This is apparently based on a real thing and I was surprised because I had no idea that universities could invest in arms manufacturers. I also was too focused on figuring out which country Bulmeria was standing in on when it should have been obvious given student protests. Not my finest hour.
That is the obvious answer. I think I was thrown because of the term “military contractors” made me think of mercenaries rather than arms sales. It’s perfectly accurate use of the term but I associated it with something else.
It is strange that universities do investing, after all they are businesses which sell higher learning not ones which sell their services managing investment capital. However, from what I can gather university involvement in investing comes from endowments. Basically, some rich person decides that rather than buy a private jet they want to fund higher education in America for future generations – good on them! They could just hand over a bunch of cash, but that doesn’t keep up with inflation or help as much long term as handing over stocks (or money the university can then invest into stocks) so as to pay dividends and help lower income students gain education for generations to come. None of this seems bad on face-value. However, we now have universities spending tons of money on people to manage all these trusts and colleges have their finances deeply entangled with arms manufacturers and other companies and business interests that may not be ethical or in their students long term interest. This situation corrodes the initial noble mission of the university with undo material and finical concerns often counter to their own creeds or basic human logic, and even where the mission is not corrupted does not, the mere appearance of contrast of interest erodes trust and leaves students wondering why the money they paid to learn to build better bridges is being used to prop up funds investing in companies that help blow up cities.
This same thing happened to the Catholic church. When Constantine formally created the Church as an institution, he also gave it the worldly concerns of a land owner, employer, and manager of investments. Thus giving a spiritual movement that dismissed the material a contradictory motivation to preserve and expand itself via finical might. This turned out great and at no point escalated into theological black mail, rampant corruption and incompetence within the clergy, or helped sparked centuries of religious violence.
See, I think that’s the foundation of the problem right there. A university shouldn’t be acting as a business in the first place. It should be acting as a public service.
eh, whatever
That only works if it’s, in American terms, a government institution.
…which is of course normal. In most countries, most universities are national institutions that get their money entirely from the national budget.
Sum Dum Gai
Even other non-profit organizations need to manage money. Doctors without Borders USA has more than $500M. They’re not going to keep that much money in the world’s largest cookie jar or inside a very thick mattress. If I gave IU $10 million to fund student scholarships, they’d invest it and peel off the interest to give $500,000 in scholarships every year, _forever_.
An accountant acquaintance of mine says that most large public and private university systems are primarily either financial companies or athletics management companies. Who happen to run education on the side.
Mark
For which we can thank steadily shrinking public funding of higher education. The money has to come from somewhere.
Nymph
Sorry does the money not come from the tens of thousands they charge to attend their schools? Universities are not some tragically underfunded widdle babies.
Sum Dum Gai
Um,… yes? It does not? Back in the Sputnik era, the US government provided a hell of a lot of funding to colleges and universities as a matter of national development. It doesn’t any more.
Michael Steamweed
The rate of increase of tuition, etc, took a severe increase in the 80s. Reagan and his congress.
Bobcat2022
Yep. “We’d rather no one get any than let a black person have some” — white america, historically, always.
Michael Steamweed
USA higher education: (1) Used to be, the federal government (and most states) gave some funding to the colleges and universities. So the students’ tuition and costs were lower. But since the times of Reagan (*me spits on his grave), the federal Congress has been providing less and less every budget cycle. And the states by and large have been decreasing their funding too. (2) Also, the larger the system, the more its administrative costs, as it increases its financial portfolio, campus constructions, academic researches, and more expensive specialized services.
Meh! It turns out universities aren’t actually funded mostly by tuition (82 million) but by a combination of hospitals (72) dorms (28) and athletics (29). There’s also a lot of medical or military research which adds into the federal grants (42) (source is the link I posted as “my” website). Universities tuition isn’t actually funding universities, it’s more profitable endeavors like rent, healthcare, and military subcontracts.
(And it’s crazy the average cost of college has hopped up to 38,000 a year, but that usually includes 12,000 in rent and 7000 in food— half of the crazy high price of college is the just the price of living)
The sample not-the-Doctor Time Lord character in the old FASA Dr. Who RPG had, as part of their outfit, a button that said “STOP THE WAR”. Pretty much guaranteed to be relevant, no matter where or when they went…
Veronica
?ex, I’m wanting more
Tell the world, “Stop the war”?
thejeff
Relevant in a way, but it can hit very differently in different contexts.
To take an extreme case, wearing a “Stop the War” button in the US in 1944 a sends a very different message than in 1970.
For any given war, we may always want it to stop, but we often have very different ideas of the terms on which it should stop.
Mark
Hey, on 02-Sep-1945 the Allies did stop the war. They’d spent six years arranging the conditions for doing so.
Mustachio
Indeed. In some contexts, ending support for one side merely means that side is doing to start doing the majority of the dying instead of the majority of the killing. In that sense, divestment ENABLES death. It doesn’t end the dying, it merely changes who the victims will be.
thejeff
Or in some contexts, “stop the war” means surrender, often much worse consequences for the conquered population and the aggressor emboldened to start another war.
Around here, the context usually assumes the US is unjustly invading some other country and can actually just stop the war with no real consequences, but that’s our exceptionalism.
Mark
Indeed, there are only two ways for a belligerent to stop a war: (1) surrender, or (2) fight to a decision.
The war against Soviet Communism wasn’t won on a battlefield. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in itself, because their economy went through a depression even worse than the one we had in the 1930s as a direct result of economic embargos our government instated.
It’s also worth noting that less than 7% of all terrorist organizations in the world are actually broken up by military action. The vast majority of them voluntarily disband after encountering conditions in which they learn that what they do isn’t really working or that they don’t really need to do it anymore given better alternatives.
“Wars” against things like terrorism and Stalinism can be won with soft power, with the likes of boycotts and other economic sanctions, because Stalinists can choose not to be Stalinist anymore, terrorists can choose not to be terrorists anymore.
Terrorism and the like happen because of legitimate, pressing issues that have to be heard and addressed before the violence can be stopped; working from positions such that these organizations do what they do because “they’re EVIL” or “terrorists just come out of nowhere and they’re a fact of life” will never end the cycle violence.
thejeff
Absolutely. There’s an enormous amount a country like the US can do with soft power. We already rely heavily on it and should do so even more.
But that doesn’t always work and it works less for countries without the overwhelming power of the US.
Once a shooting war has begun (and thus “stop the war” is directly relevant), soft power is much less relevant. Sometimes a better use of soft power (possibly even by some one else) could have kept the war from starting
“it doesn’t work for other countries” often because our military literally bombed them back to the starting line.
the US militaristic hegemony continuously justifies it’s existence often by fostering ideal conditions for war for reasons that are hardly altruistic and just.
One such instance being the Mexican American War, President James Bolk sent troops to the disputed territories Mexico claimed back from Texas precisely because he wanted to foster ideal conditions for a war. Being a slave owner himself, Polk had skin in the game where he mutually benefited from more territory being in the hands of a country were slavery wasn’t abolished. Heck, Mexico even ALLOWED wealthy US folk living in the territories to keep their slaves, but of course with those brought up to venerate the slave-based aristocracy, enough just wasn’t enough now was it?
The Vietnam War was started because someone felt a bump on a submarine in the Gulf of Tolkien which they admit was unexplained, but according to officials he told, it was OBVIOUSLY the work of icky sticky communists, and thus sent troops to “investigate”, taking advantage of the fact that the draft from WWII never technically ended.
“oh that? eh you can just leave it there. It’s not like we gonna use it, you can trust us”, they affirmed, only to send thousands of young men to their deaths and use chemical warfare to devastate their ecosystems who far more than the immediate enemy depended on, showing that they’re willing to hurt surrounding regions and even their countries’ own people a lot on the premise that whoever they tell us is The Enemy NOW is gonna hurt that much more
The US Military Industrial hegemony taking advantage of us and starting yet another war with no exit strategy is like a slow break-up:
it’s always “not happening” until it’s “already happened” ?
thejeff
Yes, the US does a lot of bad shit. The US is not the only country that does bad shit, nor is it responsible for all the bad shit in the world. We’re just the biggest at the moment.
There were wars before the US existed. There will, assuming we survive, be wars when the US is gone.
My objection was to “Stop the War” as a universally applicable slogan. You can argue that the US is evil and thus “stop the war” always applies in a US context, but that’s still not universal – imagine using the slogan on the other side of whatever US conflict you want.
Every war has two sides and often for one of those sides the threat is existential and war is justified.
This year my uni had more than a thousand students show up for a general meeting calling for UQ to cut ties with Boeing (they have a research centre here). Filled up three lecture halls!
To what level do you want to take the degree of involvement though? Many companies like Boeing, British Aerospace, Airbus, Honeywell etc are defense contractors.
Ruttech having military contracts (drones?) would be an interesting angle to expore…
To be fair, this comic takes place in an existent US college in an existent US state in an existent USA, and other countries previously alluded to in Dumbing of Age (England, Canada, India, Japan) have all been real places. Choosing this moment to create a new fictional nation in the setting where previously everything was mostly realistic (if done in a ‘wacky’ way) can’t have been the expectation.
Charles Phipps
Bulmeria has been mentioned before in Willis-comics. This is the first in DOA I think.
Considering that there have also been University protests in the past two years about arms contractors who benefit from genocide in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Saudi Arabia, and war crimes in Yemen and Russia?
Yeah, this is just a thing that happens. When I was in college, we protested over divestment from profiteering on the Rohingya genocide and China’s actions in Xinjiang. College students are always protesting a war somewhere, and they probably should be, but if you think Bulmeria is a stand-in for just one specific country, you weren’t paying attention.
Typically it’s other groups investing in the college. Generally they start off giving money, and end up involved in a lot of things. My university ended up having the ceo of a private prison corporation on the board. I’d assume things have gone in a similar direction here
i hope you’re not insinuating what i think you are, but just in case: jews are not a monolith. a lot of them oppose the genocide, and apartheid and even the zionist project as a whole. many jews have taken part in campus protests. the real antisemites here are the ones who treat all diasporia jews like they’re essentially an israeli fifth column and act like that’s perfectly normal
heh. and to think i was here feeling worse because I dare to hope T-T
my biggest thing is that I regret feeling so helpless and useless to affect the world for better with what little I can do
im a NB autisma who’s disabled six ways to sunday and coding video games to sustain myself until i can get food stamps
with any hope queer and trans folk will be better seen with games i wanna make?
I know it ain’t good to push yourself to hard or to doomscroll in your head, but I feel so guilty and sad about not being able to do more to help people around the world who are suffering
besides what a distraction, what can a game really do? ;-;
I thought This War Of Mine was a game that did a lot more than distract.
Ron-Ethan
Maybe, but for me (living pretty much in a war zone already so maybe I’m not the intended audience) This Was Of Mine was too much and I gave up after less than an hour…
For me games like Dragon Age where the wars and occupations and all are part of what’s happening but not all that is happening make it much easier to engage with the important material without getting burned out immediately. (I understood occupation so much better after playing Dragon Age Origins and reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne).
but i must admit, if there is a hope that games can give, it’s one which i feel disconnected from.
what is this hope like of which you speak, which can come from games like you describe?
Morleuca
It shows we aren’t alone, even if isolated geographically, there are those like us all around the planet. I can go on Reddit and read story after story about how something as “simple” as a game helped someone realize so much about themselves, or was key to giving them some level of closure or acceptance about themselves.
Yeah thats one of the problems with taking the time to figure yourself out and realizing how rough the structures around you are. You wind up caring, and being moved to do things about it.
The world isn’t getting worse. It was always terrible. Only the particular flavors of terrible change.
As a person gets older, they learn more and therefore notice it more. But it was always there, lurking, waiting.
Ryan
The long arc of history bends toward justice. Many things are empirically better now than they were a few decades ago which were better than a century ago which was better than a century before that.
In our youth, we see learn about how screwed up the distant and not so distant past were and feel that society is progressing faster than it really is. As we age, we feel how slow and painful change is within a generation, and however much things improve, there is inevitable compromise that makes success feel like failure.
But what I actually came here to say is: I’d feel much better if I could give up hope.
3oranges
Progress is not inevitable and the long arc of history only bends toward justice when people force it that way. I feel like right now, too many have let it go and cruel actors have been twisting it back.
Buck Ripsnort
Truth. And it’s not just here in USAstan; seems like the whole damn world is going fascist for a generation. Every hundred years, we have to fight the bastards. Looking forward to another world war in 15 years.
Ryan
I’m not trying to say that it just happens on its own, nor that there are not periods of regression as we acutely know.
What I am saying is that history is not just a constant terrible where only the flavor changes. Even with the catastrophe of a second piece of shit term looming and the fall of Roe v Wade in the recent past, the US is a more progressive society than it was the day I was born pre-Roe, pre-Clean Water Act, pre-Clean Air Act, pre-Clinton, pre-Obama, pre-ACA.
Reltzik
Yeah, it might bend towards justice in the long run, but the pendulum can take its sweet old time getting around to switching back to that direction.
Taffy
Something something bending corrupt leaders in half backwards something something.
Meagan
I like how you put two concepts I am familiar with together in a new way that brings a helpful perspective. 1) The subjective sense that time is moving more slowly as we age and 2) how that affects our perception of social change that happened before we were born versus in our lifetimes.
Because I remember reading about all the movements of the past as a kid, civil rights, women’s right to vote, etc – and it all just makes it seem like history is ‘over.’ But the people living through those things probably felt very similarly to how we do now, often discouraged and hopeless that things would ever get better.
This ties in with my recent thoughts about my uncle, who died of AIDS when I was a baby. He knew he was engaging in high-risk behaviors and apparently told my mom that he basically assumed he would die of AIDS. He made no plans to reduce his risk. I think he was just so worn down by being a gay man in society at that time that he didn’t feel like trying to stick around for the future was worth it.
Meanwhile from my perspective, if he’d just been more cautious and valued his life more, a few years later, there would have been meds available…and by the time he was in his 50s, gay marriage would have been legal across the country. But he of course had no idea and resigned himself to a fate that didn’t have to be inevitable.
(I see people doing this about climate change, giving up prematurely because it’s too painful to keep trying to do something when things seem so dire.)
tl;dr A combination of restating your point for my own benefit of solidifying it in my brain, and an overshare, perhaps.
Dante
Hope isn’t a thing with wings. It’s teeth and spite and finding stuff to cling to. I do get what you mean, I do, shit can get exhausting and we’re all so drained — I’ll be the first one to say that in the absence of a higher power, hope in humanity is also kind of an irrational feeling of faith, too. Just… Losing all of it turns a depressed person into a callous, depressed person. There’s no peace in it 🙁
One can always try to look for the helpers. There’s always some no matter the horrors. But yeah… When keeping up with it is hard, it sure helps to remember (for me at least) that people who’d love to see me dead want me to lose it wholesale, and like hell I’m giving them the pleasure.
Mark
I would put it differently. As hate is fear with its boots on, resolve is hope that has taken up its tools.
Dante
That’s a very constructive and legit beautiful way to put it.
I talk of hope this way because to me it’s like– Hope is sometimes a fight. I like acknowledging that sometimes it’s painful and you can stumble. And that getting up so you can wield the tools is an emotional rather than rational act. (And that doing it with the help of your nakama is very shonen and badass.)
“the long arc of history bends towards justice”
do you not live in the timeline where the long arc of history is bending towards total climate breakdown???
Taffy
Who needs an ecosystem and stable climate when I could have a touch screen in my car and shitty clothing that has too much dye in it?
David M Willis
the long arc of history bends towards occasional mass extinctions
278 thoughts on “Divest”
NGPZ
*plays “Get Up Stand Up” by Bob Marley on hacked muzak*
Ana Chronistic
True immortality through student loans
Ana Chronistic
#BulmeriaForever
Michael Steamweed
People get pretty anxious talking about the problems in Bulmeria. That anxiety is called Bulmeria Nervosa.
Charles Phipps
If Becky had gotten Robin elected, she would have forgiven all Student Loans!
Until the Supreme Court shut her down under the, “We can’t have nice things” law.
Michael Steamweed
It’s proper name is “Make the rich richer, and the poor poorer” law.
Charles Phipps
This is apparently based on a real thing and I was surprised because I had no idea that universities could invest in arms manufacturers. I also was too focused on figuring out which country Bulmeria was standing in on when it should have been obvious given student protests. Not my finest hour.
Opus the Poet
Probably that country next to Israel that has been bombed and shelled to rubble.
Charles Phipps
Yep.
That is the obvious answer. I think I was thrown because of the term “military contractors” made me think of mercenaries rather than arms sales. It’s perfectly accurate use of the term but I associated it with something else.
True Survivor
It is strange that universities do investing, after all they are businesses which sell higher learning not ones which sell their services managing investment capital. However, from what I can gather university involvement in investing comes from endowments. Basically, some rich person decides that rather than buy a private jet they want to fund higher education in America for future generations – good on them! They could just hand over a bunch of cash, but that doesn’t keep up with inflation or help as much long term as handing over stocks (or money the university can then invest into stocks) so as to pay dividends and help lower income students gain education for generations to come. None of this seems bad on face-value. However, we now have universities spending tons of money on people to manage all these trusts and colleges have their finances deeply entangled with arms manufacturers and other companies and business interests that may not be ethical or in their students long term interest. This situation corrodes the initial noble mission of the university with undo material and finical concerns often counter to their own creeds or basic human logic, and even where the mission is not corrupted does not, the mere appearance of contrast of interest erodes trust and leaves students wondering why the money they paid to learn to build better bridges is being used to prop up funds investing in companies that help blow up cities.
This same thing happened to the Catholic church. When Constantine formally created the Church as an institution, he also gave it the worldly concerns of a land owner, employer, and manager of investments. Thus giving a spiritual movement that dismissed the material a contradictory motivation to preserve and expand itself via finical might. This turned out great and at no point escalated into theological black mail, rampant corruption and incompetence within the clergy, or helped sparked centuries of religious violence.
Matthew Davis
The quip is that Harvard is a hedge fund with a side hustle in education.
saltchocolate
Related/unrelated: NYU is a realty company that dabbles in education.
AbacusWizard
“after all they are businesses”
See, I think that’s the foundation of the problem right there. A university shouldn’t be acting as a business in the first place. It should be acting as a public service.
eh, whatever
That only works if it’s, in American terms, a government institution.
…which is of course normal. In most countries, most universities are national institutions that get their money entirely from the national budget.
Sum Dum Gai
Even other non-profit organizations need to manage money. Doctors without Borders USA has more than $500M. They’re not going to keep that much money in the world’s largest cookie jar or inside a very thick mattress. If I gave IU $10 million to fund student scholarships, they’d invest it and peel off the interest to give $500,000 in scholarships every year, _forever_.
Michael Steamweed
An accountant acquaintance of mine says that most large public and private university systems are primarily either financial companies or athletics management companies. Who happen to run education on the side.
Mark
For which we can thank steadily shrinking public funding of higher education. The money has to come from somewhere.
Nymph
Sorry does the money not come from the tens of thousands they charge to attend their schools? Universities are not some tragically underfunded widdle babies.
Sum Dum Gai
Um,… yes? It does not? Back in the Sputnik era, the US government provided a hell of a lot of funding to colleges and universities as a matter of national development. It doesn’t any more.
Michael Steamweed
The rate of increase of tuition, etc, took a severe increase in the 80s. Reagan and his congress.
Bobcat2022
Yep. “We’d rather no one get any than let a black person have some” — white america, historically, always.
Michael Steamweed
USA higher education: (1) Used to be, the federal government (and most states) gave some funding to the colleges and universities. So the students’ tuition and costs were lower. But since the times of Reagan (*me spits on his grave), the federal Congress has been providing less and less every budget cycle. And the states by and large have been decreasing their funding too. (2) Also, the larger the system, the more its administrative costs, as it increases its financial portfolio, campus constructions, academic researches, and more expensive specialized services.
So…yeah, the costs fall upon the students.
DwarfDwarf
Meh! It turns out universities aren’t actually funded mostly by tuition (82 million) but by a combination of hospitals (72) dorms (28) and athletics (29). There’s also a lot of medical or military research which adds into the federal grants (42) (source is the link I posted as “my” website). Universities tuition isn’t actually funding universities, it’s more profitable endeavors like rent, healthcare, and military subcontracts.
(And it’s crazy the average cost of college has hopped up to 38,000 a year, but that usually includes 12,000 in rent and 7000 in food— half of the crazy high price of college is the just the price of living)
Reltzik
The country which Bulmeria stands in for changes as comic time elapses.
StClair
The sample not-the-Doctor Time Lord character in the old FASA Dr. Who RPG had, as part of their outfit, a button that said “STOP THE WAR”. Pretty much guaranteed to be relevant, no matter where or when they went…
Veronica
?ex, I’m wanting more
Tell the world, “Stop the war”?
thejeff
Relevant in a way, but it can hit very differently in different contexts.
To take an extreme case, wearing a “Stop the War” button in the US in 1944 a sends a very different message than in 1970.
For any given war, we may always want it to stop, but we often have very different ideas of the terms on which it should stop.
Mark
Hey, on 02-Sep-1945 the Allies did stop the war. They’d spent six years arranging the conditions for doing so.
Mustachio
Indeed. In some contexts, ending support for one side merely means that side is doing to start doing the majority of the dying instead of the majority of the killing. In that sense, divestment ENABLES death. It doesn’t end the dying, it merely changes who the victims will be.
thejeff
Or in some contexts, “stop the war” means surrender, often much worse consequences for the conquered population and the aggressor emboldened to start another war.
Around here, the context usually assumes the US is unjustly invading some other country and can actually just stop the war with no real consequences, but that’s our exceptionalism.
Mark
Indeed, there are only two ways for a belligerent to stop a war: (1) surrender, or (2) fight to a decision.
NGPZ
Or, and hear me out, fight it with SOFT power.
The war against Soviet Communism wasn’t won on a battlefield. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in itself, because their economy went through a depression even worse than the one we had in the 1930s as a direct result of economic embargos our government instated.
It’s also worth noting that less than 7% of all terrorist organizations in the world are actually broken up by military action. The vast majority of them voluntarily disband after encountering conditions in which they learn that what they do isn’t really working or that they don’t really need to do it anymore given better alternatives.
“Wars” against things like terrorism and Stalinism can be won with soft power, with the likes of boycotts and other economic sanctions, because Stalinists can choose not to be Stalinist anymore, terrorists can choose not to be terrorists anymore.
Terrorism and the like happen because of legitimate, pressing issues that have to be heard and addressed before the violence can be stopped; working from positions such that these organizations do what they do because “they’re EVIL” or “terrorists just come out of nowhere and they’re a fact of life” will never end the cycle violence.
thejeff
Absolutely. There’s an enormous amount a country like the US can do with soft power. We already rely heavily on it and should do so even more.
But that doesn’t always work and it works less for countries without the overwhelming power of the US.
Once a shooting war has begun (and thus “stop the war” is directly relevant), soft power is much less relevant. Sometimes a better use of soft power (possibly even by some one else) could have kept the war from starting
NGPZ
“it doesn’t work for other countries” often because our military literally bombed them back to the starting line.
the US militaristic hegemony continuously justifies it’s existence often by fostering ideal conditions for war for reasons that are hardly altruistic and just.
One such instance being the Mexican American War, President James Bolk sent troops to the disputed territories Mexico claimed back from Texas precisely because he wanted to foster ideal conditions for a war. Being a slave owner himself, Polk had skin in the game where he mutually benefited from more territory being in the hands of a country were slavery wasn’t abolished. Heck, Mexico even ALLOWED wealthy US folk living in the territories to keep their slaves, but of course with those brought up to venerate the slave-based aristocracy, enough just wasn’t enough now was it?
The Vietnam War was started because someone felt a bump on a submarine in the Gulf of Tolkien which they admit was unexplained, but according to officials he told, it was OBVIOUSLY the work of icky sticky communists, and thus sent troops to “investigate”, taking advantage of the fact that the draft from WWII never technically ended.
“oh that? eh you can just leave it there. It’s not like we gonna use it, you can trust us”, they affirmed, only to send thousands of young men to their deaths and use chemical warfare to devastate their ecosystems who far more than the immediate enemy depended on, showing that they’re willing to hurt surrounding regions and even their countries’ own people a lot on the premise that whoever they tell us is The Enemy NOW is gonna hurt that much more
The US Military Industrial hegemony taking advantage of us and starting yet another war with no exit strategy is like a slow break-up:
it’s always “not happening” until it’s “already happened” ?
thejeff
Yes, the US does a lot of bad shit. The US is not the only country that does bad shit, nor is it responsible for all the bad shit in the world. We’re just the biggest at the moment.
There were wars before the US existed. There will, assuming we survive, be wars when the US is gone.
My objection was to “Stop the War” as a universally applicable slogan. You can argue that the US is evil and thus “stop the war” always applies in a US context, but that’s still not universal – imagine using the slogan on the other side of whatever US conflict you want.
Every war has two sides and often for one of those sides the threat is existential and war is justified.
NGPZ
“give peace a chance, man” 9-9
v.gay.person
This year my uni had more than a thousand students show up for a general meeting calling for UQ to cut ties with Boeing (they have a research centre here). Filled up three lecture halls!
KM
To what level do you want to take the degree of involvement though? Many companies like Boeing, British Aerospace, Airbus, Honeywell etc are defense contractors.
Ruttech having military contracts (drones?) would be an interesting angle to expore…
Dante
Oh, that would be JUICY. Does Carla know? If not, could she keep saying “my parents are Good People” with such a revelation?
Mark
Farmers feed people who build weapons, so schools should terminate their agriculture programs.
moon
i literally looked it up as if it were a real country with a real genocide i must have forgotten about T_T
Kammon
To be fair, this comic takes place in an existent US college in an existent US state in an existent USA, and other countries previously alluded to in Dumbing of Age (England, Canada, India, Japan) have all been real places. Choosing this moment to create a new fictional nation in the setting where previously everything was mostly realistic (if done in a ‘wacky’ way) can’t have been the expectation.
Charles Phipps
Bulmeria has been mentioned before in Willis-comics. This is the first in DOA I think.
C.
The original Alex was said to had fled there:
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2017/comic/book-7/02-everything-youve-ever-wanted/alex-2
This means he’s caught up in all this, assuming that it isn’t a flimsy excuse to sidestep her transition.
Michael Steamweed
Bulmeria isn’t real??
Pft, next thing you’ll tell me is Wakanda isn’t real!
Needfuldoer
Working with companies like Raytheon, Honeywell, Boeing, and General Dynamics probably counts, too.
Tofusmith
Considering that there have also been University protests in the past two years about arms contractors who benefit from genocide in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Saudi Arabia, and war crimes in Yemen and Russia?
Yeah, this is just a thing that happens. When I was in college, we protested over divestment from profiteering on the Rohingya genocide and China’s actions in Xinjiang. College students are always protesting a war somewhere, and they probably should be, but if you think Bulmeria is a stand-in for just one specific country, you weren’t paying attention.
geno
Typically it’s other groups investing in the college. Generally they start off giving money, and end up involved in a lot of things. My university ended up having the ceo of a private prison corporation on the board. I’d assume things have gone in a similar direction here
Joy
Removing the context so it’s not awkward to have this conversation with Joe, huh.
milu
i hope you’re not insinuating what i think you are, but just in case: jews are not a monolith. a lot of them oppose the genocide, and apartheid and even the zionist project as a whole. many jews have taken part in campus protests. the real antisemites here are the ones who treat all diasporia jews like they’re essentially an israeli fifth column and act like that’s perfectly normal
Nono
Not being able to turn off the caring about things valve is hard. And exhausting.
My last breakup, I still cared about them way too much, for way too long, because it was a somewhat amicable one. Had to burn myself out to move on.
NGPZ
heh. and to think i was here feeling worse because I dare to hope T-T
my biggest thing is that I regret feeling so helpless and useless to affect the world for better with what little I can do
im a NB autisma who’s disabled six ways to sunday and coding video games to sustain myself until i can get food stamps
with any hope queer and trans folk will be better seen with games i wanna make?
I know it ain’t good to push yourself to hard or to doomscroll in your head, but I feel so guilty and sad about not being able to do more to help people around the world who are suffering
besides what a distraction, what can a game really do? ;-;
Regret
I thought This War Of Mine was a game that did a lot more than distract.
Ron-Ethan
Maybe, but for me (living pretty much in a war zone already so maybe I’m not the intended audience) This Was Of Mine was too much and I gave up after less than an hour…
For me games like Dragon Age where the wars and occupations and all are part of what’s happening but not all that is happening make it much easier to engage with the important material without getting burned out immediately. (I understood occupation so much better after playing Dragon Age Origins and reading Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne).
morleuca
“What can a game really do?” Look at Celeste, look at Our Life; Now and Forever. Games can gives us hope and they can help us build community.
NGPZ
community yes.
but i must admit, if there is a hope that games can give, it’s one which i feel disconnected from.
what is this hope like of which you speak, which can come from games like you describe?
Morleuca
It shows we aren’t alone, even if isolated geographically, there are those like us all around the planet. I can go on Reddit and read story after story about how something as “simple” as a game helped someone realize so much about themselves, or was key to giving them some level of closure or acceptance about themselves.
Zamperla
Yeah thats one of the problems with taking the time to figure yourself out and realizing how rough the structures around you are. You wind up caring, and being moved to do things about it.
Many such cases.
Charles Phipps
I don’t think college prepared me for the world getting worse and the sense of helplessness about it for those I cared about.
Rose by Any other Name
The world isn’t getting worse. It was always terrible. Only the particular flavors of terrible change.
As a person gets older, they learn more and therefore notice it more. But it was always there, lurking, waiting.
Ryan
The long arc of history bends toward justice. Many things are empirically better now than they were a few decades ago which were better than a century ago which was better than a century before that.
In our youth, we see learn about how screwed up the distant and not so distant past were and feel that society is progressing faster than it really is. As we age, we feel how slow and painful change is within a generation, and however much things improve, there is inevitable compromise that makes success feel like failure.
But what I actually came here to say is: I’d feel much better if I could give up hope.
3oranges
Progress is not inevitable and the long arc of history only bends toward justice when people force it that way. I feel like right now, too many have let it go and cruel actors have been twisting it back.
Buck Ripsnort
Truth. And it’s not just here in USAstan; seems like the whole damn world is going fascist for a generation. Every hundred years, we have to fight the bastards. Looking forward to another world war in 15 years.
Ryan
I’m not trying to say that it just happens on its own, nor that there are not periods of regression as we acutely know.
What I am saying is that history is not just a constant terrible where only the flavor changes. Even with the catastrophe of a second piece of shit term looming and the fall of Roe v Wade in the recent past, the US is a more progressive society than it was the day I was born pre-Roe, pre-Clean Water Act, pre-Clean Air Act, pre-Clinton, pre-Obama, pre-ACA.
Reltzik
Yeah, it might bend towards justice in the long run, but the pendulum can take its sweet old time getting around to switching back to that direction.
Taffy
Something something bending corrupt leaders in half backwards something something.
Meagan
I like how you put two concepts I am familiar with together in a new way that brings a helpful perspective. 1) The subjective sense that time is moving more slowly as we age and 2) how that affects our perception of social change that happened before we were born versus in our lifetimes.
Because I remember reading about all the movements of the past as a kid, civil rights, women’s right to vote, etc – and it all just makes it seem like history is ‘over.’ But the people living through those things probably felt very similarly to how we do now, often discouraged and hopeless that things would ever get better.
This ties in with my recent thoughts about my uncle, who died of AIDS when I was a baby. He knew he was engaging in high-risk behaviors and apparently told my mom that he basically assumed he would die of AIDS. He made no plans to reduce his risk. I think he was just so worn down by being a gay man in society at that time that he didn’t feel like trying to stick around for the future was worth it.
Meanwhile from my perspective, if he’d just been more cautious and valued his life more, a few years later, there would have been meds available…and by the time he was in his 50s, gay marriage would have been legal across the country. But he of course had no idea and resigned himself to a fate that didn’t have to be inevitable.
(I see people doing this about climate change, giving up prematurely because it’s too painful to keep trying to do something when things seem so dire.)
tl;dr A combination of restating your point for my own benefit of solidifying it in my brain, and an overshare, perhaps.
Dante
Hope isn’t a thing with wings. It’s teeth and spite and finding stuff to cling to. I do get what you mean, I do, shit can get exhausting and we’re all so drained — I’ll be the first one to say that in the absence of a higher power, hope in humanity is also kind of an irrational feeling of faith, too. Just… Losing all of it turns a depressed person into a callous, depressed person. There’s no peace in it 🙁
One can always try to look for the helpers. There’s always some no matter the horrors. But yeah… When keeping up with it is hard, it sure helps to remember (for me at least) that people who’d love to see me dead want me to lose it wholesale, and like hell I’m giving them the pleasure.
Mark
I would put it differently. As hate is fear with its boots on, resolve is hope that has taken up its tools.
Dante
That’s a very constructive and legit beautiful way to put it.
I talk of hope this way because to me it’s like– Hope is sometimes a fight. I like acknowledging that sometimes it’s painful and you can stumble. And that getting up so you can wield the tools is an emotional rather than rational act. (And that doing it with the help of your nakama is very shonen and badass.)
milu
“the long arc of history bends towards justice”
do you not live in the timeline where the long arc of history is bending towards total climate breakdown???
Taffy
Who needs an ecosystem and stable climate when I could have a touch screen in my car and shitty clothing that has too much dye in it?
David M Willis
the long arc of history bends towards occasional mass extinctions