Sunday, September 25, 2022

"Heavy Traffic" Funnies

Sunday, September 04, 2022

Sunday "Blame It on Antifa" Funnies

Middle-class Americans don’t have a lot of government programs directed at helping them. So it’s not surprising that one criticism of student loan forgiveness by Biden two months before an election is catching on: that it feels like the government is trying to buy votes. Only in an electorate accustomed to getting nothing back from its political class would such a statement resonate as well as this one.
This isn’t the most important or the most prominent anti-trans argument. But it’s one I’ve heard a whole bunch of times over the years, and it always bugs me that even taken on its own terms, it makes no sense. Nothing about restricting what bathrooms trans people use can stop predatory men from being predatory, or cis men from lying.

The entire argument is a pretext (even if not everyone making the argument is consciously aware that it’s a pretext). For the proponents of these laws, the mere existence of trans people is threatening, and so any law that strikes at and ostracizes trans people – even if the arguments are gibberish – is supported.

And that, in the end (literally in the fourth panel) is what this cartoon is really about – not a single nonsensical argument, but the way that this and other arguments, boiled down to their essence, are rationalizations for othering and harming trans people.

They also like fear mongering with that image of predatory men wearing dresses while attacking women – an image that goes back in pop culture at least as far back as Hitchcock’s Psycho, and probably much further.