It’s interesting to see this in the context of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and Brett Kavanaugh’s response during his Supreme Court nomination hearings this past Thursday (wrote this out for posterity). I wonder how deeply Shaenon and Jeff will dive into Mr. Green’s total sense of entitlement and lack of empathy for someone that he has placed in such a manipulative situation.
Depends. How many times did Mrs. Ford do involuntary brain transplants upon other people with carefree abandon in the way that Ginny did? o_O
From the perspective of her victims anything bad that happens to Ginny might very well be karma for *her* total sense of entitlement and lack of empathy for people she placed into bad situations. >_>
And that’s skipping lightly over the fact that whatever we see Mr. Green do is something that he *has* actually done while we have no way of knowing that Judge Kavanaugh has done anything wrong. 😛
Is lying wrong? Because Kavanaugh has blatantly lied to Congress on multiple occasions, including on trivial matters such as whether he was watching Blasey Ford’s testimony (that’s “Dr.” or “Prof.” Blasey Ford, by the way).
And of course, the fact that he has told multiple verifiable lies makes him less credible than Blasey Ford, who has not.
Also, anyone with the slightest sense of morals–so, not you–would realize that Ginny’s crimes (in which Dr. Green is totally complicit anyway) don’t justify someone imprisoning her in a virtual reality scenario and trying to literally rape her, which is what it’s called when you try to force a prisoner to have sex with you in exchange for maybe freeing her.
Simmer down, there. Going around smugly claiming other people don’t have morals is way out of line.
Towering Barbarian appears to simply be playing devil’s advocate. They’re absolutely right – from certain points of view, Ginny is a monster who some people would not mind seeing suffer for what they perceive as her crimes.
But that’s a hypothetical position, speculated as being hypothetically held by fictional characters in a webcomic. TB has not actually stated their own personal opinion on the morality of Virginia’s behavior, nor on what they would view as acceptable “karma” for it. Don’t pretend as if you know their morals, because you quite flatly do not.
There’s a vast difference between commenting on something, or even feeling that it is justified, and actually personally endorsing it.
—
Captain James T. Kirk: [looking at a library picture of Khan on viewscreen] Name: Khan Noonien Singh.
Mr. Spock: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world, from Asia through the Middle East.
Dr. McCoy: The last of the tyrants to be overthrown.
Scott: I must confess, gentlemen. I’ve always held a sneaking admiration for this one.
Captain James T. Kirk: He was the best of the tyrants and the most dangerous. They were supermen in a sense. Stronger, braver, certainly more ambitious, more daring.
Mr. Spock: Gentlemen, this romanticism about a ruthless dictator is…
Captain James T. Kirk: Mr. Spock, we humans have a streak of barbarism in us. Appalling, but there, nevertheless.
Scott: There were no massacres under his rule.
Mr. Spock: And as little freedom.
Dr. McCoy: No wars until he was attacked.
Mr. Spock: Gentlemen…
[Everyone but Spock laugh]
Captain James T. Kirk: Mr. Spock, you misunderstand us. We can be against him and admire him all at the same time.
But that’s a hypothetical position, speculated as being hypothetically held by fictional characters in a webcomic. TB has not actually stated their own personal opinion on the morality of Virginia’s behavior, nor on what they would view as acceptable “karma” for it. Don’t pretend as if you know their morals, because you quite flatly do not.
Yes, how can we know anything at all?
“There’s a vast difference between commenting on something, or even feeling that it is justified, and actually personally endorsing it.”
What is the difference between feeling that something is justified and personally endorsing it?
But if you like: Hypothetically, anyone who took the position TB is putting forth would be a monster with no morals. Hypothetically, anyone who then moves swiftly from “some women hypothetically might be considered to deserve to be raped”–that is what he is literally saying about Ginny–to a real-life consequential rape accusation, and whose comment on it is that “we have know way of knowing what happened” tongue-out emoji–well, anyone with any ability and desire to interpret context knows what’s happening. They’re trying to perpetuate a culture in which the default is not to believe alleged rape survivors, even in the face of a not inconsiderable amount of evidence about which party is more credible. (Which wouldn’t be enough for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but we’re not talking about a criminal trial here.) This is part of why rape survivors don’t come forward.
What’s sad here is that you feel the need to deny the obvious impllications of what Barbarian said because it makes you sad to see people arguing in the comment sections of a webcomic. Sweep everything under the rug. Well that sweep everything under the rug attitude is also part of what keeps rape covered up.
Sometimes you have to look at the things happening in front of your eyes and acknowledge them for what they are. If you can’t do that in a webcomics comment section are you going to be able to do that in cases of consequential evil?
@Matt w; What you have pointed out is why we have Rule of Law and the principle of Innocent Until Proven Guilty.
We cannot know the minds of others RW. Mind reading is fiction.
We set up Courts of Law solely for our own defense against the violation of the Rights of others, for both the Accuser and the Accused, and to throw away that process in a fit of emotion, however justified in our own minds, makes us Barbarians and deserving of the Hell on Earth we just recently clawed our way out of.
The Kavanaugh fiasco is a textbook example of such violations, in this case perpetrated by individuals intent on getting revenge on the Republican Party who frustrated their prior ambitions for engineering the Supreme Court in their own favor. They couldn’t win legitimately and so upended the chessboard like the willful children they yearn to be.
matt w: There are a number of cruel and bizarre things which could happen to Virginia, but I don’t think sexual violence is one of them. It’s not that sort of comic. When I read Towering Barbarian’s comment, I framed “anything bad that happens to Ginny” in those terms.
@ Sheik – The following are facts:
• A job interview is not a court of law, even if that job interview is conducted by the United States Senate.
• The decision against an FBI investigation was made by President Trump.
• Senator Flake (R-AZ) made his support of Brett Kavanaugh contingent upon an FBI investigation.
• President Trump then ordered an FBI investigation, but the investigation will be limited to one week.
• Senate Republicans refused to hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland for 293 days.
• Justice Gorsuch was nominated by President Trump on January 31, 2017 and confirmed by the Senate on April 7, 2017 (That’s 66 days.)
• Kavanaugh was nominated Monday, July 9, 2018; that was 82 days ago.
You are mistaken on the facts of this situation. And, given what you have posted, I’d wager that is a result of your search bubble. (Please consider Googling “search bubble” if you are unfamiliar with the term.) Please consider fact checking your favorite news sources against more reliable sources.
The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Bloomberg are all excellent centrist news sources. For complex analysis, I’d recommend The New Yorker (skews left-center) and The Economist (skews slightly right-center).
“Obvious implications” are completely wrong all the time.
In my own provided example, Spock drew the “obvious implication” that his human colleagues were in favor of a world run by a ruthless dictator. But they absolutely weren’t.
In real life, countless people who superficially appear guilty of crimes are proven innocent of any wrongdoing all the time. It happens every single day, and if we treated every “obvious implication” as undeniable fact, we’d be convicted innocent people left and right.
For example, the “obvious implication” of someone running from the police is that they’re a nefarious criminal who is fleeing justice. But sometimes they’re just innocent individuals who panic or make bad choices – startled children, soldiers with PTSD suffering flashbacks, intoxicated individuals who aren’t thinking clearly, victims of abuse, people who are sleep deprived or only half awake, et cetera, et cetera.
There are countless very good reasons why an innocent person might flee from a police officer, but if you operate purely based on “obvious implications”, then a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt or killed, because those implications aren’t always true.
What seems obvious to one person is entirely unfathomable to another person with different life experiences. What seems obvious in one context is utterly obtuse in another. And implications are just that – mere implications. They suggest things – but they do not remotely prove anything.
The world cannot operate off of “obvious implications” and somehow manage to be a fair and just world.
To clarify: my classification of The New Yorker as “left-center” and The Economist as “slightly right-center” is the result of the overton window being stretched by news sources like Breitbart and The Palmer Report. If you discard the outliers (and nuke Infowars from orbit) then you would classify The New Yorker as a liberal publication and The Economist as a right-center publication. And either way, you should read them both. (You should also read The Atlantic.)
To be fair, sarcasm is hard to pick up on in text at the best of times, and the effect is amplified when you’re reading a translation, and even further amplified when you’re reading a text from an earlier time period.
Heck, I sometimes have difficulty in reading Mark Twain – there are occassionally certain jokes that I simply miss completely, typically because I lack some sort of point of reference that would have been obvious to the reader of his age, or because I’m a modern speaker trying to make sense of sentence structure and compositions that are decidedly old fashioned and foreign to my ears and mind.
There’s a certain knack to getting all the sarcasm from a source like Machiavelli. It’s the same sort of knack that is required to properly understand the Bible. You need to have a proper understanding of the world as it existed at the that time, what the norms of society were, what people expected and didn’t expect, et cetera. Without that sort of broader cultural and historical context, much of the text can be near meaningless.
I don’t use Facebook or Twitter just for this reason. Sarcasm is best used face to face and with your audience both primed for it and having a good sense of hearing.
I use Robert Heinlein as a guide here; “People who read their own poetry in public may have other nasty habits.”
Assuming they (K & F) ever even actually met before; a fact not in evidence.
But what gets me here in the comic is this annoying feeling I’m missing something. Having full-out “real” villains in a Shaenon comic? Doesn’t *feel* right… could we be seeing the Great and Powerful Oz projection and thinking we’re seeing the man behind the curtain? And something Ira said about his past life might… have some bearing on something Ao said recently…
The FBI still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of the Las Vegas shooting. I’ve little faith they’ll turn up anything substantial (that isn’t planted or staged) from a night 35 years ago.
Hey, there. Whether you believe the doctor or not, please treat the subject itself with respect. There are many out there who have been or could have been (if they felt in any way safe speaking up) part of the metoo movement, and this is an incredibly hard time for them. Regardless of our own feelings, or how politicians are behaving, or how the media is behaving, we can do better than they and demand the subject itself, and the discussion around it, be treated with dignity. Tossing suggestions that something was planted doesn’t help.
And, I don’t mean to come down so harshly. How this has been spoken of has affected many: the numbers are 1 in 3. I know more than one someones. We know from the Catholic incidents how long it can take someone to come forward, and the trauma it causes over time. There was a vet on the radio the other day: he moved across country and could not speak of what happened to him for 20 years. The current allegations first came forward in 2012. Truth is for the FBI.
In the meantime, we just act better than those in power or who are reporting. I called my senator and asked him to treat the subject itself with respect… And reminded him of the young men and women who would be watching him set that example, even if the allegations were false, true, or whichever.
It *is* hard to imagine that Mr. Green really and truly is as bad at this as he seems. I mean, I get that he’s been spending a lot of time undercover as Ira, and so maybe didn’t get out much, but this is really beyond the pale “bad at it”, in a way that seems hard to believe, given Mr. Green’s apparent age and level of life experience.
If we assume that everything is as it appears, then either Green has become so arrogant that he just can’t imagine that not everyone would want to be with him, given the opportunity, or he actually has become so taken with Dr. Lee that he has completely lost his judgement. I think there must be another shoe that hasn’t dropped yet, because both of these options seem too “simple”, based on what we have seen of Mr. Green’s previous manipulations. He’s usually trickier than this.
I’m liking my “Mr. Green is actually a clone family of which Nick is an unknowing and unknown member” theory more and more. Think of Ira as “Daddy Clone” and Ao as “Clone Son#1” if this is correct. ^_^
Excuse me, but at least half of us are quite aware this may be distraction.
either ’cause he’s skilled… or ’cause none of us want to believe it -is- possible to be this dumb. Would set new limits on that, and reworking all the formulas would be HELL!
Distraction from what, though? From what I can tell, Virginia doesn’t know enough about what’s going on here to accomplish anything, even if she has already found a couple of bugs. Meanwhile, Nera’s out there somewhere with more than enough reason to try to compromise anything Anasigma leaves exposed to the internet.
I don’t think the Richard III gambit (not to suggest that Richard III did any of the things his opponents claimed) ever made sense, so it may just be that Mr Green’s acting as he is because it’s what he thinks he should do to fulfil a prophecy from the Second Gate. All bets are off in that case.
I don’t think she knows how to do either at the moment. In any case, Virginia hasn’t resigned. The best way to distract her would be simply to give her something to do. Fending of the advances of your boss may be the weirdest possible way of going about it.
Remember how they slowly reprogrammed Nick into thinking of himself as a helicopter? Ginny is friggin brilliant, so if they’re doing something similar to her, she’ll need to be sufficiently distracted while AnaSigma GLaDOS her after schlorpping her brain.
Where romance is concerned, it is very possible — even likely — to be this dumb. I have seen it time and time again in real life, particularly when someone has had little or no real experience (or at least no success) in the dating department.
So, worst-case scenario, Mr. Green is pursuing his heart’s desire by non-consensually schlorping their brain and wiring them into a VR for purposes of gaslighting and seduction That’s…
“Sir, I may not understand romance… but at least I understand it better than you do. Romance is a night of lossy YouTube rips of Star Trek movies, and a Costco-size box of Funyuns.”
And in reference to his comment yesterday that “one of us is very bad at this,” Virginia might be bad at it, but I think he’s proven that he is the one who is very bad at this.
Shaenon has said she can only draw like three different noses. So he also looks like the construction foreman at Whimsy, and one of the MIBs in the SH lounge, and kinda like Sergio without his glasses, and like Nick’s pilot in the mirror universe… etc., etc… He even looks like Artie if Artie had short hair and olive skin. Don’t go getting too carried away with the conspiracy theories.
Not likely. People keep bringing up Dave to try and support that, but it doesn’t follow. He specifically put himself into the machine in such a way that he would be in control of it. There’s no reason to believe that a Mad Scientist (which there is no evidence she even is) could control the system if they were plugged into it through a VR interface.
I hereby dub him The Mad Tighten
I dropped you and then rescued you from the fall! That makes us friends right? No? Ok,let me try it again.
Mr Green understands that Tighten is the villain, but thinks it’s because his powers were derived from one alien and delivered by another.
Or the ultimate in stalking?
Well, that blows my “corporate cultures have their own momentum” theory as to why Ginny was in there well and truly out of the water! 😛
It’s interesting to see this in the context of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and Brett Kavanaugh’s response during his Supreme Court nomination hearings this past Thursday (wrote this out for posterity). I wonder how deeply Shaenon and Jeff will dive into Mr. Green’s total sense of entitlement and lack of empathy for someone that he has placed in such a manipulative situation.
Depends. How many times did Mrs. Ford do involuntary brain transplants upon other people with carefree abandon in the way that Ginny did? o_O
From the perspective of her victims anything bad that happens to Ginny might very well be karma for *her* total sense of entitlement and lack of empathy for people she placed into bad situations. >_>
And that’s skipping lightly over the fact that whatever we see Mr. Green do is something that he *has* actually done while we have no way of knowing that Judge Kavanaugh has done anything wrong. 😛
Is lying wrong? Because Kavanaugh has blatantly lied to Congress on multiple occasions, including on trivial matters such as whether he was watching Blasey Ford’s testimony (that’s “Dr.” or “Prof.” Blasey Ford, by the way).
And of course, the fact that he has told multiple verifiable lies makes him less credible than Blasey Ford, who has not.
Also, anyone with the slightest sense of morals–so, not you–would realize that Ginny’s crimes (in which Dr. Green is totally complicit anyway) don’t justify someone imprisoning her in a virtual reality scenario and trying to literally rape her, which is what it’s called when you try to force a prisoner to have sex with you in exchange for maybe freeing her.
Simmer down, there. Going around smugly claiming other people don’t have morals is way out of line.
Towering Barbarian appears to simply be playing devil’s advocate. They’re absolutely right – from certain points of view, Ginny is a monster who some people would not mind seeing suffer for what they perceive as her crimes.
But that’s a hypothetical position, speculated as being hypothetically held by fictional characters in a webcomic. TB has not actually stated their own personal opinion on the morality of Virginia’s behavior, nor on what they would view as acceptable “karma” for it. Don’t pretend as if you know their morals, because you quite flatly do not.
There’s a vast difference between commenting on something, or even feeling that it is justified, and actually personally endorsing it.
—
Captain James T. Kirk: [looking at a library picture of Khan on viewscreen] Name: Khan Noonien Singh.
Mr. Spock: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world, from Asia through the Middle East.
Dr. McCoy: The last of the tyrants to be overthrown.
Scott: I must confess, gentlemen. I’ve always held a sneaking admiration for this one.
Captain James T. Kirk: He was the best of the tyrants and the most dangerous. They were supermen in a sense. Stronger, braver, certainly more ambitious, more daring.
Mr. Spock: Gentlemen, this romanticism about a ruthless dictator is…
Captain James T. Kirk: Mr. Spock, we humans have a streak of barbarism in us. Appalling, but there, nevertheless.
Scott: There were no massacres under his rule.
Mr. Spock: And as little freedom.
Dr. McCoy: No wars until he was attacked.
Mr. Spock: Gentlemen…
[Everyone but Spock laugh]
Captain James T. Kirk: Mr. Spock, you misunderstand us. We can be against him and admire him all at the same time.
Mr. Spock: Illogical.
Captain James T. Kirk: Totally.
But that’s a hypothetical position, speculated as being hypothetically held by fictional characters in a webcomic. TB has not actually stated their own personal opinion on the morality of Virginia’s behavior, nor on what they would view as acceptable “karma” for it. Don’t pretend as if you know their morals, because you quite flatly do not.
Yes, how can we know anything at all?
“There’s a vast difference between commenting on something, or even feeling that it is justified, and actually personally endorsing it.”
What is the difference between feeling that something is justified and personally endorsing it?
But if you like: Hypothetically, anyone who took the position TB is putting forth would be a monster with no morals. Hypothetically, anyone who then moves swiftly from “some women hypothetically might be considered to deserve to be raped”–that is what he is literally saying about Ginny–to a real-life consequential rape accusation, and whose comment on it is that “we have know way of knowing what happened” tongue-out emoji–well, anyone with any ability and desire to interpret context knows what’s happening. They’re trying to perpetuate a culture in which the default is not to believe alleged rape survivors, even in the face of a not inconsiderable amount of evidence about which party is more credible. (Which wouldn’t be enough for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but we’re not talking about a criminal trial here.) This is part of why rape survivors don’t come forward.
What’s sad here is that you feel the need to deny the obvious impllications of what Barbarian said because it makes you sad to see people arguing in the comment sections of a webcomic. Sweep everything under the rug. Well that sweep everything under the rug attitude is also part of what keeps rape covered up.
Sometimes you have to look at the things happening in front of your eyes and acknowledge them for what they are. If you can’t do that in a webcomics comment section are you going to be able to do that in cases of consequential evil?
@Matt w; What you have pointed out is why we have Rule of Law and the principle of Innocent Until Proven Guilty.
We cannot know the minds of others RW. Mind reading is fiction.
We set up Courts of Law solely for our own defense against the violation of the Rights of others, for both the Accuser and the Accused, and to throw away that process in a fit of emotion, however justified in our own minds, makes us Barbarians and deserving of the Hell on Earth we just recently clawed our way out of.
The Kavanaugh fiasco is a textbook example of such violations, in this case perpetrated by individuals intent on getting revenge on the Republican Party who frustrated their prior ambitions for engineering the Supreme Court in their own favor. They couldn’t win legitimately and so upended the chessboard like the willful children they yearn to be.
matt w: There are a number of cruel and bizarre things which could happen to Virginia, but I don’t think sexual violence is one of them. It’s not that sort of comic. When I read Towering Barbarian’s comment, I framed “anything bad that happens to Ginny” in those terms.
@ Sheik – The following are facts:
• A job interview is not a court of law, even if that job interview is conducted by the United States Senate.
• The decision against an FBI investigation was made by President Trump.
• Senator Flake (R-AZ) made his support of Brett Kavanaugh contingent upon an FBI investigation.
• President Trump then ordered an FBI investigation, but the investigation will be limited to one week.
• Senate Republicans refused to hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland for 293 days.
• Justice Gorsuch was nominated by President Trump on January 31, 2017 and confirmed by the Senate on April 7, 2017 (That’s 66 days.)
• Kavanaugh was nominated Monday, July 9, 2018; that was 82 days ago.
You are mistaken on the facts of this situation. And, given what you have posted, I’d wager that is a result of your search bubble. (Please consider Googling “search bubble” if you are unfamiliar with the term.) Please consider fact checking your favorite news sources against more reliable sources.
The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse (AFP), and Bloomberg are all excellent centrist news sources. For complex analysis, I’d recommend The New Yorker (skews left-center) and The Economist (skews slightly right-center).
“Obvious implications” are completely wrong all the time.
In my own provided example, Spock drew the “obvious implication” that his human colleagues were in favor of a world run by a ruthless dictator. But they absolutely weren’t.
In real life, countless people who superficially appear guilty of crimes are proven innocent of any wrongdoing all the time. It happens every single day, and if we treated every “obvious implication” as undeniable fact, we’d be convicted innocent people left and right.
For example, the “obvious implication” of someone running from the police is that they’re a nefarious criminal who is fleeing justice. But sometimes they’re just innocent individuals who panic or make bad choices – startled children, soldiers with PTSD suffering flashbacks, intoxicated individuals who aren’t thinking clearly, victims of abuse, people who are sleep deprived or only half awake, et cetera, et cetera.
There are countless very good reasons why an innocent person might flee from a police officer, but if you operate purely based on “obvious implications”, then a lot of innocent people are going to get hurt or killed, because those implications aren’t always true.
What seems obvious to one person is entirely unfathomable to another person with different life experiences. What seems obvious in one context is utterly obtuse in another. And implications are just that – mere implications. They suggest things – but they do not remotely prove anything.
The world cannot operate off of “obvious implications” and somehow manage to be a fair and just world.
To clarify: my classification of The New Yorker as “left-center” and The Economist as “slightly right-center” is the result of the overton window being stretched by news sources like Breitbart and The Palmer Report. If you discard the outliers (and nuke Infowars from orbit) then you would classify The New Yorker as a liberal publication and The Economist as a right-center publication. And either way, you should read them both. (You should also read The Atlantic.)
Also is an incompetently run FBI involved somehow?
Even by the standards of “I learned all my dating moves from lousy romcoms”, this is… *shakes head*
What the heck was he learning “dating” advice from?!?
I thought he was getting it from Project Second Gate. (Or maybe Project First Gate.)
The multiverse has a wicked sense of humor if this is the sequence of events that gave him the highest chance of making it with Dr. Lee.
Machiavelli. And the snide sarcasm sailed right over his head.
Machiavelli would be thumping his head on his desk by now over this.
To be fair, sarcasm is hard to pick up on in text at the best of times, and the effect is amplified when you’re reading a translation, and even further amplified when you’re reading a text from an earlier time period.
Heck, I sometimes have difficulty in reading Mark Twain – there are occassionally certain jokes that I simply miss completely, typically because I lack some sort of point of reference that would have been obvious to the reader of his age, or because I’m a modern speaker trying to make sense of sentence structure and compositions that are decidedly old fashioned and foreign to my ears and mind.
There’s a certain knack to getting all the sarcasm from a source like Machiavelli. It’s the same sort of knack that is required to properly understand the Bible. You need to have a proper understanding of the world as it existed at the that time, what the norms of society were, what people expected and didn’t expect, et cetera. Without that sort of broader cultural and historical context, much of the text can be near meaningless.
I don’t use Facebook or Twitter just for this reason. Sarcasm is best used face to face and with your audience both primed for it and having a good sense of hearing.
I use Robert Heinlein as a guide here; “People who read their own poetry in public may have other nasty habits.”
Maybe he learned it from video games. No matter what you have to do to get there, as long as you have the girl after the big boss battle, you win.
It’s always a pain though when you realize you *are* the big boss battle.
Assuming they (K & F) ever even actually met before; a fact not in evidence.
But what gets me here in the comic is this annoying feeling I’m missing something. Having full-out “real” villains in a Shaenon comic? Doesn’t *feel* right… could we be seeing the Great and Powerful Oz projection and thinking we’re seeing the man behind the curtain? And something Ira said about his past life might… have some bearing on something Ao said recently…
Meant for wearsshoes’ comment.
The FBI still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of the Las Vegas shooting. I’ve little faith they’ll turn up anything substantial (that isn’t planted or staged) from a night 35 years ago.
Hey, there. Whether you believe the doctor or not, please treat the subject itself with respect. There are many out there who have been or could have been (if they felt in any way safe speaking up) part of the metoo movement, and this is an incredibly hard time for them. Regardless of our own feelings, or how politicians are behaving, or how the media is behaving, we can do better than they and demand the subject itself, and the discussion around it, be treated with dignity. Tossing suggestions that something was planted doesn’t help.
And, I don’t mean to come down so harshly. How this has been spoken of has affected many: the numbers are 1 in 3. I know more than one someones. We know from the Catholic incidents how long it can take someone to come forward, and the trauma it causes over time. There was a vet on the radio the other day: he moved across country and could not speak of what happened to him for 20 years. The current allegations first came forward in 2012. Truth is for the FBI.
In the meantime, we just act better than those in power or who are reporting. I called my senator and asked him to treat the subject itself with respect… And reminded him of the young men and women who would be watching him set that example, even if the allegations were false, true, or whichever.
Yep, he is definitely very bad at this.
Hey Virginia show him a really “grand gesture” in fact show him 2 of them!
Or just one grand gesture, with your knee.
Okay, so this is a distraction from whatever he’s really scheming.
Seriously, it’s like y’all forget that he does obfuscating stupidity well enough to fool everyone around him, including the semi-omniscient audience.
It *is* hard to imagine that Mr. Green really and truly is as bad at this as he seems. I mean, I get that he’s been spending a lot of time undercover as Ira, and so maybe didn’t get out much, but this is really beyond the pale “bad at it”, in a way that seems hard to believe, given Mr. Green’s apparent age and level of life experience.
If we assume that everything is as it appears, then either Green has become so arrogant that he just can’t imagine that not everyone would want to be with him, given the opportunity, or he actually has become so taken with Dr. Lee that he has completely lost his judgement. I think there must be another shoe that hasn’t dropped yet, because both of these options seem too “simple”, based on what we have seen of Mr. Green’s previous manipulations. He’s usually trickier than this.
I’m liking my “Mr. Green is actually a clone family of which Nick is an unknowing and unknown member” theory more and more. Think of Ira as “Daddy Clone” and Ao as “Clone Son#1” if this is correct. ^_^
Excuse me, but at least half of us are quite aware this may be distraction.
either ’cause he’s skilled… or ’cause none of us want to believe it -is- possible to be this dumb. Would set new limits on that, and reworking all the formulas would be HELL!
Distraction from what, though? From what I can tell, Virginia doesn’t know enough about what’s going on here to accomplish anything, even if she has already found a couple of bugs. Meanwhile, Nera’s out there somewhere with more than enough reason to try to compromise anything Anasigma leaves exposed to the internet.
I don’t think the Richard III gambit (not to suggest that Richard III did any of the things his opponents claimed) ever made sense, so it may just be that Mr Green’s acting as he is because it’s what he thinks he should do to fulfil a prophecy from the Second Gate. All bets are off in that case.
s854: Distracting her from ripping her way out of the VR and kicking his butt?
I don’t think she knows how to do either at the moment. In any case, Virginia hasn’t resigned. The best way to distract her would be simply to give her something to do. Fending of the advances of your boss may be the weirdest possible way of going about it.
Remember how they slowly reprogrammed Nick into thinking of himself as a helicopter? Ginny is friggin brilliant, so if they’re doing something similar to her, she’ll need to be sufficiently distracted while AnaSigma GLaDOS her after schlorpping her brain.
Where romance is concerned, it is very possible — even likely — to be this dumb. I have seen it time and time again in real life, particularly when someone has had little or no real experience (or at least no success) in the dating department.
Given Ira’s penchant for playing the Long Game I could accept his entire pursuit of Virginia to be a ploy designed to bring her and Nick together…
Here’s hoping.
So, worst-case scenario, Mr. Green is pursuing his heart’s desire by non-consensually schlorping their brain and wiring them into a VR for purposes of gaslighting and seduction That’s…
Wait, who am I supposed to be rooting for here?
Nick. I shall be rooting for Nick.
That is the wisest option at this point.
That’s right, you FRENCH DILL PICKLES
How did I not notice … unity’s helmet is a ringer for the Golden Helmet of Mambrino (aka shaving basin)! (2009 me was not so quick on the uptake)
Rooting for the rotors?
oops – misplaced comment – the rotor comment was to be in response to John Schilling. 2018 me is not so quick on the update either.
“Sir, I may not understand romance… but at least I understand it better than you do. Romance is a night of lossy YouTube rips of Star Trek movies, and a Costco-size box of Funyuns.”
And in reference to his comment yesterday that “one of us is very bad at this,” Virginia might be bad at it, but I think he’s proven that he is the one who is very bad at this.
He and Nick could fight it out for Dr. Lee. First with the lirpas and then with the ahn woon.
Why does he look so much like the ex-Russian replacement guard? Are they all Mr Green?
Shaenon has said she can only draw like three different noses. So he also looks like the construction foreman at Whimsy, and one of the MIBs in the SH lounge, and kinda like Sergio without his glasses, and like Nick’s pilot in the mirror universe… etc., etc… He even looks like Artie if Artie had short hair and olive skin. Don’t go getting too carried away with the conspiracy theories.
If she goes mad, she will have power over all the VR systems
Not likely. People keep bringing up Dave to try and support that, but it doesn’t follow. He specifically put himself into the machine in such a way that he would be in control of it. There’s no reason to believe that a Mad Scientist (which there is no evidence she even is) could control the system if they were plugged into it through a VR interface.
There’s also no reason to not believe it. Mad scientists, as Helen was found of pointing out, are not limited by the ‘possible’.
Well it would explain why you are old and single. Pashow~!