So that explains why all these ghosts are hanging out in my bathroom, they don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know why they can’t just chill in my kitchen instead.
I like to believe that the afterlife is just something none of hve considered due to our complete inability to quantify anything outside of our limited amount of perception.
Kind of an “explaining color to a blind man” sort of thing.
Have I ever told you guys about the support call I took from some poor legally blind woman whose kids went and bought her a Windows 8 tablet for Christmas? I was like, good lord, why do they hate you so much?!
Well, nothingness is something we’re entirely incapable of imagining. As John Dies at the End puts it, death will be either that or something even stranger.
If the universe is infinite in time, your exact brain may completely by chance one day reform in the exact arrangement it was before death.
But it would like disperse a second later, a brief flash of space is all you would experience. And it would happen again googles of years later. And again.
Your existence nothing but brief strobbing flashs of starlight and nothing forever.
Thats my worst case scenario. But nothing is close.
The way I see it, the human mind’s ability to distort time for us will show us whatever we expect to see, and while it will feel like eternity, it will all occur in our final breath.
That is, if you see it coming. If not, you simply cease to be.
I’m not entirely sure there is an afterlife, if we reincarnate, or just degrade into a wet morass of decaying carbon, but I do have a feeling that whatever lies beyond death will make you feel very small if you go in slowly.
The universe is a fundamentally weirder place than any of us could have imagined, religious or not. 🙂 Also, Mary’s hipster plaid ensemble is awesome. Where the hell did she get that?
Is… is it weird to wear plaid flannel button up shirts where you’re from? It’s super normal where I live eep do I live in a den of secret hipsters?! ;___;
Unless she’s lying she didn’t take the picture. More than likely someone else did since she’s a political figure in a public place. I don’t think it’s as damning as Roz thinks it is since you can’t see them kissing, but this will probably put Robin in a position where she’ll have to double down and sell whatever is left of her soul to keep her constituents happy.
No, it’s the best of both worlds. She gets what she wants – free of her sister’s oppressive shadow – without any blame for the outing being attached to her.
Tipped someone off to what? Was she stalking Robin or Leslie? Anything’s possible, but there’s no reason to think she knew Robin had come back after being thrown out of class.
Yes, but she’s mostly sad that this means women will be able to decide what they do with their bodies. Because reproductive health is “evil” and only ever involves “killing babies”.
This is actually the only time so far I’ve been able to relate to Mary. She’s disappointed that her candidate is a hypocrite, silver-lining glad the truth came to light, and disappointed that her favourite policies will be overturned. Obviously I am super against Mary’s policies, but I can relate to disappointment with a candidate, and dismay at who is going to win instead. It also shows that Mary prioritizes her candidate’s purity over her candidate’s policies, which is interesting.
…Oh wait I was way too generous to Mary. She’s not upset that Robin is a hypocrite, she’s upset that Robin isn’t straight. She’d rather murder babies (according to her belief, not mine) than vote for a queer person. Screw you, Mary.
Mary stops hanging out with Joyce’s friends because they’re not Christian, seems unhappy to be losing friends even though it’s her choice to do so (this is probably the most sympathetic Mary’s ever been, and a good indication of why she’d be the perfect similar-but-different archnemesis to Amazi-girl, who similar suffers in the name of her own code. She similarly works as a foil to Becky, as Mary has Becky’s “I’m assuming people will hurt me so I’ll be a jerk to them pre-emptively” gimmick times a thousand)
And 3 is today. Unfortunately for Mary, every time she starts getting even a tiny bit sympathetic, assholes use it as an excuse to talk about how she’s the misunderstood hero or whatever, and then Willis makes her jerkier again in response and the cycle continues. It’s a shame, because Mary’s the most fleshed out and interesting villain in the comic by a pretty huge margin;, and I enjoy her as a character since I can relate to the “I’m a jerk because people don’t like me because I’m a jerk” self-fueling cycle she’s kind of stuck in.
I don’t think that Willis had to make Mary jerkier in response to comments. She was already a completely hateful person.
IMO, Mary isn’t a jerk because people hate her, she’s a jerk because she believes she’s obviously and intrinsically Right while everyone else is wrong. She judges everyone as immoral and inferior, and she’s consistently surprised that people don’t respect her status as the only moral person around. She basically thinks that she’s bringing light to dark places, and the fact that nobody is grateful for it only further proves how immoral they are.
Interestingly, Sarah is also hella judgmental, but she judges herself just about as harshly as everyone else, and she doesn’t expect anyone to agree with her, let alone kowtow to her natural superiority. I think she might better fit the pattern of “I’m a jerk because people don’t like me because I’m a jerk” that you describe.
I don’t think that Willis makes her jerkier because of such a big buffer. A few days ago his caption was that he wrote the strip in October, two months is a big lead time to incorporate in responses to comments.
Mary is a jerk because she’s a crusader. She genuinely believes that it’s her duty to do Gods work and punish sinners. I don’t think she actually believes she can change them, or she’d try a little less vinegar and a lil more empathy. At least to their face.
The girl behind Roz and Other Rachel here doesn’t appear to be Meredith – not tagged as such, paler, different clothing, somewhat different hair. I’m currently operating on the headcanon that that’s Bloodrose, the never-clearly-seen fifth member of Daisy’s Squad 135 in It’s Walky!, and that she’s Agatha’s unseen roommate.
I dunno where that leaves Meredith. Maybe she rooms with Rose.
I believe in an afterlife, jokes are still funny, though. God made humor, in my opinion, so laughter is good. My God isn’t a jerk, love to all and its all good. As Jesus said, there are only two rules: Love God and love everyone else. That’s it — love God, love EVERYONE else.
Though that photo could literally be any number for interactions, if you got them kissing that’s one thing but this could easily be skewed as “oh, my friend was having a really bad day so I did what a good friend should do and cheered her up”
I’m sure Freida (or others) are quickly deciding how best to spin it. But anyone who can identify Leslie can mention how she’s an out lesbian Women’s Studies professor who didn’t know Robin til like yesterday. Whoops.
yeah, she was in the Walkyverse. she was Amber’s internet boyfriend’s roommate/girlfriend/Amber’s competition????/encourager of the strategic growth of horrible porn mustaches.
1. Thank you Billie.
2. That hat Roz is wearing I can only describe as dapper.
3. Mary, I want to introduce you to something. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s called the Golden Rule. Oh, you haven’t. Never mind then. Have a good time in Gehenna.
Literal and knowing consumption of the flesh from a large number of animals’ penises? That’s not a pleasant thing to wish upon someone but, you know, not abhorrent. So it still works!
That someone is her emotionally abusive and horribly bigoted sister and this could quite possibly free her from her control so I’ve got nothing but sympathy here.
There’s historical precedent to suspect this will tank an election Robin has already talked about being behind in.
Like, all the terrifying swarms of neo-nazis makes us forget, but Trump really only was able to happen through massive disenfranchisement, a complicit media, foreign interference, and some sheer narrow luck in a few key states.
And sadly, if he was outed as having down-low sex with a man instead of being a child-raping nazi, he probably would have lost.
Ugh, it is really annoying how the US keeps getting held back by all these lingering remnants of slavery.
Like the only reason that shit exists is because the slave states wanted to count their 3/5 person slaves as part of their disproportionate voice and prevent the “mob” from ending slavery earlier than we did.
Also because the Founding Fathers were classist fucks who thought poor people were too stupid to POSSIBLY ever understand political issues and pick a responsible president, so they’d leave that to electors (HA! The irony burns)
Racism, prejudice, bad economic policy, complete ignorance of foreign affairs, repeated lies about evolution and abortion, concepts like legitimate rape? All that’s fine, so long as it’s from one of them. (And it often is.)
But being queer? You’re no longer one of them. Torch and pitchfork time.
So, like… on one hand I’m happy Robin doesn’t get to be president (she would not do well, and this way she has more time to give to Leslie~)… But on the other hand… I really wish this was not how it happened.
Because outing people is not okay. I understand wanting to out people who’ve harmed the community, either through hate speech or legislation (or in any way, really). I get it. I do. But it’s just not okay. Not when things like Orlando can still happen.
You done fucked up, Roz.
Since Roz is being ‘outed’ by someone who clearly doesn’t want to use that to alleviate pressure off of the community, yea, it’s not going to be of any real benefit.
Oh no wait you’re right it was Congress. I got it all mixed up, what with the Robin/Trump parallels. Woops. ^^”
(Of course there’s still huge benefit to keeping someone like Robin out of Congress, tho the impact of a single congressperson is presumably less than that of a president.)
People mention below that Roz isn’t responsible for this (paraphrasing, correct me if I’m misunderstanding those positions).
But she manipulated events to result in this. She got Robin to appear in Leslie’s class. She convinced Leslie to try at seducing Robin. She may not have taken the photo*, but that doesn’t clear her of guilt. And her triumphant attitude certainly doesn’t help.
(*At first read I thought that was an off-handed lie, which is waht I based my comment on largely, but at second look it does seem to be true – which doesn’t negate my point)
Understandable position. Every choice is augmented or negated by the choices of others, everything builds up into this grand cacophony of choices and causes and events thereof known as life.
What she’s done to her sister isn’t even half the problem. It’s what her actions will mean for Leslie.
Sure, she hasn’t outed her, Everyone knows she’s gay, but she’s involved her in yet another Political Scandal that can Very Easily be linked back to the College.
And this after she had front row seats to what the Dean thought after the last Political Scandal connected to the college.
Maybe Leslie should have realised that photo would happen, but she was too wrapped up in her crush, anger and quest to save Robin from herself. Which is what Roz made it sound like- a question of having her sister comes to terms with her own sexuality.
But that wasn’t Roz’s plan at all. She may not have had an active part in the photo being taken, but it Was her End Plan, one she didn’t think to warn Leslie about.
Well done Roz, you’ve just ruined the life of your Favourite Teacher.
TBF, at least Roz actually did something the school could object to by using their property as a porn location. Leslie, by this picture’s logic, merely was caught close to the Congresswoman (and smooched her, according to the article). That isn’t illegal and going on a date and kissing a pretty lady is not immoral, nor was the school involved in any capacity other than it happened to take place on or near campus. IU is a secular school that claims to be an equal opportunity employer with 3 Title IX coordinators at this campus alone, so it’s also not a school rules thing. Unless the dean personally is homophobic, Leslie should be okay on the ‘dean won’t be happy’ school. And he doesn’t seem to like Robin’s politics, and his son isn’t homophobic, so hopefully he isn’t either.
Leslie might be at issue with her housing, but if there’s any fuss about her employment, it probably won’t be from Dean McHenry.
Didn’t you see how Leslie’s tune changed when she heard the word “Photo”?
It might not mean being fired, but this Scandal is going to hurt her plenty, and she knows it.
Oh yes it will. I’m just saying that if there’s problems with her job, I don’t think it’ll be from the Dean. Other folks (or hell, other deans even), maybe, but I don’t think he specifically will auto-fire her.
I’m far more worried she’ll get tossed from her apartment.
And just to point out how closely this Scandal can be liked to the college- Robin attended a lecture there the day before. The Media could well paint a picture of Leslie jumping on Robin after the lecture was over, before dragging her away to a bar to have her wicked way with her. The media could say that Leslie used, no, Abused her powers as a teacher to lure Robin to the college under false pretences, and image that might be enforced by the premature end Leslie brought her visit to.
Robin was invited as a guest speaker, not to attend a lecture. I’d think Leslie kicking her out would be a bad sign for any attempted seduction. As for the bar, people can vouch that Leslie LEFT after that incident, no dragging off for wicked ways.
It won’t stop Robin’s die hard supporters from believing what they want, but that’s not really a ‘look bad for the college thing’.
Truth and what the Media actually reports tend to be two very different things unfortunately. Do you think it will make for an interesting story if they say Leslie just left after this? No, so they’ll just leave that part out.
That also depends who wins the media view on this story though – Manley looks like he’s trying to spin it as ‘Robin’s a hypocrite, look at her macking on this lady’ which makes it far more of an issue for Robin than Leslie.
I think you’re missing something. No, the school isn’t going to care that Leslie did a lesbian thing. But the dean made it quite clear that he’s worried about making the school look bad. Thus, if this becomes a scandal, firing Leslie may be seen as a way to make it go away.
The one thing I’m not sure about is how easily he can do that. I assume this is a public college, right? If that’s the case, there would be some procedure necessary to fire her. She seems to be a full-time teacher, so there’d have to be some paperwork and stuff.
That alone is often enough to keep public school teachers from being fired, and it might help Leslie.
The other saving grace is that Leslie didn’t take the picture, so there’s a chance she keeps things cool with Robin, and Robin calls off any attempt from her campaign to make it a scandal. Leslie can easily report that nothing happened, without also admitting any sort of guilt that might make her more undesirable.
I predict that Robin’s Story arc will come to a head when she’s forced to choose between saving the girl by telling the truth, and saving her job by giving into the smear campaign tactics her aides will inevitably come up with.
I think the two aren’t really equivalent though. Roz was using school property as a porn shoot location – that’s what he was concerned about. Leslie didn’t do anything illegal, misuse school property or resources (which might not matter to the media, but it’ll matter to the Dean), or really do anything immoral. Even going by this article, the worst she did was go on a date and maybe smooch a little with Robin. It’s not her fault Robin’s a Congressperson who wanted to keep it on the down low. This isn’t connected to the school remotely, and I really don’t think Dean McHenry, specifically, would care, especially since he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Robin. Other teachers, other deans, die hard Robin supporters, the media, etc.? They might try to give Leslie a hard time. But I don’t think Dean McHenry, specifically, is going to give much of a fuck. I hope not anyways.
Leslie and Robin are grown ass adults and they are responsible for their own actions. Leslie made the decisions that led to this of her own free will and trying to twist this into somehow being Roz’s fault is just another extension of the weird vendetta this community seems to have against her.
I have no vendetta against Roz. Overall, I rather like her. But I have a visceral reaction to the outing of people (and you can’t deny that Roz manipulated events in the hopes for this outcome), and her triumphant attitude about it just makes me want to shake her and yell at her about all the lives that have been ruined by this kind of shit. (not that I would, like, actually do that if I had her in front of me, just, that’s my gut reaction)
If any community can understand a visceral reaction to outing, I’d expect to be this comment section, considering how many here are in the LGBTQIA+ community.
And I kind of want to shake you and yell at you about all the lives that have been ruined by bigoted politicians pushing hate legislature that contributes to the cultural climate where being outed is as dangerous as it is.
In which case I’d like to invite you to read my long rant further down in the comment section where I try to think about all of those conflicting things.
I’d also like you to take into consideration the fact that visceral reactions aren’t necessarily based in the objective logic you’re talking about.
The first comment I make on these strips is always the one that’s just my initial gut reaction, before taking time to read through other opinions and think about all the different things that might be at stake, all the different perspectives that come into play and are valid. I do this so I can be honest about my feelings and about the contrast that exists between a first reaction and a second thought-out reaction.
hmm Roz has known Robin a long time so maybe she has some insider knowledge of Robin bring fickle about what her priorities are… but this still seems like a weak thread to rely on
also: I thought that really conservative people don’t think women holding hands is gay or anything, from what I’ve heard, women can share beds without being accused of being lesbians because female friendship is more affectionate or something. Basically there’s a double standard that theoretically would let Robin get away with more?
Last-panel Mary strongly reminds me of the larger-than-life Puritans at various renaissance faires. I thought it was ridiculous, but I’m forever learning that people think crazy stuff all the time. Do real people say things like that?
Used to have friends’ parents explain to me like a dumb idiot child that God loved me so much he would send me straight to hell to be tortured for all eternity if I didn’t start seriously attending church services.
I used to just deflect until they stopped pushing the point.
God seems to have a very weird idea of love. He’s like one of those dads that lies about who his son is on the baseball team because his real son isn’t very good.
“I love you, but don’t fuck up or I’ll deny all connection to ya.”
As far as I can tell, the fundamentalist Christian God is just your typical horridly abusive dad. I mean. “I’m punishing you because I love you”. That’s like as clear as it gets.
Well, this is more the good ones who “forgave” me for being a good student who never did drugs and thus a good tool for their kids to practice converting. The others… yeah, I just tried to make sure they couldn’t find out I wasn’t just as Christian as they were.
Thats because she’s a ninja! A dino Ninja! Funny, enough Dino ninjas are the least effective type of ninja, have you seen Dinosaurs? they are not very sneaky.
Are you saying that dinosaurs aren’t very sneaky? I claim the opposite. They are super sneaky. They are so sneaky that they made everyone think they’ve gone extinct.
With your amendment of adding Dina, I almost agree with you.
Billie has been likable before, and may be again someday. But, while I do feel sorry for her, I don’t particularly like her right now.
The “almost” is only because I don’t know anything about this Meredith, so she might be likeable. I do at least try to like everybody a tiny bit by default.
Hey, Roz? Not to rain on your parade, but have you ever heard of a Congressman by the name of Dave Brat?
Given a grade of “A” by the Conservative Review, one of only a few Republican Congressional lawmakers to receive such a high score. He’s probably one of the most openly conservative individuals in Congress, short of the BIG guys like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
The reason he was able to win his seat back in 2014 was because he was able to beat Eric Cantor, who at the time was the HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER, in the district’s Republican primary. It’s one of the biggest political upsets in recent memory, and arguably the biggest one in 2014. And he did it by going EVEN FURTHER RIGHT WING than Cantor, who was, again the HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER and certainly quite conservative.
What I’m basically saying Roz, is that you didn’t ensure a more progressive candidate would win. You just made it easier for a more radical conservative to step into the driver’s seat. So don’t celebrate until the election is over.
Except we’re past the primary and into the general election. If Robin’s base turns against her, Jake Manley will easily win the seat. Given that it’s not an extremely conservative district and given the advantages of incumbency, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to keep it.
It’s always possible he’ll be unseated in two years by an even more Conservative Republican, but then as your example shows that would be possible even if Robin stayed in.
Not even just ‘into the general election’. We’re a month away from the vote. Any kind of replacement would barely have time to file paperwork to get on the ballot, never mind campaign. If she drops out, it’s Manley’s.
I don’t think she had to. There were going to be plenty of people at that bar who would capture a moment like this.
Doesn’t mean she isn’t going to cheer how this frees her from her sister’s eternal campaign or how congress is going to be slightly less hostile to her rights and the rights of groups she cares about.
And that might not be kind, but it’s an unkindness I am very much guilty of as well.
I agree she didn’t have to. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t, either.
I definitely think she’d probably planned to get a photo, as I believe Roz’s goal, unlike Leslie’s, was indeed to out Robin. And, since Leslie wasn’t completely on board, either Roz or someone she trusted would have to take it.
I’m leaning towards Roz being uninvolved, but it’s more a gut feeling than anything I can show using the comic.
Alternatively, Roz could have known her sister well enough to realize that Robin has all the discretion of a rambunctious litter of puppies on a slick floor, and that pictures would have been inevitable.
I wonder if the race for the R.A job, between Roz and Dorothy, will end up coming to a vote, but it will be 50/50. With Mary being that last voter.
However, I do feel like Mary would cast her vote for Dorothy pretty fast, I mean Mary activity hates Roz on a personal level, she doesn’t know shit about Dorothy.
She knows that Dorothy is an atheist and warned Joyce about hanging out with the wrong kind of people so she has no love for her. As far as she’s concerned it’s the same with congressional race. She hates Robin, but considers her the lesser of two evils over a Democrat. I agree that if RA becomes an elected position Mary could be the swing voter which would put both Dorothy and Roz in an unenviable position. Just how far are you willing to go to get her vote?
They’d never do it openly. Roz would have the best opportunity since Mary is her roommate, but seeing as how nobody likes her no one would be paying attention if Dorothy paid her a visit too.
I think Roz has already lost with this little plan of her’s. Once it comes to light how involved in the idea she was, she will be seen in a scary new Ruthless light, completely contradictory to the image she was previously projecting.
And then when this plan ends up getting Leslie Fired (for creating yet another political scandal that can be connected to the college), people will see how little she thinks things through that concern other people.
Can we recap how exactly is Billie blackmailing Mary? Billie said she would rat Mary out on how she was blackmailing her and Ruth, which is bad why exactly? What would Billie even say? “Hey miss RM, this girl knew about our relatinship with the RA and she uh… yeah that’s about it”. What am I missing here? I understand Mary was supposedly blackmailing them, but she didn’t really make them do anything at all? Like really, what am I missing in this?
Because she was trying to bully the RM’s “favorite RA” into suicide using knowledge of her queer identity as a weapon, largely in retaliation for asking for carte blanche in harassing a trans student, and nearly caused an attempt that required hospitalization of said “favorite RA”?
I mean it’s basically a Tyler Clementi situation that was only cut off at the pass due to Carla being a force of nature: http://tylerclementi.org/tylers-story/
And Mary can claim clean hands and “not technically forcing Ruth to attempt”, but that’s complete bullshit as recognized by actual legal authorities. Harassing someone into feeling so trapped that they attempt is a crime and while it is not treated as equivalent as the attempted murder it so frequently is, it honestly probably should be.
She wasn’t trying to “Bully her into suicide”. She was trying to get her way, which is diametrically opposed to what Ruth wanted to do and caused her a lot of stress. I don’t believe that her intention was to get Ruth to kill herself.
She just wanted free wheeling to be a dick and convert people to her way of thinking. Which is still pretty shitty, but not as bad as what YOU’RE implying her end game was.
I mean, I saw that as more of a “The king is dead. Long live the king” In that she doesn’t intend for Ruth to actually be dead. But, such as the Wicked Witch is the leader of the evil part of Oz, Ruth was the leader of the floor. So “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” means she’s no longer in power, and also I didn’t like her so she’s the villain of the movie.
Also the coping strategies she was denying her was her (admittedly) toxic relationship with Billie, and also she kept her tryst with her a secret because she wanted to use that power over her. I think she wasn’t even privy to the extent of Ruth’s depression. She was just trying to twist the power in her direction with little concern for how it affected either of them. I believe even Mary would be sad if she found out Ruth killed herself.
I mean she’d probably ruin it by saying something about how she’s probably in hell or how this proves gays just aren’t all there mentally, but I still don’t believe her intention was for Ruth to kill herself.
When Carla blew the thing wide open, Mary – now knowing Ruth was suicidal – attempted to stop anyone from intervening, and to put herself in control of the situation.
She absolutely knew the extent of Ruth’s depression then. Everyone in earshot knew.
And not only did she gloat about it to Billie, she seriously believed Billie wouldn’t actually care and would even be interested in helping her do something similar to Carla, because Mary doesn’t really see them as people. They’re just depraved perverts to her. They’re already lost souls, so they don’t matter.
If Ruth had actually died, Mary might feel a brief twinge of remorse, but I guarantee you she would stomp that shit down immediately as the devil’s influence trying to make her falter from her Righteous Path, just like Ross did.
Doesn’t change the fact that after she knew her actions nearly caused a suicide attempt, she tried to bargain with the hallmates to keep it quiet or under wraps so she could continue abusing Ruth or after she knew Ruth was hospitalized, how she literally tried to bargain for the right to universal access to abusing Carla again.
Mary has shown us exactly how little she has cared about Ruth’s health and well-being, even after she was out of excuses of ignorance.
I totally agree. She doesn’t give a shit about Ruth or Billie as people. I just feel that that’s COMPLETELY different then ACTIVELY TRYING to make her kill herself. I don’t think Mary’s a good person, by any regard, but Ruth was much more of means to an end than someone she actually tried to have killed.
Oh, I think she was actively trying to make Ruth kill herself.
I just think she was heavily in denial that that was what she was trying to do. Same as she’s heavy in denial that what she’s been doing to Carla is violent bullying and harassment.
I really don’t see “not caring that your actions almost killed someone” as being significantly different from doing it yourself, morally speaking.
Simply not caring if her actions drove someone to suicide rather than specifically intending to do so might be slightly less awful, but not by much. I’d say the difference is comparable to murdering people vs murdering AND eating them.
In my opinion, driving someone to suicide is actually murder, where the murder weapon is the victim’s own depression. Just using a knife would be a considerable step up from that.
Yeah, and it’s a type of murder attempt I take really personally because so many bigot groups use this as a weapon against trans folks, making games out of driving them to suicide in order to “decrease the number of freaks in the world”, not to mention the groups at my school trying to harass the raped trans kid into another suicide attempt for various reasons.
It’s a different degree of evil. Delighting in the pain of others is a special type of evil, beyond merely not caring. One makes her a bad person, the other makes her a full on psychopath.
As for why it matters? Here, it doesn’t. She’s just a comic book character. But, in real life? There’s a difference. Getting people to notice who they are hurting and helping them care is a lot easier than convincing a psychopath. (Some argue it’s only even possible at all if they are a teen and their brains are still developing.)
Now, personally, I think Mary is straddling both groups, and could go either way. I’m just articulating why there is a difference.
trlkly, there is absolutely no question about whether Mary knows the consequences of her actions. Making her notice she’s hurting people would make no difference.
Mary probably isn’t a psychopath, either. Like Ross, she just suppresses what empathy she does feel for those she hurts. She has it in her head that being a good Christian requires it
Maybe she was trying to hurt Ruth, maybe she was just trying to neutralize what power Ruth had over her. In terms of what Billy has now regarding her blackmail attempt, it doesn’t actually matter that much – Ruth used that power to get Ruth out of the way so that she could harass Carla, and Billy knows about that. Billy has more than enough on Ruth to get Ruth to behave, at least as long as Ruth believes that Billy will carry through on the threat.
It might also help to mention which trans students. Even if Carla’s family wouldn’t get involved, I imagine the school would probably rather not piss off the zillionaires who may be giving funding, donations, publicity, might be alumni, and can feasibly sue the school off the map if their little girl killed herself.
So I read all the replies here and I gather you guys are saying that someone being an asshole and thus worsening someone’s depression is a crime recognized by law and college staff?
Literally all Mary did was being an asshole. She wanted to control Ruth, with the power of assholeness.
Yes, harassment is a crime. It’s often difficult to prosecute unless it leads to quantifiable damage like suicide, which is why we have this blurred line between “harassing” and “being an asshole” – a judge could almost certainly find Mary guilty or not based on how much how much of an asshole the judge feels like being today. But, well, Cerebrus here already covered this and she knows what she’s talking about.
Blackmail is also a crime, as is driving someone to commit suicide, even if it’s very difficult to prosecute.
Mary knew exactly what she was doing when she tried to get Chloe to leave after she showed up, so don’t try for a moment to say she was “just being an asshole”.
I don’t think so. From what we’ve seen of Mary, she’s absolutely fine to people she considers ‘her own’. It’s just any deviation from that has been instilled in her that those people will burn in hell, will suffer, and will deserve it. Even with other Christians, she’s less and less friendly the more schisms away you are from her.
It’s just a form of mindset gardened throughout her life, by her community, which has been doing it, since, well, America has been founded (Puritans, anyone?) Though the mindset can also lead to backstabbing and infighting within their own anyway, but that’s a bit off topic. Just her upbrining, really, she doesn’t seem automatically, naturally petty and spiteful, just, basically, scared shitless of any deviation or other due to religion/spirituality/superstition.
It’s kind of hinted that she might, with the “If evil weren’t nice, nobody’d bother with it :(” line from way back in “Choosing My Religion”, but we don’t really know.
Hello, horrible sister who brings her campaigning into her life cosntantly and wants to take away her birth control for political power?
Jesus christ, folks are ridiculously idiotic about her – it’s almost like they’re sexist and racist and don’t like the brown girl who actually fighters back.
Already the anti-roz posts are in. Even though she once again didn’t do anything wrong. Robin got a picture of herself taken in a public place. Nobody outed anyone,
Yeah, it’s the general smugness that makes her really annoying to me – because that’s exactly the kind of stereotypical behaviour some people associate with the left.
No matter how valid your point, people won’t care if you’re an asshole about it. :/
Her sister who is an awful person who belittles and manipulates and controls her. Sometimes being related to someone makes you hate them more for their mistreatment of you rather than less.
Robin is, what, ten years older than Roz? An age gap like that can change the usual big sis/little sis relationship into something more like a secondary mother/daughter relationship. Robin sees her role as a parental one, with her job being to guide and enforce Roz’s behavior. Roz, being eighteen, is naturally rebelling against such control (esp if her mother is similarly controlling).
I also see the age gap being an issue between Roz and Riley – they’re about 6 years apart, which may again distort the usual sibling relationship. The DeSantoes seems to have taken their time between each pregnancy…
Robin is 12 years older, so yeah, probably had to take care of her younger sisters (there’s more than Roz and Riley) a lot. Robin goes above and beyond though, dragging and forcing her into political instances she abhors and trying to force her to be the perfect family values family.
But what happens to Robin isn’t even going to be the main issue. Look what happened with your main election. Polls continually showed Hilary ahead, Trump continued to make himself look bad, but in the end…
But Leslie… Leslie is going to lose her job for causing yet another political scandal to be so closely connected to the school. Especially after she hosted the “debate” over the last scandal, where the Dean ended it in no uncertain way.
The photo may not have been something that Roz actively did, but it was certainly part of her plan. Maybe Leslie should have also realised this, but she was too wrapped up in her crush, anger, and quest to save Robin from herself that she forgot about such things. But this photo was Roz’s end game, that she forgot to tell Leslie about. Little did Roz stop to think that it would ruin her “favourite teacher”‘s life.
To those asking if she took the picture, despite her protests.
Of course not.
She’s a college freshman. Roughly 18.
I don’t see her hanging around a bar, without getting asked pointedly to leave until she turned 21.
Why would Walky need to look 21 just because Sal might? They aren’t identical twins. If she were actually 21, sure, but I just think she can pass for it.
Sal also dresses in ways that are generally associated as older (early mid 20s) and smokes, which probably deepened her voice and, likewise, would make her seem older.
Also fake IDs and apparently being very very attractive to the bouncer/bartender.
I’m not familiar with Indiana law here, but there are a lot of bars where it is totally fine to have minors there, they just can’t drink. I know of relatively few places that card at the door, and half of them are straddling the bar-nightclub divide pretty hard (some of the others are out of state for me, so it might just be Colorado being odd here).
“Even though she once again didn’t do anything wrong.”
Rejoicing that someone is outed IS doing something wrong. OUTING SOMEONE AGAINST THEIR WILL IS AN ACT OF HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENCE.
Outing people can get them harassed, hurt, jobless, homeless and even killed.
Please don’t rejoice that people get outed even when they are scum politically speaking. Yes, Robin’s politics are horrible, yes, her defeat means the more progressive candidate will win, but specifically homophobic violence should never be condoned.
Okay, um, so I’ve been noting a lot the complicated history and debate within the queer community with regards to the practice of outing anti-gay legislators and how that history directly led to a lot of gains in queer rights whether we approve or not.
But now that people are starting to argue that any person who feels joy at a professional bigot being outed or revealed to be a hypocrite, I have to much more strongly object.
I’m pretty much a trans elder and really came into my political own during the Bush years and I was on the frontlines of a lot of queer struggles back then including the fight for marriage equality.
And I remember the days, when things were going really poorly on that front and how much the whole tenor of the fight changed when bigoted candidates and hate-group members were being outed.
This thing some of you are saying makes a person scum, to cheer the outing of a hypocrite?
It’s a thing I did when I was younger.
Maybe that wasn’t right, certainly I’d be in a fuck-ton of distress if the decision came to me personally whether or not to out a bigoted politician whose policies were hurting my community. But rejoicing that someone who was hurting my community was no longer in a position to hurt people I loved?
I apologize. I was violent and peremptory with my words.
Your post gets me thinking. In a way it looks like people celebrating Thatcher’s death for example, something I do approve entirely: it can seem terrible but it is fully understandable that someone directly responsible for the misery and death of many is now unable to keep on their horrible work.
In a way, this is the same. Just another way bigots are made completely inoffensive.
I also get the point about efficiency, about how it can save lives, better lives. The idea of violence itself as a way to obtain social progress isn’t repulsive to me. Often it’s just necessary. I’ve seen that in anticapitalism, in feminism, in antiracism. Sometimes violence is the only way to get results and the only language the Powers that Be understand.
But still… Well, you’ve obviously put a lot more thought in this than me, and you have a lot more experience in the matter. I’m just 31, I’m a young enby bisexual person, and I only began activism a few years ago.
So anything I could say about how “dirty” it feels to see someone, anyone, outed, subjected to the same horrible homophobic gaze of mainstream society, you’ve likely felt and thought about already, and way more deeply.
By the very way you phrase your post, I see you grasp the way I reacted to Roz’s joy. I… frankly I’m hesitating now. It looks logical to react positively to the outing of enemies of LGBTQIA+ rights, it looks logical to even AIM for the outing of enemies of LGBTQIA+ rights, and still it feels so wrong.
Thanks for your intervention. I need to think about it.
I wouldn’t beat yourself up about it, it was more something I needed to speak up about given my own background and yeah, I think it’s very similar to things like celebrating Thatcher or Scalia’s deaths.
This thread is actually making me think a lot about my stance on this. I am extremely young (21) and have not lived the harsh activism you (Cerberus) have. From reading this I realise there’s a lot of things I didn’t think about. Maybe I avoided thinking about them, because it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t know how to find an answer that leaves me guiltless.
Maybe there is no guiltless solution. Outing someone will always feel very wrong to me, but when these politicians are doing everything they can on a daily basis to alienate us, starve us, kill us, … waiting for things to somehow get better, for someone else to get elected, etc, waiting for things that might never happen, doing nothing or doing things we know won’t be enough might be- probaby is much worse.
Maybe there is no right or wrong, only wrong and worse. It’s a distressing thought. I need to do a lot of thinking on the issue.
I do know that when politicians have been outed as, for example, having had relations with male escorts, I’ve thought “Good”. And I haven’t felt bad for them being outed, as much as I’ve felt bad about all of the self-loathing that they must have experienced. But those feelings were quickly followed by guilt over thinking it was good that they were outed, and guilt at having compassion for the struggle of a person who’s spread so much hate and misery.
My moral compass is just having a lot of trouble finding the right colour balance to suit this grey-shaded world, I guess.
(this has been a rant. I apologize for its length but I needed to get these thoughts out of my head and this is the best way I currently know)
It’s the outcome of almost any fight really – somebody loses, and it’s not pretty, but most of the winners care more about winning the fight than the fate of the people opposing what they care so much about. It’s the dark side of righteous fury – it’s quick to dismiss the humanity of the opposing side, perhaps for strong, completely understandable reasons. Would I feel as much sympathy for the death of someone who made life needlessly miserable for so many people as I would for the average person?
It’s kind of a “Is it ok to shoot someone who’s shooting people” sort of thing.
Personally I couldn’t pull the trigger but I might be happy that he’s dead. That said, I still I’d feel guilty wishing ill will on anyone. Especially if it’s something relateable.
I’m surprised that you of all people are dancing a jig, Cerberus, when it’s clear that Roz’s little prank will hurt Leslie just as badly, maybe even worse than Robin. You pointed that out yourself a few days ago. Is Leslie acceptable ‘collateral damage’ now that it has probably led to a political outcome that you want?
I’m not necessarily dancing a jig about this specific comic arc. I’m actually feeling about as conflicted about this as I would be about outing a bigoted politician myself.
But the statements are about the general cheering of the outing of anti-gay politicians and how that is monstrous.
Cheering the outing of an anti-gay politician and being thankful they weren’t able to hurt someone in a similar way as Roz here is something I’ve actually done in my past. And so the condemnation of such actions as monstrous may be warranted but definitely applies to me and places I have been in my life.
I’m inclined to think that Roz thinks so, as much as she thinks of anything or anyone besides getting what she wants (in this case, out from under Robin) – that is, hardly ever.
IMO, the DeSanto sisters (these two, at least) are a lot alike in that regard.
Panel One: Well…..shit. So Robin is probably hosed for the election and Leslie might be suddenly in trouble for her housing and employment. Yikes!
Panel Two: Okay, it’s good that Roz didn’t take the photo, but seriously? I think even pro-outing-gay-homophobic-politicians generally see it as something you should take seriously and not gloat about – it is still using homophobia and outing to defeat someone. While it might be necessary, it probably isn’t a cause for celebration (and please correct me if I’m wrong about how those things are generally seen).
Though, on the other hand, I can definitely see folks not feeling bad for Robin because Robin was going to get people killed with her laws and now she’s had a hard blow struck towards her electability.
I know I just said this on Patreon, but it seems Roz received a far more George Bushian era education regarding outing homophobic gay politicians than I did. She definitely seems to be of the school that goes ‘it’s a valid method and i’m not feeling too sorry for them’.
Also, this may be causing Roz problems with her RA bid – I’m not sure many of her classmates have gone to the same school of thought. They seem younger – it seems likely they probably learned a lot the way I did (social media) which is generally very very anti-outing.
Panel Three: Roz, Mary, both of you quit being so snazzy looking. It’s unfair that I end up wanting to raid both your closets. Think of my needs dammit! /joking.
Mary, shut the fuck up. Your evidence was ‘she’s not married at 30’. That is not a good guess. You ended up being right, but your evidence was weak sauce. And yeah, you would be in favour of folks always getting outed, wouldn’t you? For bigotry reasons, not ‘defence of a vulnerable population’ reasons.
Panel Four: Waaaaaaaah, a bigot won’t get elected! Waaaaaaaaah! Cry me a river, Mary. You nearly drove someone to suicide the other day and you asked if you could do it to someone else. Isn’t there enough awful?
Politics. Isn’t. A. Sports. Game. This isn’t ‘Roz wins!’, this is ‘thank fuck that horrible homophobe Robin isn’t getting elected’. People’s lives come before your stupid fucking team pride.
Panel Five: Aw, yes, Billie seems to be enforcing her ‘don’t be an asshole, Mary’ rule. You can have issue with her methods, but daaaaaaamn if Mary being less of an ass isn’t a good thing.
Panel Six: Yes, yes, for the horrible crimes of loving people and not acting like property like good wimmins. How dare they think they’re people? Also, endless eternal torture doesn’t sound like love to me, it sounds like abuse. But then, a lot of things in Mary’s (and Joyce’s) sect sound like abuse to me. Explains a lot about her and early Joyce, but holy shit.
As someone who has taken that stance, it’s, from what I understand, a VERY serious, grave thing to do; one taken if there’s no real chance of a legal way to defeat whatever they’re proposing, and even more so, it absolutely should never be ‘set up’, it should be as natural as possible. At most, maybe someone of their ‘caliber’ might tiptoe near by them in the office, or outside, but most of the time the politican in question acts on their own urges. Get it done, use the breather to reinforce, hope something changes; act-act-act, not celebrate and be content.
As for the culture shift with outing, I can see that, sure. There’s a very real debate NOW on what is too much action, what is too little, what is just enough on the left for EVERY stance. Do we arm ourselves? Do we form our own militas? Do we just trust the supreme law and its structure to work? Can we weather the storm, or do we try to make walls or even weather-changing machines? So on and so on. I lean towards a radical, active bent, but others don’t, and that’s fine, and there are others even more radical or proactive that I disagree with.
Robin is heading for defeat – MAYBE. And while her opponent is a democrat, they’re in a mostly red area. He might be a blue dog. No real advancement on social issues. There are many cases where defeating the homophobe brings in someone who does nothing, which can hurt in the long term, since their own terms don’t last forever. The next guy might be a straight homophobe who loves to pin conservative or reactionary answers onto social issues, then what? Thus it must be remembered that the radical action is for a greater, overall cause, not just to get dirty for one fight in the midst of a big war.
Actually, this ISN’T a mostly red district. It’s gone back and forth frequently. Her opponent might very well be able to do good things for LGBT+ folks – Roz of all people seems to have faith in him. It’s also only a month away. Any replacement would barely have time to file the paperwork necessary to get on the ballot.
It’s my own fault, the webcomic time and real time disparity has buried the comic politics for me. If that is the case, if it’s a purple district, then there may be a chance.
I don’t think Robin thinks it’s a Republican haven, though it’s easy to mistake that.
That old strip where she talked about the “peeps who keep her in office thinking Roz was a hellbound slut” could be taken that way. I read it that way at first. But it could also be read and makes more sense as “The Republican base that I rely on to overcome the urban Democratic vote thinks …”
She knows it’s a close district and she knows she needs the bigots to win, since she’s running as a Republican.
Without the base, the mushy middle doesn’t win elections. And frankly, there probably isn’t. It’s a divided urban/rural district. A lot of that vote is locked in.
They fight over that middle, but that’s because they hold the balance not because you can win with them alone.
But that’s sort of beside the point: Robin was right when she drew the map and pointed to the rural areas as her peeps.
It’s true you can’t win an election with just the middle, but you also don’t need to court a bigot vote either. Rural voters are more likely Republicans, sure, but the district’s really not mostly rural. Bloomington certainly isn’t the lone point of urbanness in a sea of rural areas – there are at least 8 other cities she needs to worry about.
The idea of hell is separation from God means that once God rejects you, it’s hell, regardless of whether or not there’s any active torture or not.
So God loves you, but if you insist on spurning Him, he’ll not force you to love him back, and will ultimately give you what you want.
There is a difference between ‘not forcing you to love him back’ and ‘punishing you via fiery torment for eternity’, which is the idea Mary seems to be espousing.
Well, Mary’s view does tend to be myopic, seeing the bits of the bible that support her preconceptions, and being blind to the bits that don’t.
I suspect Mary is a pretty good example of a modern day Pharasee. Jesus had some things to say about them.
Didn’t Jesus say to not judge, lest you be judged?
To answer Panel 2… it was at the time. Certainly was in the circles I ran in. Might make me a monster, but it was a different time.
And yeah, it is interesting because Roz definitely does seem to have an attitude that is more Bush-era queer rights activist which is odd for someone so young as she wouldn’t have as immediate connection to folks like Michael Rogers and BlogActive: http://www.blogactive.com/
Hell, the site hasn’t even really been a thing for over 5 years.
And it makes me curious about Roz’s history. Did she receive mentorship from older activists who remember those times much more clearly? Is she just a keen student of recent activist histories as part of her self-taught education? Or is this just a situation where she’s so happy to be free of her sister she doesn’t really care how it happened?
I’m very curious to see. Hell, it might even just be an anachronism as we know Willis likes to throw those in from time to time to comment on a historical battle that wouldn’t be as well known to kids of the age in the comic.
>And yeah, it is interesting because Roz definitely does seem to have an attitude that is more Bush-era queer rights activist which is odd for someone so young
There’s a strand of tumblr-era activism that encourages tracking down people who make racist tweets IRL and trying to get them fired. It’s obviously not the mainstream of modern SocJus, but there’s a lefty version of 4chan with no compunction against outing or doxxing bad people.
Panel 3: I actually own a pink flannel really similar to Mary’s so I feel you on the glaring at the fashion sense of characters.
Panel 4: It’s really interesting how much of modern conservatism seems rooted in this idea of the conservative team winning over the liberal team and the game and the points don’t matter as much as winning and making sure the other team doesn’t “score” any of their points even if they win.
Hell, that got really explicit in the Trump campaign with Trump basically mostly just crowing about how he was going to be the winningest winner there ever was.
Panel 6: From the outside, that sect has frequently felt abusive or at the very least controlling a lot of the times. Especially as my heart tended to break for queer members trapped in those organizations, some of whom are still petrified with fear about admitting the truth about their “situation” with their “roommate”.
(… aaaand that’s not a comment of mine I wanted to see associated with a smiling avatar. 🙁 Can I suggest that a function of “avatar deactivation” or “avatar choice” or whatever be added to the WordPress’ code?)
Oh Mary~ Maybe you need to burn alongside Joyces Youth Pastor in that same fire Walky talked about.
You know I hate Mary, not because that’s the reason why she exist but because there’s nothing more to her than this. Does her character have any morality? How about regret, love, compassion, respect, honor, charity, anything? I mean I’m not asking for her to turn away from being a heel I’m just saying is her growth going to go in any direction or is she just a obstacle for some of the other cast.
Yeah that’s right, Roz Sold out her own sister and got her “Favorite College professor” into a life changing scandal that might ruin her life…what the fuck?
It’s a reminder that what she does comes from a place of sincere, heartfelt belief… that God sending people to be tortured for eternity is a good thing.
So yeah, as evidenced above, I’m going to be coming from a very different background than a lot of folks on this. And I’ve already noted the complicated history and debate that has surrounded outing anti-gay politicians. But for those who want a refresher, I recommend this article by Michael Roger, a person who ran a website outing down-low anti-queer politicians in the 2000s:
And I’ve admitted that when this was happening in real time, I cheered the result of some of these outings as it really did stop some horrendous momentum.
And it’s something I’ve had to think a lot about lately especially as we might very well be seeing a world that sees the reintroduction of concentration camps for certain groups of individuals, not to mention a massive spike in nazi obsession about trans folks as the hot new “degenerate” group to kick around (cough cough Bleach Blonde Fascist using his hate tour to out trans students and engender directed harassment of them).
What are my personal limits and what would I feel joy over simply because it meant a capacity for harm by a dangerous bigot finally came to an end?
It’s not as easy of a situation and I’ve been the Roz before, the over-eager activist who cheered when dangerous people were neutralized, including by outing. Which is a delicious irony I know given my avatar. So I have a much harder time judging her here.
Especially given the dark context Roz is minimizing here because she doesn’t want to expose her vulnerabilities to the world.
Roz has been trapped by her sister’s campaign for at least the last 3 years, probably longer given that Robin likely spent some time in state congress before running for national congress. And I do mean trapped.
One of the things about family value candidates is that their family is part of the campaign. So no matter what, the other members of that family, especially those closest aren’t really allowed to differ too far from their family members and certainly not campaign about issues that are important to them that aren’t “pro-family values” as interpreted by bigots.
Where we’ve seen Roz in distress, it’s been when she’s had to grapple with that cage and how it limits the life Roz wants to lead and the politics Roz is allowed to campaign on behalf. And that especially matters to Roz as she comes of age.
This is not just Roz celebrating the results that will come from having one more D in congress, it’s Roz celebrating a hard-fought freedom from her sister, blocking her sister from every again building a political campaign solely on the strength of a “family values” platform again.
This is Roz finally gaining a future of her own to shape as she wants.
Why do you think Leslie’s tune changed when she heard the word photo? Photo means Scandal. And we all saw how happy the Dean was with the last Political Scandal that could be connected to the college. And considering Robin just attended a lecture there the day before, a connection will be made.
This is Roz’s biggest character flaw, she’s as narrow minded and thoughtless as her sister, and simply doesn’t think things through, especially concerning other people.
I would agree. She’s opinionated but reckless and does not do enough to consider and plan for collateral damage or nasty triggers of her actions.
I doubt she for a second thought about how this might affect Leslie and you’re very right that this might really fuck over Leslie. Like, just to go down the list:
1) The Dean is tight with the DeSanto campaign and is scandal-averse and Leslie is likely an adjunct professor with very little in the way of protection if the Dean decides she’s “trouble”.
2) It’s legal in Indiana to fire or deny housing to someone because they are gay. it’s a little more protected in Bloomington in specific as folks have mentioned, but I know from personal experience living a place with anti-discrimination laws that a determined bigot doesn’t have much to fear with regards to enforcement of these laws.
And we already know Leslie’s landlord is at least shitty enough to let angry strangers break into her home, so who knows how he’s going to react.
3) Mary may be resigned in this matter, but there’s going to be plenty of die-hard DeSanto faithful who will follow Robin’s initial reaction of viewing this as a secret gay trap and Leslie as a demon luring their golden candidate from the cause of righteousness.
Folks who outed bigots tended to get a shit-ton of death threats from “good Christians” and Leslie is likely to get some of that as well as harassment and blame from DeSanto’s campaign.
The Dean actually isn’t tight with the DeSanto campaign – he doesn’t like her and didn’t support her politics, as he told her to her face. There could still be problems with her job, but the Dean liking and being close to Robin isn’t one, as his reaction to her seems to be along the lines of ‘oh dear god, what’s this idiot want now?’
Still when the Media reports that Leslie abused her power as a teacher to lure Robin within her grasp under false pretences, a story that could well be supported by how abruptly Leslie put an end to her visit (“It was like she couldn’t wait to get her paws* on her!”), I can’t imagine the Dean as being too pleased with her. Sure it would be lies, and the Dean would know it, but Leslie should have known better than to allow the setup. But she was blinded by her feelings for Robin.
*Since we know all lesbians are vampires with panther forms.
I still don’t think mentioning Leslie kicked her out would work that well – especially since Leslie stayed back and taught the rest of the class, and if they talked to enough people to know Leslie abruptly kicked her out, they’d probably also learn she was distraught about what Robin was spewing. If anything, I think they might play it as a lover’s spat over Robin covering as a homophobe. Leslie booting her out and then staying back to teach really does not look sexy.
Thanks for the context on this. I was not at all plugged into this at the time and I can definitely see where you’re coming from now.
I would still contend that the better choice is to discuss the situation in hopes of winning an ally across party lines (a la the Minnesota state legislator mentioned in the article) rather than throwing them to the wolves. There has been a definite cultural shift towards more acceptance of LGBTQ people, but I’m dubious that any great amount of that is due to revelations of hypocrisy among anti-LGBTQ politicians. (Seems more likely that it’s due to people realizing that they actually knew and loved LGBTQ folks and maybe they shouldn’t support policies that hurt those people.) You take down one politician, which can certainly be helpful, but it seems like there hasn’t yet been any shortage of ones willing to take their place.
Yeah, there’s a replacement waiting. But that replacement isn’t going to win this election, because they can’t run.
Plus it’s not just the one guy. By knowing that your hypocrisy will be revealed, you limit those who have these sorts of problems from running for office in the first place.
Just because the pool of replacements seems endless doesn’t mean it is. There are a lot more voters than there are replacements, yet we don’t avoid voting.
And I think you miss why more people were more comfortable coming out. Seeing the people who want to harm you taken down can be quite motivating. Sure, eventually it becomes more about just seeing others do it, but that’s not where it started.
Plus it’s just a general principle. If my politician was anti-smoking but secretly smoked, I’d expect them to be outed. If they secretly had an affair but ran a “family values” campaign, I’d expect them to be outed.
We want the people who represent us to have integrity.
Plus, it tends to defang stances that are taken out of performative morality. Noting how many of those who preach against abortion access are seeking out or funding abortions on the down-low helps defang this idea that one is performing “good” by publicly speaking out against reproductive health care.
And a lot of the time bigots thrive in a secretive down-low culture as it allows them to have their cake and eat it too. On the abortion side, there’s a strong culture of never outing folks who seek that care, but we know from sites like “The only moral abortion is my abortion”: http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/anti-tales.shtml
That the number of folks who will protest day and night, harassing clients, but still expect to be served discreetly when they need abortions is fairly high.
And it’s interesting to contrast the two very different trajectory of rights between queer rights and reproductive rights in the 2000s and 2010s.
Unfortunately, this means that Robin’s team will now enact damage control. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on Leslie and paint her as a sexual predator (who also happens to be indoctrinating college students with who knows what sort of dangerous ideas).
Result? Robin dodges the bullet & Leslie has her life ruined (and probably loses her job as well). Hopefully the DoAverse will have a happier ending.
Well, they definitely would need to discredit and smear Leslie to avoid hemorrhaging ALL her “Family Values” voters. They could also paint it as staged and/or photoshopped, but even simply denying their being any truth to the scandal would at least lead to some of Robin’s supporters taking it upon themselves to harass her.
If Robin drops out of the race, or tries to undermine the scandal by owning it and coming out publicly, the blowback on Leslie might be negligible, but the harder Robin fights to deny it and still get elected, the worse it will be on Leslie.
You know, if any of the journalists who ran with this story did a little checking, it’d be easy to identify Leslie. She could have a media pack outside her house right now. Who would then catch Robin leaving in rumpled clothing, forcing her to wing an interview with the press. Hilarity and train wreck follows (and poor Leslie becomes “the lesbian who ruined Senator DeSanto’s career”).
That’s actually the saving grace of her not taking the photo. There’s a way out of that. She admits that nothing happened, gives a story about how Robin was asking her about how to better appeal to college students, and her campaign then lets it fall out of the news.
If she’d taken the photo, then she can’t go that route. For one, it’s much harder to explain why Robin would be in a bed with Leslie. And, two, even if she can, saying nothing happened only turns Leslie into someone who tried to pin something on saintly Robin, who fell for her lesbian tricks.
A couple things.
-Roz may not have been involved in the taking of the photo, but the Photowas her end plan, something it seems slipped her mind to tell Leslie about.
Maybe Leslie should have realised that photo would happen, but she was too concerned with other things, like her quest to save Robin from herself. But this photo is going to ruin Leslie’s life. It is another Political Scandal that will be linked back to the college, especially when the media discovers that Robin was invited to the college the day before.
We all saw how unhappy the Dean was with the last Scandal…
Well done Roz, you’ve just gotten your favourite teacher fired.
Which highlights an important thing about Roz. She doesn’t think things through.
-Once it comes to light how closely connected she was with the setup for the photo, she will be seen in an entirely Ruthless light completely contradictory to the image she was projecting before. This coupled with her inability to think things through (especially after it leads to Leslie getting fired), will seriously hurt her prospects of becoming RA.
Kinda weird actually. The most obvious parallel for Robin’s campaign in this story seemed to be Trump, but that was wrong. Instead the closest parallel is Roz’s own RA Campaign.
It’s always good that, in the end, you can rely on family… Well, actually it turns out they are the ones who are plotting against you and are quite willing to ruin innocent bystanders in the process. Roz, you’re more like your sister than you realise in your obliviousness to the affect on others of what you do.
Okay, now I really want to know – Is there a special class in America’s more conservative churches where they teach girls how to do that triangular smile?
Panel 1: And confirmation that it is indeed the bar picture of them near kissing while talking about Steven Universe. And ah, you can just imagine by that headline that this is some TMZ-style thing, heavy on the clickbait scandal.
Panel 2: I mentioned above this is also about Roz’s freedom from a campaign that was crushing her for values she actively opposes, but this is important too and I believe a major part of why she is celebrating.
While her allyship with the queer community may sometimes be of question as to its sincerity, she genuinely is extremely personally passionate about reproductive freedom and it is something she deeply cares about. And it’s something she’s terrified of losing.
She’s a straight woman who likes penetrative sex and she desperately does not want to end up with an unplanned pregnancy, especially with access to safe and legal abortions becoming more and more difficult to obtain.
This matters to her, directly as to her actual rights as a young person with a uterus and that’s front and center to her celebration here (and that resonates a lot what with my fiancee being an enby with a uterus who is utterly petrified at the thought of losing legal birth control and reproductive health on top of all the other reasons to feel petrified by politics at the moment).
And her last line is important too. She didn’t take this photo, she didn’t manipulate this photo into existence, she didn’t even push all that hard for Leslie and Robin to get together.
She might not have even intended this exact outcome to occur, though I think she’s long made her peace with this having been a potential outcome.
But she’s not going to mourn it or feel guilty now that this has happened. And that’s a valid way to feel in these sorts of circumstances. Certainly I can identify with taking joy in the outing of bigots and I doubt I would shed a tear if a sudden outing was to short-circuit Trump and Pence’s dangerous plans for me and mine.
Panel 3: A… what now, dearie? What slur were you about to let loose before you caught yourself?
Also, a nice contrast in a very different more toxic reaction. Roz is reveling in this eroding her bigoted base enough for her to gain her freedom. Mary is merely satisfied that someone who is “committing a sin”, someone she was already looking to hate due to her religion and her race, was “caught” out. As if Robin’s existence as a bi person was doing harm to her personally.
Panel 4: I noted this in BBCC’s commentary, but there’s been a sickening movement in conservatism for a long while now that has really metastasized during the Trump election and that’s the idea of politics as a game that conservatives “win” by causing liberals pain and preventing them from “scoring any points” even if they win elections.
And a lot of that probably stems from media treatment of elections and politics as horse-races and battles for the news cycle rather than as real things that affect real people’s lives. And a lot of that also probably stems from the fact that a lot of modern conservatism is rooted in a lot of old bigotries at this point and pride in identities that define themselves by what they aren’t instead of what they are (white, male, straight, these identities frequently get enforced toxically as a matter of “avoiding” gay, feminine, or “ethnic” signifiers [see bigots getting mad about taco trucks]).
But it leads to this whole toxic philosophy that Mary is espousing here. That this matters not because of how laws affect real people but that an evil liberal with evil liberal values “won” and her side lost an important piece in the overall campaign of making sure liberal people “lose”.
Panel 5: Head Cheerleader. Problem Solver.
Panel 6: Ah, the passive-aggressive “God loves you, that’s why he’ll hurt you”. I remember that shit well.
It did not particularly endear me to that particular interpretation of Christianity, surprisingly enough. Especially seeing as how me and my mother were among the numbers said people wanted to see “punished” to prove God’s love.
And the interesting thing is that this is even worse than it appears.
Mary and Joyce both belong to a form of Christianity that believes in a Rapture and an anti-christ, and that said Rapture is happening soon. When Mary says God loves them so he’ll punish them, she’s expecting that to happen any day now. And she’s expecting to be sat upon a cloud getting front-row tickets to watch said violent punishment on everyone she has deemed an “unbeliever”.
Oh I think Joyce and Mary are very different morally.
Hell, I did a podcast on that relatively recently. And yeah, my tl;dr would probably be that when Joyce sees points where her dogma meets humanity, she sees flaws in her dogma whereas Mary sees flaws in humanity and both act accordingly to adjust as they see fit.
And the end result is Joyce becoming a better person at the expense of starting to lose her faith, and Mary becoming a better form of what she believes being a christian means at the expense of a lot of her empathy and humanity.
I don’t think Mary cares at all what the rules actually are.
To me, the difference between them is that Joyce honestly, truly believes in the Christian God and the precepts in the Bible, and struggles to mesh the truth laid down there with her own morality and sense of right and wrong. If she wasn’t religious, she’d probably be a LOT more liberal, but still kind-hearted (…excluding all that nature/nurture-butterfly-stuff).
Mary? She uses the Bible and Church to justify her morality. The stuff that doesn’t fall in line, she no doubt ignores. Oh, I’m sure that she truly believes too, but she approaches it from a twisted perspective. If she were non-religious, I don’t think much about her would change. Atheists and Agnostics can be just as small-minded, mean and vindictive as anyone (and this is coming from an agnostic)…
I think you’re close, but didn’t quite hit it. Joyce wants to be good to people. She’s in it for the love and all that stuff. She picked up on some of the bad stuff, but that was not her goal.
Mary is in it for the superiority. For being able to look down on everyone else. An atheist Mary would just find some other way to prove her superiority. Maybe even, I dunno, get a loan from her rich parents and start a bunch of businesses, become a reality TV star, and then run for political office.
Pretty much this, though I don’t think Mary cares so much about rules as she does about stopping ‘immorality’. For example, in her fight with Carla, if she gave a damn about rules being broken, she’d have reported Carla (to the RM or security if she didn’t think Ruth would help), not escalated and hurled transphobia at her.
Responding to panel six: I now honestly feel really bad for the poor guy who wrote Revelations. I mean, here’s this early Christian writing in code with Jewish number games in order to communicate a message to his fellow believers to hold out hope and stay strong during a period of persecution, and nineteen centuries later people think it predicts the future and have used it to support some pretty awful beliefs at times. That was probably never the poor guy’s intention at all. But people don’t want to actually study the history of the Bible or the social and cultural context in which the parts were written.
I agree with the sentiment. But I do think there is at least some level of prophecy intended in the book. But it’s mostly in the “God will come back in and fix everything” part, not all that other stuff which was describing what was already going on in that day.
Would holding hands with another female have really such a big effect to affect anything? I know comic logic and all that, but would Trump lose the election if he was holding hands with another guy? Or Hillary win if she was holding some woman than Bill?
I won’t be here tomorrow night, so I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year now. I hope you guys have the best year possible, considering the circumstances.
I’m….kinda back and forth. I’ve gone from sad to tired to optimistic without any real reason to be to angry to energized and ready to fight for good things. Which, honestly, is good. For a while in the past month I lost the optimism and it worried me. I’m glad to have it back, even if my head knows this is going to be rough.
I’ve noted in the past that it’s easy for rational people to get depressed and lose hope. Optimism and hope feed each other, but if you have neither, it’s hard to trigger either through reason alone. What’s needed is juuust a little spark of faith to get the cycle going – but rationalists don’t ‘do’ faith. It may be why rationalism is found is growing, prosperous societies, while shrinking, collapsing societies embrace religion and dogma.
I’m not sure mine’s stable (or non-illusionary) yet, but I’m glad to have found it for now nonetheless, and I hope you find your’s soon too. As I’ve said before, my Patreon inbox is open if you need to talk.
If you have more than one link in a post it goes into moderation.
There are likely other things that cause moderation also. Maybe the website thinks your non-proxy site is dubious looking for some reason.
Sometimes when you refresh or reload you can see the post with the moderation notice, but not always.
More rarely, I’ve seen an error where a post gets stuck halfway through or something, so that it does not show up with or without a moderation notice, but if you try to post it again you get a “It looks like you already posted that” error. I don’t think those posts ever show up.
Billie DIDN’T tell Mary to dance like a monkey, but I’m still getting uncomfortable vibes from when Mary had Ruth on a leash.
Heh, here I thought Roz was on about the RA thing. Of course the real election is more interesting or her.
Roz, Bless her heart, still thinks the picture shows a cute little date that went just as she hoped. She might even know that Robin was not at her hotel this morning.
You’re thinking power corrupts? I could see Billie taking out some aggression on Mary in the future, some of it justified but some of it maybe not so much…
I’m thinking more in lines of they sent a bully (or alpha bongo) to do an RA’s job. I can absolutely see Billie take out her frustration or (justified?) vengeance on Mary, and Mary will of course look for any crack in Billie’s armor (hint – there are a few). This situation can errupt in nastiness at any moment.
Y’know, this probably means that they won’t be able to get Ryan’s full name off of Robin or her assistants now, as this has probably changed her priorities in regards to “damage control”.
And even if Roz wasn’t directly involved in outing Robin, in the past she’s shown herself to be the kind of person who doesn’t really take other people into account while making a political point.
Such as her tirade against Joyce when they learnt about the abuse fundementalists heap on LGBTQ people, which despite Joyce being horrified by her own ignorance still had Roz chosing to blame her entirely for it all, to the point of talking over an actual LGBTQ person (Leslie) who was telling her to stop.
Roz kind of seems to be the type of person who has good intentions, but will happily run over everyone in her effort to see “justice” done. The fact that Robin might double down on her constituents’ homophobic stances or politically lash out at Leslie? Or that Robin or Leslie could be victim to the many violent homophobic people who’d react negatively even to the suggestion she might not be straight? Doesn’t figure into it, as Roz’s immediate goal of having Robin outted is seen as being the solution to her sister’s conservative agenda.
Even though Robin being from a conservative upbringing probably played a big part in her current beliefs (and why she left necessary to be in the closet in the first place), and her interactions with Leslie showed she was capable of changing in a more progressive manner through interacting with people outside of her bubble.
I really don’t believe they were ever going to get Ryan’s full name no matter what. Robin had no idea who he was and I doubt even Frieda did given that she seemed to treat the douche trio as disposable meaningless minions not worth caring about and it looks like the douche trio is responsible for getting their buddy Ryan to come out and join them. But yeah, you’re right that there’s not even going to be a token effort to track that down now that the whole campaign is in crisis mode.
And yeah, I think what you mention is very much Roz’s central flaw. She has strong political beliefs but has very narrow ideas on the best ways to implement them and doesn’t overly respect other approaches (see how dismissive she is to Dorothy’s data-based approach to the RA job or as you note, her interaction with Joyce).
And she definitely doesn’t seem to believe in redemption, which might be partially explained by us knowing she’s had long fights with her sister on issues she felt were important that Robin just sort of ignored the meat of (though they slip through when Robin wants to win a petty point, see her “cisgender penis” crack at the bar) and her roommate is Mary who is very much a brick wall with regards to her bigoted beliefs.
But that also means she doesn’t really give people much chance to try and change or see a reason not to go in guns blazing against people on “the other side”, because she doesn’t see much reason to hold on hope for that.
I’m hoping her getting to know Joyce more and seeing her evolution in Gender Studies will get her to notice that maybe some people can change and its a matter of figuring out which ones and what approaches work best of which people (some people need the gently gently, some need an all-guns blazing approach to break through all their trained talking points or their bigotry shortcuts).
Roz reminds me a bit of myself, though far more active, when I started college. So frustrated with everything and convinced no one else will get it. I’m looking forward to her growing up a little, like I had to. Listening more. Learning to chill sometimes.
I think God doesn’t care about race, sexuality, handicap and etc etc.. as long God gets cookies. Just don’t bongo about these and you will be fine. Well i bet Mary will bongo about these then she goes to Cookie hell.
Funny how Mary’s happiest smile is when she’s faking it. I also like the way she dresses; she probably has my favourite style of all the comic girls, as in, if I passed her on the street I’d think “that girl looks really nice.” Fortunately, that’d last about as long as it took her to open her mouth. And finally, thanks for ending the year with “god will punish you all,” Willis; really setting a tone there.
Happy year transition to you all! May 2017 not be as bad as we fear, and may the good we find in it be better than we hope!
Also, this is a swing district, not a Republican stronghold. It’s VERY possible this will lose Robin points with the mushy middle or even moderate conservatives.
Nearly thirty and unmarried. (Which is even more wrong because she’s actually bi, so her being also attracted to women isn’t even the reason she’s not married to a man.)
Also, she’s a Catholic so Mary hates her for that too. Despite liking her political policies.
It’s funny how both of these two characters represent the worst of both sides of the spectrum. At their best, both Liberals and Conservatives want to help the people, the real argument is how to do that. In this story we have on liberal who doesn’t care who she hurts, including her own sister, and on the flip side we have a supposedly religious person, who seems to ignore everything Jesus said about forgiveness, and loving your neighbor as yourself. They are two sides of the same coin.
No, your point is just bullshit. Roz and Mary are in no way equivalent, despite the lying narrative that “both sides are just as bad.” Mary fucks innocent people over, Roz doesn’t cry when people who fuck innocent people over get fucked over. Robin is LITERALLY the most harmful character in the whole comic, and the fact that she is so because of expediency instead of malice does not make her not so.
Yes, in effect. I’m not sure if it’s possible to beat Ryan in intent. He is shit and you’ll never read me write otherwise, but his attempted rape doesn’t suddenly increase the chances for other attempted rapes. Guess what happens when your elected representative pushes legislation that says LGBTQIAA folk don’t get to be treated like people.
Less direct effect, more indirect long term damage.
Of course you could also point at someone like Joyce’s pastor, who also does a lot to encourage similar attitudes.
OTOH, because she’s not personally malicious or even invested in those believes, she’s also far more likely to change than the villains in the comic. At the very least, she is almost guaranteed to face a conflict between her sexuality, once she figures it out, and her political career.
Yes, this. She’s not as bad a human being as Ryan or Toedad or Mary, but she has much more capacity for damage because of the position of power she holds and in terms of direct effect on the ability of the characters to live their lives.
She doesn’t fully realize or accept the weight of that authority and the real-world impact of politics not being a game, but there’s a reason Joyce was so bothered by her vote and her deflection of responsibility for its intended effect.
Saying they’re two sides of the same coin implies moral equivalency. You just admitted they’re not on the same scale and therefore not morally equivalent.
Well, Roz does seem to be ignoring any problems this might cause for Leslie, so there’s that. If her plan all along was actually to use Leslie to out Robin and she didn’t even let Leslie know that was the intent, then that’s pretty despicable in my book. Whatever your opinion on outing gay anti-LGBT public figures, setting up an unsuspecting gay person to get caught up in it is pretty low.
If she was trying to hook them up in hopes of changing Robin and taking this as a lesser victory instead, that’s not quite so bad.
Agreed on paragraph one, disagree on paragraph only in that it’s not bad at all (because Leslie was already interested in Robin before Roz got involved; that’s what prompted the idea). Unless there was something on a Patreon comic, we don’t know either way, though it would be interesting to.
But that’s not what Kitsune said: they specifically mentioned Robin, not Leslie.
Mary and Roz are not morally equivalent and will not be until Roz nearly causes someone’s suicide and then asks permission to harass someone else into suicide.
This is kinda an interesting parallel to a thing that happens in politics where because we fetishize the moderate and the swing-voter so much in America, we genuinely believe that the best option in all cases is “somewhere in between two awful extremes that are just as bad”.
And there’s this thing called the Overton Window that talks about what we see as that middle sweet spot and one of the more interesting tragedies of the last 40 years has been how fascist and far-right bigots have used this American tendency to try and shift what America fetishizes as “the moderate” shifts further and further right by just becoming more and more extreme in their viewpoints, thus getting everyone to recalibrate what “middle” looks like.
And it leads to an interesting dichotomy where “openly wants to bring back death camps” is seen as equally wrong to “would like a higher minimum wage”. And a lot of this is on a media who is devoted to selling this narrative above all else, the two sides of an “equally contentious” debate where one is a normalized nazi openly talking about how he believes jewish people aren’t really human and someone trying to politely point out their own humanity.
And it ignores that in life, sometimes one side is simply morally wrong on an issue or an issue shouldn’t even be “debated” in the first place. Like, issues like “are trans people people and should they be harassed for existing” shouldn’t be a whole debate with bigots feeling like they get to be an equally respected side. Same with “is global warming real and do we need to do something to stop it”.
And it robs our ability to solve things, because working together with different ideas of how to solve a problem gets deflected as an inter-party dispute within one party while the other party feels their only position is to reject the issue entirely, lest they be accused of party disloyalty.
And I’m reminded of all that by your post because Roz and Mary are not at all two sides of the same coin or equally as bad.
Hell, even if we were to accept the nastiest interpretation of Roz (that she doesn’t care who she hurts, that she actively worked to out her sister, that she paid someone to take the picture), she simply becomes a not-nice activist who outed a bigot whose policies were actively hurting real people.
Versus Mary who has tried to drive at least one student to suicide, has been personally harassing another, and has been openly bigoted towards her fellow students in hateful manners. And this is all not because those people harmed her directly, but because of their identities and existences as queer individuals.
Hell, even if we were to try and equate the actions of the two (which we shouldn’t, Mary’s actions are way worse), the cold hard core of this is Mary went after the powerless over an identity based in how they were born. Roz went after an elected congressperson with immense personal power because of her chosen actions to harm others.
Those are very different at their very core.
But we are tempted to equate them nonetheless so we can have a pleasant “both sides, the truth is somewhere in the middle” narrative.
Now, I’m not saying Roz is universally right in this situation. But she’s for sure not as wrong as Mary.
The government that does the least, does the best is based on selfishness? I can see how wanting to lower taxes can be that, but I don’t think you know what the conservative creed is. But then again that puts you in the same category with Donald J. Trump.
“The government that does the least, does the best” is more a libertarian thing that conservatives selectively invoke to get rid of things in government they don’t like but not the things they do like.
Before it was so popular for conservatives to dress up in libertarian costumes, they said something like this:
We believe in the old traditional ways of doing things from The Good Old Days. Those ways may not have been perfect, but they were pretty good, considering. We don’t want to make sudden changes to a working system lest we break it and have terrible things happen. Changes, if any, should be careful and gradual to see what works and what doesn’t before we can’t reverse the change.
The minor problem with that is that the last bit about slow change was BS, just an excuse to stall as long as possible.
The major problem was the part about “Those ways may not have been perfect, but they were pretty good, considering.”
This wasn’t true. Or rather it was only true for members of the Establishment. If you were a white Christian cishet man in the middle or upper classes, this was usually true. It was also mostly true for a white Christian cishet woman in the middle or upper classes if the man responsible for her was a decent person.
If you weren’t in one of those two groups things weren’t pretty good. They were somewhere between bad-but-not-too-bad and unspeakably horrible, weighted towards the latter.
Conservatives were worried about breaking the system with terrible consequences, but ignoring the fact that the existing system was already doing terrible things to people all the time.
You underestimate how quickly bigoted conservatives are willing to cannibalize their own if they are discovered to not be the right sort of person.
Trump might have been right that he could shoot someone and not lose many votes, but if he’d been caught in bed with another man, all those Evangelicals supporting him and pretending he’s Christian would have flipped out.
And I don’t think I will ever forgive the sexist assholes who tipped the election over to him who were willing to overlook or even cheer the fact that he’s a child-raping nazi-loving bigot, but would have been shocked and appalled if they were to find out that he liked to put his peener into dudes consensually instead.
Actually a lot of the Evangelicals simply hated Hillary. This election, for many people, was about choosing the lesser of two evils. For the record I took a third option myself.
Sure, not every evangelical supported Trump. Some who did no doubt had bought into the right’s smear campaign against Hillary.
There is still a large number of evangelical groups who backed Trump despite the fact that they have frequently denounced politicians for doing only one of the many things Trump has done.
Though it’s not ONLY evangelicals guilty of this. Plenty of Catholics basically said the pope should shut the fuck up when he denounced Trump.
Any Christian who supported Trump or even thinks he’s not so bad has forfeit any right to complain about ANYONE for not living up to their “Christian values” ever again.
That makes me wonder what they’d actually do with a gay anti-choice candidate. And if there’s a divide in asshole-branded Christianity between which is more important.
Boy are you right about conservative homophobia Fart Captor. But that’s where the hand-waving comes in. Larry Craig’s situation was unambiguous and there were others who attested to his peener misdirectitude. But Robin could throw Leslie way under the bus by saying she was simply rejecting the advances of a gay constituent, who left without her. The photo does not show Robin’s facial expression.
Sorry, but am I stupid to be wondering how Roz lives on the floor and also has access to somewhere obviously not a dorm to throw parties? It’s bothering me. Probably just my ignorance since (1) I suspect I’m much older than many of the folks here, and (2) I have a long history of being a socially ackward type who always avoided parties because they made me uncomfortable.
Are you referring to the party she “invited” Dorothy to for the interview, and where Joyce was assaulted by Ryan? That wasn’t Roz’s party, it’s was Tony’s (blond, curly hair, plays football), and he threw it at his house.
Mary feels unrealistic to me :/ Trust me I live in a Christian environment so I’m well aware of the full spectrum of Christians, but I’ve never encountered someone quite like her
Reading the comments here for a few years has convinced me that Mary is frighteningly realistic.
And this is coming from someone who rarely encounters people who are openly Christian at all, and half of them are Jehovah’s witnesses who just want to give me a leaflet.
This comment section has opened my eyes to a lot of things. I feel lucky to be able to learn about it all without having to actually experience it. *shivers*
I personally have not encountered anyone quiiiiite as bad as her but I have dealt with people close to it.
But I know people like her exist, unfortunately. They’re not common, but they are out there.
I realize my politics tend to be “disgustingly liberal” by many standards… but it really does sadden me that there are so many people who equate “progressive” with “worse” or “evil.”
Politics is part of ethics, not just some abstract tastes. People can have a shitty opinion on movies or books and it doesn’t hurt anyone. But when people have a shitty *political* opinion, it can hurt and kill. A lot.
So I won’t say there are good people amongst conservatives. As long as someone is for the conservation of the statu quo, the conservation of a system built on inequalities, they aren’t good people after all (it doesn’t matter if they are conservative out of ignorance, misplaced anger or just plain malice).
You can’t say “class struggle, feminism, antiracism, LGBTQIA+ rights, ecology are not priorities/are outdated/go to far” and be a good person.
Also “good people” and “bad people” are bad ways to phrase things. “Good people” and “bad people” do not exist.
There are just “people who do mostly good things” and “people who do mostly bad things”, and those categories can evolve. Because there’s no “essence” of good and evil… and even if there was, no one care if there is some magical core of pure light or darkness at the heart of people.
Only actions (including communication, too) matter.
If someone tells me “Alfred is a good person, too bad they vote Republican”, I’ll tell them “Alfred does bad things, I’d like Alfred to do good things and I’m disturbed you call Alfred a good person when obviously they keep on doing bad things”.
I’m kind of uncomfortable with how many people are okay with Robin being unwillingly outed, especially since Robin doesn’t even seem fully aware of her own sexuality.
I understand wanting her to face it and wanting her to change her politics, but being a public figure or being a “bad” person doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the right to deal with this incredibly personal manner in private.
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one fine day when Mary gets up there, God’s gonna laugh in her face before booting her down to Hell
HAHA just kidding there’s no goddamned afterlife
so now we should be looking for Nathan, too?
There is…. IN HELL
But honestly who gives a fuck, they aren’t alive to bother anyone
I for one hope to be one with the allspark some day
“There is no Arby’s in Heaven because there is no Heaven.
However, there is Arby’s in Hell because this is Hell.
Arby’s. Welcome to Hell.”
But only one Arby’s, and you have already passed it.
http://www.shortpacked.com/2011/comic/book-13/02-the-new-girl/hell/
But there may be a second one, but you’ll need to keep driving to see if it’s there.
“The wicked do not die in that way: God seems to take them under his protection to use them as the instruments of his vengeance.”
So that explains why all these ghosts are hanging out in my bathroom, they don’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t know why they can’t just chill in my kitchen instead.
And Moaning Myrtle is trying to catch you in the bath.
I like to believe that the afterlife is just something none of hve considered due to our complete inability to quantify anything outside of our limited amount of perception.
Kind of an “explaining color to a blind man” sort of thing.
Yeah, the UI on the afterlife takes forever to learn how to use. I mean hidden unlabeled buttons on a 3d touch viewer? Who does that?
As both a UI/UX designer and an aetheist, I LOL’d.
*atheist. I can spell. I swear.
Have I ever told you guys about the support call I took from some poor legally blind woman whose kids went and bought her a Windows 8 tablet for Christmas? I was like, good lord, why do they hate you so much?!
Well, nothingness is something we’re entirely incapable of imagining. As John Dies at the End puts it, death will be either that or something even stranger.
I find this comforting.
There is nothing I am more afraid of than “nothing”. It’s terrifying.
If the universe is infinite in time, your exact brain may completely by chance one day reform in the exact arrangement it was before death.
But it would like disperse a second later, a brief flash of space is all you would experience. And it would happen again googles of years later. And again.
Your existence nothing but brief strobbing flashs of starlight and nothing forever.
Thats my worst case scenario. But nothing is close.
Nothing you can imagine you’re more afraid of, yeah, me neither.
The way I see it, the human mind’s ability to distort time for us will show us whatever we expect to see, and while it will feel like eternity, it will all occur in our final breath.
That is, if you see it coming. If not, you simply cease to be.
I’m not entirely sure there is an afterlife, if we reincarnate, or just degrade into a wet morass of decaying carbon, but I do have a feeling that whatever lies beyond death will make you feel very small if you go in slowly.
The universe is a fundamentally weirder place than any of us could have imagined, religious or not. 🙂 Also, Mary’s hipster plaid ensemble is awesome. Where the hell did she get that?
Hipsters “Я” Us, probably.
Is… is it weird to wear plaid flannel button up shirts where you’re from? It’s super normal where I live eep do I live in a den of secret hipsters?! ;___;
What would be the point of being a secret hipster? How do you show off your unconcerned coolness?
In the afterlife, you could be headed for the serious strife.
Yaaaassss love this song!
Sithrak doesn’t bother with the laughing. (Stay alive as long as you can).
Hell is bullshit. (Nobody said it was good.)
Good work, Roz.
Unless she’s lying she didn’t take the picture. More than likely someone else did since she’s a political figure in a public place. I don’t think it’s as damning as Roz thinks it is since you can’t see them kissing, but this will probably put Robin in a position where she’ll have to double down and sell whatever is left of her soul to keep her constituents happy.
No, it’s the best of both worlds. She gets what she wants – free of her sister’s oppressive shadow – without any blame for the outing being attached to her.
(except for the part where she set them up together, hoping that something like this would happen)
(ahem, I said WITHOUT ANY BLAME)
(let’s just say I don’t think Robin’s the only one in that family with problems re: accepting personal responsibility)
But they’re holding hands!!
*mutters to self* Pause for effect.
While Roz probably didn’t take the photo, she hasn’t disclaimed all involvement. She might still have tipped someone off.
Tipped someone off to what? Was she stalking Robin or Leslie? Anything’s possible, but there’s no reason to think she knew Robin had come back after being thrown out of class.
Yo they were kind of in a public place. I mean, a bar of all places. There’s gonna be attention regardless because she’s a politician.
There’s gonna be attention because she was miming sucking a cock in public. Not subtly, either.
Aw. That’s real sadness from Mary, not cartoon-villain anger over her schemes failing.
… yeah, what the hell?
Yes, but she’s mostly sad that this means women will be able to decide what they do with their bodies. Because reproductive health is “evil” and only ever involves “killing babies”.
This is actually the only time so far I’ve been able to relate to Mary. She’s disappointed that her candidate is a hypocrite, silver-lining glad the truth came to light, and disappointed that her favourite policies will be overturned. Obviously I am super against Mary’s policies, but I can relate to disappointment with a candidate, and dismay at who is going to win instead. It also shows that Mary prioritizes her candidate’s purity over her candidate’s policies, which is interesting.
…Oh wait I was way too generous to Mary. She’s not upset that Robin is a hypocrite, she’s upset that Robin isn’t straight. She’d rather murder babies (according to her belief, not mine) than vote for a queer person. Screw you, Mary.
yeah, I was confused by your initial post
Mary totes hates teh gays
Mary won a gold medal in mental gymnastics.
Yeah, it’s because Robin isn’t straight. Mary makes me sick.
Yeah. My sleepy mind filled in Mary’s comment as “I knew it. I knew she was a hypocrite” but, uh, that’s definitely not what she was gonna say.
She’s probably just said she can’t say something homophobic and awful about Robin because Billie owns her now.
<3 Billie
* just sad
The violin playing for Mary is sixth- or eight-dimensional, possessing negative physical size.
This is, by my count, the third time Mary’s been genuinely sad about something in this strip.
1. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2012/comic/book-2/02-choosing-my-religion/avoid/
Mary stops hanging out with Joyce’s friends because they’re not Christian, seems unhappy to be losing friends even though it’s her choice to do so (this is probably the most sympathetic Mary’s ever been, and a good indication of why she’d be the perfect similar-but-different archnemesis to Amazi-girl, who similar suffers in the name of her own code. She similarly works as a foil to Becky, as Mary has Becky’s “I’m assuming people will hurt me so I’ll be a jerk to them pre-emptively” gimmick times a thousand)
2. http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/rat/
It’s a bit more arguable that Mary’s “sad” here, but it does seem to be the moment she realizes no one likes her.
And 3 is today. Unfortunately for Mary, every time she starts getting even a tiny bit sympathetic, assholes use it as an excuse to talk about how she’s the misunderstood hero or whatever, and then Willis makes her jerkier again in response and the cycle continues. It’s a shame, because Mary’s the most fleshed out and interesting villain in the comic by a pretty huge margin;, and I enjoy her as a character since I can relate to the “I’m a jerk because people don’t like me because I’m a jerk” self-fueling cycle she’s kind of stuck in.
I don’t think that Willis had to make Mary jerkier in response to comments. She was already a completely hateful person.
IMO, Mary isn’t a jerk because people hate her, she’s a jerk because she believes she’s obviously and intrinsically Right while everyone else is wrong. She judges everyone as immoral and inferior, and she’s consistently surprised that people don’t respect her status as the only moral person around. She basically thinks that she’s bringing light to dark places, and the fact that nobody is grateful for it only further proves how immoral they are.
Interestingly, Sarah is also hella judgmental, but she judges herself just about as harshly as everyone else, and she doesn’t expect anyone to agree with her, let alone kowtow to her natural superiority. I think she might better fit the pattern of “I’m a jerk because people don’t like me because I’m a jerk” that you describe.
I don’t think that Willis makes her jerkier because of such a big buffer. A few days ago his caption was that he wrote the strip in October, two months is a big lead time to incorporate in responses to comments.
Mary is a jerk because she’s a crusader. She genuinely believes that it’s her duty to do Gods work and punish sinners. I don’t think she actually believes she can change them, or she’d try a little less vinegar and a lil more empathy. At least to their face.
I’ll say this, though: Mary is rocking that flannel shirt!
pff, she wishes she could rock flannel, that’s just plaid
Isn’t flannel just the material?
I bet it’s polyester or something. Hah, knowing her it’s a blend and she doesn’t recognize the irony.
Nice. Funny how people like Mary forget about the rest of Deuteronomy isn’t it?
Pffft, that’s OLD testament stuff, doesn’t count!
(The new testament also mentions LGBT+ stuff – 1 Timothy and Romans iirc).
Except the stuff forbidding homosexuality, that’s still super relevant.
Anti-LGBT+ stuff is in the New Testament too.
As you know, BBCC, Joyce has researched that: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/02-threes-a-crowd/wiggle/
And two strips following.
Well, sure, but Mary doesn’t care about disputed meanings. It says gay folks are evil, so they are. End of story. Point blank.
I do not like that woman.
yeah but nobody who wasn’t openly attracted to girls ever wore a short sleeved flannel shirt, come on
Yeah, I’m kinda holding out for that one! 😉
That’s an intriguing admission about the accuracy of her gaydar in panel 3, isn’t it?
It’s not exactly gaydar. She suspected because Robin is thirty and unmarried.
Aw heck how did I forget that one?
The creepy view of Women’s Rightful Place goes deep with the lunatics, doesn’t it?
On the bright side, Mary’s wall of Reagan-and-anime is amazing.
according to this school of thought I’m secretly a lesbian!!! 😮
So am I! And I’m male! XD
true, but perhaps someone who was not openly attracted to girls one wore a LONG-sleeved flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up?
Mary is physically attractive, but the garbage she keeps between her ears more than counteracts that.
I, too, am always irritated by how ‘on-point’ I find her outfits to be.
i have so many opinions about roz and all, but firstly, what is that thing on her head?? are hats getting bigger?
She wanted to look more like an oddly condom’d penis.
She’s head of the Condom Mafia.
the rest of the Mafia got the shaft.
+1! 😀
roz by the time she graduates: http://tinyurl.com/zov9agr
mustachioed Roz would be awesome
Roz gets her hats from the Turd Ferguson collection.
Oooopohhhhhhh, have I go some serious punishment coming my way…
And damn, is that comment in the wrong webcomics thread.
Is merideth agatha’s mystery roommate or do we have another enigma??
That’s my head canon and I refuse to budge from it until Willis ruins it.
She is the spider in the web, the shadowy mistress of the floor. The RM and RA are merely her puppets dancing for her amusement.
The girl behind Roz and Other Rachel here doesn’t appear to be Meredith – not tagged as such, paler, different clothing, somewhat different hair. I’m currently operating on the headcanon that that’s Bloodrose, the never-clearly-seen fifth member of Daisy’s Squad 135 in It’s Walky!, and that she’s Agatha’s unseen roommate.
I dunno where that leaves Meredith. Maybe she rooms with Rose.
But guys, Mary just wants to study in peace, right?
She studies not in peace but in a sword.
She can study …IN PIECES
No one under 17 will be admitted.
I believe in an afterlife, jokes are still funny, though. God made humor, in my opinion, so laughter is good. My God isn’t a jerk, love to all and its all good. As Jesus said, there are only two rules: Love God and love everyone else. That’s it — love God, love EVERYONE else.
Roz’s tactics may be underhanded, but her outfit is on point.
Meanwhile, Mary’s red plaid clashes with her pink shirt. And her horrible personality.
Little does Roz know that this actually tips the scales in the Constitution Party candidate’s favor
Unknown Evil, is that you?
Nice angle.
Though that photo could literally be any number for interactions, if you got them kissing that’s one thing but this could easily be skewed as “oh, my friend was having a really bad day so I did what a good friend should do and cheered her up”
I’m sure Freida (or others) are quickly deciding how best to spin it. But anyone who can identify Leslie can mention how she’s an out lesbian Women’s Studies professor who didn’t know Robin til like yesterday. Whoops.
right but how many ways can you spin a story to that pic that don’t come to LGBT hater is secret lesbian.
Bout 0.
What Leorale said. Also, it’s been mentioned before that Robin is unmarried at 30, and that her constituents might find that suspicious.
I believe this is the first time we’ve seen Meredith in DoA. Was she a character from the Walkyverse as well, or is she entirely new?
yeah, she was in the Walkyverse. she was Amber’s internet boyfriend’s roommate/girlfriend/Amber’s competition????/encourager of the strategic growth of horrible porn mustaches.
“Encourager of the strategic growth of horrible porn mustaches”? That’s a fantastic descriptor.
Meredith is the roommate of Nate, who was Amber’s internet boyfriend in Shortpacked.
Meredith also convinced Nate to grow an awful mustache so Amber would dump him, then consoled Nate with wild monkey sex.
Pretty much.
1. Thank you Billie.
2. That hat Roz is wearing I can only describe as dapper.
3. Mary, I want to introduce you to something. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s called the Golden Rule. Oh, you haven’t. Never mind then. Have a good time in Gehenna.
That’s the one that goes “whoever has the gold, makes the rules, right?” /mary interpretation
The longer form is “Whoever has the gold has been chosen and blessed by God and will make wise rules to punish” oh shit I can’t go on
dammit, that’s twice in two days now…
Prosperity doctrine. The new form of White Man’s Burden.
It’s why Trump is such a moral upstanding gentleman. Because God wouldn’t let him have so much wealth if he was not morally worthy of it deep down.
I thought it was make the guy with the gold pay
In very reluctant fairness to Mary, she doesn’t seem to care much about material wealth at all.
I think another rule she needs introducing to is “judge not lest ye be judged”.
Or maybe “strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason”. }=D
“Haha, someone’s being potentially outed against their will and I can be happy about it because I didn’t personally do it.”
Eat, like, a whole bag of dicks, Roz.
She’d enjoy that, you realize that right?
I… don’t know how to respond to that. I mean, if she didn’t, that’d be like…
I recind my previous statement and wish to replace the bag with one full of shit.
Still the question remains, just how kinky is Roz?
Literal and knowing consumption of the flesh from a large number of animals’ penises? That’s not a pleasant thing to wish upon someone but, you know, not abhorrent. So it still works!
Like this? https://youtu.be/05hTBAOnDQE?t=2m23s
That someone is her emotionally abusive and horribly bigoted sister and this could quite possibly free her from her control so I’ve got nothing but sympathy here.
Mary needs another beating.
I think she already gave herself one if that slipshine page is anything to go by
Hah, Roz, you still think conservative voters respond to “facts”. I thought Joyce was the naive one.
There’s historical precedent to suspect this will tank an election Robin has already talked about being behind in.
Like, all the terrifying swarms of neo-nazis makes us forget, but Trump really only was able to happen through massive disenfranchisement, a complicit media, foreign interference, and some sheer narrow luck in a few key states.
And sadly, if he was outed as having down-low sex with a man instead of being a child-raping nazi, he probably would have lost.
Also, the electoral college existing.
Ugh, it is really annoying how the US keeps getting held back by all these lingering remnants of slavery.
Like the only reason that shit exists is because the slave states wanted to count their 3/5 person slaves as part of their disproportionate voice and prevent the “mob” from ending slavery earlier than we did.
Also because the Founding Fathers were classist fucks who thought poor people were too stupid to POSSIBLY ever understand political issues and pick a responsible president, so they’d leave that to electors (HA! The irony burns)
Not quite. The Electoral College exists to prevent the presidency from being chosen by the people (The intent being to trigger House elections)
Conservative voters DON’T respond to facts.
They respond to affiliation.
Racism, prejudice, bad economic policy, complete ignorance of foreign affairs, repeated lies about evolution and abortion, concepts like legitimate rape? All that’s fine, so long as it’s from one of them. (And it often is.)
But being queer? You’re no longer one of them. Torch and pitchfork time.
Mary really needs to take asshole lessons from Mike. He can ruin someone’s day and not look like he enjoyed any of it.
Roz is all dressed up to lead some sort of bootlegging operation.
That or she wants to start a new fashion which involves big hats.
All hat, no cattle?
She looks like she’s dressed as an extra from some ’80s music video. Perhaps one choreographed by Paula Abdul.
Or maybe Alex in Flashdance.
If you’ve never seen Flashdance, don’t hurt yourself by doing so. Awful film.
I’ve heard OF it, maybe even seen a few minutes of it as a kid. Songs include “Maniac”, I think?
Aw, I liked it. 🙁
Of course, I saw it in first release, so the dusty corridors of memory may be lit in a rosier hue as I get older…
Trade the hat for a green plastic visor and she’ll be ready to deal poker in the back of the cafeteria.
Mary makes me want to punch a wall with my face.
thats just a headbutt.
I’d rather punch Mary’s face with a wall.
(That came out weird…)
Now I want to write fake Magic: The Gathering card.
… How would that look? I kinda want to see this.
So, like… on one hand I’m happy Robin doesn’t get to be president (she would not do well, and this way she has more time to give to Leslie~)… But on the other hand… I really wish this was not how it happened.
Because outing people is not okay. I understand wanting to out people who’ve harmed the community, either through hate speech or legislation (or in any way, really). I get it. I do. But it’s just not okay. Not when things like Orlando can still happen.
You done fucked up, Roz.
Since Roz is being ‘outed’ by someone who clearly doesn’t want to use that to alleviate pressure off of the community, yea, it’s not going to be of any real benefit.
Auch, Robin, not Roz.
I mean, preventing Robin from becoming president is of great benefit considering her policies, but as I said I disagree with the method.
This Roz-Leslie-Robin conspiracy plot has been going on for so long, was Roz really trying to prevent Robin from the presidency?
Roz might also be motivated by wanting her sister to have a happy life with love and good sex, instead of a life of hollow status in denial.
Oh no wait you’re right it was Congress. I got it all mixed up, what with the Robin/Trump parallels. Woops. ^^”
(Of course there’s still huge benefit to keeping someone like Robin out of Congress, tho the impact of a single congressperson is presumably less than that of a president.)
People mention below that Roz isn’t responsible for this (paraphrasing, correct me if I’m misunderstanding those positions).
But she manipulated events to result in this. She got Robin to appear in Leslie’s class. She convinced Leslie to try at seducing Robin. She may not have taken the photo*, but that doesn’t clear her of guilt. And her triumphant attitude certainly doesn’t help.
(*At first read I thought that was an off-handed lie, which is waht I based my comment on largely, but at second look it does seem to be true – which doesn’t negate my point)
Understandable position. Every choice is augmented or negated by the choices of others, everything builds up into this grand cacophony of choices and causes and events thereof known as life.
Doesn’t really change your points, but Robin’s running for re-election as a congreswoman, not prez
^Yea, I didn’t remember the presidency being thrown around; just the senatorial race.
Congress, not the Senate.
Still wrong! Robin’s in the House, not the Senate.
As the floating timeline advances towards the Logan’s Run future, Robin will be running for President, since the President will have to be under 30.
Yeah sorry, I have trouble remembering details like this, and the Turmp/Robin parallels got me confused.
What she’s done to her sister isn’t even half the problem. It’s what her actions will mean for Leslie.
Sure, she hasn’t outed her, Everyone knows she’s gay, but she’s involved her in yet another Political Scandal that can Very Easily be linked back to the College.
And this after she had front row seats to what the Dean thought after the last Political Scandal connected to the college.
Maybe Leslie should have realised that photo would happen, but she was too wrapped up in her crush, anger and quest to save Robin from herself. Which is what Roz made it sound like- a question of having her sister comes to terms with her own sexuality.
But that wasn’t Roz’s plan at all. She may not have had an active part in the photo being taken, but it Was her End Plan, one she didn’t think to warn Leslie about.
Well done Roz, you’ve just ruined the life of your Favourite Teacher.
TBF, at least Roz actually did something the school could object to by using their property as a porn location. Leslie, by this picture’s logic, merely was caught close to the Congresswoman (and smooched her, according to the article). That isn’t illegal and going on a date and kissing a pretty lady is not immoral, nor was the school involved in any capacity other than it happened to take place on or near campus. IU is a secular school that claims to be an equal opportunity employer with 3 Title IX coordinators at this campus alone, so it’s also not a school rules thing. Unless the dean personally is homophobic, Leslie should be okay on the ‘dean won’t be happy’ school. And he doesn’t seem to like Robin’s politics, and his son isn’t homophobic, so hopefully he isn’t either.
Leslie might be at issue with her housing, but if there’s any fuss about her employment, it probably won’t be from Dean McHenry.
Didn’t you see how Leslie’s tune changed when she heard the word “Photo”?
It might not mean being fired, but this Scandal is going to hurt her plenty, and she knows it.
Oh yes it will. I’m just saying that if there’s problems with her job, I don’t think it’ll be from the Dean. Other folks (or hell, other deans even), maybe, but I don’t think he specifically will auto-fire her.
I’m far more worried she’ll get tossed from her apartment.
And just to point out how closely this Scandal can be liked to the college- Robin attended a lecture there the day before. The Media could well paint a picture of Leslie jumping on Robin after the lecture was over, before dragging her away to a bar to have her wicked way with her. The media could say that Leslie used, no, Abused her powers as a teacher to lure Robin to the college under false pretences, and image that might be enforced by the premature end Leslie brought her visit to.
Robin was invited as a guest speaker, not to attend a lecture. I’d think Leslie kicking her out would be a bad sign for any attempted seduction. As for the bar, people can vouch that Leslie LEFT after that incident, no dragging off for wicked ways.
It won’t stop Robin’s die hard supporters from believing what they want, but that’s not really a ‘look bad for the college thing’.
Truth and what the Media actually reports tend to be two very different things unfortunately. Do you think it will make for an interesting story if they say Leslie just left after this? No, so they’ll just leave that part out.
That also depends who wins the media view on this story though – Manley looks like he’s trying to spin it as ‘Robin’s a hypocrite, look at her macking on this lady’ which makes it far more of an issue for Robin than Leslie.
I think you’re missing something. No, the school isn’t going to care that Leslie did a lesbian thing. But the dean made it quite clear that he’s worried about making the school look bad. Thus, if this becomes a scandal, firing Leslie may be seen as a way to make it go away.
The one thing I’m not sure about is how easily he can do that. I assume this is a public college, right? If that’s the case, there would be some procedure necessary to fire her. She seems to be a full-time teacher, so there’d have to be some paperwork and stuff.
That alone is often enough to keep public school teachers from being fired, and it might help Leslie.
The other saving grace is that Leslie didn’t take the picture, so there’s a chance she keeps things cool with Robin, and Robin calls off any attempt from her campaign to make it a scandal. Leslie can easily report that nothing happened, without also admitting any sort of guilt that might make her more undesirable.
I predict that Robin’s Story arc will come to a head when she’s forced to choose between saving the girl by telling the truth, and saving her job by giving into the smear campaign tactics her aides will inevitably come up with.
I think the two aren’t really equivalent though. Roz was using school property as a porn shoot location – that’s what he was concerned about. Leslie didn’t do anything illegal, misuse school property or resources (which might not matter to the media, but it’ll matter to the Dean), or really do anything immoral. Even going by this article, the worst she did was go on a date and maybe smooch a little with Robin. It’s not her fault Robin’s a Congressperson who wanted to keep it on the down low. This isn’t connected to the school remotely, and I really don’t think Dean McHenry, specifically, would care, especially since he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Robin. Other teachers, other deans, die hard Robin supporters, the media, etc.? They might try to give Leslie a hard time. But I don’t think Dean McHenry, specifically, is going to give much of a fuck. I hope not anyways.
Leslie and Robin are grown ass adults and they are responsible for their own actions. Leslie made the decisions that led to this of her own free will and trying to twist this into somehow being Roz’s fault is just another extension of the weird vendetta this community seems to have against her.
I have no vendetta against Roz. Overall, I rather like her. But I have a visceral reaction to the outing of people (and you can’t deny that Roz manipulated events in the hopes for this outcome), and her triumphant attitude about it just makes me want to shake her and yell at her about all the lives that have been ruined by this kind of shit. (not that I would, like, actually do that if I had her in front of me, just, that’s my gut reaction)
If any community can understand a visceral reaction to outing, I’d expect to be this comment section, considering how many here are in the LGBTQIA+ community.
And I kind of want to shake you and yell at you about all the lives that have been ruined by bigoted politicians pushing hate legislature that contributes to the cultural climate where being outed is as dangerous as it is.
And that’s Leslie’s fault and so she should suffer? Could we work our way through the logic again please?
In which case I’d like to invite you to read my long rant further down in the comment section where I try to think about all of those conflicting things.
I’d also like you to take into consideration the fact that visceral reactions aren’t necessarily based in the objective logic you’re talking about.
The first comment I make on these strips is always the one that’s just my initial gut reaction, before taking time to read through other opinions and think about all the different things that might be at stake, all the different perspectives that come into play and are valid. I do this so I can be honest about my feelings and about the contrast that exists between a first reaction and a second thought-out reaction.
wonder what kind of anime mary watches
hmm Roz has known Robin a long time so maybe she has some insider knowledge of Robin bring fickle about what her priorities are… but this still seems like a weak thread to rely on
also: I thought that really conservative people don’t think women holding hands is gay or anything, from what I’ve heard, women can share beds without being accused of being lesbians because female friendship is more affectionate or something. Basically there’s a double standard that theoretically would let Robin get away with more?
**Robin BEING more fickle
not if the woman is a politician. :/
…ironically, just gals being pals.
Last-panel Mary strongly reminds me of the larger-than-life Puritans at various renaissance faires. I thought it was ridiculous, but I’m forever learning that people think crazy stuff all the time. Do real people say things like that?
Yup.
Used to have friends’ parents explain to me like a dumb idiot child that God loved me so much he would send me straight to hell to be tortured for all eternity if I didn’t start seriously attending church services.
I used to just deflect until they stopped pushing the point.
God seems to have a very weird idea of love. He’s like one of those dads that lies about who his son is on the baseball team because his real son isn’t very good.
“I love you, but don’t fuck up or I’ll deny all connection to ya.”
As far as I can tell, the fundamentalist Christian God is just your typical horridly abusive dad. I mean. “I’m punishing you because I love you”. That’s like as clear as it gets.
Well, this is more the good ones who “forgave” me for being a good student who never did drugs and thus a good tool for their kids to practice converting. The others… yeah, I just tried to make sure they couldn’t find out I wasn’t just as Christian as they were.
Now watch Robin ride the “black friend” gambit to a landslide.
And some people wonder why a lot of us prefer an unknown evil over her
Sierra’s like…the only likeable person in this strip for me.
YOU HATE DINA!?
I don’t hate Dina.
I just like her less and less with every stripD:<
I like you less and less with every strip.
?? I like Yotomoe more and MORE with every strip!
… that he draws.
… I admit, I’m a whore for smut.
That’s ok. I’m not particularly likeable.
Beg to disagree.
woah i didnt even realize Dina was in the strip
Thats because she’s a ninja! A dino Ninja! Funny, enough Dino ninjas are the least effective type of ninja, have you seen Dinosaurs? they are not very sneaky.
Are you saying that dinosaurs aren’t very sneaky? I claim the opposite. They are super sneaky. They are so sneaky that they made everyone think they’ve gone extinct.
Owls are totally dinosaur ninjas.
Flying dinosaur ninjas.
according to jurrassic park dinos can be pretty sneaky for and i quote “clever girl”
She is using her natural camouflage to sneak up on prey. Or at least pizza.
I actually didn’t either. Otherwise I probably would’ve said Sierra AND Dina.
ow dude, I know Billie’s been pissy lately but…
Sierra is my fave, bar none.
But that could also be that she has been thus spared ‘character development’.
With your amendment of adding Dina, I almost agree with you.
Billie has been likable before, and may be again someday. But, while I do feel sorry for her, I don’t particularly like her right now.
The “almost” is only because I don’t know anything about this Meredith, so she might be likeable. I do at least try to like everybody a tiny bit by default.
Characters who are likeable because we don’t know much of anything about them yet:
– Sierra
– Rose
– Meredith
– Howard
– Kaitlin
– Rachel
– Other Rachel
– Bloodrose
What’d Grace and Mandy do?
Mandy has no style. And there is no Grace. Those characters have a funny face.
Mary “knew” Robin wasn’t straight the same way Leslie did. 😉
Because Robin’s sister suggested hooking up with her?
I think I missed that strip.
Hey, Roz? Not to rain on your parade, but have you ever heard of a Congressman by the name of Dave Brat?
Given a grade of “A” by the Conservative Review, one of only a few Republican Congressional lawmakers to receive such a high score. He’s probably one of the most openly conservative individuals in Congress, short of the BIG guys like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.
The reason he was able to win his seat back in 2014 was because he was able to beat Eric Cantor, who at the time was the HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER, in the district’s Republican primary. It’s one of the biggest political upsets in recent memory, and arguably the biggest one in 2014. And he did it by going EVEN FURTHER RIGHT WING than Cantor, who was, again the HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER and certainly quite conservative.
What I’m basically saying Roz, is that you didn’t ensure a more progressive candidate would win. You just made it easier for a more radical conservative to step into the driver’s seat. So don’t celebrate until the election is over.
Except we’re past the primary and into the general election. If Robin’s base turns against her, Jake Manley will easily win the seat. Given that it’s not an extremely conservative district and given the advantages of incumbency, there’s a good chance he’ll be able to keep it.
It’s always possible he’ll be unseated in two years by an even more Conservative Republican, but then as your example shows that would be possible even if Robin stayed in.
Not even just ‘into the general election’. We’re a month away from the vote. Any kind of replacement would barely have time to file paperwork to get on the ballot, never mind campaign. If she drops out, it’s Manley’s.
I think you forgot to tag Billie in this
in the tags I mean
Wait, why is Roz dressed like Annie Hall?
I think Roz had someone take the picture for her. Someone like Joe…who she paid in sex.
I don’t think she had to. There were going to be plenty of people at that bar who would capture a moment like this.
Doesn’t mean she isn’t going to cheer how this frees her from her sister’s eternal campaign or how congress is going to be slightly less hostile to her rights and the rights of groups she cares about.
And that might not be kind, but it’s an unkindness I am very much guilty of as well.
I agree she didn’t have to. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t, either.
I definitely think she’d probably planned to get a photo, as I believe Roz’s goal, unlike Leslie’s, was indeed to out Robin. And, since Leslie wasn’t completely on board, either Roz or someone she trusted would have to take it.
I’m leaning towards Roz being uninvolved, but it’s more a gut feeling than anything I can show using the comic.
Given that there’s no reason to think Roz even knew Robin had come back to talk to Leslie, it’s really hard to see how she could have.
Possible, but not even hinted at.
Alternatively, Roz could have known her sister well enough to realize that Robin has all the discretion of a rambunctious litter of puppies on a slick floor, and that pictures would have been inevitable.
…. in addition to the other objections leveled, why would anyone have to pay Joe, in any currency, to take pictures of lesbian canoodling?
Excellent point.
It really is.
I wonder if the race for the R.A job, between Roz and Dorothy, will end up coming to a vote, but it will be 50/50. With Mary being that last voter.
However, I do feel like Mary would cast her vote for Dorothy pretty fast, I mean Mary activity hates Roz on a personal level, she doesn’t know shit about Dorothy.
She knows that Dorothy is an atheist and warned Joyce about hanging out with the wrong kind of people so she has no love for her. As far as she’s concerned it’s the same with congressional race. She hates Robin, but considers her the lesser of two evils over a Democrat. I agree that if RA becomes an elected position Mary could be the swing voter which would put both Dorothy and Roz in an unenviable position. Just how far are you willing to go to get her vote?
It’s a fool’s game, as whoever courts Mary’s vote loses the support of several others.
They’d never do it openly. Roz would have the best opportunity since Mary is her roommate, but seeing as how nobody likes her no one would be paying attention if Dorothy paid her a visit too.
I think Roz has already lost with this little plan of her’s. Once it comes to light how involved in the idea she was, she will be seen in a scary new Ruthless light, completely contradictory to the image she was previously projecting.
And then when this plan ends up getting Leslie Fired (for creating yet another political scandal that can be connected to the college), people will see how little she thinks things through that concern other people.
My prediction?
Billy for RA
Except, there’s no election. RAs are appointed. Therefore the support of the group is unimportant.
Sh. Sanity is never appreciated.
Can we recap how exactly is Billie blackmailing Mary? Billie said she would rat Mary out on how she was blackmailing her and Ruth, which is bad why exactly? What would Billie even say? “Hey miss RM, this girl knew about our relatinship with the RA and she uh… yeah that’s about it”. What am I missing here? I understand Mary was supposedly blackmailing them, but she didn’t really make them do anything at all? Like really, what am I missing in this?
Because she was trying to bully the RM’s “favorite RA” into suicide using knowledge of her queer identity as a weapon, largely in retaliation for asking for carte blanche in harassing a trans student, and nearly caused an attempt that required hospitalization of said “favorite RA”?
I mean it’s basically a Tyler Clementi situation that was only cut off at the pass due to Carla being a force of nature:
http://tylerclementi.org/tylers-story/
And Mary can claim clean hands and “not technically forcing Ruth to attempt”, but that’s complete bullshit as recognized by actual legal authorities. Harassing someone into feeling so trapped that they attempt is a crime and while it is not treated as equivalent as the attempted murder it so frequently is, it honestly probably should be.
She wasn’t trying to “Bully her into suicide”. She was trying to get her way, which is diametrically opposed to what Ruth wanted to do and caused her a lot of stress. I don’t believe that her intention was to get Ruth to kill herself.
She just wanted free wheeling to be a dick and convert people to her way of thinking. Which is still pretty shitty, but not as bad as what YOU’RE implying her end game was.
She literally sang “Ding dong the witch is dead” when she knew she sent her to the hospital:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/considering/
And intentionally deprived her of any of her coping strategies despite knowing she had clinical depression.
She doesn’t want any of the blood on her hands, but would have very happily accepted a suicide or two as the result of her bullying.
I mean, I saw that as more of a “The king is dead. Long live the king” In that she doesn’t intend for Ruth to actually be dead. But, such as the Wicked Witch is the leader of the evil part of Oz, Ruth was the leader of the floor. So “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” means she’s no longer in power, and also I didn’t like her so she’s the villain of the movie.
Also the coping strategies she was denying her was her (admittedly) toxic relationship with Billie, and also she kept her tryst with her a secret because she wanted to use that power over her. I think she wasn’t even privy to the extent of Ruth’s depression. She was just trying to twist the power in her direction with little concern for how it affected either of them. I believe even Mary would be sad if she found out Ruth killed herself.
I mean she’d probably ruin it by saying something about how she’s probably in hell or how this proves gays just aren’t all there mentally, but I still don’t believe her intention was for Ruth to kill herself.
When Carla blew the thing wide open, Mary – now knowing Ruth was suicidal – attempted to stop anyone from intervening, and to put herself in control of the situation.
She absolutely knew the extent of Ruth’s depression then. Everyone in earshot knew.
And not only did she gloat about it to Billie, she seriously believed Billie wouldn’t actually care and would even be interested in helping her do something similar to Carla, because Mary doesn’t really see them as people. They’re just depraved perverts to her. They’re already lost souls, so they don’t matter.
If Ruth had actually died, Mary might feel a brief twinge of remorse, but I guarantee you she would stomp that shit down immediately as the devil’s influence trying to make her falter from her Righteous Path, just like Ross did.
Doesn’t change the fact that after she knew her actions nearly caused a suicide attempt, she tried to bargain with the hallmates to keep it quiet or under wraps so she could continue abusing Ruth or after she knew Ruth was hospitalized, how she literally tried to bargain for the right to universal access to abusing Carla again.
Mary has shown us exactly how little she has cared about Ruth’s health and well-being, even after she was out of excuses of ignorance.
I totally agree. She doesn’t give a shit about Ruth or Billie as people. I just feel that that’s COMPLETELY different then ACTIVELY TRYING to make her kill herself. I don’t think Mary’s a good person, by any regard, but Ruth was much more of means to an end than someone she actually tried to have killed.
Oh, I think she was actively trying to make Ruth kill herself.
I just think she was heavily in denial that that was what she was trying to do. Same as she’s heavy in denial that what she’s been doing to Carla is violent bullying and harassment.
I really don’t see “not caring that your actions almost killed someone” as being significantly different from doing it yourself, morally speaking.
Simply not caring if her actions drove someone to suicide rather than specifically intending to do so might be slightly less awful, but not by much. I’d say the difference is comparable to murdering people vs murdering AND eating them.
In my opinion, driving someone to suicide is actually murder, where the murder weapon is the victim’s own depression. Just using a knife would be a considerable step up from that.
Fart Captor-
Yeah, and it’s a type of murder attempt I take really personally because so many bigot groups use this as a weapon against trans folks, making games out of driving them to suicide in order to “decrease the number of freaks in the world”, not to mention the groups at my school trying to harass the raped trans kid into another suicide attempt for various reasons.
It’s a different degree of evil. Delighting in the pain of others is a special type of evil, beyond merely not caring. One makes her a bad person, the other makes her a full on psychopath.
As for why it matters? Here, it doesn’t. She’s just a comic book character. But, in real life? There’s a difference. Getting people to notice who they are hurting and helping them care is a lot easier than convincing a psychopath. (Some argue it’s only even possible at all if they are a teen and their brains are still developing.)
Now, personally, I think Mary is straddling both groups, and could go either way. I’m just articulating why there is a difference.
trlkly, there is absolutely no question about whether Mary knows the consequences of her actions. Making her notice she’s hurting people would make no difference.
Mary probably isn’t a psychopath, either. Like Ross, she just suppresses what empathy she does feel for those she hurts. She has it in her head that being a good Christian requires it
Maybe she was trying to hurt Ruth, maybe she was just trying to neutralize what power Ruth had over her. In terms of what Billy has now regarding her blackmail attempt, it doesn’t actually matter that much – Ruth used that power to get Ruth out of the way so that she could harass Carla, and Billy knows about that. Billy has more than enough on Ruth to get Ruth to behave, at least as long as Ruth believes that Billy will carry through on the threat.
It might also help to mention which trans students. Even if Carla’s family wouldn’t get involved, I imagine the school would probably rather not piss off the zillionaires who may be giving funding, donations, publicity, might be alumni, and can feasibly sue the school off the map if their little girl killed herself.
So I read all the replies here and I gather you guys are saying that someone being an asshole and thus worsening someone’s depression is a crime recognized by law and college staff?
Literally all Mary did was being an asshole. She wanted to control Ruth, with the power of assholeness.
Yes, harassment is a crime. It’s often difficult to prosecute unless it leads to quantifiable damage like suicide, which is why we have this blurred line between “harassing” and “being an asshole” – a judge could almost certainly find Mary guilty or not based on how much how much of an asshole the judge feels like being today. But, well, Cerebrus here already covered this and she knows what she’s talking about.
Blackmail is also a crime, as is driving someone to commit suicide, even if it’s very difficult to prosecute.
Mary knew exactly what she was doing when she tried to get Chloe to leave after she showed up, so don’t try for a moment to say she was “just being an asshole”.
I would hope the campus administration would take some action upon learning one of their RAs was extorted into needing hospitalization.
There was supposed to be a link in there but I guess I messed up the html tags, so have it plainly; http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vacuum/blackmailed/
Does she have some tortured past? Or, is she just mean for no reason?
I guess the answer to that depends on whether or not you consider being raised fundamental Christian automatically counts as having a tortured past.
I’m not sure we know for sure that Mary was raised Fundamentalist. I know people like her who were not, and still aren’t technically fundamentalists.
We sure never saw her having the troubles Joyce did. That suggests she has a bit more worldliness.
I don’t think so. From what we’ve seen of Mary, she’s absolutely fine to people she considers ‘her own’. It’s just any deviation from that has been instilled in her that those people will burn in hell, will suffer, and will deserve it. Even with other Christians, she’s less and less friendly the more schisms away you are from her.
It’s just a form of mindset gardened throughout her life, by her community, which has been doing it, since, well, America has been founded (Puritans, anyone?) Though the mindset can also lead to backstabbing and infighting within their own anyway, but that’s a bit off topic. Just her upbrining, really, she doesn’t seem automatically, naturally petty and spiteful, just, basically, scared shitless of any deviation or other due to religion/spirituality/superstition.
From what we’ve seen of Mary, she’s absolutely fine to people she considers ‘her own’.
Both of them?
And the Reagan poster.
Well, now I want to list a few possible tortured pasts for Mary that interest me.
A. She had to get an abortion at some point (would call back to roomies)
B. She’s barren
C. She came from a lesbian family, but was kidnaped as a small child and tortured and brainwashed by Evangelicals.
It’s kind of hinted that she might, with the “If evil weren’t nice, nobody’d bother with it :(” line from way back in “Choosing My Religion”, but we don’t really know.
Mary looks pretty Kawaii Desu.
Puts on People See Through You on hacked Muzak.
What is fucked up is the joy she is having from her sister’s problems.
Hello, horrible sister who brings her campaigning into her life cosntantly and wants to take away her birth control for political power?
Jesus christ, folks are ridiculously idiotic about her – it’s almost like they’re sexist and racist and don’t like the brown girl who actually fighters back.
Already the anti-roz posts are in. Even though she once again didn’t do anything wrong. Robin got a picture of herself taken in a public place. Nobody outed anyone,
True, but doesn’t mean I can’t find her joy in aforementioned picture
or her outfitobnoxious.Yeah, it’s the general smugness that makes her really annoying to me – because that’s exactly the kind of stereotypical behaviour some people associate with the left.
No matter how valid your point, people won’t care if you’re an asshole about it. :/
No, but she’s taking joy in it and while it may be for the right reasons she’s no different than Mary in this respect.
Ugggghhhhhh
I don’t think she’s a monster, but I would have hoped she’d feel at least a little conflicted about it. It is her own sister, after all.
Her sister who is an awful person who belittles and manipulates and controls her. Sometimes being related to someone makes you hate them more for their mistreatment of you rather than less.
Robin is, what, ten years older than Roz? An age gap like that can change the usual big sis/little sis relationship into something more like a secondary mother/daughter relationship. Robin sees her role as a parental one, with her job being to guide and enforce Roz’s behavior. Roz, being eighteen, is naturally rebelling against such control (esp if her mother is similarly controlling).
I also see the age gap being an issue between Roz and Riley – they’re about 6 years apart, which may again distort the usual sibling relationship. The DeSantoes seems to have taken their time between each pregnancy…
It’s at least been hinted if not outright stated that there are more DeSantoes, who may well fall in between the three we’ve met.
Robin is 12 years older, so yeah, probably had to take care of her younger sisters (there’s more than Roz and Riley) a lot. Robin goes above and beyond though, dragging and forcing her into political instances she abhors and trying to force her to be the perfect family values family.
But what happens to Robin isn’t even going to be the main issue. Look what happened with your main election. Polls continually showed Hilary ahead, Trump continued to make himself look bad, but in the end…
But Leslie… Leslie is going to lose her job for causing yet another political scandal to be so closely connected to the school. Especially after she hosted the “debate” over the last scandal, where the Dean ended it in no uncertain way.
The photo may not have been something that Roz actively did, but it was certainly part of her plan. Maybe Leslie should have also realised this, but she was too wrapped up in her crush, anger, and quest to save Robin from herself that she forgot about such things. But this photo was Roz’s end game, that she forgot to tell Leslie about. Little did Roz stop to think that it would ruin her “favourite teacher”‘s life.
Fuck off Mary.
To those asking if she took the picture, despite her protests.
Of course not.
She’s a college freshman. Roughly 18.
I don’t see her hanging around a bar, without getting asked pointedly to leave until she turned 21.
That’s right you Americans have weird drinking laws
Not to argue the point, but Sal didn’t. Hell she didn’t even get carded and was drinking like a fish.
Sal did. Though, tbh, I’d believe Sal was 21. I can see her looking older than she is.
But then Walky would have to be 21 also.
Why would Walky need to look 21 just because Sal might? They aren’t identical twins. If she were actually 21, sure, but I just think she can pass for it.
Sal also dresses in ways that are generally associated as older (early mid 20s) and smokes, which probably deepened her voice and, likewise, would make her seem older.
Also fake IDs and apparently being very very attractive to the bouncer/bartender.
Dang I keep forgetting people under 21 aren’t allowed in bars in the US.
Same. Also that bars won’t let them in, even just to eat.
Depends on the bar. And probably local/state laws to some extent.
I’m not familiar with Indiana law here, but there are a lot of bars where it is totally fine to have minors there, they just can’t drink. I know of relatively few places that card at the door, and half of them are straddling the bar-nightclub divide pretty hard (some of the others are out of state for me, so it might just be Colorado being odd here).
This is officially my favorite reason for Mary to be smiling. I never expected I would have one.
“Even though she once again didn’t do anything wrong.”
Rejoicing that someone is outed IS doing something wrong. OUTING SOMEONE AGAINST THEIR WILL IS AN ACT OF HOMOPHOBIC VIOLENCE.
Outing people can get them harassed, hurt, jobless, homeless and even killed.
Please don’t rejoice that people get outed even when they are scum politically speaking. Yes, Robin’s politics are horrible, yes, her defeat means the more progressive candidate will win, but specifically homophobic violence should never be condoned.
Okay, um, so I’ve been noting a lot the complicated history and debate within the queer community with regards to the practice of outing anti-gay legislators and how that history directly led to a lot of gains in queer rights whether we approve or not.
But now that people are starting to argue that any person who feels joy at a professional bigot being outed or revealed to be a hypocrite, I have to much more strongly object.
I’m pretty much a trans elder and really came into my political own during the Bush years and I was on the frontlines of a lot of queer struggles back then including the fight for marriage equality.
And I remember the days, when things were going really poorly on that front and how much the whole tenor of the fight changed when bigoted candidates and hate-group members were being outed.
This thing some of you are saying makes a person scum, to cheer the outing of a hypocrite?
It’s a thing I did when I was younger.
Maybe that wasn’t right, certainly I’d be in a fuck-ton of distress if the decision came to me personally whether or not to out a bigoted politician whose policies were hurting my community. But rejoicing that someone who was hurting my community was no longer in a position to hurt people I loved?
Yeah, I’ve done that.
I apologize. I was violent and peremptory with my words.
Your post gets me thinking. In a way it looks like people celebrating Thatcher’s death for example, something I do approve entirely: it can seem terrible but it is fully understandable that someone directly responsible for the misery and death of many is now unable to keep on their horrible work.
In a way, this is the same. Just another way bigots are made completely inoffensive.
I also get the point about efficiency, about how it can save lives, better lives. The idea of violence itself as a way to obtain social progress isn’t repulsive to me. Often it’s just necessary. I’ve seen that in anticapitalism, in feminism, in antiracism. Sometimes violence is the only way to get results and the only language the Powers that Be understand.
But still… Well, you’ve obviously put a lot more thought in this than me, and you have a lot more experience in the matter. I’m just 31, I’m a young enby bisexual person, and I only began activism a few years ago.
So anything I could say about how “dirty” it feels to see someone, anyone, outed, subjected to the same horrible homophobic gaze of mainstream society, you’ve likely felt and thought about already, and way more deeply.
By the very way you phrase your post, I see you grasp the way I reacted to Roz’s joy. I… frankly I’m hesitating now. It looks logical to react positively to the outing of enemies of LGBTQIA+ rights, it looks logical to even AIM for the outing of enemies of LGBTQIA+ rights, and still it feels so wrong.
Thanks for your intervention. I need to think about it.
I wouldn’t beat yourself up about it, it was more something I needed to speak up about given my own background and yeah, I think it’s very similar to things like celebrating Thatcher or Scalia’s deaths.
It’s complicated, yanno?
Yeah, really complicated.
(I got a Gravatar but it doesn’t look like I can retroactively apply it… dammit.)
This thread is actually making me think a lot about my stance on this. I am extremely young (21) and have not lived the harsh activism you (Cerberus) have. From reading this I realise there’s a lot of things I didn’t think about. Maybe I avoided thinking about them, because it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t know how to find an answer that leaves me guiltless.
Maybe there is no guiltless solution. Outing someone will always feel very wrong to me, but when these politicians are doing everything they can on a daily basis to alienate us, starve us, kill us, … waiting for things to somehow get better, for someone else to get elected, etc, waiting for things that might never happen, doing nothing or doing things we know won’t be enough might be- probaby is much worse.
Maybe there is no right or wrong, only wrong and worse. It’s a distressing thought. I need to do a lot of thinking on the issue.
I do know that when politicians have been outed as, for example, having had relations with male escorts, I’ve thought “Good”. And I haven’t felt bad for them being outed, as much as I’ve felt bad about all of the self-loathing that they must have experienced. But those feelings were quickly followed by guilt over thinking it was good that they were outed, and guilt at having compassion for the struggle of a person who’s spread so much hate and misery.
My moral compass is just having a lot of trouble finding the right colour balance to suit this grey-shaded world, I guess.
(this has been a rant. I apologize for its length but I needed to get these thoughts out of my head and this is the best way I currently know)
It’s the outcome of almost any fight really – somebody loses, and it’s not pretty, but most of the winners care more about winning the fight than the fate of the people opposing what they care so much about. It’s the dark side of righteous fury – it’s quick to dismiss the humanity of the opposing side, perhaps for strong, completely understandable reasons. Would I feel as much sympathy for the death of someone who made life needlessly miserable for so many people as I would for the average person?
Scalia: Pro-life. Dies anyway.
I cheered when Scalia died and I have never felt remotely conflicted about it. Much like science, social progress advances one funeral at a time.
For Scalia in particular, his death was cause for celebration because it was the only way that motherfucker was leaving the court.
It’s kind of a “Is it ok to shoot someone who’s shooting people” sort of thing.
Personally I couldn’t pull the trigger but I might be happy that he’s dead. That said, I still I’d feel guilty wishing ill will on anyone. Especially if it’s something relateable.
I’m surprised that you of all people are dancing a jig, Cerberus, when it’s clear that Roz’s little prank will hurt Leslie just as badly, maybe even worse than Robin. You pointed that out yourself a few days ago. Is Leslie acceptable ‘collateral damage’ now that it has probably led to a political outcome that you want?
I’m not necessarily dancing a jig about this specific comic arc. I’m actually feeling about as conflicted about this as I would be about outing a bigoted politician myself.
But the statements are about the general cheering of the outing of anti-gay politicians and how that is monstrous.
Cheering the outing of an anti-gay politician and being thankful they weren’t able to hurt someone in a similar way as Roz here is something I’ve actually done in my past. And so the condemnation of such actions as monstrous may be warranted but definitely applies to me and places I have been in my life.
I’m inclined to think that Roz thinks so, as much as she thinks of anything or anyone besides getting what she wants (in this case, out from under Robin) – that is, hardly ever.
IMO, the DeSanto sisters (these two, at least) are a lot alike in that regard.
You know, I’m all in favor of celebrating when the right person loses an election. Celebrating when a human being loses their life, not so much.
Panel One: Well…..shit. So Robin is probably hosed for the election and Leslie might be suddenly in trouble for her housing and employment. Yikes!
Panel Two: Okay, it’s good that Roz didn’t take the photo, but seriously? I think even pro-outing-gay-homophobic-politicians generally see it as something you should take seriously and not gloat about – it is still using homophobia and outing to defeat someone. While it might be necessary, it probably isn’t a cause for celebration (and please correct me if I’m wrong about how those things are generally seen).
Though, on the other hand, I can definitely see folks not feeling bad for Robin because Robin was going to get people killed with her laws and now she’s had a hard blow struck towards her electability.
I know I just said this on Patreon, but it seems Roz received a far more George Bushian era education regarding outing homophobic gay politicians than I did. She definitely seems to be of the school that goes ‘it’s a valid method and i’m not feeling too sorry for them’.
Also, this may be causing Roz problems with her RA bid – I’m not sure many of her classmates have gone to the same school of thought. They seem younger – it seems likely they probably learned a lot the way I did (social media) which is generally very very anti-outing.
Panel Three: Roz, Mary, both of you quit being so snazzy looking. It’s unfair that I end up wanting to raid both your closets. Think of my needs dammit! /joking.
Mary, shut the fuck up. Your evidence was ‘she’s not married at 30’. That is not a good guess. You ended up being right, but your evidence was weak sauce. And yeah, you would be in favour of folks always getting outed, wouldn’t you? For bigotry reasons, not ‘defence of a vulnerable population’ reasons.
Panel Four: Waaaaaaaah, a bigot won’t get elected! Waaaaaaaaah! Cry me a river, Mary. You nearly drove someone to suicide the other day and you asked if you could do it to someone else. Isn’t there enough awful?
Politics. Isn’t. A. Sports. Game. This isn’t ‘Roz wins!’, this is ‘thank fuck that horrible homophobe Robin isn’t getting elected’. People’s lives come before your stupid fucking team pride.
Panel Five: Aw, yes, Billie seems to be enforcing her ‘don’t be an asshole, Mary’ rule. You can have issue with her methods, but daaaaaaamn if Mary being less of an ass isn’t a good thing.
Panel Six: Yes, yes, for the horrible crimes of loving people and not acting like property like good wimmins. How dare they think they’re people? Also, endless eternal torture doesn’t sound like love to me, it sounds like abuse. But then, a lot of things in Mary’s (and Joyce’s) sect sound like abuse to me. Explains a lot about her and early Joyce, but holy shit.
As someone who has taken that stance, it’s, from what I understand, a VERY serious, grave thing to do; one taken if there’s no real chance of a legal way to defeat whatever they’re proposing, and even more so, it absolutely should never be ‘set up’, it should be as natural as possible. At most, maybe someone of their ‘caliber’ might tiptoe near by them in the office, or outside, but most of the time the politican in question acts on their own urges. Get it done, use the breather to reinforce, hope something changes; act-act-act, not celebrate and be content.
As for the culture shift with outing, I can see that, sure. There’s a very real debate NOW on what is too much action, what is too little, what is just enough on the left for EVERY stance. Do we arm ourselves? Do we form our own militas? Do we just trust the supreme law and its structure to work? Can we weather the storm, or do we try to make walls or even weather-changing machines? So on and so on. I lean towards a radical, active bent, but others don’t, and that’s fine, and there are others even more radical or proactive that I disagree with.
Though I must stress “Celebrate and be content.”
Robin is heading for defeat – MAYBE. And while her opponent is a democrat, they’re in a mostly red area. He might be a blue dog. No real advancement on social issues. There are many cases where defeating the homophobe brings in someone who does nothing, which can hurt in the long term, since their own terms don’t last forever. The next guy might be a straight homophobe who loves to pin conservative or reactionary answers onto social issues, then what? Thus it must be remembered that the radical action is for a greater, overall cause, not just to get dirty for one fight in the midst of a big war.
Actually, this ISN’T a mostly red district. It’s gone back and forth frequently. Her opponent might very well be able to do good things for LGBT+ folks – Roz of all people seems to have faith in him. It’s also only a month away. Any replacement would barely have time to file the paperwork necessary to get on the ballot.
It’s my own fault, the webcomic time and real time disparity has buried the comic politics for me. If that is the case, if it’s a purple district, then there may be a chance.
IRL this district changes all the time, so it’s definitely not the Republican haven Robin thinks it is.
I don’t think Robin thinks it’s a Republican haven, though it’s easy to mistake that.
That old strip where she talked about the “peeps who keep her in office thinking Roz was a hellbound slut” could be taken that way. I read it that way at first. But it could also be read and makes more sense as “The Republican base that I rely on to overcome the urban Democratic vote thinks …”
She knows it’s a close district and she knows she needs the bigots to win, since she’s running as a Republican.
I guess that’s possible, though I’d imagine there’s lots of mushy middle she could court instead.
Without the base, the mushy middle doesn’t win elections. And frankly, there probably isn’t. It’s a divided urban/rural district. A lot of that vote is locked in.
They fight over that middle, but that’s because they hold the balance not because you can win with them alone.
But that’s sort of beside the point: Robin was right when she drew the map and pointed to the rural areas as her peeps.
It’s true you can’t win an election with just the middle, but you also don’t need to court a bigot vote either. Rural voters are more likely Republicans, sure, but the district’s really not mostly rural. Bloomington certainly isn’t the lone point of urbanness in a sea of rural areas – there are at least 8 other cities she needs to worry about.
The idea of hell is separation from God means that once God rejects you, it’s hell, regardless of whether or not there’s any active torture or not.
So God loves you, but if you insist on spurning Him, he’ll not force you to love him back, and will ultimately give you what you want.
There is a difference between ‘not forcing you to love him back’ and ‘punishing you via fiery torment for eternity’, which is the idea Mary seems to be espousing.
Well, Mary’s view does tend to be myopic, seeing the bits of the bible that support her preconceptions, and being blind to the bits that don’t.
I suspect Mary is a pretty good example of a modern day Pharasee. Jesus had some things to say about them.
Didn’t Jesus say to not judge, lest you be judged?
Sure, but Jesus has a lot of contradictory bits in his message. Seems like a good way to get people to pick the ones that they like.
To answer Panel 2… it was at the time. Certainly was in the circles I ran in. Might make me a monster, but it was a different time.
And yeah, it is interesting because Roz definitely does seem to have an attitude that is more Bush-era queer rights activist which is odd for someone so young as she wouldn’t have as immediate connection to folks like Michael Rogers and BlogActive:
http://www.blogactive.com/
Hell, the site hasn’t even really been a thing for over 5 years.
And it makes me curious about Roz’s history. Did she receive mentorship from older activists who remember those times much more clearly? Is she just a keen student of recent activist histories as part of her self-taught education? Or is this just a situation where she’s so happy to be free of her sister she doesn’t really care how it happened?
I’m very curious to see. Hell, it might even just be an anachronism as we know Willis likes to throw those in from time to time to comment on a historical battle that wouldn’t be as well known to kids of the age in the comic.
Yeah, that makes sense. You’re definitely not a monster. I guess reactions, much like outing politicians itself, are split and that makes sense.
>And yeah, it is interesting because Roz definitely does seem to have an attitude that is more Bush-era queer rights activist which is odd for someone so young
There’s a strand of tumblr-era activism that encourages tracking down people who make racist tweets IRL and trying to get them fired. It’s obviously not the mainstream of modern SocJus, but there’s a lefty version of 4chan with no compunction against outing or doxxing bad people.
I think people generally agree doxxing is a bad thing though, whereas outing homophobic politicians is more split.
Panel 3: I actually own a pink flannel really similar to Mary’s so I feel you on the glaring at the fashion sense of characters.
Panel 4: It’s really interesting how much of modern conservatism seems rooted in this idea of the conservative team winning over the liberal team and the game and the points don’t matter as much as winning and making sure the other team doesn’t “score” any of their points even if they win.
Hell, that got really explicit in the Trump campaign with Trump basically mostly just crowing about how he was going to be the winningest winner there ever was.
Panel 6: From the outside, that sect has frequently felt abusive or at the very least controlling a lot of the times. Especially as my heart tended to break for queer members trapped in those organizations, some of whom are still petrified with fear about admitting the truth about their “situation” with their “roommate”.
Yeah, i’m Canadian, so flannel is everywhere and very pretty to me. XD
I’ve noticed. Can we kill this idea with fire, please?
YUP. Noticing it more and more.
“You nearly drove someone to suicide the other day and you asked if you could do it to someone else.”
Gotta disagree BBCC, she demanded approval for wanting to do it to someone else.
And she’s still having trouble understanding the less than nil sympathy she received for being punched out over it.
She asked Billie to ‘let her have just Carla’. If that isn’t asking permission, it’s pretty close. She’s super gross about it.
(… aaaand that’s not a comment of mine I wanted to see associated with a smiling avatar. 🙁 Can I suggest that a function of “avatar deactivation” or “avatar choice” or whatever be added to the WordPress’ code?)
You can get avatar choice by getting a Gravatar. Though it does have the quirk that whenever you change your Gravatar it is retroactive.
And unlike the default avatars, it is not case-sensitive about your email.
Oh Mary~ Maybe you need to burn alongside Joyces Youth Pastor in that same fire Walky talked about.
You know I hate Mary, not because that’s the reason why she exist but because there’s nothing more to her than this. Does her character have any morality? How about regret, love, compassion, respect, honor, charity, anything? I mean I’m not asking for her to turn away from being a heel I’m just saying is her growth going to go in any direction or is she just a obstacle for some of the other cast.
Some people never grow. 🙁
Ah. Mary. You’re still alive. I guess you’d have given Lofwyr indigestion. Doesn’t explain the lack of grotesque burns, though…
Man, I’ll never understand people like Mary who just get off of deeming everyone and their moms sinners. Why go through life in such a hateful manner?
I don’t know, I just don’t understand it. It sounds like a unhealthy, joyless, and Depressing way to live.
Indeed. Being pious is fine and all but by persecuting others? It sounds, well, overwhelming.
That’s an ugly headline and it bothers me that Roz sees only victory.
Yeah that’s right, Roz Sold out her own sister and got her “Favorite College professor” into a life changing scandal that might ruin her life…what the fuck?
but Roz gets more freedom to do as she pleases, and that’s all that seems to matter to her.
Poll needs updating. Meredith for RA.
Perhaps she’s already on it. Her Dumbingverse incarnation is unknown to us thus far.
Roz removes hat, condoms and political speeches showering her beaming face.
Indiana Rejoices.
When Mary’s being arrogant and hypocritical, she’s obnoxious.
When she’s being completely sincere, she’s fucking disturbing.
It’s a reminder that what she does comes from a place of sincere, heartfelt belief… that God sending people to be tortured for eternity is a good thing.
Without a clear look at it, I’m going to assume that’s Mary’s own face on her shirt.
I don’t know why, but I like Roz’s outfit a lot.
Comic Reactions:
So yeah, as evidenced above, I’m going to be coming from a very different background than a lot of folks on this. And I’ve already noted the complicated history and debate that has surrounded outing anti-gay politicians. But for those who want a refresher, I recommend this article by Michael Roger, a person who ran a website outing down-low anti-queer politicians in the 2000s:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/mike-rogers-outed-gay-republicans-108368
And I’ve admitted that when this was happening in real time, I cheered the result of some of these outings as it really did stop some horrendous momentum.
And it’s something I’ve had to think a lot about lately especially as we might very well be seeing a world that sees the reintroduction of concentration camps for certain groups of individuals, not to mention a massive spike in nazi obsession about trans folks as the hot new “degenerate” group to kick around (cough cough Bleach Blonde Fascist using his hate tour to out trans students and engender directed harassment of them).
What are my personal limits and what would I feel joy over simply because it meant a capacity for harm by a dangerous bigot finally came to an end?
It’s not as easy of a situation and I’ve been the Roz before, the over-eager activist who cheered when dangerous people were neutralized, including by outing. Which is a delicious irony I know given my avatar. So I have a much harder time judging her here.
Especially given the dark context Roz is minimizing here because she doesn’t want to expose her vulnerabilities to the world.
Roz has been trapped by her sister’s campaign for at least the last 3 years, probably longer given that Robin likely spent some time in state congress before running for national congress. And I do mean trapped.
One of the things about family value candidates is that their family is part of the campaign. So no matter what, the other members of that family, especially those closest aren’t really allowed to differ too far from their family members and certainly not campaign about issues that are important to them that aren’t “pro-family values” as interpreted by bigots.
Where we’ve seen Roz in distress, it’s been when she’s had to grapple with that cage and how it limits the life Roz wants to lead and the politics Roz is allowed to campaign on behalf. And that especially matters to Roz as she comes of age.
This is not just Roz celebrating the results that will come from having one more D in congress, it’s Roz celebrating a hard-fought freedom from her sister, blocking her sister from every again building a political campaign solely on the strength of a “family values” platform again.
This is Roz finally gaining a future of her own to shape as she wants.
That’s big.
She’s also ruined her favourite teacher’s life.
Why do you think Leslie’s tune changed when she heard the word photo? Photo means Scandal. And we all saw how happy the Dean was with the last Political Scandal that could be connected to the college. And considering Robin just attended a lecture there the day before, a connection will be made.
This is Roz’s biggest character flaw, she’s as narrow minded and thoughtless as her sister, and simply doesn’t think things through, especially concerning other people.
I would agree. She’s opinionated but reckless and does not do enough to consider and plan for collateral damage or nasty triggers of her actions.
I doubt she for a second thought about how this might affect Leslie and you’re very right that this might really fuck over Leslie. Like, just to go down the list:
1) The Dean is tight with the DeSanto campaign and is scandal-averse and Leslie is likely an adjunct professor with very little in the way of protection if the Dean decides she’s “trouble”.
2) It’s legal in Indiana to fire or deny housing to someone because they are gay. it’s a little more protected in Bloomington in specific as folks have mentioned, but I know from personal experience living a place with anti-discrimination laws that a determined bigot doesn’t have much to fear with regards to enforcement of these laws.
And we already know Leslie’s landlord is at least shitty enough to let angry strangers break into her home, so who knows how he’s going to react.
3) Mary may be resigned in this matter, but there’s going to be plenty of die-hard DeSanto faithful who will follow Robin’s initial reaction of viewing this as a secret gay trap and Leslie as a demon luring their golden candidate from the cause of righteousness.
Folks who outed bigots tended to get a shit-ton of death threats from “good Christians” and Leslie is likely to get some of that as well as harassment and blame from DeSanto’s campaign.
The Dean actually isn’t tight with the DeSanto campaign – he doesn’t like her and didn’t support her politics, as he told her to her face. There could still be problems with her job, but the Dean liking and being close to Robin isn’t one, as his reaction to her seems to be along the lines of ‘oh dear god, what’s this idiot want now?’
Still when the Media reports that Leslie abused her power as a teacher to lure Robin within her grasp under false pretences, a story that could well be supported by how abruptly Leslie put an end to her visit (“It was like she couldn’t wait to get her paws* on her!”), I can’t imagine the Dean as being too pleased with her. Sure it would be lies, and the Dean would know it, but Leslie should have known better than to allow the setup. But she was blinded by her feelings for Robin.
*Since we know all lesbians are vampires with panther forms.
I still don’t think mentioning Leslie kicked her out would work that well – especially since Leslie stayed back and taught the rest of the class, and if they talked to enough people to know Leslie abruptly kicked her out, they’d probably also learn she was distraught about what Robin was spewing. If anything, I think they might play it as a lover’s spat over Robin covering as a homophobe. Leslie booting her out and then staying back to teach really does not look sexy.
Thanks for the context on this. I was not at all plugged into this at the time and I can definitely see where you’re coming from now.
I would still contend that the better choice is to discuss the situation in hopes of winning an ally across party lines (a la the Minnesota state legislator mentioned in the article) rather than throwing them to the wolves. There has been a definite cultural shift towards more acceptance of LGBTQ people, but I’m dubious that any great amount of that is due to revelations of hypocrisy among anti-LGBTQ politicians. (Seems more likely that it’s due to people realizing that they actually knew and loved LGBTQ folks and maybe they shouldn’t support policies that hurt those people.) You take down one politician, which can certainly be helpful, but it seems like there hasn’t yet been any shortage of ones willing to take their place.
Yeah, there’s a replacement waiting. But that replacement isn’t going to win this election, because they can’t run.
Plus it’s not just the one guy. By knowing that your hypocrisy will be revealed, you limit those who have these sorts of problems from running for office in the first place.
Just because the pool of replacements seems endless doesn’t mean it is. There are a lot more voters than there are replacements, yet we don’t avoid voting.
And I think you miss why more people were more comfortable coming out. Seeing the people who want to harm you taken down can be quite motivating. Sure, eventually it becomes more about just seeing others do it, but that’s not where it started.
Plus it’s just a general principle. If my politician was anti-smoking but secretly smoked, I’d expect them to be outed. If they secretly had an affair but ran a “family values” campaign, I’d expect them to be outed.
We want the people who represent us to have integrity.
Plus, it tends to defang stances that are taken out of performative morality. Noting how many of those who preach against abortion access are seeking out or funding abortions on the down-low helps defang this idea that one is performing “good” by publicly speaking out against reproductive health care.
And a lot of the time bigots thrive in a secretive down-low culture as it allows them to have their cake and eat it too. On the abortion side, there’s a strong culture of never outing folks who seek that care, but we know from sites like “The only moral abortion is my abortion”:
http://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/anti-tales.shtml
That the number of folks who will protest day and night, harassing clients, but still expect to be served discreetly when they need abortions is fairly high.
And it’s interesting to contrast the two very different trajectory of rights between queer rights and reproductive rights in the 2000s and 2010s.
Unfortunately, this means that Robin’s team will now enact damage control. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on Leslie and paint her as a sexual predator (who also happens to be indoctrinating college students with who knows what sort of dangerous ideas).
Result? Robin dodges the bullet & Leslie has her life ruined (and probably loses her job as well). Hopefully the DoAverse will have a happier ending.
Well, they definitely would need to discredit and smear Leslie to avoid hemorrhaging ALL her “Family Values” voters. They could also paint it as staged and/or photoshopped, but even simply denying their being any truth to the scandal would at least lead to some of Robin’s supporters taking it upon themselves to harass her.
If Robin drops out of the race, or tries to undermine the scandal by owning it and coming out publicly, the blowback on Leslie might be negligible, but the harder Robin fights to deny it and still get elected, the worse it will be on Leslie.
You know, if any of the journalists who ran with this story did a little checking, it’d be easy to identify Leslie. She could have a media pack outside her house right now. Who would then catch Robin leaving in rumpled clothing, forcing her to wing an interview with the press. Hilarity and train wreck follows (and poor Leslie becomes “the lesbian who ruined Senator DeSanto’s career”).
True, but Robin probably isn’t so famous that Leslie would hold their attention for long unless there were a significant effort to deny the story.
Admitting the truth or dropping out of the race would still turn Leslie into a non-story before very long.
That’s actually the saving grace of her not taking the photo. There’s a way out of that. She admits that nothing happened, gives a story about how Robin was asking her about how to better appeal to college students, and her campaign then lets it fall out of the news.
If she’d taken the photo, then she can’t go that route. For one, it’s much harder to explain why Robin would be in a bed with Leslie. And, two, even if she can, saying nothing happened only turns Leslie into someone who tried to pin something on saintly Robin, who fell for her lesbian tricks.
A couple things.
-Roz may not have been involved in the taking of the photo, but the Photowas her end plan, something it seems slipped her mind to tell Leslie about.
Maybe Leslie should have realised that photo would happen, but she was too concerned with other things, like her quest to save Robin from herself. But this photo is going to ruin Leslie’s life. It is another Political Scandal that will be linked back to the college, especially when the media discovers that Robin was invited to the college the day before.
We all saw how unhappy the Dean was with the last Scandal…
Well done Roz, you’ve just gotten your favourite teacher fired.
Which highlights an important thing about Roz. She doesn’t think things through.
-Once it comes to light how closely connected she was with the setup for the photo, she will be seen in an entirely Ruthless light completely contradictory to the image she was projecting before. This coupled with her inability to think things through (especially after it leads to Leslie getting fired), will seriously hurt her prospects of becoming RA.
Kinda weird actually. The most obvious parallel for Robin’s campaign in this story seemed to be Trump, but that was wrong. Instead the closest parallel is Roz’s own RA Campaign.
It’s always good that, in the end, you can rely on family… Well, actually it turns out they are the ones who are plotting against you and are quite willing to ruin innocent bystanders in the process. Roz, you’re more like your sister than you realise in your obliviousness to the affect on others of what you do.
Okay, now I really want to know – Is there a special class in America’s more conservative churches where they teach girls how to do that triangular smile?
Why yes. Don’t you have them over there?
Panel 1: And confirmation that it is indeed the bar picture of them near kissing while talking about Steven Universe. And ah, you can just imagine by that headline that this is some TMZ-style thing, heavy on the clickbait scandal.
Panel 2: I mentioned above this is also about Roz’s freedom from a campaign that was crushing her for values she actively opposes, but this is important too and I believe a major part of why she is celebrating.
While her allyship with the queer community may sometimes be of question as to its sincerity, she genuinely is extremely personally passionate about reproductive freedom and it is something she deeply cares about. And it’s something she’s terrified of losing.
She’s a straight woman who likes penetrative sex and she desperately does not want to end up with an unplanned pregnancy, especially with access to safe and legal abortions becoming more and more difficult to obtain.
This matters to her, directly as to her actual rights as a young person with a uterus and that’s front and center to her celebration here (and that resonates a lot what with my fiancee being an enby with a uterus who is utterly petrified at the thought of losing legal birth control and reproductive health on top of all the other reasons to feel petrified by politics at the moment).
And her last line is important too. She didn’t take this photo, she didn’t manipulate this photo into existence, she didn’t even push all that hard for Leslie and Robin to get together.
She might not have even intended this exact outcome to occur, though I think she’s long made her peace with this having been a potential outcome.
But she’s not going to mourn it or feel guilty now that this has happened. And that’s a valid way to feel in these sorts of circumstances. Certainly I can identify with taking joy in the outing of bigots and I doubt I would shed a tear if a sudden outing was to short-circuit Trump and Pence’s dangerous plans for me and mine.
Panel 3: A… what now, dearie? What slur were you about to let loose before you caught yourself?
Also, a nice contrast in a very different more toxic reaction. Roz is reveling in this eroding her bigoted base enough for her to gain her freedom. Mary is merely satisfied that someone who is “committing a sin”, someone she was already looking to hate due to her religion and her race, was “caught” out. As if Robin’s existence as a bi person was doing harm to her personally.
Panel 4: I noted this in BBCC’s commentary, but there’s been a sickening movement in conservatism for a long while now that has really metastasized during the Trump election and that’s the idea of politics as a game that conservatives “win” by causing liberals pain and preventing them from “scoring any points” even if they win elections.
And a lot of that probably stems from media treatment of elections and politics as horse-races and battles for the news cycle rather than as real things that affect real people’s lives. And a lot of that also probably stems from the fact that a lot of modern conservatism is rooted in a lot of old bigotries at this point and pride in identities that define themselves by what they aren’t instead of what they are (white, male, straight, these identities frequently get enforced toxically as a matter of “avoiding” gay, feminine, or “ethnic” signifiers [see bigots getting mad about taco trucks]).
But it leads to this whole toxic philosophy that Mary is espousing here. That this matters not because of how laws affect real people but that an evil liberal with evil liberal values “won” and her side lost an important piece in the overall campaign of making sure liberal people “lose”.
Panel 5: Head Cheerleader. Problem Solver.
Panel 6: Ah, the passive-aggressive “God loves you, that’s why he’ll hurt you”. I remember that shit well.
It did not particularly endear me to that particular interpretation of Christianity, surprisingly enough. Especially seeing as how me and my mother were among the numbers said people wanted to see “punished” to prove God’s love.
And the interesting thing is that this is even worse than it appears.
Mary and Joyce both belong to a form of Christianity that believes in a Rapture and an anti-christ, and that said Rapture is happening soon. When Mary says God loves them so he’ll punish them, she’s expecting that to happen any day now. And she’s expecting to be sat upon a cloud getting front-row tickets to watch said violent punishment on everyone she has deemed an “unbeliever”.
Should I drag out my armchair theology theory again on the difference between Joyce and Mary?
tl;dr: Joyce thinks things are sins because God wants to protect you, Mary doesn’t care because rules are rules.
Oh I think Joyce and Mary are very different morally.
Hell, I did a podcast on that relatively recently. And yeah, my tl;dr would probably be that when Joyce sees points where her dogma meets humanity, she sees flaws in her dogma whereas Mary sees flaws in humanity and both act accordingly to adjust as they see fit.
And the end result is Joyce becoming a better person at the expense of starting to lose her faith, and Mary becoming a better form of what she believes being a christian means at the expense of a lot of her empathy and humanity.
Excellent podcast by the way. What happened to the one about Joe, though? Seems to have evaporated off soundcloud.
Oh shoot, yeah, thanks for the reminder. I totally forgot my plan to fix it during my holiday breakdown.
Ok, should be fixed now.
Oh no, no worries! That wasn’t a push that was just a question. By all means, take care of yourself first!
It’s back up now, yes.
Link for the podcast? I am curious now.
https://soundcloud.com/user-956738444/tracks
We’re also on iTunes and Stitcher under “Podcasting of Age”. It’s me and Emperor.
Link appreciated.
I don’t think Mary cares at all what the rules actually are.
To me, the difference between them is that Joyce honestly, truly believes in the Christian God and the precepts in the Bible, and struggles to mesh the truth laid down there with her own morality and sense of right and wrong. If she wasn’t religious, she’d probably be a LOT more liberal, but still kind-hearted (…excluding all that nature/nurture-butterfly-stuff).
Mary? She uses the Bible and Church to justify her morality. The stuff that doesn’t fall in line, she no doubt ignores. Oh, I’m sure that she truly believes too, but she approaches it from a twisted perspective. If she were non-religious, I don’t think much about her would change. Atheists and Agnostics can be just as small-minded, mean and vindictive as anyone (and this is coming from an agnostic)…
I think you’re close, but didn’t quite hit it. Joyce wants to be good to people. She’s in it for the love and all that stuff. She picked up on some of the bad stuff, but that was not her goal.
Mary is in it for the superiority. For being able to look down on everyone else. An atheist Mary would just find some other way to prove her superiority. Maybe even, I dunno, get a loan from her rich parents and start a bunch of businesses, become a reality TV star, and then run for political office.
Pretty much this, though I don’t think Mary cares so much about rules as she does about stopping ‘immorality’. For example, in her fight with Carla, if she gave a damn about rules being broken, she’d have reported Carla (to the RM or security if she didn’t think Ruth would help), not escalated and hurled transphobia at her.
Well, she’s stated she believes herself to be “God’s gentle reminder”, all along to stop the spread of immorality and sin on this godless campus, like a missionary in a hostile land:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/dark-presence/
Responding to panel six: I now honestly feel really bad for the poor guy who wrote Revelations. I mean, here’s this early Christian writing in code with Jewish number games in order to communicate a message to his fellow believers to hold out hope and stay strong during a period of persecution, and nineteen centuries later people think it predicts the future and have used it to support some pretty awful beliefs at times. That was probably never the poor guy’s intention at all. But people don’t want to actually study the history of the Bible or the social and cultural context in which the parts were written.
I agree with the sentiment. But I do think there is at least some level of prophecy intended in the book. But it’s mostly in the “God will come back in and fix everything” part, not all that other stuff which was describing what was already going on in that day.
Would holding hands with another female have really such a big effect to affect anything? I know comic logic and all that, but would Trump lose the election if he was holding hands with another guy? Or Hillary win if she was holding some woman than Bill?
It’s more the angle – makes it look like they could be kissing.
I won’t be here tomorrow night, so I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year now. I hope you guys have the best year possible, considering the circumstances.
I’m….kinda back and forth. I’ve gone from sad to tired to optimistic without any real reason to be to angry to energized and ready to fight for good things. Which, honestly, is good. For a while in the past month I lost the optimism and it worried me. I’m glad to have it back, even if my head knows this is going to be rough.
Yay! I’m glad you found your optimism. I’m still looking for mine so I’m super happy to see others who’ve managed to find it!
But if you had no optimism, you wouldn’t bother looking for it, because …
Is this like looking for your phone in the dark, and using your phone as a flashlight to help?
More knowing your phone is somewhere so shuffling your feet hoping to accidentally kick it.
Kinda.
I’ve noted in the past that it’s easy for rational people to get depressed and lose hope. Optimism and hope feed each other, but if you have neither, it’s hard to trigger either through reason alone. What’s needed is juuust a little spark of faith to get the cycle going – but rationalists don’t ‘do’ faith. It may be why rationalism is found is growing, prosperous societies, while shrinking, collapsing societies embrace religion and dogma.
“God will save us, ’cause a cold hard look at the facts strongly suggests that nothing else can.” 🙁
I’m not sure mine’s stable (or non-illusionary) yet, but I’m glad to have found it for now nonetheless, and I hope you find your’s soon too. As I’ve said before, my Patreon inbox is open if you need to talk.
Hi. Most of my posts are not appearing. The only time they do appear is when I use a proxy. Does anyone have any idea why that might be?
If you have more than one link in a post it goes into moderation.
There are likely other things that cause moderation also. Maybe the website thinks your non-proxy site is dubious looking for some reason.
Sometimes when you refresh or reload you can see the post with the moderation notice, but not always.
More rarely, I’ve seen an error where a post gets stuck halfway through or something, so that it does not show up with or without a moderation notice, but if you try to post it again you get a “It looks like you already posted that” error. I don’t think those posts ever show up.
Billie DIDN’T tell Mary to dance like a monkey, but I’m still getting uncomfortable vibes from when Mary had Ruth on a leash.
Heh, here I thought Roz was on about the RA thing. Of course the real election is more interesting or her.
Roz, Bless her heart, still thinks the picture shows a cute little date that went just as she hoped. She might even know that Robin was not at her hotel this morning.
You’re thinking power corrupts? I could see Billie taking out some aggression on Mary in the future, some of it justified but some of it maybe not so much…
I’m thinking more in lines of they sent a bully (or alpha bongo) to do an RA’s job. I can absolutely see Billie take out her frustration or (justified?) vengeance on Mary, and Mary will of course look for any crack in Billie’s armor (hint – there are a few). This situation can errupt in nastiness at any moment.
Yes agreed, a depressed, angry, suicidal person with the power over another…what could possibly go wrong
And a history of bullying!
Gloating over your sister being potentially outed is probably not going to go down well on that floor I’m guessing
Y’know, this probably means that they won’t be able to get Ryan’s full name off of Robin or her assistants now, as this has probably changed her priorities in regards to “damage control”.
And even if Roz wasn’t directly involved in outing Robin, in the past she’s shown herself to be the kind of person who doesn’t really take other people into account while making a political point.
Such as her tirade against Joyce when they learnt about the abuse fundementalists heap on LGBTQ people, which despite Joyce being horrified by her own ignorance still had Roz chosing to blame her entirely for it all, to the point of talking over an actual LGBTQ person (Leslie) who was telling her to stop.
Roz kind of seems to be the type of person who has good intentions, but will happily run over everyone in her effort to see “justice” done. The fact that Robin might double down on her constituents’ homophobic stances or politically lash out at Leslie? Or that Robin or Leslie could be victim to the many violent homophobic people who’d react negatively even to the suggestion she might not be straight? Doesn’t figure into it, as Roz’s immediate goal of having Robin outted is seen as being the solution to her sister’s conservative agenda.
Even though Robin being from a conservative upbringing probably played a big part in her current beliefs (and why she left necessary to be in the closet in the first place), and her interactions with Leslie showed she was capable of changing in a more progressive manner through interacting with people outside of her bubble.
I really don’t believe they were ever going to get Ryan’s full name no matter what. Robin had no idea who he was and I doubt even Frieda did given that she seemed to treat the douche trio as disposable meaningless minions not worth caring about and it looks like the douche trio is responsible for getting their buddy Ryan to come out and join them. But yeah, you’re right that there’s not even going to be a token effort to track that down now that the whole campaign is in crisis mode.
And yeah, I think what you mention is very much Roz’s central flaw. She has strong political beliefs but has very narrow ideas on the best ways to implement them and doesn’t overly respect other approaches (see how dismissive she is to Dorothy’s data-based approach to the RA job or as you note, her interaction with Joyce).
And she definitely doesn’t seem to believe in redemption, which might be partially explained by us knowing she’s had long fights with her sister on issues she felt were important that Robin just sort of ignored the meat of (though they slip through when Robin wants to win a petty point, see her “cisgender penis” crack at the bar) and her roommate is Mary who is very much a brick wall with regards to her bigoted beliefs.
But that also means she doesn’t really give people much chance to try and change or see a reason not to go in guns blazing against people on “the other side”, because she doesn’t see much reason to hold on hope for that.
I’m hoping her getting to know Joyce more and seeing her evolution in Gender Studies will get her to notice that maybe some people can change and its a matter of figuring out which ones and what approaches work best of which people (some people need the gently gently, some need an all-guns blazing approach to break through all their trained talking points or their bigotry shortcuts).
Roz reminds me a bit of myself, though far more active, when I started college. So frustrated with everything and convinced no one else will get it. I’m looking forward to her growing up a little, like I had to. Listening more. Learning to chill sometimes.
Is Roz going to a Anthill Mob convention?
I think God doesn’t care about race, sexuality, handicap and etc etc.. as long God gets cookies. Just don’t bongo about these and you will be fine. Well i bet Mary will bongo about these then she goes to Cookie hell.
I don’t have time to read all the comments so maybe someone already mentioned this, but there’s no “Billie” tag.
Well Mary, how the tables have turned.
Funny how Mary’s happiest smile is when she’s faking it. I also like the way she dresses; she probably has my favourite style of all the comic girls, as in, if I passed her on the street I’d think “that girl looks really nice.” Fortunately, that’d last about as long as it took her to open her mouth. And finally, thanks for ending the year with “god will punish you all,” Willis; really setting a tone there.
Happy year transition to you all! May 2017 not be as bad as we fear, and may the good we find in it be better than we hope!
Mary is nothing if not a sharp dresser and unbelievably reprehensible person.
So Roz thinks this is going to swing the election to a more Progressive Candidate? That’s cute.
If it’s neck and neck, this absolutely can, because the ‘Pubs will choose not to vote.
Also, this is a swing district, not a Republican stronghold. It’s VERY possible this will lose Robin points with the mushy middle or even moderate conservatives.
So how did Mary *know* that “Robin was a–“?
Because she was trying to be in a position of power, which is improper for a TRUE woman, is my wager.
Because Mary is God’s chosen special bongo, so clearly she can’t be wrong about anything, so she must have known it all along.
Nearly thirty and unmarried. (Which is even more wrong because she’s actually bi, so her being also attracted to women isn’t even the reason she’s not married to a man.)
Also, she’s a Catholic so Mary hates her for that too. Despite liking her political policies.
It’s funny how both of these two characters represent the worst of both sides of the spectrum. At their best, both Liberals and Conservatives want to help the people, the real argument is how to do that. In this story we have on liberal who doesn’t care who she hurts, including her own sister, and on the flip side we have a supposedly religious person, who seems to ignore everything Jesus said about forgiveness, and loving your neighbor as yourself. They are two sides of the same coin.
Of course, her sister is complicit in attempts to endanger and fuck innocent people over, so she can do with a bit of hurting at the very least.
Missing the point entirely.
No, your point is just bullshit. Roz and Mary are in no way equivalent, despite the lying narrative that “both sides are just as bad.” Mary fucks innocent people over, Roz doesn’t cry when people who fuck innocent people over get fucked over. Robin is LITERALLY the most harmful character in the whole comic, and the fact that she is so because of expediency instead of malice does not make her not so.
“Robin is LITERALLY the most harmful character in the whole comic…..” *sigh* Even more harmful than the guy who roofied Joyce?
Yes, in effect. I’m not sure if it’s possible to beat Ryan in intent. He is shit and you’ll never read me write otherwise, but his attempted rape doesn’t suddenly increase the chances for other attempted rapes. Guess what happens when your elected representative pushes legislation that says LGBTQIAA folk don’t get to be treated like people.
Less direct effect, more indirect long term damage.
Of course you could also point at someone like Joyce’s pastor, who also does a lot to encourage similar attitudes.
OTOH, because she’s not personally malicious or even invested in those believes, she’s also far more likely to change than the villains in the comic. At the very least, she is almost guaranteed to face a conflict between her sexuality, once she figures it out, and her political career.
She is. I never said that Robin was worse – there’s a long line for that, and she doesn’t break the top 5. I fully expect a redemption arc.
Yes, this. She’s not as bad a human being as Ryan or Toedad or Mary, but she has much more capacity for damage because of the position of power she holds and in terms of direct effect on the ability of the characters to live their lives.
She doesn’t fully realize or accept the weight of that authority and the real-world impact of politics not being a game, but there’s a reason Joyce was so bothered by her vote and her deflection of responsibility for its intended effect.
My point is quite correct. (See I can pretend my opinions are facts too)
Yes the scale is different, but the similarities are still there.
Saying they’re two sides of the same coin implies moral equivalency. You just admitted they’re not on the same scale and therefore not morally equivalent.
Well, Roz does seem to be ignoring any problems this might cause for Leslie, so there’s that. If her plan all along was actually to use Leslie to out Robin and she didn’t even let Leslie know that was the intent, then that’s pretty despicable in my book. Whatever your opinion on outing gay anti-LGBT public figures, setting up an unsuspecting gay person to get caught up in it is pretty low.
If she was trying to hook them up in hopes of changing Robin and taking this as a lesser victory instead, that’s not quite so bad.
Agreed on paragraph one, disagree on paragraph only in that it’s not bad at all (because Leslie was already interested in Robin before Roz got involved; that’s what prompted the idea). Unless there was something on a Patreon comic, we don’t know either way, though it would be interesting to.
But that’s not what Kitsune said: they specifically mentioned Robin, not Leslie.
*disagree on paragraph two
Curse the lack of an edit function for the umpteenth time.
“Not so bad” in the sense that she’s still celebrating the outing without considering Leslie at all. The plan wouldn’t have been bad.
Bingo….
Mary and Roz are not morally equivalent and will not be until Roz nearly causes someone’s suicide and then asks permission to harass someone else into suicide.
This is kinda an interesting parallel to a thing that happens in politics where because we fetishize the moderate and the swing-voter so much in America, we genuinely believe that the best option in all cases is “somewhere in between two awful extremes that are just as bad”.
And there’s this thing called the Overton Window that talks about what we see as that middle sweet spot and one of the more interesting tragedies of the last 40 years has been how fascist and far-right bigots have used this American tendency to try and shift what America fetishizes as “the moderate” shifts further and further right by just becoming more and more extreme in their viewpoints, thus getting everyone to recalibrate what “middle” looks like.
And it leads to an interesting dichotomy where “openly wants to bring back death camps” is seen as equally wrong to “would like a higher minimum wage”. And a lot of this is on a media who is devoted to selling this narrative above all else, the two sides of an “equally contentious” debate where one is a normalized nazi openly talking about how he believes jewish people aren’t really human and someone trying to politely point out their own humanity.
And it ignores that in life, sometimes one side is simply morally wrong on an issue or an issue shouldn’t even be “debated” in the first place. Like, issues like “are trans people people and should they be harassed for existing” shouldn’t be a whole debate with bigots feeling like they get to be an equally respected side. Same with “is global warming real and do we need to do something to stop it”.
And it robs our ability to solve things, because working together with different ideas of how to solve a problem gets deflected as an inter-party dispute within one party while the other party feels their only position is to reject the issue entirely, lest they be accused of party disloyalty.
And I’m reminded of all that by your post because Roz and Mary are not at all two sides of the same coin or equally as bad.
Hell, even if we were to accept the nastiest interpretation of Roz (that she doesn’t care who she hurts, that she actively worked to out her sister, that she paid someone to take the picture), she simply becomes a not-nice activist who outed a bigot whose policies were actively hurting real people.
Versus Mary who has tried to drive at least one student to suicide, has been personally harassing another, and has been openly bigoted towards her fellow students in hateful manners. And this is all not because those people harmed her directly, but because of their identities and existences as queer individuals.
Hell, even if we were to try and equate the actions of the two (which we shouldn’t, Mary’s actions are way worse), the cold hard core of this is Mary went after the powerless over an identity based in how they were born. Roz went after an elected congressperson with immense personal power because of her chosen actions to harm others.
Those are very different at their very core.
But we are tempted to equate them nonetheless so we can have a pleasant “both sides, the truth is somewhere in the middle” narrative.
Now, I’m not saying Roz is universally right in this situation. But she’s for sure not as wrong as Mary.
The conservative creed is based on selfish-ness.
Not sure how that’s helping other people.
The government that does the least, does the best is based on selfishness? I can see how wanting to lower taxes can be that, but I don’t think you know what the conservative creed is. But then again that puts you in the same category with Donald J. Trump.
“The government that does the least, does the best” is more a libertarian thing that conservatives selectively invoke to get rid of things in government they don’t like but not the things they do like.
Before it was so popular for conservatives to dress up in libertarian costumes, they said something like this:
We believe in the old traditional ways of doing things from The Good Old Days. Those ways may not have been perfect, but they were pretty good, considering. We don’t want to make sudden changes to a working system lest we break it and have terrible things happen. Changes, if any, should be careful and gradual to see what works and what doesn’t before we can’t reverse the change.
The minor problem with that is that the last bit about slow change was BS, just an excuse to stall as long as possible.
The major problem was the part about “Those ways may not have been perfect, but they were pretty good, considering.”
This wasn’t true. Or rather it was only true for members of the Establishment. If you were a white Christian cishet man in the middle or upper classes, this was usually true. It was also mostly true for a white Christian cishet woman in the middle or upper classes if the man responsible for her was a decent person.
If you weren’t in one of those two groups things weren’t pretty good. They were somewhere between bad-but-not-too-bad and unspeakably horrible, weighted towards the latter.
Conservatives were worried about breaking the system with terrible consequences, but ignoring the fact that the existing system was already doing terrible things to people all the time.
I just realized… Robin gets elected anyway, because absolutely nothing a conservative does matters or can’t be hand-waved away.
Let’s hope that changes in the near-future.
You underestimate how quickly bigoted conservatives are willing to cannibalize their own if they are discovered to not be the right sort of person.
Trump might have been right that he could shoot someone and not lose many votes, but if he’d been caught in bed with another man, all those Evangelicals supporting him and pretending he’s Christian would have flipped out.
And I don’t think I will ever forgive the sexist assholes who tipped the election over to him who were willing to overlook or even cheer the fact that he’s a child-raping nazi-loving bigot, but would have been shocked and appalled if they were to find out that he liked to put his peener into dudes consensually instead.
Someday I want one of them to simply admit they’re afraid of teh gay and explain why.
It’s basically that they are scared of the gays because they are terrified a man somewhere might treat them the same way they treat women.
Actually a lot of the Evangelicals simply hated Hillary. This election, for many people, was about choosing the lesser of two evils. For the record I took a third option myself.
I don’t see how that conflicts with my point?
Sure, not every evangelical supported Trump. Some who did no doubt had bought into the right’s smear campaign against Hillary.
There is still a large number of evangelical groups who backed Trump despite the fact that they have frequently denounced politicians for doing only one of the many things Trump has done.
There’s even been backlash against evangelical leaders who publicly denounced him for all of the many ways he does not uphold their values. Those are the people who would turn on Trump in an instant if he kissed a man. Because the values they claim are important to them and the ones they actually care about aren’t the same ones.
Though it’s not ONLY evangelicals guilty of this. Plenty of Catholics basically said the pope should shut the fuck up when he denounced Trump.
Any Christian who supported Trump or even thinks he’s not so bad has forfeit any right to complain about ANYONE for not living up to their “Christian values” ever again.
That makes me wonder what they’d actually do with a gay anti-choice candidate. And if there’s a divide in asshole-branded Christianity between which is more important.
Boy are you right about conservative homophobia Fart Captor. But that’s where the hand-waving comes in. Larry Craig’s situation was unambiguous and there were others who attested to his peener misdirectitude. But Robin could throw Leslie way under the bus by saying she was simply rejecting the advances of a gay constituent, who left without her. The photo does not show Robin’s facial expression.
Sorry, but am I stupid to be wondering how Roz lives on the floor and also has access to somewhere obviously not a dorm to throw parties? It’s bothering me. Probably just my ignorance since (1) I suspect I’m much older than many of the folks here, and (2) I have a long history of being a socially ackward type who always avoided parties because they made me uncomfortable.
Are you referring to the party she “invited” Dorothy to for the interview, and where Joyce was assaulted by Ryan? That wasn’t Roz’s party, it’s was Tony’s (blond, curly hair, plays football), and he threw it at his house.
That wasn’t Tony, it was Ron, who had brown hair.
There was a second party that Roz invited Jacob too, but there was no indication that she was the one hosting it.
She’s friends with older students who live off campus so she knows about hot parties to attend through them.
The part of Roz shall be played by Malcolm Tucker
She has to do a lot more fucking swearing.Fuck.
“-Which means I’ll have some company when it’s my turn to join you down there…”
Mary feels unrealistic to me :/ Trust me I live in a Christian environment so I’m well aware of the full spectrum of Christians, but I’ve never encountered someone quite like her
Lucky… *sends envious looks your way*
Reading the comments here for a few years has convinced me that Mary is frighteningly realistic.
And this is coming from someone who rarely encounters people who are openly Christian at all, and half of them are Jehovah’s witnesses who just want to give me a leaflet.
This comment section has opened my eyes to a lot of things. I feel lucky to be able to learn about it all without having to actually experience it. *shivers*
I personally have not encountered anyone quiiiiite as bad as her but I have dealt with people close to it.
But I know people like her exist, unfortunately. They’re not common, but they are out there.
I realize my politics tend to be “disgustingly liberal” by many standards… but it really does sadden me that there are so many people who equate “progressive” with “worse” or “evil.”
I get tired of people getting hung up on labels like liberal and conservative. There are both good and bad people on both sides of the isle.
Politics is part of ethics, not just some abstract tastes. People can have a shitty opinion on movies or books and it doesn’t hurt anyone. But when people have a shitty *political* opinion, it can hurt and kill. A lot.
So I won’t say there are good people amongst conservatives. As long as someone is for the conservation of the statu quo, the conservation of a system built on inequalities, they aren’t good people after all (it doesn’t matter if they are conservative out of ignorance, misplaced anger or just plain malice).
You can’t say “class struggle, feminism, antiracism, LGBTQIA+ rights, ecology are not priorities/are outdated/go to far” and be a good person.
Also “good people” and “bad people” are bad ways to phrase things. “Good people” and “bad people” do not exist.
There are just “people who do mostly good things” and “people who do mostly bad things”, and those categories can evolve. Because there’s no “essence” of good and evil… and even if there was, no one care if there is some magical core of pure light or darkness at the heart of people.
Only actions (including communication, too) matter.
If someone tells me “Alfred is a good person, too bad they vote Republican”, I’ll tell them “Alfred does bad things, I’d like Alfred to do good things and I’m disturbed you call Alfred a good person when obviously they keep on doing bad things”.
I’m kind of uncomfortable with how many people are okay with Robin being unwillingly outed, especially since Robin doesn’t even seem fully aware of her own sexuality.
I understand wanting her to face it and wanting her to change her politics, but being a public figure or being a “bad” person doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the right to deal with this incredibly personal manner in private.