And so another painful transformation begins. Like Joyce, it seems Dorothy will also suffer the collapse of a central part of her identity, based on lies she was fed as a child.
For Joyce, it was Evangelist motivations. For Dorothy, it’s her ultimate goal of becoming President, inspired by an over-idealized conception of politics she’s had since grade school.
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is deconsecrated…”
I mean arguably this is what college is for. To challenge, maybe even break your preconceptions and ideals as you educate yourself and form new ones. Trying, hopefully becoming a complete person.
I agree college is as much about learning to be a person as it is about learning math or science. Then again in many ways the process of growing as a person and the growing pain that comes with it never really ends (well, you know, until you do, but thus is life or … err… death as it were).
Her parents didn’t push her in this direction. They seemed to want her to do whatever makes her happy.
I’d love to know why she wants to be president.
This ‘you must be evil to be president’ nonsense is something I’d have thought Dorothy would have heard before. If you really think the government is so terrible, get involved with local government.
I think we’ve kind of seen why she wants to be president in how she treats her friends. Dorothy feels a compulsion to take care of everyone for them (even when they don’t need her to), and so her desire to be president is likely that but on the grandest scale. If I had to project a little bit onto her, I’d wager it’s partially because she was raised with so much support, gets the notion ingrained that ‘you can be anything you want to be with enough effort’, and what she wants to be is that person who takes care of everyone’s needs. She has the intellect and self-confidence to believe she can actually do that and can fix everything for everyone, but also the naive optimism to maybe know but not truly register that that… just can’t actually be done. That her dream is simply a childish fantasy no matter how much practical thought and effort she puts into trying to make it work.
Probably because her interests civic-oriented and this is the most unique and unattainable job in the field. It’s about the thrill of achievement. Based on me having been a Dorothy until about 23 years of age.
Kinda important to remember Dorothy becoming disillusioned with becoming President is kind of a consequence of American politics going to pot in real life. At the start of the strip her dream was corny but didn’t have that bad implications. Same way as to how Robin’s storyline happened in 2008 and had to uh, go through some changes.
The start of 2008 was much, much later than the start of all US presidents needing to do at least a few horrible things no matter what. That started with George Washington. This would have been true regardless of how politics changed in the last fifteen years (at least, in any realistic fashion; I suppose one could come up with some imaginary situation in which the last fifteen years usher on a golden age where presidents no longer need to do bad things).
I guess William Henry Harrison may be an exception. Did he have to do anything horrible during the 31 days he was President?
I don’t think it’s fair to judge historical figures morals based on modern moral standards any more than it’s fair to judge their intelligence based on modern scientific understandings.
Slavery originated as an alternative to the indiscriminate slaughter of defeated enemies, so it was arguably an improvement. Which just goes to show that something can be really bad, yet still be better than what it replaced.
And it’s almost like part of the reason we popped off a war about it was in part because a significant number of people understood that before we abolished most of it.
Enslaved people didn’t want to be slaves – usually. Some societies had high ranking slaves who were more privileged than most free people. Imperial officials and the like. Since you’re citing a Bible story, consider Joseph, enslaved, but also vizier in Egypt.
Others escaped from slavery and then took slaves of their own.
As someone with a history degree I strongly disagree. Something doesn’t stop being wrong because of its time period and just because something is widely accepted doesn’t make it right. You end up excusing a lot of awful shit with logic like that. And it always assumes that ‘widely accepted practice’ means ‘nobody knew it was wrong’ when that’s very rarely true. Nobody can know scientific facts that haven’t been discovered yet, but everyone had the tools to know that owning other people is wrong but they chose to do it anyway.
Exactly! There are people who don’t care or really actively take part in global warming, but there are also people who know it’s wrong and at least try to help in the areas they can. Same with all sorts of terrible things. And future generations will wonder why anyone didn’t want to help (she said hopefully).
…what the fuck?
Sorry, is this argument specifically in reference to US slavery and/or First Nations genocide?
Because no, I’m going to judge the hell out of people who *kidnapped, claimed ownership of, exploited, tortured, and murdered* other human beings in order to steal their stuff/labor. I’m going to judge them *almost* as hard as they were judged by their human rights advocate, abolitionist, and slave/ex-slave/First Nations freedom fighter contemporaries, all of whom did in fact exist since before the United States was officially a country.
Cultural normalization of atrocity is a hell of a thing, and can absolutely warp the minds and consciences of people who could have been decent human beings in a different environment, but that doesn’t make it- or them- okay. Donald Trump probably could have been a good person if he wasn’t raised by Fred Trump, and we don’t excuse his bullshit because of that. I promise you that throughout all of human history, humans have been capable of recognizing that slavery, torture, and genocide were evil.
Interesting philosophical question. Assume a Northern President who didn’t own slaves personally and opposed the institution within the bounds of the law – perhaps proposing legislation to ban it or at least prevent its expansion beyond the current slave states.
Would he still be considered not good simply for running a country that had slavery, despite having no legal power to change that?
John Quincy Adams was an abolitionist, oppsed admitting Texas because it would expand slavery, and litigated before the Supreme Court for the prisoners of the Amistad.
William Henry Harrison is one of the rare cases of a president who, due to dying in office so soon, did all his terrible deeds before becoming president. Mainly screwing the Native American tribes out of their land and supporting slavery in the part of the US that eventually became Indiana.
What’s that quote from, NG? Looking it up, I’m seeing
-Dumbing of Age comments
-A book about Marxism and modernism
-A novel about Chernobyl
What’s the source that inspires you?
YUP. they said they aint gonna raise production quotas, even though people like me can barely work or even FUNCTION without them T_T
phony balonga feel-good wars like the “war on drugs” are all about the drip-feed of patriotism until you realize they come at the expense of actual people and their lives
PROSPERO:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Wonder if this is setting up a period of Dorothy rushing into questionable decisions because why bother if she doesn’t have to worry about elections? Everyone in their dorm was so convinced it was Joyce who was going to be the one going wild they’d be blindsided.
Relax, Dorothy, America is far too misogynist for you to have a chance of ever getting close in the first place. America only wants old white guys for president.
Presidents have VERY little control over funding–that’s absolutely Congress’ bailiwick, and it’s one of the few they haven’t surrendered to the Executive Branch over the years.
She could theoretically make tweaks in programs which she has say in, but those are generally also kept on a tight leash. She could redeploy troops, for instance, but she couldn’t actually close the military base which those troops were originally stationed at–pork-barrel politics generally keeps those in the districts represented by someone the party in power wants to stay in power.
Yeah, there’s a very weird vibe here, that’s almost like scapegoating the President and letting the rest of the government off the hook. Not to mention the rest of the population.
As President, you likely could bring most of our overseas troops home – though some might have treaty commitments not so easily revoked?
But that comes with huge consequences. Biden ended the occupation of Afghanistan, using Trump’s withdrawal deal as a excuse. Arguably that’s less imperialism and and ending a war crime, if you consider that occupation a war crime, but there are a lot of Afghan women not celebrating the evil Empire leaving. What was the right thing to do there?
That’s the kind of decision Presidents have to make.
Indeed, I’m surprised we can pay anybody enough to take a job in which you wake up most mornings knowing that you face at least one decision in which every choice is bad.
There’s a quote from the webcomic Girl Genius I have always liked that communicates the general feeling here:
“Could you burn people down – women and children – even if you *knew* they had become monsters? The baron can. The baron has. I respect him for that, but I don’t want to *be* him. No sane man would.”
There are tons of jobs she could chose to help far more people all over the world, she has acquired knowledge and skills that are tremendously useful in things other than politics. But that’s not the only factor at play in this strip.
Compare the act of helping people to opening a stubborn jam jar, and the position of President to upper body strength. If you are alone, there are easier ways to open it, like running warm water over it, that don’t involve exhaust or any risk of injury.
But if there is a crowd, and by crowd, I mean people like Raidah who would judge you for signs of incompetence, impotence, weakness or compromise, you know you need to do it the hard way. It’s not about opening the jar anymore.
Yes it is. And it has to be. It is the basis of all democracy. It is the only way it works. And people who want to reach a high political office will have to compromise on some of their core morals from time to time. And that is sad.
Democracy sucks, but it still is the best system of government we have.
Consensus often does more sense than compromise. Especially when a compromise is often sold as “the only way”. With consensus you can argue that you had all those ways and choose the one with the least objections.
Consensus decision making requires no objections, which fails when things have to be done.
I mean, get 500 people together and require consensus on where to go to eat. You’ll starve to death.
Consensus doesn’t mean unanimous agreement. It means broad support, something well beyond a simple 50%+1 majority. Allowing a narrow majority to ram their choice down the throats of a large minority tends to lead to a lot of resentment, and an urge to retaliate as soon as the positions are reversed. I think the last few years provide convincing proof of that. People have spent decades railing against a “do nothing” Congress, but I believe that absent a decisive consensus, “nothing” is the best thing they could do. Of course, I also believe that most of life should lie outside the scope of politics altogether.
So something like the filibuster, which requires 60% to overcome and has been blocking progress in this country for years. (More than decades really, if you look back to its use against civil rights legislation back into the 1800s.)
Requiring supermajorities to do anything doesn’t avoid resentment, it just lets smaller and smaller groups block action and demand concessions in order to even keep the country functioning.
I would not walk off with Raidah after that one. Just a little disappointed in Walky here. There are no stakes in this breakfast date with a bunch of stuck up chumps plus Lucy.
After seeing how his gfs brother was treating her, and calling him out on it, he should be self aware enough not to let someone hurt the feelings of another. More to the point he should know when Dorothy is feeling off.
I really hope that, despite the way Walky is grappling with his fairly lukewarm feelings for Lucy right now, that he is once again motivated to action by someone being a dick to her. He helped her as Nightguy and he stood up to her brother, who wasn’t even being a dick in earnest, and more broadly he seems to be making an effort to actively support people (like Sal, by standing up to their mom). I don’t know how likely it is, but I’d love it if Raidah’s petty armchair-quarterback better-than-you nonsense flipped Walky’s switch and he told her to shove it.
I mean, he Does know. He’s made a pretty firm stance on being disturbed by how Raidah treated Dorothy last strip.
He’s clearly uncomfortable and he may well ditch the joint in due time. He promised to go, it’s hard to make split second 180s under the specter of social obligation. him voicing his concerns While going along with the events already makes him better than I was at his age.
Cell phones exist. He could easily call her and say “Raidah was a total bongo to one of my friends for no apparent reason. Why don’t we get breakfast, just the two of us?”
No apparent reason?! Raidah is a Muslim. The office of President
Is responsible for the entirely unjustifiable deaths of millions of her coreligionists. Come on. She’s not objecting to the war-crimey nature of the presidency out of some misplaced holier-than-thou instinct and in fact is entirely correct!
I don’t think you appreciate the sheer level of evil and brutality America has committed on the world stage. They are just too powerful to face the music.
He doesn’t have to rescue Dorothy. He can call Lucy and they can go eat Taco Bell and make out. That would likely be the better option for them right now anyway.
Same even though Walky could not out right tell Radiah to f off with out spoiling Lucy’s excitement he might have been able to tell Radiah to go on ahead while he stayed with Dorothy’s for a moment. But I’m not surprised he didn’t think that quickly on his feet and reverted to going with the flow like Linda taught him.
agreed but we might see him actually ditch her once they acquire lucy? that’d be partial credit.
presumably they’re just walking outside together because of being in the same building and all, so texting her would probably be pointless since lucy is almost certainly either at the door downstairs or arrived at the breakfast place twenty minutes ago
How exactly did he call her out? He begged Raidah not to dress him down while also playing up how much she hurt Dorothy, but he never said that’s not okay. Raidah didn’t even say she would stop, cause lawyer. (Even though she isn’t one.). It’s not a lion’s roar to beg someone not to hurt you after witnessing them hurting others.
I could see Raidah giving him vibes like his mom and just making him revert and curl up into a good boy so he doesn’t get treated like his sister- i mean dorothy
Walky can be brave, but he can also be quite passive (I hesitate to use coward but…)
This is perfectly in keeping with his character, and is a nice rhyme with the other universe, where he had truly existential threats to spur him into bravery, instead of just social awkwardness.
Walky might also realize that being his full unfiltered self at breakfast could be a greater punishment for Raidah than refusing to go. (Sarah certainly seems to think so.) I doubt Walky standing up to her is going to make Raidah feel any degree of remorse.
I am sure she has Raidah’s statement just cut her off balance as it really venomous and only designed to make Dotty feel inferior. Raidah doesn’t really give too much of shit.
True the real reason Radiah “won” this cheap shot exhange (aside from Dorothy’s lack of banter experience) is because Dorothy was already doubting herself so much. Though it’s true she hasn’t gone into detail about exactly why she wants the presidency aside from not wanting to be told she can’t which probably contributes to her lacking a ready response for criticism about the job itself.
It’s also possible this is the first time anyone’s really ever challenged Dorothy’s dream with the real consequences of being President. Doesn’t seem like her parents have discouraged her any (not that that’s a bad thing).
Also very likely her parents let her think for herself to an impressive degree though I could see Dorothy going through a bitter phase were she wonders why nobody told her sooner about the harsh reality.
Not a whole lot, I’m sure. It’s the sort of goal a lot of kids have (up there with, say, “being an astronaut”) and most kind of discard as they get older. Dorothy clung to it because she’s smart and clearly people did buy into her going places (Danny’s parents, at least, seem to consider her to be the only thing that gave their son value). She’s capable of making it. But now she’s confronting the reality of the job, and it’s clear that somewhere in her brain she’d just figured that she could skip checking the box that said War Crimes, and check the box that said Good Things instead.
This has been on my mind, so I’m just throwing it out here for consideration by all you fine people.
My take is that the problem with Dorothy’s goal of being president isn’t that it is unrealistic or that she has (had?) some poorly-conceived notions of what it would actually mean. It was those two things PLUS her inflexibility. The idea that if she changes her goal it would break her and everything she stands for.
If a more-flexible Dorothy came to new conclusions about what reaching her goal would actually mean, she could decide she actually wants to do something else with her life, and shift her goal.
If a more-flexible Dorothy concluded that she actually wants different experiences in her life right now (-Walky-), rather than always putting her effort toward the future, she could make those changes.
But she has this goal so tied up with identity, that instead she’s just breaking.
I really don’t see why people think she has to give up a worthwhile goal just because it’s hard. Everything that’s ever been done was impossible until someone did it.
It’s not so much that I think she needs to give up the goal. It’s that I think she would feel a lot better about everything in her life right now if she adopted an attitude of “If I fail at this goal, or eventually change my mind about what I want, I’ll still be ok.”
I think she has tied this goal so deeply to her identity that even thinking about the prospect of reconsidering it is crushing her.
Nah, she’s thought about the good she can do; she simply hasn’t grappled realistically before with the compromises that she’d have to make to get there, or once in power. OTOH, “Preventing another Trump from gaining office” would, in fact, be a major goal in its own right.
I think a dead person can theoretically be elected, though the position would immediately become vacant and pass to the VP. It’s happened a couple times with Congresscritters who’ve died after being nominated, but before the voting.
I don’t know if the language forbids non-humans, but Harambe wasn’t 35 years old and thus not eligible.
I assume that legal personhood for the purpose of citizenship and office holding is largely interpreted as only applying to human people. But if corporations can be legally people, I see no reason Harambe couldn’t. A more straightforward reason Harambe couldn’t be president is that he was only 17 when he was killed and would only be 23 today. The constitution requires you to be 35 to become president.
I’d say I love how we’re all taking this notion of getting a dead gorilla to be POTUS, but honestly, there’s a good chance he’d still make the list of top 5 US presidents, and that’s just sad.
I actually think she has specifically been *avoiding* giving it too much thought for that very reason. Definitely the vibe I got from the Jimmy Carter comment. Like, she’s not even arguing with Raidah about the “all American presidents are war criminals” thing- she clearly already knows that and was just in denial about it.
well she did namedrop a previous president so she has at least looked into history and stuff beyond whatever is taught in high school/independent research because even if it wasn’t over the top propaganda-y i’m sure there are plenty of ‘bad’ gov things you don’t learn about as a teen/kid in public school
I would simply shrug and say something to the effect of, “If it is not me, it will be someone else and they aren’t interested in universal healthcare… and would probably want to do a day of the rope, so I think I’ll be fine.”
Exactly this. SOMEONE has to be president, and Dorothy would be better than most. Raidah’s comments have the same vibe as “the system is broken, so I won’t vote”.
I don’t think that’s quite the point. It’s not that Dorothy wouldn’t be a good president, it’s that she doesn’t have the stomach for the job. She wouldn’t be able to make the necessary sacrifices to her integrity, so how good she would be at the position is irrelevant. She would never make it there, and the faster she realizes this the better off she will be.
That’s a much better take on it, I think. Or at least part of it.
“I don’t want to be in the position to have to make those kinds of decisions” is a valid concern. “Presidents have to be evil” isn’t.
I don’t think she’s really thinking about sacrifices to her integrity to get to the position though, but about the “checkbox for war crimes” she’d get handed after becoming President.
Someone has to be president and presidents have to commit some necessary evils, but I would rather the president be somebody like Dorothy, who deeply cares about doing the right thing and would agonize over those decisions but would also be strong enough in will and mind to make the needed choices anyway, rather than the string of amoral and corrupt officials we got over the last few decades ordering drone strikes like their handing out candy on Halloween. Dorothy should run for President, to keep people like that away from the nuclear codes.
If you’re put in a position of paramount leadership of a nation chances are you’re going to have to preform some unscrupulous actions.
I really just wish Dotty would not be presidents beacuse I think she can do more as an activist for an NGO or even work an IGO, she may not be charismatic but she is organized and knowledgeable and that in its self is a critical skill that is needed in the world.
True, if she continues to have this level of aversion to compromising her own morals playing a role whose job is to keep the presidents power in check/force the kind of compromises she wants from them might be a better position for her.
What’s so bad about the United States? I know we have a lot of issues and done a lot of pretty bad things but I we’ve also done a lot of good. I’m intrigued by why you think history would have played out better without the US. (Also when you say destroy the US, do you mean the population that comprises it or the geopolitical structure of the sovereign state?)
The colonies that comprise the United States as a country should not have existed and the people who have been in charge since it was founded should give the land back.
I can’t say for sure what would happen in an alternate universe where colonialism never happened, or wherever among any large number of dominoes that went down before that you’d want to started, but that was a moral wrong. And, like, specifically, I’m riffing off the “sending assassins to murder someone leading a genocide” thing. We’ve done and are still passively doing a lot of those.
I agree it was a moral wrong. But it also can’t be undone. The land can’t be given back. To who and what would that mean? What would happen to the people living here now?
Yeah and, who’s gonna glass the shit out of brown countries and assassinate or coup d’etat their democratically elected leaders for trying to install social programs. I mean if the US never committed atrocities in Guatemala over bananas the whole world would be communist red
I hope Dorothy realizes Raidah was just being mean to be mean. Also Its probably better that Dorothy didn’t respond to Raidah. Nothing she said would have fazed her Raidah has clearly decided she doesn’t respect Dotty and nothing said would convinced her otherwise
Dotty just focus on her civic engagement meeting she is doing far more good then Raidah is at her “breakfast of champions”
Yes. Raidah is just pushing a button that’s always worked before with people like Dorothy. The best response is to show that the button is broken. Brace for an extinction burst, but stick to the plan.
2: That’s also kinda not the point. “Funding terrorists to do Imperialist Shit on the USA’s behalf” is generally considered a bad thing to do, regardless of the legality of the actions.
Dorothy isn’t really concerned about the legal specifics of a “War Crime”. To her, a War Crime represents anything that a President would be expected and/or required to do as part of the job that she finds ammoral.
i mean, someone under her might but wouldn’t be surprised if ppl did things without her knowledge as opposed to actively dealing with a wartime situation. Tho even being a local senator/governor would be pretty impressive
or maybe the us will be in such a clusterfuck there’s other issues like the pandemic 20x worse (..and ending up committing biological warfare/eugenics after an attempt to implement better healthcare)
Look, someone is going to be a head of state. Would you rather it be YOU, someone who cares, to make those decisions or someone who doesn’t care or is actively malicious?
It’s one thing to say “It’s sad but necessary for the switch to be flipped in order to save the most possible lives”.
It’s another thing to be the one standing there needing to flip the switch themselves.
Yes, it was better that Obama was President over McCain and Romney. Obama was less of a mass-murdering monster than those two would have been.
But how much comfort do you think that notion brought to Obama when he was presented with targets and had to decide how many innocent civilians would need to die?
There’s definitely a valid “I don’t want to have to make those decisions” argument, but that seems very different from Raidah’s remark or much of the tone around here, which is more just “Presidents are evil. Dorothy shouldn’t be one because she’d have to be evil.”
You’re assuming facts that are not in evidence. There’s no way to say with certainty exactly what McCain would have done, but we have ample evidence of the damage Obama did. Support for the Libyan coup not only wrecked that country, it unleashed a flood of weapons that helped destabilize the entire region. In Syria, he didn’t even bother to ask Congress for authorization before invading a nation that posed no threat to the US. He started our support for Saudi butchery in Yemen, a policy no one seems to be able to change, even though pulling the plug should be a no-brainer. Oh, and don’t forget the ongoing bungling in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the drone wars with zero oversight. If Obama ever lost much sleep over any of this, I haven’t seen much evidence of it.
Obviously we can’t say exactly what McCain would have done, but he wasn’t exactly pretending to be a dove when he joked about bombing Iran during his campaign.
McCain was a full-throated supporter of the Iraq war, was one of the idiots-or-liars who said we’d be greeted as liberators, and one of his campaign promises was to somehow “win the Iraq war” by the end of his first presidency.
I think its fucking safe to say that McCain would not have been a less hawkish president than Obama was.
I’m probably gonna be asking this a lot considering it looks like we’re getting into the breakfast date, but what the fuck does Walky get out of this? Popularity? Connections? What does that even mean to him really? Jennifer is easily the best connection Raidah has and he already has stronger ties to Jen than she does. He’s also part of a significantly larger friend group more tangentially connected to a billionaire heiress than Raidah could ever wish to be, if we really want to call in relationships. What does this do for him?
or maybe raidah was being snippy to ‘get it out of her system’ before destroying walky. but humilating him and inadvertently sabotaging him and lucy’s relationship would be something but i imagine she’d be civil or so considering she was the one that invited as opposed to Jennifer pity-asking the group to include them
Even if Walky’s family is ‘well off’ , I imagine sal’s as infamous as asher, even if he’s supposedly stepping away from the family business so i can’t imagine it working out long term if only because walky would be too uncomfortable to hang out with asher even more even in a group section
Lucy definitely wants to go.
Presumably Walky wants to stay cool with Jennifer, even if she’s decided to go back to mean girl bullshit.
He may not be the most socially aware guy [citation needed] but is, like, scores free gay pizza smart and can probably figure out that blowing off the invitation without something the two can accept isn’t a great idea.
Since Raidah opened by shitting on the other of the probable top 3 most important woman in his life that may change, who knows.
I guess I don’t understand this “popularity” thing. It’s a group of four people. One of which is actually just nothing. Most known for dating a way more interesting character in a flashback and apparently showing Sarah his bare ass. Raidah still hangs with a girl who is okay throwing out the r-word. These are the people Lucy is marking out for???
The way i see it Radiah likes to think she’s gathering the future ruling class but there’s a limit on just who would follow her so she tries to make it seem like an exclusive privilege. Jennifer thinks of it as popularity through the high-school mean girl lens and Lucy who doesnt really know what popularity is thinks their popular because its the crowd Jennifer is now with.
These particular kind of “cool” people get that designation by establishing a pecking order. They get to be on top, and everyone else gets judged. Radiah is a natural expert at this.
Lucy is convinced that college is a great time to finally win the approval of these kinds of people. She hasn’t figured out yet that the winning move is not to play.
Well the girl who uses the r-word hasn’t been seen since the flashback to Halloween, so she may well not be there. It’s her, Carl, Asher and Jennifer that Lucy wants to go to breakfast with.
Maybe I haven’t articulated this well. It’s not just that we the audience know the reality of Raidah’s group that the cast don’t. I’m asking how are they actually popular?
You can’t just be popular as a concept. Other people have to perceive you, know you, like you. I’m asking how? None of them seem particularly known or active in the local community. Is Raidah a big shot on campus despite us never seeing or hearing of any of her accomplishments? They’re just a small group of people. Compared to the exploits of the main cast they get blown out the water. Becky alone would crush all of them. (She was a campaign manager/intern for latest former congresswoman and involved in two separate high profile kidnapping events that would at least make the local news.) Raidah is known for what exactly? She’s done what? Asher is widely known for?…Being a hot guy who smokes? I guess that puts him on par with Sal. I really think Jennifer is hard carrying the group right now. She’s rich and well known among people who actually matter.
Lucy seems to be impressed by them, but how did that happen? What does she know Raidah’s group from or is it just by their association with Jennifer who she idolizes?
I agree with you. Popular is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is Lucy, who desperately want to be part of a group of friends who appreciate her. She tried to have that on her dorm, and everyone sort of walk over her and take her for granted. Billy has constantly been ditching her to hang with others, including Raidah and Asher. For Lucy, that’s all that popularity is: it’s people wanting to hang out with you.
The sad part is that Lucy is a much better person than Raidah and co. Maybe she’s a little too eager, but that’s not so bad. She’d probably be much happier in Read Hall.
This, Lucy doesn’t have much experience with popularity. she considers Radiahs group popular because Jennifer is a part of it and she still thinks of Jennifer as a popular girl but we the audience know her view is biased and clouded by her own desire to find a group. The sad part is she could probably have that in walkys real friend group once they get to know her better but in her mind because Jennifer left them, their not the popular kids.
For one thing, pleasing Lucy. She was excited to be included in a group of popular people. I’m assuming she was never popular, possibly an outcast in high school.
So if Dorothy gives up on electoralism and has a bit of a menty b is she going to become the next campus vigilante but, like, exclusively beat up nazis?
I wonder if Walky is going to bring up what Raidah said to Dorothy once everybody is at the table. I’m never clear exactly what he has the balls to do but I’m certain he has the lack of tact to blurt out something that’s clearly going to stick with him like that.
I’d guess she’d be more likely to just do all the stuff she’s denied herself over the years. So much of her version of staying electable was denying herself anything that could be used against her in the future tabloids. It would be great if Walky did call Radiah out at the table. Her plan was to love bomb him with Carl so he actually might get away with more there then confronting her in private.
As if I really didn’t understand
That I was just another part of their plan
I went off looking for the promise
Believing in the Motherland
And from the comfort of a dreamer’s bed
And the safety of my own head
I went on speaking of the future
While other people fought and bled
The kid I was when I first left home
Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own
But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite as sweet
When the truth was known
I have prayed For America
I was made For America
It’s in my blood and in my bones…
They commit war crimes inside our own country whenever they want to stop a protest by getting cops to tear gass people.
Also, the only thing the two party system seemed to ever unanimously agree on from time to time is war profiteering. We could be spending more tax payer money on infrastructure or improving social net programs but it seems like congress and most presidential administration feel like it’s a better idea to put all our eggs into one basket by helping the military industrial complex improve their stock so the can sell weapons abroad. Plus the only time they probably make the “we should be putting the money into our own nation instead” Is when they probably want to increase the police budget so they can arm themselves to the teeth or start project like “Cop City” in Georgia.
Anyway I’m really liking this new character arc for Dorothy, like what the job she wants actually entails doing and what she might become.
They also agree that rich people should be rewarded for causing financial crises and that strikes are bad, and if towns get toxic spills, well, that’s just the cost of propping up big business.
Police are controlled by the municipality, the President has no say in it. Occasionally the National Guard comes into play when putting down protests, but it’s comparatively rare. If you want to complain about cops, look to the mayor and city council.
Congress on the other hand which Dorothy might haft to become a part of as a way to claw her way up to the Whitehouse. Also past presidents haven’t help with the corrupt policing if you look at most of them. You don’t get to call yourself the most powerful person in the free world and tell me you don’t have atleast a little bit of influence or sway with domestic issues like this.
Dorothy, would you be okay with being a LESS war-crimey president than average? I mean Bush2 set that bar pretty high, I’m pretty sure you can limbo under it.
That sounds like a rationalization. I suspect it’s not the true reason. My guess is that she likes it here, and she doesn’t want to go anymore. But that doesn’t feel like a good enough reason, so she made up another reason that sounds noble.
There’s a game one of my friends recommended that I love.
Frostpunk.
In it, you have linited time and resources and the weather is constantly getting worse and worse. If you want to make sure everyone survives, you need to be smart. But, if you’re too slow in getting everything done, the game also forces you to adopt certain… policies which makes things easier.
And those policies can save the life of the colony.
But it’s a steady slide towards being a monster.
It’s a game that genuinely makes it hard to be a good person.
Even in the best of times, you’ll still need to send people out into subzero temperatures to scavenge without any protections. But you can avoid the slide to demagogue if you’re smart enough. Careful enough. Think far enough ahead.
That’s how I kinda view international politics in a way.
Dorothy doesn’t HAVE to compromise her morals to that level. But it’ll be a damn lot harder to make anything work. And if your morality is preventing you from saving lives… well, you just have to be smarter, work harder… or be more ruthless.
It’s always your choice. But that doesn’t mean there’s always a good choice.
A lot of people here seem to think the only way to achieve anything is by being the president which is a take
I’d say building solidarity, activism, becoming all the other kinds of politicians that aren’t president. There’s a lot of roles out there.
But if you do think the presidency is the way to go, please at least understand that the war crimes have victims, people suffering. Like if you think it’s important to swallow a tough pill, at least be honest about who suffers in that scenario.
Someone having to die doesn’t actually mean you didn’t kill someone.
(Also maybe question the idea that someone “had to die”)
Oh I totally get thinking about the story, just some of the comments describing necessary evils without sounding like they understand that still means evil happened.
Your probably right about most not thinking that 😊
Agreed. I wouldn’t trust anyone whose aim is to be PM (cos I know how politics in aus works and what it takes to be a good PM) but there are a lot of politicians, particularly back benchers, non labour/liberal parties who do more good through their balance against the two party system
Any political career, especially on the national stage is going to involve moral compromise. “Being the one extra vote that stops something horrible” is as much a fantasy as not checking the war crimes checkbox would be.
Something something if you aren’t a liberal by twenty, you have no heart, if you aren’t blaming people to your left criticizing politicians for the growing rise of fascism by 30, you have no brain?
A lot of people in these comments seem to think we still need to maintain the current corrupt system at all, even though it’s almost entirely owned by and benefits the rich and the big corporations. If we could get enough of the working-class on board, we could get rid of this system and replace it with one that actually benefits the workers. Sadly there’s still a lot of people in this country who think capitalism is good and communism is bad.
If you’ve got a workable plan to achieve that, I’m all on board. Right now though, a sizeable part of the white working class seems to be down with fascism and I don’t see a way to change that, so I’m all for maintaining the current system with all its problems rather than descending into full blown authoritarianism.
^ That. It’s all well and good to talk about plans for future systems but until there’s a viable plan to achieve said system and it is put in place, we gotta pick the least awful options for our current system.
^ And speaking of viable plans, political or literal revolutions by the hands of the common people are mostly a fantasy. You can have the People(TM) want to overturn the current system of incentives all they want. It only happens if the army lets you.
The US has a stable military. It has popular support – one of the fight Right-leaning institutions to have that honor -, and one of the greatest beneficiaries of the current system, by design.
If you push them, they are not going to choose the left. You’d flood the ranks with left-leaning recruits, who’d need to distinguish themselves in the war crime factory enough to gain ranking positions before you could change that. It ain’t gonna happen. Things Can be changed, but that route’s been closed since before we were born.
It would be far, far easier to overturn the current system by working within the system than by violent revolution. If you had the massive popular support needed to overwhelm the military, you’d easily have enough to control elections and rewrite the Constitution.
That’s not going to happen either, since that support doesn’t exist, but it’s less of a fantasy than some kind of revolution.
And even if you manage all that, one of the popular (literally founding) myths of this country is that what comes after a revolution is always better. This is not supported by the historical record.
Case in point: A left-right divide on a revolution of any kind is far too naive and simplistic. Technocrats and nimbys vote Democrat for economic reasons, aren’t all that bothered by the plights of the poor, and while they aren’t representative of the west coast, they are in charge. The common people who live in those states can’t afford to arm themselves en masse thanks to what they’ve done to the cost of living. If you want a purely socialist revolution, but you don’t have California, you might as well just give up right there.
Instead, a revolution would most likely involve groups opposed to the federal government from all over the spectrum. Nevada’s always been pretty upset about how most of their state is federal land, and they have quite a few military installations, so that’s a start, if you don’t mind getting the natives displaced again. Other states who got beef with the feds mostly vote Republican though.
Then there’s the political groups who would jump on the bandwagon if you had shown any sign of success. You would be pretty happy with Black Lives Matter, or LGBT groups throwing in with you, and maybe you’re okay with the communists and antifa, but what about the religious wingnuts? Libertarians? Anarchists? The NRA? You would only have the losing options of either shooting each other instead of the establishment people, Or giving some or all of those a seat at the table after you’ve won. Good luck building a better world out of that mess.
And even leaving all that aside, if we did somehow manage a socialist ideological revolution, in any armed conflict, especially a non-conventional civil one, there’s a strong tendency for the more ruthless to rise to the top. The pacifist voices inherently are left out and those using nastier more effective tactics tend to win.
So, assuming the miracle occurs and this revolution overthrows the US government, the war criminals in the revolutionary army are going to be the ones seizing power and they’re very likely not going to let go once they’ve got it. “To preserve the revolution”, of course.
Saw the last panel as preview ~6 months ago, and I wasn’t even close to guessing correctly why until yesterday. And Becky hinted at it a few strips ago.
Also, it’s a silly goal. Like one she had as a child and never thought it through. She’s probably used to people reacting to it being a childish plan, but she has a lot of practice reassuring herself about that (eg: “It’s good to have goals.”) I don’t think she’s too intellectually honest to swallow at least some of her own bullshit.
Thought about this overnight. Dorothy’s struggle with her cognitive dissonance (not just about the role of a president) reminds me a lot of losing my religion. She has beliefs about herself, like she knows what to do in any situation, knows what’s best for other people, is charismatic, and a natural leader. And she keeps seeing those beliefs not be backed by real world evidence. That makes her feel bad about herself, so she puts a lot of effort into proving her beliefs true, which they aren’t, so she often gets something else to feel bad about.
Her realizing that she’s ordinary would be so freeing. She doesn’t have to build her life around a goal that 20+ years in the future she’ll get to decide what’s best for everyone (because the president doesn’t even do that, that’s a child’s understanding of the presidency).
Extremely disappointed in Walky. Way to let some asshole you barely know spew vitriol over one of your closest friends.
If this storyline doesn’t end with Walky finally waking up, smelling the roses and doing a mic drop on Raidah like he did on his mom, I’m going to lose a lot of the respect his bravery against Linda earned from me.
I Think this might be the Walky equivalent of Joyce occasionally still speaking bible misogyny despite not wanting to. It’s hard to fully shake off your upbringing all at once and Walky was taught to be a good obedient boy who followed the assertive authority in the room. Radiah is pretty much a stand in for Linda. It’s disappointing and im hoping he still finds a way to show back bone but its also understandable.
I’m a little worried the overall thrust of Dorothy’s plot arc is “Participating in American politics at a high level through standard channels is inherently evil. Her desire to ‘do the unglamorous work’ is well intentioned but misguided and leads to creepy consequences.”
I’m not sure that’s her arc as a whole, just some things she’s going to have to overcome. These are pretty normal things for someone like her to have to face at some point.
Most people who want to be something as a young adult aren’t really 100% prepared for the harsh realities of it – SO MANY people get very disappointed when they learn what testing games actually entails – and a lot of people do some dumb shit in college they would not do later in adulthood.
Dorothy needs to be challenged about the WHY of her goal. Roz wants to be President/a politician because she wants to help women’s rights at all costs. Dorothy wants to be President because she wants to be the highest office in the land.
I personally see it as a reflection of the increasing disillusionment young people have towards the presidency and way that politics unfold. Her ambitions were more pure when the comic started because of the time, but as the real world unfolded the ambition took on more of a naivety steeped in a lack of critical thought. The comic can’t really elaborate as much as would be needed to be for a better analysis because that would date it a little too much.
Wanting to go into politics and aiming for a place of influence isn’t bad, but Dorothy has never been very critical or reflective about her desire to be president and it’s idealises it, which can be a problem.
at least it’s not some thriller movie to where she’d be ‘radicalized’ to the point she’d be a ‘terrorist’/secretly assassinating some ppl she deems bad
Mostly, Dorothy’s entire personality is about never wanting to compromise on anything she deems important, like her goals, her morals, or her achievements, even if it’s bad for her health, or somebody else could do it better, or she has no dog in the fight.
I feel like pretty much the only way Dorothy could not-become-President without it being a huge disappointment is if she takes up some cause that gives her more freedom to to good with fewer compromises, and that might be what Willis is leaning into: “I have a better idea than President, I’m going to [insert new, badass thing here]”.
The best/worst thing about Raidah’s posturing is that I fucking guarantee you, I know in my bones, if the Keeners had money and status? If they had connections and charisma, even if Dotty was still the same? Raidah would be inviting her to breakfast all smiles, preparing a mental strategy on how to get this clearly going-places gold mine of a person away from Joyce and into a position to benefit Raidah.
Dorothy would not be asked “will you sign off on our troops/police committing humans rights violations”, she’d be asked “will you allow our brave boys to uphold freedom and traditional values?”
I’m glad that even she is acknowledging in the final panel that it’s magical thinking to believe that these choices come pre-labeled as evil/good
That’s how it would be framed when trying to build public support. Not to the President when she’s making the decisions. Treaty obligations. Economic disruptions. Balance between risks to our troops and to civilians.
None of these decisions are simple and easy. If it’s easy, it doesn’t get to the President.
Recent example: Honor Trump’s deal and withdraw from Afghanistan, knowing the Taliban will take over and innocents will suffer or continue the occupation indefinitely, making innocents suffer more directly?
With the funding thing, sometimes the choice is basically the lesser of two evils and there is no “good” choice. You can’t even just say that you will just stay out of it and do nothing, as that choice has consequences on people’s lives too (start of WW2 for example). Some stuff in history is also painted as a simple black or white answer when it was a lot more complex and nuanced at the time, especially if they were lacking information or on a wartime setting. Continuing on the WW2 examples, things like the atomic bombing of Japan or the internment of people is criticized now. The choice to not do those things could have also resulted in bad consequences, such as an island to island land war fight in Japan, or mass attacks in the streets against people that looked like Japanese citizens (not that it didn’t happen anyway, but how people react to those they perceive as different even without blaming them for starting a war, I could see it being a lot worse). Things also get a lot more complicated when you are dealing with the public (mass hysteria anyone) and posturing between other countries (Russia wanting to get involved in the war with Japan). You might also want to do the right thing (say let Jewish refugees into the country to avoid death) but the general public isn’t behind you and will revolt (being in an economic depression and worrying about them stealing jobs and resources that they want used on themselves).
WW2? Yes. The Nazis weren’t fine and dandy and suddenly became evil because holocaust, they were always a party that rose to power promising genocide, and then got together with the USSR to invade and partition Poland between them.
I don’t use Chamberlaining as an insult because he couldn’t see his future, I use it because his present was already a shitshow.
In the same vein, the time to hit Russia (and far harder than we’ve been hitting them) was when it looked sideways at Crimea.
If we’d hit Russia then, we would have had to hit them. Militarily. US war with Russia, which brings us far to close to the unthinkable.
There wasn’t the broad consensus in that situation to impose effective sanctions and those likely wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Ukainian forces at the time were nowhere near ready or capable of fighting a war to retake Crimea. What we did do at the time was start training the Ukrainian military and arming them to a limited extent. That almost certainly made a huge difference when Russia invaded the rest of the country.
With South Ossetia too, we needed an option that wasn’t a straight out start WWIII.
Dorothy’s big thing has always seemed to be needing to be needed. Being President always seemed to me like it was an extension of that in her mind.
The problem is that despite her efforts to make herself useful and needed, it doesn’t tend to end up that way. In her appearance in a different version of the Walkyverse, this ultimately got really, really bad for her. This universe doesn’t really seem to be going better.
It’s honestly pretty sad. Dorothy is none of her best friends best friend.
I think her seeming fixation on being the mom friend and the caretaker is honestly the biggest problem. She positions herself above her peers by setting up as ‘the mom friend’, and so she does not allow herself vulnerability or any confiding, she never shows her upset or asks for support or help. She doesn’t do anything with her supposed friends, only for them, and never lets them do anything with or for her. It must be super lonely, but it’s how she’s carefully and consciously set up all her relationships.
When does she get to have fun?! And with whom?!! Like, she just masturbated with Joyce without actually enjoying herself, also did a load of laundry, and damaged a dryer in frustration…
It’s no wonder the poor kid is so wound up. She’s gotta find some sort of outlet for pure relaxation, instead of burning her candle at both ends. And also in the middle. And the candle is in an oven as well. And the oven is in a burning building. On the sun.
Chin up, Dorothy; all you have to do, upon being elected to the highest office in the nation, is completely dismantle the entire military-industrial complex, defund the military, and negotiate a stable peace with all the US’s various international rivals, all while navigating a political environment that’s utterly hostile to those policies, and avoiding any revolutions, coups, or civil wars that might arise in response to such an extreme change. Also, you’re probably going to need to do something about climate change and the ongoing legacy/practice of colonialism and poverty and whatever incidental shit you promised your base to get them to vote for you. Easy!
Just make sure that if you want to dismantle the intelligence compllex you stay out of any convertibles.
(Please note, comment section (and also the FBI), this is dark humor, not an actual thing I definitely believe. I wouldn’t be surprised, but I do not have a serious belief.)
Citizen I’m appalled by the suggestion that the intelligence community could ever have been party to the assassination of a President. Just appalled. I’m putting this in your file at L—whoops oh shit.
Yeah, I was going to say. Even if we weren’t conquered ourselves immediately, allowing those rivals to dominate the rest of the world, isolate us and cut us off from international trade would be devastating enough.
I mean, the above description will be followed by the invasion of Tawain and dozens of other countries. The US military threat isn’t 100% useless to global peace. Just like 90%.
I’d say far more than that. That threat keeps any of the potential big players from making a move. It doesn’t shut down small conflicts and in fact can create them, but it has kept any large scale conflicts from breaking out. The withdrawal of that threat would destabilize many regions of the world.
Oh, blah blah blah. Fix one thing without fucking anything else up and you can be counted as one of the top ten presidents in the nation’s history. It’s not that much to ask, and nobody reasonable expects one person to solve every individual problem solo.
If only the American people were educated properly on how the government actually works, instead of being trained to start ignoring it after kindergarten.
I dont know about everywhere, but in OR 4th grade is state/native American history [including a week on just the trail of tears], 8th grade is American history as a whole and one of our exams was to take a practice citizenship test, and in high school you had to take a form of American history and world history. We were taught to start ignoring it half way through highschool whenever one was sledgehammered with the catastrophic news cycle and messages of partisan politics and doom.
I’m enjoying Dorothy’s current arc. She holds herself up to high standards; she’s the go-getter, the solid friend, the good student, the emotionally healthy one, the taker of the high road. She’s under a lot of self-made pressure. And it’s becoming too much.
If she didn’t wanna get kidnapped, she shouldn’t have been defenseless at the time. Every responsible American needs a machine gun, to prevent this sort of thing.
All due respect, but I don’t think these kinds of sarcastic comments really add anything worthwhile to the conversation, they’re just going to rile people up.
With equal respect, people seem to get riled up no matter what I say, and if somebody’s feeling personally harmed by a sarcastic comment about Dorothy with a machine gun, that’s not on me to manage.
Only sometimes, Dotty, only sometimes. I relate. Also, I am already future relating to the moments sometime when she realizes she was too self-aware about some things and not self-aware enough about others…
I had a feeling this would be Dorothy’s reaction. This arc rules.
It is a little sad when the fictional teens have more of a backbone about saying that American imperialism is evil and every President and major party since at least WWII but honestly since the Banana Wars has perpetrated evil than a lot of their audience, tho.
So… How is Biden a war criminal exactly? Last I checked he retreated from Afghanistan and supplying weapons to a country that is under attack is allowed by the UN charter. Besides: war crimes are very clearly defined. Not every wrongfull death by military action is a wat crime.
You can’t really be a politician in this country and not have some blood on your hands, as you’re actively engaging in a political system that is at all times responsible for some amount of violence or atrocity somewhere in the world.
And insisting on a legalist definition of war crime is deliberately missing the broader issue of imperialist power that perpetuates and justifies violence.
I dislike him because he’s a racist old codger who makes promises he refuses to keep, has maintained Trump-era policies, and presides over a party that has no real solutions and thinks they can slide to victory on the benefit of not being Trump.
“Some dude told us we should blow up a civilian car. We did it without bothering to check if it was true, because lol at the notion that we actually care. In fact, we not-care so much that if the same dude tolds us to blow up another civilian car, we’d totally do it again.” is not the argument for “not a war criminal” you seem to think it is.
I’m sure that’s an exact quote or at least close paraphrase that accurately summarizes the intelligence used for the strike and Biden’s reaction to it.
I don’t know waht to tell you. If a source tells you to blow up a civilian vehicle because there’s definitely bad guys in there, you blow up that vehicle and it turns there weren’t, and you throw a press conference where you say that you still fully trust that source and that the operation “wasn’t a complete failure” (even though the only thing it did was kill innocents, children included), those are clear signs that:
You can spin the US however you want, call us an international fast food corporation if you want to, we’re a globe spanning empire greased with the blood of untold thousands. And globe spanning empires do terrible things and so do the people who lead them, and not always by necessity.
Paul Krugman often points out that if you look at what the money is spent on, the US Federal Government is just an insurance company that also has an army. Everything else is small change.
It’s not just globe-spanning empires that do terrible things. They do them on a larger scale, because they span the globe, but regional powers do terrible things within their scope. And smaller nations do terrible things within theirs.
Foreign policy is a horrible game, played for the highest stakes. Everyone’s cheating and you can’t even opt out.
I disagree that this is bullshit. the one thing to not do is to consider it a fatality. If this is truly inevitable, what even is the point. That kind of mentality is just setting yourself up to give up.
Like seriously, if the reason because we can’t get a decent leader is because all the decent people have decided that it’s impossible to be leader without being indecent, then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and those are always stupid and self-defeating. Nobody said it was going to be easy. But how do you know if you at least do’nt try.
this is the reason I call Bull on Raidah. Not because she is wrong about previous presidents, but because she present it as a fatality that can be changed. It’s just setting things up for things to remain the same. That kind of mentality is part of what things stagnate.
Yes. That is EXACTLY why I keep saying that Dorothy needs to pursue her dream and become President. Far too many people want to get into power for all the wrong reasons; the people who actually be GOOD Presidents tend to decline the role because of what they fear the role may call upon them to do (and make no mistake, there WILL be hard choices where you will need to do evil in order to serve a greater good), but all the same, if you don’t have these people in power, then the ones who are left will be all too happy to abuse their position for their own ends.
To make it short, if all the people who are strongly against being war war criminal refuse to become president, all we are left with are candidate who are ready to become war criminal.
Congratulation, Raidah, you get to remain right. Cause that what matter, right?
Sorry Dotty but right now? Between the war in Ukraine and China gearing up for conquering Taiwan? Yeah there would be war crimes in your presidency whether you like it or not but that’s just part of being human.
I’m sorry but what? Saying it’s not intending to invade Taiwan is fair enough but China is legitimately expanding it’s fleet, including amphibious warfare ships.
China would very much like to invade Taiwan. That it’s almost certainly not going to do so is because it knows the US would act to prevent it.
Not because of the lofty ideals we’d justify it with, but because it’s inline with our imperialist interests. Countering our closest rival’s imperialist interests.
This is college, Dorothy. Was your dream just a child’s dream? You should be just happy to left it besides Santa and other things from your childhood. If it was something more, you should not let the mob lawyers of this world discourage you and get their happy-to-be-war-criminals elected. If you discover that you are over-reaching, good for you, but just don’t eat bullshit.
I honestly think it was a child’s dream. Have we ever heard her talk about WHY she wants to be the president? What policies she wants to implement? Or is she just ambitious and the presidency seemed prestigious. And she didn’t leave it behind with Santa because having ambitions and goals was grown-up and good.
but raidiah will probably be a defense attorney for criminals or big business so shes going to have no room to talk about anything…. just realize shes being a bongo and leave it there
America has been involved in police actions, incursions, retaliatory strikes, and countless other activities that have resulted in American military personnel being shipped home in flag-draped caskets, but when was the last time we were participants in an honest-to-goodness declared WAR? So if there haven’t been any wars, it’s only logical that you can’t have war criminals.
And Fox News truly is “fair and balanced”, the Alliance Defending Freedom does exactly that, Nazis are socialists, and North Korea is DEFINITELY democractic.
Okay but Nazis ARE Socialists. National Socialists, it’s in the name. Benito Mussolini was a socialist who became disillusioned and created Fascism as an evolution of Socialism. There are obviously differences between Nazis and Communists, like how Nazis is focused on the internal society while Communism wants to spread it to everyone but that just makes them two sides of the same coin. They even treated the “Enemy” the same way, using cattle-wagons to transport them to death/work camps.
do you know why the “poem” goes “first they came for the socialists”? BECAUSE NAZIS CAME FOR THE SOCIALISTS. It’s the first dang line. It’s absolutely vile for you to conflate the victims with their oppressors. Martin Niemöller coined the oft-recited line after becoming disillusioned with Nazis… because he at first supported them because he was a rightwing hardliner who was happy to see the lefties go. But then the Nazis came after more and more demographics and Marty’s like “well okay maybe it was a bad idea to go after the lefties even though I hated those guys.”
Yeah, “Socialist” was in the name of the party, but only to be populist. It’s like how North Korea isn’t actually democratic despite its full official name! It’s like how Fox News isn’t actually news! (both examples listed above by somebody else.)
And Mussolini was KICKED OUT of his Socialist group for being a fascist asshole, that’s how Socialist he was.
What the actual fuck. What the actual actual fuck.
Do you know WHY they came for the socialists? Because Communist terrorism contributed to the political success of the Nazi Party. People supported them Because Commies were attacking them.
What the actual fuck? I’m from Poland, FUCKING MILLIONS of people died here as Nazis and Commies fought this way and that way. There is this photo from our Day of Independence with both Nazi and Soviet imagery crossed out. The fuck is that my country suffered severely under BOTH and so we think BOTH should fight right off.
Yeah I might have gone Too far with Socialists. Western Socialists that is. But my country’s experience with this whole tree of ideologies has been thoroughly traumatizing and filled with mass graves so please excuse me for a knee-jerk reaction.
I guess we should make clear definitions. Social programs, taxes etc. All good. Seizing means of production and excessive government interventions. HOLD RIGHT THERE!
“Mussolini was kicked out”. Yeeeah, Protestants were kicked out of the Western Christian Church and… I don’t even know how it went down with Shia and Sunni but the bottom line is that a heretic is still a part of the ideology.
[eyeroll] Way to misunderstand. My point is that the greatest hatred is always between two groups that have only small ideological differences, like Protestants and Catholics, Shia and Sunni etc.
I’m sorry, did you just hear Willis had Jewish friends and tell him to ask them about Palestine as some sort of ‘proof’ they’re Nazis?????????????? What the FUCK? I don’t have words for your antisemitism. I’m glad you’re gone.
I mean, she could just be the infamous president that never became a war criminal.
The more power you wield, the easier it is to hurt someone with it. I guess Raidah is just fine with being in positions where she can just avoid any accountability.
I’m of two minds on this. Raidah was out of line, but she’s right. And it goes back to something that Harry Truman had on his desk- “The Buck Stops Here.” As the leader of a country, you are in some way responsible for everything that country does. I would argue that even if Dorothy becomes President and, say, abolishes the military, she would still be responsible for, for example, unjust tax laws that fail to sufficiently tax the rich and recompensate the poor. Or for an immigration policy that hurts folks by not unilaterally allowing everyone into the country (I’m not even talking about abuses of the system perpetrated recently by multiple administrations. I’m talking about just having a process by which some people can be denied access to the country, making it so that they can’t pursue better jobs, or see their loved ones, etc. That’s harm done. It counts)
Now, this is an absolutely ridiculous, unfair standard. In essence, I’m blaming the President that we don’t live in a utopia. But it’s true on the face of it that being a president requires doing harm. Even if you do good to countless others, the machinations of government will inflict harm. And if you hold to the absolute moral standard of “take no action that will inflict harm”, being President at all violates that standard (And we all do. We live in a society. But a President does so worse than just about anyone else)
Disclaimer: the above is mostly my anxiety talking, and not necessarily consistent with actual ethics as practiced by philosophers. I’m just rambling.
But, at the same time, to use another quote, “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.” If we accept that something like the office of the president is necessary (that’s not a given, but I *do* believe a centralized government is necessary), then it’s better that someone like Dorothy have it than most other folks. She would do *less* harm than an equivalent. And that’s important.
TL;DR- the office of the president is inherently harmful. Dorothy would probably do less harm than most in the office. We live in a society.
Though the POTUS CAN (and should) make pushes for stuff like tax law and immigration policy, that’s mostly the House/Congress job. If, e.g., Biden made public announcements about how he wanted higher taxes on the top brackets (and acted accordingly within reason, of course – none of this “I totally support right to abortion, but also let me just appoint this anti-choice judge” bullshit) but H/C went “nah, fam”, I don’t think it’d be fair to lay “unfair tax laws” at Biden’s feet, unless you want the POTUS to just executive order the other two powers away.
I mean, I totally said it’s completely unfair to. I’m blaming every president ever for not magically ending the harm the US Government does. Even though Congress is responsible, even though checks and balances are necessary. Because the President’s job is to enforce the laws. So, morally, they make the decision to direct the IRS to collect unfair taxes. They could say “I’m not going to enforce this law. It’s unjust and harms people.” Is that the right thing to do? No, of course not. It would cause far more problems than it solves. But it’s still a decision to inflict harm on people who don’t deserve it.
I admit, this is a “We live in a society” level take, but that’s the level Raidah reduced this conversation to.
Okay, so I’m sure your post is very informative and has a lot of very important politics stuff in it, but… I was scrolling up and my eyes immediately locked onto “Biden’s feet” and so I think maybe I should Log Off for the day. And probably stop reading the comments literally the second I wake up, after I spent the night doing Twelve-know-what in Final Fantasy.
Absolutely no shade toward you or anyone here, just… damn, my routine needs to be adjusted.
Being the president wouldn’t automatically make her a bad person, but it might make her unhappy. She might not be cut out for a position where she has to do harm.
… I don’t hope she keeps messing up. I hope that when she does mess up she learns it’s ok to mess up some, striving for hyper competence is going to burn her out.
Now I’m imagining the likelihood of Bernie Sanders committing a war crime if he became president. Seems very minimal but not out of the realm of possibility.
It’s almost 100%, because he sympathizes with dictators who pay lip service to his favorite economic theories. I mean, the guy was defending the bloody Cuban revolution and regime, for chrissakes. He would happily enable the “right” strongman.
Sanders would either do so or somehow manage to withdraw US military influence from around the world, which would lead to far more war crimes, even if it wasn’t the US committing them.
Within about a week of Sanders taking office he’d be despised by half of his fanbase for betraying their principles.
The deification of any political candidate is worrisome and I encourage those who think their favorite candidate (any of them) can do no wrong maybe ask themselves which marginalized groups they haven’t spent very much time listening to, because odds are there is at least one they’ve dismissed.
Disability issues, for example, tend to be overlooked a lot even in the most progressive circles, and that includes by favored candidates. :/
Good point. I’ll keep what you said in mind when analyzing them.
I’m getting my perspective shaken bit by bit when it comes to seeing politicians as infallible people. Voting just comes down to picking the lesser of two evils for left-identifying me.
It’s cool, and yeah absolutely, the system as it stands is ultimately “pick the least terrible option to minimize the amount of harm done.”
I will ultimately still vote for someone whom I know doesn’t pay enough attention to issues that directly affect me if the alternative is someone even worse. I just think it’s important to be aware of and open about where the “best available options” are still lacking, and hold them accountable, so we don’t grow complacent, and can hopefully continue to push for better.
Disability issues just aren’t seen as a national-level campaigning issue, as they resonate with a small proportion of the population. It’s more of an advocacy issue that has some champions in the House.
It’s a dumb, shallow criticism. You don’t have to commit war crimes to become president, and the fact that so many presidents cross ethical lines is due to the massive challenges and trade-offs of executing so much responsibility.
You might end up making some mistakes in office, but clearly Dorothy has vision and would want to do good, as well.
The only way to avoid consequential screw-ups is to flip burgers or make coffee drinks, where your consequences are too minor to register.
Being president seems like something she decided on when she was very young, and she hasn’t given a lot of thought to what it would actually be like or what would be required of her. She might not be cut out for those challenges and tradeoffs.
Yeah, I think it’s naive for anyone to think they can become president and do no harms.
All that said though, I’d rather someone who wants to do as little harm as possible take on the role than someone who is unconcerned (or unaware) of the harms they’d do. (Not a job I’d want though, heck no)
As an aside, a fascinating show that actually deals with this concept is Designated Survivor, if anyone here has seen that! Quality takes a dip in the 3rd season, but it’s a pretty good show!
The basic premise is: someone who never aspired to president ends up in that role because every other member of gov ahead of him in line is killed in an attack. So suddenly the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is president of the US. His character wrestles a lot with trying to avoid making choices that take human lives (and faces a lot of no-win situations where people are going to die no matter what he does).
Kind of a fascinating look at “what if someone tried to do better” and how even someone with the best intentions can end up making the very mistakes they’d wanted to avoid.
I guess Battlestar Galactica touches on this a bit too (the reboot) what with Rosalin suddenly becoming president…but that show has a lot of mysticism and scifi that kind of make it more removed from real US politics. But you do still see the evolution of this character from “schoolteacher and politician with good intentions” to “totally willing to enact a military dictatorship to get her way.”
“Quality takes a dip” is doing some serious work there, imo. That show straight up pulled a Sideshow Bob vs rakes in S3. I know they were trying to be all “the gritty realities of political campaigns”, but Kirkman just does a complete 180 in personality and morals. And yeah, the first two seasons were a bit “Mr Kirkman Goes to Washington”, but still.
Yeah, plus the sudden disappearance of multiple characters with zero explanation. 🙁
There were moments I liked in S3 but it really did suddenly feel like a different show. I honestly haven’t finished the last season yet because of all the changes and weirdness. It’s too bad because I was really enjoying the 1st 2 seasons, though I think ultimately season 1 ws the best.
I know piloting an unstoppable murder robot sounds evil, but let’s be real. The murderbot has already been built and set loose down town. There’s no stopping it now. And since somebody is going to pilot that thing, wouldn’t you rather the pilot be someone who promised to feel bad about all the murder they’re still going to do?
Not to mention that it is being used to fight other murder robots. Ukraine is fighting to a large extent thanks to American weapons. I, as someone from Ukraine’s neighbouring country, country which has Extensive experience with Russian Imperialism, have a lot of gratitude to America because it’s thanks to US that we can have our independence.
Pretty sure if they try it, we all die in nuclear fire. Like, it would save me the trouble of figuring out my own method, but I think others might have a problem with the whole “skeletons burnt into walls if you’re lucky” thing.
I think the prevailing thought here is, if you want good things to happen, you need to personally have a 39-step plan on how to do it perfectly, in a way that won’t inconvenience anyone. Dreams are legally actionable.
She totally has a plan like that in the works, guaranteed. It’s probably an incomplete and very dodgy plan, but she’s only 19, we forgive her.
Come to think of it, how long do Future President Courses usually last? Is it a four-year program, or…? Just trying to get an estimate on how old she’ll be before she even needs to start seriously considering any of this in like a short-term “this is happening soon” sort of way.
I’m glad that’s worked out well for you. I don’t mean to suggest that American imperialism can only ever do evil forever. It can, does, and will do good in the world. And opposing other imperial powers is part of that. But there’s also a lot of harm that it does and much of it is baked into the system. Even a very good president (as I think Dorothy will be) cannot halt most of that harm. I think Raidah is quite justified in being suspicious of anyone who aspires to that kind of position just in the promise that she plans to be one of the good ones.
Having been born in a US dictatorship, having met tortured people, being friends with orphans of the regime, and generally knowing the pain that is inflicted by the US’ authoritarian thumb, I can tell you: You should be looking at the storm cloud, not at the silver lining. Don’t excuse the horrors.
In your hypothetical scenario, I’d rather the next person who pilots that robot be someone who has figured out a way to stop the robot from killing any more people. By destroying that robot if necessary.
I would love to see the murder robot disassembled. I hope it won’t take bloody revolution to see it happen. Those sorts of revolutions run an elevated risk of installing brand new murder robots. I would like to see us build community centered systems of support that distance is from our dependence on state welfare and positively demonstrate a better alternative. But that is probably not a future I’ll see in my lifetime.
Also, may I assume from your avatar that you’re a … TROTskyist? (Sorry.)
And violent revolutions also have a tendency to sacrifice a lot of marginalized people as well (for example: disabled people and others less likely to be able to survive violence/harsh conditions). All idealist activists eventually learn there is no quick solution with minimal suffering to fixing the problems we face. Any choice, any path, is ultimately going to cost some people. :/
I certainly can’t pretend to have any good answers. But then again I don’t want to be president. Dorothy is a person with good intentions and anyone with good intentions who wants that kind of power eventually has to realize what having that kind of responsibility over so many lives entails.
Yeah, what’s with the pathetic, passive-aggressive little “terribly sorry”, as though we can’t all read basic English words, and discern all too readily that they’re being a shit.
“I don’t care about all that, and I already said as much. Ruth is hotter than Rachel to me, and that raw fact is my top priority between the two of them.”
Okay, they think Ruth is hotter than Rachel. How is that relevant to being worn out by geopolitics?
Also wasn’t that like a week ago, as part of a post explaining why they’re not interested in the overall Rachel/Ruth/Redemption Discourse? You’re being extremely snakey with this quote.
No. Uh-uh. you came at them right out the gate with your useless “terribly sorry” bullshit. You don’t get to claim you were wronged in this scenario. They expressed an emotion and you dredged up irrelevant nonsense from last week so you could take a cheap potshot. Nothing about this was necessary or even called for, and it’s certainly not a case of you being wronged. You started the entire thing.
Dorothy needs to talk to Sarah. I doubt she’d be all that supportive, but if she tells her what Raidah said Sarah would manage Dorothy’s campaign all the way to the White House out of sheer spite.
@Willis Probably an unreasonable request, but could you just delete this entire thread? It’s nothing but pissybaby mud slinging (including my own “contributions” and it’s not really relevant to the comic. I’m sorry for starting it.
We didn’t always have a president in this country, and there are other ways to run a country without the system like ours. Especially since the two major parties in this country are owned by the rich and the big corporations, who absolutely don’t want this system changed to benefit the working-class. Hopefully this leads to Dorothy realizing that she can help people better not by trying to become a president who somehow doesn’t commit war crimes, but instead by advocating for replacing the current right-wing capitalist system with one that actually helps the workers.
That might be a bit too far for someone who just uttered the phrase “liberal saint”. But regardless, she is clearly rethinking some things and I’m glad.
Eh, I didn’t know what socialism was when I was in college.
I mean, I also didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics outside of “these people acknowledge that climate change is a thing and aren’t actively trying to take away abortion rights so I guess I’ll vote for them and then forget about it for 2 years.”
I’d argue even college students who are very politically aware are still naive about a great many things. At that age it’s impossible to have a detailed enough understanding of the world to grasp every perspective and every harm, and in fact I’d argue those who do think they have all the answers are almost definitely ignorant of a certain amount of harms/issues.
(Not to just disparage younger people. I don’t think ANY of us have all the answers. The older I get the more I realize how much I likely still have to learn)
“We didn’t always have a president in this country”?
Sure, for less than a decade under the Articles of Confederation, which were abandoned in favor of our current Constitutional system because they proved unworkable.
I wasn’t, because that’s a stupid definition. The United States under the Articles was essentially the same country as under the Constitution. The same states, with direct continuity between the two.
Before 1492, while there were no “Presidents” there were many different societies with different systems, many of them with strong individual leaders by one name or another.
I’m not even sure WHY you’d define country as “a piece of land”. When a country’s borders change, is that no longer the same country? Is the Iroquois Confederacy the same country as the United States because the former used to be located in part of the latter’s current territory? Is Ukraine still the (part of the) USSR? Did the United States cease to exist when Texas seceded from Mexico?
Americans in the comments here are wild and i’m genuinely surprised the way people are defending the presidency. i know people are trained to love the country but i thought that kinda only worked on right wing people. do y’all know how the rest of world sees you? you know your government are like, the bad guys of the world, right? that millions of people are afraid of your government because they know people who’ve been killed or tortured by your government? you know what the CIA do, right? what do y’all learn in school?
I started to suspect something was wrong back in High School. As I got older, this questioning continued to grow. However, the programming didn’t stop because I didn’t see an alternative. Now I’m in a position where I know my programming is wrong, but it’s too deeply hardwired to change in meaningful ways. The ability to change myself has limits, and those limits move as you get older. I can rage against these patterns in my mind all I like, but it’s like throwing cheese against a brick wall. I gained some peace by trying to let it go. I’d rather be happy than right.
I still find myself in the “Raidah can go fuck herself” camp. Only assholes behave like that. And while I suffer no illusions as to the actions of my government, it takes a truly stunning amount of naivete and narcissism to sit back comfortably under the auspices *of* that government and be all “HERP A DERP WAR CRIMINALS” while doing absolutely fuck all *about* it. Unless you (the general “you” here) are actually prepared for armed revolution, all people like Raidah are doing is jerking off in public and expecting to be applauded for it.
So. Again,,unless you’re prepared to tear shit down and replace it with whatever your idea of ‘better’ is, this is what we’ve got. And someone is going to be running the show. C’est la vie.
Oddly fitting timing considering current Jimmy Carter news, but I still respect him more than most Presidents because of his direct, active until the end of his life, humanitarian work. Still a war criminal though…
As someone who managed to be a Dorothy through a state college from a state which no president has been elected… this line of thinking is also what eventually broke me.
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esprit de l’escalier kicking in in 3… 2… ?
I never knew that term. Thanks!
Never thought Dorothy as a politician would remind me of Walkyverse Robin, but this has the same vibe as her attempt to outlaw cancer.
Except Dorothy doesn’t have wacky cartoon hijinks on her side.
I mean Dorothy hasn’t tried wearing a sombrero. We can’t rule that out yet
And so another painful transformation begins. Like Joyce, it seems Dorothy will also suffer the collapse of a central part of her identity, based on lies she was fed as a child.
For Joyce, it was Evangelist motivations. For Dorothy, it’s her ultimate goal of becoming President, inspired by an over-idealized conception of politics she’s had since grade school.
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is deconsecrated…”
She should maybe adjust her goal to being a good Congresscritter. Mine rocks pretty hard, so it can be done.
Congresscritter! Upvoted. I’m not the only person who uses that.
I’m glad somebody cancels out mine, who is demonstrably evil.
I want somebody to cancel out both of my senators, Cruz and Coryn. One is pure evil, the other about 90%.
I mean arguably this is what college is for. To challenge, maybe even break your preconceptions and ideals as you educate yourself and form new ones. Trying, hopefully becoming a complete person.
I agree college is as much about learning to be a person as it is about learning math or science. Then again in many ways the process of growing as a person and the growing pain that comes with it never really ends (well, you know, until you do, but thus is life or … err… death as it were).
Her parents didn’t push her in this direction. They seemed to want her to do whatever makes her happy.
I’d love to know why she wants to be president.
This ‘you must be evil to be president’ nonsense is something I’d have thought Dorothy would have heard before. If you really think the government is so terrible, get involved with local government.
I think we’ve kind of seen why she wants to be president in how she treats her friends. Dorothy feels a compulsion to take care of everyone for them (even when they don’t need her to), and so her desire to be president is likely that but on the grandest scale. If I had to project a little bit onto her, I’d wager it’s partially because she was raised with so much support, gets the notion ingrained that ‘you can be anything you want to be with enough effort’, and what she wants to be is that person who takes care of everyone’s needs. She has the intellect and self-confidence to believe she can actually do that and can fix everything for everyone, but also the naive optimism to maybe know but not truly register that that… just can’t actually be done. That her dream is simply a childish fantasy no matter how much practical thought and effort she puts into trying to make it work.
This is pretty much my take as well.
Yup, agreed.
She really needs to go into the judiciary to fulfill that desire.
Probably because her interests civic-oriented and this is the most unique and unattainable job in the field. It’s about the thrill of achievement. Based on me having been a Dorothy until about 23 years of age.
Kinda important to remember Dorothy becoming disillusioned with becoming President is kind of a consequence of American politics going to pot in real life. At the start of the strip her dream was corny but didn’t have that bad implications. Same way as to how Robin’s storyline happened in 2008 and had to uh, go through some changes.
The start of 2008 was much, much later than the start of all US presidents needing to do at least a few horrible things no matter what. That started with George Washington. This would have been true regardless of how politics changed in the last fifteen years (at least, in any realistic fashion; I suppose one could come up with some imaginary situation in which the last fifteen years usher on a golden age where presidents no longer need to do bad things).
I guess William Henry Harrison may be an exception. Did he have to do anything horrible during the 31 days he was President?
Can any US president during the period slavery was legal be considered good?
I mean, Abraham Lincoln, but that’s cheating.
By the standards we’re using here, you can certainly find war crimes to accuse him of.
“War is Hell”, after all.
Yea the whole burning Southern fields thing.
I don’t think it’s fair to judge historical figures morals based on modern moral standards any more than it’s fair to judge their intelligence based on modern scientific understandings.
Hmmm nah imma say owning human beings and systematically torturing them is pretty bad regardless of time period.
I mean, I think so, but then I would since I work on modern moral standards.
It was widely accepted practice for some 5000+ years.
Slavery originated as an alternative to the indiscriminate slaughter of defeated enemies, so it was arguably an improvement. Which just goes to show that something can be really bad, yet still be better than what it replaced.
And it’s almost like part of the reason we popped off a war about it was in part because a significant number of people understood that before we abolished most of it.
Know who knew slavery was wrong? Every enslaved person ever. Start with Hagar. Add in Spartacus.
Enslaved people didn’t want to be slaves – usually. Some societies had high ranking slaves who were more privileged than most free people. Imperial officials and the like. Since you’re citing a Bible story, consider Joseph, enslaved, but also vizier in Egypt.
Others escaped from slavery and then took slaves of their own.
As someone with a history degree I strongly disagree. Something doesn’t stop being wrong because of its time period and just because something is widely accepted doesn’t make it right. You end up excusing a lot of awful shit with logic like that. And it always assumes that ‘widely accepted practice’ means ‘nobody knew it was wrong’ when that’s very rarely true. Nobody can know scientific facts that haven’t been discovered yet, but everyone had the tools to know that owning other people is wrong but they chose to do it anyway.
As someone complicit in global warming and plenty of other terrible things, really well put.
Exactly! There are people who don’t care or really actively take part in global warming, but there are also people who know it’s wrong and at least try to help in the areas they can. Same with all sorts of terrible things. And future generations will wonder why anyone didn’t want to help (she said hopefully).
…what the fuck?
Sorry, is this argument specifically in reference to US slavery and/or First Nations genocide?
Because no, I’m going to judge the hell out of people who *kidnapped, claimed ownership of, exploited, tortured, and murdered* other human beings in order to steal their stuff/labor. I’m going to judge them *almost* as hard as they were judged by their human rights advocate, abolitionist, and slave/ex-slave/First Nations freedom fighter contemporaries, all of whom did in fact exist since before the United States was officially a country.
Cultural normalization of atrocity is a hell of a thing, and can absolutely warp the minds and consciences of people who could have been decent human beings in a different environment, but that doesn’t make it- or them- okay. Donald Trump probably could have been a good person if he wasn’t raised by Fred Trump, and we don’t excuse his bullshit because of that. I promise you that throughout all of human history, humans have been capable of recognizing that slavery, torture, and genocide were evil.
John Brown has entered the channel.
Interesting philosophical question. Assume a Northern President who didn’t own slaves personally and opposed the institution within the bounds of the law – perhaps proposing legislation to ban it or at least prevent its expansion beyond the current slave states.
Would he still be considered not good simply for running a country that had slavery, despite having no legal power to change that?
John Quincy Adams was an abolitionist, oppsed admitting Texas because it would expand slavery, and litigated before the Supreme Court for the prisoners of the Amistad.
William Henry Harrison is one of the rare cases of a president who, due to dying in office so soon, did all his terrible deeds before becoming president. Mainly screwing the Native American tribes out of their land and supporting slavery in the part of the US that eventually became Indiana.
Harrison was elected because he was a war criminal.
I assumed being President was Dorothy suggesting to herself, “What is the absolute biggest bestest highest goal I can pursue?”
“… which will allow me to
fixhelp the most people?”I don’t think that necessarily is a primary part of it. She doesn’t have any central policies.
What’s that quote from, NG? Looking it up, I’m seeing
-Dumbing of Age comments
-A book about Marxism and modernism
-A novel about Chernobyl
What’s the source that inspires you?
It’s originally from the Communist Manifesto.
It’s a quote by Karl Marx, from the Communist Manifesto.
So tempted to write a mega-paragraph about the German Ideology, but alas, I got not the spoons after a full day of coding without Ritalin.
If only I could get inspiration to make DoA fan games.
Dang, yo’! That’s heavy sh**!
RIGHT!??!?! The DEA is a piece of shit 😤
DEA? You mean, related to the Ritalin shortage?
YUP. they said they aint gonna raise production quotas, even though people like me can barely work or even FUNCTION without them T_T
phony balonga feel-good wars like the “war on drugs” are all about the drip-feed of patriotism until you realize they come at the expense of actual people and their lives
**I hope your ship comes in, NG.**
Coulda sworn it’s from _The Tempest_, but you’re right. It’s a quote of an allusion, perhaps.
Act IV, scene 1
PROSPERO:
“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
I quoted it ten years ago, when the servers for the MMO City of Heroes shut down.
(but now, it’s back! after a fashion. 🙂 )
I’d prefer she doubles down and we get the War Criminal Dorothy Arc.
Eh, war crimes happen every day. I’ll tell you what doesn’t happen every day — Booster vs Raidah.
Ooooooh myyyy gooodness.
That would absolutely rock.
Wonder if this is setting up a period of Dorothy rushing into questionable decisions because why bother if she doesn’t have to worry about elections? Everyone in their dorm was so convinced it was Joyce who was going to be the one going wild they’d be blindsided.
They can go wild together!
She’s Dorothy. She’s going to think it through and come out the other side with a plan and a spreadsheet.
Relax, Dorothy, America is far too misogynist for you to have a chance of ever getting close in the first place. America only wants old white guys for president.
except for that one time we elected a black guy and half the country lost their minds.
Sure as hell weren’t going to follow that up with a woman though.
Dumbing of Age Book 13: If They Handed Me a Checkbox for War Crimes I Would Simply Check “No”
I am down for this title.
Cut out military funding and do as much ‘good’ as she can/has planned before she gets impeached/rioted out or so lol
Presidents have VERY little control over funding–that’s absolutely Congress’ bailiwick, and it’s one of the few they haven’t surrendered to the Executive Branch over the years.
She could theoretically make tweaks in programs which she has say in, but those are generally also kept on a tight leash. She could redeploy troops, for instance, but she couldn’t actually close the military base which those troops were originally stationed at–pork-barrel politics generally keeps those in the districts represented by someone the party in power wants to stay in power.
Yeah, there’s a very weird vibe here, that’s almost like scapegoating the President and letting the rest of the government off the hook. Not to mention the rest of the population.
As President, you likely could bring most of our overseas troops home – though some might have treaty commitments not so easily revoked?
But that comes with huge consequences. Biden ended the occupation of Afghanistan, using Trump’s withdrawal deal as a excuse. Arguably that’s less imperialism and and ending a war crime, if you consider that occupation a war crime, but there are a lot of Afghan women not celebrating the evil Empire leaving. What was the right thing to do there?
That’s the kind of decision Presidents have to make.
Indeed, I’m surprised we can pay anybody enough to take a job in which you wake up most mornings knowing that you face at least one decision in which every choice is bad.
There’s a quote from the webcomic Girl Genius I have always liked that communicates the general feeling here:
“Could you burn people down – women and children – even if you *knew* they had become monsters? The baron can. The baron has. I respect him for that, but I don’t want to *be* him. No sane man would.”
That’s my general take, but I don’t think it’s Dorothy’s and I don’t think it’s the take of a lot of commentators here.
I get a serious feeling of “The baron is evil for burning those people down. He needs to be stopped.”
my smart girl just wants to help people
Its true and its one of the reasons she’s probably my favorite of the main cast. Thus, Danny gets passed over once again (sorry bud).
There are tons of jobs she could chose to help far more people all over the world, she has acquired knowledge and skills that are tremendously useful in things other than politics. But that’s not the only factor at play in this strip.
Compare the act of helping people to opening a stubborn jam jar, and the position of President to upper body strength. If you are alone, there are easier ways to open it, like running warm water over it, that don’t involve exhaust or any risk of injury.
But if there is a crowd, and by crowd, I mean people like Raidah who would judge you for signs of incompetence, impotence, weakness or compromise, you know you need to do it the hard way. It’s not about opening the jar anymore.
Being the president is about making compromises. Thats the bases for our nation that many seem to have forgotten
In my opinion that tends to be the basis for a good society. Compromise and cooperation.
Yes it is. And it has to be. It is the basis of all democracy. It is the only way it works. And people who want to reach a high political office will have to compromise on some of their core morals from time to time. And that is sad.
Democracy sucks, but it still is the best system of government we have.
Consensus often does more sense than compromise. Especially when a compromise is often sold as “the only way”. With consensus you can argue that you had all those ways and choose the one with the least objections.
The least objections is a great way to put it, but means there are still some objections, which make it a compromise.
Consensus decision making requires no objections, which fails when things have to be done.
I mean, get 500 people together and require consensus on where to go to eat. You’ll starve to death.
500? Hell, you’d probably perish with just 5.
Consensus doesn’t mean unanimous agreement. It means broad support, something well beyond a simple 50%+1 majority. Allowing a narrow majority to ram their choice down the throats of a large minority tends to lead to a lot of resentment, and an urge to retaliate as soon as the positions are reversed. I think the last few years provide convincing proof of that. People have spent decades railing against a “do nothing” Congress, but I believe that absent a decisive consensus, “nothing” is the best thing they could do. Of course, I also believe that most of life should lie outside the scope of politics altogether.
So something like the filibuster, which requires 60% to overcome and has been blocking progress in this country for years. (More than decades really, if you look back to its use against civil rights legislation back into the 1800s.)
Requiring supermajorities to do anything doesn’t avoid resentment, it just lets smaller and smaller groups block action and demand concessions in order to even keep the country functioning.
Are you talking about presidency, right? I wonder what compromise a president must have to be.
I know the compromise a government have to do is not only to the people. It’s also for the Elite, too.
There a joke in there somewhere about how to reset Dorothy when she has frozen.
Probably yell “Someone needs a Schedule!”
I would not walk off with Raidah after that one. Just a little disappointed in Walky here. There are no stakes in this breakfast date with a bunch of stuck up chumps plus Lucy.
Same! Especially with what he said in the previous comic, I was hoping he’d just not go with Raidah.
Except that you’re effectively suggesting Walky should ditch his actual girlfriend… To run and rescue his ex-girlfriend.
Nah, Walky should stay the course, even if he might suggest to his girlfriend that they ditch the social breakfast club…
After seeing how his gfs brother was treating her, and calling him out on it, he should be self aware enough not to let someone hurt the feelings of another. More to the point he should know when Dorothy is feeling off.
I really hope that, despite the way Walky is grappling with his fairly lukewarm feelings for Lucy right now, that he is once again motivated to action by someone being a dick to her. He helped her as Nightguy and he stood up to her brother, who wasn’t even being a dick in earnest, and more broadly he seems to be making an effort to actively support people (like Sal, by standing up to their mom). I don’t know how likely it is, but I’d love it if Raidah’s petty armchair-quarterback better-than-you nonsense flipped Walky’s switch and he told her to shove it.
I mean, he Does know. He’s made a pretty firm stance on being disturbed by how Raidah treated Dorothy last strip.
He’s clearly uncomfortable and he may well ditch the joint in due time. He promised to go, it’s hard to make split second 180s under the specter of social obligation. him voicing his concerns While going along with the events already makes him better than I was at his age.
Cell phones exist. He could easily call her and say “Raidah was a total bongo to one of my friends for no apparent reason. Why don’t we get breakfast, just the two of us?”
No apparent reason?! Raidah is a Muslim. The office of President
Is responsible for the entirely unjustifiable deaths of millions of her coreligionists. Come on. She’s not objecting to the war-crimey nature of the presidency out of some misplaced holier-than-thou instinct and in fact is entirely correct!
I don’t think you appreciate the sheer level of evil and brutality America has committed on the world stage. They are just too powerful to face the music.
do we need to rehash the entire 600 comment thread from yesterday again?
the point isn’t that Raidah is WRONG, the point is that she went from 0 to 100 douchecanoes per hour with absolutely no provocation
I honestly don’t credit Raidah personally with needing a reason to be a bongo.
There’s also the basic trolley problem fact that refusing to put your hand on the lever and make a choice IS a choice.
He doesn’t have to rescue Dorothy. He can call Lucy and they can go eat Taco Bell and make out. That would likely be the better option for them right now anyway.
Same even though Walky could not out right tell Radiah to f off with out spoiling Lucy’s excitement he might have been able to tell Radiah to go on ahead while he stayed with Dorothy’s for a moment. But I’m not surprised he didn’t think that quickly on his feet and reverted to going with the flow like Linda taught him.
agreed but we might see him actually ditch her once they acquire lucy? that’d be partial credit.
presumably they’re just walking outside together because of being in the same building and all, so texting her would probably be pointless since lucy is almost certainly either at the door downstairs or arrived at the breakfast place twenty minutes ago
I wanna wait and see if he says something later, but yeah, he should’ve said it with Dorothy around.
He did say something. He didn’t just let Raidah get away with it; he called out her callous attitude. For Walky that’s like a lion’s roar.
How exactly did he call her out? He begged Raidah not to dress him down while also playing up how much she hurt Dorothy, but he never said that’s not okay. Raidah didn’t even say she would stop, cause lawyer. (Even though she isn’t one.). It’s not a lion’s roar to beg someone not to hurt you after witnessing them hurting others.
Walky’s still kinda spineless. The only person he’s ever stood up for is Sal, and that was only recently.
It’s sad, but baby steps.
He stood up for Lucy like yesterday for him. To her brother. Maybe he’s just intimidated by strong women. That would track. Relatable.
I could see Raidah giving him vibes like his mom and just making him revert and curl up into a good boy so he doesn’t get treated like his sister- i mean dorothy
Walky can be brave, but he can also be quite passive (I hesitate to use coward but…)
This is perfectly in keeping with his character, and is a nice rhyme with the other universe, where he had truly existential threats to spur him into bravery, instead of just social awkwardness.
Walky might also realize that being his full unfiltered self at breakfast could be a greater punishment for Raidah than refusing to go. (Sarah certainly seems to think so.) I doubt Walky standing up to her is going to make Raidah feel any degree of remorse.
I get the feeling that Dorothy hasn’t really given much thought to her goal of being president beyond “I want to do it”
I am sure she has Raidah’s statement just cut her off balance as it really venomous and only designed to make Dotty feel inferior. Raidah doesn’t really give too much of shit.
Yeah, after her conversation with Becky I’m pretty sure she was already mentally headed this way, Raidah just hurried it along
True the real reason Radiah “won” this cheap shot exhange (aside from Dorothy’s lack of banter experience) is because Dorothy was already doubting herself so much. Though it’s true she hasn’t gone into detail about exactly why she wants the presidency aside from not wanting to be told she can’t which probably contributes to her lacking a ready response for criticism about the job itself.
It’s also possible this is the first time anyone’s really ever challenged Dorothy’s dream with the real consequences of being President. Doesn’t seem like her parents have discouraged her any (not that that’s a bad thing).
Also very likely her parents let her think for herself to an impressive degree though I could see Dorothy going through a bitter phase were she wonders why nobody told her sooner about the harsh reality.
Roz would beg to differ
Not a whole lot, I’m sure. It’s the sort of goal a lot of kids have (up there with, say, “being an astronaut”) and most kind of discard as they get older. Dorothy clung to it because she’s smart and clearly people did buy into her going places (Danny’s parents, at least, seem to consider her to be the only thing that gave their son value). She’s capable of making it. But now she’s confronting the reality of the job, and it’s clear that somewhere in her brain she’d just figured that she could skip checking the box that said War Crimes, and check the box that said Good Things instead.
This has been on my mind, so I’m just throwing it out here for consideration by all you fine people.
My take is that the problem with Dorothy’s goal of being president isn’t that it is unrealistic or that she has (had?) some poorly-conceived notions of what it would actually mean. It was those two things PLUS her inflexibility. The idea that if she changes her goal it would break her and everything she stands for.
If a more-flexible Dorothy came to new conclusions about what reaching her goal would actually mean, she could decide she actually wants to do something else with her life, and shift her goal.
If a more-flexible Dorothy concluded that she actually wants different experiences in her life right now (-Walky-), rather than always putting her effort toward the future, she could make those changes.
But she has this goal so tied up with identity, that instead she’s just breaking.
Huh. I meant to put that as a main page comment rather than hijacking this thread. Oops.
I really don’t see why people think she has to give up a worthwhile goal just because it’s hard. Everything that’s ever been done was impossible until someone did it.
It’s not so much that I think she needs to give up the goal. It’s that I think she would feel a lot better about everything in her life right now if she adopted an attitude of “If I fail at this goal, or eventually change my mind about what I want, I’ll still be ok.”
I think she has tied this goal so deeply to her identity that even thinking about the prospect of reconsidering it is crushing her.
Nah, she’s thought about the good she can do; she simply hasn’t grappled realistically before with the compromises that she’d have to make to get there, or once in power. OTOH, “Preventing another Trump from gaining office” would, in fact, be a major goal in its own right.
I still wish we’d gotten enough meme votes for Harambe to get elected. A literal dead gorilla would have been better for the country than what we got.
I mean, Harambe WAS born in the US. Are there any legal provisions that the POTUS has to be human and/or alive?
There aren’t any rules that say a dog can’t play basketball!
I think a dead person can theoretically be elected, though the position would immediately become vacant and pass to the VP. It’s happened a couple times with Congresscritters who’ve died after being nominated, but before the voting.
I don’t know if the language forbids non-humans, but Harambe wasn’t 35 years old and thus not eligible.
It also requires candidates to be natural-born citizens. Harambe definitely missed that one.
I assume that legal personhood for the purpose of citizenship and office holding is largely interpreted as only applying to human people. But if corporations can be legally people, I see no reason Harambe couldn’t. A more straightforward reason Harambe couldn’t be president is that he was only 17 when he was killed and would only be 23 today. The constitution requires you to be 35 to become president.
If corporations are (legally) people, does this mean I can vote for Starbucks in the next “election”?
I’d say I love how we’re all taking this notion of getting a dead gorilla to be POTUS, but honestly, there’s a good chance he’d still make the list of top 5 US presidents, and that’s just sad.
I actually think she has specifically been *avoiding* giving it too much thought for that very reason. Definitely the vibe I got from the Jimmy Carter comment. Like, she’s not even arguing with Raidah about the “all American presidents are war criminals” thing- she clearly already knows that and was just in denial about it.
well she did namedrop a previous president so she has at least looked into history and stuff beyond whatever is taught in high school/independent research because even if it wasn’t over the top propaganda-y i’m sure there are plenty of ‘bad’ gov things you don’t learn about as a teen/kid in public school
I would simply shrug and say something to the effect of, “If it is not me, it will be someone else and they aren’t interested in universal healthcare… and would probably want to do a day of the rope, so I think I’ll be fine.”
Exactly this. SOMEONE has to be president, and Dorothy would be better than most. Raidah’s comments have the same vibe as “the system is broken, so I won’t vote”.
I don’t think that’s quite the point. It’s not that Dorothy wouldn’t be a good president, it’s that she doesn’t have the stomach for the job. She wouldn’t be able to make the necessary sacrifices to her integrity, so how good she would be at the position is irrelevant. She would never make it there, and the faster she realizes this the better off she will be.
That’s a much better take on it, I think. Or at least part of it.
“I don’t want to be in the position to have to make those kinds of decisions” is a valid concern. “Presidents have to be evil” isn’t.
I don’t think she’s really thinking about sacrifices to her integrity to get to the position though, but about the “checkbox for war crimes” she’d get handed after becoming President.
Someone has to be president and presidents have to commit some necessary evils, but I would rather the president be somebody like Dorothy, who deeply cares about doing the right thing and would agonize over those decisions but would also be strong enough in will and mind to make the needed choices anyway, rather than the string of amoral and corrupt officials we got over the last few decades ordering drone strikes like their handing out candy on Halloween. Dorothy should run for President, to keep people like that away from the nuclear codes.
If you’re put in a position of paramount leadership of a nation chances are you’re going to have to preform some unscrupulous actions.
I really just wish Dotty would not be presidents beacuse I think she can do more as an activist for an NGO or even work an IGO, she may not be charismatic but she is organized and knowledgeable and that in its self is a critical skill that is needed in the world.
True, if she continues to have this level of aversion to compromising her own morals playing a role whose job is to keep the presidents power in check/force the kind of compromises she wants from them might be a better position for her.
Exactly.
If West Wing taught me anything, it’s that technically being a ‘war criminal’ doesn’t necessarily make one morally wrong.
Like, say, sending assassins to murder someone who is leading a genocide.
I, too, fantasize about going back in time and destroying the United States before Andrew Jackson* makes things irrecoverable.
(* Obviously further back would be even better, but Andrew Jackson is just such a fun villain.)
What’s so bad about the United States? I know we have a lot of issues and done a lot of pretty bad things but I we’ve also done a lot of good. I’m intrigued by why you think history would have played out better without the US. (Also when you say destroy the US, do you mean the population that comprises it or the geopolitical structure of the sovereign state?)
The colonies that comprise the United States as a country should not have existed and the people who have been in charge since it was founded should give the land back.
I can’t say for sure what would happen in an alternate universe where colonialism never happened, or wherever among any large number of dominoes that went down before that you’d want to started, but that was a moral wrong. And, like, specifically, I’m riffing off the “sending assassins to murder someone leading a genocide” thing. We’ve done and are still passively doing a lot of those.
I agree it was a moral wrong. But it also can’t be undone. The land can’t be given back. To who and what would that mean? What would happen to the people living here now?
You can’t undo history. Even when it’s awful.
The West Wing is not an accurate depiction of how politics actually function, and if you act like it is you are going to lose
Yeah and, who’s gonna glass the shit out of brown countries and assassinate or coup d’etat their democratically elected leaders for trying to install social programs. I mean if the US never committed atrocities in Guatemala over bananas the whole world would be communist red
I hope Dorothy realizes Raidah was just being mean to be mean. Also Its probably better that Dorothy didn’t respond to Raidah. Nothing she said would have fazed her Raidah has clearly decided she doesn’t respect Dotty and nothing said would convinced her otherwise
Dotty just focus on her civic engagement meeting she is doing far more good then Raidah is at her “breakfast of champions”
Yes and no.
1. Raidah is just being mean.
2. Dorothy refuses to use her friends being kidnapped as leverage to get into Yale.
3. How is Dorothy supposed to be President if she won’t compromise on THAT?
I am saying that Dotty is doing more good by going to her civic engagement meeting beacuse civic engagement is a good thing.
I am not sure about the other things you listed I didnt mentioned Yale or Dotty becoming president. Sorry If I confused you on that point.
My point was Dotty is better off just moving on and not engage with Raidah beacuse it’s pointless.
Engage with civics not Raidah
Yes. Raidah is just pushing a button that’s always worked before with people like Dorothy. The best response is to show that the button is broken. Brace for an extinction burst, but stick to the plan.
I suspect the reasons Dorothy gives for not going to Yale are just her rationalisation, and not the real reason.
Since when is funding terrorists a war crime?
1: It depends on what the terrorists do.
2: That’s also kinda not the point. “Funding terrorists to do Imperialist Shit on the USA’s behalf” is generally considered a bad thing to do, regardless of the legality of the actions.
Dorothy isn’t really concerned about the legal specifics of a “War Crime”. To her, a War Crime represents anything that a President would be expected and/or required to do as part of the job that she finds ammoral.
And there’s a lot of those things.
What Wraithy said. Also, I never really thought about this, but it probably Should be a war crime? Someone call Geneva up, they need another protocol.
Good job, Raidah. Very sociopathically efficient.
It’s hard to be a pacifist when it’s even harder to achieve world peace.
Like a wise person once said while making questionable foodstuff, “I’m a fool, not an idiot”.
That person, however, did not smell false equivalence while making it.
Dumbing of Age Book 13: Why Must I Be Cursed to Be Too Intellectually Honest to Swallow My Own Bullshit?
AS PRESIDENT, WILL YOU COMMIT WAR CRIMES?
_ YES
_ YES, RELUCTANTLY
i mean, someone under her might but wouldn’t be surprised if ppl did things without her knowledge as opposed to actively dealing with a wartime situation. Tho even being a local senator/governor would be pretty impressive
or maybe the us will be in such a clusterfuck there’s other issues like the pandemic 20x worse (..and ending up committing biological warfare/eugenics after an attempt to implement better healthcare)
Dorothy.exe has encountered an unrecoverable error.
I can hear this comment.
Look, someone is going to be a head of state. Would you rather it be YOU, someone who cares, to make those decisions or someone who doesn’t care or is actively malicious?
at least she’d prolly be able to minimize the amount of blood on ppl’s hands hopefully
This is the whole Trolley Problem thing.
It’s one thing to say “It’s sad but necessary for the switch to be flipped in order to save the most possible lives”.
It’s another thing to be the one standing there needing to flip the switch themselves.
Yes, it was better that Obama was President over McCain and Romney. Obama was less of a mass-murdering monster than those two would have been.
But how much comfort do you think that notion brought to Obama when he was presented with targets and had to decide how many innocent civilians would need to die?
There’s definitely a valid “I don’t want to have to make those decisions” argument, but that seems very different from Raidah’s remark or much of the tone around here, which is more just “Presidents are evil. Dorothy shouldn’t be one because she’d have to be evil.”
You’re assuming facts that are not in evidence. There’s no way to say with certainty exactly what McCain would have done, but we have ample evidence of the damage Obama did. Support for the Libyan coup not only wrecked that country, it unleashed a flood of weapons that helped destabilize the entire region. In Syria, he didn’t even bother to ask Congress for authorization before invading a nation that posed no threat to the US. He started our support for Saudi butchery in Yemen, a policy no one seems to be able to change, even though pulling the plug should be a no-brainer. Oh, and don’t forget the ongoing bungling in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the drone wars with zero oversight. If Obama ever lost much sleep over any of this, I haven’t seen much evidence of it.
One of the few things that I can wholeheartedly praise Biden for.
All but *ending* the endless Drone Strikes that happened under Obama and Trump.
Obviously we can’t say exactly what McCain would have done, but he wasn’t exactly pretending to be a dove when he joked about bombing Iran during his campaign.
McCain was a full-throated supporter of the Iraq war, was one of the idiots-or-liars who said we’d be greeted as liberators, and one of his campaign promises was to somehow “win the Iraq war” by the end of his first presidency.
I think its fucking safe to say that McCain would not have been a less hawkish president than Obama was.
I’m probably gonna be asking this a lot considering it looks like we’re getting into the breakfast date, but what the fuck does Walky get out of this? Popularity? Connections? What does that even mean to him really? Jennifer is easily the best connection Raidah has and he already has stronger ties to Jen than she does. He’s also part of a significantly larger friend group more tangentially connected to a billionaire heiress than Raidah could ever wish to be, if we really want to call in relationships. What does this do for him?
or maybe raidah was being snippy to ‘get it out of her system’ before destroying walky. but humilating him and inadvertently sabotaging him and lucy’s relationship would be something but i imagine she’d be civil or so considering she was the one that invited as opposed to Jennifer pity-asking the group to include them
Even if Walky’s family is ‘well off’ , I imagine sal’s as infamous as asher, even if he’s supposedly stepping away from the family business so i can’t imagine it working out long term if only because walky would be too uncomfortable to hang out with asher even more even in a group section
He’s just here for Lucy. All about being a good boyfriend whatever that means.
Lucy definitely wants to go.
Presumably Walky wants to stay cool with Jennifer, even if she’s decided to go back to mean girl bullshit.
He may not be the most socially aware guy [citation needed] but is, like, scores free gay pizza smart and can probably figure out that blowing off the invitation without something the two can accept isn’t a great idea.
Since Raidah opened by shitting on the other of the probable top 3 most important woman in his life that may change, who knows.
Lucy really wants to go to breakfast with “popular people”. https://www.dumbingofage.com/breakfast-2/
Walky gets a fancy breakfast out of it.
I guess I don’t understand this “popularity” thing. It’s a group of four people. One of which is actually just nothing. Most known for dating a way more interesting character in a flashback and apparently showing Sarah his bare ass. Raidah still hangs with a girl who is okay throwing out the r-word. These are the people Lucy is marking out for???
The way i see it Radiah likes to think she’s gathering the future ruling class but there’s a limit on just who would follow her so she tries to make it seem like an exclusive privilege. Jennifer thinks of it as popularity through the high-school mean girl lens and Lucy who doesnt really know what popularity is thinks their popular because its the crowd Jennifer is now with.
These particular kind of “cool” people get that designation by establishing a pecking order. They get to be on top, and everyone else gets judged. Radiah is a natural expert at this.
Lucy is convinced that college is a great time to finally win the approval of these kinds of people. She hasn’t figured out yet that the winning move is not to play.
Well the girl who uses the r-word hasn’t been seen since the flashback to Halloween, so she may well not be there. It’s her, Carl, Asher and Jennifer that Lucy wants to go to breakfast with.
And it’s something Lucy wouldn’t know about anyway.
Maybe I haven’t articulated this well. It’s not just that we the audience know the reality of Raidah’s group that the cast don’t. I’m asking how are they actually popular?
You can’t just be popular as a concept. Other people have to perceive you, know you, like you. I’m asking how? None of them seem particularly known or active in the local community. Is Raidah a big shot on campus despite us never seeing or hearing of any of her accomplishments? They’re just a small group of people. Compared to the exploits of the main cast they get blown out the water. Becky alone would crush all of them. (She was a campaign manager/intern for latest former congresswoman and involved in two separate high profile kidnapping events that would at least make the local news.) Raidah is known for what exactly? She’s done what? Asher is widely known for?…Being a hot guy who smokes? I guess that puts him on par with Sal. I really think Jennifer is hard carrying the group right now. She’s rich and well known among people who actually matter.
Lucy seems to be impressed by them, but how did that happen? What does she know Raidah’s group from or is it just by their association with Jennifer who she idolizes?
I agree with you. Popular is in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder is Lucy, who desperately want to be part of a group of friends who appreciate her. She tried to have that on her dorm, and everyone sort of walk over her and take her for granted. Billy has constantly been ditching her to hang with others, including Raidah and Asher. For Lucy, that’s all that popularity is: it’s people wanting to hang out with you.
The sad part is that Lucy is a much better person than Raidah and co. Maybe she’s a little too eager, but that’s not so bad. She’d probably be much happier in Read Hall.
This, Lucy doesn’t have much experience with popularity. she considers Radiahs group popular because Jennifer is a part of it and she still thinks of Jennifer as a popular girl but we the audience know her view is biased and clouded by her own desire to find a group. The sad part is she could probably have that in walkys real friend group once they get to know her better but in her mind because Jennifer left them, their not the popular kids.
The person who said the R-word, Char, is no longer in Raidah’s group. At least we haven’t seen her outside of flashbacks past Halloween.
I assumed popularity didn’t really matter at college. It was never my experience that it did.
Some bangin’ eggs benedict and a stack of pancakes? This is Walky we’re talking about here.
For one thing, pleasing Lucy. She was excited to be included in a group of popular people. I’m assuming she was never popular, possibly an outcast in high school.
Lucy wants to go. Also, being invited to food is Walky’s siren call.
He’s doing it to make Lucy happy. That’s the only interest he has in it.
So if Dorothy gives up on electoralism and has a bit of a menty b is she going to become the next campus vigilante but, like, exclusively beat up nazis?
I wonder if Walky is going to bring up what Raidah said to Dorothy once everybody is at the table. I’m never clear exactly what he has the balls to do but I’m certain he has the lack of tact to blurt out something that’s clearly going to stick with him like that.
I’d guess she’d be more likely to just do all the stuff she’s denied herself over the years. So much of her version of staying electable was denying herself anything that could be used against her in the future tabloids. It would be great if Walky did call Radiah out at the table. Her plan was to love bomb him with Carl so he actually might get away with more there then confronting her in private.
As if I really didn’t understand
That I was just another part of their plan
I went off looking for the promise
Believing in the Motherland
And from the comfort of a dreamer’s bed
And the safety of my own head
I went on speaking of the future
While other people fought and bled
The kid I was when I first left home
Was looking for his freedom and a life of his own
But the freedom that he found wasn’t quite as sweet
When the truth was known
I have prayed For America
I was made For America
It’s in my blood and in my bones…
They commit war crimes inside our own country whenever they want to stop a protest by getting cops to tear gass people.
Also, the only thing the two party system seemed to ever unanimously agree on from time to time is war profiteering. We could be spending more tax payer money on infrastructure or improving social net programs but it seems like congress and most presidential administration feel like it’s a better idea to put all our eggs into one basket by helping the military industrial complex improve their stock so the can sell weapons abroad. Plus the only time they probably make the “we should be putting the money into our own nation instead” Is when they probably want to increase the police budget so they can arm themselves to the teeth or start project like “Cop City” in Georgia.
Anyway I’m really liking this new character arc for Dorothy, like what the job she wants actually entails doing and what she might become.
They also agree that rich people should be rewarded for causing financial crises and that strikes are bad, and if towns get toxic spills, well, that’s just the cost of propping up big business.
Police are controlled by the municipality, the President has no say in it. Occasionally the National Guard comes into play when putting down protests, but it’s comparatively rare. If you want to complain about cops, look to the mayor and city council.
Congress on the other hand which Dorothy might haft to become a part of as a way to claw her way up to the Whitehouse. Also past presidents haven’t help with the corrupt policing if you look at most of them. You don’t get to call yourself the most powerful person in the free world and tell me you don’t have atleast a little bit of influence or sway with domestic issues like this.
Dorothy, would you be okay with being a LESS war-crimey president than average? I mean Bush2 set that bar pretty high, I’m pretty sure you can limbo under it.
Seven strips later we see her just quietly sitting in the recycling bins, rocking back and forth.
Joe finds her and utterly breaks her mind by being considerate.
It’s not a nice or kind job, but someone has to do it.
And I think there’s a very real argument Dorothy doesn’t have the ruthlessness necessary if she won’t exploit her kidnapping for political gain.
That sounds like a rationalization. I suspect it’s not the true reason. My guess is that she likes it here, and she doesn’t want to go anymore. But that doesn’t feel like a good enough reason, so she made up another reason that sounds noble.
There’s a game one of my friends recommended that I love.
Frostpunk.
In it, you have linited time and resources and the weather is constantly getting worse and worse. If you want to make sure everyone survives, you need to be smart. But, if you’re too slow in getting everything done, the game also forces you to adopt certain… policies which makes things easier.
And those policies can save the life of the colony.
But it’s a steady slide towards being a monster.
It’s a game that genuinely makes it hard to be a good person.
Even in the best of times, you’ll still need to send people out into subzero temperatures to scavenge without any protections. But you can avoid the slide to demagogue if you’re smart enough. Careful enough. Think far enough ahead.
That’s how I kinda view international politics in a way.
Dorothy doesn’t HAVE to compromise her morals to that level. But it’ll be a damn lot harder to make anything work. And if your morality is preventing you from saving lives… well, you just have to be smarter, work harder… or be more ruthless.
It’s always your choice. But that doesn’t mean there’s always a good choice.
A lot of people here seem to think the only way to achieve anything is by being the president which is a take
I’d say building solidarity, activism, becoming all the other kinds of politicians that aren’t president. There’s a lot of roles out there.
But if you do think the presidency is the way to go, please at least understand that the war crimes have victims, people suffering. Like if you think it’s important to swallow a tough pill, at least be honest about who suffers in that scenario.
Someone having to die doesn’t actually mean you didn’t kill someone.
(Also maybe question the idea that someone “had to die”)
IMO, a lot of people here do not think that.
But that’s the story that Dorothy was fed and/or internalized, somewhere along the way.
Oh I totally get thinking about the story, just some of the comments describing necessary evils without sounding like they understand that still means evil happened.
Your probably right about most not thinking that 😊
There aren’t always good options, is the thing. Sometimes the least evil option is the best you have. That’s just the reality we live in.
Agreed. I wouldn’t trust anyone whose aim is to be PM (cos I know how politics in aus works and what it takes to be a good PM) but there are a lot of politicians, particularly back benchers, non labour/liberal parties who do more good through their balance against the two party system
That’s it exactly, so many ways to help. Being even just the one extra vote that stopes something horrible is good stuff
Any political career, especially on the national stage is going to involve moral compromise. “Being the one extra vote that stops something horrible” is as much a fantasy as not checking the war crimes checkbox would be.
Something something if you aren’t a liberal by twenty, you have no heart, if you aren’t blaming people to your left criticizing politicians for the growing rise of fascism by 30, you have no brain?
A lot of people in these comments seem to think we still need to maintain the current corrupt system at all, even though it’s almost entirely owned by and benefits the rich and the big corporations. If we could get enough of the working-class on board, we could get rid of this system and replace it with one that actually benefits the workers. Sadly there’s still a lot of people in this country who think capitalism is good and communism is bad.
If you’ve got a workable plan to achieve that, I’m all on board. Right now though, a sizeable part of the white working class seems to be down with fascism and I don’t see a way to change that, so I’m all for maintaining the current system with all its problems rather than descending into full blown authoritarianism.
^ That. It’s all well and good to talk about plans for future systems but until there’s a viable plan to achieve said system and it is put in place, we gotta pick the least awful options for our current system.
^ And speaking of viable plans, political or literal revolutions by the hands of the common people are mostly a fantasy. You can have the People(TM) want to overturn the current system of incentives all they want. It only happens if the army lets you.
The US has a stable military. It has popular support – one of the fight Right-leaning institutions to have that honor -, and one of the greatest beneficiaries of the current system, by design.
If you push them, they are not going to choose the left. You’d flood the ranks with left-leaning recruits, who’d need to distinguish themselves in the war crime factory enough to gain ranking positions before you could change that. It ain’t gonna happen. Things Can be changed, but that route’s been closed since before we were born.
It would be far, far easier to overturn the current system by working within the system than by violent revolution. If you had the massive popular support needed to overwhelm the military, you’d easily have enough to control elections and rewrite the Constitution.
That’s not going to happen either, since that support doesn’t exist, but it’s less of a fantasy than some kind of revolution.
And even if you manage all that, one of the popular (literally founding) myths of this country is that what comes after a revolution is always better. This is not supported by the historical record.
Case in point: A left-right divide on a revolution of any kind is far too naive and simplistic. Technocrats and nimbys vote Democrat for economic reasons, aren’t all that bothered by the plights of the poor, and while they aren’t representative of the west coast, they are in charge. The common people who live in those states can’t afford to arm themselves en masse thanks to what they’ve done to the cost of living. If you want a purely socialist revolution, but you don’t have California, you might as well just give up right there.
Instead, a revolution would most likely involve groups opposed to the federal government from all over the spectrum. Nevada’s always been pretty upset about how most of their state is federal land, and they have quite a few military installations, so that’s a start, if you don’t mind getting the natives displaced again. Other states who got beef with the feds mostly vote Republican though.
Then there’s the political groups who would jump on the bandwagon if you had shown any sign of success. You would be pretty happy with Black Lives Matter, or LGBT groups throwing in with you, and maybe you’re okay with the communists and antifa, but what about the religious wingnuts? Libertarians? Anarchists? The NRA? You would only have the losing options of either shooting each other instead of the establishment people, Or giving some or all of those a seat at the table after you’ve won. Good luck building a better world out of that mess.
And even leaving all that aside, if we did somehow manage a socialist ideological revolution, in any armed conflict, especially a non-conventional civil one, there’s a strong tendency for the more ruthless to rise to the top. The pacifist voices inherently are left out and those using nastier more effective tactics tend to win.
So, assuming the miracle occurs and this revolution overthrows the US government, the war criminals in the revolutionary army are going to be the ones seizing power and they’re very likely not going to let go once they’ve got it. “To preserve the revolution”, of course.
try to overturn*, one of the few**, and is one of the greatest beneficiaries***
Saw the last panel as preview ~6 months ago, and I wasn’t even close to guessing correctly why until yesterday. And Becky hinted at it a few strips ago.
Also, it’s a silly goal. Like one she had as a child and never thought it through. She’s probably used to people reacting to it being a childish plan, but she has a lot of practice reassuring herself about that (eg: “It’s good to have goals.”) I don’t think she’s too intellectually honest to swallow at least some of her own bullshit.
Thought about this overnight. Dorothy’s struggle with her cognitive dissonance (not just about the role of a president) reminds me a lot of losing my religion. She has beliefs about herself, like she knows what to do in any situation, knows what’s best for other people, is charismatic, and a natural leader. And she keeps seeing those beliefs not be backed by real world evidence. That makes her feel bad about herself, so she puts a lot of effort into proving her beliefs true, which they aren’t, so she often gets something else to feel bad about.
Her realizing that she’s ordinary would be so freeing. She doesn’t have to build her life around a goal that 20+ years in the future she’ll get to decide what’s best for everyone (because the president doesn’t even do that, that’s a child’s understanding of the presidency).
I’m pretty sure Raidah would commit warcrimes if it gave her good connections.
Someone Hug Dorothy Please 2023
(Not you, Walky, I’m too disappointed in you
Also not Raidah because Raidah is banned from receiving physical affection, or any kind of affection, by the Geneva Conventions)
Honestly I think Raidah needs a hug more than Dorothy does. A person who was hugged more probably wouldn’t as easily cut down people like that.
Extremely disappointed in Walky. Way to let some asshole you barely know spew vitriol over one of your closest friends.
If this storyline doesn’t end with Walky finally waking up, smelling the roses and doing a mic drop on Raidah like he did on his mom, I’m going to lose a lot of the respect his bravery against Linda earned from me.
I Think this might be the Walky equivalent of Joyce occasionally still speaking bible misogyny despite not wanting to. It’s hard to fully shake off your upbringing all at once and Walky was taught to be a good obedient boy who followed the assertive authority in the room. Radiah is pretty much a stand in for Linda. It’s disappointing and im hoping he still finds a way to show back bone but its also understandable.
Danny wanted to be with his girl.
Sarah wanted to be left alone.
Jennifer wanted to be one of the popular kids.
Joe wanted to be a campus sex god.
Joyce wanted to find a husband.
Walky wanted to lounge around and eat Chicken McNuggets.
Dorothy wanted to transfer to Yale and become president.
Best laid plans, huh?
Galasso, meanwhile, is living the dream.
or in a dream. hard to tell sometimes.
I’m a little worried the overall thrust of Dorothy’s plot arc is “Participating in American politics at a high level through standard channels is inherently evil. Her desire to ‘do the unglamorous work’ is well intentioned but misguided and leads to creepy consequences.”
I’m not sure that’s her arc as a whole, just some things she’s going to have to overcome. These are pretty normal things for someone like her to have to face at some point.
Most people who want to be something as a young adult aren’t really 100% prepared for the harsh realities of it – SO MANY people get very disappointed when they learn what testing games actually entails – and a lot of people do some dumb shit in college they would not do later in adulthood.
Dorothy needs to be challenged about the WHY of her goal. Roz wants to be President/a politician because she wants to help women’s rights at all costs. Dorothy wants to be President because she wants to be the highest office in the land.
Roz is willing to bloody her hands to do it.
Roz doesn’t want to be a politician. She’s stated she has no interest in positions of authority of any kind.
I personally see it as a reflection of the increasing disillusionment young people have towards the presidency and way that politics unfold. Her ambitions were more pure when the comic started because of the time, but as the real world unfolded the ambition took on more of a naivety steeped in a lack of critical thought. The comic can’t really elaborate as much as would be needed to be for a better analysis because that would date it a little too much.
Wanting to go into politics and aiming for a place of influence isn’t bad, but Dorothy has never been very critical or reflective about her desire to be president and it’s idealises it, which can be a problem.
at least it’s not some thriller movie to where she’d be ‘radicalized’ to the point she’d be a ‘terrorist’/secretly assassinating some ppl she deems bad
Okay, it’s not a perfect job and is gonna require lots of compromise no matter how hard she tries to minimise the damage she causes. So fucking what?
“Don’t have lofty aspirations, the thing you want isn’t objectively perfect in every conceivable way.” Fuck that. Raidah can get in the sea.
Mostly, Dorothy’s entire personality is about never wanting to compromise on anything she deems important, like her goals, her morals, or her achievements, even if it’s bad for her health, or somebody else could do it better, or she has no dog in the fight.
I feel like pretty much the only way Dorothy could not-become-President without it being a huge disappointment is if she takes up some cause that gives her more freedom to to good with fewer compromises, and that might be what Willis is leaning into: “I have a better idea than President, I’m going to [insert new, badass thing here]”.
The best/worst thing about Raidah’s posturing is that I fucking guarantee you, I know in my bones, if the Keeners had money and status? If they had connections and charisma, even if Dotty was still the same? Raidah would be inviting her to breakfast all smiles, preparing a mental strategy on how to get this clearly going-places gold mine of a person away from Joyce and into a position to benefit Raidah.
Oh, absolutely. She’s 3000% a scumbag. Walky’s letting her take up time in his day, which should honestly count as charity work.
Dorothy would not be asked “will you sign off on our troops/police committing humans rights violations”, she’d be asked “will you allow our brave boys to uphold freedom and traditional values?”
I’m glad that even she is acknowledging in the final panel that it’s magical thinking to believe that these choices come pre-labeled as evil/good
I mean, it’s not even a false dichotomy either.
“Our treaty with X nation says X nation will be defended against invasion. The invasion is due to X nation being assholes for centuries to Y nation.”
In real life, there’s a lot of high level decisions that have no moral answer.
Have you actually CHECKED what US traditional values are?
Most Americans haven’t.
And then President Keener says, “show me your operational plan and rules of engagement. Sarah, bring your legal eye over here and have a look.”
Yeah, that’s a recipe for disaster. Have the CiC micromanage a war effort.
So is the CIC rubber-stamping a campaign she knows nothing about.
There’s quite a gap between disapproving a plan which does not fulfill the requirements, and adjusting every little thing in it.
That’s how it would be framed when trying to build public support. Not to the President when she’s making the decisions. Treaty obligations. Economic disruptions. Balance between risks to our troops and to civilians.
None of these decisions are simple and easy. If it’s easy, it doesn’t get to the President.
Recent example: Honor Trump’s deal and withdraw from Afghanistan, knowing the Taliban will take over and innocents will suffer or continue the occupation indefinitely, making innocents suffer more directly?
With the funding thing, sometimes the choice is basically the lesser of two evils and there is no “good” choice. You can’t even just say that you will just stay out of it and do nothing, as that choice has consequences on people’s lives too (start of WW2 for example). Some stuff in history is also painted as a simple black or white answer when it was a lot more complex and nuanced at the time, especially if they were lacking information or on a wartime setting. Continuing on the WW2 examples, things like the atomic bombing of Japan or the internment of people is criticized now. The choice to not do those things could have also resulted in bad consequences, such as an island to island land war fight in Japan, or mass attacks in the streets against people that looked like Japanese citizens (not that it didn’t happen anyway, but how people react to those they perceive as different even without blaming them for starting a war, I could see it being a lot worse). Things also get a lot more complicated when you are dealing with the public (mass hysteria anyone) and posturing between other countries (Russia wanting to get involved in the war with Japan). You might also want to do the right thing (say let Jewish refugees into the country to avoid death) but the general public isn’t behind you and will revolt (being in an economic depression and worrying about them stealing jobs and resources that they want used on themselves).
I’m actually reminded of a question a history professor posed to me.
“If you didn’t know the full scope of the Nazis atrocities, do you support the War in Europe?”
WW2? Yes. The Nazis weren’t fine and dandy and suddenly became evil because holocaust, they were always a party that rose to power promising genocide, and then got together with the USSR to invade and partition Poland between them.
I don’t use Chamberlaining as an insult because he couldn’t see his future, I use it because his present was already a shitshow.
In the same vein, the time to hit Russia (and far harder than we’ve been hitting them) was when it looked sideways at Crimea.
Or even earlier than that, the playbook has hardly changed since South Ossetia almost a decade prior to Crimea.
If we’d hit Russia then, we would have had to hit them. Militarily. US war with Russia, which brings us far to close to the unthinkable.
There wasn’t the broad consensus in that situation to impose effective sanctions and those likely wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Ukainian forces at the time were nowhere near ready or capable of fighting a war to retake Crimea. What we did do at the time was start training the Ukrainian military and arming them to a limited extent. That almost certainly made a huge difference when Russia invaded the rest of the country.
With South Ossetia too, we needed an option that wasn’t a straight out start WWIII.
What is scary is the amount of people that knew the atrocities and still supported them, some even in this day and age. Absolutely terrifying.
Dorothy’s big thing has always seemed to be needing to be needed. Being President always seemed to me like it was an extension of that in her mind.
The problem is that despite her efforts to make herself useful and needed, it doesn’t tend to end up that way. In her appearance in a different version of the Walkyverse, this ultimately got really, really bad for her. This universe doesn’t really seem to be going better.
It’s honestly pretty sad. Dorothy is none of her best friends best friend.
I think her seeming fixation on being the mom friend and the caretaker is honestly the biggest problem. She positions herself above her peers by setting up as ‘the mom friend’, and so she does not allow herself vulnerability or any confiding, she never shows her upset or asks for support or help. She doesn’t do anything with her supposed friends, only for them, and never lets them do anything with or for her. It must be super lonely, but it’s how she’s carefully and consciously set up all her relationships.
When does she get to have fun?! And with whom?!! Like, she just masturbated with Joyce without actually enjoying herself, also did a load of laundry, and damaged a dryer in frustration…
Exactly. She has very carefully set up her relationships to put herself in a position where she can’t allow herself to be a complete person in them.
It’s no wonder the poor kid is so wound up. She’s gotta find some sort of outlet for pure relaxation, instead of burning her candle at both ends. And also in the middle. And the candle is in an oven as well. And the oven is in a burning building. On the sun.
The Schedule does not have time for “fun”.
(especially not any sort of fun that might make her less electable.)
Dorothy, I truly believe you are have a war criminal inside you.
Well, she may not have been in full crisis mode before, but she will be now.
Chin up, Dorothy; all you have to do, upon being elected to the highest office in the nation, is completely dismantle the entire military-industrial complex, defund the military, and negotiate a stable peace with all the US’s various international rivals, all while navigating a political environment that’s utterly hostile to those policies, and avoiding any revolutions, coups, or civil wars that might arise in response to such an extreme change. Also, you’re probably going to need to do something about climate change and the ongoing legacy/practice of colonialism and poverty and whatever incidental shit you promised your base to get them to vote for you. Easy!
Just make sure that if you want to dismantle the intelligence compllex you stay out of any convertibles.
(Please note, comment section (and also the FBI), this is dark humor, not an actual thing I definitely believe. I wouldn’t be surprised, but I do not have a serious belief.)
Citizen I’m appalled by the suggestion that the intelligence community could ever have been party to the assassination of a President. Just appalled. I’m putting this in your file at L—whoops oh shit.
Why does L need a file on not someone else? Is NSE suspected of being Kira?
I guess being conquered overnight by your international rivals is a kind of peace….
Yeah, I was going to say. Even if we weren’t conquered ourselves immediately, allowing those rivals to dominate the rest of the world, isolate us and cut us off from international trade would be devastating enough.
I mean, the above description will be followed by the invasion of Tawain and dozens of other countries. The US military threat isn’t 100% useless to global peace. Just like 90%.
I’d say far more than that. That threat keeps any of the potential big players from making a move. It doesn’t shut down small conflicts and in fact can create them, but it has kept any large scale conflicts from breaking out. The withdrawal of that threat would destabilize many regions of the world.
Oh, blah blah blah. Fix one thing without fucking anything else up and you can be counted as one of the top ten presidents in the nation’s history. It’s not that much to ask, and nobody reasonable expects one person to solve every individual problem solo.
The stakes are as low as they get, people.
You mean the bar. The stakes are… pretty high.
No, I meant the stakes.
Are they, though? One objectively positive change doesn’t seem like a lot of risk for the general population.
But that’s not the stakes, that’s the bar. The POTUS stakes are pretty high, like, as we’re having demonstrated to us in real time, SCOTUS.
People have lots of unreasonable expectations for Presidents.
If only the American people were educated properly on how the government actually works, instead of being trained to start ignoring it after kindergarten.
I dont know about everywhere, but in OR 4th grade is state/native American history [including a week on just the trail of tears], 8th grade is American history as a whole and one of our exams was to take a practice citizenship test, and in high school you had to take a form of American history and world history. We were taught to start ignoring it half way through highschool whenever one was sledgehammered with the catastrophic news cycle and messages of partisan politics and doom.
I’m enjoying Dorothy’s current arc. She holds herself up to high standards; she’s the go-getter, the solid friend, the good student, the emotionally healthy one, the taker of the high road. She’s under a lot of self-made pressure. And it’s becoming too much.
She’s also highly traumatized after being kidnapped to boot
If she didn’t wanna get kidnapped, she shouldn’t have been defenseless at the time. Every responsible American needs a machine gun, to prevent this sort of thing.
All due respect, but I don’t think these kinds of sarcastic comments really add anything worthwhile to the conversation, they’re just going to rile people up.
With equal respect, people seem to get riled up no matter what I say, and if somebody’s feeling personally harmed by a sarcastic comment about Dorothy with a machine gun, that’s not on me to manage.
I’m enjoying it too! She’s growing a lot and I’m here for it.
Only sometimes, Dotty, only sometimes. I relate. Also, I am already future relating to the moments sometime when she realizes she was too self-aware about some things and not self-aware enough about others…
I had a feeling this would be Dorothy’s reaction. This arc rules.
It is a little sad when the fictional teens have more of a backbone about saying that American imperialism is evil and every President and major party since at least WWII but honestly since the Banana Wars has perpetrated evil than a lot of their audience, tho.
So… How is Biden a war criminal exactly? Last I checked he retreated from Afghanistan and supplying weapons to a country that is under attack is allowed by the UN charter. Besides: war crimes are very clearly defined. Not every wrongfull death by military action is a wat crime.
Guantanamo isn’t closed and I will never forget about it.
I don’t know if that technically counts as a war crime, but it is the same kind of thing.
Guantanamo you can blame on congress, who literally prevented Obama from shutting it down.
You can’t really be a politician in this country and not have some blood on your hands, as you’re actively engaging in a political system that is at all times responsible for some amount of violence or atrocity somewhere in the world.
And insisting on a legalist definition of war crime is deliberately missing the broader issue of imperialist power that perpetuates and justifies violence.
That’s a no, then: you’re saying Biden is not a war criminal – instead, there are other reasons you don’t like him.
What the hell is this response?
I dislike him because he’s a racist old codger who makes promises he refuses to keep, has maintained Trump-era policies, and presides over a party that has no real solutions and thinks they can slide to victory on the benefit of not being Trump.
Also, all the war crimes.
The Biden administration ordered a drone strike against civilians, and then threw a press conference saying that they’d totally do it again.
Right, war crimes.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I MIGHT have hit the wrng reply button, though, that was meant as a reply to G127. XD
Unless I’m missing something, he ordered a strike based on faulty intelligence and said that, given the same intelligence he’d do so again.
You make it sound like a deliberate attack on civilians that he doubled down on saying that killing them was a good thing.
While, by the way, he was taking a huge political hit for pulling out of an occupation/war that he didn’t start.
“Some dude told us we should blow up a civilian car. We did it without bothering to check if it was true, because lol at the notion that we actually care. In fact, we not-care so much that if the same dude tolds us to blow up another civilian car, we’d totally do it again.” is not the argument for “not a war criminal” you seem to think it is.
I’m sure that’s an exact quote or at least close paraphrase that accurately summarizes the intelligence used for the strike and Biden’s reaction to it.
I don’t know waht to tell you. If a source tells you to blow up a civilian vehicle because there’s definitely bad guys in there, you blow up that vehicle and it turns there weren’t, and you throw a press conference where you say that you still fully trust that source and that the operation “wasn’t a complete failure” (even though the only thing it did was kill innocents, children included), those are clear signs that:
a – you don’t care, and
b – you’d totally do it again.
You can spin the US however you want, call us an international fast food corporation if you want to, we’re a globe spanning empire greased with the blood of untold thousands. And globe spanning empires do terrible things and so do the people who lead them, and not always by necessity.
Paul Krugman often points out that if you look at what the money is spent on, the US Federal Government is just an insurance company that also has an army. Everything else is small change.
And if you look closer at the army, it’s really a moving company with guns.
The Pinkertons, but government-issued.
It’s not just globe-spanning empires that do terrible things. They do them on a larger scale, because they span the globe, but regional powers do terrible things within their scope. And smaller nations do terrible things within theirs.
Foreign policy is a horrible game, played for the highest stakes. Everyone’s cheating and you can’t even opt out.
Give her a week and she will have the perfect rebuttal, in three copies and notirised.
“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates (allegedly)
Who knew there was actually an opposite of l’esprit de l’escalier?
I always wondered, did this just…never occur to her? I always figured it was sort of her childhood dream and she never really examined it to much.
I get the feeling she’s had this conversation with herself before, and is unhappy to be replaying it.
Maybe she wasn’t strong enough to face the truth before.
Ah, the moment when your greatest aspiration (possibly your childhood dream) shatters and collapses
I disagree that this is bullshit. the one thing to not do is to consider it a fatality. If this is truly inevitable, what even is the point. That kind of mentality is just setting yourself up to give up.
Like seriously, if the reason because we can’t get a decent leader is because all the decent people have decided that it’s impossible to be leader without being indecent, then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and those are always stupid and self-defeating. Nobody said it was going to be easy. But how do you know if you at least do’nt try.
this is the reason I call Bull on Raidah. Not because she is wrong about previous presidents, but because she present it as a fatality that can be changed. It’s just setting things up for things to remain the same. That kind of mentality is part of what things stagnate.
Yes. That is EXACTLY why I keep saying that Dorothy needs to pursue her dream and become President. Far too many people want to get into power for all the wrong reasons; the people who actually be GOOD Presidents tend to decline the role because of what they fear the role may call upon them to do (and make no mistake, there WILL be hard choices where you will need to do evil in order to serve a greater good), but all the same, if you don’t have these people in power, then the ones who are left will be all too happy to abuse their position for their own ends.
To make it short, if all the people who are strongly against being war war criminal refuse to become president, all we are left with are candidate who are ready to become war criminal.
Congratulation, Raidah, you get to remain right. Cause that what matter, right?
Sorry Dotty but right now? Between the war in Ukraine and China gearing up for conquering Taiwan? Yeah there would be war crimes in your presidency whether you like it or not but that’s just part of being human.
China isn’t building an amphibious-assault fleet, or any fleet. It’s “gearing up” only in rhetoric for domestic consumption.
And the preparations for the invasion of Ukraine were just exercises. Even the poor Russian bastards were convinced of that XD
I’m sorry but what? Saying it’s not intending to invade Taiwan is fair enough but China is legitimately expanding it’s fleet, including amphibious warfare ships.
China would very much like to invade Taiwan. That it’s almost certainly not going to do so is because it knows the US would act to prevent it.
Not because of the lofty ideals we’d justify it with, but because it’s inline with our imperialist interests. Countering our closest rival’s imperialist interests.
Dang. that last panel is a mood and a half!
This is college, Dorothy. Was your dream just a child’s dream? You should be just happy to left it besides Santa and other things from your childhood. If it was something more, you should not let the mob lawyers of this world discourage you and get their happy-to-be-war-criminals elected. If you discover that you are over-reaching, good for you, but just don’t eat bullshit.
I honestly think it was a child’s dream. Have we ever heard her talk about WHY she wants to be the president? What policies she wants to implement? Or is she just ambitious and the presidency seemed prestigious. And she didn’t leave it behind with Santa because having ambitions and goals was grown-up and good.
but raidiah will probably be a defense attorney for criminals or big business so shes going to have no room to talk about anything…. just realize shes being a bongo and leave it there
actually id like raidah to meet booster …….i don’t think shed have much to say after that……
Dorothy, Raidah’s just trying to be a nuisance. Don’t take her seriously, just ignore her out of spite.
America has been involved in police actions, incursions, retaliatory strikes, and countless other activities that have resulted in American military personnel being shipped home in flag-draped caskets, but when was the last time we were participants in an honest-to-goodness declared WAR? So if there haven’t been any wars, it’s only logical that you can’t have war criminals.
[points to Afghanistan and Iraq. Points to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prison]
And Fox News truly is “fair and balanced”, the Alliance Defending Freedom does exactly that, Nazis are socialists, and North Korea is DEFINITELY democractic.
Okay but Nazis ARE Socialists. National Socialists, it’s in the name. Benito Mussolini was a socialist who became disillusioned and created Fascism as an evolution of Socialism. There are obviously differences between Nazis and Communists, like how Nazis is focused on the internal society while Communism wants to spread it to everyone but that just makes them two sides of the same coin. They even treated the “Enemy” the same way, using cattle-wagons to transport them to death/work camps.
goddamn
do you know why the “poem” goes “first they came for the socialists”? BECAUSE NAZIS CAME FOR THE SOCIALISTS. It’s the first dang line. It’s absolutely vile for you to conflate the victims with their oppressors. Martin Niemöller coined the oft-recited line after becoming disillusioned with Nazis… because he at first supported them because he was a rightwing hardliner who was happy to see the lefties go. But then the Nazis came after more and more demographics and Marty’s like “well okay maybe it was a bad idea to go after the lefties even though I hated those guys.”
Yeah, “Socialist” was in the name of the party, but only to be populist. It’s like how North Korea isn’t actually democratic despite its full official name! It’s like how Fox News isn’t actually news! (both examples listed above by somebody else.)
And Mussolini was KICKED OUT of his Socialist group for being a fascist asshole, that’s how Socialist he was.
What the actual fuck. What the actual actual fuck.
iTs In tHe NaMe goddamn is this truth social
Do you know WHY they came for the socialists? Because Communist terrorism contributed to the political success of the Nazi Party. People supported them Because Commies were attacking them.
What the actual fuck? I’m from Poland, FUCKING MILLIONS of people died here as Nazis and Commies fought this way and that way. There is this photo from our Day of Independence with both Nazi and Soviet imagery crossed out. The fuck is that my country suffered severely under BOTH and so we think BOTH should fight right off.
you do know there’s a difference between communism and socialism, right, are you my MAGA dad
for serious, i had this exact conversation with the exact same “the left is the real nazis” bullet points as my Trump-voting dad
Yeah I might have gone Too far with Socialists. Western Socialists that is. But my country’s experience with this whole tree of ideologies has been thoroughly traumatizing and filled with mass graves so please excuse me for a knee-jerk reaction.
It’ll be a cold day on Venus before we can ever discuss socialism rationally, won’t it? 😑
I guess we should make clear definitions. Social programs, taxes etc. All good. Seizing means of production and excessive government interventions. HOLD RIGHT THERE!
I’m all in favor of the workers seizing the means of production. Sounds like a very good thing to me.
pivoting directly from “the nazis were socialists” to “the nazis were right to put socialists in camps”. I know who talks that way.
“Mussolini was kicked out”. Yeeeah, Protestants were kicked out of the Western Christian Church and… I don’t even know how it went down with Shia and Sunni but the bottom line is that a heretic is still a part of the ideology.
wow i’m glad you’re also looping in “all muslims are the same” while we’re at it
[eyeroll] Way to misunderstand. My point is that the greatest hatred is always between two groups that have only small ideological differences, like Protestants and Catholics, Shia and Sunni etc.
yeah that’s why nazis’ greatest hatred was for the jewish people, because of their small ideological differences
You know what, fuck this.
Keep on fucking this. I’m kind of sick of seeing you say my queer socialist jewish friends are actually nazis.
Ask them about Palestine.
Yeah, I don’t have to, they’ve all been pretty PRO-PALESTINE, ya dumb fuck
you know what i just found out a friend died, you can go away
I was working on a fairly long post about “‘it’s in the name is bullshit’ was my literal point”, but now that doesn’t even make secondary.
Sorry to hear about your friend, Willis. 🙁
😭
I’m sorry, did you just hear Willis had Jewish friends and tell him to ask them about Palestine as some sort of ‘proof’ they’re Nazis?????????????? What the FUCK? I don’t have words for your antisemitism. I’m glad you’re gone.
I’m sorry about your friend, Willis.
Raiders (wow autocorrect hasn’t learned that yet) is a blowhard.
Glad Jakes broke up with her. She was only after his brother’s influence.
I i can’t get a handle on this. It suggests that Dorothy hasn’t run into some boingo blowhard like Raidah, ever, and is caught out.
As a female in HS, with ambition, she’s never had some guy (especially) who was all blather she’s had to deal with?
She has– it’s in her twitter feed.
I mean, she could just be the infamous president that never became a war criminal.
The more power you wield, the easier it is to hurt someone with it. I guess Raidah is just fine with being in positions where she can just avoid any accountability.
I’m of two minds on this. Raidah was out of line, but she’s right. And it goes back to something that Harry Truman had on his desk- “The Buck Stops Here.” As the leader of a country, you are in some way responsible for everything that country does. I would argue that even if Dorothy becomes President and, say, abolishes the military, she would still be responsible for, for example, unjust tax laws that fail to sufficiently tax the rich and recompensate the poor. Or for an immigration policy that hurts folks by not unilaterally allowing everyone into the country (I’m not even talking about abuses of the system perpetrated recently by multiple administrations. I’m talking about just having a process by which some people can be denied access to the country, making it so that they can’t pursue better jobs, or see their loved ones, etc. That’s harm done. It counts)
Now, this is an absolutely ridiculous, unfair standard. In essence, I’m blaming the President that we don’t live in a utopia. But it’s true on the face of it that being a president requires doing harm. Even if you do good to countless others, the machinations of government will inflict harm. And if you hold to the absolute moral standard of “take no action that will inflict harm”, being President at all violates that standard (And we all do. We live in a society. But a President does so worse than just about anyone else)
Disclaimer: the above is mostly my anxiety talking, and not necessarily consistent with actual ethics as practiced by philosophers. I’m just rambling.
But, at the same time, to use another quote, “It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.” If we accept that something like the office of the president is necessary (that’s not a given, but I *do* believe a centralized government is necessary), then it’s better that someone like Dorothy have it than most other folks. She would do *less* harm than an equivalent. And that’s important.
TL;DR- the office of the president is inherently harmful. Dorothy would probably do less harm than most in the office. We live in a society.
Though the POTUS CAN (and should) make pushes for stuff like tax law and immigration policy, that’s mostly the House/Congress job. If, e.g., Biden made public announcements about how he wanted higher taxes on the top brackets (and acted accordingly within reason, of course – none of this “I totally support right to abortion, but also let me just appoint this anti-choice judge” bullshit) but H/C went “nah, fam”, I don’t think it’d be fair to lay “unfair tax laws” at Biden’s feet, unless you want the POTUS to just executive order the other two powers away.
I mean, I totally said it’s completely unfair to. I’m blaming every president ever for not magically ending the harm the US Government does. Even though Congress is responsible, even though checks and balances are necessary. Because the President’s job is to enforce the laws. So, morally, they make the decision to direct the IRS to collect unfair taxes. They could say “I’m not going to enforce this law. It’s unjust and harms people.” Is that the right thing to do? No, of course not. It would cause far more problems than it solves. But it’s still a decision to inflict harm on people who don’t deserve it.
I admit, this is a “We live in a society” level take, but that’s the level Raidah reduced this conversation to.
Okay, so I’m sure your post is very informative and has a lot of very important politics stuff in it, but… I was scrolling up and my eyes immediately locked onto “Biden’s feet” and so I think maybe I should Log Off for the day. And probably stop reading the comments literally the second I wake up, after I spent the night doing Twelve-know-what in Final Fantasy.
Absolutely no shade toward you or anyone here, just… damn, my routine needs to be adjusted.
No kinkshaming from me.
Being the president wouldn’t automatically make her a bad person, but it might make her unhappy. She might not be cut out for a position where she has to do harm.
Does anyone remember Dorothy’s Twitter handle?
https://mobile.twitter.com/DorothyKeener/
Found it.
Every time I do anything, there's always some guy who's hoping I mess up so I "finally learn a lesson."In my defense…
It really is depressing and demoralizing. She’s right.
… I don’t hope she keeps messing up. I hope that when she does mess up she learns it’s ok to mess up some, striving for hyper competence is going to burn her out.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jLK7JZO4EYM
Now I’m imagining the likelihood of Bernie Sanders committing a war crime if he became president. Seems very minimal but not out of the realm of possibility.
He spent his honey moon in the Soviet Union. I’d upgrade that probability to Very High
It’s almost 100%, because he sympathizes with dictators who pay lip service to his favorite economic theories. I mean, the guy was defending the bloody Cuban revolution and regime, for chrissakes. He would happily enable the “right” strongman.
Sanders would either do so or somehow manage to withdraw US military influence from around the world, which would lead to far more war crimes, even if it wasn’t the US committing them.
Within about a week of Sanders taking office he’d be despised by half of his fanbase for betraying their principles.
The deification of any political candidate is worrisome and I encourage those who think their favorite candidate (any of them) can do no wrong maybe ask themselves which marginalized groups they haven’t spent very much time listening to, because odds are there is at least one they’ve dismissed.
Disability issues, for example, tend to be overlooked a lot even in the most progressive circles, and that includes by favored candidates. :/
Good point. I’ll keep what you said in mind when analyzing them.
I’m getting my perspective shaken bit by bit when it comes to seeing politicians as infallible people. Voting just comes down to picking the lesser of two evils for left-identifying me.
It’s cool, and yeah absolutely, the system as it stands is ultimately “pick the least terrible option to minimize the amount of harm done.”
I will ultimately still vote for someone whom I know doesn’t pay enough attention to issues that directly affect me if the alternative is someone even worse. I just think it’s important to be aware of and open about where the “best available options” are still lacking, and hold them accountable, so we don’t grow complacent, and can hopefully continue to push for better.
Disability issues just aren’t seen as a national-level campaigning issue, as they resonate with a small proportion of the population. It’s more of an advocacy issue that has some champions in the House.
I mean, 100%. He probably wouldn’t’ve gotten us into any new wars, but he’d still have to work with the rest of the government.
Sigh, yeah. So it’s just a given with the job. Reality sucks.
It’s a dumb, shallow criticism. You don’t have to commit war crimes to become president, and the fact that so many presidents cross ethical lines is due to the massive challenges and trade-offs of executing so much responsibility.
You might end up making some mistakes in office, but clearly Dorothy has vision and would want to do good, as well.
The only way to avoid consequential screw-ups is to flip burgers or make coffee drinks, where your consequences are too minor to register.
Being president seems like something she decided on when she was very young, and she hasn’t given a lot of thought to what it would actually be like or what would be required of her. She might not be cut out for those challenges and tradeoffs.
Yeah, I think it’s naive for anyone to think they can become president and do no harms.
All that said though, I’d rather someone who wants to do as little harm as possible take on the role than someone who is unconcerned (or unaware) of the harms they’d do. (Not a job I’d want though, heck no)
As an aside, a fascinating show that actually deals with this concept is Designated Survivor, if anyone here has seen that! Quality takes a dip in the 3rd season, but it’s a pretty good show!
The basic premise is: someone who never aspired to president ends up in that role because every other member of gov ahead of him in line is killed in an attack. So suddenly the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is president of the US. His character wrestles a lot with trying to avoid making choices that take human lives (and faces a lot of no-win situations where people are going to die no matter what he does).
Kind of a fascinating look at “what if someone tried to do better” and how even someone with the best intentions can end up making the very mistakes they’d wanted to avoid.
I guess Battlestar Galactica touches on this a bit too (the reboot) what with Rosalin suddenly becoming president…but that show has a lot of mysticism and scifi that kind of make it more removed from real US politics. But you do still see the evolution of this character from “schoolteacher and politician with good intentions” to “totally willing to enact a military dictatorship to get her way.”
“Quality takes a dip” is doing some serious work there, imo. That show straight up pulled a Sideshow Bob vs rakes in S3. I know they were trying to be all “the gritty realities of political campaigns”, but Kirkman just does a complete 180 in personality and morals. And yeah, the first two seasons were a bit “Mr Kirkman Goes to Washington”, but still.
Yeah, plus the sudden disappearance of multiple characters with zero explanation. 🙁
There were moments I liked in S3 but it really did suddenly feel like a different show. I honestly haven’t finished the last season yet because of all the changes and weirdness. It’s too bad because I was really enjoying the 1st 2 seasons, though I think ultimately season 1 ws the best.
I know piloting an unstoppable murder robot sounds evil, but let’s be real. The murderbot has already been built and set loose down town. There’s no stopping it now. And since somebody is going to pilot that thing, wouldn’t you rather the pilot be someone who promised to feel bad about all the murder they’re still going to do?
Not to mention that it is being used to fight other murder robots. Ukraine is fighting to a large extent thanks to American weapons. I, as someone from Ukraine’s neighbouring country, country which has Extensive experience with Russian Imperialism, have a lot of gratitude to America because it’s thanks to US that we can have our independence.
Don’t give the US credit for stuff, it inflates their ego.
I’m hoping it gets big enough that they’ll step in and knock Russia out of the Game of Civilizations.
Pretty sure if they try it, we all die in nuclear fire. Like, it would save me the trouble of figuring out my own method, but I think others might have a problem with the whole “skeletons burnt into walls if you’re lucky” thing.
[sighs sadly] Yeah you are right, but one can always dream.
I think the prevailing thought here is, if you want good things to happen, you need to personally have a 39-step plan on how to do it perfectly, in a way that won’t inconvenience anyone. Dreams are legally actionable.
Sounds like a Path of Dorothy XD
She totally has a plan like that in the works, guaranteed. It’s probably an incomplete and very dodgy plan, but she’s only 19, we forgive her.
Come to think of it, how long do Future President Courses usually last? Is it a four-year program, or…? Just trying to get an estimate on how old she’ll be before she even needs to start seriously considering any of this in like a short-term “this is happening soon” sort of way.
Well minimal age for candidacy is 35 years old so she has a good while to perfect her plan.
I’m glad that’s worked out well for you. I don’t mean to suggest that American imperialism can only ever do evil forever. It can, does, and will do good in the world. And opposing other imperial powers is part of that. But there’s also a lot of harm that it does and much of it is baked into the system. Even a very good president (as I think Dorothy will be) cannot halt most of that harm. I think Raidah is quite justified in being suspicious of anyone who aspires to that kind of position just in the promise that she plans to be one of the good ones.
Having been born in a US dictatorship, having met tortured people, being friends with orphans of the regime, and generally knowing the pain that is inflicted by the US’ authoritarian thumb, I can tell you: You should be looking at the storm cloud, not at the silver lining. Don’t excuse the horrors.
You should also be looking at the cloud, not only at the silver lining.*
May there be peace and prosperity in Ukrainian, and may the stolen territory be returned, along with all the stolen people.
In your hypothetical scenario, I’d rather the next person who pilots that robot be someone who has figured out a way to stop the robot from killing any more people. By destroying that robot if necessary.
I would love to see the murder robot disassembled. I hope it won’t take bloody revolution to see it happen. Those sorts of revolutions run an elevated risk of installing brand new murder robots. I would like to see us build community centered systems of support that distance is from our dependence on state welfare and positively demonstrate a better alternative. But that is probably not a future I’ll see in my lifetime.
Also, may I assume from your avatar that you’re a … TROTskyist? (Sorry.)
And violent revolutions also have a tendency to sacrifice a lot of marginalized people as well (for example: disabled people and others less likely to be able to survive violence/harsh conditions). All idealist activists eventually learn there is no quick solution with minimal suffering to fixing the problems we face. Any choice, any path, is ultimately going to cost some people. :/
I certainly can’t pretend to have any good answers. But then again I don’t want to be president. Dorothy is a person with good intentions and anyone with good intentions who wants that kind of power eventually has to realize what having that kind of responsibility over so many lives entails.
Terribly sorry to bother you with relevant conversation. I’m sure we will be back to fuckable lesbians before you know it.
There’s no need to be nasty.
No, indeed; people do however really love doing so here. Take the example here- gets to vent some vitriol under cover of anonymity. So inspiring!
What?
Wow, what a reductive and mean-spirited response. When did they say anything about “fuckable lesbians”, you insincere weirdo?
Yeah, what’s with the pathetic, passive-aggressive little “terribly sorry”, as though we can’t all read basic English words, and discern all too readily that they’re being a shit.
Since you asked
“I don’t care about all that, and I already said as much. Ruth is hotter than Rachel to me, and that raw fact is my top priority between the two of them.”
Not the only quote to that effect.
Okay, they think Ruth is hotter than Rachel. How is that relevant to being worn out by geopolitics?
Also wasn’t that like a week ago, as part of a post explaining why they’re not interested in the overall Rachel/Ruth/Redemption Discourse? You’re being extremely snakey with this quote.
Okay, and?
And your a fundamentally unserious person and I refuse to take you seriously.
you’re*
You’re a judgemental asshole. Fix yourself.
Best to disengage. They clearly have some sort of chip in their shoulder over the Rachel thing and just wanted to be rude for nobody’s benefit.
Taffy; on* your shoulder. Since we’re being pedants.
Bite my ass. What’s your fucking problem?
Oh. I’m sorry. Really I thought correcting each other’s typos was a thing we were doing.
No, you did not. You’re being a snide jackass to me for literally no reason. Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit.
Do you two have prior beef or something? What IS your problem with them anyway, rabbit avatar?
Well, it’s certainly what you were doing. Doesn’t seem right to tellme to bite your ass for it.
No. Uh-uh. you came at them right out the gate with your useless “terribly sorry” bullshit. You don’t get to claim you were wronged in this scenario. They expressed an emotion and you dredged up irrelevant nonsense from last week so you could take a cheap potshot. Nothing about this was necessary or even called for, and it’s certainly not a case of you being wronged. You started the entire thing.
Go talk to your professor! Robin can give you some excellent advice on swallowing your own bullshit!
I’m glad you included those last three words.
Okay fine, I regret ever fucking saying anything.
At this point, you’re just feeding the troll. Probably best if you take a break from these toxic-ass comment threads for a while.
Probably.
Dorothy needs to talk to Sarah. I doubt she’d be all that supportive, but if she tells her what Raidah said Sarah would manage Dorothy’s campaign all the way to the White House out of sheer spite.
Ruth would join in too. She just…she really likes spite.
@Willis Probably an unreasonable request, but could you just delete this entire thread? It’s nothing but pissybaby mud slinging (including my own “contributions” and it’s not really relevant to the comic. I’m sorry for starting it.
We didn’t always have a president in this country, and there are other ways to run a country without the system like ours. Especially since the two major parties in this country are owned by the rich and the big corporations, who absolutely don’t want this system changed to benefit the working-class. Hopefully this leads to Dorothy realizing that she can help people better not by trying to become a president who somehow doesn’t commit war crimes, but instead by advocating for replacing the current right-wing capitalist system with one that actually helps the workers.
That might be a bit too far for someone who just uttered the phrase “liberal saint”. But regardless, she is clearly rethinking some things and I’m glad.
Eh, I didn’t know what socialism was when I was in college.
I mean, I also didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics outside of “these people acknowledge that climate change is a thing and aren’t actively trying to take away abortion rights so I guess I’ll vote for them and then forget about it for 2 years.”
I’d argue even college students who are very politically aware are still naive about a great many things. At that age it’s impossible to have a detailed enough understanding of the world to grasp every perspective and every harm, and in fact I’d argue those who do think they have all the answers are almost definitely ignorant of a certain amount of harms/issues.
(Not to just disparage younger people. I don’t think ANY of us have all the answers. The older I get the more I realize how much I likely still have to learn)
You said it!!! “”””trickle-down economics””” is a fucking MYTH 😤
You mean the Capitalist idea of “Invisible Hand” through which Independent Greed serves the greater population on accident?
yeah, it’s invisible because it wants to steal from the proletariat!
“We didn’t always have a president in this country”?
Sure, for less than a decade under the Articles of Confederation, which were abandoned in favor of our current Constitutional system because they proved unworkable.
If we’re defining country as piece of land, there wasn’t a president for thousands of years before 1492 and society seemed to have been working fine
I wasn’t, because that’s a stupid definition. The United States under the Articles was essentially the same country as under the Constitution. The same states, with direct continuity between the two.
Before 1492, while there were no “Presidents” there were many different societies with different systems, many of them with strong individual leaders by one name or another.
I’m not even sure WHY you’d define country as “a piece of land”. When a country’s borders change, is that no longer the same country? Is the Iroquois Confederacy the same country as the United States because the former used to be located in part of the latter’s current territory? Is Ukraine still the (part of the) USSR? Did the United States cease to exist when Texas seceded from Mexico?
My condolences on your loss, Willis.
oh no 🙁
The way to reboot Dorothy? Have her read NK Jemisin’s The ones who stay and fight. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/
It’s fine Dororthy, just choose literally any other career path than “most powerful person in America.”
But that’s the only one that (in her mind) allows her to Mom the entire country.
Americans in the comments here are wild and i’m genuinely surprised the way people are defending the presidency. i know people are trained to love the country but i thought that kinda only worked on right wing people. do y’all know how the rest of world sees you? you know your government are like, the bad guys of the world, right? that millions of people are afraid of your government because they know people who’ve been killed or tortured by your government? you know what the CIA do, right? what do y’all learn in school?
I started to suspect something was wrong back in High School. As I got older, this questioning continued to grow. However, the programming didn’t stop because I didn’t see an alternative. Now I’m in a position where I know my programming is wrong, but it’s too deeply hardwired to change in meaningful ways. The ability to change myself has limits, and those limits move as you get older. I can rage against these patterns in my mind all I like, but it’s like throwing cheese against a brick wall. I gained some peace by trying to let it go. I’d rather be happy than right.
Oh believe me, I’ve seen American Dad and studied history outside of high school, you don’t need to tell me twice. 😑
“Home of the Free” MY ASSHOLE
I mean, for all the shit the US government does, name me a global power that does better.
I still find myself in the “Raidah can go fuck herself” camp. Only assholes behave like that. And while I suffer no illusions as to the actions of my government, it takes a truly stunning amount of naivete and narcissism to sit back comfortably under the auspices *of* that government and be all “HERP A DERP WAR CRIMINALS” while doing absolutely fuck all *about* it. Unless you (the general “you” here) are actually prepared for armed revolution, all people like Raidah are doing is jerking off in public and expecting to be applauded for it.
So. Again,,unless you’re prepared to tear shit down and replace it with whatever your idea of ‘better’ is, this is what we’ve got. And someone is going to be running the show. C’est la vie.
Yeah, agreed. Dorothy wants to improve the system. I don’t see Raidah taking steps towards doing that
Even my beloved Bernie Sanders supported the bombing of Yugoslavia. 🙁 Things get tough at that level
Strange this comes out as Carter enters hospice
Dotty wouldn’t be a war criminal.
She’d be a smooth criminal.
Oddly fitting timing considering current Jimmy Carter news, but I still respect him more than most Presidents because of his direct, active until the end of his life, humanitarian work. Still a war criminal though…
Like lawyer is a “good” person Job, Raidah you’re full of shit you sanctimonious bongo.
As someone who managed to be a Dorothy through a state college from a state which no president has been elected… this line of thinking is also what eventually broke me.