF YOUR DORMITORY
“Close enough.”
How do you fit that last line into the meter of the song?
Badly.
Unless you have the verbal flare to pronounce Dormitory to rhyme with Amber. In which case, you can probably pull it off by slurring the syllables together.
Lop off the ‘itory’
This is the correct one
Kitchen Doc will patch you up tonight
Just lay on his kitchen island
Kitchen Doc will get you by tonight
Just a little stitch, and you’ll be smilin’
Oh, yeah
Asher mentioned. Trust lost.
Damn you Willis!
I was excited to see more of the mess that is Jorothy. How could you do this to us?
Yesss, where are my madly in love bisexual queens.
Right there on the screen. They just haven’t realized it yet.
They won’t realize it until the Martian invasion. Poor Walky and Danny.
Relax, soon will be Amazi-girl or Sal’s time.
So I guess she caught a rubber bullet in the gut then?
Or a knife if other theories are correct.
Do cops bring knives to protests? Like clubs and rubber bullets have that slight air of less than lethal optics that let cops justify their violence. A knife is just like yeah I’m killing. Just have the sniper start headshotting students at that point.
There was a theory going around that Amber/AG had run into Incelerator or some other chud bastard after the protest, and that was the cause of the injury. We’ll see in due time, I suspect.
Mary? ¬_¬
Mary sucks, but I don’t think she guts to actually attack someone. She’d probably just run away screaming rather than take out a knife.
Agreed. I can’t imagine Mary doing anything competently violent. Not at the A-G level.
The cop may have used a cell phone.
Probably not all of them, but certainly there are some cops that have less-than-legal weaponry on them.
I don’t think that belly wound is fresh, it would still be dressed.
You’re 100% right, which is strange since that’s where it looks like she was clutching and bleeding from when Sal found her.
This chapter title is really shaping up
Dumbing Of Age 15: IT’D NEVER BEEN SAID EXPLICITLY
Geeeeez. The size of that scar.
Ruptured spleen, perhaps?
Oh, wait, wrong side. Gall bladder?
The Spleen is usually on a person’s far left, up under the ribs. Usually… When he’s not running around being a hero himself.
THE SPLEEN should be its own comic.
*shadowy figure perched on a rooftop*
PULL. MY. FINGER!
*thunder crashes*
Wow, that’s the kind of shit that can kill you AFTER months.
Hope is not that severe.
If you mean the lower-right abdomen, that can’t be fresh from the protest. It darn well should have bandages on it.
Waiting for the gigantic walls of texts that aren’t relevant to today’s comic that make me want to eat my own hands
Honestly? Do yourself (and your blood pressure) a favour and opt out. I can guarantee no one, myself included, will have any take that is worth upsetting yourself over.
I’ve been making an effort to limit my comment engagement over the last week, and it has definitely felt beneficial to me.
They give your tummy the rumblings that only hands will satisfy?
… Caaarrrlllll…
if the comments section doesnt oblige you, i recommend Atlas Shrugged, ticks off all your boxes there, and double on the auto-cannibalism.
ew
if hell exists and I go there, I’m going to turn Ayn Rand into a human pin-cushion D:<
I’m very upset my 10th grader has to read Anthem for ELA this year, but I’m against censorship so I don’t want to be as bad as the book banning parents. Still, once they start that one I am having at home discussions. The sophomore year class is about individualism and community and what our obligations are to society.
I mean sensitivity reading the curriculum aint censorship, it’s about social obligation to not condone bigotry posing as intellectualism
You’re not as bad as the book banning parents for this resentment, context is everything, you can’t just paint stuff like this over with oversimplified sentiments like “censorship bad” and “nothing should be off limits in the free marketplace of ideas”; that’s literally what internet nazis are counting on 👀
Nothing should be off limits in the free marketplace of ideas, but maybe wait until college before tossing all ideas, both enlightening and toxic, up against the wall to see what sticks. It’s part of the Dumbing of Age process.
Rand was about as far from being a “Nazi” as you can get. Any Nazis or Nazi-adjacent types who claim to admire her either never read a word she wrote or else completely failed to understand it. Many of her critics badly misunderstand, but it’s depressing just how many self-proclaimed fans do as well.
And once you put any subject off limits for discussion, those who have or seek power are going to try and turn it to their advantage. This isn’t hypothetical, just look at current efforts to brand any criticism of the Israeli government or support for Palestinians as antisemitism.
Rand was a rabid ”greed is good, cooperation and empathy are bad” right wing ideologue. She couldn’t live up to her own so called ideals at all, but it didn’t stop her from being a moderately successful pseudo-philosopher and B-grade Sci-Fi writer.
Any adult who worships at the altar of Ayn Rand marks themselves as not worth a grown-up discussion. They won’t be able to engage with it in good faith.
I have the displeasure of knowing person with a masters degree in philosophy, who wrote their thesis on her and still gulps her BS. He is a supremely self-centred and self obsessed individual, who would not be alive without a ton of ”socialist” medical and psychotherapy services. The irony is utterly lost on him.
+1
Ayn Rand, at the end of her life, still took out Social Security. Despite saying throughout her life saying it should be abolished. Her entire ethos wasn’t “liberty” or “self-sufficiency” it was simply “fuck you, got mine.”
She certainly idolizes her own brand of ubermenches who are super special because they make a lot of money. That’s pretty nazi adjacent
You can be anti-Israel’s right to exist without being antisemitic, just like you can be a white separatist without being a white supremist. But in neither case is that the way to bet. “From the mountains to the sea” is calling for the destruction of Israel. It is hate speech and should be treated as such.
Criticizing the government of Israel is fine. Being hypocritical about it is being hypocritical. If you are a citizen of the US, your government has done far worse. If the US had an equal proportion of it’s citizens murdered, raped and tortured, I think you would see just how restrained Israel is being in comparison.
I refer you to an incident where the US had a number of ships bombed. Two large Japanese cities filled with civilians, women and children, effectively disappeared from the face of the Earth. More recently, two building in the US and part of a third were destroyed and the face of the Middle East was changed forever while the US sent a military force into an allied country to assassinate the leader of those responsible. I don’t think you want to see what would happen if the US took the kind of hit that Israel did.
If you are actually concerned about the people in Gaza and not just hating on the Jews, for crying out loud make a donation to a reputable organization like the World Food Program as I have done; they have a ShareTheMeal app that makes it very easy. The food will take a round-about and less than ideal route to get there, but it will get there and help. Do something that will actually be effective, and while you’re at it, treat antisemitic racist crap the same way you would treat any other kind of racist crap.
There are definitely cases you could make for the US being worse than Israel – and not even just because the US operates on a bigger scale.
WWII is not one of those cases. Certainly not reduced to “we nuked to cities because we had a number of ships bombed”.
The other case is more reasonable. Some of us in fact wanted Israel to learn from our example and not over-retaliate the way we did after 9/11 because of how badly that went for everyone, including us.
I don’t think Clif was talking about “WWII”, I think they were very specifically talking about that time that we chose to drop nukes on two civilian population centers “to end the war” when we knew perfectly well that Japan was ready to surrender, and would have surrendered easily, had we just been willing to promise not to execute their emperor.
That part is not defensible. Nothing else that was going on makes it defensible. And it’s also not really arguable — we didn’t drop those bombs because we “had” to, we did it because the people involved wanted big impressive blast sites to show off the power of our new toys, and we were also eager to crush Japan specifically before Russia could get involved, because we didn’t want to owe them anything.
I’m not “reducing” America’s involvement in WWII to these two bombs, though our long reluctance to get involved and the part where our own eugenics movement was admired by Hitler and we literally had newspaper articles early in the war lamenting that the Germans were “beating us at our own game”, like, none of that is admirable either.
We like to think of ourselves as just the soldiers on D-day. We don’t so much like to remember any other part of America’s participation (or lack thereof).
And that is why I’m not complaining. (To Wizard’s comment). I want to try and trust the process, I just wish I could remember what book the teacher wants to replace A Clockwork Orange with.
The Ayn Rand Foundation does some pretty skeezy marketing to get her books into middle and high schools. Some English teachers don’t read all the material that they have their students read. (Not to mention those who like her crap.)
It does, and it’s super gross.
Arizona passed a law a couple of years back that all lesson plans have to be written to the day a year in advance. Even if I wasn’t disabled I don’t think I could handle teaching here anymore just because of that. The district is also pretty strict and each grade level teaches the same texts/projects (only one high school so maybe 2 or 3 English teachers for each grade?) I like and trust the teacher enough to hope it’s compared and contrasted to the other books.
Ugh. Do you know if they’re teaching it straight?
My kid had to read a book I thought was pretty questionable in 8th grade (something PragerU-adjacent, as I recall, but I don’t remember the exact book) but it turned out it was part of the unit on propaganda and most of the pedagogy was pointing out the ways in which facts/statistics/etc were distorted and rhetoric was deployed in place of facts.
They’ll probably read the entire book, but then do a in depth critical analysis. The district is pretty good at balancing opinions and letting students gather their own ideas. The whole year is focused on community vs individuality and they’re reading The Hunger Games, too, but The Cheese knows enough people have misinterpreted those books.
*posts bee movie script*
Perfect pfp for this
I had 7th grade students post The Bee Movie script as answers to their ReadWorks assignments. When I scored them low they were very upset I actually read work they turned in, unlike other teachers.
Looks like I’m eating my hands
You are not required to read the comments.
I will excuse the break from the gay girld because of hot girls because I am a hot gay girl
Yes, we’re all trying to deal with the heat this summer. That’s what you meant, right?
Am I too cynical when I doubt the hotness of anybody self-describing themselves as hot? I suspect their attitude would immediately put me off.
Too cynical. Everyone is hot these days.
Damn global warming.
Amazi-Girl: future mob hitwoman.
No, no, _Amber_ will be the hitwoman. (though mostly they’ll have her do cybercrime). _Amazi-Girl_ will fight against her.
Sal continues to be a good character and friend
that she is!
nah your dad definitely wanted to be a mob tough guy
Yeah, like. I’m not sure if there’s a minuscule part of her trying to find a minuscule thread of… justification, maybe, to understand why her dad was a piece of shit. Definitely it’s Amber self-flagellating, but I wonder if there’s a tiny add-on.
… But Blaine?? BLAINE getting a “start of darkness” fighting for other people?? That’s one hell of a reach to make. It’s really sad she heard “mob doctor” and that’s where her brain went but, what’s new 🙁
I’m interpreting it as “maybe owing the mob favors is how the villain arc started for him”.
Yeah I think it’s fine to have Blaine start off as not quite that shitty shitbag who got involved with the mob, and only got worse the deeper he got. Better than just shitty all along, but commenters hate nuanced character
Fine if he got worse as he got deeper, but I’d still want him to start out shitty. Like if he was a lousy business man who borrowed from the mob to keep going, thinking he could pay it back and then wound up laundering money and stuff for them, that’s great.
I don’t think Blaine started out his mob connections needing a favor to help someone else
agreed, he super got off on it
…I dunno Amber, even minus the comic book costume thing I find it difficult to believe that Blaine’s path to owing the mob favors started with “getting injured while trying to help a group of protesters evacuate”. He really didn’t seem like that kinda guy.
I really doubt it involved anything noble. My guess is he wanted money drugs or women for selfish reasons.
He honestly strikes me as the type to be so blatantly narcissistic as to think he was smarter than the entire mafia, and so saw taking assistance from them not as owing favors but as in “I can’t believe these idiots let me grift them time and again.”
I have zero evidence for this, but from what we know of him, it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility. There are people that self-deluded as to think they are smarter than literally everyone. I know because I’ve met them. They’re insufferable. Which might mean I’m projecting personal experience onto the character (or lack thereof) of Blaine.
I hope Amber recovers well after this, and doesn’t have to worry too much after getting help from mob-affiliated doctors.
Asher does seem like the type who is ready to call in the favor when it is time. Though so far, based on his character, it seems like it would be for himself more than for the mob.
honestly i actually could see him calling it in to help someone else entirely, like gets sal to help him get a cousin or mom out of the mob so they can attend his and ethan’s wedding. or he witnesses a person of lesser means in medical distress and gets sal to taje them to mob doctor on her bike so as to get them treatment, fully completing his redemption arc a la Zechs in Gundam W endless waltz (i’ve been playling the SD gundam mobile game, and am addicted)
Sal isn’t beating the Amazi-girl sidekick allegations any time soon.
Are you implying Sal isn’t Amazi-girl herself?
Don’t tell Billie/Jennifer that; the shock could kill her… or just make her feel like an idiot, but definitely one of those two options.
Ooh, this could be a good moment to ruin that. Amazi-Girl and Sal are *definitely* visible together right now.
Yeah, but I’m thinking Billifer is in bed with Alice at this very time. Or anticipating it, at least.
IDK about sidekick.
I get the strong idea Sal is her Alfred.
Amazi-butler.
I’d posit more her partner in vigilantism, a la Iron Fist and Power man, or cloak and dagger, or Archer and Armstrong
I think after yesterday’s comic I’ve realized why the comment section gets so heated.
There’s a lotta mean people here. Like I dunno how else to put it. People are just not kind to one another. It’s not so much an exchange of ideas so much as it’s a game where there are “winners” and “losers”. And I think a lotta people don’t realize how antagonistic/condescending they come off. I think a lotta that behavior has been kinda normalized so it’s hard to be objective about this sorta thing.
The DoA comments have definitely gotten a lot more toxic lately. I try to avoid arguments, but when people come in here posting comments mocking others for being against cheating, or trying to imply that anyone who disagrees with them is some sort of bigot, I find it hard to resist replying to them.
I don’t think anyone is against you having an opinion about ‘cheating’, nor about you expressing it. But repeatedly expressing it is kinda tedious. And by ‘you’ i mean all the people who keep repeating their opinion. There are now several people whose name means I don’t read their comments…
I feel the same way about many of the people who are fine with the cheating, or even gleefully cheering it on. And there are definitely several people who, partly because of their opinions on this issue, I try to avoid replying to their comments when I see their names.
I think that’s a good plan.
I feel as though saying people are “fine with cheating” because they’re enjoying it in a comic might be part of the problem here. That’s like saying someone’s fine with murder because they enjoyed watching Pulp Fiction. The relationship drama, seeing characters interact in fresh new ways, grappling with the taboo of homoeroticism, these are all things we can enjoy in media as part of storytelling without it reflecting on what we’re like in our day to day lives.
I suspect, in retrospect, that the “fine with cheating (in the comic, for dramatic purposes)” equivalence “fine with cheating (in general)” at least partially comes from a conflation of some long, occasionally-heated arguments about what precisely the boundaries of “cheating” even were — some folks were making real-life arguments of the form “a kiss isn’t cheating” and “it’s not cheating until your partner disapproves” (both, circumstantially, reasonable) and that might have got conflated in.
Then tie in the people who are pissed at the discourse and thus double down on the “No really, cheating is fine”.
And the handful who are just “even having the concept of cheating is proof you’re a jealous controlling freak”
There are for sure some gleeful contrarians at this point who are pretending to be fine with cheating IRL, and tone is hard online, so even though I think the trolling is obvious, I’d understand if someone missed it.
The other thing sucks! But I do think the context that some folks have also said, “If you don’t think this is cheating, you’re a freak,” is important.
There’s a lot of mud slinging going on all over the place.
I don’t even object to the ‘fine with cheating” camp (I don’t agree with them, but I’m willing to either discuss it reasonably or just agree to disagree, as the individuals prefer)–until some of them start, without being VERY precise and targeted, declaring that the only reason people are objecting to cheating is because it’s a gay couple cheating on their straight beaus. (“precise and targeted” is necessary here, because when it’s just a general comment, with no reference to the specific post or poster displaying such an attitude, it immediately comes off as a universal attack against anyone who is not thrilled with the characters cheating).
+1
Agree. Repetition by the same person is boring!
I do get that. I’ve definitely held my tongue about stuff that’s bothered me about this comic before because I didn’t think it would be worthwhile to litigate in the comment section. Nobody needs me complaining about the supervillain stuff in a comic that’s had a superhero in it since the first chapter.
But at the same time you can’t expect people to not want to share their opinions about an ongoing tension about the main character. This isn’t a comic where threads get introduced and then conclusively resolved in a single strip
This thank you.
Welcome to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory! For reference:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies
idk, I genuinely think that was a self-report by him, and by anyone who swears by it. If being anonymous on the internet “makes” you an asshole, the only thing holding you back in real life is consequences.
Heh. Let me reply to myself to clarify more kindly!
— I do think that it’s possible to get caught up in the performative aspect of social media, and there’s a line between “snappy comeback” and “asshole” that can get blurry.
— I also think that it’s easier to depersonalize online. You see an anime avatar with a bad political take on Twitter, it’s easy to just kind of simplify it down so that anything you say to the avatar is a response to the political ideology expressed, and NOT a response to an actual human being. Which isn’t advocating being kinder to Nazis or whatever, so much as remembering that what you say is going to wind up in a real person’s notifications.
— Modern social media has done a real number on all of us. It’s so easy for the algorithm or a series of reblogs to serve up what is essentially someone else’s shower thought or a snippet of their diary, cropped out of context, and to mistake that for a thought they intended to offer up for wide public consumption.
It looks like a metaphor intended to be a political statement from an adult to you. It was actually some fourteen-year-old reflecting on something that literally happened to her, and it’s not her fault it went mega viral. Your critique of her word choice is weird, actually!
…….so yeah, those are all ways I do think the internet can lead us to be jerks.
I think Gabe of Penny Arcade is just a natural fuckwad, tho.
yeah like, I get a lot of them MEAN WELL in their intentions, but don’t seem to get that discussion shouldn’t be about “victory”, but progress.
So many of them think that debate is like BeyBlade or shit where they gotta one-up each other for points to advance their causes, oblivious to the fact that this is literally a right-wing tool XD
Heck yeah, don’t they know that debate is supposed to be like Bakugan? I mean BeyBlade? Come on! These people are savages. (To be honest, while I was never into it, I think BeyBlades were pretty rad idea for a toy line).
if anything, it SHOULD be more like multiplayer stardew valley, if that makes sense,
a cooperative effort where we put together our points to find what’s true
anyway yeah after a long day of work I do like numbing myself with badly dubbed toyetic anime XD
I have never played Stardew Valley, but I think I am picking up what you’re putting down: Debate is about synchronizing ideas, sharing and compiling knowledge, and bettering those involved rather than winning. Our society suffers, in part, because we have ceased to think about debate as it was used by Socrates (or at least as it was used as a literary device in the works of Plato) and started to think about debate in terms of judged High School Debate teams and the petulant, self-aggrandizing circuses our presidential candidates put on. It is no longer about having the patience and humility to guide another betterment by helping them confront themselves, instead it is about confronting others to prove one’s self their better and bathe in the vain victory through self-righteous displays of dancing logic and oratory. Did I understand you meaning correctly? Did I sufficiently dazzle you with my needless and vain displays of self-aggrandizing literary flamboyance? Would you recommend Stardew Valley – I know you have mentioned it some before?
Hahahahahhaa well yeah ya got the gyst of it ”
XD
Also I brought up StarDew valley because farming IRL is a collaborative effort from a bunch of people working towards a productive goal
I never actually played StarDew valley but it sure seems popular, I’m more into Don’t Starve personally, but the challenge aint quite everyone’s cup of tea XD
Don’t starve mentioned, neuron activates
Part of the problem is that there’s not really any truth to be had for some of the most contentious debates (lately, for example, if you strip away the angry and the trollish, the big debate is fundamentally “Cheating in a storyline does/doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the storyline” and “my ship should be the thing happening”) so it’s not like there’s any objective thing to reach for.
There might well be some underlying truth to be discovered in “the actions you support fictional characters taking do/do not say something about you as a person”, but I can’t imagine it being found on a comic message board.
No no no, debate is like Yu-Gi-Oh!, specifically the Duelist Kingdom arc, where the rules were often vague and you could kinda just do whatever and still win.
honestly want to jumb in with Medabots as whet it should be, but really Digimon is a better example for cooperating towards a goal, see also the monster rancher anime.
but GUNDAM MOTHERFUCKING WING, (yeah it could be said in EW that Wufei and Char swap roles and sides) the series itself, you get all kinds of the meaty grey areas of friendship and ideals and cooperation and uniting towards truth and a peaceful future. and Duo Maxwell forever!
beyblade is awesome and i am an absolute savage so
uh
yeah. basically right. carry on
( xD )
I think part of the issue is fandom arguing is taken as personal by many people while others just enjoy arguing as a fun pastime. It’s an irreconcilable take on the subject you can’t know the feelings of via text.
That is fandom for ya, it’s suck but nobody has come up with a solution yet.
Be excellent to each other?
I’d provide the accompanying sound but my air guitar is broken.
Oof, think I see myself in this comment and I don’t like it. Definitely never the intent when writing the post, but it does end up that way sometimes by mistake.
I never intend it either… and, unfortunately, can’t really tell whether my comments ended up seeming that way. This’s why I often limit myself to just posting links to strips people have mentioned, but sometimes I attempt jokes, with mixed success.
To add to that: my post yesterday about speculation on Danny and Walky possibly being trans started out as my being interested in how people might take the idea, but ended up probably ruining the possible fun by being overly wordy. Sorry.
Maybe I should hire an editor to check over my comments.
…and, after posting that, I read today’s Questionable Content, which seemed almost painfully fitting.
“Thank you for injecting some much-needed levity into the proceedings.”
“Yes ma’am. I hope one day it is a success.”
Aww I really liked your post about Danny and Walky potentially being trans yesterday. Also, having seen and written some MUCH longer posts than that, I promise no one was bothered by how many words you used.
Certainly not to the point you should apologize for it.
I think no one responded because it was good on its own and didn’t really need engagement with in a meaty way. I’m sure plenty of people (like me) read it, smiled, and went on about their day.
I’ve noticed the trend too (and occasionally get dragged into it), but I haven’t found many places to talk about this comic that are much different. External chat spots tend to have the “Ha ha, Willis can’t block me for shit-talking him, neener neener!” undertone and honestly less focus on positivity that’s not “Man, this used to be so good, I wish it’d be good like this part I liked.” On this site at least, you get a mix of things that’s more balanced.
Yeah, god, I joined the discord once and it’s just fucking vicious. I’ve never understood reading something that makes you venomously mad. Anything I hate-read is something that makes me laugh because it’s awful, not something that makes me rip every little piece of it apart and talk shit about people who like it.
Frankly this has been my experience every time I’ve joined a niche fandom discord. The culture of “closed community for topic” just really seems to skew towards spleen venting and #critical posting.
That’s why I’ve ended up deleting every social media and most forum accounts I’ve had. I’ve come to realize that not only is the format of those sites very conducive to this sort of thing, especially ‘microblogging’ like mastodon and bluesky, but I also seek it out for the thrill of getting in an argument.
The comment section of this comic is very similar in spirit, although the format is much more restrictive. So, for me, engaging with this comment section is almost like a restricted version of a self-destructive behavior. Like only drinking on weekends.
The reason? I guess I like arguing, but I don’t like starting petty bullshit with people I actually know and have a real relationship with.
I should say starting *or continuing* petty bullshit, because oftentimes I get sucked in because I respond to something that irks me.
I have a theory: people are just trying to cope.
The themes are hard stuff we all have difficult to deal (cheating, police violence, Bulmeria). I think a comment board could serve as a cheap therapy.
It annoys me, too, but I’m learning to focus in read and follow only nice people and good content, like yours.
okay sorry once again for the off topic post but this really needs to be said in light of Willis’ recent efforts
RE: “SO as i open up Asma narratively, uh, I am quickly going to hit the wall of “oh jeez am I allowed to depict her without her hijab within her own dorm room and other female-only spaces, is that okay, would she be mad at me”
Today I had a whole conversation with Lur (who is Hijabi Muslim) about this and you can check out my mega post last strip for more thorough rundown on what we talked about
but the basic gyst of it is, in their words
“I GET that [Willis] doesn’t want to learn the hard way after the fact, but my honest answer to that would be, maybe make an effort to knowing more Muslim people and show interest in their community FIRST, and THEN represent what you learn from that on your strip, instead of just asking on the internet so you can do A Representation without actually having any interest in the community.”
Is that gonna be a lot more work? Of course.
But OH WELL I guess.
Let’s face it, progressive causes are ALWAYS at this natural disadvantage to conservative ones, it’s a big reason our entire country is in this giant mess, really.
In the end, it will always take a relatively large amount of time and effort to be factually and morally right, for the sake of social progress and a more equitable society.
By contrast, it will always take a relatively small amount of time and effort to remain wrong, but nonetheless be satiated with quick answers and quippy rhetoric which FEELS as though it’s correct and easily absolves guilt regardless of what’s actually true and morally right.
Doing the research should also not be criticized.
Asking questions about something is morally wrong because if you cared enough about the answer you would have already known it.
that’s… a pretty shitty simplification of what NGPZ (or, by proxy, their friend) has been talking about, but sure. like I don’t know if you bothered reading their whole post but your quippy retort reads very strange place under the comment(s) talking about like, a pretty complex issues & someone’s personal relationship to that
I’m not disagreeing with the poster. I’m saying that it is a complex and hard issue but we should also not be harsh on people who are making an effort as well. It’s not meant to be “quippy.”
My apologies for not having that more clear.
Also, I take the subject of researching respectful portrayal very seriously. Shitposting is not something that should be used to dismiss my sincere statement.
perpetual summer wasn’t talking to you, they were talking to Clif.
Indeed they were. What I posted was a gross simplification, but was still at the core of what they posted.
Look, I think you can want to know enough to not be a jerk, without wanting to commit to making a career out of it. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Willis may want to commit to making an extensive and sensitive cultural study, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.
See, that’s a much better comment than your quip! I still don’t agree, but it’s at least an argument worth engaging with rather than something to sort of squint at because the tone sounds off to me.
My apologies, Clif!
I owe you a cookie in real life!
Peanut Butter or Chocolate chip!
“I appreciate that he’s trying, I just think he’s trying from the wrong angle — ya can’t throw a question like that into the corporate internet landscape or social media ether and just hope for a good answer! In the end that’s basically an atheist praying for a quick answer, and ultimately, an optimization to a chore about mitigating guilt.
Actually interact with us and our culture first, THEN represent it.
To quote the Fresh Prince, “he’s a little confused but he got the spirit!” XD
I mean, I’m kind of fine with his effort in the sense that you can’t cover EVERYTHING in depth, it’d end up a mess, or if you do try to cover everything you’re probably end up glossing over most of it.
And this webcomic, as much as some part of it is also kind of an ensemble cast work thing it is still ultimately about Joyce. Disappointing? Yes, but also, I get that’s not really the point of the comic.
Of course that does bring the question of “well then what’s the point of mentioning it”.
But he *technically* did not; because Bulmeria isn’t real LMAO”
— Lur
C.T. Phipps – I don’t think any apologies are called for or needed. I’m not really sure what you would apologize for.
NGPZ – There seems to be a couple of assumptions in what you’ve written, and maybe I’m not understanding them. But what I am hearing is that Willis should feel guilty about not providing more representation of Muslim characters and should not provide representation of any cultural group, particular Muslims, without significantly interacting with and studying that group first and that asking for help with it on the Internet is a bad thing because it’s just optimizing a chore. Obviously you said other quite reasonable things as well, but that’s the set things that taken together sets my teeth a little bit on edge.
nonononono,
he shouldn’t feel guilty about it, hell what we sayin is the opposite? — or rather
that he lapsing back into old white Christian habits which are making him frame the problem as though assuaging guilt is the priority / goal, without even meaning to, without realizing this is a problem (a lotta white people tend to do this if only because our society founded by white colonists is based on a confessional model)
The goal should be to encourage interaction across cultural boundaries for the sake of a better society — if you show that you can just skip over that step and still make good representation, that’s basically showing that you can be a good ally without actually, you know, being a good ally, and ultimately defeats the purpose of representation in the first place.
And the very point is that it SHOULDN’T feel like a chore where you study a book or some shit to make a slideshow to impress other white folk or some shit, but enriching as you make friends from lots of other cultures and walks of life
like
Muslim or not, it ain’t fucking hard to have a diverse set of friends on the internet???
I literally met Lur (whose Hibaji Muslim and also autistic) right here in the comments section because she’s also a Dumbing of Age fan and shared an interest in making fan games because she also a musician, we share a lot of interests in common and I really appreciate our friendship.
the internet has GREAT potential as a multicultural frontier, it’s just in paying attention to how we use it for this sake which can make an important difference in all of our lives
yeah I was replying to Clif rather than you. fwiw I mostly agree with you though I think it’s still somewhat misplaced under that comment. Sometimes getting feedback feels bad! And sometimes you just have to sit with that & think on it.
No idea how you interpreted it in that way.
I think they’re just shitposting tbh
(as in, being facetious for the sake of comedy)
It’s an issue close to me because I knew very little outside of my own fundamentalist world that research really opened my eyes on but it wasn’t until meeting actual people that I learned a lot of what I did. I feel like online communities can treat questions really hostily and I believe its important to welcome them–even if its not anyone’s responsibility to help people on their journey. It’s nice when they do.
If that makes sense.
Makes sense.
I suggest reading NGPZ’s longer post yesterday because I don’t think anyone is “criticizing research”.
It’s going to be a lot more work and it basically means putting adding more Muslim representation to the strip is going to be on hold while that work is being done, which has its own problems.
Better and more honest than representing something you know jack about!
Like Charles Schulz was more than happy to create Franklin in response to feedback from one of his black readers, but was also up and front about the fact that he knew basically nothing about black culture and thus wasn’t sure what he was gonna do with the character.
But to his credit, when papers in the South begged him to remove Franklin to not “offend” their readers, he said “either keep it the way I wrote it, or you don’t get to print it at all.” Honestly, the writers who are trying to add representation but do so imperfectly are better than those who just never include other demographics at all, right?
But at the same time, why does the bar have to be set there?
However well you mean, that’s still making the issue about how good white people are about it, the point is that people of color should be the ones getting to decide how they are represented in our media.
Also unlike Charles Shultz’s time, we live in the day and age of the internet, a multicultural frontier greater than ever, so what’s really stopping someone like Willis (or any other white comic creator) from interacting with the culture before representing it in his strip?
Lur had the answer to this to:
“Like get to the root of the problem. A Muslim Arab friend of mine once tweeted that in the age of internet, living somewhere with a predominantly white Christian population is no excuse for not having non-white or Muslim (or other belief systems) friends.
If you still somehow have no muslim friends? (muslim/non-white/etc.), then usually what that says about you is that you probably haven’t made an effort to be a safe person for them. There’s a LOT of people on the internet, odds that you haven’t engaged with any of them are rare, if you haven’t made any Muslim friends over the internet, well either you subconsciously avoid them or they consciously avoid you.”
(Sobering reminder of why it’s for the best to just NOT argue with bigoted white dudes on the internet.) 👀
All I meant is the old phrase “perfect is the enemy of good.” Yes, folks are going to screw it up. No one is going to pretend that Tonto (from the original black and white Lone Ranger, lord knows I ain’t praising Johnny Depp) was a particularly nuanced interpretation of the First Nations experience but hey, he was an actual member of that community… that’s a hell of a lot better than casting Rob Schneider (or again, Johnny Depp) in red-face.
Yes, the bar should be higher, yes; in an ideal world folks wouldn’t have to settle for crumbs… but I’d rather have crumbs (crumbs that have been slowly getting more substantial) than what we used to have, which was corpos pretending everyone was WASP rather than risk bad publicity.
Just because we still have further to go does not mean we can’t celebrate what progress we have made. If anything, it’s important to remember that progress has and can be made, even in my short lifetime, so that people do not lose hope that change is even possible.
Would I like for my Muslim friends to get more and better representation? Absolutely, but at least folks are trying. It is my opinion that it is better to encourage those who are making a genuine effort rather than lambast them for missteps. It all just stinks to me of the infuriating tendency of progressives to cannibalize their own.
At no point has Willis or anything they wrote ever given me cause to believe they are malicious or a bad actor or against the demographic in question. I’ve seen what that looks like. How’s the saying go? Better an imperfect friend than a deadly enemy?
At least empathetic and humanizing examples of representation, however inexpertly applied, will serve as pushback of the negative stereotypes and cliches.
Just my thoughts. You are of course free to take ’em or leave ’em, just thought I’d throw my two cents in, however much that’s worth…
You really think I and Lur are lambasting Willis here???
Did you even read what they said???
Nobody here is calling Willis a bad actor, as much as he is anti-racist, he is still an ex-fundie white dude and that continues to inform a lot about how he interacts with the world at large,
and even admits it himself.
I mean… that’s how it read to me at first blush, but I’m open to the possibility that I misread what was written. A lot of tone and subtlety present in verbal communication definitely gets lost when transferred to written. Wouldn’t be the first time I completely misread the vibe of someone’s writing… hell, I misread the vibes of speech sometimes too.
So maybe it was just a miscommunication. If that’s the case, then mea culpa.
like this isn’t “progressives cannabilizing their own” or whatever you call it
it’s white authors being made aware that they have privilege, that the stakes of getting our representation right are much lower for them
in the end, white/cis/het/normie/default settings folk should not really be the ones who get to set the bar on whether any given representation of us is “good enough” — otherwise that literally defaults the purpose of doing it in the first place
I feel there’s also the fact that the Bulmeria story is probably over.
Which means a lot of the people wanting a far more layered and nuanced handling of it are not going to get.
Asma’s next appearance would probably be about how she relates to the gay romance and cheating versus protesting.
Which kind of undermines a lot of what people are looking for.
like there’s nothing stopping the “”Bulmeria”” conflict from coming back up again in the story with characters affected by the conflict overseas going in-depth if Willis so chooses, of course preferably when Willis is more informed on it,
as disappointing as it is for have missed an opportunity with the recent protest storyline proper being over, that doesn’t disappear people being affected by the genocide overseas, and does not cease to be relevant anymore than queer people have to become irrelevant outside of pride month
and yeah at the same time he has to juggle a bunch of other plates in a romcom story, and if that, a romcom story that’s ultimately about an ex-fundie girl living in the United States
all in all, here’s my take on what was going through his mind:
He noticed that there was a lack of things which a comic featuring freshmen University students in the modern day outta have, and at the time thought that featuring something vaguely referencing the Palestine Protests at IU was as straightforward way to make it more relevant to an intended audience.
His intentions were good but still screwed it up when trying to balance a blooming romance with a very serious issue but wound up trivializing the issue in the setting without even meaning to.
There ain’t no ill will, but this is still frustrating to people like me with friends and family who are affected by the conflict overseas.
Whether it comes back up again in the comic or not, in any case we just wanna help Willis learn from his mistakes.
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
— Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I just wanted to say I appreciate this perspective that you went out of your way to seek out, format, and offer.
Well really thank Lur, over the years I learned a lot from them myself!
……I hope you have something warm to replace it with because hot damn isn’t it still freezing out there especially at dawn ?
See the bag she’s reaching for. When or how she got it… eh, it’s a comic.
She had it from the start… of this day’s storyline, anyway. She (or AG, rather) probably had it stashed somewhere prior to beginning the previous day’s activities.
I know that Sal is doing very well with Danny and I don’t want that to end, but there’s so much messy yuri in this strip lately that I almost expect these two to kiss soon
Look, I’ve been wanting them to kiss for about 10 years at the very least. You’re not off base, I just know it’ll happen sometime in the future. Maybe the far future but the future
Amber IS the perfect Unicorn.
Really? What makes you say that? I’m not taking the piss, I’m sincerely asking.
If Sal’s going to be kissing any girl in this comic, that girl had better be Marcie. (…who hasn’t been seen at all in this comic for over a year now, and who hasn’t been actively involved in a storyline for over six years now. This must be corrected, and the sooner the better.) Anyway, I guess it would depend on how into Malaya Marcie still is, but I would guess that she’d drop Malaya like a hot potato if a genuine chance with Sal ever came up.
To potentially tie it more directly into the current storyline, Marcie also knows that Amber is Amazi-Girl.
You understand my feelings for my ship.
Really though, much as I’m not on the AG (or Amber or both)/Sal ship, I’m happy OP and others are enjoying it. Happy sailing, y’all.
Isn’t this basically the same argument as “if Joyce’s going to be kissing any girl in this comic, that girl had better be Becky”?
Though it would definitely be good to see Marcie more.
Yes, absolutely similar vibes.
Yeah, that’s true. I read it in a tongue in cheek shipper way but it definitely can also give similar vibes as those ‘Becky has dibs on bi Joyce’ kinds of comments.
Wait, there are people who thinks Becky has “dibs?” Putting aside the fact that I doubt Becky sees it that way, just… ew, gross. This is coming from someone who is an absolute sucker for the “childhood friends” trope, but I’ve never looked at it in a “dibs” kinda way. The fact that some people look it that way is very unsettling.
Yes, many, but I’m not sure how many of them were sincerely of the mind that Becky had dibs.
I’m sure at least some of these comments are just people feeling bad for Becky and not thinking through the implications of “dibs”.
I also suspect that a not-insignificant portion of the comments weren’t even really concerned about Becky, and were actually trying to use her imagined hurt feelings as a bit of a cudgel — either to convince themselves that Becky’s existence was proof that Joyce can’t be bi, or in an effort to kinda… logic them out of shipping Joyce with girls.
“Come on, you don’t want Becky to be sad, do you?” sort of a vibe, in the most generous interpretation (where it’s not a deliberate guilt-trip, heh).
*kinda… logic other commenters out of shipping Joyce with girls.
(Btw, this sort of appeal to logic will never work. Very few people actually operate with a mental spreadsheet to determine which ships are the most rational. Mostly what we do is rationalize our ships after the fact.
Which isn’t something to feel guilty about! Rationalizing ships is fun! Digging in to a canon to mine it for evidence is fun! It’s just not how 95% of people start shipping. 95% of us pick up on or imagine a chemistry that we find appealing and go from there.)
Yeah, my only criteria for championing a ship is basically “do I they’d be cute together?” and “can I see their current relationship blossoming into something romantic*, assuming there aren’t signs of it doing so already.”
*I try to avoid the terminology “something more” because I feel like that language implies that platonic friendship is some kind of silver medal or not as valuable. Friendship is also love, not better or worse, just different.
Good comment, well-said. I especially like the second paragraph. 🙂
Also, while it’s not how I do it, shout out to people who’re like “those two will get on like a house on fire (derogatory)” and ship it gleefully. “Character X would make Character Y so much worse” is absolutely a valid shipping dynamic.
This is the way.
Hmm, that reminds me. Amazi-Girl may already be on the mob’s radar AND they know her secret identity. Blaine told the dirty cop right before the cop offed him.
The dirty cop asked him directly if Amazi-Girl was Amber, and Blaine denied it, stating again that Amber is too incapable to be Amazi-Girl.
I like the lighting in this one.
I concur. It is very well done and I think it fits the mood for the scene quite well. I especially find the first panel to be rather beautiful.
Hey, that mob doctor certianly doesn’t work for free. Did Asher pay for it too ?
I think the mob, too, got universal healthcare before the US did
I’m reminded of the Tropico series of games; they’re about being a dictator in a banana republic, with things like assassinations and electoral fraud being readily available tools, and large-scale embezzlement is one of the major goals of the game.
Yet they also have government funded universal healthcare and education, because these things just make your struggling economy work better.
He might’ve paid with a
oo ee oo ah ahh ting tang walla walla bing bang
I like Amber’s new scar.
Eventually, currently I’d guess it’s subpar stitches. Not intentionally, I’m sure there is room in the mob for people who appreciate a good cop-face-kicker.
It’s a scar now. 🔪
I somehow got the impression that it was being held together with super glue and not stitches. Goes back up to see if there is obvious stitching. Damn you lack of infinite resolution.
Damn Altey Text, Why You gotta Do a Thing?
I am comforted knowing 157 “well actually” jokes soon to follow
Pretty sure he sought them out because he was petty and a loser. Buuuuut Amazigirl would be wise to prevent any possible entanglement with the mob.
Yeah, he didn’t dress up for Comic-Con until he was well in.
Oh, wait, I see Willis beat me to it. No fair ninjaing my comments in the hovertext!
I love the lighting on this strip! The sunrise looks so pretty!
We don’t often get Amber feeling reflective so this is interesting to see her exploring her feelings on this. This could indeed be a big shoe that can drop later.
That first panel is art and fire. 😀
Blaine thought he was a criminal mastermind. He was actually a wannabe.
Love the SDCC reference.
Makes me wonder if was meant for a few weeks ago.
The Chekhov’s Gun, I suppose.
Not even a halfway through their first year of college and already starting up their awesome set of bad ass super hero scars.
if a popular car service in-universe is called zoomr, what are people the age of the main cast called?
huh, i switched browsers and my gravatar switched. not *opposed* to Ruth, but let’s see if I can remember how to get Dina back
Zipsters at a guess.
Dickheads?
Nah, that’s my generation.
Ubers
Dumbers.
The sliding timescale generation
Kitchen Doc shall now be known as…”Kitchen Mob Doc”!
Well, to be fair, eventually he did dress up as for comic-con.
A comical con?
I assume Zoomr is the gen z dating app, and they’re looking for a date who has a car.
This will work until in-universe time gets to the point where they’re all gen alpha.
It’s just in universe uber.
A-G’s a ComicCon dressup, sure. But Blaine was more a Origins cosplay guy. (NightGuy is GenCon, of course.)
I had a little bit of an insight yesterday regarding some differing perceptions of the comment section.
Li, in the course of one of the threads about overt homophobia in the comments, mentioned a username (SailorCakes) that I have never seen.
This leads me to wonder how much of a given individual’s perception of the homophobia or hostility in the comments is tied to “when they typically read/post” vs. “when Willis et al. typically nuke particularly bad comments” — I had been thinking I haven’t seen any overt homophobia here in a while… but specifically, that correlates pretty well with my work meeting schedule shifting a bit such that I now read here at a much different time of day.
That’s an interesting line of thought. I hadn’t considered that angle before. Honestly, it sounds more pleasant to hang out after most of the worst crap has been deleted. Less mile-long threads of “I am being attacked for saying I’m being attacked for saying I was being attacked for saying I didn’t say I said you said I attacked me”, at least.
It ALMOST makes me want some kind of “Thread/Post Deleted” marker in the threads so that people can get a sense that they missed something, although Reddit has shown us that often leads to a different kind of weird behavior.
Wow, this comment feels like I’m being attacked for saying “I am being attacked for saying I’m being attacked for saying I was being attacked for saying I didn’t say I said you said I attacked me”.
How could you, Taffy?
I lost track there somewhere.
I would be an awesome evil circus clown.
Like a clown in an evil circus or like an evil clown in a regular circus?
I think an evil clown in a regular circus might be a little too obvious, if that makes sense. Like “Wow, I expected to have fun and I got fed to the Vore Demon by Cracko the Clown. Never seen that one before.”
A regular clown in an evil circus is a lot more fun, to me. I could still be mischievous and mislead the protagonist in some ways, but I could also subtly help them in other ways, all while being charismatic and off-kilter.
I mean, aren’t we all kind of regular clowns in an evil circus these days?
That said, I love the idea of a clown helping the protagonist but UH OH! Sorry that was a gag, couldn’t help myself, seriously it’s this door I swear.
Exactly! Or pulling the hero up from a ledge, but it was a fake hand they grabbed and so they start to fall, but then I actually do pull them up.
Li has a new comment (6:03 pm):
“Oh wow SailorCakes’s whole thread got nuked lol.
Anyway, SailorCakes is NOT an example, and no one should have to be associated with her.”
So yes, timing is everything.
I asked for examples of people being called homophobic for no reason, though as I asked, I thought it might be a mistake for me to be the one asking specifically of Derek.
Anyway SailorCakes immediately volunteered herself and did yet another long thread of claiming people were “harassing” her for no reason, but a.) people replying to you in a neutral tone but disagreeing with you is not harassment, and b.) responding to one of the most queerphobic comments to make it past the filter this year with applause emojis and linking to a site full of “””alt right””” trolls to prove DoA’s fandom is toxic actually count as “reasons”.
(Second link is not to her link of the website, I think THAT comment must have been deleted, probably for…… linking to that website. Instead it’s to one of the threads where she and Taffy talk about her link and she makes up weird lies to defend why she thought it was a legit source, eventually landing on “I found it when I did a google search on an old work computer”. For the unaware, mask-off “””alt-right””” websites don’t come up in Google results unless you search for that kind of content a LOOOT.)
Huh, and now I’m wondering when I would have been looking at this that I glazed over SailorCakes posts entirely, because I swear I’d remember that avatar but I’m also commenting on some of those comics (but not in those threads).
(although I notice also that SailorCakes is mostly interacting with posters that I try not to — notably, Taffy, who I’m sure is a fine person but who posts in such a way that I often read their tone and intended hostility level as wildly different than probably intended)
Taffy is acerbic and sarcastic. They’re also actually a kind person imho, but I get why the communication style rubs some people the wrong way.
It doesn’t help that there’s a fair few commenters who have decided they’re the biggest jerk in the comments, which results in some returned energy on both sides.
My issue with Taffy is mostly that sometimes they seem chill snd then suddenly can become incredibly hostile and i have no idea what would trigger it. So i don’t like that felling of having to walk on eggshells around someone so i just stopped interacting with them altogether.
See, without specific examples, and not being Taffy myself, though perhaps we’re all Willis’s sock puppets who can say for sure — I will still go out on a limb and say most of that is jokes.
What I can think of that I don’t think was a joke is almost always returning energy (which might sometimes involve Taffy misjudging the energy of what they’re responding to — I’ve seen them say as much and apologize at least once), or else having a really bad day (which I’ve also seen them cop to a couple of times).
Like I’m not saying they’re an innocent lil lamb, no one here is, we all seem to be adults and responsibility for what we say to other posters stops with us! But I kind of think a lot of Taffy’s aura comes from their tendency to employ hyperbole, their specific sense of humor, and their high visibility, not only bc they’re one of the more prolific commenters but because they’ve got a unique profile pic and a unique “voice”.
So I think when they’re having a bad day, people see it and remember. When they make a joke that doesn’t land, people see it and remember.
I stand out enough already for being so long-winded, heh. If I had a unique avatar, I’m sure more people would have stronger opinions on me as a poster, and not all of them would be flattering.
Ironically, and I hope you don’t take offense to this, I perceive you as exactly the same way — there have been a few occasions in the last month where I perceive you as tossing off a one-liner that’s WAY more hostile than the situation seems to warrant.
Yeah in the times i mesn they weren’t jojes, or if they were they very much didn’t fell like it. One specific time they called me “not a person” among other things. It is hard for me to fuve the benefit of the doubt after that
Msybe it is just that i don’t get their “style” or whatever it is, but at the end of the fay i still left a good chunk of interaction woth them felling awful, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference to me.
Did I really say that? Jeez. Well, I’m sorry for that, it wasn’t cool of me to do.
Ok. Accept that apology. I also offer an apology if anything i have said provoque you.Still i rather we don’t interact if possible, i don’t think we bring out good things from ecah ither.
TBH, it’s a little weird how often my name comes up as a topic of discussion lately. I’m used to being That One Person With The Funny Changing Icon™, not the subject of a conspiracy meme and A Person To Avoid.
Internet gesture of support!!!
I think you are cool for the record.
Also? Current avatar is very nice.
I’m gonna take it as a sign to pump the brakes and cool off, maybe read some comments a second time assuming their tone is kinder than it seems, before I go quipping through a mouthful of potato chips about it. Couldn’t hurt, right?
Avatar-wise, my hands moved on their own. It’s already a fairly gay panel in isolation, all it needed was a slight change to fulfill the prophecy and keep The One Below from rising.
Something I should do too. Frankly something we should ALL be doing more of, it would make a huge difference in the general meanness of the comment section.
Also internet gesture of support. I think you’re very funny tbh.
Yeah, I wanna be absolutely clear that this is purely a perceptual thing on my end, as far as I can tell you’re on the snarky end of fine when I stop and objectively re-read.
support gesture also
yee i like ya deadpan dealio
technically “salty” but even then hey salt belongs on taffy XD
it also goes great on watermelon, heck makes fruit and a lot of sweet stuff sweeter heh
thank all of you for speaking up! I genuinely didn’t think there was much more I could do 🙁 but I like Taffy, I didn’t like them feeling so bad
She’s prolific but contained. She tends to only pop into one thread at a time, where she’ll then comment like 30 times, heh, but it’s easy to just not see that part of the page.
CW far down in the thread*, but for balance, her first post:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2025/comic/book-15/04-the-only-exception/facetious/#comment-1895089
There was nothing deleted here, so when she says that “everyone” is “attacking” her for her opinions, know that she’s talking about a thread where she and one (1) other person took turns attacking each other. I wouldn’t call all or Annarchy’s responses to her polite or anything, I just think it’s a conversation that devolved equally on both sides, and definitely not harassment in any way.
* Also at one point she makes a nasty jab about how this comment section is why [famous unrelated suicide happened], so. Just something to be aware of before you click.
Jeez, that’s wild. I hadn’t been commenting that week, and I’m kinda glad because I definitely would have been angry about it.
And I will point out that comments with in that thread that spawned other things did get deleted, so there are still worse things said that didn’t make it past the mods.
oh good
🙁
Yeaahhh, if you’ve never seen that particular DELIGHTFUL (heavy sarcasm) commenter or their ilk, I can imagine it looks like some of us are wildly overstating how rough the comment section can be.
On days where I come by late (because work/family/or I just didn’t remember this place existed) I assume there have been bad threads I missed. Especially if people are heated about it. But I only assume that because I’ve been here early a bunch of times and seen the shit that ends up deleted, and some of that is seriously gross and upsetting.
Yep. I’m in UTC -5, my main body of work meetings used to start at 10am, so I was reading right after midnight until maybe 2AM.
Now my work meetings start at 8AM, and I start here at either 7:30AM or 9AM depending.
And since there’s no visibility into moderation action aside from seeing a thread disappear after a refresh, I kinda got suckered into the unexamined belief that the comment section was getting less horrible (as opposed to more aggressively policed) — granted, this opinion also was informed by a significant portion of the “post all day” folks dialing some of the argument intensity back, which is a good thing.
it’s always an interesting experience to be told a place has a huge problem with some shit you’ve never seen because you’re not about at that specific time
and then sometimes you have to be like “damn I’m not advocating for the return of slavery I really do like cupcakes, I didn’t know there was a faction of racist cupcake likers here” or some shit (this is an example unrelated to this website)
the transience of experience can be pretty profound but it can also be really really fucking stupid
Racist cupcake likers? Is there a real story behind that one, or is it just An Example™ you came up with?
She’s definitely not the only one but she is a stand-out. It helps that she’s got a very recognizable Sailor Moon avatar. And yeah, her threads do keep getting deleted.
I know it’s not how the report function works, but I do wish we had like, This comment/thread was removed for homophobia/racism/whatever, just because I do think it would help with a shared sense of reality.
If you’ve legit never seen people like her, it must REALLY feel like the comments about lesbophobia etc are projecting.
I think there’s also some bleed, i.e. when all someone says is “aw!” but you’re used to that comment being accompanied by some gross comment about cheating, or when all someone says is “ugh”, but you’re used to that comment being accompanied by whatever gross sentiment about Joyce’s sexuality. It can start feeling like a more neutral comment has a tone. Dog whistles we may or may not be imagining.
(I really tried to phrase that neutrally bc I genuinely think we’re all doing it.)
There’s definitely bleed, but at least that can usually be talked out — I’ve had it happen twice where I got into an argument where I wasn’t sure WHY I was being argued with until I either realized or had it pointed out that my interlocutors were more engaging with “the jerks who hold superficially similar positions” and as I’m admittedly the kind of person who will toss off some less-than-carefully-phrased stuff when I’m just casually posting…
Basically a combo, right?
Not only does it seem like the “other side” is reacting to posts that don’t exist (either because they’ve been deleted or because they’re just buried in comment landslides we’ve missed), they’re also visibly overreacting to some of the posts that do exist… and all of this is before you get to regular ole confirmation bias!
It’s easy to wind up feeling like “man those people are so unreasonable”.
That would probably explain it for me too. I’m on UTC and generally read mid morning, or as late as, well, now.
(Mid-morning my time, and “now” being 6:30 in the evening my time.)
(Of course, I also sometimes look at a given strip, see it’s got hundreds and hundreds of comments, and am just like “nope!”)
Yeah, my sleep schedule has shifted such that I am no longer awake when this comic is posted and I’ve been less engaged with the comments as a result. Much easier to miss discourse if you’re skimming the thread in the late morning than it is if you’re participating as soon as the strip’s posted
Sal holds on to amazigirl’s cape for a while, then jennifer finds the cape in her backpack
That would be hilarious.
If Amber thinks that AG’s actions can make her like her father, this might be the last time we see AG. That would give her time for Walky.
I’d bet you good money this won’t be the last time we see AG.
I’m not sure what to think about AG:s new look.
It’s more refined, and maybe it does put the ”girl” in Amazi-girl a little. I still love the old ”yellow jumpsuit” look.
Gasp. Dorothy is a cheater AND a mid fashion designer
Truly she must be stopped
I mean, hitting “mid” on the first try is pretty good. Maybe she should be encouraged instead of stopped!
Oh damn, she looks like she took two bullets maybe — that cut on the arm looks rough if it needs three bandages. Maybe winged her on the side.
Is that three bandages? Looks like one gauze pad with a strip of medical tape across it to fasten it to her skin.
Started for who, Amber? Your dad? Asher? Nameless Kitchen Doc/Mob Doc? All the above?
Okay, just a quick PSA. Yes this is based on something specific. Don’t wanna put em on blast but I’m not making up a guy to get mad at:
I do not care how much you don’t like the cheating. That’s fine. If you really wanna believe that it’s being excused by more people because it’s a wlw couple — I encourage you to go back and read the Jacob/Joyce arc because we had a very similar divide back then in terms of supporters and decries, despite everyone involved being straight. I think Dorothy/Joyce has more long-term shippers because their dynamic has been a part of the comic for a long time and has read as potentially queer for 15+ years, so we’ve been waiting for our flowers for longer than Jacob/Joyce shippers and had more time to build up excitement.
But if you wanna believe it’s getting more of a pass for being gay rather than for just having more shippers — fine, I guess I can’t stop you.
I am however begging you not to say “it feels fetishizing”.
First of all because you will embarrass yourself. I promise you the overwhelming majority of people who ship the girls are ourselves queer. (Which is not the same as saying no one who’s against the ship or against the cheating is queer, that’s a weird thing that keeps getting tossed out! Stop saying that, it’s not true.)
Second of all, because “aw they’re so cute” isn’t fetishizing, no matter who says it. Because “oo Slipshine when” about fictional characters isn’t fetishizing, no matter who says it.
It wasn’t fetishizing when Joe/Joyce shippers wanted a Slipshine, it’s not magically fetishizing now because it’s gay, stop it.
PSA done.
I just love this friendship so muuuuch ahhhhhh
Li mentioned the Jacob/Joyce Arc and it reminds me: Joyce is such a cheater omg. Why is Dorothy getting so much hate on reddit and tumblr when Joyce is the one who keeps encouraging cheating?
(I don’t care about characters cheating, they’re not real. It’s just odd to me)
As I understand it, the reasoning is that Joyce experiences consequences and should have learned her lesson last time.
I think that’s taking a rosy view of the arc itself, which actually ended on this note.
Like, yes, Jacob didn’t get together with Joyce, and their friendship scaled back significantly, but the next time Joyce saw him, he wasn’t even cold to her or anything.
*experienced consequences
I’m not victim blaming, but Joe should’ve taken that as a red flag. But, it’s not smarting of age haha
Joe basically took it as the exact opposite, really, and I wonder if Jacob will say anything about it turning out to be different from inside the situation after all?
I’ve said a few times that I’m really interested in Jacob’s take on this.
Like on the one hand, Jacob genuinely has no room to talk here: Joyce didn’t cheat WITH Joe, she cheated ON him, it’s a completely different experience.
On the other hand, Joe was SO dismissive of Jacob’s disappointment and discomfort, I’m sure that at least internally, some small part of Jacob’s brain will be like, “is she perfect yet?”
(And then he’ll probably crush it, because he’s a good guy and he won’t want to ACTUALLY make Joe feel worse!)
Ah, the previous Joyce cheating episode, which IMHO differs on the following semi-salient points:
– people tend to perceive “emotional” cheating as less significant than “physical” (I don’t really agree with this here)
– no one likes Raidah and anything that takes her down a peg is going to register on most people as “yeah, that’s okay” (kinda agree here)
– at the time of the arc ending, Joyce WAS experiencing consequences in terms of Jacob being unhappy about it (and I’m kinda annoyed he wasn’t cold to her or anything, to be frank, but I wasn’t commenting much then).
– the narrative never framed this as anything other than what it was (Joyce trying to get Jacob away from Raidah) — there were no unambiguously cute moments for the Joyce x Jacob shippers.
That all said, I think the actual answer to Mym’s question is that for whatever reasons, people like Joyce better than Dorothy. (Personally, I’m irritated at Joyce because I HAD been identifying with both her and Joe’s growth arcs, and now she’s kinda off that track in a way that sinks my ship AND is gonna hurt my other favorite character.)
I should clarify that in the second point I am agreeing with “it’s nice to see Raidah get taken down a peg”, not “Joyce was justified in trying to facilitate cheating”.
— no one likes Raidah and anything that takes her down a peg is going to register on most people as “yeah, that’s okay”
You’d think, but there really were a lot of people pointing out that what Joyce was doing was wrong the whole time.
— the narrative never framed this as anything other than what it was (Joyce trying to get Jacob away from Raidah) — there were no unambiguously cute moments for the Joyce x Jacob shippers.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/burst-2/
Agree to disagree on what counts as unambiguously cute?
(There were actually a lot of moments imho from the second we learned Jacob was Raidah’s girlfriend, but for some of that, Joyce was at least unaware of her attraction to Jacob and nominally trying to talk Sarah up so that Jacob would leave Raidah for her… there’s at least some sort of deniability there, so I went for a strip from right in the middle of Joyce and Jacob’s “sorta fake but not really fake” date.
There IS a reason why some readers got really excited when Jacob kissed Joyce — there WERE moments where the focus seemed to be on what great chemistry they had, not on how wrong what they were doing was.)
Clarification: you genuinely don’t have to like, concede either point, I am engaging in cheerful intellectual debate here, no big emotional investment. I’m personally kind of torn between agreeing with Jacob’s final assessment of the whole thing and agreeing with Joe, in that it IS sitcom hijinx-y but of course that can still be a lot less fun from the inside, and Jacob was within his rights to reject Joyce for literally any reason.
Yeah, I will clarify: When I say “unambiguously cute”, I mean two things:
– the characters are having a cute moment
– there’s no other story beats or such happening.
In that case, yeah, it’s cute, but we’re also at the point where Jacob is aware of what’s going on and he’s kinda already (IMHO) decided that Joyce is not for him, AND Joyce is having a baby moment but also talking about some heavy stuff. But to me, it’s really the foregrounding of “Talking about the kidnapping” that counteracts “unambiguously”.
I don’t even disagree with you on Raidah, necessarily, I feel like I could downgrade that pretty easily to “on average, people like Joe now more than they liked Raidah then”.
Agree to disagree then. 🙂
But also honestly? I think people like Joe more than they like most of the rest of the cast. Even the folks who regularly try to remind the comment section that he used to suck are coming at it from the angle of “don’t deny him his hard-won character arc”.
There are a couple of commenters now and then who will assert that they don’t like Joe at all, but I think he’s probably the most sympathetic guy Joyce could possibly be cheating on right now.
It’s been my experience as a writer of homebrew RPG settings that nothing gets players to like a character more than “character is VISIBLY on an arc of self-improvement”… and conversely, the easiest way to make players dislike a character is make sure they routinely make self-defeating decisions.
If you squint, could be Joe and Dorothy.
I woulda said the first was also Joyce, for a while there.
Oh, people don’t just dislike Dorothy because she self-sabotages. A lot of folks have convinced themselves she also thinks she’s majorly self-righteous and manipulative. She threw away Danny and Walky like trash because she didn’t think they were good enough for her [citation needed], and generally she’s just some sort of egomaniac who doesn’t actually like any of her friends.
Meanwhile, I’m like. This sad wet cat of a woman. She puts so much pressure on herself all the time and her sense of self-worth is extremely fragile. She “mom friends” people out of a deep-seated desperation to be useful. She’s always been that girl whose best friend was a teacher. Her parents probably told her and themselves that she’d be okay once she got to college, she’d find other young people with similar goals, and there’d be people for whom her intense focus on school was admirable instead of freaky loser stuff.
Like, I genuinely don’t think Dorothy had any friends when she arrived at IU, but I don’t think she let it bother her because I think she thought she’d find Her People eventually: at Yale if not at IU, and hey, that would be even better, because she was planning on leaving IU pretty quickly! And friends at Yale would double as good networking for once she graduated.
I don’t think her lack of social graces ever actually bothered her until she tried to run for RA against Roz and discovered that, oh, actually, when I’m not burying myself in extra credit assignments and pretending that having a boyfriend is the same thing as having a social life, I am bad at this. The harder she tried, the worse it got.
(And I don’t think she’s completely gotten over that temporary rivalry with Roz, either; I’m pretty sure that’s part of why it bothered her so much when Roz specifically accused her of slut-shaming Joyce, heh.)
Yeah, cosign on all of that.
And yeah, it would have been a lot more sitcom hijinks-y if Jacob HADN’T realized that he liked everything about dating Joyce except the setup for it.
As I argued at the time, that was pretty clearly set up to be a deconstruction of the usual rom com tropes and particularly of Joyce’s own particular version of them. And it was.
It had it’s cute moments of course – you need to in order to make it work, but it didn’t lean into the grand romance in anything like the way this arc has. To me, that romance was doomed from the start and you could tell by the way the narrative framed it. Obviously that wasn’t true for everyone. 🙂
This isn’t the same.
Agree to disagree. 🙂
I do think it’s important that the next interaction between Joyce and Jacob was months later their time.
Of course that’s a potential factor (I think that link is literally Jacob’s reappearance after the timeskip!), but my point remains. I don’t think Joyce experienced significant consequences.
Dorothy told her she was better than that (insert favorite ironic meme); Becky dismissed Dorothy’s concerns entirely, saying “Joyce is horny” (this apparently made it okay); and, of course, Sarah just felt guilty for her own part in things. I don’t think anyone else ever even found out.
I haven’t seen anyone mad at her on tumblr and i check the tag regularly now that people actually post. Mostly is people enjoying the development. (It’s honestly nicer that over here)
I think I know how to solve the arguments of the comments section
Death penalty: yay or nay?
As long as i get to go first.
Nadamas, first in line for the death penalty.
That was what you meant?
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it works out for them.
Yeah put me under chief.
Genuine laughter for this
That’s tricky, because I genuinely do believe some people need killing. Your Ted Bundys, your Jeffrey Dahmers, every single currently active human trafficker, I really don’t think they deserve to live, even in permanent solitary confinement. I think there’s a place for the death penalty when it comes to that level of harm, because I don’t think there’s any coming back from it once you’ve done it. They shouldn’t be accepted back into society, and we should be burdened with keeping them alive in our already-overcrowded prisons.
The tricky part comes in when you think about who else would get the penalty. Maybe someone who doesn’t really deserve it, like someone who was framed extremely well, or someone the government decided was a threat to their power and wanted to use them as an example. Open-secret disappearings are one thing, but legally executing a political opponent through the same official means we’d use to get rid of Ted Bundy? That’s a powerful tool to spread fear in your population. And I don’t trust our government not to abuse that, especially not right now.
Basically, while I think there are genuinely good uses for the death penalty, it’s also way too easily exploited as a fear tactic.
Well said. The only thing I’d add to that is that it’s far too easy for well meaning juries to screw up. And death is permanent.
Oh yeah, the jury angle is also worth considering. Unless I’m mistaken, isn’t a typical American jury composed of basically random people with no relation to a given case, who are handed some stuff to go over and encouraged to pick something quickly? That’s the impression that I get.
Not quite. They sit and watch the trial as it happens. Which doesn’t help when your public defender falls asleep and isn’t able to object to the prosecutor breaking rules.
Your defense attourny falling asleep during the trial was ruled to not be grounds for a mistrial.
In that scenario, I should be allowed to throw Pop-Its at the attorney to wake them the fuck up. The drowsy conga’s there to work, not to sleep.
It’s not just easy for juries to screw up. It’s also easy for police to obtain false confessions (See the Central Park 5 for one of the more prominent cases of police obtaining a false confession) and for prosecutors to absolutely railroad innocent people.
There’s even been at least one case where someone on death row was proven to be innocent and it was ruled that being innocent was not grounds to not execute the person that was on death row.
You read that right, at least one person who was known to be innocent was given the death penalty because being innocent wasn’t good enough to get them off death row.
Whether some people deserve the death penalty or not it’s been objectively shown that the government can not be trusted with that power.
I… reading that gave me the vibes of that one “Malcolm in the Middle” quote. I expected nothing, and still end up disappointed. How in the bleeding hell is “this guy didn’t do it” not good enough to… what are you even punishing them for if they’ve been proven to not have done the thing you’re punishing them for?!
I’m going to go play Warframe before my head explodes. Warframe’s plot, involving time travel, parallel universes, ancient gods outside causality, immortal robots, and talking goldfish? Even that’s easier to parse than the absurdity I just read.
Normally I’d ask for sources… but you know what, Verhoeven? No. No I would NOT “like to know more.”
It’s simple, and stupid: “The RULES say that appeals are for errors of law, not for errors of fact. Proof of innocence is an error of fact, and unless you can prove that the prosecution deliberately and unlawfully hid that proof, it’s not the state’s fault you were convicted and therefore it’s not right to let you free.”
Lawful Stupid mindset.
WOW that is ridiculous. What legal mechanism do the various nonprofits use to get innocent people off death row then? Is it just throwing enough lawyers at the problem until the prosecutor decides it’s not worth the effort any more?
Trigger warning: amateur hour legal blather.
As I understand it, mostly, it’s either “prove that the prosecution DID have evidence that would exonerate the subject but unlawfully hid it from the defense, police coerced a confession, etc” (in other words, proving that the error in question was an appealable one) or else “amassing sufficient proof that the governor of the state and/or the parole board pardon/commute sentence on/release the subject rather than continue their death row sentence”.
It is, as usual, one of those things — originally, the “rule” (and to be clear, it’s more “defer to the original court’s finding of facts” than a strict rule as written) was intended to make sure that everyone aired all evidence at the first trial rather than holding something back to sweeten an appeal attempt, which makes sense on its face. Appeals courts typically only rule on facts when the trial involved a judge rather than a jury making declarations of fact, on the assumption that juries are generally impartial.
I think my brain just broke.
I think I need to learn some new swear words, because the old ones just aren’t cutting it anymore.
https://youtu.be/L30_hfuZoQ8?si=Rsu_BJ50faYDxcFQ
Link is to Shaun’s video on the death penalty, which I think is excellent, and also contains a lot of original research. The specific cases covered are also really interesting.
she ty on my penal ‘til i death
(Nay.)
Related question: given the problems with the death penalty, would mutilation be an acceptable substitute? It leaves the opportunity for someone to clear their name while they’re still alive, and a person can still turn it around and lead a good life with their eyes gouged out or something. It sounds gruesome, but honestly if I was given the opportunity of life in prison or having my hand chopped off, I’d go for the hand.
ah dangit this is meant to be a reply to Florence’s comment above
I think that falls under “cruel and unusual punishment” and so it’s unconstitutional.
I know, but my question is more whether it should be.
Yes? Because that is what it is.
Not whether it should be considered ‘cruel and unusual’, although I think that prison and execution are both more cruel, but whether it should be unconstitutional.
The entire point of the question is, it is expressed often in this debate that there are some people who really do deserve to be executed, but the death penalty is still wrong because the ruling cannot be reversed in any way. Mutilation doesn’t have this problem, especially now that we have prosthetic limbs and even blindness can be cured to an extent. In many ways it’s a lighter sentence. So, why do we have a taboo against it but not the death penalty?
I am begging you to consider people who live with the disabilities you’re discussing when you talk about them as punishments this flippantly. That’s the last I’ll say on it. Yikes.
I concur, this same kind of bullshit is also peddled by RFK
autism nor any disability is a “punishment”, like from what from god or something???
for fucks sake 9-9
[insert rest of rant here I’m DONE]
RFK can die soon, please.
And the answer to your question is yes, with the follow up question what the hell is wrong with you?
Well, the point was to provoke discussion of why people think the death penalty *could* be acceptable in principle, if not for all the false convictions. Personally I believe that even many punishments we consider barbaric are better than the death penalty, so the death penalty is unacceptable in principle and in all circumstances.
I realize most of the people replying to this post are probably not the ones the question is meant to get at, which is people who think that execution could be warranted in some situations. In this way the whole project has been a failure.
My own feelings about the death penalty are complicated, I don’t think it’s a one and done approval. However, I think at least with the death penalty, it is final. The person is dead, they’ve passed, and if people believe in an afterlife, then the person is now contending with whatever that looks like.
Whereas mutilation is willfully giving someone a disability. That person now has to live with whatever mutilation they have. If they remain imprisoned, is the prison system going to properly care for that prisoner? Providing prosthetic limbs? Will they just leave someone to crawl? And what about when they are released? Will they be given care?
You also have to keep in mind that for this thought experiment, there are people with disabilities that match whatever mutilation you imagine in this scenario. People who’re missing their limbs, blind, deaf, mute, etc. By looking at someone with a disability and going “hmmm that’d be a good thing to do to someone else” that only serves to further dehumanize people with disabilities. They go from a person to a cautionary tale, “ooh you don’t wanna murder someone or else you’ll be blinded like that guy” and that’s just terrible.
My question for you, and I’m asking this because I’m curious not to demonize you or attack you, but why is it that you think punishing someone in such a way is a lighter punishment? Prosthetic limbs don’t change the fact that that person no longer has that missing limb. Hands are still very difficult (and expensive) to replicate in prosthetics. Often people with missing limbs have phantom limb syndrome. Chronic pain is a common affliction that impedes everyday life. Blindness is a tricky subject because it depends on how one is blinded.
For example, my mother lost vision in one of her eyes due to being electrocuted. For a while, the possibility of a transplant was considered, but in the end was deemed not viable because the source of her blindness wasn’t damage to her eyeball, but was optic nerve damage. That cannot be replaced or replicated. Also keep in mind that because my mother was disabled (partially blind and deaf), I have the first person view of what life was like for her and how difficult getting around could be at times. I often was her second pair of eyes and ears whenever we were out or when she was driving. My mother did the best she could, to the point that many of her coworkers were actually unaware she had these disabilities, but it still impeded her life in many ways. She had dreams of being a pilot.
I’m going to mostly stay out of the entire discussion, because I have BIG feels about it given the rate of innocent people who have been put on Death Row, but I just… yikes to this additional question.
This made me physically recoil. It’s so unnecessarily cruel, and does absolutely nothing to rehabilitate criminals. Pure punishment, pain, and vengeance. That’s a yuck from me.
Yeah it’s weird.
Well, the whole point is that for some reason the death penalty is something that we entertain as something that can be just in some situations. This is despite the fact that in every way, it is worse than mutilation, especially when done incorrectly (which it very often is). The main difference is that if someone is dead they cannot continue to harm others, which implicitly is enough to overcome the fact that otherwise it is just torture with no purpose.
Absolutely the fuck not.
what in the fuck even is this. living with your eyes gouged out?
Wait, there is no blood on her Amazi-girl outfit. Cherchez l’assailant…