Pretty much every single scene where Sal rides her bike in this entire comic is going to be super depressing in hindsight, isn’t it?
Like, every single bit of good Sal did with that bike… helping Joyce save Becky, saving AG from the truck, helping AG save Joyce and Faz from Blaine… it all feels tainted now.
It’s all the same basic mistake no matter which way you slice it — if you value their respect too much, you give them a hold over you, that they deserve come a cold day on Venus.
When the focus turns to YOUR own self-respect, there is often a well-needed, natural shift.
I understand this *so* so much. I have accomplishments that were made /far/ more *difficult* because of interference by certain people in my life. And on finally succeeding *despite* being Harding’d, these people had the temerity to act like they deserved to celebrate my success? Their actions do *nothing* to actually diminish my success, but they cast a shadow upon it, and when I look, the shadow on the surface is what I see.
I’m trying to erect a brighter light, but it is very hard and taking a long time.
Think of it this way. All those things she did with the bike, are all things her mother would have disapproved of. She used that bike to help the very people her mom would have thrown out of school.
Well, if they go by credits and she passed enough AP tests… like by my university’s standards I was never technically a freshman because of credits from AP tests, and there are a lot of APs that are unrelated to math.
I’ve known people who were extremely intelligent and tested very well but still struggle with math. I’ve also known people that could blow the roof off a math test but failed at everything else. The intelligence split over math is weird.
I was going to say that Linda’s last words to Sal will be “You’re welcome.”, but then I realized that’s not right.
Her last words will be to ask/demand Sal apologize to and thank her.
So, yes… I think Linda is more delusional than Shadow Weaver.
I think I’m the only person that didn’t see Shadow Weaver’s “You’re Welcome” bit as intending to be one last moment of emotional manipulation, but rather exactly what Catra needed to hear at the moment.
After all, the previous thing she did was give Catra what she always wanted from her. Acknowledgement that she was proud of what she’d accomplished. But how do you properly respond to somebody who has abused you for your entire life finally doing something directly for your benefit that you appreciate? How do you work through those emotions?
No time to wait for her to figure it all out, so Shadow Weaver simply tells her. Say ‘Thank You’ for the one good thing they’ve done for you and then go do what you have to do. She knew better than anybody else that a handful of good deeds didn’t make her a good person, and she wasn’t expecting anybody else to think that either.
Huh, you mean they won’t rent you a parking spot that costs a fortune every semester and is so far across campus from where you live that you’ll wind up either walking everywhere or taking the bus anyway, but you need to do it because if you can’t make the drive home every now and again you’ll barely ever see your family?
Well, back when I was in college (admittedly over 45 years ago) I didn’t have a car, and that wasn’t that uncommon. Most people didn’t go home too often (winter break, spring break, and maybe thanksgiving – plus summers, as attending over summers was not common back then). To get home if you didn’t have a car, you either had to know someone with a car going where you were, or you used the ride board (which was an physical bulletin board that people posted when and where they were going – and riders paid for gas). Nowadays people may be less willing to get rides from people they don’t know (or offer rides to people they don’t know)…
It’s been over a quarter century since I went to school, but I seem to recall neither IU nor Purdue would do that to you… unless you filed for a hardship exemption to get a parking spot. They just want to ensure that freshmen all live in the dorms and don’t have cars on campus for some reason I never understood.
This is different from Purdue’s not offering test out credit for Programming I for CS majors.
That’s the only class in which they explicitly teach students how to use their online submission system, and they don’t want to have to tell the students who tested out of that class to ‘man submit’. Those two words are so hard to say that they’re unwilling to reduce their risk of needing to ask students, “Um, despite being one of the better schools for mathematics in the country, we are completely unfamiliar with the practice of throwing out outliers, and so you’ve *totally* ruined our curve with your grades with your 100%s on everything. Could you please just skip the last couple of projects and the final so we can pass a reasonable number of your classmates? You have enough points in the class that will still be one of the higher As.” That’s always so much easier to say, after all.
So it was a matter of principles, good on Sal for that then. Also I understand a little bit more about the whole “No one owns me” stick Sal has bugging her lately, she doesn’t want to owe anybody anything and personally I can relate to that. Sal choosing to give up her ride also further validates what I said before, she decides to do things on her own terms and that’s admirable in it’s own right.
But it’s also feeding this expectation she has where every act of kindness comes with strings attached. She expects there to be a quid pro quo to every exchange, whether it’s an immediate transaction or something that can be held over her head and cashed in later. That’s just depressing.
She doesn’t want to ‘owe’ anybody anything, and nobody just gives her anything outright, so she feels she has to ‘break even’ in the zero-sum game of life. Hence the gift cards in exchange for the bicycle.
Which, yeah, is messed up. But it’s pretty clear she thinks that way because she was effectively raised to believe it. Because her parents never do nice things for her without expecting a “return on their investment”. Even while they treated Walky completely differently – which is why she is so often instinctively bitter towards him, even though she’s starting to resist that tendency, because she understands now that it isn’t his fault.
Linda’s racism, at least in regards to Sal, is probably overstated. My read on her is that it’s mainly about personality and behavior. Linda has a very specific image in mind about how a daughter should behave which Sal has never matched, and Linda is too inflexible and too controlling to handle that in a healthy manner. Any racism on Linda’s part is secondary to the clash of personality here.
That said, she’s definitely racist, her treatment of Marcie makes that pretty clear.
You may be right, but you may be understating the influence of Linda’s racism in her treatment of Sal. Racism is a subconscious influence, not usually a conscious one; Linda probably thinks it’s just a clash of personality too, but realistically, if she is racist, that is going to influence her concept of how her daughter should look and behave. Sal and Linda’s relationship reminds me strongly of a friend’s relationship with her own mother. My friend and her mother are both mixed race, and my friend has afro-textured curly hair. Her mother is extremely controlling, especially about my friend’s appearance, and especially about her hair. It’s odd because her mother is the same race that she is, but she seems to feel very strongly that my friend wearing her hair naturally is nothing short of unforgivable. She obsesses over my friend’s hair even more than my friend’s weight, which is her second biggest source of criticism. Why does she think my friend has to straighten her hair? Probably for the same reason she thinks my friend has to be thin: it’s not something she actively thinks about, it’s the expression of an unconscious societally-ingrained prejudice. Her obsession with her daughter’s hair is racist in the same way her obsession with her daughter’s weight is sexist, it’s a bigger-picture thing.
Well she stole from her own daughter while being prejudiced against young Marcie because she’d “wind up robbing convenience stores just to get mommy’s attention”.
Just the kind of behavior you’d expect from supremacist groups and individuals who judge others by standards they themselves fail to follow.
The hair stuff isn’t the root of the problem here, it’s a small part of the clash between who Sal is and what Linda wants her to be. If Sal naturally had hair like Walky I don’t think she’d have wound up with a better relationship with Linda
It isn’t a small part though. Linda and Charles opinions on her hair are one of the things Sal was visibly carrying for 99% of the story pre-timeskip. We know her feelings on ‘how she’s supposed to look’ are complicated and go back to when she was at least 12. On another note, hair type would’ve been one of the first things Linda would be able to notice went against what she wanted – long before any personality would be evident.
I don’t know your friend or her mother, so can’t explain them. But I’ve known mixed-race parents who struggle with the feeling that their kids not doing the things they did to blend in is going to end up horribly. The thing is, they specifically selected the neighborhood they lived in to be one that was more accepting, so their kids aren’t facing the racism that they got from both sides for no goddamned reason.
Note that by ‘struggle with’, I mean, ‘abuse their kids and then get called out on it by their neighbors and coworkers, over and over again’, rather than something more enlightened, unfortunately. It’s a sad world sometimes, even in the good parts. And by the good parts, I mean the enlightened microcosms that shift around over time as the bad parts try to stamp them out, so it’s not like I can list neighborhoods. By the time you moved there, they probably wouldn’t be the good parts anymore.
I think it’s been explored/explained pretty well that Sal’s mom has always favored Walky over Sal because he’s lighter? cuter? more compliant? Has “whiter, straighter hair”? Because she’s racist against her own child. Argh.
IIRC their skintone is pretty much the same, and their facial features aren’t that different. I think it started with Sal’s curly hair vs. Walky’s straight hair, which led to Linda treating Walky more favorably, which led to Sal giving less and less of a shit about what Linda thought (which is itself a more stereotypically black trait) while Walky was more compliant, which led to Linda being even more biased, and the whole thing just kinda snowballed.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think Willis said that Sal is meant to be noticeably darker. That Linda noticed this and unconsciously (consciously) began forwarding Walky toward being a doctor while dismissing Sal due to her friendship with Marcie (AN ILLEGAL’S CHILD!) and later robbery. Essentially writing off her child as a lost cause.
I thought he said their skintone is the same. There were a bunch of posts by readers saying so when this originally came up. When she told Walky “you came out whiter” I don’t think she was speaking literally.
Iirc Willis has said that their skin coloring is exactly the same, like with an eyedropper tool, but the “ethnic” hair is a thing.
I do not think Willis would write a series where the Black character is mistaken about her own lifelong experiences of racism. Let’s believe Sal.
In addition, Linda likes Walky’s instinctive “fawn” reactions, and doesn’t like Sal’s instinctive “fight” reactions. It does not occur to Linda that she is the threat causing these reactions, she thinks it’s just how her kids are (because one is a golden boy and one is a Black hoodlum). She is actually mistreating both her kids — directly with Sal, obviously, plus indirectly with Walky, as he gets a front-row seat to how conditional Linda’s love is, and what it looks like to lose mom’s support.
I would like to see how Charles feels about all this. He’s been kind of a passive houseplant, so far. (Kinda like Ethan’s dad, but less closeted.)
I digressed, there. I meant to say, their identities as Black vs. “generically beige” are more complicated than their literal eyedropped skin colour. Which makes sense because, in real life, Blackness is not just the melanin, either.
Correct, their literal eyedropper skin coloring is exactly the same: #CEA87E in average light, and #A67558 in the shadows. (Outdoor winter shadows are #90806F.)
Eyedropper-ed from the most recent comic where they’re both indoors on the same panel:
Linda’s projecting the stereotypes of her own biases onto her children, but it doesn’t seem to sink in for her that she’s the one perpetuating the negativity feedback loop that “pRoVeS hEr RiGhT” (for want of better phrasing) about Sal.
My agreement to all of this. I wonder about Charles, but given Sal doesn’t have any warm thoughts about him either, I don’t expect much. Still, maybe there’s hope for him much like there’s hope for Hank.
Sometimes I remember Saul exists, and feel a passing sadness. Gay or ace, that approach to sexuality just sounds miserable.
Honestly? I think Charles has been well-represented as, well, complicit in his wife’s racism, if not actively aiding it. It’s not a flavor of racism that bothers him, essentially.
See, if you told Linda or Charles that Linda was doing anything racist, they’d be furious. How dare you? Her husband is Black! She has mixed-race children! She LOVES Charles, how can you throw these stupid tiny details in her face? And Charles would back her up, because what a ridiculous accusation. Linda just wants the best for their kids, rather than to “grow up on the streets”, or “acting like a thug”.
Eh, that specific strip you linked seemed less like Mike actually detecting any hypocrisy on their part and more like an unironic “checkmate liberals” meme.
Also wow it’s weird to read that strip in light of what Walkyverse Mike ultimately became
At least, that’s Sal’s conclusion. But honestly, who knows? It could be random. It could be that Linda just likes boys better than girls, or that Sal cried a bit more as a baby, or that Walky was more compliant as a child (and still is today) or that she flipped a coin.
Willis doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would write a story in which a Black character would be wrong about her lifelong experience of racism. Let’s believe Sal.
Also, perhaps you’re only doubting Sal here because she’s a fictional character. If you tend to come up with alternate possibilities in real life, where you’d argue that something isn’t really about racism as claimed, but it’s some other thing instead, you might be falling into the trap of Occam’s Big Paisley Tie. http://www.shakesville.com/2013/08/occams-big-paisley-tie.html?m=1
It’s my impression that they still will, but only in their enclaves. Which more or less means that if you accuse someone of racism and they admit it, watch out, because that means they know that pretty much everyone around them except you will support them on that, and most of them have more clout than you. And by ‘support them’, I mean ‘go after you, your house, your family.’
Sure, she’s a closet bigot, but trying to figure out why a toxic parent would favor one child over another is generally a waste of time. It doesn’t matter what Linda’s motivations are. It’s enough to know that she favors Walky over Sal. That may be because she’s racist, or that may be incidental to her racism, or it may be that it’s only part of the reason.
But worrying about what makes toxic people tick is always a waste of time.
In real life, figuring out what makes toxic people tick is very important: that’s the only way to predict what they’ll be toxic about next, and the only possible way to get them to understand anything.
Also how they will attack people. It’s not all about what they *can* do. I’ve known toxic CEOs who never personally demoted or fired anyone due to their particular toxicity.
Sure, these things *definitely* happened under their watch, and it was *definitely* with their support. But they limited themselves to casting shade and supporting the toxicity of others, rather than getting their own hands dirty, because of their own fear of persecution – despite being a CEO of a local major employer and well respected by the other elites of their state, they were still ‘persecuted’.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not say they were subject to “persecution”!
Persecution is about the systematic mistreatment of individuals and groups. It’s about cruel and unfair behavior. However, when an individual or group in a position of power is angrily criticized and perhaps boycotted for social, ethical, legal violations, that’s not “persecution”. That’s PROTEST.
Government officials jailed for denying the rights of groups they deem unworthy are not being persecuted for their beliefs or personality. Parents penalized for stealing from their children are not being persecuted for their beliefs. They’re being protested and appropriately punished for their on cruel and unfair behavior towards fellow human beings.
By repackaging protest and appropriate punishment as “persecution”, not only do manipulative groups and individuals get to commit all kinds of abuses guilt-free — they get to feel like they’re martyrs while doing so. Further counciling manipulative religious groups in particular are passages in their holy books that promise glorious rewards for being “persecuted” — after they die, of course.
She didn’t say they were persecuted she said they were ‘persecuted’ personally I don’t use half quotes for that type of thing I use full quotes but to each their own.
Its basically the typing equivelent of air quotes or the double blinking peace sign, or an eyeroll.
That’s sorta the thing with narratives really. In real life I’ve known plenty of black people conflate the way they’ve been treated to racism. But then when the situation is seen or observed they were also being really unreasonable? Where like even if racism played a part they definitely weren’t blameless. People have a habit of latching on to their “otherisms” when trying to parse why they’re treated badly. I mean why else would somebody be treating me badly other than that they have a biased hatred towards me and people like me. Which yknow credit where credit is due that happens all the goddamn time. And since we’ve recieved word of god that that is probably what’s happening we can’t fight that. You could just as easily argue Linda has some deep rooted sexism since that’s another way Sal and Walky differ. Or even that there’s no reason and Linda just can’t compartmentalise her love and just naturally shows favoritism. If I was Sal’s friend in real life and she told me me her brother is the favorite because he’s less black (well for one if he put off because the whole idea of what makes someone more or less black is a huge thing for me, as I am a black man who feel estranged from the black community and is kinda sensitive to the black on black gatekeeping our community can sometimes have) I would also ask what makes her feel that way. Like not that I don’t believe she’s being neglected or abused but moreso that understanding her bias is paramount to confronting it. That and it could just be multiple things. Nobody’s restricted to just being one form of bigot.
^ This ^. I fully read Linda as more sexist than racist, but also very, very much both, *and* classist. (total aside Yoto, with apologies for being way out of line, but curious: do you think ‘Black on Black’ gatekeeping might also be defensive classism?)
Back to Linda though, she seems like, it’s ok that her husband is black, because he’s a man. Her son is too, /and/ he has whiter attributes. But Sal came out blacker and *female*. Then had the gaul to make friends with poor trash? Doesn’t Sal get how hard Linda has had to work on her image and station?
So it’s like, “Jesus Christ lady! Just pick a bigotry and stay in your lane. Do you have to hog them all?”
Colorism is absolutely just a gatekeeping way of separating yourself from others in your community. It often gets into classism cuz every ism tends to be classism at its core. Darks skinned black people are portrayed by media and other black people as aggressive, rude and thuggish while light skinned or mixed black people are often seen as sell-outs and uncle toms. Mixed children tend to get the worst of it since they have to deal with both racists AND black people who feel they get preferential treatment. Darker skinned people have absolutely disavowed and criticized light skinned people for appearing in film and tv or being more in line with what is seen as conventional beauty in the US. Which is pretty unfair if you ask me. So I’m that regard I kinda am not a fan of Walky being guilted but for being less black (whatever that means in this context). It honestly feels like that would just be Sal being just as bigoted as Linda for the opposite reasons. As is the fate of any light skinned black people who aren’t black enough to “matter”
I think Linda is the not racist (TM) type of racist.
So she wouldn’t refuse to marry him because he’s black she would just find him not marriage material in a way she can’t put her finger on, or a specific reason which she would just happen not to notice in a white man, until she for whatever reason changed her mind.
Going off of a one off comment he proberly started off as fun but not marriage material but became her project.
I think she’s sexist not in a women are inherently inferior to men way but in a double standard way.
Where stuff like conquoring the slide or standing up for a friend are more likely to be celebrated or at least corrected with understanding when a boy is doing it than a girl.
Linda stole nearly 1K that Sal had saved up specifically to help Marcie pay for an expensive surgery and to this day she thinks that was a good parenting move, despite the fact that Sal robbed a convenience store out of desperation right after this. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/01-flyin-to-the-red/losses/
There’s some slightly rscist subtext at the root but I think they kind of just have too much negative history between them now. It’s not just one thing, it’s several that build ontop of each other. They kind of just have different idealogies now and apparently even when Linds does something “nice” for Sal it has ulterior motives. I am one of the few that don’t think Linda is “evil” but there’s s lot keeping them from understanding each other and it’s mostly Linda’s fault.
Linda’s abusive and Sal’s her chosen Unfavorite Child to Walky’s Golden Boy Who Can Do No Wrong. (Woe be to Walky when she turns up the pressure about something important, someday, and he DOESN’T break under it.) Also, both Sal and Walky suspect Linda’s got some unconscious racism and Sal’s natural hair texture was a factor in her favoring Walky. Linda’s racism was DEFINITELY a factor in her irrationally deeming Marcie a ‘bad influence’ and going so far as to steal money from Sal to demand her cut ties with her best friend.
This. Because, after all, Lucy doesn’t have aspirations to be president and … sorry, I can’t come up with any other ways that Lucy falls short of the Dorothy standard.
It could just be parental favoritism. The reasons why could be any number of things of course. In any case it’s pretty shitty how Linda is towards Sal compared to Walky.
Not if you check how it’s expressed and what particulars Linda picks over. If it were any number of things, those would be different. In Linda’s case, they’re all possibly racism particulars. You don’t grab a dice bag full of perfectly balanced dice and roll straight sixes. Thirty plus dice, the odds against that happening are over a septillion to one.
…not sure if you meant “Joyce can’t drop that F-bomb on Carol soon enough” or “Sal can’t drop that F-bomb on Linda soon enough,” but either one works by me.
TAG TEAM! Joyce and Sal vs Linda and Carol. In today’s rumble we see two daughters combining forces to standup to their manipulative, machiavalian, moronic mothers. So far the match has been pretty even. Joyce and Sal have scored many great points, but the heels are just so into themselves the points aren’t landing. Wait! There’s movement outside the ring. What’s this? IT’S AMAZI-GIRL! She’s climbing up, up, up oh GAWD, she’s coming in off the TOP rope! “You all are *worse* than MY dad.” BOOM! Can you believe that slam! It’s hitting the media! It’s trending! Linda and Carol will never hear then end of that in their congregations folks. That’s it, tonight is THE night that the lights went out in Bloomington. Drive safe. Hug your loved ones. Good night.
No, seriously. What is this thing you have about Joyce specifically dropping an F-bomb on Linda when they’ve hardly interacted. I’d much rather see Jennifer lose it with Linda.
Oh, Linda. Thinking that you’re doing your kid, who’s always been fiercely independent and wanting to earn things her way*, a favour by pulling strings for her. Though I’m going to chance this one up to… ignorance, rather than malice.
*one might argue whether or not screwing a Math TA for better grades was earning it.
I mean, it’s also pretty clear from this context and what we already know of her* – Linda’s favors come with catches, and she WILL use them later to try and get her way because you ‘owe her’ for them.
* Again, stole money in an attempt to control Sal’s behavior, specifically. Not just ‘stole money meant for Marcie’s medical care’ but ‘stole money meant for Marcie’s medical care with its return dependent on Sal cutting ties with Marcie.’ With that in mind, either Linda actively used those strings she pulled to try and get her way during the fight, or Sal realized she COULD do it later and benched the motorcycle before Linda could.
Well, she already had the motorcycle and rebel things going without her mom but yeah, that must’ve pissed her off something fierce. After all, she doesn’t use the bike anymore.
Honestly, at least Sal still HAS her motorcycle, so it’ll be available once she graduates to avoid ever having to be dependent her parents again.
I mean, obviously fuck Linda for doing things for her kids so she can use them as collateral to get her way later, but I was expecting Sal to be forced to sell it.
I didn’t have a car as a Freshman at SC, but I was only 16 at the time, so it wasn’t that surprising that my parents would be hesitant. But for most legal adult students to not be allowed cars seems odd.
They likely have the policy because at least these days, college students really don’t know their rights as well as they should, and are less likely to challenge such infantilizing policies.
True that. My first school (transferred for soon to be obvious reasons) had us under CURFEW. Had to be in bed by 11 pm. That wasn’t even the only rule like that.
There could be various practical reasons like, as mentioned below, a dearth of parking spaces, the need to have traffic control on campus if too many vehicles are there, …
Your first though is “it’s done to infantilize the students”. I wonder how you arrive at that conclusion?
Practical reasons don’t change when students get older. If there’s a limit on cars, why isn’t it equally distributed, or distributed by some actual need, instead of pegged to an age cutoff?
University students are generally infantilized in the US, compared to other countries that treat them as the adults they are in all respects*, so I’m not surprised…
* You get a culture shock when you finish school and enter university in such places. Already classifying university as “school”, as done in the US and not elsewhere, is part of the infantilization.
you are right that the practical reasons don’t change when they get older. The restriction just gets moved to the next batch of freshmen, so the demand on resources is still reduced by restricting freshmen vehicle privileges.
I don’t know that campus personally, but I can imagine a few reasons.
Thinking back to my own college experiences…
College campuses have a limited number of parking permits/spaces.
Permits are prioritized by seniority and need (off-campus housing / mobility).
Freshman are expected to live on campus.
Colleges, like many institutions, are very litigation conscious.
1. Danny could have been exagerating the improbability of Sal managing to snag a permit.
2. UofI could have decided to blanketly disallow undergraduate freshman from having permits (barring strong reason) in order to make things easier on themselves.
Btw Paid parking, in ANY CAPACITY, is a scam. It’s insane to me that we just…accept it cuz that’s so dumb. I have to PAY to be in the city where I’m planning to spend money? Just to BE here? In my CAR? That I have to pay TAXES AND INSURANCE AND GAS FOR? YOU’RE GONNA MAKE ME PAY TO JUST BE HERE? EVEN THOUGH IF I’M NOT HERE NONE OF YOUR BUSINESSES MAKE MONEY OR HAVE WORKERS TO MAKE YOUR MONEY. I HAVE TO PAY FOR ADMISSION…TO YOUR ENTIRE CITY? FUCKING HELL.
Yeah, a lot of cities around here made parking free during most of the pandemic, but recently I went to a nearby downtown area and the parking garages were charging again. I was like, ah, yes… I hate this.
FREE parking is the scam. That land has market value, and we’re gonna give it up so that people can put their cars on it? Dude, no. Charge for it, tax it, put that money into public transit.
Urban land is valuable. Why should large amounts of it be reserved for the use of drivers, for free?
Parking is expensive. Garages need to be paid off and maintained. Parking lots have high opportunity cost, such as other uses that actually would pay the owner. The feeling of entitlement to free parking is one of the most damaging things to US cities.
>Why should large amounts of it be reserved for the use of drivers, for free
Because people who commute to the city should be able to drive there and do stuff? The entire reason I never go to the city is because parking is both a nightmare and also paying for parking is inconvenient. Like I guess if you live near the city it’s whatever but I need to either drive to the nearest train station to go to the city OR Ride the bus for like an hour to get there. And guess what? Those cost money and are inconvenient too!
So yeah I guess fine, Maybe paid parking is a big picture necessary evil. But I’ll never stop hating it.
Look, you should only be allowed to enter a city for the purposes of toil and Spending. The only reason a person should exist near a large population center is to give away as much money as possible for the least amount of return, and they’d better fuck off within a few hours so we don’t have to look at them.
It is impossible for everyone who commutes to a city to have their own car and park anywhere. Cities are dense places and cars are incredibly space inefficient. In the hypothetical scenario where parking is free and everybody has a car then what happens is traffic is a constant gridlock in the urban centers and you still probably can’t find parking because there is not enough for everybody.
Yeah, public transport is often expensive and inconvenient, but that is the real problem, not lack of free parking or cities being slightly inconvenient to cars. In fact, cities being too friendly for cars is what often causes public transport to be expensive and inconvenient, as they become slower and less people want to use them (which also forces the prices up). Inclusive transport solutions for urban center usually involve promoting public transport and restricting cars because these are kinda mutually exclusive.
I totally respect your feelings on the matter. Especially as a driver, I get it. But Europe shows us that public transit can actually be an efficient way (even financially for those who use it) to commute and access a city core. America was cursed with land without population at the invention of the automobile, and it’s fucked with our perspective on land use and privilege for a century.
We also had pretty damn good public transit – rail and light rail mostly, but we tore most of it up to build roads and cater to the car. It was more deliberate than just happenstance of how densely populated we were when cars were invented.
Keep in mind that most of Europe is pretty densely populated, so public transit has enough ridership that it can be affordable and efficient, and people don’t have to go very far to get where they need to go. Large areas of North America are not nearly densely populated enough to have that luxury. And also things are spread out enough that travel without a personal vehicle in many cases is just not possible.
True, but a large majority of the US population also lives in densely populated areas that still have lousy public transportation at best – outside of a few inner city areas.
My biggest problem has been when there WAS free parking but then they fill it in. It happened twice in my time at university – we’d find a place to park that didn’t have a meter or wasn’t behind a toll and then by next year they’d filled it in with more fucking curb. That’s not ‘we don’t have the spaaaaaace’ that’s ‘we only want you to park here if you pay for it’. It was incredibly frustrating if you lived off campus since paid parking cost up to $40 a week to park. Cabs were expensive and the bus closest to me was not safe in my last year. I wanted to strangle someone.
A big part of the reason parking is inconvenient is that urban parking is often underpriced even when they do charge for it, particularly with curbside metered parking. Supply exceeds demand, so you get shortages, and people cruising around looking for a parking space. Studies have estimated that 1/3 or more of traffic in such places is people cruising for parking, adding to congestion and pollution.
Charge the right price, dynamically, and you can get it so there’s generally 85% use of parking spaces; enough to be efficient, with enough free that people can park at the same frequency people leave.
A parking lot or garage space needs about 330 square feet per parking space, including access lanes and ramps. I never saw IU dorm rooms, but at Caltech a double room was 130-170 square feet. Just one parking space takes up room for four students, even assuming it’s a multi-level garage as tall as the dorm; a surface parking lot wastes way more space.
Which gets to the other reason for charging for parking: supply and demand. US zoning codes tend to mandate an oversupply of parking, creating the illusion that it’s naturally free, at the cost of forcing such low density that you *have* to drive everywhere. Happily, IU and central Bloomington are older than the car, thus walkable, but that means not everyone can have a car handy. Which is why the university runs its own (free?) buses in addition to the city buses.
During my freshman year, we were made painfully aware that there are apparently federal housing regulations that pertain to college dorms, because our dorm was “temporary housing” that got a waiver from those rules because it was only supposed to be around for about 20 years. Never mind the number of students who started school and graduated within those 20 years. I was there for year 20, so we all had to go to another dorm after that.
The temporary housing dorm was the cheapest of the dorms. The replacement dorm was the most expensive dorm the school ever had to that point, even after factoring inflation into the prices. Did I get to go there? Sure, they gave all of the students from my dorm preferential placement for the new dorm, but could I afford it? Could any of us afford it?
Probably a few could, but I know I saw a *lot* of my former dormmates in the cheapest dorm they still had. Maybe some were just visiting a lot, but I think most of us were still dormmates.
330 square feet seemed high to me. So I looked it up. In North America, average parking spaces are about 9×18, with 14 to 24 width for the drive lane, depending on whether it’s one way or two way traffic. Parking garages generally have more access ramps between levels, and not enough horizontal space to pay for that from having all the vehicles parked perpendicularly with the drive lane.
I knew my sedan is always shorter than the parking space, unless it’s a ‘compact only’ spot, because it’s only .5″ longer than a compact, but 18 feet for the standard parking spot length? Wow.
330 square feet includes the access lanes. I’ve checked it myself via Google Maps: use ruler tools to measure the dimensions of a parking lot, count the number of parking spaces, divide.
In a reddit AMA thread, an LA architect said they counted more on 380 sqft per parking space. Maybe that was for garages, which lose more space to ramps and support pillars, or maybe they just plan for huge SUVs.
Curbside parking takes less space, at the cost of more congestion because the ‘access lane’ is also a traffic lane.
I would note that 9×18 is 162 sqft, itself the size of a dorm room. One car taking the space of two people. (Granted that’s cheating a bit, because the dorm also has hallways and bathrooms, which I’m not counting. Still, car parking takes a LOT of space.)
Yes, you have to pay to be in the city in your car. Because you are increasing traffic by being in the city in your car. Because your car takes up parking space of citizens that live in the city. Because tourism only pays off if people buy things. Your car’s presence is a large metallic hindrance to everyone who actually lives there and popular places become horribly congested very fast.
This isn’t just a case of ‘free parking vs paid parking’ but weighing up the inconvenience to people living there that comes with the financial benefits of tourism versus the inconvenience to people visiting that may deter them from taking part in tourism. You want tourism, but not people showing up on whims every two days and making it impossible for the people that literally live in the city to enjoy where they live.
Well, if it’s such a hindrance for people to visit the city, maybe all us country folk should just stay out and keep to our unsightly glorified truck stops.
Public transport ain’t convenient or free either though? Like even living an hourish from the city means I’d either need to take a long ass bus ride or theyd have to build huge stretches of railroad through the country, which would also be bad. Unless the innovation in public transportation you have is something not really used yet. How should we country folks make our way to the city without being penalized for interacting with what is the majority of goings ons in my state?
“How should we country folks make our way to the city without being penalized for interacting with what is the majority of goings ons in my state?”
Park in a garage at the urban edge and ride a train in. That’s how Boston tries to do things: big garages at the end of lines. Or you can drive in, but downtown parking is like $25/day instead of $8/day.
Or if you want easy access to what’s happening in the city, live in the city and walk/bike/transit. (Granted those are shitty options in the US, but that’s *because* we’ve embraced cars so much.)
There is no natural right to going around in a multi-ton polluting vehicle that takes tons of road and parking space to accommodate.
City people just don’t understand the pain of basically nothing being walking distance. I’m not going to be shamed for driving a car just because everything near me is NOT AT ALL walking distance. Seriously screw off with your pollution rhetoric as if public transport doesn’t have its own environmental concerns. And you don’t know if I’ve got an electric car or anything anyway. (I don’t but I’m poor which is sorta where the whole outrage stems from). Being poor is also why I can’t just move to the city. Turns out housing is kinda expensive there. And even if it wasn’t moving is kind of a huge step and will change my entire lifestyle. I’m moderately mixed by paid parking considering how much my income is taxed by it so if you think I deserve some retribution for my station in life I suggest you reevaluate your principles.
“City people just don’t understand the pain of basically nothing being walking distance.”
Kind of do.
“I’m not going to be shamed for driving a car just because everything near me is NOT AT ALL walking distance.”
I don’t think anyone was shaming you for driving. We’re saying it’s not reasonable to expect free parking in a city center.
“Seriously screw off with your pollution rhetoric as if public transport doesn’t have its own environmental concerns.”
Now you’re losing sympathy. Electrified transit like trains and trolleybuses are far far far cleaner than cars. Trains use a lot less energy per passenger (steel wheel on rail is efficient), as do packed buses (because packed). (And urbanites use even less energy when they can walk/bike many of their trips.) Most urban pollution is from cars, as we saw when driving collapsed in the covid lockdowns in 2020 and city air cleared up. Even electric cars produce particulates from brake and tire wear, as as well as noise pollution (cars are most of the noise pollution of cities, too.)
Diesel buses can be dirty but a walkable city with buses is still cleaner than everyone driving all the time.
It becomes an even more complex issue when the popular place is in a more rural area or a national park. Because public transit may not exist, there are environmental concerns, roads may be narrow or limited reducing parking availability, people cannot be trusted to not leave trash everywhere or open gates on farms to take shortcuts which can let animals free and so on.
Balancing economic design with not making the locals hate everyone is no easy task. When people visit the holiday park near where I live, it often impacts how much of our regular shopping we can get and that annoys me a little bit. And one of our local landmarks for years has been vandalized which doesn’t bother me but it has bothered a lot of the locals that have been here for years and years.
As a slight counterpoint: Paramus, New Jersey has some of the strictest Blue Laws in the nation, dictating what can and can’t be sold on Sundays, and even what businesses can be open. The people of Paramus and the surrounding Bergen County have upheld these laws for one simple reason: Paramus is a shopping mecca and they want ONE F███ING DAY where the highway wasn’t clogged with people from New York City flocking to this town to buy goods that are untaxed in New Jersey, e.g. clothes and shoes.
This sounds like you think that people in the city don’t have to pay for parking. I remember thinking that was what ‘residential parking permits’ meant before I moved to the city.
‘Residential parking permit’ means that they paid for parking in monthly installments, at a lower rate because it’s cheaper to bill people monthly than it is to install parking meters and police them, and they’re basically always getting money for the spaces. With residential permits, the police can just ticket everyone without a permit, rather than checking to see if there’s still time on the meter. It’s a slightly easier ticket to write, and it’s easier for the court case should you try to fight it. Not that you stand a chance of fighting it either way, since you’re basically asking the judge to decide that their employer should have less incentive to pay them.
Residential permits do *not* mean “you get a space near your apartment” or even “in your neighborhood”. You *might*, but you might not. Parking’s still really tight, and if you get home late at night, you may spend an extra hour or two looking for somewhere to park, or paying for an overnight stay in a garage because it’s worth it to be able to get the extra hour or two of sleep.
Residential permits in the US are typically underpriced. In Boston they’re free, in Cambridge and Somerville they’re like $25 or $40/year, when a monthly parking spot in a residential neighborhood would probably go for $150/month. Granted the permit isn’t as convenient but it’s still a huge difference. Alternatively one can imagine what someone in an RV, or a food truck, would be willing to pay for a space.
I admit I got a little heated and I apologize. That being said even if public transit is “better” for city living it’s still rather inconvenient for me at this time and as a consequence I find it difficult to visit the city. (While I CAN ride the Marta train to certain places I still have to drive over half an hour to get to it.) I’m still not gonna like paid parking but I guess I’ll accepr it’s not as bullshit as I originally thought
Lack of space. If Sal kept her vehicle parked in a private lot off-campus they probably wouldn’t care.
Note: Though they probably can’t actually ban it, the college most likely would look askance on students who live on-campus parking their cars in the public streets overnight and annoying the people who live in the nearby town.
That’s how it was handled where I went to school. No cars on campus before Junior year, but I needed one as a sophomore for various reasons so I shelled out for off campus parking. Didn’t drive much during the year since it was a pain to get to, but it let me get to where I needed to stay during breaks and the like.
I didn’t go to IU, but I’ve heard they do it similar to how they do it at Purdue. At Purdue, the school has a part interest in all property within a mile of campus. It’s not a law, it’s just something they invested in. And the school uses that part interest to be able to dictate things like freshmen must live in the dorms out to a mile from campus.
As such, if you’re a freshman and want to live off-campus? Fine. You’re walking a mile, at least. You want a vehicle, despite the lack of parking permits for freshmen? Fine. You’re parking that vehicle a mile from campus, at least.
I knew a guy who decided to go that route. For the car, not the housing. For about a week, he was the cool freshman who could take his fellow freshmen to the mall. But after that, he lost the will to walk all the way out to get his car and then drive back to pick up his dormmates for a few coolness points, especially since there was that mile walk to look forward to at the end. If I recall correctly, he actually took his car home and left it with his parents more than a week before his month of paid parking was up, because he didn’t want to risk forgetting about it and either paying fines, losing the car, or needing to pay for an extra month.
Or won’t need to own, because you can rent them and get them to come to you at will. Which will mean many fewer cars.
But basically all that shows is that in most cases, having a car on campus is a luxury not nearly a necessity. Everything you need for your daily life is on or near campus – walking distance or within the campuses public transit, if it has some. Having a car gets you status points.
Some people suggest that one reason many Americans are nostalgic for college campus life is that it’s the only time of their life they’ve lived in something like a walkable urban-like environment. Four years of living in apartments (dorms) and walking to class and food and parties and enjoying serendipitous contacts, squished between childhood and adulthood in car-dependent suburbs.
I can see that being the case for cars/trucks/SUVs, however a motorcycle doesn’t take up nearly as much space, seems to me they could make some provision for two wheeled motorized transportation being allowed for freshmen.
I don’t know about elsewhere in Canada, but the University of Saskatchewan doesn’t limit what kind of students can apply for student parking.
These days a bus pass for Saskatoon Transit is included with your tuition. What some students do is park near a bus stop and take a bus onto campus. That way they avoid having to pay for a parking spot. One of the Walmarts here became a popular location to do that, so Walmart actually put up signs saying it was prohibited. I don’t think they’ve worked too well.
I seem to remember that most post secondary educational facilities In Edmonton, a bus pass was part of your tuition, both my kids had bus passes included. Of course, it wasn’t in place when I went to the U of A, I had to buy my own passes.
At my school we simply didn’t have enough parking spaces for everyone to have a car. Freshmen were mostly living in dorms anyway so permits were reserved for older students.
Well, that’s not as bad as I worried, so yay! “Not as bad a mom as you could’ve been award” is in the mail.
Seriously though, nothing Linda Walkerton ever does will EVER be genuinely ‘just being nice’. She doesn’t work that way. Everything she does ‘to be nice’ ends up as ammunition or becomes ammunition as soon as they argue or she doesn’t get what she wants. As long as that’s consistent, NOTHING she does will ever be ‘just being nice’, though I imagine she thinks it is and intends it to be at the time.
Or, in ideal situations, Linda will think she’s being nice. But you can count on future less than ideal moments when Linda feels like she’s backed in a corner and she’ll take every nice thing she’s done and turn it into weapons. So you gotta see every nice thing she does as weapons all the time.
Man yeah I hate when people do it. It’s part of why I never wanna owe anybody anything (or at least not give them the pretense that I will ever pay them back) because I don’t want it thrown in my face. Probably a bad take but it’s also why I would rather adopt
What, people think giving birth to someone is some kind of favor?
Your birth was NOT a favor to you. There was no “you” before your birth. You weren’t some disembodied potential person, floating around and hoping for life.
A parent gives intentional birth to a child because they want another family member. It’s a gift they give to themselves. Expecting gratitude for a gift you gave yourself is absurd.
People do love to play the card of “you owe me because I made you.” I was going to say this was abusive parents, but honestly even generally fine parents will play the “sixteen hour labor” card or whatever.
It’s a rhetoric that is as old as the oldest Abrahamic religions, going hand in hand with the notion that everyone is supposed to feel endless gratitude towards their god for creating humanity.
But even if any of these gods DID exist, there would be NOTHING to thank them for.
In Judaist, Islamic and Christian scripture, God did not “give life to humans”. God gave HIMSELF an inferior human species, inferior lifeforms, to rule over. He gave HIMSELF an empire.
Hell, it almost certainly predates the Abrahamic religions. How many Greek myths have people receive horrific punishments for being insufficiently gracious towards their divine overlords? It’s gotta be a vast majority of them
This. It took me decades to work through this even after realizing it, because it’s just been such a pervasive thing in my life. It was *everywhere*. I was raised to think that I owed god, the church, my family, and the community.
To be fair, if souls exist before life, such as believed by reincarnation religions, then one could owe ones deity for the opportunity to be incarnated. One would only owe the family, the church, the community if there was some prior arrangement between the soul and the organization in question. But one would only owe ones deity if the incarnation was on ones own terms. If the deity chooses the particulars of the incarnation? Not so much.
Abrahamic religions deny reincarnation and claim that the soul is created along with the incarnation, and thus deny any debt that a soul could have to god, family, church, or community. But they sure do claim the existence of said debt a *lot*.
Well what do you expect? With thousands of years of practice, the Abrahamic religions have gotten gaslighting down to an EXPERT craft.
They proclaim us humans guilty and indebted because of events before our birth. They propose inconsistent values that are impossible to observe consistently. They put followers in impossible mind games by condoning and condemning the same behaviors. The proclaim activities that cause no conceivable harm to be worthy of persecution, torture and even death.
These maneuvers serve but to erode our sense of judgment, and make us more susceptible to their control.
A lot of the seeds were in Judaism though, even if Christianity took them off in a different direction.
Even in Judaism of Biblical times, there were essentially arbitrary codes that were nigh impossible to follow completely and God kept having to punish Israel for breaking their covenant.
i mean, god punished israel a lot in… some stories that may not be historical
i don’t think we should put those on equal footing with the real-life power structures that exist today in America which are solely Christian
Christianity stole Jewish everything and then used it to murder them for 2000 years. We don’t need to rope Jewish faith in with our condemnation of Evangelicalism. That’s just adding insult to injury.
“Abrahamic religion” is used specifically because it acknowledges that the manipulative tactics and abuses are by no means exclusive to Christianity.
Jewish scripture itself (even in the EARLIEST known copies made before Christianity), called for genocide and other atrocious crimes against whole tribes, nations and religious groups in the middle east.
In Exodus 20, Yahweh commanded that all Baal worshipers and their children be put to death. In Numbers 31, Moses himself commanded the army of Israel to kill every man and married woman of the Midianite tribe, while keeping the virgin girls as sexual stock. Isaiah 13 and Psalm 137 document their intent to kill each and everyone of the children of Babylon and molest their mothers.
The kinds of abusive and manipulative attitudes in Evangelicalism didn’t just spring ready made from an ideological vacuum.
AGAIN, those are ahistorical stories and it’s very unlikely most of them happened, so for the love of cheese stop trying to put them on equal footing with the suffering of actual real people – it’s kind of extremely hard to get riled up about genocidal stories that never occurred, you might as well be ranting about Thanos
and, yes, evangelicals use these stories to justify their behavior which is, again, my entire point
and i swear if you one more time try to mansplain to ME of all people what’s in the bible, like it’s some incredible new information, like i haven’t studied this shit all my life, i’m just gonna spamfolder you
By the way I didn’t imply that you didn’t encounter those in the Old Testament, and I know you already know this, but Baal worshipers were actually REAL, and were sentenced to death for their worship, along with those who picked up sticks on the wrong day of the week.
The Babylonians were obviously real too, but whether or not the Israelites actually enacted their planned-out blood-soaked revenge on them is besides the point. The manipulative and abusive attitudes were there long before Christianity was ever invented.
Not to mention the fact that Christians were also subject to genocide during China’s Mainland Period, Japan’s Edo Period, and the Ottoman Empire’s Old Regime. Should Christian sects be allowed to use THOSE events to justify their behavior?
The modern American Christian, whom these conversations tend to revolve around when discussing, y’know, ongoing and active continued prejudice, doesn’t really exist in a state where the persecution of Christians in the Edo period factors into their lives. Maybe if I were a Japanese Culture Expert I could write something informative on Christianity in present day Japan, but I’m not, and how that exists in and around Christianity in North America and their fount of cultural power doesn’t really matter.
The persecution caused by American Christians is a constant background radiation of millions of lives in North America. There’s your difference, bub.
Like I’m not saying don’t talk about historical religious imperialism on a global scale, but when you can safely assume the audience you’re talking to has their main interaction with American Fundamentalism, like, tailor your speech to that audience.
I guess the counter then is why put the blame on Paul instead of Abraham, if you’re concerned about modern American Evangelicals? Blame them, not some dude 2000 years back who wouldn’t recognize modern Christianity any more than the historical Jesus would.
Generally, the objections have to do with what exactly is occurring right here: uncharitably lassoing in Judaism based on a term pushed by Christians to build themselves a little goodwill buffer after being butts to Jewish folks for 2000 years. It’s a term that Christians like, nonChristians not so much. It’s the popular kid saying “yeah i’m friends with these nerds” for clout while shoving them into lockers.
In my original post, when I said “Abrahamic religions have become gas-lighting experts”, I was also thinking of Islamic scripture and ideology, which today is still used to psychologically manipulate and inspire fear in their members (sometimes under the threat of death).
On a side note, even though Christianity and Islam both show intent in scripture and otherwise to gain vacuous control over people, Islam is actually BETTER in that regard because it’s a lot more up and front about it. The word “Islam” itself is actually Arabic for “submission”/”surrender” — specifically, surrender to the Islamic god.
Even outside of the scripture dripping head to toe with sadism and ancient dictatorial practices, the God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam have all inspired much corruption and atrocity because of just two elements. First, is their monotheistic nature. Second, is their human inventors’ overzealous desire for justice.
Judeo-Christian is a useless term, since there’s really little the two have in common that’s not also shared with Islam, and the whole point of it is to exclude Islam. A term for that particular strain of monotheism, as opposed to other religions of the world is useful, because they share not only common origins but a lot of basic assumptions that aren’t common elsewhere.
So this is a weird fixation I had but years ago on tumblr there was a post from some talk show, I don’t remember where a woman asked the host if he was going to have a baby. He said “oh yes, My wife and I are going to have a child” and she told him “No you won’t SHE’LL be having a child” and then proceeded to go on a rant about how Childbirth is difficult, being pregnant is stressful and it’s not something the man has to go through. Sort of as a “gotcha” to the idea of “we’re pregnant” or whatever.
Which is y’know…fair.
But also I thought “Well ok. If it’s that inconvenient I don’t want that to be held over me as if it’s something I DID to her. I mean I’m assuming if it’s my wife I WANT her to be comfortable and happy, not feel like I’m getting off easy cuz she has to suffer through this when you can just purchase a kid instead. I mean if she REALLY wants to have a kid then that’s fine but I just don’t want the unpleasantness of child rearing and the fact that my capacity to support that being limited as it is to cause contention. And I am WELL aware this is just because I hate the idea of feeling “at fault” or like having her pull rank over me because of her suffering which I’d rather she not go through at all, so I can’t pretend it’s a ‘noble’ reason. I just don’t like that power dynamic. That one video just really turned me off of the whole idea. :/
Whether that remains a *good idea* will remain to be seen. i.e. Is it healthy for a developing consciousness to float in a non-animal, sterile, vat fed by nutrifluid? Or will that just breed a whole new level of psychopath?
How do you know that psychopaths aren’t caused by traditional pregnancy? I mean, even without that, the whole human pregnancy process is much more dangerous compared to the overwhelming majority of other mammals.
We don’t need to burn coal to heat our homes. We don’t need livestock pancreas to get insulin for diabetics. We don’t need to destroy forest land to grow more vegetables. We don’t need animals to get meat.
Whatever neurological or physiological needs are met by conventional pregnancy, there are much more efficient, effective, safer ways to fulfill them without the collateral damage caused by the apparently unquestionable, “traditional” method of reproduction.
Oh regular psychos are grown now the usual way, up until they get out of the womb and get perpetually abused and rejected by their mother and severly taught that they are unlovable and entirely to blame for *being*.
This isn’t *all* of them, but there is a scary high corelation with the really violent ones. So my hypothesis is largely, how much worse would it be to grow someone with no human contact at all until or after birth? Especially given the documented importance of skin-to-skin contact immediately at birth. Babies are not meant to be apart from their parents. Not for a long long time.
Why would a human womb be necessary for contact at birth and after birth?
There are smart materials being developed right now which will be able to completely simulate every aspect of the human uterus.
This will not only make it possible for people who can’t deliver safely to have genetically related children; it may very well guarantee that even MORE children get much needed contact, seeing that there would be no risk of the mother DYING as a result of the birth.
“simulate every aspect of the human uterus” seems unlikely without also simulating every aspect of the human that the uterus is normally a part of, since many things that mothers do affect the uterus. Especially later in development when senses start to develop.
But mostly, I just had to post to drop an old in-joke “You were raised by the wire monkey, weren’t you?”
Thejeff’s got the rub of this. My point about contact after birth: If contact is *that* important literally the second a child is born (and it really REALLY is), then why would we *ever* dare to assume that contact is unimportant in the previous 40 weeks? Fetus’ do all kinds of crazy learning and development in the womb.
However, to focus on the technological points, from a purely chemistry perspective, I’ve no doubt we could eventually simulate a *perfect* womb. But thejeff’s point weighs in here. If we can do all that, why not just fix things so the mother is safe? And if our technology is that far advanced, will we even be biological anyways?
But if somehow we’re in an in-between phase, where we can simulate a womb, but not save a mother, I have *GRAVE* misgivings about what this would do to the neurological development of the fetus. Also, if parents can’t make the commitment to be with the fetus for those first 10 months, are they really fit to be there for the following 20 years?
If someone is really that hard up for a baby, maybe look at adoption, fostering, or having someone carry on your behalf if there’s a health complication.
(p.s. oh look at the hypocrite with two biological kids and no adoptions. Yes, trust me I know. This was… not my dream)
The way that argument is always framed, the one giving birth gets turned into some kind of martyr and the other parent is turned into nothing but an obstacle to be surpassed, no matter what. It turned me off the idea of having a natural kid, too.
Also this. I dated a few women over the years who were clearly much more interested in having kids than I was. But they also made it pretty clear that they were going to do this whole martyr thing about it and I was so not on board with that.
I finally said nix to that and stopped dating until someone who didn’t want kids wanted to date.
Yeah, I’m not sure what your (presumed) emotional drive is, for having such a strong stance against pregnancy. Please, would you be willing to take the time to explain it? It’s not a position i’ve encountered before.
Also, while not intending to speak for womankind, I *think* you’re presenting as male, and seeking to displace an evolutionarily fundamental aspect of what it can mean to be female, there may be some push back.
I guess you could say I am anatomically “male”, and I’m for now OK with that. However, I really prefer to identify with my mind, and mind has no need for gender. In case you’re wondering, yes, male pronouns are OK I guess.
My stance against traditional pregnancy is partly out of concern for the health of humanity, partly feminist. I just don’t think it’s fair for women to have exclusively undergo ALL that pain and emotional turmoil and to be the only ones with the possibility of DYING and not having any more children after that, all while men get to share in no such pain (as well as MANY other inequalities).
As far as I’m concerned, the only real “rules” to the game we call life are the principles of physics and chemistry. Everything else is just the metagame, and therefore subject to change.
Pregnancy being a “fundamental aspect of being female” is only according to the “rules” of the body, the world, we just happened to be born into. If we really wanted to, we could just change that “rule”. After all, we as a species used science, technology, the combined power of our intellect, to change MANY other “rules” to suit ourselves.
And by the way, a mother can’t give “warm touch” to a baby if she DIES as soon as the baby is born.
An artificial womb may very well guarantee MORE “human touch”. I have a hard time believing that artificial wombs have any impact on the well-being of the child later in life — there’s no evidence for it at all, and really amounts to Voodoo Medicine™ and the magical thinking that surrounds nature. Choosing to believe that nature was created for the sole benefit of humans living in it, and if that living in it like it’s only ever gonna be the 1950s or something, is just setting us up for failure, you know?
OTOH, I’ve known some couples where the guy wanted kids much more than the woman did and she not only had to go through the pregnancy but wound up doing most of the childcare as well.
Also yeah honestly my mom’s never pulled the “because I made you card” cuz she’s a good mom. But also I’d say “making you” isn’t even a favor. If I was never born I’d never have to fear death. Life isn’t a gift. It’s a fleeting pleasure at best and all the shit I’m worried about I wouldn’t have to worry about had I never been born. If anything, they owe ME for dragging me into this mortal coil without asking first.
Somebody is set to sue his parents over that (don’t think the trial’s been heard yet). Feeling lazy so didn’t reread the story but IIRC he lives with them and they are funding his lawsuit.
This is a bit tangential, but my dearest friend is adopted (from infancy), and has gotten the message all her life that she is not allowed to complain even a little bit about how her parents treated her, because she should be eternally grateful to them that she was given a safe warm home after her birth mother gave her up.
Which is to say, if parents want to hold the power of gratitude over their kids to try to control them, the circumstances don’t much matter :/
My mom passed away three months ago and my aunt came down to assist my dad and I. She helped organize things, had pictures printed and framed for her service. But the ‘nice’ things she did were not done to be nice. We had an open casket for my mom and my aunt ignored my wishes and snapped a picture of her in her casket. When I called her out on it, she brought up how she paid for those pictures to be done and called me out on not paying for the pictures… even though I paid the 7 grand for the entire ceremony and I thought she was helping out because her sister had died and she wanted to help, not to use as ammunition when she gets called out on being a bongo. Needless to say, my aunt and I no longer talk. Her last words to me were calling me a spoiled little girl and telling me that ‘one day life is going to hit you’. Sometimes family really SUCKS.
Turning gifts into ammunition is even worse once you really about it.
<strong<Gifts by DEFINITION are given freely. Trying to use them to create a sense of debt only proves that they are not gifts at all. It also implies a very manipulative mindset.
In healthy relationships, people don’t try to trap each other with guilt, debt or obligation. They stick around because they like each other.
She told somebody grieving her mother – a reasonably close fanily member no less – that some day life was going to..? What an awful person!! My condolences for having to deal with that on top of losing your mother
Oh I can understand the mentality of wanting a picture. There’s lots of possible reasons. Some less flattering than others.
The *approach* and attitude shown however. I’m a little lenient because she loast her sister too, but people *like* that, should pad the LZ for the casket in the ground.
It could be “I need something to remind me every day that this person is finally dead.”
Or it could be, “since she’s died, she’s been dreams *every* *night*. Once, it was just a casual `Oh, I’m also here because you know, sister, so you remember me.` But the rest have been events where we deliberately excluded her, and she keeps making snide comments about how horrible we were being. We wanted to avoid that! THAT’S WHY WE EXCLUDED HER! And so I need something to look at when I wake up to remind myself she’s not here anymore.”
Probably the best reason was not having had anything resembling a recent picture. But it’s probably better to ask for a more up to date picture than a casket picture.
I’d like to think that there exist some good reasons for wanting a casket picture besides “news reporter, need to show the people this person is dead”. But unlike Demoted Oblivious, I’m only recalling encountering very unflattering reasons. Such as, for example, total ghoul.
She did have a recent picture, because when she came to visit my mom while she was sick, she took a selfie with her. The true reason why she wanted a picture, is that it is a ‘tradition’ for her. She has a picture of several women in the family who have died, so it’s something that means a lot to her. My mom, however, didn’t really care much for that tradition because she hated the idea of taking a picture of someone when they’re in a weak or vulnerable state.
More context for why I didn’t want a picture taken, is because my mom died of cancer. She was diagnosed in February, died in April, and despite only having one chemo treatment in that time, she lost a lot of her hair in the last week of her life. Hair which was her pride and joy, hair she took great pride in. The idea of an open casket was already overwhelming for me, because I hated the idea of anyone seeing what the cancer had done to her. But, I knew people would need to see her in order to have closure and say good bye. Especially since only dad, myself, and one of her friends had seen her during her last day or so of life. A lot of people still needed to say good bye. So we had an open casket, and I stated I didn’t want pictures taken.
I’m not entirely unreasonable. After all, my aunt lost her sister too. If my aunt had TALKED to me, told me ‘hey, I know you don’t want pictures taken, but I have this tradition and it’d mean a lot to me if I could take a picture’, then I would have agreed, with stipulations such as ‘don’t post it on social media’ and ‘don’t show it to anybody’. Instead, she snapped the picture when I had left the casket area, behind my back, DESPITE my wishes. And she went on to show her daughter and her daughter’s FRIEND the picture of my mom in her casket. She’s a total ghoul.
I was trying *really hard* to look at it neutrally, so I didn’t get all in Doopy’s grill because I wasn’t 100% clear on their feelings. Family shit can be complicated.
There are too many people to respond to individually but I want to say thank you to everybody who has offered their condolences about both my mom passing and my aunt’s behavior. I didn’t even get into the HALF of all the shit she did, such as accusing me of being a thief, trying to turn my dad against me (big mistake, ha), attempting to gaslight me into thinking she had in fact ‘asked’ before taking the picture, telling my father she could have hit me with a ‘felony assault charge’ and thus would have fucked up my job, when the most I did was step closer to her while we argued, and called her a bongo. There was no hitting, no fists were raised, not even a threat of violence. Although she also threatened to sue me when we were arguing too, ha. So… just an all around awful person.
But I’ve cut her from my life, and I don’t plan to ever have anything to do with her. I’m far happier without her in my life. The loss of my mom is still a hard one, we were very close and her death was very sudden. But I am determined to make her proud by continuing to work in my field, doing all that I can to secure our home through probate, and taking care of my dad.
Well since Linda is finally back in discussion I can finally admit this. I actually love Linda as a character! She’s like the perfect parental antagonist. She’s better than Ross, she’s better than Blaine, she’s probably better than Clint too because we don’t really know much about his motivations beyond him just being horrible for the sake of it I guess.
But everything Linda does makes absolute sense to me. She’s not a religious zealot, or an abusive and maniacal two bit mob stooge. She’s just a mom. Yet she’s earned almost as much ire as the former big bads. And all her actions are relatable and justifiable! Linda is amazing! I gotta give respect to how well she’s tormented Sal so far. Top class stuff.
I’m not sure there’s any universe where robbing a sick child’s Go Fund Me money and probably spending it for herself is anything but irredeemably evil.
We don’t actually know, but it’s pretty widely speculated it was spent ‘on Sal’ – specifically, her tuition (or maybe surgery bills) post-convenience store, in a not-technically-punishment that is, nonetheless, a dick move given what those funds were earmarked for by Sal.
It sounded like she was earmarking them for Sal’s college. But because of what she did and how Sal reacted to it, she felt that Sal needed another expensive education more urgently, so got an opportunity to spend that money a bit earlier.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t spend that money. At least not on frivolous bullshit because that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Why would she want 1000 bucks? The Walkertons live pretty comfortably and she most likely controls the finances. Chances are it went into Sal’s tuition or some sneaky way of returning it without actually doing that. 1k was never going to be enough for the medical care Marcie needed. To Linda, her daughter was wasting money on a lost cause. Horrible but it was logical for a racist mother.
The reward of a good action cannot be given by any power
For it is the natural result of the good action.
How can we do good
When nobody will let us?
How can we create a more healthy society
When we keep supporting systems that reward sickness?
I think Sirksome’s right here. She’s not that cartoonishly evil.
It’s a 1000 bucks her kid was going to waste, so she took it to direct it to something more important. All for Sal’s “benefit”. I’ve long assumed it went towards paying the boarding school.
No, those actions are evil, but they’re a type of evil we’re most likely to encounter and stem from bigotry and a racist motivation instead of religious zealousness or cartoonishly evil mob associations. In my life I am much more likely to encounter a Linda than I am a Ross or a Blaine or even a Carol.
I’m not saying there aren’t Carols and Rosses and Blaines out in the real world, just that I myself am lucky enough not to be in those social circles. I think Linda’s flavor of evil is much more likely to fly under the radar, and to me that makes her the type of person we’re much more likely to interact with unknowingly.
It makes sense and that’s why I think Linda is a better antagonist than Blaine or Ross, but I also think the term “evil” is used too frequently when people do things you don’t agree with. The most evil thing about Linda is her racism which doesn’t really have a justification but it’s hard to label that as evil either. A lot of people share Linda’s intolerant views but aren’t actually evil people.
Linda works a lot better because she’s been a lot more… grounded is probably the best term.
Blaine and Ross doing supervillain Don Quixote shit doesn’t do wonders for them as serious antagonists, to the point where I find Blaine’s walkyverse counterpart more effective for just being a relatively mundane shitbag
It feels more real to me, and in this sort of story I think that’s preferable
In my life, I’ve knowingly encountered one Blaine, 4-6 Rosses, a dozen Carols. But then, I grew up in the sort of environment where Rosses and Carols thrive.
I literally cannot count the number of Linda’s I’ve knowingly encountered because they’re so pervasive.
That said, I feel like anyone who disrespects their child’s opinion enough to steal from them and then blame the child for the outcome probably rates at least a little on the evil scale. They’re not the head of the KKK, but they’re decidedly doing what they shouldn’t.
I’d like to agree with Thag Simmons about Blaine and Ross going too beyond the pale to be believed, but… I’ve been around and I’ve known people enough to have met some like that. Mostly like Ross, but at least one person who dressed up like Batman to go bully non-violent law-abiding geeks.
There’s a reason why, even after everything, I refer to my biological grandfather as a Blaine and not some other evil parent in this strip when talking about him here. Was he a literal supervillain who worked for the mob, kidnapped half a dozen people in a half-baked revenge scheme, and killed two more? No.
That’s about everything we can say, with confidence, bio-Blaine definitely wouldn’t have done or have potentially done something similar. I can fully imagine Blaine yelling at a family member for suggesting he remove a loaded gun from the coffee table while visiting with their 1-year-old, clearly you just can’t control your child if you think this is necessary and they can stay in their carseat the whole time if you have a problem there. For all Ross’s many, many, MANY faults, I do actually think he was slightly more sensible in his controlling bastarddom than that. (That’s not actually why he had no relationship with his oldest grandchildren, since my parent was already estranged by then, but it is why he never had a relationship with any of us. Sometimes, cutting your parent off and not coming back is the right move. Fortunately, his children are not him.)
My issue with Blaine and Ross isn’t that their nature is unbelievable to me. A physically abusive low level mobster and a religious zealot who tries to ‘fix’ his gay daughter, both of those are frighteningly real.
What makes them not work for me is the quixotic supervillainy. It’s not that it’s impossible, but it’s silly and absurd and difficult to take seriously, and I think it’s less effective than a more mundane portrayal would have been.
Maybe as Willis became a dad himself he came to be less preoccupied with exploring the brand of messed-up-ness he suffered from as a kid and thus got rid of Ross & Blaine, each representing a variation on Spectacularly Bad parenting;
Instead wanting to paint more subtly terrible parents, with faults he as a not-in-a-cult Dad might relate to as tendentially present in decent parenting but a matter of balance and judgement. Maybe the line between a bad parent and an OK one is not so much in whether or not you experience the impulse to curtail your child’s agency “for their own good” but in the complicated and shifting ways a parent chooses to yield to or resist that impulse.
That phrase familiar to all of us…. “it’s for your own good”.
Once combined with an excuse not to give reasons for this alleged good (“you’re to young to understand”; “you’re too inexperienced to understand”; “tough love”; “you’ll understand when you’re older”; “you’re so naive to resist this”), or even through denying the power of reason entirely, becomes a perfect means by which to get away with repeated immorality.
With this simple system, vice becomes virtue. Bullying becomes “discipline”. Invasion becomes “bonding”. Molesting becomes “therapy”. Intolerance becomes “safety”. Hate becomes “love”. Any of this sounding familiar? With this simple way of unthinking, we can abuse people without any remorse.
A moral compass with two north ends, is no compass at all.
OTOH, parents really do have to do things to and for kids that they don’t want, for their own good and often many of those excuses are true.
By college age you really can’t get away with it anymore, even when it is for their own good and they really are being foolish and naive. It can still be hard to tell the difference from outside or when you’re the naive kid.
Did you even read what I wrote? Are you really suggesting that kids need to be MOLESTED for their mental health’s sake?
The major problem with the “too young to understand” argument is that abusive parents, who very much wrongly treat their children, can use EXACTLY the same line. So, how do children discern actual meanness from apparent meanness? According to the “too young to understand” argument, they don’t. They just have to take it — until they’re old enough to figure out that they were abused.
The fact that children are asking “why”, should be a clear and cut signal that they are ready for some kind of answer. We don’t have to OVERWHELM them with information — we can hand it to them piece by piece, pausing to see if they’re satisfied or ready for more.
To give them nothing — to dismiss their attempts to understand — is to leave them to fill in the blanks with very predictable, childlike fears and misgivings. Would any loving parent want that? Would any loving GOD want that?
Thats true if something is really for the kids own good you can proberly give them an explanation for why even if its not the whole answer.
I think a big part of how people figure stuff out is talking to strangers its not a perfect system but it at least gives you an outside opinion.
yeah, uh, i kept my toddlers from running out the front door into the street “for their own good,” so i guess sure i’m abusive now, i’m glad we’ve taken this discussion in this insane direction
I think that’s kind of attacking a straw man, I was referring to how actual abusive parents including Sal’s mother combine “it’s for your own good” with excuses not to explain themselves when questioned, so yeah. Obviously keeping someone from running out into the street is born out of love, where stealing money from them is born out of power.
Obviously that’s true, but that’s why the “for your own good” and “I’ll explain when you’re older” thing works for abusers. Because it’s also really common and basically necessary for any parents in plenty of non-abusive situations.
Parents do need to do things for their kids own good whether the kids like it or not. Kids, especially younger kids, really do have trouble understanding and aren’t always satisfied with age-appropriate responses, even when there’s no abuse involved.
And yes, that leaves an opening for abusers to use the same tactics. Which sucks, but is unavoidable. We have to look more carefully rather than assume anything not fully explained to a child’s satisfaction is abusive.
Well even if they’re not satisfied with the response, at least they have something to build on when they talk about it with friends and teachers. Giving them NOTHING just let’s them fill in the blanks with their imagination, their fears.
But anyway I said it was “for your own good” COMBINED with excuses to never give reasons that made for the abusive system. Maybe I should go back to using bold print to catch the eye.
Interesting idea, and one that I will think hard on myself.
I had two parenting role models and am now a parent myself. As well, in college I wrote papers in favour of licensing parents, before they could become parents. I mean, we make adopters jump through crazy hoops, but you get to pop one out just because you failed to use protection? After having kids myself, and walking out of the hospital that first time and like, no one was there to make sure I was suitable to care for this tiny fragile being? And with how fucked my life has become since, because there were giant nuclear powered red flags in my relationship, that *I* couldn’t see. So I /still/ support the idea of licensing parents. I was lucky, in that I had one decent parent, who themself had one decent parent. Confusingly my other parent had two decent parents, but she herself is a 100% mental Linda/ Carol amalgam. Different faith, but Communists are no less radical. (and I don’t mean the American “you favour health care? Are you some kind’a pinko commie bastard?” I mean an actual, put the enemies of the state against the wall. Execute them. And return the means of production to the proletariat, COM-MUN-IST). I was lucky to get out as a kid (parents were separated thankfully). But I think understand Willis’ experience. And with as much insight as they has, I can’t see them coming to the conclusion that Linda is a sympathetic character and portraying her like this.
So for myself, I can categorically state that Linda is dead wrong. And I see her not as a misguidedly “loving” parent, and more as just another Blaine. Her methods are very different, and terrifyingly more ‘real’. But she is no different in seeing Walky and Sal as her posessions that are hers to control and dictate what they are to do. Love is an act about nuturing and supporting and empowering someone to be themselves to the best of their ability and desire. Actual love is never about dictating or dictatorial behaviour to anyone. And on that, Imma put this down and go play with my kids and feed them dinner.
The problem with licensing parents is that it would get eugenics-y really fast. That said, yeah, Linda does in many ways not love her kids. In some ways (like feeling the emotion ‘love’) maybe. She’s an abusive dick though, so it’s kinda irrelevant.
Yeah. Sure, it’s important that someone make sure new parents are ready for the responsibility. The children are our future, and improperly prepared parents are almost guaranteed to make huge mistakes that will have devastating effects on said future.
*However*, we do not have any body to whom we’re willing to delegate that authority. Some of us can name some individual people, but a lot of us will disagree on who gets on that list, and we absolutely can’t agree on an existing organization.
There’s also the bit that even people who do get parented well manage to really botch parenting like nobody’s business. Frequently, we can look back at a bad parent and work out how they got to where they are. But sometimes, there’s just no explanation.
Excellent points from you both. And yes there is no mechanism for doing it, that wouldn’t result in an absolute cluster of a nightmare dystopia. So were stuck with self-determination, because the alternative is so much worse. And thus the only thing we as a society can actually do, is improve the support available for parents. For example, instead of taking kids from families whose only failure is being poor, and then paying someone to foster the kid, why not just give the foster money to the kids family in the first place. (our failures in vetting foster parents is sure a solid indication that even if we did license parents, we are doing a shit job of it elsewhere).
Well, at least SOME minor guidelines as to gets to be a parent (as well as better, more contraception) would be a VERY good idea. Especially if you put them on equal footing with those who adopt.
If we just give parenting up to Rule By the Accident of Birth (the very thing our country was founded to REPEAL), we are basically gambling with children, THE FUTURE OF OUR WORLD, as playing tokens.
Either that, or we should raise parents’ accountability by A LOT. Be it a government or a parent, liberal philosophy holds that there are very few justified reasons for humans having ANY sort of power over other humans. The most important of those reasons is to defend the rights of ALL society, not just some. And also parents are supposed to nurture kids become who they want to be and all that.
The point is that individuals or groups holding powers over others is ONLY justified so long as they ONLY use it to provide this extremely important, practical service to society. In the long run, in order to make sure that parents, governments and other forms of governing power actually go on to provide this important service safely, effectively, and efficiently, with only the power necessary and proper to do so, they need to be held to some of the HIGHEST STANDARDS OF ACCOUNTABILITY in direct or greater proportion to said power.
It’s also worth exploring the possibility that the very process of human parenting itself is fundamentally flawed, at least in our modern environment.
I mean, human children are dependent on their parents for an unusually long developmental period compared to other species. Typically, they’ll display an unquestioning trust and submissiveness to their parents for a significant part of that development. In theory, this should a good survival strategy because their parents are likely to be the most fiercely protective adults in those formative years. To mistrust or resist their parents at that early stage might actively endanger them.
That may have worked out fine millions of years ago, when the primary threats to humanity were lions, tigers and poisonous reptiles. But in the modern world, these survival instincts are often hijacked for other purposes — not by other species, but by ideologies. Manipulative religious, political and pseudo-scientific groups attempt to introduce a false parent (sometimes a god, sometimes a movement or ideology) — a parasitic parent that will divert and endlessly exploit the child’s natural instincts, trust and submission.
That said, it may very well be in our best interest NOT to consecrate innocence, to make sure that children are able to survive on their own as early as possible before they can be turned into objects for manipulative groups’ and individuals’ selfish purposes — weapons to forward an ideological cause; trophies which to polish to their liking and show off to others; living dolls used to act out unresolved issues; human crutches with which to compensate for their own unmet psychological needs.
We don’t need to burn coal to heat our homes. We don’t need to destroy forest land to grow more vegetables. We don’t need to kill animals to get meat.
Whatever purposes traditional parenting may have fulfilled (the natural needs, and not just Skinner-Box-style conditioned needs), there are (or will be) much more efficient, safer, effective means by which to fulfill them, without the collateral damage and background radiation that results from apparently unquestionable, “traditional” methods.
Anyway, those are my ten cents on the issue. Now off to deep fry some Sesame Chicken — A.K.A. the heroin of the food court.
Good lord this hits home.
Growing up, for me, there were never favors and gifts. Just ‘future ammunition’.
My parents and I have a better relationship now, but I still can’t accept any help from them.
Turing gifts into ammunition like this is even worse once you realy think about it.
Gifts by DEFINITION are given FREELY. Using them to create a sense of debt only proves that no gifts were given at all. It also implies a very manipulative mindset.
In healthy relationships, people don’t try to trap each other with guilt, debt or obligation. They stick around because they like each other.
I don’t think Linda has ulterior motives, or at least not motives she recognizes as ulterior, as Thag and Sirksome excellently pointed out.
When she does something and then tries to manipulate the person who benefited from that action later, it’s out of a genuine desire to do what’s best for them that they “don’t realize is what’s best for them”.
(Is this behavior taken to an incredibly abusive extreme? Absolutely.)
Also, yeah, Linda is a bad person but she’s a bad person in a slightly different way than Carol.
The “don’t realize is what’s best for them” gimmick in and of itself is very manipulative, and insidiously disguised as “helping people”.
It’s implying that there’s some set of “best interests” hidden inside Sal, that she’ll struggle to find by herself, so Linda oh so kindly steps in to “help”. Such an idealized picture of philanthropy, isn’t it?
But what if a politican claimed they were helping a child find their “unrealized Greenback Party interest”? What if they claimed the child “loved the Populist Party but didn’t realize it yet”? Would it seem like they were doing the child a favor, or themselves? What if parents claimed to help children find their “stamp collector interests”? Or their “violinist interests”?
We don’t help people find their interests or identify by imposing interests and identity on them of our own choosing. We help them by facilitating their exposure to the sheer diversity of human life and lifestyle, and let them be so they can discover their OWN interests and identity.
If children were taught about all ways of life, all religions, all lifestyles without bias from the very get-go, they wouldn’t be so easily herded into the ones laid out for them, now would they?
It’s been long enough I don’t remember how this wasn’t what Carol was like. I mean, OK, Carol supported Ross, but it seemed like that was from the same sort of misguided “I know what’s best for people” sort of way that wasn’t interested in actually checking in with reality. I kind of recall feeling like the biggest difference between Linda and Carol was what church they went to. I mean, I don’t recall Carol seeming overtly racist, but I also don’t remember her actually interacting with anyone who wasn’t either white or in some fashion a service worker.
What “underclassman” means varies, but it would never mean the same as undergraduate. When/where I went to college, it generally meant freshmen and sophomores, but for some purposes (mostly related to dorms) it only meant freshmen, and for one or 2 things meant everyone other than seniors.
At Purdue, technically sophomores were allowed vehicles on campus, but there wasn’t enough space for all the vehicles that policy authorized students would want to bring on campus. As I understand it, they worked this out by approving all vehicle requests from juniors and seniors as the requests came in. Not that the juniors and seniors usually needed an edge there, since they were able to put in their requests at the end of the prior year. But maybe they only happened to get a vehicle at the last minute or something.
On a particular date shortly before the start of the semester, they started giving out authorizations to sophomores in the order they were received until they ran out of spaces. (Well, apart from the number they reserved for late notice qualifying exceptions, such as special needs or student/family with clout and willing to pay a lot for it.)
Some years, that happened pretty quickly.
As a result, some students talked like it was just upperclassmen who got to have vehicles on campus. But sophomores were technically permitted by policy.
The Motorcycle might be a recent thing, and for all we know he mended some bridges with Gramps in order to not wind up dead in a ditch for stealong from him
Regarding Linda, and I am trying my ample best to word this so if you have a problem, please let me know, it’s a sensitive subject that deserves to be held to a standard. I feel that Linda as a character was best used in the Freshman Family Weekend arc in her brief appearance in Sal’s dorm, the resulting argument between Sal and Walky, and then that one meaningful flashback to the Hymmel audition.
Something I think should come up more in fiction is our own engagement and culpability with prejudice, however that manifests. I think it’s really, really easy to believe in progressive values and from there believe you and your values are progressive and therefore correct, and stepping back like what those strips made me do, I appreciate that. I appreciate the prospect of reflecting on the fact that just because I’m not as racist as somebody else doesn’t mean I’m somehow squeaky clean, that my own ability to engage with racism doesn’t need to manifest overtly, but in a thousand subtle, insidious ways. Yeah I’m queer and neurodivergent, but I’m also a middle class white dude in his late 20s who spends too much time on the internet. Is it even feasible for me to be someone without the capacity for prejudice, even if I’d like to believe I’m not? By telling myself I’m not, and I blinding myself to the idea that I could one day hurt someone I love and never even acknowledge it?
I don’t necessarily want Linda to learn a lesson from this or whatever, she’s not the character in a special episode who’s So Nice but then reveals themself to be racist until she learns a Very Important Lesson, I don’t think what I said above is necessarily incongruous with Linda’s writing later on, I just feel her best use was in how her actions made me reflect on myself and I find that more interesting than the question of whether or not she’s an asshole parent (answer: ye).
I think anyone who doesn’t examine their own prejudices at least a little probably has more of them than they’d care to admit. Honestly I don’t trust anyone who considers themselves a “good person”.
The point is that we need to examine what we do, to truly question the customs and group behaviors we were born into if we want to improve ourselves, our society. After all, as our moral awareness only increases with time, a truly moral system NEEDS to be an OPEN system.
This thread sounds like, “Well, if you’ve examined your prejudices once, you’re golden.”
For me, it’s not like that. I’ve been at this long enough that I generally am decent about treating people respectfully and not treating their race as a factor for making decisions about a person. But when I’m rushed, it’s very easy to make a snap judgement and just assume some whitey I don’t know is up to no good.
It’s really a matter that I need to take the time to really be mindful of exactly where my choices are coming from. Maybe he does look like a snakeoil salesman I interacted with decades ago, but it’s not the same guy, and he deserves to be treated as the different individual he is.
I know that’s not the same racism that other people work on. But, as a white person, once I truly accepted that skin color doesn’t matter, it quickly became apparent to me that I was surrounded by people who were just not OK. Some of them were willing to be open-minded, but a lot aren’t.
To be fair, I don’t really understand what it’s like for most people to grow up with that sort of thing as a core tenant, of second or third importance to, “we made you, so you owe us,” depending on whether the individual was willing to count that debt as two things, giving either God or the family the primary debt, or if it was just one thing. (Generally, the family and the church counted it as two, with the family or God having primacy in that debt respectively, and anyone else didn’t really care about that level of detail.)
I mean, sure, I grew up with that. But I didn’t particularly adopt a great deal of what I was taught by my parents. At most, I learned the critical thinking my father tried to teach me, and then used it all over the place.
I do know what it’s like to be an outcast, because I have been for most of my life. I’ve had times when I was welcomed in to social circles, but usually that came with strings of “be this toxic sort of person that we are”, and as soon as I recognized that I left. Being an outcast is not pleasant, but at least i was able to sleep at night.
Of course, that was over half a lifetime ago. Now I spend too much time wondering what exactly I did wrong in college and would it have been possible for me to do things right in a way that really mattered?
So… Asher’s flexing those family connections then.
And while my own family isn’t THAT specific flavor of messed up, it is one I understand, as a sibling had to deal with a whole issue of being given a large gift, that was used as leverage against the two not even a week later.
Assuming Danny’s use of “underclassmen” would apply to Asher, it’s also possible that he just rides it without permission, and hasn’t been caught. The campus cops wouldn’t know who is and who isn’t – the main issue would be underclassmen wouldn’t be able to get parking decals. So if he never parked it on campus, or parked only in visitor or paid parking, he might get away with it, without flexing any connections…
Personally I would’ve done the same as Sal. Hell I couldn’t even bring myself to borrow even gas money from my family, knowing damn well they would milk anytime I ever asked them for help as guilt trip material.
On the plus side, it is good to know Sal’s bike wasn’t fully destroyed merely put into storage. Sucks that she can’t ride it anymore around campus but glad she has her own personal code of conduct she intends to keep.
Well, this puts a different complexion on Daisy wanting an interview with the cool chick on the motorcycle. (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/supervisor/) Silly Jennifer, you should have gone after that story, you could have had the front page with your expose of campus corruption.
Of course, given your background, you probably wouldn’t recognize corruption if you saw it, but still.
It is because she isn’t healthy, thanks to her mother, that she assumes they are.
It’s a subconscious survival strategy that’s suited her well in dealing with her family.
Sal did the only logical thing possible. Her mother is really a disgusting and manipulative person. Putting her bike away was certainly a pain, but it’s better than owing her something more. I don’t remember, does Danny already know her family situation or is this the first hint she gave to him?
Credit where it’s due, Sal, this is an excellent and succinct explanation that lets Danny know the deal without placing blame on him that belongs only and ever to Actual White-Moderate-Style Racist Control Freak, Linda Walkerton
Man, the comments section really hates Linda. As if they’ve never met (or been) people who’ve fucked up parenting, or held unexamined perspectives with racist roots. As if Linda represents an exceptionally bad person, as opposed to the many people you’ve met and are probably friends with.
I’m not defending her, I’m just surprised at the amount of vitriol aimed at a very common type of person.
Being a common type of person doesn’t make her a good type of person and personally I’m not in the habit of making friends with such a low standard of ethics.
But I should also add that it is easier to be mad at and more vicious towards characters than real people. Because Linda has no real feelings. She isn’t real. She’s not going to come to you crying at 3am about how her daughter hates her while still making her controlling awful decisions or have been in your life for 20 years, slowly turning into someone you can’t stand.
You know, it’s probably worth looking at all the comments which mention knowing people (frequently family members, frequently parents) who do this same ‘all favors are later used as collateral’ thing. The issue is, a lot of people DO know someone like Linda, and a decent chunk more of us know someone like Sal or Walky. Unfortunately, Lindas are not pleasant people to know in this respect. Or many respects.
If I had a friend and they said something to me like ‘oh, he’s pre-med. he just doesn’t know it yet,’ I’d have issues with that friend over that statement. If I heard anything like their treatment of Sal, or ‘tried to get a student expelled because her father kidnapped her and other students to get her pulled from school,’ we’re not friends anymore.
And yeah, Linda’s fictional, which makes her a lot easier to hate uncomplicatedly than the actual Lindas in your life, who sometimes do have some complicated ‘after everything I’ve done for you’ type guilt or relative good times to make you sad you’re not on good terms lodged in your psyche. Since the people in the comments who directly know a Linda aren’t happy to know one, though, that should say a lot.
Yeah, but do you really think this comes from an accurate assessment of Walky’s interests and skills, or from what she thinks her golden child SHOULD grow up to be, because she wants a doctor son?
Linda’s easy to hate because her brand of child abuse is something that happens to whole swaths of people, so it’s easier to have a visceral reaction to her behaviour than, say, Blaine putting on a supervillain costume.
Lots of people fuck up parenting when they’re doing their best and lots of people have unexamined racist issues. However, yeah, Linda strikes me as worse than average on both these things. She stole nearly 1K from a little girl so she couldn’t get help paying for a surgery ffs.
That doesn’t excuse anything Linda did. Sal is a person to her.
Also, the mere fact that Linda makes judgements about who is and who isn’t a person doesn’t really do Linda any favors, especially since it’s based on superficial appearances. To be fair, I don’t recall anyone suggesting criteria for determining personhood that didn’t strike me as seeming pretty superficial.
A certain amount of that comes down to the question of what exactly the definition of a person is. I mean, that *seems* pretty simple to answer until I start trying to actually do it. Much like, what exactly a computer programming language is seemed like a pretty simple question until I started trying to answer it. To be fair, I think I’d have a lot easier time of answering that question if I didn’t recall that, before we had electric-powered computers, `computer` was a job description many working women had.
Feels like Mom felt guilty and decided to throw her daughter a bone and was very proud of that and when Sal got into an argument with her the “Ungrateful Kid” mode kicked in and this went down… Sal and Mom could really use some communication lessons and maybe a bit of therapy.
I think that once you’re trying to get another student expelled, specifically because her father kidnapped your son as well as her in a bid to scare her out of college (she brings up the Sal stuff, but she was willing to let it stand until the kidnapping), you’re kind of the asshole here. Likewise when you tell other people that your son ‘is a pre-med major, he just doesn’t know it yet’ over the major he actually has declared.
I also think that once you steal money meant for your daughter’s best friend’s medical care, from your daughter, with the express intent of trying to get your daughter to cut ties with said best friend because you decided she’s ‘a bad influence’ and frame her injury as ‘proof’ of that*, you’ve broken something in that relationship that’s never going to be fixed totally. Just because she’s not the same variety of abusive as Blaine or Ross or Clint doesn’t mean Linda isn’t an abusive parent, and it’s very clear Sal does not trust her as a result of Linda’s actions.
* Note that what we know of Marcie’s injury is that she was maimed by the ‘good kid with a bright future’ who’d already hurt Marcie once, and Sal got in trouble for defending against. Linda said nothing about Leland facing consequences or defending Sal’s actions then, which says a lot about how hollow her subsequent actions against Amber really were. Marcie and Sal have also discussed the incident in a way that implies Sal might have been picking fights with Leland, and Marcie was collateral damage. In other words, Linda’s blaming the victim for being maimed by a wealthier, whiter, maler kid, and then using her status as victim as ‘proof’ she’s unsuitable as Sal’s friend. And then she did something similar down the line with Amber.
These things are all true and horrible, but Linda is still Sal and Walky’s mom. Any amount of improvement on her part would in turn improve their lives, even if Sal were to justifiably cut ties.
I didn’t deny that she was an asshole. The thing about her is that she cares about her kids but her methods and approach are really shitty. What she really needs is help in understanding why what she is doing is shitty and how to improve it. She Cares but in a very wrong way.
When your caring manifests as emotional and financial abuse of your child, some bridges get burned. Even if Linda turned everything around instantly and started groveling for forgiveness from her kids*, Sal would not be obligated to forgive her just because Linda’s her mother. Neither would Walky. And the onus is on Linda, as the parent who still has all the power here, to stop abusing her children and make amends. The intent doesn’t matter, because the impact was ‘Linda emotionally and financially abused her children, and continues to do so.’
* Just because Walky was the golden boy doesn’t mean Linda didn’t fuck him up, too. He clearly has severe anxiety about disappointing her from seeing how she treated Sal, to the point where it’s a blow to his identity that he might not be effortlessly learning the material anymore because he’s the Smart Funny One. There’s other issues in play there – he never learned to study due to giftedness/possible ADHD that means the methods taught won’t work on him – but the degree to which he was afraid of not getting an A because it’d disappoint Linda? That’s from seeing her love is conditional and trying to stay on her good side.
In any relationship isolated down to two people, I’m unable to think of any time in which an abused person has an obligation to accept reconciliation with their abuser beyond any environmental situation that requires cooperation. To be clear, once such an environmental situation is resolved, they’re back to “no obligation”, even if there had been an apparent accepting of the reconciliation to get over the environmental situation.
When the abuse includes any form of continuity errors, such as gaslighting or guilt-tripping over gifts given, reconciliation becomes nigh impossible. Sal cannot reasonably ever trust anything from Linda. For that matter, neither can Walky. He probably *will*, but that doesn’t mean it’s sane for him to do so. He’s just not recognized all of what she’s done to his sister.
As far as the Walky abuse goes, yeah. I think the best way I’ve seen to handle a gifted child like Walky is to find something that does tax their abilities early on, and use that to teach those skills. If you can’t find something early on, take advantage of that to get them to the point where you can quickly.
Our school systems do not do this. The ones I have direct experience with actively fought against doing this. After all, they’re daycare systems, and they don’t get paid for turning out valuable members of society early. Or, for that matter, at all.
As an older person with autism spectrum and ADHD, I can say that many of the study techniques that normal people use *do* work for me and many others with autism spectrum and ADHD. The problem is, you can’t teach them to someone with a trivial learning exercise as the training material.
Everything my elementary school tried to use as exercises in those studying methods failed because I picked up the material as quickly as they related it. Actually, quicker. They repeated stuff multiple times so the normal kids could learn it, which taught me to recognize, “lesson’s on repeat mode, time to find my own stimulus.”
For a long time, I thought that’s what ADD *was*. It took me until college for me to recognize that the fact that I got bored with tests and quizzes and stopped focusing on them was a real issue beyond the impact it had on my grades.
That point wasn’t driven home by college academics. I continued to get acceptable grades by getting the first x% of a long quiz or a test perfect and then flaking through the rest, in part because even on the later portions, I was doing above average – I just wasn’t meeting the same standard as I had at the start. What made me realize it was situations in my personal life that happened because I wasn’t living at home and more importantly was surrounded by others who weren’t living at home. Taking care of my friends required that I push past that ADD boundary – and it turned out to be a thing there, too. It was one thing for that to be an issue during a test, another for a friend to be hurt because I stopped paying as much attention.
Caring about your kids dictates you care about their friends. This is one of the few positions my father has held that I still respect him for. I feel like Linda would deliberately miss this point and assert that’s why she was trying to get Sal to cut ties with Marcie.
I feel like Linda cares about Sal as an extension of herself that she can’t control, rather than as a separate person. This is by no means not unique to her. In the comic, Blaine was also like this regarding Amber, though that was also taken to the next level by his misogynism and again by his mafia ties.
No, people can be beyond hope. Specifically, if they refuse to try and change. It’s not like Linda doesn’t know what Sal thinks of her but she’s never seen fit to try and improve things or change her behaviour. So for now, yeah, she’s beyond hope. She doesn’t have to be forever, but for now she absolutely is.
I feel like that’s less of a “Linda is beyond hope” and more of a “What has been attempted to get Linda to see she needs to fix herself isn’t working”.
In that way, Linda is much more like the world today. It certainly needs fixing, but the things I’ve tried don’t seem to be doing anything.
Why stricter rules for first years? At a Big Ten university, 20-30% will be gone after one year. Why treat 18 year olds as not completely adult? Check the name of the comic. That year is a transition and it’s when kids get into the most trouble. Keeping that trouble on campus makes it easier to manage.
And it makes it a real pain in the ass when drama happens on campus and the Uni has to lawyer up against lawsuits and bad PR I imagine. As I remember that Evergreen college got such massively bad rep that their enrolment went down the drain.
Sal views anything from Linda like this, because once Linda showed this pattern of behavior, it was clear that any gift would later be twisted like this. In the short term, it doesn’t matter what the short term plan is. What matters is the long term plan.
Also, the kicker was that Linda was honest when she was giving the gifts the first time around. That’s why Sal doesn’t have any way to tell that Danny’s being honest. The only way she can learn to trust Danny is to see that he lives by the things he says, that he gives gifts to others and doesn’t hold them over their heads.
Except… upkeep isn’t hella expensive. I DIDN’T have a rich mom, and I had a motorcycle through college (still do). Upkeep is hella cheap. Parts much cheaper than car parts and you can easily take a motorcycle apart and put it back together by hand with a good wrench and screwdriver, and liability insurance on a motorcycle is next-to-nothing because they’re light enough to not cause much damage.
Unless you’re driving a Harley or Goldwing and you got full coverage insurance (including medical) and are going to the shop for every breakdown and buying OEM parts and… ohhhh…. Sal you spoiled princess.
Mechanical maintenance on Goldwings isn’t that bad, since they’re basically built like small cars the service intervals are longer than high-revving sport bikes. They get you in labor, because when those intervals roll around you have to take all that bodywork apart to get at anything (even simple maintenance items like the air filter). Insurance might also be a problem for a teenager when the bike’s engine displacement is measured in nautical tonnage.
Grandpa’s highway Barcalounger is one of the best-kept secrets of the motorcycling world. They run like a Swiss watch and eat up highway miles like nothing.
I’ve got an old 70s Honda; it’s mechanically simple, reliable, and insurance is cheap, but the maintenance intervals are short, the tires are skinny, it has dual rear shocks so death wobble can happen, and pretty much the only place to get the right parts for it is Common Motor Collective. All dat chrome, tho…
I suspect it’s that Sal either doesn’t have the time for a part-time job/her own maintenance right now while also getting the hang of college courseloads, or what money she does have was stretched pretty thin between motorcycle upkeep and getting back into music and starting roller derby, which both would’ve had initial costs. I suspect Sal doesn’t let Linda have access to her finances at all (since that would give her access to withdraw money), and we’ve never seen her at a part-time job, so presumably whatever money she had last semester was saved up from the summer and high school. If she didn’t have the time for work, or at least not stable work, expenses start adding up a lot faster.
Also two superheroic chase sequences, one of which included AG dropping caltrops on the road and the other of which included catching people being thrown from a moving vehicle, does seem pretty likely to do more than the usual wear and tear.
Anything’s basically hella ‘xpensive when you’ve got no money coming in. I started college with about 75% of what I’d need to pay for my expected four years… but I’d been saving up my whole life to get to that point.
Sure, I was making a lot more per hour at age 18 than I had been at age 2, but I also wasn’t working while school was in session (well, tutoring, but that’s not reliable). My employer from right before college wasn’t interested in having a summer employee, so I wasn’t able to get as much per hour at 19 as I was at 18.
So I was definitely feeling the cost of all of those not readily replaceable dollars. I went as far as not eating supper on Sundays because the dorm cafeterias didn’t serve Sunday supper, and I didn’t have a kitchen so the only alternatives were fast food and restaurants, both of which were hella ‘xpensive.
I’m not taking the time to go back to look at those two chase scenes, but I did somehow get the impression that there was at least major cosmetic damage and possibly some structural damage as well to the motorcycle at the end of the second chase scene. I think we saw the bike after that, but if I’m recalling that correctly, it’s probably beyond what Harmony was thinking.
Linda really and truly doesn’t grasp how terrible of a parent she is, huh.
It’s one thing to do something nice for a kid, with the understanding between the both of you that “here’s a nice thing, but if you do something wrong with this nice thing, it will be taken from you.” But that’s involve clearly communicating with her daughter from the get go and not secretly doing something “nice” in order to then use that fact in a fight later.
There’s also a difference between a child (or even an adult) being given privileges and using a nice thing you ostensibly did ‘just to be nice’ as ammunition.
With this series of conversations about how Sal thinks being are trying to use for their own ends, I wonder if Marcie telling her that Sal was “her first Malaya” freaked her out too.
‘Cause like the answer’s real obvious, Marcie had a crush on Sal for a long time (maybe still does?) and that’s still real but it doesn’t have to influence Marcie’s every decision and feeling, Marcie still cares about Sal and values her companionship, but it suddenly occurred to me that Marcie and Sal hadn’t even had a conversation since then and that was over two years ago, and Marcie only finally reappeared on-panel with Sal this storyline at roller derby, and now I’m wondering if Sal’s tanking her relationships because “everyone wants something from her.”
I hope it hasn’t gotten that bad. She seemed reassured from what Malaya told her (though of course Malaya had to tease her a bit in there), but it has definitely been a bit since we saw a lot of Marcie outside bonus strips.
The fact that she is still in roller derby seems promising to me, though – I’m not sure Sal’d be able to stand that much Malaya, especially Malaya with authority, if she were on REALLY bad terms with Marcie. (She likes Carla well enough, and she was clearly starting to be on better terms with AG, but I’m not sure either of them was sufficient pre-skip to put up with That Much Malaya.)
It could definitely be nothing, I’m just kinda thinking it like Sal hangs out with Marcie and then starts thinking “oh right Marcie had a crush on me. She wanted something from me. She didn’t want me for me, she wanted me to love her back.”
Yeah, I hope that’s not the case but I could see it being Weird for a while until Sal manages to shout Asshole Brain down that they were best friends BEFORE Marcie was (probably) attracted to her (sure, little kids have crushes sometimes but usually not THAT young) and have maintained best frienddom even after it was clear Sal was straight.
(Those two things being true, and Marcie being one of Sal’s closest friends, I do think Sal would eventually be able to break the thought pattern before it permanently destroyed their relationship. Or at least, I certainly hope so.)
My Mom: I hope when you have kids, that you have a daughter who’s as horrible as you are to me!
Me at 14: Oh, well that’s no problem. I didn’t plan on having kids anyway.
Mom: *insert Willy Wonka “Wait stop come back” meme here*
I’m getting married in November & none of my family will be involved as I refuse to allow her or my older sister who likes to act like a parent to meddle and intervene in my God blessed right to MY OWN happiness. No amount of “generosity” is worth being “graced by their presence”, and if that puts me off their preferred path to their idea of Paradise, well then lemme get some streamers for my handbasket to Hell.
Only advice I give the bride and groom is to ignore all the advice people will give you. Even this. Since you seem to have a firm grip on that, I wish you well and all the years of love and happiness.
Also, I look forward to chatting with you in hell if I’m wrong. You sound awesome.
My husband’s relationship with his mom is like this… only she doesn’t have the same clout to pull. Every present is something to bring up when you are mad. My dad suggested my husband start bringing cash whenever he visits her and when she says “you can’t talk to me like that after all I did for you” start laying 20s on the table and going “can I now?”
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Well, I don’t know what I expected*… but this is worse.
beyond it being linda’s fault in some way, obvs
Pretty much every single scene where Sal rides her bike in this entire comic is going to be super depressing in hindsight, isn’t it?
Like, every single bit of good Sal did with that bike… helping Joyce save Becky, saving AG from the truck, helping AG save Joyce and Faz from Blaine… it all feels tainted now.
(it’s also giving me major IW!Linda vibes)
In matters of parents, it seens we will be never enough to them…
It’s all the same basic mistake no matter which way you slice it — if you value their respect too much, you give them a hold over you, that they deserve come a cold day on Venus.
When the focus turns to YOUR own self-respect, there is often a well-needed, natural shift.
I understand this *so* so much. I have accomplishments that were made /far/ more *difficult* because of interference by certain people in my life. And on finally succeeding *despite* being Harding’d, these people had the temerity to act like they deserved to celebrate my success? Their actions do *nothing* to actually diminish my success, but they cast a shadow upon it, and when I look, the shadow on the surface is what I see.
I’m trying to erect a brighter light, but it is very hard and taking a long time.
If someone gives you money to buy groceries, and you use them to cook one of the best meals in the world, did they cook the meal or did you?
Oh, logically I know the truth value of it. I’m just failing to download that to my reptile brain so that I am emotionally convinced of it.
Think of it this way. All those things she did with the bike, are all things her mother would have disapproved of. She used that bike to help the very people her mom would have thrown out of school.
*I* expected that she was secretly an amazing student. Like, unbeknownst to her peers, she tested out of two semesters’ worth of classes.
And then is having trouble with freshman calculus? Possible, I suppose, but not very likely.
Well, if they go by credits and she passed enough AP tests… like by my university’s standards I was never technically a freshman because of credits from AP tests, and there are a lot of APs that are unrelated to math.
I’ve known people who were extremely intelligent and tested very well but still struggle with math. I’ve also known people that could blow the roof off a math test but failed at everything else. The intelligence split over math is weird.
*huffs on a toy pipe* Yep, that’s how that went.
Would it really be reasonable to go around IU in a motorbike?
classic Linda shit
too bad I bet even if she dies of 100% natural causes with a perfect alibi for Sal, somehow there’ll be something still hanging over Sal’s head
I was going to say that Linda’s last words to Sal will be “You’re welcome.”, but then I realized that’s not right.
Her last words will be to ask/demand Sal apologize to and thank her.
So, yes… I think Linda is more delusional than Shadow Weaver.
….is your Gravatar meant to be Kaiserneko?
I saw it as the TF2 Scout
It’s from paranatural, a webcomic I highly recomend!
I think I’m the only person that didn’t see Shadow Weaver’s “You’re Welcome” bit as intending to be one last moment of emotional manipulation, but rather exactly what Catra needed to hear at the moment.
After all, the previous thing she did was give Catra what she always wanted from her. Acknowledgement that she was proud of what she’d accomplished. But how do you properly respond to somebody who has abused you for your entire life finally doing something directly for your benefit that you appreciate? How do you work through those emotions?
No time to wait for her to figure it all out, so Shadow Weaver simply tells her. Say ‘Thank You’ for the one good thing they’ve done for you and then go do what you have to do. She knew better than anybody else that a handful of good deeds didn’t make her a good person, and she wasn’t expecting anybody else to think that either.
Somehow I don’t think Linda would have changed her name from Light Spinner.
Huh, you mean they won’t rent you a parking spot that costs a fortune every semester and is so far across campus from where you live that you’ll wind up either walking everywhere or taking the bus anyway, but you need to do it because if you can’t make the drive home every now and again you’ll barely ever see your family?
Yes, I’m bitter, thanks for asking.
Well, back when I was in college (admittedly over 45 years ago) I didn’t have a car, and that wasn’t that uncommon. Most people didn’t go home too often (winter break, spring break, and maybe thanksgiving – plus summers, as attending over summers was not common back then). To get home if you didn’t have a car, you either had to know someone with a car going where you were, or you used the ride board (which was an physical bulletin board that people posted when and where they were going – and riders paid for gas). Nowadays people may be less willing to get rides from people they don’t know (or offer rides to people they don’t know)…
It’s been over a quarter century since I went to school, but I seem to recall neither IU nor Purdue would do that to you… unless you filed for a hardship exemption to get a parking spot. They just want to ensure that freshmen all live in the dorms and don’t have cars on campus for some reason I never understood.
This is different from Purdue’s not offering test out credit for Programming I for CS majors.
That’s the only class in which they explicitly teach students how to use their online submission system, and they don’t want to have to tell the students who tested out of that class to ‘man submit’. Those two words are so hard to say that they’re unwilling to reduce their risk of needing to ask students, “Um, despite being one of the better schools for mathematics in the country, we are completely unfamiliar with the practice of throwing out outliers, and so you’ve *totally* ruined our curve with your grades with your 100%s on everything. Could you please just skip the last couple of projects and the final so we can pass a reasonable number of your classmates? You have enough points in the class that will still be one of the higher As.” That’s always so much easier to say, after all.
Hm. So, not a Ghost Rider situation, then…
So it was a matter of principles, good on Sal for that then. Also I understand a little bit more about the whole “No one owns me” stick Sal has bugging her lately, she doesn’t want to owe anybody anything and personally I can relate to that. Sal choosing to give up her ride also further validates what I said before, she decides to do things on her own terms and that’s admirable in it’s own right.
But it’s also feeding this expectation she has where every act of kindness comes with strings attached. She expects there to be a quid pro quo to every exchange, whether it’s an immediate transaction or something that can be held over her head and cashed in later. That’s just depressing.
She doesn’t want to ‘owe’ anybody anything, and nobody just gives her anything outright, so she feels she has to ‘break even’ in the zero-sum game of life. Hence the gift cards in exchange for the bicycle.
Which, yeah, is messed up. But it’s pretty clear she thinks that way because she was effectively raised to believe it. Because her parents never do nice things for her without expecting a “return on their investment”. Even while they treated Walky completely differently – which is why she is so often instinctively bitter towards him, even though she’s starting to resist that tendency, because she understands now that it isn’t his fault.
Well I like my idea that her bike was actually a transformer a lot better. But of course it’s just Linda being a jerk. Bleh.
I mean, this isn’t totally incompatible with her bike being a Transformer. You can hold out hope.
This will payoff when Sal’s bike escapes and blows up Linda. 😀
It can definitely be both.
Any theories why Sal and her mom can never get along? I mean, she’s not a delinquent, not really, so…
Likely racial issues aside, Linda is a very controlling person, and Sal is a person who is very against being controlled.
Very succinctly said!
Linda’s racism, at least in regards to Sal, is probably overstated. My read on her is that it’s mainly about personality and behavior. Linda has a very specific image in mind about how a daughter should behave which Sal has never matched, and Linda is too inflexible and too controlling to handle that in a healthy manner. Any racism on Linda’s part is secondary to the clash of personality here.
That said, she’s definitely racist, her treatment of Marcie makes that pretty clear.
You may be right, but you may be understating the influence of Linda’s racism in her treatment of Sal. Racism is a subconscious influence, not usually a conscious one; Linda probably thinks it’s just a clash of personality too, but realistically, if she is racist, that is going to influence her concept of how her daughter should look and behave. Sal and Linda’s relationship reminds me strongly of a friend’s relationship with her own mother. My friend and her mother are both mixed race, and my friend has afro-textured curly hair. Her mother is extremely controlling, especially about my friend’s appearance, and especially about her hair. It’s odd because her mother is the same race that she is, but she seems to feel very strongly that my friend wearing her hair naturally is nothing short of unforgivable. She obsesses over my friend’s hair even more than my friend’s weight, which is her second biggest source of criticism. Why does she think my friend has to straighten her hair? Probably for the same reason she thinks my friend has to be thin: it’s not something she actively thinks about, it’s the expression of an unconscious societally-ingrained prejudice. Her obsession with her daughter’s hair is racist in the same way her obsession with her daughter’s weight is sexist, it’s a bigger-picture thing.
Well she stole from her own daughter while being prejudiced against young Marcie because she’d “wind up robbing convenience stores just to get mommy’s attention”.
Just the kind of behavior you’d expect from supremacist groups and individuals who judge others by standards they themselves fail to follow.
The hair stuff isn’t the root of the problem here, it’s a small part of the clash between who Sal is and what Linda wants her to be. If Sal naturally had hair like Walky I don’t think she’d have wound up with a better relationship with Linda
It isn’t a small part though. Linda and Charles opinions on her hair are one of the things Sal was visibly carrying for 99% of the story pre-timeskip. We know her feelings on ‘how she’s supposed to look’ are complicated and go back to when she was at least 12. On another note, hair type would’ve been one of the first things Linda would be able to notice went against what she wanted – long before any personality would be evident.
I don’t know your friend or her mother, so can’t explain them. But I’ve known mixed-race parents who struggle with the feeling that their kids not doing the things they did to blend in is going to end up horribly. The thing is, they specifically selected the neighborhood they lived in to be one that was more accepting, so their kids aren’t facing the racism that they got from both sides for no goddamned reason.
Note that by ‘struggle with’, I mean, ‘abuse their kids and then get called out on it by their neighbors and coworkers, over and over again’, rather than something more enlightened, unfortunately. It’s a sad world sometimes, even in the good parts. And by the good parts, I mean the enlightened microcosms that shift around over time as the bad parts try to stamp them out, so it’s not like I can list neighborhoods. By the time you moved there, they probably wouldn’t be the good parts anymore.
I’m inclined to blame sexism more than racism, but Salk nows more about her situation than I do.
She didn’t get her brothers white people hair.
I mean isn’t it pretty clear? Linda’s a racist who feels entitled to steal from her children, and Sal disagrees.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I think it’s been explored/explained pretty well that Sal’s mom has always favored Walky over Sal because he’s lighter? cuter? more compliant? Has “whiter, straighter hair”? Because she’s racist against her own child. Argh.
IIRC their skintone is pretty much the same, and their facial features aren’t that different. I think it started with Sal’s curly hair vs. Walky’s straight hair, which led to Linda treating Walky more favorably, which led to Sal giving less and less of a shit about what Linda thought (which is itself a more stereotypically black trait) while Walky was more compliant, which led to Linda being even more biased, and the whole thing just kinda snowballed.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think Willis said that Sal is meant to be noticeably darker. That Linda noticed this and unconsciously (consciously) began forwarding Walky toward being a doctor while dismissing Sal due to her friendship with Marcie (AN ILLEGAL’S CHILD!) and later robbery. Essentially writing off her child as a lost cause.
I thought he said their skintone is the same. There were a bunch of posts by readers saying so when this originally came up. When she told Walky “you came out whiter” I don’t think she was speaking literally.
Iirc Willis has said that their skin coloring is exactly the same, like with an eyedropper tool, but the “ethnic” hair is a thing.
I do not think Willis would write a series where the Black character is mistaken about her own lifelong experiences of racism. Let’s believe Sal.
In addition, Linda likes Walky’s instinctive “fawn” reactions, and doesn’t like Sal’s instinctive “fight” reactions. It does not occur to Linda that she is the threat causing these reactions, she thinks it’s just how her kids are (because one is a golden boy and one is a Black hoodlum). She is actually mistreating both her kids — directly with Sal, obviously, plus indirectly with Walky, as he gets a front-row seat to how conditional Linda’s love is, and what it looks like to lose mom’s support.
I would like to see how Charles feels about all this. He’s been kind of a passive houseplant, so far. (Kinda like Ethan’s dad, but less closeted.)
I digressed, there. I meant to say, their identities as Black vs. “generically beige” are more complicated than their literal eyedropped skin colour. Which makes sense because, in real life, Blackness is not just the melanin, either.
Correct, their literal eyedropper skin coloring is exactly the same: #CEA87E in average light, and #A67558 in the shadows. (Outdoor winter shadows are #90806F.)
Eyedropper-ed from the most recent comic where they’re both indoors on the same panel:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2021/comic/book-11/04-hompk/bigmanlymachoman/
Linda’s projecting the stereotypes of her own biases onto her children, but it doesn’t seem to sink in for her that she’s the one perpetuating the negativity feedback loop that “pRoVeS hEr RiGhT” (for want of better phrasing) about Sal.
My agreement to all of this. I wonder about Charles, but given Sal doesn’t have any warm thoughts about him either, I don’t expect much. Still, maybe there’s hope for him much like there’s hope for Hank.
Sometimes I remember Saul exists, and feel a passing sadness. Gay or ace, that approach to sexuality just sounds miserable.
Honestly? I think Charles has been well-represented as, well, complicit in his wife’s racism, if not actively aiding it. It’s not a flavor of racism that bothers him, essentially.
See, if you told Linda or Charles that Linda was doing anything racist, they’d be furious. How dare you? Her husband is Black! She has mixed-race children! She LOVES Charles, how can you throw these stupid tiny details in her face? And Charles would back her up, because what a ridiculous accusation. Linda just wants the best for their kids, rather than to “grow up on the streets”, or “acting like a thug”.
Yeah, I agree. Charles is less active, so we’ve seen less, but we haven’t seen him push back at all, even when not in Linda’s presence.
Well, after all, Sal looks so PRETTY with her hair long and straight…
Hypocrisy is a thing.
You know who was particularly good at detecting hypocrisy? Mike was. http://www.itswalky.com/comic/hypocrites/
@Clif
Eh, that specific strip you linked seemed less like Mike actually detecting any hypocrisy on their part and more like an unironic “checkmate liberals” meme.
Also wow it’s weird to read that strip in light of what Walkyverse Mike ultimately became
I think it’s been alluded to that her skin is slightly darker then walky’s and therefor the “less white” child is worth less
At least, that’s Sal’s conclusion. But honestly, who knows? It could be random. It could be that Linda just likes boys better than girls, or that Sal cried a bit more as a baby, or that Walky was more compliant as a child (and still is today) or that she flipped a coin.
Willis doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would write a story in which a Black character would be wrong about her lifelong experience of racism. Let’s believe Sal.
Also, perhaps you’re only doubting Sal here because she’s a fictional character. If you tend to come up with alternate possibilities in real life, where you’d argue that something isn’t really about racism as claimed, but it’s some other thing instead, you might be falling into the trap of Occam’s Big Paisley Tie. http://www.shakesville.com/2013/08/occams-big-paisley-tie.html?m=1
Well no racist, at least these days, will outright admit it. But they don’t need to.
“If it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
It’s my impression that they still will, but only in their enclaves. Which more or less means that if you accuse someone of racism and they admit it, watch out, because that means they know that pretty much everyone around them except you will support them on that, and most of them have more clout than you. And by ‘support them’, I mean ‘go after you, your house, your family.’
Sure, she’s a closet bigot, but trying to figure out why a toxic parent would favor one child over another is generally a waste of time. It doesn’t matter what Linda’s motivations are. It’s enough to know that she favors Walky over Sal. That may be because she’s racist, or that may be incidental to her racism, or it may be that it’s only part of the reason.
But worrying about what makes toxic people tick is always a waste of time.
I suppose you have a point there. Said time may very well be better spent on preventing those toxic mindsets from reproducing.
There’s no cure for toxicity as of yet, but why use that as an excuse not to develop a vaccine?
In real life, figuring out what makes toxic people tick is very important: that’s the only way to predict what they’ll be toxic about next, and the only possible way to get them to understand anything.
Also how they will attack people. It’s not all about what they *can* do. I’ve known toxic CEOs who never personally demoted or fired anyone due to their particular toxicity.
Sure, these things *definitely* happened under their watch, and it was *definitely* with their support. But they limited themselves to casting shade and supporting the toxicity of others, rather than getting their own hands dirty, because of their own fear of persecution – despite being a CEO of a local major employer and well respected by the other elites of their state, they were still ‘persecuted’.
Sounds about white.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not say they were subject to “persecution”!
Persecution is about the systematic mistreatment of individuals and groups. It’s about cruel and unfair behavior. However, when an individual or group in a position of power is angrily criticized and perhaps boycotted for social, ethical, legal violations, that’s not “persecution”. That’s PROTEST.
Government officials jailed for denying the rights of groups they deem unworthy are not being persecuted for their beliefs or personality. Parents penalized for stealing from their children are not being persecuted for their beliefs. They’re being protested and appropriately punished for their on cruel and unfair behavior towards fellow human beings.
By repackaging protest and appropriate punishment as “persecution”, not only do manipulative groups and individuals get to commit all kinds of abuses guilt-free — they get to feel like they’re martyrs while doing so. Further counciling manipulative religious groups in particular are passages in their holy books that promise glorious rewards for being “persecuted” — after they die, of course.
She didn’t say they were persecuted she said they were ‘persecuted’ personally I don’t use half quotes for that type of thing I use full quotes but to each their own.
Its basically the typing equivelent of air quotes or the double blinking peace sign, or an eyeroll.
That’s sorta the thing with narratives really. In real life I’ve known plenty of black people conflate the way they’ve been treated to racism. But then when the situation is seen or observed they were also being really unreasonable? Where like even if racism played a part they definitely weren’t blameless. People have a habit of latching on to their “otherisms” when trying to parse why they’re treated badly. I mean why else would somebody be treating me badly other than that they have a biased hatred towards me and people like me. Which yknow credit where credit is due that happens all the goddamn time. And since we’ve recieved word of god that that is probably what’s happening we can’t fight that. You could just as easily argue Linda has some deep rooted sexism since that’s another way Sal and Walky differ. Or even that there’s no reason and Linda just can’t compartmentalise her love and just naturally shows favoritism. If I was Sal’s friend in real life and she told me me her brother is the favorite because he’s less black (well for one if he put off because the whole idea of what makes someone more or less black is a huge thing for me, as I am a black man who feel estranged from the black community and is kinda sensitive to the black on black gatekeeping our community can sometimes have) I would also ask what makes her feel that way. Like not that I don’t believe she’s being neglected or abused but moreso that understanding her bias is paramount to confronting it. That and it could just be multiple things. Nobody’s restricted to just being one form of bigot.
^ This ^. I fully read Linda as more sexist than racist, but also very, very much both, *and* classist. (total aside Yoto, with apologies for being way out of line, but curious: do you think ‘Black on Black’ gatekeeping might also be defensive classism?)
Back to Linda though, she seems like, it’s ok that her husband is black, because he’s a man. Her son is too, /and/ he has whiter attributes. But Sal came out blacker and *female*. Then had the gaul to make friends with poor trash? Doesn’t Sal get how hard Linda has had to work on her image and station?
So it’s like, “Jesus Christ lady! Just pick a bigotry and stay in your lane. Do you have to hog them all?”
Can you imagine if Sal *had* been into Marcie? 🌋
Colorism is absolutely just a gatekeeping way of separating yourself from others in your community. It often gets into classism cuz every ism tends to be classism at its core. Darks skinned black people are portrayed by media and other black people as aggressive, rude and thuggish while light skinned or mixed black people are often seen as sell-outs and uncle toms. Mixed children tend to get the worst of it since they have to deal with both racists AND black people who feel they get preferential treatment. Darker skinned people have absolutely disavowed and criticized light skinned people for appearing in film and tv or being more in line with what is seen as conventional beauty in the US. Which is pretty unfair if you ask me. So I’m that regard I kinda am not a fan of Walky being guilted but for being less black (whatever that means in this context). It honestly feels like that would just be Sal being just as bigoted as Linda for the opposite reasons. As is the fate of any light skinned black people who aren’t black enough to “matter”
“Can you imagine if Sal *had* been into Marcie? 🌋”
Nope, because I don’t need an aneurysm born of rage. Or a coronary for that matter.
I think Linda is the not racist (TM) type of racist.
So she wouldn’t refuse to marry him because he’s black she would just find him not marriage material in a way she can’t put her finger on, or a specific reason which she would just happen not to notice in a white man, until she for whatever reason changed her mind.
Going off of a one off comment he proberly started off as fun but not marriage material but became her project.
I think she’s sexist not in a women are inherently inferior to men way but in a double standard way.
Where stuff like conquoring the slide or standing up for a friend are more likely to be celebrated or at least corrected with understanding when a boy is doing it than a girl.
Linda has specific and inflexible expectations for her children that Sal never fit.
Linda stole nearly 1K that Sal had saved up specifically to help Marcie pay for an expensive surgery and to this day she thinks that was a good parenting move, despite the fact that Sal robbed a convenience store out of desperation right after this.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-9-comic/01-flyin-to-the-red/losses/
It goes back earlier than those two events, they were the breaking point on an already strained relationship
There’s some slightly rscist subtext at the root but I think they kind of just have too much negative history between them now. It’s not just one thing, it’s several that build ontop of each other. They kind of just have different idealogies now and apparently even when Linds does something “nice” for Sal it has ulterior motives. I am one of the few that don’t think Linda is “evil” but there’s s lot keeping them from understanding each other and it’s mostly Linda’s fault.
She stole $700 dollars from her 13-year-old daughter.
Linda’s abusive and Sal’s her chosen Unfavorite Child to Walky’s Golden Boy Who Can Do No Wrong. (Woe be to Walky when she turns up the pressure about something important, someday, and he DOESN’T break under it.) Also, both Sal and Walky suspect Linda’s got some unconscious racism and Sal’s natural hair texture was a factor in her favoring Walky. Linda’s racism was DEFINITELY a factor in her irrationally deeming Marcie a ‘bad influence’ and going so far as to steal money from Sal to demand her cut ties with her best friend.
I can see her having troubles with Walky dating Lucy, because Lucy isn’t a go getter like Dorothy is.
Yeah, that’s gonna be a rough one provided they last long enough for Linda to meet her.
What do you wanna bet that’d prompt Linda trying to pressure him into his ‘real’ major, too? We know that one’s going to happen eventually.
This. Because, after all, Lucy doesn’t have aspirations to be president and … sorry, I can’t come up with any other ways that Lucy falls short of the Dorothy standard.
It could just be parental favoritism. The reasons why could be any number of things of course. In any case it’s pretty shitty how Linda is towards Sal compared to Walky.
Not if you check how it’s expressed and what particulars Linda picks over. If it were any number of things, those would be different. In Linda’s case, they’re all possibly racism particulars. You don’t grab a dice bag full of perfectly balanced dice and roll straight sixes. Thirty plus dice, the odds against that happening are over a septillion to one.
Whatever you roll, the odds of getting that exact roll were a septillion to one.
Or whatever 6 to the 30th power is.
“Whatever 6 to the 30th power is”
It’s 221073919720733357899776.
Yeah, Joyce can’t drop that F-bomb on Linda soon enough.
The rise in blood pressure will burst her open like a racist piñata.
…not sure if you meant “Joyce can’t drop that F-bomb on Carol soon enough” or “Sal can’t drop that F-bomb on Linda soon enough,” but either one works by me.
It definitely help if Linda increased her cholesterol intake.
Come on Linda
Take a bite…
You know you want to.
It’s pure temptation
Like the apple
Eve gave on to Adam.
TAG TEAM! Joyce and Sal vs Linda and Carol. In today’s rumble we see two daughters combining forces to standup to their manipulative, machiavalian, moronic mothers. So far the match has been pretty even. Joyce and Sal have scored many great points, but the heels are just so into themselves the points aren’t landing. Wait! There’s movement outside the ring. What’s this? IT’S AMAZI-GIRL! She’s climbing up, up, up oh GAWD, she’s coming in off the TOP rope! “You all are *worse* than MY dad.” BOOM! Can you believe that slam! It’s hitting the media! It’s trending! Linda and Carol will never hear then end of that in their congregations folks. That’s it, tonight is THE night that the lights went out in Bloomington. Drive safe. Hug your loved ones. Good night.
No, seriously. What is this thing you have about Joyce specifically dropping an F-bomb on Linda when they’ve hardly interacted. I’d much rather see Jennifer lose it with Linda.
Oh, Linda. Thinking that you’re doing your kid, who’s always been fiercely independent and wanting to earn things her way*, a favour by pulling strings for her. Though I’m going to chance this one up to… ignorance, rather than malice.
*one might argue whether or not screwing a Math TA for better grades was earning it.
Doing favors for your child are great. Its just Sal resents these favors because she hates her mother and will never forgive her.
Because what her mother did was unforgivable.
I mean, it’s also pretty clear from this context and what we already know of her* – Linda’s favors come with catches, and she WILL use them later to try and get her way because you ‘owe her’ for them.
* Again, stole money in an attempt to control Sal’s behavior, specifically. Not just ‘stole money meant for Marcie’s medical care’ but ‘stole money meant for Marcie’s medical care with its return dependent on Sal cutting ties with Marcie.’ With that in mind, either Linda actively used those strings she pulled to try and get her way during the fight, or Sal realized she COULD do it later and benched the motorcycle before Linda could.
Yeah this isn’t just spite, this is ‘she is manipulative and abusive, and if you let her get hooks into you she will use them’
If only it were that simple, Sal might not still keep getting hurt so much by her.
The cherry on top is Sal owed her motorcycle rebel cred to her own rich mom’s intervention.
That musta chafed
Nooooo screw it im reposting this below fingers crossed
Well, she already had the motorcycle and rebel things going without her mom but yeah, that must’ve pissed her off something fierce. After all, she doesn’t use the bike anymore.
That’s fair
BBCC and Regalli will not like this strip.
I got my tantrum out on patreon. 😀
I kid, I kid. I always have time for another ‘fuck Linda Walkerton’ tantrum.
Honestly, at least Sal still HAS her motorcycle, so it’ll be available once she graduates to avoid ever having to be dependent her parents again.
I mean, obviously fuck Linda for doing things for her kids so she can use them as collateral to get her way later, but I was expecting Sal to be forced to sell it.
Say what? Why would IU have a policy like that?
I didn’t have a car as a Freshman at SC, but I was only 16 at the time, so it wasn’t that surprising that my parents would be hesitant. But for most legal adult students to not be allowed cars seems odd.
It seems to be a common policy, at least where I’m at. My college didn’t allow freshmen to have cars either.
They likely have the policy because at least these days, college students really don’t know their rights as well as they should, and are less likely to challenge such infantilizing policies.
True that. My first school (transferred for soon to be obvious reasons) had us under CURFEW. Had to be in bed by 11 pm. That wasn’t even the only rule like that.
There could be various practical reasons like, as mentioned below, a dearth of parking spaces, the need to have traffic control on campus if too many vehicles are there, …
Your first though is “it’s done to infantilize the students”. I wonder how you arrive at that conclusion?
Practical reasons don’t change when students get older. If there’s a limit on cars, why isn’t it equally distributed, or distributed by some actual need, instead of pegged to an age cutoff?
University students are generally infantilized in the US, compared to other countries that treat them as the adults they are in all respects*, so I’m not surprised…
* You get a culture shock when you finish school and enter university in such places. Already classifying university as “school”, as done in the US and not elsewhere, is part of the infantilization.
you are right that the practical reasons don’t change when they get older. The restriction just gets moved to the next batch of freshmen, so the demand on resources is still reduced by restricting freshmen vehicle privileges.
It’s easier to make the cut based on something the college definitely gets access to, versus information they only get if you volunteer it to them.
My guess: space.
IIRC, UGA has (or at least had) a policy where freshman living on campus also couldn’t have a vehicle. There just isn’t enough parking space.
Where you could even get a parking space was based on how long you had been there as well.
Yup, this. Not enough space for everyone to have a vehicle so the upperclassmen and grad students get parking and freshmen don’t.
I don’t know that campus personally, but I can imagine a few reasons.
Thinking back to my own college experiences…
College campuses have a limited number of parking permits/spaces.
Permits are prioritized by seniority and need (off-campus housing / mobility).
Freshman are expected to live on campus.
Colleges, like many institutions, are very litigation conscious.
1. Danny could have been exagerating the improbability of Sal managing to snag a permit.
2. UofI could have decided to blanketly disallow undergraduate freshman from having permits (barring strong reason) in order to make things easier on themselves.
I took the train to my college but I don’t think it had any rules like that. Then again they had a parking garage so they made money off of parking.
Oh, colleges love to make money off parking. I’m sure IU charges for parking passes as well.
Btw Paid parking, in ANY CAPACITY, is a scam. It’s insane to me that we just…accept it cuz that’s so dumb. I have to PAY to be in the city where I’m planning to spend money? Just to BE here? In my CAR? That I have to pay TAXES AND INSURANCE AND GAS FOR? YOU’RE GONNA MAKE ME PAY TO JUST BE HERE? EVEN THOUGH IF I’M NOT HERE NONE OF YOUR BUSINESSES MAKE MONEY OR HAVE WORKERS TO MAKE YOUR MONEY. I HAVE TO PAY FOR ADMISSION…TO YOUR ENTIRE CITY? FUCKING HELL.
Yeah, a lot of cities around here made parking free during most of the pandemic, but recently I went to a nearby downtown area and the parking garages were charging again. I was like, ah, yes… I hate this.
If it’s any consolation, the Delta variant might just make them free again. But at what cost?
Hopefully free 😀
Of course! Like getting a cemetary plot, people are dying for free parking.
FREE parking is the scam. That land has market value, and we’re gonna give it up so that people can put their cars on it? Dude, no. Charge for it, tax it, put that money into public transit.
Urban land is valuable. Why should large amounts of it be reserved for the use of drivers, for free?
Parking is expensive. Garages need to be paid off and maintained. Parking lots have high opportunity cost, such as other uses that actually would pay the owner. The feeling of entitlement to free parking is one of the most damaging things to US cities.
>Why should large amounts of it be reserved for the use of drivers, for free
Because people who commute to the city should be able to drive there and do stuff? The entire reason I never go to the city is because parking is both a nightmare and also paying for parking is inconvenient. Like I guess if you live near the city it’s whatever but I need to either drive to the nearest train station to go to the city OR Ride the bus for like an hour to get there. And guess what? Those cost money and are inconvenient too!
So yeah I guess fine, Maybe paid parking is a big picture necessary evil. But I’ll never stop hating it.
Look, you should only be allowed to enter a city for the purposes of toil and Spending. The only reason a person should exist near a large population center is to give away as much money as possible for the least amount of return, and they’d better fuck off within a few hours so we don’t have to look at them.
It is impossible for everyone who commutes to a city to have their own car and park anywhere. Cities are dense places and cars are incredibly space inefficient. In the hypothetical scenario where parking is free and everybody has a car then what happens is traffic is a constant gridlock in the urban centers and you still probably can’t find parking because there is not enough for everybody.
Yeah, public transport is often expensive and inconvenient, but that is the real problem, not lack of free parking or cities being slightly inconvenient to cars. In fact, cities being too friendly for cars is what often causes public transport to be expensive and inconvenient, as they become slower and less people want to use them (which also forces the prices up). Inclusive transport solutions for urban center usually involve promoting public transport and restricting cars because these are kinda mutually exclusive.
I totally respect your feelings on the matter. Especially as a driver, I get it. But Europe shows us that public transit can actually be an efficient way (even financially for those who use it) to commute and access a city core. America was cursed with land without population at the invention of the automobile, and it’s fucked with our perspective on land use and privilege for a century.
We also had pretty damn good public transit – rail and light rail mostly, but we tore most of it up to build roads and cater to the car. It was more deliberate than just happenstance of how densely populated we were when cars were invented.
Keep in mind that most of Europe is pretty densely populated, so public transit has enough ridership that it can be affordable and efficient, and people don’t have to go very far to get where they need to go. Large areas of North America are not nearly densely populated enough to have that luxury. And also things are spread out enough that travel without a personal vehicle in many cases is just not possible.
True, but a large majority of the US population also lives in densely populated areas that still have lousy public transportation at best – outside of a few inner city areas.
My biggest problem has been when there WAS free parking but then they fill it in. It happened twice in my time at university – we’d find a place to park that didn’t have a meter or wasn’t behind a toll and then by next year they’d filled it in with more fucking curb. That’s not ‘we don’t have the spaaaaaace’ that’s ‘we only want you to park here if you pay for it’. It was incredibly frustrating if you lived off campus since paid parking cost up to $40 a week to park. Cabs were expensive and the bus closest to me was not safe in my last year. I wanted to strangle someone.
A big part of the reason parking is inconvenient is that urban parking is often underpriced even when they do charge for it, particularly with curbside metered parking. Supply exceeds demand, so you get shortages, and people cruising around looking for a parking space. Studies have estimated that 1/3 or more of traffic in such places is people cruising for parking, adding to congestion and pollution.
Charge the right price, dynamically, and you can get it so there’s generally 85% use of parking spaces; enough to be efficient, with enough free that people can park at the same frequency people leave.
A parking lot or garage space needs about 330 square feet per parking space, including access lanes and ramps. I never saw IU dorm rooms, but at Caltech a double room was 130-170 square feet. Just one parking space takes up room for four students, even assuming it’s a multi-level garage as tall as the dorm; a surface parking lot wastes way more space.
Which gets to the other reason for charging for parking: supply and demand. US zoning codes tend to mandate an oversupply of parking, creating the illusion that it’s naturally free, at the cost of forcing such low density that you *have* to drive everywhere. Happily, IU and central Bloomington are older than the car, thus walkable, but that means not everyone can have a car handy. Which is why the university runs its own (free?) buses in addition to the city buses.
During my freshman year, we were made painfully aware that there are apparently federal housing regulations that pertain to college dorms, because our dorm was “temporary housing” that got a waiver from those rules because it was only supposed to be around for about 20 years. Never mind the number of students who started school and graduated within those 20 years. I was there for year 20, so we all had to go to another dorm after that.
The temporary housing dorm was the cheapest of the dorms. The replacement dorm was the most expensive dorm the school ever had to that point, even after factoring inflation into the prices. Did I get to go there? Sure, they gave all of the students from my dorm preferential placement for the new dorm, but could I afford it? Could any of us afford it?
Probably a few could, but I know I saw a *lot* of my former dormmates in the cheapest dorm they still had. Maybe some were just visiting a lot, but I think most of us were still dormmates.
330 square feet seemed high to me. So I looked it up. In North America, average parking spaces are about 9×18, with 14 to 24 width for the drive lane, depending on whether it’s one way or two way traffic. Parking garages generally have more access ramps between levels, and not enough horizontal space to pay for that from having all the vehicles parked perpendicularly with the drive lane.
I knew my sedan is always shorter than the parking space, unless it’s a ‘compact only’ spot, because it’s only .5″ longer than a compact, but 18 feet for the standard parking spot length? Wow.
330 square feet includes the access lanes. I’ve checked it myself via Google Maps: use ruler tools to measure the dimensions of a parking lot, count the number of parking spaces, divide.
In a reddit AMA thread, an LA architect said they counted more on 380 sqft per parking space. Maybe that was for garages, which lose more space to ramps and support pillars, or maybe they just plan for huge SUVs.
Curbside parking takes less space, at the cost of more congestion because the ‘access lane’ is also a traffic lane.
I would note that 9×18 is 162 sqft, itself the size of a dorm room. One car taking the space of two people. (Granted that’s cheating a bit, because the dorm also has hallways and bathrooms, which I’m not counting. Still, car parking takes a LOT of space.)
The extra space in 380sqft is for access driveway, parking meters et al. Structure would go around *that*.
Yes, you have to pay to be in the city in your car. Because you are increasing traffic by being in the city in your car. Because your car takes up parking space of citizens that live in the city. Because tourism only pays off if people buy things. Your car’s presence is a large metallic hindrance to everyone who actually lives there and popular places become horribly congested very fast.
This isn’t just a case of ‘free parking vs paid parking’ but weighing up the inconvenience to people living there that comes with the financial benefits of tourism versus the inconvenience to people visiting that may deter them from taking part in tourism. You want tourism, but not people showing up on whims every two days and making it impossible for the people that literally live in the city to enjoy where they live.
Well, if it’s such a hindrance for people to visit the city, maybe all us country folk should just stay out and keep to our unsightly glorified truck stops.
Or someone could build more public transport. Yes, in the US. Shock, horror.
You and I both know that’s not gonna happen. That would be #Socialism, which means someone who isn’t in poverty will also have to pay up.
Public transport ain’t convenient or free either though? Like even living an hourish from the city means I’d either need to take a long ass bus ride or theyd have to build huge stretches of railroad through the country, which would also be bad. Unless the innovation in public transportation you have is something not really used yet. How should we country folks make our way to the city without being penalized for interacting with what is the majority of goings ons in my state?
“How should we country folks make our way to the city without being penalized for interacting with what is the majority of goings ons in my state?”
Park in a garage at the urban edge and ride a train in. That’s how Boston tries to do things: big garages at the end of lines. Or you can drive in, but downtown parking is like $25/day instead of $8/day.
Or if you want easy access to what’s happening in the city, live in the city and walk/bike/transit. (Granted those are shitty options in the US, but that’s *because* we’ve embraced cars so much.)
There is no natural right to going around in a multi-ton polluting vehicle that takes tons of road and parking space to accommodate.
City people just don’t understand the pain of basically nothing being walking distance. I’m not going to be shamed for driving a car just because everything near me is NOT AT ALL walking distance. Seriously screw off with your pollution rhetoric as if public transport doesn’t have its own environmental concerns. And you don’t know if I’ve got an electric car or anything anyway. (I don’t but I’m poor which is sorta where the whole outrage stems from). Being poor is also why I can’t just move to the city. Turns out housing is kinda expensive there. And even if it wasn’t moving is kind of a huge step and will change my entire lifestyle. I’m moderately mixed by paid parking considering how much my income is taxed by it so if you think I deserve some retribution for my station in life I suggest you reevaluate your principles.
“City people just don’t understand the pain of basically nothing being walking distance.”
Kind of do.
“I’m not going to be shamed for driving a car just because everything near me is NOT AT ALL walking distance.”
I don’t think anyone was shaming you for driving. We’re saying it’s not reasonable to expect free parking in a city center.
“Seriously screw off with your pollution rhetoric as if public transport doesn’t have its own environmental concerns.”
Now you’re losing sympathy. Electrified transit like trains and trolleybuses are far far far cleaner than cars. Trains use a lot less energy per passenger (steel wheel on rail is efficient), as do packed buses (because packed). (And urbanites use even less energy when they can walk/bike many of their trips.) Most urban pollution is from cars, as we saw when driving collapsed in the covid lockdowns in 2020 and city air cleared up. Even electric cars produce particulates from brake and tire wear, as as well as noise pollution (cars are most of the noise pollution of cities, too.)
Diesel buses can be dirty but a walkable city with buses is still cleaner than everyone driving all the time.
It becomes an even more complex issue when the popular place is in a more rural area or a national park. Because public transit may not exist, there are environmental concerns, roads may be narrow or limited reducing parking availability, people cannot be trusted to not leave trash everywhere or open gates on farms to take shortcuts which can let animals free and so on.
Balancing economic design with not making the locals hate everyone is no easy task. When people visit the holiday park near where I live, it often impacts how much of our regular shopping we can get and that annoys me a little bit. And one of our local landmarks for years has been vandalized which doesn’t bother me but it has bothered a lot of the locals that have been here for years and years.
As a slight counterpoint: Paramus, New Jersey has some of the strictest Blue Laws in the nation, dictating what can and can’t be sold on Sundays, and even what businesses can be open. The people of Paramus and the surrounding Bergen County have upheld these laws for one simple reason: Paramus is a shopping mecca and they want ONE F███ING DAY where the highway wasn’t clogged with people from New York City flocking to this town to buy goods that are untaxed in New Jersey, e.g. clothes and shoes.
This sounds like you think that people in the city don’t have to pay for parking. I remember thinking that was what ‘residential parking permits’ meant before I moved to the city.
‘Residential parking permit’ means that they paid for parking in monthly installments, at a lower rate because it’s cheaper to bill people monthly than it is to install parking meters and police them, and they’re basically always getting money for the spaces. With residential permits, the police can just ticket everyone without a permit, rather than checking to see if there’s still time on the meter. It’s a slightly easier ticket to write, and it’s easier for the court case should you try to fight it. Not that you stand a chance of fighting it either way, since you’re basically asking the judge to decide that their employer should have less incentive to pay them.
Residential permits do *not* mean “you get a space near your apartment” or even “in your neighborhood”. You *might*, but you might not. Parking’s still really tight, and if you get home late at night, you may spend an extra hour or two looking for somewhere to park, or paying for an overnight stay in a garage because it’s worth it to be able to get the extra hour or two of sleep.
Residential permits in the US are typically underpriced. In Boston they’re free, in Cambridge and Somerville they’re like $25 or $40/year, when a monthly parking spot in a residential neighborhood would probably go for $150/month. Granted the permit isn’t as convenient but it’s still a huge difference. Alternatively one can imagine what someone in an RV, or a food truck, would be willing to pay for a space.
I admit I got a little heated and I apologize. That being said even if public transit is “better” for city living it’s still rather inconvenient for me at this time and as a consequence I find it difficult to visit the city. (While I CAN ride the Marta train to certain places I still have to drive over half an hour to get to it.) I’m still not gonna like paid parking but I guess I’ll accepr it’s not as bullshit as I originally thought
Looks like the whole human transportation game needs a major update, seeing that the last one we got was 100 years ago.
Wait, MARTA? Yotomoe, do you live in Georgia?
At a guess, it’s probably just down to having a high student-to-parking-space ratio.
Lack of space. If Sal kept her vehicle parked in a private lot off-campus they probably wouldn’t care.
Note: Though they probably can’t actually ban it, the college most likely would look askance on students who live on-campus parking their cars in the public streets overnight and annoying the people who live in the nearby town.
That’s how it was handled where I went to school. No cars on campus before Junior year, but I needed one as a sophomore for various reasons so I shelled out for off campus parking. Didn’t drive much during the year since it was a pain to get to, but it let me get to where I needed to stay during breaks and the like.
I didn’t go to IU, but I’ve heard they do it similar to how they do it at Purdue. At Purdue, the school has a part interest in all property within a mile of campus. It’s not a law, it’s just something they invested in. And the school uses that part interest to be able to dictate things like freshmen must live in the dorms out to a mile from campus.
As such, if you’re a freshman and want to live off-campus? Fine. You’re walking a mile, at least. You want a vehicle, despite the lack of parking permits for freshmen? Fine. You’re parking that vehicle a mile from campus, at least.
I knew a guy who decided to go that route. For the car, not the housing. For about a week, he was the cool freshman who could take his fellow freshmen to the mall. But after that, he lost the will to walk all the way out to get his car and then drive back to pick up his dormmates for a few coolness points, especially since there was that mile walk to look forward to at the end. If I recall correctly, he actually took his car home and left it with his parents more than a week before his month of paid parking was up, because he didn’t want to risk forgetting about it and either paying fines, losing the car, or needing to pay for an extra month.
Self driving cars that can be activated with your cell phone will eventually be something that everyone needs.
Or won’t need to own, because you can rent them and get them to come to you at will. Which will mean many fewer cars.
But basically all that shows is that in most cases, having a car on campus is a luxury not nearly a necessity. Everything you need for your daily life is on or near campus – walking distance or within the campuses public transit, if it has some. Having a car gets you status points.
Some people suggest that one reason many Americans are nostalgic for college campus life is that it’s the only time of their life they’ve lived in something like a walkable urban-like environment. Four years of living in apartments (dorms) and walking to class and food and parties and enjoying serendipitous contacts, squished between childhood and adulthood in car-dependent suburbs.
I can see that being the case for cars/trucks/SUVs, however a motorcycle doesn’t take up nearly as much space, seems to me they could make some provision for two wheeled motorized transportation being allowed for freshmen.
I don’t know about elsewhere in Canada, but the University of Saskatchewan doesn’t limit what kind of students can apply for student parking.
These days a bus pass for Saskatoon Transit is included with your tuition. What some students do is park near a bus stop and take a bus onto campus. That way they avoid having to pay for a parking spot. One of the Walmarts here became a popular location to do that, so Walmart actually put up signs saying it was prohibited. I don’t think they’ve worked too well.
I seem to remember that most post secondary educational facilities In Edmonton, a bus pass was part of your tuition, both my kids had bus passes included. Of course, it wasn’t in place when I went to the U of A, I had to buy my own passes.
At my school we simply didn’t have enough parking spaces for everyone to have a car. Freshmen were mostly living in dorms anyway so permits were reserved for older students.
Ah, I see. Also, classic Linda shit.
I’ve got TONS of prepared ammunition against mine, but it’s only to be used AGAINST her dumbass coward attacks.
It’s how I’ve been trained from a young age.
Communication is my kink.
Well, that’s not as bad as I worried, so yay! “Not as bad a mom as you could’ve been award” is in the mail.
Seriously though, nothing Linda Walkerton ever does will EVER be genuinely ‘just being nice’. She doesn’t work that way. Everything she does ‘to be nice’ ends up as ammunition or becomes ammunition as soon as they argue or she doesn’t get what she wants. As long as that’s consistent, NOTHING she does will ever be ‘just being nice’, though I imagine she thinks it is and intends it to be at the time.
Or, in ideal situations, Linda will think she’s being nice. But you can count on future less than ideal moments when Linda feels like she’s backed in a corner and she’ll take every nice thing she’s done and turn it into weapons. So you gotta see every nice thing she does as weapons all the time.
If she pulls ’em out as a weapon later, it stops being ‘just being nice’. That’s the problem. Linda is NEVER just nice.
God Linda fucking blows
Actually, I think that’s TWO mysteries solved.
What’s the other one?
Mystery one: Where Sal’s motorcycle went.
Mystery two: How come she was able to get away with riding it around campus.
(Well, okay, I think we knew it was in storage, but it was still a mystery as to why.)
Makes sense. Thanks for answering.
Man yeah I hate when people do it. It’s part of why I never wanna owe anybody anything (or at least not give them the pretense that I will ever pay them back) because I don’t want it thrown in my face.
Probably a bad take but it’s also why I would rather adopt“why I would rather adopt…”,
What, people think giving birth to someone is some kind of favor?
Your birth was NOT a favor to you. There was no “you” before your birth. You weren’t some disembodied potential person, floating around and hoping for life.
A parent gives intentional birth to a child because they want another family member. It’s a gift they give to themselves. Expecting gratitude for a gift you gave yourself is absurd.
And yet, people do, in fact, throw that in their kids’ faces.
People do love to play the card of “you owe me because I made you.” I was going to say this was abusive parents, but honestly even generally fine parents will play the “sixteen hour labor” card or whatever.
But I don’t think that’s what Yotomoe was saying.
“You owe me because I made you” is also pretty close to the rhetoric of certain types of Christian.
It’s a rhetoric that is as old as the oldest Abrahamic religions, going hand in hand with the notion that everyone is supposed to feel endless gratitude towards their god for creating humanity.
But even if any of these gods DID exist, there would be NOTHING to thank them for.
In Judaist, Islamic and Christian scripture, God did not “give life to humans”. God gave HIMSELF an inferior human species, inferior lifeforms, to rule over. He gave HIMSELF an empire.
Hell, it almost certainly predates the Abrahamic religions. How many Greek myths have people receive horrific punishments for being insufficiently gracious towards their divine overlords? It’s gotta be a vast majority of them
This. It took me decades to work through this even after realizing it, because it’s just been such a pervasive thing in my life. It was *everywhere*. I was raised to think that I owed god, the church, my family, and the community.
To be fair, if souls exist before life, such as believed by reincarnation religions, then one could owe ones deity for the opportunity to be incarnated. One would only owe the family, the church, the community if there was some prior arrangement between the soul and the organization in question. But one would only owe ones deity if the incarnation was on ones own terms. If the deity chooses the particulars of the incarnation? Not so much.
Abrahamic religions deny reincarnation and claim that the soul is created along with the incarnation, and thus deny any debt that a soul could have to god, family, church, or community. But they sure do claim the existence of said debt a *lot*.
Well what do you expect? With thousands of years of practice, the Abrahamic religions have gotten gaslighting down to an EXPERT craft.
They proclaim us humans guilty and indebted because of events before our birth. They propose inconsistent values that are impossible to observe consistently. They put followers in impossible mind games by condoning and condemning the same behaviors. The proclaim activities that cause no conceivable harm to be worthy of persecution, torture and even death.
These maneuvers serve but to erode our sense of judgment, and make us more susceptible to their control.
look leave abraham out of this, you’re probably just mad at paul, really
A lot of the seeds were in Judaism though, even if Christianity took them off in a different direction.
Even in Judaism of Biblical times, there were essentially arbitrary codes that were nigh impossible to follow completely and God kept having to punish Israel for breaking their covenant.
i mean, god punished israel a lot in… some stories that may not be historical
i don’t think we should put those on equal footing with the real-life power structures that exist today in America which are solely Christian
Christianity stole Jewish everything and then used it to murder them for 2000 years. We don’t need to rope Jewish faith in with our condemnation of Evangelicalism. That’s just adding insult to injury.
“Abrahamic religion” is used specifically because it acknowledges that the manipulative tactics and abuses are by no means exclusive to Christianity.
Jewish scripture itself (even in the EARLIEST known copies made before Christianity), called for genocide and other atrocious crimes against whole tribes, nations and religious groups in the middle east.
In Exodus 20, Yahweh commanded that all Baal worshipers and their children be put to death. In Numbers 31, Moses himself commanded the army of Israel to kill every man and married woman of the Midianite tribe, while keeping the virgin girls as sexual stock. Isaiah 13 and Psalm 137 document their intent to kill each and everyone of the children of Babylon and molest their mothers.
The kinds of abusive and manipulative attitudes in Evangelicalism didn’t just spring ready made from an ideological vacuum.
AGAIN, those are ahistorical stories and it’s very unlikely most of them happened, so for the love of cheese stop trying to put them on equal footing with the suffering of actual real people – it’s kind of extremely hard to get riled up about genocidal stories that never occurred, you might as well be ranting about Thanos
and, yes, evangelicals use these stories to justify their behavior which is, again, my entire point
and i swear if you one more time try to mansplain to ME of all people what’s in the bible, like it’s some incredible new information, like i haven’t studied this shit all my life, i’m just gonna spamfolder you
By the way I didn’t imply that you didn’t encounter those in the Old Testament, and I know you already know this, but Baal worshipers were actually REAL, and were sentenced to death for their worship, along with those who picked up sticks on the wrong day of the week.
The Babylonians were obviously real too, but whether or not the Israelites actually enacted their planned-out blood-soaked revenge on them is besides the point. The manipulative and abusive attitudes were there long before Christianity was ever invented.
Not to mention the fact that Christians were also subject to genocide during China’s Mainland Period, Japan’s Edo Period, and the Ottoman Empire’s Old Regime. Should Christian sects be allowed to use THOSE events to justify their behavior?
The modern American Christian, whom these conversations tend to revolve around when discussing, y’know, ongoing and active continued prejudice, doesn’t really exist in a state where the persecution of Christians in the Edo period factors into their lives. Maybe if I were a Japanese Culture Expert I could write something informative on Christianity in present day Japan, but I’m not, and how that exists in and around Christianity in North America and their fount of cultural power doesn’t really matter.
The persecution caused by American Christians is a constant background radiation of millions of lives in North America. There’s your difference, bub.
Like I’m not saying don’t talk about historical religious imperialism on a global scale, but when you can safely assume the audience you’re talking to has their main interaction with American Fundamentalism, like, tailor your speech to that audience.
I guess the counter then is why put the blame on Paul instead of Abraham, if you’re concerned about modern American Evangelicals? Blame them, not some dude 2000 years back who wouldn’t recognize modern Christianity any more than the historical Jesus would.
Just don’t use the term “Abrahamic religion.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions#Challenges_to_the_term
https://twitter.com/TheRaDR/status/1304506334747013121
Generally, the objections have to do with what exactly is occurring right here: uncharitably lassoing in Judaism based on a term pushed by Christians to build themselves a little goodwill buffer after being butts to Jewish folks for 2000 years. It’s a term that Christians like, nonChristians not so much. It’s the popular kid saying “yeah i’m friends with these nerds” for clout while shoving them into lockers.
In my original post, when I said “Abrahamic religions have become gas-lighting experts”, I was also thinking of Islamic scripture and ideology, which today is still used to psychologically manipulate and inspire fear in their members (sometimes under the threat of death).
On a side note, even though Christianity and Islam both show intent in scripture and otherwise to gain vacuous control over people, Islam is actually BETTER in that regard because it’s a lot more up and front about it. The word “Islam” itself is actually Arabic for “submission”/”surrender” — specifically, surrender to the Islamic god.
Even outside of the scripture dripping head to toe with sadism and ancient dictatorial practices, the God of Christianity, Judaism and Islam have all inspired much corruption and atrocity because of just two elements. First, is their monotheistic nature. Second, is their human inventors’ overzealous desire for justice.
Judeo-Christian is a useless term, since there’s really little the two have in common that’s not also shared with Islam, and the whole point of it is to exclude Islam. A term for that particular strain of monotheism, as opposed to other religions of the world is useful, because they share not only common origins but a lot of basic assumptions that aren’t common elsewhere.
So this is a weird fixation I had but years ago on tumblr there was a post from some talk show, I don’t remember where a woman asked the host if he was going to have a baby. He said “oh yes, My wife and I are going to have a child” and she told him “No you won’t SHE’LL be having a child” and then proceeded to go on a rant about how Childbirth is difficult, being pregnant is stressful and it’s not something the man has to go through. Sort of as a “gotcha” to the idea of “we’re pregnant” or whatever.
Which is y’know…fair.
But also I thought “Well ok. If it’s that inconvenient I don’t want that to be held over me as if it’s something I DID to her. I mean I’m assuming if it’s my wife I WANT her to be comfortable and happy, not feel like I’m getting off easy cuz she has to suffer through this when you can just purchase a kid instead. I mean if she REALLY wants to have a kid then that’s fine but I just don’t want the unpleasantness of child rearing and the fact that my capacity to support that being limited as it is to cause contention. And I am WELL aware this is just because I hate the idea of feeling “at fault” or like having her pull rank over me because of her suffering which I’d rather she not go through at all, so I can’t pretend it’s a ‘noble’ reason. I just don’t like that power dynamic. That one video just really turned me off of the whole idea. :/
Well if it’s any consolation, the power of science will one day give us the ability to make children WITHOUT the dredge or danger of pregnancy!
Whether that remains a *good idea* will remain to be seen. i.e. Is it healthy for a developing consciousness to float in a non-animal, sterile, vat fed by nutrifluid? Or will that just breed a whole new level of psychopath?
How do you know that psychopaths aren’t caused by traditional pregnancy? I mean, even without that, the whole human pregnancy process is much more dangerous compared to the overwhelming majority of other mammals.
We don’t need to burn coal to heat our homes. We don’t need livestock pancreas to get insulin for diabetics. We don’t need to destroy forest land to grow more vegetables. We don’t need animals to get meat.
Whatever neurological or physiological needs are met by conventional pregnancy, there are much more efficient, effective, safer ways to fulfill them without the collateral damage caused by the apparently unquestionable, “traditional” method of reproduction.
Oh regular psychos are grown now the usual way, up until they get out of the womb and get perpetually abused and rejected by their mother and severly taught that they are unlovable and entirely to blame for *being*.
This isn’t *all* of them, but there is a scary high corelation with the really violent ones. So my hypothesis is largely, how much worse would it be to grow someone with no human contact at all until or after birth? Especially given the documented importance of skin-to-skin contact immediately at birth. Babies are not meant to be apart from their parents. Not for a long long time.
Why would a human womb be necessary for contact at birth and after birth?
There are smart materials being developed right now which will be able to completely simulate every aspect of the human uterus.
This will not only make it possible for people who can’t deliver safely to have genetically related children; it may very well guarantee that even MORE children get much needed contact, seeing that there would be no risk of the mother DYING as a result of the birth.
“simulate every aspect of the human uterus” seems unlikely without also simulating every aspect of the human that the uterus is normally a part of, since many things that mothers do affect the uterus. Especially later in development when senses start to develop.
But mostly, I just had to post to drop an old in-joke “You were raised by the wire monkey, weren’t you?”
Thejeff’s got the rub of this. My point about contact after birth: If contact is *that* important literally the second a child is born (and it really REALLY is), then why would we *ever* dare to assume that contact is unimportant in the previous 40 weeks? Fetus’ do all kinds of crazy learning and development in the womb.
However, to focus on the technological points, from a purely chemistry perspective, I’ve no doubt we could eventually simulate a *perfect* womb. But thejeff’s point weighs in here. If we can do all that, why not just fix things so the mother is safe? And if our technology is that far advanced, will we even be biological anyways?
But if somehow we’re in an in-between phase, where we can simulate a womb, but not save a mother, I have *GRAVE* misgivings about what this would do to the neurological development of the fetus. Also, if parents can’t make the commitment to be with the fetus for those first 10 months, are they really fit to be there for the following 20 years?
If someone is really that hard up for a baby, maybe look at adoption, fostering, or having someone carry on your behalf if there’s a health complication.
(p.s. oh look at the hypocrite with two biological kids and no adoptions. Yes, trust me I know. This was… not my dream)
The way that argument is always framed, the one giving birth gets turned into some kind of martyr and the other parent is turned into nothing but an obstacle to be surpassed, no matter what. It turned me off the idea of having a natural kid, too.
Also this. I dated a few women over the years who were clearly much more interested in having kids than I was. But they also made it pretty clear that they were going to do this whole martyr thing about it and I was so not on board with that.
I finally said nix to that and stopped dating until someone who didn’t want kids wanted to date.
We cannot outphase traditional pregnancy SOON ENOUGH!!!!
Yeah, I’m not sure what your (presumed) emotional drive is, for having such a strong stance against pregnancy. Please, would you be willing to take the time to explain it? It’s not a position i’ve encountered before.
Also, while not intending to speak for womankind, I *think* you’re presenting as male, and seeking to displace an evolutionarily fundamental aspect of what it can mean to be female, there may be some push back.
I guess you could say I am anatomically “male”, and I’m for now OK with that. However, I really prefer to identify with my mind, and mind has no need for gender. In case you’re wondering, yes, male pronouns are OK I guess.
My stance against traditional pregnancy is partly out of concern for the health of humanity, partly feminist. I just don’t think it’s fair for women to have exclusively undergo ALL that pain and emotional turmoil and to be the only ones with the possibility of DYING and not having any more children after that, all while men get to share in no such pain (as well as MANY other inequalities).
As far as I’m concerned, the only real “rules” to the game we call life are the principles of physics and chemistry. Everything else is just the metagame, and therefore subject to change.
Pregnancy being a “fundamental aspect of being female” is only according to the “rules” of the body, the world, we just happened to be born into. If we really wanted to, we could just change that “rule”. After all, we as a species used science, technology, the combined power of our intellect, to change MANY other “rules” to suit ourselves.
And by the way, a mother can’t give “warm touch” to a baby if she DIES as soon as the baby is born.
An artificial womb may very well guarantee MORE “human touch”. I have a hard time believing that artificial wombs have any impact on the well-being of the child later in life — there’s no evidence for it at all, and really amounts to Voodoo Medicine™ and the magical thinking that surrounds nature. Choosing to believe that nature was created for the sole benefit of humans living in it, and if that living in it like it’s only ever gonna be the 1950s or something, is just setting us up for failure, you know?
OTOH, I’ve known some couples where the guy wanted kids much more than the woman did and she not only had to go through the pregnancy but wound up doing most of the childcare as well.
Also yeah honestly my mom’s never pulled the “because I made you card” cuz she’s a good mom. But also I’d say “making you” isn’t even a favor. If I was never born I’d never have to fear death. Life isn’t a gift. It’s a fleeting pleasure at best and all the shit I’m worried about I wouldn’t have to worry about had I never been born. If anything, they owe ME for dragging me into this mortal coil without asking first.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287
Somebody is set to sue his parents over that (don’t think the trial’s been heard yet). Feeling lazy so didn’t reread the story but IIRC he lives with them and they are funding his lawsuit.
That’s a step too far. Nobody asked to be born, yeah yeah, get over it and either live or don’t.
This is a bit tangential, but my dearest friend is adopted (from infancy), and has gotten the message all her life that she is not allowed to complain even a little bit about how her parents treated her, because she should be eternally grateful to them that she was given a safe warm home after her birth mother gave her up.
Which is to say, if parents want to hold the power of gratitude over their kids to try to control them, the circumstances don’t much matter :/
My mom passed away three months ago and my aunt came down to assist my dad and I. She helped organize things, had pictures printed and framed for her service. But the ‘nice’ things she did were not done to be nice. We had an open casket for my mom and my aunt ignored my wishes and snapped a picture of her in her casket. When I called her out on it, she brought up how she paid for those pictures to be done and called me out on not paying for the pictures… even though I paid the 7 grand for the entire ceremony and I thought she was helping out because her sister had died and she wanted to help, not to use as ammunition when she gets called out on being a bongo. Needless to say, my aunt and I no longer talk. Her last words to me were calling me a spoiled little girl and telling me that ‘one day life is going to hit you’. Sometimes family really SUCKS.
My sympathies on all levels here. Light physical contact if desired.
You have my greatest sympathy as well.
Turning gifts into ammunition is even worse once you really about it.
<strong<Gifts by DEFINITION are given freely. Trying to use them to create a sense of debt only proves that they are not gifts at all. It also implies a very manipulative mindset.
In healthy relationships, people don’t try to trap each other with guilt, debt or obligation. They stick around because they like each other.
She told somebody grieving her mother – a reasonably close fanily member no less – that some day life was going to..? What an awful person!! My condolences for having to deal with that on top of losing your mother
Dude, your aunt sounds like a total ghoul. Also who takes photos of a fucking dead body?
Oh I can understand the mentality of wanting a picture. There’s lots of possible reasons. Some less flattering than others.
The *approach* and attitude shown however. I’m a little lenient because she loast her sister too, but people *like* that, should pad the LZ for the casket in the ground.
It could be “I need something to remind me every day that this person is finally dead.”
Or it could be, “since she’s died, she’s been dreams *every* *night*. Once, it was just a casual `Oh, I’m also here because you know, sister, so you remember me.` But the rest have been events where we deliberately excluded her, and she keeps making snide comments about how horrible we were being. We wanted to avoid that! THAT’S WHY WE EXCLUDED HER! And so I need something to look at when I wake up to remind myself she’s not here anymore.”
Probably the best reason was not having had anything resembling a recent picture. But it’s probably better to ask for a more up to date picture than a casket picture.
I’d like to think that there exist some good reasons for wanting a casket picture besides “news reporter, need to show the people this person is dead”. But unlike Demoted Oblivious, I’m only recalling encountering very unflattering reasons. Such as, for example, total ghoul.
She did have a recent picture, because when she came to visit my mom while she was sick, she took a selfie with her. The true reason why she wanted a picture, is that it is a ‘tradition’ for her. She has a picture of several women in the family who have died, so it’s something that means a lot to her. My mom, however, didn’t really care much for that tradition because she hated the idea of taking a picture of someone when they’re in a weak or vulnerable state.
More context for why I didn’t want a picture taken, is because my mom died of cancer. She was diagnosed in February, died in April, and despite only having one chemo treatment in that time, she lost a lot of her hair in the last week of her life. Hair which was her pride and joy, hair she took great pride in. The idea of an open casket was already overwhelming for me, because I hated the idea of anyone seeing what the cancer had done to her. But, I knew people would need to see her in order to have closure and say good bye. Especially since only dad, myself, and one of her friends had seen her during her last day or so of life. A lot of people still needed to say good bye. So we had an open casket, and I stated I didn’t want pictures taken.
I’m not entirely unreasonable. After all, my aunt lost her sister too. If my aunt had TALKED to me, told me ‘hey, I know you don’t want pictures taken, but I have this tradition and it’d mean a lot to me if I could take a picture’, then I would have agreed, with stipulations such as ‘don’t post it on social media’ and ‘don’t show it to anybody’. Instead, she snapped the picture when I had left the casket area, behind my back, DESPITE my wishes. And she went on to show her daughter and her daughter’s FRIEND the picture of my mom in her casket. She’s a total ghoul.
I was trying *really hard* to look at it neutrally, so I didn’t get all in Doopy’s grill because I wasn’t 100% clear on their feelings. Family shit can be complicated.
I’m sorry for your loss and for your shitty aunt.
I’m sorry about your mom and hope ‘life’ smacks your aunt. And by life I mean whatever is appropriately gratifying to you.
There are too many people to respond to individually but I want to say thank you to everybody who has offered their condolences about both my mom passing and my aunt’s behavior. I didn’t even get into the HALF of all the shit she did, such as accusing me of being a thief, trying to turn my dad against me (big mistake, ha), attempting to gaslight me into thinking she had in fact ‘asked’ before taking the picture, telling my father she could have hit me with a ‘felony assault charge’ and thus would have fucked up my job, when the most I did was step closer to her while we argued, and called her a bongo. There was no hitting, no fists were raised, not even a threat of violence. Although she also threatened to sue me when we were arguing too, ha. So… just an all around awful person.
But I’ve cut her from my life, and I don’t plan to ever have anything to do with her. I’m far happier without her in my life. The loss of my mom is still a hard one, we were very close and her death was very sudden. But I am determined to make her proud by continuing to work in my field, doing all that I can to secure our home through probate, and taking care of my dad.
Well since Linda is finally back in discussion I can finally admit this. I actually love Linda as a character! She’s like the perfect parental antagonist. She’s better than Ross, she’s better than Blaine, she’s probably better than Clint too because we don’t really know much about his motivations beyond him just being horrible for the sake of it I guess.
But everything Linda does makes absolute sense to me. She’s not a religious zealot, or an abusive and maniacal two bit mob stooge. She’s just a mom. Yet she’s earned almost as much ire as the former big bads. And all her actions are relatable and justifiable! Linda is amazing! I gotta give respect to how well she’s tormented Sal so far. Top class stuff.
I’m not sure there’s any universe where robbing a sick child’s Go Fund Me money and probably spending it for herself is anything but irredeemably evil.
Did she spend it on herself?
We don’t actually know, but it’s pretty widely speculated it was spent ‘on Sal’ – specifically, her tuition (or maybe surgery bills) post-convenience store, in a not-technically-punishment that is, nonetheless, a dick move given what those funds were earmarked for by Sal.
This.
It sounded like she was earmarking them for Sal’s college. But because of what she did and how Sal reacted to it, she felt that Sal needed another expensive education more urgently, so got an opportunity to spend that money a bit earlier.
I’m pretty sure she didn’t spend that money. At least not on frivolous bullshit because that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Why would she want 1000 bucks? The Walkertons live pretty comfortably and she most likely controls the finances. Chances are it went into Sal’s tuition or some sneaky way of returning it without actually doing that. 1k was never going to be enough for the medical care Marcie needed. To Linda, her daughter was wasting money on a lost cause. Horrible but it was logical for a racist mother.
The reward of a good action cannot be given by any power
For it is the natural result of the good action.
How can we do good
When nobody will let us?
How can we create a more healthy society
When we keep supporting systems that reward sickness?
>Why would she want 1000 bucks? The Walkertons live pretty comfortably and she most likely controls the finances.
That’s a thousand bucks someone other than Linda had, and a black kid at that.
I think Sirksome’s right here. She’s not that cartoonishly evil.
It’s a 1000 bucks her kid was going to waste, so she took it to direct it to something more important. All for Sal’s “benefit”. I’ve long assumed it went towards paying the boarding school.
Either way, that’s spending money that she stole for her own purchases.
No, those actions are evil, but they’re a type of evil we’re most likely to encounter and stem from bigotry and a racist motivation instead of religious zealousness or cartoonishly evil mob associations. In my life I am much more likely to encounter a Linda than I am a Ross or a Blaine or even a Carol.
I’m not saying there aren’t Carols and Rosses and Blaines out in the real world, just that I myself am lucky enough not to be in those social circles. I think Linda’s flavor of evil is much more likely to fly under the radar, and to me that makes her the type of person we’re much more likely to interact with unknowingly.
Hope that makes sense.
It makes sense and that’s why I think Linda is a better antagonist than Blaine or Ross, but I also think the term “evil” is used too frequently when people do things you don’t agree with. The most evil thing about Linda is her racism which doesn’t really have a justification but it’s hard to label that as evil either. A lot of people share Linda’s intolerant views but aren’t actually evil people.
Feeling entitled to STEAL from your child, all while denigrating whole demographics for allegedly doing the same is pretty evil.
Linda works a lot better because she’s been a lot more… grounded is probably the best term.
Blaine and Ross doing supervillain Don Quixote shit doesn’t do wonders for them as serious antagonists, to the point where I find Blaine’s walkyverse counterpart more effective for just being a relatively mundane shitbag
It feels more real to me, and in this sort of story I think that’s preferable
In my life, I’ve knowingly encountered one Blaine, 4-6 Rosses, a dozen Carols. But then, I grew up in the sort of environment where Rosses and Carols thrive.
I literally cannot count the number of Linda’s I’ve knowingly encountered because they’re so pervasive.
That said, I feel like anyone who disrespects their child’s opinion enough to steal from them and then blame the child for the outcome probably rates at least a little on the evil scale. They’re not the head of the KKK, but they’re decidedly doing what they shouldn’t.
I’d like to agree with Thag Simmons about Blaine and Ross going too beyond the pale to be believed, but… I’ve been around and I’ve known people enough to have met some like that. Mostly like Ross, but at least one person who dressed up like Batman to go bully non-violent law-abiding geeks.
There’s a reason why, even after everything, I refer to my biological grandfather as a Blaine and not some other evil parent in this strip when talking about him here. Was he a literal supervillain who worked for the mob, kidnapped half a dozen people in a half-baked revenge scheme, and killed two more? No.
That’s about everything we can say, with confidence, bio-Blaine definitely wouldn’t have done or have potentially done something similar. I can fully imagine Blaine yelling at a family member for suggesting he remove a loaded gun from the coffee table while visiting with their 1-year-old, clearly you just can’t control your child if you think this is necessary and they can stay in their carseat the whole time if you have a problem there. For all Ross’s many, many, MANY faults, I do actually think he was slightly more sensible in his controlling bastarddom than that. (That’s not actually why he had no relationship with his oldest grandchildren, since my parent was already estranged by then, but it is why he never had a relationship with any of us. Sometimes, cutting your parent off and not coming back is the right move. Fortunately, his children are not him.)
My issue with Blaine and Ross isn’t that their nature is unbelievable to me. A physically abusive low level mobster and a religious zealot who tries to ‘fix’ his gay daughter, both of those are frighteningly real.
What makes them not work for me is the quixotic supervillainy. It’s not that it’s impossible, but it’s silly and absurd and difficult to take seriously, and I think it’s less effective than a more mundane portrayal would have been.
Oooh, sizzling take, Sirk
…with which I find I entirely agree 👏
HYPOTHESIS
content warning: authorial intent over-emphasis
Maybe as Willis became a dad himself he came to be less preoccupied with exploring the brand of messed-up-ness he suffered from as a kid and thus got rid of Ross & Blaine, each representing a variation on Spectacularly Bad parenting;
Instead wanting to paint more subtly terrible parents, with faults he as a not-in-a-cult Dad might relate to as tendentially present in decent parenting but a matter of balance and judgement. Maybe the line between a bad parent and an OK one is not so much in whether or not you experience the impulse to curtail your child’s agency “for their own good” but in the complicated and shifting ways a parent chooses to yield to or resist that impulse.
That phrase familiar to all of us…. “it’s for your own good”.
Once combined with an excuse not to give reasons for this alleged good (“you’re to young to understand”; “you’re too inexperienced to understand”; “tough love”; “you’ll understand when you’re older”; “you’re so naive to resist this”), or even through denying the power of reason entirely, becomes a perfect means by which to get away with repeated immorality.
With this simple system, vice becomes virtue. Bullying becomes “discipline”. Invasion becomes “bonding”. Molesting becomes “therapy”. Intolerance becomes “safety”. Hate becomes “love”. Any of this sounding familiar? With this simple way of unthinking, we can abuse people without any remorse.
A moral compass with two north ends, is no compass at all.
OTOH, parents really do have to do things to and for kids that they don’t want, for their own good and often many of those excuses are true.
By college age you really can’t get away with it anymore, even when it is for their own good and they really are being foolish and naive. It can still be hard to tell the difference from outside or when you’re the naive kid.
Did you even read what I wrote? Are you really suggesting that kids need to be MOLESTED for their mental health’s sake?
The major problem with the “too young to understand” argument is that abusive parents, who very much wrongly treat their children, can use EXACTLY the same line. So, how do children discern actual meanness from apparent meanness? According to the “too young to understand” argument, they don’t. They just have to take it — until they’re old enough to figure out that they were abused.
The fact that children are asking “why”, should be a clear and cut signal that they are ready for some kind of answer. We don’t have to OVERWHELM them with information — we can hand it to them piece by piece, pausing to see if they’re satisfied or ready for more.
To give them nothing — to dismiss their attempts to understand — is to leave them to fill in the blanks with very predictable, childlike fears and misgivings. Would any loving parent want that? Would any loving GOD want that?
Thats true if something is really for the kids own good you can proberly give them an explanation for why even if its not the whole answer.
I think a big part of how people figure stuff out is talking to strangers its not a perfect system but it at least gives you an outside opinion.
Holy shit, dude, your first paragraph really reads as a bad faith response.
yeah, uh, i kept my toddlers from running out the front door into the street “for their own good,” so i guess sure i’m abusive now, i’m glad we’ve taken this discussion in this insane direction
I think that’s kind of attacking a straw man, I was referring to how actual abusive parents including Sal’s mother combine “it’s for your own good” with excuses not to explain themselves when questioned, so yeah. Obviously keeping someone from running out into the street is born out of love, where stealing money from them is born out of power.
I guess this is an instance of TL;DR, isn’t it?
Obviously that’s true, but that’s why the “for your own good” and “I’ll explain when you’re older” thing works for abusers. Because it’s also really common and basically necessary for any parents in plenty of non-abusive situations.
Parents do need to do things for their kids own good whether the kids like it or not. Kids, especially younger kids, really do have trouble understanding and aren’t always satisfied with age-appropriate responses, even when there’s no abuse involved.
And yes, that leaves an opening for abusers to use the same tactics. Which sucks, but is unavoidable. We have to look more carefully rather than assume anything not fully explained to a child’s satisfaction is abusive.
Well even if they’re not satisfied with the response, at least they have something to build on when they talk about it with friends and teachers. Giving them NOTHING just let’s them fill in the blanks with their imagination, their fears.
But anyway I said it was “for your own good” COMBINED with excuses to never give reasons that made for the abusive system. Maybe I should go back to using bold print to catch the eye.
Interesting idea, and one that I will think hard on myself.
I had two parenting role models and am now a parent myself. As well, in college I wrote papers in favour of licensing parents, before they could become parents. I mean, we make adopters jump through crazy hoops, but you get to pop one out just because you failed to use protection? After having kids myself, and walking out of the hospital that first time and like, no one was there to make sure I was suitable to care for this tiny fragile being? And with how fucked my life has become since, because there were giant nuclear powered red flags in my relationship, that *I* couldn’t see. So I /still/ support the idea of licensing parents. I was lucky, in that I had one decent parent, who themself had one decent parent. Confusingly my other parent had two decent parents, but she herself is a 100% mental Linda/ Carol amalgam. Different faith, but Communists are no less radical. (and I don’t mean the American “you favour health care? Are you some kind’a pinko commie bastard?” I mean an actual, put the enemies of the state against the wall. Execute them. And return the means of production to the proletariat, COM-MUN-IST). I was lucky to get out as a kid (parents were separated thankfully). But I think understand Willis’ experience. And with as much insight as they has, I can’t see them coming to the conclusion that Linda is a sympathetic character and portraying her like this.
So for myself, I can categorically state that Linda is dead wrong. And I see her not as a misguidedly “loving” parent, and more as just another Blaine. Her methods are very different, and terrifyingly more ‘real’. But she is no different in seeing Walky and Sal as her posessions that are hers to control and dictate what they are to do. Love is an act about nuturing and supporting and empowering someone to be themselves to the best of their ability and desire. Actual love is never about dictating or dictatorial behaviour to anyone. And on that, Imma put this down and go play with my kids and feed them dinner.
The problem with licensing parents is that it would get eugenics-y really fast. That said, yeah, Linda does in many ways not love her kids. In some ways (like feeling the emotion ‘love’) maybe. She’s an abusive dick though, so it’s kinda irrelevant.
Yeah. Sure, it’s important that someone make sure new parents are ready for the responsibility. The children are our future, and improperly prepared parents are almost guaranteed to make huge mistakes that will have devastating effects on said future.
*However*, we do not have any body to whom we’re willing to delegate that authority. Some of us can name some individual people, but a lot of us will disagree on who gets on that list, and we absolutely can’t agree on an existing organization.
There’s also the bit that even people who do get parented well manage to really botch parenting like nobody’s business. Frequently, we can look back at a bad parent and work out how they got to where they are. But sometimes, there’s just no explanation.
Excellent points from you both. And yes there is no mechanism for doing it, that wouldn’t result in an absolute cluster of a nightmare dystopia. So were stuck with self-determination, because the alternative is so much worse. And thus the only thing we as a society can actually do, is improve the support available for parents. For example, instead of taking kids from families whose only failure is being poor, and then paying someone to foster the kid, why not just give the foster money to the kids family in the first place. (our failures in vetting foster parents is sure a solid indication that even if we did license parents, we are doing a shit job of it elsewhere).
Definitely. There’s lots of things we can do to help with Children’s Aid like offering cash to poor parents instead of foster care.
Well, at least SOME minor guidelines as to gets to be a parent (as well as better, more contraception) would be a VERY good idea. Especially if you put them on equal footing with those who adopt.
If we just give parenting up to Rule By the Accident of Birth (the very thing our country was founded to REPEAL), we are basically gambling with children, THE FUTURE OF OUR WORLD, as playing tokens.
Either that, or we should raise parents’ accountability by A LOT. Be it a government or a parent, liberal philosophy holds that there are very few justified reasons for humans having ANY sort of power over other humans. The most important of those reasons is to defend the rights of ALL society, not just some. And also parents are supposed to nurture kids become who they want to be and all that.
The point is that individuals or groups holding powers over others is ONLY justified so long as they ONLY use it to provide this extremely important, practical service to society. In the long run, in order to make sure that parents, governments and other forms of governing power actually go on to provide this important service safely, effectively, and efficiently, with only the power necessary and proper to do so, they need to be held to some of the HIGHEST STANDARDS OF ACCOUNTABILITY in direct or greater proportion to said power.
It’s also worth exploring the possibility that the very process of human parenting itself is fundamentally flawed, at least in our modern environment.
I mean, human children are dependent on their parents for an unusually long developmental period compared to other species. Typically, they’ll display an unquestioning trust and submissiveness to their parents for a significant part of that development. In theory, this should a good survival strategy because their parents are likely to be the most fiercely protective adults in those formative years. To mistrust or resist their parents at that early stage might actively endanger them.
That may have worked out fine millions of years ago, when the primary threats to humanity were lions, tigers and poisonous reptiles. But in the modern world, these survival instincts are often hijacked for other purposes — not by other species, but by ideologies. Manipulative religious, political and pseudo-scientific groups attempt to introduce a false parent (sometimes a god, sometimes a movement or ideology) — a parasitic parent that will divert and endlessly exploit the child’s natural instincts, trust and submission.
That said, it may very well be in our best interest NOT to consecrate innocence, to make sure that children are able to survive on their own as early as possible before they can be turned into objects for manipulative groups’ and individuals’ selfish purposes — weapons to forward an ideological cause; trophies which to polish to their liking and show off to others; living dolls used to act out unresolved issues; human crutches with which to compensate for their own unmet psychological needs.
We don’t need to burn coal to heat our homes. We don’t need to destroy forest land to grow more vegetables. We don’t need to kill animals to get meat.
Whatever purposes traditional parenting may have fulfilled (the natural needs, and not just Skinner-Box-style conditioned needs), there are (or will be) much more efficient, safer, effective means by which to fulfill them, without the collateral damage and background radiation that results from apparently unquestionable, “traditional” methods.
Anyway, those are my ten cents on the issue. Now off to deep fry some Sesame Chicken — A.K.A. the heroin of the food court.
I’m glad you said this. I appreciate Linda as a nuanced character. It’s more interesting that Blaine being evil because he can.
Good lord this hits home.
Growing up, for me, there were never favors and gifts. Just ‘future ammunition’.
My parents and I have a better relationship now, but I still can’t accept any help from them.
That was one of the many, many tricks my adoptives pulled too. Everything – everything is like this. The only question is how.
I haven’t spoken to any of them in … a long time. And I have no plans to change that.
Hard same. Everything, EVERYTHING, even food and shelter had strings attached.
I also had this horrible experience growing up.
Turing gifts into ammunition like this is even worse once you realy think about it.
Gifts by DEFINITION are given FREELY. Using them to create a sense of debt only proves that no gifts were given at all. It also implies a very manipulative mindset.
In healthy relationships, people don’t try to trap each other with guilt, debt or obligation. They stick around because they like each other.
Has Linda ever done anything without an ulterior motive?
She chewed out the Browns for their role in the Day of the Dadly Duo. I don’t think she had an ulterior motive for that one.
Her golden child was involved in that incident. By proxy and through the lens of a dipshit like Linda, that makes Walky look bad.
I don’t think Linda has ulterior motives, or at least not motives she recognizes as ulterior, as Thag and Sirksome excellently pointed out.
When she does something and then tries to manipulate the person who benefited from that action later, it’s out of a genuine desire to do what’s best for them that they “don’t realize is what’s best for them”.
(Is this behavior taken to an incredibly abusive extreme? Absolutely.)
Also, yeah, Linda is a bad person but she’s a bad person in a slightly different way than Carol.
The “don’t realize is what’s best for them” gimmick in and of itself is very manipulative, and insidiously disguised as “helping people”.
It’s implying that there’s some set of “best interests” hidden inside Sal, that she’ll struggle to find by herself, so Linda oh so kindly steps in to “help”. Such an idealized picture of philanthropy, isn’t it?
But what if a politican claimed they were helping a child find their “unrealized Greenback Party interest”? What if they claimed the child “loved the Populist Party but didn’t realize it yet”? Would it seem like they were doing the child a favor, or themselves? What if parents claimed to help children find their “stamp collector interests”? Or their “violinist interests”?
We don’t help people find their interests or identify by imposing interests and identity on them of our own choosing. We help them by facilitating their exposure to the sheer diversity of human life and lifestyle, and let them be so they can discover their OWN interests and identity.
If children were taught about all ways of life, all religions, all lifestyles without bias from the very get-go, they wouldn’t be so easily herded into the ones laid out for them, now would they?
It’s been long enough I don’t remember how this wasn’t what Carol was like. I mean, OK, Carol supported Ross, but it seemed like that was from the same sort of misguided “I know what’s best for people” sort of way that wasn’t interested in actually checking in with reality. I kind of recall feeling like the biggest difference between Linda and Carol was what church they went to. I mean, I don’t recall Carol seeming overtly racist, but I also don’t remember her actually interacting with anyone who wasn’t either white or in some fashion a service worker.
So how is ASHER able to ride around on his motorcycle? Is he just hoping not to get caught, or did his Grandpa pull some strings for him?
I was wondering about that too.
Maybe he’s not a freshman? Like, he’s a year older than Sal and Walky maybe?
Danny says underclassmen are not allowed vehicles, not just freshmen. No way he’s not an undergraduate.
Underclassmen usually means freshmen and sophomores, not necessarily undergraduate. Regardless, money maybe?
What “underclassman” means varies, but it would never mean the same as undergraduate. When/where I went to college, it generally meant freshmen and sophomores, but for some purposes (mostly related to dorms) it only meant freshmen, and for one or 2 things meant everyone other than seniors.
At Purdue, technically sophomores were allowed vehicles on campus, but there wasn’t enough space for all the vehicles that policy authorized students would want to bring on campus. As I understand it, they worked this out by approving all vehicle requests from juniors and seniors as the requests came in. Not that the juniors and seniors usually needed an edge there, since they were able to put in their requests at the end of the prior year. But maybe they only happened to get a vehicle at the last minute or something.
On a particular date shortly before the start of the semester, they started giving out authorizations to sophomores in the order they were received until they ran out of spaces. (Well, apart from the number they reserved for late notice qualifying exceptions, such as special needs or student/family with clout and willing to pay a lot for it.)
Some years, that happened pretty quickly.
As a result, some students talked like it was just upperclassmen who got to have vehicles on campus. But sophomores were technically permitted by policy.
Asher’s family may be influential in a different way.
The Motorcycle might be a recent thing, and for all we know he mended some bridges with Gramps in order to not wind up dead in a ditch for stealong from him
Interesting thought. We didn’t see the motorcycle last semester, did we?
On the other hand, we didn’t see much of him and he might just be breaking the rules.
Linda’s not his mom. Nothing to be held over his head.
Regarding Linda, and I am trying my ample best to word this so if you have a problem, please let me know, it’s a sensitive subject that deserves to be held to a standard. I feel that Linda as a character was best used in the Freshman Family Weekend arc in her brief appearance in Sal’s dorm, the resulting argument between Sal and Walky, and then that one meaningful flashback to the Hymmel audition.
Something I think should come up more in fiction is our own engagement and culpability with prejudice, however that manifests. I think it’s really, really easy to believe in progressive values and from there believe you and your values are progressive and therefore correct, and stepping back like what those strips made me do, I appreciate that. I appreciate the prospect of reflecting on the fact that just because I’m not as racist as somebody else doesn’t mean I’m somehow squeaky clean, that my own ability to engage with racism doesn’t need to manifest overtly, but in a thousand subtle, insidious ways. Yeah I’m queer and neurodivergent, but I’m also a middle class white dude in his late 20s who spends too much time on the internet. Is it even feasible for me to be someone without the capacity for prejudice, even if I’d like to believe I’m not? By telling myself I’m not, and I blinding myself to the idea that I could one day hurt someone I love and never even acknowledge it?
I don’t necessarily want Linda to learn a lesson from this or whatever, she’s not the character in a special episode who’s So Nice but then reveals themself to be racist until she learns a Very Important Lesson, I don’t think what I said above is necessarily incongruous with Linda’s writing later on, I just feel her best use was in how her actions made me reflect on myself and I find that more interesting than the question of whether or not she’s an asshole parent (answer: ye).
I think anyone who doesn’t examine their own prejudices at least a little probably has more of them than they’d care to admit. Honestly I don’t trust anyone who considers themselves a “good person”.
You mean if they feel the need to outright say it? Yeah, totally dubious. That’s basically “Jennifer”.
This is the phenomenon of “crank magnetism” in action.
Hey, Wagstaff, are you a good person?
I mean, I’m not, but I somehow usually manage to be good enough to live with myself.
My wife is a much better person and so I sometimes wind up being a better person than I intended as well.
The point is that we need to examine what we do, to truly question the customs and group behaviors we were born into if we want to improve ourselves, our society. After all, as our moral awareness only increases with time, a truly moral system NEEDS to be an OPEN system.
” A life unexamined is not one worth living. ”
— Socrates
“The unexamined life is not worth living, Man”-Demitri Martin
How to Be Good – R. Gatwood https://apex-magazine.com/how-to-be-good/
So Wagstaff, are you a good person?
GASP
That story was SO GOOD
Omigod that ending
I never saw it coming
What the fuck
SO GOOD
Thanks Clif!
This thread sounds like, “Well, if you’ve examined your prejudices once, you’re golden.”
For me, it’s not like that. I’ve been at this long enough that I generally am decent about treating people respectfully and not treating their race as a factor for making decisions about a person. But when I’m rushed, it’s very easy to make a snap judgement and just assume some whitey I don’t know is up to no good.
It’s really a matter that I need to take the time to really be mindful of exactly where my choices are coming from. Maybe he does look like a snakeoil salesman I interacted with decades ago, but it’s not the same guy, and he deserves to be treated as the different individual he is.
I know that’s not the same racism that other people work on. But, as a white person, once I truly accepted that skin color doesn’t matter, it quickly became apparent to me that I was surrounded by people who were just not OK. Some of them were willing to be open-minded, but a lot aren’t.
To be fair, I don’t really understand what it’s like for most people to grow up with that sort of thing as a core tenant, of second or third importance to, “we made you, so you owe us,” depending on whether the individual was willing to count that debt as two things, giving either God or the family the primary debt, or if it was just one thing. (Generally, the family and the church counted it as two, with the family or God having primacy in that debt respectively, and anyone else didn’t really care about that level of detail.)
I mean, sure, I grew up with that. But I didn’t particularly adopt a great deal of what I was taught by my parents. At most, I learned the critical thinking my father tried to teach me, and then used it all over the place.
I do know what it’s like to be an outcast, because I have been for most of my life. I’ve had times when I was welcomed in to social circles, but usually that came with strings of “be this toxic sort of person that we are”, and as soon as I recognized that I left. Being an outcast is not pleasant, but at least i was able to sleep at night.
Of course, that was over half a lifetime ago. Now I spend too much time wondering what exactly I did wrong in college and would it have been possible for me to do things right in a way that really mattered?
So… Asher’s flexing those family connections then.
And while my own family isn’t THAT specific flavor of messed up, it is one I understand, as a sibling had to deal with a whole issue of being given a large gift, that was used as leverage against the two not even a week later.
Assuming Danny’s use of “underclassmen” would apply to Asher, it’s also possible that he just rides it without permission, and hasn’t been caught. The campus cops wouldn’t know who is and who isn’t – the main issue would be underclassmen wouldn’t be able to get parking decals. So if he never parked it on campus, or parked only in visitor or paid parking, he might get away with it, without flexing any connections…
Personally I would’ve done the same as Sal. Hell I couldn’t even bring myself to borrow even gas money from my family, knowing damn well they would milk anytime I ever asked them for help as guilt trip material.
On the plus side, it is good to know Sal’s bike wasn’t fully destroyed merely put into storage. Sucks that she can’t ride it anymore around campus but glad she has her own personal code of conduct she intends to keep.
Well, this puts a different complexion on Daisy wanting an interview with the cool chick on the motorcycle. (https://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/04-the-bechdel-test/supervisor/) Silly Jennifer, you should have gone after that story, you could have had the front page with your expose of campus corruption.
Of course, given your background, you probably wouldn’t recognize corruption if you saw it, but still.
I don’t think she’d have any issues with this specific abuse of power even if she wasn’t a kind of unofficial Walkerton sibling
Sal, not everyone is as vile as your mother (although I’m sure that many are). It isn’t healthy to assume they are without evidence.
It is because she isn’t healthy, thanks to her mother, that she assumes they are.
It’s a subconscious survival strategy that’s suited her well in dealing with her family.
“Not that additional Sal angst is hard to conjure up. It’s like finding lost change under the couch cushions.” – David Willis, June 22, 2016
See Linda can be nice.
as in “not”
She can be nice, but it requires a complicated pulley system and large quantities of dyed cement.
Sal did the only logical thing possible. Her mother is really a disgusting and manipulative person. Putting her bike away was certainly a pain, but it’s better than owing her something more. I don’t remember, does Danny already know her family situation or is this the first hint she gave to him?
Don’t think he knows Sal’s, but after Amber’s situation, he’s well acquainted with the shitty family archetype.
All shitty families are different.
He’s certainly familiar with his own, but that’s different from wither Amber’s or Sal’s.
Credit where it’s due, Sal, this is an excellent and succinct explanation that lets Danny know the deal without placing blame on him that belongs only and ever to Actual White-Moderate-Style Racist Control Freak, Linda Walkerton
Well that does answer one question, and in a super bummer way
Speaking of that, we’ve seen Ashe using a motorcycle on campus too, which means the dean also know his dad, the boss of the local mafia.
Doesn’t have to mean he knows the dean personally. Maybe he just made a large donation to the college recently or something.
Or at the very least, he found his favourite horse’s head in his bed.
Don’t you hate it when that happens? Particularly when it isn’t even your horse and you have to explain to the owner.
Man, the comments section really hates Linda. As if they’ve never met (or been) people who’ve fucked up parenting, or held unexamined perspectives with racist roots. As if Linda represents an exceptionally bad person, as opposed to the many people you’ve met and are probably friends with.
I’m not defending her, I’m just surprised at the amount of vitriol aimed at a very common type of person.
Being a common type of person doesn’t make her a good type of person and personally I’m not in the habit of making friends with such a low standard of ethics.
But I should also add that it is easier to be mad at and more vicious towards characters than real people. Because Linda has no real feelings. She isn’t real. She’s not going to come to you crying at 3am about how her daughter hates her while still making her controlling awful decisions or have been in your life for 20 years, slowly turning into someone you can’t stand.
You know, it’s probably worth looking at all the comments which mention knowing people (frequently family members, frequently parents) who do this same ‘all favors are later used as collateral’ thing. The issue is, a lot of people DO know someone like Linda, and a decent chunk more of us know someone like Sal or Walky. Unfortunately, Lindas are not pleasant people to know in this respect. Or many respects.
If I had a friend and they said something to me like ‘oh, he’s pre-med. he just doesn’t know it yet,’ I’d have issues with that friend over that statement. If I heard anything like their treatment of Sal, or ‘tried to get a student expelled because her father kidnapped her and other students to get her pulled from school,’ we’re not friends anymore.
And yeah, Linda’s fictional, which makes her a lot easier to hate uncomplicatedly than the actual Lindas in your life, who sometimes do have some complicated ‘after everything I’ve done for you’ type guilt or relative good times to make you sad you’re not on good terms lodged in your psyche. Since the people in the comments who directly know a Linda aren’t happy to know one, though, that should say a lot.
Coming out to yourself as pre-med is a real thing.
Yeah, but do you really think this comes from an accurate assessment of Walky’s interests and skills, or from what she thinks her golden child SHOULD grow up to be, because she wants a doctor son?
Linda’s easy to hate because her brand of child abuse is something that happens to whole swaths of people, so it’s easier to have a visceral reaction to her behaviour than, say, Blaine putting on a supervillain costume.
It’s hard not to hate Linda when she stole money for a child’s surgery.
Lots of people fuck up parenting when they’re doing their best and lots of people have unexamined racist issues. However, yeah, Linda strikes me as worse than average on both these things. She stole nearly 1K from a little girl so she couldn’t get help paying for a surgery ffs.
Linda and Sal’s relationship is bad.
But Marcie is not a person to Linda.
That doesn’t excuse anything Linda did. Sal is a person to her.
Also, the mere fact that Linda makes judgements about who is and who isn’t a person doesn’t really do Linda any favors, especially since it’s based on superficial appearances. To be fair, I don’t recall anyone suggesting criteria for determining personhood that didn’t strike me as seeming pretty superficial.
A certain amount of that comes down to the question of what exactly the definition of a person is. I mean, that *seems* pretty simple to answer until I start trying to actually do it. Much like, what exactly a computer programming language is seemed like a pretty simple question until I started trying to answer it. To be fair, I think I’d have a lot easier time of answering that question if I didn’t recall that, before we had electric-powered computers, `computer` was a job description many working women had.
The cherry on top is Sal owed her Just That Cool™ motorcycle rebel cred to her own rich mom’s intervention.
That musta chafed
Feels like Mom felt guilty and decided to throw her daughter a bone and was very proud of that and when Sal got into an argument with her the “Ungrateful Kid” mode kicked in and this went down… Sal and Mom could really use some communication lessons and maybe a bit of therapy.
Sal could use some communication lessons for a thing or two, but Linda’s beyond hope.
No. No one is beyond hope, sure Linda is misguided and quite a bit of an asshole but she is far from the worst the comic has to offer.
I think that once you’re trying to get another student expelled, specifically because her father kidnapped your son as well as her in a bid to scare her out of college (she brings up the Sal stuff, but she was willing to let it stand until the kidnapping), you’re kind of the asshole here. Likewise when you tell other people that your son ‘is a pre-med major, he just doesn’t know it yet’ over the major he actually has declared.
I also think that once you steal money meant for your daughter’s best friend’s medical care, from your daughter, with the express intent of trying to get your daughter to cut ties with said best friend because you decided she’s ‘a bad influence’ and frame her injury as ‘proof’ of that*, you’ve broken something in that relationship that’s never going to be fixed totally. Just because she’s not the same variety of abusive as Blaine or Ross or Clint doesn’t mean Linda isn’t an abusive parent, and it’s very clear Sal does not trust her as a result of Linda’s actions.
* Note that what we know of Marcie’s injury is that she was maimed by the ‘good kid with a bright future’ who’d already hurt Marcie once, and Sal got in trouble for defending against. Linda said nothing about Leland facing consequences or defending Sal’s actions then, which says a lot about how hollow her subsequent actions against Amber really were. Marcie and Sal have also discussed the incident in a way that implies Sal might have been picking fights with Leland, and Marcie was collateral damage. In other words, Linda’s blaming the victim for being maimed by a wealthier, whiter, maler kid, and then using her status as victim as ‘proof’ she’s unsuitable as Sal’s friend. And then she did something similar down the line with Amber.
These things are all true and horrible, but Linda is still Sal and Walky’s mom. Any amount of improvement on her part would in turn improve their lives, even if Sal were to justifiably cut ties.
I didn’t deny that she was an asshole. The thing about her is that she cares about her kids but her methods and approach are really shitty. What she really needs is help in understanding why what she is doing is shitty and how to improve it. She Cares but in a very wrong way.
When your caring manifests as emotional and financial abuse of your child, some bridges get burned. Even if Linda turned everything around instantly and started groveling for forgiveness from her kids*, Sal would not be obligated to forgive her just because Linda’s her mother. Neither would Walky. And the onus is on Linda, as the parent who still has all the power here, to stop abusing her children and make amends. The intent doesn’t matter, because the impact was ‘Linda emotionally and financially abused her children, and continues to do so.’
* Just because Walky was the golden boy doesn’t mean Linda didn’t fuck him up, too. He clearly has severe anxiety about disappointing her from seeing how she treated Sal, to the point where it’s a blow to his identity that he might not be effortlessly learning the material anymore because he’s the Smart Funny One. There’s other issues in play there – he never learned to study due to giftedness/possible ADHD that means the methods taught won’t work on him – but the degree to which he was afraid of not getting an A because it’d disappoint Linda? That’s from seeing her love is conditional and trying to stay on her good side.
In any relationship isolated down to two people, I’m unable to think of any time in which an abused person has an obligation to accept reconciliation with their abuser beyond any environmental situation that requires cooperation. To be clear, once such an environmental situation is resolved, they’re back to “no obligation”, even if there had been an apparent accepting of the reconciliation to get over the environmental situation.
When the abuse includes any form of continuity errors, such as gaslighting or guilt-tripping over gifts given, reconciliation becomes nigh impossible. Sal cannot reasonably ever trust anything from Linda. For that matter, neither can Walky. He probably *will*, but that doesn’t mean it’s sane for him to do so. He’s just not recognized all of what she’s done to his sister.
As far as the Walky abuse goes, yeah. I think the best way I’ve seen to handle a gifted child like Walky is to find something that does tax their abilities early on, and use that to teach those skills. If you can’t find something early on, take advantage of that to get them to the point where you can quickly.
Our school systems do not do this. The ones I have direct experience with actively fought against doing this. After all, they’re daycare systems, and they don’t get paid for turning out valuable members of society early. Or, for that matter, at all.
As an older person with autism spectrum and ADHD, I can say that many of the study techniques that normal people use *do* work for me and many others with autism spectrum and ADHD. The problem is, you can’t teach them to someone with a trivial learning exercise as the training material.
Everything my elementary school tried to use as exercises in those studying methods failed because I picked up the material as quickly as they related it. Actually, quicker. They repeated stuff multiple times so the normal kids could learn it, which taught me to recognize, “lesson’s on repeat mode, time to find my own stimulus.”
For a long time, I thought that’s what ADD *was*. It took me until college for me to recognize that the fact that I got bored with tests and quizzes and stopped focusing on them was a real issue beyond the impact it had on my grades.
That point wasn’t driven home by college academics. I continued to get acceptable grades by getting the first x% of a long quiz or a test perfect and then flaking through the rest, in part because even on the later portions, I was doing above average – I just wasn’t meeting the same standard as I had at the start. What made me realize it was situations in my personal life that happened because I wasn’t living at home and more importantly was surrounded by others who weren’t living at home. Taking care of my friends required that I push past that ADD boundary – and it turned out to be a thing there, too. It was one thing for that to be an issue during a test, another for a friend to be hurt because I stopped paying as much attention.
Caring about your kids dictates you care about their friends. This is one of the few positions my father has held that I still respect him for. I feel like Linda would deliberately miss this point and assert that’s why she was trying to get Sal to cut ties with Marcie.
I feel like Linda cares about Sal as an extension of herself that she can’t control, rather than as a separate person. This is by no means not unique to her. In the comic, Blaine was also like this regarding Amber, though that was also taken to the next level by his misogynism and again by his mafia ties.
Outside of the comic… it’s pretty common.
No, people can be beyond hope. Specifically, if they refuse to try and change. It’s not like Linda doesn’t know what Sal thinks of her but she’s never seen fit to try and improve things or change her behaviour. So for now, yeah, she’s beyond hope. She doesn’t have to be forever, but for now she absolutely is.
I feel like that’s less of a “Linda is beyond hope” and more of a “What has been attempted to get Linda to see she needs to fix herself isn’t working”.
In that way, Linda is much more like the world today. It certainly needs fixing, but the things I’ve tried don’t seem to be doing anything.
“Upkeep is expensive”. Now all I can imagine is Sal doing her own wrenching &c, and it makes her even cooler.
Why stricter rules for first years? At a Big Ten university, 20-30% will be gone after one year. Why treat 18 year olds as not completely adult? Check the name of the comic. That year is a transition and it’s when kids get into the most trouble. Keeping that trouble on campus makes it easier to manage.
Does Dorothy need this? Nope. Did Joyce? Yes.
And it makes it a real pain in the ass when drama happens on campus and the Uni has to lawyer up against lawsuits and bad PR I imagine. As I remember that Evergreen college got such massively bad rep that their enrolment went down the drain.
Limited parking space and “immersion in campus life” probably play a part in it as well.
“Hella” has migrated to Indiana and/or Tennessee now? Damn.
I’m willing to believe that Linda did intend it as a nice gesture, but was later happy to use it as an example of “all I’ve done for you”.
I imagine Sal views anything from Linda this way because there’s so much bad blood–and she’s not wrong.
Sal views anything from Linda like this, because once Linda showed this pattern of behavior, it was clear that any gift would later be twisted like this. In the short term, it doesn’t matter what the short term plan is. What matters is the long term plan.
Also, the kicker was that Linda was honest when she was giving the gifts the first time around. That’s why Sal doesn’t have any way to tell that Danny’s being honest. The only way she can learn to trust Danny is to see that he lives by the things he says, that he gives gifts to others and doesn’t hold them over their heads.
Except… upkeep isn’t hella expensive. I DIDN’T have a rich mom, and I had a motorcycle through college (still do). Upkeep is hella cheap. Parts much cheaper than car parts and you can easily take a motorcycle apart and put it back together by hand with a good wrench and screwdriver, and liability insurance on a motorcycle is next-to-nothing because they’re light enough to not cause much damage.
Unless you’re driving a Harley or Goldwing and you got full coverage insurance (including medical) and are going to the shop for every breakdown and buying OEM parts and… ohhhh…. Sal you spoiled princess.
omg
what if sal was a biker poser this whole time
Mechanical maintenance on Goldwings isn’t that bad, since they’re basically built like small cars the service intervals are longer than high-revving sport bikes. They get you in labor, because when those intervals roll around you have to take all that bodywork apart to get at anything (even simple maintenance items like the air filter). Insurance might also be a problem for a teenager when the bike’s engine displacement is measured in nautical tonnage.
Grandpa’s highway Barcalounger is one of the best-kept secrets of the motorcycling world. They run like a Swiss watch and eat up highway miles like nothing.
I’ve got an old 70s Honda; it’s mechanically simple, reliable, and insurance is cheap, but the maintenance intervals are short, the tires are skinny, it has dual rear shocks so death wobble can happen, and pretty much the only place to get the right parts for it is Common Motor Collective. All dat chrome, tho…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlbkAhCNvik
I suspect it’s that Sal either doesn’t have the time for a part-time job/her own maintenance right now while also getting the hang of college courseloads, or what money she does have was stretched pretty thin between motorcycle upkeep and getting back into music and starting roller derby, which both would’ve had initial costs. I suspect Sal doesn’t let Linda have access to her finances at all (since that would give her access to withdraw money), and we’ve never seen her at a part-time job, so presumably whatever money she had last semester was saved up from the summer and high school. If she didn’t have the time for work, or at least not stable work, expenses start adding up a lot faster.
Also two superheroic chase sequences, one of which included AG dropping caltrops on the road and the other of which included catching people being thrown from a moving vehicle, does seem pretty likely to do more than the usual wear and tear.
Yeah, upkeep IS hella expensive when you’re not employed anymore. Whatever she was doing in Tennessee, she’s not doing now.
Anything’s basically hella ‘xpensive when you’ve got no money coming in. I started college with about 75% of what I’d need to pay for my expected four years… but I’d been saving up my whole life to get to that point.
Sure, I was making a lot more per hour at age 18 than I had been at age 2, but I also wasn’t working while school was in session (well, tutoring, but that’s not reliable). My employer from right before college wasn’t interested in having a summer employee, so I wasn’t able to get as much per hour at 19 as I was at 18.
So I was definitely feeling the cost of all of those not readily replaceable dollars. I went as far as not eating supper on Sundays because the dorm cafeterias didn’t serve Sunday supper, and I didn’t have a kitchen so the only alternatives were fast food and restaurants, both of which were hella ‘xpensive.
I’m not taking the time to go back to look at those two chase scenes, but I did somehow get the impression that there was at least major cosmetic damage and possibly some structural damage as well to the motorcycle at the end of the second chase scene. I think we saw the bike after that, but if I’m recalling that correctly, it’s probably beyond what Harmony was thinking.
On a high school job salary? Unlikely.
I think Sal is unemployed. Or if she is employed it’s by roller Ferber.
I’m surprised you even know of Dr. Richard Ferber and his crying baby rolling machine.
Linda really and truly doesn’t grasp how terrible of a parent she is, huh.
It’s one thing to do something nice for a kid, with the understanding between the both of you that “here’s a nice thing, but if you do something wrong with this nice thing, it will be taken from you.” But that’s involve clearly communicating with her daughter from the get go and not secretly doing something “nice” in order to then use that fact in a fight later.
There’s also a difference between a child (or even an adult) being given privileges and using a nice thing you ostensibly did ‘just to be nice’ as ammunition.
With this series of conversations about how Sal thinks being are trying to use for their own ends, I wonder if Marcie telling her that Sal was “her first Malaya” freaked her out too.
‘Cause like the answer’s real obvious, Marcie had a crush on Sal for a long time (maybe still does?) and that’s still real but it doesn’t have to influence Marcie’s every decision and feeling, Marcie still cares about Sal and values her companionship, but it suddenly occurred to me that Marcie and Sal hadn’t even had a conversation since then and that was over two years ago, and Marcie only finally reappeared on-panel with Sal this storyline at roller derby, and now I’m wondering if Sal’s tanking her relationships because “everyone wants something from her.”
I hope it hasn’t gotten that bad. She seemed reassured from what Malaya told her (though of course Malaya had to tease her a bit in there), but it has definitely been a bit since we saw a lot of Marcie outside bonus strips.
The fact that she is still in roller derby seems promising to me, though – I’m not sure Sal’d be able to stand that much Malaya, especially Malaya with authority, if she were on REALLY bad terms with Marcie. (She likes Carla well enough, and she was clearly starting to be on better terms with AG, but I’m not sure either of them was sufficient pre-skip to put up with That Much Malaya.)
It could definitely be nothing, I’m just kinda thinking it like Sal hangs out with Marcie and then starts thinking “oh right Marcie had a crush on me. She wanted something from me. She didn’t want me for me, she wanted me to love her back.”
Yeah, I hope that’s not the case but I could see it being Weird for a while until Sal manages to shout Asshole Brain down that they were best friends BEFORE Marcie was (probably) attracted to her (sure, little kids have crushes sometimes but usually not THAT young) and have maintained best frienddom even after it was clear Sal was straight.
(Those two things being true, and Marcie being one of Sal’s closest friends, I do think Sal would eventually be able to break the thought pattern before it permanently destroyed their relationship. Or at least, I certainly hope so.)
Sal considering all things transactional and not appreciating friends doing favors is a very unhealthy thing.
Wait but then if that’s the case why does Asher get to have a motorcycle?
Grandpa’s a mob Don and the local PD is on the take. Either school security turns a blind eye, or he has somewhere off-campus to park it.
My Mom: I hope when you have kids, that you have a daughter who’s as horrible as you are to me!
Me at 14: Oh, well that’s no problem. I didn’t plan on having kids anyway.
Mom: *insert Willy Wonka “Wait stop come back” meme here*
I’m getting married in November & none of my family will be involved as I refuse to allow her or my older sister who likes to act like a parent to meddle and intervene in my God blessed right to MY OWN happiness. No amount of “generosity” is worth being “graced by their presence”, and if that puts me off their preferred path to their idea of Paradise, well then lemme get some streamers for my handbasket to Hell.
Only advice I give the bride and groom is to ignore all the advice people will give you. Even this. Since you seem to have a firm grip on that, I wish you well and all the years of love and happiness.
Also, I look forward to chatting with you in hell if I’m wrong. You sound awesome.
My husband’s relationship with his mom is like this… only she doesn’t have the same clout to pull. Every present is something to bring up when you are mad. My dad suggested my husband start bringing cash whenever he visits her and when she says “you can’t talk to me like that after all I did for you” start laying 20s on the table and going “can I now?”