This is apparently based on a real thing and I was surprised because I had no idea that universities could invest in arms manufacturers. I also was too focused on figuring out which country Bulmeria was standing in on when it should have been obvious given student protests. Not my finest hour.
That is the obvious answer. I think I was thrown because of the term “military contractors” made me think of mercenaries rather than arms sales. It’s perfectly accurate use of the term but I associated it with something else.
It is strange that universities do investing, after all they are businesses which sell higher learning not ones which sell their services managing investment capital. However, from what I can gather university involvement in investing comes from endowments. Basically, some rich person decides that rather than buy a private jet they want to fund higher education in America for future generations – good on them! They could just hand over a bunch of cash, but that doesn’t keep up with inflation or help as much long term as handing over stocks (or money the university can then invest into stocks) so as to pay dividends and help lower income students gain education for generations to come. None of this seems bad on face-value. However, we now have universities spending tons of money on people to manage all these trusts and colleges have their finances deeply entangled with arms manufacturers and other companies and business interests that may not be ethical or in their students long term interest. This situation corrodes the initial noble mission of the university with undo material and finical concerns often counter to their own creeds or basic human logic, and even where the mission is not corrupted does not, the mere appearance of contrast of interest erodes trust and leaves students wondering why the money they paid to learn to build better bridges is being used to prop up funds investing in companies that help blow up cities.
This same thing happened to the Catholic church. When Constantine formally created the Church as an institution, he also gave it the worldly concerns of a land owner, employer, and manager of investments. Thus giving a spiritual movement that dismissed the material a contradictory motivation to preserve and expand itself via finical might. This turned out great and at no point escalated into theological black mail, rampant corruption and incompetence within the clergy, or helped sparked centuries of religious violence.
See, I think that’s the foundation of the problem right there. A university shouldn’t be acting as a business in the first place. It should be acting as a public service.
Even other non-profit organizations need to manage money. Doctors without Borders USA has more than $500M. They’re not going to keep that much money in the world’s largest cookie jar or inside a very thick mattress. If I gave IU $10 million to fund student scholarships, they’d invest it and peel off the interest to give $500,000 in scholarships every year, _forever_.
An accountant acquaintance of mine says that most large public and private university systems are primarily either financial companies or athletics management companies. Who happen to run education on the side.
Sorry does the money not come from the tens of thousands they charge to attend their schools? Universities are not some tragically underfunded widdle babies.
Um,… yes? It does not? Back in the Sputnik era, the US government provided a hell of a lot of funding to colleges and universities as a matter of national development. It doesn’t any more.
The sample not-the-Doctor Time Lord character in the old FASA Dr. Who RPG had, as part of their outfit, a button that said “STOP THE WAR”. Pretty much guaranteed to be relevant, no matter where or when they went…
Relevant in a way, but it can hit very differently in different contexts.
To take an extreme case, wearing a “Stop the War” button in the US in 1944 a sends a very different message than in 1970.
For any given war, we may always want it to stop, but we often have very different ideas of the terms on which it should stop.
Indeed. In some contexts, ending support for one side merely means that side is doing to start doing the majority of the dying instead of the majority of the killing. In that sense, divestment ENABLES death. It doesn’t end the dying, it merely changes who the victims will be.
Or in some contexts, “stop the war” means surrender, often much worse consequences for the conquered population and the aggressor emboldened to start another war.
Around here, the context usually assumes the US is unjustly invading some other country and can actually just stop the war with no real consequences, but that’s our exceptionalism.
This year my uni had more than a thousand students show up for a general meeting calling for UQ to cut ties with Boeing (they have a research centre here). Filled up three lecture halls!
To what level do you want to take the degree of involvement though? Many companies like Boeing, British Aerospace, Airbus, Honeywell etc are defense contractors.
Ruttech having military contracts (drones?) would be an interesting angle to expore…
To be fair, this comic takes place in an existent US college in an existent US state in an existent USA, and other countries previously alluded to in Dumbing of Age (England, Canada, India, Japan) have all been real places. Choosing this moment to create a new fictional nation in the setting where previously everything was mostly realistic (if done in a ‘wacky’ way) can’t have been the expectation.
Considering that there have also been University protests in the past two years about arms contractors who benefit from genocide in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Saudi Arabia, and war crimes in Yemen and Russia?
Yeah, this is just a thing that happens. When I was in college, we protested over divestment from profiteering on the Rohingya genocide and China’s actions in Xinjiang. College students are always protesting a war somewhere, and they probably should be, but if you think Bulmeria is a stand-in for just one specific country, you weren’t paying attention.
Typically it’s other groups investing in the college. Generally they start off giving money, and end up involved in a lot of things. My university ended up having the ceo of a private prison corporation on the board. I’d assume things have gone in a similar direction here
heh. and to think i was here feeling worse because I dare to hope T-T
my biggest thing is that I regret feeling so helpless and useless to affect the world for better with what little I can do
im a NB autisma who’s disabled six ways to sunday and coding video games to sustain myself until i can get food stamps
with any hope queer and trans folk will be better seen with games i wanna make?
I know it ain’t good to push yourself to hard or to doomscroll in your head, but I feel so guilty and sad about not being able to do more to help people around the world who are suffering
besides what a distraction, what can a game really do? ;-;
Yeah thats one of the problems with taking the time to figure yourself out and realizing how rough the structures around you are. You wind up caring, and being moved to do things about it.
The world isn’t getting worse. It was always terrible. Only the particular flavors of terrible change.
As a person gets older, they learn more and therefore notice it more. But it was always there, lurking, waiting.
The long arc of history bends toward justice. Many things are empirically better now than they were a few decades ago which were better than a century ago which was better than a century before that.
In our youth, we see learn about how screwed up the distant and not so distant past were and feel that society is progressing faster than it really is. As we age, we feel how slow and painful change is within a generation, and however much things improve, there is inevitable compromise that makes success feel like failure.
But what I actually came here to say is: I’d feel much better if I could give up hope.
Progress is not inevitable and the long arc of history only bends toward justice when people force it that way. I feel like right now, too many have let it go and cruel actors have been twisting it back.
Truth. And it’s not just here in USAstan; seems like the whole damn world is going fascist for a generation. Every hundred years, we have to fight the bastards. Looking forward to another world war in 15 years.
I’m not trying to say that it just happens on its own, nor that there are not periods of regression as we acutely know.
What I am saying is that history is not just a constant terrible where only the flavor changes. Even with the catastrophe of a second piece of shit term looming and the fall of Roe v Wade in the recent past, the US is a more progressive society than it was the day I was born pre-Roe, pre-Clean Water Act, pre-Clean Air Act, pre-Clinton, pre-Obama, pre-ACA.
I like how you put two concepts I am familiar with together in a new way that brings a helpful perspective. 1) The subjective sense that time is moving more slowly as we age and 2) how that affects our perception of social change that happened before we were born versus in our lifetimes.
Because I remember reading about all the movements of the past as a kid, civil rights, women’s right to vote, etc – and it all just makes it seem like history is ‘over.’ But the people living through those things probably felt very similarly to how we do now, often discouraged and hopeless that things would ever get better.
This ties in with my recent thoughts about my uncle, who died of AIDS when I was a baby. He knew he was engaging in high-risk behaviors and apparently told my mom that he basically assumed he would die of AIDS. He made no plans to reduce his risk. I think he was just so worn down by being a gay man in society at that time that he didn’t feel like trying to stick around for the future was worth it.
Meanwhile from my perspective, if he’d just been more cautious and valued his life more, a few years later, there would have been meds available…and by the time he was in his 50s, gay marriage would have been legal across the country. But he of course had no idea and resigned himself to a fate that didn’t have to be inevitable.
(I see people doing this about climate change, giving up prematurely because it’s too painful to keep trying to do something when things seem so dire.)
tl;dr A combination of restating your point for my own benefit of solidifying it in my brain, and an overshare, perhaps.
Hope isn’t a thing with wings. It’s teeth and spite and finding stuff to cling to. I do get what you mean, I do, shit can get exhausting and we’re all so drained — I’ll be the first one to say that in the absence of a higher power, hope in humanity is also kind of an irrational feeling of faith, too. Just… Losing all of it turns a depressed person into a callous, depressed person. There’s no peace in it 🙁
One can always try to look for the helpers. There’s always some no matter the horrors. But yeah… When keeping up with it is hard, it sure helps to remember (for me at least) that people who’d love to see me dead want me to lose it wholesale, and like hell I’m giving them the pleasure.
“the long arc of history bends towards justice”
do you not live in the timeline where the long arc of history is bending towards total climate breakdown???
welp, if worse comes to worse, at least our human skeletons will millions of years from now be the object of fascination to the new dominant species’ version of Dina XD @-@ T_T <3
the good news is according to relativity if you go away fast enough and then come back you do jump ahead in time. backwards time machines are probably impossible but physics says a fast forward time machine is theoretically possible.
Yeah, I assumed it was an Eastern European nation by the name so I assumed it was…thankfully that mistake took only a few seconds for my brain to discard.
Well, Russia is doing its best to commit genocide in Ukraine. Until last week Assad was genociding his own people. There’s lots of genocides in the world – don’t focus on the propaganda, much of which is anti-semitic and pro-more-billions-for-Hamas.
There’ve been many genocides throughout history, and will almost certainly be many more. The Israel-Palestine conflict is pretty distinctive, though, for multiple reasons, such as how long it’s been going on (even if it’s been dormant from time to time).
Many people seem to pick a side to favour for reasons largely unrelated to the conflict itself, though, which tends to distract from the reality of the situation (which, to me, seems to be the suffering and death of innocents regardless of whether they’re Israeli or Palestinian, caused by the people in charge playing military games to keep their political power).
I wonder… if we could just pit the people who actually want the war against each other, and let everyone else involved sit by and watch in safety, how would it turn out? And could we fit the whole lot of the resulting warmongers in a single room?
a lot of formerly colonized people recognize themselves in Palestine. much of the protest is dominated by anticolonial sentiment. historically palestinian resistance is tied to the global anticolonial movement. in the west it tends to involve a lot of antifascists, who are at the forefront of fighting antisemitism and other forms of racism the rest of the time.
is it a cover for antisemitism for some people? sure. Look at that piece of shit Dan Bilzerian for instance. he’s just a nazi. the issue does periodically crop up in protests and online spaces where antisemites have to be booted out. but zionists are also doing their damnedest to muddy the waters. there’s a good case to be made that zionist propaganda is encouraging antisemitism, not fighting it.
Ask antizionist jews such as Naomi Klein, Norman Finkelstein, or the hosts of Bad Hasbara podcast. There’s a lot of them, actually. In Germany, up to a quarter of people arrested for protesting Israel are Jews. What these people tend to point out that israeli propaganda actually makes Jews less safe. i’m not jewish myself but if you’re going to talk about antisemitism in good faith (challenge!!) then you should be able to argue against that line of reasoning and not just say “uuuh self-hating jews uuh”.
…and of course the new problem is fucking tankies and conspiracy nuts “on our side” booing the Syrians because Hezbollah supported Assad and HTS benefited from Israel’s war on Lebanon. (not that i trust HTS, just like i’m not a fan of either Hamas or Hizbollah… but fuck if it isn’t beautiful to see Assad gone <3) it's geopolitics. it's messy. there are authoritarians on the left, unfortunately. But the struggle for the liberation of Palestine is still a noble one, bad apples and unpleasant bedfellows notwithstanding.
like, what's the alternative? sit back? do nothing? fuck that.
I’m Mizrahi Jewish myself and have several pro-Israel relatives, a couple of whom work directly for the IDF and use shit like “chosen people” to justify their military doing the most horrific things you dare not imagine.
If I want them to give peace a chance, that somehow makes me a race-traitor. Can you guess how many of them I’m on speaking terms with? 👀
Here I have not hatred so much as grave sorrow and deep disappointment. The founders of the religious ethno-state of Israel, the Zionists, were Jews who were so sick and tired of putting up with the established racist systems of the world that they up and established their own racist system.
I just want to make one thing absolutely clear: NOTHING about what’s been happening over there is okay.
In centuries past, people from many faiths and cultures lived alongside each other peacefully in Palestine.
But of course the United States militarism and imperialism can’t help but be the Only Solution™ to the problems they cause, can they?
US support and militarization of the ethno-state and the Saudi Royal Family are the biggest reasons why the Middle East went from being a prosperous center of civilization to the desolate war zone it is today.
Of course it doesn’t help matters that the US has now TWICE elected a president WITH KNOWN TIES TO THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY.
Are we a nation run by six-year-olds who are brought up to venerate ignorance and militarism, and who can’t be bothered to think too deeply about anything besides football and furniture?
Oh, long before this current war started they were Islamophobic shitheads and the kind of ableists who downright REFUSE to tell the difference between autistic allyship and unsolicited “””helping”””” and would bully me for it worse than Jennifer if you could believe that.
one of them even called me a (w-slur) for not wearing a bra because of sensory issues, even tho im so flat it ain’t even justified T_T
I’ve disowned them for years now, oh so kind of God to arrange matters such that my random family of birth was the One Most Perfect For Me And Absolutely Irreplaceable™ 9-9
before I pour my angst out anymore I must not forget to say,
thanks! i’m not staying though, probably. i still read a few comments from time to time but i’m mostly moved on. i might hang out now and again but meh. my disappointment at willis and this community for their apathy post october 7 played a part, but i was already annoyed with this space for other reasons
Expecting anything from this “community” is a good way to end up disappointed, much less a sustained long-term commitment to foreign aid. I’ve seen comments and links here and there, but most days it’s the same ol’ “Who’s Misbehaving Most?” game and bickering. Those who use social media are (I assume) using those sites to do their activism, not a webcomic comments section full of people who can’t remember what happened yesterday.
Fair enough. I don’t really think of online interactions as activism, I’m more referring to a sense of shared values I used to feel around here. But sure I guess those were misplaced expectations
that being said, I respect your choice not to engage here of all places,
but yeah so unfortunate how the internet has in recent years seen the proliferation of environments in which not outgrowing the Stanislavski Opinion is something which is actively rewarded, not to mention billionaires bringing out the worst in them by sponsoring bigoted reaction-bait and hate-speech
even this comments section is no stranger to dudebros acting like 12-year-olds who just discovered the word “communist” (-_-)
I think contextualising it as a 1-1 analogue is a bad idea. Although in this plotline it’s definitley supposed to be referencing it, I would doubt that literally every past and future time this fictional country is referenced, it will be in this exact way.
No. “Bulmeria” is an analogue for events *like* Palestine. Because, sad to say, there will always be similar events happening somewhere in the world, and this comic is written not only for the audience today, but the audiences of the future.
It’s kind of like how Danny’s DS became a 3DS, which then became a Switch. It’s flexible because it has to be, because the world changes. Today’s Palestine may be tomorrow’s South Korea, and the future’s Catalan, and Jocelene protesting with her sit-in stands for the mostly futile efforts from someone far away who wants to fight .
The only ethical answer, even when you know you’re not affecting the grand scheme of the things, is to stand up and yell you’re a human being who cares.
I think there are some exceptions here where schools do disburse loans, at least I’ve been told such loans exist even though I’ve never encountered any (and its probably more of a private school thing anyway).
The schools don’t provide the money. They get the money. The banks or other financial companies give the money. The government promises the money will be paid back, one way or another. The student gets the debt and owes the money in the (nearish)_ future.
The only times that universities give their own money to the students are for athletics, allowances, research, teaching, etc. Athletics salaries are common; non-athletics salaries are uncommon.
I’m pretty sure a majority of loans are public and thus come from the government and not a bank (otherwise Biden’s blanket forgiveness wouldn’t have been such a big deal to so many people). But regardless I’m saying that colleges can give out student loans themselves even if that rarely happens. So there is at least a slim possibility that Jocelyne is correct about where her student loans are being paid too even if it is far more likely she is mistaken.
seriously raytheon, lockheed, all the big MIC companies pay big bucks to universities to scout engineers for employment. And from experience, raising a fuss about this as an engineering student loses you a lot of friends (who want raytheon paychecks without feeling bad about it)
former Physics major here, had pandemic not turned my life upside down like it did, I would have wound up being scouted by these people, or even the IDF 0-0
Having Ruttech be a defense contractor (or at least, holding some military contracts) would be an interesting avenue to explore…
I don’t think it’s all that unrealistic either, Microsoft and Google i’m fairly certain have military contracts even if they aren’t explicitly defense contractors in the same way Raytheon or Boeing are.
Heck, most of the chocolate in (US) military rations is supplied by Hersheys. The military, like any other big organization, needs a lot of things. Is IU supposed to not allow Hershey bars on campus because they’re in MREs?
so. the way a boycott or a divestment campaign functions is not to take a comprehensive list of all brands that have some sort of tie with a political issue. it’s to focus on a few influential brands or institutions and focus collective effort on getting them banned or divested from. that’s why this sort of argument is beside the point: boycott has to be public and massive, so the selectiveness of boycotting campaigns is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Besides an important feature of the BDS and associated movements is taking their cue from the Palestinians themselves. currently the divestment protests on american campuses focus on terminating investments and academic partnerships with Israeli universities, because that’s what Palestinian organizations are asking them to do.
And to think if the events of 2020 hadn’t happened, if some protein didn’t fold a certain way on the opposite side of the globe resulting in the conception of the first Sars-2-Coronavirus and the pandemic hadn’t happen, I would have very well been recruited by an Israeli University and coerced into using my STEM skills to help them commit the unspeakable crimes they are doing now @-@
This is why i don’t want Dorothy to become president. if i had that kind of blood on my conscious, i couldn’t imagine being able to live with myself. As fucked up as it sounds, sometimes it’s for the BEST that you get what you thought were your dreams crushed early on, especially if they’re based on lies to children.
Oh so kind of God to arrange matters such that, no matter where on this planet or when in history you are born, the country into which you are born by pure chance has the traditions, values and status quo which just so happen to be the ones you need to be on The One True Path To Happiness™ 👀
You said ‘arse’ so I’m making an assumption, but British universities also make deals with, invest in, and take money from defense contractors and arms companies.
Like so many things, this is less of a case of USA being uniquely weird, and more a case of people in the USA being uniquely aware of and willing to complain/talk about the issue.
And in all honesty that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You want clever people to design stuff you’ll need to defend yourself from… say an imperialistic neighbour. My country is definitely benefitting from the American Military Industrial Complex
imperialistic countries today are often as awful as they are precisely because they keep taking after the “United” States’ shining bad example.
It’s no coincidence the regime of Nazi Germany took after the Confederacy’s founding principles of White Supremacy long after it was thought to have been abolished via legal fiat, that which inspired countless acts of terrorism against black families in the Jim Crow South.
After WWII, the US Government, on top of incarcerating queer folk they “rescued” from concentration camps so they could be used for prison labor, and denying refuge to thousands of displaced victims of the Nazis, went out of their way not only to grant refuge, but citizenship and military jobs and subsidies to Nazi scientists who were actual war criminals.
That’s right. Fascist scientists who terrorized my people, were recruited by the US government into the military and other government positions of great affluence, under the premise that this was a necessity to curb the influence of the Soviet Union and their icky sticky communism, nevermind injustices that would be upheld and continue domestically as a result.
In recent decades concerning the Middle East, hardly a coincidence that Osama Bin Laden himself fought alongside US troops as an ally in the Soviet-Afgan War, bred to weaponize his religion against EVIL GODLESS COMMIES and adopt xenophobia as a practical solution to his peoples’ problems.
To this day the US military continues to devote a great chunk tax-money to non-productive purposes as it constantly kills people undermines our freedom in the name of “protection”. Money that could actually be helping people, building affordable housing, fostering better living conditions to ensure people have not incentive to get radicalized in the first place.
We have not universal public health care and student loan relief because the government needs those as incentives to join the military and uphold their imperialist hegemony and commit horrific killings across the globe in the name of GOD AND FREEDOM™
United States militarism and supporting attitudes of bigotry and xenophobia have always been here to keep the rich rich and the poor poor, dating all the way back to the slavery of the south before and during the Civil War.
““If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, the former won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.
Hell, give him somebody to hate, berate, look down on, war against, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Buddy, my country was under the boot of the Russian Empire before United States of America was even born as a country. You are really not that special. Our Tadeusz Kościuszko fought in your independence war on US side only to go travel back to Poland and try to regain Our Independence a couple years later.
Public university systems are not for-profit. (Some private systems are, though.) But the publics do have to manage their endowments and investments very carefully. So they invest in hedge funds, real estate, bonds, stocks, etc. The universities don’t manage their own money; they hire accountants and financial companies to do that for them. And those financial companies outsource the investing, too. Eventually the public university can end up financing some troubling stuff without knowing it.
And when public universities try to disinvest, or even ALLOW protest, the “Free Speech” party gets VERY angry and starts talking about cutting off public funds.
I kinda love that it’s Joce the one introducing them to broader social issues. The last time the cast got involved with anything political was with the kidnapping, as Becky was Robin’s PR hire. What happens when it’s something that doesn’t directly affect them? I truly wanna know.
RL politics intrude on their lives all the time. Many of them are queer, BIPOC, or trans – their lives are political, their existence is political. I think you meant (as Dante said) politics which don’t directly affect them, but I think it’s important to note that the characters of this comic would be really accustomed to political issues causing them pain and struggle.
Some private bank or for-profit financial company (which means their old, rich, white, male investors) wants more of your money, more of your wealth production. Why won’t you give it to them? Are you really that thoughtless? :O
Sadly true for so many universities. I have many regrets about my time in college, but my greatest is just how much I kept my head down, stewing in my feelings of helplessness at the cruelties of the world while doing nothing about them. Now I’m so exhausted mentally that I don’t even know where to start pulling myself out of this pit.
*sending care* I burn out pretty quickly at uni and my brain is not suited to rallies or crowds, so I’m not as active as I wish I was. Something that I can do (and have done) is do some big cook-ups to take food for the pro-bulmeria camp and coordinate with some friends to source things for them (like tents or blankets).
It’s transferable to other groups… mining protest camp, taking groceries for neighbours during covid, flood relief, bush-fire relief, storms fucked up the rough-sleepers’ camp.
I have a friend who does the planning/organising/social part, I just buy cheap stuff and cook.
ok no shade but like, most movements have a local open whatsapp group or insta page or whatever that you can join and get updates. go to one meeting one time, ask for how to be updated, they will add you. in addition most areas have like some kind of alternative media you can also check to find out what happens when where why and how. it requires effort but like… not very much
Caring equally about everything all the time is a ticket to burnout. You can actually hold everything in your heart, as a part of what makes up your sense of justice.
… But you gotta pick a couple to bring into focus, and yeah, play to your strengths. Being able to affect an issue or two beats getting paralyzed by grief brought by all of them.
but doom scrolling in my head or not, i feel really sad about not being able to do more for struggling people of the earth as I struggle myself in a corporate hellscape state
what can I do as a disabled video game coder besides provide distraction? what can a game I make do for social justice, really? T_T
(trying so hard these days not to spiral, it ain’t easy)
It’s not easy, and y’all took a big blow recently. I get the sadness, and beyond saying it’s a signal you care and that’s actually good, promise…
I don’t know what can you do in your day to day, because I’m not there. And you don’t have to turn video game coding into activism either, bringing people joy is no small thing. But since you mention it, should you choose to, well – it IS an art form.
(And also, considering we’re queer neurodivergent people, sometimes thriving is the best challenge you can take on for the moment. It’s more than enough and has “gaining the ability to help again after escaping burnout” as a bonus.)
In case it helps, I have some of the opposite regrets. One time there was a protest going by shouting “Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Culture’s Got To Go” and I joined it without thinking much; I’m pretty embarrassed about that now. And I protested the first Gulf War pretty hard as a knee-jerk pacifist – harder than I protested the second one – I wish that had been reversed.
One time I sat through an entire presentation by Earth First, mostly agreeing with it – until they started talking about vandalizing legitimate and harmless research, and I finally realized what they were about.
So, don’t get hopeless – but do pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about that.
“Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Culture’s Got To Go”
idk what that protest was about but like all slogans it’s probably simplistic and provocative on purpose. the point is to make people go “huh?!” and then, *hopefully*, ask more questions, read some books, and have conversations about things that mainstream education and culture takes for granted.
i read someone recently complain that leftists don’t realize that “defunding the police” and “abolishing prisons” is going to increase violent crime and it’s like… ugh. it’s a slogan!! Of course reality is more complex. The point is to start a conversation, not end it.
(are some leftists cultish and/or dumb and/or hypocritical and/or inclined to chaos for its own sake? sure. we all have our lot of bad experiences in activist circles. to me that’s not a reason to give up on trying but i get why people drop out.)
I’ve spent enough time trying to convince people what slogans like “Defund the police” really mean to know that it actually creates a barrier that might not be there if you started with something closer to what you actually mean.
Using this method instantly puts them on adversarial foot with the people who realize it’s bullshit, it attracks dumbasses to their cause and generally sounds like they look down on people’s intelligence. Like they wouldn’t get it if they explained it properly.
Doing the right thing is rarely easy and often trouble because if it was easy it would have already been accomplished. Doesn’t mean it’s not trouble worth incurring though.
Oh jeez, I thought it was going to be some trans rights protest but it’s actually the genocide. I am very concerned now, the police did not treat those folks well in real life.
thank you; i’ll add this one for a family in Gaza with 2 children, one’s a baby. a friend of mine is in touch and tries to raise money for them.
you’ll find an english translation below the french version. they included a list of current prices in gaza… it’s so bad.
I… Really know the feeling, too. And I could pontificate about it for hours, honestly. Or I could just leave a link with a summary – Three quotes on anarcho-nihilism that fucked me up in the best way. (Basically: “Maybe it IS hopeless! Do you need certainties to be kind?”)
Anyway I love that Joyce shares her inability to stop caring with her sister.
Jocelyne will be a fine sister-in-law for Joe. Joe will be a fine brother-in-law for Jocelyne. (And as soon as Joyce has that thought, it’s a done deal for Joe.)
Bulmeria? Isn’t that one of the countries that formed when Yugostan broke
up, back in the 90’s? They eschewed the predominant neo-agrarian patrio-facism of the day, in favor of ludocratic corporatism. Very enlightened for the 90s. Alas, when a cabal of local ludosyndicates rebelled in 2008, the central corp collapsed and threw Bulmeria into civil war. Now their infrastructure is in ruins, and millions are starving. Truly a humanitarian nightmare.
It genuinely baffles me how US unconditionally supports the… as one Professor I listen to would put it “The country that lays where it wants to.”. It completely blows up their diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and makes them look like an accessory to genocide.
And stopping them would be so easy, just cut off arms supplies and… oh send them to Ukraine where they could find great use? And the aforementioned country would have to go “Yes Sir, No Sir.” because without US support it would have no chance of survival.
Because these strips are written months in advance and there’s always some possibility of something bad happening in the real world overshadowing whatever Willis is talking about. Say, something really big and bad happening in “That Country Not To Be Named”. Also, unfortunately, there’s more than one genocide going on in the world.
I’m not talking about “Bulmeria”, I fully understand the use of a fictional country in the world of fiction. What I don’t get is the use of euphemisms instead of real country names in the real-life internet discussion of real countries.
To elaborate on that, the joke name comes from one Middle East expert I watch and he has to use all these euphemisms because Youtube is really pissy and a worse Censor than the Communist Party. If he wants videos to be recommended to people he needs to be very nudge nudge wink wink about these things.
Honestly the funniest thing is that he is old enough to have lived his adult life when Communism was still around and so has personal experience with dodging the censors of the time. It’s a damn sad time that people need to do that in so-called Free Democratic World.
Well, “That country that cannot be named” has a lot of voters concerned about it. And pays a helluva lot of money for propaganda and congressional favors (bribes). You’ll notice there’s no difference between the two US parties here, both want to prop up Bibi, no matter what the American people think.
Oh yeah I did hear something about lobby groups that straight up throw money at any politician who might stand against candidates that talk badly about Voldesrael
On our campus students (and people from outside the campus altogether) protested that our buildings have Caterpillar generators and that an auditorium is named for that company. They may also have protested any arms investment but I didn’t see that.
I don’t know how practical their demands are, but let’s be real, US corporations have played historic roles in genocides before.
Fortunately there was no trouble or arrests, because a U to the south of us got all law-enforcement-y and it was a bad thing.
I suppose it makes sense to use a fictional nation with this floating timeline. Shortly after this strip first started we had the Arab Spring although Syria is back in the news after 13 years.
I was just thinking a week ago something interesting – in the comic it is still the same year when the story began over a decade ago, yet our current events are their current events.
Our year transition gets a little weird, because is it now Jan 2024? Which was almost a year ago and student protests likely would have been focused on Gaza.
Or is it the upcoming Jan 2025, which we don’t know about yet, but student protests would more likely be focused on Trump’s inauguration or the latest horror he’s proposing.
Not to nitpick, but Jocelyn is repaying whoever she got her student loans from. She’s already given that loaned money to the university.
But, still, alums carry a certain weight on a university campus.
Penultimate panel is too real for a lot of us, I think. Which is a very good trait to have, up to a point. But if you’re reading this, please remember to take time to take care of yourself too. Selflessness is good and fine, but you can’t serve from an empty cup. (And if you don’t set aside time to take care of yourself, your body will pick a time for you. Learned that the hard way last week, lmao)
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*plays “Get Up Stand Up” by Bob Marley on hacked muzak*
True immortality through student loans
#BulmeriaForever
People get pretty anxious talking about the problems in Bulmeria. That anxiety is called Bulmeria Nervosa.
If Becky had gotten Robin elected, she would have forgiven all Student Loans!
Until the Supreme Court shut her down under the, “We can’t have nice things” law.
It’s proper name is “Make the rich richer, and the poor poorer” law.
This is apparently based on a real thing and I was surprised because I had no idea that universities could invest in arms manufacturers. I also was too focused on figuring out which country Bulmeria was standing in on when it should have been obvious given student protests. Not my finest hour.
Probably that country next to Israel that has been bombed and shelled to rubble.
Yep.
That is the obvious answer. I think I was thrown because of the term “military contractors” made me think of mercenaries rather than arms sales. It’s perfectly accurate use of the term but I associated it with something else.
It is strange that universities do investing, after all they are businesses which sell higher learning not ones which sell their services managing investment capital. However, from what I can gather university involvement in investing comes from endowments. Basically, some rich person decides that rather than buy a private jet they want to fund higher education in America for future generations – good on them! They could just hand over a bunch of cash, but that doesn’t keep up with inflation or help as much long term as handing over stocks (or money the university can then invest into stocks) so as to pay dividends and help lower income students gain education for generations to come. None of this seems bad on face-value. However, we now have universities spending tons of money on people to manage all these trusts and colleges have their finances deeply entangled with arms manufacturers and other companies and business interests that may not be ethical or in their students long term interest. This situation corrodes the initial noble mission of the university with undo material and finical concerns often counter to their own creeds or basic human logic, and even where the mission is not corrupted does not, the mere appearance of contrast of interest erodes trust and leaves students wondering why the money they paid to learn to build better bridges is being used to prop up funds investing in companies that help blow up cities.
This same thing happened to the Catholic church. When Constantine formally created the Church as an institution, he also gave it the worldly concerns of a land owner, employer, and manager of investments. Thus giving a spiritual movement that dismissed the material a contradictory motivation to preserve and expand itself via finical might. This turned out great and at no point escalated into theological black mail, rampant corruption and incompetence within the clergy, or helped sparked centuries of religious violence.
The quip is that Harvard is a hedge fund with a side hustle in education.
“after all they are businesses”
See, I think that’s the foundation of the problem right there. A university shouldn’t be acting as a business in the first place. It should be acting as a public service.
That only works if it’s, in American terms, a government institution.
…which is of course normal. In most countries, most universities are national institutions that get their money entirely from the national budget.
Even other non-profit organizations need to manage money. Doctors without Borders USA has more than $500M. They’re not going to keep that much money in the world’s largest cookie jar or inside a very thick mattress. If I gave IU $10 million to fund student scholarships, they’d invest it and peel off the interest to give $500,000 in scholarships every year, _forever_.
An accountant acquaintance of mine says that most large public and private university systems are primarily either financial companies or athletics management companies. Who happen to run education on the side.
For which we can thank steadily shrinking public funding of higher education. The money has to come from somewhere.
Sorry does the money not come from the tens of thousands they charge to attend their schools? Universities are not some tragically underfunded widdle babies.
Um,… yes? It does not? Back in the Sputnik era, the US government provided a hell of a lot of funding to colleges and universities as a matter of national development. It doesn’t any more.
The country which Bulmeria stands in for changes as comic time elapses.
The sample not-the-Doctor Time Lord character in the old FASA Dr. Who RPG had, as part of their outfit, a button that said “STOP THE WAR”. Pretty much guaranteed to be relevant, no matter where or when they went…
🎵ex, I’m wanting more
Tell the world, “Stop the war”🎵
Relevant in a way, but it can hit very differently in different contexts.
To take an extreme case, wearing a “Stop the War” button in the US in 1944 a sends a very different message than in 1970.
For any given war, we may always want it to stop, but we often have very different ideas of the terms on which it should stop.
Hey, on 02-Sep-1945 the Allies did stop the war. They’d spent six years arranging the conditions for doing so.
Indeed. In some contexts, ending support for one side merely means that side is doing to start doing the majority of the dying instead of the majority of the killing. In that sense, divestment ENABLES death. It doesn’t end the dying, it merely changes who the victims will be.
Or in some contexts, “stop the war” means surrender, often much worse consequences for the conquered population and the aggressor emboldened to start another war.
Around here, the context usually assumes the US is unjustly invading some other country and can actually just stop the war with no real consequences, but that’s our exceptionalism.
This year my uni had more than a thousand students show up for a general meeting calling for UQ to cut ties with Boeing (they have a research centre here). Filled up three lecture halls!
To what level do you want to take the degree of involvement though? Many companies like Boeing, British Aerospace, Airbus, Honeywell etc are defense contractors.
Ruttech having military contracts (drones?) would be an interesting angle to expore…
Oh, that would be JUICY. Does Carla know? If not, could she keep saying “my parents are Good People” with such a revelation?
Farmers feed people who build weapons, so schools should terminate their agriculture programs.
i literally looked it up as if it were a real country with a real genocide i must have forgotten about T_T
To be fair, this comic takes place in an existent US college in an existent US state in an existent USA, and other countries previously alluded to in Dumbing of Age (England, Canada, India, Japan) have all been real places. Choosing this moment to create a new fictional nation in the setting where previously everything was mostly realistic (if done in a ‘wacky’ way) can’t have been the expectation.
Bulmeria has been mentioned before in Willis-comics. This is the first in DOA I think.
The original Alex was said to had fled there:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/alex-2
This means he’s caught up in all this, assuming that it isn’t a flimsy excuse to sidestep her transition.
Bulmeria isn’t real??
Pft, next thing you’ll tell me is Wakanda isn’t real!
Working with companies like Raytheon, Honeywell, Boeing, and General Dynamics probably counts, too.
Considering that there have also been University protests in the past two years about arms contractors who benefit from genocide in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Saudi Arabia, and war crimes in Yemen and Russia?
Yeah, this is just a thing that happens. When I was in college, we protested over divestment from profiteering on the Rohingya genocide and China’s actions in Xinjiang. College students are always protesting a war somewhere, and they probably should be, but if you think Bulmeria is a stand-in for just one specific country, you weren’t paying attention.
Typically it’s other groups investing in the college. Generally they start off giving money, and end up involved in a lot of things. My university ended up having the ceo of a private prison corporation on the board. I’d assume things have gone in a similar direction here
Not being able to turn off the caring about things valve is hard. And exhausting.
My last breakup, I still cared about them way too much, for way too long, because it was a somewhat amicable one. Had to burn myself out to move on.
heh. and to think i was here feeling worse because I dare to hope T-T
my biggest thing is that I regret feeling so helpless and useless to affect the world for better with what little I can do
im a NB autisma who’s disabled six ways to sunday and coding video games to sustain myself until i can get food stamps
with any hope queer and trans folk will be better seen with games i wanna make?
I know it ain’t good to push yourself to hard or to doomscroll in your head, but I feel so guilty and sad about not being able to do more to help people around the world who are suffering
besides what a distraction, what can a game really do? ;-;
I thought This War Of Mine was a game that did a lot more than distract.
“What can a game really do?” Look at Celeste, look at Our Life; Now and Forever. Games can gives us hope and they can help us build community.
community yes.
but i must admit, if there is a hope that games can give, it’s one which i feel disconnected from.
what is this hope like of which you speak, which can come from games like you describe?
Yeah thats one of the problems with taking the time to figure yourself out and realizing how rough the structures around you are. You wind up caring, and being moved to do things about it.
Many such cases.
I don’t think college prepared me for the world getting worse and the sense of helplessness about it for those I cared about.
The world isn’t getting worse. It was always terrible. Only the particular flavors of terrible change.
As a person gets older, they learn more and therefore notice it more. But it was always there, lurking, waiting.
The long arc of history bends toward justice. Many things are empirically better now than they were a few decades ago which were better than a century ago which was better than a century before that.
In our youth, we see learn about how screwed up the distant and not so distant past were and feel that society is progressing faster than it really is. As we age, we feel how slow and painful change is within a generation, and however much things improve, there is inevitable compromise that makes success feel like failure.
But what I actually came here to say is: I’d feel much better if I could give up hope.
Progress is not inevitable and the long arc of history only bends toward justice when people force it that way. I feel like right now, too many have let it go and cruel actors have been twisting it back.
Truth. And it’s not just here in USAstan; seems like the whole damn world is going fascist for a generation. Every hundred years, we have to fight the bastards. Looking forward to another world war in 15 years.
I’m not trying to say that it just happens on its own, nor that there are not periods of regression as we acutely know.
What I am saying is that history is not just a constant terrible where only the flavor changes. Even with the catastrophe of a second piece of shit term looming and the fall of Roe v Wade in the recent past, the US is a more progressive society than it was the day I was born pre-Roe, pre-Clean Water Act, pre-Clean Air Act, pre-Clinton, pre-Obama, pre-ACA.
Yeah, it might bend towards justice in the long run, but the pendulum can take its sweet old time getting around to switching back to that direction.
Something something bending corrupt leaders in half backwards something something.
I like how you put two concepts I am familiar with together in a new way that brings a helpful perspective. 1) The subjective sense that time is moving more slowly as we age and 2) how that affects our perception of social change that happened before we were born versus in our lifetimes.
Because I remember reading about all the movements of the past as a kid, civil rights, women’s right to vote, etc – and it all just makes it seem like history is ‘over.’ But the people living through those things probably felt very similarly to how we do now, often discouraged and hopeless that things would ever get better.
This ties in with my recent thoughts about my uncle, who died of AIDS when I was a baby. He knew he was engaging in high-risk behaviors and apparently told my mom that he basically assumed he would die of AIDS. He made no plans to reduce his risk. I think he was just so worn down by being a gay man in society at that time that he didn’t feel like trying to stick around for the future was worth it.
Meanwhile from my perspective, if he’d just been more cautious and valued his life more, a few years later, there would have been meds available…and by the time he was in his 50s, gay marriage would have been legal across the country. But he of course had no idea and resigned himself to a fate that didn’t have to be inevitable.
(I see people doing this about climate change, giving up prematurely because it’s too painful to keep trying to do something when things seem so dire.)
tl;dr A combination of restating your point for my own benefit of solidifying it in my brain, and an overshare, perhaps.
Hope isn’t a thing with wings. It’s teeth and spite and finding stuff to cling to. I do get what you mean, I do, shit can get exhausting and we’re all so drained — I’ll be the first one to say that in the absence of a higher power, hope in humanity is also kind of an irrational feeling of faith, too. Just… Losing all of it turns a depressed person into a callous, depressed person. There’s no peace in it 🙁
One can always try to look for the helpers. There’s always some no matter the horrors. But yeah… When keeping up with it is hard, it sure helps to remember (for me at least) that people who’d love to see me dead want me to lose it wholesale, and like hell I’m giving them the pleasure.
I would put it differently. As hate is fear with its boots on, resolve is hope that has taken up its tools.
“the long arc of history bends towards justice”
do you not live in the timeline where the long arc of history is bending towards total climate breakdown???
Who needs an ecosystem and stable climate when I could have a touch screen in my car and shitty clothing that has too much dye in it?
the long arc of history bends towards occasional mass extinctions
welp, if worse comes to worse, at least our human skeletons will millions of years from now be the object of fascination to the new dominant species’ version of Dina XD @-@ T_T <3
I’d actually love to have a time machine and go to that point, just to see what kind of misconceptions the future people come up with about us.
the good news is according to relativity if you go away fast enough and then come back you do jump ahead in time. backwards time machines are probably impossible but physics says a fast forward time machine is theoretically possible.
The long arc of history bends towards the heat death of the universe.
It. Never. Gets. Any. Easier.
*plays “Red Fraction” from Black Lagoon on hacked muzak*
If you need a foreign country, there’s always Bulmeria
I think that’s where the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare equivalent of the Willisverse is set.
It has Head Alien mode.
Also, I think it’s the villain country in both Top Gun movies.
I think Black Adam may have been king of it.
We’ll Always Have
Paris BulmeriaI may have a PhD in geography, I still googled the name just to be sure I was fully sure
This sentence made no sense but I can hide behind the fact that english isn’t my first language
No no “just to make sure i was fully sure” is fine internet English, I support it
Protesting against the “private military contractors” hired by Capsule Corporation that Hercule Satan warned us about.
Is this about that time the CEO’s husband beat up some protesters because they were annoying him? And by beat up I mean was throwing trucks at them?
Aah, Bulmeria is Palestine. That recontextualizes a couple of strips.
Yeah, I assumed it was an Eastern European nation by the name so I assumed it was…thankfully that mistake took only a few seconds for my brain to discard.
I thought it was of african country.
It’s a county east of Bakersfield off I-15
They’re in a perpetual border dispute with Arstotzka.
Well, Russia is doing its best to commit genocide in Ukraine. Until last week Assad was genociding his own people. There’s lots of genocides in the world – don’t focus on the propaganda, much of which is anti-semitic and pro-more-billions-for-Hamas.
There’ve been many genocides throughout history, and will almost certainly be many more. The Israel-Palestine conflict is pretty distinctive, though, for multiple reasons, such as how long it’s been going on (even if it’s been dormant from time to time).
Many people seem to pick a side to favour for reasons largely unrelated to the conflict itself, though, which tends to distract from the reality of the situation (which, to me, seems to be the suffering and death of innocents regardless of whether they’re Israeli or Palestinian, caused by the people in charge playing military games to keep their political power).
I wonder… if we could just pit the people who actually want the war against each other, and let everyone else involved sit by and watch in safety, how would it turn out? And could we fit the whole lot of the resulting warmongers in a single room?
a lot of formerly colonized people recognize themselves in Palestine. much of the protest is dominated by anticolonial sentiment. historically palestinian resistance is tied to the global anticolonial movement. in the west it tends to involve a lot of antifascists, who are at the forefront of fighting antisemitism and other forms of racism the rest of the time.
is it a cover for antisemitism for some people? sure. Look at that piece of shit Dan Bilzerian for instance. he’s just a nazi. the issue does periodically crop up in protests and online spaces where antisemites have to be booted out. but zionists are also doing their damnedest to muddy the waters. there’s a good case to be made that zionist propaganda is encouraging antisemitism, not fighting it.
Ask antizionist jews such as Naomi Klein, Norman Finkelstein, or the hosts of Bad Hasbara podcast. There’s a lot of them, actually. In Germany, up to a quarter of people arrested for protesting Israel are Jews. What these people tend to point out that israeli propaganda actually makes Jews less safe. i’m not jewish myself but if you’re going to talk about antisemitism in good faith (challenge!!) then you should be able to argue against that line of reasoning and not just say “uuuh self-hating jews uuh”.
…and of course the new problem is fucking tankies and conspiracy nuts “on our side” booing the Syrians because Hezbollah supported Assad and HTS benefited from Israel’s war on Lebanon. (not that i trust HTS, just like i’m not a fan of either Hamas or Hizbollah… but fuck if it isn’t beautiful to see Assad gone <3) it's geopolitics. it's messy. there are authoritarians on the left, unfortunately. But the struggle for the liberation of Palestine is still a noble one, bad apples and unpleasant bedfellows notwithstanding.
like, what's the alternative? sit back? do nothing? fuck that.
Re: anti-Semitism,
I’m Mizrahi Jewish myself and have several pro-Israel relatives, a couple of whom work directly for the IDF and use shit like “chosen people” to justify their military doing the most horrific things you dare not imagine.
If I want them to give peace a chance, that somehow makes me a race-traitor. Can you guess how many of them I’m on speaking terms with? 👀
Here I have not hatred so much as grave sorrow and deep disappointment. The founders of the religious ethno-state of Israel, the Zionists, were Jews who were so sick and tired of putting up with the established racist systems of the world that they up and established their own racist system.
I just want to make one thing absolutely clear: NOTHING about what’s been happening over there is okay.
In centuries past, people from many faiths and cultures lived alongside each other peacefully in Palestine.
But of course the United States militarism and imperialism can’t help but be the Only Solution™ to the problems they cause, can they?
US support and militarization of the ethno-state and the Saudi Royal Family are the biggest reasons why the Middle East went from being a prosperous center of civilization to the desolate war zone it is today.
Of course it doesn’t help matters that the US has now TWICE elected a president WITH KNOWN TIES TO THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY.
Are we a nation run by six-year-olds who are brought up to venerate ignorance and militarism, and who can’t be bothered to think too deeply about anything besides football and furniture?
Yes, yes we are. (9-9)
Damn thats so rough. It’s so unfair to have to chose between opposing genocide and your own family. Take care
Oh, long before this current war started they were Islamophobic shitheads and the kind of ableists who downright REFUSE to tell the difference between autistic allyship and unsolicited “””helping”””” and would bully me for it worse than Jennifer if you could believe that.
one of them even called me a (w-slur) for not wearing a bra because of sensory issues, even tho im so flat it ain’t even justified T_T
I’ve disowned them for years now, oh so kind of God to arrange matters such that my random family of birth was the One Most Perfect For Me And Absolutely Irreplaceable™ 9-9
before I pour my angst out anymore I must not forget to say,
long time no see, Milu. Glad to see you here ^^
thanks! i’m not staying though, probably. i still read a few comments from time to time but i’m mostly moved on. i might hang out now and again but meh. my disappointment at willis and this community for their apathy post october 7 played a part, but i was already annoyed with this space for other reasons
understandable.
at least you seem to still be using that avatar i made for you, i glad.
good journey, Milu. take care and may peace be with you <3
Expecting anything from this “community” is a good way to end up disappointed, much less a sustained long-term commitment to foreign aid. I’ve seen comments and links here and there, but most days it’s the same ol’ “Who’s Misbehaving Most?” game and bickering. Those who use social media are (I assume) using those sites to do their activism, not a webcomic comments section full of people who can’t remember what happened yesterday.
Fair enough. I don’t really think of online interactions as activism, I’m more referring to a sense of shared values I used to feel around here. But sure I guess those were misplaced expectations
Don’t get me wrong, it’s felt like that to me as well, in the past. Lately though? Nah, it’s mainly total randos now.
have folks at least been cheering for Brian Thompson’s execution over here? i feel like that’s the most wholesome the internet has been in a while =P
re: activism, it can take many different forms, including that of online interaction?
voting and classic sit-ins are hardly the only way to do activism.
it also happens on the streets, online, in the community and by mutually supporting each other.
that being said, I respect your choice not to engage here of all places,
but yeah so unfortunate how the internet has in recent years seen the proliferation of environments in which not outgrowing the Stanislavski Opinion is something which is actively rewarded, not to mention billionaires bringing out the worst in them by sponsoring bigoted reaction-bait and hate-speech
even this comments section is no stranger to dudebros acting like 12-year-olds who just discovered the word “communist” (-_-)
Zionists literally worked with Nazis to build Israel. Free Palestine.
I think contextualising it as a 1-1 analogue is a bad idea. Although in this plotline it’s definitley supposed to be referencing it, I would doubt that literally every past and future time this fictional country is referenced, it will be in this exact way.
No. “Bulmeria” is an analogue for events *like* Palestine. Because, sad to say, there will always be similar events happening somewhere in the world, and this comic is written not only for the audience today, but the audiences of the future.
It’s kind of like how Danny’s DS became a 3DS, which then became a Switch. It’s flexible because it has to be, because the world changes. Today’s Palestine may be tomorrow’s South Korea, and the future’s Catalan, and Jocelene protesting with her sit-in stands for the mostly futile efforts from someone far away who wants to fight .
The only ethical answer, even when you know you’re not affecting the grand scheme of the things, is to stand up and yell you’re a human being who cares.
And then act surprised when the State sends goons to beat you down.
Oh, the school doesn’t see any of that student loan eternal interest….
Yeah, I was gonna say. Student loan payments go to the bank you borrowed the loan from, not the school. The school gets paid up front.
I think there are some exceptions here where schools do disburse loans, at least I’ve been told such loans exist even though I’ve never encountered any (and its probably more of a private school thing anyway).
The schools don’t provide the money. They get the money. The banks or other financial companies give the money. The government promises the money will be paid back, one way or another. The student gets the debt and owes the money in the (nearish)_ future.
The only times that universities give their own money to the students are for athletics, allowances, research, teaching, etc. Athletics salaries are common; non-athletics salaries are uncommon.
I’m pretty sure a majority of loans are public and thus come from the government and not a bank (otherwise Biden’s blanket forgiveness wouldn’t have been such a big deal to so many people). But regardless I’m saying that colleges can give out student loans themselves even if that rarely happens. So there is at least a slim possibility that Jocelyne is correct about where her student loans are being paid too even if it is far more likely she is mistaken.
…why the FUCK does an university got military contractors ?
money
seriously raytheon, lockheed, all the big MIC companies pay big bucks to universities to scout engineers for employment. And from experience, raising a fuss about this as an engineering student loses you a lot of friends (who want raytheon paychecks without feeling bad about it)
this
former Physics major here, had pandemic not turned my life upside down like it did, I would have wound up being scouted by these people,
or even the IDF0-0“give peace a chance, man”
The IDF needs your help! They suck at Counterstrike and they need you to make them a powerful new aimbot!
Having Ruttech be a defense contractor (or at least, holding some military contracts) would be an interesting avenue to explore…
I don’t think it’s all that unrealistic either, Microsoft and Google i’m fairly certain have military contracts even if they aren’t explicitly defense contractors in the same way Raytheon or Boeing are.
Ok, that’s a huge plot, and I would be sorry about Carla…
If they make small drones it’s pretty likely that those would fly in Ukraine
Heck, most of the chocolate in (US) military rations is supplied by Hersheys. The military, like any other big organization, needs a lot of things. Is IU supposed to not allow Hershey bars on campus because they’re in MREs?
so. the way a boycott or a divestment campaign functions is not to take a comprehensive list of all brands that have some sort of tie with a political issue. it’s to focus on a few influential brands or institutions and focus collective effort on getting them banned or divested from. that’s why this sort of argument is beside the point: boycott has to be public and massive, so the selectiveness of boycotting campaigns is not a bug, it’s a feature.
Besides an important feature of the BDS and associated movements is taking their cue from the Palestinians themselves. currently the divestment protests on american campuses focus on terminating investments and academic partnerships with Israeli universities, because that’s what Palestinian organizations are asking them to do.
And to think if the events of 2020 hadn’t happened, if some protein didn’t fold a certain way on the opposite side of the globe resulting in the conception of the first Sars-2-Coronavirus and the pandemic hadn’t happen, I would have very well been recruited by an Israeli University and coerced into using my STEM skills to help them commit the unspeakable crimes they are doing now @-@
This is why i don’t want Dorothy to become president. if i had that kind of blood on my conscious, i couldn’t imagine being able to live with myself. As fucked up as it sounds, sometimes it’s for the BEST that you get what you thought were your dreams crushed early on, especially if they’re based on lies to children.
Oh so kind of God to arrange matters such that, no matter where on this planet or when in history you are born, the country into which you are born by pure chance has the traditions, values and status quo which just so happen to be the ones you need to be on The One True Path To Happiness™ 👀
the USA is a weird-arse place.
Isn’t it, though?
You said ‘arse’ so I’m making an assumption, but British universities also make deals with, invest in, and take money from defense contractors and arms companies.
Like so many things, this is less of a case of USA being uniquely weird, and more a case of people in the USA being uniquely aware of and willing to complain/talk about the issue.
It absolutely is, but the issue of military involvement in the money and influence at universities is a worldwide one.
And in all honesty that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You want clever people to design stuff you’ll need to defend yourself from… say an imperialistic neighbour. My country is definitely benefitting from the American Military Industrial Complex
imperialistic countries today are often as awful as they are precisely because they keep taking after the “United” States’ shining bad example.
It’s no coincidence the regime of Nazi Germany took after the Confederacy’s founding principles of White Supremacy long after it was thought to have been abolished via legal fiat, that which inspired countless acts of terrorism against black families in the Jim Crow South.
After WWII, the US Government, on top of incarcerating queer folk they “rescued” from concentration camps so they could be used for prison labor, and denying refuge to thousands of displaced victims of the Nazis, went out of their way not only to grant refuge, but citizenship and military jobs and subsidies to Nazi scientists who were actual war criminals.
That’s right. Fascist scientists who terrorized my people, were recruited by the US government into the military and other government positions of great affluence, under the premise that this was a necessity to curb the influence of the Soviet Union and their icky sticky communism, nevermind injustices that would be upheld and continue domestically as a result.
In recent decades concerning the Middle East, hardly a coincidence that Osama Bin Laden himself fought alongside US troops as an ally in the Soviet-Afgan War, bred to weaponize his religion against EVIL GODLESS COMMIES and adopt xenophobia as a practical solution to his peoples’ problems.
To this day the US military continues to devote a great chunk tax-money to non-productive purposes as it constantly kills people undermines our freedom in the name of “protection”. Money that could actually be helping people, building affordable housing, fostering better living conditions to ensure people have not incentive to get radicalized in the first place.
We have not universal public health care and student loan relief because the government needs those as incentives to join the military and uphold their imperialist hegemony and commit horrific killings across the globe in the name of GOD AND FREEDOM™
United States militarism and supporting attitudes of bigotry and xenophobia have always been here to keep the rich rich and the poor poor, dating all the way back to the slavery of the south before and during the Civil War.
““If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, the former won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.
Hell, give him somebody to hate, berate, look down on, war against, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
— Lyndon B. Johnson
Buddy, my country was under the boot of the Russian Empire before United States of America was even born as a country. You are really not that special. Our Tadeusz Kościuszko fought in your independence war on US side only to go travel back to Poland and try to regain Our Independence a couple years later.
That’s what you get when universities are for-profit corporations.
Public university systems are not for-profit. (Some private systems are, though.) But the publics do have to manage their endowments and investments very carefully. So they invest in hedge funds, real estate, bonds, stocks, etc. The universities don’t manage their own money; they hire accountants and financial companies to do that for them. And those financial companies outsource the investing, too. Eventually the public university can end up financing some troubling stuff without knowing it.
And when public universities try to disinvest, or even ALLOW protest, the “Free Speech” party gets VERY angry and starts talking about cutting off public funds.
Free speech is when you’re only allowed to say what I like hearing.
sadly still topical
considering my friend’s experience protesting for palestine at this very university this likely won’t go well
I am legitimately curious how the cast will respond to RL politics intruding on their lives.
Walky is, for example, allergic to anything unpleasant as we saw with Halloween.
+1
I kinda love that it’s Joce the one introducing them to broader social issues. The last time the cast got involved with anything political was with the kidnapping, as Becky was Robin’s PR hire. What happens when it’s something that doesn’t directly affect them? I truly wanna know.
RL politics intrude on their lives all the time. Many of them are queer, BIPOC, or trans – their lives are political, their existence is political. I think you meant (as Dante said) politics which don’t directly affect them, but I think it’s important to note that the characters of this comic would be really accustomed to political issues causing them pain and struggle.
More Joe x Jocelyne! More!
Just make a good protest safety plan, girl.
As someone in this struggle, curious to see how this strip develops.l
man; would’ve been really nice to have had student loans forgiven :/
But that would mean a bank didn’t get paid eternally.
Some private bank or for-profit financial company (which means their old, rich, white, male investors) wants more of your money, more of your wealth production. Why won’t you give it to them? Are you really that thoughtless? :O
Sadly true for so many universities. I have many regrets about my time in college, but my greatest is just how much I kept my head down, stewing in my feelings of helplessness at the cruelties of the world while doing nothing about them. Now I’m so exhausted mentally that I don’t even know where to start pulling myself out of this pit.
*sending care* I burn out pretty quickly at uni and my brain is not suited to rallies or crowds, so I’m not as active as I wish I was. Something that I can do (and have done) is do some big cook-ups to take food for the pro-bulmeria camp and coordinate with some friends to source things for them (like tents or blankets).
It’s transferable to other groups… mining protest camp, taking groceries for neighbours during covid, flood relief, bush-fire relief, storms fucked up the rough-sleepers’ camp.
I have a friend who does the planning/organising/social part, I just buy cheap stuff and cook.
That’s the way to do it, together 🙂 Play to your strengths, and more importantly, play away from your weaknesses.
You’re wise as hell ♥
I’d join a local protest, but I never hear about anything until it’s already wrapping up.
ok no shade but like, most movements have a local open whatsapp group or insta page or whatever that you can join and get updates. go to one meeting one time, ask for how to be updated, they will add you. in addition most areas have like some kind of alternative media you can also check to find out what happens when where why and how. it requires effort but like… not very much
Ah. I don’t use basically any social media (never saw much point), so it didn’t occur to me to check those. Thanks, I’ll give it a shot.
Caring equally about everything all the time is a ticket to burnout. You can actually hold everything in your heart, as a part of what makes up your sense of justice.
… But you gotta pick a couple to bring into focus, and yeah, play to your strengths. Being able to affect an issue or two beats getting paralyzed by grief brought by all of them.
if you say so ;-;
but doom scrolling in my head or not, i feel really sad about not being able to do more for struggling people of the earth as I struggle myself in a corporate hellscape state
what can I do as a disabled video game coder besides provide distraction? what can a game I make do for social justice, really? T_T
(trying so hard these days not to spiral, it ain’t easy)
It’s not easy, and y’all took a big blow recently. I get the sadness, and beyond saying it’s a signal you care and that’s actually good, promise…
I don’t know what can you do in your day to day, because I’m not there. And you don’t have to turn video game coding into activism either, bringing people joy is no small thing. But since you mention it, should you choose to, well – it IS an art form.
(And also, considering we’re queer neurodivergent people, sometimes thriving is the best challenge you can take on for the moment. It’s more than enough and has “gaining the ability to help again after escaping burnout” as a bonus.)
If you are helping someone to unload for a while and recharge, you are helping.
In case it helps, I have some of the opposite regrets. One time there was a protest going by shouting “Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Culture’s Got To Go” and I joined it without thinking much; I’m pretty embarrassed about that now. And I protested the first Gulf War pretty hard as a knee-jerk pacifist – harder than I protested the second one – I wish that had been reversed.
One time I sat through an entire presentation by Earth First, mostly agreeing with it – until they started talking about vandalizing legitimate and harmless research, and I finally realized what they were about.
So, don’t get hopeless – but do pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about that.
It doesn’t help, don’t worry. You’re exempt of this conversation.
“Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Culture’s Got To Go”
idk what that protest was about but like all slogans it’s probably simplistic and provocative on purpose. the point is to make people go “huh?!” and then, *hopefully*, ask more questions, read some books, and have conversations about things that mainstream education and culture takes for granted.
i read someone recently complain that leftists don’t realize that “defunding the police” and “abolishing prisons” is going to increase violent crime and it’s like… ugh. it’s a slogan!! Of course reality is more complex. The point is to start a conversation, not end it.
(are some leftists cultish and/or dumb and/or hypocritical and/or inclined to chaos for its own sake? sure. we all have our lot of bad experiences in activist circles. to me that’s not a reason to give up on trying but i get why people drop out.)
Slogans tend to make me think, “nah, they haven’t thought this through, I want nothing to do with them.”
that’s fine, we got you. may i suggest: books
This makes you seem super uncurious, yeah? Like Milu said, a slogan is just the attention getter, not the whole spiel.
He’s right though. It doesn’t work.
I’ve spent enough time trying to convince people what slogans like “Defund the police” really mean to know that it actually creates a barrier that might not be there if you started with something closer to what you actually mean.
Using this method instantly puts them on adversarial foot with the people who realize it’s bullshit, it attracks dumbasses to their cause and generally sounds like they look down on people’s intelligence. Like they wouldn’t get it if they explained it properly.
Old enough to remember anti-Apartheid protests at my campus, and the Red state newspapers calling them “communist.” It never changes.
it never changes, except for the fact that the apartheid regime ended. hint, hint.
Doing the right thing is rarely easy and often trouble because if it was easy it would have already been accomplished. Doesn’t mean it’s not trouble worth incurring though.
Bulmeria’s lore is getting more and more interesting.
Book 15: Caring About Things Has Always Just Gotten Me in Trouble (ft. Dorothy)
I’m gonna take a wild guess and say this one was written around October of last year (free Palestine!)
Or maybe when there were the student protests at some of the American universities.
Buffer isn’t quite that long. Probably last spring sometime. Still plenty of protesting over Gaza.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_African_countries
Oh, Willis is famous in Wikipedia
Oh jeez, I thought it was going to be some trans rights protest but it’s actually the genocide. I am very concerned now, the police did not treat those folks well in real life.
And getting arrested as s trans person is really bad
Yeah I’m really concerned about that angle as well, though I don’t think Willis would take it there.
also, based
here are 2 gfms for families trapped in gaza right now if anybody has anything to give
https://gofund.me/9a85746a
https://gofund.me/31c5cbe3
thank you; i’ll add this one for a family in Gaza with 2 children, one’s a baby. a friend of mine is in touch and tries to raise money for them.
you’ll find an english translation below the french version. they included a list of current prices in gaza… it’s so bad.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/appel-a-dons-pour-noha-et-ses-filles-mila-et-zainab-a-gaza
“I just don’t know how to not… care about things”
oof, I know that feeling
Jocelyn, marry me.
I… Really know the feeling, too. And I could pontificate about it for hours, honestly. Or I could just leave a link with a summary – Three quotes on anarcho-nihilism that fucked me up in the best way. (Basically: “Maybe it IS hopeless! Do you need certainties to be kind?”)
Anyway I love that Joyce shares her inability to stop caring with her sister.
These are beautiful.
thank you for sharing. that helps ❤️🔥
“I don’t know how to not care about things”
Yup, she’s Joyce’s sister alright.
The alt text and Wikipedia at war!
Caring about things is how you got Joyce to you, Joe.
I know we’re not rooting for them but Joe and Jocelyn are really well-matched as a couple.
Jocelyne will be a fine sister-in-law for Joe. Joe will be a fine brother-in-law for Jocelyne. (And as soon as Joyce has that thought, it’s a done deal for Joe.)
Fictional or real, I’m now inspired to compose a national anthem for Bulmeria.
Bulmeria? Isn’t that one of the countries that formed when Yugostan broke
up, back in the 90’s? They eschewed the predominant neo-agrarian patrio-facism of the day, in favor of ludocratic corporatism. Very enlightened for the 90s. Alas, when a cabal of local ludosyndicates rebelled in 2008, the central corp collapsed and threw Bulmeria into civil war. Now their infrastructure is in ruins, and millions are starving. Truly a humanitarian nightmare.
It genuinely baffles me how US unconditionally supports the… as one Professor I listen to would put it “The country that lays where it wants to.”. It completely blows up their diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and makes them look like an accessory to genocide.
And stopping them would be so easy, just cut off arms supplies and… oh send them to Ukraine where they could find great use? And the aforementioned country would have to go “Yes Sir, No Sir.” because without US support it would have no chance of survival.
What’s the point of dancing around the name?
Having fun
Because these strips are written months in advance and there’s always some possibility of something bad happening in the real world overshadowing whatever Willis is talking about. Say, something really big and bad happening in “That Country Not To Be Named”. Also, unfortunately, there’s more than one genocide going on in the world.
I’m not talking about “Bulmeria”, I fully understand the use of a fictional country in the world of fiction. What I don’t get is the use of euphemisms instead of real country names in the real-life internet discussion of real countries.
To elaborate on that, the joke name comes from one Middle East expert I watch and he has to use all these euphemisms because Youtube is really pissy and a worse Censor than the Communist Party. If he wants videos to be recommended to people he needs to be very nudge nudge wink wink about these things.
Honestly the funniest thing is that he is old enough to have lived his adult life when Communism was still around and so has personal experience with dodging the censors of the time. It’s a damn sad time that people need to do that in so-called Free Democratic World.
Well, “That country that cannot be named” has a lot of voters concerned about it. And pays a helluva lot of money for propaganda and congressional favors (bribes). You’ll notice there’s no difference between the two US parties here, both want to prop up Bibi, no matter what the American people think.
Oh yeah I did hear something about lobby groups that straight up throw money at any politician who might stand against candidates that talk badly about Voldesrael
indeed they do. there’s this little thing called AIPAC. they’re good. at being evil, i mean.
I predict comments are getting turned off on this one
wow didn’t think i’d see the day when willis takes some kind of stand on palestine..
never too late, i guess
I misread Bulmeria as Bulimia and went “hold up what why would Jocelyn be against wiping out bulimia that’s a bad eating disorder!”
This is what reading too fast leads to.
I’ll advocate for the genocide of eating disorders, for sure.
On our campus students (and people from outside the campus altogether) protested that our buildings have Caterpillar generators and that an auditorium is named for that company. They may also have protested any arms investment but I didn’t see that.
I don’t know how practical their demands are, but let’s be real, US corporations have played historic roles in genocides before.
Fortunately there was no trouble or arrests, because a U to the south of us got all law-enforcement-y and it was a bad thing.
Good luck, Jocelyn…
I suppose it makes sense to use a fictional nation with this floating timeline. Shortly after this strip first started we had the Arab Spring although Syria is back in the news after 13 years.
Especially considering the buffer.
I was just thinking a week ago something interesting – in the comic it is still the same year when the story began over a decade ago, yet our current events are their current events.
Um, actshewally it’s the year after the story started, because it’s January.
/s
Our year transition gets a little weird, because is it now Jan 2024? Which was almost a year ago and student protests likely would have been focused on Gaza.
Or is it the upcoming Jan 2025, which we don’t know about yet, but student protests would more likely be focused on Trump’s inauguration or the latest horror he’s proposing.
and the longer we live, the more things we find to care about
no wonder so many of us are so burnt out
Not to nitpick, but Jocelyn is repaying whoever she got her student loans from. She’s already given that loaned money to the university.
But, still, alums carry a certain weight on a university campus.
Penultimate panel is too real for a lot of us, I think. Which is a very good trait to have, up to a point. But if you’re reading this, please remember to take time to take care of yourself too. Selflessness is good and fine, but you can’t serve from an empty cup. (And if you don’t set aside time to take care of yourself, your body will pick a time for you. Learned that the hard way last week, lmao)
I’m going to give some kudos to Willis for handling this even with a fictional stand in.
KUDOS
KUDOS
KUDOS
Isn’t the comic on like a ten month buffer? Man.