Normally I enjoy Tom the Dancing Bug but this one was idiotic, low-information shouting into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.
Normally I enjoy Tom the Dancing Bug but this one was idiotic, low-information shouting into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.
Normally I enjoy Tom the Dancing Bug but this one was idiotic, low-information shouting into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.
Normally I enjoy Tom the Dancing Bug but this one was idiotic, low-information shouting into a self-congratulatory echo chamber.
HistoricalWreckord, I love that someone who disagrees with your notion of the importance of gun rights is automatically branded as “low information”! It’s quite remarkable that you can tell which bits of information are missing from Mr. Bollings’ understanding from some text and pictures he drew. For my part I think the metaphor of a country collectively deciding to sacrifice a large number of its citizens every year in misguided deference to a misunderstood constitutional amendment is provocative. In fact, it’s barely even a metaphor. I can see that it would make someone uncomfortable if their opinion to the contrary was challenged, and you would even lash out and call it “idiotic”. But it is not.
The Gun Lobby has Democrats right where they want them: craven and terrified. Obama shrugs every time a massacre happens. Fox News would yell at him if he didn’t call the families-- but they’d really yell at him if he actually tried to do something about it.
So it touched a nerve, then.
The unmistakable sound of someone’s ox being gored.
Normally I enjoy Tom the Dancing bug, but this one was up to Bolling’s usual standard.
Oversimplification of complex issues often does that. I react the same way when somebody tries to claim that there’s no legally established right to have an abortion.
Yeah, I disagree with Bolling on the question of gun rights, but that’s not what makes me dislike this strip. I’m a radical and he’s a liberal, but I read lots of liberal stuff that I find fun and insightful.
I dislike it because it doesn’t take its subject seriously, which is the key to good satire. Bolling’s better political strips make me laugh and/or think even when I definitely disagree with the moral. Sometimes they even make me want to write something serious about the issue, further exploring it. This just doesn’t inspire any of that. But hey, maybe I’m just grumpy because I’m not the recipient of this rhetorical high-five.
Yeah, oversimplification. Not, you know, a political cartoon that captures an aspect of the public debate in a way that allows us to frame our thinking and see alternate points of view:
Okay, I’m working off of 200 years of legal precedent that shows the statement from frame 6 of this comic to be patently false, but please feel free to illuminate me as to how this isn’t an expression of a low-information sentiment.
Oh except you already characterized that amendment as “misunderstood” so I’m guessing that you’re operating from a place of cognitive bias.
This comic isn’t about alternate points of view, it’s about portraying people who don’t agree with the author and his target audience as sociopaths. Love your example though.
“Cognitive bias” sounds fancy. It doesn’t sound as fancy if you just call it an “opinion”.
Yes, other people have opinions you do not share. They are therefore all idiots and “low-information” something something blah blah.
(Yes, your position is opinion too. It happens to be shared by the supreme court, but that court sometimes reverses many decades worth of legal precedent as they did in, say, the case of slavery or miscegenation.)
In this case I was going more for “opinion informed by limited personal experience or inability to understand circumstances other than your own.” But yeah, we can go with opinion.
It would be interesting to see what happens if the Supreme Court ever reversed itself on this subject. Bonus points for bringing up miscegenation though. I love telling people about the weird pesudo-science behind that, but it’s rare to hear/read someone mentioning it conversationally.
I think, especially after reading this thread, that this week’s comic may be Mr. Bolling’s best work. Thousands of people are being sacrificed (with knives, for some reason) in the name of a god that the interloper from panel 6 thinks is false. Given that setup, does it even matter whether the second amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms? There is no indication anywhere in the comic that the interloper would stop thinking the “god” was false, or that the killing would be less monstrous if the second amendment guaranteed a an individual right to bear arms. However, rather than shouting something germane like “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS” or “YOU’RE KILLING DEFENSELESS CHILDREN,” he leads with a legal point, and is carted off so that the slaughter can continue.
Seeing as how the first thing the comments did was fixate on the exact same legal point the interloper raised in panel 6, I’m not sure a better criticism of the gun control debate as focusing on abstractions rather than the life and death issues that are really at stake is even possible. Kudos to you Mr. Bolling (and to you, HistoricalWreckord, for bringing the point home)!
During the lunch hour when I composed this comment, 3.6 people were killed by guns in this country (assuming that my lunch hour was average in terms of gun deaths).
To many people outside the US it looks like a religious issue; the US Constitution is in theory (but no longer) capable of amendment, just as the Bible was made definitive in the Church Councils. But as time passes and the 18th century recedes, certain people focus on a few passages, apply a very one sided interpretation, and pretend that they are still appropriate today.
