Despite my statements last week, I did wind up finishing David Cross’s book ‘I Drink for a Reason’. I finally found a way into it by reading it as an educational study in why “edgy” comedy seems a lot less funny to many people than it used to, and why it’s growing gradually less popular. (I’m sure that comedians like Cross would say that it’s because “society is getting too PC”, but I’m a big believer in the fundamental truth that only assholes use “politically correct” or “politically incorrect” in anything other than an ironic manner.)

The conclusion I’m coming to is that the central joke behind “edgy” comedy is the conflict between the societal expectations for behavior and the way that the comedian treats their open defiance of those societal norms as commonplace and unexceptional. So the humor comes not so much from the fact that they’re being racist, misogynist, transphobic, homophobic, and generally terrible as human beings, but that someone would stand up on a stage and act that way and not expect to be criticized for their horrible behavior.

Example: There’s a photo in the book of two women I don’t recognize, with the caption, “I fucking HATE these two cunts!” The joke is that nobody would simply drop that admission into a random conversation, because nobody is that openly hateful and misogynist.

The problem is, though, the advent of the Internet has given a voice to a number of people who actually would and actually are. You can no longer assume, as an “edgy” comedian, that people can detect the irony in your vicious misogynistic insults, because there’s no difference anymore between what you say as a joke and what Roosh V says every damn day of his life as a serious statement of purpose. You’re essentially trying to argue a form of special pleading, saying, “If you really knew me, you’d understand that this is all deeply ironic,” but you’re saying it to a crowd of strangers who only know you as the fictional persona you present…and who can compare it to any number of real people saying that shit for real.

It’s especially problematic when some…probably a lot, let’s be honest…of these “edgy” comedians are kind of assholes about some things, like, say, women in comedy (they’re generally agin’ it) and who try the Cousin Larry move of giving their honest opinions about some things, their “just kidding” opinions about other things, and waiting to see your reaction before they reveal which is which. ‘I Drink for a Reason’, to once again use the book as my punching bag, has sections where Cross makes fun of anyone who believes in a religion because they’re spending their lives chasing down a delusion about a non-existent god. He also makes fun of Midwesterners for all being crystal meth addicts. And he expects people to just “know” when he’s being ironic, because it’s obvious to him, so why isn’t it obvious to us?

Basically, “edgy” comedy is running into Poe’s Law like it’s a brick wall. How can Daniel Tosh claim that it’s a joke when he says that he hopes someone gets raped when there’s a guy running for city office in New Jersey on the GOP ticket who said the same thing to a reporter writing a story on him? How can David Cross differentiate his smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” from the smug, alienating anger about “PC liberals” displayed by an actual major-party Presidential candidate? “Edgy” comedians really need to up their game to stand out from the crowd these days.

It’s not to say that it can’t be done–Sarah Silverman manages it by constantly tip-toeing up to the line of admitting that she’s putting on an act, then undercutting her admissions with a fresh round of absurd and callous ignorance. Colbert in his old Comedy Central days used his material to constantly make himself the butt of his joke. Even Cross and Odenkirk, when they worked together on ‘Mr. Show’, signposted the premise by starting their act with an open admission that they were just doing it to get hate mail. But the days when you could just say something racist and give people an “aw shucks” grin are gone. Don’t blame the PC liberals, though. Blame the guys like Vox Day who never understood that it was a joke in the first place.

So I’m currently reading ‘I Drink for a Reason’, by David Cross. And it’s bad. I mean, it is shit-the-bed bad. It is is-this-actually-meant-to-be-an-ironic-douchebag-persona-he-created-for-this-book-a-la-Colbert, change-the-name-of-the-show-retroactively-to-“Mr. Show With Bob and That Guy He Carried On His Back for Four Seasons”, oh-my-god-did-he-actually-just-put-in-a-chapter-explaining-that-while-he’s-not-bitter-or-angry-about-bad-reviews-they-are-“bordering on libel”-and-he-must-respond bad. I am 82 pages into this 236-page book, and there’s been exactly one bit that I actually thought was funny and I feel kind of dirty for laughing at it because it’s about a guy entering a pole-sitting contest and being pelted with Rupert Murdoch’s feces. (It is, though, kind of funny in context.)

But I’m not quite ready to quit reading yet. Because I started the book. And I don’t like starting a book and not finishing it. I feel like I need closure, even if the closure is just “Yep, that’s 237 pages of unfunny material that I’m going to pretend he was forced to produce at gunpoint, probably by the same sadistic bastards who made him do ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel’. (And yes, I did go look up the correct spelling of “squeakquel”.) But the point is, I know that this is irrational behavior and yet I can’t stop myself. I can only think of two books I’ve ever given up on reading, and I admit to wanting to go back to at least skim one of them to the end.

(‘House of Leaves’, by Mark Danielewski. I couldn’t stand the Johnny Truant or Zampano material, but part of me wants to at least read the Navidson records.)

(‘The Laughing Corpse’, by Laurell K Hamilton. Bought the first two books at once in a fit of optimism because I heard good things about the series and they looked short, gritted my way through the first one, and realized that the second one wasn’t getting any better.)

What I’m getting at is, am I some sort of weird aberration? Does my pathological need to finish what I’ve started and complete even the sloggiest, draggiest book mark me out as some sort of crazy person, or does everyone else gut it through bad books too? And if you do tap out, how long does it take you? Do you give it a chapter, a section, a paragraph, a sentence? Are there specific events that make you decide to nopetopus your way out, like a horrific and gratuitous violent sequence or the use of a particular hacky trope?

And most importantly, should I go with my instincts and continue reading the remaining 154 pages of smug, unfunny ‘comedy’? (Sample joke: “Imagine! A grown man treating the idea of exorcising the ‘Devil’ out of some mentally ill woman as a real thing! Crazy!”) (No, that’s not the setup for a joke. “Crazy!” is apparently his idea of a punchline.) Or should I just sell the damn thing to some other poor unsuspecting fool and get on with my life?

*looks around* Well, what do you know, they didn’t change the locks on me…!

Hello, citizens. My name is Justin. If you recall (and even if you don’t), I used to write about comics and stuff here, way back in 2009-2010. Do you remember when Conan O’Brien was hosting The Tonight Show and people were losing their damn minds about James Cameron’s Avatar? This was the cultural climate of the time during which I communicated important thoughts to you about Superman and the Dark Phoenix Saga, and also a small number of made-up facts about Beck.

Anyway, since we last spoke, I have had two children! There is a boy and a girl; the older one is six, and if you do the math, you will find a clue as to why I stopped blogging. There came a time when I had less disposable income to spend on comics and less time to spend reading them—and even less time to spend writing about them. I buy a few things here and there and keep in touch with the comics world by reading stuff on the usual comics news sources, much in the same way that you might follow a baseball team in your fine local newspaper without ever actually watching a game.

But I still think things about comics and feel things about comics, and every now and again I find I still want to talk about comics. However, my wife is pretty uninterested on the whole subject, and my son is not yet old enough to understand what I mean when I tell him that Jim Shooter was one of the best damn things ever to happen to Marvel, yet in the end he left them no choice but to ride him out on a rail in 1987. And so, I thought I would maybe start sharing these thoughts with you again.

Much has happened in the world in the past six years. For example, a terrifying madman is running for president! Have you heard about this? I will spare you the details because I want to talk about superhero comics, so you can perhaps draw your own parallels between the current unpleasantness and the Vote Lex 2000 storyline. (I still have my pin!)

Anyway, let’s talk about the big things.

DC rebooted its entire line, and then five years later wrote a kind of a narrative apology for doing so. I wish that DC Comics wasn’t so gosh-darn insecure about its superheroes. That’s what I think it comes down to, in the end. They have these characters that everyone knows and everyone loves, and yet they feel they constantly have to apologize for them. “You know, now that you mention it, maybe the kids who made fun of me for reading comics were right, and it is dumb that Superman wears trunks on the outside of his costume. Sorry it took us so long to get rid of them. By the way, do you think he should have been Superboy? I think he should have been Superboy and hung out with the Legion; sorry we got rid of that bit of history all those years ago. But on second thought, let’s do it over now and say he was never Superboy again. Sorry.”

They try so hard to convince you that Aquaman is cool. But don’t you already think Aquaman is cool? And if you don’t, is Geoff Johns going to change your mind by telling you, “No seriously, he really really really is, actually”? But anyway, All-Star Batman is neat and people seem to be cautiously enjoying Rebirth. But if sales go south again, I hope they’ll look at their characters and say, “Well, here are some things that are really neat about this character, let’s play around with them and bring them to the forefront,” rather than convincing themselves that Wonder Woman would sell like hotcakes if only they changed these three things about her origin.

Marvel made a bunch of movies that fans, critics, and non-fan audiences liked. Let me admit something to you: when Marvel announced their intention to make a series of individual movies that would feed into a combined Avengers movie, I was like 90% certain this was not going to happen. The deck, at the time, seemed pretty stacked against the idea. If any of the movies leading up to it had bombed, the whole thing would topple over, and then there’s the whole matter of figuring out how to make an Avengers movie itself. And then they got Joss Whedon to direct it, who at that time had a bit of a reputation for having projects fall apart on him.

But First Avenger was great (I’m kind of iffy about third act, though) and Thor was winning enough, and then Whedon came along and made it look like making an Avengers movie is the most obvious thing in the world. For real, you guys, Avengers was the real deal, the superhero movie you always wanted to see but which conventional wisdom told you could never be. Conventional wisdom, as it turns out, was wrong. I was wrong. And now the barriers are down and Spider-Man can show up in a Captain America movie that has Giant-Man and Iron Man and this all seems about right.

By contrast, DC made a movie that has Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman in it that I have no interest in seeing. Friends and family can scarcely believe this, but it’s true. Understand, it’s not so much that I am refusing to see this movie on some kind of principle, or because I took some sort of nonsense loyalist oath to Marvel movies. It’s just that every single thing I have read or heard or seen about it has told me, “You will not enjoy this on any level.” Even Suicide Squad I have a morbid curiosity about; I will possibly rent it. But Batman v. Superman…I’m not a professional critic and I don’t “owe” DC or Marvel anything. Why would I bother spending what little free time I have on something that looks so frustrating?

That said, DC has a bunch of TV shows on the air that have their problems but are so thoroughly charming that they overcome them. I don’t mean for this to be a backhanded compliment. Charm is important; possibly the most importing thing in adapting a superhero comic. Grant Gustin isn’t playing any Barry Allen I recognize, or even Wally West, but he’s really good at playing whoever this guy is who calls himself the Flash, and Jesse L. Martin’s Joe West has become one of my favorite TV dads of all time. Supergirl is very uneven and is totally hampered by having to hang around the DEO. (Did CBS think that their audience couldn’t handle a genre show that had no procedural element to it?) But Melissa Benoist is terrific and embodies everything you like in Supermythology. I’m curious to see if the move to the CW will allow a bit more of the “Can you believe they’re doing this on TV?” feeling you get from seeing King Shark or Gorilla Grodd on The Flash.

Marvel has made a push for diversity that people, by and large, seem to have accepted. When they announced Sam Wilson was going to take over as Captain America, the first thing I thought about was that eventually Steve Rogers would be back, and how was that going to look? “Well, thanks for holding down the fort, Temporary Black Replacement, but White Original is back!” But instead Marvel has decided…they are both Captain America? And Peter Parker and Miles Morales are both called “Spider-Man” and nobody much seems to mind? I wouldn’t have thought to go that route, but darn it, it’s working.

I have a sneaking suspicion these characters are being primed for the movies, which, if true, is clever forethought. Robert Downey Jr.’s not going to be able to be Tony Stark forever, and recasting the role risks a sort of George Lazenby Iron Man, but maybe you could transition the franchise to Ironheart if she turns out to be a hit? We’ve seen a proof-of-concept that audiences will accept a female Thor. Maybe this seems cynical, but sometimes the best way to get diversity advanced is to find a way for it to make it profitable, so I can’t complain.

There’s a lot more I didn’t cover (ComicBookResources redesigned their website in a way that made me sad!), but it was six whole years, and anyway, there will be time enough to talk about other things. I realize my little overview here looks a little harsh toward DC and pretty praising of Marvel. But would it surprise you to learn that I have trouble really connecting with Marvel books these days? And that this is not actually Marvel’s fault? Tune in next time, True Believer, for The Reason Why.

Recently got an email, the hey portion of which was (I am editing a bit for clarity):

“I’m not going to vote for Trump, obviously. But I have to admit I am leery of voting for Hillary. I mean – I understand that she’s been targeted by the right wing, I get it, but the Clinton Foundation stuff seems uncomfortably close to pay-for-play to me. Can you make me feel better about it?”

Sure. It’s actually remarkably easy.¹

First off, a caveat: all of the following makes one assumption, which is “Hillary Clinton is extremely intelligent.” I’m not worried about her morality or lack thereof here, you can have your own beliefs about that. I personally think she’s a person who has a moral code she takes seriously, and has political positions – particularly with her views on the use of American military power – with which I disagree. But that’s me, you can think different about that. However, if you think Hillary Clinton is stupid – not “disagrees with me politically,” not “is crooked and amoral,” but stupid – then honestly, I don’t know what the point of this even is, you’re just a dipshit living in a mirror universe. But anyway.

Okay, caveat finished. Here are some important facts. Not theories about Hillary Clinton: just facts.

One: Hillary Clinton (and Bill) at this point have publicly released their tax returns for every year since 1977.² Obviously their post-Presidential incomes are the most important. The thing about their returns is this: they are mostly very straightforward and kind of boring. The Clintons earn employment income from Bill and Hillary making speeches, and Hillary’s various government salaries as a Senator and then Secretary of State, and also there’s Bill’s presidential pension. Their investment strategies are as straightforward as their income: they have a large cash interest-bearing cash account and a large investment in a dividend-bearing mutual fund, and that’s it. They co-ordinate their charitable donations through a nonprofit charitable foundation, the Clinton Family Foundation (which is distinct from the Clinton Foundation that is the cause of all the concern and hubbub – that’s the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation): you can look at the CFF’s 2014 tax return here and there’s a list of charities they donate to at the end. A lot of Arkansas-based charities, unsurprisingly, but the charitable foundations of their alma maters are there too, their church in Chappaqua, New York, and the American Heart Association, and a few other things (and, yes, the WJ Clinton Foundation gets a lot from them as well). Basically the CFF is a bank account that serves as a hub for the Clintons’ charitable spending.

Two: For those concerned, a list of organizations that have paid Hillary to speak can be found here, albeit with some right-wing demonizing. But the list itself is correct.³

Three: Hillary mostly charges $225,000 per speech. This seems excessive to us proles, who don’t make that much in a year or even multiple years. However, it is certainly not excessive considering how much your average famous person charges for a speech. Here is one speaking organizer agency’s list of speaker fees of famous people who command over $200,000 per speech. You will note the list includes Dr. Oz, Chris Colfer, Nate Berkus, Kate Bosworth, Larry the Cable Guy, Steffi Graf, and a Dutch DJ named “Tiesto.” Hillary Clinton is much, much more famous than all of those people and is far more important/has done far more important things than all of them. It is entirely accurate to say that while speaking fees generally may be ridiculously high, Hillary Clinton’s are not particularly exceptional. (Bill, incidentally, apparently charges about $400,000-500,000 per speech. Of course, there are only four living ex-Presidents right now so it’s not unreasonable for them to have a higher rate.)

Four: The Clinton Foundation’s annual financial reports and tax forms are all public (they are here). They used to have a bad rating from CharityWatch because they had not publicly released all their records, but once they did release their records, CharityWatch gave them a very high rating. The Foundation’s overhead expenses constitute 12% of its spending; the average charity in the United States has overhead expenses of approximately 25%. The Clinton Foundation spends most of its money on, well, good works – their programs have been widely praised for their effectiveness – the Clinton Health Access Intiative, a subsidiary charity run by the Foundation which helps poor countries combat medical plagues such as HIV and malaria, gets the bulk of the operations money. There’s very little opportunity for the Foundation to enrich the Clintons (who haven’t been board members of it for years and do not draw a salary from the Foundation) or for that matter anybody else.

Five: There’s been some hubbub recently re: Clinton Foundation donors getting access to Hillary while she was Secretary of State, but the hubbub is mostly baseless. John Aravoisis pointed out yetserday that the AP’s reporting on this was actively getting numbers wrong to inflate the number of donors who actually met with Hillary. Others have pointed out that many of the donors who did meet with Hillary while she was SoS were people she would probably meet with anyway: the Crown Prince of Bahrain, who runs an OPEC member nation which sells oil to the United States, doesn’t really need to donate money to the Foundation to warrant a meeting with Hillary Clinton. Neither does Muhammad Yunis, Nobel Peace Prize-winning founder of the Grameen Bank. There’s evidence that a lot of Foundation donors wanted or hoped to meet with Hillary, but not a lot that most of them actually got to do so. As Kevin Drum summed up well enough:

So here are several possible takes on Hillary:

1. Powerful people all run in the same circles. They all know each other. They all ask favors from one another. Hillary is part of this circle.

2. People who are big party donors and big policy influencers have more access to politicians than, say, you or me. On this score, Hillary is a garden variety politician.

3. Donating to the Clinton Foundation was a well-known requirement for getting a meeting with Hillary.

I’ve simply seen no evidence of #3, and that includes the AP’s strained effort yesterday. Besides, if this were truly well known, by now someone would have come forward to spill the beans. As for #1 and #2, I don’t doubt that they’re as true of Hillary as they are of every other politician in the country. This might be an unfortunate state of affairs, but it’s certainly no scandal.

So, all of that having been said: why am I not concerned about Hillary Clinton’s corruption? I am not concerned about it because, for the most part, there’s no there there.

Look. The Clintons’ income is, as I said, straightforward. It’s boring in a very telling way, because the Clintons could be earning much more money than they do. Neither of them sits on any corporate boards, and there are any number of boards that would be willing to pay them millions of dollars a year to attend a few meetings. They have a very large amount of money, to be sure – those speaking fees add up (the large majority of their money, by the way, is Bill’s). But there are so many tax accounting tricks they could use to pay lower tax rates, to invest more actively for higher returns, and they don’t do any of it. Go look at their effective income tax rates on their disclosure page: they pretty much always pay regular combined federal and state tax. They live by choice in a relatively high-tax state (New York), but there are plenty of tricks to pretend that one lives in, say, Texas to pay no income tax. They haven’t bothered. And this isn’t something they did just recently – you can go look at their entire tax history. They’ve pretty much always invested conservatively, paid their fair share of income tax on their income, and donated about ten percent of their income to charity.

Similarly: the Clinton Foundation’s financial records are public, and they too are very straightforward. The Clintons get a lot of donations from people who want the Clintons to think kindly of them: that is politics, like it or not. But there is no real evidence to show that the Clintons have done anything with that money other than a remarkable amount of good for people who desperately need it, and no real evidence that Clinton Foundation donors were unfairly favoured as a result of their donations.

Bluntly: these are not the actions of people who are overly interested in money. These are the actions of people who got to a certain level of material comfort (and are happy to keep earning at that same rate) and said “this is fine.” There is simply nothing in their financial history to suggest that the Clintons are particularly avaricious.

This is generally the point where someone might say “but what about the speeches to Wall Street” and my response is “the Clintons were paid for a service, and provided that service.” (Most of their speeches, it should be noted, aren’t to financial institutions anyway.) Nobody asks Larry the Cable Guy if he’s beholden to Wall Street. Nobody says “Hillary got paid $225,000 to give a speech to the American Camping Association, is she in the pocket of Big Camping.” In order for Hillary to make money the rest of her life, she is simply not beholden to Wall Street. She can go make speeches to campers and other people at $200K a pop for the rest of her life and she’ll be fine. There’s simply no evidence that she needs Wall Street.

(Granted: one can argue that Hillary is too cozy with Wall Street, in the sense that many of the monied finance elite are her contemporaries. That is fair. But she is hardly unique in this, and indeed the same can be said of practically all American politicians who actually have to work within the system, as opposed to the Gary Johnsons and Jill Steins of the world who like to consider their political irrelevance proof of a higher moral standard, which it is not.)

Now, the final argument at this point is that Hillary is hungry not for money, but power – this is something both sides like to accuse her of, and of politicians generally. It is mostly crap. Most politicians are not, in fact, power-hungry, because power is an abstract concept. Politicians who want power want it for specific reasons, and the two reasons are to get money and to advance their own ideological beliefs. (Political power is actually really kind of bad at creating longterm security for yourself. Most people who go into politics can say, accurately, they would have made more money simply working in their chosen fields.) And all the evidence is that Hillary’s interest in power is that she wants to do things with it to make the world a better place – granted, for her own personal definition of “better place,” and you might take issue with that definition. But her desires are purely political, in the most morally neutral sense.

In short: there is no real evidence of Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” beyond the sort of penny-ante everyday elbow-rubbing with elites that are the natural byproduct of the American system. Which is shitty in its own way, to be sure, but Hillary is not exceptional in this regard. Frankly, the evidence as to her character trends in the other direction: the sheer boringness of her personal finances and the effectiveness of the Clinton Foundation at what it does shows that Hillary’s personal priority (and Bill’s) is to work for her general concept of the public good. And that’s why I don’t worry about Hillary Clinton.

1. As a Canadian obviously I do not technically have skin in this game, but as a Canadian I follow American politics as a rule because it’s more interesting, and also our economy depends largely on yours so I kind of do have skin in the game, just not a vote. Much of the rest of the world probably feels the same way. [↩]
2. The link only includes the last decade. [↩]
3. I leave it to the reader to consider what type of supposedly liberty-loving American patriot uses the word “blitzkrieg” to name their site. Ahem. [↩]

As we get closer to the election, I will probably be doing more political posts, especially because this is an absolutely unprecedented election. My speculation on 2008 and 2012 was things like, “What if McCain has a health issue on the campaign trail?”, or “What if Romney’s tax returns reveal a historically low tax rate?”; my speculations on this election are, “If the GOP invokes Article 9 to try to kick Trump off the ticket and he sues them, would a judge have to try to figure out the monetary value of the Presidency to estimate damages?” and “Is it possible that Trump is actually hooked up to some sort of ‘Twitch Runs for President’ livestream somewhere, and 4Chan is really running his entire campaign?”

Today, I’ll be addressing one of the things I hear sometimes from my fellow liberals, which is that they don’t think the polls will stay this lopsided because the media has a vested interest in keeping people tuned in to the “horse race”, and so they’ll start diverting some media attention to Clinton’s scandals to drive things closer as we go into November. This is, according to some, what happened in 2012 when the post-debate coverage was slanted heavily toward praising Romney’s performance. It didn’t make a material difference, but it allowed pundits to pretend that Romney still had a shot, and some are thinking the same will happen with Trump.

I don’t think it will, though (with, again, the caveat that tomorrow Trump could declare himself God-Emperor of Cleveland and it wouldn’t be significantly more surprising than anything else that’s happened this year), for one main reason. Namely, the media already have a great story, the story of a madman collapsing not just his own political fortunes but those of an entire political party that’s been a force in US politics for over 150 years, and it’s getting amazing ratings for them. They can ride this all the way to election day as long as Trump keeps giving them material to feed this narrative.

And Trump, in turn, wants to do exactly that. His overriding need for attention has driven him to continually say controversial things in order to keep the spotlight on him, despite the fact that Hillary’s high negatives and his own high negatives mean that whoever has the most media attention is invariably going to do the worst. Basically, he can’t tell the difference between good attention, say for doing well in school, or bad attention, like picking a fight with a Gold Star family and insisting the President of the United States founded ISIS. Trump is more than happy to help a media-driven narrative that he’s the most controversial candidate ever, because a) it’s about him, and b) it’s about him being the most something something.

So no, there will be no point where Trump pivots to being boring and normal, and no, there will be no point where CNN gets tired of putting up footage of the latest crazy thing he says and saying, “Wow, isn’t that crazy?” (Or putting up Trump surrogates on TV and asking them, “Can you maybe explain why your candidate apparently called for military tribunals for American civilians?”) They are feeding off each other. The Crazy Train ain’t stopping, not unless the Republicans come to their senses and kick Trump off of it.

Which comes with its own set of craziness, but we’ll deal with that if it happens.

A lot of people will, as part of the ongoing debate about how miserable and grinding the current election is, talk about how frustrating it is that in America we only have Trump and Clinton as viable options because “we live in a two-party system”. (Usually, this is right before they talk about writing in Mickey Mouse, and right before I deliver a long and boring discussion of tactical voting that I’m going to skip this time out, which is kind of a shame because I have a great analogy but I’ll save it for later.)

The problem is, this isn’t untrue. We don’t live in a two-party system. We live in a two-competent-party system. There’s no reason encoded into our nation’s laws that genuinely prevents a third party from forming, and in fact there are actually something like one hundred political parties currently operating in the United States. But most of them are content to run essentially as ego-stroking campaigns for their members, insisting that they would totally win if not for “bias” and “a rigged system” while ignoring their own clear issues that prevent them from gaining a foothold beyond the occasional Congressperson or state official. Here’s why you don’t see a national third party that competes with the Democrats and the Republicans, and why it has very little to do with media coverage or any rigging that might be going on.

1. Third parties don’t put in the work. The Green Party runs a Presidential candidate every four years, and insists each time that their momentum is growing and that they’re going to take back the mantle of “liberal” from the centrist Democrats. But a) nobody has ever explained how President Stein will get her agenda enacted when she has literally no Congressional support, and b) nobody has ever explained how a party with absolutely no track record in government will suddenly do a great job in that field.

The fact of the matter is, a third party needs to be built from the ground up, not the top down. A Presidential run is great press, but any third party that wants to have a hope in hell of enacting their agenda needs to have a full ticket–a Congressperson for every district at minimum, Senators for the 33-34 seats up each year, and probably local representation as well. But that kind of work is boring and low-profile, while running for President is exciting and fun and entails lots of interviews with people who really want to know your opinion! So the Green Party is Jill Stein every four years talking about how unfair it is that she never gets elected.

2. Third parties are fringe. Both the Libertarians and the Greens this year are presenting themselves as alternatives for those in the Republican and Democratic (respectively) Parties who want a candidate who’s more true to their beliefs. Meaning more conservative for the Libertarians, and more liberal for the Greens.

The problem is, a candidate who trends toward the far end of the political spectrum is going to have less appeal to the middle, for obvious reasons. And if you have less appeal, you get fewer votes. A third party that gets fewer votes doesn’t get elected. Once you start selecting for ideological purity and campaigning for the outliers, you’re not going to win. Hell, that’s the problem the Republicans have this year, which is why they nominated a sculpture of Mussolini made entirely out of pre-chewed Cheetos.

3. Third parties tend to be single issue parties. This isn’t so much true of the Greens and the Libertarians, who are least are making a pretense of caring about actual governance, but something like the Alaskan Independence Party is basically running on the issue of, “Hey, seceding from the United States would solve all of Alaska’s problems!” (I assume the “Rent Is Too Damn High Party” in New York state has a similar approach, but I’m not quite sure what their issue is. Probably legalization of marijuana or something.)

The problem is, this is a nonsensical approach to governance. There’s no single fix that can be pushed through that will solve the problems the United States experiences on a yearly basis, and generally these candidates tend to be delusional people who have focused their emotional energy on demanding one unworkable fix because it’s easier to believe that you can Solve All the Problems with one heroic swoop than it is to deal with the years of constant and unrewarding work needed to make the world a better place. Most people know this, which is why these parties tend to only attract a few true believers who are just as delusional as the candidate. Which brings us to…

4. Most third-party candidates tend to be delusional nutbags who build the party around their particular hobbyhorses, and they wind up more as cults of personality than viable attempts to do the work of governance. The obvious example that comes to mind is H. Ross Perot, whose stated goal was to create a pragmatic third party focused on practical solutions rather than ideology, but that wound up being held hostage to the narcissistic whims of its eccentric candidate. (Yes, I know, it does sound like the Republicans are rapidly descending into third-party status, doesn’t it?) But really, I mean something like this guy:

http://andy2016.com/

Take a look at those proposals. This is a man sincerely running on a platform of disclosing the Pentagon’s secret time travel program and admitting that we’re already on Mars. This is the kind of thing that third parties in America are doing right now. They’re not out there trying to become a viable alternative to the current two dominant parties, they’re out there trying to put Bigfoot on the Endangered Species List. This is why we live in a two-party system. It’s not because the Republicans and Democrats suppress the competition, it’s because third parties are more interested in being symbolic forms of protest against an unpleasant reality than any kind of actual group interested in promoting responsible governance. Until someone–a lot of someones, really, because a political party isn’t just something you make with your buddies in the garage–is willing to change that, a third party won’t gain traction in America.

In fact, at this rate, we could be down to a “one-party system” in a few years unless the Republicans get their act together. But that’s probably a separate post.

I was thinking the other day about how odd it is that political campaigns are treated mainly as conflicts in ideology, personality, and party affinity, when they’re basically job interviews…and before I could really get into that idea, even in the privacy of my own head, it struck me how absurd this political campaign has been in yet another way. Because I pictured Donald Trump interviewing for a job the same way he’s been running for President.

“Hi, it’s really great to be here, because I’m an amazing guy and I’m going to do a great job for you. Although I will say I’ve been treated very unfairly here–I mean, I don’t need this job. I’m very rich, I’m very successful, but all of my close personal friends have been saying how badly you’re running this business and how much you need me, so I decided to apply. And nobody here has given me the respect I deserve for that. But I’m a very big-hearted man, so I’ll let it go, but if you want me to continue this interview, you’re going to have to be more polite. That’s all I’m saying.

“Anyway, the point is, this business is gonna be yuuuge with me in charge. I’m a very smart man, I have great ideas, I’m going to build a big wall around your business to keep out all the riff-raff–you know, all the rapists and murderers that are just everywhere, and all the terrorists, I’m not gonna be afraid to say ‘radical Islam’ to your customers, your suppliers, pretty much everyone. I’m gonna be strong. Customers respect strength. If they bring in a coupon for 10% off, I might just decide to charge ’em double. Or kick ’em out of the building and kill their families. You can’t let people laugh at you. Everyone’s laughing at you right now, all of them, and you have to stop it.

“You should probably give guns to all your employees. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they were always armed, so they could defend themselves no matter where they went? I mean, in bars, while drinking, wherever. Guns are awesome. I have a gun, you know. I mean, I don’t need it, because everyone loves me, but if anyone did try anything, I could kill them. I’m very tough. Your other applicants, they don’t think I’m tough, they’ve been saying mean things about me, but that’s just because they’re all losers. Some of them, I think, should probably be in jail. But I’m not here to talk about them, because they’re all losers who should be in prison and I’m really the best candidate for this job.

“I’m the best candidate because I’m such a great businessman. I know everything about business. I ran a whole bunch of businesses, and I made money on all of them. Even the ones that went bankrupt. Some pathetic losers will make a big deal about all those bankruptcies, but they don’t know business the way I do and you don’t either. You probably need me to educate you in business. I run a few seminars, if you’ve got $45,000 to spare…but that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to talk about me. Because I’m a very smart guy, did I mention that? I’m very smart, I’m very successful, I’m very strong, and my fingers? Well, let’s just say there’s no problems there.

“I can already tell this interview is going great. I’m winning this interview. I’m winning it so much, I may just get tired of winning and quit the job before I even get it. I may decide once I have the job to hire someone to do the job while I get on with the important job of being me, which is very important because I’m such a great guy. I’m certainly going to make sure that once I get this job, everyone respects me. I’ll make it pretty damn tough on anyone who works here who doesn’t understand how great I am, believe me. That’s because I’m strong and I deserve respect.

“See, you’re calling for the security guards right now. I could kill them in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still love me–not that I would, but I could if I wanted to. I could also punch them, I’d really like to hit them but my good friends, they told me to let them drag me out of the building, they said that I needed to be the bigger man here, not like my enemies who should all be in jail because they’re losers, you should be kicking them out and not me, I’ll be back the next time you have a job opening, I know you’ll miss me…”

If you want to see Page One of Ra-Boka, clicketh thee here.

Remember: if you want pages more regularly, the key is our Patreon – we’re less than $50 away from two pages per month.

I’m pretty much sickened to the point of inarticulation by the events of the last few days. I live in the Twin Cities. I’ve driven along the same road where Philando Castile was pulled over and murdered by a panicky idiot with a badge. I have African-American friends and family who drive up and down that same road. I now have to spend every day wondering if I’ll see their deaths on my Facebook feed. There aren’t really words to respond to that.

Some of the things I want to say feel too obvious. This is an unpardonable breach of the covenant we have with our government. More than that, it (along with the Alton Sterling shooting and the Tamir Rice shooting and all the other police murders caught on video in the past year) makes that covenant feel like a sick joke, a lie we tell ourselves to help us sleep at night. These videos show us that what white people think of as the law is really just the largest street gang out there as far as minorities are concerned. They’re just another group of violent thugs that have to be placated or avoided. At this point, though, it feels like the multiple police murders…and worse, the multiple policemen who have avoided any punishment for committing murder due to a system that protects them…speaks so strongly to that fact that anything I could say on the subject feels inadequate.

And other things feel too taboo to say. Like…look, I don’t condone violence. I don’t support violence. But I do understand why someone would kill those policemen in Dallas. It is very difficult to say that in our culture, where the police are portrayed by default as “good guys”, where their bending or breaking of the rules to catch “bad guys” is celebrated by popular culture, and where their lives are considered sacrosanct to the point where the mere testimony of an officer that they believed their lives to be in danger is considered to be sufficient to exonerate them from any suggestion of wrongdoing. But if the police are murdering people, targeting them by demographic for rape and murder and extortion and seemingly getting away with it, I can understand why some people would respond by killing police. I don’t want it to happen, but it is an unsurprising response.

And the response to the response…again, this is the point where we’re supposed to say, “But he was a bad guy!” We, as a culture, celebrate rough justice done to criminals. But we shouldn’t. The police murdered one of the suspects in Dallas. They had him cornered, they were out of the line of fire, and they delivered a bomb to him by remote control and set it off in his face. They decided that the courts didn’t need to be involved in this man’s trial and punishment, not when they had a little wheeled robot and a spare bomb. This is the problem. This is the heart of it. There are police out there who feel like they have the right to decide who lives and who dies based on whether they’re “bad”. That is not the rule of law. That is murder. It doesn’t matter how bad they are, it doesn’t matter if they had multiple previous convictions or just a bunch of traffic stops, the police are murdering people who pose them no immediate threat. And we are allowing it.

And in the end, I don’t want to talk about it because there’s nothing I can do. We protest and the police murder people. We catch them on camera shooting unarmed men and they walk away scot-free. An essay like this is just another drop in the bucket of words that won’t change anything. That’s why I don’t talk about this more. Because everything I’m saying? It won’t matter to the guy with the gun and the badge who knows he can get away with murder if he kills the right sort of person.

Everyone loves a good fan theory, right?

…um, right?

….can we just pretend they do, for the sake of my introductory spiel, here?

……..so some people on the Internet really love a good fan theory, while others are indifferent or unaware of them, and still others find them tedious and annoying. There are plenty of famous/infamous ones out there, like the Pixar Timeline, or Jar Jar Binks being Supreme Leader Snoke. But there are some fan theories out there that have gotten a little less traction. Let’s look at a few of them, shall we?

All of the extras in ‘Ghostbusters’ and ‘Independence Day’ are the same people, but the two stories don’t take place in the same fictional universe. They’re just crowds of gawkers who travel from one reality to another to watch crazy-ass shit happen.

Al Leong plays the exact same role in each of his movies, a wise and benevolent member of an alien species who has come to Earth to teach us universal peace and harmony. Unfortunately, they introduce themselves through their race’s traditional peaceful gesture of leaping into frame, brandishing weapons, and screaming loudly, and so are constantly gunned down by action heroes without a second thought.

‘Adventures in Babysitting’, ‘Home Alone’, ‘Mrs Doubtfire’, and the first two Harry Potter movies are all directed by Chris Columbus.

The peddler at the beginning of ‘Aladdin’ is really just making up the whole story to get you to buy his crappy merchandise, and Disney cut the scene at the end where ushers come into the audience pestering you to part with a little extra cash for some tchotchkes.

‘Highlander 2: The Quickening’ is a sequel to ‘Highlander’. (This is remarkably unpopular!)

John Cusack’s character in the disaster movie ‘2012’ is a time traveler, having come to 2012 from 1408 without having aged more than a few years.

All of the Marvel movies are linked in a variety of subtle ways, with characters such as Captain America, the Black Widow, Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Hawkeye, Thor, the Winter Soldier, and Nick Fury reprising their parts as “Easter Eggs” for the attentive viewer.

Soylent Green is actually made from people.

Will Smith pretty much plays the same part in every movie he ever did. (A similar fan theory exists regarding Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger.)

Deckard is actually a telepath who can project his thoughts, but only in an unconvincing monotone.

’28 Days Later’ was originally written as a bleak, post-apocalyptic sequel to the film ’28 Days’, but after Sandra Bullock was recast as Cillian Murphy, they changed the character’s name.

Radagast the Brown was supposed to die in battle at the end of the third Hobbit movie and be reborn as Radagast the White, but Paul McGann was unavailable due to other filming commitments.

All of Pixar’s movies exist on my DVD shelf.

‘The Shining’ is really a movie about a hotel caretaker that goes insane and tries to kill his family.

‘The Abyss’, ‘Cyborg’, ‘Day of the Dead’, ‘Howard the Duck’, ‘Earth Girls Are Easy’, ‘Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome’, ‘Terminator’, ‘Real Genius’, ‘Night of the Comet’, ‘Short Circuit 2’, ‘Cocoon’, ‘Altered States’, ‘Back to the Future’, ‘Enemy Mine’, ‘Cherry 2000’, ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ and ‘The Garbage Pail Kids Movie’ are all works of fiction created in the same decade and filmed for public consumption to varying degrees of critical and commercial success. And you can’t prove otherwise.

Let’s start out with the obvious: I, like many others, was woefully wrong regarding the Republican electorate and their love affair of Trump. In retrospect, I can see where I went wrong; I knew that the Tea Party crowd was going to hijack the process somewhere in the next few elections, because they’ve been pushing the party ever further right (aided by a gerrymandering process in 2010 that made it impossible to be moderate in the Republican Party without risking usurpation in the primary by someone louder and dumber) and sooner or later they were going to stage a revolution against the money people who kept insisting that they needed a moderate like McCain or Romney to win, but who lost anyway. 2016 seemed like their “If we’re going to go down, we’ll go down with a real Republican” moment.

But where I made my mistake was in thinking that a real Republican was someone like Ted Cruz, who was against taxes, against government regulation, pro-religion, pro-life, and generally embodied the talking points Republicans have been spouting since the 1990s. I didn’t think they would look at a New York businessman with ties to the Clintons and Hollywood and say, “Yeah, that’s one of us alright!” But that’s because I didn’t really understand what the true values of the Tea Party crowd were. It wasn’t about taxes. It wasn’t about small government. It wasn’t about religion. It was about bigotry. Everything that the Republicans have said since Nixon has been a long string of dog-whistles for their xenophobic base, and Trump outflanked people with far stronger political credentials by simply being nakedly, unashamedly racist. Ted Cruz might have years of experience in attempting to destroy the federal government out of thinly-veiled spite at the Democrats for electing a black man, but he wasn’t willing to get down to it and say that the federal government needed to deport all the brown people everywhere. Trump was. That’s why he’s the nominee.

(At least, theoretically the nominee. It is still June, and there’s a non-zero chance that someone could derail the Trump campaign with parliamentary maneuvering at the convention. It’s in the realms of “OMFGReally?”, because if they do it then that’ll pretty much be it for the Presidential election and it’ll also finally cause the slow-simmering feud between the four entirely incompatible factions of the Republican party to boil over, but I feel like it has to be mentioned because if I don’t say it, someone else will.)

(The four factions, by the way, are the ultra-religious theocrats, the libertarian “business is business” deregulators, the “subjugate the lesser countries” neocons, and Trump has revealed that the racists in the party are a faction all their own that can be courted.)

Anyhow, the point is, Trump appealed to the racist wing of the Republican party through a series of Nurembergian rallies, and is now…pending serious bizarreness…the nominee. And he’s down seven points to Clinton. Clinton has, if not actually seen off her one serious challenger in Bernie Sanders, at the very least reduced him to sulking somewhere in Vermont and muttering dire conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, and she has a huge war chest, a battle-tested and savvy group of campaigners on the ground and already moving in the hotly-contested swing states, and several much-loved Democrats up to and including President Obama ready to go out and stump for her. While Trump has…

Okay, look. The thing you need to understand about Trump, in order to make the last few weeks and the next several months make any sense at all, is that he has been surrounded for pretty much his entire adult life by people whose job it is to tell him everything he says, thinks and does is brilliant. If there was ever a point where he had any self-awareness, it withered and died decades ago. This is key, because everyone out there is constantly assuming that at some point, Trump is going to say, “Nah, nah, just kidding! Here’s my real plan,” and we’ll find out that this was all some sort of clever Xanatos gambit to position himself into some sort of superior position to win the election.

But the fact of the matter is, the Trump you see is the Trump you get. He really does believe that he doesn’t need to fundraise personally, because he’s rich. He really does believe that he’s going to be competitive in New York (where he’s currently twenty points down in the polls) because he’s a great guy and everybody in his home state loves him. He really thinks that he can just go around from state to state holding rallies, and appear on TV talk shows, and everyone will listen to his great ideas and vote for him. He really, honest to God, thinks that “the Mexicans” and “the gays” love him. (For that matter, he really thinks that they like being called “the Mexicans” and “the gays”.) Why not? he asks himself. People told him that wouldn’t work to get the Republican nomination, and they were wrong then. Why can’t he win the Presidency this way too?

To the rest of us, the reasons why are obvious. There are not enough bigots in this country (thank God!) to make up for the number of women and minorities who will turn out to vote against him. A Presidential candidate receives far more public scrutiny for their statements than a B-list celebrity and reality TV star, and he will have to spend the next several months defending his record of lies, inanity, unworkable plans, and general drunken uncle on Facebook-level blather. The Republicans are not going to throw good money at this moron, and while they may not actively turn on him, they certainly don’t want any part of the Trump brand. Spending time and effort campaigning in states you are going to lose no matter what, or states you are going to win no matter what, is essentially ceding ground to an opponent who targets swing states. You really should settle any pending fraud lawsuits against you before you decide to run for political office, so that you’re not desperately trying to seal evidence while the media is looking for a juicy scandal. Little things like that.

At this point, those little things are adding up to a major defeat. Nobody is willing to call it that, because we all have memories of Trump somehow rolling up victories in the primaries when it was obvious to the majority of Americans that his campaign was an unmitigated shitshow run by a bloviating fascist who raised epistemic closure to an artform, and none of us wants to be wrong again. But of course, Trump wasn’t trying to appeal to a majority of Americans in the Republican primaries, just the bigoted few who agreed with his ugly, racist screeds. The very fact that the majority of Americans have been waiting months to weigh in on the discussion should tell us something about how November will go.

There is a lot to say about the massacre in Orlando. There is my sympathy for the victims and their loved ones, all of whom must be kept close in our hearts. They were victims of a horrible crime committed solely because of who they loved, a heartbreaking tragedy that we must always remember. There is my deep and abiding concern that the Republican Party continues to stoke these fires of hate, calling trans women “sexual predators” and warning about the awful dangers they pose to children, then affecting a pious pose of bland sympathy when their hateful rhetoric becomes hateful action. There is my strong feeling that this is a test that one candidate has failed so thoroughly, so disgustingly that we cannot possibly trust him with even a Twitter account, let alone the Oval Office. There is my belief that we have to correct our course on gun control. This cannot continue.

But one of the most important things to say, I’ve already said on my own blog. I’m reposting it here because I don’t really think it can ever be said enough and in enough places. I wrote this after Paris, but it is no less true today:

Okay. I am going to try to explain this calmly and reasonably.

The most pessimistic estimates of ISIL’s membership put it at about 200,000 worldwide. That includes non-combatants, support staffers, administrators and other political actors as well as fighters, but 200,000 is going to be our baseline estimate because it’s always good to think worst-case scenario.

There are currently 1.3 million active US military service members, with a further 850,000 on reserve. This is solely the number of men and women that America can put into the field; it does not count our traditional allies such as France, Great Britain, Canada, et cetera et cetera.

There are 1.47 billion practicing Muslims worldwide.

Take those three sets of numbers together, and you will see a picture of ISIL as a tiny guerrilla force unable to do anything more than inflict cruelty on the defenseless. They are out numbered more than 10 to 1 by the United States military alone, and we are far from alone in our opposition to ISIL. Even many of the countries we have historically had a troubled relationship with feel that an apocalyptic death cult doesn’t make a good neighbor. ISIL is politically isolated and counting on two things to help them in their struggle against the West.

One, they are counting on the fact that because they are small and we are large, we have more to defend and they can choose to strike us where we are not expecting it. This is in the nature of guerrilla warfare. It is utterly tragic, and it will mean that Paris is not the last place that ISIL attacks us, but the same tactics that make them effective as a guerrilla force make them ineffective as a conventional army. They are not able to destroy America. They are not able to destroy anybody. They are only able to inflict cruelty upon the helpless when nobody is watching.

Two, the only way that they can progress beyond their status as petty, vicious murderers is by reframing the issue from “ISIL against the world” to “Muslims against Christians”. As a crazy, hate-filled death cult, they are a weak military force that has drawn the attention of some of the most powerful armies in history. As defenders of the Muslim faith, they have a potential army of over a billion that they can recruit from. They are desperate, literally desperate to convince Muslims everywhere that the West hates all Muslims with the same passion that they hate ISIL and want to crush Islam entirely.

In other words, when Donald Trump says that we need to shut down all the mosques to prevent ISIL from gaining strength in America, or when Ted Cruz says that we don’t need to care about civilian casualties when fighting ISIL, they are making ISIL recruiting speeches. They are doing our enemy’s work for them, and it is a testament to the kindness and decency of the overwhelming majority of the people of the Islamic faith that they have refused to give in to the hatred that their supposed allies around the world hold for them.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t need to stop and stop now.

This isn’t going to be thoughts on the actual issue; I made the decision back in about April 2007 (during the execrable ‘Countdown to Final Crisis’ and ‘Amazons Attack’) that I wasn’t going to be spending any more money on DC’s comics without a wholesale shakeup of their senior management. Apart from a few good reviews of the ‘Omega Men’ reboot and some passionate defenses of ‘Final Crisis’, I’ve heard absolutely nobody telling me I made a mistake here.

It’s also worth emphasizing that these are solely my thoughts on the subject; I’m sure MGK has his own opinions, which may or may not coincide with mine, and he may make his own post on the subject at some point. Oh yes, and I’m going to install a spoiler tag for those who want to read the issue but haven’t.

continue reading "Random Thoughts on DC Rebirth"

For a while, people have been asking “when are you going to release a collected edition of Al’Rashad like you said you wanted to do, we want to buy that.”

Yes! We did ask about that!

In answer, Davinder and I have set up a Patreon page for the sequel to Al’Rashad, entitled Ra-Boka: Kingdom of the Bound. More swords! More undeads! More Joro mouthing off! Everything you love and new things as well, which he hope you will love, including numerous other major cultures in this world what we have created, and new characters who we are sure you will like (or, as appropriate, hate) as much as the original cast. And, if the Patreon is successful enough, we’ll put out pages at a faster rate than we did for Al’Rashad.

…but that’s not exactly what we asked for?

We know. We’re currently trying (and have been for a while) to get a deal with a traditional publisher, because Davinder and I both have time-consuming day jobs, and the time spent on publishing a book, even via an assistance service like MakeThatThing or similar, is time that we would prefer to spend on other things. An ongoing Patreon that is successful makes us more attractive to publishers – and I will not lie, pretty much every publisher we’ve talked to says some variation of “I like this, but it doesn’t fit into our current paradigms of what makes for a successful comic release,” so demonstrating that we have an audience via the Patreon will help us a lot in that regard.

And if it turns out the paying audience is smaller than we hoped, well, that’s what Kickstarter is for. But we’re hoping to avoid that.

Are there like, rewards and things?

Yes! Getting to see pages in advance before they’re published on the website; getting to see rough pencils before the pages are finished; PDF copies of any promos/prints we might do for yourself; and, for our most generous contributors, insertion of yourself as a character into the comic, either in a non-speaking role or – and this last one is pretty exclusive – with lines. Ra-Boka will have a larger and more diverse cast than even Al’Rashad had, so we can do this easily without tainting the artistic integrity of the work. Pretty cool, if we do say so ourselves.

Okay, I’m sold. What’s the link again?

Glad you asked, Invented Person Who Doesn’t Really Exist! It’s here.

This is the most depressing goddamn book I’ve read in ages. Everyone should go out and read it right now.

Okay, that probably needs a little background. Like, for example, what the hell I’m talking about. ‘Shrill’ is the new memoir by Lindy West (of Jezebel and GQ fame), which jumps around a bit chronologically but is basically the story of how she went from being a shy, vulnerable person who was convinced that she couldn’t be loved to being a badass fat-positive feminist who writes about why she got an abortion and why Daniel Tosh is an asshole whose rape jokes are shitty and unfunny. (Which some folks may remember me agreeing with at the time on this blog…)

I bought it because I was familiar with Lindy West’s writing on Jezebel, because she has always been wickedly funny and brutally insightful and has the kind of take-no-shit attitude that makes me stand up and cheer every time I read one of her pieces. She calls bullshit out for what it is, basically, and that’s always a thing I will enjoy reading. I assumed this would be more of the same, and to some extent it was, but…

This is a book about what it costs to be a badass fat-positive feminist who writes openly about controversial issues on the same Internet as GamerGaters and Vox Day. This is a book about what it’s like to receive six hundred text messages a day explaining how the person on the other end would love to rape you to death if only you weren’t so ugly. This is a book about what it is like to receive a constant, unending torrent of vicious abuse for the crime of being a woman who expresses opinions. This is a book about what it is like to have someone create a Twitter account named after your dad who died of cancer less than a month ago so that they can express, through his lips, what a disappointment you were to him. Basically, if you have any shred of empathy at all, this is like sticking your hand into the fucking pain box from Dune.

But that’s why it’s so important to read. Because as painful as it is to hear about it, it’s even more painful for Lindy West to live it. And Lindy West isn’t at all an unusual or special case; she’s just the person who had the chance to write a memoir about it so that everyone could understand what it’s like just a little tiny fraction of a bit. This is what a lot of women go through on the Internet. All the time. Every day. This is something that if you’re a straight white cishet guy, you need to know about so that you can help, in whatever way you can, in pushing back against it and making the Internet, which is by this point pretty much a default mode of human interaction and not some special Wild West electronic frontier that only the select few need to bother with, a less shitty place for your fellow human beings. And if you think you already know what it’s like, you may want to read the book anyway, because it’s probably worse than that.

Oh yes, and it did also turn out to be wickedly funny and brutally insightful and Lindy West did, in fact, call out a lot of bullshit for what it was. Which was awesome, and did soften the blow of sticking my hand in the pain box just a little bit. But trust me when I say this is not a fun read.

But it’s a necessary one.