Joyce sometimes your forced to make a choice and don’t always have all the right information, I’ve heard that sometimes beneficial bills will be failed because someone slipped something in there for personal benefits and the only way to stop them is to block the bill. (this is a second hand retelling so I can’t guarantee this is true to any extent – but do you really think people wouldn’t try something like that.)
That does happen all the time, but Robin voted for a bill removing rights, not against one granting them.
Even then, if there’d been some rider attached that seemed worth voting for, she would have brought that up in her own defense.
As much as I think Robin is salvageable as a person, that vote was indefensible.
LeslieBean4Shizzle
Considering that various previously established information means that Robin is queer, I find it more tragic. The fact that she would vote for that shows a level of self-denial (at best) or self-loathing (at worst) that is… really sad.
This Robin? Walkyverse Robin is straight with an exception.
Elf Royalty
robin wasn’t ‘straight with an exception,’ she kind of passed herself off as such before, but ultimately admitted later in the comic that she was ‘definitely not straight,’ and has experienced romantic + sexual attraction to girls on more than one occasion (amber, when talking to leslie about their first female crushes iirc, was the person robin was thinking abt – she lied saying she was into wonder woman, tho, iirc)… & if sexuality carries over, robin is still definitely not straight, but may be oblivious or repressing those feelings.
@willis is this an accurate summary of robin’s sexuality ??
No, she’s really not. She’s bi and was afraid to admit it. Leslie was not the only or even first woman she exhibited an attraction to. That “straight with an exception” self-description evolved as she came to terms with her sexuality. Her last (I think) self-description was something like “kinda indefinably queer”.
That’s Walkyverse Robin, but her sexuality should be the same in the Dumbiverse.
Yeah, it would fit well with this incarnation as well. Though it’s anyone’s guess if she’s even figured out that much about herself at this point
StClair
She has very good reasons to stay closeted, even from herself.
Jinxed44
I mean, didn’t she just explain that she follows the male will in her party as a defense mechanism? She also seems not to actually know much about governing… Maybe she’s playing the role of a puppet? Signed the bill, maybe knowing it likely wouldn’t pass (maybe not), so they wouldn’t “try to destroy” her?
Jinxed: That’d make sense, too. It’s hard to be very sure at this point, as we still don’t know a lot about her
Blind_Gardener
It’s good politics to vote for bills you know won’t pass “Oh, look, I’m cooperative. Now vote for my bill that might pass”
Arquinsiel
Here in Ireland the fundies have two pet gay men who love to talk about how they are voting against their own interests constantly. I’d feel bad for them if they weren’t so utterly hateful that they are household names for starting every opinion with “as a gay man” and ending it with some horrific repressive bullshit and otherwise being indistinguishable from any other alt-right types. They’re basically Milo, except old and Irish.
I’m thinking of her comments from yesterday’s strip where she treated the “cool girl” trap as just what you have to do to get by as a woman as well as the fact that in this universe, her party’s president-elect ran on a campaign of treating everyone of her race as a rapist trying to destroy America.
Robin has internalized political self-loathing and convinced herself that that is just what one “has” to do. That it is inevitable.
OH MAN equal rights for women happened because some asshat added it to a bill about equal rights for Black people, because he was sure that would sink it. It didn’t, but booooooongo watta dingleberry
chris2315
Source? Seriously I want to read about that because it sounds awesome.
Smiling Cat
I believe it was Strom Thurmond who pulled that one.
Ann Potter
Strom Thermond is old but not that old, because women won the right to vote in 1920. After black males received that right a bit earlier.
Shade
Just looked it up despite being a staunch opponent of racial integration Howard W. Smith had ties to the National Woman’s Party and even supported the Equal Rights Amendment for something like 20 years, but this version only covered gender.
In short his record suggests he did it so if it passed white women wouldn’t have less rights than black people. Horribly racist, but did seem to genuinely care about women’s rights if they shared his skin colour.
Yea, it happens all the time with proposed bills, I think it is one of the major problems with the current US political system. I think the laws should be changed so that amendments have to be related to the bill in question. Would stop a lot of this stupidity.
Uh what? “No way to justify that”? Did or didn’t Trump just get elected by, uh, a respective majority governing the election of a majority of electors (which is not a majority of voters but not all that far off). A lot of people obviously can justify a whole lot. You are not living in liberal fairy land where merely being any kind of human endows you with inalienable rights. If you want that, emigrate. But do it fast, since hating on people other than your folks is quickly becoming all the rage again everywhere after a bit of hiatus caused by WWII being pretty unpopular all in all.
I’m pretty sure that Fart Captor meant that there’s no moral way to justify it.
Like, yeah, folks will obfuscate and throw endless chaff in front of actually acknowledging the consequences of their actions. See all the shitty white folk right now wanting everyone to stop pointing out the direct effect popular white supremacy had on the election results.
Like, I’m sure Robin has her knots she’s tied herself into to justify voting for a nasty hate-filled law simply for a momentary political advantage, but those aren’t good justifications, those aren’t moral justifications.
They are instead the desperate excuses of a kid who’s done something wrong and doesn’t want to get in trouble for it.
David
They are instead the desperate excuses of a kid who’s done something wrong and doesn’t want to get in trouble for it.
What else do you need justifications for? Good and moral things are not in need of justification.
True, I suppose, except due to the political situation of my country, I have spent all my life having to justify my right to exist, which I neither think is wrong nor something that should get me in trouble… though it certainly does in practice.
If they don’t have a justification, they’re, at best, neutral.
Don’t confuse having a justification with engaging in post-hoc rationalization.
sjmcc13
Her job is to represent her constituents, of more favoured the bigotry it is her job to support it….
Sad but true.
Reltzik
Does that count as a justification, though, or is it simply passing the buck?
Cerberus
That’s not a moral justification. That’s a cowardly attempt to deny one’s personal connection to bigotry. Everyone has a moral choice and if you run on a platform of beat the gays and then enact anti-gay laws, because oh, that’s what you ran for or the party you ran with, then that’s on you.
All the attempt by bigots to pretend their actions aren’t real. Don’t affect real people. Doesn’t say something about their morality and moral code?
It’s bullshit. Sorry Robin and everyone who is like Robin, but no one forced you to vote for a bill stripping the rights of queer folks. This isn’t like a public defender lawyer thing where you have to defend who you get assigned to defend. This is real fucking life. And real fucking actions that have real fucking consequences.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
John Scalzi has a good bit today about your responsibility of what you vote for. Individuals, not legislators, though.
Yeah, I actually excluded horseshit “justifications” like those because I like Robin.
I’m sure she could have come up with something like that if she had tried, but she actually has enough humanity that she is now questioning the morality of it and can’t bring herself to defend it.
Ann Potter
Trump did not get the popular vote. Hillary did which means that there is still some hope for this country.
Jon Rich
“You are not living in liberal fairy land where merely being any kind of human endows you with inalienable rights.”
The Declaration of Independence would like a few words with you. Specifically, it’s second sentence.
Lailah
The declaration of independence is paper (and hilariously hypocritical ones at that). The /constitution/ is paper, though the latter at least carries legal force. The reality of the situation is not the pretty words that are on paper.
Sunny
I thought thea were both vellum.
thejeff
The history of the US has some choice words right back to that.
Neeks
Eh, the problem isn’t “being human,” the problem is “being ACKNOWLEDGED as human.”
Chrissy
No David, the majority of votes went to Hillary Clinton. Gerrymandering made sure that the majority of electoral votes went to trump.
Lailah
Interestingly, this is true in spite of the west coast effect, where the polls in some east coast states will close before people really get a chance to vote in the west coast (the polls might be open, but…)
You lack imagination. I can think at least four ways of justifying the vote. A deontological libertarian argument “It’s wrong to discriminate, but it’s also wrong to force others not to discriminate”, a consequentialistic argument about how if bosses are afraid to fire a gay person because they’ll be afraid they’ll be accused of firing them because of the gayness and end up not hiring them in the first place, an argument against state power by arguing that court cases regarding discrimination would cause the court to need to dig through personal conversations and past history, and an economic argument that companies that discriminate lose the benefits of good employees, and such benefits are gained by companies that wouldn’t, kinda like America benefitted from accepting Jewish refugees from Europe.
The arguments in defense aren’t very good or sufficient, but they can exist, if Willis wants Robin to have a defense.
Li
Point one: I mean, deontological libertarianism is also opposed to laws existing, like, at all (since literally every law is “forcing” someone either to do or not do something), so it seems kind of strange to try to use their positions to talk about the morality of a given law, when all laws are equally evil.
And yes, Ayn Rand would disagree, but Rand’s philosophy is incoherent for a reason.
Points two through four: even if these arguments had any merit at all, what merit they could be argued to have is severely undercut by the fact that identical protections already exist on the basis of gender, race, and religion. These arguments were all brought forth and considered insufficient reason not to legislate protections for gender, race, and religion, so now you have to try to demonstrate that LGBTQIA+ identities are somehow different enough to reconsider them.
Point of order: that comparison to people fleeing the Holocaust is really… odd and uncomfortable. America’s immigration policy during WWII was incredibly shameful, and we hardly welcomed Jewish refugees with open arms, but “companies that discriminate lose the benefits of good employees, and companies that do benefit” is a just… I don’t even understand what that was supposed to mean wrt Jewish refugees.
Elitist Oars
I’m certainly not saying the arguments are good. But there’s no need to use the word ‘indefensible’ if one just means ‘wrong’. Robin’s vote was *wrong*, the arguments in its favour are very weak at best — but it wasn’t indefensible.
Here’s yet another argument that could have been used by Robin — the idea that elected representative are actually there to promote their constituencies’s positions, so that if the constituency is bigoted, then by golly the representative is morally obliged to vote in favour of bigoted laws, whether they personally believe in them or not.
Again not an argument I’d make, not an argument I believe in, but an argument that someone could speak.
Li
That is argument in favor of tyranny of the majority,
which is absolutely NOT enshrined either by USAian laws or by any justifiable system of morality. The entire reason why the Bill of Rights exists is in an attempt (however historically ineffective) to prevent a bigoted constituency from resulting in bigoted laws.
It also feels like you’re (accidentally?) misinterpreting the use of “unjustifiable” / “indefensible” by other people in this thread.
Because there’s the technical meaning (“literally cannot be defended in any way”), but there’s also the more lay definition (“not able to be thought of as good or acceptable”). Heck, even the technical meaning has an implication: “incapable of being maintained as right or valid”.
In this thread, people aren’t saying that NO defense can be mounted; they’re saying no LONG-TERM defense can be mounted. You yourself acknowledge that the defenses you’ve offered are weak; to say “this action is morally-justified” is to say not merely that justifications can be made, but that those justifications will hold up under scrutiny.
365 thoughts on “Would’ve”
Mr. D.
Awkwaaaard
TheAnonymousGuy
Joyce sometimes your forced to make a choice and don’t always have all the right information, I’ve heard that sometimes beneficial bills will be failed because someone slipped something in there for personal benefits and the only way to stop them is to block the bill. (this is a second hand retelling so I can’t guarantee this is true to any extent – but do you really think people wouldn’t try something like that.)
Fart Captor
That does happen all the time, but Robin voted for a bill removing rights, not against one granting them.
Even then, if there’d been some rider attached that seemed worth voting for, she would have brought that up in her own defense.
As much as I think Robin is salvageable as a person, that vote was indefensible.
LeslieBean4Shizzle
Considering that various previously established information means that Robin is queer, I find it more tragic. The fact that she would vote for that shows a level of self-denial (at best) or self-loathing (at worst) that is… really sad.
spriteless
This Robin? Walkyverse Robin is straight with an exception.
Elf Royalty
robin wasn’t ‘straight with an exception,’ she kind of passed herself off as such before, but ultimately admitted later in the comic that she was ‘definitely not straight,’ and has experienced romantic + sexual attraction to girls on more than one occasion (amber, when talking to leslie about their first female crushes iirc, was the person robin was thinking abt – she lied saying she was into wonder woman, tho, iirc)… & if sexuality carries over, robin is still definitely not straight, but may be oblivious or repressing those feelings.
@willis is this an accurate summary of robin’s sexuality ??
John
No, she’s really not. She’s bi and was afraid to admit it. Leslie was not the only or even first woman she exhibited an attraction to. That “straight with an exception” self-description evolved as she came to terms with her sexuality. Her last (I think) self-description was something like “kinda indefinably queer”.
That’s Walkyverse Robin, but her sexuality should be the same in the Dumbiverse.
Fart Captor
Yeah, it would fit well with this incarnation as well. Though it’s anyone’s guess if she’s even figured out that much about herself at this point
StClair
She has very good reasons to stay closeted, even from herself.
Jinxed44
I mean, didn’t she just explain that she follows the male will in her party as a defense mechanism? She also seems not to actually know much about governing… Maybe she’s playing the role of a puppet? Signed the bill, maybe knowing it likely wouldn’t pass (maybe not), so they wouldn’t “try to destroy” her?
Or maybe I’m putting too much thought into this.
Fart Captor
Jinxed: That’d make sense, too. It’s hard to be very sure at this point, as we still don’t know a lot about her
Blind_Gardener
It’s good politics to vote for bills you know won’t pass “Oh, look, I’m cooperative. Now vote for my bill that might pass”
Arquinsiel
Here in Ireland the fundies have two pet gay men who love to talk about how they are voting against their own interests constantly. I’d feel bad for them if they weren’t so utterly hateful that they are household names for starting every opinion with “as a gay man” and ending it with some horrific repressive bullshit and otherwise being indistinguishable from any other alt-right types. They’re basically Milo, except old and Irish.
Cerberus
I’m thinking of her comments from yesterday’s strip where she treated the “cool girl” trap as just what you have to do to get by as a woman as well as the fact that in this universe, her party’s president-elect ran on a campaign of treating everyone of her race as a rapist trying to destroy America.
Robin has internalized political self-loathing and convinced herself that that is just what one “has” to do. That it is inevitable.
Mr. Random
They’re known as poison pills. Some people use them as a way to stall, some as a way to kill a bill they think might pass.
Carms
OH MAN equal rights for women happened because some asshat added it to a bill about equal rights for Black people, because he was sure that would sink it. It didn’t, but booooooongo watta dingleberry
chris2315
Source? Seriously I want to read about that because it sounds awesome.
Smiling Cat
I believe it was Strom Thurmond who pulled that one.
Ann Potter
Strom Thermond is old but not that old, because women won the right to vote in 1920. After black males received that right a bit earlier.
Shade
Just looked it up despite being a staunch opponent of racial integration Howard W. Smith had ties to the National Woman’s Party and even supported the Equal Rights Amendment for something like 20 years, but this version only covered gender.
In short his record suggests he did it so if it passed white women wouldn’t have less rights than black people. Horribly racist, but did seem to genuinely care about women’s rights if they shared his skin colour.
Jhon
You want the Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
someguy
Thats also how we came to the great conclusion that corporations are people.
Roborat
Yea, it happens all the time with proposed bills, I think it is one of the major problems with the current US political system. I think the laws should be changed so that amendments have to be related to the bill in question. Would stop a lot of this stupidity.
DarkoNeko
*grab popcorn*
Wheelpath
*throws it at screen*
Roborat
No, no, you are supposed to throw rice or toast at the screen, depending on what part of the movie you are at.
Bill M.
But… I brought the toilet paper. Y’know, the “great scott” line… wait, did I walk into the right movie theater?
Aeron
*find out all popcorn ever was already consumed last night*
AnvilPro
Robin was elected to LEAD. Not to READ.
miados
beware the dome
inqntrol
Now you fucked up Robin.
Reltzik
Sounds like she fucked up a while ago.
Roborat
I thought that was when you have sex while standing?
Reltzik
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Fart Captor
No, she fucked up back when she cast that vote.
This is more of a “there is no way to justify that” situation.
David
Uh what? “No way to justify that”? Did or didn’t Trump just get elected by, uh, a respective majority governing the election of a majority of electors (which is not a majority of voters but not all that far off). A lot of people obviously can justify a whole lot. You are not living in liberal fairy land where merely being any kind of human endows you with inalienable rights. If you want that, emigrate. But do it fast, since hating on people other than your folks is quickly becoming all the rage again everywhere after a bit of hiatus caused by WWII being pretty unpopular all in all.
Cerberus
I’m pretty sure that Fart Captor meant that there’s no moral way to justify it.
Like, yeah, folks will obfuscate and throw endless chaff in front of actually acknowledging the consequences of their actions. See all the shitty white folk right now wanting everyone to stop pointing out the direct effect popular white supremacy had on the election results.
Like, I’m sure Robin has her knots she’s tied herself into to justify voting for a nasty hate-filled law simply for a momentary political advantage, but those aren’t good justifications, those aren’t moral justifications.
They are instead the desperate excuses of a kid who’s done something wrong and doesn’t want to get in trouble for it.
David
They are instead the desperate excuses of a kid who’s done something wrong and doesn’t want to get in trouble for it.
What else do you need justifications for? Good and moral things are not in need of justification.
Cerberus
True, I suppose, except due to the political situation of my country, I have spent all my life having to justify my right to exist, which I neither think is wrong nor something that should get me in trouble… though it certainly does in practice.
Fart Captor
Moral actions are easily justified by simply explaining how they are moral.
If I hurt someone in self defense because they attacked me, my action was moral, but that may not be obvious to all observers.
Kamino Neko
If they don’t have a justification, they’re, at best, neutral.
Don’t confuse having a justification with engaging in post-hoc rationalization.
sjmcc13
Her job is to represent her constituents, of more favoured the bigotry it is her job to support it….
Sad but true.
Reltzik
Does that count as a justification, though, or is it simply passing the buck?
Cerberus
That’s not a moral justification. That’s a cowardly attempt to deny one’s personal connection to bigotry. Everyone has a moral choice and if you run on a platform of beat the gays and then enact anti-gay laws, because oh, that’s what you ran for or the party you ran with, then that’s on you.
All the attempt by bigots to pretend their actions aren’t real. Don’t affect real people. Doesn’t say something about their morality and moral code?
It’s bullshit. Sorry Robin and everyone who is like Robin, but no one forced you to vote for a bill stripping the rights of queer folks. This isn’t like a public defender lawyer thing where you have to defend who you get assigned to defend. This is real fucking life. And real fucking actions that have real fucking consequences.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
John Scalzi has a good bit today about your responsibility of what you vote for. Individuals, not legislators, though.
The Cinemax Theory of Racism
Fart Captor
Yeah, I actually excluded horseshit “justifications” like those because I like Robin.
I’m sure she could have come up with something like that if she had tried, but she actually has enough humanity that she is now questioning the morality of it and can’t bring herself to defend it.
Ann Potter
Trump did not get the popular vote. Hillary did which means that there is still some hope for this country.
Jon Rich
“You are not living in liberal fairy land where merely being any kind of human endows you with inalienable rights.”
The Declaration of Independence would like a few words with you. Specifically, it’s second sentence.
Lailah
The declaration of independence is paper (and hilariously hypocritical ones at that). The /constitution/ is paper, though the latter at least carries legal force. The reality of the situation is not the pretty words that are on paper.
Sunny
I thought thea were both vellum.
thejeff
The history of the US has some choice words right back to that.
Neeks
Eh, the problem isn’t “being human,” the problem is “being ACKNOWLEDGED as human.”
Chrissy
No David, the majority of votes went to Hillary Clinton. Gerrymandering made sure that the majority of electoral votes went to trump.
Lailah
Interestingly, this is true in spite of the west coast effect, where the polls in some east coast states will close before people really get a chance to vote in the west coast (the polls might be open, but…)
hof1991
There’s always a way to justify your behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by_Me)
Elitist Oars
You lack imagination. I can think at least four ways of justifying the vote. A deontological libertarian argument “It’s wrong to discriminate, but it’s also wrong to force others not to discriminate”, a consequentialistic argument about how if bosses are afraid to fire a gay person because they’ll be afraid they’ll be accused of firing them because of the gayness and end up not hiring them in the first place, an argument against state power by arguing that court cases regarding discrimination would cause the court to need to dig through personal conversations and past history, and an economic argument that companies that discriminate lose the benefits of good employees, and such benefits are gained by companies that wouldn’t, kinda like America benefitted from accepting Jewish refugees from Europe.
The arguments in defense aren’t very good or sufficient, but they can exist, if Willis wants Robin to have a defense.
Li
Point one: I mean, deontological libertarianism is also opposed to laws existing, like, at all (since literally every law is “forcing” someone either to do or not do something), so it seems kind of strange to try to use their positions to talk about the morality of a given law, when all laws are equally evil.
And yes, Ayn Rand would disagree, but Rand’s philosophy is incoherent for a reason.
Points two through four: even if these arguments had any merit at all, what merit they could be argued to have is severely undercut by the fact that identical protections already exist on the basis of gender, race, and religion. These arguments were all brought forth and considered insufficient reason not to legislate protections for gender, race, and religion, so now you have to try to demonstrate that LGBTQIA+ identities are somehow different enough to reconsider them.
Point of order: that comparison to people fleeing the Holocaust is really… odd and uncomfortable. America’s immigration policy during WWII was incredibly shameful, and we hardly welcomed Jewish refugees with open arms, but “companies that discriminate lose the benefits of good employees, and companies that do benefit” is a just… I don’t even understand what that was supposed to mean wrt Jewish refugees.
Elitist Oars
I’m certainly not saying the arguments are good. But there’s no need to use the word ‘indefensible’ if one just means ‘wrong’. Robin’s vote was *wrong*, the arguments in its favour are very weak at best — but it wasn’t indefensible.
Here’s yet another argument that could have been used by Robin — the idea that elected representative are actually there to promote their constituencies’s positions, so that if the constituency is bigoted, then by golly the representative is morally obliged to vote in favour of bigoted laws, whether they personally believe in them or not.
Again not an argument I’d make, not an argument I believe in, but an argument that someone could speak.
Li
That is argument in favor of tyranny of the majority,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
which is absolutely NOT enshrined either by USAian laws or by any justifiable system of morality. The entire reason why the Bill of Rights exists is in an attempt (however historically ineffective) to prevent a bigoted constituency from resulting in bigoted laws.
It also feels like you’re (accidentally?) misinterpreting the use of “unjustifiable” / “indefensible” by other people in this thread.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indefensible
Because there’s the technical meaning (“literally cannot be defended in any way”), but there’s also the more lay definition (“not able to be thought of as good or acceptable”). Heck, even the technical meaning has an implication: “incapable of being maintained as right or valid”.
In this thread, people aren’t saying that NO defense can be mounted; they’re saying no LONG-TERM defense can be mounted. You yourself acknowledge that the defenses you’ve offered are weak; to say “this action is morally-justified” is to say not merely that justifications can be made, but that those justifications will hold up under scrutiny.
TheAnonymousGuy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGp9P6QvMjY here you go.
Fart Captor
:Ibutts
(_|_) (_|_) (_|_) (_|_) (_|_)
(some butts for you, because everything else is terrible)
Emperor Norton II
Let’s all fart in the Toupéed One’s general direction!
PRRRRFRFRFRFRT!
Fart Captor
Butts are always appreciated
Koms
Those are some really nice butts. My gravatar also approves.
Rodimiss
Oshit. Go in, Joyce.
Apostate
The mask cracks.
Ana Chronistic
…at least she’s backpedalling vs. grabbing the shovel and digging deeper?
it’s like, I keep trying to think of funny or at least goodness but nothing comes out ’cause it’s all been sucked dry
but at least there’s Cracked to the rescue
Ana Chronistic
also this: http://notbecauseofvictories.tumblr.com/post/152935168405/can-you-please-talk-about-those-protections-to
butts
I’m sort of
dead inside
right now
when I’m not FILLED WITH RAGE, which is always
Orion Fury
Seconded.
Leorale
Third. It’s been a really tough couple of days so far.
My one of my brother’s students asked him, “will every day feel like today?”
Ana Chronistic
The best teacher-student exchange: https://twitter.com/ryanestrada/status/796267936826605568
John