The alt-text panel hints at this, but the problem with making up a fake group everyone can hate is that racists and bigots will stretch the definition to include whatever they want.
We’ve seen it with “antisemitism” being redefined to include any criticism of Israel, and before that “pedophilia” being redefined to include drag queens and parents supporting their trans children. For that reason, hatred like this should not be encouraged, even if it’s imaginary.
My interpretation of it was that it was satire and not proposing the creation of a fake group. In short, I perceived it as being in agreement with everything you said.
You’re right of course about this being satire. My fear though is that things like this can fall out of the author’s control very quickly, much like Pepe the Frog, and I really don’t want gratch to be a catchall dog whistle.
Do you have any examples of this? Because my experience is the opposite. It’s the perception that your group is normal, the “default”, and tearing down all of these other groups using phrases exactly like the ones in the comic.
You’re saying the same thing I am. Racists usually consider their race superior and all the others inferior. And in that case the solution in the comic would just add another inferior race to the list of inferior races.
It’s not like racists are racist against a single race and if you give them a new race to be racist against they’ll stop being racist against the first one.
Different kinds of racists. They’re not all hardcore white supremacist types, plenty of otherwise-normal people have prejudices against specific groups for being lazy, smelly, deviant, whatever.
Case 1: Blue guy hates green people. Red and yellow are fine, but green people are sub-human and don’t deserve the same treatment as blue, red, and yellow. According to this comic, you just give them gray people to refocus their racism and then blue and red will both hate gray together.
Case 2: Blue guy thinks only blue people are true human. If you’re not blue you don’t deserve to be treated the same as blue. Giving them gray people to be racist against will not change anything, it’s just one more color that’s not blue.
I’m saying case 2 is what racism looks like in real life in 99% of cases. But even in case 1, I doubt the blue racist would suddenly be ok with red people just because gray are worse.
Even in Case 2, it satisfies the satirical robot’s definition of unity for blue, red, yellow, and green people to all agree that Gratches are the fucking worst. The comic simply does not claim that racism against Gratches will reduce racism against anyone else, that’s you adding meaning where none exists. All it claims is unity.
I had an ex who couldn’t fathom why in a walking dead/fallout scenario I’d personally not choose to trade with gold, but actual useful and tangible goods like food, ammo, salt, skills…
Their whole argument was gold has always been valuable so it’ll always be valuable and I was like “the fuck good would gold do me when I’m starving”
Yeah. If anything, a gold coin is too much value in one piece. Like, who are you going to find with enough spare stuff to trade that would actually be worth the equivalent value of an ounce of gold?
I figure that someone with nothing but gold coin would end up with very very expensive food, and with some luck a very expensive gun of some kind.
I would expect that if I had a pile of gold, the first armed person to realize that I have that much gold would immediately shoot me to get the gold. Then the next half-crazed, highly stressed, armed individuals would take them out and the cycle continues.
But the value of gold still relies on a majority of apocalypse survivor’s collectively deciding that gold has value. We could just, not.
Or why not bottle caps, shells, cool looking rocks, dry salt, sugar, nutmeg, pickles, …
Cooper would hold more value than gold, as a metal that can be worked and given practical application with even primitive metallurgy skills. Or silver, with it’s antimicrobial properties would still be more valuable than gold.
Unless we’re all surviving the apocalypse and still trying to make chips for iPhones, what good is gold?
Gold is workable, conductive, and non oxidizing. It’s also used for jewelry. So yeah not great for survival but if you’re using copper, gold is similar or better except for its rarity or iron is available and much better
It does rely on people deciding it has value. It’s not the people who are still mostly logical who would value gold the highest. That’s why I would expect a highly stressed, armed person hopped up on memories of apocalyptic ads to go “ooh, shiny” and instinctively shoot to get at the stockpile of gold.
Thank you! It has never made sense to me, either. Hoarding gold did make some sense back in the day when you were fleeing a local or regional calamity, or could expect to see a return to relative normalcy in your lifetime. But if global civilization collapses from climate change or similar, gold will have no practical value to a refugee or survivalist.
It’s valuable because barter economies aren’t real and don’t work. All the alternatives you mention are difficult to transport, not fungible, or not scarce, so they won’t work as a currency. Either we revert back to gift economies where distribution of goods happens within a community and follows cultural rather than economic rules, or the market settles on a currency for standardized arbitrary transactions between strangers that has the necessary properties of a currency.
I have a spice rack that takes up a large portion of my bugout bag. I guarantee that when I start cooking and whip out some Saffron, powdered Sumac Berries, and Turmeric for a rice dish, and people will just want me to stick around and cook for them. Especially since I also have my, my father’s, and my grandfathers BSA manuals, each of which has different pictures of various edible plants, herbs, and spices that can be found in the various parts of the world.
When you’re cultivating a relationship with a real person their wants and desires also factor into your choices, assuming you aren’t a psychopath. They will want different things from you, and keeping that to themselves and never pushing back just makes them miserable and builds resentment. Similarly, you don’t want to impose unreasonable expectations on them. Whether that’s related to their behaviour or their appearance, no one can reasonably expect to get exactly what they want 100% of the time, and that’s part of a healthy relationship.
…but if you’re constructing an artificial partner from a blank slate that’s completely bespoke to you, to choose anything other than an idealized match for all your desires is frankly insane, and to pretend otherwise is simply disingenuous.
I got sooooo lucky and just found a copy of me. That’s not what everyone wants, but they’re exactly the perfect match for me. We’re together 24/7 and have been for over a decade. No fights. I wish the same success for everyone who deserves it (everyone who isn’t a piece of shit)!
Plus, when you’re done painting them, you can move them around a table with aquarium plants and make “BOOM” and “WAAAGH” noises while occasionally rolling dice and arguing about rules
Also denying shootings happened and harassing the families of their victims so the idiot customers consuming said supplements have something to rage about.
I hope the trials are successful at fucking up the rest of his life.
I’ve seen this argument pushed unironically, and quite convincingly.
It of course depends on a lot of factors, and GHG emissions are not the only concern, but “short-circuit” consumption can (apparently, I did not run the numbers myself and read this a few years ago) emit much more CO2 than importing food from far away… simply because driving a car for 10 km to a farm for a bag of apples (or whatever) is a LOT worse per apple than the traditional container-on-ship->container-on-rail->semi-truck->local store supply chain which has a few times the fuel consumption of a car… but multiple orders of magnitude more cargo.
This is in reality not so much a dig on short-circuit consumption, which is obviously overall good, than a dig at how polluting cars are, even compared to cargo ships whose emissions we intuitively over-estimate. Still, it has stuck with me as a good example of the complexity of making a life-cycle emissions assessment.
Modern globalized economies are also often criticized to have gone too far into economies of scale, making them very brittle… as we saw in 2020/2021, as farmers re-discover every time one illness destroys an entire country’s mono-culture, and as we fear we may discover soon with TSMC.
Furthermore almost every country (even very economically liberal ones like the US) heavily subsidizes their local agricultural sector to shield them from foreign competition, as it is of the utmost national security importance that a blockade on agricultural imports could not result in widespread famine.
simply because driving a car for 10 km to a farm for a bag of apples (or whatever) is a LOT worse per apple than the traditional container-on-ship->container-on-rail->semi-truck->local store supply chain which has a few times the fuel consumption of a car
Uh. Do you think those semi trucks are bringing apples right into people’s homes? Guess how far the grocery store is from people’s houses lmao
That argument only works if every citizen in the country lives in high density, transit enabled city cores.
IIRC the hypothetical scenario assumed you had a supermarket on your side of town (say 1 km) but had to to on the other side of town to get to a local farm (say 10-15 km). As a suburbanite this seems quite reasonable to me on both fronts.
It's always seemed like such a weak take to just say Batman is a rich guy punching bad guys and nothing else.
He invests in infrastructure, supports the community, promotes people bettering themselves... it's just not nearly as exciting as battling a Joker who's sliced his own face off or a giant crocodile man or a guy who's theme is kites.
Batman’s nuts. Like everybody else in Gotham. He’s pathologically obsessed with beating the crap out of criminals with his bare hands because he needs to emotionally. The fact that he’s saving the world is incidental.
That actually makes his “no killing” rule make more sense. A person doing this for moral reasons would grapple with the continuous living trolley problem embodied by The Joker, and would likely eventually do what needs to be done. An otherwise-decent person feeding addiction to violence would draw a hard line in the sand that he will never ever cross no matter the cost. Which sounds more like Bats?
It also makes his choice of weapons make more sense – tazers don’t satisfy him the way his fists do.
Yes he might also do philanthropic things but that’s not what drives him.
A hero driven by dark needs is way more interesting than a boring paragon of virtue.
It also gives his emotional divide from Nightwing a more coherent moral centre than just “Nightwing didn’t like how Batman’s mean”.
Somewhere between (where he actually sits) is more interesting than both. He's clearly dealing with emotional trauma, but that doesn't mean he's not also still human. And trying to be more so.
We all got trauma. Trauma isn’t what makes Batman interesting. Obsession is. The maniacal motivation to make himself into the greatest DCU superhero by sheer force of will.
I keep trying to read the webcomic but I don’t have a good device for it so I make it a few issues past wherever the show is and lose patience with my failing eyes. But if we’re doing that game, Damien Darkblood vs Batman as worlds’ greatest detectives
I don’t really like the take that it is solely Batman’s responsibility to kill the Joker. Batman acts as a vigilante, and in order to not take actions that one cannot provide restitution for, he has a strict rule that he cannot kill. He enforces the law but he doesn’t act like he’s the judge, jury, or the executioner. He stops them and he lets the judicial system sentence them. The people he hands over the Joker to every single time has far more ample opportunity to kill him. The police, the judge deciding on capital punishment, prison guards, a random bystander with a gun. None of them carry the same extrajudicial responsibility that the Batman imposes on himself in order to remain accountable or at least not start taking charge of life and death.
The problem wouldn’t be that the Batman kills the Joker. The problem would be when he starts deciding whether others are better off dead than alive.
Both are interesting and both are generally how Batman is. It depends on the run. Sometimes he’s dark and grows into a paragon, and sometimes the reverse is true. Totally depends on the author.
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