He didn’t actually tell her that, though, unless I’m misremembering. He pointed out a flaw in her logic, with a lot of subtext that, if she thought through it, could possibly make her rethink her worries. (Not that she would, but you know.)
“If you really ARE doomed to follow your parents’ pattern, and YOU’RE never the one picking the jerks… WHICH one of them does that make you?”
Obviously, as a mere reader, I can take that much more calmly than Amber could, but what stands out there for me is the initial “If.” She’s worried she’ll repeat the pattern and end up like her mom, Mike points out that’s not the role — hey, Amber, have you considered the possibility that means you aren’t doomed to repeat the pattern? (No. No, of course you haven’t.)
Regalli
He also later admitted (by which I mean, shortly before the fall) that he enjoyed psychologically messing with Amber and ‘pointing her dadwards,’ because she was ‘multiple time bombs.’
He was, if nothing else, aware that saying things like that to Amber could seriously mess her up. And likely would. He doesn’t get a pass for that. (I want him to live but that’s in no small part because I want him to actually fucking APOLOGIZE to Ethan and Amber for that shit.)
Agemegos
That’s no excuse: might even make it worse.
“Don’t you ‘truth’ me, and I won’t ‘truth’ you.”
“Only a fool or a scoundrel tells the trith on social occasions.”
“I’m very disappointed in the Prime Minister. I thought that we had an arrangement that he wouldn’t tell any lies about me, and I wouldn’t tell the truth about him.”
I’m a bit scandalized that saying something bad should come close to justify being beaten into a coma.
IMO some of the things Mike did or said would qualify for giving him a friendly wallop, but that’s where I’d draw the line.
He Who Abides
The fact that, by his own admission, he was exacerbating Amber’s mental illness for his own amusement feels like a good reason to me.
thejeff
Verbal abuse is a real thing and goes far beyond what we normally think of as “saying something bad.”
Borkborkbork
Good enough reason to maybe get a restraining order, but “beaten into a coma and potentially brain damaged or crippled for life” doesn’t sound like a just response.
I’m not sure how far apart “a valiant effort” is from “he came close”, but I think they’re not all that distant. I’m actually thinking props to Joyce to be able to display some amount of humour about this all. Given the massive growth she’s displayed, and her own kind demeanor, I seriously doubt Joyce would ever think anyone actually deserved something like this. It seems more like a harsher than normal response due to the insane stresses she’s been under since… um… well the beginning of the comic really.
This is her first semester, not even 2 months in and
1. Her bff is gay (not a negative, but still a worldview changing event)
2. Becky is homeless
3. Assaulted and almost got raped after being drugged
4. Becky is kidnapped
5. Ding dong bandit (and capture)
6. Jacob Crush, confusion and rejection
7. R.A. at suicide risk/severe depression
8. Mom unmasked as Bananas/ ‘rents on the rocks
9. Mom springs guy who kidnapped becky
10. Joyce gets kidnapped
11 Finds out Mike’s in Hospital
12 Combat/car chase
13 Gun shot in hospital
14 whatwver else Ive forgot
Any one of those is enough to deal with, and with homework and exams. I mean *seriously* it’s a wonder she hasn’t lost her marbles.
I’d say it’s more the opposite; Mike is good at making people face the things they don’t want to acknowledge about themselves. But he does it by being an asshole.
So he’s kind of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Maybe?
I would lean towards the second. And I will add, there are worse things than being an asshole, being nice does have its limitations (as much as I personally prefer it), and in several cases even before his recent arc I get the impression that he was doing the right thing for what might be the right reason (or at least a well-intentioned reason) in what may be the wrong way but is at least an unpopular way. *Some* of the time, to be clear – being a snarky asshole also seems to be a hobby… gotta stay in practice, I suppose.
That said, while I have found his character development very fascinating, there are parts of his perspective I really don’t feel like I understand.
But in real life, I will say I know at least one person who – while not specifically going out of their way to be an asshole – does use whatever means at their disposal to try to chase a greater good. They’re really good at applying it. It’s a bit like seeing a drunken master in action to watch, but they get their points across, and they do leave people better than they found them in general. I mention that because I was definitely raised to think being nice was all-encompassing, myself, and seeing them in action, over time they disabused me of that notion. If you know the trope Omniscient Morality License (warning: TV Tropes named the idea), it’s about the closest I’ve seen to a human pull a lower-stakes version of that off.
Of course, if you think you’re doing that but actually failing at it, you’re just being a horrible asshole who’s ALSO self-satisfied…
Mike’s development implies that he was trying to ‘tough love’ people into better versions of themselves so it was for well-intentioned reasons, in the wrong way that mostly made things worse, based on misguided beliefs that people needed to learn the lessons he himself had learned (to not care what others think, to hide vulnerabilities, to not trust people not to turn around and hurt you etc.).
We’ve had the Mike discussion many times, and I doubt this one will solve the conundrum between “Mike is just an asshole” and “Mike does it for the right reasons,” but I’ve been wondering whether both views aren’t right, explaining the divergence in viewpoints between Danny and Ethan. I don’t have time for an archive dive at the moment, but is it possible that whenever Mike’s been arguably doing the right thing, he’s been doing it to his friends, while with everyone else he was just an asshole pure and simple?
thejeff
Or arguably thinking he was doing the right thing, since his own realization that he was using Blaine’s own arguments to justify it makes it pretty clear that at least with Amber he wasn’t actually doing the right thing.
Sam
I would say right and well-intentioned are different. Mike seems to me at least, to have been ultimately well-intentioned of trying to improve people. But were these the right reasons to do these things? No.
Because no one else agreed these lessons were necessary, it was not his place to try to forcibly teach them and if improving them was his entire goal, he could have talked to them straight up about their hypocrisy. I think at least part of it was self-validation and part of it was well-intentioned most of the time but then at other times he was just an ass (to Walky in particular as I think he didn’t particularly like Walky much).
thejeff
As he realized, “well-intentioned” in the same way Blaine’s abuse was “well-intentioned”.
“Nickel deficiency is accompanied by histological and biochemical changes and reduced iron resorption and leads to anaemia. It can disturb the incorporation of calcium into skeleton and lead to parakeratosis-like damage, which finds expression in disturbed zinc metabolism.” You’re welcome.
Ryek Hvek
Facing reduced iron resorption, obviously Mike needs to trade someone’s mom for a nickel and exchange the nickel for steel pennies, then eat them.
I don’t think so. That would mean that his line, “I did your mom for a nickel” is saying that Mike is a prostitute instead of your mom, which ruins his attempt at insulting you.
SuperFroakie82
Nah, he’s saying that your mom’s a prostitute AND she pays him anyways. He’s just that good.
I’ve always found the practice of not speaking ill of someone because they’re dying/in mortal danger/dead is a rather strange one. To a point I understand the idea behind it, you don’t want the last thing you say about someone to be mean. But on the other hand if they were not a great person then trying to say something nice is disingenuous.
I think this is true but I also think time, place, and context matter.
For example, saying ‘They were awful all the time and I’m not personally grieving’ is a lot more understandable at home when talking to your family than at the hospital talking to one of their grieving loved ones. In the latter case, I’d personally probably say something like ‘We weren’t close, but I’m sorry for your loss.’
Avoiding fights at the funeral. Honestly it has more to do with keeping the “peace” in the affected community than with who died. Sometimes it works other times it just lets things fester.
Personally, I don’t think there’s much value in talking about recently dead individuals – they can’t really do anything anymore, after all. If they’ve left behind problems, you can generally deal with the problem itself without going into detail about the person; likewise, if they’ve left behind some toxic advice or mindsets, then you can address those philosophies directly. There’s rarely a need to talk about the person at all.
As such, I don’t think there’s much need to say more than something like “I feel sorry for their friends and family” if the subject comes up, even in the case of genuinely evil people – and since most people are loved by somebody, I’m not really comfortable causing them more pain by celebrating a death.
To summarize, in my opinion, you don’t have to praise a bad person just because they died – but there’s no reason to go out of your way to praise them, either. There’s plenty of bland, neutral platitudes for times like these.
I think it is more for the people around them than for the person themselves. You don’t have to lie and say they were great or nice or wonderful, and you don’t have to be dishonest with people that don’t care or have no attachment to them, but you also don’t want to be known as the ass that made it difficult for all the grieving people that actually do care what happens to them by blurting out all their horrible traits during a hard time as if trying to convince them to not grieve them.
It’s being sensitive to the fact that their relationships with others were different than yours with them and that even if they weren’t, the feelings of other people can be complex. You can know someone sucks but also still care if something bad happens to them (like, a lot of people feel this way for family members and people that were malicious but in their lives a long time) because not everyone is at an extreme of ‘cares immensely and loves them’ or ‘cares not at all and hates them’, sometimes people are in a weird middle of kind of cares but doesn’t trust them or want to be around them much.
Sort of an extension of the ring theory of support, I think: comfort in, vent out. You don’t have to pretend you liked someone to say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ to their grieving spouse/child/sibling/whatever, because as you say, people’s relationships even to real assholes tend to be complicated. (See: Becky. And I’m pretty sure that, even acknowledging Mike was TERRIBLE to them, him dying like this would be worse for Amber and Ethan’s mental health than him living. For one thing, if he hadn’t had the realization and heroic sacrifice ploy, I’m pretty sure they were in fact starting to grow away from him and he might eventually have pissed them off enough for a massive friend break-up. Now Amber has a survivor’s guilt-based Mike living rent-free in her head and Ethan is in fact defensive of his Asshole Friend if only out of loyalty to the maybe-dying. I don’t see either of those getting better if he actually dies, not any time soon.)
No matter who someone is or how shitty that person might have been overall, there has to be something good about them. It is only the polite thing to try to find it.
And that’s why I hate this so-called “cancel culture” so much. For example, take George Washington led the Continental Armies to win our independence from Great Britain and went on to pilot the tiny little ship that was the foundling United States through troubled seas as our first president, or Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the document that became the birth certificate of our country (the Declaration of Independence). But – ohmyGod! – they also were wealthy men who *gasp!* owned slaves, so they are not worthy of recognition or memorialization because of that.
Or take it the other way. Bill Cosby turned out to be a sexual predator – not good, and I am in no way trying to minimize it – and Garrison Keillor also fell from grace due to alleged sexual improprieties. But is that any reason to cast everything and anything either of the two did – Keillor’s beloved radio program and writings, and Cosby’s early comedy routines, ground-breaking TV shows (as ‘Alexander Scott’ in “I Spy”, he became the first black man have a lead role in an American TV series), books, and movies (with the possible exception of ‘Leonard: Part 6’) – onto the dungheap never to be mentioned again?
I take it you’ve never been to the Washington monument of the Jefferson Memorial?
Bicycle Bill
As a matter of fact, I have been to both — as well as to Mount Rushmore, where both the men I mention are also immortalized in stone. And there have, occasionally, been trial balloons floated that the site is politically incorrect — honoring four white Americans by sculpting a mountain in the middle of the Black Hills, an area considered sacred by many groups of Native Americans, and that the mountain should be blasted clear and the mountain restored, as much as possible, to its natural state.
As for the Washington and Jefferson Memorials in Washington or the historic sites of Mount Vernon and Monticello in Virginia, I haven’t heard any serious talk of tearing them down, but when you look at how other statues have been removed – statutes of Columbus, for example, or that statue of Edward Colston that was torn down and tossed into the Thames in London because, among other things, he had been a 17th-century slave trader, or various representations of Native Americans because of “stereotyping”, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before George, Thomas, and the rest of the Founding Fathers are next up on the chopping block.
MW
This is a lot of words to say “I think we should keep idolizing people who owned slaves and committed genocide.”
TheHorseCouncil
This whole conversation honestly makes me think about the situation with our current dumbass in charge
And i have been of the strong opinion that no one in his family will mourn him
And so if he couldn’t even have loved ones who would mourn him should he ever finally be removed from his pathetic life
Then why should anyone be polite about it
He was is ass of a person and should he ever actually die i will say im happy about
Good riddance
Fuck him
Or can anyone honestly say he deserves platitudes when his time comes?
thejeff
It gets complicated when dealing with politicians (or to a lesser extent with public figures in general.)
The death of a (in)famous politician is often used not just to rehabilitate their image in a space where it’s impolite to counter the propaganda, but also to rehabilitate the crap they did and the policies they pushed and even other still active political figures linked to them.
Think when Nixon died or even Reagan and Bush.
Agemegos
The statue of Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into the habour at Bristol, not into the Thames at London.
Perhaps we ought to reconsider the custom of raising statues to heroise people. Maybe “thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image of anything” is wiser than I thought.
Jefferson loses me with the whole “rape a 14 year old who was his wife’s half-sister and keep the resulting kids as property” thing.
Regalli
Yeah, you wouldn’t think the Sally Hemings situation could get creepier than it is by inherent ‘she was considered his property and could not say no, also she was 14 for fuck’s sake,’ and then you learn about the half-sister thing and somehow it gets EVEN WORSE.
cancel culture is treating owning slaves as something more than a faux pas, I guess. Nobody is allowed to talk about the atrocious things anyone did, because doing so would be rewriting history or something. pc gone amok, cancel culture, civility, sjw, blah blah blah.
It’s normally a decent practice. Protecting grieving loved ones from petty gossip and complaints.
It can get out of hand when the dead or dying person was horrible and their victims are pushed by social convention into enduring people praising him without being able to respond. In this comic, Blaine and Ross are both dead. Should Amber and Becky refrain from saying anything bad about them?
201 thoughts on “Vomit”
Ana Chronistic
no he didn’t Joyce
he gave it a valiant effort, but no
Schpoonman
I don’t know, the day he told amber she was on the path to becoming her father was pretty bad.
Dr. Gonzo
But it was the truth.
Poppy
Was it tho?
Rabid Rabbit
He didn’t actually tell her that, though, unless I’m misremembering. He pointed out a flaw in her logic, with a lot of subtext that, if she thought through it, could possibly make her rethink her worries. (Not that she would, but you know.)
“If you really ARE doomed to follow your parents’ pattern, and YOU’RE never the one picking the jerks… WHICH one of them does that make you?”
Obviously, as a mere reader, I can take that much more calmly than Amber could, but what stands out there for me is the initial “If.” She’s worried she’ll repeat the pattern and end up like her mom, Mike points out that’s not the role — hey, Amber, have you considered the possibility that means you aren’t doomed to repeat the pattern? (No. No, of course you haven’t.)
Regalli
He also later admitted (by which I mean, shortly before the fall) that he enjoyed psychologically messing with Amber and ‘pointing her dadwards,’ because she was ‘multiple time bombs.’
He was, if nothing else, aware that saying things like that to Amber could seriously mess her up. And likely would. He doesn’t get a pass for that. (I want him to live but that’s in no small part because I want him to actually fucking APOLOGIZE to Ethan and Amber for that shit.)
Agemegos
That’s no excuse: might even make it worse.
“Don’t you ‘truth’ me, and I won’t ‘truth’ you.”
“Only a fool or a scoundrel tells the trith on social occasions.”
“I’m very disappointed in the Prime Minister. I thought that we had an arrangement that he wouldn’t tell any lies about me, and I wouldn’t tell the truth about him.”
Crash
Citation needed
(Honestly, would love to find that stript. my memories of the situation are very similar to Rabid Rabbit’s description)
Rabid Rabbit
https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/ensnared/
Crash
Thanks mate!
Fela
I’m a bit scandalized that saying something bad should come close to justify being beaten into a coma.
IMO some of the things Mike did or said would qualify for giving him a friendly wallop, but that’s where I’d draw the line.
He Who Abides
The fact that, by his own admission, he was exacerbating Amber’s mental illness for his own amusement feels like a good reason to me.
thejeff
Verbal abuse is a real thing and goes far beyond what we normally think of as “saying something bad.”
Borkborkbork
Good enough reason to maybe get a restraining order, but “beaten into a coma and potentially brain damaged or crippled for life” doesn’t sound like a just response.
Captain Oblivious
I’m not sure how far apart “a valiant effort” is from “he came close”, but I think they’re not all that distant. I’m actually thinking props to Joyce to be able to display some amount of humour about this all. Given the massive growth she’s displayed, and her own kind demeanor, I seriously doubt Joyce would ever think anyone actually deserved something like this. It seems more like a harsher than normal response due to the insane stresses she’s been under since… um… well the beginning of the comic really.
This is her first semester, not even 2 months in and
1. Her bff is gay (not a negative, but still a worldview changing event)
2. Becky is homeless
3. Assaulted and almost got raped after being drugged
4. Becky is kidnapped
5. Ding dong bandit (and capture)
6. Jacob Crush, confusion and rejection
7. R.A. at suicide risk/severe depression
8. Mom unmasked as Bananas/ ‘rents on the rocks
9. Mom springs guy who kidnapped becky
10. Joyce gets kidnapped
11 Finds out Mike’s in Hospital
12 Combat/car chase
13 Gun shot in hospital
14 whatwver else Ive forgot
Any one of those is enough to deal with, and with homework and exams. I mean *seriously* it’s a wonder she hasn’t lost her marbles.
Cattleprod
Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new DOA this early, I was just here to reread yesterday’s as I always do before the new one goes up.
Chris
Tell me about him.
Well, sometimes he does the right thing, but it’s usually for the wrong reason.
Doctor_Who
I’d say it’s more the opposite; Mike is good at making people face the things they don’t want to acknowledge about themselves. But he does it by being an asshole.
So he’s kind of doing the wrong thing for the right reason. Maybe?
bemisawa
I would lean towards the second. And I will add, there are worse things than being an asshole, being nice does have its limitations (as much as I personally prefer it), and in several cases even before his recent arc I get the impression that he was doing the right thing for what might be the right reason (or at least a well-intentioned reason) in what may be the wrong way but is at least an unpopular way. *Some* of the time, to be clear – being a snarky asshole also seems to be a hobby… gotta stay in practice, I suppose.
That said, while I have found his character development very fascinating, there are parts of his perspective I really don’t feel like I understand.
But in real life, I will say I know at least one person who – while not specifically going out of their way to be an asshole – does use whatever means at their disposal to try to chase a greater good. They’re really good at applying it. It’s a bit like seeing a drunken master in action to watch, but they get their points across, and they do leave people better than they found them in general. I mention that because I was definitely raised to think being nice was all-encompassing, myself, and seeing them in action, over time they disabused me of that notion. If you know the trope Omniscient Morality License (warning: TV Tropes named the idea), it’s about the closest I’ve seen to a human pull a lower-stakes version of that off.
Of course, if you think you’re doing that but actually failing at it, you’re just being a horrible asshole who’s ALSO self-satisfied…
Chris
Remember, Mike will chaperone a date, if he’s allowed to punch people who act inappropriately.
He Who Abides
Mike was waaaaaaay more inappropriate than Joe during that date.
Sam
Mike’s development implies that he was trying to ‘tough love’ people into better versions of themselves so it was for well-intentioned reasons, in the wrong way that mostly made things worse, based on misguided beliefs that people needed to learn the lessons he himself had learned (to not care what others think, to hide vulnerabilities, to not trust people not to turn around and hurt you etc.).
Rabid Rabbit
We’ve had the Mike discussion many times, and I doubt this one will solve the conundrum between “Mike is just an asshole” and “Mike does it for the right reasons,” but I’ve been wondering whether both views aren’t right, explaining the divergence in viewpoints between Danny and Ethan. I don’t have time for an archive dive at the moment, but is it possible that whenever Mike’s been arguably doing the right thing, he’s been doing it to his friends, while with everyone else he was just an asshole pure and simple?
thejeff
Or arguably thinking he was doing the right thing, since his own realization that he was using Blaine’s own arguments to justify it makes it pretty clear that at least with Amber he wasn’t actually doing the right thing.
Sam
I would say right and well-intentioned are different. Mike seems to me at least, to have been ultimately well-intentioned of trying to improve people. But were these the right reasons to do these things? No.
Because no one else agreed these lessons were necessary, it was not his place to try to forcibly teach them and if improving them was his entire goal, he could have talked to them straight up about their hypocrisy. I think at least part of it was self-validation and part of it was well-intentioned most of the time but then at other times he was just an ass (to Walky in particular as I think he didn’t particularly like Walky much).
thejeff
As he realized, “well-intentioned” in the same way Blaine’s abuse was “well-intentioned”.
Felgraf
No, Mike is good at making people face things *HE* thinks they need to face about themselves.
He is not a mind reader, and he is CERTAINLY no Weatherwax.
clif
He’s not even a full blown Mike yet. He’s still the DOA larval form of Mike.
Doctor_Who
Ironically, the doctors examining Mike have discovered that he has a nickel deficiency.
Kyrik Michalowski
That would be fairly amusing actually, although I don’t know what nickel deficiency does to someone.
ktbear
“Nickel deficiency is accompanied by histological and biochemical changes and reduced iron resorption and leads to anaemia. It can disturb the incorporation of calcium into skeleton and lead to parakeratosis-like damage, which finds expression in disturbed zinc metabolism.” You’re welcome.
Ryek Hvek
Facing reduced iron resorption, obviously Mike needs to trade someone’s mom for a nickel and exchange the nickel for steel pennies, then eat them.
Jon Rich
Well, of course he does, he’s always giving his nickels to moms.
Mra
Why would that be ironic?
Jon Rich
Because he fucks moms, for a nickel.
Stephen Bierce
If you must coin a phrase.
Jeff K!
That’s the only way he makes cents!
Captain Oblivious
How else would he make change in this world?
Geneseepaws
I am Gene C’pausse and I applauded this comment.
Timtam
No he doesn’t. He has an excess of nickles, because that’s how much your mom pays him for sex.
Cholma
I don’t think so. That would mean that his line, “I did your mom for a nickel” is saying that Mike is a prostitute instead of your mom, which ruins his attempt at insulting you.
SuperFroakie82
Nah, he’s saying that your mom’s a prostitute AND she pays him anyways. He’s just that good.
King Daniel
Why would he have an excess of woodpeckers?
Bicycle Bill
You and I are two of the very few people who will “get” the above comment without having to refer to Google.
Captain Oblivious
Even /with/ google Im not sure I’m getting that one. Is it a fishing lure? A rare minting? Wood slugs? A coat rack?
King Daniel
A “nickle” is a woodpecker.
A “nickel” is a coin.
clif
He’s just that good.
BigDogLittleCat
“Ironic”
Heh.
BBCC
Score one for tact!
Kyrik Michalowski
I’ve always found the practice of not speaking ill of someone because they’re dying/in mortal danger/dead is a rather strange one. To a point I understand the idea behind it, you don’t want the last thing you say about someone to be mean. But on the other hand if they were not a great person then trying to say something nice is disingenuous.
Anyone else want to put their two cents in?
BBCC
I think this is true but I also think time, place, and context matter.
For example, saying ‘They were awful all the time and I’m not personally grieving’ is a lot more understandable at home when talking to your family than at the hospital talking to one of their grieving loved ones. In the latter case, I’d personally probably say something like ‘We weren’t close, but I’m sorry for your loss.’
Tadpole7
Avoiding fights at the funeral. Honestly it has more to do with keeping the “peace” in the affected community than with who died. Sometimes it works other times it just lets things fester.
He Who Abides
Huh. We Irish just get roaringly drunk at the wake, so we’re too hungover to fight at the funeral.
Jane
Personally, I don’t think there’s much value in talking about recently dead individuals – they can’t really do anything anymore, after all. If they’ve left behind problems, you can generally deal with the problem itself without going into detail about the person; likewise, if they’ve left behind some toxic advice or mindsets, then you can address those philosophies directly. There’s rarely a need to talk about the person at all.
As such, I don’t think there’s much need to say more than something like “I feel sorry for their friends and family” if the subject comes up, even in the case of genuinely evil people – and since most people are loved by somebody, I’m not really comfortable causing them more pain by celebrating a death.
To summarize, in my opinion, you don’t have to praise a bad person just because they died – but there’s no reason to go out of your way to praise them, either. There’s plenty of bland, neutral platitudes for times like these.
Sam
I think it is more for the people around them than for the person themselves. You don’t have to lie and say they were great or nice or wonderful, and you don’t have to be dishonest with people that don’t care or have no attachment to them, but you also don’t want to be known as the ass that made it difficult for all the grieving people that actually do care what happens to them by blurting out all their horrible traits during a hard time as if trying to convince them to not grieve them.
It’s being sensitive to the fact that their relationships with others were different than yours with them and that even if they weren’t, the feelings of other people can be complex. You can know someone sucks but also still care if something bad happens to them (like, a lot of people feel this way for family members and people that were malicious but in their lives a long time) because not everyone is at an extreme of ‘cares immensely and loves them’ or ‘cares not at all and hates them’, sometimes people are in a weird middle of kind of cares but doesn’t trust them or want to be around them much.
Regalli
Sort of an extension of the ring theory of support, I think: comfort in, vent out. You don’t have to pretend you liked someone to say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ to their grieving spouse/child/sibling/whatever, because as you say, people’s relationships even to real assholes tend to be complicated. (See: Becky. And I’m pretty sure that, even acknowledging Mike was TERRIBLE to them, him dying like this would be worse for Amber and Ethan’s mental health than him living. For one thing, if he hadn’t had the realization and heroic sacrifice ploy, I’m pretty sure they were in fact starting to grow away from him and he might eventually have pissed them off enough for a massive friend break-up. Now Amber has a survivor’s guilt-based Mike living rent-free in her head and Ethan is in fact defensive of his Asshole Friend if only out of loyalty to the maybe-dying. I don’t see either of those getting better if he actually dies, not any time soon.)
Jamie
I think it’s “don’t punch down”.
Bicycle Bill
No matter who someone is or how shitty that person might have been overall, there has to be something good about them. It is only the polite thing to try to find it.
And that’s why I hate this so-called “cancel culture” so much. For example, take George Washington led the Continental Armies to win our independence from Great Britain and went on to pilot the tiny little ship that was the foundling United States through troubled seas as our first president, or Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the document that became the birth certificate of our country (the Declaration of Independence). But – ohmyGod! – they also were wealthy men who *gasp!* owned slaves, so they are not worthy of recognition or memorialization because of that.
Or take it the other way. Bill Cosby turned out to be a sexual predator – not good, and I am in no way trying to minimize it – and Garrison Keillor also fell from grace due to alleged sexual improprieties. But is that any reason to cast everything and anything either of the two did – Keillor’s beloved radio program and writings, and Cosby’s early comedy routines, ground-breaking TV shows (as ‘Alexander Scott’ in “I Spy”, he became the first black man have a lead role in an American TV series), books, and movies (with the possible exception of ‘Leonard: Part 6’) – onto the dungheap never to be mentioned again?
Sean Smith
I take it you’ve never been to the Washington monument of the Jefferson Memorial?
Bicycle Bill
As a matter of fact, I have been to both — as well as to Mount Rushmore, where both the men I mention are also immortalized in stone. And there have, occasionally, been trial balloons floated that the site is politically incorrect — honoring four white Americans by sculpting a mountain in the middle of the Black Hills, an area considered sacred by many groups of Native Americans, and that the mountain should be blasted clear and the mountain restored, as much as possible, to its natural state.
As for the Washington and Jefferson Memorials in Washington or the historic sites of Mount Vernon and Monticello in Virginia, I haven’t heard any serious talk of tearing them down, but when you look at how other statues have been removed – statutes of Columbus, for example, or that statue of Edward Colston that was torn down and tossed into the Thames in London because, among other things, he had been a 17th-century slave trader, or various representations of Native Americans because of “stereotyping”, I suppose it’s only a matter of time before George, Thomas, and the rest of the Founding Fathers are next up on the chopping block.
MW
This is a lot of words to say “I think we should keep idolizing people who owned slaves and committed genocide.”
TheHorseCouncil
This whole conversation honestly makes me think about the situation with our current dumbass in charge
And i have been of the strong opinion that no one in his family will mourn him
And so if he couldn’t even have loved ones who would mourn him should he ever finally be removed from his pathetic life
Then why should anyone be polite about it
He was is ass of a person and should he ever actually die i will say im happy about
Good riddance
Fuck him
Or can anyone honestly say he deserves platitudes when his time comes?
thejeff
It gets complicated when dealing with politicians (or to a lesser extent with public figures in general.)
The death of a (in)famous politician is often used not just to rehabilitate their image in a space where it’s impolite to counter the propaganda, but also to rehabilitate the crap they did and the policies they pushed and even other still active political figures linked to them.
Think when Nixon died or even Reagan and Bush.
Agemegos
The statue of Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into the habour at Bristol, not into the Thames at London.
Agemegos
Consider the example of the statue of Hans Christian Heg outside the Wisconsin state Capitol in Madison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Hans_Christian_Heg
Perhaps we ought to reconsider the custom of raising statues to heroise people. Maybe “thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image of anything” is wiser than I thought.
hof1991
Jefferson loses me with the whole “rape a 14 year old who was his wife’s half-sister and keep the resulting kids as property” thing.
Regalli
Yeah, you wouldn’t think the Sally Hemings situation could get creepier than it is by inherent ‘she was considered his property and could not say no, also she was 14 for fuck’s sake,’ and then you learn about the half-sister thing and somehow it gets EVEN WORSE.
Huehuetotl
cancel culture is treating owning slaves as something more than a faux pas, I guess. Nobody is allowed to talk about the atrocious things anyone did, because doing so would be rewriting history or something. pc gone amok, cancel culture, civility, sjw, blah blah blah.
Sean Smith
My great uncle just died two weeks ago. I never liked him, but I love his kids. So the best I could do was not say anything mean about him.
thejeff
It’s normally a decent practice. Protecting grieving loved ones from petty gossip and complaints.
It can get out of hand when the dead or dying person was horrible and their victims are pushed by social convention into enduring people praising him without being able to respond. In this comic, Blaine and Ross are both dead. Should Amber and Becky refrain from saying anything bad about them?
Sean Smith
Very fair point. My situation is nothing like theirs.
EnerPrime