Dumbing of Age

You could swap Robin and Jason with Zap Brannigan and Kif and change almost nothing about this strip.

Willis himself does that in the alt text.

It's going to be a best-seller, isn't it?

Robin could just do op-eds and it'd be probably simpler

how is she pronouncing blond like that with her mouth

Edit

Edited by Whowho on Mar 22nd 2024 at 1:58:25 AM

I guess it's real self-destructive hours again

Or maybe this is the boost she needs.

She can't save the world, but who says she can't write down stuff that helps other people save the world?

Dorothy Keener, author. It's not "president", but.......

Would be better for her, if she was you know going to get any credit.

Nope, she isn't. Right decision, too; the vainglorious satisfaction:exposure exchange rate is pretty bad right now.

Also, Tristan?!

Still beats Dargon I'd imagine

I'd imagine there's triple parentheses around "globalists"

Ugh, how performative. Exactly one praising of God every day.

Didn't Jesus have something to say about praying loudly on street corners?

Tristan's gone through some changes I see.

Or he's faking.

Matthew 6:5—6

I mean, still doesn't explain the antisemitism, though. You can pretend to be "pious" (by whatever definition of piety your weird cult is using) without doing antisemitism.

For those not quite following (as I was not), apparently "globalist" is being used as a substitute for "Jewish" in anti-semitic missives.

That said, in an era where people are claiming the "OK" sign as a definite sign of racism (and frankly, we've had decades of inverted crosses being claimed to be "Satanic"), the use of a term like that seems like a funny reason to suddenly jump into assuming anti-semitism. That said, I've often found myself baffled at the wide variety of symbols and keywords people use for those things (or at least someone on the Internet claims it's the case, and possibly it gets picked up by the people in question since "the Internet says it's true". Funny story, I recently ran into an article pointing out that the "Klan uniform" of the pointed white hood and robes may have been the result of Klan members seeing it as an example uniform in "The Birth of a Nation" and deciding it looked official).

Edited by FuzzyBoots on Mar 26th 2024 at 12:35:08 PM

For more context, globalist is usually used by antisemitics because they believe that Jewish people control the world.

Especially if they start clamoring about George Soros.

Edited by tclittle on Mar 26th 2024 at 11:36:27 AM

Yeah it's an antisemetic dogwhistle, also saying bad things about vaccines is also not related to false piety and you know bad.

Heh, the tying of the two together reminds me of some of the discussion of "virtue signaling" for people making wearing, or not wearing, a mask a sign of where you stood. I was a firm believer in masking up to protect people around me, just in case I might get infected and not know it yet, but as the information about actual efficacy, particularly for simple cloth masks, mounted up, I came to realize that it was also a kind of signaling.

Nobody's doing that. What happened was that some far-right people were like "Okay, we're gonna use the OK sign in a certain way to own the libs".

Which of course then led to people wondering "Hey, why are people making the OK sign in these situations where there's not really a reason to make the OK sign?"

And that led to people realising "Oh wait, it's a weird thing some fascists are doing."

Nobody ever claimed the OK sign was a racist or fascist symbol in itself, but there's a good chance that if somebody was making it for no discernible reason - including a guy who shot up a mosque doing so during his trial - then it's being used in a very specific context.

And why did fascists pick the OK sign, out of all things? Firstly, because fascists are unironical hacks who have to steal and pervert everything and secondly because the OK sign is in itself a normal hand gesture and using it would allow to them gaslight people.

"No, I'm not a fascist, I'm just making a normal hand sign; YOU are the crazy person."

Short read-up on the whole thing - as with a lot of things wrong with people, this one also originated on 4chan.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Mar 26th 2024 at 7:40:33 PM

I am aware that it showed up originally in 4chan as a joke. The fact that then people adopted it... and now it's become one of those things where I feel self-conscious on the off chance that someone would think that double-meaning is being used. And yeah, it did seem to touch off a trend of people saying "this politician is making an OK sign in this photo. They must be a secret racist..." It was dumb. But it happened. I knew people I considered otherwise intelligent who saw it as a smoking gun thing.

Sorry... it's one of my objections to whole "dogwhistle" thing. On one hand, yes, people will use an innocent term in a different way to create plausible deniability, or for the purpose of signalling, but it's led to the other direction sometimes, in my opinion, where it goes from "some people use it this way, so look at the context" to "this word was used. This must be a dogwhistle for X".

Edited by FuzzyBoots on Mar 26th 2024 at 3:10:00 PM

The word "globalist" is not really used by anyone but anti-Semites, and its use here is definitely intentional from Willis to show that Tristan has drunk the Kool-aid.

Fair enough. Like I said, I'd never known it to be used for anything in particular, and would have assumed it was some sort of economy term. Which I suppose shows that that sort of thing can work in context.

Yeah, globalism (and globalisation) are terms you'll occasionally see used legitimately, because they describe market effects. With "globalists" though, there's no other real reason to use the word.

" but it's led to the other direction sometimes, in my opinion, where it goes from "some people use it this way, so look at the context" to "this word was used. This must be a dogwhistle for X". "

There is case by case variance in how established the whistle is. OK hand was an attempt to make it into one that didn't pan out in long term. "Globalists are doing X" going hand in hand with "Globalists are The Jews" is well established.

"Which I suppose shows that that sort of thing can work in context. "

Yeah, context also matters. Joyce's family wasn't fond of actual practicioners of Judaism in the cast for example, so that is an extra link to how their community works and how an extreme version could go with Tristan.

Edited by Adannor on Mar 26th 2024 at 1:59:10 PM

It's like actually going on the Facebooks of some people I know