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.
True love is actually a great wish. Money runs out, the earth doesn’t have the resources to power an x-wing, super dude can’t do anything super or else society will now expect him to be Superman, which is a huge responsibility anyone reasonable would want. But TRUE LOVE, the fucking stuff from Disney movies? I’d take that in a heartbeat, then proceed to do a lewd photoshoot with my partner on the defunct x-wing.
super dude can’t do anything super or else society will now expect him to be Superman
Reminds me of a scene in My Adventures With Superman where Clark literally cannot go to sleep because he can’t stop hearing people needing help (thanks to his super-hearing). He stays awake the whole night helping people.
Super dude can use his super powers to steal the X-Wing and then fly off to another planet and find true love there. True love that can do some freaky alien sex.
Doesn’t sound humble enough for true love to exist in the same plane of existence. I mean if having a god complex worked then no doctor, cop or lawyer could possibly single, have a perfect relationship and absolutely satisfied with their life.
You started this argument with how you can have true love and now you don’t so you can embrace your god complex . The amount of goalpost movement in this discussion alone says you’re probably incapable anyways so it’s probably wise to avoid such a relationship until you are willing to work on yourself.
If he has a a personality disorder that could be a cause of the inability to form or maintain relationships, wishing for true love might not last either.
Just have your GF make a wish for a pair of x-wings. Or that you both have super powers. Or whatever. She would be a new customer and this able to make 1 wish.
Edit: Wait… Did she just poof into existence or was she already in line? I’ve seen this comic so many times and only now am I noticing the girl is in the first panel.
She was poofed into existence one hour in the past, and started walking toward the well. At first it was just a zombie shuffle, mindless and jagged. But slowly and surely, she remembered her made-up past, forgot that she had materialized from thin air.
Perhaps everything we do is the preamble to some future dingbat’s wish. Maybe all of history is unavoidably conspiring to lead to a truck of cash toppling over in front of him, after which point we’ll all blink and look around, dazed, unsure what to do.
The hydrologist in me always asks: why dig a well at the top of the hill? Surely that is more effort than digging it at the bottom of the hill where the water table is closer to the surface.
But I guess wells like this predate modern hydrology. And outhouses and such could be polluting the water as it flows down gradient. So the water at the top of the hill was likely cleaner and safer to drink…
I’d wish for clean drinking water in every well. ;)
This is a misapprehension. Springs are on hillsides, not hilltops. Basically, imagine there are two surfaces: the ground, and the water table. In some places, usually on hillsides, the water table will intersect the surface. Where that happens, a spring will exist.
But that water has to be under pressure for this to happen – this is known as the hydrological gradient. Water flows down hill on the surface, and down gradient under ground. In order for there to be pressure on the water, enough to force it out a hillside, the water table somewhere in the hill needs to be physically higher in altitude than the spring.
In other words, it rains on top of the hill, and the rain soaks into the ground. That water wants to flow downhill, so it flows out of the ground on the sides of the hills. But this means a spring will never flow from the top of a hill.
Only in a 2D world with the directions being limited to “up” and “down”. Carrying it laterally around the circumference of the hill would be equally probable.
Wishes flow best in vuggy volcanic strata, so well location is based on luck hitting a vug or interconnected seam. Any wishes in sandstone were used up millennia ago for plants to eat or, apparently in one case, death by meteor.
The problem is in the “look forward to.” How depressing to get a globe and recognize a memory from your past. You wouldn’t even have that to look forward to.
A bit of a weird wish, but I’d definitely wish that whenever I want I could be looking at a living person (either through TV or a photo), see their age, and be able to adjust it at will. I would finally be able to turn the US legislators into the babies they are.
I don’t know if it has been explored in great depths in general media, but I know just about every single cartoon I’ve ever seen has done at least one episode involving age regression. I also know that season 3 episode 9 (Secret Agent Bear) of Yogi’s Treasure Hunt they had Dick Dastardly was trying to hold world leaders ransom with fountain of youth water and that’s the closest I can think of to this super power that I’ve seen in popular media.
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