Haha, and privilege rears its ugly head. Tip is extremely well intentioned, and in a position to learn more about human/nonhuman relations than most other humans, but he’s still got the privilege and can’t /quite/ see things from the other side. Nice last line there, tying his human privilege with the concepts of white privilege and male privilege, and doing it humorously, to boot!
…privilege doesn’t look like a real word anymore after writing this post.
Tip’s completely right in panel three. In panel four, Artie—as a largeish black man—may have some insights that Tip should maybe shut up and learn from.
“War for reality itself”: now that’s an interesting way to put it. Are mad scientists really reality warpers? Are the weirdness-blind really something other than selectively insane? Is Unity a figment of a talking dog’s imagination?
Linguistic jamais vu sucks. Luckily, it’s been years since that happened to me, but I do remember that chanting the word under my breath worked as a cure.
Nobody can see things from the other side — not even with another person. But the ones who make up excuses for why it’s really, really hard to do, and the ones who say “MY demographic understands YOUR demographic better than vice versa” (or even worse, YOU are not entitled to an opinion) are the ones you can bet on to be especially bad at it.
Some people believe that a woman who brings a rape accusation without producing three witnesses ought to be jailed for fornication. Others thought that an entire university lacrosse team is less trustworthy than one drunk criminal (now murderer) with no evidence and a completely inconsistent story. One group call themselves religious scholars, while the other group call themselves academic scholars, and the sad part is that either group of bigots could fool anyone else into taking them seriously.
Of course, bigotry buried in so-called scholarship is old news (phrenology, anyone?) That was the joke of Huck Finn: Huck believed himself to be too stupid to understand the racist theories that the smart folks tried to teach him in Sunday school.
So, yeah. There’s nothing wrong with talking about privilege. For instance, privilege in the form of an assumption that those who claim not to have it are more qualified to speak on gender and race relations is pretty stupid.
Just to point out a bit on the privilege front, for another perspective: Tip is a cross dressing veteran and social worker while Artie is the super intelligent scion of the most powerful mad scientist family in the world.
Well, social worker IS a class thing. Artie is the son of Helen Narbon and Dave Davenport. He’s practically royalty, and if he’s willing to go to his family for favors he has unlimited resources. Add on the fact that he was built to be super intelligent…
On the other hand, Tip may be human but for all his skills he has no special status or powers beyond mojo. And he cross dresses public ally, which Doesn’t get hidden by reality blinding.
In other words, Artie loses the privilege contest: not only does he have wealth and status, plus important family ties, he also has passing privilege.
We don’t even have to look that far into the past: in the US military today, he’d almost certainly have been dishonourably discharged for that. Which makes – for instance – this early comic’s gag a rather bitter one: even back in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, in reality Tip’d be worse off than your average gay member of the military.
I guess that, ironically, the authors are too privileged to realise just how screwed Tip would be in the real world. Oh well.
I’m not sure any social system can really handle endemic insanity among their population. On the other hand, now they’ve got a solution for the brain-eating thing!
The problem, of course, is that every time the oppressed try to overthrow the current system entirely, they tend to end up becoming the new oppressors and nothing is actually solved in the long run.
Artie is also the most subtle of evils. …created by mad science, everything he attempts tends to go horribly wrong in the end. So it isn’t that I disagree; I’m just also afraid of what would happen if Artie were given the go-ahead.
In response to Zap’s comment, that is how it has often worked in human history, but can you really say that George Washington wasn’t an improvement over King George III?
Also, Haiti’s revolt against the French was mostly an improvement over the older slave plantations.
In addition, it’s not clear that this rule will work the same way with a non-human oppressed population.
Part of the problem is that for such a system to exist, whatever rules and system they laid down would have to have a basis in the nonhuman populace, or it’ll fall apart.
And as far as we’ve seen, mad scientists and consequently their experiments (and others caught up) tend to be fiercely individualistic. Artie helping them get a system going would be like herding cats, with the added risk of him ending up with a virtual dictatorship, which I believe is the opposite of what he wants.
It’s a tricky question – individual freedom versus social security – which is most important? (I can think of the ‘opposites’ as freedom versus individual safety/care, but both weak and strong states have problems, and this is grossly simplifying things).
Artie might (probably?) want a society by the (nonhuman) people where every nonhuman’s rights are insured. Those rights will diverge some from regular human rights.
As an ignorant American I can’t speak to Haiti, but as for the American Revolution, that was more about maintaining the legal structure the colonies had been operating under from inception until the aftermath of the Seven Years War, which had been discarded in favor of more home country control than had happened so far – it was purely maintaining the status quo on the part of the ‘revolutionaries’, although the other side obviously didn’t see it that way.
Lets not go too far. Many of the supporters of the revolution wanted a more radically democratic new state than they got – ultimately, the conservative elites hijacked the post-revolution government, and it took another forty years to get something near the universal suffrage (well, for white males, that is) many were looking for…
True enough. But those same supporters, such as Thomas Paine, were actually hanger ons rather than the actual organizers or soldiers, and the fact that they didn’t get to hijack someone else’s revolution for *their* selfish ends is hardly cause for mourning. “Many” is an elastic word as far as quantification goes and as such not truly all that reliable. 😛
Trust Artie to be ninety steps ahead of everyone else ^_^
Haha, and privilege rears its ugly head. Tip is extremely well intentioned, and in a position to learn more about human/nonhuman relations than most other humans, but he’s still got the privilege and can’t /quite/ see things from the other side. Nice last line there, tying his human privilege with the concepts of white privilege and male privilege, and doing it humorously, to boot!
…privilege doesn’t look like a real word anymore after writing this post.
Tip’s completely right in panel three. In panel four, Artie—as a largeish black man—may have some insights that Tip should maybe shut up and learn from.
Largish black gay man, to boot.
“War for reality itself”: now that’s an interesting way to put it. Are mad scientists really reality warpers? Are the weirdness-blind really something other than selectively insane? Is Unity a figment of a talking dog’s imagination?
Linguistic jamais vu sucks. Luckily, it’s been years since that happened to me, but I do remember that chanting the word under my breath worked as a cure.
Jamais vu is a different phenomenon, IIRC. This is semantic satiation.
He’s also a smallish white man who crossdresses all the time, which does knock him no few points down on the Privilege-O-Meter.
Nobody can see things from the other side — not even with another person. But the ones who make up excuses for why it’s really, really hard to do, and the ones who say “MY demographic understands YOUR demographic better than vice versa” (or even worse, YOU are not entitled to an opinion) are the ones you can bet on to be especially bad at it.
Some people believe that a woman who brings a rape accusation without producing three witnesses ought to be jailed for fornication. Others thought that an entire university lacrosse team is less trustworthy than one drunk criminal (now murderer) with no evidence and a completely inconsistent story. One group call themselves religious scholars, while the other group call themselves academic scholars, and the sad part is that either group of bigots could fool anyone else into taking them seriously.
Of course, bigotry buried in so-called scholarship is old news (phrenology, anyone?) That was the joke of Huck Finn: Huck believed himself to be too stupid to understand the racist theories that the smart folks tried to teach him in Sunday school.
So, yeah. There’s nothing wrong with talking about privilege. For instance, privilege in the form of an assumption that those who claim not to have it are more qualified to speak on gender and race relations is pretty stupid.
It looks just as sensible as it always does…
Just to point out a bit on the privilege front, for another perspective: Tip is a cross dressing veteran and social worker while Artie is the super intelligent scion of the most powerful mad scientist family in the world.
Yup. Sixty years ago Tip would probably have been thrown into an institution and lobotomized.
Well, that may not be done anymore, but people’s attitude towards us is the same as anything else that’s against social norms.
But still, the joke that Shaenon was trying to convey is understood and taken as such.
You’re…you’re a SOCIAL WORKER?! Ewwww. Didn’t know they let *your* kind o ndecent websites like this.
roflmao
+1 to you
Well, social worker IS a class thing. Artie is the son of Helen Narbon and Dave Davenport. He’s practically royalty, and if he’s willing to go to his family for favors he has unlimited resources. Add on the fact that he was built to be super intelligent…
On the other hand, Tip may be human but for all his skills he has no special status or powers beyond mojo. And he cross dresses public ally, which Doesn’t get hidden by reality blinding.
In other words, Artie loses the privilege contest: not only does he have wealth and status, plus important family ties, he also has passing privilege.
We don’t even have to look that far into the past: in the US military today, he’d almost certainly have been dishonourably discharged for that. Which makes – for instance – this early comic’s gag a rather bitter one: even back in the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, in reality Tip’d be worse off than your average gay member of the military.
I guess that, ironically, the authors are too privileged to realise just how screwed Tip would be in the real world. Oh well.
I think you’re missing the joke.
(TUNE: “I’m A Little Teapot”, anon.)
TIP:
I’m a little human, male and white!
(Also a bishy, hot transvestite!)
Thrown into a cavern, black as night?
That, I tell you, just ain’t right!
ARTIE:
I’m a demi-human, large and black!
Soon, humankind, I fear will attack!
But a social system’s what we lack …
I could give them such a smack!
Thanks, Ed. My childhood is ruined. Ruined! *sob*
I’m not sure any social system can really handle endemic insanity among their population. On the other hand, now they’ve got a solution for the brain-eating thing!
The problem, of course, is that every time the oppressed try to overthrow the current system entirely, they tend to end up becoming the new oppressors and nothing is actually solved in the long run.
Artie is also the most subtle of evils. …created by mad science, everything he attempts tends to go horribly wrong in the end. So it isn’t that I disagree; I’m just also afraid of what would happen if Artie were given the go-ahead.
Is it the end…? Or just mid-way? 🙂
Artie has grown up to be a lot like his mother.
In response to Zap’s comment, that is how it has often worked in human history, but can you really say that George Washington wasn’t an improvement over King George III?
Also, Haiti’s revolt against the French was mostly an improvement over the older slave plantations.
In addition, it’s not clear that this rule will work the same way with a non-human oppressed population.
Part of the problem is that for such a system to exist, whatever rules and system they laid down would have to have a basis in the nonhuman populace, or it’ll fall apart.
And as far as we’ve seen, mad scientists and consequently their experiments (and others caught up) tend to be fiercely individualistic. Artie helping them get a system going would be like herding cats, with the added risk of him ending up with a virtual dictatorship, which I believe is the opposite of what he wants.
It’s a tricky question – individual freedom versus social security – which is most important? (I can think of the ‘opposites’ as freedom versus individual safety/care, but both weak and strong states have problems, and this is grossly simplifying things).
Artie might (probably?) want a society by the (nonhuman) people where every nonhuman’s rights are insured. Those rights will diverge some from regular human rights.
As an ignorant American I can’t speak to Haiti, but as for the American Revolution, that was more about maintaining the legal structure the colonies had been operating under from inception until the aftermath of the Seven Years War, which had been discarded in favor of more home country control than had happened so far – it was purely maintaining the status quo on the part of the ‘revolutionaries’, although the other side obviously didn’t see it that way.
Lets not go too far. Many of the supporters of the revolution wanted a more radically democratic new state than they got – ultimately, the conservative elites hijacked the post-revolution government, and it took another forty years to get something near the universal suffrage (well, for white males, that is) many were looking for…
True enough. But those same supporters, such as Thomas Paine, were actually hanger ons rather than the actual organizers or soldiers, and the fact that they didn’t get to hijack someone else’s revolution for *their* selfish ends is hardly cause for mourning. “Many” is an elastic word as far as quantification goes and as such not truly all that reliable. 😛