CSotD: Parade of Follies

I wasn’t going to do any more about the Nashville shootings because there wasn’t much fresh to be said about it even yesterday: Either you want it to stop or you don’t.

But, at the moment, the alternative seemed to be more cartoons about David and I was already burned out on them.

On the other hand, Cathy Wilcox did a pretty fine job of melding the two, and it kept me going.

There was also something in the way she depicts slaughtered children here that reminded me to take a second look at yesterday’s dismissal of the Washington Post piece on what assault rifles do to young bodies. I still consider it, if not exactly “prissy,” at least far too antiseptic to get the word across.

But seeing other reactions, I began to wonder if my response was flavored by my long exposure to guns and shooting. I’ve never been a hunter, though many of my friends were, but I was a target shooter back in the days when the NRA was a gun-safety group, before it turned into a terrorist organization, and I’ve kept up with things, so I knew what a bullet can do, and what a tumbling bullet can do.

I still think we ought to stop beating around the bush and lay it all right out there for people to see, but I’m willing to admit that I was probably assuming a great deal of familiarity that simply isn’t there. Can’t fix the problem until everyone is up to scratch on how these things work.

Meanwhile, however, people are dying, needlessly and unforgivably.

Whether that comes at the hands of pathological murderers or through neglect and carelessness really doesn’t matter.

Anyway, if you think a classical statue of a Biblical hero is pornographic, what do you make of RJ Matson’s depiction of a hypocrite who prays on street corners, that all may see him pray, but does nothing to stop the ongoing slaughter?

Yet one should be practical and accurate.

I had seen people complain about Republicans taking NRA money and thought it a shame that we were already making this partisan, but, when I dug in to find out who’s giving how much to whom, the results were chilling and, indeed, partisan.

According to Open Secrets, the NRA stopped giving to Democrats in the last election cycle. Not “reduced” or “cut back” but stopped. And other gun-rights groups did roughly likewise:

Nor has this been confined just to the most recent elections. The gun-rights folks give to Republicans.

And the gun-control folks give to Democrats.

Maybe it doesn’t matter whether we show what a tumbling bullet does to the body of a small child, unless we link it to what a tumbling dollar does to the value of a vote in an alleged democracy.

Meanwhile, the whole world is watching. Aghast. In shock. Do we care?

Juxtaposition of the Day

Note that, just as the Australian Cathy Wilcox saw through the misdirected, misguided values of that American mom, these foreign cartoonists are also able to see clearly that we Yanks are trapped in a cycle and that we seem obsessed with where the guns come from rather than why they are here at all.

Perhaps we should try focusing on why the cycle and all the guns are here, and no place else.

And on why we obsess over asking questions without expecting, or wanting, or listening to, answers.

The other day, some ammosexual posted on Twitter that the first thing Hitler did was to take away everybody’s guns. Couple of problems with that:

1. Hitler only took away guns from the Jews.
2. We know how you feel about Jews.
3. We also know how you feel about Hitler.

Speaking of Twitter ….

This brings us to Chilean cartoonist Alen Lauzán (Cartoon Movement), who comments on the continued fall of Twitter as a worldwide informational service, under the bizarre leadership of Elon Musk, whose latest feat lies in turning a company he bought for $44 billion into one he estimates is worth about half that much.

The business side is documented in today’s Reliable Sources, though you have to scroll down because there is so much other toxic media news to cover. But for the global, political significance of this very strange man’s very strange world, try this Bulwark article.

It’s all very entertaining in the same way as that fellow in “The Pit and the Pendulum” must have been entertained by watching the razor-sharp pendulum swing ever lower towards his body. It’s been so long since I read that story (Seventh grade? Eighth?) that I’ve forgotten how it ends, and I don’t know how this version does, either, so no spoilers.

But the McGuffin in this case is that Elon has declared that anyone who pays $7.99 a month can be verified as being anyone they claim to be, while only those verified people can participate in his polls, which he ignores if he doesn’t like the outcomes anyway. And he says it’s to ensure the quality of the site.

Not everyone who has previously felt the need to be verified agrees.

But, as Lauzan suggests, it means that every one of Musk’s faithful flock of sheep who wants a blue tag can buy one, and that’s the important part of his business plan: To spend $44 billion for a site which he can monetize for $11 million.

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Incidentally, I’m still there.

What Elon hasn’t done yet is limit the number of intrusive, disruptive, annoying idiots you can block, which calms things down, especially if you block one particularly intrusive, disruptive, annoying idiot, because his massive bot army appears to vanish along with him.

Anyway, I tried Mastodon, the amazing social media site with no center and couldn’t figure it out, and I tried Post, which I like except that, after a bit of excitement to begin with, it seems to have calmed down so that you can go back in 24 hours and find the same few people posting and nobody responding.

So as long as Elon keeps the lights on, I’m okay on Twitter, and, for that matter, I’m not scared of the dark, either.