The struggle of any complex ideas (and given the complexity of the world, any ideas worth a damn are complex) is that core concepts can often end up being ripped from context and simplified. Even very smart and wise people have trouble not doing this- the complexities are so numerous that it is impossible for any one person to keep it all straight all the time. At least, I’ve never met one who I thought could, and even if I did, I’d never tell them so, because I think the moment you think you are such a person you cease to have any chance of being so.
Is there a cop out there who will refuse to evict anyone? Who will leave a homeless person who’s not hurting anyone alone? The law requires anyone who enforces it to do things that make them a bastard. Someone else who’s not currently up at three in the morning is likely to be able to expand on this betted.
ACAB is not about each individual cop being a bastard, it’s about cops being part of a system that forces them to be bastards. Imagine if you will a hypothetical “good” SS officer. They would still be forced to take part in all the things the SS officers do, and thus would no longer be good, or no longer be an SS officer.
Policing in America is a less extreme variant of this. “The Thin Blue Line” exists to protect extremist cop behavior, and cops who don’t toe the line are penalized. For instance a cop who stopped another cop from strangling someone was fired and charged. A cop who tried to report on police abuses in NYC was forceably imprisoned in a mental institution. A cop who tried to stop a suicidal person without killing them was charged with “endangering police officers.”
There are plenty of small towns in America with 2-4 cops, perhaps many of them have reasonable police officers who want to help the community. And that’s great for them (plenty also do not, or have a very interesting definition of community). But for large police forces, if you don’t toe the thin blue line, you’re not allowed to be a cop. And that means that all of those cops are bastards, whether they started out wishing to be or not.
Thanks for this explanation. It was really enlightening. 🙂 That said, we should probably rename the expression ACAB (along with “defund the police”) because on first glance it is REALLY misleading and is probably costing us support from neutral or uninformed people who read the abbreviation and draw an utterly incorrect (but nonetheless quite understandable) conclusion from it.
There are well-meaning people who do misunderstand, but you’re right; they often misunderstand because bad actors intentionally muddy the waters. The bad guys know the longer we have to explain and defend ourselves, the more time they have to rob us blind (of money, of rights, of infrastructure, etc.)
Sure, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. They can and will twist anything we say, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. Things like “defund the police” that are already misleading on first glance don’t help anyone.
The fact that no one who wants to do it actually wants to do the thing everyone who first hears it assumes the sentence means? Like if your slogan needs explaining while making people think they know what you’re about it’s not a great slogan, and “defund the police” did damage to progressives with black and brown communities specifically in addition to being weaponized by the right.
Messaging does matter. That piece is particularly ineffective.
There are plenty of people out there who still see the police system overall as a force of good. Think the older generations and just generally people who don’t majorly focus on the news cycles and aren’t regularly seeing all the evidence against the police. To these people, ‘Defund the police’ may seem like either a really dumb idea, or something insidious.
You want your slogan to make sense to someone who’s mostly clueless as to what’s going on, otherwise you’re just preaching to your choir. Random spitballing but something like ‘Policing Must Change’ or ‘Police Justice, Not Police Brutality’ would at least make it clearer that you’re not seeking to weaken the notions of security that people see the police as safeguarding.
I will not disagree with your intent but a significant issue is getting clear messaging across. In the age of hashtags and slogans repeated 1000 times a minute in your media feeds, it’s difficult to get someone to read a 3 paragraph explanation of a political idea.
Take “Make America Great Again.” What does that mean exactly? It’s a nice phrase, but doesn’t say much. Now people might look into what the message means, or maybe just take it at its face value in blind support.
All Cops Are Bastards operates by the same rule. For a lot of people, that base idea resonates. For others, they may look into what that phrase actually means. The important bit is people hear the slogan and get interested enough to learn more. For that you need a bold statement to catch people’s attention in the barrage of messaging that is modern social media.
Basically, ACAB fits on a signboard, and anyone seeing that signboard might look it up and then get the actual message you replied to. Another timely example is “From the river to the sea.” I heard people chanting that and then looked it up.
Not interested in going through all the effort of creating new terms that will only be immediately twisted again, as Hat noted.
It’s also just much better to explain to people that the right misrepresents terms, so that they’ll learn to be more skeptical of right-wing definitions, than to capitulate to the right’s deliberately misleading definitions — not only legitimizing their definitions but their tactics.
Not to mention constantly playing defense and spending all our time trying to come up with new terms to describe things, instead of actually making any progress on these conversations.
Heck, the “Mayberry” paradigm of a peaceable kingdom small town with a token police department was considered a fantasy even back when it was made–especially in the face of the real Jim Crow South. I won’t name a name, but near where I was living a few years ago, there is a notorious state line town where the Sheriff just had a few above-board officers under his command, but was also in with the local organized crime families, who could loan him thugs to handle the Sheriff’s dirty work. The Sheriff finally got busted, but it’s been impossible to replace both him and his Deputies as there aren’t a lot of local men qualified for the jobs. And if you’re a GOOD man, why would you WANT to be a cop in a place like that?
What your comment brings to mind is how people in these positions can have opportunities to do good, and these probably go unnoticed by history. For example in the movie JoJo Rabbit (spoiler ahead)
we see someone in the German military who has clearly become disillusioned with Hitler step into a situation in a way that saves multiple lives – and he’s not found out by his peers, thankfully. Then again near the end of the movie, he takes action to protect someone more innocent than him and sacrifices himself in the process (or at least doesn’t try to help his situation).
No one is morally pure and I personally couldn’t stand the assaults on my integrity that I’m sure being a police officer would present while trying to do any good in that positions. But if a saying that is supposed to be a systemic critique and people consistently misunderstand it, I want better slogans that don’t just drive culture wars.
I missed articulating one of my main points, which is that sometimes people in the most morally compromised positions can also take actions that no one else could for good.
Because Police are mandated to be suspicious of everything, even innocuous or innocent actions made with nervousness. In Short, All cops are bastards because they are paid to be whether they want to or not. Even the so called “good ones”😀
There are always going to be evil people out there. They don’t need to be many to ruin everything for everyone. You know the saying about how a rotten apple spoils the bunch? Once rot appears, it propagates fast.
Evil people will set up to rule over other people. Criminal behavior of coercion, extortion, even abduction and enslavement appear spontaneously. With more people under their sway, they go out to use their force to enslave even more people, until they run out of free people nearby and at that point they go raid other criminal lords.
This is basically how the ancestors of nation states appeared. People took power by force and fought other of their ilk over who would get to oppress the most people.
Once you get to rule over a lot of people, however, power can no longer be exercised directly. You need to delegate, to have intermediaries, lieutenants, etc. That’s where a need to have some sort of legitimacy comes into play, and that’s where we have a long list of thinkers who came up with differences between a just ruler and an unjust one, and of better ways to reprogram the criminal racketeering and enslaving enterprise that was at the origin of the state into something that will benefit the people instead of oppress them.
But despite many revolutions and enlightened ideals, this was never fully achieved. The state is still, at its core, a machine of oppression that we have to tolerate mostly because it protects us from worse oppression.
Nowadays, it is harder for an evil man with ambitions to just take over a tribe and then snowball from there. Precisely because there are those states out there. So you can either work within the system (join the state), or against the system (join organized crime), or both at once (be a corrupt member the state).
And this is where ACAB comes from. It’s not about each and every single member of the police being a bad person; it’s about the entire system being bad — at best, a necessary evil; at worst, just an evil.
There’s a big show being made of how police and military should not obey illegitimate orders. How the “just following orders” excuse famously didn’t fly in the Nuremberg trials. And yet, can’t you think of some recent illegitimate orders being passed, and dutifully obeyed without complaint? Can’t you think of how people who are supposed to swear an oath to protect the Constitution are allowing blatantly unconstitutional things to happen because they’re just following orders?
And this is where ACAB comes from. It’s not about each and every single member of the police being a bad person; it’s about the entire system being bad.
That is the exact problem with the wording ACAB: it appears to place the blame on every individual cop, which makes the claim and the views behind it really easy to misunderstand.
People not already familiar with the more nuanced interpretation don’t get it, and often oppose the oversimplified wording rather than the actual ideas, as illustrated by Differentiator’s message.
Alas, the effectiveness of a slogan tends to be inversely proportional to how accurately it reflects reality. “Refocus police efforts on local care and train officers to be social workers first, crime-fighters second” doesn’t really get people fired up to go and protest, even if it’s what’s actually needed. One *hopes* that the people shouting ACAB understand this, although I’ve been on the internet long enough to become rather cynical about that.
But what does “effectiveness of a slogan” really mean? If it gets those who understand it fired up to go protest, but drives a bigger backlash from those who take it more literally, is that really effective?
Don’t forget, when calculating that, the fact that the right wing will deliberately twist the meanings of any and all slogans no matter how innocuous — see Hat’s post above, but witness how “Black Lives Matter” is treated basically like a scam, a racist anti-white argument, and a violent anti-cop slogan all at once.
In other words, when the backlash is artificial and will exist no matter what slogan you use, why even consider it?
As I said above: it’s both a waste of time and effort to constantly reinvent new terms that the right is just gonna twist again and actively counterproductive to concede that a given term was “bad”.
It legitimizes the tactic.
And it does nothing to increase wariness around right wing twisting.
Much better investment of time to raise awareness of how the right keeps twisting terms so that people are more prepared for the next twist.
Just a reminder that the movie Serpico was a dramatization of the true story of my addled mind wants to say Frank Serpico’s battle against dirty cops. Lemme Google that first name. Googled and corrected. He even took “friendly” fire during a drug raid.
Or people get on board with the non systemic interpretation of it and focus their energy on hatred for individual cops rather than changing and improving the system that leads to the critique.
I’ve found that thoughts on cops and their ilk is a lot more broad outside of the US.
For example, in my home country, Cops are mostly respected and trusted to do the right thing (because there are systems that actually sack and remove the pension of cops that break the code of conduct), while it is the Military that is hated and distrusted. And that comes from the simple fact that my homecountry was under a military dictatorship for 30 years.
The same talking points about cops being jackbooted thugs of the state that exist only to be the boot on the neck of the people are directed towards the Military, because it was them who did that, and not even under a veneer of “Law and Justice”, but because the Generalissimo demanded it.
In the words of Brennan Lee Mulligan:
“Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just a promise of violence that’s enacted and police are basically an occupying army, ya know what I mean?”
Which is to say ACAB is true because the institution of a police force – especially nowadays – is there to protect and serve the interests of the ruling classes, rather than protect and serve the interests of the people.
Unfortunately good cops just don’t last. They either get pulled to the bad side, or fired, or driven to suicide. The system of cops is an always has been corrupt and harmful. Link below is written by an ex-cop who is in hiding due to fear of doxxing and retaliation. He explains it very well.
Its along the same line as “no ethical consumption in capitalism”, but people have oversimplified it to be against individuals. In a corrupt system, no one participating is good, there are only lesser evils
“leftist theory” being “about not seeing the world in black and white”, is the most vibes-ass description of a thing i’ve read in a while. you’re not describing “leftist theory”, you seem to be trying to talk the general concept of learning and understanding the world around you, and you’re getting that worryingly wrong too.
The point of trying to understand the world around you is not actually to maximize the amount of information you understand. The point of seeking knowledge is to try to make your understanding of the world more accurate, and in particular, to improve yourself to be more effective at making the world a better place. The reason why we identify and explore the nuances of all these systems of power is to arrive at conclusions, and refine those conclusions in light of new information.
The reason why it’s important to identify the limits of our understanding may be so we don’t plant our feet on shaky ground, but equally importantly, to identify strong principles upon which we can stand firm, because you can’t begin trying to make the world a better place without committing to some concrete understanding of what “better” is. Nuance does not exist to be your personal excuse generator to avoid ideological commitment.
If you look at the general pattern of “when people analyze the world around them, their understanding of things often becomes more complex and nuanced” and conclude “complicated things are more correct than simple things”, then congratulations, you’ve disguised a heuristic as knowledge, you’ve replaced reasoning with gradient descent, you have restructured your cognition to resemble the functioning of ChatGPT. I promise you, you do actually have the capacity to think, and you are actually supposed to use that capacity.
Thank you for all the explanations and discussions, guys, seriously. This was exactly what I hoped to achieve with this comment. I also learned quite a few things myself and changed my attitude towards the slogan ACAB.
And to those who commented the less helpful stuff: I don’t know what you were hoping to achieve, but I wish you that you got out of it what you wanted.
god damn did i misread your overall attitude lol. imagine how apropos my reply would be if u were actually a deeply incurious asshole though. uh… yeah, sorry about that. i do think it’s worth questioning the premise that “not seeing the world in black and white” is a particular trait of leftist thought and not just a generalization about what happens when people engage intellectually, and it’s worth considering that sometimes clarity is about revealing hidden complexity and sometimes it’s about tearing down obfuscation. but… idk, i guess if you want to u can read my comment like u overheard me saying it to a real fuckin piece of work who, critically, isn’t actually you
That explains your first comment quite well 😀 tbf I could have worded my first comment more as a question and less provocative. No harm done 🙂
Of course, seeking clarity instead of categorisation isn’t inherently left behaviour, but I do believe that a) the (alt-)right tend to engage in it less, up to outright refusal from many. At the same time, many who call themselves left seem to resort to that simplicity when it is convenient. I thought ACAB was an example of that, and I even remember looking into it at one point, but apparently, my research was flawed. I’m glad my stupid provocative comment could resolve that, if anything^^ coincidentally, that’s also where my username stems from – the need to seek clarity by going beyond black and white, with my name serving as a constant reminder that I want to keep asking questions. I do suck at asking them nicely, though XP
this is just a side effect of dog whistle politics, and me having bad impulse control. but i don’t think u need to deprecate yourself for happening to trigger my “committed centrist” detector by random chance, i have to take responsibility for not getting so mad on such shaky grounds. i’m gonna go ahead and turn my ublock origin filter back on that hides the dumbingofage comments section, because there’s something about this specific space that brings out the worst in me.
The thing is good cops don’t last while the bad apples get protected and moved around where they can then go on to infect other precincts. The term “a few bad apples” gets simplified to saying “but the rest are good,” and not “spoils the whole barrel.” The problem is that too many bad cops get essentially rewarded for being bad cops, or at least passive permission, while those who want to change the system are either ignored, corrupted, fired, or left to fend for themselves in a dangerous environment and then killed by criminals, if not taken out back and given the Ol’ Yeller treatment. And any attempt to reform the department is treated as if you were slitting the throat of justice. So yeah, ACAB until the system is fixed.
Raidah: “You want to become President again. You’ll be a war crim-“
Dorothy: “Oh fuck you Raidah! Your stupid attitude is why nothing changes!! I will be elected President, and I will the Abraham Lincoln of ending American war crimes, just as I was the Abraham Lincoln of making Joyce cum!!”
Raidah: “ . . . What was that last one?”
Dorothy: “I mean, making Joyce . . . come . . . to a protest with me! . . . I have to go!”
I can’t recall which of her parents is Jewish but I assume it’s her mother since Keener isn’t a Jewish surname. Jewishness is matrilineally inherited per Jewish law.
Also I’m very sure she’s described herself as Jewish before.
She has absolutely described herself as Jewish repeatedly, and Willis showed an unused strip where they almost wrote Dorothy had attended Hebrew school before deciding against it. She also (see one of the links before) has been on the receiving end of antisemitism already, so I’m not sure where people’s disconnect is coming from.
Dorothy is Jewish by her own admission and by her lived experiences. This is not a thing it’s reasonable to debate (agreeing with you, Dot).
Dorothy (I think) was born Jewish, raised Catholic, and believes in atheism. I don’t remember which comic she mentions it, but she does. Something about Amazi-Girl asking her if being a superhero was appropriation because superheroes are a Jewish invention?
Literally referred to her grandmother as “my bubbe” in a fairly recent strip. That’s Yiddish. So yeah.
Also: probably should recommend theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic for everyone! Or at least warn people, because boy is it depressingly common.
On top of the other reasons for favouring theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic: if someone’s thinking is so flawed that they’re willing to apply broad stereotypes to people based simply on who their possibly-distant ancestors were, they might not be particularly good with nuanced reasoning.
Admittedly, I haven’t read Bakunin’s work, so this is more of a general statement.
A lot of theorists are right about one thing (capitalism) while being incredibly wrong about other things (“women” and “other races” being incredibly common areas).
Ignoring or whitewashing the parts where a given theorist said and believed shitty bigoted things causes all kinds of problems, like having an unrealistically rosy image of the past, or increasing inclination to excuse these aspects as “products of the time”.
Like. No. Don’t excuse, don’t whitewash. Call it out. Put it in context: HP Lovecraft was for example a foundational horror author while also being incredibly racist, and not just virulently racist “by modern standards” but by the standards of his own time! He was UNUSUALLY awful! People KNEW he was unusually awful! That’s worth drawing attention to and warning for, especially warning Jewish readers and readers of color.
Once again, late to respond (partly because I wasn’t sure how to phrase this, and the next strip was already up when I saw the above comment), but… certainly, it’s possible for someone who’s very wrong about some things to still have valid insights on others.
I was just saying that, however useful their works may be, it’s often necessary to keep in mind the potential for flaws in their philosophy resulting from them regarding certain things as irrelevant when they really, really aren’t.
I mean… there could, as a hypothetical example, be a society which is scrupulous about providing for the needs of all their citizens and adequately supporting even their most vulnerable, but do so by horribly abusing the non-citizens they keep as slaves. There may be worthwhile lessons in how they treat the former, but it’s necessary to keep in mind their treatment of the latter when interpreting those lessons.
It’s a good point and I’ll take it. I was thinking of “God and the State” as a text that mainly deals with what Authority is on itself, but I always assume there’s at least ONE major thing I’ll disagree on with the philosophers I drink from. The antisemitism in this case, and it does merit a CW.
– religion as a means of control
– violence as a means of resistance
– pro-contraception
– feminist (and pro-free love)
– vocal supporter or LGBT people
From a comment under a clip of Brian joining the People’s Front of Judea (specifically not the Judean People’s Front):
“Leninist Communists? We’re Stalinist Communists!! The only people we hate more than Capitalists are Leninist Communists! And the Maoist Communists! And the Minh Communists! And the Cuban Communists …what ever happened to the Trotskyist Communists? They’re over there in Mexico.”
Marx is a product of his time. He wrote in the middle of the laissez-faire capitalism of the early industrial revolition.
Lenin was an a***hole who was never about power to the people, but rather smashing the state and installing himself on the top. The Soviet Union was never ”communist” in any ideological sense, but just the Russian empire with new slogans.
Just about every time some revolution happens without a clear plan of progressing and replacing with a better system, it gets replaced with a worse system. Opportunism and pogroms arise too damn often.
The actual revolutionaries themselves don’t even need to be at fault; there’ll always be someone eager to fill the power vacuum, and those most eager are usually the ones who want to abuse the opportunities.
To quote Douglas Adams: “The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
Oh, just to add: he was exaggerating for the sake of humour and to set up a joke. People like Dorothy, who want to rule for the sake of helping others, likely would be good choices, at least as long as they retain those altruistic goals.
Sadly, even those with good intentions can, all too often, be led astray by people who are skilled in the art of manipulating those in power… But they’re still likely to be better than those who are corrupt from the start. Not naming names, of course… mostly because we’re all pretty tired of certain names by now.
Honestly, reading some useless tripe that they barely understand, and making that their entire personality would be very on brand for someone in their first year of third level education.
Lenin? Really? I know there’s some latter-day efforts to paint him as someone who was TRYING to hand over control to “anyone other than Stalin”, but let’s be real the man was the kind of guy who responded to bad things happening by picking a scapegoat and sending a murder squad. The man appointed Iron Felix as his head of political police, which was also a thing he had.
Serious answer for the people who’re clutching pearls: Yes, Lenin. Early Lenin did some pretty good work, and if anything, you gotta read the man to criticize him. Which is why I can say latter Lenin dropped the ball hardcore.
The way he analyzed capitalism has merit. The way he reified the role of the state, and of the party, in socialism + his concept of authority are whack.
(Anarcho-communist chiming in! Thesis/Anti-thesis/Synthesis, y’all: Analyze everything, absorb the good, yeet the bad, hone your ideals to Keep Walking)
Honestly, the thing Dorothy’s done lately that has made me most disappointed with her is taking Raidah’s Twitter-discourse-level “President War Crime” bullshit seriously.
To those responding to you: Being right and not worth being taken seriously aren’t mutually exclusive. Political leaders have many responsibilities and many possible duties they’re supposed to carry out to the best of their ability. Raidah having a point about war crimes is no reason to not seek power to effect positive change. Since Dorothy was still unseasoned enough that Raidah’s myopic putdown could affect her deeply, I’m glad she’s been going through the experience now. The world will throw far more complicated problems than that at her in the future.
power is not some sort of liquid commodity you can exchange at your discretion. all power exists in a context; when you have power, you are empowered to do certain things, and you will have internalized a commitment to do certain things in order to seek that power. when someone becomes president of the united states, they are given immense powers, and those powers enable them to be the president of the united states. by the time someone reaches the point where they have any chance of becoming president of the united states, they will have developed a very clear understanding of exactly what it means to wield that kind of power on behalf of that kind of entity. i don’t think any of us can imagine what it is like to be that kind of person, for all intents and purposes they are an alien that we can only reason about empirically. and yes, empirically, it’s clear that “war crimes” mean nothing to such a creature.
People at that level of power are, NON-OPTIONALLY, regularly making choices about what to prioritize knowing whatever choices they make will kill people. I am not kidding about this. Like. When the economy gets worse people die type stuff. If you are a person who’s trying not to suck, you continue to care about that at least in numbers, but buying stuff in lives is just like. Your job.
The question it’s usually worth asking is what are people in power buying (or refusing to spend) with deaths, and is that something you can lobby them to indicate they should not think it’s worth that cost. (The current administration is unfortunately mostly buying ego and personal wealth, so they’re unlikely to care.) It is hard to get to such a position without becoming heavily beholden to corporate interests, but like. Presidents don’t get to decide not to make those tradeoffs but they CAN if they’re well intentioned try to make better ones, and making good tradeoffs can be MASSIVELY beneficial to lots of people.
The power is real, the power is useful, and we should want the people with the best possible values to both want and achieve it. But the tradeoffs it involves making are brutal, and often it’s not clear HOW to buy the outcomes you want or people are heavily beholden to corporate interests or trying to dismantle certain evils will be politically costly enough that you wouldn’t be able to buy the things you wanted to be here to get in the first place or myriad other things. But the ability to decide which tradeoffs get made and for what is real.
This take makes more sense to me. It’s not that people who reach the top are inevitably corrupt or that the system itself makes them choose evil, it’s that there are plenty of cases at that level where there aren’t any good choices. Despite all the power of the President, they can’t just fix everything with the wave of a magic wand. Sometimes doing the morally right thing has high costs, that other people pay. And when they do make mistakes, the consequences can be even worse.
And of course, despite all that power, the President isn’t a king. Often even what they want can’t be pushed through Congress (or is limited by the Courts), but as the head of the executive branch they’re still responsible for enforcing even policies which weren’t their ideal choice.
If the process of reaching the top didn’t select for evil, the fraction of the people at the top defending a genocidal state’s right to commit genocide would be lower.
I’ll agree that the process of getting there tends to demand people be good at working with entrenched interests. But it is worth knowing that Israel is a very difficult position to give up if you care about being able to intervene effectively in the Middle East. Like. Israel is kind of our most insubordinate military base, and we don’t have a good replacement. Do I think we should be supporting them at this point? Absolutely the fuck not, but I’ve thought their treatment of the Palestinians looked like a slow genocide long before it was a fast one–I wish we had been making our resources a lot more conditional a lot earlier. But that’s what we’ve been buying for a long time was the ability to enforce some kind of stability in the Middle East.
Unfortunately Trump is an idiot and I suspect THAT is not on his radar so much as imperial ambitions and personal wealth are. I do wonder if at this point we’d be seeing different behavior from a Harris presidency. I wonder at what point if any a president who was actually trying would be deciding to redo the math on exactly how much the power we’d be giving up is worth to them. Perhaps around the time Israel started bombing Iran and you weren’t getting what you were paying for anyway. I wish it didn’t take that much. I wish I were more confident a threshold existed.
Finding a solution to Israel is hard. I guess from one point of view, the moral answer is just to stop supporting them and wash our hands of whatever happens next.
Which would almost certainly going to be at least as horrific as what we’re seeing now and possibly on a larger scale.
Yeah I agree, at this point Israel is very much a regional superpower in their own right, no matter what they like to tell themselves. But we could probably exercise a lot more coercive power than we’ve historically been willing to do, and we could CERTAINLY stop selling them weapons.
We probably can’t really. At one point maybe we could have, but they’ve put in a lot of work to avoid that.
We could certainly stop selling them weapons, but that has consequences and it’s not really clear to me what they are. Would that weaken them enough to not be able to kill people in Palestine without weakening them enough to make them vulnerable to attacks from Iran and potentially from Arab states?
I mean unfortunately a lot of the coercive power we have over them is power to make them more vulnerable in their part of the world. I think that’s why broadly the US government has been pretty unwilling to use it. Maybe there are some things we could do to them economically but… yeah. It’s VERY hard to exert influence if an impact you’re willing to eat isn’t increased Israeli vulnerability. Which is… Unfortunate, to say the least.
@alice: So the only way to avoid become such an evil creature is to avoid power, thus leaving the power only those who actively seek out the corruption.
There are some positions of power that people will not be allowed to hold without committing themselves to evil. The institution is bigger than any individual
thats why you remove the instititions and go ny the one law, institutions of all times outlawed. any non familygroup over 25 people is illeagal, the only law
Vernor Vinge, who was himself very sympathetic to minarchist/anarchist ideals, wrote a fairly decent story about how that’s an incredibly bad idea — if you don’t have any other laws, well, there are already people whose personal net worth is more than 25 MILLION people, let alone 25. “We’re not in a group, I’m paying you for a service” repeated hundreds of times, and now you have to figure out how to fight the Jeff Bezos Army without breaking your own rules.
Other authors have done similar — a self-published buddy of mine (also an anarchist!) hit it from the other angle and set up a sci-fi protagonist who kept trying to build communities like this. Which worked great every time he set one up on a new colony, until another person/group secretly organized (how to prevent conspiracies when your biggest group is 25?) about 10% of the total colony, then revealed themselves and said “Well, we’re the government now. We’ve already got the organization and the guns and planned for this, so you can try to get your true believers to figure out how to organize a larger group or you can pay taxes and things keep going along like they used to for most people most of the time.”
Part of the benefit of institutions/systems is preventing hostile institutions/systems. Until you figure out how to prevent infiltration/conspiracy evading your 25-person limit, that system falls rapidly to any organized attempt to defeat it.
i said power exists in a context. i then described the context in which the power of the president of the united states exists. i did not describe the context in which all forms of power exist, you have to actually keep track of what ppl are referring to when they’re talking
sometimes i wonder if we could significantly improve the discourse around this comic by putting up a big flashing banner over each strip that says “THESE CHARACTERS ARE LIKE NINETEEN”
yeah but then you have to deal with the 19 year old readers! do you wanna write an essay deconstructing generational warfare and re-framing the value of years of slow-earned life experience in a respectful, non-adversarial light? no thank you!
Honestly, I’ve been pretty harsh on Dorothy and Joyce, but I agree with this 100%.
I hadn’t fully embraced ACAB until my early 30s, and I was in the military so I knew EXACTLY how corrupt it was. It takes time for people to reconcile reality with what we were taught as kids.
While I mostly agree with you in most context, I do have somewhat higher expectations for the amount of reading/homework done by the girl whose life dream was “Transfer to Yale, eventually reach the apex of US politics”.
I mean, I was dumb as shit as a 18-19 year old freshman, but I was significantly LESS dumb as shit about computer engineering.
I still don’t buy it. I see very strange needle-threading characterization. One example: The response of someone with that kind of ambition, who knew exactly that their red state lege and governor created one law hours in advance of a protest? What kind of news hound has not put that together yet?
See to me “transfer to yale, ascend us politics” seems like peak naivete, that’s something an over-eager high school guidance councilor puts you up to when your marks are too good.
I reported them a second time just to make it worse and then I reported you too, because it literally doesn’t matter at all until like a bazillion reports occur.
Taffy, horrified, watches the BBCC and reddslym start evaporating into dust as they realize that what they thought was a “joking second report” was actually “exactly the one bazillionth report”.
Yeah, that speech did exactly nothing to convince my sapphic ass. Had I been Frodo, i would have handed the ring over immediately and been like “yup. Sounds like a plan. Kick his ass, my Queen.”
And this is exactly why Elrond went out of his way to specifically exclude disaster sapphics from the original council meeting that established the Fellowship.
Yep. This and ONLY THIS is the reason that whole council was dudes (in the movie, from my shaky memory, don’t @me if I’m wrong, mostly because tagging doesn’t work in this forum)
She wasn’t present in the book. The movie may have technically had her present, because it had her take Frodo to Rivendell. In the book, it’s a minor male elf character, who’s also a pure high elf, which is why Frodo sees the glow.
(Arwen, like her father, and like Legolas, is part human. She wouldn’t have done the glow. But I don’t at all blame the movie for ignoring that, because like. First of all, yikes @ blood purity as a concept, but second of all I don’t think it ever even comes up that Arwen or Elrond are part human in the movies. The only indicator of it is that they’re not blond.
And yeah! Yeah. Their lack of purity being represented by dark hair is… yep!)
i was specifically refering to the council scene, there is a fairly large crowd of elves in the movie and i feel like arwen is standing by or behind here father.
@Li: Ah, blood purity as a concept, still cringe even in a universe where it actually makes sense to care (because the different Free Peoples are not only not evolved from the same stock, but were created at wildly different times and have souls that function differently!).
The Peter Jackson movies are epic and sweeping and have several nice messages.
They also reproduce the books’ racism and even add some new bonus racism that wasn’t there in the books explicitly.
Also Alexander Siddig (aka Julian Bashir of Deep Space Nine) tried to audition, he wanted to just be like a background elf, and they told him pretty directly that he’s not white enough to be an elf. He could’ve played an orc though!!
I know I’m late, but had to comment: how did they think Alexander Siddig could pass for an orc? He’d have to spend longer in the makeup chair than on the screen! He’s got a more elven facial structure than (movie) Elrond, for Ilúvatar’s sake!
Huh. TIL a new thing! (love it when that happens) I didn’t know what “Ironsides Music” was. Looked it up. All these years I had thought that siren-ish sound sequence was created for the KB movies. Nope, turns out to be a much older jazz album! Yay new understanding!
I’m joining my voice with other commenters in wondering what the heck caused her to bleed from the side if it wasn’t a bullet.
Riot cops are very fond of murdering people, but not usually with blades or knives, it mostly blunt force trauma bashing people’s heads in or causing internal bleeding in the torso or abdomen.
Amber was bleeding from her side and I can’t think of how that could happen with a police baton. the closest thing would be abraison from being dragged, but if she was dragged I feel like she would be in jail instead of here
He doesn’t know Amber is AG, and Amber is the one who stabbed dude.
It’s possible he could figure it out, but he didn’t strike me as that smart, and most of the cast never figured it out on their own.
Hell, maybe none of the cast did, besides Dina, but it’s been years, so don’t quote me.
I’m going to make a wild stab in the dark that Amber wasn’t shot because Willis didn’t want to deal with Amber having a gunshot wound healing for the next few years of storytime.
I was wondering if she got hit by a gas canister, or one of those rubber bullets that are not supposed to be fired directly at people, but often are. Either of those could break skin depending on how she was hit.
You would be surprised how many cops carry tactical knives. Yes, chain of engagement usually goes baton first and the probably taser but if Dorothy was going them too much trouble, I can imagine a particularly “spirited” officer using a knife on her to slow her down.
She could have gotten snagged on a barrier while escaping (cut chain link is like barbed wire), took a blow from the corner or rough edge on a piece of gear, got thrown into a branch or rock with enough momentum, etc. There’s a lot of ways to get badly gashed or punctures without a knife. (Fellow clumsy people, you know what I’m talking about.)
Also, she wasn’t that badly injured. Surface cuts and a decent amount of blood loss. Whatever that wound was, it didn’t get to internal organs or that kitchen doctor wouldn’t have been enough. Stitched and glued back up, not major trauma surgery.
Ambers father was killed in the hospital by Lester, a policeman employed by Asher’s Mob Family. Hit was ordered (apparently) by Asher. Blaine died still insisting that AG was not his daughter. AG may have too much info on Blaine’s mob connections soo it would be nice if she died in the confusion. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/opaque/
and the next strip
it has been said before but blunt force trauma can break skin. riot cops have clubs, and some have ridged grips that could aid in the tearing of skin.
also she could easily gotten cut on jagged fencing or by being knocked into a broken tree branch. she also could have taken shrapnel damage from a riot shield breaking or one of the visors from the riot helmets. hell i am pretty sure she has on in a head lock in the background of one of the panels and could have cut herself on the visor then
I used to a lot of medieval/fantasy LARP type stuff. It was very much designed on focused on being as safe as possible, and the weapons we used were VERY non-realistic. Despite that, saw a few bloody injuries. Usually as a result of “engaging in vigorous activity outside can get you hurt”, but even a very, very safe mock weapon can break in a weird way and cut you. Just…there are a LOT of ways to get hurt.
Ditto mine, but I just went through 20 minutes of ICE being abusive anonymous bastards attacking brown people pretty much at random including some whose ancestors were here before this was even a collection of colonies. All the non-bastard ICE agents need to quit yesterday. I know that’s physically impossible it’s just to emphasize how quickly it needs to be done.
If Dorothy is heading down a political path similar to mine, good for her. I only wish I had started realized this stuff when I was in college, instead of about a decade after I graduated.
if this ends up being “she was stabbed by a cop with an illegal knife” it would subvert the very message it’s trying to convey because the whole point is that cops are legally allowed to perpetrate heinous violence on people.
it’s a very significant point in protests that cops are currently legally allowed and encouraged to perpetrate violence in a way that can permanently maim or kill people. even people who are not on the “defund the police” camp agree that it’s a problem when cops have carte blanche to kill someone, because it undermines the whole point of having a legal system that supposedly includes fair trials and a jury of your peers
TL;DR “rogue cop did this” would be a bad revelation if we’re framing this as Dorothy’s realization that the system is corrupt and unfair because it leaves open the possibility that he was one bad apple and not merely symptom of a whole rotten institution
Okay, but Dorothy isn’t braindead, so she’s not stupid enough to fall for “one bad apple”. Only dipshits who can’t tell celery from leather think that’s a real thing.
You are aware that “one bad apple ruins the bunch” is a metaphor, right? And you’re aware how apples rot? It has do with ethylene, an invisible gas that is a plant growth hormone that accelerates ripening, which is produced more as fruit ripens and especially when it rots. So single rotten apple will cause the surrounding apples to ripen faster than you’d expect if you didn’t know that one bad apple ruins the bunch. This is why apple sellers on noticing a single rotten apple gave massive discounts on that barrel, because they know it isn’t going to last. And if they’re smart they include the barrel in that sale, because ethylene is produced by even the tiniest shred of rotten fruit, and it gets into the wood as well, so any barrel that had a rotten apple in it is very likely to accelerate rot in the next bunch as well.
You see, the metaphor here is that corruption spreads invisibly, and that you can’t solve the problem of corruption while keeping the apples that were in the vicinity of the rotten apple. You have to be thorough, you can’t half-ass your way through cutting out the rot. When noticing corruption you need to fire everyone in that precinct and permanently ban them from law enforcement, and then you should not use that building or any of the service companies used by that precinct for a couple decades. Let’s say fifty years to be sure.
The rotten apple is a perfectly good metaphor for corruption. It doesn’t capture everything wrong with police, because as always reality is worse: There are systemic and cultural reasons that promote corruption that aren’t covered by the rotten apple metaphor. But that doesn’t mean the parts that are described by the metaphor aren’t accurate enough to be explanatory.
One bad apple ruins the bunch isn’t what people mean by one bad apple anymore though. The one bad apple that dipshits who can’t tell celery from leather are falling for is when cop defenders say that cop who (whatever heinous fuckery even they can’t excuse) is just a bad apple and the rest of the police are fine because having a bad apple doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the rest of the apples in that department.
Exactly what I meant, yes. I’m also gonna go ahead and add that there are no good apples either. Not a single apple in that bunch is fit for human consumption. If you baked any of those apples in a pie and served that pie to a human, it would be morally justified for that person to have you executed by a firing squad.
One step further, there are no apples. There were never any apples at any point. This is a warehouse full of grenades. Most of the time you want them not exploding, but if one of them goes off and kills a bunch of people … yeah that’s what it’s for. A grenade that explodes is not a “bad apple”. It’s not a preventable tragedy. It doesn’t need reforming; it’s a triumph. A grenade that explodes has performed exactly the task it was made for.
The purpose then of the narratives that follow (“we’re investigating the incident …” “shameful, there was no need for so many people to be injured by that grenade” “well, play stupid games … they should’ve followed the grenade’s orders) is only to calm and vent the anger of spectators. And once you delay action, let the anger calm a bit, you can go back to filling your warehouse with grenades. To sum up, the problem with rotten apples isn’t the rotten part, it’s the apples part.
You never want to confuse making everybody feel better, the integral part of the system which makes it perpetual, with a movement.
Well, yes, given that all of the apples in this situation are human, and forcing people to commit cannibalism, even unwittingly, is generally regarded as poor form.
Yeah, there’s a popularized usage which makes the original meaning just not matter anymore (aside from like, giving a fun fact). Happens to a bunch of idioms like that.
I feel like this is getting very much into the reeds. The message is clearly, “cops are allowed to violently go after peaceful protestors and did so on camera.”
Focusing on them stabbing instead of shooting Amber sounds like the kind of distinction making that completely ignores the cops stabbed Amber.
Or, as I pointed out above, they didn’t stab her – they broke a rib, which in turn broke the skin. Compound fractures are exactly the sort of wounds police batons can produce, and so far as I’m aware, nothing we’ve seen has contradicted that possibility.
Theoretically possible, though the kitchen doc didn’t even hint at it. Seems like that would need a little more than sealing back up with surgical glue.
That’s no fun. Instead I would like to say that if it turns out Amazi-Girl’s injuries were purely self-inflicted to make the cops look bad, it would be an extremely unfair portrayal of the protests this is based on and a total betrayal of her character. I don’t think Willis should do it.
It only subverts the message if the supposed rogue cop is punished by the system. If he did it with an illegal knife and the system protects him, then that’s just part of the problem.
A lot of the bad shit cops do is illegal in theory. It’s just that they get protected. It gets covered up. Prosecutors choose not to indict. Juries believe the cop’s lies and refuse to convict.
And honestly, Amazi-Girl here already subverts any ACAB message. Along with weakening any discussion about police brutality at this protest. Not a jury in the country would have convicted a cop for use of force against Amazi-Girl while she was assaulting officers and apparently beating them up pretty successfully.
I don’t know if this happens for anyone else, but the website for this strip tends to load really slow for a few minutes about 15-20 minutes after each new strip is posted.
The survey that was done recently had 2000+ responses from people invested enough in this comic to fill out a survey about it. Even if only a few hundred of those are “rapidly refresh the page until the new comic is up” kinda people, it would explain a slow load for the first little bit a strip is up.
Especially if Taffy accounts for an extra 173 devices.
There’s also the technical possibility that whatever publishing mechanism that Willis is using has something janky going on with its caching layer, and until that’s settled down with new assets, load speed is reduced.
What in the world – ? God, no. Lawyers aren’t cops. I’m thinking the type of lawyer who sues public universities to keep them from outlawing free speech and allowing snipers on the roof of their buildings to point guns at people. Or the immigration lawyers fighting to keeping people from being mistreated and illegally deported, and the ACLU attorneys constantly fighting for people’s rights. Those folks are unironically heroes.
Besides, we know “future Dorothy” is president…of the bar association. 😛
I’m into social worker Dorothy. Healthy professional focus on helping people, big focus on social justice and affecting change on both the micro and macro scale, and potential work in policy development.
Tho tbh I don’t know whether the focus of social work in the US is broad like Australia or narrower like the UK.
That would be great, but I think she’s too much of a big picture person to be satisfied with one-on-one care, social work in the US is mostly connecting people with resources, drowning in paperwork and bureaucracy, and not doing enough about reports of abuse because the law sucks. You have to go pretty high up in experience and chain of command before you get a chance at anything macro or policy involved in social work here. Mostly it’s soul-destroying, low paying, frustrating and will burn you out even as you’re literally saving lives the best you can. (Source: parent and grandparent were social workers.)
Frankly I think she has to DECIDE if she’s actually a big picture person, since this arc in particular shows both “Dorothy decides to do something ground-level, throws herself into it whole-ham, and gets Joyce-kisses for her efforts” and “Dorothy is ABSOLUTELY willing to fuck around with her priority list of things in order to avoid doing the hard bits as long as possible.”
Neither of those really say “big-picture person” to me (mostly, they say “stupid freshman”, to be fair).
Excellent example of “is this gay?” getting met with “No, OBVIOUSLY not, duh, instead it’s [something it turns out to not have been]” for years and years.
Sometimes I remember that and I think, not all the Joyce/Dorothy shippers have been gracious winners, but can I really blame them?
Honestly, it’s hard to say that without giving a lot of credit to Willis riding that “gay” vs. “just the best gal pals” tightrope with an incredible degree of skill right up until they started touching faces.
I know I’m late, but…
Went back to check that “doesn’t see Joyce as a person” thing, just because I had to find out how it’d make any kind of sense for someone to type that, and… turns out GholaHalleck was implying Dorothy didn’t see Joe as a person, not Joyce. I still don’t understand what they were trying to say, but it’s not as bizarre.
Dramatic Guitar Riff. Cut to 10 years later. A shadowy figure gives a signal, and a group of masked figures descend on a police vehicle, knocking out the cops and freeing the prisoners inside. As the assailants disperse, the shadowy figure backs into an alley and emerges onto an adjoining street. It’s Dorothy, now with an eyepatch, and she smiles, matching the expression of a campaign poster behind her saying, “Keener for Governor”. She gets a text. “Dinner will be ready at 5. Mac and cheese!” She replies, “I’ll be there,” and walks away.
The problem is, if pressed, the police will say that the reason that the riot gear was there, the tear gas, the batons, and the sniper, was because they had heard rumors that there was going to be a violent uprising, and as the police it is their job to keep everyone safe. That is what they will say. And to be fair, that is a reason.
And they will point to Amazi-Girl and say, and look: as soon as we began peacefully clearing the meadow, there WAS resistance. Within minutes, that eight or so officers were assaulted by masked assailants, completely unprovoked. They can probably also point to a few other random people who were “hostile,” or at least trying to reason or argue.
The protesters knew the risks, knew what they were showing up for, knew what was possibly going to happen. It was common knowledge when speaking to Asma that a sniper was in place and gates were going up. No one needed to be “rescued” other than two braindead freshman that were right next to the entrance and decided, hey, we’re so in love with each other that we’re going to run in there and GOAD the police to force us down.
Amazing-Girl saved no one. It was a ridiculous overreaction to show up and commit multiple felonies by assaulting multiple police officers just so that your friends don’t get what they are *literally* asking for.
You know what the point of these nonviolent protests are? They’re so that, when you’re all handcuffed and gassed and pelted with rubber bullets and people see photos of you, bruised and bloodied, people go, “Oh, shit, look what the police did to *children* in school, just for speaking out about the school’s role in the genocide. What is going on?! Why would they do that?!” You make yourself a living martyr for the cause and enrage far more people. Take a hint from MLK, or Ghandi, or Susan B. Anthony; smarter, braver people than the average person advocating violent upheaval online, who accomplished far more, too.
Instead – now the headlines will be about masked domestic terrorists assaulting officers in the line of duty who are seemingly aligned with this radical liberal group. It will completely undermine everything that the protest stood for and delegitimize them in many people’s minds.
Because – whoops! Again, I guess it really wasn’t about the people dying in a genocide halfway around the world. That tragedy’s nothing compared to the fact that white college students might actually suffer for a cause they believe in.
yeah it genuinely took me a while to recognize how wrong this is, i was writing a whole long thing about where i think they went wrong because for most of it it’s like yes, exactly this, but then… you get to the end and realize wait a minute this is just me when i was like 15 in social studies class lmao. and let me tell you, i was not good at being 15 in social studies class.
i think all i rly need to say is, this is what happens when u take the cartoon depiction of martyrdom used to flatten MLK Jr into a sufficiently non-threatening paste, and try to extrapolate it to a (cartoon depiction of) a real world movement. apparently the concrete demands being made of the school are a cynical ruse to sell the optics of the police response, both Jocelyn and Asma are in fact white and have identical motivations and goals, will face identical risks, and produce identical cultural reactions when fed into the meat grinder of state violence. nailed it
scrolling around the thread and their responses and seeing a reflection of past me, i think the main insight i experience to get over this mindset was attending a real protest and reflecting on the fact that this didn’t cause me to turn into a chess piece.
I have really come to dislike that MLK is propped up as this all-father of peaceful protest. The sanitization of history really does work. I mean Stoney Carmichael and Julian Bond are RIGHT there and news made EVERY protest out to be violent and destroying property and I just—
Sigh…Sorry guys. Sorry. I…Back to regularly scheduled comic.
Look, I don’t blame you a bit for not reading – it’s a long post – but of all the possible responses, that one really doesn’t make sense.
When Jocylene was telling Dorothy to put the sign down, that the protest leaders said there was no point in going ahead, did you yell, “How’s that boot taste, Jocylene?”
When Dorothy went back and grabbed that sign, was she planning on fighting for change by smacking the police with that sign? When you realized she was planning on getting arrested, did you yell at her, “How’s that boot taste?”
No because that’s fucking stupid.
We all know all cops are bastards. Just like all crocodiles eat people. If you want to affect real change in the world, you don’t shake and cry and go “But the crocodiles were supposed to PROTECT us,” you assume they’re going to be assholes and behave like crocs, and you make your strategy with that in mind.
And, I mean. Once again, these guys are protesting the fact that *the college* is *funding genocide.*. Why is it that someone like Asma or Leslie can just stand there holding a sign and stuff, and even *acknowledge* that there’s corruption here and acknowledge that the college and police are corrupt, but the second that they became even somewhat in danger here, THEN it was something that characters would just stare, haunted, into the middle distance? We can all agree, I hope, that literal genocide is markedly worse than rubber bullets and tear gas?
look i’ve felt all these things too but that doesn’t make them true. you are in fact suggesting that anyone interested in trying to confront their governments for their enthusiastic complicity in a genocide that will be remembered alongside the Holocaust, should so by helpfully placing themselves at the mercy of said governments. to state the obvious, (because i genuinely know from experience what it’s like to be naive enough to require this exact explanation) that is not a winning strategy, and telling people to submit themselves to the police does in fact have cop energy. the point of fighting is not actually to demonstrate moral superiority, the point of fighting is to win
Thing is. The crocodiles AREN’T supposed to protect us. They’re animals we have no control over.
The cops ARE supposed to serve us. They’re human beings that we pay for with our fucking taxes. It is REASONABLE to complain about the damage they do to other human beings.
Dismissive metaphors don’t really work when you put “animal doing what it naturally does” on one side and “heavily militarized former slave catchers brutally murdering and maiming people who are making use of their legal free speech to protest the actions of their country and the way their taxes are used.”
Also, saying outright that victims of police brutality at protests are “literally asking for” it is one of the shittiest takes in your whole shitty essay.
The crocodile analogy was a bad one. Cops are a rabid dog. They’re supposed to be there for you, but they’re not.
But if you kneel down and open your arms wide when one is rushing towards you, then you are an idiot.
If the brand-spanking-new policy says that you’re trespassing by occupying the grounds in this way.
And the college has contacted the police and requested that the protesters be cleared out.
And the police are armed with riot gear to make it happen.
And they’ve given you all an ultimatum and told you that if you don’t leave by a certain time, they will forcibly remove you.
And if they’ve already begun forcibly removing people from the grounds.
And if you, instead, burst back in there, grab a sign, buy a tent, and stand defiantly in their way, with literally nothing to block a rubber bullet other than your face,
And the other people tell you, what are you doing, the protest is over, the leaders said there was no sense in staying here, this is stupid, and you say, fuck you, you don’t know what I need –
– are you NOT literally asking them to do what they are literally telling you they will be doing?
And here’s where I come down. Look, if this was about stopping police brutality, like 2020 and BLM and getting them to be accountable for what they are doing, then I’m on board. One million percent.
But the dog was never the *point* of all of this. The point was a GENOCIDE. The point was to get people to understand that we are complicit in atrocities that happen to other people, not focus on the lesser (but still valid!) injusticies that happen to us.
So no. The dog’s here, and maybe he was *supposed* to be the guard dog, but he’s rabid and he’s not recognizing that I’m anything but a threat. Either way – cops are gonna cop; the question is, what are you going to do about it?
Let me pose it to you in a different way, and see if you can get my point.
The cops want you to resist. They want you to not obey their orders. Hell, they want you to throw a punch or kick. Sure, they’d never say it, but they’re all on edge expecting for it to happen, looking for it, and ready to respond back with overwhelming force to people who “resist.”
They showed up in full riot gear and “nonlethal” weaponry. They’ve got a freaking sniper. They’ve been getting themselves ready and worked up for any sort of resistance, and their goals are to establish dominance over that area and get people cleared out while not sustaining any injuries on their side.
No, *they are not there to protect you and keep you safe.* Come on. Cops aren’t these chaotic-good vigilantes who help the downtrodden; they’re lawful-neutral at best, and are only as good as the laws that they enforce – and sometimes, not even that good.
Cops are there to catch criminals. And the school made it so suddenly all those protesters are trespassing. Meaning the school painted a big target on them and said “Sic ’em.”
If you, when learning that the college had changed their policy, stayed because you expected them to be polite, calm, and rational, while they explain to you that you will need to leave, and then watch as everyone walks out in a single file line and waves bye, *you are foolish*.
If you feel that, if the protesters said “No, actually, we don’t feel like leaving, actually” the police would have just thrown up their hands and said, “Welp, they said no, we asked politely, I don’t know what I can do,” then *you are foolish*.
It’s like clearing your throat and saying to the charging grizzly, “Actually, please don’t eat me,” and being shocked and angry as you note that it’s got your leg in its jaw. It’s a bear. They do what bears do. If you think that bears do something different, you’ve clearly gotten your idea of what bears do from cartoons.
Nope, I will not be reading all that. I don’t go to lectures by people who think victims of police brutality at protests are “literally asking for it”.
look as someone who was going hard on this person earlier, what are you talking about. if someone makes the tactical decision to intentionally expose themselves to the violence of police, they are doing something incredibly brave. they’re not a victim, and it’s fucking insulting to call them that. now, i continue to have problems with Bork’s black-and-white framing of martyrdom (although either they seem to be moving towards a more balanced conception of “heroically facing risk”, or i’m just less grumpy today), but your black-and-white framing of victimhood is equally offensive.
If they’re going in there knowing the risks and exposing themselves as a tactical decision, they’re incredibly brave, and heroes, and deserve respect.
If they’re going in there seeing all the signs that the police WILL be violent and brutal and WILL be using riot gear and tear gas, have the opportunity to leave, have been told again and again to leave, yet stay not because of principles or a tactical decision, but from an angsty emotional outburst- then are SHOCKED that cops are copping, and need a superhero escort to get them out of the mess they made – they are not heroes, they are not standing up to violence; they are tourists who ignored every “No Swimming” and “No Tresspassing” and “Undertow present” sign, went down to the ocean to swim, and are shocked that they ignored all the signs and went swimming and They ARE a victim, but of their own stupidity.
And I will say stupidity. Dorothy went from “I’m going to stand here, get gassed and arrested,” to “What, they’re using tear gas and arresting people? Oh no – well thankfully we have a superhero to get us out of this!”
yeah i agree with this 100%, my problem is that i don’t think these categories exist so distinctly in real life, where people have imperfect situational awareness, random unpredictable developments, getting-it-but-not-totally-getting-it about police, or just, lacking the resources to adequately prepare but compelled by their conscience to show up anyways. i think in reality there’s a gradient, where a lot of people are both being very brave, but also not fully choosing the risks they end up facing, and as a result neither the martyr or the victim fully represents them.
that being said, this comic did in fact set it up to be as black and white as you describe, Dorothy and Joyce really were not anywhere on this gradient, so maybe i’m mistaken in presuming this reasoning is meant to apply directly to real life
make up your mind. are cops “supposed to serve us”, or are they “heavily militarized former slave catchers”. do you actually have a coherent reason to find “comparing cops to crocodiles” offensive or did you fall for the classic blunder of the original take being so bad it blew out your sensor?
Cops were originally conceived, in London, as servants of the people and protectors of the law. In the US, the concept was applied to groups that were originally organized as slave-catchers. Our police have been kinda DID, ethically speaking, since their inception.
Also—can’t remember the last time someone sitting on the fence of protest looked at a bunch of kids protesting and thought, ‘those poor kids’. Usually it’s a shitty variation of, ‘these colleges are brainwashing kids’.
Or they puke out that “play stupid games win stupid prizes” tripe, like they didn’t just watch someone get their brain splattered across the nearest wall for literally no reason.
Begging you to read literally anything on MLK because though conservative and conservative-leaning white people love to reduce him to a guy who just talked about his dreams and advocated for equality and was extremely noncontroversial, the actual man would rightfully resent being used as a cudgel against all agitators for civil rights.
Oh and also the CIA murdered him because he was considered extremely dangerous and radical.
NO BUT SERIOUSLY IT IS ACTUALLY INSANE THE DEEPER YOU DIVE TO REALIZE HOW FURIOUSLY THEY SANITIZED HIM. Like a full court press on everything he was and stood for.
… are you assuming I’ve only heard of Dr. King in the past five or ten years or so ago, from conservative pundits on social media?
How sad that modern conservative idiots trying to sanitize his legacy, prompts modern liberals to further tear down his legacy and accomplishments.
Also, I’m aware of the conspiracy theory you’re mentioning. I feel like people who believe that, *really* don’t get the situation. He was a black man living in Georgia in the 60s. You did not need an airtight conspiracy that held solid sixty years later to arrange to kill him. That’s why what he was doing was so amazing. If someone wanted anonymity they’d wear a freaking hood. So many other civil rights leaders were killed in the same time.
Source? I know that there were documents that were released a few weeks ago, but I didn’t hear anything like that.
No major news outlets are covering it. NPR isn’t. The government’s websites claim that no governmental force federally, statewide, or locally had anything to do with it. The first several pages of Google searches for “Did the CIA kill MLK” all either acknowledge that it’s a conspiracy theory, or are stating strongly that there is no substantial evidence.
Could you share what you have? I’d be very interested to see it, because as it stands, if the CIA did release a statement saying that they were responsible, then they’ve gone and covered it up again, making it again a second conspiracy.
I generally agree with up until what you say the protests are for- it’s not for martyrdom (otherwise the organisers of this protest would not have been asking people to leave) but for visibility, to disrupt the norm and to force an acknowledgement of the issue. A successful example is my country’s recent ‘rainy Sunday’ march for humanity. There has been almost no media coverage of the genocide in Palestine but they HAD to acknowledge 100,000 (or as much as 300,000) people marching over the Sydney Harbour bridge. The uni sit ins are usually targetting the uni itself by disrupting the day to day and forcing them to recognise that we want them to stop contributing to genocide.
Violence may be anticipated, and groups like XR will train people engaging in direct action in how to /reduce/ risk while knowing the risk. The police violence isn’t the point of the protest- it’s a strategy of the police, not the protesters.
You are correct that violence like AG’s vigilantism is likely to lead to greater harm, but that is the point of the police violence. To make protesters out to be violent and sway public opinion and to keep others from joining. Thats not on AG, Dorothy or the protesters. That’s on the cops and the state that claim a monopoly on violence.
Tldr: the police can and will use AG to legitimise their own violence in the eyes of the public, but that does not make it valid or true.
An analogy might be if one state spent 70 years using its military power to take over a second state, displacing it’s people and occupying it’s land. If a militant minority from the second state then retaliated with an equally abhorrent, if smaller scale, act of violence, that does not validate the first state’s ongoing war crimes and attempted genocide regardless of how international media covers it.
But that’s just an analogy (that got out of hand sorry, I got excited)
If AG hadn’t been there they would make something up. Back during the BLM protests they were constantly posting disseperate bits of litter and claiming they were bombs and shit.
Why are you talking about “If Amazi-Girl hadn’t been there”?
There is a real-life version of the Dunn Meadow protest, that this is (very loosely) based upon, where the police are exactly as hostile as they appear here, there is no Amazi-Girl who viciously attacks the police so they can escape, because the protesters aren’t trying to escape. They dug in and stayed protesting for over three months, despite over fifty arrests.
I have some slight annoyances at how, in the DoA version, the protesters are instead 100% compliant and leaving, the police are brutal anyways, and they need a literal superhero to get them all to safety.
… but probably not as much annoyance there, as the annoyance I feel for all the commenters loudly arguing that the fictional cartoon version is reality, that things would have been far worse if the superhero wasn’t there to stop them, and that the peaceful resistance which actually happened IRL which shocked and outraged people across the nation, was “ineffective.”
A little more complicated from when I looked into this at the start. There was an initial protest encampment that was broken up quickly when the rules were changed on the fly, like just happened here. I think, though it wasn’t clear, the protesters weren’t really prepared and did disperse quickly, though there was tear gas and arrests and some violence.
Then there was some legal maneuvering and probably better preparation for a confrontation and they came back and set up another encampment that lasted for over three months, as you said.
I don’t believe they ever broke it up. They made 55 arrests over three days, kept coming back and using similar tactics to arrest more people, but the protest wasn’t budging.
What I should have said, is that this was the reason for *nonviolence* in the protests. So that any action taken against you IS seen as overblown, instread of (to some minds) justified.
Consider a sit-in protest. These protests are done knowing that there are two ways that they end: either with their demands being met, or by being arrested for trespassing. You don’t go to a sit-in and be *shocked* that the police plan to arrest you; that was always on the table. Putting the police in that situation is literally part of the strategy.
I do think people should be allowed the opportunity to defend themselves and others during a protest. I get that nonviolence in a protest is important, it is, but at this point, all the cameras need to do is point to one bad actor and the news will paint everybody with that same paintbrush. And frankly, I don’t blame the bad actor. Because what’s considered a ‘bad actor’ changes based on what the other side needs.
When people peacefully took a knee during sports events, people complained. When protests escalated as people were ignored, those same complainers said “well I would support it if they just did it nonviolently”, when they demonstrate that isn’t the case. I’ve heard these arguments with my very own ears, in person, off the internet. Once upon a time I’d say “you need to be nonviolent, always”, but at this rate… I’m tired. And for some people, it will NEVER be peaceful enough, quiet enough, convenient enough. It will ALWAYS be wrong for some reason.
Nonviolence here is a tactic, not a moral principle. There’s a time for street fighting and black bloc tactics, but there’s a time for peaceful protest, even in the face of police violence.
And that’s largely a matter of organization. Of not letting even individuals who are sympathetic to your cause derail the event, much less provocateurs or people just there to break shit. The people organizing the protest didn’t count on Amazi-Girl. They didn’t want the fight. Not this time around.
I understand that, I just think if someone does wind up defending themselves or others, they shouldn’t be blamed when the system that allows the police to brutalize its own citizens is the real problem.
I guess it depends on what you mean by blamed? Yeah, the cops (and the authorities behind them) are the real problem, but if protestors show up to fight and defend others who don’t want their “help”, there’s some blame to go around.
Did you forget that the cops started threatening forceful retaliation for “unlawful assembly” before any reasonable sign that the protest was intended to be, let alone about to become, non-peaceful, meaning that it was definitionally not unlawful assembly (6/3/25)? Did you forget that Amazi-Girl didn’t get involved until Joyce was unlawfully restrained by an armed officer despite clearly being outside of the protest area and stating she was evacuating (6/15/25)? Did you forget that by the time Amazi-Girl did anything beyond stop said unlawful arrest, the police were actively utilizing tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protestors who did nothing wrong besides be too slow to comply with an unlawful threat of charges that should not apply (6/15/25)? Did you forget that the entire point of Amazi-Girl’s actions was to save people who had committed no crime from police brutality, because standing up to the abuse of power is the right thing to do, even if the way in which she did so was comparatively inadvisable by praxis? Did you forget that we’re talking about a teenager here, who’s likely and understandably more concerned with whether she can do something right now to stop people getting hurt than with the long term optics of her being there? Or were you just too busy being up your own ass to notice the taste of boot in your mouth from blaming a kid doing her best to help in the one way she knows how, instead of the police who were wrongly enacting the violence in the first place that she acted to prevent?
But I also didn’t forget that this entire plotline was based off of a real world event, which made national news for how grossly violent and overblown the police response was, and how crooked the university was for drastically changing their policy.
I also didn’t forget that IRL, they didn’t need rescuing because they had no intention to leave, and stayed for over a hundred days, with no injuries; and the pro-Palestinian protests became louder and more widespread because of that injustice.
I also didn’t forget that the law doesn’t reward or give protections for vigilantism, that sometimes the right thing to do is also the stupid thing to do. That trying to stop violence with more violence is as effective as fighting fire with fire.
In an alternate universe – this one – there’s a version of this protest that *wasn’t* broken up, that practiced peaceful resistance, and that could not be controlled or shouted down by either the university or the police. That version that others read about, or saw a news article about, and got angry about, and formed MORE resistance – for which this comic storyline is just one of many outcomes for what those people did.
So don’t tell me that doing what the IRL Dunn Meadow protesters did was cowardly or wrong, and what they REALLY should have done was attack the police. Because that would have done shit for the Gaza protest.
Wow, you really didn’t read our comment very closely. In what universe did we suggest that not attacking the police was “cowardly”, much less “wrong”? Because it sure as fuck wasn’t this one.
Amazi-Girl saw her friend getting her face smashed into the dirt for doing nothing wrong, saw that she was able to save her, and acted. Was that a smart decision? Fuck no! On that much, we agree. But given we’re talking about a super-powered teenager who was just as much trying to protect the people right in front of her as hoping she’d get killed in the process, I’m inclined to suggest that maybe this was just an impulsive but understandable decision, and not some deeply rotten failure of praxis.
Furthermore, the police do not need an excuse to twist the narrative. Violence or no violence at this protest, they could (and in real life, often do) just as easily outright make shit up to spin the situation to whatever suits them best. The truth may eventually come out, but by the point that reaches anyone with the authority to punish them, the vast majority of people will have moved on and forgotten there was ever an issue in the first place. They get off with a slap on the wrist, a quota fulfilled, and a boss up the chain happy that their investors aren’t getting busted for human rights violations.
I’ll say it again: a teenager made a snap decision to save her friend from blatant police brutality. That is what we’re talking about here. We can wax poetic all you like about the long-term implications of that choice, but the bottom line is that she stopped an injustice, period, even if greater injustice ends up coming from it down the line. If you were in that exact same situation – 19ish, stressed, depressed, kinda hoping just a little that you can give the cops an excuse to shoot you, and watching someone you know personally get wrongfully detained right in front of you, with ample ability to intervene and stop that from happening – can you honestly say you’re certain that you wouldn’t have done the same? Because I seriously doubt most people could.
I am honestly, 100% sure that if my friend and I had left the protest and were literally at the fence – as is apparent from July 9th – and then go BACK IN, when police have said they will arrest anyone who doesn’t evacuate-
(and yes, we can see that Joyce went back in- there’s no longer the line of casually strolling protesters walking to the gate, she says “I’m evacuating,” not “have evacuated,” and also the fact that she needs Amazi-Girl’s help to get *out*, not *in*)
– I can say with 100% confidence that if an officer gave them a command to get down, and instead of complying they argue, my response would not be to high-jump kick the officer in the head.
I don’t think I’m wild in that. There are, statistically, very few protests that end in flying Mortal Kombat-esque face kicks. Probably because there are more than one or two cops assigned to these thinfshtt
Maybe that makes me a bad friend, I dunno. Probably I’d be recording it. Probably, most people would be. How else are you going to protect your friend when it’s their word against yours? In this moment, they need *that* help more than Kung Fu.
But if I, say, was drunk and ran back to the protest, and my buddy Craig roundhouse kicks several cops in the face so that I don’t get arrested (classic Craig!) when the police fight Craig, I do *not* go, “But they’re supposed to protect me, and Craig was just defending me! How could those police have hurt Craig?!
It is clearly visible in the July 9th strip that while Joyce did reach back inside the fence briefly while attempting to stop Dorothy from initially running away, she was fully and clearly outside the fence by the time the police intervened in the next strip. There is nothing to suggest she was within the protest area, nor moving towards it; she was simply looking in the direction of the gate from outside it, and was forcefully detained without warning.
Regardless, you clearly did not understand the point being made in this strip. The point is not “how could they have hurt Amazi-Girl, she was only attacking them to defend us”, that would be stupid. The point is that the police should not have been using violence in the first place. Dorothy is coming to the realization that the police are not, in fact, there to protect civilians, as they typically attempt to portray. If the police had not used force – which I think we can at least agree was immoral, even if it were lawful – there would have been no reason for Amazi-Girl to intervene. But because the police were using force to disperse innocent civilians, to protect the interests of a corporation complicit in genocide, someone who was trying (even if misguidedly) to do the right thing got hurt.
Again: Dorothy is not saying the police shouldn’t have fought back when they were attacked. She’s realizing that if the police were actually there to protect people, like they say they are and ideally should be, then there would never have been a reason to attack them in the first place.
MLK was playing “good cop, bad cop” with Malcolm X. “You negotiate with me, the presentable one, or the other guy’s totally deranged fanatics just might accidentally start shooting. Boy, I hope they never do. Don’t we all?”
This, in and of itself, is a pretty reductive take compared to the reality of what was happening with the various protest movements during the Civil Rights era.
Yeah, definitely on board with this. Mixing superhero action into protests is as much of a problem for me as mixing the romance arc into the protest.
We get to see even within the strip itself, Jocelyne saying the organizers ordered the evacuation. We saw in a bonus strip Asma telling AG not to escalate. We know from the real event this was based on that the sniper didn’t shoot anyone and as far as I can tell there were no serious injuries: people got roughed up and arrested, which is bad enough, don’t get me wrong. But it’s what the protestors expected and signed up for.
AG not only almost certainly changed the coverage of the situation from a focus on the genocide and on police violence and the campus changing the rules to “campus superhero attacks police”, but she also risked escalating the violence even further. You’ve got someone successfully fighting with police, who they can’t take down, that’s definitely justification for lethal force. It’s really only for story reasons that no one tried to shoot her – potentially hitting others in the chaos.
And to undermine my own argument a bit: Once the police violence and the breaking up of the protest happens, the narrative already inevitably shifts from the genocide to the police brutality and the right to protest.
We see that even in the discussions here: “dissolve the carceral state” doesn’t actually have anything to do with helping stop the Bulmerian genocide. The tactic was already successful.
That’s a difference from the Civil Rights protests, where peaceful black protestors being beaten directly ties to the black civil rights they were fighting for.
> two braindead freshman that were right next to the entrance and decided, hey, we’re so in love with each other that we’re going to run in there and GOAD the police to force us down.
So first of all, Joyce was OUTSIDE the fence, doing nothing besides looking on worriedly, when a cop in full riot gear shoved her to the ground. Before Amazi-Girl showed up.
She’s standing at the fence gate, looking back in in the previous panel. There are protesters calmly walking out in that strip.
Next strip, there’s no gate, no fence, no quietly leaving protesters. When Amazi-Girl helps, she doesn’t then try to find a way *into* the meadow, but *out* of it. And when Joyce is attacked, she says “I’m evacuating,” not “I’ve already evacuated!”
Joyce went back in. It just wasn’t shown, because that’s not necessary to know in this narrative.
Needing pretext or excuses is frankly something we’re so far past at this point that its silly. During the BLM protests we had media and government describing lawless cities in literal flames when what was actually going on was a few blocks having basically a pretty chill block party.
There is no way the cops would actually say “Yeah, while we were about to beat up this cute blonde white girl who was outside the fence, this other short cute white girl in a super hero outfit came outta nowhere and, unarmed, took down a cop and tied him up”. Even to their most messed up supporters that would AT BEST just make them look incredibly incompetent. They’re going to be claiming they were attacked by dozens of angry, huge, black guys with bricks and pronoun buttons. And at that amount of lying, the fact that someone actually did stand up to them really doesn’t matter. They’d be saying it anyway.
That would be a hilarious payoff if Raidah’s smackdown on Dorothy as president helped lead to Dorothy becoming a defense lawyer thorn-in-the-side to Raidah the prosecution lawyer for the rest of their careers.
It’s funny because you’re responding to someone who put villain in quotes and probably doesn’t literally mean villain, but I know you do literally mean villain.
Must be a hell of sleep to Amber: A barely stitched wound, the tiredness of all fight against cops, and trying to sleep with phones on, what makes the sleeping almost impossible.
I think Dorothy will transfer to Yale after all. Because she’s found a cause that is more important than her (relatively) short term happiness. I’m calling it. And it will complicate the drama between her and Joyce despite and because of the multiple incoming breakups.
It’s certainly not going to happen mid-semester. She might decide she’s going to try to get in again. She might even get accepted. And we’ll see her heading off in the epilogue as the comic wraps up.
“Qualified immunity” and “Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales” (2005) have made it clear: cops aren’t required to protect people. Their job isn’t to ‘protect and serve’ but, rather, to ‘protect capital and property and enforce order and serve the ruling class’. Dorothy, what are you going to do about that?
Much like many other Supreme Court rulings, this one takes what should be a reasonable concept on its face (“Public servants can’t guarantee they’re going to be able to respond to every single request…”) and instead of making a SANE ruling (maybe something like “… and therefore, if they are accused of malfeasance-by-ignoring-a-report, that should be evaluated on their workload and triage process…”) they made a totally bonkers one (“…and therefore, you can’t ever sue them for not showing up, cause they don’t have to neener neener.”)
I feel like it’s generous to call this a triumphant awakening moment when less than 24 hours ago, Dorothy ran into a quickly escalating protest with the intention of self-sabotage. I could see her doing any number of things from this point forward and they could be good or bad.
Hey, be glad she came to the conclusion at all. I’ve got a relative who still sees cops as blameless superheroes. Even when confronted with the obvious abuses, she either gives me the old “bad apples/not all cops,” and that’s if she believes me at all. Other times I get a “well I don’t know about that” which is the faux-polite Midwest way of calling you either gullible or an outright liar, or she tells me to “stop with the conspiracy theories.”
Her definition of conspiracy being “anything that suggests the status quo isn’t benevolent.”
Most American sayings that involve water are negative in connotation. “This is dogwater” when something sucks, “we’re in hot water” when were in trouble or danger, “sleeping with the fishes” when you’re killed and your body is disposed of in water, “up shit creek without a paddle” when you’re in a bad situation that doesn’t stop keep happening and you don’t have many tools to deal with it, “reaching my/their/its/the boiling point” when something has escalated in a troublesome fashion, “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” when someone is clearly putting you in a bad situation and trying to deflect attention off of them, and so on.
I’m pretty sure most of the commenters are from the US, and unfortunately most people in this country are exposed to a lot of propaganda that tries to make them fear and hate any political views that are even remotely anti-capitalist. So yeah, whenever a strip touches on political topics we get some interesting takes in the comments.
I mean even the erstwhile anticapitalists are unwilling to abandon their propagandized preconceptions of certain theorists and leaders lol. It’s a grim scene, man
My opinion is ACAB because the system is designed by an oppressive legislature that has been racist and corrupt since its conception. However, people don’t seem to have the same attitude to the fact at least (at least) half of the politicians are directly creating laws designed to oppress.
Marx (still good for analysis)
Battle Cry Of Freedom – James McPherson
Autobiography of Malcolm X
James Baldwin
WEB Dubois
Studs Terkel (Division Street or Race)
Thought that just occurred to me on this comic, and I’m gonna put it out in the world because if it happens, I don’t want to be coming in after the fact with “I knew it!” without some receipts.
Oh? That’s an interesting theory. She’s not on the same athletic level as AG(fair, AG is ridiculous) but if I recall she is reasonably fit so it’s not too unreasonable. Plus she is smart and could probably leverage that.
And in her mentally lost and aimless guilt ridden state, it may even seem like a reasonable choice.
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yeah Dorothy ACAB
TOOK YA LONG ENOUGH
I don’t think she’s quite there yet, but she’s getting close. I hope Dorothy finds the time to read some leftist political theory soon.
It’s a step up that she’s no longer focused on lesbian feels at the protest of the genocide.
But still not focused on the genocide.
I find it peculiar that while much of leftist theory is about not seeing the world in black and white, attitudes like ACAB still persist.
lol
The struggle of any complex ideas (and given the complexity of the world, any ideas worth a damn are complex) is that core concepts can often end up being ripped from context and simplified. Even very smart and wise people have trouble not doing this- the complexities are so numerous that it is impossible for any one person to keep it all straight all the time. At least, I’ve never met one who I thought could, and even if I did, I’d never tell them so, because I think the moment you think you are such a person you cease to have any chance of being so.
Is there a cop out there who will refuse to evict anyone? Who will leave a homeless person who’s not hurting anyone alone? The law requires anyone who enforces it to do things that make them a bastard. Someone else who’s not currently up at three in the morning is likely to be able to expand on this betted.
lmao
ACAB is not about each individual cop being a bastard, it’s about cops being part of a system that forces them to be bastards. Imagine if you will a hypothetical “good” SS officer. They would still be forced to take part in all the things the SS officers do, and thus would no longer be good, or no longer be an SS officer.
Policing in America is a less extreme variant of this. “The Thin Blue Line” exists to protect extremist cop behavior, and cops who don’t toe the line are penalized. For instance a cop who stopped another cop from strangling someone was fired and charged. A cop who tried to report on police abuses in NYC was forceably imprisoned in a mental institution. A cop who tried to stop a suicidal person without killing them was charged with “endangering police officers.”
There are plenty of small towns in America with 2-4 cops, perhaps many of them have reasonable police officers who want to help the community. And that’s great for them (plenty also do not, or have a very interesting definition of community). But for large police forces, if you don’t toe the thin blue line, you’re not allowed to be a cop. And that means that all of those cops are bastards, whether they started out wishing to be or not.
Excellent explanation. Thank you very much.
Thanks for this explanation. It was really enlightening. 🙂 That said, we should probably rename the expression ACAB (along with “defund the police”) because on first glance it is REALLY misleading and is probably costing us support from neutral or uninformed people who read the abbreviation and draw an utterly incorrect (but nonetheless quite understandable) conclusion from it.
Zaxares, pretty much every progressive idea is twisted by bad actors.
“Black Lives Matter,” a pretty benign statement when you think about it, became some horribly controversial thing
“Woke,” was literally just “aware of systemic issues in society”, and is now meant to be anything conservatives don’t like.
“DEI” is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. All good things.
Hell, “Feminism” is treated as some kind of matriarchal, man-hating club
They aren’t confused as to what the words mean. They actively fight to twist the words.
There are well-meaning people who do misunderstand, but you’re right; they often misunderstand because bad actors intentionally muddy the waters. The bad guys know the longer we have to explain and defend ourselves, the more time they have to rob us blind (of money, of rights, of infrastructure, etc.)
Sure, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. They can and will twist anything we say, but we don’t need to make it easier for them. Things like “defund the police” that are already misleading on first glance don’t help anyone.
What’s misleading about that?
The fact that no one who wants to do it actually wants to do the thing everyone who first hears it assumes the sentence means? Like if your slogan needs explaining while making people think they know what you’re about it’s not a great slogan, and “defund the police” did damage to progressives with black and brown communities specifically in addition to being weaponized by the right.
Messaging does matter. That piece is particularly ineffective.
There are plenty of people out there who still see the police system overall as a force of good. Think the older generations and just generally people who don’t majorly focus on the news cycles and aren’t regularly seeing all the evidence against the police. To these people, ‘Defund the police’ may seem like either a really dumb idea, or something insidious.
You want your slogan to make sense to someone who’s mostly clueless as to what’s going on, otherwise you’re just preaching to your choir. Random spitballing but something like ‘Policing Must Change’ or ‘Police Justice, Not Police Brutality’ would at least make it clearer that you’re not seeking to weaken the notions of security that people see the police as safeguarding.
I will not disagree with your intent but a significant issue is getting clear messaging across. In the age of hashtags and slogans repeated 1000 times a minute in your media feeds, it’s difficult to get someone to read a 3 paragraph explanation of a political idea.
Take “Make America Great Again.” What does that mean exactly? It’s a nice phrase, but doesn’t say much. Now people might look into what the message means, or maybe just take it at its face value in blind support.
All Cops Are Bastards operates by the same rule. For a lot of people, that base idea resonates. For others, they may look into what that phrase actually means. The important bit is people hear the slogan and get interested enough to learn more. For that you need a bold statement to catch people’s attention in the barrage of messaging that is modern social media.
Basically, ACAB fits on a signboard, and anyone seeing that signboard might look it up and then get the actual message you replied to. Another timely example is “From the river to the sea.” I heard people chanting that and then looked it up.
Not interested in going through all the effort of creating new terms that will only be immediately twisted again, as Hat noted.
It’s also just much better to explain to people that the right misrepresents terms, so that they’ll learn to be more skeptical of right-wing definitions, than to capitulate to the right’s deliberately misleading definitions — not only legitimizing their definitions but their tactics.
Not to mention constantly playing defense and spending all our time trying to come up with new terms to describe things, instead of actually making any progress on these conversations.
Heck, the “Mayberry” paradigm of a peaceable kingdom small town with a token police department was considered a fantasy even back when it was made–especially in the face of the real Jim Crow South. I won’t name a name, but near where I was living a few years ago, there is a notorious state line town where the Sheriff just had a few above-board officers under his command, but was also in with the local organized crime families, who could loan him thugs to handle the Sheriff’s dirty work. The Sheriff finally got busted, but it’s been impossible to replace both him and his Deputies as there aren’t a lot of local men qualified for the jobs. And if you’re a GOOD man, why would you WANT to be a cop in a place like that?
What your comment brings to mind is how people in these positions can have opportunities to do good, and these probably go unnoticed by history. For example in the movie JoJo Rabbit (spoiler ahead)
we see someone in the German military who has clearly become disillusioned with Hitler step into a situation in a way that saves multiple lives – and he’s not found out by his peers, thankfully. Then again near the end of the movie, he takes action to protect someone more innocent than him and sacrifices himself in the process (or at least doesn’t try to help his situation).
No one is morally pure and I personally couldn’t stand the assaults on my integrity that I’m sure being a police officer would present while trying to do any good in that positions. But if a saying that is supposed to be a systemic critique and people consistently misunderstand it, I want better slogans that don’t just drive culture wars.
I missed articulating one of my main points, which is that sometimes people in the most morally compromised positions can also take actions that no one else could for good.
Bad example.
SS recruits were chosen because they were anti-semitic thugs.
One of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen held two PhDs
I find it peculiar that while much of leftist theory is about not seeing the world in black and white, attitudes like the sky is blue still persist.
Because Police are mandated to be suspicious of everything, even innocuous or innocent actions made with nervousness. In Short, All cops are bastards because they are paid to be whether they want to or not. Even the so called “good ones”😀
There are always going to be evil people out there. They don’t need to be many to ruin everything for everyone. You know the saying about how a rotten apple spoils the bunch? Once rot appears, it propagates fast.
Evil people will set up to rule over other people. Criminal behavior of coercion, extortion, even abduction and enslavement appear spontaneously. With more people under their sway, they go out to use their force to enslave even more people, until they run out of free people nearby and at that point they go raid other criminal lords.
This is basically how the ancestors of nation states appeared. People took power by force and fought other of their ilk over who would get to oppress the most people.
Once you get to rule over a lot of people, however, power can no longer be exercised directly. You need to delegate, to have intermediaries, lieutenants, etc. That’s where a need to have some sort of legitimacy comes into play, and that’s where we have a long list of thinkers who came up with differences between a just ruler and an unjust one, and of better ways to reprogram the criminal racketeering and enslaving enterprise that was at the origin of the state into something that will benefit the people instead of oppress them.
But despite many revolutions and enlightened ideals, this was never fully achieved. The state is still, at its core, a machine of oppression that we have to tolerate mostly because it protects us from worse oppression.
Nowadays, it is harder for an evil man with ambitions to just take over a tribe and then snowball from there. Precisely because there are those states out there. So you can either work within the system (join the state), or against the system (join organized crime), or both at once (be a corrupt member the state).
And this is where ACAB comes from. It’s not about each and every single member of the police being a bad person; it’s about the entire system being bad — at best, a necessary evil; at worst, just an evil.
There’s a big show being made of how police and military should not obey illegitimate orders. How the “just following orders” excuse famously didn’t fly in the Nuremberg trials. And yet, can’t you think of some recent illegitimate orders being passed, and dutifully obeyed without complaint? Can’t you think of how people who are supposed to swear an oath to protect the Constitution are allowing blatantly unconstitutional things to happen because they’re just following orders?
That is the exact problem with the wording ACAB: it appears to place the blame on every individual cop, which makes the claim and the views behind it really easy to misunderstand.
People not already familiar with the more nuanced interpretation don’t get it, and often oppose the oversimplified wording rather than the actual ideas, as illustrated by Differentiator’s message.
Alas, the effectiveness of a slogan tends to be inversely proportional to how accurately it reflects reality. “Refocus police efforts on local care and train officers to be social workers first, crime-fighters second” doesn’t really get people fired up to go and protest, even if it’s what’s actually needed. One *hopes* that the people shouting ACAB understand this, although I’ve been on the internet long enough to become rather cynical about that.
But what does “effectiveness of a slogan” really mean? If it gets those who understand it fired up to go protest, but drives a bigger backlash from those who take it more literally, is that really effective?
Don’t forget, when calculating that, the fact that the right wing will deliberately twist the meanings of any and all slogans no matter how innocuous — see Hat’s post above, but witness how “Black Lives Matter” is treated basically like a scam, a racist anti-white argument, and a violent anti-cop slogan all at once.
In other words, when the backlash is artificial and will exist no matter what slogan you use, why even consider it?
As I said above: it’s both a waste of time and effort to constantly reinvent new terms that the right is just gonna twist again and actively counterproductive to concede that a given term was “bad”.
It legitimizes the tactic.
And it does nothing to increase wariness around right wing twisting.
Much better investment of time to raise awareness of how the right keeps twisting terms so that people are more prepared for the next twist.
Just a reminder that the movie Serpico was a dramatization of the true story of my addled mind wants to say Frank Serpico’s battle against dirty cops. Lemme Google that first name. Googled and corrected. He even took “friendly” fire during a drug raid.
Or people get on board with the non systemic interpretation of it and focus their energy on hatred for individual cops rather than changing and improving the system that leads to the critique.
I’ve found that thoughts on cops and their ilk is a lot more broad outside of the US.
For example, in my home country, Cops are mostly respected and trusted to do the right thing (because there are systems that actually sack and remove the pension of cops that break the code of conduct), while it is the Military that is hated and distrusted. And that comes from the simple fact that my homecountry was under a military dictatorship for 30 years.
The same talking points about cops being jackbooted thugs of the state that exist only to be the boot on the neck of the people are directed towards the Military, because it was them who did that, and not even under a veneer of “Law and Justice”, but because the Generalissimo demanded it.
In the words of Brennan Lee Mulligan:
“Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just a promise of violence that’s enacted and police are basically an occupying army, ya know what I mean?”
Which is to say ACAB is true because the institution of a police force – especially nowadays – is there to protect and serve the interests of the ruling classes, rather than protect and serve the interests of the people.
Unfortunately good cops just don’t last. They either get pulled to the bad side, or fired, or driven to suicide. The system of cops is an always has been corrupt and harmful. Link below is written by an ex-cop who is in hiding due to fear of doxxing and retaliation. He explains it very well.
https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759
This.
We know ACAB, because non-bastard cops tell us so. After they’ve been kicked out!
Bingo.
lmao, even
Look, not all cops are literally bastards, but when dealing with cops doing copper stuff it’s safest to assume they will make the bastardest choice.
Its along the same line as “no ethical consumption in capitalism”, but people have oversimplified it to be against individuals. In a corrupt system, no one participating is good, there are only lesser evils
“leftist theory” being “about not seeing the world in black and white”, is the most vibes-ass description of a thing i’ve read in a while. you’re not describing “leftist theory”, you seem to be trying to talk the general concept of learning and understanding the world around you, and you’re getting that worryingly wrong too.
The point of trying to understand the world around you is not actually to maximize the amount of information you understand. The point of seeking knowledge is to try to make your understanding of the world more accurate, and in particular, to improve yourself to be more effective at making the world a better place. The reason why we identify and explore the nuances of all these systems of power is to arrive at conclusions, and refine those conclusions in light of new information.
The reason why it’s important to identify the limits of our understanding may be so we don’t plant our feet on shaky ground, but equally importantly, to identify strong principles upon which we can stand firm, because you can’t begin trying to make the world a better place without committing to some concrete understanding of what “better” is. Nuance does not exist to be your personal excuse generator to avoid ideological commitment.
If you look at the general pattern of “when people analyze the world around them, their understanding of things often becomes more complex and nuanced” and conclude “complicated things are more correct than simple things”, then congratulations, you’ve disguised a heuristic as knowledge, you’ve replaced reasoning with gradient descent, you have restructured your cognition to resemble the functioning of ChatGPT. I promise you, you do actually have the capacity to think, and you are actually supposed to use that capacity.
Thank you for all the explanations and discussions, guys, seriously. This was exactly what I hoped to achieve with this comment. I also learned quite a few things myself and changed my attitude towards the slogan ACAB.
And to those who commented the less helpful stuff: I don’t know what you were hoping to achieve, but I wish you that you got out of it what you wanted.
god damn did i misread your overall attitude lol. imagine how apropos my reply would be if u were actually a deeply incurious asshole though. uh… yeah, sorry about that. i do think it’s worth questioning the premise that “not seeing the world in black and white” is a particular trait of leftist thought and not just a generalization about what happens when people engage intellectually, and it’s worth considering that sometimes clarity is about revealing hidden complexity and sometimes it’s about tearing down obfuscation. but… idk, i guess if you want to u can read my comment like u overheard me saying it to a real fuckin piece of work who, critically, isn’t actually you
That explains your first comment quite well 😀 tbf I could have worded my first comment more as a question and less provocative. No harm done 🙂
Of course, seeking clarity instead of categorisation isn’t inherently left behaviour, but I do believe that a) the (alt-)right tend to engage in it less, up to outright refusal from many. At the same time, many who call themselves left seem to resort to that simplicity when it is convenient. I thought ACAB was an example of that, and I even remember looking into it at one point, but apparently, my research was flawed. I’m glad my stupid provocative comment could resolve that, if anything^^ coincidentally, that’s also where my username stems from – the need to seek clarity by going beyond black and white, with my name serving as a constant reminder that I want to keep asking questions. I do suck at asking them nicely, though XP
this is just a side effect of dog whistle politics, and me having bad impulse control. but i don’t think u need to deprecate yourself for happening to trigger my “committed centrist” detector by random chance, i have to take responsibility for not getting so mad on such shaky grounds. i’m gonna go ahead and turn my ublock origin filter back on that hides the dumbingofage comments section, because there’s something about this specific space that brings out the worst in me.
The thing is good cops don’t last while the bad apples get protected and moved around where they can then go on to infect other precincts. The term “a few bad apples” gets simplified to saying “but the rest are good,” and not “spoils the whole barrel.” The problem is that too many bad cops get essentially rewarded for being bad cops, or at least passive permission, while those who want to change the system are either ignored, corrupted, fired, or left to fend for themselves in a dangerous environment and then killed by criminals, if not taken out back and given the Ol’ Yeller treatment. And any attempt to reform the department is treated as if you were slitting the throat of justice. So yeah, ACAB until the system is fixed.
DOROTHY is evolving!
(We hope.)
The first comment, like a thrown stone.
what I wanna know is why nobody here but me seems to be talking about DINA PLUSH :0
Dorothy… your problem wasn’t setting your aspirations too high, it was setting them to be too low.
Why be president when you can be one of the rebel founders bringing forth a new nation?
Raidah: “You want to become President again. You’ll be a war crim-“
Dorothy: “Oh fuck you Raidah! Your stupid attitude is why nothing changes!! I will be elected President, and I will the Abraham Lincoln of ending American war crimes, just as I was the Abraham Lincoln of making Joyce cum!!”
Raidah: “ . . . What was that last one?”
Dorothy: “I mean, making Joyce . . . come . . . to a protest with me! . . . I have to go!”
THIS!
I really don’t think the arc here is going to be “Dorothy becomes even more of an institutionalist”
“Dorothy does an anarchism” would be fun
I need her to read Bakunin so bad, truly
Or perhaps we could recommend a theorist for the Jewish girl who isn’t reprehensibly antisemitic
I don’t believe Dorothy is Jewish.
I can’t recall which of her parents is Jewish but I assume it’s her mother since Keener isn’t a Jewish surname. Jewishness is matrilineally inherited per Jewish law.
Also I’m very sure she’s described herself as Jewish before.
Her dad’s side is Jewish and Catholic, her mum’s is Catholic
She has absolutely described herself as Jewish repeatedly, and Willis showed an unused strip where they almost wrote Dorothy had attended Hebrew school before deciding against it. She also (see one of the links before) has been on the receiving end of antisemitism already, so I’m not sure where people’s disconnect is coming from.
Dorothy is Jewish by her own admission and by her lived experiences. This is not a thing it’s reasonable to debate (agreeing with you, Dot).
And additionally, the most important piece of evidence that Dorothy is Jewish: Joyce is into her.
She has a thing for the tribe.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/chaser/
Dorothy (I think) was born Jewish, raised Catholic, and believes in atheism. I don’t remember which comic she mentions it, but she does. Something about Amazi-Girl asking her if being a superhero was appropriation because superheroes are a Jewish invention?
Religion doesn’t come into what I’m talking about here.
See panel 2 of https://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/catholic/
Literally referred to her grandmother as “my bubbe” in a fairly recent strip. That’s Yiddish. So yeah.
Also: probably should recommend theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic for everyone! Or at least warn people, because boy is it depressingly common.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/provisionally/
Here she clearly calls herself jewish
On top of the other reasons for favouring theorists who aren’t virulently antisemitic: if someone’s thinking is so flawed that they’re willing to apply broad stereotypes to people based simply on who their possibly-distant ancestors were, they might not be particularly good with nuanced reasoning.
Admittedly, I haven’t read Bakunin’s work, so this is more of a general statement.
A lot of theorists are right about one thing (capitalism) while being incredibly wrong about other things (“women” and “other races” being incredibly common areas).
Ignoring or whitewashing the parts where a given theorist said and believed shitty bigoted things causes all kinds of problems, like having an unrealistically rosy image of the past, or increasing inclination to excuse these aspects as “products of the time”.
Like. No. Don’t excuse, don’t whitewash. Call it out. Put it in context: HP Lovecraft was for example a foundational horror author while also being incredibly racist, and not just virulently racist “by modern standards” but by the standards of his own time! He was UNUSUALLY awful! People KNEW he was unusually awful! That’s worth drawing attention to and warning for, especially warning Jewish readers and readers of color.
Once again, late to respond (partly because I wasn’t sure how to phrase this, and the next strip was already up when I saw the above comment), but… certainly, it’s possible for someone who’s very wrong about some things to still have valid insights on others.
I was just saying that, however useful their works may be, it’s often necessary to keep in mind the potential for flaws in their philosophy resulting from them regarding certain things as irrelevant when they really, really aren’t.
I mean… there could, as a hypothetical example, be a society which is scrupulous about providing for the needs of all their citizens and adequately supporting even their most vulnerable, but do so by horribly abusing the non-citizens they keep as slaves. There may be worthwhile lessons in how they treat the former, but it’s necessary to keep in mind their treatment of the latter when interpreting those lessons.
It’s a good point and I’ll take it. I was thinking of “God and the State” as a text that mainly deals with what Authority is on itself, but I always assume there’s at least ONE major thing I’ll disagree on with the philosophers I drink from. The antisemitism in this case, and it does merit a CW.
With the overarching themes of the comic, I’m handing her Emma Goldman
– religion as a means of control
– violence as a means of resistance
– pro-contraception
– feminist (and pro-free love)
– vocal supporter or LGBT people
You’re so. incredibly. cool.
Thank you, you’re super right, this is a far better pick 8DD
I hope she reads some Marx and Engels and Lenin soon.
Nothing says anti-cop energy like Lenin.
(anti-communist anarchist here)
When you say anti-communist, do you mean anti-authoritarian state or anti-sharing or anti-work-based-definition-of-ownership?
Because communism has a lot of different definitions, especially among those that are against it.
Twice as many among those who are for it. Damn splitters.
From a comment under a clip of Brian joining the People’s Front of Judea (specifically not the Judean People’s Front):
“Leninist Communists? We’re Stalinist Communists!! The only people we hate more than Capitalists are Leninist Communists! And the Maoist Communists! And the Minh Communists! And the Cuban Communists …what ever happened to the Trotskyist Communists? They’re over there in Mexico.”
Marx is a product of his time. He wrote in the middle of the laissez-faire capitalism of the early industrial revolition.
Lenin was an a***hole who was never about power to the people, but rather smashing the state and installing himself on the top. The Soviet Union was never ”communist” in any ideological sense, but just the Russian empire with new slogans.
Lenin? “Seize power first, figure out what to do with it later”, not even a concept of a plan?
Dorothy is going to be disgusted. Revulsed (…that’s a pun on revolution).
Just about every time some revolution happens without a clear plan of progressing and replacing with a better system, it gets replaced with a worse system. Opportunism and pogroms arise too damn often.
The actual revolutionaries themselves don’t even need to be at fault; there’ll always be someone eager to fill the power vacuum, and those most eager are usually the ones who want to abuse the opportunities.
To quote Douglas Adams: “The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
Oh, just to add: he was exaggerating for the sake of humour and to set up a joke. People like Dorothy, who want to rule for the sake of helping others, likely would be good choices, at least as long as they retain those altruistic goals.
Sadly, even those with good intentions can, all too often, be led astray by people who are skilled in the art of manipulating those in power… But they’re still likely to be better than those who are corrupt from the start. Not naming names, of course… mostly because we’re all pretty tired of certain names by now.
all power is all corrupting, The allpower is fictional damn it
Power corrupts.
Absolute power is kind of neat to have.
If I had absolute power, I would simply use my power to avoid being corrupted.
I think I could be trusted with absolute power. Just gimme a chance to prove myself.
Honestly, reading some useless tripe that they barely understand, and making that their entire personality would be very on brand for someone in their first year of third level education.
Lenin? Really? I know there’s some latter-day efforts to paint him as someone who was TRYING to hand over control to “anyone other than Stalin”, but let’s be real the man was the kind of guy who responded to bad things happening by picking a scapegoat and sending a murder squad. The man appointed Iron Felix as his head of political police, which was also a thing he had.
Just because you’re anti-capitalist doesn’t mean you’re a good person. After all, we have neo-feudalists.
Serious answer for the people who’re clutching pearls: Yes, Lenin. Early Lenin did some pretty good work, and if anything, you gotta read the man to criticize him. Which is why I can say latter Lenin dropped the ball hardcore.
The way he analyzed capitalism has merit. The way he reified the role of the state, and of the party, in socialism + his concept of authority are whack.
(Anarcho-communist chiming in! Thesis/Anti-thesis/Synthesis, y’all: Analyze everything, absorb the good, yeet the bad, hone your ideals to Keep Walking)
Honestly, the thing Dorothy’s done lately that has made me most disappointed with her is taking Raidah’s Twitter-discourse-level “President War Crime” bullshit seriously.
Raidah’s bullshit might be annoying, but it is not wrong.
Raidah is a jerk, but she’s correct about presidents and war crimes.
APAB
Assigned President at Bongo
Wanna say more?
I’m all about critiquing the twitter discourse.
To those responding to you: Being right and not worth being taken seriously aren’t mutually exclusive. Political leaders have many responsibilities and many possible duties they’re supposed to carry out to the best of their ability. Raidah having a point about war crimes is no reason to not seek power to effect positive change. Since Dorothy was still unseasoned enough that Raidah’s myopic putdown could affect her deeply, I’m glad she’s been going through the experience now. The world will throw far more complicated problems than that at her in the future.
Gotta be honest, “In order to effect positive change my ultimate goal should be becoming president” is pretty myopic and naive in itself
power is not some sort of liquid commodity you can exchange at your discretion. all power exists in a context; when you have power, you are empowered to do certain things, and you will have internalized a commitment to do certain things in order to seek that power. when someone becomes president of the united states, they are given immense powers, and those powers enable them to be the president of the united states. by the time someone reaches the point where they have any chance of becoming president of the united states, they will have developed a very clear understanding of exactly what it means to wield that kind of power on behalf of that kind of entity. i don’t think any of us can imagine what it is like to be that kind of person, for all intents and purposes they are an alien that we can only reason about empirically. and yes, empirically, it’s clear that “war crimes” mean nothing to such a creature.
People at that level of power are, NON-OPTIONALLY, regularly making choices about what to prioritize knowing whatever choices they make will kill people. I am not kidding about this. Like. When the economy gets worse people die type stuff. If you are a person who’s trying not to suck, you continue to care about that at least in numbers, but buying stuff in lives is just like. Your job.
The question it’s usually worth asking is what are people in power buying (or refusing to spend) with deaths, and is that something you can lobby them to indicate they should not think it’s worth that cost. (The current administration is unfortunately mostly buying ego and personal wealth, so they’re unlikely to care.) It is hard to get to such a position without becoming heavily beholden to corporate interests, but like. Presidents don’t get to decide not to make those tradeoffs but they CAN if they’re well intentioned try to make better ones, and making good tradeoffs can be MASSIVELY beneficial to lots of people.
The power is real, the power is useful, and we should want the people with the best possible values to both want and achieve it. But the tradeoffs it involves making are brutal, and often it’s not clear HOW to buy the outcomes you want or people are heavily beholden to corporate interests or trying to dismantle certain evils will be politically costly enough that you wouldn’t be able to buy the things you wanted to be here to get in the first place or myriad other things. But the ability to decide which tradeoffs get made and for what is real.
This take makes more sense to me. It’s not that people who reach the top are inevitably corrupt or that the system itself makes them choose evil, it’s that there are plenty of cases at that level where there aren’t any good choices. Despite all the power of the President, they can’t just fix everything with the wave of a magic wand. Sometimes doing the morally right thing has high costs, that other people pay. And when they do make mistakes, the consequences can be even worse.
And of course, despite all that power, the President isn’t a king. Often even what they want can’t be pushed through Congress (or is limited by the Courts), but as the head of the executive branch they’re still responsible for enforcing even policies which weren’t their ideal choice.
If the process of reaching the top didn’t select for evil, the fraction of the people at the top defending a genocidal state’s right to commit genocide would be lower.
Not every choice is hard.
I’ll agree that the process of getting there tends to demand people be good at working with entrenched interests. But it is worth knowing that Israel is a very difficult position to give up if you care about being able to intervene effectively in the Middle East. Like. Israel is kind of our most insubordinate military base, and we don’t have a good replacement. Do I think we should be supporting them at this point? Absolutely the fuck not, but I’ve thought their treatment of the Palestinians looked like a slow genocide long before it was a fast one–I wish we had been making our resources a lot more conditional a lot earlier. But that’s what we’ve been buying for a long time was the ability to enforce some kind of stability in the Middle East.
Unfortunately Trump is an idiot and I suspect THAT is not on his radar so much as imperial ambitions and personal wealth are. I do wonder if at this point we’d be seeing different behavior from a Harris presidency. I wonder at what point if any a president who was actually trying would be deciding to redo the math on exactly how much the power we’d be giving up is worth to them. Perhaps around the time Israel started bombing Iran and you weren’t getting what you were paying for anyway. I wish it didn’t take that much. I wish I were more confident a threshold existed.
Finding a solution to Israel is hard. I guess from one point of view, the moral answer is just to stop supporting them and wash our hands of whatever happens next.
Which would almost certainly going to be at least as horrific as what we’re seeing now and possibly on a larger scale.
Yeah I agree, at this point Israel is very much a regional superpower in their own right, no matter what they like to tell themselves. But we could probably exercise a lot more coercive power than we’ve historically been willing to do, and we could CERTAINLY stop selling them weapons.
We probably can’t really. At one point maybe we could have, but they’ve put in a lot of work to avoid that.
We could certainly stop selling them weapons, but that has consequences and it’s not really clear to me what they are. Would that weaken them enough to not be able to kill people in Palestine without weakening them enough to make them vulnerable to attacks from Iran and potentially from Arab states?
I mean unfortunately a lot of the coercive power we have over them is power to make them more vulnerable in their part of the world. I think that’s why broadly the US government has been pretty unwilling to use it. Maybe there are some things we could do to them economically but… yeah. It’s VERY hard to exert influence if an impact you’re willing to eat isn’t increased Israeli vulnerability. Which is… Unfortunate, to say the least.
@alice: So the only way to avoid become such an evil creature is to avoid power, thus leaving the power only those who actively seek out the corruption.
choose permanent power vacuum, choose Anarchy!
Who enforces Anarchy?
Nature abhors a vacuum. As true in politics as anywhere. Someone will try to fill the power vacuum.
There are some positions of power that people will not be allowed to hold without committing themselves to evil. The institution is bigger than any individual
thats why you remove the instititions and go ny the one law, institutions of all times outlawed. any non familygroup over 25 people is illeagal, the only law
Vernor Vinge, who was himself very sympathetic to minarchist/anarchist ideals, wrote a fairly decent story about how that’s an incredibly bad idea — if you don’t have any other laws, well, there are already people whose personal net worth is more than 25 MILLION people, let alone 25. “We’re not in a group, I’m paying you for a service” repeated hundreds of times, and now you have to figure out how to fight the Jeff Bezos Army without breaking your own rules.
Other authors have done similar — a self-published buddy of mine (also an anarchist!) hit it from the other angle and set up a sci-fi protagonist who kept trying to build communities like this. Which worked great every time he set one up on a new colony, until another person/group secretly organized (how to prevent conspiracies when your biggest group is 25?) about 10% of the total colony, then revealed themselves and said “Well, we’re the government now. We’ve already got the organization and the guns and planned for this, so you can try to get your true believers to figure out how to organize a larger group or you can pay taxes and things keep going along like they used to for most people most of the time.”
Part of the benefit of institutions/systems is preventing hostile institutions/systems. Until you figure out how to prevent infiltration/conspiracy evading your 25-person limit, that system falls rapidly to any organized attempt to defeat it.
How is that law to be enforced, when the police can only number 25 in total?
i said power exists in a context. i then described the context in which the power of the president of the united states exists. i did not describe the context in which all forms of power exist, you have to actually keep track of what ppl are referring to when they’re talking
Dorothy later knocks on Joyce’s door wearing a false beard and stovepipe hat.
Joyce canonically likes tall hairy dudes with Jewish names. It’s not Dorothy’s worst guess.
Though it was technically “I’m like the Abraham Lincoln of getting Joyce to cum,” she really said that:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-13/02-turning-saints-into-the-sea/murderous/
I love it!
Glad to see that Dorothy is close to realizing that the cops don’t exist to protect us, they exist to protect the wealthy and their property.
I love how incredibly naive she is.
sometimes i wonder if we could significantly improve the discourse around this comic by putting up a big flashing banner over each strip that says “THESE CHARACTERS ARE LIKE NINETEEN”
yeah but then you have to deal with the 19 year old readers! do you wanna write an essay deconstructing generational warfare and re-framing the value of years of slow-earned life experience in a respectful, non-adversarial light? no thank you!
Honestly, I’ve been pretty harsh on Dorothy and Joyce, but I agree with this 100%.
I hadn’t fully embraced ACAB until my early 30s, and I was in the military so I knew EXACTLY how corrupt it was. It takes time for people to reconcile reality with what we were taught as kids.
While I mostly agree with you in most context, I do have somewhat higher expectations for the amount of reading/homework done by the girl whose life dream was “Transfer to Yale, eventually reach the apex of US politics”.
I mean, I was dumb as shit as a 18-19 year old freshman, but I was significantly LESS dumb as shit about computer engineering.
I still don’t buy it. I see very strange needle-threading characterization. One example: The response of someone with that kind of ambition, who knew exactly that their red state lege and governor created one law hours in advance of a protest? What kind of news hound has not put that together yet?
See to me “transfer to yale, ascend us politics” seems like peak naivete, that’s something an over-eager high school guidance councilor puts you up to when your marks are too good.
That’s what college is for! Learn lots about how the human world really works. And, ideally, study up to DO something about it.
I do love when Dorothy finds her fight.
Shit accidentally reported your comment when trying to reply. Disregard that pls.
I reported them a second time just to make it worse and then I reported you too, because it literally doesn’t matter at all until like a bazillion reports occur.
I’m right behind you aren’t I?
Literal LOL.
I went out of my way to report all three of you above me, let’s see if we can get the bot to react!
I reported all of you but the only thing I got was this lousy t-shirt.
I reported Mr D for only reporting three of you.
Taffy, horrified, watches the BBCC and reddslym start evaporating into dust as they realize that what they thought was a “joking second report” was actually “exactly the one bazillionth report”.
There is regret.
It is too late.
“
Mr. StarkTaffy… I don’t feel so good…”This is blatant character assassination. I’d give a nonchalant “Oh, shit. My bad.” And then I’d go back to tinkering with FL Studio.
You’d have to have character to be character assassinated, buddy.
>:O
Damn. Just regular assassinated.
There we go, some productive radicalization!
Now go break up with your boyfriend.
Are we back to the president thing? Including transferring?
Bah, president. She shall be Queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night! All shall love her and despair!
Yeah, that speech did exactly nothing to convince my sapphic ass. Had I been Frodo, i would have handed the ring over immediately and been like “yup. Sounds like a plan. Kick his ass, my Queen.”
And this is exactly why Elrond went out of his way to specifically exclude disaster sapphics from the original council meeting that established the Fellowship.
Yep. This and ONLY THIS is the reason that whole council was dudes (in the movie, from my shaky memory, don’t @me if I’m wrong, mostly because tagging doesn’t work in this forum)
havent watched in years, not read, but i think Arwen is present at the council, and female dwarves are bearded so there may have been present as well
She wasn’t present in the book. The movie may have technically had her present, because it had her take Frodo to Rivendell. In the book, it’s a minor male elf character, who’s also a pure high elf, which is why Frodo sees the glow.
(Arwen, like her father, and like Legolas, is part human. She wouldn’t have done the glow. But I don’t at all blame the movie for ignoring that, because like. First of all, yikes @ blood purity as a concept, but second of all I don’t think it ever even comes up that Arwen or Elrond are part human in the movies. The only indicator of it is that they’re not blond.
And yeah! Yeah. Their lack of purity being represented by dark hair is… yep!)
i was specifically refering to the council scene, there is a fairly large crowd of elves in the movie and i feel like arwen is standing by or behind here father.
For the record — she is not, as far as I can tell.
@Li: Ah, blood purity as a concept, still cringe even in a universe where it actually makes sense to care (because the different Free Peoples are not only not evolved from the same stock, but were created at wildly different times and have souls that function differently!).
@Big Z: YEP.
The Peter Jackson movies are epic and sweeping and have several nice messages.
They also reproduce the books’ racism and even add some new bonus racism that wasn’t there in the books explicitly.
Also Alexander Siddig (aka Julian Bashir of Deep Space Nine) tried to audition, he wanted to just be like a background elf, and they told him pretty directly that he’s not white enough to be an elf. He could’ve played an orc though!!
The glow I think isn’t really a racial purity thing, but an elf who had lived in Aman in the time of the Trees.
And while Arwen, like Elrond is Half-Elven, Legolas is very definitely not.
I know I’m late, but had to comment: how did they think Alexander Siddig could pass for an orc? He’d have to spend longer in the makeup chair than on the screen! He’s got a more elven facial structure than (movie) Elrond, for Ilúvatar’s sake!
@deliverything racism is a helluva drug!
NEW MISSION UNLOCKED: SMASH THE CARCERAL STATE
(the Ironsides Music from Kill Bill begins playing in that last frame)
Huh. TIL a new thing! (love it when that happens) I didn’t know what “Ironsides Music” was. Looked it up. All these years I had thought that siren-ish sound sequence was created for the KB movies. Nope, turns out to be a much older jazz album! Yay new understanding!
I’m joining my voice with other commenters in wondering what the heck caused her to bleed from the side if it wasn’t a bullet.
Riot cops are very fond of murdering people, but not usually with blades or knives, it mostly blunt force trauma bashing people’s heads in or causing internal bleeding in the torso or abdomen.
Amber was bleeding from her side and I can’t think of how that could happen with a police baton. the closest thing would be abraison from being dragged, but if she was dragged I feel like she would be in jail instead of here
You can be dragged during a fight and still manage to get away
Calling Incellerwhatever doing a stab from the bushes as “justice” for her stabbing what’s-his-stabbed-face’s name.
yeah I believe this more than a cop doing it
He doesn’t know Amber is AG, and Amber is the one who stabbed dude.
It’s possible he could figure it out, but he didn’t strike me as that smart, and most of the cast never figured it out on their own.
Hell, maybe none of the cast did, besides Dina, but it’s been years, so don’t quote me.
Anyone here ever played the game dave the diver? It’s really great!
Fuck i mean to meake this it’s own comment, can everyone report it so it gets dleted?
No, it is there forever now.
I especially like the part where the sushi chef stabs Amber!
(there, now we’re back on topic)
Dorothy figured it out on her own.
The obvious implications being that her wound wasn’t caused by the police but something else that happened after she got away.
It seems like a staggeringly bad idea for these injuries to be from anyone other than the cops.
I’m going to make a wild stab in the dark that Amber wasn’t shot because Willis didn’t want to deal with Amber having a gunshot wound healing for the next few years of storytime.
That would be my instinct too.
Rubber bullets do a hell of a lot of damage but nowhere near the same recovery time as a bullet-bullet. I’m betting she was shot with one of those.
It could be both. An already battered down vigilante is an easy target for one of her at this point numerous enemies.
Maybe she fell on her grappling hook.
It could also be a compound fracture.
Baton broke a rib, which then protruded from the skin, causing an open wound.
I was wondering if she got hit by a gas canister, or one of those rubber bullets that are not supposed to be fired directly at people, but often are. Either of those could break skin depending on how she was hit.
You would be surprised how many cops carry tactical knives. Yes, chain of engagement usually goes baton first and the probably taser but if Dorothy was going them too much trouble, I can imagine a particularly “spirited” officer using a knife on her to slow her down.
Amber* GAH I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS ALL STORYLINE
Both are short, muscular, with velma hair, have glasses, tomboys, and bang Walkie. It’s totally understandable.
I don’t think Dorothy is muscular, in fact she’s pretty scrawny
She could have gotten snagged on a barrier while escaping (cut chain link is like barbed wire), took a blow from the corner or rough edge on a piece of gear, got thrown into a branch or rock with enough momentum, etc. There’s a lot of ways to get badly gashed or punctures without a knife. (Fellow clumsy people, you know what I’m talking about.)
Also, she wasn’t that badly injured. Surface cuts and a decent amount of blood loss. Whatever that wound was, it didn’t get to internal organs or that kitchen doctor wouldn’t have been enough. Stitched and glued back up, not major trauma surgery.
Ambers father was killed in the hospital by Lester, a policeman employed by Asher’s Mob Family. Hit was ordered (apparently) by Asher. Blaine died still insisting that AG was not his daughter. AG may have too much info on Blaine’s mob connections soo it would be nice if she died in the confusion.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2020/comic/book-10/04-is-a-song-forever/opaque/
and the next strip
it has been said before but blunt force trauma can break skin. riot cops have clubs, and some have ridged grips that could aid in the tearing of skin.
also she could easily gotten cut on jagged fencing or by being knocked into a broken tree branch. she also could have taken shrapnel damage from a riot shield breaking or one of the visors from the riot helmets. hell i am pretty sure she has on in a head lock in the background of one of the panels and could have cut herself on the visor then
I used to a lot of medieval/fantasy LARP type stuff. It was very much designed on focused on being as safe as possible, and the weapons we used were VERY non-realistic. Despite that, saw a few bloody injuries. Usually as a result of “engaging in vigorous activity outside can get you hurt”, but even a very, very safe mock weapon can break in a weird way and cut you. Just…there are a LOT of ways to get hurt.
Good. I can feel your anger.
Let it flow through you…
A blind, deaf, comatose, lobotomy patient could feel my anger
ah, a student of Darth Baras the Wide…
Ditto mine, but I just went through 20 minutes of ICE being abusive anonymous bastards attacking brown people pretty much at random including some whose ancestors were here before this was even a collection of colonies. All the non-bastard ICE agents need to quit yesterday. I know that’s physically impossible it’s just to emphasize how quickly it needs to be done.
Who watches the watchmen?
Me! It was on Hulu for Juneteenth a few years back.
The press. In this case Dorothy’s article in the next edition of the student newspaper.
Except that Daisy’s the editor, so she’s going to want to focus on Amazi-Girl.
Well I’ve got (good?) news for you. The cops beat up Amazi-Girl.
Seems more to me like Amazi-Girl beat up the cops. 🙂
Even if she eventually came out of it worse, she certainly seemed to give as good as she got, just spread out over more people.
There’s very little way for reporting to turn AG taking down cop after cop, sprinting between groups to dropkick knee them as “Police brutality”.
Caution: The watchmen _really_ get pissy when they’re being watched too. They _really_ prefer to hide their misdeeds.
Yes, yes! That’s the righteous anger you need. Get angry, anger get shit done!
Not that I’ve ever noticed, but okay. Maybe for others.
For me, peace and quiet and copious amounts of cold brew coffee get shit done.
Dorothy wearing a ‘Don’t argue with the people John Brown would’ve shot’ tee is gonna hit different.
Dorothy goes butch.
Not to get too emotional but
Yes yes YES YES YES!!!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Nodding vigorously.
Leftist awakenings always warm my tired heart
👍🏻!
If Dorothy is heading down a political path similar to mine, good for her. I only wish I had started realized this stuff when I was in college, instead of about a decade after I graduated.
The important part is you did
if this ends up being “she was stabbed by a cop with an illegal knife” it would subvert the very message it’s trying to convey because the whole point is that cops are legally allowed to perpetrate heinous violence on people.
it’s a very significant point in protests that cops are currently legally allowed and encouraged to perpetrate violence in a way that can permanently maim or kill people. even people who are not on the “defund the police” camp agree that it’s a problem when cops have carte blanche to kill someone, because it undermines the whole point of having a legal system that supposedly includes fair trials and a jury of your peers
TL;DR “rogue cop did this” would be a bad revelation if we’re framing this as Dorothy’s realization that the system is corrupt and unfair because it leaves open the possibility that he was one bad apple and not merely symptom of a whole rotten institution
Okay, but Dorothy isn’t braindead, so she’s not stupid enough to fall for “one bad apple”. Only dipshits who can’t tell celery from leather think that’s a real thing.
You are aware that “one bad apple ruins the bunch” is a metaphor, right? And you’re aware how apples rot? It has do with ethylene, an invisible gas that is a plant growth hormone that accelerates ripening, which is produced more as fruit ripens and especially when it rots. So single rotten apple will cause the surrounding apples to ripen faster than you’d expect if you didn’t know that one bad apple ruins the bunch. This is why apple sellers on noticing a single rotten apple gave massive discounts on that barrel, because they know it isn’t going to last. And if they’re smart they include the barrel in that sale, because ethylene is produced by even the tiniest shred of rotten fruit, and it gets into the wood as well, so any barrel that had a rotten apple in it is very likely to accelerate rot in the next bunch as well.
You see, the metaphor here is that corruption spreads invisibly, and that you can’t solve the problem of corruption while keeping the apples that were in the vicinity of the rotten apple. You have to be thorough, you can’t half-ass your way through cutting out the rot. When noticing corruption you need to fire everyone in that precinct and permanently ban them from law enforcement, and then you should not use that building or any of the service companies used by that precinct for a couple decades. Let’s say fifty years to be sure.
The rotten apple is a perfectly good metaphor for corruption. It doesn’t capture everything wrong with police, because as always reality is worse: There are systemic and cultural reasons that promote corruption that aren’t covered by the rotten apple metaphor. But that doesn’t mean the parts that are described by the metaphor aren’t accurate enough to be explanatory.
K.
One bad apple ruins the bunch isn’t what people mean by one bad apple anymore though. The one bad apple that dipshits who can’t tell celery from leather are falling for is when cop defenders say that cop who (whatever heinous fuckery even they can’t excuse) is just a bad apple and the rest of the police are fine because having a bad apple doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the rest of the apples in that department.
Exactly what I meant, yes. I’m also gonna go ahead and add that there are no good apples either. Not a single apple in that bunch is fit for human consumption. If you baked any of those apples in a pie and served that pie to a human, it would be morally justified for that person to have you executed by a firing squad.
One step further, there are no apples. There were never any apples at any point. This is a warehouse full of grenades. Most of the time you want them not exploding, but if one of them goes off and kills a bunch of people … yeah that’s what it’s for. A grenade that explodes is not a “bad apple”. It’s not a preventable tragedy. It doesn’t need reforming; it’s a triumph. A grenade that explodes has performed exactly the task it was made for.
The purpose then of the narratives that follow (“we’re investigating the incident …” “shameful, there was no need for so many people to be injured by that grenade” “well, play stupid games … they should’ve followed the grenade’s orders) is only to calm and vent the anger of spectators. And once you delay action, let the anger calm a bit, you can go back to filling your warehouse with grenades. To sum up, the problem with rotten apples isn’t the rotten part, it’s the apples part.
You never want to confuse making everybody feel better, the integral part of the system which makes it perpetual, with a movement.
Well, yes, given that all of the apples in this situation are human, and forcing people to commit cannibalism, even unwittingly, is generally regarded as poor form.
Yeah, there’s a popularized usage which makes the original meaning just not matter anymore (aside from like, giving a fun fact). Happens to a bunch of idioms like that.
See also: The customer is always right.
See also also: “blood thicker than water.”
I like “The customer is always a fucking moron, just give them whatever weird shit they ordered and get them the hell out of the store.”
That’s a pretty accurate representation of the original meaning of the phrase, yes.
I feel like this is getting very much into the reeds. The message is clearly, “cops are allowed to violently go after peaceful protestors and did so on camera.”
Focusing on them stabbing instead of shooting Amber sounds like the kind of distinction making that completely ignores the cops stabbed Amber.
Or, as I pointed out above, they didn’t stab her – they broke a rib, which in turn broke the skin. Compound fractures are exactly the sort of wounds police batons can produce, and so far as I’m aware, nothing we’ve seen has contradicted that possibility.
Very possible. So is just falling on some sharp rocks after exhaustion.
7″ serrated rocks with “tactical” Paracord wrapping on the handles.
Theoretically possible, though the kitchen doc didn’t even hint at it. Seems like that would need a little more than sealing back up with surgical glue.
Depends what you mean by “allowed”. And, “who” does the allowing. Quite some disagreement over all that.
Probably wait until we actually have the revelation first?
That’s no fun. Instead I would like to say that if it turns out Amazi-Girl’s injuries were purely self-inflicted to make the cops look bad, it would be an extremely unfair portrayal of the protests this is based on and a total betrayal of her character. I don’t think Willis should do it.
Why in the world would you think Amber is the kind of person to frame cops who were already assaulting protestors without provocation?
Exactly! It would just be a bad plot point all around.
It only subverts the message if the supposed rogue cop is punished by the system. If he did it with an illegal knife and the system protects him, then that’s just part of the problem.
A lot of the bad shit cops do is illegal in theory. It’s just that they get protected. It gets covered up. Prosecutors choose not to indict. Juries believe the cop’s lies and refuse to convict.
And honestly, Amazi-Girl here already subverts any ACAB message. Along with weakening any discussion about police brutality at this protest. Not a jury in the country would have convicted a cop for use of force against Amazi-Girl while she was assaulting officers and apparently beating them up pretty successfully.
To put it another way: What’s the difference between legal and illegal if that law is never enforced?
If she was stabbed, I don’t think she’d be alive right now.
Refund the police until they’re on the current level of public school teachers
I want a refund on the police, can I get that in cash or just a gift card? /joking
You get kholes cash
Another literal LOL.
I don’t know if this happens for anyone else, but the website for this strip tends to load really slow for a few minutes about 15-20 minutes after each new strip is posted.
It’s just me refreshing the page on 173 devices, don’t even trip.
Not even mad. I’m just impressed. That’s a kind of efficiency I can only dream of.
The survey that was done recently had 2000+ responses from people invested enough in this comic to fill out a survey about it. Even if only a few hundred of those are “rapidly refresh the page until the new comic is up” kinda people, it would explain a slow load for the first little bit a strip is up.
Especially if Taffy accounts for an extra 173 devices.
There’s also the technical possibility that whatever publishing mechanism that Willis is using has something janky going on with its caching layer, and until that’s settled down with new assets, load speed is reduced.
FYI – I’m guessing there’s a Doylist reason for the injury not being a gunshot wound than a Watsonian.
Willis doesn’t want Amber healing for the next 10 years of Real Time.
It could have been a graze from a bullet. A deep knife wound could leave her just as laid up.
Lawyer Dorothy arc unlocked maybe??? I wouldn’t die on this hill but I’ll gladly wave a flag on it
Yes, Dorothy will REFORM THE SYSTEM!
COP DOROTHY!
(FYI – God no. That is a horrible idea)
I mean, there are plenty of lawyers who aren’t cops. Civil rights lawyers, public defenders, even just boring old contract lawyers and the like.
What in the world – ? God, no. Lawyers aren’t cops. I’m thinking the type of lawyer who sues public universities to keep them from outlawing free speech and allowing snipers on the roof of their buildings to point guns at people. Or the immigration lawyers fighting to keeping people from being mistreated and illegally deported, and the ACLU attorneys constantly fighting for people’s rights. Those folks are unironically heroes.
Besides, we know “future Dorothy” is president…of the bar association. 😛
I’m into social worker Dorothy. Healthy professional focus on helping people, big focus on social justice and affecting change on both the micro and macro scale, and potential work in policy development.
Tho tbh I don’t know whether the focus of social work in the US is broad like Australia or narrower like the UK.
That would be great, but I think she’s too much of a big picture person to be satisfied with one-on-one care, social work in the US is mostly connecting people with resources, drowning in paperwork and bureaucracy, and not doing enough about reports of abuse because the law sucks. You have to go pretty high up in experience and chain of command before you get a chance at anything macro or policy involved in social work here. Mostly it’s soul-destroying, low paying, frustrating and will burn you out even as you’re literally saving lives the best you can. (Source: parent and grandparent were social workers.)
Frankly I think she has to DECIDE if she’s actually a big picture person, since this arc in particular shows both “Dorothy decides to do something ground-level, throws herself into it whole-ham, and gets Joyce-kisses for her efforts” and “Dorothy is ABSOLUTELY willing to fuck around with her priority list of things in order to avoid doing the hard bits as long as possible.”
Neither of those really say “big-picture person” to me (mostly, they say “stupid freshman”, to be fair).
On the subject of big picture vs small picture: https://www.dumbingofage.com/2023/comic/book-14/01-everybodys-looking-for-nothing/feeding/ might be relevant.
Great link as ever. Also very fun to read some of the comments under that one, knowing what we now know 😀
Excellent example of “is this gay?” getting met with “No, OBVIOUSLY not, duh, instead it’s [something it turns out to not have been]” for years and years.
Sometimes I remember that and I think, not all the Joyce/Dorothy shippers have been gracious winners, but can I really blame them?
Honestly, it’s hard to say that without giving a lot of credit to Willis riding that “gay” vs. “just the best gal pals” tightrope with an incredible degree of skill right up until they started touching faces.
Seeing ghol saying Dorothy “doesn’t see Joyce as a person”. They are really just like tgat huh?
Always has been, heh.
(This works as a reply to both of you really.)
I know I’m late, but…
Went back to check that “doesn’t see Joyce as a person” thing, just because I had to find out how it’d make any kind of sense for someone to type that, and… turns out GholaHalleck was implying Dorothy didn’t see Joe as a person, not Joyce. I still don’t understand what they were trying to say, but it’s not as bizarre.
and that’s when she decided the system had to go
Reform it from both within and without!
Dorothy’s supervillain origin.
Seeing your friend brutally injured by cops fills you with determination
Does the red tint on that last panel mean it counts as a Red Background panel?
I am ready for Dorothy’s student activist arc.
Dorothy went from wanting to be president to fix everything to wanting to be an anarchist to fix everything.
Dorothy gets a Jewish Anarchist arc >:D
HAVA NAGILA!!!
Dramatic Guitar Riff. Cut to 10 years later. A shadowy figure gives a signal, and a group of masked figures descend on a police vehicle, knocking out the cops and freeing the prisoners inside. As the assailants disperse, the shadowy figure backs into an alley and emerges onto an adjoining street. It’s Dorothy, now with an eyepatch, and she smiles, matching the expression of a campaign poster behind her saying, “Keener for Governor”. She gets a text. “Dinner will be ready at 5. Mac and cheese!” She replies, “I’ll be there,” and walks away.
Cue Batman the Animated Series theme
‘Wonderful, an impossible task I can put on the to do list above breaking up with my boyfriend.’
Dissolving the carceral state isn’t the answer. It’s the solution.
“dissolving”. “solution”. The answer was right there in front of us the whole time!
A+ science pun. Have an internet for your troubles, friendly stranger.
I think it was 3oranges’ pun, really. I just followed along… and perhaps made it a little less subtle?
Ah… well, admittedly it didn’t click until you pointed it out. 😅
Dina said “Yes”. I’m awaiting the significance of that short word.
Dorothy…Dorothy…you had a really important thing to take care of…something incredibly personal and local…Dorothy?
…aaaaaand she’s off.
Here I am, stick in the mud that I am.
That’s *an* interpretation.
The problem is, if pressed, the police will say that the reason that the riot gear was there, the tear gas, the batons, and the sniper, was because they had heard rumors that there was going to be a violent uprising, and as the police it is their job to keep everyone safe. That is what they will say. And to be fair, that is a reason.
And they will point to Amazi-Girl and say, and look: as soon as we began peacefully clearing the meadow, there WAS resistance. Within minutes, that eight or so officers were assaulted by masked assailants, completely unprovoked. They can probably also point to a few other random people who were “hostile,” or at least trying to reason or argue.
The protesters knew the risks, knew what they were showing up for, knew what was possibly going to happen. It was common knowledge when speaking to Asma that a sniper was in place and gates were going up. No one needed to be “rescued” other than two braindead freshman that were right next to the entrance and decided, hey, we’re so in love with each other that we’re going to run in there and GOAD the police to force us down.
Amazing-Girl saved no one. It was a ridiculous overreaction to show up and commit multiple felonies by assaulting multiple police officers just so that your friends don’t get what they are *literally* asking for.
You know what the point of these nonviolent protests are? They’re so that, when you’re all handcuffed and gassed and pelted with rubber bullets and people see photos of you, bruised and bloodied, people go, “Oh, shit, look what the police did to *children* in school, just for speaking out about the school’s role in the genocide. What is going on?! Why would they do that?!” You make yourself a living martyr for the cause and enrage far more people. Take a hint from MLK, or Ghandi, or Susan B. Anthony; smarter, braver people than the average person advocating violent upheaval online, who accomplished far more, too.
Instead – now the headlines will be about masked domestic terrorists assaulting officers in the line of duty who are seemingly aligned with this radical liberal group. It will completely undermine everything that the protest stood for and delegitimize them in many people’s minds.
Because – whoops! Again, I guess it really wasn’t about the people dying in a genocide halfway around the world. That tragedy’s nothing compared to the fact that white college students might actually suffer for a cause they believe in.
Fuck off bork.
yeah it genuinely took me a while to recognize how wrong this is, i was writing a whole long thing about where i think they went wrong because for most of it it’s like yes, exactly this, but then… you get to the end and realize wait a minute this is just me when i was like 15 in social studies class lmao. and let me tell you, i was not good at being 15 in social studies class.
i think all i rly need to say is, this is what happens when u take the cartoon depiction of martyrdom used to flatten MLK Jr into a sufficiently non-threatening paste, and try to extrapolate it to a (cartoon depiction of) a real world movement. apparently the concrete demands being made of the school are a cynical ruse to sell the optics of the police response, both Jocelyn and Asma are in fact white and have identical motivations and goals, will face identical risks, and produce identical cultural reactions when fed into the meat grinder of state violence. nailed it
scrolling around the thread and their responses and seeing a reflection of past me, i think the main insight i experience to get over this mindset was attending a real protest and reflecting on the fact that this didn’t cause me to turn into a chess piece.
I have really come to dislike that MLK is propped up as this all-father of peaceful protest. The sanitization of history really does work. I mean Stoney Carmichael and Julian Bond are RIGHT there and news made EVERY protest out to be violent and destroying property and I just—
Sigh…Sorry guys. Sorry. I…Back to regularly scheduled comic.
How’s that boot taste?
Look, I don’t blame you a bit for not reading – it’s a long post – but of all the possible responses, that one really doesn’t make sense.
When Jocylene was telling Dorothy to put the sign down, that the protest leaders said there was no point in going ahead, did you yell, “How’s that boot taste, Jocylene?”
When Dorothy went back and grabbed that sign, was she planning on fighting for change by smacking the police with that sign? When you realized she was planning on getting arrested, did you yell at her, “How’s that boot taste?”
No because that’s fucking stupid.
We all know all cops are bastards. Just like all crocodiles eat people. If you want to affect real change in the world, you don’t shake and cry and go “But the crocodiles were supposed to PROTECT us,” you assume they’re going to be assholes and behave like crocs, and you make your strategy with that in mind.
And, I mean. Once again, these guys are protesting the fact that *the college* is *funding genocide.*. Why is it that someone like Asma or Leslie can just stand there holding a sign and stuff, and even *acknowledge* that there’s corruption here and acknowledge that the college and police are corrupt, but the second that they became even somewhat in danger here, THEN it was something that characters would just stare, haunted, into the middle distance? We can all agree, I hope, that literal genocide is markedly worse than rubber bullets and tear gas?
It’s a fucking contest you god damn weirdo.
*not
look i’ve felt all these things too but that doesn’t make them true. you are in fact suggesting that anyone interested in trying to confront their governments for their enthusiastic complicity in a genocide that will be remembered alongside the Holocaust, should so by helpfully placing themselves at the mercy of said governments. to state the obvious, (because i genuinely know from experience what it’s like to be naive enough to require this exact explanation) that is not a winning strategy, and telling people to submit themselves to the police does in fact have cop energy. the point of fighting is not actually to demonstrate moral superiority, the point of fighting is to win
Thing is. The crocodiles AREN’T supposed to protect us. They’re animals we have no control over.
The cops ARE supposed to serve us. They’re human beings that we pay for with our fucking taxes. It is REASONABLE to complain about the damage they do to other human beings.
Dismissive metaphors don’t really work when you put “animal doing what it naturally does” on one side and “heavily militarized former slave catchers brutally murdering and maiming people who are making use of their legal free speech to protest the actions of their country and the way their taxes are used.”
Also, saying outright that victims of police brutality at protests are “literally asking for” it is one of the shittiest takes in your whole shitty essay.
The crocodile analogy was a bad one. Cops are a rabid dog. They’re supposed to be there for you, but they’re not.
But if you kneel down and open your arms wide when one is rushing towards you, then you are an idiot.
If the brand-spanking-new policy says that you’re trespassing by occupying the grounds in this way.
And the college has contacted the police and requested that the protesters be cleared out.
And the police are armed with riot gear to make it happen.
And they’ve given you all an ultimatum and told you that if you don’t leave by a certain time, they will forcibly remove you.
And if they’ve already begun forcibly removing people from the grounds.
And if you, instead, burst back in there, grab a sign, buy a tent, and stand defiantly in their way, with literally nothing to block a rubber bullet other than your face,
And the other people tell you, what are you doing, the protest is over, the leaders said there was no sense in staying here, this is stupid, and you say, fuck you, you don’t know what I need –
– are you NOT literally asking them to do what they are literally telling you they will be doing?
And here’s where I come down. Look, if this was about stopping police brutality, like 2020 and BLM and getting them to be accountable for what they are doing, then I’m on board. One million percent.
But the dog was never the *point* of all of this. The point was a GENOCIDE. The point was to get people to understand that we are complicit in atrocities that happen to other people, not focus on the lesser (but still valid!) injusticies that happen to us.
So no. The dog’s here, and maybe he was *supposed* to be the guard dog, but he’s rabid and he’s not recognizing that I’m anything but a threat. Either way – cops are gonna cop; the question is, what are you going to do about it?
Let me pose it to you in a different way, and see if you can get my point.
The cops want you to resist. They want you to not obey their orders. Hell, they want you to throw a punch or kick. Sure, they’d never say it, but they’re all on edge expecting for it to happen, looking for it, and ready to respond back with overwhelming force to people who “resist.”
They showed up in full riot gear and “nonlethal” weaponry. They’ve got a freaking sniper. They’ve been getting themselves ready and worked up for any sort of resistance, and their goals are to establish dominance over that area and get people cleared out while not sustaining any injuries on their side.
No, *they are not there to protect you and keep you safe.* Come on. Cops aren’t these chaotic-good vigilantes who help the downtrodden; they’re lawful-neutral at best, and are only as good as the laws that they enforce – and sometimes, not even that good.
Cops are there to catch criminals. And the school made it so suddenly all those protesters are trespassing. Meaning the school painted a big target on them and said “Sic ’em.”
If you, when learning that the college had changed their policy, stayed because you expected them to be polite, calm, and rational, while they explain to you that you will need to leave, and then watch as everyone walks out in a single file line and waves bye, *you are foolish*.
If you feel that, if the protesters said “No, actually, we don’t feel like leaving, actually” the police would have just thrown up their hands and said, “Welp, they said no, we asked politely, I don’t know what I can do,” then *you are foolish*.
It’s like clearing your throat and saying to the charging grizzly, “Actually, please don’t eat me,” and being shocked and angry as you note that it’s got your leg in its jaw. It’s a bear. They do what bears do. If you think that bears do something different, you’ve clearly gotten your idea of what bears do from cartoons.
God you are insufferable.
Nope, I will not be reading all that. I don’t go to lectures by people who think victims of police brutality at protests are “literally asking for it”.
Hope you learn and grow!
Hope you do, too.
Me too! Growth and learning are core principles I live my life by. Thank you so much!
Trust me you are not missing anything worthwhile.
lmao yeah I didn’t think so.
look as someone who was going hard on this person earlier, what are you talking about. if someone makes the tactical decision to intentionally expose themselves to the violence of police, they are doing something incredibly brave. they’re not a victim, and it’s fucking insulting to call them that. now, i continue to have problems with Bork’s black-and-white framing of martyrdom (although either they seem to be moving towards a more balanced conception of “heroically facing risk”, or i’m just less grumpy today), but your black-and-white framing of victimhood is equally offensive.
If they’re going in there knowing the risks and exposing themselves as a tactical decision, they’re incredibly brave, and heroes, and deserve respect.
If they’re going in there seeing all the signs that the police WILL be violent and brutal and WILL be using riot gear and tear gas, have the opportunity to leave, have been told again and again to leave, yet stay not because of principles or a tactical decision, but from an angsty emotional outburst- then are SHOCKED that cops are copping, and need a superhero escort to get them out of the mess they made – they are not heroes, they are not standing up to violence; they are tourists who ignored every “No Swimming” and “No Tresspassing” and “Undertow present” sign, went down to the ocean to swim, and are shocked that they ignored all the signs and went swimming and They ARE a victim, but of their own stupidity.
And I will say stupidity. Dorothy went from “I’m going to stand here, get gassed and arrested,” to “What, they’re using tear gas and arresting people? Oh no – well thankfully we have a superhero to get us out of this!”
yeah i agree with this 100%, my problem is that i don’t think these categories exist so distinctly in real life, where people have imperfect situational awareness, random unpredictable developments, getting-it-but-not-totally-getting-it about police, or just, lacking the resources to adequately prepare but compelled by their conscience to show up anyways. i think in reality there’s a gradient, where a lot of people are both being very brave, but also not fully choosing the risks they end up facing, and as a result neither the martyr or the victim fully represents them.
that being said, this comic did in fact set it up to be as black and white as you describe, Dorothy and Joyce really were not anywhere on this gradient, so maybe i’m mistaken in presuming this reasoning is meant to apply directly to real life
make up your mind. are cops “supposed to serve us”, or are they “heavily militarized former slave catchers”. do you actually have a coherent reason to find “comparing cops to crocodiles” offensive or did you fall for the classic blunder of the original take being so bad it blew out your sensor?
Cops were originally conceived, in London, as servants of the people and protectors of the law. In the US, the concept was applied to groups that were originally organized as slave-catchers. Our police have been kinda DID, ethically speaking, since their inception.
No, I read it. You didn’t lick the boot you deep throated it.
Martyrdom helps nobody, actually. Getting killed by a cop without resistance is just suicidally stupid.
Also—can’t remember the last time someone sitting on the fence of protest looked at a bunch of kids protesting and thought, ‘those poor kids’. Usually it’s a shitty variation of, ‘these colleges are brainwashing kids’.
Or they puke out that “play stupid games win stupid prizes” tripe, like they didn’t just watch someone get their brain splattered across the nearest wall for literally no reason.
God I long for the days when that phrase was reserved for, say, frat bros peeing on an electric fence, or mooning a bull in its pen.
Or the morons who jump into a tiger pen at the zoo and have their flabbers absolutely gasted that an apex predator attacked and tried to eat them.
I won’t get into much, but I will add something that was clear as day.
Amazi-Girl literally saved Joyce in front of us.
Joyce who was outside of the fence, who was leaving, who was obeying.
F the pigs!
A point completely forgotten in this entire discussion.
Begging you to read literally anything on MLK because though conservative and conservative-leaning white people love to reduce him to a guy who just talked about his dreams and advocated for equality and was extremely noncontroversial, the actual man would rightfully resent being used as a cudgel against all agitators for civil rights.
Oh and also the CIA murdered him because he was considered extremely dangerous and radical.
NO BUT SERIOUSLY IT IS ACTUALLY INSANE THE DEEPER YOU DIVE TO REALIZE HOW FURIOUSLY THEY SANITIZED HIM. Like a full court press on everything he was and stood for.
… are you assuming I’ve only heard of Dr. King in the past five or ten years or so ago, from conservative pundits on social media?
How sad that modern conservative idiots trying to sanitize his legacy, prompts modern liberals to further tear down his legacy and accomplishments.
Also, I’m aware of the conspiracy theory you’re mentioning. I feel like people who believe that, *really* don’t get the situation. He was a black man living in Georgia in the 60s. You did not need an airtight conspiracy that held solid sixty years later to arrange to kill him. That’s why what he was doing was so amazing. If someone wanted anonymity they’d wear a freaking hood. So many other civil rights leaders were killed in the same time.
Uh.
They’ve admitted they killed him. It’s not a conspiracy theory.
Source? I know that there were documents that were released a few weeks ago, but I didn’t hear anything like that.
No major news outlets are covering it. NPR isn’t. The government’s websites claim that no governmental force federally, statewide, or locally had anything to do with it. The first several pages of Google searches for “Did the CIA kill MLK” all either acknowledge that it’s a conspiracy theory, or are stating strongly that there is no substantial evidence.
Could you share what you have? I’d be very interested to see it, because as it stands, if the CIA did release a statement saying that they were responsible, then they’ve gone and covered it up again, making it again a second conspiracy.
I generally agree with up until what you say the protests are for- it’s not for martyrdom (otherwise the organisers of this protest would not have been asking people to leave) but for visibility, to disrupt the norm and to force an acknowledgement of the issue. A successful example is my country’s recent ‘rainy Sunday’ march for humanity. There has been almost no media coverage of the genocide in Palestine but they HAD to acknowledge 100,000 (or as much as 300,000) people marching over the Sydney Harbour bridge. The uni sit ins are usually targetting the uni itself by disrupting the day to day and forcing them to recognise that we want them to stop contributing to genocide.
Violence may be anticipated, and groups like XR will train people engaging in direct action in how to /reduce/ risk while knowing the risk. The police violence isn’t the point of the protest- it’s a strategy of the police, not the protesters.
You are correct that violence like AG’s vigilantism is likely to lead to greater harm, but that is the point of the police violence. To make protesters out to be violent and sway public opinion and to keep others from joining. Thats not on AG, Dorothy or the protesters. That’s on the cops and the state that claim a monopoly on violence.
Tldr: the police can and will use AG to legitimise their own violence in the eyes of the public, but that does not make it valid or true.
An analogy might be if one state spent 70 years using its military power to take over a second state, displacing it’s people and occupying it’s land. If a militant minority from the second state then retaliated with an equally abhorrent, if smaller scale, act of violence, that does not validate the first state’s ongoing war crimes and attempted genocide regardless of how international media covers it.
But that’s just an analogy (that got out of hand sorry, I got excited)
If AG hadn’t been there they would make something up. Back during the BLM protests they were constantly posting disseperate bits of litter and claiming they were bombs and shit.
Why are you talking about “If Amazi-Girl hadn’t been there”?
There is a real-life version of the Dunn Meadow protest, that this is (very loosely) based upon, where the police are exactly as hostile as they appear here, there is no Amazi-Girl who viciously attacks the police so they can escape, because the protesters aren’t trying to escape. They dug in and stayed protesting for over three months, despite over fifty arrests.
I have some slight annoyances at how, in the DoA version, the protesters are instead 100% compliant and leaving, the police are brutal anyways, and they need a literal superhero to get them all to safety.
… but probably not as much annoyance there, as the annoyance I feel for all the commenters loudly arguing that the fictional cartoon version is reality, that things would have been far worse if the superhero wasn’t there to stop them, and that the peaceful resistance which actually happened IRL which shocked and outraged people across the nation, was “ineffective.”
A little more complicated from when I looked into this at the start. There was an initial protest encampment that was broken up quickly when the rules were changed on the fly, like just happened here. I think, though it wasn’t clear, the protesters weren’t really prepared and did disperse quickly, though there was tear gas and arrests and some violence.
Then there was some legal maneuvering and probably better preparation for a confrontation and they came back and set up another encampment that lasted for over three months, as you said.
I don’t believe they ever broke it up. They made 55 arrests over three days, kept coming back and using similar tactics to arrest more people, but the protest wasn’t budging.
What I should have said, is that this was the reason for *nonviolence* in the protests. So that any action taken against you IS seen as overblown, instread of (to some minds) justified.
Consider a sit-in protest. These protests are done knowing that there are two ways that they end: either with their demands being met, or by being arrested for trespassing. You don’t go to a sit-in and be *shocked* that the police plan to arrest you; that was always on the table. Putting the police in that situation is literally part of the strategy.
I do think people should be allowed the opportunity to defend themselves and others during a protest. I get that nonviolence in a protest is important, it is, but at this point, all the cameras need to do is point to one bad actor and the news will paint everybody with that same paintbrush. And frankly, I don’t blame the bad actor. Because what’s considered a ‘bad actor’ changes based on what the other side needs.
When people peacefully took a knee during sports events, people complained. When protests escalated as people were ignored, those same complainers said “well I would support it if they just did it nonviolently”, when they demonstrate that isn’t the case. I’ve heard these arguments with my very own ears, in person, off the internet. Once upon a time I’d say “you need to be nonviolent, always”, but at this rate… I’m tired. And for some people, it will NEVER be peaceful enough, quiet enough, convenient enough. It will ALWAYS be wrong for some reason.
Nonviolence here is a tactic, not a moral principle. There’s a time for street fighting and black bloc tactics, but there’s a time for peaceful protest, even in the face of police violence.
And that’s largely a matter of organization. Of not letting even individuals who are sympathetic to your cause derail the event, much less provocateurs or people just there to break shit. The people organizing the protest didn’t count on Amazi-Girl. They didn’t want the fight. Not this time around.
I understand that, I just think if someone does wind up defending themselves or others, they shouldn’t be blamed when the system that allows the police to brutalize its own citizens is the real problem.
I guess it depends on what you mean by blamed? Yeah, the cops (and the authorities behind them) are the real problem, but if protestors show up to fight and defend others who don’t want their “help”, there’s some blame to go around.
Did you forget that the cops started threatening forceful retaliation for “unlawful assembly” before any reasonable sign that the protest was intended to be, let alone about to become, non-peaceful, meaning that it was definitionally not unlawful assembly (6/3/25)? Did you forget that Amazi-Girl didn’t get involved until Joyce was unlawfully restrained by an armed officer despite clearly being outside of the protest area and stating she was evacuating (6/15/25)? Did you forget that by the time Amazi-Girl did anything beyond stop said unlawful arrest, the police were actively utilizing tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protestors who did nothing wrong besides be too slow to comply with an unlawful threat of charges that should not apply (6/15/25)? Did you forget that the entire point of Amazi-Girl’s actions was to save people who had committed no crime from police brutality, because standing up to the abuse of power is the right thing to do, even if the way in which she did so was comparatively inadvisable by praxis? Did you forget that we’re talking about a teenager here, who’s likely and understandably more concerned with whether she can do something right now to stop people getting hurt than with the long term optics of her being there? Or were you just too busy being up your own ass to notice the taste of boot in your mouth from blaming a kid doing her best to help in the one way she knows how, instead of the police who were wrongly enacting the violence in the first place that she acted to prevent?
No, I didn’t.
But I also didn’t forget that this entire plotline was based off of a real world event, which made national news for how grossly violent and overblown the police response was, and how crooked the university was for drastically changing their policy.
I also didn’t forget that IRL, they didn’t need rescuing because they had no intention to leave, and stayed for over a hundred days, with no injuries; and the pro-Palestinian protests became louder and more widespread because of that injustice.
I also didn’t forget that the law doesn’t reward or give protections for vigilantism, that sometimes the right thing to do is also the stupid thing to do. That trying to stop violence with more violence is as effective as fighting fire with fire.
In an alternate universe – this one – there’s a version of this protest that *wasn’t* broken up, that practiced peaceful resistance, and that could not be controlled or shouted down by either the university or the police. That version that others read about, or saw a news article about, and got angry about, and formed MORE resistance – for which this comic storyline is just one of many outcomes for what those people did.
So don’t tell me that doing what the IRL Dunn Meadow protesters did was cowardly or wrong, and what they REALLY should have done was attack the police. Because that would have done shit for the Gaza protest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06G801FBNRM
Wow, you really didn’t read our comment very closely. In what universe did we suggest that not attacking the police was “cowardly”, much less “wrong”? Because it sure as fuck wasn’t this one.
Amazi-Girl saw her friend getting her face smashed into the dirt for doing nothing wrong, saw that she was able to save her, and acted. Was that a smart decision? Fuck no! On that much, we agree. But given we’re talking about a super-powered teenager who was just as much trying to protect the people right in front of her as hoping she’d get killed in the process, I’m inclined to suggest that maybe this was just an impulsive but understandable decision, and not some deeply rotten failure of praxis.
Furthermore, the police do not need an excuse to twist the narrative. Violence or no violence at this protest, they could (and in real life, often do) just as easily outright make shit up to spin the situation to whatever suits them best. The truth may eventually come out, but by the point that reaches anyone with the authority to punish them, the vast majority of people will have moved on and forgotten there was ever an issue in the first place. They get off with a slap on the wrist, a quota fulfilled, and a boss up the chain happy that their investors aren’t getting busted for human rights violations.
I’ll say it again: a teenager made a snap decision to save her friend from blatant police brutality. That is what we’re talking about here. We can wax poetic all you like about the long-term implications of that choice, but the bottom line is that she stopped an injustice, period, even if greater injustice ends up coming from it down the line. If you were in that exact same situation – 19ish, stressed, depressed, kinda hoping just a little that you can give the cops an excuse to shoot you, and watching someone you know personally get wrongfully detained right in front of you, with ample ability to intervene and stop that from happening – can you honestly say you’re certain that you wouldn’t have done the same? Because I seriously doubt most people could.
I am honestly, 100% sure that if my friend and I had left the protest and were literally at the fence – as is apparent from July 9th – and then go BACK IN, when police have said they will arrest anyone who doesn’t evacuate-
(and yes, we can see that Joyce went back in- there’s no longer the line of casually strolling protesters walking to the gate, she says “I’m evacuating,” not “have evacuated,” and also the fact that she needs Amazi-Girl’s help to get *out*, not *in*)
– I can say with 100% confidence that if an officer gave them a command to get down, and instead of complying they argue, my response would not be to high-jump kick the officer in the head.
I don’t think I’m wild in that. There are, statistically, very few protests that end in flying Mortal Kombat-esque face kicks. Probably because there are more than one or two cops assigned to these thinfshtt
Maybe that makes me a bad friend, I dunno. Probably I’d be recording it. Probably, most people would be. How else are you going to protect your friend when it’s their word against yours? In this moment, they need *that* help more than Kung Fu.
But if I, say, was drunk and ran back to the protest, and my buddy Craig roundhouse kicks several cops in the face so that I don’t get arrested (classic Craig!) when the police fight Craig, I do *not* go, “But they’re supposed to protect me, and Craig was just defending me! How could those police have hurt Craig?!
It is clearly visible in the July 9th strip that while Joyce did reach back inside the fence briefly while attempting to stop Dorothy from initially running away, she was fully and clearly outside the fence by the time the police intervened in the next strip. There is nothing to suggest she was within the protest area, nor moving towards it; she was simply looking in the direction of the gate from outside it, and was forcefully detained without warning.
Regardless, you clearly did not understand the point being made in this strip. The point is not “how could they have hurt Amazi-Girl, she was only attacking them to defend us”, that would be stupid. The point is that the police should not have been using violence in the first place. Dorothy is coming to the realization that the police are not, in fact, there to protect civilians, as they typically attempt to portray. If the police had not used force – which I think we can at least agree was immoral, even if it were lawful – there would have been no reason for Amazi-Girl to intervene. But because the police were using force to disperse innocent civilians, to protect the interests of a corporation complicit in genocide, someone who was trying (even if misguidedly) to do the right thing got hurt.
Again: Dorothy is not saying the police shouldn’t have fought back when they were attacked. She’s realizing that if the police were actually there to protect people, like they say they are and ideally should be, then there would never have been a reason to attack them in the first place.
MLK was playing “good cop, bad cop” with Malcolm X. “You negotiate with me, the presentable one, or the other guy’s totally deranged fanatics just might accidentally start shooting. Boy, I hope they never do. Don’t we all?”
This, in and of itself, is a pretty reductive take compared to the reality of what was happening with the various protest movements during the Civil Rights era.
Yeah, definitely on board with this. Mixing superhero action into protests is as much of a problem for me as mixing the romance arc into the protest.
We get to see even within the strip itself, Jocelyne saying the organizers ordered the evacuation. We saw in a bonus strip Asma telling AG not to escalate. We know from the real event this was based on that the sniper didn’t shoot anyone and as far as I can tell there were no serious injuries: people got roughed up and arrested, which is bad enough, don’t get me wrong. But it’s what the protestors expected and signed up for.
AG not only almost certainly changed the coverage of the situation from a focus on the genocide and on police violence and the campus changing the rules to “campus superhero attacks police”, but she also risked escalating the violence even further. You’ve got someone successfully fighting with police, who they can’t take down, that’s definitely justification for lethal force. It’s really only for story reasons that no one tried to shoot her – potentially hitting others in the chaos.
And to undermine my own argument a bit: Once the police violence and the breaking up of the protest happens, the narrative already inevitably shifts from the genocide to the police brutality and the right to protest.
We see that even in the discussions here: “dissolve the carceral state” doesn’t actually have anything to do with helping stop the Bulmerian genocide. The tactic was already successful.
That’s a difference from the Civil Rights protests, where peaceful black protestors being beaten directly ties to the black civil rights they were fighting for.
> two braindead freshman that were right next to the entrance and decided, hey, we’re so in love with each other that we’re going to run in there and GOAD the police to force us down.
So first of all, Joyce was OUTSIDE the fence, doing nothing besides looking on worriedly, when a cop in full riot gear shoved her to the ground. Before Amazi-Girl showed up.
Actually, no.
She’s standing at the fence gate, looking back in in the previous panel. There are protesters calmly walking out in that strip.
Next strip, there’s no gate, no fence, no quietly leaving protesters. When Amazi-Girl helps, she doesn’t then try to find a way *into* the meadow, but *out* of it. And when Joyce is attacked, she says “I’m evacuating,” not “I’ve already evacuated!”
Joyce went back in. It just wasn’t shown, because that’s not necessary to know in this narrative.
Needing pretext or excuses is frankly something we’re so far past at this point that its silly. During the BLM protests we had media and government describing lawless cities in literal flames when what was actually going on was a few blocks having basically a pretty chill block party.
There is no way the cops would actually say “Yeah, while we were about to beat up this cute blonde white girl who was outside the fence, this other short cute white girl in a super hero outfit came outta nowhere and, unarmed, took down a cop and tied him up”. Even to their most messed up supporters that would AT BEST just make them look incredibly incompetent. They’re going to be claiming they were attacked by dozens of angry, huge, black guys with bricks and pronoun buttons. And at that amount of lying, the fact that someone actually did stand up to them really doesn’t matter. They’d be saying it anyway.
Dorothy just became a civil rights lawyer.
I think she’d be a good one.
YEP. I am excited to see how she and Raidah end up interacting if they end up in the same circles.
That would be a hilarious payoff if Raidah’s smackdown on Dorothy as president helped lead to Dorothy becoming a defense lawyer thorn-in-the-side to Raidah the prosecution lawyer for the rest of their careers.
Subtle color change of righteous anger in that last panel.
I hope Amber and AG will be alright considering everything.
I think Dorothy should design her own costume, take fighting lessons from Amber, bulk up a bit, and join her crime fighting.
Oh, Dotty was already on gym. It’s a start!
Someone got a renewed interest in becoming president ?
No but thanks you for asking i just not ready for the responsibility.
It can be hard to face your limits
Or maybe becoming an activist…
Get’ em President Dorothy
The hidden, actual story of Dumbing of Age: The origin of the “villain” Dorothy.
😛
Everyone says “Go president Dorothy!”, nobody was expecting, “Stop right there Tyrant Dotty!”
Is this finally her heel turn?
It’s funny because you’re responding to someone who put villain in quotes and probably doesn’t literally mean villain, but I know you do literally mean villain.
“I need you to go to law school, and graduate as soon as humanly possible.”
“Historians point to the campus protest of 20xx as the moment when Senator Keener-Brown was radicalized.”
Must be a hell of sleep to Amber: A barely stitched wound, the tiredness of all fight against cops, and trying to sleep with phones on, what makes the sleeping almost impossible.
Determination – ACTIVATED
Just exactly how long did you say your buffer is?
A year.
Currently about 3 months?
Which suggests some major revisions, since it was about 9 months when this was written and more than a year a few months back.
Willis keeps working. There’s anxiety if the buffer becomes less than a year.
Sure, but the buffer dropped drastically recently. A month or so back it was well into 2026, now it’s just to Nov 2025.
Hopefully this is the Return of President Doris. She’s way more interesting when she’s taking on the world rather than just being the mum friend
I think Dorothy will transfer to Yale after all. Because she’s found a cause that is more important than her (relatively) short term happiness. I’m calling it. And it will complicate the drama between her and Joyce despite and because of the multiple incoming breakups.
This would.be an amazing plot twist!!
I’m looking forward to it.
Dorothy is not going to get written out of the comic. That’s what going to Yale would mean, and that’s why she was never going to go to Yale.
It’s certainly not going to happen mid-semester. She might decide she’s going to try to get in again. She might even get accepted. And we’ll see her heading off in the epilogue as the comic wraps up.
“Qualified immunity” and “Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales” (2005) have made it clear: cops aren’t required to protect people. Their job isn’t to ‘protect and serve’ but, rather, to ‘protect capital and property and enforce order and serve the ruling class’. Dorothy, what are you going to do about that?
Never heard of “Castle Rock v. Gonzales,” so I looked it up and… what in the actual fuck? Are you fucking kidding me?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzales
Much like many other Supreme Court rulings, this one takes what should be a reasonable concept on its face (“Public servants can’t guarantee they’re going to be able to respond to every single request…”) and instead of making a SANE ruling (maybe something like “… and therefore, if they are accused of malfeasance-by-ignoring-a-report, that should be evaluated on their workload and triage process…”) they made a totally bonkers one (“…and therefore, you can’t ever sue them for not showing up, cause they don’t have to neener neener.”)
And of course Scalia was part of this decision. Dude made an entire career out of setting awful precedents.
Yyyyyup. Police can pick and choose which people to protect, which restraining orders to enforce, etc. 🙁
Man, wish I could just pick and choose what parts of my job I didn’t feel like doing.
Second that hovertext.
Dorothy has too many projects already. She needs to spend some time working out her control issues before she takes on any additions.
Dismantling the corrupt police system in the US is just the side quest that Dorothy needed to distract her from talking to Walky!
ACAB indeed
Dorothy sword les(bi)an ACAB arc, finally !
I cannot overstate how “on board” with this concept. Let’s GOOOOOO!!!
* on board I am with this concept
I mean, you did warn us you couldn’t state it
I got a genuine chuckle out of that. Well played.
Well, that right there’s a master class in visual storytelling.
Hg
hell yeah hovertext!
why do I hear boss music?
she is deeply mauved by the turn of events
I feel like it’s generous to call this a triumphant awakening moment when less than 24 hours ago, Dorothy ran into a quickly escalating protest with the intention of self-sabotage. I could see her doing any number of things from this point forward and they could be good or bad.
I fear talking to her therapist about her real issues will not soon be one of them.
“I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled her with a terrible resolve.”
Dont look now but the sky is also blue
Hey, be glad she came to the conclusion at all. I’ve got a relative who still sees cops as blameless superheroes. Even when confronted with the obvious abuses, she either gives me the old “bad apples/not all cops,” and that’s if she believes me at all. Other times I get a “well I don’t know about that” which is the faux-polite Midwest way of calling you either gullible or an outright liar, or she tells me to “stop with the conspiracy theories.”
Her definition of conspiracy being “anything that suggests the status quo isn’t benevolent.”
She’s a fictional character she will be ok if I don’t give her headpats for not having basic political revelations until they affect her directly
That’s not a red panel, but it is a red-tinted panel, for what that’s worth.
It seems perhaps Dorothy is beginning to develop a less childlike concept of what she wants to be when she grows up.
As ever when the topic of discussion is politics, I am reminded that the collective politics of this comment section are pretty dogwater
I mean it’s a given, but like
all I care about right now is
DINA’S PLUSH FORM IS OUT NOW AND SHE’S SO BEAUTIFUL!!!
🥺🥹😭❤️🦕
screw everything else, i
im so overwhelmingly happy… T^T <3
*plays Starlight Festival Theme from Super Mario Galaxy on hacked muzak*
Is that wee, or water that canines have been boiled in, or hotdog water? I am so unschooled in USA passions, and unexpected water preferences…
It just means “really bad” that’s all. Kind of like how “hogwash” means “total bullshit”.
Most American sayings that involve water are negative in connotation. “This is dogwater” when something sucks, “we’re in hot water” when were in trouble or danger, “sleeping with the fishes” when you’re killed and your body is disposed of in water, “up shit creek without a paddle” when you’re in a bad situation that doesn’t stop keep happening and you don’t have many tools to deal with it, “reaching my/their/its/the boiling point” when something has escalated in a troublesome fashion, “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” when someone is clearly putting you in a bad situation and trying to deflect attention off of them, and so on.
I have never noticed this pattern before and I’m not sure how to process it.
Americans would literally rather incarcerate each other than drink some goddamn water.
I’m pretty sure most of the commenters are from the US, and unfortunately most people in this country are exposed to a lot of propaganda that tries to make them fear and hate any political views that are even remotely anti-capitalist. So yeah, whenever a strip touches on political topics we get some interesting takes in the comments.
I mean even the erstwhile anticapitalists are unwilling to abandon their propagandized preconceptions of certain theorists and leaders lol. It’s a grim scene, man
Amazi-Girl sidekick origin story????? Love an all-lady superhero team
My opinion is ACAB because the system is designed by an oppressive legislature that has been racist and corrupt since its conception. However, people don’t seem to have the same attitude to the fact at least (at least) half of the politicians are directly creating laws designed to oppress.
Yup, we’re living in the I.C.E. age
Okay, that was brilliant. I mean, I’m sobbing while I laugh (I think a lot of us are, lately), but credit where credit is due.
Friends of mine say “I.C.E. Age” and “I.C.E.stapo” are their top favorite terms.
There’s the Dorothy we know. She just needed a proper jump start to get that passionate political fires regoing
Epic the Musical style danger theme begins.
Soyjak Dorothy: She was protecting us from from people who should be protecting us. And they did this to her.
Chad Dina: Yes.
Flawless. Got a big old belly laugh out of that one. Thanks for sharing.
A suggested reading list for Dorothy
Marx (still good for analysis)
Battle Cry Of Freedom – James McPherson
Autobiography of Malcolm X
James Baldwin
WEB Dubois
Studs Terkel (Division Street or Race)
Second Sex – de Beauvoir
A Vindication of the rights of Women
The Female Eunuch – Germaine Greer
Thought that just occurred to me on this comic, and I’m gonna put it out in the world because if it happens, I don’t want to be coming in after the fact with “I knew it!” without some receipts.
I think Dotty’s gonna take up the AG mantle.
Oh? That’s an interesting theory. She’s not on the same athletic level as AG(fair, AG is ridiculous) but if I recall she is reasonably fit so it’s not too unreasonable. Plus she is smart and could probably leverage that.
And in her mentally lost and aimless guilt ridden state, it may even seem like a reasonable choice.