I expect her to have one of those storage clipboards full of pre-composed apology forms. Any time she needs one she can just hastily fill it out multiple-choice / Mad Libs style, tear the yellow copy off for the recipient, and keep the original for her records.
Before the semester is out, she will upgrade to digital methods, starting with Google Forms and weekly spreadsheet reports. Out of pity, Amber will help her catch up to the 2010s with webforms and trigger logs.
She gotta learn that adherence to moral absolutes simply makes no sense when it leads to you treating bloated bourgeois bigots with kid gloves.
The horrible irony is that them assholes put REAL children’s lives in very real danger with their schemes.
But when you see an old white toenail griftin’ off the US military industrial complex without any care for the consequences, just remember that what you’re lookin at ain’t a child, it’s a CHOICE
Dorothy is so Kantian she reminds me of– IDK have you watched The Good Place? The Philosophy professor is a beautiful person but he’s perma-stressed due to moral anxiety. Dude can’t lie even if it’s for a good cause because, Ethics.
This also means he has a terrible time making any choice at all btw.
indeed, the flawed heuristic is much more common than you think, if only because of the pervasive influence of the long dominant moral institutions of the United States
our country, largely built by and for the Christian majority, is one which has just about always taught us one way or another to believe that supporting or engaging in ANY flavor of Evil whatsoever will leave a stain on your soul.
In this schema, Evil exists in this world to test the integrity of the individual, for which they will be judged at some distant point in the future when it all *really* counts (i.e. “you will stand alone when God judges you at the gates of heaven”).
And it largely continues to FEEL that way, even long after you no longer believe in God, souls, or anything supernatural.
Dante
Oh, I agree. And it’s the way it works for many atheists, people can’t help but be shaped by the societies they live in, whether in agreement or rebellion. Just as an addendum though, while Kant was indeed Protestant, there’s many, many ways to feel moral anxiety. It’s about Doing The Right Thing, the superego and transcendence.
Dorothy was raised atheist, if memory serves, but since she was left to explore she decided she indeed didn’t feel religious faith. She gives me the feel she espouses the idea an atheist may have about transcendence (leaving a mark in others, and into the world); and in a rigid moral code like hers (aka, the laws that govern her), her harshest judge is herself — past, present, and future.
yep, “Christian atheist” is certainly not an oxymoron,
Indeed, Dorothy has compelled herself constantly to commit to her moral code 100% of the time no matter what, even when they are shown to hurt her and the causes she’s fighting for, almost to the point of superstition.
She is operating under this schema in which rigid commitment and sacrifice to her moral absolutes is something which MUST pay off and be worth it at some point in the ever-receding future, through some arbitrary mechanism which she is probably not even sure of herself.
all her being an atheist means is that “god/heaven” as the mechanism is replaced with “i don’t know but there has to be something” — underneath the tip of the iceberg is still is the fundamentally flawed understanding of where the reward for doing good actually comes from
Indeed, I frequently see more Christ-like actions from avowed atheists than from supposed Evangelical “Christians”. Back 20-30 years ago we were referring to such as Xtians using the same shorthand of letting a Capital X stand in for the very similar Greek letter “Chi”, to mean “almost but not quite”.
Jerach
It’s very reflective in American society even in things that are not strictly religious. Like American attitudes around “criminals” are absolutely bonkers. People act like anything less than the harshest, most permanent, life ruining punishment is “going too easy” on criminals. “Did you ever do something bad? Suffer forever.”
It’s so frustrating and I wish people realized that helping do good is more important than punishing the wicked or avoiding doing anything bad ever.
It’s right in there with how conservatives talk about gun control and reparations for historical racial injustice: “why should I be punished for the crimes of monsters?”
to them, laws, education and social customs are NEVER about shaping society for more positive outcomes, but about deciding who gets PUNISHED.
To them, government in its ENIRETY is only ever about marking off one particular way of life as The Right Way™, and punishing those who stray, a mindset which of course they witlessly project unto the left. 9-9
It’s no coincidence our country has a religious right and not so much a religious left.
They believe that the human world has always been and will always be a corrupting, polluted swamp of sin which we have no hope of ever cleansing from the inside. But walk the Perfect Path of Piety™ laid forth by your parents and pastors, you might just save yourself. Punish the people who stray, you might just save them as well. (-_-)
You can’t be an iriritant without collateral damage. For example, there are regular and very visible Extinction Rebellion protests blocking roads into The Hague which are very good irritants, but they also irritate people on a bus taking that road. Those people are irritated but aren’t the target of the protest.
“Why can’t you protest in a place where nobody has to hear and see and doesn’t disrupt order in any way” is a surefire way to make a protest invisible and ineffective as hell though.
there’s a reason why Reverend Martin Luther King Junior emphasized the importance of fostering non-violent tension for the sake of social justice in his Letter From Birmingham Jail:
“as history has unfortunately told us, privileged groups rarely give up their privilege willingly.”
RonF
You have a right to speak freely. You do not have a right to force other people to listen. Which means that you do not have a right to disrupt order. You can apply for a permit to occupy common space, and if that is ever granted to people to present one viewpoint then it must also be granted to others with a different viewpoint. But for a given space it can simply be withheld from all.
Taffy
Haha, that’s fucking stupid to say. You’ve said a stupid thing.
Jeremiah
Hopefully you have some mouthwash to clean the taste of those boot from your mouth.
Jerach
So nobody can ever publicly protest anything without the permission of those in power, thus they cannot protest against what those in power want. That seems to be the logical conclusion to your statement.
thejeff
It’s complicated.
The flip side to that argument is that any group can use any space, regardless of disruption or even danger, as long as they call it a protest and somehow the authorities would be powerless to intervene.
In practice, you always can only protest those in power with their permission. That’s what “power” means. In the US (and most liberal democracies), the law allows great freedom in protests and is supposed to be as RonF says, content neutral. The government can refuse permission based on the location you want or the time you want or the amount of disruption it’s likely to cause, but not based on the cause you’re supporting.
They don’t always live up to that, to say the least, but it’s hard to see what would be a better approach in theory.
A lot of protest tactics focused on media attention deliberately aim for approaches that wouldn’t be granted permission, precisely because they want to cause disruption.
RonF
“That seems to be the logical conclusion to your statement.”
I don’t see how.
What does the word “protest” mean to you? Writing a letter to your congressman is protest. Showing up at a school board meeting is protest. Renting out a hall and using it to hold a meeting where speeches opposing school policy is protest. Creating a Facebook group to organize people to publicize opposition to a policy and getting that group to speak publicly and otherwise petition a governing body is protest. Organizing people to go out and vote to defeat candidates for office and vote for people who agree with you is protest.
Civil disobedience is also protest. But that includes getting arrested and accepting the punishment so as to draw attention to your point of view. Committing civil disobedience but then expecting that you will not be punished or that you must not be punished and that the authorities should provide support for that disobedience is not how it works. And committing property damage or blocking people from access to common facilities based on their race or religion is not even civil.
This is “like” an argument people on the left use when people on the right complain about censorship, as far as it’s using similar words, but it’s so gravely misapplied in this context it sounds like an AI generated post.
Jeremiah
Honestly it seem this guy is just some bootlicker, really don’t think they are arguing from any kind of good faith.
… maybe it’s about time Willis stopped linking new strips on the platform formerly known as Twitter ?
Proxiehunter
Fuck order.
Blakey
Y’know what? You’re right! Very important. Now so we know who to learn from I will prepare a list of every movement that has achieved any meaningful change under such strictures:
Extinction Rebellion Boston held a standout in front of the visitors’ entrance to the Mass Statehouse without any collateral damage. It made our governor very aware of our goals. May not have really accomplished much beyond that, though.
I think Climate Defense has the right idea: irritate the people who are either directly responsible for the problem, or refusing to use their power to fix it. They get in the face of people like the CEO of Exxon when he’s about to get an award for being a wonderful person. Collateral damage is minimal but CD has gotten some results.
I can’t remember where I read this, but when climate protestors were throwing soup at (protective screens over) paintings, and people were saying “I agree with their motives, but not their methods,” someone pointed out that was their goal: they didn’t care if you agreed with their methods or not, as long as it made you aware of climate issues. Hardly anybody was saying “If they’re going to throw soup at paintings, we should make the climate crisis worse to spite them,” therefore it was working.
Freemage
I disagree, not because the souped paintings were some horrible sin, but because they were, frankly, silly. Most folks I know who heard about it had the following sequence of reactions:
“They threw soup at paintings? Why?”
“What does that have to do with climate change?”
“This is stupid, these people are stupid, I’m gonna go watch porn.”
If your protest action has no tie to the issue at hand, it’ll be very easy to be dismissed as a stunt. The people who agreed with the protestors’ motives agreed the day before, and afterwards were mostly embarrassed by being associated with them. The people who opposed them just pointed and laughed. And the unconcerned? Yeah, they still didn’t give a damn.
************
Similar vein. During one of the campus sit-ins over Gaza, a student leader read a public letter. It wasn’t explaining their position, or naming names, or pleading their case. It was asking the university to not do things the administration hadn’t even done yet, like blocking UberEats/Doordash drivers from delivering food.
This was not a good look.
A very common reaction in the mainstream coverage was, “Oh, look at the cute little kiddies and their adorable little protest. They’re soooo brave, willing to occupy a building that no one was guarding and eat delivery food.” Again, if your protest makes you mockable, it’s not going to be an effective protest.
The university protestors should’ve gone in with the assumption that they WOULD be denied easy access to food and water, and stockpiled beforehand. They should have assumed that heat/AC and power would be shut down, and come bearing battery-powered lanterns and thermal protection.
A key part of ‘irritating’ protests is that they, well, irritate. Those in power don’t like to be irritated, and they will absolutely lash out when provoked. If you’re demanding that your protest not result in you being the target of those sorts of tactics, you’re going to be seen as a bunch of children having a temper-tantrum.
Note that despite those protests affecting campuses across the country, very few institutions disinvested, and Netanyahu is closer than ever to achieving his goals, especially with Team Trump coming in this month.
thejeff
Often these kinds of protests seem to wind up shifting the focus to how awful the authorities are to the protestors and thus away from the topic of the protest.
In some cases that works: If you’re protesting police brutality and the police come in and start cracking heads, that proves your point.
Gotta either irritate the flow of money, media, or logistics. Otherwise, how else to get the necessary political attention?
thejeff
But seriously, figure out which one will be effective and target it. Getting political attention often becomes the goal and isn’t necessarily productive on its own.
Interrupting the money is almost always the most effective, at least if it’s the money going to the people who can change the thing. That’s why stuff like strikes and boycotts work. Boycotts have to be broad or targeted enough to matter. Often a small group boycotting backfires, bringing attention to the company and sympathy from those opposed to your cause.
Sometime attention raising is an important goal on its own. Very often it has no real effect.
Michael Steamweed
Of course, interrupting the money flow does tend to get the money to try violence first, if they can.
Now might be a good time to read up on Syria. The current moment is extremely promising, and even if it doesn’t live up to its full potential, every likely outcome is a dozen times better than what came before.
More wishful thinking-y is to be rn rubbing my hands because yes, Jocelyn/Dorothy. Which is incredibly funny considering an It’s Walky re-read I finished yesterday. She got a kind of Walky, kind of Joyce character to ship her with because those two were otherwise occupied.
Yeah I’m a little uncertain on that too. Maybe to her parents, in the event that this, like, gets her expelled or voids her scholarship or something? I feel like they’d probably be proud of her for standing up on an ethical issue like this, but maybe they’re more “always solve problems from within the system” types IDK
To be honest, yeah, I do expect that she’s been intending to reply to the letter, apologetically turning them down.
“I regret that your university does not fit my needs at this time. I am entirely unsure what my needs are, exactly, but I do know Yale does not fit them, whatever they may be.”
Whoever she ends up upsetting. I think she’s pre-composing generic apology letters for when she inevitably needs them. Just fill in any necessary blanks on the fly, and you’re good to go.
Well, hey, this is one way to explore if she wants to continue her dream (albeit hopefully with a new emphasis on work life balance and her mental health), modify her dream to something related but different or find a new one entirely.
This feels like a situation where Dorothy shows up at the sit in and gets arrested, and then she’s convinced an arrest record will keep her from ever getting elected, but because of what it’s for it would probably help her in 30 years.
Oh right, US universities are businesses whose profit depend on a) real estate, b) sports franchising and c) stock investment; that’s why they’re funding wars rather than like, teacher salaries.
Most of the larger public and private systems have been categorized as either athletics organizations that run education programs, or financial organizations that run education programs. And that’s just the non-profits.
99% of the for-profits are financial organizations that run student loan-disbursement programs and pretend to have education programs.
I didn’t realize the schools themselves provide the loans to let people pay for sitting in their classes, that’s an impressively shady scam.
thejeff
Note that “for-profits” generally doesn’t refer to universities, even private ones, but more focused programs, like trade schools and the like. Some coding schools.
And my understanding is that they don’t usually provide the loans themselves, but help students get government loans and provide them with basically worthless degrees or certificates on the cheap. Leaving the students owing large sums, with no better job prospects.
Real private universities still tend to be organized as non-profits.
Michael Steamweed
“For-profits” refers to newer places with crappy education like Capella, DeVry, Univ of Phoenix, Walden, Fox, Wade, etc. Their average acceptance rate is very high; the proportion of students applying for federal loans is extremely high; the quality of education provided is (arguably by most metrics) quite low. (Not WGU; they are non-profit.)
This is besides the trade school type places like coding, HVAC, and welding. Their variety of quality in their educational training is hard to pin down, since it’s much less academically testable and more skills-based. But not for the State and public schools for such trades, like the public college or university schools that teach the vocational / trade tech / technical and continuing education stuff. They mostly have good or great training.
I am not referring to private non-profit universities like Rice Univ, Stanford Univ, Cal-Tech, MIT, Duke, Johns Hopkins, etc. They are indeed expensive places (and friggin’ highly selective), but their educational quality is orders of magnitude better than the for-profits crappy places.
Michael Steamweed
No, the schools don’t do the loaning (some few do; very little money, compared to the fed govt). They do the disbursing. The student applies for the loan from the govt; the govt gives the money to the school; the school keeps that money and gives the student some shoddy-ass services. Occasionally, the student will get a little bit of the money (what’s left over after all costs), but not often at all.
205 thoughts on “Carve”
Ana Chronistic
aw, come on, just carve the apology into a stamp and streamline the process
Needfuldoer
I expect her to have one of those storage clipboards full of pre-composed apology forms. Any time she needs one she can just hastily fill it out multiple-choice / Mad Libs style, tear the yellow copy off for the recipient, and keep the original for her records.
Michael Steamweed
Before the semester is out, she will upgrade to digital methods, starting with Google Forms and weekly spreadsheet reports. Out of pity, Amber will help her catch up to the 2010s with webforms and trigger logs.
Reltzik
Just get an autopen to write them for you. That’s Presidential, right?
NGPZ
Dorothy no, DON’T apologize in advance.
She gotta learn that adherence to moral absolutes simply makes no sense when it leads to you treating bloated bourgeois bigots with kid gloves.
The horrible irony is that them assholes put REAL children’s lives in very real danger with their schemes.
But when you see an old white toenail griftin’ off the US military industrial complex without any care for the consequences, just remember that what you’re lookin at ain’t a child, it’s a CHOICE
Dante
Dorothy is so Kantian she reminds me of– IDK have you watched The Good Place? The Philosophy professor is a beautiful person but he’s perma-stressed due to moral anxiety. Dude can’t lie even if it’s for a good cause because, Ethics.
This also means he has a terrible time making any choice at all btw.
NGPZ
indeed, the flawed heuristic is much more common than you think, if only because of the pervasive influence of the long dominant moral institutions of the United States
our country, largely built by and for the Christian majority, is one which has just about always taught us one way or another to believe that supporting or engaging in ANY flavor of Evil whatsoever will leave a stain on your soul.
In this schema, Evil exists in this world to test the integrity of the individual, for which they will be judged at some distant point in the future when it all *really* counts (i.e. “you will stand alone when God judges you at the gates of heaven”).
And it largely continues to FEEL that way, even long after you no longer believe in God, souls, or anything supernatural.
Dante
Oh, I agree. And it’s the way it works for many atheists, people can’t help but be shaped by the societies they live in, whether in agreement or rebellion. Just as an addendum though, while Kant was indeed Protestant, there’s many, many ways to feel moral anxiety. It’s about Doing The Right Thing, the superego and transcendence.
Dorothy was raised atheist, if memory serves, but since she was left to explore she decided she indeed didn’t feel religious faith. She gives me the feel she espouses the idea an atheist may have about transcendence (leaving a mark in others, and into the world); and in a rigid moral code like hers (aka, the laws that govern her), her harshest judge is herself — past, present, and future.
NGPZ
yep, “Christian atheist” is certainly not an oxymoron,
Indeed, Dorothy has compelled herself constantly to commit to her moral code 100% of the time no matter what, even when they are shown to hurt her and the causes she’s fighting for, almost to the point of superstition.
She is operating under this schema in which rigid commitment and sacrifice to her moral absolutes is something which MUST pay off and be worth it at some point in the ever-receding future, through some arbitrary mechanism which she is probably not even sure of herself.
all her being an atheist means is that “god/heaven” as the mechanism is replaced with “i don’t know but there has to be something” — underneath the tip of the iceberg is still is the fundamentally flawed understanding of where the reward for doing good actually comes from
Opus the Poet
Indeed, I frequently see more Christ-like actions from avowed atheists than from supposed Evangelical “Christians”. Back 20-30 years ago we were referring to such as Xtians using the same shorthand of letting a Capital X stand in for the very similar Greek letter “Chi”, to mean “almost but not quite”.
Jerach
It’s very reflective in American society even in things that are not strictly religious. Like American attitudes around “criminals” are absolutely bonkers. People act like anything less than the harshest, most permanent, life ruining punishment is “going too easy” on criminals. “Did you ever do something bad? Suffer forever.”
It’s so frustrating and I wish people realized that helping do good is more important than punishing the wicked or avoiding doing anything bad ever.
NGPZ
This. Exactly this.
It’s right in there with how conservatives talk about gun control and reparations for historical racial injustice: “why should I be punished for the crimes of monsters?”
to them, laws, education and social customs are NEVER about shaping society for more positive outcomes, but about deciding who gets PUNISHED.
To them, government in its ENIRETY is only ever about marking off one particular way of life as The Right Way™, and punishing those who stray, a mindset which of course they witlessly project unto the left. 9-9
It’s no coincidence our country has a religious right and not so much a religious left.
The reactionary fundamentalist Christian narrative holds that the problems plaguing human society are helpless Facts of Life because humans are inherently awful creatures of immutable sinful nature (hence Joyce pointing out that humans brought death and all things evil into this world in Genesis).
They believe that the human world has always been and will always be a corrupting, polluted swamp of sin which we have no hope of ever cleansing from the inside. But walk the Perfect Path of Piety™ laid forth by your parents and pastors, you might just save yourself. Punish the people who stray, you might just save them as well. (-_-)
Regret
You can’t be an iriritant without collateral damage. For example, there are regular and very visible Extinction Rebellion protests blocking roads into The Hague which are very good irritants, but they also irritate people on a bus taking that road. Those people are irritated but aren’t the target of the protest.
Dante
“Why can’t you protest in a place where nobody has to hear and see and doesn’t disrupt order in any way” is a surefire way to make a protest invisible and ineffective as hell though.
NGPZ
so very much this
there’s a reason why Reverend Martin Luther King Junior emphasized the importance of fostering non-violent tension for the sake of social justice in his Letter From Birmingham Jail:
“as history has unfortunately told us, privileged groups rarely give up their privilege willingly.”
RonF
You have a right to speak freely. You do not have a right to force other people to listen. Which means that you do not have a right to disrupt order. You can apply for a permit to occupy common space, and if that is ever granted to people to present one viewpoint then it must also be granted to others with a different viewpoint. But for a given space it can simply be withheld from all.
Taffy
Haha, that’s fucking stupid to say. You’ve said a stupid thing.
Jeremiah
Hopefully you have some mouthwash to clean the taste of those boot from your mouth.
Jerach
So nobody can ever publicly protest anything without the permission of those in power, thus they cannot protest against what those in power want. That seems to be the logical conclusion to your statement.
thejeff
It’s complicated.
The flip side to that argument is that any group can use any space, regardless of disruption or even danger, as long as they call it a protest and somehow the authorities would be powerless to intervene.
In practice, you always can only protest those in power with their permission. That’s what “power” means. In the US (and most liberal democracies), the law allows great freedom in protests and is supposed to be as RonF says, content neutral. The government can refuse permission based on the location you want or the time you want or the amount of disruption it’s likely to cause, but not based on the cause you’re supporting.
They don’t always live up to that, to say the least, but it’s hard to see what would be a better approach in theory.
A lot of protest tactics focused on media attention deliberately aim for approaches that wouldn’t be granted permission, precisely because they want to cause disruption.
RonF
“That seems to be the logical conclusion to your statement.”
I don’t see how.
What does the word “protest” mean to you? Writing a letter to your congressman is protest. Showing up at a school board meeting is protest. Renting out a hall and using it to hold a meeting where speeches opposing school policy is protest. Creating a Facebook group to organize people to publicize opposition to a policy and getting that group to speak publicly and otherwise petition a governing body is protest. Organizing people to go out and vote to defeat candidates for office and vote for people who agree with you is protest.
Civil disobedience is also protest. But that includes getting arrested and accepting the punishment so as to draw attention to your point of view. Committing civil disobedience but then expecting that you will not be punished or that you must not be punished and that the authorities should provide support for that disobedience is not how it works. And committing property damage or blocking people from access to common facilities based on their race or religion is not even civil.
Amelie Wikström
This is “like” an argument people on the left use when people on the right complain about censorship, as far as it’s using similar words, but it’s so gravely misapplied in this context it sounds like an AI generated post.
Jeremiah
Honestly it seem this guy is just some bootlicker, really don’t think they are arguing from any kind of good faith.
NGPZ
… maybe it’s about time Willis stopped linking new strips on the platform formerly known as Twitter ?
Proxiehunter
Fuck order.
Blakey
Y’know what? You’re right! Very important. Now so we know who to learn from I will prepare a list of every movement that has achieved any meaningful change under such strictures:
Dan
Extinction Rebellion Boston held a standout in front of the visitors’ entrance to the Mass Statehouse without any collateral damage. It made our governor very aware of our goals. May not have really accomplished much beyond that, though.
I think Climate Defense has the right idea: irritate the people who are either directly responsible for the problem, or refusing to use their power to fix it. They get in the face of people like the CEO of Exxon when he’s about to get an award for being a wonderful person. Collateral damage is minimal but CD has gotten some results.
Daibhid C
I can’t remember where I read this, but when climate protestors were throwing soup at (protective screens over) paintings, and people were saying “I agree with their motives, but not their methods,” someone pointed out that was their goal: they didn’t care if you agreed with their methods or not, as long as it made you aware of climate issues. Hardly anybody was saying “If they’re going to throw soup at paintings, we should make the climate crisis worse to spite them,” therefore it was working.
Freemage
I disagree, not because the souped paintings were some horrible sin, but because they were, frankly, silly. Most folks I know who heard about it had the following sequence of reactions:
“They threw soup at paintings? Why?”
“What does that have to do with climate change?”
“This is stupid, these people are stupid, I’m gonna go watch porn.”
If your protest action has no tie to the issue at hand, it’ll be very easy to be dismissed as a stunt. The people who agreed with the protestors’ motives agreed the day before, and afterwards were mostly embarrassed by being associated with them. The people who opposed them just pointed and laughed. And the unconcerned? Yeah, they still didn’t give a damn.
************
Similar vein. During one of the campus sit-ins over Gaza, a student leader read a public letter. It wasn’t explaining their position, or naming names, or pleading their case. It was asking the university to not do things the administration hadn’t even done yet, like blocking UberEats/Doordash drivers from delivering food.
This was not a good look.
A very common reaction in the mainstream coverage was, “Oh, look at the cute little kiddies and their adorable little protest. They’re soooo brave, willing to occupy a building that no one was guarding and eat delivery food.” Again, if your protest makes you mockable, it’s not going to be an effective protest.
The university protestors should’ve gone in with the assumption that they WOULD be denied easy access to food and water, and stockpiled beforehand. They should have assumed that heat/AC and power would be shut down, and come bearing battery-powered lanterns and thermal protection.
A key part of ‘irritating’ protests is that they, well, irritate. Those in power don’t like to be irritated, and they will absolutely lash out when provoked. If you’re demanding that your protest not result in you being the target of those sorts of tactics, you’re going to be seen as a bunch of children having a temper-tantrum.
Note that despite those protests affecting campuses across the country, very few institutions disinvested, and Netanyahu is closer than ever to achieving his goals, especially with Team Trump coming in this month.
thejeff
Often these kinds of protests seem to wind up shifting the focus to how awful the authorities are to the protestors and thus away from the topic of the protest.
In some cases that works: If you’re protesting police brutality and the police come in and start cracking heads, that proves your point.
Michael Steamweed
Gotta either irritate the flow of money, media, or logistics. Otherwise, how else to get the necessary political attention?
thejeff
But seriously, figure out which one will be effective and target it. Getting political attention often becomes the goal and isn’t necessarily productive on its own.
Interrupting the money is almost always the most effective, at least if it’s the money going to the people who can change the thing. That’s why stuff like strikes and boycotts work. Boycotts have to be broad or targeted enough to matter. Often a small group boycotting backfires, bringing attention to the company and sympathy from those opposed to your cause.
Sometime attention raising is an important goal on its own. Very often it has no real effect.
Michael Steamweed
Of course, interrupting the money flow does tend to get the money to try violence first, if they can.
Charles Phipps
I am weirdly invested in the ongoing Bulmeria crisis. Possibly because it might actually end positively unlike current RL ones.
Also, it might lead to more Alex strips.
ABunchOTrees
Now might be a good time to read up on Syria. The current moment is extremely promising, and even if it doesn’t live up to its full potential, every likely outcome is a dozen times better than what came before.
Doctor_Who
Even odds this ends with Dorothy running a very organized Volcano Lair.
Dara
yaaaaaaaaaaas supervillain dorothy
Dark_T_Zeratul
Obviously Amazi-girl would feel obligated to stop her, but where would Night Guy side?
MordWa
With the most accessible bewbs.
Which is still up for debate…
ValdVin
Night Guy has way more of a connection to Dorothy, in several manners.
(I was informed by Mondays observation on bewbs, so credit where it is due.)
Decidedly Orthogonal
Supervillain yes. At least, from the eyes of the elite and their media. I’m seeing something like Ozymandias.
Decidedly Orthogonal
P.S. Is there a Rorschach?
Michael Steamweed
The closest Rorschach I’ve ever seen in DoA was Mike. But sadly, no more Mike.
_Unless_ Willis does a Doc Manhattan and Mike finally figures out how to put himself back together after losing his Intrinsic Field…..
Wizard
If your plan to bring about world peace involves murdering a few million people, then you’re definitely a supervillain.
Ana Chronistic
I now have Ballister Blackheart in my head
(would that make Jocelyne Nimona?)
darkoneko
Will you, tho.
Nono
The audience all along: Joyce/Dorothy! Joyce/Dorothy!
Willis: writing a storyline where Jocelyne is discovering she likes girls and also maybe asking Dorothy if she wants to share a tent on the weekend
Davus
I would be cautiously optimistic about joycelyne/dorothy, but that still requires polyamory (and dorothy being bi)
Dante
I mean, the latter is pretty much here already.
More wishful thinking-y is to be rn rubbing my hands because yes, Jocelyn/Dorothy. Which is incredibly funny considering an It’s Walky re-read I finished yesterday. She got a kind of Walky, kind of Joyce character to ship her with because those two were otherwise occupied.
Acebender
I mean, I wouldn’t be mad about it
Taffy
Hmmm. They’re both legal adults, they’re both cute, they both like doing the right thing. It could work. It could happen.
Michael Steamweed
But Dorothy has hearts and horns for Joyce. Relationshipping up with the 2 sisters would seem odd for her.
Sirksome
Who gets the letters?
NGPZ
she should just skip all the CCs and make a huge-ass graffiti that reads:
“Not sorry,
Reese’sDotty”RassilonTDavros
Yeah I’m a little uncertain on that too. Maybe to her parents, in the event that this, like, gets her expelled or voids her scholarship or something? I feel like they’d probably be proud of her for standing up on an ethical issue like this, but maybe they’re more “always solve problems from within the system” types IDK
RassilonTDavros
Or maybe it’s to Yale’s admissions department for not responding to her acceptance letter.
Shade
Eh probably not that.
Michael Steamweed
To be honest, yeah, I do expect that she’s been intending to reply to the letter, apologetically turning them down.
“I regret that your university does not fit my needs at this time. I am entirely unsure what my needs are, exactly, but I do know Yale does not fit them, whatever they may be.”
Regret
Anyone she irritates when she is being an irritant.
Taffy
A lotta moms.
Azhrei Vep
Whoever she ends up upsetting. I think she’s pre-composing generic apology letters for when she inevitably needs them. Just fill in any necessary blanks on the fly, and you’re good to go.
BBCC
Well, hey, this is one way to explore if she wants to continue her dream (albeit hopefully with a new emphasis on work life balance and her mental health), modify her dream to something related but different or find a new one entirely.
HueSatLight
Apology letter to Robin for missing class.
HueSatLight
Apology letter to the waitstaff for when she dumps redsauce and wine on a senator.
Laserbeaks Fury
This feels like a situation where Dorothy shows up at the sit in and gets arrested, and then she’s convinced an arrest record will keep her from ever getting elected, but because of what it’s for it would probably help her in 30 years.
Michael Steamweed
Activism convictions preferred by one party; financial convictions preferred by another party. A good division of criminal labor.
Amelie Wikström
Oh right, US universities are businesses whose profit depend on a) real estate, b) sports franchising and c) stock investment; that’s why they’re funding wars rather than like, teacher salaries.
Michael Steamweed
Most of the larger public and private systems have been categorized as either athletics organizations that run education programs, or financial organizations that run education programs. And that’s just the non-profits.
99% of the for-profits are financial organizations that run student loan-disbursement programs and pretend to have education programs.
Amelie Wikström
I didn’t realize the schools themselves provide the loans to let people pay for sitting in their classes, that’s an impressively shady scam.
thejeff
Note that “for-profits” generally doesn’t refer to universities, even private ones, but more focused programs, like trade schools and the like. Some coding schools.
And my understanding is that they don’t usually provide the loans themselves, but help students get government loans and provide them with basically worthless degrees or certificates on the cheap. Leaving the students owing large sums, with no better job prospects.
Real private universities still tend to be organized as non-profits.
Michael Steamweed
“For-profits” refers to newer places with crappy education like Capella, DeVry, Univ of Phoenix, Walden, Fox, Wade, etc. Their average acceptance rate is very high; the proportion of students applying for federal loans is extremely high; the quality of education provided is (arguably by most metrics) quite low. (Not WGU; they are non-profit.)
This is besides the trade school type places like coding, HVAC, and welding. Their variety of quality in their educational training is hard to pin down, since it’s much less academically testable and more skills-based. But not for the State and public schools for such trades, like the public college or university schools that teach the vocational / trade tech / technical and continuing education stuff. They mostly have good or great training.
I am not referring to private non-profit universities like Rice Univ, Stanford Univ, Cal-Tech, MIT, Duke, Johns Hopkins, etc. They are indeed expensive places (and friggin’ highly selective), but their educational quality is orders of magnitude better than the for-profits crappy places.
Michael Steamweed
No, the schools don’t do the loaning (some few do; very little money, compared to the fed govt). They do the disbursing. The student applies for the loan from the govt; the govt gives the money to the school; the school keeps that money and gives the student some shoddy-ass services. Occasionally, the student will get a little bit of the money (what’s left over after all costs), but not often at all.