I expect her to have one of those storage clipboards full of pre-composed apology forms. Any time she needs one she can just hastily fill it out multiple-choice / Mad Libs style, tear the yellow copy off for the recipient, and keep the original for her records.
Before the semester is out, she will upgrade to digital methods, starting with Google Forms and weekly spreadsheet reports. Out of pity, Amber will help her catch up to the 2010s with webforms and trigger logs.
She gotta learn that adherence to moral absolutes simply makes no sense when it leads to you treating bloated bourgeois bigots with kid gloves.
The horrible irony is that them assholes put REAL children’s lives in very real danger with their schemes.
But when you see an old white toenail griftin’ off the US military industrial complex without any care for the consequences, just remember that what you’re lookin at ain’t a child, it’s a CHOICE
Dorothy is so Kantian she reminds me of– IDK have you watched The Good Place? The Philosophy professor is a beautiful person but he’s perma-stressed due to moral anxiety. Dude can’t lie even if it’s for a good cause because, Ethics.
This also means he has a terrible time making any choice at all btw.
indeed, the flawed heuristic is much more common than you think, if only because of the pervasive influence of the long dominant moral institutions of the United States
our country, largely built by and for the Christian majority, is one which has just about always taught us one way or another to believe that supporting or engaging in ANY flavor of Evil whatsoever will leave a stain on your soul.
In this schema, Evil exists in this world to test the integrity of the individual, for which they will be judged at some distant point in the future when it all *really* counts (i.e. “you will stand alone when God judges you at the gates of heaven”).
And it largely continues to FEEL that way, even long after you no longer believe in God, souls, or anything supernatural.
Oh, I agree. And it’s the way it works for many atheists, people can’t help but be shaped by the societies they live in, whether in agreement or rebellion. Just as an addendum though, while Kant was indeed Protestant, there’s many, many ways to feel moral anxiety. It’s about Doing The Right Thing, the superego and transcendence.
Dorothy was raised atheist, if memory serves, but since she was left to explore she decided she indeed didn’t feel religious faith. She gives me the feel she espouses the idea an atheist may have about transcendence (leaving a mark in others, and into the world); and in a rigid moral code like hers (aka, the laws that govern her), her harshest judge is herself — past, present, and future.
yep, “Christian atheist” is certainly not an oxymoron,
Indeed, Dorothy has compelled herself constantly to commit to her moral code 100% of the time no matter what, even when they are shown to hurt her and the causes she’s fighting for, almost to the point of superstition.
She is operating under this schema in which rigid commitment and sacrifice to her moral absolutes is something which MUST pay off and be worth it at some point in the ever-receding future, through some arbitrary mechanism which she is probably not even sure of herself.
all her being an atheist means is that “god/heaven” as the mechanism is replaced with “i don’t know but there has to be something” — underneath the tip of the iceberg is still is the fundamentally flawed understanding of where the reward for doing good actually comes from
Indeed, I frequently see more Christ-like actions from avowed atheists than from supposed Evangelical “Christians”. Back 20-30 years ago we were referring to such as Xtians using the same shorthand of letting a Capital X stand in for the very similar Greek letter “Chi”, to mean “almost but not quite”.
It’s very reflective in American society even in things that are not strictly religious. Like American attitudes around “criminals” are absolutely bonkers. People act like anything less than the harshest, most permanent, life ruining punishment is “going too easy” on criminals. “Did you ever do something bad? Suffer forever.”
It’s so frustrating and I wish people realized that helping do good is more important than punishing the wicked or avoiding doing anything bad ever.
It’s right in there with how conservatives talk about gun control and reparations for historical racial injustice: “why should I be punished for the crimes of monsters?”
to them, laws, education and social customs are NEVER about shaping society for more positive outcomes, but about deciding who gets PUNISHED.
To them, government in its ENIRETY is only ever about marking off one particular way of life as The Right Way™, and punishing those who stray, a mindset which of course they witlessly project unto the left. 9-9
It’s no coincidence our country has a religious right and not so much a religious left.
They believe that the human world has always been and will always be a corrupting, polluted swamp of sin which we have no hope of ever cleansing from the inside. But walk the Perfect Path of Piety™ laid forth by your parents and pastors, you might just save yourself. Punish the people who stray, you might just save them as well. (-_-)
You can’t be an iriritant without collateral damage. For example, there are regular and very visible Extinction Rebellion protests blocking roads into The Hague which are very good irritants, but they also irritate people on a bus taking that road. Those people are irritated but aren’t the target of the protest.
“Why can’t you protest in a place where nobody has to hear and see and doesn’t disrupt order in any way” is a surefire way to make a protest invisible and ineffective as hell though.
there’s a reason why Reverend Martin Luther King Junior emphasized the importance of fostering non-violent tension for the sake of social justice in his Letter From Birmingham Jail:
“as history has unfortunately told us, privileged groups rarely give up their privilege willingly.”
You have a right to speak freely. You do not have a right to force other people to listen. Which means that you do not have a right to disrupt order. You can apply for a permit to occupy common space, and if that is ever granted to people to present one viewpoint then it must also be granted to others with a different viewpoint. But for a given space it can simply be withheld from all.
So nobody can ever publicly protest anything without the permission of those in power, thus they cannot protest against what those in power want. That seems to be the logical conclusion to your statement.
It’s complicated.
The flip side to that argument is that any group can use any space, regardless of disruption or even danger, as long as they call it a protest and somehow the authorities would be powerless to intervene.
In practice, you always can only protest those in power with their permission. That’s what “power” means. In the US (and most liberal democracies), the law allows great freedom in protests and is supposed to be as RonF says, content neutral. The government can refuse permission based on the location you want or the time you want or the amount of disruption it’s likely to cause, but not based on the cause you’re supporting.
They don’t always live up to that, to say the least, but it’s hard to see what would be a better approach in theory.
A lot of protest tactics focused on media attention deliberately aim for approaches that wouldn’t be granted permission, precisely because they want to cause disruption.
This is “like” an argument people on the left use when people on the right complain about censorship, as far as it’s using similar words, but it’s so gravely misapplied in this context it sounds like an AI generated post.
Y’know what? You’re right! Very important. Now so we know who to learn from I will prepare a list of every movement that has achieved any meaningful change under such strictures:
Extinction Rebellion Boston held a standout in front of the visitors’ entrance to the Mass Statehouse without any collateral damage. It made our governor very aware of our goals. May not have really accomplished much beyond that, though.
I think Climate Defense has the right idea: irritate the people who are either directly responsible for the problem, or refusing to use their power to fix it. They get in the face of people like the CEO of Exxon when he’s about to get an award for being a wonderful person. Collateral damage is minimal but CD has gotten some results.
I can’t remember where I read this, but when climate protestors were throwing soup at (protective screens over) paintings, and people were saying “I agree with their motives, but not their methods,” someone pointed out that was their goal: they didn’t care if you agreed with their methods or not, as long as it made you aware of climate issues. Hardly anybody was saying “If they’re going to throw soup at paintings, we should make the climate crisis worse to spite them,” therefore it was working.
I disagree, not because the souped paintings were some horrible sin, but because they were, frankly, silly. Most folks I know who heard about it had the following sequence of reactions:
“They threw soup at paintings? Why?”
“What does that have to do with climate change?”
“This is stupid, these people are stupid, I’m gonna go watch porn.”
If your protest action has no tie to the issue at hand, it’ll be very easy to be dismissed as a stunt. The people who agreed with the protestors’ motives agreed the day before, and afterwards were mostly embarrassed by being associated with them. The people who opposed them just pointed and laughed. And the unconcerned? Yeah, they still didn’t give a damn.
************
Similar vein. During one of the campus sit-ins over Gaza, a student leader read a public letter. It wasn’t explaining their position, or naming names, or pleading their case. It was asking the university to not do things the administration hadn’t even done yet, like blocking UberEats/Doordash drivers from delivering food.
This was not a good look.
A very common reaction in the mainstream coverage was, “Oh, look at the cute little kiddies and their adorable little protest. They’re soooo brave, willing to occupy a building that no one was guarding and eat delivery food.” Again, if your protest makes you mockable, it’s not going to be an effective protest.
The university protestors should’ve gone in with the assumption that they WOULD be denied easy access to food and water, and stockpiled beforehand. They should have assumed that heat/AC and power would be shut down, and come bearing battery-powered lanterns and thermal protection.
A key part of ‘irritating’ protests is that they, well, irritate. Those in power don’t like to be irritated, and they will absolutely lash out when provoked. If you’re demanding that your protest not result in you being the target of those sorts of tactics, you’re going to be seen as a bunch of children having a temper-tantrum.
Note that despite those protests affecting campuses across the country, very few institutions disinvested, and Netanyahu is closer than ever to achieving his goals, especially with Team Trump coming in this month.
Often these kinds of protests seem to wind up shifting the focus to how awful the authorities are to the protestors and thus away from the topic of the protest.
In some cases that works: If you’re protesting police brutality and the police come in and start cracking heads, that proves your point.
But seriously, figure out which one will be effective and target it. Getting political attention often becomes the goal and isn’t necessarily productive on its own.
Interrupting the money is almost always the most effective, at least if it’s the money going to the people who can change the thing. That’s why stuff like strikes and boycotts work. Boycotts have to be broad or targeted enough to matter. Often a small group boycotting backfires, bringing attention to the company and sympathy from those opposed to your cause.
Sometime attention raising is an important goal on its own. Very often it has no real effect.
Now might be a good time to read up on Syria. The current moment is extremely promising, and even if it doesn’t live up to its full potential, every likely outcome is a dozen times better than what came before.
More wishful thinking-y is to be rn rubbing my hands because yes, Jocelyn/Dorothy. Which is incredibly funny considering an It’s Walky re-read I finished yesterday. She got a kind of Walky, kind of Joyce character to ship her with because those two were otherwise occupied.
Yeah I’m a little uncertain on that too. Maybe to her parents, in the event that this, like, gets her expelled or voids her scholarship or something? I feel like they’d probably be proud of her for standing up on an ethical issue like this, but maybe they’re more “always solve problems from within the system” types IDK
To be honest, yeah, I do expect that she’s been intending to reply to the letter, apologetically turning them down.
“I regret that your university does not fit my needs at this time. I am entirely unsure what my needs are, exactly, but I do know Yale does not fit them, whatever they may be.”
Whoever she ends up upsetting. I think she’s pre-composing generic apology letters for when she inevitably needs them. Just fill in any necessary blanks on the fly, and you’re good to go.
Well, hey, this is one way to explore if she wants to continue her dream (albeit hopefully with a new emphasis on work life balance and her mental health), modify her dream to something related but different or find a new one entirely.
This feels like a situation where Dorothy shows up at the sit in and gets arrested, and then she’s convinced an arrest record will keep her from ever getting elected, but because of what it’s for it would probably help her in 30 years.
Oh right, US universities are businesses whose profit depend on a) real estate, b) sports franchising and c) stock investment; that’s why they’re funding wars rather than like, teacher salaries.
Most of the larger public and private systems have been categorized as either athletics organizations that run education programs, or financial organizations that run education programs. And that’s just the non-profits.
99% of the for-profits are financial organizations that run student loan-disbursement programs and pretend to have education programs.
Note that “for-profits” generally doesn’t refer to universities, even private ones, but more focused programs, like trade schools and the like. Some coding schools.
And my understanding is that they don’t usually provide the loans themselves, but help students get government loans and provide them with basically worthless degrees or certificates on the cheap. Leaving the students owing large sums, with no better job prospects.
Real private universities still tend to be organized as non-profits.
“For-profits” refers to newer places with crappy education like Capella, DeVry, Univ of Phoenix, Walden, Fox, Wade, etc. Their average acceptance rate is very high; the proportion of students applying for federal loans is extremely high; the quality of education provided is (arguably by most metrics) quite low. (Not WGU; they are non-profit.)
This is besides the trade school type places like coding, HVAC, and welding. Their variety of quality in their educational training is hard to pin down, since it’s much less academically testable and more skills-based. But not for the State and public schools for such trades, like the public college or university schools that teach the vocational / trade tech / technical and continuing education stuff. They mostly have good or great training.
I am not referring to private non-profit universities like Rice Univ, Stanford Univ, Cal-Tech, MIT, Duke, Johns Hopkins, etc. They are indeed expensive places (and friggin’ highly selective), but their educational quality is orders of magnitude better than the for-profits crappy places.
No, the schools don’t do the loaning (some few do; very little money, compared to the fed govt). They do the disbursing. The student applies for the loan from the govt; the govt gives the money to the school; the school keeps that money and gives the student some shoddy-ass services. Occasionally, the student will get a little bit of the money (what’s left over after all costs), but not often at all.
I just feel like her language (coupled with the alt-text) is really painting the picture like she’s correlating HER personal victory to what is actually possible within the context of a singular protest.
The alt text is obviously meant as a joke. I don’t think He Lynn think that, she is just stating the reason for the protest in a way that inspires Dorothy.
Dorothy really needs to do away with the individualist attitude where solving the problems plaguing the world is a matter of “earning her place among the great and the worthy”,
but rather that it’s about many many people working together to make a real difference over time by fighting together for a common cause, every little bit of support counts no matter how small, etc
Joce has already said there’s a number of people doing this though. She’s not alone, it’s a protest.
Dorothy does need to do away with that attitude, but also she’s gotta learn you can fail and/or change your mind, and this doesn’t mean inaction or permanent failure. It was more of a “so what are you going to do now?” thing, I think. Just. Let’s hope Dorothy gets it. Instead of trying to carry the world on her shoulders again :’33
I once took a CPR / First Aid class in University, things that are there for helping people,
literally the first thing you learn there is rule #1 of helping people is not to become a victim yourself, cuz otherwise that’s one more person who needs to be saved, and one less person who can do saving when every little bit counts
Dorothy burning out as a result of wearing the weight of the world on her shoulders not only hurts her, but people who would have otherwise been able to help in more sustainable, realistic ways she can *actually* manage
Her personal victory is externalizing who she is inside to affirm her humanity. The protest she’s going to participate in (and we don’t know if this is her first one), is externalizing what’s inside of her too: What she, as a human being, feels and thinks about justice/dignity/integrity. Stating them (and standing for them) on the face of an unfair world.
She even acknowledges that most times you can only be an irritant. But you gotta.
I mean I also feel like it’s extremely selfish almost to the point of complicity that she’s talking about a genocide against children in terms of what it says about her gender presentation.
I agree. There’s extreme “first protest” energy here that mixes with The CW protest energy in a way that’s kind of hard to read. In terms of second hand embarrassment.
I’m with you on this one. She’s got that heady attitude I remember so well from the first few years of transition, when you think you have everything figured out because you realized this one step. There’s a lot more for her to learn.
Can’t a person just have a fucking moment of trying to inspire someone and do some good without you all trying to turn it into it being cringe or a sign that she is naive of some shit? It’s really fucking annoying.
It’s easy to give up and say nothing works and nothing can help in any way. Especially when you don’t use those words, to maintain plausible deniability. There’s always an extra little reason not to do something, always that tiny shred of despair to put on the pile.
Weirdly enough, it’s also easy to come up with solutions, even half-assed ones that miss a detail, but those might give someone a sliver of hope, and that’s #problematic for some reason.
That is literally the opposite what she is doing??? She is telling her to be an irritant to the injustices of the world, that is no at all being complacent (Through say, participanting in protests). And ia sorry but considering a lot of your other comments I am not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are coming from a. Place of good flight. In short: Shut the fuck up.
The first one serves the system so, society looks the other way.
…………..the latter is a ~moral failure~ (when the politician doesn’t serve the system, cough cough felons, etc.) It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so enraging sdlkgj
The irony here is that regardless of whether that’s actually his quote, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote extensively on the threat of capitalist corporate power to the freedom of consumers and how the flawed intuition of the de facto oligarchy of capital owners inevitably leads to speculation bubbles and subsequent crashes.
“Communism” is also of course dumbed down to “totalitarianism” as usual by the US audience.
Are strong welfare policies and their positive, non-exploitative outcomes in northern Europe “actually” socialism (and therefore “bad”), or are they not?
The answer seems to be whatever makes the left wrong in that moment 9-9
I grew up during the Vietnam War, and the protests thereof. One protest does not change things, but continued protests for years will. It took years of protesting and a change of President to stop the war.
So true. It took many years of protests by numerous groups in numerous places, sometimes with collateral damage (e.g., Kent State, 50K+ casualties in SE Asia). But in the end, the protests changed public opinion and U.S. left Viet Nam.
Remember, folks! One action is never supposed to be It™, you’ve gotta keep doin’ stuff. Nobody thinks their single act of rebellion is all it’s gonna take, that’s just what lazy people want you to be thinking so they can feel better about doing nothing.
I was there too. I don’t think protests do anything but keep a lot of people busy feeling that they are doing something worthwhile, while a handful of other people hammer out the shape of the future. Or, sometimes, while the current group in charge gradually become aware that their objective is unreachable and change course.
This is such a USA White Person thing to say. Respectfully, learn some history. Literally nothing about any social justice issue has been borne without a protest, because the purpose of rhe system is to keep working as its owners intend.
what, do people think that the weekend and the eight hour workday that have become the standard just came out of nowhere??!?!
Is the United States a country run by 6-year-olds brought up to venerate ignorance and militarism, and who can’t be bothered to think too deeply about anything besides football and furniture?
The labor movement, which won us the weekend, definitely paid the price in blood, but the effective tool there was far more the strike than the protest.
During the trial that ultimately ended with his death, Socrates stated he was the gadfly annoying sluggish Athens with his questions on the nature of truth and justice. That these things the city refused to analyze, brought into the light, were of course disruptive to the order of things — but necessary to think about.
I thought I couldn’t love Jocelyne more and then she goes and paraphrases one of the GOATs.
I think it’s more timeless than that. Justice and peace are not like replacing a broken window; they’re like washing the dishes. Something you do regularly forever because daily living will always generate more dirty dishes no matter how you organize it.
I think Dorothy would have been deeply involved in the old Occupy movements from years ago. Should anything like that get going again, she would be right in the middle.
It doesn’t matter which direction you pour gasoline into the fire from, so long as you do. And Melon is far from being the only rich in US, oh you have a whole bunch of these.
Keep this in mind, identity politics and all kinds of divisions really took off during Occupy Wall Street when the bankers, stock bros and others were feeling threatened but then it fell apart when the protesters started infighting. Who do you think benefited from that? And has been benefiting ever since?
In The Exceptional X-men, Kitty Pryde is mentoring new mutants and they mention the pronoun thing. Kitty needs a second to adjust as she realizes she’s now getting old(er).
I never can tell what people think they mean when they say stuff like this. Especially when they’re both-sidesing it.
If “identity politics” are funded by the wealthy to keep the peasants fighting each, are we talking about oppressed groups fighting for their rights as the problem? Should Becky and Jocelyne get back in the closet to stop distracting from the important fight?
How far back does this go? Were women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement just wealthy psyops?
Or is this all just a dumb talking point designed to cause infighting?
What I mean is primarily the shift in attitude and messaging. Basically I grew up with the “Let’s get along and work towards the better future” messaging. But in the last decade or two everything has become very divisive and hostile. It’ basically let’s blame The Other group for all the ills of the world regardless of which group you belong to and which group you are supposed to blame. A free for all between everyone.
…. You know I think the fact the actually seem to believe that at any point there was a message of “let’s all get along” make it worse that if you were bullshitting.
Well that’s what the message was in the media when I was growing up in the 90s. But then again I’m not from US so I can only talk about the media I encountered that was imported to my country. Getting on Tumblr certainly opened me up to… well the nasty reality.
Yeah, 2012 when black people started blaming white people for their problems and when queer people started blaming the straights. For no particular reason.
The most generous interpretation of this is that you were just oblivious, which isn’t completely unreasonable for someone with the privilege not to have to deal with any of it personally. That’s the point of dog whistles. The bigots and their targets know what they mean, but the normies don’t, so when the targets react it looks like it’s coming out of nowhere.
But still, even with all that, the rhetoric you used here is still blaming marginalized groups for opposing their own oppression.
Yeah you do have a point.
I think it’s more that… all these people united against a common issue, the rich screwing everyone over.
But then the animosities between groups took front stage over their common problem and it all kind of fell apart.
All these people were never united against a common issue. Before Occupy, the Tea Party was already in full swing, opposing taxes, the government taking over health care and very idea of a black President.
Occupy itself didn’t collapse over identity politics as far as I can tell
‘Identity politics’ isn’t why Occupy Wall Street failed. From what I’ve read, that was more due to a lack of cohesion on the part of the occupiers.
Also, as a queer person who’s been out since 2006, I don’t buy that non-classism forms of bigotry would magically go away overnight if everyone ate the rich. Humans can be amazingly loving and selfless, but there are also a lot of us who are genuinely spiteful, hateful people. Obviously this isn’t an easily-tested hypothesis, but I really do believe that that as a species we would always find a way to divide and devalue each other. Don’t get me wrong, I’d LOVE to be proven wrong here. :C
To an extent, but only to an extent. Because that implies they’re manipulating both sides in the same way. Which implies, for example, that trans people are being manipulated into coming out more publicly and fighting for their rights in the same way that transphobes are being manipulated into fearing trans people.
I so identify with Dorothy here. “Yes, in an unhinged world, I should be an irritant! Can I do this in a way that minimises the possibility anyone might be annoyed with me in any way?”
At that point, she understands what power means. She understands the value of the collective and fighting together for stuff that matters, so… why is she still looking like she’s aiming for president ?
What is it with you people and thinking she literally thinks she stop the thing by just sitting there. The point is the demonstration and that is what she is going to do. You all are being really weird about this.
While it’s sad how society has responded to BDS & campus movements for institutions to stop profiting off the bombing of children (“Antisemitism! Radicalization!”), this is a very real thing that real students are fighting right now.
Shame the enforcers of the status quo, not the people who fight against it for having the audacity to hope that change is possible…
From what I’ve seen and heard from my alma mater’s President, you will end up being removed by the police and your tent will end up in a dumpster within 24 hours and the administration won’t change their investment portfolio a hair. That’s because 1) the parents of the current students have let the administration know that they are not paying to have their child’s ability to go to classes and use the facilities of the school interrupted by protesters and 2) the alumni have let the administration know that donations and other support will stop if they let these things happen again.
Don’t shoot the messenger folks. That’s just the way it is. It’s not 2024 anymore.
“That’s just the way it is.” No, somebody made it that way. It’s not like that on its own, so it can be changed again.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” I’ll shoot whoever I want, regardless of what link they represent in the chain of communication. I’m an American, I can shoot the recipient if I feel like it.
The kind of protests that actually work are the kind that college kids don’t want to do, because at the end of the day they are part of the educated elites (or at least training for it) and they don’t want to give up their chance at a cushy white-collar job.
Mass drop-out. Permanently fucks up a college’s enrollment and four-year completion metrics, and there’s nothing they can do about it except beg everyone back by lowering tuition, which hurts their profits (even public universities are very profitable for certain people).
For TA’s and professors, the possibility of a strike is even better, because it’s an exceptionally hard field to hire scabs for, and it actually hurts the university’s bottom line.
For TAs and profs, strikes would work, but the problem with a “mass drop-out” is the “mass”. A bunch of students (and often ex-students like Jocelyne) setting up an encampment on the lawn draws media attention and causes disruption, but that same number of students dropping out is barely going to be noticed (and of course the ex-students don’t have that option).
It’s like the regular talk of a general strike. Yeah, that would probably work, but how the hell does anyone organize the millions of people it would take and you can’t start small and work up, cause that just gets the ones who start fired without changing anything. Or inspiring anything.
I think there’s a real question whether encampment protests like this actually do any good, but pretending mass drop-outs are a potential alternative is absurd.
Eh, the protest doesn’t have to stop the funding of the bombings by the university. Nor would it meaningfully effect the funding of the bombs by the university.
It does draw attention to it, though.
Which is its own good.
Especially when they send in Asher’s family to help the police bust heads and drag them off to jail.
Off-topic, but regarding how realistic it is for Nightguy or AG running around, and Joe’s disbelief that she was “real”. https://www.dumbingofage.com/de-escalate/
According to the real IDS, there’s a Spiderman in Bloomington. But he’s wearing the costume for amusement, not to hide his identity and beat people up. So the same level of real as Nightguy or what Joe thought about AG originally.
Loading ...
aw, come on, just carve the apology into a stamp and streamline the process
I expect her to have one of those storage clipboards full of pre-composed apology forms. Any time she needs one she can just hastily fill it out multiple-choice / Mad Libs style, tear the yellow copy off for the recipient, and keep the original for her records.
Before the semester is out, she will upgrade to digital methods, starting with Google Forms and weekly spreadsheet reports. Out of pity, Amber will help her catch up to the 2010s with webforms and trigger logs.
Just get an autopen to write them for you. That’s Presidential, right?
Dorothy no, DON’T apologize in advance.
She gotta learn that adherence to moral absolutes simply makes no sense when it leads to you treating bloated bourgeois bigots with kid gloves.
The horrible irony is that them assholes put REAL children’s lives in very real danger with their schemes.
But when you see an old white toenail griftin’ off the US military industrial complex without any care for the consequences, just remember that what you’re lookin at ain’t a child, it’s a CHOICE
Dorothy is so Kantian she reminds me of– IDK have you watched The Good Place? The Philosophy professor is a beautiful person but he’s perma-stressed due to moral anxiety. Dude can’t lie even if it’s for a good cause because, Ethics.
This also means he has a terrible time making any choice at all btw.
indeed, the flawed heuristic is much more common than you think, if only because of the pervasive influence of the long dominant moral institutions of the United States
our country, largely built by and for the Christian majority, is one which has just about always taught us one way or another to believe that supporting or engaging in ANY flavor of Evil whatsoever will leave a stain on your soul.
In this schema, Evil exists in this world to test the integrity of the individual, for which they will be judged at some distant point in the future when it all *really* counts (i.e. “you will stand alone when God judges you at the gates of heaven”).
And it largely continues to FEEL that way, even long after you no longer believe in God, souls, or anything supernatural.
Oh, I agree. And it’s the way it works for many atheists, people can’t help but be shaped by the societies they live in, whether in agreement or rebellion. Just as an addendum though, while Kant was indeed Protestant, there’s many, many ways to feel moral anxiety. It’s about Doing The Right Thing, the superego and transcendence.
Dorothy was raised atheist, if memory serves, but since she was left to explore she decided she indeed didn’t feel religious faith. She gives me the feel she espouses the idea an atheist may have about transcendence (leaving a mark in others, and into the world); and in a rigid moral code like hers (aka, the laws that govern her), her harshest judge is herself — past, present, and future.
yep, “Christian atheist” is certainly not an oxymoron,
Indeed, Dorothy has compelled herself constantly to commit to her moral code 100% of the time no matter what, even when they are shown to hurt her and the causes she’s fighting for, almost to the point of superstition.
She is operating under this schema in which rigid commitment and sacrifice to her moral absolutes is something which MUST pay off and be worth it at some point in the ever-receding future, through some arbitrary mechanism which she is probably not even sure of herself.
all her being an atheist means is that “god/heaven” as the mechanism is replaced with “i don’t know but there has to be something” — underneath the tip of the iceberg is still is the fundamentally flawed understanding of where the reward for doing good actually comes from
Indeed, I frequently see more Christ-like actions from avowed atheists than from supposed Evangelical “Christians”. Back 20-30 years ago we were referring to such as Xtians using the same shorthand of letting a Capital X stand in for the very similar Greek letter “Chi”, to mean “almost but not quite”.
It’s very reflective in American society even in things that are not strictly religious. Like American attitudes around “criminals” are absolutely bonkers. People act like anything less than the harshest, most permanent, life ruining punishment is “going too easy” on criminals. “Did you ever do something bad? Suffer forever.”
It’s so frustrating and I wish people realized that helping do good is more important than punishing the wicked or avoiding doing anything bad ever.
This. Exactly this.
It’s right in there with how conservatives talk about gun control and reparations for historical racial injustice: “why should I be punished for the crimes of monsters?”
to them, laws, education and social customs are NEVER about shaping society for more positive outcomes, but about deciding who gets PUNISHED.
To them, government in its ENIRETY is only ever about marking off one particular way of life as The Right Way™, and punishing those who stray, a mindset which of course they witlessly project unto the left. 9-9
It’s no coincidence our country has a religious right and not so much a religious left.
The reactionary fundamentalist Christian narrative holds that the problems plaguing human society are helpless Facts of Life because humans are inherently awful creatures of immutable sinful nature (hence Joyce pointing out that humans brought death and all things evil into this world in Genesis).
They believe that the human world has always been and will always be a corrupting, polluted swamp of sin which we have no hope of ever cleansing from the inside. But walk the Perfect Path of Piety™ laid forth by your parents and pastors, you might just save yourself. Punish the people who stray, you might just save them as well. (-_-)
You can’t be an iriritant without collateral damage. For example, there are regular and very visible Extinction Rebellion protests blocking roads into The Hague which are very good irritants, but they also irritate people on a bus taking that road. Those people are irritated but aren’t the target of the protest.
“Why can’t you protest in a place where nobody has to hear and see and doesn’t disrupt order in any way” is a surefire way to make a protest invisible and ineffective as hell though.
so very much this
there’s a reason why Reverend Martin Luther King Junior emphasized the importance of fostering non-violent tension for the sake of social justice in his Letter From Birmingham Jail:
“as history has unfortunately told us, privileged groups rarely give up their privilege willingly.”
You have a right to speak freely. You do not have a right to force other people to listen. Which means that you do not have a right to disrupt order. You can apply for a permit to occupy common space, and if that is ever granted to people to present one viewpoint then it must also be granted to others with a different viewpoint. But for a given space it can simply be withheld from all.
Haha, that’s fucking stupid to say. You’ve said a stupid thing.
Hopefully you have some mouthwash to clean the taste of those boot from your mouth.
So nobody can ever publicly protest anything without the permission of those in power, thus they cannot protest against what those in power want. That seems to be the logical conclusion to your statement.
It’s complicated.
The flip side to that argument is that any group can use any space, regardless of disruption or even danger, as long as they call it a protest and somehow the authorities would be powerless to intervene.
In practice, you always can only protest those in power with their permission. That’s what “power” means. In the US (and most liberal democracies), the law allows great freedom in protests and is supposed to be as RonF says, content neutral. The government can refuse permission based on the location you want or the time you want or the amount of disruption it’s likely to cause, but not based on the cause you’re supporting.
They don’t always live up to that, to say the least, but it’s hard to see what would be a better approach in theory.
A lot of protest tactics focused on media attention deliberately aim for approaches that wouldn’t be granted permission, precisely because they want to cause disruption.
This is “like” an argument people on the left use when people on the right complain about censorship, as far as it’s using similar words, but it’s so gravely misapplied in this context it sounds like an AI generated post.
Honestly it seem this guy is just some bootlicker, really don’t think they are arguing from any kind of good faith.
… maybe it’s about time Willis stopped linking new strips on the platform formerly known as Twitter 👀
Fuck order.
Y’know what? You’re right! Very important. Now so we know who to learn from I will prepare a list of every movement that has achieved any meaningful change under such strictures:
Extinction Rebellion Boston held a standout in front of the visitors’ entrance to the Mass Statehouse without any collateral damage. It made our governor very aware of our goals. May not have really accomplished much beyond that, though.
I think Climate Defense has the right idea: irritate the people who are either directly responsible for the problem, or refusing to use their power to fix it. They get in the face of people like the CEO of Exxon when he’s about to get an award for being a wonderful person. Collateral damage is minimal but CD has gotten some results.
I can’t remember where I read this, but when climate protestors were throwing soup at (protective screens over) paintings, and people were saying “I agree with their motives, but not their methods,” someone pointed out that was their goal: they didn’t care if you agreed with their methods or not, as long as it made you aware of climate issues. Hardly anybody was saying “If they’re going to throw soup at paintings, we should make the climate crisis worse to spite them,” therefore it was working.
I disagree, not because the souped paintings were some horrible sin, but because they were, frankly, silly. Most folks I know who heard about it had the following sequence of reactions:
“They threw soup at paintings? Why?”
“What does that have to do with climate change?”
“This is stupid, these people are stupid, I’m gonna go watch porn.”
If your protest action has no tie to the issue at hand, it’ll be very easy to be dismissed as a stunt. The people who agreed with the protestors’ motives agreed the day before, and afterwards were mostly embarrassed by being associated with them. The people who opposed them just pointed and laughed. And the unconcerned? Yeah, they still didn’t give a damn.
************
Similar vein. During one of the campus sit-ins over Gaza, a student leader read a public letter. It wasn’t explaining their position, or naming names, or pleading their case. It was asking the university to not do things the administration hadn’t even done yet, like blocking UberEats/Doordash drivers from delivering food.
This was not a good look.
A very common reaction in the mainstream coverage was, “Oh, look at the cute little kiddies and their adorable little protest. They’re soooo brave, willing to occupy a building that no one was guarding and eat delivery food.” Again, if your protest makes you mockable, it’s not going to be an effective protest.
The university protestors should’ve gone in with the assumption that they WOULD be denied easy access to food and water, and stockpiled beforehand. They should have assumed that heat/AC and power would be shut down, and come bearing battery-powered lanterns and thermal protection.
A key part of ‘irritating’ protests is that they, well, irritate. Those in power don’t like to be irritated, and they will absolutely lash out when provoked. If you’re demanding that your protest not result in you being the target of those sorts of tactics, you’re going to be seen as a bunch of children having a temper-tantrum.
Note that despite those protests affecting campuses across the country, very few institutions disinvested, and Netanyahu is closer than ever to achieving his goals, especially with Team Trump coming in this month.
Often these kinds of protests seem to wind up shifting the focus to how awful the authorities are to the protestors and thus away from the topic of the protest.
In some cases that works: If you’re protesting police brutality and the police come in and start cracking heads, that proves your point.
Gotta either irritate the flow of money, media, or logistics. Otherwise, how else to get the necessary political attention?
But seriously, figure out which one will be effective and target it. Getting political attention often becomes the goal and isn’t necessarily productive on its own.
Interrupting the money is almost always the most effective, at least if it’s the money going to the people who can change the thing. That’s why stuff like strikes and boycotts work. Boycotts have to be broad or targeted enough to matter. Often a small group boycotting backfires, bringing attention to the company and sympathy from those opposed to your cause.
Sometime attention raising is an important goal on its own. Very often it has no real effect.
Of course, interrupting the money flow does tend to get the money to try violence first, if they can.
I am weirdly invested in the ongoing Bulmeria crisis. Possibly because it might actually end positively unlike current RL ones.
Also, it might lead to more Alex strips.
Now might be a good time to read up on Syria. The current moment is extremely promising, and even if it doesn’t live up to its full potential, every likely outcome is a dozen times better than what came before.
Even odds this ends with Dorothy running a very organized Volcano Lair.
yaaaaaaaaaaas supervillain dorothy
Obviously Amazi-girl would feel obligated to stop her, but where would Night Guy side?
With the most accessible bewbs.
Which is still up for debate…
Night Guy has way more of a connection to Dorothy, in several manners.
(I was informed by Mondays observation on bewbs, so credit where it is due.)
Supervillain yes. At least, from the eyes of the elite and their media. I’m seeing something like Ozymandias.
P.S. Is there a Rorschach?
The closest Rorschach I’ve ever seen in DoA was Mike. But sadly, no more Mike.
_Unless_ Willis does a Doc Manhattan and Mike finally figures out how to put himself back together after losing his Intrinsic Field…..
If your plan to bring about world peace involves murdering a few million people, then you’re definitely a supervillain.
I now have Ballister Blackheart in my head
(would that make Jocelyne Nimona?)
Will you, tho.
The audience all along: Joyce/Dorothy! Joyce/Dorothy!
Willis: writing a storyline where Jocelyne is discovering she likes girls and also maybe asking Dorothy if she wants to share a tent on the weekend
I would be cautiously optimistic about joycelyne/dorothy, but that still requires polyamory (and dorothy being bi)
I mean, the latter is pretty much here already.
More wishful thinking-y is to be rn rubbing my hands because yes, Jocelyn/Dorothy. Which is incredibly funny considering an It’s Walky re-read I finished yesterday. She got a kind of Walky, kind of Joyce character to ship her with because those two were otherwise occupied.
I mean, I wouldn’t be mad about it
Hmmm. They’re both legal adults, they’re both cute, they both like doing the right thing. It could work. It could happen.
But Dorothy has hearts and horns for Joyce. Relationshipping up with the 2 sisters would seem odd for her.
Who gets the letters?
she should just skip all the CCs and make a huge-ass graffiti that reads:
“Not sorry,
Reese’sDotty”Yeah I’m a little uncertain on that too. Maybe to her parents, in the event that this, like, gets her expelled or voids her scholarship or something? I feel like they’d probably be proud of her for standing up on an ethical issue like this, but maybe they’re more “always solve problems from within the system” types IDK
Or maybe it’s to Yale’s admissions department for not responding to her acceptance letter.
Eh probably not that.
To be honest, yeah, I do expect that she’s been intending to reply to the letter, apologetically turning them down.
“I regret that your university does not fit my needs at this time. I am entirely unsure what my needs are, exactly, but I do know Yale does not fit them, whatever they may be.”
Anyone she irritates when she is being an irritant.
A lotta moms.
Whoever she ends up upsetting. I think she’s pre-composing generic apology letters for when she inevitably needs them. Just fill in any necessary blanks on the fly, and you’re good to go.
Well, hey, this is one way to explore if she wants to continue her dream (albeit hopefully with a new emphasis on work life balance and her mental health), modify her dream to something related but different or find a new one entirely.
Apology letter to Robin for missing class.
Apology letter to the waitstaff for when she dumps redsauce and wine on a senator.
This feels like a situation where Dorothy shows up at the sit in and gets arrested, and then she’s convinced an arrest record will keep her from ever getting elected, but because of what it’s for it would probably help her in 30 years.
Activism convictions preferred by one party; financial convictions preferred by another party. A good division of criminal labor.
Oh right, US universities are businesses whose profit depend on a) real estate, b) sports franchising and c) stock investment; that’s why they’re funding wars rather than like, teacher salaries.
Most of the larger public and private systems have been categorized as either athletics organizations that run education programs, or financial organizations that run education programs. And that’s just the non-profits.
99% of the for-profits are financial organizations that run student loan-disbursement programs and pretend to have education programs.
I didn’t realize the schools themselves provide the loans to let people pay for sitting in their classes, that’s an impressively shady scam.
Note that “for-profits” generally doesn’t refer to universities, even private ones, but more focused programs, like trade schools and the like. Some coding schools.
And my understanding is that they don’t usually provide the loans themselves, but help students get government loans and provide them with basically worthless degrees or certificates on the cheap. Leaving the students owing large sums, with no better job prospects.
Real private universities still tend to be organized as non-profits.
“For-profits” refers to newer places with crappy education like Capella, DeVry, Univ of Phoenix, Walden, Fox, Wade, etc. Their average acceptance rate is very high; the proportion of students applying for federal loans is extremely high; the quality of education provided is (arguably by most metrics) quite low. (Not WGU; they are non-profit.)
This is besides the trade school type places like coding, HVAC, and welding. Their variety of quality in their educational training is hard to pin down, since it’s much less academically testable and more skills-based. But not for the State and public schools for such trades, like the public college or university schools that teach the vocational / trade tech / technical and continuing education stuff. They mostly have good or great training.
I am not referring to private non-profit universities like Rice Univ, Stanford Univ, Cal-Tech, MIT, Duke, Johns Hopkins, etc. They are indeed expensive places (and friggin’ highly selective), but their educational quality is orders of magnitude better than the for-profits crappy places.
No, the schools don’t do the loaning (some few do; very little money, compared to the fed govt). They do the disbursing. The student applies for the loan from the govt; the govt gives the money to the school; the school keeps that money and gives the student some shoddy-ass services. Occasionally, the student will get a little bit of the money (what’s left over after all costs), but not often at all.
Jocelyn, you’re about to find out the hard way that’s not how it works.
how what works exactly?
I just feel like her language (coupled with the alt-text) is really painting the picture like she’s correlating HER personal victory to what is actually possible within the context of a singular protest.
The alt text is obviously meant as a joke. I don’t think He Lynn think that, she is just stating the reason for the protest in a way that inspires Dorothy.
inspiration is good but, Bryy still has a point
Dorothy really needs to do away with the individualist attitude where solving the problems plaguing the world is a matter of “earning her place among the great and the worthy”,
but rather that it’s about many many people working together to make a real difference over time by fighting together for a common cause, every little bit of support counts no matter how small, etc
Joce has already said there’s a number of people doing this though. She’s not alone, it’s a protest.
Dorothy does need to do away with that attitude, but also she’s gotta learn you can fail and/or change your mind, and this doesn’t mean inaction or permanent failure. It was more of a “so what are you going to do now?” thing, I think. Just. Let’s hope Dorothy gets it. Instead of trying to carry the world on her shoulders again :’33
so much this.
I once took a CPR / First Aid class in University, things that are there for helping people,
literally the first thing you learn there is rule #1 of helping people is not to become a victim yourself, cuz otherwise that’s one more person who needs to be saved, and one less person who can do saving when every little bit counts
Dorothy burning out as a result of wearing the weight of the world on her shoulders not only hurts her, but people who would have otherwise been able to help in more sustainable, realistic ways she can *actually* manage
They don’t actually have a point because what they said it’s not what is actually happening in the strip and it’s not what Jocelyn is saying.
Her personal victory is externalizing who she is inside to affirm her humanity. The protest she’s going to participate in (and we don’t know if this is her first one), is externalizing what’s inside of her too: What she, as a human being, feels and thinks about justice/dignity/integrity. Stating them (and standing for them) on the face of an unfair world.
She even acknowledges that most times you can only be an irritant. But you gotta.
✊🏽💯
I mean I also feel like it’s extremely selfish almost to the point of complicity that she’s talking about a genocide against children in terms of what it says about her gender presentation.
Like it’s not worse than not protesting… but it’s inappropriate in new ways that not protesting is not.
Unclench.
Again that is not a thing that she is saying. And if that is how your interpret it there is something wrong with you.
I never said this. It’s not what happened, not what it’s being said, and not even the authorial intention.
It’s a bad faith read at every level.
I agree. There’s extreme “first protest” energy here that mixes with The CW protest energy in a way that’s kind of hard to read. In terms of second hand embarrassment.
I’ll be really narratively unsatisfied if Jocelyn doesn’t have serious character growth away from this attitude.
I’m with you on this one. She’s got that heady attitude I remember so well from the first few years of transition, when you think you have everything figured out because you realized this one step. There’s a lot more for her to learn.
Can’t a person just have a fucking moment of trying to inspire someone and do some good without you all trying to turn it into it being cringe or a sign that she is naive of some shit? It’s really fucking annoying.
Doomers want everyone to feel as miserable as they are. I’d pity them if it weren’t indeed so fucking annoying.
It’s easy to give up and say nothing works and nothing can help in any way. Especially when you don’t use those words, to maintain plausible deniability. There’s always an extra little reason not to do something, always that tiny shred of despair to put on the pile.
Weirdly enough, it’s also easy to come up with solutions, even half-assed ones that miss a detail, but those might give someone a sliver of hope, and that’s #problematic for some reason.
No, because Dorothy’s existential crisis at present is well-earned and appropriate and Jocelyn is dragging her back into comfortable complicity.
That’s silly and dumb to say. Say smarter things.
That is literally the opposite what she is doing??? She is telling her to be an irritant to the injustices of the world, that is no at all being complacent (Through say, participanting in protests). And ia sorry but considering a lot of your other comments I am not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are coming from a. Place of good flight. In short: Shut the fuck up.
Say something actually inspiring and we’ll talk.
You could try just not talking at all, if it’s all gonna be this meaningless. 🤷
I believe she is aware protest doesn’t always work dude, she is not a child. Doesn’t mean is not worth doing anyway.
Activism does occasionally result in positive net gains for the cause. Not a total waste of resources and time.
Yes it is.
Wild that we have bombs signed by politicians
but they have to apologize for something like DUI in college.
The first one serves the system so, society looks the other way.
…………..the latter is a ~moral failure~ (when the politician doesn’t serve the system, cough cough felons, etc.) It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so enraging sdlkgj
indeed this capitalist social order is inevitably unjust, unstable and unsustainable,
for it is a social order in which there are in-groups who are protected by morality and law but not bound to it,
alongside out-groups who are bound to morality and law but not protected by it
Like every other real-world social order..
The irony here is that regardless of whether that’s actually his quote, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote extensively on the threat of capitalist corporate power to the freedom of consumers and how the flawed intuition of the de facto oligarchy of capital owners inevitably leads to speculation bubbles and subsequent crashes.
“Communism” is also of course dumbed down to “totalitarianism” as usual by the US audience.
Are strong welfare policies and their positive, non-exploitative outcomes in northern Europe “actually” socialism (and therefore “bad”), or are they not?
The answer seems to be whatever makes the left wrong in that moment 9-9
That’s honestly a very good piece of life advice. Feels like it sums up some things I’ve been feeling for years very nicely.
I grew up during the Vietnam War, and the protests thereof. One protest does not change things, but continued protests for years will. It took years of protesting and a change of President to stop the war.
So true. It took many years of protests by numerous groups in numerous places, sometimes with collateral damage (e.g., Kent State, 50K+ casualties in SE Asia). But in the end, the protests changed public opinion and U.S. left Viet Nam.
BTW, sorry for accidentally flagging your comment.
Remember, folks! One action is never supposed to be It™, you’ve gotta keep doin’ stuff. Nobody thinks their single act of rebellion is all it’s gonna take, that’s just what lazy people want you to be thinking so they can feel better about doing nothing.
yup, so much this needs an upvote
Social justice is a VERB, not a noun
Yes exactly, and it’s weird that some people takeaway from this strip is that Jocelyne does think that her singlehandedly gonna end this.
Or that she’s doing it for ego. Most WTF thing I’ve read in a while
I swear this comment section make me wanna get violent sometimes.
There’s also people with actually good opinions, and some who are at least well-meaning but ill-informed.
… The handful that aren’t though, holy shit. Absolutely agreeing.
You and NGPZ are pretty cool and usually not with your head up your own asses as far as I know.
im just trying to do my best to prevent myself and others like me from having to live under a freeway @-@
Is literally the same variety of bad faith shit you see on what’s become of Twitter.
It’s just about time Willis seriously distanced himself from that platform, given the demographic it tends to attract now 👀
I was there too. I don’t think protests do anything but keep a lot of people busy feeling that they are doing something worthwhile, while a handful of other people hammer out the shape of the future. Or, sometimes, while the current group in charge gradually become aware that their objective is unreachable and change course.
Fuck off.
This is such a USA White Person thing to say. Respectfully, learn some history. Literally nothing about any social justice issue has been borne without a protest, because the purpose of rhe system is to keep working as its owners intend.
Even having a _weekend_ was written in blood.
I co-sign this not respectfully.
YUUUUP, this for reals deserves an upvote
what, do people think that the weekend and the eight hour workday that have become the standard just came out of nowhere??!?!
Is the United States a country run by 6-year-olds 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 it is. (-_-)
Okay, I get the football part but are Americans obsessed with furniture?
https://youtu.be/uGXEsFRpHq8?si=gjSHiyv-i5OM_Tvo
Okay I had heard about that show but now I might actually watch it.
*plays “Get Up Stand Up” by Bob Marley on the hacked muzak*
The labor movement, which won us the weekend, definitely paid the price in blood, but the effective tool there was far more the strike than the protest.
Tactics matter.
During the trial that ultimately ended with his death, Socrates stated he was the gadfly annoying sluggish Athens with his questions on the nature of truth and justice. That these things the city refused to analyze, brought into the light, were of course disruptive to the order of things — but necessary to think about.
I thought I couldn’t love Jocelyne more and then she goes and paraphrases one of the GOATs.
The sad part is this comic is likely to be timeless in term of its reference at least within my lifetime.
I think it’s more timeless than that. Justice and peace are not like replacing a broken window; they’re like washing the dishes. Something you do regularly forever because daily living will always generate more dirty dishes no matter how you organize it.
Jocelyne is rapidly becoming one of my favorite characters in DoA. And no Dorothy, you don’t have to apologize for protesting against evil.
Nah, the apologies will be when she turns it into a riot.
🙂
I think Dorothy would have been deeply involved in the old Occupy movements from years ago. Should anything like that get going again, she would be right in the middle.
Unlikely to happen considering how the wealthy heavily funded identity politics. Gotta have the peasants fighting each other and not their masters.
Um akshully– the wealthy are funding ANTI-identity politics. Muskie HAAAATES pronouns. A pronoun killed his kid, y’know.
It doesn’t matter which direction you pour gasoline into the fire from, so long as you do. And Melon is far from being the only rich in US, oh you have a whole bunch of these.
Keep this in mind, identity politics and all kinds of divisions really took off during Occupy Wall Street when the bankers, stock bros and others were feeling threatened but then it fell apart when the protesters started infighting. Who do you think benefited from that? And has been benefiting ever since?
White. Male. Cis. These are identities too. Apartheid nepo baby is also an identity.
Well, the pronoun did sloppy-ass work, leaving survivors in the bloodline. The pronoun can get its lazy ass back in there and finish the fucking job.
In The Exceptional X-men, Kitty Pryde is mentoring new mutants and they mention the pronoun thing. Kitty needs a second to adjust as she realizes she’s now getting old(er).
Look, she knows shapeshifters and genderless aliens. You’d think she’d have this sorted out. 🙂
“Pronouns: Not as dangerous as people think.”
I never can tell what people think they mean when they say stuff like this. Especially when they’re both-sidesing it.
If “identity politics” are funded by the wealthy to keep the peasants fighting each, are we talking about oppressed groups fighting for their rights as the problem? Should Becky and Jocelyne get back in the closet to stop distracting from the important fight?
How far back does this go? Were women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement just wealthy psyops?
Or is this all just a dumb talking point designed to cause infighting?
What I mean is primarily the shift in attitude and messaging. Basically I grew up with the “Let’s get along and work towards the better future” messaging. But in the last decade or two everything has become very divisive and hostile. It’ basically let’s blame The Other group for all the ills of the world regardless of which group you belong to and which group you are supposed to blame. A free for all between everyone.
…. You know I think the fact the actually seem to believe that at any point there was a message of “let’s all get along” make it worse that if you were bullshitting.
Well that’s what the message was in the media when I was growing up in the 90s. But then again I’m not from US so I can only talk about the media I encountered that was imported to my country. Getting on Tumblr certainly opened me up to… well the nasty reality.
Okay but there is difference between “there was a change of message” and “I realized the media was lying about the message”.
Yeah, 2012 when black people started blaming white people for their problems and when queer people started blaming the straights. For no particular reason.
The most generous interpretation of this is that you were just oblivious, which isn’t completely unreasonable for someone with the privilege not to have to deal with any of it personally. That’s the point of dog whistles. The bigots and their targets know what they mean, but the normies don’t, so when the targets react it looks like it’s coming out of nowhere.
But still, even with all that, the rhetoric you used here is still blaming marginalized groups for opposing their own oppression.
Yeah you do have a point.
I think it’s more that… all these people united against a common issue, the rich screwing everyone over.
But then the animosities between groups took front stage over their common problem and it all kind of fell apart.
All these people were never united against a common issue. Before Occupy, the Tea Party was already in full swing, opposing taxes, the government taking over health care and very idea of a black President.
Occupy itself didn’t collapse over identity politics as far as I can tell
YES THANK YOU.
‘Identity politics’ isn’t why Occupy Wall Street failed. From what I’ve read, that was more due to a lack of cohesion on the part of the occupiers.
Also, as a queer person who’s been out since 2006, I don’t buy that non-classism forms of bigotry would magically go away overnight if everyone ate the rich. Humans can be amazingly loving and selfless, but there are also a lot of us who are genuinely spiteful, hateful people. Obviously this isn’t an easily-tested hypothesis, but I really do believe that that as a species we would always find a way to divide and devalue each other. Don’t get me wrong, I’d LOVE to be proven wrong here. :C
“Let’s you and you fight!”
To an extent, but only to an extent. Because that implies they’re manipulating both sides in the same way. Which implies, for example, that trans people are being manipulated into coming out more publicly and fighting for their rights in the same way that transphobes are being manipulated into fearing trans people.
I so identify with Dorothy here. “Yes, in an unhinged world, I should be an irritant! Can I do this in a way that minimises the possibility anyone might be annoyed with me in any way?”
Handwritten apology letters… are Dotty’s parents Canadian immigrants by any chance?
I think Ruth has completely shattered that stereotype.
Yeah she German Suplexed it through the floor
I’m loving loving loving this storyline!
I don’t know about you, but I wish it could be more busy than first time Jocelyne went out to the closet.
Making them letters will be harder now when she’s already thrown away all the Fs.
At that point, she understands what power means. She understands the value of the collective and fighting together for stuff that matters, so… why is she still looking like she’s aiming for president ?
“In an unhinged world,” be the sand in the gears.
at this rate, better make it a monkey wrench
It’s sadlarious because she thinks the university will stop funding bombs because of her little tent.
lol yes this is where I land on this scene. Jocelyne is very sweet but not someone with a head for practical results.
You’re a tar pit.
What is it with you people and thinking she literally thinks she stop the thing by just sitting there. The point is the demonstration and that is what she is going to do. You all are being really weird about this.
Quote the exact part of this comic where that’s said. Do it. I fucking dare you.
While it’s sad how society has responded to BDS & campus movements for institutions to stop profiting off the bombing of children (“Antisemitism! Radicalization!”), this is a very real thing that real students are fighting right now.
Shame the enforcers of the status quo, not the people who fight against it for having the audacity to hope that change is possible…
https://www.kqed.org/news/12002307/san-francisco-state-divests-from-weapons-makers-after-working-with-student-activists
Oh man, really? Awesome ;ww; thanks, I didn’t know
Dorothy’s Anarchist-Arc, when?
Can someone as organized as her even be Anarchistic? She’ll have spreadsheets for chaotic behaviour
You have to be very organized to be an anarchist, according to this anarchist.
Otherwise, fascists will take over in the power vacuum.
God, thank you!! I’m here like “do these people know what an Union is or….?”
Like. To start with the basics, because there’s so much more, holy shit
Wait are you implying that Unions are Anarchist? I’m confused
Unions have been historically supported by self-identified anarchists, yes.
There’s this common mistake that “anarchist” means being against any and all social order whatsoever and wanting nothing but total chaos.
But what it REALLY means is being opposed to social pyramids and especially the coercive means used to establish and perpetuate them.
Ah that makes sense
Not always, but a great example of organization, anarchy-style, is the Anarcho-Sydicalism in Spain during the early XX Century.
Leaving aside the nazis helped end it by razing entire cities, the anarchists got pretty far in everything they set to do before the fash coup d’etat.
From what I’ve seen and heard from my alma mater’s President, you will end up being removed by the police and your tent will end up in a dumpster within 24 hours and the administration won’t change their investment portfolio a hair. That’s because 1) the parents of the current students have let the administration know that they are not paying to have their child’s ability to go to classes and use the facilities of the school interrupted by protesters and 2) the alumni have let the administration know that donations and other support will stop if they let these things happen again.
Don’t shoot the messenger folks. That’s just the way it is. It’s not 2024 anymore.
What does being 2024 or not have to do with anything you said?
Current year argument
“That’s just the way it is.” No, somebody made it that way. It’s not like that on its own, so it can be changed again.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” I’ll shoot whoever I want, regardless of what link they represent in the chain of communication. I’m an American, I can shoot the recipient if I feel like it.
The kind of protests that actually work are the kind that college kids don’t want to do, because at the end of the day they are part of the educated elites (or at least training for it) and they don’t want to give up their chance at a cushy white-collar job.
Mass drop-out. Permanently fucks up a college’s enrollment and four-year completion metrics, and there’s nothing they can do about it except beg everyone back by lowering tuition, which hurts their profits (even public universities are very profitable for certain people).
For TA’s and professors, the possibility of a strike is even better, because it’s an exceptionally hard field to hire scabs for, and it actually hurts the university’s bottom line.
Oh yeah there’s also a lot of people that are financially dependent on scholarships so that’s another reason why most people wouldn’t go for it.
Man just fuck all the way off. What is wrong with y’all.
For TAs and profs, strikes would work, but the problem with a “mass drop-out” is the “mass”. A bunch of students (and often ex-students like Jocelyne) setting up an encampment on the lawn draws media attention and causes disruption, but that same number of students dropping out is barely going to be noticed (and of course the ex-students don’t have that option).
It’s like the regular talk of a general strike. Yeah, that would probably work, but how the hell does anyone organize the millions of people it would take and you can’t start small and work up, cause that just gets the ones who start fired without changing anything. Or inspiring anything.
At the local university, there was an encampment. Enrollment: about 25,000. Encampment size: about 30.
Exactly.
I think there’s a real question whether encampment protests like this actually do any good, but pretending mass drop-outs are a potential alternative is absurd.
From what I understand, several unions have lined up their contracts to expire at the same time: May Day 2028.
How would that work when 90% of the money the college makes is by sports?
Athletes begone, of course. Not endorsing it necessarily, but if 90% of their income is from sports, I figure having no sports would probably hurt.
does dorothy know there isn’t really social pressure to do thank you notes and suchlike anymore
has anyone told her in explicit terms
Closest is her Nana (bonus strip April 2018 / book 8)
maaaaaaan, I really need to buy the books or a patreon subscription
Eh, the protest doesn’t have to stop the funding of the bombings by the university. Nor would it meaningfully effect the funding of the bombs by the university.
It does draw attention to it, though.
Which is its own good.
Especially when they send in Asher’s family to help the police bust heads and drag them off to jail.
hahaha they’re gonna leave assprints in dunn meadow!
Off-topic, but regarding how realistic it is for Nightguy or AG running around, and Joe’s disbelief that she was “real”. https://www.dumbingofage.com/de-escalate/
According to the real IDS, there’s a Spiderman in Bloomington. But he’s wearing the costume for amusement, not to hide his identity and beat people up. So the same level of real as Nightguy or what Joe thought about AG originally.
Whimsy off the charts. Exemplary behavior
Brb. Gonna get a Joce quote tattoo now