Cartoon: Centrists

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Ampersand

This cartoon is by me and Becky Hawkins.

If you like this cartoon, help us make more by supporting my Patreon! It’s what Uncle Sam, Mother Earth, and three out of four earthworms want you to do.

To be fair, not all centrists are like this. But a whole bunch are.

Becky writes:

I was listening to a Henry James audiobook before writing this, so let me know if it’s too rambly or doesn’t make sense:

Drawing not one but two houses on fire (at night, naturally) was a fun (and at times frustrating) challenge. Yay! Of course, I wanted the houses to be interesting and old-fashioned and grand, since they represented important issues. I googled “wooden house on fire,” and got a few reference images. But I didn’t want to draw a real disaster area that readers might recognize as a famous hotel or something. So I found some interesting houses on Google Street View. But I also didn’t want to possibly jinx a house by drawing it on fire. (I’m an artist, I get to be superstitious, okay?) So I drew some houses inspired by old Portland homes, and then looked at reference photos for how to draw and color the fire.

In designing the characters, I wanted to draw people who would consider themselves nonconformists. You know, they’re “free thinkers” who just happen to agree with the right and/or argue with the left most of the time. I gave the man slightly fluffy hair, a goatee, and a scarf. For the figure on the left, well… There was a screenshot from Fox News that was going around Twitter as I was drawing this. The chyron said “Feminist: I’m the most hated lesbian in Baltimore due to my views on trans debate.” I don’t know if this person identifies as a centrist, but she sure looked annoying, and the phrase “most hated lesbian in Baltimore” made me laugh. So I used her appearance as a jumping-off point.

She was originally wearing a grayish suit, but with her blonde hair and pale skin, she looked too monochromatic compared to the rest of the cartoon. I don’t use a super-limited color palette, but I also don’t want to use infinite random colors in a cartoon. When it’s time to choose colors (like, for someone’s clothes) I’ll try to pick a color I’m already using somewhere else. For example, I used the same blue for the left-hand house trim, the woman’s shirt, and the man’s blazer. I tried coloring her blazer pink, to echo the pinkish house on the right. And I realized I accidentally recreated the color scheme of Ellie Sattler’s iconic outfit from Jurassic Park. But I’m guessing no-one will notice.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has a single panel, which shows two rather nice houses burning, with bright orange and yellow flames on the roofs and coming out every window, leaping high into the sky. Both houses have two full stories plus an attic. The house on the left has bay windows, and the house on the right has a sizable front porch with columns.

The house on the left has a mailbox on its front lawn; the mailbox has “Democracy” written on it. The house on the right has a yard sign on its front law, which has “Climate Change” written on it.

On the sidewalk in front of the houses, two people are talking. The person on the left has short blonde hair (or her hair looks blonde in the firelight), is wearing a pink jacket and tan pants, and is holding a smartphone that she’s looking at. She looks very worried.

The person on the right has short, fluffy brown hair, red cats eye glasses, and a van dyke beard. He’s wearing a blue jacket and a blue-and-white patterned scarf.  He is yelling angrily at the sky, waving his fists in the air.

WOMAN: Look at this… College students are criticizing a speaker… And the students are being strident and unreasonable!

MAN (loudly): This is the worst disaster EVER!

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 32 Comments

Cartoon: How The 2nd Amendment Saves Us From Tyranny

Posted on March 29, 2022 by Ampersand

If you enjoy these cartoons, help us make more by supporting my Patreon! Supporting my Patreon will make you taller, better looking, improve your posture, and small children and dogs will stop hating you quite so much.

This cartoon’s gag is kind of obvious, but it made me laugh, especially after seeing Kevin Moore’s art on it. The “ye-e-es” dude in panel three especially cracks me up. (The “ye-e-es!” was entirely Kevin’s idea, btw. I find it hilarious, but I wouldn’t have thought of myself.)

“Wipe Out Freedom Immediately!” might be a good title for a future cartoon collection.

Casey Michel, writing on the lack of relationship between gun ownership and freedom, provides this graph, charting gun ownership rates against “democratization data from Freedom House.” What it shows is… a complete lack of any strong relationship between guns and democracy, one way or the other.

From Michel’s article:

The data shows no significant correlation between high civilian gun ownership rates and countries that have improved their democracy scores over the past decade. Nor is there a significant correlation between countries with low civilian gun ownership rates and those that have seen democratic backsliding.

The findings back up previous studies on the supposed link between civilian arms and democratic freedoms. As Jan Amo Hessbruegge, who works for the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in 2017, “Research does not establish a clear correlation between private gun ownership levels and the relative political freedom of a particular country.”

And in looking at data from 2013, The Atlantic found that the relationship between democracy and civilian gun ownership rates was “observable, but minor.” One analyst called the link “baloney.”

I wish I could tell you what my plans are for 2022, but I don’t know. I’ve pitched a large-scale project to a publisher, and what this year looks like depends a lot on if they say yes or not.

For me, this sort of thing is the major advantage of having a “pay per cartoon” model, rather than a monthly subscription. If I get less productive for some reason, y’all will automatically be charged less (or not charged at all, if I don’t produce any new policartoons – but I don’t anticipate that happening).

I am definitely planning a new cartoon collection paperback in 2022. As for the rest… I’ll tell you once I know.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows two people – The President of the United States and an assistant of some sort – in the oval office. The angles chosen for each shot makes it impossible to see the President’s face: We can make out that he’s a white male with brown hair, but that’s it. In other words, he’s a generic white male President.

The assistant is wearing a blue suit with a red tie. He’s balding on top and has neatly combed salt-and-pepper hair on the sides.

PANEL 1

In the foreground, we see the President’s hand and arm; he’s sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. The assistant stand in front of the desk, talking to the President; he is grinning and doing a fist-pump with one hand, and holding a folder in the other.

PRESIDENT: We’ve had enough freedom! It’s tyranny time in America! How many soldiers do we have?

ASSISTANT: Yes sir, Mr President! We’ve got over a million troops.

PANEL 2

A similar angle shows the President’s hand and shoulder. The assistant is holding up a forefinger, listing things off, and looks very smug.

PRESIDENT: Excellent. And how about firepower?

ASSISTANT: We have six thousand tanks, thirteen thousand aircraft, forty thousand armored vehicles and almost four thousand nukes, Mr President.

PANEL 3

In the foreground, we can see the President pointing in a dramatic “go make it happen!” gesture. The drama is heightened by the extreme foreshortening on the arm, making the pointing hand look huge.

In the background, the assistant looks so thrilled that it’s frankly a bit disturbing; he’s pumping both his fists, grinning hugely, has huge wide eyes, and is hissing “ye-e-es!” Also, his folder has disappeared. Did he drop it? Maybe I’ll get in touch with Kevin and ask him to add a folder tucked under an arm to this panel.

PRESIDENT: Send them in and wipe out freedom immediately!

PANEL 4

The assistant is talking to the President, but now he looks very worried, wringing his hands with sweat flying off his forehead. In the foreground, we can see enough of the president to know that he’s also sweating, and has clasped his hands to his head, mussing his hair.

CAPTION: A few hours later

ASSISTANT: Mr President, the army has encountered some civilians armed with rifles and handguns.

PRESIDENT: Oh no! My evil plot is doomed! Abort! ABORT!

CAPTION AT THE BOTTOM OF THE CARTOON: How The Second Amendment Saves Us From Tyranny

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 29 Comments

Cartoon: The Constant Cacophony of Cancelling Cancel Culture

Posted on March 23, 2022 by Ampersand

If you enjoy these cartoons, help us make more by supporting my Patreon! This particularly rapid unintelligible patter isn’t generally read and if it is it doesn’t matter.

This is one of my occasional cartoons written and drawn (relatively) quickly in response to the (relatively) current news cycle.

On March 7 2022, the New York Times gave the royal treatment (including two large photos) to a piece by college senior (and soon to be Reason staff writer) Emma Camp about the problem of self-censorship on college campuses. Camp described her experience speaking in class:

This idea seems acceptable for academic discussion, but to many of my classmates, it was objectionable.

The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.

I’m sympathetic to Camp’s view – it can be scary and uncomfortable speaking out in class when we know our classmates might disagree. But is this anything that requires a New York Times op-ed piece?

Ten days later, the Times editorial board published another op-ed on the same subject, writing:

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

Of course, there is no right to speak “without fear of being shamed or shunned.” That would amount to a right to freedom from criticism, and no one has or should have that right.

Both of those quotes are referred to in this cartoon.

It should be surprising the “paper of record” published two extremely similar cancel-culture-panic pieces in two weeks. But it’s not. I used the New York Times‘ site search function to count up how many opinion page pieces referred to terms like “cancel culture” and “CRT.”

In the last year, the NYTimes opinion pages printed 71 pieces including the phrase “cancel culture,” 28 pieces including “C.R.T.,” and 9 including “book bans.”

Some of the “cancel culture” pieces even concede – in “to be sure” asides buried in the middle – that right wing legal bans are much more dangerous.  So why are they objected to so much less?

Arguably, the three most censored groups in the U.S. are prisoners, sex workers, and undocumented migrants.  As far as I can find, the Times opinion page didn’t run a single piece about censorship of any of these groups in the last year.

In fact, the Times ran more more opinion page pieces about “cancel culture” than about all other free-speech issues combined. Even if “cancel culture” is a real problem, that’s ridiculous. The Times‘ coverage is wildly disproportionate, in a way that strongly favors right-wing narratives and gives many instances of right-wing censorship a free pass. And as far as I can tell, the Times‘ disproportionate coverage is typical of the media as a whole.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has five panels.

PANEL 1

This panel shows two news anchors sitting in a TV studio facing the camera. The angle is from the camera’s perspective, as if we were watching them on TV. A circular logo superimposed on the image says “5” (as in channel 5) and a chyron runs across the bottom of the image.

(Chyron this panel says: “Free Speech in Peril! Young people are frightening. They’re coming after you.”)

The anchors are a man and a woman. They are both well-dressed and have professionally styled hair. Both speak to the camera with very serious expressions.

MALE ANCHOR: Tonight on WMSM: the first of our seventeen part series on the horrors of cancel culture!

FEMALE ANCHOR: America has a free speech problem! We’ve lost our long established right to speak without fear of being shamed.

PANEL 2

A close-up on the male anchor. He looks genuinely angry.

(Chyron this panel says: “Prison Censorship is an issue we’re not going to be covering whatsoever.”)

MALE ANCHOR: Especially on college campuses! Surveys show that students sometimes self-censor because they’re afraid of criticism! Something that has never before happened in all of history!

PANEL 3

This panel shows a hand holding a smartphone. On the smartphone screen, we can see the female anchor talking. She also looks angry and intense.

FEMALE ANCHOR: Next up: a college student “saw people shift in their seats” when they disagreed with her! Will left wing assaults on free speech never end?

PANEL 4

This is an unusually narrow panel, less than a third as wide as other panels. The panel shows the male anchor, still talking to the camera, but the figure is tiny. He’s smiling and raising a finger in a “just making a point” manner.

(Chyron this panel: “Tiny Type is rarely re (the word is cut off by the panel edge). Tiny type tiny type tiny type tiny type”)

MALE ANCHOR (small print): To show we’re unbiased, I will briefly mention that the right is writing laws to ban books, stifle teachers and even legalize running over protesters, and those things are also bad. Now back to our story.

PANEL 5

A new scene. Two people are standing; the second of them is holding a tablet, which they’re frantically tapping (sound effect: tap tap tap tap tap tap).

The first person is a black woman wearing what looks like a bowling shirt (meaning I drew a shirt with vertical stripes and it accidently came out as a bowling shirt) and carryign a purse. She has short curly hair. She looks a little concerned as she speaks to the second person.

The second person has long hair, in an unnatural red color, in long spikes and with an undercut. Their left arm is covered with tattoos. They’re frantically tapping the tablet they’re holding (sound effect: tap tap tap tap tap tap), have a panicked expression, and they’re talking loudly.

FIRST PERSON: Would you mind turning that off?

SECOND PERSON: IT WON’T STOP!

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc. | Comments Off on Cartoon: The Constant Cacophony of Cancelling Cancel Culture

Cartoon: Trans People Just Don’t Listen

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Ampersand

A cartoon by me and Becky Hawkins.

Help us make more cartoons by supporting my Patreon! Here at Barrypatreon headquarters, we will serve no sheep before it sleeps and brew no glue before it’s true.

When I think about how I became a cartoonist, I think of a original Sunday Pogo page that my parents had on their wall when I was a kid. It was hanging over a sofa in the den; I remember standing on the sofa, facing the wall, reading and rereading that Pogo strip. I was fascinated by the way I could, when I looked closely, see traces of Walt Kelly’s blue pencil lines still visible under the lush black brush strokes.

That childhood experience is part of my personal “childhood clues Barry would be a cartoonist” narrative. It was an early sign of whatever I have in me that’s obsessed with telling stories with sequential pictures.

But by telling that story, I’m not claiming that all children who are obsessed with comics for a while are cartoonists.

There are many (but not all) trans women who, thinking back on their own childhoods, will remember early signs of their true sex – including wanting to play with toys that are traditionally associated with girls, like Barbie dolls. That’s part of their personal narratives. And after all, toy choices are a common way for children in our culture to express their gender.

(Is it sexist that our society assigns gender to toys? Yes, of course it is. But acknowledging that our society has gender associations with different toys, and that commonly affects the toy preferences of children, isn’t the same as endorsing those gender associations.)

When supportive parents of trans kids try to explain how they knew their child was trans, they often mention gendered toys or clothes their child was drawn to. Again, this is part of their and their kids’ life stories – not a claim that all tomboys are actually trans boys.

But transphobes, in transparently bad faith, pretend that’s what’s being claimed. (That link is to a transphobic op-ed piece, so don’t click if you’d rather not see that.)  It’s something I’ve seen tranphobes argue or allude to in countless arguments, and it’s annoyed me each time. They have a pre-existing narrative, and they’ll warp and misinterpret what trans people say to crowbar it into that narrative. So that’s what this comic strip is about.

Becky created “The JAQ Off” TV talk show for a strip she drew back in May. It seemed natural to bring it back for this strip – although now that I think about it, this may be the first time that two #PoliCartoons I’ve worked on have been set in the same shared “universe.” Watch out, MCU!

Becky and I went back and forth on if we should reuse the host character from that earlier strip, or if Becky should instead model the host visually on Kathleen Stock, a well-known British transphobe.  In the end, Becky reused the host character, but not before she’d also penciled the strip with the Stock-looking character.

 

[The following was written in December 2021, when I originally posted this cartoon on Patreon.]

This is the last cartoon I’ll post in 2021. Thank you all so much for supporting these comics! I’m really proud of the body of work me and my collaborators have created in 2021 – both artistically, and that we frequently do cartoons on subjects that almost no other professional political cartoonists cover. And it literally could not have happened without y’all.

I’m very lucky to be spending this New Year’s Eve with my sister’s family in New York. We’ve had a bit of a Covid scare earlier this week – my niece tested positive for Covid and was under the weather for a couple of days. But she’s feeling much better now, and the rest of us (who are all vaccinated and boosted) also feel fine, and so far have tested negative for Covid (knock wood).

It could have been SO much worse, and it’s made me think about how lucky my life is, and I’m grateful (although, being an atheist, I’m not really grateful to anyone in particular) (it occurs to me that I’ve never done any comics about atheism! Maybe in 2022….). I hope we’ll all be lucky in 2022. Have a fabulous New Year, everyone.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows a TV talk show studio; there’s a table that the host and guest sit behind (the table has the words “Just Asking QUESTIONS” printed on it in large letters), and a couple of large potted plants on either side of the table (the planters have “The JAQ Off” printed on them),  We can see a couple of big TV lights hanging down from the ceiling, lighting the scene.

Behind the table are two women. On the left is Nadia, a woman with wavy light brown hair, wearing a pink blouse with a white jabot tie. On the right is the host, a woman wearing a pink blouse under a dark gray blazer; she has catseye glasses and her neck-length dark brown hair looks professionally styled. Both women have a coffee mug on the table beside them.

PANEL 1

Nadia looks straight into the camera, smiling with a wide-eyed “wow I’m actually on TV!” expression. The host has turned to face Nadia. She’s smiling, and raising one palm in a “just asking a question” sort of gesture.

HOST: Our guest today is Nadia Alves, of the “Valley Trans Coalition.” Welcome, Nadia.

HOST: Nadia, can you explain why trans activists insist that all boys who like dolls must “really be girls?”

PANEL 2

Nadia looks bewildered. The host, ignoring Nadia, has dramatically clutched her hands to her sternum, and has her eyes closed and an “oh the tragedy” expression on her face.

NADIA: What? Of course boys can like dolls.

HOST: I was a tomboy —  if I were a girl today trans activists would force me to be a boy!

PANEL 3

Nadia explains, looking worried about the turn the conversation has taken. The host is suddenly furious, pounding the table so hard her coffee mug bounces up. To indicate the host’s fury, Becky has colored the background of this panel red, and the host’s head is suddenly much larger than it is in the other panels. (Plus the host has a furious expression, of course.)

NADIA: Nobody is doing that. Obviously not all—

HOST (yelling): Why are trans activists so regressive? Newsflash: Not all girls wear dresses! It’s like you’re stuck in the 1950s!

PANEL 4

Nadia is turning her head left and right, looking around with a confused expression. The host smiles and talks directly to the camera, making a “can you believe this person?” gesture indicating Nadia. Unnoticed, the host’s coffee mug has spilled, and coffee is dripping off the front of the table.

NADIA: Who are you talking to? Is there someone else here?

HOST: I try talking to trans people, but they just don’t listen!

This cartoon on Patreon.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 25 Comments

Link Farm and Open Thread, Squirrel Face Edition

Posted on March 9, 2022 by Ampersand

  1. My friend PH Lee’s short story Just Enough Rain has been nominated for a Nebula Award! Congrats, Lee!
  2. Millions of Angry, Armed Americans Stand Ready to Seize Power If Trump Loses in 2024
    Disturbing. Not surprising, but disturbing.
  3. Transgender Teens and Their Families Prepare to Flee Texas – Mother Jones
    “But even if families manage to avoid a knock on the door from child protective services, many worry that the governor’s directive could fuel anti-transgender sentiment and harassment in their communities or discourage doctors from prescribing medically necessary treatments.”
  4. Idaho legislation infringes on transgender youth, families | Idaho Statesman
    “If you want to live in a state that controls you, that removes your choice, that tells you how to raise your children, a state that inserts itself into your family’s private medical decisions, then maybe you should support HB 675, a bill that criminalizes medical experts for providing care to my transgender child. This bill puts politics over the health and well-being of my family and turns my beautiful and thriving daughter into a political prop.”
  5. Telltale Signs of Democratic Backsliding
    “So how can we tell whether a country is likely to experience, or already is experiencing, democratic backsliding? Fortunately, enough research has been done to help us identify key telltale signs…”
  6. Hamilton Flays the Filibuster (and Slams the Senate) | The New Yorker
    Mainly quotes from Federalist no 22. See also.
  7. The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence
    The revolution wasn’t only an effort to establish independence from the British—it was also a push to preserve slavery and suppress Native American resistance.
  8. ‘I Lost Everything’: More Than 160 Former Hertz Customers Are Suing Company Over Claims It Falsified Stolen Car Reports, Landing Some Drivers In Jail
    Hat tip to Gay and Tonic.
  9. What would artificial wombs mean for humans?
    Includes a list of “Ten things that were basic, regular, near-universal experiences for most people in the world’s most technologically advanced societies just four decades ago, all of which are either rare or almost unimaginable today.” And that list could be a lot longer, of course.
  10. In Higher Education, New Educational Gag Orders Would Exert Unprecedented Control Over College Teaching – PEN America
  11. “I loathe these people”: Rick and Morty creator’s backlash against TV’s bad fans | Television | The Guardian
  12. What are words worth? Thoughts on the pardoning of witches – language: a feminist guide
    I think I disagree with one premise of the article – I don’t think that a “pardon” carries with it an assumption of guilt, since legally people can be pardoned because they are innocent. (For example). But it’s an interesting article that covers a lot more ground than my nit-pick with one premise. (Thanks to Mandolin).
  13. All the King’s Women: the Fats – Fantasy Magazine
    “Stephen King hates fat people.”
  14. #MeToo: Eric Schneiderman Says He’s Changed. Is It Enough?
    Medium-long, frustrating article about Schneiderman’s post-#MeToo life, including his ongoing conversations with a friend, herself a survivor of sexual violence, who has been trying to make him understand the harms he caused.
  15. The Strangely Tangled Legal Battle Over a Series of Shark Sculptures Near the Antepavillion in London
    The video is very entertaining. I am on the shark’s side.
  16. Men experience body image issues, too — and this actor says it’s time to talk about it | CBC Radio
    The article begins with the actor, but wanders away and is actually about male body image, especially for older men. “But research shows that men now receive more cultural messages than they have in the past about retaining lean, muscular physiques as they grow older, she said. However, because men are also socially conditioned to be stoic and not emotionally expressive, they don’t talk about body image much…”
  17. Biden’s economic message doesn’t really matter | by Katelyn Burns | Feb, 2022 | Medium
    “…it’s laughably absurd to believe that rural Republicans are storming school board meetings, and vandalizing their liberal neighbors’ property because of ‘defund the police.'”
  18. Two Teenagers Were Fighting. Only the Black One Was Handcuffed. – The New York Times (And an alternate link).
    The video is very clear. By the time the cops arrived, the bigger, white boy was on top; they put the white boy on a sofa while they tackled and handcuffed the black boy.
  19. Rikers Guards Are Punishing Inmates Who Speak Out
    There’s probably no group in the US whose free speech is as routinely smashed as prisoners. For every story like this that gets reported, there’s no way of knowing how many prisoners were more successfully silenced.
  20. “He Died Like an Animal”: Some Police Departments Hogtie People Despite Knowing The Risks | The Marshall Project
  21. No, the war in Ukraine wasn’t because of pronouns | by Katelyn Burns | Feb, 2022 | Medium
    “So if an obsession with pronouns makes a group of people weak, the evidence here is that the far right is the weakest among us, and it’s not even close.”
  22. Florida House passes ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill
    “This bill goes way beyond the text on its page. It sends a terrible message to our youth that there is something so wrong, so inappropriate, so dangerous about this topic that we have to censor it from classroom instruction.” … “…in less than two months this year, conservative state legislators have filed more than 170 anti-LGBTQ bills.”
  23. EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn’t hurt sales | Engadget
    It’s a 2017 article, but it was news to me, so…
  24. Wyoming Senate Votes to Defund Gender and Women’s Studies
    It still has to get through the Wyoming House, however. In the past a law like this would be unequivocally unconstitutional; I honestly don’t know if the current Supreme Court would agree, if it comes to that.
  25. Opinion | War in Ukraine Threatens World Food Supplies – The New York Times (And an alternative link).
  26. In Missouri, Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman proposes abortion law to stop women from accessing abortions out of state – The Washington Post
    It’s a variation on Texas’ new anti-abortion law; it gives Missouri residents the ability to sue people in other states if they in any way assist someone from Missouri’s abortion.
  27. The Short, Strange, Very Predictable Story of Caroline Calloway’s Snake Oil
    She sounds like someone who’s found a niche that is simultaneously perfect for and incredibly unhealthy for her. There’s something very funny about people angry because they paid for a product called “Snake Oil” and were scammed.
  28. A Vast Web of Vengeance – The New York Times (Alternate link.)
    A sixty-year-old Canadian women uses the internet to get revenge on dozens of innocent people, many of whom she’s never met, and she’s surprisingly and horribly effective at it.
  29. The Willful Blindness of Reactionary Liberalism | The New Republic
    “Slippery slope thinking, fallacious to most, is the reactionary liberal’s primary means of understanding the world around them, and their tendency to catastrophize produces a state of alarm about the spread of dangerous ideas as constant and hysterical as the stereotypical liberal arts student’s. Thus, White Fragility, the widely criticized and lampooned book by social justice educator Robin DiAngelo, can be characterized by Matt Taibbi as not merely counterproductive, misguided, or even harmful but actually “Hitlerian.””
  30. Opinion | Who Should Be Allowed to Transition? – The New York Times
    “Far from accidental, this stereotyping was one of the early aims of the gatekeeping model: to ensure that only people who could “pass” would be allowed to transition. … Conventional attractiveness — and gender conformity — became a proxy for successful transition, a bias that still shows up today.”
  31. The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters | The New Yorker
    “Gonzalez is part of a new transitory workforce, made up largely of immigrants, many undocumented, who follow climate disasters around the country the way agricultural workers follow crops, helping communities rebuild.”
  32. The photos accompanying this link farm are by Steven Weeks and Semyon Borisov on Unsplash

Posted in Link farms | 20 Comments

Excerpt Sampler of Stories from 2022 Weekend Warrior

Posted on March 2, 2022 by Mandolin

My exclusive Patreon content for February collects excerpts from the beginnings of five new stories.

As I do annually, during January and February, I participated in the Codex contest Weekend Warrior run by Vylar Kaftan. Participants write one piece of flash fiction each weekend.

The stories in the Example Sampler are:

“Thing about Timeline Collapse I Decided Not to Post” based on the prompt: write about someone moving who doesn’t want to.

“An Alphabetical Guide to Potential Building Materials for Aspiring Urban Planners” based on the prompt: what is your kingdom made of?

 “The Letters You Lost” based on a suggested title.

“Dear Awesomest Uncle Zarny” based on the prompt: write a letter to an imaginary relative for a special occasion.

“The Thing about Things,” theoretically based on the prompt: choose a random wikipedia page… although I ended up meandering onto an unrelated subject.

(I released the full text of my week two story, “An Alphabetical Guide to Potential Building Materials for Aspiring Urban Planners,” on my Patreon in January.)

These were a lot of fun. I seem to be playing a lot with humor right now! Maybe it’s reading all that Wodehouse and Adams.

Thanks to all my patrons. All of my Patreon content–including a substantial, patron-exclusive offering once a month of something like an original essay, poem or short story–is available to all my patrons, no matter how much or little they contribute. Every contribution is greatly appreciated and makes a big difference to supporting my writing career!

Comments Off on Excerpt Sampler of Stories from 2022 Weekend Warrior

Cartoon: The News Could Not Be Any More Objective

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Ampersand

If you like these cartoons, please help us make more!

This cartoon was drawn by the one and only Kevin Moore!

Hello from the east coast!  When I originally wrote these words (in December 2021), I was in upstate New York (Ithaca is upstate, right?), visiting my family and basically not leaving my sister’s house at all (because plague).

The trip from Portland was okay. I’m someone who usually enjoys layovers and doesn’t mind a long trip, so I booked a flight that include two 4-5 hour layovers without giving it much thought, bringing the whole trip to about 19 hours – long even for me, but not impossibly long.

What I hadn’t considered is that, although in the past I haven’t much minded spending long trips like that, that’s because in the past I didn’t need to wear a mask the whole time. I don’t find surgical-style masks that uncomfortable – I even sometimes forget that I’m wearing a mask at all – but 19 hours is a reallllllllly long time to go masked. It made me feel very lucky to have a job that I can do unmasked from home.

From a creating-cartoons perspective, the big news about this trip – and by “big,” I mean, “it matters to me and no one else in the entire universe has any reason to care” – is that for the first time in well over a decade I’m traveling without my Windows Cintiq tablet. I recently bought a used IPad Pro I found on Craigslist, and I decided I could do with just the IPad this trip.

Pros: So lightweight! The IPad weighs much less than the Windows tablet I draw most of my comics on (which is a Wacom Mobilestudio Pro 13, for those of you wondering), plus it doesn’t require a power brick to be hauled around. With the Wacom I‘d never take it out of my bag unless I was at a table and knew I’d be planted there for at least an hour, because it was too unwieldy; with the IPad I can take it out, use it for five minutes, move on, etc., without giving it a second thought.

Cons: I actually miss Windows. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using Windows for so long, but many extremely simple tasks that seem intuitive to me on Windows – like knowing where files are saved and being able to open them easily from any compatible program – can be weirdly difficult and finicky on the IPad.

Anyway, so far, so good.

In a column about how news media frames “the homeless problem,” Adam Johnson writes:

This Sept 24 NBC4 Los Angeles segment entitled “Streets of Shame” led off with the anchor telling the viewer that, “NBC 4’s John Cádiz Klemack spoke with some homeowners who say they are looking forward to fewer tents and fewer trash.” Needless to say, no homeless people or homeless advocacy groups were quoted in the story. It’s simply taken for granted that the most important moral constituent in a story about displacing homeless people (some of whom may or may not end up in shelters, according to the report) is the “homeowner,” rather than the party clearly suffering from massive social failures of the state and housing market.

I’ve noticed and read about similar biases in how news reports on labor issues and on sex workers – the sources are almost always business owners, the chamber of commerce, police, “rescue” agencies. Labor unions and sex workers are rarely quoted, and even more rarely are their views used to frame the story, the way business owners and cops‘ views are routinely used to frame stories. And of course, fat acceptance advocates are virtually never part of any story about “the obesity crisis.”

I’ve wanted to do a strip about this for a while, but the ideas I’ve had – all focusing on the news anchors – never seemed right. The issue is fundamentally about the news, and who it leaves out – but doing a strip focused on journalists seemed to just be another example of what I’m trying to criticize. It wasn’t until I thought of focusing on the people the news usually leaves out, listening to the news, that I had a strip that I thought was worth completing.

The protest signs in panel 3 weren’t made up by me; I saw them all in photos of sex worker demonstrations. The “fuck the patriarchy but not for free” sign in particular was too great not to use.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has five panels, each of which shows a different scene.

PANEL 1

Three people sit on the ground, warming themselves around a small fire burning in a large tin can. We can see their tento behind them; from their clothes and context, we can infer that they’re homeless.  All three of them are watching the screen of a smartphone that the woman in the center is holding. A TV Anchor’s voice comes from the smartphone.

ANCHOR: Welcome to WMSM, where we bring you the objective news!

ANCHOR: Tonight’s stories begin with homelessness! Our reporter spoke with homeowners who say they want fewer tents and trash. No homeless people are interviewed.

PANEL 2

A fat man sits in a coffee shop (we can see the coffee shop’s logo on the window behind him). He’s holding an open laptop in his lap, and watching the screen. The News Anchor talks from the computer.

ANCHOR: A new report on how the obesity crisis is crushing America! We’ll interview a weight loss guru and the author of a new diet book.

ANCHOR: But no fat people, let alone fat acceptance advocates.

PANEL 3

A group of protestors, dressed in warm winter clothing, stands outside of a building, holding up protest signs. The signs say “sex work is work!,” “Outlaw poverty not prostitutes,” “rights not rescue,” “nothing about us without us,” and “fuck the patriarchy but not for free.”

In the foreground, a woman with pink hair and cat eye sunglasses is frowning at her smartphone as she watches something on it. A news anchor’s voice comes from her phone.

ANCHOR: We’ll then have a segment about prostitution, which will quote “rescue” groups and the police—

ANCHOR: But no sex workers or sex worker advocates.

PANEL 4

A waitress in a diner is about to pour coffee into a customer’s mug, but has paused and is giving major side eye to a news anchor on a small TV placed on top of a display case filled with pies. The waitress is wearing an apron over her outfit, and a name tag, and we can see a pen tucked behind her ear. This is the first time in this cartoon we’ve seen the anchor’s face, which is grinning hugely.

ANCHOR: Next, the minimum wage: Does it mean you’ll never work again? To find out, we’ll interview restaurant owners—

ANCHOR: But no workers or union organizers.

PANEL 5

This panel shows the news studio where the anchors – there are two of them, the man we saw on TV in panel 4, and a woman sitting next to him at the news desk – are speaking to a large TV camera. A bored looking cameraman stands behind the camera. Behind the anchors, we can see a backdrop showing a graphic of skyscraper silhouettes, and to the side is the backdrop for a weather report. Both anchors have huge, inane grins, and the female anchor is giving the camera the finger.

MALE ANCHOR: WMSM news — we literally could not be any more objective!

FEMALE ANCHOR: And if anyone says otherwise, you won’t see them here!

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Fat, fat and more fat, Media criticism, Sex work, porn, etc, Union Issues | 3 Comments

Cartoon: Easy Ways to be Cancelled

Posted on February 26, 2022 by Ampersand

If you like these cartoons, please support them on Patreon! Even a little bit unlikely anyone reads this can help!

I wrote this cartoon in July of 2020, and posted a sketch on the Discord. Here’s what it looked like then:

One Discord participant, ChessyPig (hi, ChessyPig!), made a criticism that stuck with me:

I am particularly uncomfortable with the second panel because I know entirely decent people who live in fear of Twitter criticism and think that it means that they’re about to be cancelled, because the hype about cancel culture interacts badly with their anxiety.

That struck me as a very good point. There was some more discussion in the discord, and more good points were made, but I didn’t see a way to fix things that left me with a comic strip I enjoyed. So I did what I often do: I left the cartoon to sit and stew in my “unfinished” folder, either forever, or until I saw how to fix it.

Recently I reread the sketch, and noticed a few things.

* First, the original panel four – based on Alan Dershowitz, in 2018, complaining that his friends in Martha’s Vineyard don’t invite him to parties since he publicly hopped on the Trump train – was about an event that virtually no one remembers.

* Second, the “kicker” panel was the funniest part.

* Third, the “Barry as salesman” thing in panel one really wasn’t adding anything and could be replaced with something funnier.

* And finally, the Twitter panel would be easy to rewrite.

With those things in mind, I rewrote the cartoon – deleting the original panel 4 and “promoting” the kicker panel to panel 4 – and felt much better about it. I also added a new kicker panel to prebut the “what about ordinary people who have lost jobs?” criticism.

Panel two could apply to a number of anti-woke academics, but I had in mind British philosopher and transphobe Kathleen Stock, who more than once complained specifically about the terrible burden of having her views criticized within academia. For example:

[Stock] becomes visibly distressed is describing a research talk she was due to give her department in April. Some graduate students organised a rival trans solidarity event, with a guest speaker critical of Stock, and 40 of her colleagues chose that event over her talk.

This event was often included in lists claiming Stock had been “run off campus” by “cancel culture.”

The character’s appearance is loosely based on Stock’s appearance. Since it’s not important that readers recognize Stock (or even know who she is) – the character is inspired by Stock, not Stock herself – I didn’t sweat getting a perfect resemblance. I don’t think Stock wears glasses, but my character does because I thought glasses popping of her face would look funny.

In a similar fashion, the panel three character’s appearance and complaint is loosely inspired by Andrew Sullivan. (I could have just as easily used Bari Weiss, without modifying the text at all.)

In panel four, I got to draw the multiple-waving-arms effect, which is always fun. Especially drawing on a computer, since doing things like fading arms out and adding white “zip” lines on top is so easy.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, each showing a different character and scene. There’s also a tiny kicker panel, below the bottom of the cartoon.

PANEL 1

This panel shows a man with neatly-combed hair wearing a black vest over an orange long-sleeved shirt. He has an expression of intense concentration, and is clasping his hands almost as if praying. Above him, in the panel, is a lengthy caption.

CAPTION: Are you a wealthy and famous reactionary, but somehow your SJW boss hasn’t fired you? Not to worry! You can still be a martyr for free speech with these

CAPTION CONTINUES IN MUCH LARGER FONT: Easy ways to be CANCELLED!

MAN: Please please let me be a victim!

PANEL 2

A woman wearing a striped shirt, dark orange pants, and comfortable-looking boots is on a city sidewalk. She’s jumping in shock as she stares at something on her tablet screen, her eyeglasses popping off her face. Her expression is extremely alarmed.

WOMAN: Other academics are criticizing my work! That can only mean…

WOMAN (much larger font): I’ve been CANCELLED!

PANEL 3

A strong-looking bald man with a white beard and mustache sits at a desk, with a coffee cup and a laptop on his desk. He’s speaking directly to the readers, shaking his fist in the air.

MAN: My co-workers don’t like me so I’m resigning to start my own incredibly lucrative media site! In other words

MAN (much larger font) I’ve been CANCELLED!

PANEL 4

A man stands on a hillside in a park or some other fairly tame natural area. He’s pretty distant from the “camera” and is speaking (well, shouting) directly to readers. He’s waving his arms so fast and frantically that it looks like he’s got six arms.

MAN: My book got panned? CANCELLED!

MAN: My $20 million Netflix special was criticized? CANCELLED!

MAN: Mocked in a cartoon? CANCELLED!

TINY KICKER PANEL UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE CARTOON

The white-bearded man from panel 3 speaks directly to the reader, while indicating himself with a thumb.

MAN: Hey! Some non-rich people have actually been fired! Which clearly validates my claim to be a victim!

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics | 3 Comments

Cat Pictures! Pete in a Sink

Posted on February 25, 2022 by Mandolin

drawing of a cat in a sink

This is one of the images I used in Scragamuffin, the chapbook I released as October’s exclusive Patreon reward. I thought it might be fun to release the pictures with the photos that inspired them.

When we lived in Bakersfield, our master bathroom had two sinks, which meant there was always an extra for a cat to flop in. It was probably summer when this picture was taken since Pete’s mane seems relatively short. I like the mad look in his eye.

drawing of a cat in a sink

Posted in artwork, Cats | Comments Off on Cat Pictures! Pete in a Sink

Cartoon: Capitalism can Innovate Around Anything!

Posted on February 22, 2022 by Ampersand

If you like these cartoons, please support them! Each $2 pledge really helps! Do it or I’ll buy a puppy from a puppy farm instead of going to a shelter!

This cartoon was inspired by a Paul Krugman column that was published in August, “The Bad Economics of Fossil Fuel Defenders.” Krugman wrote:

…there is a remarkable inconsistency between conservatives’ expressed faith in the power of private initiative and their assertion that climate policies will paralyze the economy. Businesses, the right likes to tell us, are engines of innovation and adaptation, rising to meet any challenge. Yet somehow the same people who laud private-sector creativity insist that businesses will shrivel up and die if confronted with new regulations or emission fees.

In fact, a number of studies have shown that government projections of the effects of new environmental or safety regulations consistently overestimate their costs, precisely because businesses respond to new rules and incentives by innovating, finding ways to reduce compliance costs. And industry projections of the adverse effects of regulation are far worse, typically overstating the costs to a ludicrous degree.

I made a process illustration. I’ve done these a few times before, because I honestly love looking at other cartoonists’ process illustrations, so I figure some of you will be interested too.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, plus an additional tiny “kicker” panel under the bottom of the cartoon.

The cartoon shows two businessmen-types walking on a city street. One of them is wearing a red bow-tie and a sky-blue suit; the other is wearing an ordinary tie and a duller suit, with a desaturated green jacket and black pants. The bow-tie guy is totally bald – probably shaves his head – and has a van dyke beard and mustache. The regular-tie guy has blond hair and is cleanshaven, and is looking at his smart phone as he walks.

PANEL ONE

The two of them walk on the sidewalk, Blonde looking at his phone, Bowtie raising his arms enthusiastically as he talks, grinning. (Not important to the cartoon: In the background, across the street, a smiling businessman talks to a smiling man with red skin, horns, and a tail, who is holding up a clipboard. And a woman in a second story window leans out to smile at a largish bird which is hovering and looking back at her.)

BOWTIE: The most amazing thing about capitalism is the creative genius of entrepreneurs!

PANEL 2

A closeup on just Bowtie, who looks overjoyed. His eyes are drawn as stars, and the air around him is filled with stars and dollar signs.

BOWTIE: If there’s profit to be made, there’s nothing capitalism can’t do! Feed the world! Create the internet! Create modern medicine!

PANEL 3

A shot of the two of them walking. Bowtie keeps on grinning and talking, his fists pumped in front of him in a pleased sort of way. Blonde reads something from the cell phone he’s holding.

BOWTIE: There’s no problem that capitalism can’t innovate around!

BLONDE: Hey, look at this: some senators want new regulations to protect the climate.

PANEL 4

Bowtie jumps straight up into the air (cartoon code for “I am very surprised”), clutching his face in his hands, his mouth and eyes huge in an expression of enormous dismay. He is yelling. Blonde, surprised by Bowtie’s big reaction, is stumbling back from Bowtie a little.

BOWTIE: NOOOO! CAPITALISM IS DOOMED!

TINY KICKER PANEL UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE STRIP

Bowtie is speaking directly to the readers, his face still showing distress.

BOWTIE: Even if capitalism miraculously survives, some rich people will be slightly less rich! I can’t imagine a greater tragedy!

This cartoon on patreon

Posted in Capitalism, Cartooning & comics, Environmental issues | 1 Comment