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to be fair not all lessons need to be pleasant. by diving into the darkest parts of humanity you can learn things you cant if you only stay where you feel most comfortable.
i did that when nobody tried to touch the darkness because others forced it on me. I remember my classmates kept asking if they were on my kill list which i never had because they thought i was the most likely to pull a columbine.
When I was in high school, some guys would say if anyone was gonna shoot up the school, it would be me. Cause I was quiet and didn’t care about talking about people. They asked me the same thing, if they were on my kill list. I turned it into a joke and said oh absolutely, you’re near the top. It was doubly satisfying because I thought it was hilarious and they stopped talking to me.
Same. I got sent to five different school counselors who told me to deal with the bullying by ignoring them and they’d leave me alone, then turned the focus to checking to see how homicidal I seemed to be. On the bright side, the bullying stopped entirely once I bought a black trenchcoat.
“five different school counselors who told me to deal with the bullying by ignoring them and they’d leave me alone,”
I hate that particular lie so much. Why don’t they ever give good advice for dealing with bullies? Or just “Sorry that’s happening, I have no idea how to stop it”? instead of feel-good lies that don’t work?
I’d have settled for “sorry you’re being bullied, kid. That’s some bullshit”.
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” is crap, though. It only works with some bullies, and only if they never get a reaction from you. Once they have, they’ll keep at it no matter how long you ignore them
If anything, my experiences being bullied growing up only seemed to indicate that they took being ignored as a challenge to see how far they could keep pushing before I’d snap and lash out.
I also had the bad luck of having other kids start a rumor that I had a “kill list”. I was hauled out of class and had the cops search my locker and all my things, then was interrogated for hours by the school counselor. Even though I kept repeating that this was just my bullies’ latest way of bullying me, nobody would listen.
I didn’t have a “kill list.”
I did (do) have an asshole brain that likes to torment me with shit I don’t actually want to do but can’t stop thinking about. So guess what it latched onto after that for the next three years?
When they told me “They’re just trying to get a reaction out of you” I saw the most efficient way to get a reprieve as breaking down in tears pretty much immediately. They got their reaction, they spent less time harassing me.
I’m not saying this was actually a good idea but since I wasn’t dead inside it was hard to go with not actually reacting.
Well, glad to know I’m not the only one who got shoved into a damned mental asylum for several days because of the testimony of shitweasels that managed to get away with completely grinding down my patience to the point where I did actually retaliate and threaten them, all because they were “easier to trust” than someone who spent most of his time away from most everyone else.
No? Just me?
But yeah, they eventually came to the realization that I was a perfectly rational human being.
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” is the lie adults tell so they can avoid accepting that THEY are failing to protect children. So is “He’s only hitting you/pulling your hair/insulting you because he likes you.” Impotent adults victim blaming to hide their guilt.
Oh yeah, I got the “boys just do that to girls they like”. In junior high. In response to me telling the teacher the guy had threatened to kill my cat.
The sad part for Leslie is, she’s not supporting Robin for political reasons like Trump vs Hillary or Democrat vs Republican etc. She’s doing it because she thinks Robin is hot. … which, ultimately means, however shallow and pandering Robin is being portrayed here, Leslie is even MORE shallow and pandering, willing to completely give up her own principles in order to win brownie points with her target audience… :O
I fail to see how being attracted to someone horrible could make her worse than the horrible person.
Even if Leslie weren’t – right here, in today’s strip – changing her mind about dating Robin, it’s not like it would help Robin pass more discriminatory laws. Robin would still be the one doing that, like she was already.
Porsche is a German company that was part of the Third Reich’s military industry complex. So anyone who owns a Porsche can be connected to the Nazis with…one degree of separation.
The Volkswagen was commissioned by Hitler and Ferry Porsche had the first production car delivered to him. Anyone who owns a Beetle is one degree of separation, any other models are 2 degrees.
That’s a good question.
Since it’s just the likeness of a beetle, it’s probably two degrees, but Japan was one of the three Axis powers, so that might knock it back down to one degree.
Depends on if the toy market was somehow tied to the war effort or not.
Your robot toys are actually spies for the Japanese government that is why furbies turn on all the time without you touching them, or why your robot listlessly walks across the floor without you doing a damn thing. Or that DAMN monkey with the symbols clashing them together and staring at you with his huge grin saying, “Imma gonna eat you, YES I AM!”
In the grand scheme of things, though, “the villain’s tailor” is a position of at best minimal culpability, unless the clothes have, I don’t know, combat capabilities of their own.
In the grand scheme of things, everyone and everyone shrinks to insignificance. Seriously. The Nazis were SO deeply into symbolism and appearances that Boss SS uniforms definitely contributed to their sense of self and efficacy and so contributed to what they did. Bottom line: I don’t see why Boss should get a pass because all he did was outfit the guys who did the crimes.
The Altright *love* the tailoring, and fogel is right. I can’t remember who called the nazis “hippies with helmets” but they were right, idiotic symbols and rituals were all part of the Nazi thing. Symbolism and mysticism were all the Nazis had going for them, they were shit at organizing which is why they lost.
The “cool” uniforms back-fired on the SS and Wehrmacht. Those uniforms were rubbish in cold weather.
The Soviets may have looked like a bunch of scruff-bags, but they were warm scruff-bags who survived.
Honestly, I can’t decide if the parallels between Trump and Hitler are scarier than they are freakishly uncanny anymore, and that’s saying a lot because they’re absolutely terrifying.
To be fair, Hitler had the full support of his party and the populace that put him in power legitimately thought he had some viable ideas on how to fix the problems of the day. Trump meanwhile was largely elected by people who have no trust in him but still had less in his opponent and is now the leader of a party that supports him only a bit more than they would have supported his opponent. There is further the fact that the amount of power centralized in the Chancellorship of Germany then was significantly greater than what has ever been available to the PotUS.
I’m not sure about your distinction. The fact no history book on the third reich explained was how suddenly there were so many people following him when before, German society was at its most open. Right now I feel like I’m watching something like that happening again. You start with electing someone to make you great again and then people around you start acting like assholes, and the more people are acting that way the more likely it is that others fall in line.
And btw, there were people in his party who were against him. He killed some of them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
Sorry for my english which is particulary hectic when I speak about germany (as I think it in german first, then translate it to french then english)
There are many, with different explanations. For example antisemitism was already largely uses by political parties at the time. Winckler explains the fall of Weimar by the failure of socio-democrats (MSPD and USPD) to unite with the right and that they were too much influenced by the former spartakists – he very much tells that the radicality of the then-passed laws upseted the military chefs and that rather tot try to control their left they should have allied. That’s a bit too much excusing Noske massakers for me. Of course, the authoritarian communist theory is that the country wasn’t ready as cities as Berlin were nowhere as much an industrial city as a military-driven and kaiser-true administrative city, or as Bavaria was entirely too much rural (so Fröhlich). Libertarian communists explain it by the fall of the left and of organization, and the massive Freikörper use. For whoever is interested in it but doesn’t want to read history books I advice reading the literature of the time (Mann – the young one Döblin, Fallada, Zweig, Tucholski…). I too advice to read upon Austria history, were another fascist regime, somehow opposed to hitler, was at work whereas a great workers movement could have resisted (and some but not as many as could have been tried and died).
Hitler’s story starts with the coup in Munic in 1923, when he allied with other ultra-conservative forces against the Stresemann chancellorship during the hyper-inflation and the French occupation of the Rhineland and Ruhr area, then acceptance of the conditions imposed by Versailles. While that putsch failed, Hitler spent only a nine months in prison, where he wrote “Mein Kampf”.
Basically, he was a militia leader who had marched against the state military, spent some time in prison where he wrote his pamphlet, then returned to work the political scene for the next eight years before winning the election through a coalition of conservative but not Nazi parties, like e.g. DNVP, the party of the Junker landholders of northeastern Germany.
The multi-party situation of te Weimar Republic is quite different from anything happening in the US. But, when Hitler became chancellor, he had less than one third of the German voters behind the NSDAP. The German equivalent of Murdoch and the Koch Brothers then thought they could ride the tiger, and proved that they couldn’t.
So: Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the history that that Austrian Charly Chaplin imitator had when he won his election So far that comparison is way over the top. (Let’s hope that remains to be true…)
A lot of things are cultural and unwritten – those will go by the board.
Your institutions will be stress-tested. In the UK, there will be a march against the UK Supreme Court led by Farage, who seems to be fulfilling the role of some sort of ex officio minister, and some right wing groups.
“Trump has said he wants to keep holding rallies.”
This is because he enjoys hearing people scream his name far, far more than he cares about the job of actually being President, which is why his staffers (reportedly) offered “total control of domestic and foreign policy” to their prospective VP nominees, specifically Kasich, who turned it down (one of his people was supposedly the person who leaked the exchange), and Pence, who accepted.
When a skeptical staffer asked what Trump would be in charge of if not either foreign or domestic policy, the response was (predctably) “making America great again.”
I mean, yes. But then, that’s one reason I voted for him. He’s still the only primary opponent who never endorsed the now-(regrettably)-President-elect.
On a more meta level, if Kasich *wasn’t* such a principled guy as to reject the offer, wouldn’t that prove that he wouldn’t have been a good enough VP in the first place? I mean, probably still better than Pence, but that’s a pretty low bar.
The Nazis got into power with something like 33% of the vote. But in Germany’s multi-party system with the Nazis having 33% and the Communists having 17%, it was impossible to form a stable government coalition without one or the other, and Hindeburg decided the Nazis were the lesser evil.
Not a whole lot of choice there when the Entente had all but disbanded the German army, Poles were deciding they didn’t care for the border set at the table and making a grab for Upper Silesia, and Communists were trying to set up Soviets in Bavaria, turning to the Freikorps seemed like the least bad of a nasty set of options. And if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression and the inability of the centrist parties to form a stable coalition with either the non-Communist left or the non-Nazi right, it would have paid off. The Nazi putsch in Munich in the 20s was a fiasco, after all.
Yeah, I’m way more scared of Pence than I am of Trump, for one thing, the republicans actually love Pence;And Pence is the one who likes the idea of conversion therapy.
Trump might talk about his ‘wall’, but Pence is the one I could see going through with mass deportation.
Actually, Benito Mussolini also died in ’45, and apparently proclaimed that he would be reincarnated to take over another, greater nation. I don’t know if that was real or just an internet-urban-legend started when someone noticed that Trump was born in ’46, though.
America has had countless prejudice-spouting demagogues who have run on campaigns of fear. Reagan, Dubya, Nixon, and plenty of others have served in office. Damage will happen but it’s not the end of the world. It’s a shitty 4-8 years.
Note that in the list of poor Presidents I’ve just listed, friends of mine, my brothers, and my father’s all died. Also, it’s possible my own family may be made destitute depending on medical emergency. FUN FUN. I just am able to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
I, like you, wish his presidency the dullest of times. I’m just not as sure as you that’s going to happen.
He’s sort of reneging on his plans to gut Obamacare, so we’ll see.
The deportation of 2million “illegals” still seems to be on his wish-list.
He’s reneged on gutting Obamacare.
Unless something else happens, we know that environment policy *will* get fucked over – the civilisation-ending disaster is coming and he’ll make it come faster with his appointment of the Climate Change denier to the EPA.
The problem with Trump is that his dampening effects won’t just be in the US. He will effectively stifle the international cooperation that is needed to combat global warming.
Then there’s the creationist in charge of education. The “gay is a lifestyle choice” in charge of social policy.
Newt Gingrich at the State Department, who will almost certainly oversee genocide in Syria.
That was my first thought, there’s actually an entire generation of trans women and gay men who are lost because of the absolute gutting that was the AIDS crisis during Reagan’s population and that was just a passive attempt at genocide of the “let’s all sit back and watch this” variety.
We’re gonna lose a lot of folks. Through hate crimes, through loss of life support and healthcare, through top-level elimination campaigns, through suicide. We’re already losing lots of folks.
Some of us will survive. The trick is keeping that number as high as we can make it, even if it’s just out of spite against the fuckers trying to gut us like fish.
Well. Depending on whether we get things like, for example, a climate change denier as the head of the EPA … it might be the end of the world. Sooner, at any rate, since it was always going to end sometime.
One important point. He has the Senate and Congress and only TWO YEARS to prove to the US citizens that his policies are helping before mid- term elections roll around. Otherwise, the Republicans could lose one or both houses and he’s left having to fight tooth and nail to enact any of his policies.
Republicans have huge strategic advantages in 2018. Gerrymandering and more voter suppression for the House, but the House is probably still easier to flip. 2018’s Senators are the product of the Democratic wave in 2006 & the presidential election of 2012. There are, IIRC, 25 Democrats up for re-election and only 8 Republicans. The Republicans are mostly in deep red states that held through both those pro-Democratic cycles. Many of the Democrats are in hostile, republican territory. It’s going to be hard to hold the line, much less gain seats.
It’s not the end of the world, but given taht even fucking medicare is looking under threat… people are going to die.
Well, technically, that was true regardless, since there was no way we’d stop engaging in safe (for us) violence against middle easterners, but even more than that.
My best friend needs it to care for his ailing father or his father will die. It may wipe out MY father in his current condition and me as well. The thing is, the Democrats can fight this the way the Republicans did its implementation. I just don’t know if they have it in them.
Regan ran in a much more peaceful era than many we have lived thru. Nixon ran in a darker era true. Dubya ran on fear yes, after 9/11 he gloried in it,
But none of them are in the same league with Trump. They were surely not saints. But….None of them admitted on national tv that they assaulted women, none admitted they never paid any income tax because the govt. was too stupid to know what to do with it, none of them called one of our biggest importers (Mexico) rapists and murders, none of them were friendly with David Dukes of the KKK. None made fun of disabled or harassed gold star parents. And yet…the man who DID do all of this is our President Elect.
I don’t think this says much for our common sense.
Regan ran during the Cold War and many people who lived in his time believed he would literally cause a nuclear war. I think the attempt to make Trump worse than the above isn’t so much an insult to Trump (it isn’t) but a pass for those individuals. Trump is not the dictator of the United States and there are checks and balances for a reason. Making him more than he is gives him too much power when Presidents can and have been checked many times.
Also, don’t forget all the proxy wars Reagan paid for in central and south America. Pinochet? Our fault. Nicaraguan civil war? Our fault. Death squads in El Salvador? Also our fault. Colombian drug war? Ditto.
The robust system of checks and balances that stopped the black Democratic president from making sport of the Fourth in the same way as his predecessor?
Like, don’t get ahead of yourself here. These things don’t automatically work based on cosmic law.
Oh yes, Trump has an immense amount of power to work havoc thanks to Bush and Obama. On the other hand, it didn’t stop Reagan or his supporters from doing the same everywhere from Afghanistan to Angola to all of South America.
Nixon had a Democratic Congress throughout his terms. Reagan had at least a Democratic House.
That made those checks and balances a little more effective.
Even beyond that, the Republican party as a whole is crazier and less interested in good governance than back then.
Really, that is the nature of the Wild Card that is Trump in that the Republicans may or may not fall in behind him. They’re certainly glad he’s their President versus Hillary but it really depends on who will get behind who in the coming years.
Honestly the Republicans falling in behind Trump isn’t even really the issue. Him being willing to sign off on most of the Republican agenda is sufficient.
That there may be conflict over the few things from either that are sufficiently horrific that the other can’t stomach them is really cold comfort.
This does NOT downs Cale the Evil that is Trump, it’s a technical thing. There are parralels between Trump & Hitler, but there also important differences AND there are other historical cases which work better. This is important, first, because we need to understand vmas well as possible who/what we are dealing with. Second, we risk being less effective if we throw “Hitler” around casually. (I do not care if it’s “unfair” to Trump. I’m concerned about defeating him.)
In my school in Germany, when programming classes where particularly dull, we played the Hitler game on Wikipedia. You take a random page and then have to find the shortest way to get to Hitler, only clicking on links in the article.
Yeah. It makes me sad that there’s no one else in the cast who is an eligible romantic partner for her. Maybe she will just have a mostly off-panel lover, which would make sense because she’s one of the few adult characters. Or maybe Robyn will have a much bigger change of heart than anything we’re expecting, but that seems less likely.
Which I think is part of what explains her desperation here. She’s stuck in Indiana because she’s a fresh-faced professor and these days that means going where the positions are, which are often locals that are sometimes passively or openly hostile to non-normative ways of being.
And fuck yes, echoing the desire to smash into the comic and hug her.
Depends. I don’t find anyone attractive unless I like them – or can imagine that I would like them based on facial expression and other cues. Learning that I do not like someone kills their attractiveness. Liking someone may cause them to be attractive to me when they weren’t before. I’m unclear on it, but this may put me within hailing range of demisexual.
reminds me how the timing on a dilbert comic mocked nuns at the same time a famous one died and he had about a 6 month buffer. the law of large numbers means these things happen.
Well, he knew when the strip would drop, and therefor that it would be on point, either in the depressing sense that it turned out to be, or as a reminder of the bullet we’d dodged.
The “not statements” being made are something else. Robin is so fucked, and not in the good way by Leslie, I miss the cheese in their relationship in Shortpacked
A few days ago, someone said something that’s been bugging me ever since: that the classroom discussion was “violently unsafe.”
These young adults are voting age. If they should never be exposed to what the hater politicians are saying, even in a classroom setting where there is zero physical danger and a caring teacher…
Then how are they supposed to learn that it’s VERY IMPORTANT to get out and vote against the hater politicians?
I wonder how many millennials didn’t vote against Trump just because of this?
It’s ridiculous how the use of terms like “triggers” and “safe spaces” to shield people from opinions that are not their own has proliferated as of late, much on detriment to the people with real fucking triggers that have to deal with others making them all look not just bad, but fake.
i was raised in a violent home. i really fucking hate what people have done to those words. i feel disgusting to use it even though “triggered” is EXACTLY how i felt watching a movie and then it suddenly shows the step-dad constantly insulting and leading to punching and throwing plates.
i had to run out of my friend’s hows sobbing and i was out of commission for a fucking week. couldn’t even bring myself to explicitly say i needed a “safe space” i just fucking ran
…well, that’s certainly a very narrow view of the situation. Unfortunately, some of us are extremely well versed in “violently unsafe” without ever having seen it in a classroom situation–I very much doubt that any voter was completely unfamiliar with the kind of violence Trump-like people can do. Mayyyyyybe some of the straight white cis able-bodied male voters? But those went majority to Trump anyway, soooooooo.
Point being, some of us need a place where we can just breathe and stop being on our guard.
Some of you need to grow up and realize that the world is not and never will be a safe place. If you need a place to breath, go home and go to bed.
It would appear that a major shift in education is taking place now: no longer do young people go to college to learn that there are actually opinions in the world that do not agree with what they grew up with, and that those opinions are not necessarily bad, they are simply…different. It is a good think to learn new ideas, new opinions, new ways of life. It helps us to grow. Or it used to anyway.
We are raising, have raised, a generation of wimps. Don’t like the real world, go hide in a closet and wait for it to go away.
It’s iconic that you say that, considering that the need for both safe spaces and trigger warnings have come up in her story arcs, sometimes even referred to as such.
Becky deliberately created a safe space for her when organizing the party. That was even the entire reason for the party.
Joyce’s friends and Leslie haven’t actually mentioned trigger warnings, but have all clearly shown they feel taking a little extra care when talking about certain subjects around her isn’t some unreasonable burden. Because it isn’t.
to be fair, i don’t think that’s what idontcarenomore was referring to. they weren’t saying being sensitive to people’s adversities and trauma’s is bad. it’s just that people can’t expect the world to accommodate them.
also, i didn’t interpret it as putting the onus on people to just be reckless. it was more like show compassion but understand the world won’t.
“Bigoted oppression and violence” =/= “Different opinions”. Forgive this ‘generation of wimps’ for wanting a spot guaranteed not to include shit like that and get a break.
the world will always have bigots. you can want the bad to be gone but still see it be there.
i was raised in a violent home, so i understand the bigoted actions and violence you are talking about. luckily, my mother is a kind person and taught me to be kind and considerate. but she (..and my father..) also taught me the world is going to suck.
True, the world’s a shitty place, and it always makes me sad to learn about people that had to live through violent or abusing childhood and adolescence (or also their whole life). I respect people that can live through things like that strong and tackle on life, no matter what shit’s been throwing at them (though I realise it takes hard work to come to this point).
But some people (no matter their experiences, whether they’ve been sheltered or not) aren’t like that and can’t change their personality and adapt to the world as a shitty place simply like that. I don’t see how them maybe wishing to be or stay in a safe place makes them “a generation of wimps” or “whiny”.
That does not obligate people to deal with them 100% of the time and wanting a place where you won’t HAVE to deal with their bullshit 24/7 is not wrong. Taking an hour or two to meet with folks, discuss your issues, and NOT have to deal with whatever bigoted nonsense is being thrown your way is a good thing.
Also, my point wasn’t whether you can make bigots disappear. I said ‘bigoted oppression and violence’ are not mere ‘differing opinions’. The former is morally wrong. The other doesn’t need to be. People do not have any more obligation to put up with assholes spewing hatred and bigotry than they do an asshole trying to hit them (which, wouldn’t you know it, is often part of bigotry).
I don’t know why I’ve bothered to reply to you with this since by arguing folks are just ‘being whiny’ by wanting a space where they don’t have to deal with this shit, you’re clearly not acting in good faith.
Calling folks on their shit is not being whiny. Explaining the harm done by their bullshit is not whiny. Wanting a spot they won’t have to deal with that bullshit and it not being tolerated is not whiny.
“The world is going to suck” is a defeatist attitude. Constructing a space people can go to get a break and weather the storm a little is a good thing – it’s good for their mental health, it builds community, and it makes it so there’s at least one spot where bigots are not tolerated. They are important for making things better.
So, bigots are ubiquitous, and you can never completely escape them.
But also, if you are briefly allowed to escape them, you’ll be so sheltered you’ll never be able to deal with them. Anything less than 100% asshole saturation will leave you a whiny baby unable to deal.
Your own argument blatantly contradicts itself, because it’s a shitty argument.
People keep saying that, except for professors and students who mostly seem to find it a fiction. For example consider the term “trigger warning”. It’s widely reported as a sign coddled people are being insulated from discussing other opinions. And yet it literally means “be ready for this because we are going to discuss it”.
Since nobody, aside from certain extremely fundamentalist Christians, expects not to have their ideas challenged in a North American college; I assume you’re shitting on trigger warnings.
The need for these stems from a mental illness called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A major symptom is that certain events can bring on a re-experience of the trauma in question, which, let me assure you as someone who knows, is fucking unpleasant. A trigger warning is a warning that a discussion topic, or some other stimulus, is likely to trigger that kind of reaction in a PTSD sufferer whose trauma is something related. In a learning environment, that allows a student who might otherwise have anything from a panic attack to a full-on psychotic episode to avoid that reaction, and spares the rest of the class any disruption.
I assure you, no classroom experience really needs the added effect of me reliving the gang-rape I underwent at age 4. I further assure you that since this is in fact my bloody gang-rape we are talking about, not forcing me to relive it won’t coddle me particularly, since I’m still living with the effects of it 35 years later, 22 years after my last sexual assault, and I am by the same token richly aware that the world is not a safe place. This also applies to my co-sufferers and their own traumas.
If the class discussing child rape in my hypothetical trigger-warned absence doesn’t get a good grasp of the full horror of the subject despite the very graphic materials and descriptions that were presumably the occasion of said warning, that is not my problem.
One last thought: PTSD is fairly common among combat vets, first responders to the scenes of major tragedies, people who have survived torture, and those who have survived events that stood a good chance of killing them. Not, in other words, wimps.
Whirlwitch: yes AND I send you my best as you go forward.
A gender studies courselves needs trigger warnings exactly because of its subject. NOTWITHSTANDING WHICH GS courses are SAFE places to learn what the world out there is like and even how to deal with it better.
i think it’s more about the idea that they’re actively trying to block off opposing viewpoints like keeping speakers from coming to those schools
i mean even the KKK guy got enough votes to go to that one debate. you can’t protest him BEING there. you can debate him and knock his points out like a champ, though.
While that does happen, that’s not how safe spaces are supposed to work. You can’t commandeer a public space and declare it a safe space and force people there to abide by a set of rules they never agreed to.
Safe spaces are about creating an environment where everyone entering it has to agree to those rules to enter it, so the those inside can get a break from the shit they have to deal with outside of that space.
And again, people protesting a speaker can and should express their displeasure about that speaker just being there. Protesting doesn’t stop them from speaking. It only voices the feelings of “YOU’RE A BIGOTED ASSHOLE” which any member of the KKK should already be hearing from inside their own head.
…honey, I know you mean this really really hard with all your misguided little heart, but to be totally honest, I’ve heard this tired old line so many times I can’t even take it seriously.
If you insist other people live a constant battle just to keep their head above water, you shouldn’t be so disappointed when they start fighting you over it.
Part of the reason we *HAVE* trigger warnings now is that people refused to stay in the closet. So we’ve been forced to acknowledge that when we’re talking about negative attitudes towards LGBT people, there may be people present who’ve been personally affected. We can’t just use sexual assault as a throwaway example (which I’ve had male professors do) and assume that that won’t affect assault victims’ ability to absorb the course material.
Does it sometimes go to far? Sure. But “generation of wimps” is an awfully strong way of putting it. And I’m a teacher who uses trigger warnings precisely BECAUSE I expose my students to difficult topics. I want them to come to class prepared when we’re looking at a study of all the f*cked up things people say to blame sexual assault victims. It’s painful, but they all understand that it’s important.
Is the fact that people think I’m a immoral sinner who doesn’t deserve to marry – and who some believe would deserve to DIE – really just a ‘different opinion’ I should be okay with, though…?
Ok. This bullshit stops. I am a cis white male. I was shot, fifteen times, breaking up a gay bashing. Dumb bastards couldn’t even aim right at point blank. Point is, every time you say shit like that, you demean me, and you demean every decent, honest cis white male who just wants *everyone* to have the same rights and respect he does.
Marginalized people do NOT get to be like privileged people and ignore the viewpoints and hostility of dominant groups. Like, let’s take me. I’m trans. I don’t get to rest for a hot second and ignore the hostility and abuse of cis people who think I am a stain on humanity’s jeans and need to be destroyed.
Where I get abuse screamed at me on the street, where I get to read about endless amounts of politicians fundraising on the idea that I’m inherently a child rapist simply for existing and that my right to pee should be eliminated to protect children from being raped by me. Where I have plenty of people feeling fully empowered to yell all manner of abuse at me or threaten me with death or violence to my face.
So, if a bigot politician is not invited to spout hate on a campus I belong to or a community organization I belong to, that is not lacking every seeing what that bigot thinks about me. How much pain he (and it’s very frequently a he) desires to deliver to my community. How little he sees me as a being worthy of life. How much he wants me to die.
And even if I managed to block out all news and live in a safe little bubble, I’d still find out about the laws he passed specifically targeting me and mine’s ability to survive and peacefully move through society and his acolytes will only be too happy to echo his rhetoric to me on the streets, shouted from their cars or their sides of the street.
I don’t get to hide for even a second and turn it off and simply be in a space that is not overtly hostile to my existence, that wants me to give up and kill myself.
So, when I work to create a safe space on a campus or state that my goal is to create a safe space at my school for trans youth, what I’m doing isn’t letting them stick their heads in the sand and ignore the world. What I’m doing is giving them a temporary respite from the storm, carving out a tiny space where they can exist without fearing that they’ll be killed for it, giving them one space that says they are beautiful and deserving of life, giving them a community that doesn’t just tolerate their right to not die (maybe), but actually cheers their existence.
One small little respite from the violent world outside that they can’t help but be aware of.
THAT’S what a safe space is.
And content warnings? Those are simply giving people who’ve been through shit a head’s up so they don’t dissolve into a PTSD attack in the middle of the goddamn classroom. Cause you know, it’s super easy for them to participate in a lesson when they are fighting a rape flashback, or weeping in the bathroom because they’re having a full panic attack, or unable to leave the bed for the next few days.
It’s giving folks a head’s up so they can prepare what they need to cope with the toxic painful abusive memories of LIVING through hell.
And the fact that shitty ass privileged piles of puke can look at the suffering of people who’ve actually suffered and go, ugh these institutions mean weakness, these tiny pillows mean hiding from the big bad world openly disgusts me and I’m out of patience now that the champion of the fuckers who’ve been making “triggered” jokes at me for the last 4 years because I talk about surviving attempts to murder me, because I talk about surviving rape, I talk about the PTSD I’ve carried with me like an unruly child is going to the White House.
okay, i get the rage. but the point is more to the examples of people actively protesting certain speakers from coming to schools.
or the KKK dude who got enough senatorial race votes to go to a debate. you can’t protest him BEING there. you can tell people this is how he’ll think and you can debate the hell outta him. (honestly, it wouldn’t be hard.. considering how stupid the “logic” behind his proposals are)
Freedom of speech does not equate to entitlement to a platform – and furthermore, it goes both ways. Person A has the right to say horrible things, and I have the right to say to other people, “This person is a horrible asshole, why are you listening to them?”
I only noticed since you pointed it out and I had to go back and look at this strip, and then last strip. I love details like that, though it makes me wonder how much I’ve potentially missed at some point or another.
Did Joe & Walky loose interest in the class when da cleavage vanished OR did that make it posipke for them to attend to the discussion, now that all of their attention isn’t absorbed by Jillian & Holtzman?
now im picturing walky like “they arent nazi they are the anti robot coallition” while a certain girlfriend starts to point out the similarities before he goes “nope i wont let you put them in my monkey master.
then a certain mister mike shows up with a hand drill and holding walkies monkey master toy, “I’ll do it instead.”
one time i had a crush on a lady and then i stopped because of her really gross habit of leaving the dishes unwashed and unrinsed on the counter until she had enough to run a load
I keep wanting to comment on the updates, but every time I try and say something I get nervous because I know Willis has to read and approve first posts. I kinda feel like I have stage fright.
i never knew he reviewed your first posts when i started, but im of the attitude online if i embarrass myself they might mock me for a week them move on.
I think the reasoning is as a stop-gap measure to prevent hateful views from being put out there. Or something like that, I think I may have messed up my analogy.
It’s like dancing at a club or party: if I worried about embarrassing myself I wouldn’t do it, but it’s too fun not too, so I do, embarrassment be danged. So, welcome to the Party!
I had no idea about that. It does partially explain why there’s an almost uncanny lack of advertisements, trolling, or general nastiness anywhere on here. I’ve always thought it was remarkably heartwarming, and now I know at least one reason why. So, thank you to Willis, if he reads this, and congratulations on building a really great online community.
I suspected she might have been from how she was around becky, but at the same time i had to clue carla was trans. Although since i never knew that was true of any of my trans friends until they told me it makes sense.
In Shortpacked, Leslie’s family was rich…as in RICH. Her father taught her to fly the family helicopter. But, her father never accepted her after she came out but her mother still would see her with out the father knowing. So Leslie was homeless for a while, and ended up meeting the group at the toy store.
I don’t know her backstory so much here in DoA, but they usually run sorta along the same lines. So makes sense, she was homeless here too.
Roz does think about the consequences. But she’s only 18 and thinks she knows more than she does, so possibilities get overlooked.
That still doesn’t mean she would deliberately plan to out her sister. Hell, we’ve seen that the potential for harmful consequences of someone coming out has specifically been covered, by Leslie, in this very class
No no no, Roz isn’t setting them up to destroy Robin’s career. She said she was hoping that Leslie could help convince Robin of more progressive values. (Roz has tried, but she’s always Robin’s kid sister; Robin might be more convinced by a constituent her own age.) Anybody have the link handy?
Something about Roz’s lines in this strip made me think outing was the plan, but on rereading I can’t see anything specific one way or the other. So I’ll give Roz the benefit of the doubt.
However, if she tries to pressure Leslie into sticking with the plan after Leslie has decided she can’t do it, benefit of the doubt is gone.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that to Roz, using Robin’s queerness against her to destroy her politically was the plan and in that comment, it hasn’t really struck her yet that playing so lightly with the humanity of her teacher to achieve this end is hella immoral and shitty.
No, it wouldn’t be monstrous at all. If she’s LGBT and she’s been attacking the LGBT, then it’s literally the duty of those who know to out her. Yes, it may hurt her, but that is not worth the 100000s of people who she is already hurting.
Where does this idea that outing someone is the worst thing you can possibly do come from? It’s perfectly okay to out a hypocrite.
Outing Robin isn’t going to suddenly make her not a shitstain who votes for anti-gay bills. At best, she turns it in to another thing to be ‘the cool marginalized person’ for. At worst, she gets exposed to biphobic violence herself and decides this clearly means she was right to vote on all that anti-gay legislation because look what they did to her.
Getting Robin potentially hurt or killed is not an ethical solution to this. Trying to educate, or failing that, getting her out of office is.
It is not okay to use societal biphobia as a weapon – and no, that doesn’t make it okay for her to do it either.
If we learned there she was about to support another anti-gay bill that might actually pass, an argument could be made that it should be an option as a last resort. It still sounds like a horrible idea, but I could understand considering it
But even *if* there were any circumstance where it would be okay, a straight person such as Roz should absolutely not be the one making that call.
It doesn’t work that way. Trying to end heterosexism by outing someone just reinforces heterosexism. The political will that gathered in the harrassment they fomented will still be there, /and now/ it’s primary organizer will be harrassed too – in fact, it’s validated, by making the person a public target.
Where does this idea that outing someone is the worst thing you can possibly do come from?
Generally speaking, a thing that has a reasonable chance of having someone lose their job and their entire support network, expose them to physical violence or even murder, and at the very least will probably result in massive, long-term harassment, is considered a bad thing.
Whether or not your personal moral compass says it’s an acceptable thing in whatever given instance- and I would agree that sometimes it is- it’s still hurting someone, potentially very very badly.
Her plan was:
1) Hook Leslie up with Robin.
2) Have Leslie convince Robin with her differing views that her previous views were wrong and harmful to many people.
Roz doesn’t want to destroy her sister – she still loves her and knows she has a good heart, but Robin doesn’t listen to her and she believes Leslie, someone closer to Robin’s age, could get through to her better.
Roz’s hope seems to have been that someone Robin’s own age might get through to her without being brushed off like Robin did with Joyce (and Roz when she’s tried in the past)
So when a guy is horny, people say he’s thinking with his, errr, other head. Is there an equivalent for women? Some organ that figuratively drains their brains of blood to think clearly?
Because I’ve been trying to find that expression to describe Leslie here, but not being a native speaker I’m falling a bit short.
I’m no means an expert on this sort of thing, but a brief internet search indicates that the labia and other external bits and bobs do become somewhat engorged with arousal.
So I duess you could say she’s thinking with her, uh…
I feel this is a really silly topic, but also very interesting because it kinda says a lot on the way society sees men and women when it comes to attraction and the way it supposedly works with each.
sometimes a proper comparison doesn’t work when gender is switched and i think this is one of those times. Closest i could think of is her eyes grew so big she couldn’t hear…… something something. i dunno im going to bed. maybe someone smarter than me can finish this thought
That came to mind, but I can’t recall a single time I’ve seen it used. What’s the usual line when talking about women and emotions, pheromones? Estrogen? I find it curious there’s not consistent parallel, not that it has to be a bad or a good thing.
I’d much rather the anatomical analogy Michael (and Cheshrin) said than something about hormones. “Clouded judgement due to hormones” is already at the center of at least two other tropes that don’t need to be amplified.
The organs are literally the same thing. One’s just been washed in huge amounts of testosterone at some point (usually in fetal development) and the other hasn’t. That’s it. So yeah, perfectly swappable terms.
“I’m white until Alt-Right Trolls find me on Twitter”…
…oddly accurate. It’s like a “No True Scottsman” thing in reverse, like those fuckers have this series of concentric circles in their mind, marking levels of “good person” by their definition…
Ugh. Need a shower now.
Also? Robin’s reaction to this is… interesting. Her facial expressions make me think that she’s, personally, a lot more liberal than her political appearance is. That her positions are entirely strategic…
This would be entirely consistent with her last appearance in the gender studies class. Her description of her constituents’ views then made it seem like her positions were opportunistic.
Robin is essentially a self-centered person who doesn’t give a great deal of thought to how her actions affect others. For her, politics is about being popular & like she said, she just does what the guys tell her to do. She’s not someone who actively wants to hurt people. When she realizes this, she’s uncomfortable with it.
Robin is impulsive so a lot of her actions are selfish but usually at least in part because she doesn’t think them through in the slightest.
In actuality, she has a great deal of empathy for other people – it is getting her to sit still and listen that is the challenge because she has a short attention span.
Both true but also a little troubling. Dorothy reads as white enough that she enjoys almost all the privileges that go along with that. I’m half Jewish, but in most contexts these days, I’m still white as heck. And I’m not even blonde.
Newsreaders do not gather the information of check it for correctness etc…they are on screen for their looks and they ‘read’ what they are handed.
Anchors on the other hand often are in the field, gather their own information, their own teams check it. They do need intelligence and common sense.
Usually this is how it works, not often.
I think Robin picked the blue eyed blonde as the least threatening as opposed to an obvious racial type that may ask her biased questions. She didn’t expect that from Dorothy.
I think it’s more that she is expecting Dorothy to be a “basic” white girl with little actual intelligence to command. She is in for a very rude awakening.
Less of a minority than the blond haired, blue-eyed girl? I guess technically brown eyes are more common than blue, but still, I don’t think it works that way… Honestly, Robin’s joke doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe so. Seems like all politicians get called Nazis sooner or later, though. (I’ve seen Obama compared to Hitler because he could deliver a speech without mispronouncing the words…)
I’m not sure if this entirely gets at your point, but it is not at all rare for white racists to assume other whites are racist as well, sexist men to assume other men are sexist, etc. In particular I’m not sure I’ve seen a homophobe yet who hasn’t assumed that all non-homophobes are gay, and all straight people agree with them, even if secretly.
Many homophobes seem to think that *everyone* is gay – or, rather, that everyone has “urges” that they have to suppress in order to keep god happy – and that actual gay people are simply those who have failed at doing so.
Many of those homophobes are probably actually queer to some degree. For a kinder, gentler parallel, see Billie telling Joyce that exploring bisexuality is “basically inevitable”
I hope we’ll eventually learn exactly why Leslie’s so enamored with Robin in the Dumbiverse. I mean, sure, her Walkyverse crush sprouted in less than healthy soil too (it’s hard to put a positive spin on someone who was secretly only pretending to date you to try and make the gay man who rejected her incredulous enough to bang her, and only ever got in touch with you again as a last resort when her other friends were busy/couldn’t stand her), and we know that DoA Robin is bisexual since 1:1 sexual preferences between universes is an author-established rule, but DoA to my memory hasn’t shown a dang thing that would explain why Leslie’s got it so bad for someone actively working against both her personal liberty and her friggin’ life’s work (because lord knows she couldn’t have put all that work into becoming a professor for the money).
Like, I really do hope I’m not being an asshole noting this (or beating a dead horse if discussing this is old hat), but it’s hard to be invested in Leslie realizing she shouldn’t have looked past Robin’s legislative awfulness without establishing her rationale in looking past it in the first place.
Leslie has a crush on Robin because she saw her as a Latin-American woman who succeeded in a man’s world and rose to power as well as respect in her state. Also, presumably, Leslie has a type. Conservative girls may also be in her wheelhouse. The problem is Leslie didn’t realize that Robin got to her position by throwing other women, gays, and minorities under the bus. She wanted to believe she did it as a story of triumph than treason.
Willis, of course, may just say, “Leslie just thinks Robin is super hot. It happens.”
I’ll admit I forgot about the strip where Leslie talks about how neato Robin is (thank you to Fart Captor for tracking it down below), but…god, I’m sorry, I just can’t take what she lists off seriously. If Leslie really does admire Robin for being bright, then it’s now even MORE difficult to comprehend her crush, because Robin’s only ever shown using her brainpower to groom her political image. That’s shallow even WITHOUT screwing over the oppressed in the process; if she actually stands for or works towards any goal but keeping her job, we’ve yet to see it! As for the rest…look, Margaret Thatcher was the UK’s first woman to serve as Prime Minister, and that’s an undeniable milestone, but if you find her politics and what she did with the office abhorrent then admiring her as a whole package is awfully difficult!
Physical attraction as one part of the equation is a given, and I guess it’s possible for it to be the only one, but I remain incredulous that it’s enough to make Leslie go to such lengths pursuing someone who she KNOWS treats her human rights as acceptable losses. The one rationale for giving Robin a pass on this is that she likely isn’t ACTUALLY bigoted, just apathetic to the terrible consequences advancing her career has on said acceptable losses. Which isn’t any better. It’s a lousy excuse, and I can’t understand what would lead Leslie to use it unless there’s something else to Robin we don’t know about. Career-related sleaze is all we’ve been shown or told of regarding the elder DeSanto. Leslie’s excusing Robin’s sole character trait, and without that trait, the Robin we’ve been shown isn’t anything at all. What’s the point of excusing what you don’t like about a person without something you DO like about them?
It’s even worse when we remember that there’s nothing in DoA itself to indicate that Robin’s even INTO girls, or that Leslie has reason to believe she might. That wouldn’t be something I’d think was worth mentioning if not for everything else. The whole business is confusing and it’d be neat to see more development to demystify all this a little.
We know that Robin is into girls though, because she was in Shortpacked and Willis has stated that sexual orientations are consistent across the board.
What the audience knows and what the CHARACTERS know are very different. And since that information isn’t in DoA itself, we have as much knowledge of which characters know Robin is bisexual as we do which characters in Harry Potter know Dumbledore is gay.
Oh yeah, the other characters don’t know (but Roz suspects, and Leslie trusted her on it enough to go with it) I was just pointing out that, unlike the characters, WE can be sure it’s a possibility because we know Robin is into girls.
In the end they all knew Dumbledore was gay thanks to the tell-all book put out after his death. I read the final book and was genuinely surprised that so many people were shocked when Rowling mentioned that he was gay several years later. She put it in her damned book! I mean, she did not hammer you over the head with it like some ham-fisted neophyte author might, so I guess so, so many people missed it when they read the book.
…are you completely sure about that? I’m all but positive not so much of a word is breathed, explicitly or implicitly, regarding Dumbledore’a sexuality and/or romantic inclinations at any point within all seven books.
Apologies if I’m misinterpreting you, but it sounds like you’re saying “a posthumorous tell-all book exists in the HP books, and Rowling told us outside of the books (long after the series was over, at that) that Dumbledore was gay, therefore Dumbledore being gay is mentioned in the HP books.” Which…doesn’t follow? It works off of assuming that “fyi albus was totes gay” would’ve been revealed in the in-universe tell-all book, but that’s worth a hill of beans to the reader because Rowling put jack shit about it in Deathly Hollows or any of the books that came before it!
No, there is an in-canon tell-all book about Dumbledore. Harry reads some of it.
And to be honest, I completely disagree with Dr. T. While I also got vibes off of Dumbledore’s friendship with that other wizard, the prose of the tell-all book never so much as waggles its eyebrows, and it doesn’t occur to Harry either.
That the supposedly tell-all book didn’t explicitly call attention to Dumbledore’s sexuality is one of many reasons why I heavily side-eye Rowling for the complete non-representation that Dumbledore was.
Oh no, I know that the tell-all book exists in canon (it’s kind of an important part of Deathly Hollows). My gripe is identical to yours. Sorry for not wording that more clearly!
I think Robin is a lot like Walky, in that she’s actually intelligent, when she focuses and applies herself, but she usually doesn’t, so she tends to come across like a bit of a ditz.
In this incarnation, “not acting too smart so as not to make the boys feel intimidated” seems a likely factor as well.
That could easily be! But DoA is supposed to stand on its own, and I’m disinclined to draw too many assumptions about what the DoA iteration of someone is like from their Walkyverse counterpart (Sal and Dina in particular might share traits like “badass with a southern drawl” or “likes dinosaurs” between continuities but otherwise they might as well be completely new characters; there’s nothing wrong with that but it is a thing), and I’m especially disinclined to call anyone’s characterization fleshed out because of stuff that happened solely in IW/SP.
The problem is that Robin has been reduced from a character with some depth and complexity to a Trump/Sara Palin stand-in, because Willis decided he wanted to do some strips about bad politicians/bigotry. Leslie’s crush is a narrative holdover from the earlier days.
Honestly, I prefer politician Robin to Shortpacked Robin. I like the character is more realistically flawed in that she traded her dignity for wealth and power.
Except Robin never had any more depth than that here in DoA. Her initial appearance matches this one pretty closely, though we’ve seen more detail now.
We saw the political opportunism, we saw the way she plays different characters, we saw the reasons for Leslie’s admiration and that she voted against her. This sequence is just the consequences of all that.
She knew what she was getting into, but Roz sold her on the idea that Robin might change if someone her own age showed her how her political views are horrible. Leslie was game to try.
But as we see in this comic, all the horrible aspects you’re pointing out are precisely why Leslie feels gross right now. Seeing it in person made it real for her, bypassing the fog of denial her libido had created.
Different people have different standards, not to mention goals. If you’re (this is a “vague” you btw) going to sleep with someone and don’t plan to ever seeing them again then you could probably put up with a lot of things, if they’re attractive enough.
Here we can see that Leslie was taking a more serious approach and has now been repulsed.
Latina/female congresscritter in a dark red district is the biggest one, plus the physical attraction based on looks. It was in a couple of strips way earlier in the run.
Robin in the Shortpacked is not really Bi I think. She was into men all the way. But Leslie didn’t give up and Robin eventually fell in love with her, she often said she was only bi- for Leslie.
Hard to really say just what the heck she was: except at the end the two of them made a good pair.
Besides, Robin is hot by many views it seems. Based on looks alone, guess Leslie just plain got the hots for her. Till she opened her mouth in class, on issues that pertained to Leslies classmates: made it personal.
Even then. In terms of communicating the concept of having sex with and sexual attraction to both men and women, “bisexual” accomplishes roughly the same as “pansexual”, and “queer” is downright useless.
No, bisexual generally means you can be attracted to men or women, while pansexual specifically includes non-binary folks as well.
Queer is more of a blanket term, but there are real life people who prefer to identify that way, because sexuality is complicated and there isn’t always a specific label that the person is comfortable with and is specifically descriptive.
So yes, “bisexual” is technically accurate, as Robin was attracted to both men and women (pansexual might be correct as well, for all we know), but Robin identifying herself as “indefinably queer” isn’t only about conveying information. It’s also a matter of how a person feels comfortable being identified.
Bisexuality includes attraction to non-binary persons too. The choice of whether to describe yourself as bisexual or pansexual is a matter of personal preference.
Except the fact they’re three different orientations, sure.
Bisexual = Attracted to two or more genders, not necessarily all of them, usually including your own.
Pansexual = Attracted to all genders without regard for gender (as in, they tend to be more attracted to people or personalities rather than gender)
Queer = Other definitions do not feel right, used often as a catch-all.
Robin does not consider herself bi because she likes boys a lot more than girls – while many people who are bi feel this way as well, Robin feels it doesn’t work for her, so she went with one that does. Insisting that she’s bi over her own term for herself is incredibly rude.
She was into Amber also. It’s first revealed when Leslie tells Robin she realized she was attracted to women because of Leia in RotJ and asks who Robin’s first girl crush was.
You mean the plan to make her sister less awful (because she cares enough about Robin to not simply give up on her), which she enlisted her teacher’s help for?
And which Leslie – an adult capable of making her own decisions – chose to participate in of her own free will?
Man, never ever look too close at the pretty ones. I remember when I started following Michelle Rodriguez on twitter, and all she could talk about was some perpetual energy scam she believed in.
Even if you can’t, you can between “white” and “Jewish”
But I think she brought up the Irish part because while she may be white, she’s still off-white enough to be targeted for hate.
And while discrimination against the Irish isn’t anywhere near the level it is against other, browner minorities like it once was (to my knowledge, at least), hurtful stereotypes persist because “it’s okay since it’s other white people”
How is blond haired blue eyed Dorothy ‘off white’. Only because she just said she is Jewish, would she be targeted.
She would not be targeted for hate based on her looks…as compared to Sal.
And if you want to see what the Irish went thru in America, watch the movie based on New York City in the late 1890, early 1900’s.
One side of my family came over from Ireland to get away from the starvation of the Potato Famine.
Though I don’t think Dotty actually has blue eyes, I wasn’t referring to her appearance, really. The Irish part is probably the more visible, though she’d have to be drawn a lot more realistically to tell if she looks at all ethnically Jewish. The blond hair makes that seem less likely, but it’s not impossible.
And I know both that the Irish used to have it really bad, and that members of obvious minorities such as Sal have it much worse. I acknowledged as much in that last paragraph.
Though I’m sure there’s still pockets of the internet (if not the real world) where the Irish are still on somebody’s racial shit-list.
Jewish people are not white. Many of them are lighter skinned (centuries of rape and forced assimilation will do that to you!) but ethnically Jewish people have a unique gene pool much the way other ethnicities do, many of whom have Middle Eastern features and/or darker skin even if their primary ancestry is European, and they have a different culture. Also, they get a lot of flack for not being white from white supremacist groups, so calling them unequivocally white is iffy at best.
Sure, many are not visibly not white, but there are plenty of PoC who aren’t (especially with PoC with lots of history of rape and forced assimilation, like Romani for example). That doesn’t make them white. It means people might not immediately notice and so they’ll treat them as such until they’re ‘revealed’ to be else wise.
Ashkenazim cluster genetically with southern Italians, who are generally considered “white.” The Italian DNA in Ashkenazim is largely mitochondrial, meaning that Jewish men married Italian women, not Italian men raping Jewish women. Not a whole lot of German as far as I know in Ashkenazim,–I suspect that the kids of people who married out ended up leaving the Jewish community.
Sephardic, Mizrahi, Cochin, etc., Jews each have their own genetic signature, due to inter-marriage with the locals (again, largely Jewish men with local women, though there may be exceptions.)
There is no single “uniquely Jewish” DNA, because so many Jewish groups have absorbed people from the different lands they’ve lived in over the years, but there is an underlying pattern.
“Ashkenazi Jews cluster genetically with southern Italians” is a polite euphemism for how Rome invaded, colonized, and destroyed Judea. Jews had been ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire – after they were all enemies of the state and repeatedly lost in several wars over about 120 years, how much war rape do you think was going on?
…Man, that’s always weird to hear. Irish got way the hell more play than any other group besides black people in most of what I’ve seen, including both secondary and college. Native American racism sort of vanishes into the aether except for the mention of a couple of massacres, hispanic people might see brief mentions in the 1960s (As a group that suffers racism – other than that, mexicans are just sort of the evil oppressors of Houston and his bastards, and a footnote in the Spanish American War), but the Irish are a recurring theme of 19th century racism. Granted, still only limited perspectives, but there was never any rush to hide the Irish at all, especially in comparison (The big losers here almost definitely being native americans, in the courses I’ve taken part in or read over the syllabi for)
Weird as it seems now, Irish people were actually viewed as a completely seperate (and inferior) race compared to whites. Which lead to Irish racism against black people (and immigrants from first Southern Europe and then Latin America) as they were often in direct competition for the position of “not the absolute bottom of society”.
Whiteness is provisional. It’s not weird at all. What I’m saying is, it’s weird to hear people talk about Irish racism as if it’s ignored. I guess the Northeast might be, to bury its shame (Geography meant that they were the primary folks being bastards about it), but I’m pretty sure they still have to use the same books as Texas in secondary, just like we do, so it seems unlikely.
Irish are one of the biggest groups in America, so lots of Irish around to talk about anti-Irish discrimination. Not so many Native Americans around anymore.
That seems unlikely. MLK has his own holiday, and I suspect that the 14% or so of us who are black care a lot more about ati-black racism than anyone cares about anti-Irish-ism.
Yes, but white people don’t care about racism against people who aren’t white. It’s really, really, really hard to not talk about anti-black racism at least some in US history – we fought a war over it, at the end of the day, and based multiple economic sectors off of it at multiple points. The Irish, for the most part, don’t represent anything that /needs/ to be discussed any more than say, racism against native americans; quite the inverse, given the sheer number of bush wars we’ve fought with them, while also basing so much of our economy and prosperity off of stealing their land from them, as well as their involvement in other conflicts we’ve fought. And numbers don’t explain it either, or there’d be more talk on anti-latin@ racism.
This isn’t to say anti-Irish racism shouldn’t be discussed. It should. It’s still important, both on its own, because it was terrible, and because of how it fit into the tapestry of Meriken history. But it’s always seemed disproportionate in comparison to how much other people’s issues are brought up.
Dude, if whites didn’t care about anti-black racism, we wouldn’t have fought a whole war over it. We would still have Jim Crow. We wouldn’t have the 14th amendment. We wouldn’t have anti-discrimination laws. We wouldn’t have Affirmative Action. MLK Day wouldn’t be a holiday. A bunch of white people in my city wouldn’t have just gotten arrested protesting against Donald Trump. And many of the strips and characters in this comic wouldn’t exist.
I think a lot of that was due to the efforts of POC. Not that whites weren’t involved at all, but don’t give them all the credit, cause they don’t really deserve it. And slavery being abolished was a strategic and crippling blow to the Southern Confederacy, as was burning and razing the plantations in a lot of towns and cities. Indeed, like in the American Revolution, blacks were encouraged to fight for the union because they would be “freed”. And this time they were – but on condition, and because of the white people then Jim Crow was born..
Basically, a lot of the laws you describe weren’t enacted out of benevolence, but out of a time when there was intense pressure, mostly by POC, to revise the structure of the government. No. No we do not solely have white people to thank for any of those laws. Don’t overestimate the role whites have played, as we saw on Tuesday majority of white voters dont actually care or didnt put their liberal money where their mouths were. Most of that work was done by POC.
Well. White Northerners didn’t fight the civil war for anything approaching the sake of black people for a great deal of it. Southerners were traitors, and those that fought would hang. Don’t underestimate lizard brains. They’re kind of a thing. Now, I’ll be fair here – as the war went on, abolitionist sentiment really did spread throughout the union army. But at the same time, that was well after the gauntlet was taken up, with little real option to back down.
Interestingly, some of the happiest fighters on the Union’s side were Irish immigrants, who had a really hard time getting a decent job elsewhere. They actually /were/ stoked to end slavery, because slavery was a bullshit barbarism that had to end. Which is to say, a bunch of people who weren’t white, and had come from a place where ‘white’ wasn’t even really a societal concept (Even today, European racial politics look nothing like American ones).
As far as ‘Jim Crow would still be on the books if white people didn’t care about racism’… no? It’s almost astounding to me. You’re looking at a few folks being decent, in the face of the bulk of them just throwing in with the most racist president since Nixon (at least.) .
If White People as a whole did actually care about racism, we wouldn’t hear so much hooey about how we live in a post-racial society. They wouldn’t have been planning rebellion the second a black man was in charge. They wouldn’t act like being called a racist was the worst god damned thing. They, you know, would have voted against Trump, at the very least. None of that is the case (Some fools are /still/ claiming the post-racial society nonsense).
Like, wifey is white. And given that she’s my wife, you can assume she cares. I have no idea why you think I’m unaware of individuals caring. What I don’t understand is why you’re unaware of what the damn majority culture does.
And then there’s the Italians. Faced a lot of the same crap the Irish did and get far less notice for it.
A lot of that, for the Irish as well, was based in religious prejudice – Catholics weren’t really Christian to many people.
Mostly I think the Irish just became the goto example for explaining the process.
Although there is no longer organized anti-Irish discrimination like you saw in the 19th centurym Irish-Americans are still aware of the history of discrimination. Some use that as a reminder that anyone can be a target and that they need to stand up against bigotry aimed at other groups, others use it as a “get out of bigotry free” card. “The Irish were slaves, so your suffering is invalid!”
The conflation of slavery and indentured servitude is one of my pet peeves as a student of history, but that’s a digression. At any rate, “The Irish were treated worse than black people” has been one of the squares on White Privilege Bingo for a long time now.
Am Jewish, can confirm about being provisionally white — as long as everything is going very well for white people, Jews get treated with white privilege, but as soon as something goes wrong or the economy dips or whatever, we’re suddenly the Other again. It’s wacky.
This election cycle brought a lot of anti-Semitism to the surface, it seemed, as a datum to the effect of what you’ve said here. I knew it was still a thing, but I didn’t realize how widespread it still is.
It turns out it’s really hard to erase 2,000 years of anti-Semitism with 75 years of education.
That, and when people are desperate, it turns out to be easier than you’d think to turn them against the “Other” as a solution to their problems.
Like, I’d bet Weimar Germany probably thought itself reasonably enlightened, and then this angry little bigot with a funny mustache came along and six million deaths later…
If you didn’t approve of your professor having the hots for your sister because of her poltical stance then why did you try to hook her up with her in the first place.
That was the original plan I think. Big sister would not listen to her: big sisters seldom do. And Roz hoped that Leslie, being a contemporary of Robin, may be able to talk to her and ‘show her the error of her ways.’
Being her teacher and a person Roz looked up too, I guess she figured it was a good idea.
But hey if we haven’t made a our point how about we get Alex joins and Steve Bannen to be a guess speaker. I’m sure that’ll get a point across to someone.
I swear to god, if Willis somehow manages to make this couple work on this version of the walkyverse it’s going to be something kinda fucked up. I mean, is Robin going to drop her political carreer for Leslie? Leslie’s urge to get into Robin’s pants is so big that she’s going to bend her morals? I just don’t see this happening since Robin hasn’t showed any signs of “hey maybe I’m kinda homo in secret”
I really dislike the term “alt-right”. Call them Nazis. Call them racists. Call them anti-Semites. Call them bigots. Call them complete fucking scum. Don’t make up a euphemism to hide how awful they are.
(The same goes for Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”. I saw a Trump ad repeating the clip of her saying that, and explaining how that meant she hated ordinary Americans. I keep seeing (most often on Girl Genius) this banner ad for a fucking T-shirt bragging about being deplorable. We wouldn’t get that shit if she’d just said, “Hey, half of Trump’s supporters are fucking bigots,” instead of making up euphemisms for them.
At least I’m still telling myself that we wouldn’t.)
You can’t. Those terms don’t encompass what they are. The alt-right is not just racist/sexist/etc. They are also trolls. They are also profoundly atheist. They still believe in the smaller government. They think freedom of speech means the freedom to be an asshole. They see disruption as a good thing.
They are awful enough that the term “alt-right” has turned into an insult on its own, so don’t worry.
It’s the “two people talking past each other” which is the tragedy of the election. Trump voters are voting for an enormous racist and cretin but were doing so because many of them honestly felt like they were going to die in poverty or lose their homes. He claimed he would fix that. Hillary dismissed Trump supporters as voting entirely on racism and never quite grocked the larger terror. It’s a weird strategy that Trump won because no one could ever take him seriously enough to argue his issues. Mostly because Trump only addressed said issues to his faithful.
Basically, less, “If you vote for Trump, you’re a racist monster.”
and more, “Don’t vote for Trump because he is an enormous idiot and we have a plan so you don’t lose your house or medical coverage.”
And the oddest thing about it is they were offended by that more than being called Nazi’s and bigots.
And on that note these are the same peoplein witch the Majority of most of them defended rape, spray painted “Vote Trump” on a black church and proparty belonging to members of the LGBT community right after they burned all that stuff down. Meanwhile they think they get offended by a name I don’t think most of them understand.
I think that kind of “you’re all Nazis and bigots who defend this” is part of the reason they voted that way. The NYT basically ignored all the exit polls where the voters said they hated what Trump said, did, and didn’t think he was qualified but believed he could do the CHANGE buzzword.
I only bring this up because of all the people who voted for Obama who voted for Trump this time–four states worth.
The vote was very very close Charles Phipps. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
Trump is a minority President Elect and that only because of the Electorial College: a several Clinton dedicated voters who stabbed their constituents in the back and changed their minds, and their votes.
Go to the live electorial map on Google: Look at the states votes where they read like this: Trump: 45.60% Clinton: 45.50%. There are a lot of them.
So he is now large, in charge, and still orange. Still bigoted, still racist, still a woman assulter, and now – from the looks of him, not so sure that he actually knows what he has bitten off.
We shall see. Hope he does well, would be stupid to hope he does not. Maybe enough handlers will be able to hold him down from total disaster.
To be fair, if we’re talking about third party votes, the libertarians got three times more votes than the greens. The popular vote leaned right regardless of whether or not you include third parties or not.
This isn’t anything new or unusual though. The US has alternated between a democrat and a republican over the vast majority of recent history. We had an excellent Democrat president for eight years and I’m happy about that. We were due for a republican term. Hopefully it won’t be quite as terrible as the last one. I mean, at least Trump isn’t a religious nutjob but a secular one who used to be a democrat.
But also, I know plenty of people who voted for Gary Johnson despite being anti-Trump. They (entirely mistakenly) believed he was closer to Bernie than Hillary was.
There’s a very popular image of libertarians on the left side of the aisle as being socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and since a lot of folks had been convinced that Hillary was conservative on both parts, they considered Johnson a better vote.
That said, I’m less concerned about the third party voters than the entire half of the country that just didn’t bother to vote at all.
I recall posting a while back (not here) that the trope that Trump’s campaign seem to be based off of was ‘Springtime for Hitler’. If that’s true, it’d be funny, except that it’s true.
On a serious note, though, I’m confused by Leslie’s reaction. Yes, it’s shitty for her seduction plan but isn’t this a great thing for the class? They’re getting exposed to lots of fascinating information about prejudice, politics, and dangers. It’s probably the most important class she’ll ever teach and she should be glad she’s brought it about.
I suspect her plan for the class was, “Get successful woman to talk about things related to gender and politics,” and right now, she’s feeling personally hurt by someone she had a crush on. Later on, she can get a little emotional distance and find that silver lining.
I’m not entirely convinced that calling them nazis would be useful. The nazis were horrible, but they’re also used as shorthand for things that.
The Alt-right is generally all racist, but it can also just get drowned in weird conspiracy theories for their own sake. And there’s a lot of crossover with different flavors of horrible. Alt-right is less a euphemism, I think, and more just an acknowledgement there isn’t a whole lot tying the disparate groups together except for vaguely feeling like they belong ont he right wing and voting for restricting human rights.
The alt-right also encompasses groups that don’t really have anything to do with racism, like some types of anarchocapitalists, and some groups that don’t have anything to do with politics, like the more extreme MRA/Red Pill types. It’s not a word for one group, it’s a name for many, many, many groups, most of which hate each other, and for that matter some of whom are literally Nazis. It’s just that the ones that specifically focus on being racist have gotten in the news lately.
Yup – she’s reached the age of consent (so as to make it less creepy given her Walkyverse counterpart’s strong association with sex), but she’s not old enough for university (as per Patreon).
I admit, I prefer Leslie/Robin here and Mike here because I hate the “you can change a person to be less awful” meme. Willis handled it nicely with both characters but the whole “toxic people are actually good to cut out of your life” thing with Raidah resonated with me.
That’s not a meme so much as a thing that can and does happen in real life. Not nearly as often as one might like it to, but it does happen. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to give someone a chance. Other times they really are toxic and even if they (in theory) deserved a chance, the cost of giving them one is too high. Life is rarely so helpful as to give us such general scenarios where we can simply say “always do ___”
It’s definitely too often done by writers who lack the skill to make the change feel organic, but when it’s done well it’s very enjoyable.
Though I would argue that Mike didn’t really become any less awful. We simply had a not-awful side of him revealed to him. He continued to be awful to people other than Amber. Just like Malaya’s genuine affection for Ultra-Car didn’t make her any less insufferable to everyone else.
I’m not familiar with the other strips, but I’m not convinced that DoA Mike is as bad as he’s made out to be. He’s certainly capable of being a huge dick, but I’ve noticed that more often, he’s simply being either extremely sarcastic or extremely blunt. I’ve also noticed that in both cases, he’s usually calling someone out on their own bullshit. He may be abrasive, but he’s not often wrong.
Is Irish only provisionally white? How distant do you have to be from that heritage to be just white? I’m Anglo-Irish and I always thought I was as white as could be. In Britain it’s different, because Britain, but America? How finely does the alt-right sift?
Well, it helps to understand “White is however close my race is to it.” In the 19th century, you have Mexican Whites and Irish Whites loathed by Anglo Saxon Whites but all hating X minorities together.
Another example is the fact Hitler’s victims were almost all people which would be considered White in the USA.
In the UK/Ireland it can mean something but yeah it doesn’t really affect anyone to be Irish in America as far as I can tell? But then I don’t live there. I mean as far as I can tell from Americans online basically the Irish eventually ‘became’ properly white in the US while they did /use/ to be second class citizens once upon a time. There’s no difference in the US itself. Europe itself is the one which seems to… talk about different flavors of white in general more so than the US in these modern times as someone who also lives on these islands I’m sure you know. (Like if you’re eastern european you can be fucked up more than a little etc.)
Then /again/ maybe Dorothy is referring to that on some level. I mean online international borders are torn down so many people can be bigoted farts from thousands of miles away. So like (I’m originally from N.Ireland)… mmaaaaybe some unionist type from there has been gross and has reamed her over that? It’s possible.
I mean actually some Irish folks hate Irish Americans too but yeeaaaah that’s for reasons I don’t want to debate over here. Let’s just say there are both petty and decidedly non-petty reasons for it.
But tbh the Jewish part is what would /really/ be the big thing for the alt right to descend on like rabid wolves no matter where they went. Anti-semitism never really died in europe or in the US either.
Irish is considered white “nowadays” but back in THE DAY white americans would have laughed at the idea of irish being white. Whiteness is not the color of your skin per se, but a social construct. Think about all the ginger jokes you hear? yeah. Yeah. That being said it’s a topic riddled with nuance, in that pale is still considered the “beauty ideal” and European features the same, and white passing, and all that sort of thing you need to keep in mind when talking about the social construct of whiteness and the “”superiority”” of it.
There’s a good book called “How the Irish Became White”, ie pretty much acceptable, respectable people in the view of the original dominant groups in the US.
I identify as Irish (direct male lineage) but to my knowledge have no cliche characteristics, at least as to pertaining as to how I look. I always thought that the jokes were just a normal cultural thing, and not racism derived. For me, that was weird.
The disturbing thing about this strip is that, for all her ignorance in many areas, Robin clearly understands how the political world treats smart but attractive women. Whilst it is possible that Dorothy may get somewhere, the Establishment would be a lot more comfortable with her being a powerless talking head that they can patronise and ignore.
I’m a little confused here. So Leslie knew about Robin’s policy stance beforehand, and she STILL wanted to romance/lustmance it up with her? Why would someone who supported an anti-LGBT bill even BE interested in a lesbian encounter? If I was Leslie, my main concern would be whether or not trying to get Robin’s attentions would eventually get twisted into a “SEE?! Gay folks try to make their disgusting moves on you even when you’re CLEARLY straight!” political attack.
Friendly reminder that DoA, like any other interation of the Walkyverse, is first and foremost a strip about likeable characters making stupid decisions while we watch in horror from behind the fourth wall.
Remember that the first rule of politics is “get re-elected”.
There have been many example in politics where a representative, who has a particular stance on an issue — a tax increase, let’s say — and a vote comes up on a bill that this person would normally support…. but the candidate knows that the bill is doomed to failure, so he/she votes the opposite way (with the eventual majority) so they can then spin it as “well, I DID vote for (or against) it but it just wasn’t meant to be”. I see it as Robin (who may or may not be gay or bi) giving support to the bill, knowing it would fail, so it would paint her in a favorable light with the rest of her conservative district.
Sorry — that should be “a bill that this person would normally oppose (not support)… but the representative knows the bill is doomed to failure anyway so he/she votes with the eventualminority (not majority) so they can then spin it…”
Since when was she Jewish? Her paternal grandparents were “both Catholic and Jewish”. If her grandparents were Catholic converts, her father was areligious, and she had no Jews in her matrilineal family, it’s odd that she would claim the ethnicity of Jewish for herself. Additionally, considering how anti-Irish sentiment in the U.S.A. is always spoken of in the past-tense to the point that Irish is considered white nowadays… why even bring it up? A congresswoman is inviting her to ask a question, and she gets sidetracked by being called white? Which, by the way, seems to be an accurate assessment.
If her paternal grandparents were both Jewish, regardless of religious adherence, she’s half Jewish. That was Jewish enough for Hitler, and apparently it is for the furnace-posters as well.
Fun fact: the Nazis’ Final Solution, through combing of geneological records, netted Germans whose Jewish heritage was so remote they weren’t aware of it. Hitler didn’t care whether they considered themselves Jewish or not, and he was especially offended by mischlings, since he was concerned with keeping Aryan blood undiluted.
This isn’t Nazi Germany, though. Unless there are neo-Nazis on the Internet that meticulously research everyone’s genealogy in order to find the non-Jewish descendants of Jews, she had to go online and tell everyone that she was part Jewish. Unless her paternal ancestors for thousands of years never married outside the Jewish population (technically possible, I suppose), her father isn’t a “full blooded Jew”.
I’n going go to ask something, and I promise that it is out of a sincere desire to learn.
Can someone explain what she meant when she said “tecnically I’m Irish”. I know that means that she is of Irish descent but how does that mean she isn’t white? Again, I promise this is an attempt to learn.
I’m wondering the same. At some point in the past, there was a lot of anti-Irish sentiment, to the point that many people considered Irish to be a separate race inferior to their own white. As anti-Irish sentiment went away over the years, that distinction went away as well, and nowadays Irish is just considered white. I don’t get why Dorothy felt the need to clarify what kind of white person she is.
Because generic “white” is low-class in the US. High-class people know where their ancestors came from. Dorothy is signalling that she is not low-class and does not identify as “white.”
The thing with that is, there are some /really/ racist white people. Really, /really/ racist. People who /remember/ that shit. How the Italians and Slavs weren’t white (Still something of a thing, at least for Slavs). How mediterranean people aren’t white (Andalucians and the like in particular) People who remember the /Irish/ not being white (Or at least, were taught to treat them as non-white). They try to teach their kids their ways. Sometimes it works.
I’m pretty sure this is extremely rare for people of Irish descent, but where it does come up, it probably feels like a sucker punch. And the neo-nazi wing of the republican party is definitely the group most likely to think that shit.
This sort of thing always baffles me as a generic mixed-mutt white American. I am aware that there are a number of different ‘flavors’ of white and certainly aware that people can be super-shitty to people not the right flavor, but I cannot for the life of me see the visual distinctions that are apparently obvious to other people between Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Greek, Eastern European, Jewish, light-skinned Hispanic… Even for darker skin tones, without other hints I cannot tell between white-with-a-tan, darker-skinned Hispanic, lighter-skinned multiracial, etc. Get a group of all of these types of people together and, while I can tell differences between individuals, visually I would assess all of them as white people.
Growing up I had a friend who was Puerto Rican. The way I know that is that he talked about his family being from Puero Rico. To me he just had a nice tan. I had another pair of friends (brothers) whose grandmother would yell at them in Spanish, so looking back I assume they were some flavor of Hispanic, but the topic never came up so they were always just generic white to me. I was honest-to-God confused when there were complaints from certain parts of the internet over the lack of white actors on Luke Cage until I had the epiphany that oh yeah, all those white people I was seeing were probably in fact Hispanic people who ‘don’t count’ as white (which still makes the complaints stupid, but at least an internally consistent stupid complaint)
This is not meant to diminish anyone’s heritage or struggles, just one more way that I will never relate to certain bigoted points of view.
Because it’s not all visual. Or even mostly visual.
It’s cultural. Those weird foreigners might be European, but they’re not real Americans like us. They’re a different religion, they don’t speak good English or talk some foreign gibberish, they eat weird food, they’re just different. They’re all poor and poorly educated (see “don’t speak good English”).
I was from a suuuper white region. Not being Scottish or English was bad enough to be not white to them. I was alternatively told to “go back where”I came from because my dad is Afrikaaner or called Nazi because of the German surname or Kike by those who did enough research to discover that my surname from Johannesburg (where my Dad’s family is from, aka “Jewburg” to skinheads) is a 80%Jewish surname (and most of the 20% are ppl who converted to escape anti-Semitism. Including my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my granddad’s side). Yeah there were folks who cared about their bigotry enough to research demographics of my surname in Johannesburg. I can’t make this shit up.
Sooo yeah. Wrong type of white totally exists. “That’s an interesting surname, where’s it from?” is code for “You’re white, but are you white-white?” in some places.
Clarification: This does not mean I don’t benefit from white privilege – just that in some places, you only get some degree of white privilege unless you’re the right type of white.
Perhaps, but nonetheless I’m pretty sure I’m missing some key differentiation ability, as there have been a large number of confirmed instances where other people are able to look at someone and, without any other information about them, accurately know these things while I am not.
If so, you’re not alone on that. Unless there is something about a person that is very obvious, such as their skin being very dark or their eyes being distinctly Asian, my brain tends to not actually register any difference between them and me. It’s just not a skill I have, and it’s not one I care to have, if I’m honest. I wouldn’t have much use for it, anyhow. If someone needs me to know what ethnicity or race they are, they’ll tell me. Otherwise, it’s none of my business, I’m just gonna treat you like a person.
@TheJeff: what you said is one version of it, but there are others, including those who BELIEVE in physical differences which may or may not exist AND for some bigots, it doesn’t matter how you look, it soes matter how culturally assimilated you are IN REALITY , because in their world you’re still The Other …. even if you can pass.
Looking at Irish as being less worth the other nationalities was a British sentiment (they occupied Irleand completely until 1923). They claimed that Irish were lazy, unreliable und stupid because they were poor. Sounds familiar?
During the great famine (1845 ff), Irish landlords (i.e the mostly British gentry) offered money to their peasants if they took it to buy a passage to America, but they got none if they wanted to stay.
She says “Technically, I’m Irish and Jewish.” It’s the “and Jewish” part that she is drawing Robin’s attention to, as evidenced by the next panel, but she’s acknowledging that she’s only part Jewish. Which evidently matters not at all to the furnace-posters.
It means she doesn’t want to be called “white” because she doesn’t consider herself “white.” She has an ethnicity–two, in fact–and these are what matter to her self-identity, not “whiteness.” Only low-class Americans are ignorant of which European countries their ancestors hailed from and so can only describe themselves as generically “white,” and Dorothy wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of those.
I’m not being sarcastic. Americans are really classist.
That’s pretty much crap. There’s plenty of classism certainly, but identifying as white isn’t a marker for low class.
In many cases it’s just a matter of those immigrants being a long way back and thus there being a lot of them. I know I’m a whole mess of things dating back in the US on one side to at least the early 1700s. That I can’t trace all of that back to specific immigrants doesn’t mean a damn thing. I’ve never heard people claiming specific European ethnicity as a class thing. In general those who hold to X-American ethnicity tend to be of more recent immigrant stock and to have faced more discrimination, at least in their family history, if not personally.
I suspect Dorothy is aware enough to reference Irish in full awareness of “how the Irish became white”, which is in no way a claim to upper class status, and as a set up and contrast to the Jewish part, all as a counter to Robin looking for a nice safe white blonde who won’t ask hard questions.
As an American who identifies as white, half-Jewish,* and half-Irish, I agree that specifying ethnicity has nothing to do with class. However, people (including earlier, less-enlightened versions of myself) may specify their ethnicities because they’d rather seem like a victim than like a perpetrator of racism/oppression, and they think saying something other than “white” will help with that.
Like thejeff said, it also has something to do with how much one’s family has held onto its immigrant roots. I’m third/fourth-generation American and I grew up in New York City, and the Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. that I grew up with acknowledged that they were white, but they also identified with their ethnicities. I literally didn’t know that anyone identified as “just white” until I went away to college and met people who’d grown up in communities that are more…post-melting-pot, I guess. I don’t think anyone in college saw it as a class thing that I sometimes brought up my ethnicities — it was just a thing that was important to some families, others not so much.
*Some Jews are offended by the idea of “half-Jewish” as a category, primarily because they see Jewishness as a religious category. Since I”m a cradle Catholic and therefore it’s kind of not my place to define Jewishness, I sometimes describe this side of my heritage as Eastern European, since that’s where my people were before coming to the US, but “half-Jewish” is the way my parents raised me to think of myself.
While she’s “white” she’s of the kind that people were at one time racist against, instead of being the ones that propagated it?
Like Robin’s thought process was “Hey she’s a white girl that’s looking to be a talking head. She won’t have anything deep and or meaningful or complex or anti-bigotry based to throw at me”?
It seriously worries my 66 year old mother how much Trump’s rhetoric and the way the crowds eat it up mirror Hitler’s rise to power. That was a big thing in school when she was growing up along with you know practicing diving under your desk and kissing you behind goodbye.
When I hear people talking like Robin or have acquaintances or relatives who voted for Trump, my mind always starts playing TMBG Your Racist Friend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4_COOh4VXw
Wish is was music for today’s comic, but I’m going to be hearing it for the next four years. A lot.
Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyou for addressing conditional whiteness for Jews. I hardly ever see it addressed outside of Jewish circles, let alone in any form of media.
This would be highly educational for the class if Leslie wasn’t in the weird position of wanting Robin not to horrify her students. She’s completely ignoring the opportunities for educating them because it’s not what she wanted to do here.
Don’t you just love the way Robin disses Dorothy? “Talk at me, future cable news anchor”, like the best Dorothy can aspire to is being Megyn Kelly — while conveniently forgetting that she herself is a Congresscritter, and that there have been females as presidential candidates and running mates (I assume that the DoA history does accept the historic record of the Mondale/Ferraro campaign of 1984 and Shirley Chisholm’s failed attempt to become the 1972 Democratic candidate for POTUS).
And it looks like even Dorothy is momentarily taken aback at it.
I’m a white American whose heritage is half-Jewish, half-Irish, so it’s kind of fun to see someone similar explicitly represented Also, these are reasons I think Dorothy may have specified her ethnicities in this context:
1. She may be unfairly distancing herself from white privilege. White ethnics (who absolutely experience white privilege) sometimes derail conversations about racism against POCs to talk about their own sense of vicitimization. One reason for this is that it’s socially more comfortable to be like “yeah, I’m in the struggle with you” than to own the fact that you benefit from other people’s oppression. Robin made a comment about Dorothy’s white privilege, so it’s likely that her knee-jerk reaction is to disown responsibility for it. (It would be so awesome if Willis did an arc about her learning not to do that.)
2. She may feel like discrimination against her because of her ethnicities does actually inform her experience and her take on the world. Maybe she has been attacked by the alt-right and/or bullied in school or something, and this makes her a more empathetic ally to POCs. If so, fine, but she still shouldn’t be disowning her whiteness. Any discrimination you face inside that bubble is not as bad as anything that POCs go through.
Based on my experience and the experiences of those I know, I’m almost sure that she has in some way been made to feel unsafe or unwanted because of her Jewish heritage. I highly doubt that that’s happened because of her Irish heritage. Maybe someone’s made some stupid comments stereotyping her family as drunks — which could actually be hurtful if it’s true, but that’s still far from systemic oppression — but that’s probably it. It’s odd to me that she would bring up both heritages, but maybe she’s just trying to be accurate. If your heritage is only part-Jewish, but you yourself are not Jewish, it’s a weird spot because you may have faced anti-Semitism, but a) not to the extent that actual Jews have, and b) you’re not really a part of the community being targeted. Many Jewish people will (reasonably, in my opinion) object to you calling yourself Jewish, and Dorothy may be trying to avoid provoking that response. And/or, she may feel like the experience of being mixed-ethnicity has taught her something (I was cured of the common white mindset that it’s okay to say something racist when the only other people present are white by having multiple people think it was okay to say something anti-Semitic around me because they found out I was Catholic and therefore assumed I was not Jewish). Hopefully she acknowledges that the Irish part of her has full white privilege these days.
3. She may feel like her family history has influenced her worldview. In my case, this is true — for instance, I’ve gotten maybe three stupid comments against Irish people in my life, but I grew up hearing stories about what my great-grandparents went through to get into this country, to get jobs, to keep jobs, etc., so I think I’m more viscerally attuned to immigrant experiences than my totally assimilated white friends. I grew up knowing about how my Jewish great-grandmother was approached by a eugenist out of nowhere and told how to stop having children, so I think I’m more viscerally attuned to the reproductive rights of women now considered to be in “undesirable” categories. Dorothy strikes me as thoughtful enough for this to be true, and while I’m sure she herself has experienced more crap about being Jewish than about being Irish, the split may be more even among her ancestors and so bringing up both sides in this mindset makes sense to me. Still, girl needs to make sure she acknowledges the fact that she currently does have white privilege. She grew up in a white community, everyone sees her as white unless she tells them otherwise, and even if she does tell them otherwise, the majority will just see her as a more specific type of white.
Yeah, with 1 and 2, it’s like trying to distance yourself from the horribleness. “It was those whites, not me. I’m on your side here. Please don’t hate me.” So on and so forth. Also, with 3, if you don’t mind me asking, what about the eugenist? ‘Told how to stop having kids’? What?
Yeah, even 3 can shade into that sometimes…I’ve definitely heard people talk about what their Irish etc. ancestors went through as an excuse for being okay with discrimination against contemporary Latino immigrants.
Members of the birth control movement in the 1930s (roughly — the Margaret Sanger era) believed birth control was a way to eliminate or at least diminish “undesirable” elements, which in NYC during their time included Jews (and I believe they targeted Italians, Blacks, and the disabled as well). They didn’t promote birth control, like, as an option for any woman who wanted it — they made the assumption (a) that the “undesirable” women wanted to stop having children, and (b) that those women did not know how to stop having children. According to this line of thought, poor non-white/off-white women needed rich white women to act as saviors by coming into their neighborhoods and telling them how to avoid reproducing. My great-grandmother was among those they decided to “help” in this way.
In the US, Irish is white NOW, not still. But you just wait. If the racists get rid of their usual targets, someone else is going to be the next in line. Jews are probably it, but I bet Italians and Irish aren’t far behind. People better informed than I have made good explanations above.
Jewishness is weird, because it serves as the name used for both an ethnicity and a religion, and there’s plenty of people who are one but not the other. Regardless, iirc from parents’ weekend, Dorothy’s parents are atheists as well.
Check the [original] Nazi Nuremberg Laws: there were 2 ways to qualify for a ticket to Auschwitz as Jewish:
1) members of the Jewish religious community
2) jewish by blood — ie ethnically
In other words, conversion wouldn’t save you and there were priests and nuns genocided for being Jewish
Judaism is a religion with adherents of all races/ethnicities
Not all adherents of the religion come to it ethnically — Ivanka, anyone?
And those who do come from multiple ethnicities. MOST jews in America are ethnically Yiddish, of eastern/central european origin. BUT not all Jews are Yiddish, which is why Israel is multi-ethnic/multi-racial: Its the NATIONAL homeland of the Jews. AND, vice verse not all Yids TODAY are Jewish. (
Judaism is more “the traditional religion of the Jewish people” than Jews being “people who practice Judaism.” It’s a bit flipped from many assumptions.
Today’s talk about race spawned a doubt. Why is it that I can’t read two articles analysing the election without seeing the vote trends for whites, blacks, and latinos (often including breakdowns by binary gender), but I haven’t ran into any mentioning other ethnicities? Would jewish be included in “white” on those analyses? Where are the stats of those of asian descent? Amerindians? Literally everyone else?
Or maybe 76-24? It was in that range, though. Leaning slightly more toward Clinton than the Latino vote.
Perhaps more interestingly, Jewish GOP donations fell this year, representing only 4% of Jewish donations to political campaigns; they’d hit a high of 30% in 2012 as Jews began to trend further right.
@Gesc: just the opposite: sardonic humor like this, playing with the enemies tropes and such to reduce their power, comes way too easily to me, reflexively, really, I need to check myself from “sharing”. In this case Dorothy labeled herself “provisionally white” because she knows that as she raises her online profile, Pepe is going to come at her with all the anti-semitics including the pictures of ovens, that she mentions, but many many others including “Yid” and The K-word, prefixed with “dirty” and other terms of abuse. You can check it out on line: trump’s nazi supporters gave been harassing the wuzzle out of Jewish journalists — one of whom, says our First Lady Elect, brought it on herself by writing a profile about her tgat wasn’t ly sufficiently 100% fawning.
So, Dorothy got in Robin’s face about Pepe saying that Jews aren’t really white, appearances (and white privilege) withstanding. And I combined that with the fact that Jews are the only white ethnic group which doesn’t vote like the rest of the white ethnic groups, that is, the majority of Jewish votes went for hillary, as they’ve gone democratic perhaps for ever. SO, in that sense Jews don’t behave like the other white folks, which ha ha, is maybe what led Pepe to say that Jews aren’t Genuine white, AND Pepe isn’t polite, Pepe say the K-word.
And to gird myself to not be afraid, I say the K-word, and I say fuck K all nazis. Cause November 9 was the anniversary of Kristalnacht, and two of my Yid friends wrote to me saying, hm, seems kind of familar, doesn’t it.
HOWEVER I may finally get that I shouldn’t be using the K-word and similar here and I do regret it because I do NOT do it to outrage the folks here.
Even if using racial slurs and faux-racist humor were ever okay, this is absolutely the worst fucking time for it, considering how much hate speech has increased – not just online, but out in public – since Tuesday.
There’s enough of that shit happening for real without people trying to make asinine jokes out of it. Especially when it’s not even at all clear it’s a joke.
Combination of tone being lost in text, Poe’s Law, and, well, nobody knows nobody on a comment section well enough to easily say “James wouldn’t say something like that, what was actually meant?”
I do believe that happens to me at times as well. I think I’ve crossed the line twice, but others it was only once. Normally I can explain myself in time. Once I posted support, or more so, thought I posted support. I don’t believe it read as such, considering it was deleted and I couldn’t post for days. That had me worked up, that I had hurt someone when I was being supportive (in my mind).
Thinking “They’ll know what I mean” I’ve been trying to use a flag to either rewrite, or include some kind of flag/tag to state that it’s a joke. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve missed some, posting after being up for around 20+ hours does tend to make one prone to mistakes.
It appears that Willis 86’d my most egregious fail today, which was definitely called for! But lack of sleep wasn’t my problem today, even tho lack of sleep is deadly. For me today it was a failure of mindfulness BEFORE posting something which I might have been aware wasn’t apt here at all, before I finished writing it. The mindfulness is great stuff, but it’s a bear to learn.
Oh, yeah. Throw the white solidarity thing to an educated member of the two white segments that most recently got declared white, just because someone even less white showed up. That’ll totally wor8k.
So… does Dorothy identify as part-Jewish on Twitter? Because that’s the only way I can think of that alt-right trolls would recognize her as such. She’s not any kind of celebrity, so they probably wouldn’t think of checking her heritage (…or would they? :(), the name Keener shouldn’t be a tipoff (alt-right trolls tend to assume that any last name ending in “-berg” or “-stein” is Jewish), and they wouldn’t know from looking at her.
Dorothy in fact becomes involved in the news if the whole president/politician thing doesn’t work out or she changes her mind. As both a major face and researcher with regards politics in particular be it local, national or international (or perhaps a various combination or rising from the first to the latter two).
She in such a role, unlike some of her predecessors or contemporaries in the beginning of her career: is frightfully honest and ethical, well researched and even more frighteningly for politicians, is still exceedingly popular despite this. She manages to convince people who perhaps would have originally swallowed bile from someone else unthinkingly simply because it confirmed their bias.
She in her own way can almost make or break a politicians career or at least turn an ‘easy district’ into more of a challenge. It’s just a good thing she doesn’t take it lightly. Then again that’s partially how she built her reputation.
She could turn easily evil in such a role but it doesn’t happen thankfully. Still perhaps it sort of gets to the point she could partially quote Lex Luthor:
“President? Do you know how much power I’d have to give up to be President?”
Leslie’s crush has now died… in agony. Roz is still trying to go with her original plan… the forecast is bleak… very bleak.
On the other hand Robin is sure having trouble now with the reality of her policies, good.
About the bullying, I’m old, in school the teachers said, come tell me, I’ll take care of it. They lied, they didn’t take care of it, they couldn’t take care of it, not then. And they can’t take care of it now either.
I want to thank you for Dorothy’s words. I’ve never seen that situation actually addressed outside of strictly-jewish circles, and I’ve dealt with the same stuff.
…Irish are not white? Am I missing something? I understand that Jewis features can show and thus make someone the target of racism, but Irish? They are just white? What ancestry is accepted as pure white in America?
Irish are generally considered white today, but 1800 years ago they were in a separate racial category: Irish. In order to be considered “white” they had to thoroughly assimilate and the immigration from Ireland had to come to an end.
Panel 2: Nothing is more frightening to a demagogue than someone who actually knows their shit.
Panel 5: Content Warning: Antisemitism
Oof, yeah, it’s been interesting to be a child of the internet growing up with it as well as growing up in a hyper-fundie Rapturist believing part of the country, because I’ve always been baffled at all the white people who’ve pretended that anti-semitism every stopped.
Like… no. The community I grew up with grew up literally reading works written by John Birch Society members talking about how “international bankers *wink wink*” were going to destroy the world and bring about the Anti-christ, how jews are just “unperfected christians”, and where it was important to support Israel’s eternal war with its neighbors in the hope of kickstarting an apocalypse that would incinerate every jewish man, woman, and non-binary person alive.
And that pulsing heart of pure anti-semitism has been at the heart of so much bullshit. It’s the reason why conservatives have ranted about “liberal” Hollywood, the “liberal” media, “liberal” control over universities, and the “liberal” elites (hint for all of you, liberal is an open dog-whistle for jewish in those communities, and they drop the dog-whistle when they think they are in a room of fellow travelers. It’s all jewish media and jewish elites and jewish Hollywood.
It’s why they’ve continued those dog-whistles even after Hollywood and the media tried to run from their supposed “liberal bias”. It’s why neighborhoods I’ve lived in have had bans against Jewish people owning houses there that extended well into the 1970s.
And intermixed in with this, I’ve had to see the denialism of white people to pretend that no, there hasn’t been an open recruitment of white supremacists on sites like 4chan or Reddit or Twitter. That trolls are just harmless kids having fun rather than angry violent 30+ somethings actively trying to train the next generation of white supremacists to be as full of hate as they are.
That the folks sending oven pics to jewish folks online or making a game of trying to drive trans kids to suicide or posting lynching threats to black folks were just a meaningless group that one should just ignore so they wouldn’t “win”.
And we all ignored that core group as they escalated their death threats into making it common-place in many industries to try and ruin the lives of anyone who befalls these groups, to make people scared to be alive less they get their family members killed. Asked their victims to ignore their attacks as they recruited and grew and got someone who fully espouses all their hate speech to be the president-elect of the country.
Our country has a deep and abiding white supremacist problem and Jewish folks have never been considered white. And if we let these fuckers win and continue to turn a blind eye, we’re going to find that the list of people they don’t consider to be white to be a very long list.
I’m glad you brought this up. I actually missed Dorothy’s comment about it lasting only until someone wants to discriminate against her. As a white Jew who can reasonably pass, this rings very true.
I remember when I was younger seeing those ethnicity boxes and being confused what to put. To my young brain it was “ok, I know the people near me are white, but where is the Jew box for me?” Now of course I put white, but on websites that are more open-ended I put Jewish. Even though I’m borderline Atheist, I consider being Jewish cultural as much as religous.
I remember talking to a (black) friend once, and he didn’t believe anti-semetism was still a thing since, “Jews control the media” and other stereotypes like that. I didn’t feel like argueing, but thinking about it now my declining to argue that should tell you how common it is.
For those who DON’T belive anti-semetism is a thing, here are some examples:
1) The kid that threw money at my brother when Borat came out and told him to “go him”.
2) The person sitting next to me in class that complained that our teacher was “Jewing us” by not letting us use the tissues on his desk. I’m pretty sure she knew I was Jewish but it was so common to her she didn’t make the connection.
3) I was on OkCupid looking for guys (I’m gay) when I found this cute white guy. I sent him a message, and when he responded I got cursed out in German and called a “mudman”. Honestly, I was kind of amused. I didn’t even know there WERE gay neo-nazis.
Panels 5 and 6: Oof, poor Leslie. Cause yeah, I’ve been there. It’s one thing to know about the bigotry of a person you know or a politician who controls your area and another to see it in person, see the hate shine and shimmer off them.
And it’s also another thing to be brought back to a time of suffering, to relive some of the hell that is having to survive on the streets or being treated as trash to be discarded by society.
And even more of another thing to hear that hate coming directly from the lips of someone you are attracted to. It happens a lot in the trans community, especially for straight trans women. Where they find someone they think loves them and accepts them and then they go out and meet their family or their friends and hear their loved one say all manner of transphobic things that demean their humanity and realize that the same person who is so sweet alone nonetheless doesn’t view you as a full human being.
And for Leslie, it’s even worse, because this person who is so casually dismissive of her past self. Over her own humanity? Is someone she brought on campus, is someone she didn’t give warnings to her students would be coming back, is someone she was hoping to connect with romantically or at least flirtatiously. She let this monster come into this teaching space of hers and be openly hostile to those students of hers going through the same things or supporting others going through the same things. Out of misguided lust.
And I think that’s what makes her feel gross and why it was this topic and Joyce’s mini-fight with Robin that cut through the denialism and lust. Because she knows Joyce has been through hell, nearly killed to defend her homeless queer friend, even being so triggered in a class she’s literally had to run out of it.
And yet she brought someone on campus who can’t even pretend that Becky and Leslie are human. That their lives matter as much as the potential votes of some bigots.
And that’s too much for Leslie, which is good. I love her crush and the love for Robin that defined so much for Shortpacked!, but that’s in a world of whimsy and whackiness, where Robin’s tendencies to ape the worst of Republican high officials didn’t have such lasting and abusive consequences for folks.
This Robin? Leslie can do better. Deserves someone who sees her as a full human no matter how much chemistry there is.
And Roz? Oof, fucking Roz. Like, that pained look on her face is necessary, because here she’s just failing Consent 101. You do not ever pressure someone who is having to tap out of a situation because an aspect hit hard. You do not use the pressure of “but you agreed to it” to try and push someone to continue something emotionally toxic and unhealthy to them because you think it will benefit yourself.
And it’s this moment that makes her supposed support for the queer community absolutely hollow. Cause she sees her queer teacher in distress, genuine triggered distress mumbling about her time as a queer homeless youth, and yet does not fully see said teacher’s humanity and pain and say, hey it’s okay if this isn’t going to work out.
Cause to the Roz that exists in this moment, she feels trapped and emprisoned by her sister’s political office and to her any method to destroy her sister’s candidacy, no matter what is justified to regain her freedom. And to that end she’s used herself and that’s one thing, though the podcast episode with the Emperor really did make me realize that she didn’t fully let Joe know what filming an adult video with her would mean as far as him being sucked into a scandal.
But here? She ignores her conscience and asks Leslie to keep pushing through, because to her getting her freedom means more than the suffering and pain and humanity of her queer teacher.
And that becomes even more monstrous as she makes clear her plan all along was to use her sister’s queerness (a queerness she doesn’t yet realize she has) as a means of destroying her candidacy once and for all.
About to pass out, but wanted to post. It’ll be a bit simple. Roz is in pain, and is seeking to stop it, and as such doesn’t see/realize the hurt she’s causing? Not excusing her action, btw.
Screw it, hiding that, but also want to know, so as to avoid offending. Just confused.
That actually makes a lot of sense and you might be right.
And yeah, there’s debate inside the community, but at least in the queer communities I’ve grown up in, queer has served as an umbrella terms for all individuals who are LGBT+ including the oft left-off letters like intersex, asexual, non-binary and so on. And that’s definitely a generational thing, as community fights disagree on how reclaimed the term is.
I’m also disinclined to give much weight to the “queer is a slur” types at the moment, because so many of the ones I’ve encountered have used that pose as a means of defending acephobia or intersex-exclusion in the community, so that taints that argument somewhat for me.
And it’s also the term I use for describing my own romantic orientation these days as homoromantic feels incomplete and inaccurate owing to my romantic attractions to non-binary folks including my enbyfriend, but bi/panromantic being too frequently interpreted as meaning every skeezy cis boy should hit on me in the most Joe way possible. So queeromantic has fit for me at the moment which makes me feel even more positively for the term.
Well alright then, thank you. And I’m also kinda disturbed that I had a thought out, albeit simple, theory and a non-offensive question articulated minutes before falling asleep.
I’ve never posted here before (I don’t think?), but I had to say that I love the sound of ‘queeromantic’. I use queer as a self/community descriptor, but that portmanteau just rolls off the tongue in a pleasing way.
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btw if you're one of those rando bluesky weirdos who doesn't know me but sees me in the wild being sarcastic and don't know i'm being sarcastic because you haven't taken like 30 seconds to, like, maybe look at my user profile or something, keep walking, you're not going to score internet points here
Here's an entertaining cite at the bottom of the first page
Josh Gerstein@joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
JUST IN: Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan moves to dismiss federal criminal case against her for allegedly helping immigrant hide from ICE. Her lawyers say she's protected by official acts & judicial immunity and 10th Amendment. Doc: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 18h
Josh Gerstein @joshgerstein.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 2d
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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still doing better than if Trump was there
Leslie putting away her lesson plans and planning a Robinexit
to be fair not all lessons need to be pleasant. by diving into the darkest parts of humanity you can learn things you cant if you only stay where you feel most comfortable.
Or you can enter a depressive spiral, or at least come very close. I’m speaking from personal experience here.
i did that when nobody tried to touch the darkness because others forced it on me. I remember my classmates kept asking if they were on my kill list which i never had because they thought i was the most likely to pull a columbine.
When I was in high school, some guys would say if anyone was gonna shoot up the school, it would be me. Cause I was quiet and didn’t care about talking about people. They asked me the same thing, if they were on my kill list. I turned it into a joke and said oh absolutely, you’re near the top. It was doubly satisfying because I thought it was hilarious and they stopped talking to me.
Same. I got sent to five different school counselors who told me to deal with the bullying by ignoring them and they’d leave me alone, then turned the focus to checking to see how homicidal I seemed to be. On the bright side, the bullying stopped entirely once I bought a black trenchcoat.
“five different school counselors who told me to deal with the bullying by ignoring them and they’d leave me alone,”
I hate that particular lie so much. Why don’t they ever give good advice for dealing with bullies? Or just “Sorry that’s happening, I have no idea how to stop it”? instead of feel-good lies that don’t work?
Sorry, pet peeve. You can guess why.
I’d have settled for “sorry you’re being bullied, kid. That’s some bullshit”.
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” is crap, though. It only works with some bullies, and only if they never get a reaction from you. Once they have, they’ll keep at it no matter how long you ignore them
If anything, my experiences being bullied growing up only seemed to indicate that they took being ignored as a challenge to see how far they could keep pushing before I’d snap and lash out.
Then after you actually did lash out, you’d get in trouble and they’d play innocent…
I am sorry you also dealt with that shit.
I also had the bad luck of having other kids start a rumor that I had a “kill list”. I was hauled out of class and had the cops search my locker and all my things, then was interrogated for hours by the school counselor. Even though I kept repeating that this was just my bullies’ latest way of bullying me, nobody would listen.
I didn’t have a “kill list.”
I did (do) have an asshole brain that likes to torment me with shit I don’t actually want to do but can’t stop thinking about. So guess what it latched onto after that for the next three years?
Fun times. */sarcasm*
When they told me “They’re just trying to get a reaction out of you” I saw the most efficient way to get a reprieve as breaking down in tears pretty much immediately. They got their reaction, they spent less time harassing me.
I’m not saying this was actually a good idea but since I wasn’t dead inside it was hard to go with not actually reacting.
Well, glad to know I’m not the only one who got shoved into a damned mental asylum for several days because of the testimony of shitweasels that managed to get away with completely grinding down my patience to the point where I did actually retaliate and threaten them, all because they were “easier to trust” than someone who spent most of his time away from most everyone else.
No? Just me?
But yeah, they eventually came to the realization that I was a perfectly rational human being.
“Ignore them and they’ll go away” is the lie adults tell so they can avoid accepting that THEY are failing to protect children. So is “He’s only hitting you/pulling your hair/insulting you because he likes you.” Impotent adults victim blaming to hide their guilt.
Oh yeah, I got the “boys just do that to girls they like”. In junior high. In response to me telling the teacher the guy had threatened to kill my cat.
Pretty sure he didn’t like me.
You both sound a lot like me, miados and Burps.
Of course, I’d also tell them that I had a note after their name reminding me to use a full clip.
i cant stand realistic gore in movies etc so even if i wanted to after the first person i would end up vomiting and be unable to continue.
Oh hell yes.
She’s dragging he feet on invoking Article 50.
Just occurred to me that DeSexit might’ve been better? XD
Well, she definitely did a Debreastit.
The sad part for Leslie is, she’s not supporting Robin for political reasons like Trump vs Hillary or Democrat vs Republican etc. She’s doing it because she thinks Robin is hot. … which, ultimately means, however shallow and pandering Robin is being portrayed here, Leslie is even MORE shallow and pandering, willing to completely give up her own principles in order to win brownie points with her target audience… :O
I fail to see how being attracted to someone horrible could make her worse than the horrible person.
Even if Leslie weren’t – right here, in today’s strip – changing her mind about dating Robin, it’s not like it would help Robin pass more discriminatory laws. Robin would still be the one doing that, like she was already.
Thinking somebody is hot, while actively working against the horrible things they’re doing makes you worse than them?
She didn’t vote DeSanto though.
Please let this comment be the first on every future strip
idk if that’d work for Becky/Dina strips, but sure XD
Have you every played Six Degrees of Hitler? It’s surprisingly easy
ok how about um…….. bill gates. or am i guessing how the game works wrong
Ok so to get to hitler in 5 steps from Bill Gates:
competition: Apple: 1984: fascist dictator: hitler.
Done.
Here’s one.
Gates sold PCDOS to IBM
IBM sold Hollerith sorting machines to the Nazis
Porsche is a German company that was part of the Third Reich’s military industry complex. So anyone who owns a Porsche can be connected to the Nazis with…one degree of separation.
The Volkswagen was commissioned by Hitler and Ferry Porsche had the first production car delivered to him. Anyone who owns a Beetle is one degree of separation, any other models are 2 degrees.
IIRC, pretty much any major company with ‘volk’ in the name goes back to the Nazi party.
“Anyone who owns a Beetle is one degree of separation, any other models are 2 degrees.”
So, where would my G1 Bumblebee and Goldbug toys put me?
That’s a good question.
Since it’s just the likeness of a beetle, it’s probably two degrees, but Japan was one of the three Axis powers, so that might knock it back down to one degree.
Depends on if the toy market was somehow tied to the war effort or not.
Your robot toys are actually spies for the Japanese government that is why furbies turn on all the time without you touching them, or why your robot listlessly walks across the floor without you doing a damn thing. Or that DAMN monkey with the symbols clashing them together and staring at you with his huge grin saying, “Imma gonna eat you, YES I AM!”
After playing Fallout 4, my first impulse when I see those monkeys is to blow their head off.
Hugo Boss – tailors to the Third Reich.
Bosch – made the doors on the gas chambers.
In the grand scheme of things, though, “the villain’s tailor” is a position of at best minimal culpability, unless the clothes have, I don’t know, combat capabilities of their own.
Bosch gets no excuses, though.
In the grand scheme of things, everyone and everyone shrinks to insignificance. Seriously. The Nazis were SO deeply into symbolism and appearances that Boss SS uniforms definitely contributed to their sense of self and efficacy and so contributed to what they did. Bottom line: I don’t see why Boss should get a pass because all he did was outfit the guys who did the crimes.
The Altright *love* the tailoring, and fogel is right. I can’t remember who called the nazis “hippies with helmets” but they were right, idiotic symbols and rituals were all part of the Nazi thing. Symbolism and mysticism were all the Nazis had going for them, they were shit at organizing which is why they lost.
The “cool” uniforms back-fired on the SS and Wehrmacht. Those uniforms were rubbish in cold weather.
The Soviets may have looked like a bunch of scruff-bags, but they were warm scruff-bags who survived.
Way easier now that we’ve elected his reincarnation.
Honestly, I can’t decide if the parallels between Trump and Hitler are scarier than they are freakishly uncanny anymore, and that’s saying a lot because they’re absolutely terrifying.
To be fair, Hitler had the full support of his party and the populace that put him in power legitimately thought he had some viable ideas on how to fix the problems of the day. Trump meanwhile was largely elected by people who have no trust in him but still had less in his opponent and is now the leader of a party that supports him only a bit more than they would have supported his opponent. There is further the fact that the amount of power centralized in the Chancellorship of Germany then was significantly greater than what has ever been available to the PotUS.
Or not to be fair, Hitler published his book Mein Kamp (My Life) and detailed exactly what he planned to do. And then he did it.
FYI, that’s “Mein Kampf” (My Fight or My Struggle, depending on translation)
vlademir1 – Correct on all counts. I wonder if he realizes it yet?
I’m not sure about your distinction. The fact no history book on the third reich explained was how suddenly there were so many people following him when before, German society was at its most open. Right now I feel like I’m watching something like that happening again. You start with electing someone to make you great again and then people around you start acting like assholes, and the more people are acting that way the more likely it is that others fall in line.
And btw, there were people in his party who were against him. He killed some of them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
Sorry for my english which is particulary hectic when I speak about germany (as I think it in german first, then translate it to french then english)
There are many, with different explanations. For example antisemitism was already largely uses by political parties at the time. Winckler explains the fall of Weimar by the failure of socio-democrats (MSPD and USPD) to unite with the right and that they were too much influenced by the former spartakists – he very much tells that the radicality of the then-passed laws upseted the military chefs and that rather tot try to control their left they should have allied. That’s a bit too much excusing Noske massakers for me. Of course, the authoritarian communist theory is that the country wasn’t ready as cities as Berlin were nowhere as much an industrial city as a military-driven and kaiser-true administrative city, or as Bavaria was entirely too much rural (so Fröhlich). Libertarian communists explain it by the fall of the left and of organization, and the massive Freikörper use. For whoever is interested in it but doesn’t want to read history books I advice reading the literature of the time (Mann – the young one Döblin, Fallada, Zweig, Tucholski…). I too advice to read upon Austria history, were another fascist regime, somehow opposed to hitler, was at work whereas a great workers movement could have resisted (and some but not as many as could have been tried and died).
Goodbye to Berlin (the story Cabaret is based on) reflects the time well.
Hitler’s story starts with the coup in Munic in 1923, when he allied with other ultra-conservative forces against the Stresemann chancellorship during the hyper-inflation and the French occupation of the Rhineland and Ruhr area, then acceptance of the conditions imposed by Versailles. While that putsch failed, Hitler spent only a nine months in prison, where he wrote “Mein Kampf”.
Basically, he was a militia leader who had marched against the state military, spent some time in prison where he wrote his pamphlet, then returned to work the political scene for the next eight years before winning the election through a coalition of conservative but not Nazi parties, like e.g. DNVP, the party of the Junker landholders of northeastern Germany.
The multi-party situation of te Weimar Republic is quite different from anything happening in the US. But, when Hitler became chancellor, he had less than one third of the German voters behind the NSDAP. The German equivalent of Murdoch and the Koch Brothers then thought they could ride the tiger, and proved that they couldn’t.
So: Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the history that that Austrian Charly Chaplin imitator had when he won his election So far that comparison is way over the top. (Let’s hope that remains to be true…)
A lot of things are cultural and unwritten – those will go by the board.
Your institutions will be stress-tested. In the UK, there will be a march against the UK Supreme Court led by Farage, who seems to be fulfilling the role of some sort of ex officio minister, and some right wing groups.
Trump has said he wants to keep holding rallies.
“Trump has said he wants to keep holding rallies.”
This is because he enjoys hearing people scream his name far, far more than he cares about the job of actually being President, which is why his staffers (reportedly) offered “total control of domestic and foreign policy” to their prospective VP nominees, specifically Kasich, who turned it down (one of his people was supposedly the person who leaked the exchange), and Pence, who accepted.
When a skeptical staffer asked what Trump would be in charge of if not either foreign or domestic policy, the response was (predctably) “making America great again.”
Damn you for being such a principled guy, Kasich!
I mean, yes. But then, that’s one reason I voted for him. He’s still the only primary opponent who never endorsed the now-(regrettably)-President-elect.
On a more meta level, if Kasich *wasn’t* such a principled guy as to reject the offer, wouldn’t that prove that he wouldn’t have been a good enough VP in the first place? I mean, probably still better than Pence, but that’s a pretty low bar.
I’m right there with you, I’m just sad-laughing at the irony of it
Job opening for an Albert Speer like figure.
Trump wants to build things. What better than to build arenas for his rallies?
The Nazis got into power with something like 33% of the vote. But in Germany’s multi-party system with the Nazis having 33% and the Communists having 17%, it was impossible to form a stable government coalition without one or the other, and Hindeburg decided the Nazis were the lesser evil.
And the Weimarer Republic was born in bloodbath and the government chose to arm right wing war veterans…there’s that too
Not a whole lot of choice there when the Entente had all but disbanded the German army, Poles were deciding they didn’t care for the border set at the table and making a grab for Upper Silesia, and Communists were trying to set up Soviets in Bavaria, turning to the Freikorps seemed like the least bad of a nasty set of options. And if it hadn’t been for the Great Depression and the inability of the centrist parties to form a stable coalition with either the non-Communist left or the non-Nazi right, it would have paid off. The Nazi putsch in Munich in the 20s was a fiasco, after all.
If only they’d left Hitler in jail…
I’ve heard people say that Trump is more a Mussolini than a Hitler… not that it’s much comfort.
“Cheeto Mussolini” just works, though.
Oh my god, where did you hear that? Did you *come up with* that? Can I use it, please, pretty pretty please?
I keep trying to push ‘Mango Mussolini’
I’ve seen him called Il Douche (or even Ill Douche).
Wait a minute. Trump’s like 70 right? Hitler died in mid 1945. Add nine months… ahhh shit.
DONALD TRUMP IS FEGELEIN
That’s what you were going for, right?
God no. Then Pence takes control. And he’s competent enough to ACHIEVE all of the horrible things he believes in.
Yeah, I’m way more scared of Pence than I am of Trump, for one thing, the republicans actually love Pence;And Pence is the one who likes the idea of conversion therapy.
Trump might talk about his ‘wall’, but Pence is the one I could see going through with mass deportation.
You know, that was actually really clever – pick such a horrible VP that people will still prefer Trump to remain in office…
I know a 14 month gap.
Whew. That was a close one.
Actually, Benito Mussolini also died in ’45, and apparently proclaimed that he would be reincarnated to take over another, greater nation. I don’t know if that was real or just an internet-urban-legend started when someone noticed that Trump was born in ’46, though.
America has had countless prejudice-spouting demagogues who have run on campaigns of fear. Reagan, Dubya, Nixon, and plenty of others have served in office. Damage will happen but it’s not the end of the world. It’s a shitty 4-8 years.
Depends whether our marginalized pals live through these years (vs getting hate-crimed, or dying from improper access to healthcare, etc).
Note that in the list of poor Presidents I’ve just listed, friends of mine, my brothers, and my father’s all died. Also, it’s possible my own family may be made destitute depending on medical emergency. FUN FUN. I just am able to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Apropos of nothing, people who are dying are also often said to be able to see a light at the end of a tunnel.
I, like you, wish his presidency the dullest of times. I’m just not as sure as you that’s going to happen.
He’s sort of reneging on his plans to gut Obamacare, so we’ll see.
The deportation of 2million “illegals” still seems to be on his wish-list.
He’s reneged on gutting Obamacare.
Unless something else happens, we know that environment policy *will* get fucked over – the civilisation-ending disaster is coming and he’ll make it come faster with his appointment of the Climate Change denier to the EPA.
The problem with Trump is that his dampening effects won’t just be in the US. He will effectively stifle the international cooperation that is needed to combat global warming.
Then there’s the creationist in charge of education. The “gay is a lifestyle choice” in charge of social policy.
Newt Gingrich at the State Department, who will almost certainly oversee genocide in Syria.
And Trump still wants to do his rallies.
That was my first thought, there’s actually an entire generation of trans women and gay men who are lost because of the absolute gutting that was the AIDS crisis during Reagan’s population and that was just a passive attempt at genocide of the “let’s all sit back and watch this” variety.
We’re gonna lose a lot of folks. Through hate crimes, through loss of life support and healthcare, through top-level elimination campaigns, through suicide. We’re already losing lots of folks.
Some of us will survive. The trick is keeping that number as high as we can make it, even if it’s just out of spite against the fuckers trying to gut us like fish.
Well. Depending on whether we get things like, for example, a climate change denier as the head of the EPA … it might be the end of the world. Sooner, at any rate, since it was always going to end sometime.
The world will still be here (It’s really hard to destroy a planet). Human civilization, for some value of it, will still be here.
This is the rough extent of the good things to say about unchecked climate change. Things will change.
Actually, there’s been research since last year by the U of Leicester that there might not be breathable atmosphere by 2060 at this rate:
http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/press-releases/2015/december/global-warming-disaster-could-suffocate-life-on-planet-earth-research-shows
And remember: Climatologists always lowball their estimates.
Actually they don’t.
Or we could have another William Harrison.
Only if Pence dies first.
I was including Pence in that statement.
Tragic crash of Air Force One, or the Lady of the Lake decides that it’s time we try something different. Either one is fine with me.
you know, I was WONDERING if there was a particular reason “Designated Survivor” suddenly became a series
Mencius Moldbug has an outline for the latter.
they use two different planes.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is… well, better than the Electoral College, actually.
Rather than be morbid, I’d like to wish Trump a long life and a completely lame duck presidency so he and Pence are irrelevancies for their term.
One important point. He has the Senate and Congress and only TWO YEARS to prove to the US citizens that his policies are helping before mid- term elections roll around. Otherwise, the Republicans could lose one or both houses and he’s left having to fight tooth and nail to enact any of his policies.
Republicans have huge strategic advantages in 2018. Gerrymandering and more voter suppression for the House, but the House is probably still easier to flip. 2018’s Senators are the product of the Democratic wave in 2006 & the presidential election of 2012. There are, IIRC, 25 Democrats up for re-election and only 8 Republicans. The Republicans are mostly in deep red states that held through both those pro-Democratic cycles. Many of the Democrats are in hostile, republican territory. It’s going to be hard to hold the line, much less gain seats.
I imagine Mike Pence being about as horrid as John Tyler if he gets in.
It’s not the end of the world, but given taht even fucking medicare is looking under threat… people are going to die.
Well, technically, that was true regardless, since there was no way we’d stop engaging in safe (for us) violence against middle easterners, but even more than that.
My best friend needs it to care for his ailing father or his father will die. It may wipe out MY father in his current condition and me as well. The thing is, the Democrats can fight this the way the Republicans did its implementation. I just don’t know if they have it in them.
As said friend who is terrified said, “Yeah, I suspect he’ll just be as bad as Bush.”
“Millions will die?”
“Yes, but not billions.”
If, as expected, Trump sides with Assad in Syria there will be a genocide. The refugee problem will be dwarf what we’ve seen so far.
As a comfort, he may or may not give nuclear weapons to the Sauds.
His plan to wipe out ISIS is actually insane and will cause more problems that it cures (see genocide).
The worse thing about all this, is that after 2 years of a brutal campaign we have no idea what will happen.
We do know, with his transition plan, that his ideas of “draining the swamp” are bollocks. BAU.
Regan ran in a much more peaceful era than many we have lived thru. Nixon ran in a darker era true. Dubya ran on fear yes, after 9/11 he gloried in it,
But none of them are in the same league with Trump. They were surely not saints. But….None of them admitted on national tv that they assaulted women, none admitted they never paid any income tax because the govt. was too stupid to know what to do with it, none of them called one of our biggest importers (Mexico) rapists and murders, none of them were friendly with David Dukes of the KKK. None made fun of disabled or harassed gold star parents. And yet…the man who DID do all of this is our President Elect.
I don’t think this says much for our common sense.
Regan ran during the Cold War and many people who lived in his time believed he would literally cause a nuclear war. I think the attempt to make Trump worse than the above isn’t so much an insult to Trump (it isn’t) but a pass for those individuals. Trump is not the dictator of the United States and there are checks and balances for a reason. Making him more than he is gives him too much power when Presidents can and have been checked many times.
With the NATO exercise Able Archer, Reagan almost caused a nuclear war. He was rational enough to withdraw from that precipice.
Trump? I’m not so sure.
Also, don’t forget all the proxy wars Reagan paid for in central and south America. Pinochet? Our fault. Nicaraguan civil war? Our fault. Death squads in El Salvador? Also our fault. Colombian drug war? Ditto.
The robust system of checks and balances that stopped the black Democratic president from making sport of the Fourth in the same way as his predecessor?
Like, don’t get ahead of yourself here. These things don’t automatically work based on cosmic law.
Oh yes, Trump has an immense amount of power to work havoc thanks to Bush and Obama. On the other hand, it didn’t stop Reagan or his supporters from doing the same everywhere from Afghanistan to Angola to all of South America.
Nixon had a Democratic Congress throughout his terms. Reagan had at least a Democratic House.
That made those checks and balances a little more effective.
Even beyond that, the Republican party as a whole is crazier and less interested in good governance than back then.
Really, that is the nature of the Wild Card that is Trump in that the Republicans may or may not fall in behind him. They’re certainly glad he’s their President versus Hillary but it really depends on who will get behind who in the coming years.
Honestly the Republicans falling in behind Trump isn’t even really the issue. Him being willing to sign off on most of the Republican agenda is sufficient.
That there may be conflict over the few things from either that are sufficiently horrific that the other can’t stomach them is really cold comfort.
In the Reagan era, people were afraid that we would die in a nuclear war with the USSR. Not a wartime, sure, but people were pretty scared.
This does NOT downs Cale the Evil that is Trump, it’s a technical thing. There are parralels between Trump & Hitler, but there also important differences AND there are other historical cases which work better. This is important, first, because we need to understand vmas well as possible who/what we are dealing with. Second, we risk being less effective if we throw “Hitler” around casually. (I do not care if it’s “unfair” to Trump. I’m concerned about defeating him.)
In my school in Germany, when programming classes where particularly dull, we played the Hitler game on Wikipedia. You take a random page and then have to find the shortest way to get to Hitler, only clicking on links in the article.
logic vs labido basically
Labido being a labrador retriever’s libido, which presumably has nothing to do with the current situation.
*can’t find any limbo records*
Consolation Prize.
Because you’re supposed to requisition a beat.
Aw, Leslie… *hughughug*
Seriously. If somebody doesn’t hug that lady soon I’m gonna have to bust into the comic and do it myself
Yeah. It makes me sad that there’s no one else in the cast who is an eligible romantic partner for her. Maybe she will just have a mostly off-panel lover, which would make sense because she’s one of the few adult characters. Or maybe Robyn will have a much bigger change of heart than anything we’re expecting, but that seems less likely.
Which I think is part of what explains her desperation here. She’s stuck in Indiana because she’s a fresh-faced professor and these days that means going where the positions are, which are often locals that are sometimes passively or openly hostile to non-normative ways of being.
And fuck yes, echoing the desire to smash into the comic and hug her.
Meh, Just because you find someone attractive doesn’t mean you have to like them. They’re two separate things.
yeah. if you had to like a person as a person to find them hot adult entertainment would be much different.
lots of things like explaining why they think they are a good person and then they strip.
the section at the store would be divided differently too
dog lover, readers, knows how to cook.
I would not necessarily be opposed to a porn section organized in such a manner…
how about merge a pron shop and dating service?
Yes, but it is a requirement if you’re going to pursue a relationship with them.
Leslie is no longer convinced this fixer-upper is worth it
It just seems a little pricey for a unique fixer-upper opportunity, that’s all.
Depends. I don’t find anyone attractive unless I like them – or can imagine that I would like them based on facial expression and other cues. Learning that I do not like someone kills their attractiveness. Liking someone may cause them to be attractive to me when they weren’t before. I’m unclear on it, but this may put me within hailing range of demisexual.
*nod* Same here.
Well, unless you’re demisexual.
Ouch. ;~;
Right back atcha Robin.
man, the timing on this buffer was so on-point…
reminds me how the timing on a dilbert comic mocked nuns at the same time a famous one died and he had about a 6 month buffer. the law of large numbers means these things happen.
I think it was supposed to be coincidental.
Well, he knew when the strip would drop, and therefor that it would be on point, either in the depressing sense that it turned out to be, or as a reminder of the bullet we’d dodged.
The bar is Nazis and the ground below it is caffeine-free coffee
Hey now, some people like me need caffeine-free coffee or we’d be even more stressed out.
But yeah, I’m transitioning to jasmine tea at the moment.
The “not statements” being made are something else. Robin is so fucked, and not in the good way by Leslie, I miss the cheese in their relationship in Shortpacked
A few days ago, someone said something that’s been bugging me ever since: that the classroom discussion was “violently unsafe.”
These young adults are voting age. If they should never be exposed to what the hater politicians are saying, even in a classroom setting where there is zero physical danger and a caring teacher…
Then how are they supposed to learn that it’s VERY IMPORTANT to get out and vote against the hater politicians?
I wonder how many millennials didn’t vote against Trump just because of this?
It’s ridiculous how the use of terms like “triggers” and “safe spaces” to shield people from opinions that are not their own has proliferated as of late, much on detriment to the people with real fucking triggers that have to deal with others making them all look not just bad, but fake.
i was raised in a violent home. i really fucking hate what people have done to those words. i feel disgusting to use it even though “triggered” is EXACTLY how i felt watching a movie and then it suddenly shows the step-dad constantly insulting and leading to punching and throwing plates.
i had to run out of my friend’s hows sobbing and i was out of commission for a fucking week. couldn’t even bring myself to explicitly say i needed a “safe space” i just fucking ran
…well, that’s certainly a very narrow view of the situation. Unfortunately, some of us are extremely well versed in “violently unsafe” without ever having seen it in a classroom situation–I very much doubt that any voter was completely unfamiliar with the kind of violence Trump-like people can do. Mayyyyyybe some of the straight white cis able-bodied male voters? But those went majority to Trump anyway, soooooooo.
Point being, some of us need a place where we can just breathe and stop being on our guard.
Some of you need to grow up and realize that the world is not and never will be a safe place. If you need a place to breath, go home and go to bed.
It would appear that a major shift in education is taking place now: no longer do young people go to college to learn that there are actually opinions in the world that do not agree with what they grew up with, and that those opinions are not necessarily bad, they are simply…different. It is a good think to learn new ideas, new opinions, new ways of life. It helps us to grow. Or it used to anyway.
We are raising, have raised, a generation of wimps. Don’t like the real world, go hide in a closet and wait for it to go away.
I worry for our future.
Joyce is one of the few here in DoA who have learned and is living that lesson.
It’s iconic that you say that, considering that the need for both safe spaces and trigger warnings have come up in her story arcs, sometimes even referred to as such.
Becky deliberately created a safe space for her when organizing the party. That was even the entire reason for the party.
Joyce’s friends and Leslie haven’t actually mentioned trigger warnings, but have all clearly shown they feel taking a little extra care when talking about certain subjects around her isn’t some unreasonable burden. Because it isn’t.
*ironic, not iconic
to be fair, i don’t think that’s what idontcarenomore was referring to. they weren’t saying being sensitive to people’s adversities and trauma’s is bad. it’s just that people can’t expect the world to accommodate them.
also, i didn’t interpret it as putting the onus on people to just be reckless. it was more like show compassion but understand the world won’t.
“Bigoted oppression and violence” =/= “Different opinions”. Forgive this ‘generation of wimps’ for wanting a spot guaranteed not to include shit like that and get a break.
the world will always have bigots. you can want the bad to be gone but still see it be there.
i was raised in a violent home, so i understand the bigoted actions and violence you are talking about. luckily, my mother is a kind person and taught me to be kind and considerate. but she (..and my father..) also taught me the world is going to suck.
you can fight it without being whiny.
True, the world’s a shitty place, and it always makes me sad to learn about people that had to live through violent or abusing childhood and adolescence (or also their whole life). I respect people that can live through things like that strong and tackle on life, no matter what shit’s been throwing at them (though I realise it takes hard work to come to this point).
But some people (no matter their experiences, whether they’ve been sheltered or not) aren’t like that and can’t change their personality and adapt to the world as a shitty place simply like that. I don’t see how them maybe wishing to be or stay in a safe place makes them “a generation of wimps” or “whiny”.
“The world will always have bigots”
That does not obligate people to deal with them 100% of the time and wanting a place where you won’t HAVE to deal with their bullshit 24/7 is not wrong. Taking an hour or two to meet with folks, discuss your issues, and NOT have to deal with whatever bigoted nonsense is being thrown your way is a good thing.
Also, my point wasn’t whether you can make bigots disappear. I said ‘bigoted oppression and violence’ are not mere ‘differing opinions’. The former is morally wrong. The other doesn’t need to be. People do not have any more obligation to put up with assholes spewing hatred and bigotry than they do an asshole trying to hit them (which, wouldn’t you know it, is often part of bigotry).
I don’t know why I’ve bothered to reply to you with this since by arguing folks are just ‘being whiny’ by wanting a space where they don’t have to deal with this shit, you’re clearly not acting in good faith.
Calling folks on their shit is not being whiny. Explaining the harm done by their bullshit is not whiny. Wanting a spot they won’t have to deal with that bullshit and it not being tolerated is not whiny.
“The world is going to suck” is a defeatist attitude. Constructing a space people can go to get a break and weather the storm a little is a good thing – it’s good for their mental health, it builds community, and it makes it so there’s at least one spot where bigots are not tolerated. They are important for making things better.
So, bigots are ubiquitous, and you can never completely escape them.
But also, if you are briefly allowed to escape them, you’ll be so sheltered you’ll never be able to deal with them. Anything less than 100% asshole saturation will leave you a whiny baby unable to deal.
Your own argument blatantly contradicts itself, because it’s a shitty argument.
yikes
People keep saying that, except for professors and students who mostly seem to find it a fiction. For example consider the term “trigger warning”. It’s widely reported as a sign coddled people are being insulated from discussing other opinions. And yet it literally means “be ready for this because we are going to discuss it”.
3Oranges: yes
Since nobody, aside from certain extremely fundamentalist Christians, expects not to have their ideas challenged in a North American college; I assume you’re shitting on trigger warnings.
The need for these stems from a mental illness called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A major symptom is that certain events can bring on a re-experience of the trauma in question, which, let me assure you as someone who knows, is fucking unpleasant. A trigger warning is a warning that a discussion topic, or some other stimulus, is likely to trigger that kind of reaction in a PTSD sufferer whose trauma is something related. In a learning environment, that allows a student who might otherwise have anything from a panic attack to a full-on psychotic episode to avoid that reaction, and spares the rest of the class any disruption.
I assure you, no classroom experience really needs the added effect of me reliving the gang-rape I underwent at age 4. I further assure you that since this is in fact my bloody gang-rape we are talking about, not forcing me to relive it won’t coddle me particularly, since I’m still living with the effects of it 35 years later, 22 years after my last sexual assault, and I am by the same token richly aware that the world is not a safe place. This also applies to my co-sufferers and their own traumas.
If the class discussing child rape in my hypothetical trigger-warned absence doesn’t get a good grasp of the full horror of the subject despite the very graphic materials and descriptions that were presumably the occasion of said warning, that is not my problem.
One last thought: PTSD is fairly common among combat vets, first responders to the scenes of major tragedies, people who have survived torture, and those who have survived events that stood a good chance of killing them. Not, in other words, wimps.
Oh, so that’s what “trigger warning” means. Sounds like a reasonable idea.
They also can serve, not just as “leave if you can’t handle this”, but “brace yourself so you can handle this”.
Whirlwitch: yes AND I send you my best as you go forward.
A gender studies courselves needs trigger warnings exactly because of its subject. NOTWITHSTANDING WHICH GS courses are SAFE places to learn what the world out there is like and even how to deal with it better.
i think it’s more about the idea that they’re actively trying to block off opposing viewpoints like keeping speakers from coming to those schools
i mean even the KKK guy got enough votes to go to that one debate. you can’t protest him BEING there. you can debate him and knock his points out like a champ, though.
While that does happen, that’s not how safe spaces are supposed to work. You can’t commandeer a public space and declare it a safe space and force people there to abide by a set of rules they never agreed to.
Safe spaces are about creating an environment where everyone entering it has to agree to those rules to enter it, so the those inside can get a break from the shit they have to deal with outside of that space.
And again, people protesting a speaker can and should express their displeasure about that speaker just being there. Protesting doesn’t stop them from speaking. It only voices the feelings of “YOU’RE A BIGOTED ASSHOLE” which any member of the KKK should already be hearing from inside their own head.
What the fuck. What in the actual /fuck/?
…honey, I know you mean this really really hard with all your misguided little heart, but to be totally honest, I’ve heard this tired old line so many times I can’t even take it seriously.
If you insist other people live a constant battle just to keep their head above water, you shouldn’t be so disappointed when they start fighting you over it.
Part of the reason we *HAVE* trigger warnings now is that people refused to stay in the closet. So we’ve been forced to acknowledge that when we’re talking about negative attitudes towards LGBT people, there may be people present who’ve been personally affected. We can’t just use sexual assault as a throwaway example (which I’ve had male professors do) and assume that that won’t affect assault victims’ ability to absorb the course material.
Does it sometimes go to far? Sure. But “generation of wimps” is an awfully strong way of putting it. And I’m a teacher who uses trigger warnings precisely BECAUSE I expose my students to difficult topics. I want them to come to class prepared when we’re looking at a study of all the f*cked up things people say to blame sexual assault victims. It’s painful, but they all understand that it’s important.
Violent bigotry is not a “different opinion” and it sure as Hell isn’t fine.
Btw, I’ve followed hate groups. I know where that lie/line originated; do you?
Is the fact that people think I’m a immoral sinner who doesn’t deserve to marry – and who some believe would deserve to DIE – really just a ‘different opinion’ I should be okay with, though…?
You should compromise. Maybe they could half kill you?
I think you’re being unreasonable here, we’re trying to find common ground.
Ok. This bullshit stops. I am a cis white male. I was shot, fifteen times, breaking up a gay bashing. Dumb bastards couldn’t even aim right at point blank. Point is, every time you say shit like that, you demean me, and you demean every decent, honest cis white male who just wants *everyone* to have the same rights and respect he does.
Oh, and the guy I saved? We’re dating now.
Probably not very many, since if it was just the millennials who voted Clinton would have procured over 500 electoral votes.
Ughhhhhhh.
Okay, let’s explain this real quick.
Marginalized people do NOT get to be like privileged people and ignore the viewpoints and hostility of dominant groups. Like, let’s take me. I’m trans. I don’t get to rest for a hot second and ignore the hostility and abuse of cis people who think I am a stain on humanity’s jeans and need to be destroyed.
Where I get abuse screamed at me on the street, where I get to read about endless amounts of politicians fundraising on the idea that I’m inherently a child rapist simply for existing and that my right to pee should be eliminated to protect children from being raped by me. Where I have plenty of people feeling fully empowered to yell all manner of abuse at me or threaten me with death or violence to my face.
So, if a bigot politician is not invited to spout hate on a campus I belong to or a community organization I belong to, that is not lacking every seeing what that bigot thinks about me. How much pain he (and it’s very frequently a he) desires to deliver to my community. How little he sees me as a being worthy of life. How much he wants me to die.
And even if I managed to block out all news and live in a safe little bubble, I’d still find out about the laws he passed specifically targeting me and mine’s ability to survive and peacefully move through society and his acolytes will only be too happy to echo his rhetoric to me on the streets, shouted from their cars or their sides of the street.
I don’t get to hide for even a second and turn it off and simply be in a space that is not overtly hostile to my existence, that wants me to give up and kill myself.
So, when I work to create a safe space on a campus or state that my goal is to create a safe space at my school for trans youth, what I’m doing isn’t letting them stick their heads in the sand and ignore the world. What I’m doing is giving them a temporary respite from the storm, carving out a tiny space where they can exist without fearing that they’ll be killed for it, giving them one space that says they are beautiful and deserving of life, giving them a community that doesn’t just tolerate their right to not die (maybe), but actually cheers their existence.
One small little respite from the violent world outside that they can’t help but be aware of.
THAT’S what a safe space is.
And content warnings? Those are simply giving people who’ve been through shit a head’s up so they don’t dissolve into a PTSD attack in the middle of the goddamn classroom. Cause you know, it’s super easy for them to participate in a lesson when they are fighting a rape flashback, or weeping in the bathroom because they’re having a full panic attack, or unable to leave the bed for the next few days.
It’s giving folks a head’s up so they can prepare what they need to cope with the toxic painful abusive memories of LIVING through hell.
And the fact that shitty ass privileged piles of puke can look at the suffering of people who’ve actually suffered and go, ugh these institutions mean weakness, these tiny pillows mean hiding from the big bad world openly disgusts me and I’m out of patience now that the champion of the fuckers who’ve been making “triggered” jokes at me for the last 4 years because I talk about surviving attempts to murder me, because I talk about surviving rape, I talk about the PTSD I’ve carried with me like an unruly child is going to the White House.
okay, i get the rage. but the point is more to the examples of people actively protesting certain speakers from coming to schools.
or the KKK dude who got enough senatorial race votes to go to a debate. you can’t protest him BEING there. you can tell people this is how he’ll think and you can debate the hell outta him. (honestly, it wouldn’t be hard.. considering how stupid the “logic” behind his proposals are)
Yes, you can protest him being there. Just as the speaker has the right to speak, others have the right to protest it and call them an asshole.
Freedom of speech does not equate to entitlement to a platform – and furthermore, it goes both ways. Person A has the right to say horrible things, and I have the right to say to other people, “This person is a horrible asshole, why are you listening to them?”
Not only can you protest him being there, it’s pretty obviously and objectively immoral to raise no objection at all.
Gonna be a little hard to do that Robin, since they think they damn near run the country right now.
…Too soon?
YES!
…..Sorry it’s still painful.
Sorry, Robin, but all discussions eventually turn to Nazis.
You could say that she did nazi that coming.( I’ll show myself out)
Heh.
By Law.
I like the detail that her shirt has been buttoned back up as she gets less interested in Robin. I missed that detail in the last strip.
i only noticed it five minutes ago hitting refresh to look at this comic
By the time Robin leaves the room, Leslie will be wearing a hazmat suit.
I only noticed since you pointed it out and I had to go back and look at this strip, and then last strip. I love details like that, though it makes me wonder how much I’ve potentially missed at some point or another.
That’s why I read the comments. Someone else always picks up on things I didn’t.
Did Joe & Walky loose interest in the class when da cleavage vanished OR did that make it posipke for them to attend to the discussion, now that all of their attention isn’t absorbed by Jillian & Holtzman?
Silly Robin. EVERY question is eventually about nazis.
I mean, it’s a bit justified in her case, but still. Inevitable.
that plus your avitar made me wonder if there was a monkeymaster vs the nazis episode.
Monkeymaster vs the thinly veiled nazi clones, at least.
now im picturing walky like “they arent nazi they are the anti robot coallition” while a certain girlfriend starts to point out the similarities before he goes “nope i wont let you put them in my monkey master.
then a certain mister mike shows up with a hand drill and holding walkies monkey master toy, “I’ll do it instead.”
Congratulations, Leslie, you’re officially over her. Nothing kills a lady boner faster than your crush’s shitty political views
one time i had a crush on a lady and then i stopped because of her really gross habit of leaving the dishes unwashed and unrinsed on the counter until she had enough to run a load
… is there a reason why you couldn’t wash them yourself if you didn’t like how she was doing it?
It seems to me that they and their crush hadn’t been dating seriously yet. Doing dishes for an acquaintance or a friend could be awkward.
Pff. Political views my ass. She’s pandering to a constituency for the express purpose of keeping herself on the sweet government payroll.
You really think Robin thinks hard enough to have political views?
I keep wanting to comment on the updates, but every time I try and say something I get nervous because I know Willis has to read and approve first posts. I kinda feel like I have stage fright.
Anyways, I like the comic. Is good. Yes.
i never knew he reviewed your first posts when i started, but im of the attitude online if i embarrass myself they might mock me for a week them move on.
I think the reasoning is as a stop-gap measure to prevent hateful views from being put out there. Or something like that, I think I may have messed up my analogy.
It also helps keep out spambots.
It’s like dancing at a club or party: if I worried about embarrassing myself I wouldn’t do it, but it’s too fun not too, so I do, embarrassment be danged. So, welcome to the Party!
I had no idea about that. It does partially explain why there’s an almost uncanny lack of advertisements, trolling, or general nastiness anywhere on here. I’ve always thought it was remarkably heartwarming, and now I know at least one reason why. So, thank you to Willis, if he reads this, and congratulations on building a really great online community.
Oops, confirmed from the horse’s mouth: Leslie was indeed homeless. Apparently I am very bad at subtext
I suspected she might have been from how she was around becky, but at the same time i had to clue carla was trans. Although since i never knew that was true of any of my trans friends until they told me it makes sense.
I guess in that aspect of life i have no radar.
In Shortpacked, Leslie’s family was rich…as in RICH. Her father taught her to fly the family helicopter. But, her father never accepted her after she came out but her mother still would see her with out the father knowing. So Leslie was homeless for a while, and ended up meeting the group at the toy store.
I don’t know her backstory so much here in DoA, but they usually run sorta along the same lines. So makes sense, she was homeless here too.
If you don’t want to be compared to a Nazi, try not acting and speaking like a Nazi.
And it’s such a low bar to clear too. Rather surprising how many people seem to just trip over it.
Unfortunately, some view it as something to aspire towards rather than past.
/twitch
What if I stomp on the bar and break it?
Sounds like they’d just dig a ditch.
What does Roz mean that’s why they’re doing this? Was Leslie seducing Robin part of a plan to convert the latter into being pro-queer people?
I think it was the much more horrific, “Have an affair with her and expose her to all of her constituents.”
Neither Roz nor Leslie would ever consider doing that because that would be monstrous of them.
I can kinda picture Roz planning something that might accidentally have that result, but deliberately? Hell no.
Roz doesn’t think about the consequences of her actions. She’s a college freshman. All that matters is destroying her sister.
Roz does think about the consequences. But she’s only 18 and thinks she knows more than she does, so possibilities get overlooked.
That still doesn’t mean she would deliberately plan to out her sister. Hell, we’ve seen that the potential for harmful consequences of someone coming out has specifically been covered, by Leslie, in this very class
Roz may think that’s worth it as she sees her sister as a force of evil which…well, she is.
No no no, Roz isn’t setting them up to destroy Robin’s career. She said she was hoping that Leslie could help convince Robin of more progressive values. (Roz has tried, but she’s always Robin’s kid sister; Robin might be more convinced by a constituent her own age.) Anybody have the link handy?
Here is the strip where Roz approaches Leslie about Robin:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/twerp/
Thank you
Something about Roz’s lines in this strip made me think outing was the plan, but on rereading I can’t see anything specific one way or the other. So I’ll give Roz the benefit of the doubt.
However, if she tries to pressure Leslie into sticking with the plan after Leslie has decided she can’t do it, benefit of the doubt is gone.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that to Roz, using Robin’s queerness against her to destroy her politically was the plan and in that comment, it hasn’t really struck her yet that playing so lightly with the humanity of her teacher to achieve this end is hella immoral and shitty.
No, it wouldn’t be monstrous at all. If she’s LGBT and she’s been attacking the LGBT, then it’s literally the duty of those who know to out her. Yes, it may hurt her, but that is not worth the 100000s of people who she is already hurting.
Where does this idea that outing someone is the worst thing you can possibly do come from? It’s perfectly okay to out a hypocrite.
No. No it is not.
Outing Robin isn’t going to suddenly make her not a shitstain who votes for anti-gay bills. At best, she turns it in to another thing to be ‘the cool marginalized person’ for. At worst, she gets exposed to biphobic violence herself and decides this clearly means she was right to vote on all that anti-gay legislation because look what they did to her.
Getting Robin potentially hurt or killed is not an ethical solution to this. Trying to educate, or failing that, getting her out of office is.
It is not okay to use societal biphobia as a weapon – and no, that doesn’t make it okay for her to do it either.
If we learned there she was about to support another anti-gay bill that might actually pass, an argument could be made that it should be an option as a last resort. It still sounds like a horrible idea, but I could understand considering it
But even *if* there were any circumstance where it would be okay, a straight person such as Roz should absolutely not be the one making that call.
It doesn’t work that way. Trying to end heterosexism by outing someone just reinforces heterosexism. The political will that gathered in the harrassment they fomented will still be there, /and now/ it’s primary organizer will be harrassed too – in fact, it’s validated, by making the person a public target.
Where does this idea that outing someone is the worst thing you can possibly do come from?
Generally speaking, a thing that has a reasonable chance of having someone lose their job and their entire support network, expose them to physical violence or even murder, and at the very least will probably result in massive, long-term harassment, is considered a bad thing.
Whether or not your personal moral compass says it’s an acceptable thing in whatever given instance- and I would agree that sometimes it is- it’s still hurting someone, potentially very very badly.
I dunno, take a look at Roz’s facial expression when she realizes there’s a mutual crush: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/hmmm/
That was most definitely not her plan at all.
Her plan was:
1) Hook Leslie up with Robin.
2) Have Leslie convince Robin with her differing views that her previous views were wrong and harmful to many people.
Roz doesn’t want to destroy her sister – she still loves her and knows she has a good heart, but Robin doesn’t listen to her and she believes Leslie, someone closer to Robin’s age, could get through to her better.
Also I suspect fully out Robin to herself – make her acknowledge what Roz at least suspects.
That in itself might make her change.
Something like that:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/twerp/
Roz’s hope seems to have been that someone Robin’s own age might get through to her without being brushed off like Robin did with Joyce (and Roz when she’s tried in the past)
Could be a couple of things
A) Seduce and distract her.
B) Seduce her and out her.
C) Seduce her and talk her into not being a shitstain.
Because I like Roz I am hoping to give her the benefit of not assuming she’s about to out her sister without trying other options first.
maybe just roz sees her sister being gay as a positive thing that she wants to encourage
I assume they’re just doing the pulp hero thing, where the white guy hooks up with a native woman and then joins her side.
Except lesbians.
Leslie, you need to learn to throw everyone under the bus if you need to get what you want. Abandon your principles and join the Robin-side!
Ugh, all the wacky statements I used to make now just feel awful because reality has shown me up.
Something, Something, Truth > Fiction.
Fiction has to be plausible. The real world doesn’t.
So when a guy is horny, people say he’s thinking with his, errr, other head. Is there an equivalent for women? Some organ that figuratively drains their brains of blood to think clearly?
Because I’ve been trying to find that expression to describe Leslie here, but not being a native speaker I’m falling a bit short.
I’m no means an expert on this sort of thing, but a brief internet search indicates that the labia and other external bits and bobs do become somewhat engorged with arousal.
So I duess you could say she’s thinking with her, uh…
I don’t have a good euphemism for this.
She’s thinking with her lady boner?
Crude, but effective in communicating what you mean by playing on the same male stereotypes you mentioned.
I feel this is a really silly topic, but also very interesting because it kinda says a lot on the way society sees men and women when it comes to attraction and the way it supposedly works with each.
I’m sorry, I can’t hear anything you said over the sound of my vagina shouting at me.
sometimes a proper comparison doesn’t work when gender is switched and i think this is one of those times. Closest i could think of is her eyes grew so big she couldn’t hear…… something something. i dunno im going to bed. maybe someone smarter than me can finish this thought
Oh that’s a nice one. Doesn’t carry the same obvious sexual connotation, though. Like, men are physical, women are emotional?
i admited to writing it when i was heading to bed so i didn’t claim it was well thought out XP
“Thinking with her clit” works. Pretty much any cliche involving “dick” can be genderswapped that way.
That came to mind, but I can’t recall a single time I’ve seen it used. What’s the usual line when talking about women and emotions, pheromones? Estrogen? I find it curious there’s not consistent parallel, not that it has to be a bad or a good thing.
But yeah, Leslie’s whatever has deflated, badly.
I’d much rather the anatomical analogy Michael (and Cheshrin) said than something about hormones. “Clouded judgement due to hormones” is already at the center of at least two other tropes that don’t need to be amplified.
^This.
Oh, totally. I don’t really think there is a good parallel, all in all. Which is interesting in its own way.
Hormones, not pheromones.
Yeah, it’s “thinking with your clit”
The organs are literally the same thing. One’s just been washed in huge amounts of testosterone at some point (usually in fetal development) and the other hasn’t. That’s it. So yeah, perfectly swappable terms.
thinking with your boobs maybe
Technically clitorises have a head too. I think it still applies.
The Little Guy in the Canoe is leading the armada?
Letting the woman in the canoe make the decision.
Came across the idea in a Sci-Fi book.
“I’m white until Alt-Right Trolls find me on Twitter”…
…oddly accurate. It’s like a “No True Scottsman” thing in reverse, like those fuckers have this series of concentric circles in their mind, marking levels of “good person” by their definition…
Ugh. Need a shower now.
Also? Robin’s reaction to this is… interesting. Her facial expressions make me think that she’s, personally, a lot more liberal than her political appearance is. That her positions are entirely strategic…
This would be entirely consistent with her last appearance in the gender studies class. Her description of her constituents’ views then made it seem like her positions were opportunistic.
Robin is essentially a self-centered person who doesn’t give a great deal of thought to how her actions affect others. For her, politics is about being popular & like she said, she just does what the guys tell her to do. She’s not someone who actively wants to hurt people. When she realizes this, she’s uncomfortable with it.
^This.
Robin is impulsive so a lot of her actions are selfish but usually at least in part because she doesn’t think them through in the slightest.
In actuality, she has a great deal of empathy for other people – it is getting her to sit still and listen that is the challenge because she has a short attention span.
Both true but also a little troubling. Dorothy reads as white enough that she enjoys almost all the privileges that go along with that. I’m half Jewish, but in most contexts these days, I’m still white as heck. And I’m not even blonde.
*just gives up and plays sad, calliope circus music*
If there were news cameras recording this, it would have lost her some of the swinging voters.
Trump won Indiana so I guess she’s fine
Who said There isn’t anybody in the class recording this on their iPhone ?
Ah, the magic of phone cameras.
Used mine this evening to show my aunt the goat curry I had.
Now Robin believes Dorothy would be a bigot because of her race. Not quite racism but definitely an unusual example of prejudice.
She pigeonholed her as a Dummy. A newsreader. There was an insult there, I suspect.
Weird, I assumed anchorwoman requires intelligent.
The available evidence does not really support your assumption.
Newsreaders do not gather the information of check it for correctness etc…they are on screen for their looks and they ‘read’ what they are handed.
Anchors on the other hand often are in the field, gather their own information, their own teams check it. They do need intelligence and common sense.
Usually this is how it works, not often.
I think Robin picked the blue eyed blonde as the least threatening as opposed to an obvious racial type that may ask her biased questions. She didn’t expect that from Dorothy.
I think it’s more that she is expecting Dorothy to be a “basic” white girl with little actual intelligence to command. She is in for a very rude awakening.
…What the what? How the fuck are you getting that? She just thinks she’ll get a safer question, because she appears to be less of a minority.
Less of a minority than the blond haired, blue-eyed girl? I guess technically brown eyes are more common than blue, but still, I don’t think it works that way… Honestly, Robin’s joke doesn’t make any sense.
Robin’s possibly worried about being compared to Nazis herself.
Most likely she just doesn’t want to have to deal with any sensitive racial issues where she might inadvertently say anything else awful.
Maybe so. Seems like all politicians get called Nazis sooner or later, though. (I’ve seen Obama compared to Hitler because he could deliver a speech without mispronouncing the words…)
The blonde, blue eyed girl is currently calling her out on her bullshit. She’s off the ‘safe list’.
I’m not sure if this entirely gets at your point, but it is not at all rare for white racists to assume other whites are racist as well, sexist men to assume other men are sexist, etc. In particular I’m not sure I’ve seen a homophobe yet who hasn’t assumed that all non-homophobes are gay, and all straight people agree with them, even if secretly.
Many homophobes seem to think that *everyone* is gay – or, rather, that everyone has “urges” that they have to suppress in order to keep god happy – and that actual gay people are simply those who have failed at doing so.
Many of those homophobes are probably actually queer to some degree. For a kinder, gentler parallel, see Billie telling Joyce that exploring bisexuality is “basically inevitable”
I hope we’ll eventually learn exactly why Leslie’s so enamored with Robin in the Dumbiverse. I mean, sure, her Walkyverse crush sprouted in less than healthy soil too (it’s hard to put a positive spin on someone who was secretly only pretending to date you to try and make the gay man who rejected her incredulous enough to bang her, and only ever got in touch with you again as a last resort when her other friends were busy/couldn’t stand her), and we know that DoA Robin is bisexual since 1:1 sexual preferences between universes is an author-established rule, but DoA to my memory hasn’t shown a dang thing that would explain why Leslie’s got it so bad for someone actively working against both her personal liberty and her friggin’ life’s work (because lord knows she couldn’t have put all that work into becoming a professor for the money).
Like, I really do hope I’m not being an asshole noting this (or beating a dead horse if discussing this is old hat), but it’s hard to be invested in Leslie realizing she shouldn’t have looked past Robin’s legislative awfulness without establishing her rationale in looking past it in the first place.
Leslie has a crush on Robin because she saw her as a Latin-American woman who succeeded in a man’s world and rose to power as well as respect in her state. Also, presumably, Leslie has a type. Conservative girls may also be in her wheelhouse. The problem is Leslie didn’t realize that Robin got to her position by throwing other women, gays, and minorities under the bus. She wanted to believe she did it as a story of triumph than treason.
Willis, of course, may just say, “Leslie just thinks Robin is super hot. It happens.”
I’ll admit I forgot about the strip where Leslie talks about how neato Robin is (thank you to Fart Captor for tracking it down below), but…god, I’m sorry, I just can’t take what she lists off seriously. If Leslie really does admire Robin for being bright, then it’s now even MORE difficult to comprehend her crush, because Robin’s only ever shown using her brainpower to groom her political image. That’s shallow even WITHOUT screwing over the oppressed in the process; if she actually stands for or works towards any goal but keeping her job, we’ve yet to see it! As for the rest…look, Margaret Thatcher was the UK’s first woman to serve as Prime Minister, and that’s an undeniable milestone, but if you find her politics and what she did with the office abhorrent then admiring her as a whole package is awfully difficult!
Physical attraction as one part of the equation is a given, and I guess it’s possible for it to be the only one, but I remain incredulous that it’s enough to make Leslie go to such lengths pursuing someone who she KNOWS treats her human rights as acceptable losses. The one rationale for giving Robin a pass on this is that she likely isn’t ACTUALLY bigoted, just apathetic to the terrible consequences advancing her career has on said acceptable losses. Which isn’t any better. It’s a lousy excuse, and I can’t understand what would lead Leslie to use it unless there’s something else to Robin we don’t know about. Career-related sleaze is all we’ve been shown or told of regarding the elder DeSanto. Leslie’s excusing Robin’s sole character trait, and without that trait, the Robin we’ve been shown isn’t anything at all. What’s the point of excusing what you don’t like about a person without something you DO like about them?
It’s even worse when we remember that there’s nothing in DoA itself to indicate that Robin’s even INTO girls, or that Leslie has reason to believe she might. That wouldn’t be something I’d think was worth mentioning if not for everything else. The whole business is confusing and it’d be neat to see more development to demystify all this a little.
We know that Robin is into girls though, because she was in Shortpacked and Willis has stated that sexual orientations are consistent across the board.
What the audience knows and what the CHARACTERS know are very different. And since that information isn’t in DoA itself, we have as much knowledge of which characters know Robin is bisexual as we do which characters in Harry Potter know Dumbledore is gay.
Oh yeah, the other characters don’t know (but Roz suspects, and Leslie trusted her on it enough to go with it) I was just pointing out that, unlike the characters, WE can be sure it’s a possibility because we know Robin is into girls.
In the end they all knew Dumbledore was gay thanks to the tell-all book put out after his death. I read the final book and was genuinely surprised that so many people were shocked when Rowling mentioned that he was gay several years later. She put it in her damned book! I mean, she did not hammer you over the head with it like some ham-fisted neophyte author might, so I guess so, so many people missed it when they read the book.
…are you completely sure about that? I’m all but positive not so much of a word is breathed, explicitly or implicitly, regarding Dumbledore’a sexuality and/or romantic inclinations at any point within all seven books.
Apologies if I’m misinterpreting you, but it sounds like you’re saying “a posthumorous tell-all book exists in the HP books, and Rowling told us outside of the books (long after the series was over, at that) that Dumbledore was gay, therefore Dumbledore being gay is mentioned in the HP books.” Which…doesn’t follow? It works off of assuming that “fyi albus was totes gay” would’ve been revealed in the in-universe tell-all book, but that’s worth a hill of beans to the reader because Rowling put jack shit about it in Deathly Hollows or any of the books that came before it!
No, there is an in-canon tell-all book about Dumbledore. Harry reads some of it.
And to be honest, I completely disagree with Dr. T. While I also got vibes off of Dumbledore’s friendship with that other wizard, the prose of the tell-all book never so much as waggles its eyebrows, and it doesn’t occur to Harry either.
That the supposedly tell-all book didn’t explicitly call attention to Dumbledore’s sexuality is one of many reasons why I heavily side-eye Rowling for the complete non-representation that Dumbledore was.
Oh no, I know that the tell-all book exists in canon (it’s kind of an important part of Deathly Hollows). My gripe is identical to yours. Sorry for not wording that more clearly!
I think Robin is a lot like Walky, in that she’s actually intelligent, when she focuses and applies herself, but she usually doesn’t, so she tends to come across like a bit of a ditz.
In this incarnation, “not acting too smart so as not to make the boys feel intimidated” seems a likely factor as well.
That could easily be! But DoA is supposed to stand on its own, and I’m disinclined to draw too many assumptions about what the DoA iteration of someone is like from their Walkyverse counterpart (Sal and Dina in particular might share traits like “badass with a southern drawl” or “likes dinosaurs” between continuities but otherwise they might as well be completely new characters; there’s nothing wrong with that but it is a thing), and I’m especially disinclined to call anyone’s characterization fleshed out because of stuff that happened solely in IW/SP.
Hear, hear! And IIRC, Willis has said that discussion of previous works may confuse or annoy DoA only readers. Like me. (grits teeth about spoilers…)
The problem is that Robin has been reduced from a character with some depth and complexity to a Trump/Sara Palin stand-in, because Willis decided he wanted to do some strips about bad politicians/bigotry. Leslie’s crush is a narrative holdover from the earlier days.
Honestly, I prefer politician Robin to Shortpacked Robin. I like the character is more realistically flawed in that she traded her dignity for wealth and power.
But that would imply Trump and Palin don’t have…right. Carry on.
Except Robin never had any more depth than that here in DoA. Her initial appearance matches this one pretty closely, though we’ve seen more detail now.
We saw the political opportunism, we saw the way she plays different characters, we saw the reasons for Leslie’s admiration and that she voted against her. This sequence is just the consequences of all that.
Sexual attraction doesn’t give a damn about logic or facts, though the basis of it has been established:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/knock/
She knew what she was getting into, but Roz sold her on the idea that Robin might change if someone her own age showed her how her political views are horrible. Leslie was game to try.
But as we see in this comic, all the horrible aspects you’re pointing out are precisely why Leslie feels gross right now. Seeing it in person made it real for her, bypassing the fog of denial her libido had created.
People say that, yet I’ve never been attracted to someone I thought was an awful human being. Once I find that out, the attraction is gone.
Different people have different standards, not to mention goals. If you’re (this is a “vague” you btw) going to sleep with someone and don’t plan to ever seeing them again then you could probably put up with a lot of things, if they’re attractive enough.
Here we can see that Leslie was taking a more serious approach and has now been repulsed.
Different people experience things differently, or even completely different things.
But as I said, that’s happening to her now. Knowledge of Robin’s awful politics just wasn’t the immediate boner-killer that seeing it first hand was.
You can want things on different levels, you know? You can want things on primal, sexual level while still being disgusted on another level.
Latina/female congresscritter in a dark red district is the biggest one, plus the physical attraction based on looks. It was in a couple of strips way earlier in the run.
For you, Robin’s first class visit
starts here. For me, yesterday was Thursday.
Robin in the Shortpacked is not really Bi I think. She was into men all the way. But Leslie didn’t give up and Robin eventually fell in love with her, she often said she was only bi- for Leslie.
Hard to really say just what the heck she was: except at the end the two of them made a good pair.
Besides, Robin is hot by many views it seems. Based on looks alone, guess Leslie just plain got the hots for her. Till she opened her mouth in class, on issues that pertained to Leslies classmates: made it personal.
Wrong. Towards the end, she was calling herself ‘generally undefinably queer’.
Not bi, no. But she certainly didn’t consider herself straight or ‘only into Leslie’ by the end of the comic.
Which is closer to the truth anyways, because she wasn’t only into Leslie. She also had crushes on Amber and Joyce.
I don’t think it’s very useful to say that a woman who is sexually attracted to both men and women, plural, is not bisexual.
Unless she identifies as pansexual or queer.
Even then. In terms of communicating the concept of having sex with and sexual attraction to both men and women, “bisexual” accomplishes roughly the same as “pansexual”, and “queer” is downright useless.
No, bisexual generally means you can be attracted to men or women, while pansexual specifically includes non-binary folks as well.
Queer is more of a blanket term, but there are real life people who prefer to identify that way, because sexuality is complicated and there isn’t always a specific label that the person is comfortable with and is specifically descriptive.
So yes, “bisexual” is technically accurate, as Robin was attracted to both men and women (pansexual might be correct as well, for all we know), but Robin identifying herself as “indefinably queer” isn’t only about conveying information. It’s also a matter of how a person feels comfortable being identified.
Bisexuality includes attraction to non-binary persons too. The choice of whether to describe yourself as bisexual or pansexual is a matter of personal preference.
Except the fact they’re three different orientations, sure.
Bisexual = Attracted to two or more genders, not necessarily all of them, usually including your own.
Pansexual = Attracted to all genders without regard for gender (as in, they tend to be more attracted to people or personalities rather than gender)
Queer = Other definitions do not feel right, used often as a catch-all.
Robin does not consider herself bi because she likes boys a lot more than girls – while many people who are bi feel this way as well, Robin feels it doesn’t work for her, so she went with one that does. Insisting that she’s bi over her own term for herself is incredibly rude.
She was into Amber also. It’s first revealed when Leslie tells Robin she realized she was attracted to women because of Leia in RotJ and asks who Robin’s first girl crush was.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
A year to soon.
i like Roz showing concern for her teacher. she’s not a main char, but she’s still showing some big character development.
Her teacher, or her cunning plan to use her teacher as a tool to turn her sister, which seems to be falling apart?
You mean the plan to make her sister less awful (because she cares enough about Robin to not simply give up on her), which she enlisted her teacher’s help for?
And which Leslie – an adult capable of making her own decisions – chose to participate in of her own free will?
Yep. And is now changing her mind about. I’m not convinced that Roz’s concern is for Leslie the person rather than Leslie the element of her plan.
Man, never ever look too close at the pretty ones. I remember when I started following Michelle Rodriguez on twitter, and all she could talk about was some perpetual energy scam she believed in.
“Pretty” has nothing to do with it. Look no further than our future president he’s awful and he definitely not pretty.
Or our current first lady, who is both gorgeous, and rad as hell.
Yeah, can we have a do-over with a different (soon-to-be) former First Lady?
I don’t remember anyone talking about how they were hot for Trump (except Putin), so he isn’t really on-topic.
Kinda getting a little sick to my stomach at what a slime ball Robin has become.
As a mick myself, I’m sometimes annoyed at the way anti-Irish racism is kind of forgotten about in American history.
But can you really draw a meaningful distinction between “white” and “Irish” in America in 2016?
Even if you can’t, you can between “white” and “Jewish”
But I think she brought up the Irish part because while she may be white, she’s still off-white enough to be targeted for hate.
And while discrimination against the Irish isn’t anywhere near the level it is against other, browner minorities like it once was (to my knowledge, at least), hurtful stereotypes persist because “it’s okay since it’s other white people”
How is blond haired blue eyed Dorothy ‘off white’. Only because she just said she is Jewish, would she be targeted.
She would not be targeted for hate based on her looks…as compared to Sal.
And if you want to see what the Irish went thru in America, watch the movie based on New York City in the late 1890, early 1900’s.
One side of my family came over from Ireland to get away from the starvation of the Potato Famine.
Though I don’t think Dotty actually has blue eyes, I wasn’t referring to her appearance, really. The Irish part is probably the more visible, though she’d have to be drawn a lot more realistically to tell if she looks at all ethnically Jewish. The blond hair makes that seem less likely, but it’s not impossible.
And I know both that the Irish used to have it really bad, and that members of obvious minorities such as Sal have it much worse. I acknowledged as much in that last paragraph.
Though I’m sure there’s still pockets of the internet (if not the real world) where the Irish are still on somebody’s racial shit-list.
Just to note, there are blond, blue eyed Jews, including some who are not accepted as properly Jewish because of that.
Jewish people are not white. Many of them are lighter skinned (centuries of rape and forced assimilation will do that to you!) but ethnically Jewish people have a unique gene pool much the way other ethnicities do, many of whom have Middle Eastern features and/or darker skin even if their primary ancestry is European, and they have a different culture. Also, they get a lot of flack for not being white from white supremacist groups, so calling them unequivocally white is iffy at best.
Sure, many are not visibly not white, but there are plenty of PoC who aren’t (especially with PoC with lots of history of rape and forced assimilation, like Romani for example). That doesn’t make them white. It means people might not immediately notice and so they’ll treat them as such until they’re ‘revealed’ to be else wise.
Ashkenazim cluster genetically with southern Italians, who are generally considered “white.” The Italian DNA in Ashkenazim is largely mitochondrial, meaning that Jewish men married Italian women, not Italian men raping Jewish women. Not a whole lot of German as far as I know in Ashkenazim,–I suspect that the kids of people who married out ended up leaving the Jewish community.
Sephardic, Mizrahi, Cochin, etc., Jews each have their own genetic signature, due to inter-marriage with the locals (again, largely Jewish men with local women, though there may be exceptions.)
There is no single “uniquely Jewish” DNA, because so many Jewish groups have absorbed people from the different lands they’ve lived in over the years, but there is an underlying pattern.
“Ashkenazi Jews cluster genetically with southern Italians” is a polite euphemism for how Rome invaded, colonized, and destroyed Judea. Jews had been ten percent of the population of the Roman Empire – after they were all enemies of the state and repeatedly lost in several wars over about 120 years, how much war rape do you think was going on?
Most, if not all, ethnically Jewish people have been found to have Middle Eastern genetic markers.
I also included assimilation in that – a form of which involves marrying locals, so there you go.
…Man, that’s always weird to hear. Irish got way the hell more play than any other group besides black people in most of what I’ve seen, including both secondary and college. Native American racism sort of vanishes into the aether except for the mention of a couple of massacres, hispanic people might see brief mentions in the 1960s (As a group that suffers racism – other than that, mexicans are just sort of the evil oppressors of Houston and his bastards, and a footnote in the Spanish American War), but the Irish are a recurring theme of 19th century racism. Granted, still only limited perspectives, but there was never any rush to hide the Irish at all, especially in comparison (The big losers here almost definitely being native americans, in the courses I’ve taken part in or read over the syllabi for)
Weird as it seems now, Irish people were actually viewed as a completely seperate (and inferior) race compared to whites. Which lead to Irish racism against black people (and immigrants from first Southern Europe and then Latin America) as they were often in direct competition for the position of “not the absolute bottom of society”.
Whiteness is provisional. It’s not weird at all. What I’m saying is, it’s weird to hear people talk about Irish racism as if it’s ignored. I guess the Northeast might be, to bury its shame (Geography meant that they were the primary folks being bastards about it), but I’m pretty sure they still have to use the same books as Texas in secondary, just like we do, so it seems unlikely.
(Shoot, Turks aren’t white, nor romani or jewish people. Whiteness isn’t really about skin color.)
Yup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw
Irish are one of the biggest groups in America, so lots of Irish around to talk about anti-Irish discrimination. Not so many Native Americans around anymore.
Partially that. More that I’m pretty sure we actually care about racism against people who are now considered white, than people who aren’t white.
That seems unlikely. MLK has his own holiday, and I suspect that the 14% or so of us who are black care a lot more about ati-black racism than anyone cares about anti-Irish-ism.
Yes, but white people don’t care about racism against people who aren’t white. It’s really, really, really hard to not talk about anti-black racism at least some in US history – we fought a war over it, at the end of the day, and based multiple economic sectors off of it at multiple points. The Irish, for the most part, don’t represent anything that /needs/ to be discussed any more than say, racism against native americans; quite the inverse, given the sheer number of bush wars we’ve fought with them, while also basing so much of our economy and prosperity off of stealing their land from them, as well as their involvement in other conflicts we’ve fought. And numbers don’t explain it either, or there’d be more talk on anti-latin@ racism.
This isn’t to say anti-Irish racism shouldn’t be discussed. It should. It’s still important, both on its own, because it was terrible, and because of how it fit into the tapestry of Meriken history. But it’s always seemed disproportionate in comparison to how much other people’s issues are brought up.
Dude, if whites didn’t care about anti-black racism, we wouldn’t have fought a whole war over it. We would still have Jim Crow. We wouldn’t have the 14th amendment. We wouldn’t have anti-discrimination laws. We wouldn’t have Affirmative Action. MLK Day wouldn’t be a holiday. A bunch of white people in my city wouldn’t have just gotten arrested protesting against Donald Trump. And many of the strips and characters in this comic wouldn’t exist.
Some whites don’t care about racism. Some do.
I think a lot of that was due to the efforts of POC. Not that whites weren’t involved at all, but don’t give them all the credit, cause they don’t really deserve it. And slavery being abolished was a strategic and crippling blow to the Southern Confederacy, as was burning and razing the plantations in a lot of towns and cities. Indeed, like in the American Revolution, blacks were encouraged to fight for the union because they would be “freed”. And this time they were – but on condition, and because of the white people then Jim Crow was born..
Basically, a lot of the laws you describe weren’t enacted out of benevolence, but out of a time when there was intense pressure, mostly by POC, to revise the structure of the government. No. No we do not solely have white people to thank for any of those laws. Don’t overestimate the role whites have played, as we saw on Tuesday majority of white voters dont actually care or didnt put their liberal money where their mouths were. Most of that work was done by POC.
Well. White Northerners didn’t fight the civil war for anything approaching the sake of black people for a great deal of it. Southerners were traitors, and those that fought would hang. Don’t underestimate lizard brains. They’re kind of a thing. Now, I’ll be fair here – as the war went on, abolitionist sentiment really did spread throughout the union army. But at the same time, that was well after the gauntlet was taken up, with little real option to back down.
Interestingly, some of the happiest fighters on the Union’s side were Irish immigrants, who had a really hard time getting a decent job elsewhere. They actually /were/ stoked to end slavery, because slavery was a bullshit barbarism that had to end. Which is to say, a bunch of people who weren’t white, and had come from a place where ‘white’ wasn’t even really a societal concept (Even today, European racial politics look nothing like American ones).
As far as ‘Jim Crow would still be on the books if white people didn’t care about racism’… no? It’s almost astounding to me. You’re looking at a few folks being decent, in the face of the bulk of them just throwing in with the most racist president since Nixon (at least.) .
If White People as a whole did actually care about racism, we wouldn’t hear so much hooey about how we live in a post-racial society. They wouldn’t have been planning rebellion the second a black man was in charge. They wouldn’t act like being called a racist was the worst god damned thing. They, you know, would have voted against Trump, at the very least. None of that is the case (Some fools are /still/ claiming the post-racial society nonsense).
Like, wifey is white. And given that she’s my wife, you can assume she cares. I have no idea why you think I’m unaware of individuals caring. What I don’t understand is why you’re unaware of what the damn majority culture does.
And then there’s the Italians. Faced a lot of the same crap the Irish did and get far less notice for it.
A lot of that, for the Irish as well, was based in religious prejudice – Catholics weren’t really Christian to many people.
Mostly I think the Irish just became the goto example for explaining the process.
Although there is no longer organized anti-Irish discrimination like you saw in the 19th centurym Irish-Americans are still aware of the history of discrimination. Some use that as a reminder that anyone can be a target and that they need to stand up against bigotry aimed at other groups, others use it as a “get out of bigotry free” card. “The Irish were slaves, so your suffering is invalid!”
The conflation of slavery and indentured servitude is one of my pet peeves as a student of history, but that’s a digression. At any rate, “The Irish were treated worse than black people” has been one of the squares on White Privilege Bingo for a long time now.
General McPentagon: “Just ruuuuuun, congresswoman.”
Aide: You are a very silly person, please get lost.
General McPentagon: “Neeever. I will protect her with my liiiiiife if… um…”
*Dorothy raises hand.*
General McPentagon: “Everyone for themseeeeeelves” *dives through window, gallops away over the hills*
I think we will find that Joyce was only softening Robin up for the big blow. Future president motherfudging Keener, in the house.
with VP Joyce? After a tour in the Air Force, of course.
Well, that went sour quickly.
it was… needed, i guess.
Am Jewish, can confirm about being provisionally white — as long as everything is going very well for white people, Jews get treated with white privilege, but as soon as something goes wrong or the economy dips or whatever, we’re suddenly the Other again. It’s wacky.
This election cycle brought a lot of anti-Semitism to the surface, it seemed, as a datum to the effect of what you’ve said here. I knew it was still a thing, but I didn’t realize how widespread it still is.
It turns out it’s really hard to erase 2,000 years of anti-Semitism with 75 years of education.
That, and when people are desperate, it turns out to be easier than you’d think to turn them against the “Other” as a solution to their problems.
Like, I’d bet Weimar Germany probably thought itself reasonably enlightened, and then this angry little bigot with a funny mustache came along and six million deaths later…
50 million deaths.
You’d win that bet, Stranger.
*hugs*
If you didn’t approve of your professor having the hots for your sister because of her poltical stance then why did you try to hook her up with her in the first place.
Roz does approve. It’s Leslie who’s getting cold feet about it.
Well somebody didn’t think this through here I’m just trying to find out who.
Maybe she hoped Les could change Robin.
In a more perfect world maybe… it’s all because I think I just implied Milwaukee Brewers is a better establish more than this.
That was the original plan I think. Big sister would not listen to her: big sisters seldom do. And Roz hoped that Leslie, being a contemporary of Robin, may be able to talk to her and ‘show her the error of her ways.’
Being her teacher and a person Roz looked up too, I guess she figured it was a good idea.
That does seem to be the idea.
But hey if we haven’t made a our point how about we get Alex joins and Steve Bannen to be a guess speaker. I’m sure that’ll get a point across to someone.
I swear to god, if Willis somehow manages to make this couple work on this version of the walkyverse it’s going to be something kinda fucked up. I mean, is Robin going to drop her political carreer for Leslie? Leslie’s urge to get into Robin’s pants is so big that she’s going to bend her morals? I just don’t see this happening since Robin hasn’t showed any signs of “hey maybe I’m kinda homo in secret”
I really dislike the term “alt-right”. Call them Nazis. Call them racists. Call them anti-Semites. Call them bigots. Call them complete fucking scum. Don’t make up a euphemism to hide how awful they are.
(The same goes for Hillary’s “basket of deplorables”. I saw a Trump ad repeating the clip of her saying that, and explaining how that meant she hated ordinary Americans. I keep seeing (most often on Girl Genius) this banner ad for a fucking T-shirt bragging about being deplorable. We wouldn’t get that shit if she’d just said, “Hey, half of Trump’s supporters are fucking bigots,” instead of making up euphemisms for them.
At least I’m still telling myself that we wouldn’t.)
You can’t. Those terms don’t encompass what they are. The alt-right is not just racist/sexist/etc. They are also trolls. They are also profoundly atheist. They still believe in the smaller government. They think freedom of speech means the freedom to be an asshole. They see disruption as a good thing.
They are awful enough that the term “alt-right” has turned into an insult on its own, so don’t worry.
A fair percent of them are Catholic.
It’s the “two people talking past each other” which is the tragedy of the election. Trump voters are voting for an enormous racist and cretin but were doing so because many of them honestly felt like they were going to die in poverty or lose their homes. He claimed he would fix that. Hillary dismissed Trump supporters as voting entirely on racism and never quite grocked the larger terror. It’s a weird strategy that Trump won because no one could ever take him seriously enough to argue his issues. Mostly because Trump only addressed said issues to his faithful.
Basically, less, “If you vote for Trump, you’re a racist monster.”
and more, “Don’t vote for Trump because he is an enormous idiot and we have a plan so you don’t lose your house or medical coverage.”
Acknowledging, yes, every bigot and their sister got out in droves to vote for Trump–and there were a lot of them.
And the oddest thing about it is they were offended by that more than being called Nazi’s and bigots.
And on that note these are the same peoplein witch the Majority of most of them defended rape, spray painted “Vote Trump” on a black church and proparty belonging to members of the LGBT community right after they burned all that stuff down. Meanwhile they think they get offended by a name I don’t think most of them understand.
I think that kind of “you’re all Nazis and bigots who defend this” is part of the reason they voted that way. The NYT basically ignored all the exit polls where the voters said they hated what Trump said, did, and didn’t think he was qualified but believed he could do the CHANGE buzzword.
I only bring this up because of all the people who voted for Obama who voted for Trump this time–four states worth.
The vote was very very close Charles Phipps. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
Trump is a minority President Elect and that only because of the Electorial College: a several Clinton dedicated voters who stabbed their constituents in the back and changed their minds, and their votes.
Go to the live electorial map on Google: Look at the states votes where they read like this: Trump: 45.60% Clinton: 45.50%. There are a lot of them.
So he is now large, in charge, and still orange. Still bigoted, still racist, still a woman assulter, and now – from the looks of him, not so sure that he actually knows what he has bitten off.
We shall see. Hope he does well, would be stupid to hope he does not. Maybe enough handlers will be able to hold him down from total disaster.
That’s the frustrating part, really. You only needed SOME of those guys and gals to change their votes in those states.
To be fair, if we’re talking about third party votes, the libertarians got three times more votes than the greens. The popular vote leaned right regardless of whether or not you include third parties or not.
This isn’t anything new or unusual though. The US has alternated between a democrat and a republican over the vast majority of recent history. We had an excellent Democrat president for eight years and I’m happy about that. We were due for a republican term. Hopefully it won’t be quite as terrible as the last one. I mean, at least Trump isn’t a religious nutjob but a secular one who used to be a democrat.
Yeah, but he’s handing policy over to his religious nutjob VP.
No, the popular vote went to Hillary.
But also, I know plenty of people who voted for Gary Johnson despite being anti-Trump. They (entirely mistakenly) believed he was closer to Bernie than Hillary was.
There’s a very popular image of libertarians on the left side of the aisle as being socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and since a lot of folks had been convinced that Hillary was conservative on both parts, they considered Johnson a better vote.
That said, I’m less concerned about the third party voters than the entire half of the country that just didn’t bother to vote at all.
Depends on your definition of “well.” I’d rather he be totally ineffective than be effective at fulfilling the promises he made on the campaign trail.
I recall posting a while back (not here) that the trope that Trump’s campaign seem to be based off of was ‘Springtime for Hitler’. If that’s true, it’d be funny, except that it’s true.
Alt-right is the alt-rights own term for itself.
On a serious note, though, I’m confused by Leslie’s reaction. Yes, it’s shitty for her seduction plan but isn’t this a great thing for the class? They’re getting exposed to lots of fascinating information about prejudice, politics, and dangers. It’s probably the most important class she’ll ever teach and she should be glad she’s brought it about.
I suspect her plan for the class was, “Get successful woman to talk about things related to gender and politics,” and right now, she’s feeling personally hurt by someone she had a crush on. Later on, she can get a little emotional distance and find that silver lining.
I’m not entirely convinced that calling them nazis would be useful. The nazis were horrible, but they’re also used as shorthand for things that.
The Alt-right is generally all racist, but it can also just get drowned in weird conspiracy theories for their own sake. And there’s a lot of crossover with different flavors of horrible. Alt-right is less a euphemism, I think, and more just an acknowledgement there isn’t a whole lot tying the disparate groups together except for vaguely feeling like they belong ont he right wing and voting for restricting human rights.
The alt-right also encompasses groups that don’t really have anything to do with racism, like some types of anarchocapitalists, and some groups that don’t have anything to do with politics, like the more extreme MRA/Red Pill types. It’s not a word for one group, it’s a name for many, many, many groups, most of which hate each other, and for that matter some of whom are literally Nazis. It’s just that the ones that specifically focus on being racist have gotten in the news lately.
Request for info from someone more knowledgeable: is PEPE a symbol for all of the selfidentified alt-right OR for the nazi part?
So, I wonder who Leslie’s going to date now.
And more importantly, if she’ll offer shelter to Becky.
Conquest?
Conquest is sixteen, so I’d hope not!
How about Daisy?
We know Connie’s age?
Yup – she’s reached the age of consent (so as to make it less creepy given her Walkyverse counterpart’s strong association with sex), but she’s not old enough for university (as per Patreon).
http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/129039790302/i-know-that-this-wasnt-your-intent-but-taking-a
Right here.
Everybody forgets about Daisy…
…I do not really like Robin right now….
But then. When it comes down to it. I only liked Robin in Shortpacked (as a PERSON) when she was with Leslie. DX DX DX DX DX
I admit, I prefer Leslie/Robin here and Mike here because I hate the “you can change a person to be less awful” meme. Willis handled it nicely with both characters but the whole “toxic people are actually good to cut out of your life” thing with Raidah resonated with me.
That’s not a meme so much as a thing that can and does happen in real life. Not nearly as often as one might like it to, but it does happen. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to give someone a chance. Other times they really are toxic and even if they (in theory) deserved a chance, the cost of giving them one is too high. Life is rarely so helpful as to give us such general scenarios where we can simply say “always do ___”
It’s definitely too often done by writers who lack the skill to make the change feel organic, but when it’s done well it’s very enjoyable.
Though I would argue that Mike didn’t really become any less awful. We simply had a not-awful side of him revealed to him. He continued to be awful to people other than Amber. Just like Malaya’s genuine affection for Ultra-Car didn’t make her any less insufferable to everyone else.
I’m not familiar with the other strips, but I’m not convinced that DoA Mike is as bad as he’s made out to be. He’s certainly capable of being a huge dick, but I’ve noticed that more often, he’s simply being either extremely sarcastic or extremely blunt. I’ve also noticed that in both cases, he’s usually calling someone out on their own bullshit. He may be abrasive, but he’s not often wrong.
Can anyone explain Roz’ “Yeah, that’s why we are doing this” comment to me? I don’t get it.
Roz and Leslie had previously conspired to make Robin a better person:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/twerp/
Is Irish only provisionally white? How distant do you have to be from that heritage to be just white? I’m Anglo-Irish and I always thought I was as white as could be. In Britain it’s different, because Britain, but America? How finely does the alt-right sift?
Well, it helps to understand “White is however close my race is to it.” In the 19th century, you have Mexican Whites and Irish Whites loathed by Anglo Saxon Whites but all hating X minorities together.
Another example is the fact Hitler’s victims were almost all people which would be considered White in the USA.
I.e. the whole thing is bullshit to make Europeans feel better about themselves.
In the UK/Ireland it can mean something but yeah it doesn’t really affect anyone to be Irish in America as far as I can tell? But then I don’t live there. I mean as far as I can tell from Americans online basically the Irish eventually ‘became’ properly white in the US while they did /use/ to be second class citizens once upon a time. There’s no difference in the US itself. Europe itself is the one which seems to… talk about different flavors of white in general more so than the US in these modern times as someone who also lives on these islands I’m sure you know. (Like if you’re eastern european you can be fucked up more than a little etc.)
Then /again/ maybe Dorothy is referring to that on some level. I mean online international borders are torn down so many people can be bigoted farts from thousands of miles away. So like (I’m originally from N.Ireland)… mmaaaaybe some unionist type from there has been gross and has reamed her over that? It’s possible.
I mean actually some Irish folks hate Irish Americans too but yeeaaaah that’s for reasons I don’t want to debate over here. Let’s just say there are both petty and decidedly non-petty reasons for it.
But tbh the Jewish part is what would /really/ be the big thing for the alt right to descend on like rabid wolves no matter where they went. Anti-semitism never really died in europe or in the US either.
Americans can’t really tell different European ethnicities apart without an accent.
Irish are white. Americans can’t tell an Irish person from a German anyway.
Irish is considered white “nowadays” but back in THE DAY white americans would have laughed at the idea of irish being white. Whiteness is not the color of your skin per se, but a social construct. Think about all the ginger jokes you hear? yeah. Yeah. That being said it’s a topic riddled with nuance, in that pale is still considered the “beauty ideal” and European features the same, and white passing, and all that sort of thing you need to keep in mind when talking about the social construct of whiteness and the “”superiority”” of it.
There’s a good book called “How the Irish Became White”, ie pretty much acceptable, respectable people in the view of the original dominant groups in the US.
Irish had to earn whiteness, by becoming god racist Americans.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/305686.How_the_Irish_Became_White
I identify as Irish (direct male lineage) but to my knowledge have no cliche characteristics, at least as to pertaining as to how I look. I always thought that the jokes were just a normal cultural thing, and not racism derived. For me, that was weird.
The disturbing thing about this strip is that, for all her ignorance in many areas, Robin clearly understands how the political world treats smart but attractive women. Whilst it is possible that Dorothy may get somewhere, the Establishment would be a lot more comfortable with her being a powerless talking head that they can patronise and ignore.
Sighs. Poor Leslie.
These poor students
And yikes Robin.
(This is basically 90% of my too long posts in the last few strips summed up I guess).
I’m a little confused here. So Leslie knew about Robin’s policy stance beforehand, and she STILL wanted to romance/lustmance it up with her? Why would someone who supported an anti-LGBT bill even BE interested in a lesbian encounter? If I was Leslie, my main concern would be whether or not trying to get Robin’s attentions would eventually get twisted into a “SEE?! Gay folks try to make their disgusting moves on you even when you’re CLEARLY straight!” political attack.
Friendly reminder that DoA, like any other interation of the Walkyverse, is first and foremost a strip about likeable characters making stupid decisions while we watch in horror from behind the fourth wall.
*iteration
Remember that the first rule of politics is “get re-elected”.
There have been many example in politics where a representative, who has a particular stance on an issue — a tax increase, let’s say — and a vote comes up on a bill that this person would normally support…. but the candidate knows that the bill is doomed to failure, so he/she votes the opposite way (with the eventual majority) so they can then spin it as “well, I DID vote for (or against) it but it just wasn’t meant to be”. I see it as Robin (who may or may not be gay or bi) giving support to the bill, knowing it would fail, so it would paint her in a favorable light with the rest of her conservative district.
Sorry — that should be “a bill that this person would normally oppose (not support)… but the representative knows the bill is doomed to failure anyway so he/she votes with the eventualminority (not majority) so they can then spin it…”
What do we want? Edit feature!
When do we want it? NOW!!
Where do we want it? To the left of the Reply link would be nice.
That’s absolutely the best interpretation that can be put on it.
That is what I assumed too.
Since when was she Jewish? Her paternal grandparents were “both Catholic and Jewish”. If her grandparents were Catholic converts, her father was areligious, and she had no Jews in her matrilineal family, it’s odd that she would claim the ethnicity of Jewish for herself. Additionally, considering how anti-Irish sentiment in the U.S.A. is always spoken of in the past-tense to the point that Irish is considered white nowadays… why even bring it up? A congresswoman is inviting her to ask a question, and she gets sidetracked by being called white? Which, by the way, seems to be an accurate assessment.
If her paternal grandparents were both Jewish, regardless of religious adherence, she’s half Jewish. That was Jewish enough for Hitler, and apparently it is for the furnace-posters as well.
Fun fact: the Nazis’ Final Solution, through combing of geneological records, netted Germans whose Jewish heritage was so remote they weren’t aware of it. Hitler didn’t care whether they considered themselves Jewish or not, and he was especially offended by mischlings, since he was concerned with keeping Aryan blood undiluted.
This isn’t Nazi Germany, though. Unless there are neo-Nazis on the Internet that meticulously research everyone’s genealogy in order to find the non-Jewish descendants of Jews, she had to go online and tell everyone that she was part Jewish. Unless her paternal ancestors for thousands of years never married outside the Jewish population (technically possible, I suppose), her father isn’t a “full blooded Jew”.
I’d need to double-check the Family Week strips, but my understanding was that one of her paternal grandparents was Jewish and the other Catholic.
In any case, I think she’s less personally identifying as Jewish as mentioning that she’s ‘Jewish enough’ to be treated as such by anti-Semites.
Yeaaaaah, that’s what’s making me go “WTF?” at people whoa re looking at her lineage to make sure it follows the rules.
Y’all know racists don’t give a fuck, right?
So long as amount is greater than 0%, it’s enough. Shouldn’t exist in the first place, stupid nonsensical evolution of tribal protection.
Not only that but didn’t Dorothy also say she is an athiest so she would have rejected jewdaism even if she had maternal jewish heratige
Judaism is both a religion and an ethnicity. It is possible to be one without the other.
I’n going go to ask something, and I promise that it is out of a sincere desire to learn.
Can someone explain what she meant when she said “tecnically I’m Irish”. I know that means that she is of Irish descent but how does that mean she isn’t white? Again, I promise this is an attempt to learn.
I’m wondering the same. At some point in the past, there was a lot of anti-Irish sentiment, to the point that many people considered Irish to be a separate race inferior to their own white. As anti-Irish sentiment went away over the years, that distinction went away as well, and nowadays Irish is just considered white. I don’t get why Dorothy felt the need to clarify what kind of white person she is.
Because generic “white” is low-class in the US. High-class people know where their ancestors came from. Dorothy is signalling that she is not low-class and does not identify as “white.”
The thing with that is, there are some /really/ racist white people. Really, /really/ racist. People who /remember/ that shit. How the Italians and Slavs weren’t white (Still something of a thing, at least for Slavs). How mediterranean people aren’t white (Andalucians and the like in particular) People who remember the /Irish/ not being white (Or at least, were taught to treat them as non-white). They try to teach their kids their ways. Sometimes it works.
I’m pretty sure this is extremely rare for people of Irish descent, but where it does come up, it probably feels like a sucker punch. And the neo-nazi wing of the republican party is definitely the group most likely to think that shit.
This sort of thing always baffles me as a generic mixed-mutt white American. I am aware that there are a number of different ‘flavors’ of white and certainly aware that people can be super-shitty to people not the right flavor, but I cannot for the life of me see the visual distinctions that are apparently obvious to other people between Anglo-Saxon, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Greek, Eastern European, Jewish, light-skinned Hispanic… Even for darker skin tones, without other hints I cannot tell between white-with-a-tan, darker-skinned Hispanic, lighter-skinned multiracial, etc. Get a group of all of these types of people together and, while I can tell differences between individuals, visually I would assess all of them as white people.
Growing up I had a friend who was Puerto Rican. The way I know that is that he talked about his family being from Puero Rico. To me he just had a nice tan. I had another pair of friends (brothers) whose grandmother would yell at them in Spanish, so looking back I assume they were some flavor of Hispanic, but the topic never came up so they were always just generic white to me. I was honest-to-God confused when there were complaints from certain parts of the internet over the lack of white actors on Luke Cage until I had the epiphany that oh yeah, all those white people I was seeing were probably in fact Hispanic people who ‘don’t count’ as white (which still makes the complaints stupid, but at least an internally consistent stupid complaint)
This is not meant to diminish anyone’s heritage or struggles, just one more way that I will never relate to certain bigoted points of view.
Because it’s not all visual. Or even mostly visual.
It’s cultural. Those weird foreigners might be European, but they’re not real Americans like us. They’re a different religion, they don’t speak good English or talk some foreign gibberish, they eat weird food, they’re just different. They’re all poor and poorly educated (see “don’t speak good English”).
Yeah.
I was from a suuuper white region. Not being Scottish or English was bad enough to be not white to them. I was alternatively told to “go back where”I came from because my dad is Afrikaaner or called Nazi because of the German surname or Kike by those who did enough research to discover that my surname from Johannesburg (where my Dad’s family is from, aka “Jewburg” to skinheads) is a 80%Jewish surname (and most of the 20% are ppl who converted to escape anti-Semitism. Including my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my granddad’s side). Yeah there were folks who cared about their bigotry enough to research demographics of my surname in Johannesburg. I can’t make this shit up.
Sooo yeah. Wrong type of white totally exists. “That’s an interesting surname, where’s it from?” is code for “You’re white, but are you white-white?” in some places.
Clarification: This does not mean I don’t benefit from white privilege – just that in some places, you only get some degree of white privilege unless you’re the right type of white.
Perhaps, but nonetheless I’m pretty sure I’m missing some key differentiation ability, as there have been a large number of confirmed instances where other people are able to look at someone and, without any other information about them, accurately know these things while I am not.
If so, you’re not alone on that. Unless there is something about a person that is very obvious, such as their skin being very dark or their eyes being distinctly Asian, my brain tends to not actually register any difference between them and me. It’s just not a skill I have, and it’s not one I care to have, if I’m honest. I wouldn’t have much use for it, anyhow. If someone needs me to know what ethnicity or race they are, they’ll tell me. Otherwise, it’s none of my business, I’m just gonna treat you like a person.
@TheJeff: what you said is one version of it, but there are others, including those who BELIEVE in physical differences which may or may not exist AND for some bigots, it doesn’t matter how you look, it soes matter how culturally assimilated you are IN REALITY , because in their world you’re still The Other …. even if you can pass.
Looking at Irish as being less worth the other nationalities was a British sentiment (they occupied Irleand completely until 1923). They claimed that Irish were lazy, unreliable und stupid because they were poor. Sounds familiar?
During the great famine (1845 ff), Irish landlords (i.e the mostly British gentry) offered money to their peasants if they took it to buy a passage to America, but they got none if they wanted to stay.
http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/america.htm
irish immigrants several generations back were basically what mexican immigrants are now, and were literally not considered white
https://www.quora.com/At-what-point-did-Irish-people-become-White-Americans-and-not-an-undesirable-minority
She says “Technically, I’m Irish and Jewish.” It’s the “and Jewish” part that she is drawing Robin’s attention to, as evidenced by the next panel, but she’s acknowledging that she’s only part Jewish. Which evidently matters not at all to the furnace-posters.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if she said “technically” because Jewish refers to not just ethnicity but religious affiliation, and she’s an atheist.
It means she doesn’t want to be called “white” because she doesn’t consider herself “white.” She has an ethnicity–two, in fact–and these are what matter to her self-identity, not “whiteness.” Only low-class Americans are ignorant of which European countries their ancestors hailed from and so can only describe themselves as generically “white,” and Dorothy wouldn’t want to be mistaken for one of those.
I’m not being sarcastic. Americans are really classist.
That’s pretty much crap. There’s plenty of classism certainly, but identifying as white isn’t a marker for low class.
In many cases it’s just a matter of those immigrants being a long way back and thus there being a lot of them. I know I’m a whole mess of things dating back in the US on one side to at least the early 1700s. That I can’t trace all of that back to specific immigrants doesn’t mean a damn thing. I’ve never heard people claiming specific European ethnicity as a class thing. In general those who hold to X-American ethnicity tend to be of more recent immigrant stock and to have faced more discrimination, at least in their family history, if not personally.
I suspect Dorothy is aware enough to reference Irish in full awareness of “how the Irish became white”, which is in no way a claim to upper class status, and as a set up and contrast to the Jewish part, all as a counter to Robin looking for a nice safe white blonde who won’t ask hard questions.
As an American who identifies as white, half-Jewish,* and half-Irish, I agree that specifying ethnicity has nothing to do with class. However, people (including earlier, less-enlightened versions of myself) may specify their ethnicities because they’d rather seem like a victim than like a perpetrator of racism/oppression, and they think saying something other than “white” will help with that.
Like thejeff said, it also has something to do with how much one’s family has held onto its immigrant roots. I’m third/fourth-generation American and I grew up in New York City, and the Irish-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. that I grew up with acknowledged that they were white, but they also identified with their ethnicities. I literally didn’t know that anyone identified as “just white” until I went away to college and met people who’d grown up in communities that are more…post-melting-pot, I guess. I don’t think anyone in college saw it as a class thing that I sometimes brought up my ethnicities — it was just a thing that was important to some families, others not so much.
*Some Jews are offended by the idea of “half-Jewish” as a category, primarily because they see Jewishness as a religious category. Since I”m a cradle Catholic and therefore it’s kind of not my place to define Jewishness, I sometimes describe this side of my heritage as Eastern European, since that’s where my people were before coming to the US, but “half-Jewish” is the way my parents raised me to think of myself.
So when she said she was Irish and Jewish do you think she was trying to be more specific than “white” rather than deny she is white?
Yeah, though it sets up the bit about being attacked for being Jewish, which I’m sure came to mind right away.
While she’s “white” she’s of the kind that people were at one time racist against, instead of being the ones that propagated it?
Like Robin’s thought process was “Hey she’s a white girl that’s looking to be a talking head. She won’t have anything deep and or meaningful or complex or anti-bigotry based to throw at me”?
I’m not sure — it could go either way, and since I don’t remember Dorothy talking about race before, I don’t know which way she meant it.
@Murgatroyd. If I may suggest, perhaps try Yiddish/half Yiddish for your non-religious ethnicity, rather than “half Jewish”
Interesting, I’ve never heard anyone use “Yiddish” to describe the ethnicity, only the language.
Robin. Robin no. Robin you are disappointing Leslie )=
That feeling of disappointment when someone you find physically attractive opens their mouth and starts saying terrible shit. Poor Leslie.
It seriously worries my 66 year old mother how much Trump’s rhetoric and the way the crowds eat it up mirror Hitler’s rise to power. That was a big thing in school when she was growing up along with you know practicing diving under your desk and kissing you behind goodbye.
When I hear people talking like Robin or have acquaintances or relatives who voted for Trump, my mind always starts playing TMBG Your Racist Friend.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4_COOh4VXw
Wish is was music for today’s comic, but I’m going to be hearing it for the next four years. A lot.
I have a feeling it will be useful to commit this song to memory.
Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyou for addressing conditional whiteness for Jews. I hardly ever see it addressed outside of Jewish circles, let alone in any form of media.
This would be highly educational for the class if Leslie wasn’t in the weird position of wanting Robin not to horrify her students. She’s completely ignoring the opportunities for educating them because it’s not what she wanted to do here.
Don’t you just love the way Robin disses Dorothy? “Talk at me, future cable news anchor”, like the best Dorothy can aspire to is being Megyn Kelly — while conveniently forgetting that she herself is a Congresscritter, and that there have been females as presidential candidates and running mates (I assume that the DoA history does accept the historic record of the Mondale/Ferraro campaign of 1984 and Shirley Chisholm’s failed attempt to become the 1972 Democratic candidate for POTUS).
And it looks like even Dorothy is momentarily taken aback at it.
right??? i mean, we all know dorothy wants to be president someday and here’s a successful woman telling her she can’t.
it’s almost painfully topical, actually.
I’m a white American whose heritage is half-Jewish, half-Irish, so it’s kind of fun to see someone similar explicitly represented
Also, these are reasons I think Dorothy may have specified her ethnicities in this context:
1. She may be unfairly distancing herself from white privilege. White ethnics (who absolutely experience white privilege) sometimes derail conversations about racism against POCs to talk about their own sense of vicitimization. One reason for this is that it’s socially more comfortable to be like “yeah, I’m in the struggle with you” than to own the fact that you benefit from other people’s oppression. Robin made a comment about Dorothy’s white privilege, so it’s likely that her knee-jerk reaction is to disown responsibility for it. (It would be so awesome if Willis did an arc about her learning not to do that.)
2. She may feel like discrimination against her because of her ethnicities does actually inform her experience and her take on the world. Maybe she has been attacked by the alt-right and/or bullied in school or something, and this makes her a more empathetic ally to POCs. If so, fine, but she still shouldn’t be disowning her whiteness. Any discrimination you face inside that bubble is not as bad as anything that POCs go through.
Based on my experience and the experiences of those I know, I’m almost sure that she has in some way been made to feel unsafe or unwanted because of her Jewish heritage. I highly doubt that that’s happened because of her Irish heritage. Maybe someone’s made some stupid comments stereotyping her family as drunks — which could actually be hurtful if it’s true, but that’s still far from systemic oppression — but that’s probably it. It’s odd to me that she would bring up both heritages, but maybe she’s just trying to be accurate. If your heritage is only part-Jewish, but you yourself are not Jewish, it’s a weird spot because you may have faced anti-Semitism, but a) not to the extent that actual Jews have, and b) you’re not really a part of the community being targeted. Many Jewish people will (reasonably, in my opinion) object to you calling yourself Jewish, and Dorothy may be trying to avoid provoking that response. And/or, she may feel like the experience of being mixed-ethnicity has taught her something (I was cured of the common white mindset that it’s okay to say something racist when the only other people present are white by having multiple people think it was okay to say something anti-Semitic around me because they found out I was Catholic and therefore assumed I was not Jewish). Hopefully she acknowledges that the Irish part of her has full white privilege these days.
3. She may feel like her family history has influenced her worldview. In my case, this is true — for instance, I’ve gotten maybe three stupid comments against Irish people in my life, but I grew up hearing stories about what my great-grandparents went through to get into this country, to get jobs, to keep jobs, etc., so I think I’m more viscerally attuned to immigrant experiences than my totally assimilated white friends. I grew up knowing about how my Jewish great-grandmother was approached by a eugenist out of nowhere and told how to stop having children, so I think I’m more viscerally attuned to the reproductive rights of women now considered to be in “undesirable” categories. Dorothy strikes me as thoughtful enough for this to be true, and while I’m sure she herself has experienced more crap about being Jewish than about being Irish, the split may be more even among her ancestors and so bringing up both sides in this mindset makes sense to me. Still, girl needs to make sure she acknowledges the fact that she currently does have white privilege. She grew up in a white community, everyone sees her as white unless she tells them otherwise, and even if she does tell them otherwise, the majority will just see her as a more specific type of white.
I think the strip establishes it as canon that she’s experienced online harassment.
Yeah, with 1 and 2, it’s like trying to distance yourself from the horribleness. “It was those whites, not me. I’m on your side here. Please don’t hate me.” So on and so forth. Also, with 3, if you don’t mind me asking, what about the eugenist? ‘Told how to stop having kids’? What?
Yeah, even 3 can shade into that sometimes…I’ve definitely heard people talk about what their Irish etc. ancestors went through as an excuse for being okay with discrimination against contemporary Latino immigrants.
Members of the birth control movement in the 1930s (roughly — the Margaret Sanger era) believed birth control was a way to eliminate or at least diminish “undesirable” elements, which in NYC during their time included Jews (and I believe they targeted Italians, Blacks, and the disabled as well). They didn’t promote birth control, like, as an option for any woman who wanted it — they made the assumption (a) that the “undesirable” women wanted to stop having children, and (b) that those women did not know how to stop having children. According to this line of thought, poor non-white/off-white women needed rich white women to act as saviors by coming into their neighborhoods and telling them how to avoid reproducing. My great-grandmother was among those they decided to “help” in this way.
(Now that I think about it, I’m not sure how common this was — I only have anecdotal evidence.)
Irish is still white and isn’t Dorothy’s family catholic and she left catholosim for athiesism so how the fuck is she Jewish?
In the US, Irish is white NOW, not still. But you just wait. If the racists get rid of their usual targets, someone else is going to be the next in line. Jews are probably it, but I bet Italians and Irish aren’t far behind. People better informed than I have made good explanations above.
Jewishness is weird, because it serves as the name used for both an ethnicity and a religion, and there’s plenty of people who are one but not the other. Regardless, iirc from parents’ weekend, Dorothy’s parents are atheists as well.
She has a Jewish grandparent on her father’s side – this came up during Family Weekend, if not also back when Joyce learned Dorothy was an atheist.
Check the [original] Nazi Nuremberg Laws: there were 2 ways to qualify for a ticket to Auschwitz as Jewish:
1) members of the Jewish religious community
2) jewish by blood — ie ethnically
In other words, conversion wouldn’t save you and there were priests and nuns genocided for being Jewish
Judaism is a religion with adherents of all races/ethnicities
Not all adherents of the religion come to it ethnically — Ivanka, anyone?
And those who do come from multiple ethnicities. MOST jews in America are ethnically Yiddish, of eastern/central european origin. BUT not all Jews are Yiddish, which is why Israel is multi-ethnic/multi-racial: Its the NATIONAL homeland of the Jews. AND, vice verse not all Yids TODAY are Jewish. (
She’s Jewish the same way she’s Irish.
Judaism is more “the traditional religion of the Jewish people” than Jews being “people who practice Judaism.” It’s a bit flipped from many assumptions.
Traditionally, yes. Except for the Khazars …. HOWEVER, both formulating are true today.
Irish has only been “white” in America for a few generations.
Not “we,” Robin. You. Youuuuuuu.
Today’s talk about race spawned a doubt. Why is it that I can’t read two articles analysing the election without seeing the vote trends for whites, blacks, and latinos (often including breakdowns by binary gender), but I haven’t ran into any mentioning other ethnicities? Would jewish be included in “white” on those analyses? Where are the stats of those of asian descent? Amerindians? Literally everyone else?
Jewish typically falls under a religious breakdown, if at all. Ethnically, they’re considered part of the “white” vote.
When I saw the breakdown, it was 70-30 Clinton-Trump for Jews.
> Ethnically, they’re considered part of the “white” vote.
Ashkenazi Jews are. Jews can be any race, so….
Or maybe 76-24? It was in that range, though. Leaning slightly more toward Clinton than the Latino vote.
Perhaps more interestingly, Jewish GOP donations fell this year, representing only 4% of Jewish donations to political campaigns; they’d hit a high of 30% in 2012 as Jews began to trend further right.
It was 70-24-6 if I recall correctly, accounting for third-party votes.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Looks like the telltale signs of “trying too hard” to me.
@Gesc: just the opposite: sardonic humor like this, playing with the enemies tropes and such to reduce their power, comes way too easily to me, reflexively, really, I need to check myself from “sharing”. In this case Dorothy labeled herself “provisionally white” because she knows that as she raises her online profile, Pepe is going to come at her with all the anti-semitics including the pictures of ovens, that she mentions, but many many others including “Yid” and The K-word, prefixed with “dirty” and other terms of abuse. You can check it out on line: trump’s nazi supporters gave been harassing the wuzzle out of Jewish journalists — one of whom, says our First Lady Elect, brought it on herself by writing a profile about her tgat wasn’t ly sufficiently 100% fawning.
So, Dorothy got in Robin’s face about Pepe saying that Jews aren’t really white, appearances (and white privilege) withstanding. And I combined that with the fact that Jews are the only white ethnic group which doesn’t vote like the rest of the white ethnic groups, that is, the majority of Jewish votes went for hillary, as they’ve gone democratic perhaps for ever. SO, in that sense Jews don’t behave like the other white folks, which ha ha, is maybe what led Pepe to say that Jews aren’t Genuine white, AND Pepe isn’t polite, Pepe say the K-word.
And to gird myself to not be afraid, I say the K-word, and I say fuck K all nazis. Cause November 9 was the anniversary of Kristalnacht, and two of my Yid friends wrote to me saying, hm, seems kind of familar, doesn’t it.
HOWEVER I may finally get that I shouldn’t be using the K-word and similar here and I do regret it because I do NOT do it to outrage the folks here.
How much time do you have?
Even if using racial slurs and faux-racist humor were ever okay, this is absolutely the worst fucking time for it, considering how much hate speech has increased – not just online, but out in public – since Tuesday.
There’s enough of that shit happening for real without people trying to make asinine jokes out of it. Especially when it’s not even at all clear it’s a joke.
I accept that. And I will do my dang ist to remember not to post that shizzle here. (Maybe save it for the Quentin Tarantino Film Fest.)
Ew, racial slur. Fuck you.
First panel: Dorothy is giving the Nazi salute! SEE! That proves that Libtards/Jews/Feminists are The real Nazis!
[Tis a joke, using things I’ve actually seen on line to ridicule what I’ve seen on line, using DoA as the pivot]
(Tho, YMMV, cause my sardonic humor has been known to fall flat here … more often than not, probably)
Combination of tone being lost in text, Poe’s Law, and, well, nobody knows nobody on a comment section well enough to easily say “James wouldn’t say something like that, what was actually meant?”
Yes. It made sense in my head, but, that’s me and not everyone else. Definite filter failure on my part.
I do believe that happens to me at times as well. I think I’ve crossed the line twice, but others it was only once. Normally I can explain myself in time. Once I posted support, or more so, thought I posted support. I don’t believe it read as such, considering it was deleted and I couldn’t post for days. That had me worked up, that I had hurt someone when I was being supportive (in my mind).
Thinking “They’ll know what I mean” I’ve been trying to use a flag to either rewrite, or include some kind of flag/tag to state that it’s a joke. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve missed some, posting after being up for around 20+ hours does tend to make one prone to mistakes.
It appears that Willis 86’d my most egregious fail today, which was definitely called for! But lack of sleep wasn’t my problem today, even tho lack of sleep is deadly. For me today it was a failure of mindfulness BEFORE posting something which I might have been aware wasn’t apt here at all, before I finished writing it. The mindfulness is great stuff, but it’s a bear to learn.
That it is.
Oh, yeah. Throw the white solidarity thing to an educated member of the two white segments that most recently got declared white, just because someone even less white showed up. That’ll totally wor8k.
Like biting into a trump sandwich and realizing it was poop all along!
So, a pleasant surprise then?
Er, no. Google “feces sandwich”.
(what kind of alternate universe did I strand myself in?)
It’s blue waffle all over again.
So… does Dorothy identify as part-Jewish on Twitter? Because that’s the only way I can think of that alt-right trolls would recognize her as such. She’s not any kind of celebrity, so they probably wouldn’t think of checking her heritage (…or would they? :(), the name Keener shouldn’t be a tipoff (alt-right trolls tend to assume that any last name ending in “-berg” or “-stein” is Jewish), and they wouldn’t know from looking at her.
Well, she *does* want to be president some day, so she has aspirations of being well-known enough for it to potentially be an issue.
Wild- and way over the top head canon appears:
Dorothy in fact becomes involved in the news if the whole president/politician thing doesn’t work out or she changes her mind. As both a major face and researcher with regards politics in particular be it local, national or international (or perhaps a various combination or rising from the first to the latter two).
She in such a role, unlike some of her predecessors or contemporaries in the beginning of her career: is frightfully honest and ethical, well researched and even more frighteningly for politicians, is still exceedingly popular despite this. She manages to convince people who perhaps would have originally swallowed bile from someone else unthinkingly simply because it confirmed their bias.
She in her own way can almost make or break a politicians career or at least turn an ‘easy district’ into more of a challenge. It’s just a good thing she doesn’t take it lightly. Then again that’s partially how she built her reputation.
She could turn easily evil in such a role but it doesn’t happen thankfully. Still perhaps it sort of gets to the point she could partially quote Lex Luthor:
“President? Do you know how much power I’d have to give up to be President?”
She…she wouldn’t be able to steal cakes!
I like reading this comic because I like understanding other people, even if it’s by peeking into the bubble they never leave.
Leslie’s crush has now died… in agony. Roz is still trying to go with her original plan… the forecast is bleak… very bleak.
On the other hand Robin is sure having trouble now with the reality of her policies, good.
About the bullying, I’m old, in school the teachers said, come tell me, I’ll take care of it. They lied, they didn’t take care of it, they couldn’t take care of it, not then. And they can’t take care of it now either.
I want to thank you for Dorothy’s words. I’ve never seen that situation actually addressed outside of strictly-jewish circles, and I’ve dealt with the same stuff.
…Irish are not white? Am I missing something? I understand that Jewis features can show and thus make someone the target of racism, but Irish? They are just white? What ancestry is accepted as pure white in America?
Irish are generally considered white today, but 1800 years ago they were in a separate racial category: Irish. In order to be considered “white” they had to thoroughly assimilate and the immigration from Ireland had to come to an end.
So 216 AD?
Comic Reactions (late):
Panel 2: Nothing is more frightening to a demagogue than someone who actually knows their shit.
Panel 5: Content Warning: Antisemitism
Oof, yeah, it’s been interesting to be a child of the internet growing up with it as well as growing up in a hyper-fundie Rapturist believing part of the country, because I’ve always been baffled at all the white people who’ve pretended that anti-semitism every stopped.
Like… no. The community I grew up with grew up literally reading works written by John Birch Society members talking about how “international bankers *wink wink*” were going to destroy the world and bring about the Anti-christ, how jews are just “unperfected christians”, and where it was important to support Israel’s eternal war with its neighbors in the hope of kickstarting an apocalypse that would incinerate every jewish man, woman, and non-binary person alive.
And that pulsing heart of pure anti-semitism has been at the heart of so much bullshit. It’s the reason why conservatives have ranted about “liberal” Hollywood, the “liberal” media, “liberal” control over universities, and the “liberal” elites (hint for all of you, liberal is an open dog-whistle for jewish in those communities, and they drop the dog-whistle when they think they are in a room of fellow travelers. It’s all jewish media and jewish elites and jewish Hollywood.
It’s why they’ve continued those dog-whistles even after Hollywood and the media tried to run from their supposed “liberal bias”. It’s why neighborhoods I’ve lived in have had bans against Jewish people owning houses there that extended well into the 1970s.
And intermixed in with this, I’ve had to see the denialism of white people to pretend that no, there hasn’t been an open recruitment of white supremacists on sites like 4chan or Reddit or Twitter. That trolls are just harmless kids having fun rather than angry violent 30+ somethings actively trying to train the next generation of white supremacists to be as full of hate as they are.
That the folks sending oven pics to jewish folks online or making a game of trying to drive trans kids to suicide or posting lynching threats to black folks were just a meaningless group that one should just ignore so they wouldn’t “win”.
And we all ignored that core group as they escalated their death threats into making it common-place in many industries to try and ruin the lives of anyone who befalls these groups, to make people scared to be alive less they get their family members killed. Asked their victims to ignore their attacks as they recruited and grew and got someone who fully espouses all their hate speech to be the president-elect of the country.
Our country has a deep and abiding white supremacist problem and Jewish folks have never been considered white. And if we let these fuckers win and continue to turn a blind eye, we’re going to find that the list of people they don’t consider to be white to be a very long list.
I’m glad you brought this up. I actually missed Dorothy’s comment about it lasting only until someone wants to discriminate against her. As a white Jew who can reasonably pass, this rings very true.
I remember when I was younger seeing those ethnicity boxes and being confused what to put. To my young brain it was “ok, I know the people near me are white, but where is the Jew box for me?” Now of course I put white, but on websites that are more open-ended I put Jewish. Even though I’m borderline Atheist, I consider being Jewish cultural as much as religous.
I remember talking to a (black) friend once, and he didn’t believe anti-semetism was still a thing since, “Jews control the media” and other stereotypes like that. I didn’t feel like argueing, but thinking about it now my declining to argue that should tell you how common it is.
For those who DON’T belive anti-semetism is a thing, here are some examples:
1) The kid that threw money at my brother when Borat came out and told him to “go him”.
2) The person sitting next to me in class that complained that our teacher was “Jewing us” by not letting us use the tissues on his desk. I’m pretty sure she knew I was Jewish but it was so common to her she didn’t make the connection.
3) I was on OkCupid looking for guys (I’m gay) when I found this cute white guy. I sent him a message, and when he responded I got cursed out in German and called a “mudman”. Honestly, I was kind of amused. I didn’t even know there WERE gay neo-nazis.
Panels 5 and 6: Oof, poor Leslie. Cause yeah, I’ve been there. It’s one thing to know about the bigotry of a person you know or a politician who controls your area and another to see it in person, see the hate shine and shimmer off them.
And it’s also another thing to be brought back to a time of suffering, to relive some of the hell that is having to survive on the streets or being treated as trash to be discarded by society.
And even more of another thing to hear that hate coming directly from the lips of someone you are attracted to. It happens a lot in the trans community, especially for straight trans women. Where they find someone they think loves them and accepts them and then they go out and meet their family or their friends and hear their loved one say all manner of transphobic things that demean their humanity and realize that the same person who is so sweet alone nonetheless doesn’t view you as a full human being.
And for Leslie, it’s even worse, because this person who is so casually dismissive of her past self. Over her own humanity? Is someone she brought on campus, is someone she didn’t give warnings to her students would be coming back, is someone she was hoping to connect with romantically or at least flirtatiously. She let this monster come into this teaching space of hers and be openly hostile to those students of hers going through the same things or supporting others going through the same things. Out of misguided lust.
And I think that’s what makes her feel gross and why it was this topic and Joyce’s mini-fight with Robin that cut through the denialism and lust. Because she knows Joyce has been through hell, nearly killed to defend her homeless queer friend, even being so triggered in a class she’s literally had to run out of it.
And yet she brought someone on campus who can’t even pretend that Becky and Leslie are human. That their lives matter as much as the potential votes of some bigots.
And that’s too much for Leslie, which is good. I love her crush and the love for Robin that defined so much for Shortpacked!, but that’s in a world of whimsy and whackiness, where Robin’s tendencies to ape the worst of Republican high officials didn’t have such lasting and abusive consequences for folks.
This Robin? Leslie can do better. Deserves someone who sees her as a full human no matter how much chemistry there is.
And Roz? Oof, fucking Roz. Like, that pained look on her face is necessary, because here she’s just failing Consent 101. You do not ever pressure someone who is having to tap out of a situation because an aspect hit hard. You do not use the pressure of “but you agreed to it” to try and push someone to continue something emotionally toxic and unhealthy to them because you think it will benefit yourself.
And it’s this moment that makes her supposed support for the queer community absolutely hollow. Cause she sees her queer teacher in distress, genuine triggered distress mumbling about her time as a queer homeless youth, and yet does not fully see said teacher’s humanity and pain and say, hey it’s okay if this isn’t going to work out.
Cause to the Roz that exists in this moment, she feels trapped and emprisoned by her sister’s political office and to her any method to destroy her sister’s candidacy, no matter what is justified to regain her freedom. And to that end she’s used herself and that’s one thing, though the podcast episode with the Emperor really did make me realize that she didn’t fully let Joe know what filming an adult video with her would mean as far as him being sucked into a scandal.
But here? She ignores her conscience and asks Leslie to keep pushing through, because to her getting her freedom means more than the suffering and pain and humanity of her queer teacher.
And that becomes even more monstrous as she makes clear her plan all along was to use her sister’s queerness (a queerness she doesn’t yet realize she has) as a means of destroying her candidacy once and for all.
So yeah, major disappointment for Roz here.
About to pass out, but wanted to post. It’ll be a bit simple. Roz is in pain, and is seeking to stop it, and as such doesn’t see/realize the hurt she’s causing? Not excusing her action, btw.
Screw it, hiding that, but also want to know, so as to avoid offending. Just confused.
That actually makes a lot of sense and you might be right.
And yeah, there’s debate inside the community, but at least in the queer communities I’ve grown up in, queer has served as an umbrella terms for all individuals who are LGBT+ including the oft left-off letters like intersex, asexual, non-binary and so on. And that’s definitely a generational thing, as community fights disagree on how reclaimed the term is.
I’m also disinclined to give much weight to the “queer is a slur” types at the moment, because so many of the ones I’ve encountered have used that pose as a means of defending acephobia or intersex-exclusion in the community, so that taints that argument somewhat for me.
And it’s also the term I use for describing my own romantic orientation these days as homoromantic feels incomplete and inaccurate owing to my romantic attractions to non-binary folks including my enbyfriend, but bi/panromantic being too frequently interpreted as meaning every skeezy cis boy should hit on me in the most Joe way possible. So queeromantic has fit for me at the moment which makes me feel even more positively for the term.
Well alright then, thank you. And I’m also kinda disturbed that I had a thought out, albeit simple, theory and a non-offensive question articulated minutes before falling asleep.
I’ve never posted here before (I don’t think?), but I had to say that I love the sound of ‘queeromantic’. I use queer as a self/community descriptor, but that portmanteau just rolls off the tongue in a pleasing way.
Doesn’t everything eventually devolve into Nazis?
That would be Godwin’s Law, I believe. Though that’s normally Hitler, but it could be one and the same.
Soooo I’m guessing Leslie & Robin don’t get together in this universe.