So very, very much to unpack in such a little one-off…
First, even Chomsky isn’t talking about ‘every president’–he’s focusing on the post-WWII presidents only.
Second, while I like a lot of Chomsky’s stuff, his claims here don’t quite stand up to muster. To declare the actions of the US indictable, he has to take the position that US forces were involved in the actions in question. While that’s clearly true in some of his examples, many of his examples are cases of proxy fights–we provide financial and materiel support to some group that then turns around and commits war crimes. I scanned the Geneva Conventions and… nope. Doesn’t apply to such situations, only to direct actions by signatory States. Short form, unless it involves boots on the ground, there’s very little the GC has to say about it. Sure, you can take a position that there’s no ethical or moral distinction, but Chomsky uses the word ‘indictable’ repeatedly, and that is about the law, not about ethics or morals, and if Raidah doesn’t know THAT difference yet, she should change majors now, to something like, I dunno, fingerpainting.
Third, if we expand it to that ethical/moral framework, then it gets really fun, because there’s literally no nation of note that has not done so in one way or another. By Chomsky’s standards, allying with Stalin to bring down Hitler would qualify as a war crime (as Stalin’s own regime was absolutely committing such atrocities). Please feel free to discuss this with any of the folks who would’ve been in Auschwitz for another few months without coordinated effort.
Of course, Chomsky is wonderfully one-sided in his analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which when viewed honestly simply illustrates my prior point–both sides at this stage have so many Geneva Convention violations that pretty much the entire leadership of both nations should be in the Hague.
Now, if Raidah has a real alternative to trying to change the system other than seeking power within it, I’m all ears. But as is almost always the case in such positions, we’ve gotten nothing of that nature. And while the president alone is unlikely to be able to change things for the better, having someone who agrees that things need to change in that position is VITAL if we’re ever going to achieve anything. Just the Veto and SCOTUS appointments pretty much assure that.
If Raidah gave two flying fucks about anything other than her shitty little status games, she’d be sounding Dorothy out as a potential ally, proposing that with some effort, they might be able to make a two-front attack that would actually get some results. But she’s only caring about taking cheap shots.
The “genius” of that comment is that it doesn’t need to be true. 1) this is a liberal arts college, a lot of the students would just assume it’s true; 2) an explanation as to how and why it’s not, like Freemage has given above, would have to be long-winded and nuanced. But if you are explaining yourself, you are playing defense. On a purely rational level, Raidah isn’t making much of an argument: she said something short, quippy and wrong, and didn’t provide any sources or evidence for her claims. But she’s not making a rational argument. On an instinctual, lizard-brain level, she’s on the offensive, and a Dorothy who plays defense would be on the defensive. She’d lose the social encounter.
The only way to win here is not to play. But that also feels like losing. You could quip back, and then it might be a toss up, except we know Raidah has a lot more practice and Dorothy is far too kind to be good at that sort of thing.
Indeedy. Having said that, the amount of interesting stuff Ive learned while doing research to rebuff said BS has made doing so well worth the effort. Helps I dont have a life I guess.
He’s also the purveyor of an incredibly seductive theory of language that I wish was true because it makes my brain happy, but is also colossal bullshit.
People are complicated and Chomsky is a complicated kind of bad. In this context, the relevant bad is that he’s a war crimes apologist. Both historically, and with respect to current events.
Yeah, there’s a lot of value in tearing down the idealized picture that many Americans have of the country, but many who start down that path wind up blaming America for everything and absolving other countries of any responsibility.
You realize this webcomic artist is extremely sociolist right? Like, he believes in helping poor, starving and dying people without putting them into an early grave through debt related stress.
Noam Chomsky is, and I wish I was exaggerating here, a genocide denier. So long as those genocides were carried out by a communist government (see: Khmer Rouge).
And on a less controversial note, he’s also the least useful sort of pundit. All he does is take snipes at imperialism, which we all know is bad. He doesn’t offer any coherent plans for a better world, because it’s easier to gain traction by just repeating various forms of “everything is bad and will continue to be bad until my idealized form of communism arrives to save us. ‘
He ignores that imperialism isn’t just a Western capitalist thing, but basically just a variant of what every powerful country has done throughout history.
Also, despite Putin literally saying “We are attacking Ukraine because it belongs to us in an imperial sense and it was a mistake for Lenin to even nominally carve it off from the empire in the first place”, Chomsky has been sadly pushing the idea that “Russia *had* to invade Ukraine and murder thousands of people because the USA is big and mean and they’re so scared of it, just let them kill Ukrainians unopposed and seize their territory, that’s what anti-imperialism is”.
A lot of socialist/communist types use an old Leninist definition of “Imperialism” where it’s an inherently capitalism thing, rather than a basic part of state’s foreign policy dating back to the Bronze Age.
When Communist nations exercise influence over client states and build spheres of influence and buffer states, that’s something completely different than what capitalist nations do.
There’s a lot of “my side” defense that Leftists engage in as much as Right types. I say this as a Leftist. The idea that as long as its anti-American hegemony then it must be justified because if the communists are as bad (or worse) than Americans during the Cold War then that forces you to realize, GASP, some of the points they may raise could be true and not to completely villify them.
I have never met or read a leftist ever claim to support communism seriously. Not only because communism has had it’s name dragged through the mud by dictatorships pretending to be communist, but because leftists are specifically socialists, a different idealogy entirely. If you, sir, believe you know any leftists that support communism as any more then a very general framework for fairness (everyone gets equal blank) then you don’t know leftists. Which makes it strange that you claim to be one. Do you watch ANY leftist media?
Chomskey isn’t left. He’s an old crazy man who sometimes says things EVERYONE quotes. The right quotes him all the time too. Everyone does. He’s a meme machine. That’s it.
You define leftists as “specifically socialists”, who you believe are definitionally not communists, and think there’s somehow something meaningful in the fact they’re not communists? When that’s literally just how you define the term?
I don’t know how to even start to unpack this, but please, read something. Vaush or Hasan or whoever are not theorists and don’t even have a particularly firm grasp of their own beliefs, let alone what other strains of left wing thinkers believe. This is a rather breathtaking take, and not in a good way.
Near as I can tell, Raidah’s idea of a ‘loftier goal’ is ‘sit on the sidelines and complain about whoever is in charge.’ There’s a direct path from this sort of deliberate disengagement and the elections of Reagan, Bush and Trump. It amounts to hollow posturing.
“Everything is awful forever. Therefor I have no responsibility to try to improve things or help others, and instead am morally justified in spending my entire life reveling in my own petty selfishness. QED.”
I don’t think we know how Raidah actually feels about the US government. Here, she’s taking a knife to Dorothy (who she barely knows) as a minor step toward a larger. Or is it Asher’s goal?
ROZ WOULD EAT HER ALIVE. I SAID IT DOWNTHREAD TOO. Roz would snap her little opportunist butt like a TWIG. GET HER, ROZ. GET THE FAKE PROGRESSIVE PETIT-BOURGEOIS ASSHOLE.
Roz believes in her positions. Call her, quite correctly, what you will—spiteful, holier than thou, selfish—but she’s shown an unwavering commitment to women’s rights, and honestly, her plan to derail Robin’s campaign was stupid and self-centered, but it came from a genuine place.
I cannot imagine she would cotton to Raidah’s horse shit for a second.
And she wants to be a lawyer? Speaking as someone currently in law school…if she keeps this attitude in law school, she won’t make it through 1L. Plus, depending on what kind of law she wants to go into (and I’m guessing it isn’t Patent Law), the odds of her having to do something at some point she deeply disagrees with are high. Someone who wants to be a lawyer has no business being on a high horse about someone who wants to be President.
Mike stood up for his friends, and called them out when they were being blind to their own failings.
Raidah is just a jerk. Same power set. Totally different motive behind its use.
Radiahs definitely going out of her way to be an ahole here. I can only guess she’s decided Dorothy is too close to Joyce to recruit and not worth feigning politeness to, and she seems to be trying to isolate Walky, getting him to walk away after a friend just got insulted.
The distinction is that she knows Dorothy cares about being ethical, while Raidah only seems to care about ethics insofar as the standards required to practice law. So she knew that was an insult that’d land on Dorothy, but if someone tried to counter by mentioning that lawyers are sketchy, Raidah wouldn’t care.
There’s certainly some truth there, although I hold to the belief that “anyone who wants the job, doesn’t deserve the job (and certainly shouldn’t have it)”
This leads logically to the conclusion that inherited monarchies are a better form of government than representative democracies, since anyone getting elected in a democracy must be trying to, but there’s at least some chance that the child of a ruler doesn’t actually want the throne.
Yeah, but it also feels like a bit of an empty sentiment, like “War criminal presidents are just a thing we’re going to have”. That’s how it’s been so far, but I don’t know that I trust someone who’s content for it to just always be that way.
Yeah. Someone who is absolutely dedicated to the idea that “Everything is awful forever” will always be right, because they can always find something awful to point to.
Any chance of living a life with meaning or making the world a better place requires dropping the cynicism for at least a moment.
I’m guessing Raidah considers even thinking about this kind of thing to be a waste of time. For her, cynicism is just another weapon she can use to put other people in their place (below her).
Thing is Raidah’s doing that thing where you say something that feels right without actually being factual. The presidency is a tool of enormous power and it’s up to every president to decide what they do with it, it’s just really fuckin hard to get there without being being complicit in some humanitarian atrocity or another.
Yes sometimes a president has to authorize the use of military force. But not all military actions rise to the level of “war crimes”, and not all presidents have used the military in that way.
Carter was a pretty decent person and didn’t overuse the military option. And while Obama used drone strikes and authorized action in Libya, efforts were made to minimize casualties.
Words have meaning. You figure a potential lawyer like RAdaih would understand that. And tossing the words “war crimes*
around when they do not apply cheapens the meaning
7 don’t think Radiah actually cares about the meaning of the words coming out of her mouth so long as they have the effect she wants. Kind of hoping thst comes back to bite her.
Her accusation is ridiculous even on the face of it. She is essentially saying that president, the person holding the most powerful position on the planet, is legally required to do something illegal. I was actually expecting a more well thought out insult than that coming from Raidah.
Less “legally required” as if the law actually matters in any way to a sitting President (or the vast majority of ones who’ve left office, with the possible exception, we’re about to see, of one) and more “do you really think that any one human being in an otherwise realisticish universe could Just Decide to ignore over a century of foreign policy of dramatic violent intervention”.
But yes, yes, I know, Obama’s term had fewer war crimes which is the same as zero, everyone’s memory-holed the Chelsea Manning trial, and thhings like all the massive human rights and legal violations we’re still ramping up on our Southern border should never diminish our trust that someone, somewhere, definitely not us but like, somebody in charge, will eventually fix the system and return it to its default and intended state of- of uh-
You are correct, we should not rely on ‘someone else’ to fix the system. Raidah, however, is advocating not even attempting to fix it, and is deriding anyone who might even want to try.
Or do you think non-Presidents can do a better job of dictating Presidential policy than Presidents can?
Yes. Yes I do believe that. I believe there’s a reason there are like thousands and thousands of people in the executive branch, I believe most Presidents select their advisors specifically because they want to listen to them, I believe there’s a reason we vote for the President and that it’s at least intended to matter, and I believe that, from everything I know about politics- from everything I know about any position of power– it is a giant game of trying to figure out the best of a lot of shitty options while you’re surrounded by a ton of people who have the power to fuck with your ability to do your job, even if it’s unofficial, and who you may or may not be able to trust.
I do not think any one person should, is meant to, or is capable of just floating around above that. Not even a President. A President is one person.
I also think it’s ridiculous to imply that being wary of people who want positions of power, or god forbid criticizing them in hopes they do that thing centrists are always saying about “elect them and then yell at them until they do the right thing”, means you just want to whine and sit on your hands and do nothing, and I’m a bit tired of it. There are a damn near infinite number of things a person can do to help fix or reform or replace the system other than running for one specific office, and I’m sure Dorothy’s even doing several of them.
I think it’s self-defeating and infantile to take the position that you can change the current nature of the presidency without the current occupant of the White House being on-board.
As I’ve said elsewhere in today’s comments, if Raidah were actually remotely interested in changing the system, she’d be working on recruiting anyone who might make a likely ally inside and outside of the executive branch. Instead, she’s playing petty one-upmanship games in order to… I’m not even sure any more, honestly.
I have no idea what Raidah is doing beyond being an asshole. This could be her actual feelings or just coming up with shit on the fly to hurt someone. She is not acting in good faith basically ever in her life regardless of the truth value or lack thereof of her statements. Still, the word she said was “wary”, not “fuck voting and never try anything else”, and I don’t think that necessarily means she’s advocating the latter.
Or, well, advocating anything– again, Raidah- but that’s not exactly the conversation.
I just don’t at all think the only way to get a world leader on board with something is to start with one who’s already there, or even necessarily close to there, and I don’t think they’re the only person who needs to be on board for it to go smoothly. A President is pulled a lot of different ways and even if they have a ton of power, it’s still by definition limited by a number of things.
In my experience it means some old people in another country miles away technically has some power/say in your government. Or it’s the republic type of prime minister where you also have a president, for some reason
You’re assuming that US law is consistent with international law. US law is probably not even self-consistent before you factor in that treaties have the force of law.
We’re still in Iraq, ain’t we? And we’re still occupying land within our own borders that doesn’t belong to us, according to our own Constitution, aren’t we? Perpetuating crimes began by another administration counts.
We literally do still have troops occupying Iraq tho. There’s been a huge draw down, but we have about 2500-3000 troops actively stationed in Iraq, and likely will for many more years due to the instability caused by the us invasion and subsequent conflicts with isis and isil
Barack Obama comitted targeted assassinations by drone and killed innocent children. His admin also authorized the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital. I wouldn’t call his drone program very good at “minimizing casualties”
You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to her
Like, she’s right, but so what? Look how she’s using the truth and who she’s talking to. Don’t miss the forest, which is “she’s just trying to make Dorothy feel like shit” for the trees of the stupid Presidents. Who gives a shit about Presidents, why go up to someone you barely know and dunk on them for clout??
She isn’t even loosely right, let alone legally correct (which would be the more important part if she cared about being a good lawyer rather than feeling better than everyone else).
Oh I gotta be honest, you’ve confused my forest for my trees. I don’t care about her opinion on the presidents, I like that she just delivered the most brutal emotional injury Dorothy’s ever suffered. And I like Dorothy! In fiction, sometimes it’s fun to see even good people get a swift kick in the face 🙂
Raidah didn’t make that comment to be poignant, she did it to put Dorothy down. She would have had a derisive comment even if Dorothy said she was going to find a way to convert CO2 emissions into universal housing.
Well at least for a maximum of 10 years, starting sometime 15-20 years in the future. And in Willis-Time, we know how long THAT will be 🙂 (Not counting the occasional semester break time-jumps, that is).
LOL, it would be amazing if someone framed it as a question to ask future candidates like “have you considered what it means to potentially do war crimes for the country?”
it’s def more entertaining to watch as a third party/series as opposed to irl esp if it comes outta nowhere, even if someone’s ‘default’ mode is smarmy/sarcastic but hers is def more ‘barbed’ than walky’s harmless ‘goofyness’/ribbing
She not saying that Dorothy WILL commit war crimes; she’s saying that people drawn to the presidency make her wary. I honestly can empathize with that position. If someone older than 7 told me they were aiming to be a cop, I’d be wary of them.
Is this some kind of ‘once you get older you’ll be more conservative bs or is this the typical Centrist bs? Cause honestly? I don’t trust a single person who wants the near unlimited power that someone like the United States President has. No one who attains that power is a good person.
So do you just wanna get rid of the presidency? I don’t even say I disagree but it’s not like I trust any of the alternatives because I don’t trust people in general.
There are better systems than presidencies. One of the strongest points in favor of a parliamentary system is that prime ministers can be removed with a vote of no confidence. And sure, that can produce a circus like UK 2022, but it’s a far more meaningful check on the executive than America’s toothless impeachment process, which has never actually removed a president.
There are also other strategies for representation that would be able to map to constituency preferences a lot better than America’s model. If combined with better ballot design and a parliamentary system, you wouldn’t have nearly as much dumbshit infighting as you see inside the Democratic Party, because the DNC has been forced to be big-tent “inclusive” rather than a nuanced representation of what people actually believe. (And as a bonus, it would be nice if the Christian nationalists were properly split off from the Koch toadies and the gun nuts, rather than having them find common cause in a coalition party as they do now.)
For all the hot air about working across the aisle, there should really be another four or six aisles to work across when you’re representing 300 million people.
Of course, the parliamentary system also means that, short of removal, the legislature is even less likely to check the executive, since they’ll always be the same party, with the same basic agenda.
Britain committed atrocities as an imperial power for centuries under a parliamentary system.
And while coalitions would need to be formed between parties in such a system rather than within them, they’d still need to be formed. The Democrats might not have to be “big-tent inclusive” then, but they’d still need to form a similar big tent inclusive coalition to form a government.
Which isn’t to say a parliamentary system is a bad idea, but it’s far from a quick fix.
Sort of? Parliamentary systems also have minority governments, which does put the government at increased “checks”. Mind you, it also sometimes results in the other parties being dicks and subverting the government altogether.
In some ways but in other ways it also means the government has to play nice or have a vote of no confidence, which is definitely more of a check than an impeachment process that never actually happens.
The bigger check is that you can’t get your agenda through and are limited to what the executive can do on its own.
Having midterms is also a big check that most parliamentary systems don’t have – since a change in parliament is likely to mean a change in government, elections tend to be further apart.
Frankly, it is my belief that if we just got rid of first past the post voting, we’d be a long way toward a better legislature.
I’d also like to see term limits, but I’d also like to see strict limits on profiting from the office, and on the source of campaign monies. Koch or Soros, neither one, should be helping decide the Senator race in Washington.
You can’t “just git rid of first past the post voting”. You’ve got to replace it with something and what you replace it with will play a huge role in how that turns out.
There are several versions of alternative voting systems that don’t have near the problems of our current, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. They all invite you to vote for multiple candidates at once. The mechanism behind the vote varies, but they mainly fall into three camps; approval, ranked choice, and score. While I would prefer some form of ranked choice, probably either IRV or STV, although I’d prefer Condorcet, ANY of these options, in all of their permutations of which I am aware, would be preferable to the system most of us vote under today, that heavily penalizes voting for third-party candidates, thus reinforcing the “‘uniparty’ duopoly” we’ve fallen into.
Fair and a couple of states are experimenting with at least IRV.
I don’t think it’ll have much effect though. The fundamentals that push a two party system in the US run deeper than that. Letting 3rd parties lose without affecting the results doesn’t really change anything.
Not in the way that some kind of proportional representation would, for example.
If you don’t trust people then spreading power around instead of centralizing it reduces the total amount of damage that can be done. Power is a force multiplier, not a force adder. So yeah, take the most powerful position and weaken or abolish it. Keep doing that forever and we might have a small chance at politics not sucking.
Spread power around too much and nothing gets done. And some things still need to be done.
Much of the increase in Presidential power in recent decades is due to Congressional gridlock. Nothing gets through Congress, Presidents are still being pushed to act, so they turn to executive orders.
First off it is not unlimited power, not even close. Our whole system of government in the US was built on the idea of checks and balances and no president has been able to do half of what they wanted to do. Secondly, the power that they do have is a tool that can be used for either good or evil. And believe it or not, some people pursue that power to do good. I think we are better off giving those people the power presidency over those who seek the office only for personal gain.
And for the record I’m not a centrist and certainly not a conservative. What I’m talking about is more just an understanding on how the political system works.
The people seeking to do good are never on the ballot though, like I understand that there are checks and balances in place but the power of the United States president is seriously just too fucking much. The sheer number of dead people that presidents are responsible for, that the United States is responsible for is simply too much.
Also it is impossible to make any real significant change to systemic evils like systemic discrimination from climbing with the system that creates those evils. One of your parties I’d pure fucking cartoon evil the other is more comic book evil and I don’t think a single person with good intentions would be allowed to gain much power in either party. And if she did somehow do it then the cartoon villains would just block any good thing she attempts and then use distractions to keep her occupied for 8 years and nothing changes.
Then, what do you do? Lose all hope? Don’t bother? Don’t try to change anything. Just leave those positions for the assholes and monsters? Flee the country and let it fester until it becomes the new confederacy? What, honestly, do you propose the average Joe do if there’s no hope?
Do French police have surplus military equipment, training geared toward escalating a situation toward violence as quickly as possible, and an almost inherent desire to murder civilians for any little thing?
It’s easy to suggest, much harder to convince people to actually do it. Nobody wants to get turned into paste on live television, shockingly.
One of the law enforcement organs in France is the Gendarmerie nationale, which is part of the French military. The equipment of some of their units includes armoured vehicles.
About rocket launchers, since the military (the legit army, not the “gendarmerie”) is since a few presidents being trained for “crowd control”, the answer is also yes.
Welcome, if you’re american you’ll be able to stay, if you’re from a country with actual civil war or disastrous economy, good luck.
You mean the current protests, right? Because last I heard, Macron has been insistent that the protests are *not* going to stop the retirement age from being raised to 64. And this is only an issue now because a similar level of protests likewise *failed to stop* the raising of the retirement age to 62 a decade ago.
As far as I can tell, the French aren’t doing anything more effective than the US protests after the Dobbs decision. And the protests from a decade ago had the same effect: they didn’t actually control the policy, but their enemies got screwed come election time.
So the point remains: What exactly are people meant to do?
One is you can do what a lot of political parties have done and start focusing really hard on your local communities. That’s a lot harder to do in the US where both major parties plus our voting system are actively hostile to leftward change or other parties but it makes a measurable difference. Another is using other power structures, like mutual aid networks. You can also be a part of protesting groups, advocaqcy groups, hell even lobbying groups are something even if I don’t agree with them, they do objectively make a difference in policy.
You can also try to help educate people on what the problems are, or you can do activism through art and media, so there’s more public pressure and more people helping to build things and strategize new possibilities.
You (not necessarily specifically you, I mean I know you’re not in the best position here) can learn how to effectively defend marginalized people in real circumstances, how to de-escalate and distract when possible and what to do when it isn’t.
You can participate in any number of fields where people are trying to change communities, government, workplaces, leftist orgs, etc. to be more actively inclusive of marginalized people and to help understand what effective aid and solidarity is and how to get there from here.
And then, under many circumstances, if you want, you can still vote for the lesser evil, if your boss won’t fire you for it.
Pointing out reality is not meant to be a call to despair.
Well reality is a point to despair and I’m not the kinda guy who sees all this doom and gloom about the state our country is in and can be particularly constructive with it. I’m not an activist. I’m not a politician. I’m a guy who just wants to draw cartoons who wakes up and goes to bed depressed because I know no matter what every day, every second, every minute everything is getting worse. Everyone tells me 6 ways to Sunday a billion ways everything I like or everything where I live is fucked and I’m supposed to take all of it in stride. People act like I’M the crazy one for not seeing a point in living when nobody seems to have anything positive to say about drawing breath on this earth. So I apologize if I’m a little apprehensive, I just hate it here (t. the planet earth).
Sorry you feel that way fam. Honestly I sometimes get sick and tired of Earth life too.
On that note, maybe you’d like to wake up and see the Martian landscape first thing in the morning one day. Or maybe the icy curves of Europa, overlooking Jupiter.
It is absolutely okay to focus on you. Not everyone has the energy to fight the world and most of us who do still have to fight the world on behalf of ourselves first. It’s fucking exhausting, and you’re not alone.
I also think you are also absolutely allowed to be the guy who just draws cartoons and tries to be just aware enough of problems that you’re not accidentally a dick to your friends or whatever. But if you did someday have the energy, and were capable of doing more, there are absolutely tthings to do and reasons to hope.
I just… really dislike that some people seem to think that pointing out flaws in the one really obvious option means you’re saying nothing ever will work. I responded to your question because I felt it was an actual question.
Offer of soft blankets and distracting happy music?
I deeply empathize with this feeling. Might I offer you the (slightly abridged, I’m going from memory/my tattoos) Wizard’s Oath, from Diane Duane’s incredibly good Young Wizards novels?
In Life’s Name, and for Life’s sake
I will guard growth and ease pain
I will fight to preserve that which grows and lives well in its own way
I will change no object or creature unless it or the system of which it is part are threatened
To these ends, in the practice of my Art
I will put aside fear for courage
And death for life when it is right to do so
Til Universe’s End
*line break*
Making art IS saving the world. The world is small as well as large. That doesn’t mean activism doesn’t matter, or these big conversations are pointless, but it does mean that the little things you do that make someone smile or have a realization or even just escape from the shittiness that is reality for a second…that made a difference. You kept someone alive for one more second, and that’s worth it.
Hey fellow Andrea Gail. You might want to check out “How to be Hopeless” by Carlos Maza on YT. Fascinating musing on how to live with that growing sense of despair, when everything feels like that poor boat in A Perfect Storm trying to sail up the wall of water. It still gives me a bit of comfort when things look are looking bleaker and more overwhelming than usual. Hang in there
I will recommend something very radical: never EVER watch the news. Reading the news might be okay. I’d focus on in-depth analysis of events after the fact. Like, you don’t need to pay attention to 24-hour coverage of the latest crisis. Though, if you do watch, try and look out for the positive. News outlet tend to focus on the terrible, be ause the sensational most often is. But, as Mister Rogers said: ” Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Look too at larger trends. Some things are getting worse, but there are also things that are improving over time. The situation isn’t quite as bleak as we might think sometimes.
And finally, I can say that if you were to get involved in activism you would probably feel less hopeless and helpless. Activists, in my experience, tend to be some of the most hopeful people I know, and that’s due in good part to how thoughtful activism does have an impact. It does make a difference, and you can see it.
@notsomeoneelse
Yeah that wasn’t fair of me. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and I took it out on you. Often times I feel like I’m constantly getting the emotional version of an “um…actually”.
@JRivest
I honestly don’t watch the news but the discords I’m in usually keep me up to date on whatever awful thing is happening at any particular moment. Plus it’s not just politics. As a Rick & Morty, Kanye West, Inside Job, Cartoon Network and WB in general fan, who also wants to make money making non-artificially intelligent art, these last months have been TRYING, to say the least. I always try to believe in people and look on the bright side of things and believe in people but honestly I’m losing faith in people.
I see what you mean. Leaving facebook ended up being one of the best decisions I have ever made for my mental health. It was a hard habit to kick. The rush of dopamine can get addictive. But my Facebook was very political by design and it ended up being very draining. Perhaps it’s different for you, but to me it sounds like those platforms bring you more grief than joy, and maybe taking a break from them would be for the best? If you need to publish to sell your art, maybe you can set up some automated posts, and just avoid doomscrolling? Whatever works for you!
Yup. That’s the other big problem with arguments like this. They reduce the question to a binary: “All presidents are war criminals” and thus whitewash any real differences. Either people avoid politics because they don’t want to support any war criminals or they can use it as an excuse to back the worse one who might give them an advantage in other ways.
Saw plenty of arguments along those lines that Clinton (or Obama) were worse than Trump, back in the day.
Depends highly on the audience. The small sampling size of the comments so far suggest there’s about a 50/50 split that do think “Radiah have a real good point though” even if she in truth does not. Whether her position will be represented as truth within the comic or merely one opinion is yet to be seen though, Walkys reaction, while a small indicator, is far from hard evidence.
It’s just…how does she say something like that and no one laughs at her face?
Real hot-take there, Raidah, your immediate and unearned super aggressiveness is totally devastating, let no one tell you different.
I do see what you mean regarding the opinion of the comments, it’s just not a matter of her being right or wrong, if that makes sense?
Well Radiah’s making a social play to own Dorothy. How effective this is necessarily depends on the social audience around them. It doesn’t depend on what actually is right or wrong, but it does depend on what they and people around them think is wrong or right. I was in part pointing to the comments to showcase that there is a real demographic of people who would nod and cheer Radiah on, which is being represented here by Walky.
Even if he does not intend or realize he’s doing it, he’s really pulling in an assisted double combo for her here. Dorothy only seems really upset when Walky comes in with the whole subtle “Yeah Radiah is totally right your entire life goal sucks this is exactly why I’ve been trying to nudge you out of it five minutes earlier.” because that’s what makes it personal.
It’s the difference between her getting the people around to go ohh! and cheerlead her and Mary making a cold shallow remark and it not landing with anyone, wherein Walky shows strong sympathy for Dorothy. In Joyces hometown, that power play of Marys own would have landed. Generally, people are pretty okay with unearned super aggressiveness, as long as its their team doing the aggression, so if you know your audience you can be a bully all you want and it’s pretty okay. https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/opportunity/
I’m curious why you say “in truth she does not [make a good point]”. I agree that she’s needlessly hostile for no reason and this is not the way to have a conversation as a civilized person or an adult.
But is she wrong about US presidents and what they do?
It’s a narrow position, and a defeatist one. The notion that the nature of the Presidency could change without the active assistance of the person currently in the Oval Office is… naive is too polite. I’m gonna stick with ‘infantile’.
Adding to Freemage’s point, it’s also hilariously hypocritical coming from Raidah. “Don’t trust anyone who wants to participate in a system that does vile things” is a hell of a line from someone who’s studying to be a lawyer.
There are hundreds of thousands of lawyers at any one time, a large proportion of whom will be good people doing good work to benefit people. There is one president of the USA at a time and Raidah has spent her entire life watching them kill people who are a lot more like her than they are like Dorothy.
As an aside the idea that lawyers are particularly slimy is mostly propaganda to try to deter people from associating with lawyers, meaning we’re less likely to sue corporations or the government when we’re wronged.
This is actually a poor moment for Walky I think. There’s no one else in this hallway and his knee jerk reaction was to add shade onto his friend instead of maybe defending her. I know it’s not intentional on his part but this is kind of a bad look.
Linda quite a number on him, raising a son who was obiedient and unquestioning with limited socisl skills, something he has in common with Joyce…
Wonder if this could be a lead up to him learning to be more confrontional where it counts.
This was really disappointing and dare I say kinda cowardly. Not a good look at all, Walky my boy. 🙁 Where’s that fire you had standing up to Lyle a day ago??
She doesn’t want to please Walky, she wants to use him. She’s trying to show him she’s superior to his peon friends so that he’ll feel privileged to be in her group. She’s a manipulative ass and she wants ascendancy.
Walky’s only going through this breakfast at all to please Lucy. Dorothy’s on her own. (I’m not happy about it, but she really has no one to blame for that except herself.)
completely unrelated, I read a book a few years back that was the sequel to a book I really enjoyed, and in the middle of a rather poetic, somber, beautiful monologue about the end of a solar system, the speaker said “and they had none planet, left grief”
I have never put down a book more angrily in my entire life.
The meme is “none pizza, left beef”. You can probably find the image if you google it – someone on tumblr got super high and ordered a pizza from pizza hut with no toppings except beef on only the left side, and got a circle of dough with a handful of beef tossed in.
The author of the book in question decided that it would be absolutely hilarious to include as many memes as possible disguised with flowery, difficult-to-parse language. I genuinely have never felt so disrespected by prose before.
Another example that I recall was “jail for mother, jail for mother for ten thousand years”. That one was word for word as far as I remember.
“If I fought the Resurrection Beast I’d leave my Houses to die,” he said. “If I fought the Heralds, I might as well go mad, which would be the same thing. So I’m shut in here – walled in, really – to prevent the Nine Houses from becoming None House, left grief.”
I haven’t gotten that far in the series, so I really can’t comment on that specific bit. She does seem to have fun throwing in memes and other references that don’t always make sense as things that would still be quoted, so if that bothers you a lot, maybe it’s not for you.
So far what I’ve read has been a wild ride and one of the best new fantasy series I’ve read in quite a while.
What’s so infuriating about “and they had none planet, left grief?” It may not be proper modern English, but poets are always doing that sort of thing. The notion that grief was the only thing they had left of their planet doesn’t seem all that bad. What am I missing?
You gotta become a war criminal to be in a position to stop wars, baby. The whole damn Country’s a war criminal right now, Raidah. You’re not special just cuz you didn’t participate, Raidah!
I suck at omelets (I can never fold it properly), but I like when others make them, and I’m pretty much a meat and cheese guy.
I do, however, make pretty decent scrambled eggs, with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, dried chopped onion, a splash of milk, a dash of hot sauce, and some sharp cheddar cheese.
I like omelettes with spinach, fresh garlic, mushrooms, and Italian spices on them. Ooh! And mozzarella slices or feta cheese. When it comes to what I make myself, though, usually I only get as far as the spinach and garlic, and some shredded cheese on top.
I like chicken rice omelets a LOT, might try making them with hoisin sauce soon! If it makes pork buns delicious, imagine what it would do for an omelet! 🤩😋
I’ll have shredded bacon, ham, sausage, onion, bell pepper, spinach leaves, tomatoes, avocado and double mushrooms with Chipotle sauce drizzled over the top. War crimes are optional.
Yeah no I’m hating Raidah more and more the more I read this. Walky shouldn’t go to breakfast. She doesn’t even have the decency to say “oh, don’t worry, I won’t shit on your whole life for no reason”. She has proven herself to be a pill in 2 sentences, shows no remorse and doesn’t promise to not continue to be one. She deserves to eat breakfast alone.
This actually makes me want to know more about Raidah. We only ever see her as an antagonist, but unless you’re Mike you don’t normally wake up and choose to be an asshole. Like Ruth started out very hateable, but we learned she’s suffering from, parental loss, alcoholism, abuse, and depression. Who knows what Raidah has going on. Although Raidah does have questionable friends so maybe this is her default setting.
I don’t imagine we’d have this lunch plot if we weren’t going to learn something about her. I’m battening down the hatches for some less than calm comment section action.
Speaking as someone whose cousin is a public defender, I don’t see it as ironic or hypocritical.
At the very least, very few lawyers have access to predator drones and a system of power that practically requires them to be used on civilian targets.
Its very hypocritical. There’s no reason to believe Raidah is going to be a crusading public defender, and there’s no reason to believe Dorothy would continue illegal activities as President
I seriously doubt Dorothy is going to be able to pull out from all the nations we are currently occupying, including the large swaths of land inside our borders we are occupying through broken treaties, despite Article VI of our own damn Constitution. It’s honestly not a surprise we habitually break the Geneva Convention.
Now I’m mildly curious what would happen if the entire United States military, down to the last soldier, got withdrawn and called back all at once. No waiting time, no “by 2025”, just “Come home now.”
You’d think at some point that like Europe and our other allies might do something. Maybe we can just hand them some of our quadrillions of dollars of excess shit the Army doesn’t want.
Okay but seriously, could literally anyone else take some of these ducking guns? We have so many we don’t even know where to put them all. People have started collecting them like less-cool Funko Pops.
I object, not to the idea of general disarmament, but to the notion of people collecting them like “less-cool Funko Pops,” on the grounds that it carries the implicit assumption that Funko Pops were ever cool.
Oh, yes, because America letting other countries sort it out worked so well at the turn of the last century….
Seriously, we’re not in NATO to prevent Russia from invading Europe. That’s a happy side-effect, at best. We’re in NATO to prevent Europe from having to worry about Russia invading. Because the last two times European powers decided they all needed to build up their armed forces enough to make Russia think twice before pushing their way in, they wound up realizing they had all these wonderful armies that could be used for other policy goals, instead.
Might not be the Alsace-Lorraine this time–I could easily see Northern Ireland becoming a flashpoint with a re-armed EU (esp. France and Germany) deciding to try to aid reunification efforts, post-Brexit. Then Russia decides to help out poor besieged Britain, Turkey jumps in to try to settle some issues with Greece, and suddenly American soldiers end up getting dragged back into trenches, anyway.
Having the US provide the muscle for NATO has saved countless lives. I’m no rah-rah nationalist; I know damned well that once we get out of Europe, the history of the US’s foreign policy is written in blood. But no, just walking away from it all is not the answer, either.
Maybe now, but NATO was absolutely formed to prevent the Soviet Union from invading. At that time, keeping European powers from fighting each other was the happy side-effect.
It’s also kind of an odd thing to say while Russia is invading a non-NATO European nation and that’s driving other non-NATO European nations to try to join. Finland isn’t applying because they’re worried about internal European conflict, but about Russian expansionism.
Just for the record, I wasn’t advocating we just dump an aircraft carrier full of Ospreys at like, Denmark’s door as any kind of serious policy decision, any more than I think Taffy was.
Even if we didn’t do it that quickly, what it leads to is destabilization of the world order, a huge power vacuum and various regional powers vying to fill that vacuum. With Russia revealed as mostly a hollow bear, China’s likely best poised to take advantage. In a decade or so India might be in a better position.
Without the US on board, NATO’s likely to fall apart along with the EU. If the EU holds together, they may wind up in a hot war with Russia – or Russia manages to roll over the rest of Ukraine and some other smaller border states before getting drained to death in the occupation.
Taiwan certainly falls to China. Other nations, especially in the Middle East and Africa turn to China for arms and military support.
The US economy also almost certainly collapses, along with most of the rest of the world. That’s really most of what we project power abroad for.
As for anyone who thinks the US is horrible as the world’s superpower, I can’t really disagree, but China’s behavior even internally suggests they’d be far worse and the other contenders aren’t much if at all better.
Sounds like the world’s problem. I’m personally just tired of being blamed for everything by proxy, just because I was born in a certain clump of dirt. Fuck it, let the world collapse if it’s so reliant on one Karen to hold everything together.
The world’s problems are by definition everyone’s problems. Like what’s being argued here is essentially world piece which humans have not figured out since the dawn of time. Mainly because our elected (or otherwise) world leaders are only motivated to operate within their self interest. Consolidate and enshrine their own power, feed into the corrupt ideologies they were raised in. The American system is corrupt, highly capitalistic, and exploitive, but it’s a close to free as most civilizations have gotten. We’re the biggest economy, we have the biggest army, and usually our leader at least kinda believes in the basic human rights of most of its citizens. A lot of leaders don’t. That plus the resources we need to keep us in power (oil, microchips, etc) is why we don’t pull out of all the countries we occupy, and continue to influence foreign powers. Yeah, America sucks, we’re the bad guys. But we can kind of afford to be.
I dislike the “we’re the bad guys” framing. We’re arguably bad guys. We’re certainly not “the good guys”. But we’re not “the” bad guys. There are a lot of bad guys out there and even if we’re the biggest, we’re far from the worst.
@thejeff- Oh there’s definitely worse I was just framing that off Taffy saying we Americans get blamed for everything. Like America’s gonna get hate regardless , cause we’re the dominant power right now.
Yeah, she’s technically correct, but she’s also a holier-than-thou asshole, which is apparently all she ever is. Dotty was wrong about her, she’s not networking, she sees people as things that are somehow just hers for the using. That’s way crappier than just trying to meet rich people.
Well, lawyers don’t use a terrorist attack as an opportunity to wage a 20 year war with almost every middle eastern country out there except for the one most likely responsible because we have a business partnership with them.
Just saying as much as layers are sharks, most of them don’t have the same amount of the destructive power or the history of being tempted to abuse said destructive power.
That doesn’t help their case though. Give them access to even just one sort of okay tank, see what happens. Let he who is without sin cast the first dirty bomb, as the saying goes.
“They’re nowhere near as bad because they don’t have as much power” is an interesting take.
I mean, mob bosses haven’t waged wars for decades with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, so they’re obviously morally superior to any president. Even Jeffery Dahmer only ate a few people. No where near so bad.
Umm wouldn’t go that far I would like to see Radiah fail and suffer a degree of humiliation that forces her to re-evaluate her life that we actually see (I don’t think we saw Raidah Jacob break up directly. Just a moment where she is humiliated and is force to apologize and Sarah is there with pop corn.
Also as of the others Malaya and Rachel aren’t nearly that bad to warrant such a fate and I’d just prefer to see Mary just go away from comic
And frankly this seemed pretty devastating to Raidah, I’m pretty sure she saw Jacob as male-wife material. That “We’ll see.” Also kind of implies she was holding back for him and now the the Dragon Ball Z weighted training gear is off as far as her personality goes. I’d overall call that a pretty big fail.
I think that is correct. She has chosen to be meaner. Raidah very much underestimated Joyce. Had lunch with her, let Jacob hang with her, form a connection. That ended up costing her big time. Being openly more mean and judgmental will fix that. That plus revenge explains a lot about Raidah right now, actually.
To be fair, the “had lunch with her” wasn’t her underestimating Joyce, it was her striking back at Joyce. Trying to undermine that connection, by showing Jacob how Joyce wouldn’t fit his checklist.
…I mean, she’s not wrong, really. She’s being a colossal asshole and cutting right to the bone, but the things she’s saying are probably already running through Dorothy’s head.
Forget Booster, Raidah is the true Replacement Mike
Sure, she’s not technically incorrect, on a certain level. She’s also reaching for the lowest hanging fruit and may as well have said “Being a carpenter requires you to touch wood”.
The term “War Crime” isn’t a word that should be tossed around carelessly. It should be reserved for situations that require it. (Targeting civilians in a military conflict, use of WMD, engaging in wars of conquest.) There may be valid debates on whether military action is warranted in some cases, but there is a difference between a military action that is launched with noble intentions but fails for some reason and a “war crime”.
“Targeting” civilians is the key point here, as well. Civilian casualties are a sad reality of war–especially in an era where every tin-pot dictator deliberately puts their ammo dumps and command & control facilities in densely populated areas to discourage air strikes. There’s a categorical difference between something like Ukraine hitting that Crimea bridge and what Russia did at Bucha, for example.
Lol, the Biden administration made a drone strike that blew up NOTHING but civilians, and then threw a press conference basically saying “and we’d totally do it again”.
In Afghanistan, the US military, as admitted by its own soldiers, started using people’s homes for tank target practice because it was bored.
Iraq was started under false pretenses.
The threat of US military deployment to target civilian population is being used to prop up dictators, like say, over in the Dominican Republic, after having been deployed in the Dominican Republican where they *checks notes* commited war crimes.
She’s very similar to Mike except instead of doing it for weird philosophy-adjacent nonsense reasons and then realizing he’s been a huge asshole and seeking redemption through heroic sacrifice, Raidah does her shit to maintain social hierarchy and control!
As satisfisfying as that would be i dont think verbal warfare is Dorothy’s strong suit, she always relies on being kind and reasonable expecting others to respond in kind. She always off her game when people don’t follow that social script.
As opposed to someone who wants to be a lawyer who gets paid to lie for a living? But Raidah does have a point. Dorothy would be better off in academia.
Lie? Never bend the truth sure, present the facts in a way so as to lead to an incorrect conclusion sure. But actually lying will get a lawyer disbarred.
Depending on the context, lawyers can sometimes be the only person with the professional skills to prevent an innocent person from rotting in jail forever thanks to bullshit charges.
There’s obviously more money in not having scruples, but that’s every job in the world.
I guess I should elaborate a little. You may or may not recall that there were regular kerfuffles around Trump regarding something called the Emoluments Clause. The layman’s version of it is basically, “It is illegal for the POTUS to take bribes.”
So, yes. A lack of scruples is 100% a way to make money for the POTUS.
Raidah, while I do sort of agree with this statement (though not really? Y’all’re 18-20, such vitriol and cynicism isn’t necessarily called for), you continue to be one of those people that I would just find completely draining to interact with and cannot for the life of me understand who willingly interacts with people that act like this and why.
Like, I honestly don’t get it. In real life when people have tried to open a conversation like this with me, I end the interaction and leave immediately. It’s not even painful. Why do people want to spend time around someone who can only speak in backhanded compliments and insults???
Walkys in a position where he probably will go despite Radiah being a bongo to his friend because Lucy really wants to be in the same circle as Jennifer and he doesn’t want to mess up his relationship.
Fair point, but I does it justify this level of self righteousness? Especially to a person who’s Raidah met exactly one time? Does Raidah’s perhaps justifiable view of the US Government justify her treatment of Sarah? (It may seem unrelated, but my point is that she just seems to find reasons to be shitty to a lot of people and only seems to be nice to those she hopes to use one day for connections. Granted, this character hasn’t gotten as much screen time as others, but that seems to be the impression.)
That’s the crux of the matter for me. Whether Raidah is CORRECT or not is irrelevant. She just walked up to a STRANGER and unloaded that sheer amount of vitriol for absolutely no reason.
She probably knows Dorothy is friends with Joyce, and that’s about the extent of any justification she could have for opening with this double barreled salvo.
See, the thing is, Wraithy, the conversation Raidah started isn’t about the Presidency. She’s not doing this to have a good-faith debate about the excesses of the executive branch. She’s not talking about herself personally, or her family, or her culture. She’s just saying “hey Keener, I know this fact about you and I’m going to hurt you with it. To make you feel small. To make you feel unwelcome.”
She’s not speaking truth to power, and you can tell she’s not, because her friend group is carefully cultivated to be full of Power. She’s just hurting someone she doesn’t like.
1) Glad somebody brought that up. It’s definitely a possible reason she might hold an opinion like that, despite being a classist social climber without any apparent trace of the usual leftist ideas usually associated with it.
2) It’s a pretty common view around these comments, as we’ve seen over the last few weeks at least.
I’m not even saying it’s a bad opinion to have. I generally agree with distrusting someone who aspires to be president—*if they know what all that entails*. I don’t think Dorothy quite understands the massive weight of the baggage that comes with being president, she’s very naive and bushy tailed.
That being said, it’s completely irrelevant to why I dislike Raidah. There’s no reason to open a conversation with a complete stranger like that. And it’s not the only time we’ve seen her talk to people like this.
I don’t think all lawyers are assholes I am just saying Radiah statement if you substituted lawyer the statement is ” an asshole never promises” beacuse Radiah is an asshole and she can’t keep her promises.
Also besides this interaction Radiah has shown to be an assbole the biggest being when she insulted Dina
Wow Radiah’s seeming to be gunning for the job of Queen(2/9/20/3/8 ) of the Campus. Mary better look out or she’ll be dethroned.
Her behavior exactly like Mary’s.
Oh, you just gave me a vague hope for this breakfast. Despite his lukewarm feelings for Lucy, and the fact that he’s really having to struggle with them right now, one thing that has galvanized Walky in the past is someone being a dick to Lucy- and that was her own brother, who was not doing it in earnest. Lyle correctly identified this as a good course of action, and I think Walky is generally trying to be a better and more active ally (as witness his interactions with Sal). So, all that said, I would love it if Raidah tries her supercilious bullshit on Lucy (Tangent: she reminds me of Roz a little here, when Roz claimed to be the only true leftist, which she proves by never articulating her own principles) and Walky just says, nope, you’re full of it, we’re done here, goodbye have a nice life or whatever. I don’t think it’s necessarily super likely, but it would be interesting and also pleasing, in that Raidah is a giant jerk and somehow that is not pointed out often enough.
Also manipulative social climbers. Radiahs putting Walky is a no win situation. Either he goes to breakfast and ditches his friend who just got insulted causing hurt there or he tells off radiah giving her reason to call off breakfast hurting Lucy who is really looking forward to it.
Nah Radiah can only call Booster a friendless loser who evaluates people to cover for their poor social graces and tbh Booster is aware that. Booster also has a freind or two, when it comes to emotional damage Booster would likely shock Raidah to her core.
Okay, so would you rather it be someone like Dorothy who will try to disentangle the presidency from war crimes and who will keep them to a minimum or someone who at best doesn’t care or at worst will jump right in and make the situation worse?
FR, Walky, you might need to call Becky to hold her back. That’s not a friendly face in the end. I doubt Dorothy would touch her but that doesn’t rule out ‘stop stop, she’s already dead’ levels of verbal violence.
I know what I really want is another Obama to pave the way for another Trump. That would be great and excellent for this country. Or I want Dorothy taken out by the government before she gets the chance to abolish the DoD. Both would be good to me.
Neither of which has to do with what I said. I’m talking purely on level of war crimes. If the position is inherently full of war crimes, do you want someone who will try to keep them to a minimum or someone who will jump right in?
I’m intrigued because Raidah has been set up as manipulative, social climbing antagonist but she’s not wrong about the type of people who gets to be elected to be president of the USA.
I don’t think being president of the US has been a wholesome thing for a kid to want to be since like…Reagan
I mean, George Washington did some incredibly terrible shit, too, if you’re just trying to reach back. It’s not a secret. There have been videogames made, for crissakes.
Yeah, I mean…
He threw a knife into heaven, and could kill with a stare
He made love like an eagle falling out of the sky
Killed his sensei in a duel and he never said why…
Washington, Washington
Twelve stories high, made of radiation
The present beware, the future beware
He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming
(Showing my internet age with this reference but I couldn’t resist)
But, but… wasn’t Obama made out to be the Second Coming of Christ? I seem to recall nothing but people falling over themselves to praise his scholarly mien, etc etc etc
It’s almost like running a country leads to hard decisions. Often evil ones.
You could apply this to basically any country in the world. At least those with the power to do anything – and most of the others do some awful shit trying to keep the more powerful ones at bay.
The biggest and most powerful tend to commit the worst crimes, partly to get and stay that powerful and partly just because weak countries can’t hit the same scale.
This is the world and there’s nothing unique about America.
Ayup, this is why I think the whole idea of having one leader for a nation/state is flawed from the get-go and is a holdover from thinking the Divine Right of Kings was real.
But it’s got nothing to do with having one leader. The decisions still need to get made.
It’s not about the individual leaders. It’s about the realities of geopolitical power.
I should emphasize the word one. I think Having a SINGLE leader as the head of a nation is a bad idea. Parliaments and congresses and senates should have more power than any singular head of state.
Since we’re talking about the USA here, in theory the president is only one part out of three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial); and they don’t have absolute power. In practice this still means that one flawed human being is making decisions that result in genocides. No person should have that much power.
I get that, but I don’t think it would change much, other than not having a single person to point at and blame. The decisions are institutional, systemic, not really one person’s whims.
You know, thinking about it, Raidah’s still being a jerk, like, undeniably, but I guess if anyone’s allowed to have this kind of attitude about the US presidency, a Muslim woman’s probably high up there. So, fair cop, I guess.
Eeeh, I don’t know about that chief. Maybe don’t conflate geopolitical interest with a part of the job description. Maybe you don’t blame the office, but the people who held it.
Maybe, just maybe, you don’t preemptively condemn a person who wants the job for something they Could do with it once they have it. Maybe you do something else.
There’s self-interest, and then there are degrees to which you are willing to go to match that self-interest.
It’s typically not Necessary to get what you want by bombing the shit out of it.
There are arguments to be made for improving the US political system.(So, so many arguments). But even within that system, even with how incentivized you are as commander-in-chief to wield the Big Stick(TM), there are ways both more effective and less deadly than what has been used in the middle east in the holy mission to keep oil prices low and/or kill terrorists. I completely blame the presidents for that.
Some decisions I certainly agree with you on – Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was probably the US’s biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam, if not including Vietnam. Afghanistan was more justifiable, but still a bad call imo.
Once done though, whether to try to salvage the situation or just back out and let it collapse is a much harder call.
I’ve also been reading a lot of history lately and have gotten a lot more sympathetic. As superpowers throughout history go, the US is remarkably restrained, if not exactly benevolent.
I think we are tackling this from two wildly different angles. I am not making an argument for or against the morality or practicality of engaging in those wars at all.
I’m saying that, considering the president of the US has great influence over the most dangerous military on the face of the earth, it’s Logical they will reach for it for time and again. I will go as far as to say it’s forgivable for a single human being to reach for this tool – dismantling or weakening it would be political suicide at home, and a geopolitical catastrophe everywhere else. So it’s always going to hang over their head and tempt them when foreign relations, domestic prices or reelection chances are not looking so rosy.
I would say that is a very generous interpretation of the actions of recent US presidents from either party. Practically going out of my way here to understand their position and view it in a favorable light.
So when I recall the Bush era, though it was but a sense of vague dread for my then-young brain, or Obama drowning on dry land as he tries to stammer out on live TV how many civilians died on his watch that month, or how both Trump and Biden had to literally sign off on allowing Yemen to be systematically starved to death, that’s the position I try to see those events from.
And I still think they kinda dropped the ball. Didn’t they?:/
The Yemen stuff’s still happenin’, btw. Funny how your news cycle will churn a day of content out of a Russian general’s farts, but Saudi Arabia can with US backing depopulate an entire country and you don’t hear a single thing about it. But I’m sure the press is completely free with healthy incentives.
And frankly I really couldn’t possibly care less if she “has a point.” It doesn’t matter if she “has a point.” You come up to me and the first thing you do is try to score some cheap Morality Points about my passion in life, *you* are the asshole. The point of g r e e t i n g s o m e o n e is not to “make a point.” It’s stupid, antisocial nonsense and it’s all. she. does. She’s exhausting and intolerable regardless of whether she’s right or wrong about something.
raidah’s being an ass, but I can emphasize with her suspicion, mostly due to my experiences brushing against power-hungry white students. also, I’m wondering if as a muslim woman, she might be responding this way due to recent presidents’ islamophobia.
Aye. I can see Raidah going “she’s either a powerhungry ass who’d be happy with the notion of drone-bombing innocent brown people, or a naive idiot who thinks the power of the presidency can be used without doing those things on a habitual basis, and she sure doesn’t sound like an idiot”.
Yea, Stubby McBonespurs was a racist in many ways. But Raidah is old enough to have lived through at least part of Obama’s tenure, and he wasn’t exactly known for being a bigot.
Just a campaign of drone bombings targeting civilians while he continued the human rights violations his predecessor began. We still have people being held without trial to this day and Biden hasn’t done shit about it either.
During Obama’s presidency, the US Military launched thousands of drone strikes, killing a lot of civilians.
If anything, that might solidify Raidah’s viewpoint. Even “the good one” still has an innocent civilian body count in the hundreds, if not more. The point isn’t necessarily that Dorothy is automatically evil for wanting to become President, its that the job requires those kinds of actions.
Actions is the wrong word there since that implies choice and there is very little actual choice. The system is inherently broken, so it doesn’t matter how pure your heart is, the moment you become a part of it you will be part of many atrocities.
I’d like to say the winning move is not to play, but that just makes you passive in the face of atrocities. There’s not actually a way out on the national level, because the national level is on the wrong scale to solve the problem. The underlying problem is in part caused by our collective lack of control over behaviour and goal-setting. We’ve outsourced goal-setting to abstractions like corporations and nation-states, which, not being human, can’t set human goals. businesses and nation-states should be tools, but in this case our tools use us, not the other way around. And we lack a proper science of behaviour.
He actually kinda was if you talked to basically anyone among the Hispanic immigrant communities. He may not have personally intended racial discrimination but his immigration policies absolutely had that effect.
I’m not sure what Raidah’s ethnicity is, but given that she’s Muslim IIRC, I wouldn’t be surprised if she knows people or even has family who were affected by the war crimes she’s citing (I’ve had several friends who lost parents, uncles, and cousins to American drones and bombs, so at least in my experience, it isn’t uncommon to meet people with such connections). So I have a hard time judging her open hostility towards the concept of the presidency here, and side-eyeing Dorothy for her ambition.
Anyway, I’ve always liked Raidah even if I wouldn’t like someone like her in real life. She’s a very interesting and complex character.
Yeah, this is how my thought process is leaning. Raidah is certainly entitled to choose not to associate with aspiring presidents. On one hand, I wish she wouldn’t be so rude toward Dorothy, but it also feels iffy(?) to say that Raidah owes her politeness toward what she views as a morally objectionable goal.
Here we go again with this “entitled” and “owed” stuff. Why does everything have to be about social debt? Why can’t people just be reasonably expected not to take worthless potshots as a form of greeting?
Well, was crys wrong in saying that a person is in fact entitled to getting to choose not to associate with someone they don’t want to associate with? Pretty sure everyone is entitled to this. They did NOT say Raidaih is entitled to “taking worthless potshots as a form of greeting.”
That’s not the point. A binary right/wrong is irrelevant. It’s just something I’ve seen pop up a lot and it seems like an exhausting way to view the world.
So, you say things to make a point, then when I point out that it doesn’t hold up, it’s “irrelevant” or “not on your wavelength.” Got it. Not worth continuing a conversation in that case.
No, you misunderstood what I said and were responding based on that, and I was trying to correct that misunderstanding. I’m not doing whatever weasely shit you think I’m doing. If you want clarity, I can attempt to provide it, but don’t project ideas and condemn me for them.
Dorothy is just STANDING THERE talking to her FRIEND. she’s not trying to join the breakfast that she wasn’t invited to.
If Dorothy was trying to muscle in on the invitation, sure, some hostility would be warranted, but she’s literally just talking to Walky while they wait for their group to coalesce, AND SHE HAS SOMEWHERE TO BE HER OWN DAMN SELF!
RAIDAH brought up the presidential goal, not Dorothy. Raidah isn’t OWED any fuckin kind of social interaction here. They’re strangers who don’t need to interact beyond “hello, goodbye”.
This is agonizing to read, because I don’t think either of you is in opposition to the other. I wanna chime in real fast, and say that I don’t think Taffy was saying that crys said Raidah was entitled to anything. I think they(?) were kinda just complaining about the use of the words “entitled” and “owes” , since those terms do come up here a lot, and it does kinda come across as people seeing things in some sort of social debt based way.
When they said “a binary right/wrong is irrelevant”, I think they were trying to say that it doesn’t matter if crys was technically correct about who was or wasn’t entitled to anything, because that’s not the angle they were approaching that comment from in the first place. I don’t personally understand where you got the “no right or wrong with Raidah’s hostility” part, though. They didn’t say that.
And they certainly weren’t shifting the goalposts or being dismissive like you seem to think they were, the “wavelength” thing feels like a pretty clear attempt to say you’re both coming at this with different assumptions and ideas in mind.
Maybe. I’m not a mind reader, it just seems like something isn’t connecting in this interaction.
And I’m definitely on board with finding the “entitled” and “owes” language I keep seeing about basic social interaction around here very strange and not at all how I’ve seen any kind of real life social interaction works.
It just feels so transactional, like people are going to the Social Interaction Store, where every product requires a separate F2P premium currency.
“Oh yes, I’d like one Not Getting Lambasted For No Reason, please.”
“Sorry, you don’t have enough Decency Crystals for that, and also this other person already bought a Non-Interaction Card, so they get to loudly scream at you about not wanting to interact with you the instant you enter their line of sight.”
It’s fucking confusing. And exhausting. How do people live their lives with this constant social-debt-based paranoia?
If I come up to you, say I hear you like to cook steaks on the weekend, and then when you say “Nothing wrong with a grill weekend!” affably, and I then sneer at you that the beef industry is built on environmental destruction and that you must love animal cruelty, you piece of shit, don’t get your blood-mouth aura on me, am I (mostly) factually correct, at least when it comes to problems in the meat industry and agriculture?
Yes.
You know what else I am?
A fucking asshole and a bully who starts a conversation by slapping rhetorical shit into your hand and sneering at you to eat it! Raidah’s not doing this out of some noble, high-minded goal, she’s just doing it to hurt Dorothy because she wants Dorothy to know she’s not welcome!!
I’d like to add that Raidah isn’t just making sure Dorothy knows she’s not welcome. She wants her to know she’s not welcome to an activity which Dorothy has not expressed interest in joining. Dorothy didn’t even ask to tag along, she’s literally just standing here, minding her own goddamn business. Raidah is going so far out of her way to be rude for no reason, it’s almost fucking comical. There’s nothing whatsoever that can be said in her defense here.
Sometimes the people I would most despise IRL are the ones I find most fascinating in fiction!
I guess it’s similar to the reason some people like watching horror movies. It’s a safe way to explore and analyze the things that make you uncomfortable/upset you/scare you with the ability to step away if it gets to be too much, without real life consequences.
She’s a very unkind person, but also complex, and I enjoy seeing complex morally questionable or unkind characters explored in fiction because I feel like it’s an opportunity to try to think about and understand negative human behavior better. Understanding humanity’s worse impulses and traits and the motivations behind toxic actions is a useful skill.
The way things are going, the way things are more liable to change in American politics by the time she runs for president is that she won’t be allowed to run for president.
In the long term this could be beneficial for Dorothy to get used to people are passive aggressive her no matter how she acts. If she’s still going in to politices she really needs some come backs.
Got to say, I am loving this new character arc for Dorothy with her learning what she might haft to really sacrifice to achieve her goal and what achieve that goal might be.
I swear to Palutena, if someone I had just met had treated me like that I would… well, I’d probably just crumble and say “yes ma’am” because I am bad at standing up for myself, especially against this kind of shit. Who fucking talks to complete strangers like this?
@Jamie As someone who I’m pretty sure probably used to liberally use that phrase over a decade ago when he was a young and stupid edgy teenager way, way back in junior high, that phrase and whatever the hell was supposed to be intended by its meaning could not have died quickly enough. I’m pretty sure that there are still jackasses out there who talk like that, trying to give themselves an excuse to be total pricks to people (as if they needed one).
I hate to say it, but Radah is completly correct and I respect her stance
It’s rare to see the honest side of Radah and it not annoy me. I’m not sure what the narrative direction is but I hope Radahs story lets us see more of this side and perhaps less the bad kind of social climber(as Dorothy said, being a social climber isn’t inherently bad)
Sure, but unlike the president, the other positions have more leeway and you don’t gotta give up your morals to exist in those positions. Heck, you can in fact live up to your morals by stopping bad shit
Her stance lacks nuance- clearly intentionally- so she’s not “completely correct” by any measure. Notwithstanding the fact that she’s only saying it to score a cheap point, and is a total asshole.
And here we see Dorothy discover a new emotion: nemesis. She may have thought being Becky’s gave her a taste, but in Raidah she has truly met her evil peer.
Someday, she and Becky and going to discover they have a mutual enemy out to destroy Joyce. Raidah’s career as supervillainess has only just begun.
Guess I have to spell it out. In addition to prosecutors, and defense lawyers, and appeals lawyers (including those at the innocence project), there are a lot of non-criminal lawyers. There’s divorce lawyers, copyright lawyers, NGOs have lawyers (some even specialize in lawyers, like the ACLU), corporate lawyers, union lawyers. If my landlord decides to evict me so they can jack up the rent on my apartment, there’s a service I can call to possibly get a lawyer to take up my case.
The percent of lawyers whose job it is to save child rapists and white collars from prison is lower than the percent of US presidents who have been war criminals. In the best of light, the roll the US president is sin-eater. And you should be wary of someone who is eager to have that job, even if they would turn out to be less atrocious compared to other US presidents.
I was going to say that’s a hugely bad faith portrayal of lawyers (and that focusing on saving child rapists paints a really inaccurate picture of what kinds of crimes people usually go to prison for), but… actually, third-guessing myself now. It’s a fair critique of Sarah, who wants to be a *well-paid* lawyer, but Raidah may plan to be a public defender or work for nonprofits, like my friend who recently passed the bar.
You know, a poor lawyer.
So, yeah, that’s a bit unfair. Raidah sucks, but assuming those are her career goals is, I’m pretty sure, assuming.
I guess she could still turn out to champion none profits but everything about the people she surrounds herself with and her snide comment about joyces teaching profession being low paid strongly suggests she too wants the well paying job.
Given Raidah’s eagerness to “network” and her bragging about her family ties, I doubt whether she’s really interested in a life of working for the poor, downtroden folks.
I mean, if she’s a public defender, she would indeed be working to keep child rapists out of prison at some point in her career.
Public defense is a noble profession because everyone in the US is entitled to an attorney and not everyone can afford it. Their sole purpose is to help people vindicate the rights that they are owed, whether guilty or innocent. But they don’t have any more control over which clients they have to represent than a lawyer at a large firm—less control, actually.
But in spirit, you’re right. There’s lots of different kinds of lawyers, and most of them are NOT defending criminals, regardless of how well they get paid. Raidah doesn’t even have to be poor to do “good”; she could hypothetically make bank at a large plaintiff-side employment firm.
I don’t know how many kiddy fiddlers who the cops bother to take down actually need public defenders. Thank god I don’t have to know for sure, but a lot of the ones who do like porn rings, snuff, trafficking, and other stuff that’s actually prosecuted on a level that harming one or two kids is usually not, tend to have money.
Most public defenders, from what I’ve heard from public defenders, are way too busy defending like seventeen Black kids caught with petty crimes (or “”caught”” “”loitering”” or existing in public or-) per day.
Can we not call them cutesy things like “kiddy fiddlers”? They’re subhuman scum, undeserving of even the most basic decency. It just feels flippant, but maybe I’m being sensitive.
Oh no, that’s totally fair. I don’t like saying… the usual words because it’s kind of uncomfortable for me personally as someone who uhm, had those experiences, but that specific euphemism does sound pretty flippant. Thanks.
Sarah wants to be a well-paid lawyer for incredibly understandable reasons and is not, I will note, engaging in creepy social engineering where she treats her friend group as things she can control and manipulate. Also Sarah doesn’t, you know, claim to be people’s friend and talk shit behind their back, or gatekeep her friend group, or harass someone who tried to do the right thing and stay out of trouble with the authorities for a whole school year.
Hey, I said Raidah was terrible. I just don’t think it’s about her being a lawyer. She *is* super mercenary about her connections, but even low-pay lawyers have to network, so I don’t think it proves she’s planning to go high-end.
Naah based on everything we’ve seen on Raidah she is not going to work for dirt cheap. She is absolutely going to build herself a comfy and rich life by buddying up with rich and powerful… like she is doing now.
Also being a court lawyer is not necessarily the only path. She could also become a corporate lawyer, coming with best ways to make her company money while screwing over clients and employees XD
I know the whole US justice system is fucked up, but are you suggesting things would be better without lawyers? You think innocent people would fare better in court without a person whose entire job is to know law and advise them on their options? You think guilty people would even get brought to court if lawyers didn’t file charges?
Heck, how would class-action lawsuits against corporations that are poisoning the environment be put together?
I know a lot of people are having a bit of a hard time with Raidah’s true statement that all U.S. Presidents are war criminals and that the office requires it as maintenance of American empire, and I sympathize. Let me help out.
That doesn’t actually matter here.
Raidah doesn’t actually care about the Presidency. Raidah doesn’t give a shit about the problems of capitalist hegemony or any of that. You know how I know?? Because she manages her friend group to make sure it’s full of the ruling class, with a fucking iron fist! She’s not an activist, like Roz. No.
What’s going on here is that she doesn’t like Dorothy and she wants to hurt her, because Raidah is a fucking bully. She’s a psychologically abusive bully. She’s doing this to hurt Dorothy using the ONE thing she knows about Dorothy. I know this because: it’s her whole fuckin’ MO! It’s the shit she does constantly! It goes hand in hand with her ableism towards Dina, her socially ostracizing and tormenting Sarah (a Black woman trying to avoid police trouble!!), and her gaslighting Jennifer while talking shit behind her back.
She’s like Mike, yes, except instead of doing bullying and psychological abuse for weird philosophy ideas, she does them to maintain control of her social circle and keep out the Wrong Sort of People. Which she has pegged Dorothy as and has this started a totally unprovoked fight with her like a “progressive” Ben Shapiro. Like, sure she’s right about the Presidency, but what the fuck is Dorothy supposed to do about that? How can Dotty respond without looking like a chump or a weirdo?? She can’t, Raidah knows this, that’s why she said it. It’s not fucking ABOUT the Presidency. It’s about making Dorothy feel small and unwanted. It’s about a “polite” way to say “go eat shit, Keener, nanny nanny boo boo”.
And before anyone comes out to chastise me: yeah I’m aware Raidah is brown and Muslim. I’m sure that’s had some effects on her worldview. But guess what? She doesn’t get a pass for that! Ruth doesn’t get a pass for her treatment of Jennifer because she’s got depression, an abusive parent, and is queer! She only doesn’t get shit around here because she’s working on herself, a thing Raidah won’t do because Raidah thinks her shitty behavior is Good, Actually and revels in it!
So here is my reply, full throated, to Raidah in all her appearances from now forwards.
<b<Fuck you, Raidah, you absolute toolbox. You’re an abuser and a bully. I hope you get a job at your dream firm in the mailroom. As a clerk. And get fired when you start angling for a promotion. I wish you all the luck of one of Jimmy’s marks on Better Call Saul. You’re gross and your behavior is gross and you can fuck off to Mars. Fix your heart or die.
Yes, this is all well and good. But have you considered: Raidah has only been in an antagonistic position, which means we’re all somehow mistaken about her being a shitheel, because Sarah doesn’t like her and something something backstory. Or whatever bullshit nonsense people wanna come up with to defend her scummy ass.
Yeah people defending her seem to be falling for her two faced persona
She’s nice when she can get something out of you, but she’s been shown, multiple times to just be a selfish bully, implying the only reason dinah was hanging out with sarah because she was mentally ill, even if she didn’t approve of the “R” slur she was hardly being nice
She may be nice to Walky to his face, but she insults him and his interest when he leaves, and Jennifer too
I could forgive her in a way being mad at Sarah for their mutual friend as she didn’t have all the info, and Joyce for trying to get with Jacob, but she’s still awful to people who have done honestly nothing to her
I used to think that but she’s been consistently shitty towards people and we’ve seen what kind of people Charlotte and Carl are. She infantilized Jacob and only wanted him for status (and presumably his body like everyone else in that storyline.), and… She just treats people bad constantly.
Idk like, Sarah was mean to Jennifer consistently and Raidah was nice to her for a while, but I don’t think it’s out for kindness.
Hit the nail on the head here. Radiah want hostile to Dorothy when she had lunch with her a few months ago it’s probably her association with Joyce and Sarah.
I mean, yeah, she’s being a jackass, like, 100%. Just because it’s funny doesn’t mean it’s not a vile thing to just come out and stab somebody with especially when you yourself are a rich social-climbing tool.
This exactly. Regardless of how people feel about the statement, it’s clear Raidah’s not doing this because she felt deeply compelled to express her moral convictions here.
Presumably if instead of wanting to be president, Dorothy went around talking about how that role is for war criminals, Raidah would be taking the exact opposite position and finding some way to shame her for that (“so you’re just letting the system continue by accepting it as inevitable?” Or something like that).
Tbh it’s probably very lawyerly. She can take any position to attack or defend people as needed, a skill she would need as a prosecutor or defense attorney.
I actually find her an increasingly fascinating character the more we see of her, because she’s such a good example of the sort of person who works extremely hard to appear genuine while every single statement and action is carefully calculated. I have brain fog right now and am struggling to articulate my thoughts well, but basically she’s a fascinating character study of the sort of person I really do not like. And sometimes those are great characters to explore in fiction because you can try to figure out what makes them tick without the stress of an IRL action.
Thank you. The utter needless cruelty of her behavior towards Dorothy — as much as I have issues with little miss wannabe-Hillary Jr. — was really upsetting to me, and seeing everyone praise her was a grim reminder of why I only comment sometimes around here.
I feel like this is a crazy harsh take when you’re the one to bring up this ambition. Like… you’re studying to be a lawyer, Raidah. Are you still going to vote in presidential elections? You’re going to participate in a system that supports this power structure.
What’s the funniest court case Raidah could take? I’m voting for something involving a dog. Like maybe she’s meant to try getting a dog jailed for looking too much like Air Bud or somethin’.
I’m torn between some 80s movie shit where she’s literally stanning for a Trump-style land developer who is trying to put like 350 barrels literally labeled “TOXIC WASTE” and overflowing with glowing green ooze/goop in the town’s drinking water, not bury them nearby just throw them in the reservoir, and acting very morally uptight about it, a Phoenix Wright type case where she tries to cross-examine a clown, or just a Better Call Saul episode where she has a full Chuck McGill meltdown.
Definitely one of those cases where someone tries to sue God and/or Satan. I’d also throw in some minor but beloved nerd celebrity accused of like, serious financial crimes, a sovcit lawyer, and Tree Law.
Maybe not exactly funniest but definitely most entertaining?
You shouldn’t, good comrade, she’s not saying the true thing because she believes in it. She’s just being a shithead. Recall that Raidah is the girl who keeps her friend group exclusively full of future ruling-class stepping stones.
Seriously though Raidah is this kind of person who… well even if I’d agree on something with her the moment she opens her mouth I desperately want to switch sides.
The job and its decisions exist regardless of your personal convictions.
Saying it only is helmed by war criminals is in part an abdication of holding someone to a higher standard.
It feels odd that someone who wants to be a lawyer and use slegal loopholes to get (potentially) ACTUAL criminals out of jail time would make an accusation like this at all.
Ok Walky, now’s your chance to show how good a friend you can be and skip breakfast to keep Dorothy from spiraling further, and it might have the added bonus of helping you get out of a relationship you aren’t at all really invested in.
Better yet, Walky could text Lucy something like “Hey, Raidah’s being a dink, let’s eat with Dorothy instead. She seems like she could use a friendly ear.”
Not Norton I., Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
According to a paper at the time ” he had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line.”
Speaking of which though, I haven’t seen our own Norton II around here lately?
You do realize people can dislike and criticize multiple presidents and presidential candidates at once, right? Especially when presidents and candidates for president from both major parties have been fine with doing terrible things.
You can, but it’s funny how often that kind of criticism is used to draw a line that implies a level of equivalence that acts to absolve the one that’s objectively far worse.
Like back in the 2016 campaign, “all politicians lie” is a true statement that was commonly used to disguise the fact that Trump wasn’t even in the same ball park when it came to telling lies.
And yet I have absolutely never criticised anybody for voting Clinton in the general election, but oh boy, you should hear what words I have for people who voted Trump (or perhaps you shouldn’t; the best I can say about them is that they’re mortal, and therefore will, eventually but not soon enough, be dead).
In fact, I’d say a BIGGER problem in the US is that whenever anybody criticises Democrats, some assclown goes “bUT thE REpubLICanS arE Worse”, which is how you end up with a town in Ohio getting turned into a toxic wasteland.
Indeed. I am seeing a lot of people saying that “thinking the president is bad is defeatist mentality”, as if constantly defending a bad system that consistently return bad results is not defeatist in itself.
The idea that even question the validity of the system is seem as taboo is a poison that is slowly destroying the world.
I never wanted Dorothy to slap, punch or insult someone like now. I hate presidents and politicians in general, but Raidah way to do is disgusting and definitely based on Dorothy being friends with Sarah and Joyce.
it’s almost like inheriting a country with horrible ethical and global violations; even with the best of intentions, will inevitably mean you have to get your hands dirty. Or you could always leave the job to the people who enjoy partaking in that kind of thing; usually works out so well for the country then!
Yeah; Raidah out here with “we live in a society” levels of kiddie pool politics. How has Dorothy not ran into a million of her kinda BS in college of all places?
Obama’s failure to leave Afghanistan and Iraq combined with his increased expansion of executive privilege gave Trump cover to run under, and then power to fuck things up. Dennis Kucinich, who promised to abolish the DoD and replace it with a Department of Peace would have in all likelihood not survived being elected President.
We don’t just live in a society. We live in a genocidal apartheid state that is one of the biggest contributors to global warming being the end of the world as we knew it and also the only state to use nuclear weapons (and fiercely oppose de-armament), and we used them in the largest coordinated mass murder of school children in history. We are an amoral nation unmoored from our past that is eating the future of the entire world. The arc of American society, when it winds down (and if it doesn’t take all of humanity with it” will be seen in a similar way we view Nazi society now. At least the Nazis never nuked school children. Twice.
Yeah, Nazis shoved children into gas chambers. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of them. It’s actually adorable how American are convinced they are the most evil thing in the world. You didn’t even clear Top 3 during World War 2. You complain about nuking of Japan? Ask half the fucking Asia how they feel about that, they’d probably tell you you didn’t nuke the Japanese hard enough. There was a Nazi in Nanking during The Rape and he thought “Oh this is Too evil”. A Nazi! Thought the Japanese were too evil!
Obama failing to leave Afghanistan and Iraq had almost no effect on Trump’s election. Obama pulling out and the inevitable disasters that followed would certainly have been used against him far more effectively.
“the only state to use nuclear weapons”
I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with being the /first/ state to use them, after which a combination of knowing the effects and MAD have prevented any further large-scale uses. No, it’s definitely because the US is the only country to do anything bad ever.
“Because lawyers are known for their high moral character. Your job, as a lawyer will be to get people free from consequences, regardless if they are guilty or not. Lawyers -defend- war-criminals.”
ROZ WOULD CRUSH HER. Roz would crush her with her fuckin’ PINKIE. Roz would take her man, her social standing, and her life. With a steel chair.
Like, Roz is a bit of a cranky Twitter leftist who jumps on conversations where she’s not necessarily wanted but at least she does it for a reason and she believes in something. I believe with revolutionary fervor she would take Raidah apart like legos.
The law is inherently corrupt and people should be shielded from it. American law has always lagged significantly behind morality, and then we use that law as a club, both within our own country and without – even though we as a country don’t even follow our own Constitution! We are occupying great swaths of land that legally, according to Article VI, we are violating “THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND” by doing so. We assaulted and murdered and displaced the original inhabitants over and over again in the name of spreading a system that we were ourselves violating by perpetrating these acts.
So you approve of Trump’s lawyers doing everything legal (or not) to delay and protect him from any prosecution? You approve of the lawyers defending cops who shoot unarmed black kids? You approve of the inevitable defense of the company responsible for the Ohio toxic train wreck?
After all, the law is inherently corrupt and people should be shielded from it.
Sure, public defenders have an important role in keeping poor people from being railroaded into jail, even if that role usually comes down to advising them to take a shitty plea deal these days, but there’s an awful lot of money to be made shielding real criminals from the law.
The law is inherently corrupt because the system is built such that people like Trump and cops and companies are inherently and easily protected. Lawyers don’t have to do much. Even if they were actually prosecuted, the worst the law has to do for them is probably a fine, or some other slap on the wrist. The only people actually threatened by the law are everybody else, which is why they need to be protected from it.
That’s how they get away with it. They say something that sounds true enough at face value to distract from their actual point, which is universally “I want to cause you harm in any way I can get away with”.
Like … shit. This is taking me right back to college and the self-righteous avengers who couldn’t wait to dismantle and defecate upon everything you cared about.
Even though I teach these kids now, I never connected it that social media could/would make it even worse.
Now, I wonder if walky has the balls to skip breakfast on the basis of that comment?
Regardless of how wrong or right she is (argue that with one of the people who seem to actually want to do that here) that was blatantly malicious.
Maybe he still subconsciously expects enough that the people Jennifer hangs out with will be mean that he’ll just let it pass by default.
That’s an interesting point. One of Walky’s defining traits so far has been his desire to avoid conflict by any means necessary (direct parallels here with that flashback where he backed Leland up regarding his covering up his bullying of Marcy). He recently learned to start standing up for his sister and here is a great chance for him to learn that he can do that for other people in his life as well.
But I don’t think he’s going to make that connection here, since he’s doing this breakfast for the sake of his girlfriend and is in “gotta make a good impression” mode.
I just want to say, as I try to everytime that bit comes up, Walky “backed up” Leland in the most transparent “I just don’t want to get beaten up” way possible. Any teacher who didn’t pick up on that wasn’t going to listen, whatever he said.
Oh for sure, but he could have taken a stand and didn’t. He didn’t even have to lead the charge, he just had to back up his sister’s true account of what happened. This is outwardly a lower-stakes situation but it echoes previous ones that he voiced an intention to do better on. He gets some understanding for being under duress, and if it were only situations like that it would read differently. As it stands, it’s a dramatic example of a pattern that is only sometimes made excusable by potential direct harm (something that is absent from this situation).
I’ll give him partial credit if he talks to Lucy about not doing events with Raidah after the fact, since he’s clearly still terrified to do a conflict.
Now, the near-certainty that either she’s gonna interpret it as if or he’s gonna make it sound like it’s because he still likes Dorothy more than because Raidah is deliberately being a jerk at people is another issue entirely.
Poor Dorothy really can’t get a break in this comic, can she? From the start, she’s just constantly beaten down.
I mean, I agree that Dorothy could probably put her considerable talents to better use than trying to become a politician (totally different skillset than what she’s been shown to have), but why does the story constantly need to have her fail at things?
She’s not hyper competent. She thinks of herself as hyper competent, and presents herself as hyper competent. Her realizing she’s not hyper competent is going to be her chance to grow as a person.
Jeez, i’m generally pro “people being mean and cynical about the US. Gov” and even I think Raidah’s just being the worst right now.
Failing her just pratfalling straight into a puddle or something, I really, genuinely hope that breakfast ends with her getting screwed over in some ironic twist of fate. A real cutting “you reap what you sow” moment.
You know what won’t happen but would fucking rule? You know what would rule?
Is if Raidah is such a transparent asshole, constantly, all breakfast, that Walky finally gets fed up with it all and calls his mom to leverage his remaining golden child points to cut Raidah’s career maneuvering off at the knees. Just like “yeah mom there’s this really rude garbage girl that’s manipulating Billie and was a total shithead to Dorothy and my new girlfriend? I think she mentioned wanting to get a job at your firm or something. You shouldn’t hire her.”
Use Linda’s shady connections on someone who deserves it, for once.
Actually, ACTUALLY, you know what, rather than Walky doing anything bad on his part, Linda just happens to be getting breakfast and stops by the table.
Even she is repulsed by Raidah’s cynical grifting. All that social climbing does nothing to actually impress her.
Personally, i was thinking something along the lines of Raidah pulling her whole “Sarah is an evil monster who got our friend kicked out of IU and ruined her life, poor sweet Dana is just absolutely ruined and miserable because of that wicked witch” spiel all throughout breakfast, only for them to run into Dana right outside the diner, who’s just fully forgiven Sarah and is kinda grateful that she’s in a better place at this point in her life. Cue Raidah with egg on her face.
You’re absolutely right though, Linda Walkerton getting to beef with another 20-something year old would absolutely rule.
Man, but I love the idea of Dana being disgusted by Raidah using her as an excuse to mistreat Sarah too! Maybe we can combine these two ideas: Dana and Linda are both at breakfast and Dana already has an internship. Disgusted by Raidah, she gets Linda to blackball said jerk.
I will say this, I really love this storyline for giving us a VERY definite villain.
Like, “Turning Saints Into The Sea” we were all guessing. The villain was DOTTY! No, actually, the villain was JOE! No, wait, ROZ is the villain?? No, it’s JOYCE’S FORMER PROTESTANT DEATH CULT! Or is it BECKY?? Or is the real villain the READERS???
“Joementum” we don’t have to wonder, because Raidah came out in an M. Bison outfit or something she borrowed from the Undertaker and just hit Dorothy over the head with a steel chair, then spun around the ring going “SUCK IIIIIITTTTT” and gesturing wildly to her crotch. The heel heat is well and truly established.
It’s so weird seeing people shitting on lawyers as “defenders of violent criminals and child rapists”.
I know many lawyers have a (deserved) bad reputation, but civil defense lawyers and environmental lawyers are often out there doing entirely thankless hard work trying to keep people alive. Lawyers arguing tirelessly in court is what gets black people who were arrested in trumped-up charges out of jail; it’s who forces megacorps to abide by environmental regulations and labor laws. Lawyers are the ones who help people in abusive marriages leave their spouse and never have to contact them again or be financially dependent on them.
I know it’s messy because it’s also often lawyers hired for the other side who make successful arguments that food regulations are bad for business or that undocumented folks are ticking time bombs for violence waiting to happen.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it’s fair to lump all lawyers as people who chose a profession that’s a net negative on humanity. Truly useless and damaging professions are hedge fund managers and cryptocurrency miners. Lawyers actually have a chance to do good in the world.
[all this said, I don’t think Raidah will be one of the good ones. Sarah might]
I understand why people are doing it, it’s a natural knee-jerk reaction to Raidah’s incredibly obvious aura of hypocrisy, but I agree with you that they shouldn’t.
i think it’s interesting because while i personally do feel that, overall, our judicial system is corrupt (and i do believe that the systems of this country just cannot be appropriately reformed from the inside by ostensibly good actors like raidah sarah Or dorothy, they are all idealistic if this is their belief), i don’t think they’re corrupt because of the reasons people are reaching for. lawyers… aren’t inherently some terrible concept. i think the more true point to make is that, regardless of her intent, raidah would be participating in the an arm of the US government and unfortunately participating in imperialism, regardless of in what way she does it.
we don’t actually know what sort of lawyer raidah plans to be – criminal or civil, prosecution or defense, etc.. raidah could be planning to be a civil lawyer who wouldn’t be handling any of The Bad Things, just divorce and custody and property damage. we don’t know because she hasn’t really talked about it.
but the judicial system, carceral ‘justice,’ and general law of the land are written and exist in such a way as to enforce oppressive structures. they exist to ensure natives don’t get our land back. they exist to keep black and brown people in poverty. they exist to prevent disabled people, the homeless, gay and trans people, from existing in the public view – or at all. they exist to separate families and rehouse children of marginalized backgrounds with white evangelicals. they exist to placate the masses while still denying us liberties and rights and serve the empire At Large.
no matter what kind of lawyer raidah is, she would have to participate in those things – the more important things than “defending the scary criminal in court.” that’s what, to me, makes this raidah throwing stones in glass houses. and i think it’s interesting to see how she and dorothy are similar in this respect.
Most of them are doing it because it’s roughly as valid and nuanced as accusing all people who want to be the president as being future war criminals, which is to say not even remotely.
If Dorothy was still his girlfriend, he would defend her here. But he’s going to a meal with his new girlfriend so he doesn’t. The damage to Dorothy isn’t the comment from someone she barely knows and doesn’t like. The damage is Walky now playing neutral observer instead of friend or lover. The past day or two has been a series of people she cares for showing that it’s not as reciprocal as she hoped.
Are you talking about why Walky should NOT react to Raidah, right? That’s painful, and I won’t let it happen, if it was me. But you have strong points.
i think its funny that raidah is criticizing dorothy for wanting a job where she’ll have to do bad things considering she also wants a job where she’ll have to do bad things
Hate to agree with Raidah on anything, but I guess even a clock that only says things to put other people down and have an undeserved feeling of moral superiority is right twice a day
Future Mob Lawyer Raidah has suddenly discovered integrity AND Dot has suddenly forgotten her mission in life (until she finishes the recalibration beginning with turning down Yale, I’m guessing) is to not just become president but a president she can be proud of being? That’s a bit much.
I see a lot of people here saying that Raidah shouldn’t act so smug considering that she wants to be a lawyer, and lawyers have to do bad things. Have we seen any actual sign that Raidah wants to become a corrupt lawyer, and not just one who defends her client to the best of her ability (which, if we want fair trials to exist, is an *objectively good* thing)? Because it seems to me that people are just assuming the worst about her. And that’s not Raidah’s fault.
And even if she becomes something like a mob lawyer, I honestly feel that if somebody from the mob is taken to court for murder, he still has the right to a fair trial. IMO, saying that it’s wrong to be a mob lawyer equals saying that fair trials are wrong and need to be abolished. Everybody, even mobsters, have the right to a defense. IMO, being a lawyer for a horrible criminal is only wrong if you do it specifically because you don’t want people who really do commit horrible crimes to be held responsible for those crimes. Otherwise, it’s just making sure people get fair trials. The problem with using legal loopholes is that the “loopholes” exist at all, not that the lawyer makes sure that the actual law is followed.
And concerning the idea that presidents have to become war criminals: If you literally have no choice, then you’re not a criminal because you weren’t in control of things. If you do have a choice, then make the decision of not committing war crimes. Easy peasy.
Yes, some people might say that even if you have no choice but to call a drone strike on civilians, it’s still wrong to want to be the person who does it, and you should leave it to somebody else. And that’s true if you specifically look forward to ordering those drone strikes.
But if you see it as something horrifying that has to be done regardless of if you want to, then I’m not sure it’s more ethical to leave it to somebody else. I feel like that’s just saying “The guilt of ordering drone strikes would be too much for me. I want the suffering of that feeling of guilt to befall somebody else. Why should I endure that suffering, when I can let somebody else suffer in my place?” And that is, ultimately, selfish.
And again, there are a few options:
1. Drone strikes are an unethical decision. In which case, make another decision instead. Problem solved.
2. Drone strikes are, in the end, an ethically right decision. In which case, why feel guilty about doing the right thing? (And if it’s the kind of guilt you still can’t help, then why shuffle that burden onto somebody else?)
3. You do not have any kind of real ability to choose not to commit drone strikes, even though they should not happen. In which case, you are not actually in charge and thus it’s not your fault.
No, I don’t think Raidah “wants” to be corrupt, but I think she has no idea how to judge people and she’ll be happy to commit tax fraud for Asher and his business associates because they’re her friends and therefore good people who deserve freedom from taxes, or put someone like Sarah in prison for something like reckless endangerment (seeking help for her acutely depressed addicted roommate) because she hurts her, Raidah’s, friends and is therefore a bad person.
Better ethical questions are: how and why has the US military become a machine in which drone strikes are necessary for it to function and important follow up: why would anyone want to be part of this machine in which wanton murder of innocent people is an essential part of its functioning?
Can Dorothy (or anyone who wants to work so directly with the US government and military) truly make a case for these drones murdering civilians actively making a better world; or will explanation just be a hand wave of “well you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs/some casualties are to be expected/the end result will justify these means”?
It’s never been quite clear to me why drone strikes are considered so horrible.
Drones are a part of modern warfare and it’s very likely no military could fight effectively without them today. As we see clearly in Ukraine. That’s going to continue being more true as the tech advances.
Murdering civilians is bad of course, but the tech involved isn’t what makes it so. And all wars involve collateral damage. Short of simply surrendering or limiting yourself so severely you can’t win, there’s no way to avoid it. Civilians die in wars. It’s not even always a war crime. Probably not even usually.
The question isn’t the drone strikes. The question is why are you fighting.
Yeah, that’s fair. One hypothesis I’ve had for a while now is that drone strikes actually are good for civilians, relatively speaking, because somebody who’s comfortably seated far away from the action, controlling the drone by remote, is less likely to feel threatened than if they were there in person, and thus less likely to shoot a civilian out of “self-defense”.
Drone strikes are basically awful because people use them a lot more as assassination weapons for extrajudicial killings on foreign soil than they would with, say, airplanes. So the number of people getting killed has massively gone up since their usage since “little robot planes” is a lot easier to use versus people on the ground or in the air.
Have they? Sure targeted killings are easier with drones, but we’ve done some pretty awful saturation bombings back before we had more precision weapons.
Even as recently as early days in Afghanistan, there were things like bombing weddings.
We’re talking about a woman who once said ‘Future lawyer. That’s a no’ when asked if the human cost of your actions should matter less than rhetorical one-up-manship.
Which may not 100% mean a corrupt lawyer but probably not the most ethical one.
There’s a big difference between a criminal defense lawyer who sometimes defends mobsters and a “mob lawyer”. If you’re a lawyer working for the mob itself, you’ve crossed the line. You’re in the mob, but your job in the mob is “lawyer” rather than “drug pusher” or “hit man”.
I mean becky already sorta said it but in a much more palatable way than “youre going to have blood on your hands” (but i imagine if she does full blast on it, she’d have blood like a third if not halfway through the climb to the top lol)
He’s only doing it for his girlfriend though. Not only does Lucy not know about this interaction, but she has blinders on about all the people she perceives as the cool kids.
I don’t think Walky could describe this interaction to Lucy in a way that she could understand. She would refuse to believe it.
This comment section is wild. All lawyers have to do bad things? Really? Even estate planning lawyers? Environmental law lawyers? Immigration lawyers?
Also, I don’t think Raidah is correct or clever here. It’s just an extremely cynical position. Dorothy probably believes she can change the world for the better as president and to be a president who stops the imperialism and war crimes. I don’t subscribe to world views in which there can never be progress or change for the better
anyway this strip rules because it finally acknowledges the elephant in the room (the president is head of an imperialist war machine and unfortunately there is no ethical way to be that thing), while it also serves to show exactly why raidah is such an effective bully, and also further demonstrates how raidah plans to destabilize joyce and sarah’s friend group. this decision to attack dorothy in this way was to not just demoralize her, but to put cracks in dorothy and walky’s relationship, and eventually dislodge him and lucy from sarah and joyce. walky being scared of her is definitely a bit of a bonus, i think. that’s just my read on this though
i would hope it’d be a bit more nuanced rather than clear cut/black and white otherwise ppl would be protesting the presidential elections (well, more so than usual then again we can’t even get americans agreeing on one thing let alone international affairs)
i think you overestimate the safety of protests and peoples’ willingness to endanger themselves and their loved ones for the sake of change, unfortunately. not to say that many aren’t making the efforts and that direct action isn’t possible, just that like, a lot of people have to weigh that against being able to literally survive in a capitalist society. i don’t want to seem like i’m like, doom saying or whatever, though. i think we are on the precipice of great change and i have a lot of faith in people’s propensity for growth and love for each other. it’s human to want to survive, and even moreso to want to survive together.
american imperialism isn’t only international – it’s domestic, too. the whole country is a colonialist imperialist venture. people get really uncomfortable when you point that out though! the structures that be directly benefit a huge swath of the population, which is an incentive to maintain the status quo in a lot of ways, y’know?
Well other than physically showing up outside the white house similar areas to protest, there’d def be also a metaphorical and vocal disagreement through social media as well , though i imagine other than huge controversial plans/decisions, most ‘average joes’ would be too busy with work/kids to just take a week off of their life to have picket signs
Okay, the little drama gremlin in me who wants an effective social antagonist loves the idea of Raidah actually fracturing their friends group (before they realize they’re being manipulated and team up to defeat her).
that’s what i’m saying!!! it’s going to be so good to watch how she manages to needle them, i think. even if they don’t actually fall apart as a social circle i looove the drama. 🙂
i’m also really excited to see specifically how this affects jennifer (and also asher tbh).
Speaking as an anarchist, 90% of all law is busywork and the majority of people sent to jail are sent to jail for things that don’t deserve jailtime. Drugs, prostitution, and other matters clog our legal system versus other methods of punishment. Fines and rehabilitation would be far better.
Which, TLDR, “Most law is not Law and Order. Most law is Night Court.”
Feels like i gotta say something so the comments can be an even 600 before it gets locked so uh, idk, Raidah sucks but as someone muslim-adjacent i hope the diner they go to has a good bacon substitute i guess.
While her point is not necessarily untrue, the fact that she managed to whip that out so quickly and fluidly is flying ALL kinds of red flags to me.
She steered the conversation in that direction the INSTANT she saw Dorothy was there. Dorothy’s presence in that moment was pure coincidence. She just conveniently ran into Walky at the elevator minutes beforehand and was heading in the same direction. By all accounts, there’s no reason for Raidah to be prepared for her presence at that moment. And yet, she managed to pull out the topic COMPLETELY unprompted and lay out the point in two to three sentences.
Raidah had that one-two-punch locked and loaded on the OFF-chance she encountered Dorothy. This was not a casual, genuine expression of her feelings on the matter. This was a contingent, premeditated strike meant to tear Dorothy down at the first opportunity to present itself. And as someone with a lot of firsthand experience in picking through lawyeresque bullshit, I am VERY deeply concerned by what else she potentially has in the works.
(It’s also worth noting that she keeps making a point to call Walky “David,” which given similar behavior with other characters, is probably setting up to convince him to change who he is under the imposed belief that it’s what he actually wants for… WHATEVER reason she’s got behind it, much like she’s been pulling with Jennifer for months now)
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I didn’t see that on the list of requirements, is that on a secret menu? 🤔 Would it be a loftier goal to become an anarchist dictator?
🙄
alt: “said the one who SHOTS FIRED“
Ok, I will.
“said the one who had the first SHOTS FIRED“
Every single president of the United States has been a war criminal: https://youtu.be/5BXtgq0Nhsc
So very, very much to unpack in such a little one-off…
First, even Chomsky isn’t talking about ‘every president’–he’s focusing on the post-WWII presidents only.
Second, while I like a lot of Chomsky’s stuff, his claims here don’t quite stand up to muster. To declare the actions of the US indictable, he has to take the position that US forces were involved in the actions in question. While that’s clearly true in some of his examples, many of his examples are cases of proxy fights–we provide financial and materiel support to some group that then turns around and commits war crimes. I scanned the Geneva Conventions and… nope. Doesn’t apply to such situations, only to direct actions by signatory States. Short form, unless it involves boots on the ground, there’s very little the GC has to say about it. Sure, you can take a position that there’s no ethical or moral distinction, but Chomsky uses the word ‘indictable’ repeatedly, and that is about the law, not about ethics or morals, and if Raidah doesn’t know THAT difference yet, she should change majors now, to something like, I dunno, fingerpainting.
Third, if we expand it to that ethical/moral framework, then it gets really fun, because there’s literally no nation of note that has not done so in one way or another. By Chomsky’s standards, allying with Stalin to bring down Hitler would qualify as a war crime (as Stalin’s own regime was absolutely committing such atrocities). Please feel free to discuss this with any of the folks who would’ve been in Auschwitz for another few months without coordinated effort.
Of course, Chomsky is wonderfully one-sided in his analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, which when viewed honestly simply illustrates my prior point–both sides at this stage have so many Geneva Convention violations that pretty much the entire leadership of both nations should be in the Hague.
Now, if Raidah has a real alternative to trying to change the system other than seeking power within it, I’m all ears. But as is almost always the case in such positions, we’ve gotten nothing of that nature. And while the president alone is unlikely to be able to change things for the better, having someone who agrees that things need to change in that position is VITAL if we’re ever going to achieve anything. Just the Veto and SCOTUS appointments pretty much assure that.
If Raidah gave two flying fucks about anything other than her shitty little status games, she’d be sounding Dorothy out as a potential ally, proposing that with some effort, they might be able to make a two-front attack that would actually get some results. But she’s only caring about taking cheap shots.
The “genius” of that comment is that it doesn’t need to be true. 1) this is a liberal arts college, a lot of the students would just assume it’s true; 2) an explanation as to how and why it’s not, like Freemage has given above, would have to be long-winded and nuanced. But if you are explaining yourself, you are playing defense. On a purely rational level, Raidah isn’t making much of an argument: she said something short, quippy and wrong, and didn’t provide any sources or evidence for her claims. But she’s not making a rational argument. On an instinctual, lizard-brain level, she’s on the offensive, and a Dorothy who plays defense would be on the defensive. She’d lose the social encounter.
The only way to win here is not to play. But that also feels like losing. You could quip back, and then it might be a toss up, except we know Raidah has a lot more practice and Dorothy is far too kind to be good at that sort of thing.
“Well aren’t we lovely today. May the rest of your day be so as well.”
But yeah, not Dorothy’s skill set.
The bullshit asimmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Indeedy. Having said that, the amount of interesting stuff Ive learned while doing research to rebuff said BS has made doing so well worth the effort. Helps I dont have a life I guess.
Ah, Chomsky, the darling of leftists who are cool with atrocities as long as they’re committed by anti-Americans.
I thought he was a garden gnome you had to carry through a carnival after winning him in a shooting gallery.
He can be both.
He’s also the purveyor of an incredibly seductive theory of language that I wish was true because it makes my brain happy, but is also colossal bullshit.
People are complicated and Chomsky is a complicated kind of bad. In this context, the relevant bad is that he’s a war crimes apologist. Both historically, and with respect to current events.
That’s Nome Chogmsky.
you mean GNOME Chomsky
Yeah, there’s a lot of value in tearing down the idealized picture that many Americans have of the country, but many who start down that path wind up blaming America for everything and absolving other countries of any responsibility.
You realize this webcomic artist is extremely sociolist right? Like, he believes in helping poor, starving and dying people without putting them into an early grave through debt related stress.
Noam Chomsky is, and I wish I was exaggerating here, a genocide denier. So long as those genocides were carried out by a communist government (see: Khmer Rouge).
And on a less controversial note, he’s also the least useful sort of pundit. All he does is take snipes at imperialism, which we all know is bad. He doesn’t offer any coherent plans for a better world, because it’s easier to gain traction by just repeating various forms of “everything is bad and will continue to be bad until my idealized form of communism arrives to save us. ‘
He ignores that imperialism isn’t just a Western capitalist thing, but basically just a variant of what every powerful country has done throughout history.
Also, despite Putin literally saying “We are attacking Ukraine because it belongs to us in an imperial sense and it was a mistake for Lenin to even nominally carve it off from the empire in the first place”, Chomsky has been sadly pushing the idea that “Russia *had* to invade Ukraine and murder thousands of people because the USA is big and mean and they’re so scared of it, just let them kill Ukrainians unopposed and seize their territory, that’s what anti-imperialism is”.
A lot of socialist/communist types use an old Leninist definition of “Imperialism” where it’s an inherently capitalism thing, rather than a basic part of state’s foreign policy dating back to the Bronze Age.
When Communist nations exercise influence over client states and build spheres of influence and buffer states, that’s something completely different than what capitalist nations do.
There’s a lot of “my side” defense that Leftists engage in as much as Right types. I say this as a Leftist. The idea that as long as its anti-American hegemony then it must be justified because if the communists are as bad (or worse) than Americans during the Cold War then that forces you to realize, GASP, some of the points they may raise could be true and not to completely villify them.
I have never met or read a leftist ever claim to support communism seriously. Not only because communism has had it’s name dragged through the mud by dictatorships pretending to be communist, but because leftists are specifically socialists, a different idealogy entirely. If you, sir, believe you know any leftists that support communism as any more then a very general framework for fairness (everyone gets equal blank) then you don’t know leftists. Which makes it strange that you claim to be one. Do you watch ANY leftist media?
Chomskey isn’t left. He’s an old crazy man who sometimes says things EVERYONE quotes. The right quotes him all the time too. Everyone does. He’s a meme machine. That’s it.
Just to be clear here: You don’t know any leftists who support communism because you define leftists in way that means they don’t support communism?
You define leftists as “specifically socialists”, who you believe are definitionally not communists, and think there’s somehow something meaningful in the fact they’re not communists? When that’s literally just how you define the term?
I don’t know how to even start to unpack this, but please, read something. Vaush or Hasan or whoever are not theorists and don’t even have a particularly firm grasp of their own beliefs, let alone what other strains of left wing thinkers believe. This is a rather breathtaking take, and not in a good way.
He should’ve stuck to linguistics.
(He’s shit at that, too.)
Raidah is plain-spoken. Also she is a monumental ASS.
Near as I can tell, Raidah’s idea of a ‘loftier goal’ is ‘sit on the sidelines and complain about whoever is in charge.’ There’s a direct path from this sort of deliberate disengagement and the elections of Reagan, Bush and Trump. It amounts to hollow posturing.
“Everything is awful forever. Therefor I have no responsibility to try to improve things or help others, and instead am morally justified in spending my entire life reveling in my own petty selfishness. QED.”
Oh, so you have seen Rick & Morty.
Maybe she just sees a vulnerability in one of Joyce’s friends and strikes at it. Doesn’t necessarily reflect her personal politics at all.
It would be amusing if she was a hard core leftist who really believes that. Goes well with the classism we’ve seen from her before.
Pretty sure she’s Muslim. Very easy to imagine her having a completely justified dislike of the united states federal government
I don’t think we know how Raidah actually feels about the US government. Here, she’s taking a knife to Dorothy (who she barely knows) as a minor step toward a larger. Or is it Asher’s goal?
I think if she didn’t believe something like this she’d have chosen a different line of attack
I posted about Raidah and Roz downthread and I should have done that here instead.
ROZ WOULD EAT HER ALIVE. I SAID IT DOWNTHREAD TOO. Roz would snap her little opportunist butt like a TWIG. GET HER, ROZ. GET THE FAKE PROGRESSIVE PETIT-BOURGEOIS ASSHOLE.
I feel like that description might well apply equally well to Roz herself.
Roz believes in her positions. Call her, quite correctly, what you will—spiteful, holier than thou, selfish—but she’s shown an unwavering commitment to women’s rights, and honestly, her plan to derail Robin’s campaign was stupid and self-centered, but it came from a genuine place.
I cannot imagine she would cotton to Raidah’s horse shit for a second.
And she wants to be a lawyer? Speaking as someone currently in law school…if she keeps this attitude in law school, she won’t make it through 1L. Plus, depending on what kind of law she wants to go into (and I’m guessing it isn’t Patent Law), the odds of her having to do something at some point she deeply disagrees with are high. Someone who wants to be a lawyer has no business being on a high horse about someone who wants to be President.
Yeah… sure… as a pre-law student, call every modern US President a war criminal… why not?.
Oh, right… because lawyers are known throughout the world and even history itself as being ‘upstanding citizens’ themselves? *rolls eyes*
Very much a glass house situation she’s in, comparing respective future career goals.
I mean, assuming she wants to be a prosecutor, this would be pretty hypocritical. If she wants to be a defense attorney, that’s a different story
The only way she gets a pass on hypocrisy is if she becomes a public defender, and you don’t get to climb a social ladder doing that.
prosecutors do so many fucked up and illegal things, defense attorneys can be shitty but prosecutors are no better.
I didn’t say her criticism of Dorothy’s ambitions would be hypocritical if she wanted to be a prosecutor because I think it’s an ethical job.
How percicly would you have an Anarchist dictator. They’re contrasting terms…
I think the term of Anarcho-dictators is “Chieftain”.
THOSE Anarchists are 100% hypocrites
Okay I love Dorothy but I gotta hand it to Raidah here, sometimes she spits truth
Dorothy’s also probably on edge because of what Becky said the other day. The world just seems set on wearing down her resolve lately
She must be next her birthday. Or retrograde mercury.
There’s a key distinction between being an honest jerk and just being a complete bongo.
I hate this girl. “David” “Jennifer” She’s out to destroy, I don’t think war crimes are safe from her.
Just noticed that, really hoping Walky doesn’t keep going along with that ‘David’ nonsense.
She’s like, a slightly more coherent Mike.
Mike stood up for his friends, and called them out when they were being blind to their own failings.
Raidah is just a jerk. Same power set. Totally different motive behind its use.
Mike, in his own words, spent 5 years poking Amber’s bear to turn her into a rage bomb to use against her father.
Emotional abuse 😮
Indeed. Raidah crossed the line.
I mean yeah she’s right but its still a shitty thing to say to someone as soon as you see them.
Plus, being a lawyer isn’t exactly a saintly profession either
Radiahs definitely going out of her way to be an ahole here. I can only guess she’s decided Dorothy is too close to Joyce to recruit and not worth feigning politeness to, and she seems to be trying to isolate Walky, getting him to walk away after a friend just got insulted.
Pecking order. Dotty’s got the potential to be a leader of lackeys. Radiah is making sure Dotty knows she’s not above her in the pecking order.
And Radiah doesn’t share lackeys.
This is, IMHO, an excellent description of what’s going on here. Thank you for providing it!
Oh, I wish it was out of her way. This seems to be her default path. As is said, it’s her lane,and she likes being in it.
Wondering how often she was lie this with Jacob. Can I be charitable and figure she has other good qualities yet unseen on panel?
She’s…physically attractive? When she’s not making a face or opening her mouth to state an opinion?
When you’re a sociopath, you get very good at putting on masks.
Florence King once described a man who was trying to get a date/her phone number with:
“If I could only put a paper bag over his personalityn”
The distinction is that she knows Dorothy cares about being ethical, while Raidah only seems to care about ethics insofar as the standards required to practice law. So she knew that was an insult that’d land on Dorothy, but if someone tried to counter by mentioning that lawyers are sketchy, Raidah wouldn’t care.
It’s very strategic. Fortunately you could just be dismissive of her if she says that. “Noted? You’re really mean. Bye.”
There’s certainly some truth there, although I hold to the belief that “anyone who wants the job, doesn’t deserve the job (and certainly shouldn’t have it)”
I don’t buy that at all and I think it’s ridiculous.
Socrates figured out 2500 years ago that giving power to people that want it is a bad idea.
This leads logically to the conclusion that inherited monarchies are a better form of government than representative democracies, since anyone getting elected in a democracy must be trying to, but there’s at least some chance that the child of a ruler doesn’t actually want the throne.
So it’s okay to say anything to anyone as long it has a kernel of truth? She could’ve just said “That’s nice.”
Yeah, but it also feels like a bit of an empty sentiment, like “War criminal presidents are just a thing we’re going to have”. That’s how it’s been so far, but I don’t know that I trust someone who’s content for it to just always be that way.
Yeah. Someone who is absolutely dedicated to the idea that “Everything is awful forever” will always be right, because they can always find something awful to point to.
Any chance of living a life with meaning or making the world a better place requires dropping the cynicism for at least a moment.
I’m guessing Raidah considers even thinking about this kind of thing to be a waste of time. For her, cynicism is just another weapon she can use to put other people in their place (below her).
Thing is Raidah’s doing that thing where you say something that feels right without actually being factual. The presidency is a tool of enormous power and it’s up to every president to decide what they do with it, it’s just really fuckin hard to get there without being being complicit in some humanitarian atrocity or another.
Uh no she doesn’t.
Yes sometimes a president has to authorize the use of military force. But not all military actions rise to the level of “war crimes”, and not all presidents have used the military in that way.
Carter was a pretty decent person and didn’t overuse the military option. And while Obama used drone strikes and authorized action in Libya, efforts were made to minimize casualties.
Words have meaning. You figure a potential lawyer like RAdaih would understand that. And tossing the words “war crimes*
around when they do not apply cheapens the meaning
7 don’t think Radiah actually cares about the meaning of the words coming out of her mouth so long as they have the effect she wants. Kind of hoping thst comes back to bite her.
I agree. She needs some consequences.
Didn’t Obama also personally order the kidnapping of Tony Stark?
Couldn’t be, Iron Man is Marvel and Obama is DC.
Heh
Her accusation is ridiculous even on the face of it. She is essentially saying that president, the person holding the most powerful position on the planet, is legally required to do something illegal. I was actually expecting a more well thought out insult than that coming from Raidah.
Less “legally required” as if the law actually matters in any way to a sitting President (or the vast majority of ones who’ve left office, with the possible exception, we’re about to see, of one) and more “do you really think that any one human being in an otherwise realisticish universe could Just Decide to ignore over a century of foreign policy of dramatic violent intervention”.
But yes, yes, I know, Obama’s term had fewer war crimes which is the same as zero, everyone’s memory-holed the Chelsea Manning trial, and thhings like all the massive human rights and legal violations we’re still ramping up on our Southern border should never diminish our trust that someone, somewhere, definitely not us but like, somebody in charge, will eventually fix the system and return it to its default and intended state of- of uh-
reads notes on hand
Looks like we’re out of time for this comment!
You are correct, we should not rely on ‘someone else’ to fix the system. Raidah, however, is advocating not even attempting to fix it, and is deriding anyone who might even want to try.
Or do you think non-Presidents can do a better job of dictating Presidential policy than Presidents can?
Yes. Yes I do believe that. I believe there’s a reason there are like thousands and thousands of people in the executive branch, I believe most Presidents select their advisors specifically because they want to listen to them, I believe there’s a reason we vote for the President and that it’s at least intended to matter, and I believe that, from everything I know about politics- from everything I know about any position of power– it is a giant game of trying to figure out the best of a lot of shitty options while you’re surrounded by a ton of people who have the power to fuck with your ability to do your job, even if it’s unofficial, and who you may or may not be able to trust.
I do not think any one person should, is meant to, or is capable of just floating around above that. Not even a President. A President is one person.
I also think it’s ridiculous to imply that being wary of people who want positions of power, or god forbid criticizing them in hopes they do that thing centrists are always saying about “elect them and then yell at them until they do the right thing”, means you just want to whine and sit on your hands and do nothing, and I’m a bit tired of it. There are a damn near infinite number of things a person can do to help fix or reform or replace the system other than running for one specific office, and I’m sure Dorothy’s even doing several of them.
And I’m not suggesting any of that.
I think it’s self-defeating and infantile to take the position that you can change the current nature of the presidency without the current occupant of the White House being on-board.
As I’ve said elsewhere in today’s comments, if Raidah were actually remotely interested in changing the system, she’d be working on recruiting anyone who might make a likely ally inside and outside of the executive branch. Instead, she’s playing petty one-upmanship games in order to… I’m not even sure any more, honestly.
I have no idea what Raidah is doing beyond being an asshole. This could be her actual feelings or just coming up with shit on the fly to hurt someone. She is not acting in good faith basically ever in her life regardless of the truth value or lack thereof of her statements. Still, the word she said was “wary”, not “fuck voting and never try anything else”, and I don’t think that necessarily means she’s advocating the latter.
Or, well, advocating anything– again, Raidah- but that’s not exactly the conversation.
I just don’t at all think the only way to get a world leader on board with something is to start with one who’s already there, or even necessarily close to there, and I don’t think they’re the only person who needs to be on board for it to go smoothly. A President is pulled a lot of different ways and even if they have a ton of power, it’s still by definition limited by a number of things.
Presidential policy is dumb. We should have a prime ministerial policy instead.
What’s the difference, aside from more tea and Postman Pat stickers?
In my experience it means some old people in another country miles away technically has some power/say in your government. Or it’s the republic type of prime minister where you also have a president, for some reason
You’re assuming that US law is consistent with international law. US law is probably not even self-consistent before you factor in that treaties have the force of law.
Ever heard of double tap drone strikes? Those were designed to maximize casualties and the target of the second strike was first responders.
Every President since the passing of the Geneva Convention has committed crimes against it, including Carter
Biden???
We’re still in Iraq, ain’t we? And we’re still occupying land within our own borders that doesn’t belong to us, according to our own Constitution, aren’t we? Perpetuating crimes began by another administration counts.
…no?
No war, no Geneva Convention.
We literally do still have troops occupying Iraq tho. There’s been a huge draw down, but we have about 2500-3000 troops actively stationed in Iraq, and likely will for many more years due to the instability caused by the us invasion and subsequent conflicts with isis and isil
Barack Obama comitted targeted assassinations by drone and killed innocent children. His admin also authorized the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital. I wouldn’t call his drone program very good at “minimizing casualties”
Dorothy, God gave you middle fingers for a reason.
Yeah, but it’s a very hard to swallow pill to people.
I laughed my ass off, tbh. And even more with Walky’s response.
Raidah alternates between “pure bongo” and “you’re not wrong you’re just an asshole” and she’s always been more fun as the latter.
You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to her
Like, she’s right, but so what? Look how she’s using the truth and who she’s talking to. Don’t miss the forest, which is “she’s just trying to make Dorothy feel like shit” for the trees of the stupid Presidents. Who gives a shit about Presidents, why go up to someone you barely know and dunk on them for clout??
She isn’t even loosely right, let alone legally correct (which would be the more important part if she cared about being a good lawyer rather than feeling better than everyone else).
Oh I gotta be honest, you’ve confused my forest for my trees. I don’t care about her opinion on the presidents, I like that she just delivered the most brutal emotional injury Dorothy’s ever suffered. And I like Dorothy! In fiction, sometimes it’s fun to see even good people get a swift kick in the face 🙂
Raidah didn’t make that comment to be poignant, she did it to put Dorothy down. She would have had a derisive comment even if Dorothy said she was going to find a way to convert CO2 emissions into universal housing.
Not smart to make enemies of the future president. Raidah can kiss that Supreme Court appointment goodbye.
Very nice.
Well at least for a maximum of 10 years, starting sometime 15-20 years in the future. And in Willis-Time, we know how long THAT will be 🙂 (Not counting the occasional semester break time-jumps, that is).
LOL, it would be amazing if someone framed it as a question to ask future candidates like “have you considered what it means to potentially do war crimes for the country?”
im excited for more raidah appearances she always brings her a game
Her a-hole game, maybe.
Woah, Raidah really knows how to hurt. 😮
Let’s see Walky give her a well deserved taste of ADHDemon power. ✌😈
*plays “Prophet” from Naruto CD on hacked muzak*
This is why I don’t like being around snippy people like this. It’s an uncomfortable vibe to be around.
FUCKING RIGHT?!?!
it’s def more entertaining to watch as a third party/series as opposed to irl esp if it comes outta nowhere, even if someone’s ‘default’ mode is smarmy/sarcastic but hers is def more ‘barbed’ than walky’s harmless ‘goofyness’/ribbing
Would beating up a pre-law student hurt or HELP her future campaign?
Depends if anyone ever finds out. A good President would be able to prevent leaked evidence.
Depends on the party.
Well, Raidah is brown. So, what Karla Jean said.
Beating up a muslim woman for being anti-american would probably go over well with certain voters. Not the ones Dorothy wants to appeal to, mind
Let’s not give Raidah too much credit here. Someone who’s an asshole about everything will occasionally be a correct asshole.
Like Mary with the cake donuts?
She isn’t actually correct, though.
Every one of my direct ancestors had a child at some point. That doesn’t mean I will have a child.
She not saying that Dorothy WILL commit war crimes; she’s saying that people drawn to the presidency make her wary. I honestly can empathize with that position. If someone older than 7 told me they were aiming to be a cop, I’d be wary of them.
That’s nice, Raidah. Let us know when you finally achieve a twenty year old’s grasp of politics in a few years
I mean, she is 18, isn’t she…? How’s this a burn?
19 or 20, depends whether her birthday has passed. She’s a sophomore like Sarah.
Is this some kind of ‘once you get older you’ll be more conservative bs or is this the typical Centrist bs? Cause honestly? I don’t trust a single person who wants the near unlimited power that someone like the United States President has. No one who attains that power is a good person.
So do you just wanna get rid of the presidency? I don’t even say I disagree but it’s not like I trust any of the alternatives because I don’t trust people in general.
There are better systems than presidencies. One of the strongest points in favor of a parliamentary system is that prime ministers can be removed with a vote of no confidence. And sure, that can produce a circus like UK 2022, but it’s a far more meaningful check on the executive than America’s toothless impeachment process, which has never actually removed a president.
There are also other strategies for representation that would be able to map to constituency preferences a lot better than America’s model. If combined with better ballot design and a parliamentary system, you wouldn’t have nearly as much dumbshit infighting as you see inside the Democratic Party, because the DNC has been forced to be big-tent “inclusive” rather than a nuanced representation of what people actually believe. (And as a bonus, it would be nice if the Christian nationalists were properly split off from the Koch toadies and the gun nuts, rather than having them find common cause in a coalition party as they do now.)
For all the hot air about working across the aisle, there should really be another four or six aisles to work across when you’re representing 300 million people.
Of course, the parliamentary system also means that, short of removal, the legislature is even less likely to check the executive, since they’ll always be the same party, with the same basic agenda.
Britain committed atrocities as an imperial power for centuries under a parliamentary system.
And while coalitions would need to be formed between parties in such a system rather than within them, they’d still need to be formed. The Democrats might not have to be “big-tent inclusive” then, but they’d still need to form a similar big tent inclusive coalition to form a government.
Which isn’t to say a parliamentary system is a bad idea, but it’s far from a quick fix.
Sort of? Parliamentary systems also have minority governments, which does put the government at increased “checks”. Mind you, it also sometimes results in the other parties being dicks and subverting the government altogether.
Not sure what you mean by “minority governments”? A party that doesn’t have a majority on its own and has to form a coalition to form a government?
That can be, but in many ways it’s still less of a check than a President’s party not having control of one or both Houses of Congress.
In some ways but in other ways it also means the government has to play nice or have a vote of no confidence, which is definitely more of a check than an impeachment process that never actually happens.
The bigger check is that you can’t get your agenda through and are limited to what the executive can do on its own.
Having midterms is also a big check that most parliamentary systems don’t have – since a change in parliament is likely to mean a change in government, elections tend to be further apart.
Frankly, it is my belief that if we just got rid of first past the post voting, we’d be a long way toward a better legislature.
I’d also like to see term limits, but I’d also like to see strict limits on profiting from the office, and on the source of campaign monies. Koch or Soros, neither one, should be helping decide the Senator race in Washington.
You can’t “just git rid of first past the post voting”. You’ve got to replace it with something and what you replace it with will play a huge role in how that turns out.
There are several versions of alternative voting systems that don’t have near the problems of our current, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system. They all invite you to vote for multiple candidates at once. The mechanism behind the vote varies, but they mainly fall into three camps; approval, ranked choice, and score. While I would prefer some form of ranked choice, probably either IRV or STV, although I’d prefer Condorcet, ANY of these options, in all of their permutations of which I am aware, would be preferable to the system most of us vote under today, that heavily penalizes voting for third-party candidates, thus reinforcing the “‘uniparty’ duopoly” we’ve fallen into.
Fair and a couple of states are experimenting with at least IRV.
I don’t think it’ll have much effect though. The fundamentals that push a two party system in the US run deeper than that. Letting 3rd parties lose without affecting the results doesn’t really change anything.
Not in the way that some kind of proportional representation would, for example.
If you don’t trust people then spreading power around instead of centralizing it reduces the total amount of damage that can be done. Power is a force multiplier, not a force adder. So yeah, take the most powerful position and weaken or abolish it. Keep doing that forever and we might have a small chance at politics not sucking.
Spread power around too much and nothing gets done. And some things still need to be done.
Much of the increase in Presidential power in recent decades is due to Congressional gridlock. Nothing gets through Congress, Presidents are still being pushed to act, so they turn to executive orders.
First off it is not unlimited power, not even close. Our whole system of government in the US was built on the idea of checks and balances and no president has been able to do half of what they wanted to do. Secondly, the power that they do have is a tool that can be used for either good or evil. And believe it or not, some people pursue that power to do good. I think we are better off giving those people the power presidency over those who seek the office only for personal gain.
And for the record I’m not a centrist and certainly not a conservative. What I’m talking about is more just an understanding on how the political system works.
The people seeking to do good are never on the ballot though, like I understand that there are checks and balances in place but the power of the United States president is seriously just too fucking much. The sheer number of dead people that presidents are responsible for, that the United States is responsible for is simply too much.
Also it is impossible to make any real significant change to systemic evils like systemic discrimination from climbing with the system that creates those evils. One of your parties I’d pure fucking cartoon evil the other is more comic book evil and I don’t think a single person with good intentions would be allowed to gain much power in either party. And if she did somehow do it then the cartoon villains would just block any good thing she attempts and then use distractions to keep her occupied for 8 years and nothing changes.
Then, what do you do? Lose all hope? Don’t bother? Don’t try to change anything. Just leave those positions for the assholes and monsters? Flee the country and let it fester until it becomes the new confederacy? What, honestly, do you propose the average Joe do if there’s no hope?
You can protest and riot like the French do
Yeah, and then we get gunned down in the street. Great solution.
Do French police have surplus military equipment, training geared toward escalating a situation toward violence as quickly as possible, and an almost inherent desire to murder civilians for any little thing?
It’s easy to suggest, much harder to convince people to actually do it. Nobody wants to get turned into paste on live television, shockingly.
One of the law enforcement organs in France is the Gendarmerie nationale, which is part of the French military. The equipment of some of their units includes armoured vehicles.
Sweet. Do they also have rocket launchers? If they have rocket launchers, I’m defecting to France.
Yes.
About rocket launchers, since the military (the legit army, not the “gendarmerie”) is since a few presidents being trained for “crowd control”, the answer is also yes.
Welcome, if you’re american you’ll be able to stay, if you’re from a country with actual civil war or disastrous economy, good luck.
Ok, go do that
And how’s that going for the French?
You mean the current protests, right? Because last I heard, Macron has been insistent that the protests are *not* going to stop the retirement age from being raised to 64. And this is only an issue now because a similar level of protests likewise *failed to stop* the raising of the retirement age to 62 a decade ago.
As far as I can tell, the French aren’t doing anything more effective than the US protests after the Dobbs decision. And the protests from a decade ago had the same effect: they didn’t actually control the policy, but their enemies got screwed come election time.
So the point remains: What exactly are people meant to do?
Ho boy. Okay. Let’s start with the obvious ones.
One is you can do what a lot of political parties have done and start focusing really hard on your local communities. That’s a lot harder to do in the US where both major parties plus our voting system are actively hostile to leftward change or other parties but it makes a measurable difference. Another is using other power structures, like mutual aid networks. You can also be a part of protesting groups, advocaqcy groups, hell even lobbying groups are something even if I don’t agree with them, they do objectively make a difference in policy.
You can also try to help educate people on what the problems are, or you can do activism through art and media, so there’s more public pressure and more people helping to build things and strategize new possibilities.
You (not necessarily specifically you, I mean I know you’re not in the best position here) can learn how to effectively defend marginalized people in real circumstances, how to de-escalate and distract when possible and what to do when it isn’t.
You can participate in any number of fields where people are trying to change communities, government, workplaces, leftist orgs, etc. to be more actively inclusive of marginalized people and to help understand what effective aid and solidarity is and how to get there from here.
And then, under many circumstances, if you want, you can still vote for the lesser evil, if your boss won’t fire you for it.
Pointing out reality is not meant to be a call to despair.
“if your boss won’t fire you for it” hahaha we’re all gonna die
One day, comment-section acquaintance, but in the meantime we can make the bastards earn it.
Well reality is a point to despair and I’m not the kinda guy who sees all this doom and gloom about the state our country is in and can be particularly constructive with it. I’m not an activist. I’m not a politician. I’m a guy who just wants to draw cartoons who wakes up and goes to bed depressed because I know no matter what every day, every second, every minute everything is getting worse. Everyone tells me 6 ways to Sunday a billion ways everything I like or everything where I live is fucked and I’m supposed to take all of it in stride. People act like I’M the crazy one for not seeing a point in living when nobody seems to have anything positive to say about drawing breath on this earth. So I apologize if I’m a little apprehensive, I just hate it here (t. the planet earth).
Sorry you feel that way fam. Honestly I sometimes get sick and tired of Earth life too.
On that note, maybe you’d like to wake up and see the Martian landscape first thing in the morning one day. Or maybe the icy curves of Europa, overlooking Jupiter.
It is absolutely okay to focus on you. Not everyone has the energy to fight the world and most of us who do still have to fight the world on behalf of ourselves first. It’s fucking exhausting, and you’re not alone.
I also think you are also absolutely allowed to be the guy who just draws cartoons and tries to be just aware enough of problems that you’re not accidentally a dick to your friends or whatever. But if you did someday have the energy, and were capable of doing more, there are absolutely tthings to do and reasons to hope.
I just… really dislike that some people seem to think that pointing out flaws in the one really obvious option means you’re saying nothing ever will work. I responded to your question because I felt it was an actual question.
Offer of soft blankets and distracting happy music?
I deeply empathize with this feeling. Might I offer you the (slightly abridged, I’m going from memory/my tattoos) Wizard’s Oath, from Diane Duane’s incredibly good Young Wizards novels?
In Life’s Name, and for Life’s sake
I will guard growth and ease pain
I will fight to preserve that which grows and lives well in its own way
I will change no object or creature unless it or the system of which it is part are threatened
To these ends, in the practice of my Art
I will put aside fear for courage
And death for life when it is right to do so
Til Universe’s End
*line break*
Making art IS saving the world. The world is small as well as large. That doesn’t mean activism doesn’t matter, or these big conversations are pointless, but it does mean that the little things you do that make someone smile or have a realization or even just escape from the shittiness that is reality for a second…that made a difference. You kept someone alive for one more second, and that’s worth it.
Hey fellow Andrea Gail. You might want to check out “How to be Hopeless” by Carlos Maza on YT. Fascinating musing on how to live with that growing sense of despair, when everything feels like that poor boat in A Perfect Storm trying to sail up the wall of water. It still gives me a bit of comfort when things look are looking bleaker and more overwhelming than usual. Hang in there
I will recommend something very radical: never EVER watch the news. Reading the news might be okay. I’d focus on in-depth analysis of events after the fact. Like, you don’t need to pay attention to 24-hour coverage of the latest crisis. Though, if you do watch, try and look out for the positive. News outlet tend to focus on the terrible, be ause the sensational most often is. But, as Mister Rogers said: ” Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
Look too at larger trends. Some things are getting worse, but there are also things that are improving over time. The situation isn’t quite as bleak as we might think sometimes.
And finally, I can say that if you were to get involved in activism you would probably feel less hopeless and helpless. Activists, in my experience, tend to be some of the most hopeful people I know, and that’s due in good part to how thoughtful activism does have an impact. It does make a difference, and you can see it.
@notsomeoneelse
Yeah that wasn’t fair of me. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed and I took it out on you. Often times I feel like I’m constantly getting the emotional version of an “um…actually”.
@JRivest
I honestly don’t watch the news but the discords I’m in usually keep me up to date on whatever awful thing is happening at any particular moment. Plus it’s not just politics. As a Rick & Morty, Kanye West, Inside Job, Cartoon Network and WB in general fan, who also wants to make money making non-artificially intelligent art, these last months have been TRYING, to say the least. I always try to believe in people and look on the bright side of things and believe in people but honestly I’m losing faith in people.
I see what you mean. Leaving facebook ended up being one of the best decisions I have ever made for my mental health. It was a hard habit to kick. The rush of dopamine can get addictive. But my Facebook was very political by design and it ended up being very draining. Perhaps it’s different for you, but to me it sounds like those platforms bring you more grief than joy, and maybe taking a break from them would be for the best? If you need to publish to sell your art, maybe you can set up some automated posts, and just avoid doomscrolling? Whatever works for you!
Good luck!
So, yes, let’s just let the WORST people go for that power, instead. That worked out great in 2016.
Purity politics are infantile.
Golden perfect solution or nothin’, baybeeeeeeee
Purity politics is also very willing to sacrifice those that they claim to be helping.
Yup. That’s the other big problem with arguments like this. They reduce the question to a binary: “All presidents are war criminals” and thus whitewash any real differences. Either people avoid politics because they don’t want to support any war criminals or they can use it as an excuse to back the worse one who might give them an advantage in other ways.
Saw plenty of arguments along those lines that Clinton (or Obama) were worse than Trump, back in the day.
Not more conservative, she just hasn’t demonstrated a nuanced understanding of …. Anything so far on screen to my knowledge.
Hear me out, but I want a sort of Antihero Justice League of Carla, Roz, and Malaya to come together just to knock Raidah down a peg.
Malaya gives negative infinity fucks what anybody says to her.
Roz is just as self-righteous and prickly, but at least has slightly better intentions.
And Carla will hit her with a pie.
I’m here for that. I’d like to swipe that smug self-centered smirk off her face. Jacob is very lucky to done with her.
I’d bring popcorn to that.
wait, Walky, you think RAIDAH came out of that exchange in any sort of winning stance?
Depends highly on the audience. The small sampling size of the comments so far suggest there’s about a 50/50 split that do think “Radiah have a real good point though” even if she in truth does not. Whether her position will be represented as truth within the comic or merely one opinion is yet to be seen though, Walkys reaction, while a small indicator, is far from hard evidence.
It’s just…how does she say something like that and no one laughs at her face?
Real hot-take there, Raidah, your immediate and unearned super aggressiveness is totally devastating, let no one tell you different.
I do see what you mean regarding the opinion of the comments, it’s just not a matter of her being right or wrong, if that makes sense?
Well Radiah’s making a social play to own Dorothy. How effective this is necessarily depends on the social audience around them. It doesn’t depend on what actually is right or wrong, but it does depend on what they and people around them think is wrong or right. I was in part pointing to the comments to showcase that there is a real demographic of people who would nod and cheer Radiah on, which is being represented here by Walky.
Even if he does not intend or realize he’s doing it, he’s really pulling in an assisted double combo for her here. Dorothy only seems really upset when Walky comes in with the whole subtle “Yeah Radiah is totally right your entire life goal sucks this is exactly why I’ve been trying to nudge you out of it five minutes earlier.” because that’s what makes it personal.
It’s the difference between her getting the people around to go ohh! and cheerlead her and Mary making a cold shallow remark and it not landing with anyone, wherein Walky shows strong sympathy for Dorothy. In Joyces hometown, that power play of Marys own would have landed. Generally, people are pretty okay with unearned super aggressiveness, as long as its their team doing the aggression, so if you know your audience you can be a bully all you want and it’s pretty okay.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-6/04-it-all-returns/opportunity/
I’m curious why you say “in truth she does not [make a good point]”. I agree that she’s needlessly hostile for no reason and this is not the way to have a conversation as a civilized person or an adult.
But is she wrong about US presidents and what they do?
It’s a narrow position, and a defeatist one. The notion that the nature of the Presidency could change without the active assistance of the person currently in the Oval Office is… naive is too polite. I’m gonna stick with ‘infantile’.
Adding to Freemage’s point, it’s also hilariously hypocritical coming from Raidah. “Don’t trust anyone who wants to participate in a system that does vile things” is a hell of a line from someone who’s studying to be a lawyer.
There are hundreds of thousands of lawyers at any one time, a large proportion of whom will be good people doing good work to benefit people. There is one president of the USA at a time and Raidah has spent her entire life watching them kill people who are a lot more like her than they are like Dorothy.
As an aside the idea that lawyers are particularly slimy is mostly propaganda to try to deter people from associating with lawyers, meaning we’re less likely to sue corporations or the government when we’re wronged.
He certainly seems to think Dorothy thinks so.
This is actually a poor moment for Walky I think. There’s no one else in this hallway and his knee jerk reaction was to add shade onto his friend instead of maybe defending her. I know it’s not intentional on his part but this is kind of a bad look.
Yeah. DoA!Walky’s not really good at being supportive. Never has been.
He’s improving, but very little progress has been made, and even that was mostly with Sal.
Linda quite a number on him, raising a son who was obiedient and unquestioning with limited socisl skills, something he has in common with Joyce…
Wonder if this could be a lead up to him learning to be more confrontional where it counts.
He’s always been incredibly supportive of Dorothy. Not sure where you get that from.
This was really disappointing and dare I say kinda cowardly. Not a good look at all, Walky my boy. 🙁 Where’s that fire you had standing up to Lyle a day ago??
Who’s Lyle?
Lucy’s brother.
If you consider Raidah’s goal “Hurting Dorothy as much as you can without being someone she already cares about”, then yeah, I’d say she winning.
I mean, look at the face she more Dorothy make. That’s W in her book
Yes, Dorothy is painfully naive that being President will require killing people in all likelihood.
Too early to comment that Raidah was pretty dumb if she wanted to gain some points with Walky. But she’s not necessarily wrong. And Dorothy knows it.
She doesn’t want to please Walky, she wants to use him. She’s trying to show him she’s superior to his peon friends so that he’ll feel privileged to be in her group. She’s a manipulative ass and she wants ascendancy.
Check, check, and … check.
I’m impressed Walky is so dumb and coward to follow her, after this. At least, he missiled down any chance to be with Dorothy again.
Radiah thinks Walky shoukd be flattered by the invite and worried about gaining points with her. I personally think she overestimate her social group.
Hey Raidah, let me get out my counting mechanism to count the number of people who asked for your opinion on Dorothy’s career trajectory.
Oh, it’s none. None people.
Walky’s response here is in character, I’m not complaining about it, but man it would be nice to see him stand up for Dorothy.
It’s true that this jerk is very similar to his mother. He may be defenseless.
Walky’s only going through this breakfast at all to please Lucy. Dorothy’s on her own. (I’m not happy about it, but she really has no one to blame for that except herself.)
Uh, I read Walky’s remark as “you just made an enemy, by attacking my friend.” I thought he *is* standing up for her.
With left beef
completely unrelated, I read a book a few years back that was the sequel to a book I really enjoyed, and in the middle of a rather poetic, somber, beautiful monologue about the end of a solar system, the speaker said “and they had none planet, left grief”
I have never put down a book more angrily in my entire life.
That sounds familiar. This book wouldn’t happen to have been about a space lesbian and have a really cool cover?
You have spotted it!
What kind of English is “none planet, left grief”? I don’t understand it.
The meme is “none pizza, left beef”. You can probably find the image if you google it – someone on tumblr got super high and ordered a pizza from pizza hut with no toppings except beef on only the left side, and got a circle of dough with a handful of beef tossed in.
The author of the book in question decided that it would be absolutely hilarious to include as many memes as possible disguised with flowery, difficult-to-parse language. I genuinely have never felt so disrespected by prose before.
Another example that I recall was “jail for mother, jail for mother for ten thousand years”. That one was word for word as far as I remember.
I found a reddit post that had an imgur of the passage – https://imgur.com/a/BBjTJp4
Apparently it was “None House, left grief”, my bad for misremembering, but the statement remains.
gosh dang it that link didn’t work
ahem
“If I fought the Resurrection Beast I’d leave my Houses to die,” he said. “If I fought the Heralds, I might as well go mad, which would be the same thing. So I’m shut in here – walled in, really – to prevent the Nine Houses from becoming None House, left grief.”
Thank you! Yeah, that’s awful.
I haven’t gotten that far in the series, so I really can’t comment on that specific bit. She does seem to have fun throwing in memes and other references that don’t always make sense as things that would still be quoted, so if that bothers you a lot, maybe it’s not for you.
So far what I’ve read has been a wild ride and one of the best new fantasy series I’ve read in quite a while.
What’s so infuriating about “and they had none planet, left grief?” It may not be proper modern English, but poets are always doing that sort of thing. The notion that grief was the only thing they had left of their planet doesn’t seem all that bad. What am I missing?
It’s a dumb meme reference that ruined the mood.
I don’t get it. What does “they had none planet, left grief” mean? It sounds like word salad to me.
“None pizza, left beef.” It’s a meme. Scroll up above for a full explanation.
You gotta become a war criminal to be in a position to stop wars, baby. The whole damn Country’s a war criminal right now, Raidah. You’re not special just cuz you didn’t participate, Raidah!
Making the mother of all omelettes here, Raidah
Okay, new game — what you like in your omelets?
Or breakfast in general if you don’t like or are allergic to eggs.
I suck at omelets (I can never fold it properly), but I like when others make them, and I’m pretty much a meat and cheese guy.
I do, however, make pretty decent scrambled eggs, with salt, pepper, crushed red pepper flakes, dried chopped onion, a splash of milk, a dash of hot sauce, and some sharp cheddar cheese.
I like omelettes with spinach, fresh garlic, mushrooms, and Italian spices on them. Ooh! And mozzarella slices or feta cheese. When it comes to what I make myself, though, usually I only get as far as the spinach and garlic, and some shredded cheese on top.
Sausage, fried potatoes, avocado, tomato, cream cheese
Cheddar cheese, bacon, and broccoli (“the Phillip” at the local diner)
All really good!
I like chicken rice omelets a LOT, might try making them with hoisin sauce soon! If it makes pork buns delicious, imagine what it would do for an omelet! 🤩😋
Spam, mushrooms, onions, cheese, pepper. No fuss.
Bonus: potatoes and sausage and spinach.
Mushroom, cheese, tomato. Sometimes ham. That’s pretty much exactly and specifically all.
Not a huge fan of omelettes- I’m more of a scrambled eggs and buttered toast kind of enby.
I’ll have shredded bacon, ham, sausage, onion, bell pepper, spinach leaves, tomatoes, avocado and double mushrooms with Chipotle sauce drizzled over the top. War crimes are optional.
Can’t fret over every Dana.
I played College Asher, you know.
NANOMACHINES, RAIDAH!
“They harden in response to trauma! And every time I miss Walky! Especially when I miss him sexually!”
This is the best thread this commentariat has produced in months.
Thank you, now it will get inside my mind the rest of the day, again.
Walky should be smart enough to see toxicity when its near him
Oh hey, Raidah said something to put somebody down in a needlessly confrontational way. What a novel activity for her. 🥱
Another thing that just happened for the first time ever, the sky got dark at night.
Oh shit, the sky’s dark? The end times are near!!!
I’ve already pre-fucked the furniture so no looters will want it.
I’m really hoping you mean in a damage way and not a a table-kun way.
Hang on, lemme look up “table-kun” for context.
Sorry to dash your hopes like this.
Poor Table-kun and their friends.
Fetch Dina. Raidah infestation needs to be handled.
I…don’t have a come back for that one, she hit her with facts.
No, she hit her with sloppy, infantile purity politics.
……………..I mean, Raidah’s not *wrong* exactly…
This might be the first time Dumbing of Age has made me full on snort. Thank you Walky’s last comment!
Yeah no I’m hating Raidah more and more the more I read this. Walky shouldn’t go to breakfast. She doesn’t even have the decency to say “oh, don’t worry, I won’t shit on your whole life for no reason”. She has proven herself to be a pill in 2 sentences, shows no remorse and doesn’t promise to not continue to be one. She deserves to eat breakfast alone.
yeah I would VERY much like this to end with walky saying “hey lucy, let’s go somewhere else”
that seems a little emotionally mature for walky, but hope springs eternal
This actually makes me want to know more about Raidah. We only ever see her as an antagonist, but unless you’re Mike you don’t normally wake up and choose to be an asshole. Like Ruth started out very hateable, but we learned she’s suffering from, parental loss, alcoholism, abuse, and depression. Who knows what Raidah has going on. Although Raidah does have questionable friends so maybe this is her default setting.
I don’t imagine we’d have this lunch plot if we weren’t going to learn something about her. I’m battening down the hatches for some less than calm comment section action.
Well, contra that, there are other rarely-appearing cast members who are also presumably showing up, and we could be learning about them instead.
But this strip definitely suggests we’re going to see a lot of Raidah.
Kinda ironic with the corruption in the judicial system she wants to be a part of
Speaking as someone whose cousin is a public defender, I don’t see it as ironic or hypocritical.
At the very least, very few lawyers have access to predator drones and a system of power that practically requires them to be used on civilian targets.
Its very hypocritical. There’s no reason to believe Raidah is going to be a crusading public defender, and there’s no reason to believe Dorothy would continue illegal activities as President
I seriously doubt Dorothy is going to be able to pull out from all the nations we are currently occupying, including the large swaths of land inside our borders we are occupying through broken treaties, despite Article VI of our own damn Constitution. It’s honestly not a surprise we habitually break the Geneva Convention.
Now I’m mildly curious what would happen if the entire United States military, down to the last soldier, got withdrawn and called back all at once. No waiting time, no “by 2025”, just “Come home now.”
Probably nuclear stuff, I imagine.
China invades Taiwan. North Korea invades and/or nukes South Korea. Russia nukes Kyiv.
Just off the top of my head.
You’d think at some point that like Europe and our other allies might do something. Maybe we can just hand them some of our quadrillions of dollars of excess shit the Army doesn’t want.
Okay but seriously, could literally anyone else take some of these ducking guns? We have so many we don’t even know where to put them all. People have started collecting them like less-cool Funko Pops.
I object, not to the idea of general disarmament, but to the notion of people collecting them like “less-cool Funko Pops,” on the grounds that it carries the implicit assumption that Funko Pops were ever cool.
Oh, yes, because America letting other countries sort it out worked so well at the turn of the last century….
Seriously, we’re not in NATO to prevent Russia from invading Europe. That’s a happy side-effect, at best. We’re in NATO to prevent Europe from having to worry about Russia invading. Because the last two times European powers decided they all needed to build up their armed forces enough to make Russia think twice before pushing their way in, they wound up realizing they had all these wonderful armies that could be used for other policy goals, instead.
Might not be the Alsace-Lorraine this time–I could easily see Northern Ireland becoming a flashpoint with a re-armed EU (esp. France and Germany) deciding to try to aid reunification efforts, post-Brexit. Then Russia decides to help out poor besieged Britain, Turkey jumps in to try to settle some issues with Greece, and suddenly American soldiers end up getting dragged back into trenches, anyway.
Having the US provide the muscle for NATO has saved countless lives. I’m no rah-rah nationalist; I know damned well that once we get out of Europe, the history of the US’s foreign policy is written in blood. But no, just walking away from it all is not the answer, either.
Maybe now, but NATO was absolutely formed to prevent the Soviet Union from invading. At that time, keeping European powers from fighting each other was the happy side-effect.
It’s also kind of an odd thing to say while Russia is invading a non-NATO European nation and that’s driving other non-NATO European nations to try to join. Finland isn’t applying because they’re worried about internal European conflict, but about Russian expansionism.
@Songbird: Yeah, Funko Pops may be exceptionality uncool, but guns make them look like sentient robot dogs by comparison.
Just for the record, I wasn’t advocating we just dump an aircraft carrier full of Ospreys at like, Denmark’s door as any kind of serious policy decision, any more than I think Taffy was.
Even if we didn’t do it that quickly, what it leads to is destabilization of the world order, a huge power vacuum and various regional powers vying to fill that vacuum. With Russia revealed as mostly a hollow bear, China’s likely best poised to take advantage. In a decade or so India might be in a better position.
Without the US on board, NATO’s likely to fall apart along with the EU. If the EU holds together, they may wind up in a hot war with Russia – or Russia manages to roll over the rest of Ukraine and some other smaller border states before getting drained to death in the occupation.
Taiwan certainly falls to China. Other nations, especially in the Middle East and Africa turn to China for arms and military support.
The US economy also almost certainly collapses, along with most of the rest of the world. That’s really most of what we project power abroad for.
As for anyone who thinks the US is horrible as the world’s superpower, I can’t really disagree, but China’s behavior even internally suggests they’d be far worse and the other contenders aren’t much if at all better.
Sounds like the world’s problem. I’m personally just tired of being blamed for everything by proxy, just because I was born in a certain clump of dirt. Fuck it, let the world collapse if it’s so reliant on one Karen to hold everything together.
Don’t worry, it’d screw us over too. No pretense we’re not doing it for our own benefit.
And I like the world. It’s the only one we’ve got.
The world’s problems are by definition everyone’s problems. Like what’s being argued here is essentially world piece which humans have not figured out since the dawn of time. Mainly because our elected (or otherwise) world leaders are only motivated to operate within their self interest. Consolidate and enshrine their own power, feed into the corrupt ideologies they were raised in. The American system is corrupt, highly capitalistic, and exploitive, but it’s a close to free as most civilizations have gotten. We’re the biggest economy, we have the biggest army, and usually our leader at least kinda believes in the basic human rights of most of its citizens. A lot of leaders don’t. That plus the resources we need to keep us in power (oil, microchips, etc) is why we don’t pull out of all the countries we occupy, and continue to influence foreign powers. Yeah, America sucks, we’re the bad guys. But we can kind of afford to be.
Uh huh. Yep. I know all that. I don’t like it anyway.
I dislike the “we’re the bad guys” framing. We’re arguably bad guys. We’re certainly not “the good guys”. But we’re not “the” bad guys. There are a lot of bad guys out there and even if we’re the biggest, we’re far from the worst.
@thejeff- Oh there’s definitely worse I was just framing that off Taffy saying we Americans get blamed for everything. Like America’s gonna get hate regardless , cause we’re the dominant power right now.
Like Horace said: “it’s your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.”
A hollow voice whispers, “Afghanistan.”
Not completely reforming the entire US state to be a de-armed utopia =/= war crime doer
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point
Come on, she’s a terrible person but she’s not Joyce’s mom or Mary.
I’m not gonna say shes WRONG but the way Raidah said it is coming off so Regina from Mean Girls I’m having a hard time taking her seriously.
It’s also obvious she’s only doing that because she knows Dorothy is linked to Sarah and Joyce.
Yeah, she’s technically correct, but she’s also a holier-than-thou asshole, which is apparently all she ever is. Dotty was wrong about her, she’s not networking, she sees people as things that are somehow just hers for the using. That’s way crappier than just trying to meet rich people.
I just saw that movie for the first time last week.
So cue Capt America reference meme.
Oh blah blah blah, politics bad. Don’t be a lawyer then. Shitstain.
Well, lawyers don’t use a terrorist attack as an opportunity to wage a 20 year war with almost every middle eastern country out there except for the one most likely responsible because we have a business partnership with them.
Neither do pizzeria owners, what’s your point?
Just saying as much as layers are sharks, most of them don’t have the same amount of the destructive power or the history of being tempted to abuse said destructive power.
That doesn’t help their case though. Give them access to even just one sort of okay tank, see what happens. Let he who is without sin cast the first dirty bomb, as the saying goes.
“They’re nowhere near as bad because they don’t have as much power” is an interesting take.
I mean, mob bosses haven’t waged wars for decades with hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, so they’re obviously morally superior to any president. Even Jeffery Dahmer only ate a few people. No where near so bad.
You know the White House has lawyers on tap specifically for the purpose of explaining why the stuff you talk about is legal, right?
I hope Rachel, Raidah, Mary, and Malaya are all on the same bus that drives off a cliff and explodes into an inferno.
Umm wouldn’t go that far I would like to see Radiah fail and suffer a degree of humiliation that forces her to re-evaluate her life that we actually see (I don’t think we saw Raidah Jacob break up directly. Just a moment where she is humiliated and is force to apologize and Sarah is there with pop corn.
Also as of the others Malaya and Rachel aren’t nearly that bad to warrant such a fate and I’d just prefer to see Mary just go away from comic
We did see them breakup directly.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2019/comic/book-10/01-birthday-pursuit/bubblebrained/
And frankly this seemed pretty devastating to Raidah, I’m pretty sure she saw Jacob as male-wife material. That “We’ll see.” Also kind of implies she was holding back for him and now the the Dragon Ball Z weighted training gear is off as far as her personality goes. I’d overall call that a pretty big fail.
It’s genuinely amazing how some people on this form can bring past strips that shed light on minor story beats. no sarcasm I am genuinely impressed.
While devastating I don’t think it caused her to re evaluate her life unless that re evaluation was I should meaner
I think that is correct. She has chosen to be meaner. Raidah very much underestimated Joyce. Had lunch with her, let Jacob hang with her, form a connection. That ended up costing her big time. Being openly more mean and judgmental will fix that. That plus revenge explains a lot about Raidah right now, actually.
To be fair, the “had lunch with her” wasn’t her underestimating Joyce, it was her striking back at Joyce. Trying to undermine that connection, by showing Jacob how Joyce wouldn’t fit his checklist.
Personally, I’m not really interested in a Raidah redemption arc.
Let’s not be hasty, now. Malaya has an excellent rear end. Be a shame to ruin that.
…I mean, she’s not wrong, really. She’s being a colossal asshole and cutting right to the bone, but the things she’s saying are probably already running through Dorothy’s head.
Forget Booster, Raidah is the true Replacement Mike
Sure, she’s not technically incorrect, on a certain level. She’s also reaching for the lowest hanging fruit and may as well have said “Being a carpenter requires you to touch wood”.
Heheheh… touch wood
Actually Raidah is wrong.
The term “War Crime” isn’t a word that should be tossed around carelessly. It should be reserved for situations that require it. (Targeting civilians in a military conflict, use of WMD, engaging in wars of conquest.) There may be valid debates on whether military action is warranted in some cases, but there is a difference between a military action that is launched with noble intentions but fails for some reason and a “war crime”.
“Targeting” civilians is the key point here, as well. Civilian casualties are a sad reality of war–especially in an era where every tin-pot dictator deliberately puts their ammo dumps and command & control facilities in densely populated areas to discourage air strikes. There’s a categorical difference between something like Ukraine hitting that Crimea bridge and what Russia did at Bucha, for example.
Lol, the Biden administration made a drone strike that blew up NOTHING but civilians, and then threw a press conference basically saying “and we’d totally do it again”.
In Afghanistan, the US military, as admitted by its own soldiers, started using people’s homes for tank target practice because it was bored.
Iraq was started under false pretenses.
The threat of US military deployment to target civilian population is being used to prop up dictators, like say, over in the Dominican Republic, after having been deployed in the Dominican Republican where they *checks notes* commited war crimes.
She’s very similar to Mike except instead of doing it for weird philosophy-adjacent nonsense reasons and then realizing he’s been a huge asshole and seeking redemption through heroic sacrifice, Raidah does her shit to maintain social hierarchy and control!
…Which is worse!
God I want to see Dorothy take her apart next strip (but I’m guessing she won’t be emotionally ready for it)
As satisfisfying as that would be i dont think verbal warfare is Dorothy’s strong suit, she always relies on being kind and reasonable expecting others to respond in kind. She always off her game when people don’t follow that social script.
wow, burn
That seems a little intense. She’s a jerky jerk face but she shouldn’t get lit on fire for it.
What’s wrong with keeping her warm for the rest of her life?
As opposed to someone who wants to be a lawyer who gets paid to lie for a living? But Raidah does have a point. Dorothy would be better off in academia.
Lie? Never bend the truth sure, present the facts in a way so as to lead to an incorrect conclusion sure. But actually lying will get a lawyer disbarred.
Depending on the context, lawyers can sometimes be the only person with the professional skills to prevent an innocent person from rotting in jail forever thanks to bullshit charges.
There’s obviously more money in not having scruples, but that’s every job in the world.
Including being President?
Yes.
I guess I should elaborate a little. You may or may not recall that there were regular kerfuffles around Trump regarding something called the Emoluments Clause. The layman’s version of it is basically, “It is illegal for the POTUS to take bribes.”
So, yes. A lack of scruples is 100% a way to make money for the POTUS.
They can be, but as I recall she wants to be a DA. That’s a district attorney not a defense attorney. DA’s are the ones who make the bullshit charges.
Make the bs charges and also choose not to charge bs people when they should charge them, most notably wrong cops, but not just them either.
Has that been established?
I’ve always imagined her going into corporate law. That’s where the money is. No textual support for that though.
The treatment of defense lawyers here is horrifying.
Raidah, while I do sort of agree with this statement (though not really? Y’all’re 18-20, such vitriol and cynicism isn’t necessarily called for), you continue to be one of those people that I would just find completely draining to interact with and cannot for the life of me understand who willingly interacts with people that act like this and why.
Like, I honestly don’t get it. In real life when people have tried to open a conversation like this with me, I end the interaction and leave immediately. It’s not even painful. Why do people want to spend time around someone who can only speak in backhanded compliments and insults???
Walkys in a position where he probably will go despite Radiah being a bongo to his friend because Lucy really wants to be in the same circle as Jennifer and he doesn’t want to mess up his relationship.
Walky is becoming his dad here. This bitter, nasty jerk is exactly like his mother and they’ll probably start dating. 😰
He definitely was raised to go along with others like his dad but still shows hope of having some spine.
A muslim woman in the midwest who grew up in the wake of 9/11 might, just might, have a different view of the United States Government than you or I.
Fair point, but I does it justify this level of self righteousness? Especially to a person who’s Raidah met exactly one time? Does Raidah’s perhaps justifiable view of the US Government justify her treatment of Sarah? (It may seem unrelated, but my point is that she just seems to find reasons to be shitty to a lot of people and only seems to be nice to those she hopes to use one day for connections. Granted, this character hasn’t gotten as much screen time as others, but that seems to be the impression.)
I mean, as a non-american…yeah?
That’s the crux of the matter for me. Whether Raidah is CORRECT or not is irrelevant. She just walked up to a STRANGER and unloaded that sheer amount of vitriol for absolutely no reason.
She probably knows Dorothy is friends with Joyce, and that’s about the extent of any justification she could have for opening with this double barreled salvo.
See, the thing is, Wraithy, the conversation Raidah started isn’t about the Presidency. She’s not doing this to have a good-faith debate about the excesses of the executive branch. She’s not talking about herself personally, or her family, or her culture. She’s just saying “hey Keener, I know this fact about you and I’m going to hurt you with it. To make you feel small. To make you feel unwelcome.”
She’s not speaking truth to power, and you can tell she’s not, because her friend group is carefully cultivated to be full of Power. She’s just hurting someone she doesn’t like.
1) Glad somebody brought that up. It’s definitely a possible reason she might hold an opinion like that, despite being a classist social climber without any apparent trace of the usual leftist ideas usually associated with it.
2) It’s a pretty common view around these comments, as we’ve seen over the last few weeks at least.
I’m not even saying it’s a bad opinion to have. I generally agree with distrusting someone who aspires to be president—*if they know what all that entails*. I don’t think Dorothy quite understands the massive weight of the baggage that comes with being president, she’s very naive and bushy tailed.
That being said, it’s completely irrelevant to why I dislike Raidah. There’s no reason to open a conversation with a complete stranger like that. And it’s not the only time we’ve seen her talk to people like this.
SIWOTI syndrome.
Yes, in meatspace. Lots of people have it.
You’re not a lawyer yet Radiah, but you are an ass hole so I guess the statement stays the same.
I don’t think all lawyers are assholes I am just saying Radiah statement if you substituted lawyer the statement is ” an asshole never promises” beacuse Radiah is an asshole and she can’t keep her promises.
Also besides this interaction Radiah has shown to be an assbole the biggest being when she insulted Dina
As if Raidah’s goals doesn’t involve being a war criminal at the right situation
“Sike, that’s the wrong goal”
DA’s are in a position to commit many human rights violations but it would take very unusual circumstances for one to commit a war crime.
Then she’s concerned about methods, not results.
Wow Radiah’s seeming to be gunning for the job of Queen(2/9/20/3/8 ) of the Campus. Mary better look out or she’ll be dethroned.
Her behavior exactly like Mary’s.
Nah. Mary is more honest.
Man, I came in here thinking I was prepared for whatever Raidah had to throw at me, I was not expecting that.
Who the fuck starts a conversation like that
Boring losers, usually.
Really showing Walky a good time, convincing him he is among friends, huh? Lucy is going be get eviscerated.
Oh, you just gave me a vague hope for this breakfast. Despite his lukewarm feelings for Lucy, and the fact that he’s really having to struggle with them right now, one thing that has galvanized Walky in the past is someone being a dick to Lucy- and that was her own brother, who was not doing it in earnest. Lyle correctly identified this as a good course of action, and I think Walky is generally trying to be a better and more active ally (as witness his interactions with Sal). So, all that said, I would love it if Raidah tries her supercilious bullshit on Lucy (Tangent: she reminds me of Roz a little here, when Roz claimed to be the only true leftist, which she proves by never articulating her own principles) and Walky just says, nope, you’re full of it, we’re done here, goodbye have a nice life or whatever. I don’t think it’s necessarily super likely, but it would be interesting and also pleasing, in that Raidah is a giant jerk and somehow that is not pointed out often enough.
“I just-” Well actually they’re all standing not sitting but the point is made.
Also manipulative social climbers. Radiahs putting Walky is a no win situation. Either he goes to breakfast and ditches his friend who just got insulted causing hurt there or he tells off radiah giving her reason to call off breakfast hurting Lucy who is really looking forward to it.
Okay, you know what I really wanna see now?
Booster Vs. Raidah ✌😈
Oh, that seems like it would be Mutually Assured Destruction of the highest caliber.
Nah Radiah can only call Booster a friendless loser who evaluates people to cover for their poor social graces and tbh Booster is aware that. Booster also has a freind or two, when it comes to emotional damage Booster would likely shock Raidah to her core.
Ohhhhhh. This is a galaxy brain take! I want this too!
This would be an epic battle. I’m imagining it scored with Duel of the Fates.
Apparently, Raidah does.
Gotta drive that wedge between her social stepping stones and the scum of the earth (by association with Joyce and Sarah).
Okay, so would you rather it be someone like Dorothy who will try to disentangle the presidency from war crimes and who will keep them to a minimum or someone who at best doesn’t care or at worst will jump right in and make the situation worse?
FR, Walky, you might need to call Becky to hold her back. That’s not a friendly face in the end. I doubt Dorothy would touch her but that doesn’t rule out ‘stop stop, she’s already dead’ levels of verbal violence.
Thank you. This.
I know what I really want is another Obama to pave the way for another Trump. That would be great and excellent for this country. Or I want Dorothy taken out by the government before she gets the chance to abolish the DoD. Both would be good to me.
Neither of which has to do with what I said. I’m talking purely on level of war crimes. If the position is inherently full of war crimes, do you want someone who will try to keep them to a minimum or someone who will jump right in?
I’m intrigued because Raidah has been set up as manipulative, social climbing antagonist but she’s not wrong about the type of people who gets to be elected to be president of the USA.
I don’t think being president of the US has been a wholesome thing for a kid to want to be since like…Reagan
And don’t forget Jimmy Carter.
“He’s History’s greatest monster!”
Don’t forget John Quincy Adams!!
I mean, George Washington did some incredibly terrible shit, too, if you’re just trying to reach back. It’s not a secret. There have been videogames made, for crissakes.
Yeah, I mean…
He threw a knife into heaven, and could kill with a stare
He made love like an eagle falling out of the sky
Killed his sensei in a duel and he never said why…
Washington, Washington
Twelve stories high, made of radiation
The present beware, the future beware
He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming
(Showing my internet age with this reference but I couldn’t resist)
He’ll save children
BUT NOT THE BRITISH CHILDREN
❤️ I’m so glad I’m not alone in remembering this masterpiece XD
Almost every president in America’s history has done some terrible things, even the ones most people think were the “good” presidents.
But, but… wasn’t Obama made out to be the Second Coming of Christ? I seem to recall nothing but people falling over themselves to praise his scholarly mien, etc etc etc
Mostly by Republicans describing what they thought Democrats made of him.
It’s almost like running a country leads to hard decisions. Often evil ones.
You could apply this to basically any country in the world. At least those with the power to do anything – and most of the others do some awful shit trying to keep the more powerful ones at bay.
The biggest and most powerful tend to commit the worst crimes, partly to get and stay that powerful and partly just because weak countries can’t hit the same scale.
This is the world and there’s nothing unique about America.
Ayup, this is why I think the whole idea of having one leader for a nation/state is flawed from the get-go and is a holdover from thinking the Divine Right of Kings was real.
But it’s got nothing to do with having one leader. The decisions still need to get made.
It’s not about the individual leaders. It’s about the realities of geopolitical power.
I should emphasize the word one. I think Having a SINGLE leader as the head of a nation is a bad idea. Parliaments and congresses and senates should have more power than any singular head of state.
Since we’re talking about the USA here, in theory the president is only one part out of three branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial); and they don’t have absolute power. In practice this still means that one flawed human being is making decisions that result in genocides. No person should have that much power.
I get that, but I don’t think it would change much, other than not having a single person to point at and blame. The decisions are institutional, systemic, not really one person’s whims.
You know, thinking about it, Raidah’s still being a jerk, like, undeniably, but I guess if anyone’s allowed to have this kind of attitude about the US presidency, a Muslim woman’s probably high up there. So, fair cop, I guess.
Eeeh, I don’t know about that chief. Maybe don’t conflate geopolitical interest with a part of the job description. Maybe you don’t blame the office, but the people who held it.
Maybe, just maybe, you don’t preemptively condemn a person who wants the job for something they Could do with it once they have it. Maybe you do something else.
Honestly, I’d blame the office. Or the job, more accurately. Same for the leader of basically any country.
Foreign policy has always been a dirty game and there doesn’t really seem to be any way out of it.
There’s self-interest, and then there are degrees to which you are willing to go to match that self-interest.
It’s typically not Necessary to get what you want by bombing the shit out of it.
There are arguments to be made for improving the US political system.(So, so many arguments). But even within that system, even with how incentivized you are as commander-in-chief to wield the Big Stick(TM), there are ways both more effective and less deadly than what has been used in the middle east in the holy mission to keep oil prices low and/or kill terrorists. I completely blame the presidents for that.
I can’t stop you.
Some decisions I certainly agree with you on – Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was probably the US’s biggest foreign policy blunder since Vietnam, if not including Vietnam. Afghanistan was more justifiable, but still a bad call imo.
Once done though, whether to try to salvage the situation or just back out and let it collapse is a much harder call.
I’ve also been reading a lot of history lately and have gotten a lot more sympathetic. As superpowers throughout history go, the US is remarkably restrained, if not exactly benevolent.
I think we are tackling this from two wildly different angles. I am not making an argument for or against the morality or practicality of engaging in those wars at all.
I’m saying that, considering the president of the US has great influence over the most dangerous military on the face of the earth, it’s Logical they will reach for it for time and again. I will go as far as to say it’s forgivable for a single human being to reach for this tool – dismantling or weakening it would be political suicide at home, and a geopolitical catastrophe everywhere else. So it’s always going to hang over their head and tempt them when foreign relations, domestic prices or reelection chances are not looking so rosy.
I would say that is a very generous interpretation of the actions of recent US presidents from either party. Practically going out of my way here to understand their position and view it in a favorable light.
So when I recall the Bush era, though it was but a sense of vague dread for my then-young brain, or Obama drowning on dry land as he tries to stammer out on live TV how many civilians died on his watch that month, or how both Trump and Biden had to literally sign off on allowing Yemen to be systematically starved to death, that’s the position I try to see those events from.
And I still think they kinda dropped the ball. Didn’t they?:/
The Yemen stuff’s still happenin’, btw. Funny how your news cycle will churn a day of content out of a Russian general’s farts, but Saudi Arabia can with US backing depopulate an entire country and you don’t hear a single thing about it. But I’m sure the press is completely free with healthy incentives.
When was the last time Raidah ever said a single productive thing in her entire life?
Insufferable.
And frankly I really couldn’t possibly care less if she “has a point.” It doesn’t matter if she “has a point.” You come up to me and the first thing you do is try to score some cheap Morality Points about my passion in life, *you* are the asshole. The point of g r e e t i n g s o m e o n e is not to “make a point.” It’s stupid, antisocial nonsense and it’s all. she. does. She’s exhausting and intolerable regardless of whether she’s right or wrong about something.
raidah’s being an ass, but I can emphasize with her suspicion, mostly due to my experiences brushing against power-hungry white students. also, I’m wondering if as a muslim woman, she might be responding this way due to recent presidents’ islamophobia.
Aye. I can see Raidah going “she’s either a powerhungry ass who’d be happy with the notion of drone-bombing innocent brown people, or a naive idiot who thinks the power of the presidency can be used without doing those things on a habitual basis, and she sure doesn’t sound like an idiot”.
Yea, Stubby McBonespurs was a racist in many ways. But Raidah is old enough to have lived through at least part of Obama’s tenure, and he wasn’t exactly known for being a bigot.
Just a campaign of drone bombings targeting civilians while he continued the human rights violations his predecessor began. We still have people being held without trial to this day and Biden hasn’t done shit about it either.
Biden recently got a few of them out.
During Obama’s presidency, the US Military launched thousands of drone strikes, killing a lot of civilians.
If anything, that might solidify Raidah’s viewpoint. Even “the good one” still has an innocent civilian body count in the hundreds, if not more. The point isn’t necessarily that Dorothy is automatically evil for wanting to become President, its that the job requires those kinds of actions.
Actions is the wrong word there since that implies choice and there is very little actual choice. The system is inherently broken, so it doesn’t matter how pure your heart is, the moment you become a part of it you will be part of many atrocities.
I’d like to say the winning move is not to play, but that just makes you passive in the face of atrocities. There’s not actually a way out on the national level, because the national level is on the wrong scale to solve the problem. The underlying problem is in part caused by our collective lack of control over behaviour and goal-setting. We’ve outsourced goal-setting to abstractions like corporations and nation-states, which, not being human, can’t set human goals. businesses and nation-states should be tools, but in this case our tools use us, not the other way around. And we lack a proper science of behaviour.
He actually kinda was if you talked to basically anyone among the Hispanic immigrant communities. He may not have personally intended racial discrimination but his immigration policies absolutely had that effect.
He didn’t like racist rhetoric, but he sure loved racist policies
I wonder where Raidah’s family came from.
And nobody has talked about how cowardly Walky is handling this. Hope this make Dorothy stops to wish him again.
I’m not sure what Raidah’s ethnicity is, but given that she’s Muslim IIRC, I wouldn’t be surprised if she knows people or even has family who were affected by the war crimes she’s citing (I’ve had several friends who lost parents, uncles, and cousins to American drones and bombs, so at least in my experience, it isn’t uncommon to meet people with such connections). So I have a hard time judging her open hostility towards the concept of the presidency here, and side-eyeing Dorothy for her ambition.
Anyway, I’ve always liked Raidah even if I wouldn’t like someone like her in real life. She’s a very interesting and complex character.
Eight years ago I drew this picture of her that I still like: https://twitter.com/namioshiro/status/1626092351616589826
Yeah, this is how my thought process is leaning. Raidah is certainly entitled to choose not to associate with aspiring presidents. On one hand, I wish she wouldn’t be so rude toward Dorothy, but it also feels iffy(?) to say that Raidah owes her politeness toward what she views as a morally objectionable goal.
Here we go again with this “entitled” and “owed” stuff. Why does everything have to be about social debt? Why can’t people just be reasonably expected not to take worthless potshots as a form of greeting?
Well, was crys wrong in saying that a person is in fact entitled to getting to choose not to associate with someone they don’t want to associate with? Pretty sure everyone is entitled to this. They did NOT say Raidaih is entitled to “taking worthless potshots as a form of greeting.”
That’s not the point. A binary right/wrong is irrelevant. It’s just something I’ve seen pop up a lot and it seems like an exhausting way to view the world.
Doesn’t that mean there isn’t really a right/wrong on whether Raidah is openly hostile to Dorothy for wanting to be what she sees as a War Criminal?
You and I aren’t on nearly the same wavelength, here. I meant I don’t care if crys is wrong about who’s “entitled” to what, not the thing you said.
So, you say things to make a point, then when I point out that it doesn’t hold up, it’s “irrelevant” or “not on your wavelength.” Got it. Not worth continuing a conversation in that case.
No, you misunderstood what I said and were responding based on that, and I was trying to correct that misunderstanding. I’m not doing whatever weasely shit you think I’m doing. If you want clarity, I can attempt to provide it, but don’t project ideas and condemn me for them.
Dorothy is just STANDING THERE talking to her FRIEND. she’s not trying to join the breakfast that she wasn’t invited to.
If Dorothy was trying to muscle in on the invitation, sure, some hostility would be warranted, but she’s literally just talking to Walky while they wait for their group to coalesce, AND SHE HAS SOMEWHERE TO BE HER OWN DAMN SELF!
RAIDAH brought up the presidential goal, not Dorothy. Raidah isn’t OWED any fuckin kind of social interaction here. They’re strangers who don’t need to interact beyond “hello, goodbye”.
And yet what she did was “taking worthless potshots as a form of greeting.”
Yes. Yes she did.
This is agonizing to read, because I don’t think either of you is in opposition to the other. I wanna chime in real fast, and say that I don’t think Taffy was saying that crys said Raidah was entitled to anything. I think they(?) were kinda just complaining about the use of the words “entitled” and “owes” , since those terms do come up here a lot, and it does kinda come across as people seeing things in some sort of social debt based way.
When they said “a binary right/wrong is irrelevant”, I think they were trying to say that it doesn’t matter if crys was technically correct about who was or wasn’t entitled to anything, because that’s not the angle they were approaching that comment from in the first place. I don’t personally understand where you got the “no right or wrong with Raidah’s hostility” part, though. They didn’t say that.
And they certainly weren’t shifting the goalposts or being dismissive like you seem to think they were, the “wavelength” thing feels like a pretty clear attempt to say you’re both coming at this with different assumptions and ideas in mind.
Maybe. I’m not a mind reader, it just seems like something isn’t connecting in this interaction.
And I’m definitely on board with finding the “entitled” and “owes” language I keep seeing about basic social interaction around here very strange and not at all how I’ve seen any kind of real life social interaction works.
It just feels so transactional, like people are going to the Social Interaction Store, where every product requires a separate F2P premium currency.
“Oh yes, I’d like one Not Getting Lambasted For No Reason, please.”
“Sorry, you don’t have enough Decency Crystals for that, and also this other person already bought a Non-Interaction Card, so they get to loudly scream at you about not wanting to interact with you the instant you enter their line of sight.”
It’s fucking confusing. And exhausting. How do people live their lives with this constant social-debt-based paranoia?
If I come up to you, say I hear you like to cook steaks on the weekend, and then when you say “Nothing wrong with a grill weekend!” affably, and I then sneer at you that the beef industry is built on environmental destruction and that you must love animal cruelty, you piece of shit, don’t get your blood-mouth aura on me, am I (mostly) factually correct, at least when it comes to problems in the meat industry and agriculture?
Yes.
You know what else I am?
A fucking asshole and a bully who starts a conversation by slapping rhetorical shit into your hand and sneering at you to eat it! Raidah’s not doing this out of some noble, high-minded goal, she’s just doing it to hurt Dorothy because she wants Dorothy to know she’s not welcome!!
I’d like to add that Raidah isn’t just making sure Dorothy knows she’s not welcome. She wants her to know she’s not welcome to an activity which Dorothy has not expressed interest in joining. Dorothy didn’t even ask to tag along, she’s literally just standing here, minding her own goddamn business. Raidah is going so far out of her way to be rude for no reason, it’s almost fucking comical. There’s nothing whatsoever that can be said in her defense here.
When I first heard “blood mouth,” I could not believe that it was serious. How is making me sound Totally Metal an insult?
also, lovely art! you’ve captured her ever-present side eye.
(i am also a raidah-as-a-character fan)
Haha thanks! Couldn’t not get the side-eye down.
Obligatory reminder that she called Dina
mentally challengedand thought she was being kind.Make what you want of that, I guess.
Sometimes the people I would most despise IRL are the ones I find most fascinating in fiction!
I guess it’s similar to the reason some people like watching horror movies. It’s a safe way to explore and analyze the things that make you uncomfortable/upset you/scare you with the ability to step away if it gets to be too much, without real life consequences.
She’s a very unkind person, but also complex, and I enjoy seeing complex morally questionable or unkind characters explored in fiction because I feel like it’s an opportunity to try to think about and understand negative human behavior better. Understanding humanity’s worse impulses and traits and the motivations behind toxic actions is a useful skill.
She’s not incorrect, but Dorothy seems like she was expecting a response like “that’s juvenile”, which also would not have been incorrect.
Chin up, Dorothy.
Maybe everything about American politics will change by the time you run for president!
The way things are going, the way things are more liable to change in American politics by the time she runs for president is that she won’t be allowed to run for president.
In the long term this could be beneficial for Dorothy to get used to people are passive aggressive her no matter how she acts. If she’s still going in to politices she really needs some come backs.
Got to say, I am loving this new character arc for Dorothy with her learning what she might haft to really sacrifice to achieve her goal and what achieve that goal might be.
Well, I’M wary of someone who’s decided they want a job that requires them to justify a deranged sociopath’s criminal behavior.
I swear to Palutena, if someone I had just met had treated me like that I would… well, I’d probably just crumble and say “yes ma’am” because I am bad at standing up for myself, especially against this kind of shit. Who fucking talks to complete strangers like this?
Assholes who use the truth solely to hurt and isolate people they barely know.
You know, like Raidah.
“But I’m just being brutally honest.” Remember when that phrase was a fad?
@Jamie As someone who I’m pretty sure probably used to liberally use that phrase over a decade ago when he was a young and stupid edgy teenager way, way back in junior high, that phrase and whatever the hell was supposed to be intended by its meaning could not have died quickly enough. I’m pretty sure that there are still jackasses out there who talk like that, trying to give themselves an excuse to be total pricks to people (as if they needed one).
I’ve always replied to that with “the truth will set your teeth free.”
Honestly that’s a kick-ass reply, I like that.
I think the kick is in the teeth, not the ass.
Ooh, I like that one. I’ll have to remember that.
Yeah, and lawyers aren’t exactly paragons of virtue.
And yeah Raidah isn’t wrong. But she also has the tact of a wasp’s nest covered in sandpaper.
I hate to say it, but Radah is completly correct and I respect her stance
It’s rare to see the honest side of Radah and it not annoy me. I’m not sure what the narrative direction is but I hope Radahs story lets us see more of this side and perhaps less the bad kind of social climber(as Dorothy said, being a social climber isn’t inherently bad)
You’re being bamboozled by a bully.
Eh, she consistently gives us reasons to hate her every time she makes an appearance.
Valid as her point is, I can see why lots of people here wouldn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being right.
I get that, though I feel like Dorothy can still be in politics doing a world of good. Just focus on other roles
Although as I said, I usually find Radah very annoying to deeply frustrating so you know, broken clocks and all that
Politics isn’t some pure game that only becomes war criming when you get to President.
That’s just the top, most visible part of it.
Sure, but unlike the president, the other positions have more leeway and you don’t gotta give up your morals to exist in those positions. Heck, you can in fact live up to your morals by stopping bad shit
Her stance lacks nuance- clearly intentionally- so she’s not “completely correct” by any measure. Notwithstanding the fact that she’s only saying it to score a cheap point, and is a total asshole.
And here we see Dorothy discover a new emotion: nemesis. She may have thought being
Someday, she and Becky and going to discover they have a mutual enemy out to destroy Joyce. Raidah’s career as supervillainess has only just begun.
And here we see Dorothy discover a new emotion: nemesis. She may have thought being Becky’s gave her a taste, but in Raidah she has truly met her evil peer.
Someday, she and Becky and going to discover they have a mutual enemy out to destroy Joyce. Raidah’s career as supervillainess has only just begun.
hur dur politics evil said the person whose job it is to save child rapists and white collars from prison
there are in fact lots of clients lawyers can have.
Guess I have to spell it out. In addition to prosecutors, and defense lawyers, and appeals lawyers (including those at the innocence project), there are a lot of non-criminal lawyers. There’s divorce lawyers, copyright lawyers, NGOs have lawyers (some even specialize in lawyers, like the ACLU), corporate lawyers, union lawyers. If my landlord decides to evict me so they can jack up the rent on my apartment, there’s a service I can call to possibly get a lawyer to take up my case.
The percent of lawyers whose job it is to save child rapists and white collars from prison is lower than the percent of US presidents who have been war criminals. In the best of light, the roll the US president is sin-eater. And you should be wary of someone who is eager to have that job, even if they would turn out to be less atrocious compared to other US presidents.
I was going to say that’s a hugely bad faith portrayal of lawyers (and that focusing on saving child rapists paints a really inaccurate picture of what kinds of crimes people usually go to prison for), but… actually, third-guessing myself now. It’s a fair critique of Sarah, who wants to be a *well-paid* lawyer, but Raidah may plan to be a public defender or work for nonprofits, like my friend who recently passed the bar.
You know, a poor lawyer.
So, yeah, that’s a bit unfair. Raidah sucks, but assuming those are her career goals is, I’m pretty sure, assuming.
I guess she could still turn out to champion none profits but everything about the people she surrounds herself with and her snide comment about joyces teaching profession being low paid strongly suggests she too wants the well paying job.
Given Raidah’s eagerness to “network” and her bragging about her family ties, I doubt whether she’s really interested in a life of working for the poor, downtroden folks.
I mean, if she’s a public defender, she would indeed be working to keep child rapists out of prison at some point in her career.
Public defense is a noble profession because everyone in the US is entitled to an attorney and not everyone can afford it. Their sole purpose is to help people vindicate the rights that they are owed, whether guilty or innocent. But they don’t have any more control over which clients they have to represent than a lawyer at a large firm—less control, actually.
But in spirit, you’re right. There’s lots of different kinds of lawyers, and most of them are NOT defending criminals, regardless of how well they get paid. Raidah doesn’t even have to be poor to do “good”; she could hypothetically make bank at a large plaintiff-side employment firm.
If your job requires you to defend pedos, at least have the decency to be upset if you’re successful. That’s all I can say.
I don’t know how many kiddy fiddlers who the cops bother to take down actually need public defenders. Thank god I don’t have to know for sure, but a lot of the ones who do like porn rings, snuff, trafficking, and other stuff that’s actually prosecuted on a level that harming one or two kids is usually not, tend to have money.
Most public defenders, from what I’ve heard from public defenders, are way too busy defending like seventeen Black kids caught with petty crimes (or “”caught”” “”loitering”” or existing in public or-) per day.
Can we not call them cutesy things like “kiddy fiddlers”? They’re subhuman scum, undeserving of even the most basic decency. It just feels flippant, but maybe I’m being sensitive.
Oh no, that’s totally fair. I don’t like saying… the usual words because it’s kind of uncomfortable for me personally as someone who uhm, had those experiences, but that specific euphemism does sound pretty flippant. Thanks.
Oh dang, that’s a harsh hand to be dealt. I mean, if typing the actual terms gets to you, euphemise away. I ain’t your mom.
Sarah wants to be a well-paid lawyer for incredibly understandable reasons and is not, I will note, engaging in creepy social engineering where she treats her friend group as things she can control and manipulate. Also Sarah doesn’t, you know, claim to be people’s friend and talk shit behind their back, or gatekeep her friend group, or harass someone who tried to do the right thing and stay out of trouble with the authorities for a whole school year.
That’s all Raidah, baby.
Hey, I said Raidah was terrible. I just don’t think it’s about her being a lawyer. She *is* super mercenary about her connections, but even low-pay lawyers have to network, so I don’t think it proves she’s planning to go high-end.
would love a one shot 15 year time skip where she and raidah are in the courtroom together.
Ace Attorney/parody homage fanart maybe? lol
If Raidah can assuming Dorothy war crimes I will assume her devil advocate
HA HA HA hahahahaha no.
When Lucky slips on pee-pee at the Mega-Lo-Mart, Raidah’s going to defend Mega-Lo-Mart.
And she canonically loses that case, for the record. Lucky got his settlement.
Naah based on everything we’ve seen on Raidah she is not going to work for dirt cheap. She is absolutely going to build herself a comfy and rich life by buddying up with rich and powerful… like she is doing now.
Also being a court lawyer is not necessarily the only path. She could also become a corporate lawyer, coming with best ways to make her company money while screwing over clients and employees XD
Among the well-connected kids she’s forming into her circle is the grandson of a mob boss.
I’m not saying she’s looking to become a mob lawyer, but I don’t think we can say she’s ruled it out.
Better call Raidah, eh?
Yeah tbh with the skills she has at zeroing in on weakness and going for the kill, I think her talents would lie more with prosecution than defense.
I would like to remind the thread that Raidah’s immediate first reaction to Joyce’s major was, paraphrased: You know that pays like shit, right?
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2018/comic/book-8/04-of-mike-and-men/salary/
Raidah’s priorities are pretty clear.
What, Raidah? The character with two personality traits, “asshole” and “I don’t have friends, I have tools”?
I know the whole US justice system is fucked up, but are you suggesting things would be better without lawyers? You think innocent people would fare better in court without a person whose entire job is to know law and advise them on their options? You think guilty people would even get brought to court if lawyers didn’t file charges?
Heck, how would class-action lawsuits against corporations that are poisoning the environment be put together?
welp, SHE AIN’T WRONG
Points to Raidah!
I know a lot of people are having a bit of a hard time with Raidah’s true statement that all U.S. Presidents are war criminals and that the office requires it as maintenance of American empire, and I sympathize. Let me help out.
That doesn’t actually matter here.
Raidah doesn’t actually care about the Presidency. Raidah doesn’t give a shit about the problems of capitalist hegemony or any of that. You know how I know?? Because she manages her friend group to make sure it’s full of the ruling class, with a fucking iron fist! She’s not an activist, like Roz. No.
What’s going on here is that she doesn’t like Dorothy and she wants to hurt her, because Raidah is a fucking bully. She’s a psychologically abusive bully. She’s doing this to hurt Dorothy using the ONE thing she knows about Dorothy. I know this because: it’s her whole fuckin’ MO! It’s the shit she does constantly! It goes hand in hand with her ableism towards Dina, her socially ostracizing and tormenting Sarah (a Black woman trying to avoid police trouble!!), and her gaslighting Jennifer while talking shit behind her back.
She’s like Mike, yes, except instead of doing bullying and psychological abuse for weird philosophy ideas, she does them to maintain control of her social circle and keep out the Wrong Sort of People. Which she has pegged Dorothy as and has this started a totally unprovoked fight with her like a “progressive” Ben Shapiro. Like, sure she’s right about the Presidency, but what the fuck is Dorothy supposed to do about that? How can Dotty respond without looking like a chump or a weirdo?? She can’t, Raidah knows this, that’s why she said it. It’s not fucking ABOUT the Presidency. It’s about making Dorothy feel small and unwanted. It’s about a “polite” way to say “go eat shit, Keener, nanny nanny boo boo”.
And before anyone comes out to chastise me: yeah I’m aware Raidah is brown and Muslim. I’m sure that’s had some effects on her worldview. But guess what? She doesn’t get a pass for that! Ruth doesn’t get a pass for her treatment of Jennifer because she’s got depression, an abusive parent, and is queer! She only doesn’t get shit around here because she’s working on herself, a thing Raidah won’t do because Raidah thinks her shitty behavior is Good, Actually and revels in it!
So here is my reply, full throated, to Raidah in all her appearances from now forwards.
<b<Fuck you, Raidah, you absolute toolbox. You’re an abuser and a bully. I hope you get a job at your dream firm in the mailroom. As a clerk. And get fired when you start angling for a promotion. I wish you all the luck of one of Jimmy’s marks on Better Call Saul. You’re gross and your behavior is gross and you can fuck off to Mars. Fix your heart or die.
Yes, this is all well and good. But have you considered: Raidah has only been in an antagonistic position, which means we’re all somehow mistaken about her being a shitheel, because Sarah doesn’t like her and something something backstory. Or whatever bullshit nonsense people wanna come up with to defend her scummy ass.
Yeah people defending her seem to be falling for her two faced persona
She’s nice when she can get something out of you, but she’s been shown, multiple times to just be a selfish bully, implying the only reason dinah was hanging out with sarah because she was mentally ill, even if she didn’t approve of the “R” slur she was hardly being nice
She may be nice to Walky to his face, but she insults him and his interest when he leaves, and Jennifer too
I could forgive her in a way being mad at Sarah for their mutual friend as she didn’t have all the info, and Joyce for trying to get with Jacob, but she’s still awful to people who have done honestly nothing to her
If she’s mad at Sarah, she could always do something revolutionary like “listen to Sarah’s side without scoffing and sneering the entire time”.
But her body is like 95% scoffsneer molecules, so that’s never gonna happen.
I used to think that but she’s been consistently shitty towards people and we’ve seen what kind of people Charlotte and Carl are. She infantilized Jacob and only wanted him for status (and presumably his body like everyone else in that storyline.), and… She just treats people bad constantly.
Idk like, Sarah was mean to Jennifer consistently and Raidah was nice to her for a while, but I don’t think it’s out for kindness.
Hit the nail on the head here. Radiah want hostile to Dorothy when she had lunch with her a few months ago it’s probably her association with Joyce and Sarah.
I mean, yeah, she’s being a jackass, like, 100%. Just because it’s funny doesn’t mean it’s not a vile thing to just come out and stab somebody with especially when you yourself are a rich social-climbing tool.
Still think it’s funny though.
Thanks for saying that far more eloquently that I could.
This exactly. Regardless of how people feel about the statement, it’s clear Raidah’s not doing this because she felt deeply compelled to express her moral convictions here.
Presumably if instead of wanting to be president, Dorothy went around talking about how that role is for war criminals, Raidah would be taking the exact opposite position and finding some way to shame her for that (“so you’re just letting the system continue by accepting it as inevitable?” Or something like that).
Tbh it’s probably very lawyerly. She can take any position to attack or defend people as needed, a skill she would need as a prosecutor or defense attorney.
I actually find her an increasingly fascinating character the more we see of her, because she’s such a good example of the sort of person who works extremely hard to appear genuine while every single statement and action is carefully calculated. I have brain fog right now and am struggling to articulate my thoughts well, but basically she’s a fascinating character study of the sort of person I really do not like. And sometimes those are great characters to explore in fiction because you can try to figure out what makes them tick without the stress of an IRL action.
Thank you. The utter needless cruelty of her behavior towards Dorothy — as much as I have issues with little miss wannabe-Hillary Jr. — was really upsetting to me, and seeing everyone praise her was a grim reminder of why I only comment sometimes around here.
Well said. When a bully mocks someone for a physical flaw, do we say “Well, she has a point,” or do we call the bullying what it is?
“In Raidah’s defense, Brett IS in a wheelchair”
“She accused him of being racist.”
My first actual LOL of today’s comments section. Thanks for that!
I feel like this is a crazy harsh take when you’re the one to bring up this ambition. Like… you’re studying to be a lawyer, Raidah. Are you still going to vote in presidential elections? You’re going to participate in a system that supports this power structure.
I mean, she brought it up specifically in order to spear Dorothy through the heart.
Big talk coming from a future lawyer. Still gonna ride that moral high horse when the firm you work for the next Wienstien.
yeaah you have guts going on your high horses like that after we’ve seen how you consider people when talking behind the scenes.
Raidah read the comments yesterday!
What’s the funniest court case Raidah could take? I’m voting for something involving a dog. Like maybe she’s meant to try getting a dog jailed for looking too much like Air Bud or somethin’.
I don’t know, I don’t sleep enough anymore.
I’m torn between some 80s movie shit where she’s literally stanning for a Trump-style land developer who is trying to put like 350 barrels literally labeled “TOXIC WASTE” and overflowing with glowing green ooze/goop in the town’s drinking water, not bury them nearby just throw them in the reservoir, and acting very morally uptight about it, a Phoenix Wright type case where she tries to cross-examine a clown, or just a Better Call Saul episode where she has a full Chuck McGill meltdown.
As Once-lers lawer vs Lorax
Definitely one of those cases where someone tries to sue God and/or Satan. I’d also throw in some minor but beloved nerd celebrity accused of like, serious financial crimes, a sovcit lawyer, and Tree Law.
Maybe not exactly funniest but definitely most entertaining?
I mean there is a convenient case in Ohio with that hazardous chemicals train and all. Make her defend the rail company.
Tap! Tap! Tap!
“Require” That’s quite the cynical view.
Ah yes, brutally honest. Way to burn bridges by being condescending to anyone you feel you can’t use.
It’s times like this that I miss Mike.
Point to Raidah for being fast and accurate with that verbal knifing.
I do hope Dorothy is ok after all that heat though.
Holy crap I did not expect to agree with Raidah on something.
You shouldn’t, good comrade, she’s not saying the true thing because she believes in it. She’s just being a shithead. Recall that Raidah is the girl who keeps her friend group exclusively full of future ruling-class stepping stones.
Seriously though Raidah is this kind of person who… well even if I’d agree on something with her the moment she opens her mouth I desperately want to switch sides.
The job and its decisions exist regardless of your personal convictions.
Saying it only is helmed by war criminals is in part an abdication of holding someone to a higher standard.
Yeeeesssss… I look forward to the strips to come. The CARNAGE will be GLORIOUS! >:)
Raidah: You have a dream huh? Well, your dream sucks and you’re awful for having it. Bye, so nice to meet you~
Do you prefer to friend a war criminal or a lawyer for the mob, David?
I don’t know about David, but if I ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO PICK ONE, “lawyer for the mob” wins over “war criminal” every time.
What if the mob is the Russian government?
That’s a “lawyer for the mob who is ALSO a war criminal”, I guess? What’s my other pick?
It feels odd that someone who wants to be a lawyer and use slegal loopholes to get (potentially) ACTUAL criminals out of jail time would make an accusation like this at all.
Cause it’s not about morality but about kicking people to fuel Raidah’s ego.
It’s only a contradiction if she wants to be a prosecutor. Very easy to square “Presidents are inherently evil” with wanting to be a defense lawyer
Ok Walky, now’s your chance to show how good a friend you can be and skip breakfast to keep Dorothy from spiraling further, and it might have the added bonus of helping you get out of a relationship you aren’t at all really invested in.
Better yet, Walky could text Lucy something like “Hey, Raidah’s being a dink, let’s eat with Dorothy instead. She seems like she could use a friendly ear.”
Walky and Lucy Soothe Dorothy’s Psychic Wounds, Sexual-Style: A Dumbing of Age Pornographique
It hasn’t even been a week, jeez, give the guy a minute. Is he supposed to be falling at her feet in love with her already?
Oh yes because if there’s anything that lawyers are known for, it’s being honest, noble, and a net positive for the world. SUUUUURE. Eat shit, Raidah.
19 year olds, am I right?
Dorothy: “I need a reason to take out all my built up loathing, resentment, and anger at the world”
Raidah: *speaks*
Dorothy: “Oh look at that”
She’s out of line, but she’s right.
That’s why I always wanted to be Emperor. The US has only ever had ONE Emperor, and by all accounts he wasn’t too bad of a guy.
All Hail Norton II!
I mean, with Emperors the war crimes are pretty much written into the title.
Not Norton I., Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
According to a paper at the time ” he had shed no blood; robbed no one; and despoiled no country; which is more than can be said of his fellows in that line.”
Speaking of which though, I haven’t seen our own Norton II around here lately?
I mean, Clinton didn’t even MAKE president and she was already saying she was going to commit war crimes, so…
Well, the guy who is fully in Putin’s pocket, loves the Saudis, Erdogan of Turkey and Kim Jong Un. Is that a-ok in your books?
That’s a weird question to ask.
“This dude is terrible, so what anybody else does is above criticism” is certainly a take that you just had, but perhaps shouldn’t have.
You do realize people can dislike and criticize multiple presidents and presidential candidates at once, right? Especially when presidents and candidates for president from both major parties have been fine with doing terrible things.
You can, but it’s funny how often that kind of criticism is used to draw a line that implies a level of equivalence that acts to absolve the one that’s objectively far worse.
Like back in the 2016 campaign, “all politicians lie” is a true statement that was commonly used to disguise the fact that Trump wasn’t even in the same ball park when it came to telling lies.
And yet I have absolutely never criticised anybody for voting Clinton in the general election, but oh boy, you should hear what words I have for people who voted Trump (or perhaps you shouldn’t; the best I can say about them is that they’re mortal, and therefore will, eventually but not soon enough, be dead).
In fact, I’d say a BIGGER problem in the US is that whenever anybody criticises Democrats, some assclown goes “bUT thE REpubLICanS arE Worse”, which is how you end up with a town in Ohio getting turned into a toxic wasteland.
Indeed. I am seeing a lot of people saying that “thinking the president is bad is defeatist mentality”, as if constantly defending a bad system that consistently return bad results is not defeatist in itself.
The idea that even question the validity of the system is seem as taboo is a poison that is slowly destroying the world.
This is going to end with Dorothy randomly bumping into Joe and totally losing it, isn’t it. Old Joe would’ve likely had sex with her at that point.
I never wanted Dorothy to slap, punch or insult someone like now. I hate presidents and politicians in general, but Raidah way to do is disgusting and definitely based on Dorothy being friends with Sarah and Joyce.
God, I hate this but:
“Raidah made some valid points.”
And now I hate myself.
Drop the “And” in line 3. (Friendly/playful suggestion) 😉☺️
That did not touch a nerve it touched her frontal cortex
Mary got punched and pied while navigating her particular course of superiority and up-close abuse.
Valid points or not, I can’t wait to see what Raidah’s comeuppance is going to be.
It’s true, but she shouldn’t say it!
it’s almost like inheriting a country with horrible ethical and global violations; even with the best of intentions, will inevitably mean you have to get your hands dirty. Or you could always leave the job to the people who enjoy partaking in that kind of thing; usually works out so well for the country then!
Yeah; Raidah out here with “we live in a society” levels of kiddie pool politics. How has Dorothy not ran into a million of her kinda BS in college of all places?
Obama’s failure to leave Afghanistan and Iraq combined with his increased expansion of executive privilege gave Trump cover to run under, and then power to fuck things up. Dennis Kucinich, who promised to abolish the DoD and replace it with a Department of Peace would have in all likelihood not survived being elected President.
We don’t just live in a society. We live in a genocidal apartheid state that is one of the biggest contributors to global warming being the end of the world as we knew it and also the only state to use nuclear weapons (and fiercely oppose de-armament), and we used them in the largest coordinated mass murder of school children in history. We are an amoral nation unmoored from our past that is eating the future of the entire world. The arc of American society, when it winds down (and if it doesn’t take all of humanity with it” will be seen in a similar way we view Nazi society now. At least the Nazis never nuked school children. Twice.
Yeah, Nazis shoved children into gas chambers. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of them. It’s actually adorable how American are convinced they are the most evil thing in the world. You didn’t even clear Top 3 during World War 2. You complain about nuking of Japan? Ask half the fucking Asia how they feel about that, they’d probably tell you you didn’t nuke the Japanese hard enough. There was a Nazi in Nanking during The Rape and he thought “Oh this is Too evil”. A Nazi! Thought the Japanese were too evil!
It’s just another form of American exceptionalism. No different in kind from the “Rah Rah, America can do no wrong” version.
It’s true- we absolutely aren’t even part of a small number of genocidal apartheid states. There’s a lot of those.
Obama failing to leave Afghanistan and Iraq had almost no effect on Trump’s election. Obama pulling out and the inevitable disasters that followed would certainly have been used against him far more effectively.
“the only state to use nuclear weapons”
I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with being the /first/ state to use them, after which a combination of knowing the effects and MAD have prevented any further large-scale uses. No, it’s definitely because the US is the only country to do anything bad ever.
Is there any comeback/retort that would actually land a hit on Raidah? The only thing we’ve ever really seen get under her skin is losing.
“Well if that happens, I hope you get to prosecute me. I like easy wins.”
“Because lawyers are known for their high moral character. Your job, as a lawyer will be to get people free from consequences, regardless if they are guilty or not. Lawyers -defend- war-criminals.”
Have Roz and Raidah met yet? I think in about 90 seconds they’d either be best friends or literally tearing at each other’s throats.
ROZ WOULD CRUSH HER. Roz would crush her with her fuckin’ PINKIE. Roz would take her man, her social standing, and her life. With a steel chair.
Like, Roz is a bit of a cranky Twitter leftist who jumps on conversations where she’s not necessarily wanted but at least she does it for a reason and she believes in something. I believe with revolutionary fervor she would take Raidah apart like legos.
Big talk from someone who wants to shield criminals from the law. 😉
^ polemic but that’s what you say to that.
The law is inherently corrupt and people should be shielded from it. American law has always lagged significantly behind morality, and then we use that law as a club, both within our own country and without – even though we as a country don’t even follow our own Constitution! We are occupying great swaths of land that legally, according to Article VI, we are violating “THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND” by doing so. We assaulted and murdered and displaced the original inhabitants over and over again in the name of spreading a system that we were ourselves violating by perpetrating these acts.
So you approve of Trump’s lawyers doing everything legal (or not) to delay and protect him from any prosecution? You approve of the lawyers defending cops who shoot unarmed black kids? You approve of the inevitable defense of the company responsible for the Ohio toxic train wreck?
After all, the law is inherently corrupt and people should be shielded from it.
Sure, public defenders have an important role in keeping poor people from being railroaded into jail, even if that role usually comes down to advising them to take a shitty plea deal these days, but there’s an awful lot of money to be made shielding real criminals from the law.
that’s a bad faith interpretation of what they said.
The law is inherently corrupt because the system is built such that people like Trump and cops and companies are inherently and easily protected. Lawyers don’t have to do much. Even if they were actually prosecuted, the worst the law has to do for them is probably a fine, or some other slap on the wrist. The only people actually threatened by the law are everybody else, which is why they need to be protected from it.
I mean 90% of criminals are guilty of nothing that deserves punishment.
* drugs
* Being a minority
* Prostitution
And so on!
Imagine a lawyer trying to morally dunk on a politician.
This breakfast will contain heavy amounts of iron-y.
i imagine lots of lawyers making decent living just being ‘on retainer’ for ppl like politicians/ceos that’d constantly need one lol
Fuck off, Raidah.
In a comic full of unpleasant characters, Raidah works hard to reach the top of the list.
To be fair, she’s got a couple freshly exterminated scumboys to climb over. Makes that staircase a little easier when you’ve got a step stool.
I agree.
In this one instance, she does have a bit of a point, however.
That’s how they get away with it. They say something that sounds true enough at face value to distract from their actual point, which is universally “I want to cause you harm in any way I can get away with”.
This. That was a prime example of words being used as a bludgeon, with a bully’s aptitude for hitting you where it hurts.
Like … shit. This is taking me right back to college and the self-righteous avengers who couldn’t wait to dismantle and defecate upon everything you cared about.
Even though I teach these kids now, I never connected it that social media could/would make it even worse.
Now, I wonder if walky has the balls to skip breakfast on the basis of that comment?
Regardless of how wrong or right she is (argue that with one of the people who seem to actually want to do that here) that was blatantly malicious.
Maybe he still subconsciously expects enough that the people Jennifer hangs out with will be mean that he’ll just let it pass by default.
That’s an interesting point. One of Walky’s defining traits so far has been his desire to avoid conflict by any means necessary (direct parallels here with that flashback where he backed Leland up regarding his covering up his bullying of Marcy). He recently learned to start standing up for his sister and here is a great chance for him to learn that he can do that for other people in his life as well.
But I don’t think he’s going to make that connection here, since he’s doing this breakfast for the sake of his girlfriend and is in “gotta make a good impression” mode.
I just want to say, as I try to everytime that bit comes up, Walky “backed up” Leland in the most transparent “I just don’t want to get beaten up” way possible. Any teacher who didn’t pick up on that wasn’t going to listen, whatever he said.
Oh for sure, but he could have taken a stand and didn’t. He didn’t even have to lead the charge, he just had to back up his sister’s true account of what happened. This is outwardly a lower-stakes situation but it echoes previous ones that he voiced an intention to do better on. He gets some understanding for being under duress, and if it were only situations like that it would read differently. As it stands, it’s a dramatic example of a pattern that is only sometimes made excusable by potential direct harm (something that is absent from this situation).
I’ll give him partial credit if he talks to Lucy about not doing events with Raidah after the fact, since he’s clearly still terrified to do a conflict.
Now, the near-certainty that either she’s gonna interpret it as if or he’s gonna make it sound like it’s because he still likes Dorothy more than because Raidah is deliberately being a jerk at people is another issue entirely.
That seems fair. Baby steps and all that.
I still think the better play is to text/call Lucy to explain he’s getting terrible vibes from Raidah or something and they should bail.
Poor Dorothy really can’t get a break in this comic, can she? From the start, she’s just constantly beaten down.
I mean, I agree that Dorothy could probably put her considerable talents to better use than trying to become a politician (totally different skillset than what she’s been shown to have), but why does the story constantly need to have her fail at things?
Hyper competent people are more interesting on the few days where they aren’t succeeding, I guess?
Could be some variation of the Worf Effect.
She’s not hyper competent. She thinks of herself as hyper competent, and presents herself as hyper competent. Her realizing she’s not hyper competent is going to be her chance to grow as a person.
Ahem:
• It’s mid tier judgey at best. For someone who *wants* to be a social climber, Raidah is really bad at it.
• Raidah isn’t likely coming from a righteous place, considering her previous interactions with Dorothy. She just wants to believe that she has the moral high ground, like usual.
• You don’t get in someone’s good graces by systemically alienating half their friend group. Shouldn’t she have better priorities?
• I feel insulted by Walky, right now. As far as insults go, that was spicy as a glass of milk.
Jeez, i’m generally pro “people being mean and cynical about the US. Gov” and even I think Raidah’s just being the worst right now.
Failing her just pratfalling straight into a puddle or something, I really, genuinely hope that breakfast ends with her getting screwed over in some ironic twist of fate. A real cutting “you reap what you sow” moment.
You know what won’t happen but would fucking rule? You know what would rule?
Is if Raidah is such a transparent asshole, constantly, all breakfast, that Walky finally gets fed up with it all and calls his mom to leverage his remaining golden child points to cut Raidah’s career maneuvering off at the knees. Just like “yeah mom there’s this really rude garbage girl that’s manipulating Billie and was a total shithead to Dorothy and my new girlfriend? I think she mentioned wanting to get a job at your firm or something. You shouldn’t hire her.”
Use Linda’s shady connections on someone who deserves it, for once.
Actually, ACTUALLY, you know what, rather than Walky doing anything bad on his part, Linda just happens to be getting breakfast and stops by the table.
Even she is repulsed by Raidah’s cynical grifting. All that social climbing does nothing to actually impress her.
Personally, i was thinking something along the lines of Raidah pulling her whole “Sarah is an evil monster who got our friend kicked out of IU and ruined her life, poor sweet Dana is just absolutely ruined and miserable because of that wicked witch” spiel all throughout breakfast, only for them to run into Dana right outside the diner, who’s just fully forgiven Sarah and is kinda grateful that she’s in a better place at this point in her life. Cue Raidah with egg on her face.
You’re absolutely right though, Linda Walkerton getting to beef with another 20-something year old would absolutely rule.
Man, but I love the idea of Dana being disgusted by Raidah using her as an excuse to mistreat Sarah too! Maybe we can combine these two ideas: Dana and Linda are both at breakfast and Dana already has an internship. Disgusted by Raidah, she gets Linda to blackball said jerk.
Perfection.
I will say this, I really love this storyline for giving us a VERY definite villain.
Like, “Turning Saints Into The Sea” we were all guessing. The villain was DOTTY! No, actually, the villain was JOE! No, wait, ROZ is the villain?? No, it’s JOYCE’S FORMER PROTESTANT DEATH CULT! Or is it BECKY?? Or is the real villain the READERS???
“Joementum” we don’t have to wonder, because Raidah came out in an M. Bison outfit or something she borrowed from the Undertaker and just hit Dorothy over the head with a steel chair, then spun around the ring going “SUCK IIIIIITTTTT” and gesturing wildly to her crotch. The heel heat is well and truly established.
I appreciate your use of “heel heat” in this context.
Now that I think of it, Walky should recruit Becky for this breakfast as as pre-emptive strike.
It’s so weird seeing people shitting on lawyers as “defenders of violent criminals and child rapists”.
I know many lawyers have a (deserved) bad reputation, but civil defense lawyers and environmental lawyers are often out there doing entirely thankless hard work trying to keep people alive. Lawyers arguing tirelessly in court is what gets black people who were arrested in trumped-up charges out of jail; it’s who forces megacorps to abide by environmental regulations and labor laws. Lawyers are the ones who help people in abusive marriages leave their spouse and never have to contact them again or be financially dependent on them.
I know it’s messy because it’s also often lawyers hired for the other side who make successful arguments that food regulations are bad for business or that undocumented folks are ticking time bombs for violence waiting to happen.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t think it’s fair to lump all lawyers as people who chose a profession that’s a net negative on humanity. Truly useless and damaging professions are hedge fund managers and cryptocurrency miners. Lawyers actually have a chance to do good in the world.
[all this said, I don’t think Raidah will be one of the good ones. Sarah might]
I understand why people are doing it, it’s a natural knee-jerk reaction to Raidah’s incredibly obvious aura of hypocrisy, but I agree with you that they shouldn’t.
i think it’s interesting because while i personally do feel that, overall, our judicial system is corrupt (and i do believe that the systems of this country just cannot be appropriately reformed from the inside by ostensibly good actors like raidah sarah Or dorothy, they are all idealistic if this is their belief), i don’t think they’re corrupt because of the reasons people are reaching for. lawyers… aren’t inherently some terrible concept. i think the more true point to make is that, regardless of her intent, raidah would be participating in the an arm of the US government and unfortunately participating in imperialism, regardless of in what way she does it.
we don’t actually know what sort of lawyer raidah plans to be – criminal or civil, prosecution or defense, etc.. raidah could be planning to be a civil lawyer who wouldn’t be handling any of The Bad Things, just divorce and custody and property damage. we don’t know because she hasn’t really talked about it.
but the judicial system, carceral ‘justice,’ and general law of the land are written and exist in such a way as to enforce oppressive structures. they exist to ensure natives don’t get our land back. they exist to keep black and brown people in poverty. they exist to prevent disabled people, the homeless, gay and trans people, from existing in the public view – or at all. they exist to separate families and rehouse children of marginalized backgrounds with white evangelicals. they exist to placate the masses while still denying us liberties and rights and serve the empire At Large.
no matter what kind of lawyer raidah is, she would have to participate in those things – the more important things than “defending the scary criminal in court.” that’s what, to me, makes this raidah throwing stones in glass houses. and i think it’s interesting to see how she and dorothy are similar in this respect.
Most of them are doing it because it’s roughly as valid and nuanced as accusing all people who want to be the president as being future war criminals, which is to say not even remotely.
If Dorothy was still his girlfriend, he would defend her here. But he’s going to a meal with his new girlfriend so he doesn’t. The damage to Dorothy isn’t the comment from someone she barely knows and doesn’t like. The damage is Walky now playing neutral observer instead of friend or lover. The past day or two has been a series of people she cares for showing that it’s not as reciprocal as she hoped.
Are you talking about why Walky should NOT react to Raidah, right? That’s painful, and I won’t let it happen, if it was me. But you have strong points.
i think its funny that raidah is criticizing dorothy for wanting a job where she’ll have to do bad things considering she also wants a job where she’ll have to do bad things
Hate to agree with Raidah on anything, but I guess even a clock that only says things to put other people down and have an undeserved feeling of moral superiority is right twice a day
Future Mob Lawyer Raidah has suddenly discovered integrity AND Dot has suddenly forgotten her mission in life (until she finishes the recalibration beginning with turning down Yale, I’m guessing) is to not just become president but a president she can be proud of being? That’s a bit much.
I see a lot of people here saying that Raidah shouldn’t act so smug considering that she wants to be a lawyer, and lawyers have to do bad things. Have we seen any actual sign that Raidah wants to become a corrupt lawyer, and not just one who defends her client to the best of her ability (which, if we want fair trials to exist, is an *objectively good* thing)? Because it seems to me that people are just assuming the worst about her. And that’s not Raidah’s fault.
And even if she becomes something like a mob lawyer, I honestly feel that if somebody from the mob is taken to court for murder, he still has the right to a fair trial. IMO, saying that it’s wrong to be a mob lawyer equals saying that fair trials are wrong and need to be abolished. Everybody, even mobsters, have the right to a defense. IMO, being a lawyer for a horrible criminal is only wrong if you do it specifically because you don’t want people who really do commit horrible crimes to be held responsible for those crimes. Otherwise, it’s just making sure people get fair trials. The problem with using legal loopholes is that the “loopholes” exist at all, not that the lawyer makes sure that the actual law is followed.
And concerning the idea that presidents have to become war criminals: If you literally have no choice, then you’re not a criminal because you weren’t in control of things. If you do have a choice, then make the decision of not committing war crimes. Easy peasy.
Yes, some people might say that even if you have no choice but to call a drone strike on civilians, it’s still wrong to want to be the person who does it, and you should leave it to somebody else. And that’s true if you specifically look forward to ordering those drone strikes.
But if you see it as something horrifying that has to be done regardless of if you want to, then I’m not sure it’s more ethical to leave it to somebody else. I feel like that’s just saying “The guilt of ordering drone strikes would be too much for me. I want the suffering of that feeling of guilt to befall somebody else. Why should I endure that suffering, when I can let somebody else suffer in my place?” And that is, ultimately, selfish.
And again, there are a few options:
1. Drone strikes are an unethical decision. In which case, make another decision instead. Problem solved.
2. Drone strikes are, in the end, an ethically right decision. In which case, why feel guilty about doing the right thing? (And if it’s the kind of guilt you still can’t help, then why shuffle that burden onto somebody else?)
3. You do not have any kind of real ability to choose not to commit drone strikes, even though they should not happen. In which case, you are not actually in charge and thus it’s not your fault.
No, I don’t think Raidah “wants” to be corrupt, but I think she has no idea how to judge people and she’ll be happy to commit tax fraud for Asher and his business associates because they’re her friends and therefore good people who deserve freedom from taxes, or put someone like Sarah in prison for something like reckless endangerment (seeking help for her acutely depressed addicted roommate) because she hurts her, Raidah’s, friends and is therefore a bad person.
Better ethical questions are: how and why has the US military become a machine in which drone strikes are necessary for it to function and important follow up: why would anyone want to be part of this machine in which wanton murder of innocent people is an essential part of its functioning?
Can Dorothy (or anyone who wants to work so directly with the US government and military) truly make a case for these drones murdering civilians actively making a better world; or will explanation just be a hand wave of “well you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs/some casualties are to be expected/the end result will justify these means”?
It’s never been quite clear to me why drone strikes are considered so horrible.
Drones are a part of modern warfare and it’s very likely no military could fight effectively without them today. As we see clearly in Ukraine. That’s going to continue being more true as the tech advances.
Murdering civilians is bad of course, but the tech involved isn’t what makes it so. And all wars involve collateral damage. Short of simply surrendering or limiting yourself so severely you can’t win, there’s no way to avoid it. Civilians die in wars. It’s not even always a war crime. Probably not even usually.
The question isn’t the drone strikes. The question is why are you fighting.
Yeah, that’s fair. One hypothesis I’ve had for a while now is that drone strikes actually are good for civilians, relatively speaking, because somebody who’s comfortably seated far away from the action, controlling the drone by remote, is less likely to feel threatened than if they were there in person, and thus less likely to shoot a civilian out of “self-defense”.
Drone strikes are basically awful because people use them a lot more as assassination weapons for extrajudicial killings on foreign soil than they would with, say, airplanes. So the number of people getting killed has massively gone up since their usage since “little robot planes” is a lot easier to use versus people on the ground or in the air.
Have they? Sure targeted killings are easier with drones, but we’ve done some pretty awful saturation bombings back before we had more precision weapons.
Even as recently as early days in Afghanistan, there were things like bombing weddings.
War sucks. Especially messy insurgent wars.
We’re talking about a woman who once said ‘Future lawyer. That’s a no’ when asked if the human cost of your actions should matter less than rhetorical one-up-manship.
Which may not 100% mean a corrupt lawyer but probably not the most ethical one.
There’s a big difference between a criminal defense lawyer who sometimes defends mobsters and a “mob lawyer”. If you’re a lawyer working for the mob itself, you’ve crossed the line. You’re in the mob, but your job in the mob is “lawyer” rather than “drug pusher” or “hit man”.
Thank you, Raidah. About time someone said this.
It really wasn’t needed or worth thanking.
It was worth saying because Dorothy wants to be President without explicitly saying what she wants to DO as President.
I mean becky already sorta said it but in a much more palatable way than “youre going to have blood on your hands” (but i imagine if she does full blast on it, she’d have blood like a third if not halfway through the climb to the top lol)
I mean, the proper thing for Walky to do here is say, “Okay. Bye.” and go get breakfast anywhere else.
There are so many benefits!
He’s only doing it for his girlfriend though. Not only does Lucy not know about this interaction, but she has blinders on about all the people she perceives as the cool kids.
I don’t think Walky could describe this interaction to Lucy in a way that she could understand. She would refuse to believe it.
Look, politicians suck, but a lot of politicians start out as lawyers. Raidah’s potential future shit doesn’t stink any less than Dorothy’s.
Radiah’s a combative bongo
lol censoring
saw on tumblr that things got spicy in the comments, what’s going? *grabs popcorn*
Imagine I actually said “what’s going on”
*imagines that scenario intensely*
😗
550 comments… do I even want to look? Do I want to know?
This one didn’t even *look* that controversial!
So… lawyer bashing + lawyer defending with a side order of politics or do I need to keep scrolling up?
I’d say it’s mostly politics bashing with a side order of lawyer bashing. And another of Raidah bashing, but I don’t mind that part.
👍
We are discussing war crimes of imperialist countries. Like Petoria.
This comment section is wild. All lawyers have to do bad things? Really? Even estate planning lawyers? Environmental law lawyers? Immigration lawyers?
Also, I don’t think Raidah is correct or clever here. It’s just an extremely cynical position. Dorothy probably believes she can change the world for the better as president and to be a president who stops the imperialism and war crimes. I don’t subscribe to world views in which there can never be progress or change for the better
too much pop culture brainrot and ‘copraganda’ of “lawyers are terrible people” in the mainstream 😛
“Good” presidents tend to be historically assassinated tho
anyway this strip rules because it finally acknowledges the elephant in the room (the president is head of an imperialist war machine and unfortunately there is no ethical way to be that thing), while it also serves to show exactly why raidah is such an effective bully, and also further demonstrates how raidah plans to destabilize joyce and sarah’s friend group. this decision to attack dorothy in this way was to not just demoralize her, but to put cracks in dorothy and walky’s relationship, and eventually dislodge him and lucy from sarah and joyce. walky being scared of her is definitely a bit of a bonus, i think. that’s just my read on this though
i would hope it’d be a bit more nuanced rather than clear cut/black and white otherwise ppl would be protesting the presidential elections (well, more so than usual then again we can’t even get americans agreeing on one thing let alone international affairs)
i think you overestimate the safety of protests and peoples’ willingness to endanger themselves and their loved ones for the sake of change, unfortunately. not to say that many aren’t making the efforts and that direct action isn’t possible, just that like, a lot of people have to weigh that against being able to literally survive in a capitalist society. i don’t want to seem like i’m like, doom saying or whatever, though. i think we are on the precipice of great change and i have a lot of faith in people’s propensity for growth and love for each other. it’s human to want to survive, and even moreso to want to survive together.
american imperialism isn’t only international – it’s domestic, too. the whole country is a colonialist imperialist venture. people get really uncomfortable when you point that out though! the structures that be directly benefit a huge swath of the population, which is an incentive to maintain the status quo in a lot of ways, y’know?
Well other than physically showing up outside the white house similar areas to protest, there’d def be also a metaphorical and vocal disagreement through social media as well , though i imagine other than huge controversial plans/decisions, most ‘average joes’ would be too busy with work/kids to just take a week off of their life to have picket signs
Okay, the little drama gremlin in me who wants an effective social antagonist loves the idea of Raidah actually fracturing their friends group (before they realize they’re being manipulated and team up to defeat her).
that’s what i’m saying!!! it’s going to be so good to watch how she manages to needle them, i think. even if they don’t actually fall apart as a social circle i looove the drama. 🙂
i’m also really excited to see specifically how this affects jennifer (and also asher tbh).
Speaking as an anarchist, 90% of all law is busywork and the majority of people sent to jail are sent to jail for things that don’t deserve jailtime. Drugs, prostitution, and other matters clog our legal system versus other methods of punishment. Fines and rehabilitation would be far better.
Which, TLDR, “Most law is not Law and Order. Most law is Night Court.”
Feels like i gotta say something so the comments can be an even 600 before it gets locked so uh, idk, Raidah sucks but as someone muslim-adjacent i hope the diner they go to has a good bacon substitute i guess.
There exists no good substitute for bacon. But I, too, hope that the diner they go to has good halal food.
While her point is not necessarily untrue, the fact that she managed to whip that out so quickly and fluidly is flying ALL kinds of red flags to me.
She steered the conversation in that direction the INSTANT she saw Dorothy was there. Dorothy’s presence in that moment was pure coincidence. She just conveniently ran into Walky at the elevator minutes beforehand and was heading in the same direction. By all accounts, there’s no reason for Raidah to be prepared for her presence at that moment. And yet, she managed to pull out the topic COMPLETELY unprompted and lay out the point in two to three sentences.
Raidah had that one-two-punch locked and loaded on the OFF-chance she encountered Dorothy. This was not a casual, genuine expression of her feelings on the matter. This was a contingent, premeditated strike meant to tear Dorothy down at the first opportunity to present itself. And as someone with a lot of firsthand experience in picking through lawyeresque bullshit, I am VERY deeply concerned by what else she potentially has in the works.
(It’s also worth noting that she keeps making a point to call Walky “David,” which given similar behavior with other characters, is probably setting up to convince him to change who he is under the imposed belief that it’s what he actually wants for… WHATEVER reason she’s got behind it, much like she’s been pulling with Jennifer for months now)
She’s a lawyer? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black xD