#satirical justice warrior

[satiricaljusticewarrior]

I feel like Bruce Wayne who returns to being the Batman in Dark Knight Rises.

Satire about the murder apologism of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO.

Being pro murder isn’t such a new things for lefties. After all, they were happily gunning down Black children at CHAZ and none of its organizers or even participants have ever felt to publicly apologize for it.

What is new, however, is the open celebration of murder—or at least expressing such views without the usual pretense of supporting lethal force when wielded by the police, as they did in the case of Ashley Babbitt.

And now we have both the press (which has condemned GamerGate with a 0 killing count), organizations and academics excusing it.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/unitedhealthcare-shooting-inevitable.html

https://x.com/CHSommers/status/1865449878962225460

https://x.com/ScreenSlate/status/1865034827948245304

Anyway, fun facts regarding how senseless is to blame healthcare insurance industry.

US spends $4.5 trillion on healthcare

https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-reports/national-health-expenditure-data/historical

The entire profit of the healthcare insurance industry is $45 billion.

https://x.com/NielsHoven/status/1864755179775758819

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Matt Bors’s “Justice Warriors: Vote Harder”

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

There's no political satirist working today quite like Matt "Mr Gotcha" Bors, whose 2023 masterpiece Justice Warriors just got a timely – and brutally funny – sequel, Justice Warriors: Vote Harder:

https://www.mattbors.com/store/p/justice-warriors-ffzgn

You've doubtless seen Matt Bors's work, which has repeatedly attained viral liftoff, most notably with his Mr Gotcha strips, easily one of the most useful additions to online political debate in internet history:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Last year, Bors, along with Ben Clarkson and Felipe Sobreiro, published Justice Warriors, a postapocalyptic cyberpunk graphic novel in the vein of Warren Ellis's classic Transmetropolitan:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz

Justice Warriors is the tale of Bubble City, a domed enclave walled off from the teeming masses of the UZ (which stands for "Uninhabited Zone" – see what they did there?). Bubble City runs on vibes, therapy-speak, social media nonsense, memes and garbage hot-takes. And while there's a lot of broad satire here, the thing that makes Justice Warriors stand out is how its creators do the relatively straightforward futuristic exercise of asking themselves, "What if deeply unserious nonsense was taken seriously?"

Others have done this before – Mike Judge's Idiocracy, say – but Bors, Clarkson and Sobreiro attain a density of sight gags, trenchant wordplay, and outrageous cyberpunk imagery that is just next level. Think Al Jaffee meets William Gibson, with art direction by Vaughn Bode, who's had one too many at the Mos Eisley Cantina. To that, mix in all kinds of MAD Magazine style fake ads and social media postings, layering joke on gag, all of it walking the fine line between "you gotta cry" and "you gotta laugh."

Justice Warriors did big numbers, selling out three printings, and now the gang is back together for the sequel, Vote Harder, which drops just in time for the final, all consuming election-season media apocalypse.

Vote Harder sees Bubble City facing its first election in living memory, as the mayor – who inherited his position from his "powerful, strapping Papa" – loses a confidence vote by the city's trustees. They're upset with his plan to bankrupt the city in order to buy a laser powerful enough to carve his likeness into the sun as a viral stunt for the launch of his comeback album. The trustees are in no way mollified by the fact that he expects to make a lot of money selling special branded sunglasses that allow Bubble City (and the mutant hordes of the Uninhabited Zone) to safely look into the sun and see what their tax dollars bought.

So it's time for an election, and the two candidates are going hard: there's the incumbent Mayor Prince; there's his half-sister and ex-girlfriend, Stufina Vipix XII, and there's a dark-horse candidate Flauf Tanko, a mutant-tank cyborg that went rogue after a militant Home Owners Association disabled it and its owners abandoned it. Flauf-Tanko is determined to give the masses of the Uninhabited Zone the representation they've been denied for so long, despite the structural impediments to this (UZers need to complete a questionnaire, sub-forms, have three forms of ID, and present a rental contract, drivers license, work permit and breeding license. They also need to get their paperwork signed in person at a VERI-VOTE location, then wait 14 days to get their voter IDs by mail. Also, districts of 2 million or more mutants are allocated the equivalent of only 250,000 votes, but only if 51% of eligible voters show up to the polls; otherwise, their votes are parceled out to other candidates per the terms of the Undervoting and Apathy Allotment Act).

Despite the structural advantages afforded to Mayor Prince – like the fact that residents of District 12 on floors 120-145 of the Bubble each get 2048 votes, while District 1 (floors 1-7) only get a single vote – he's not taking any chances. Officer Schitt (a humanoid poop emoji) and the lovelorn Officer Swamp (an anthropomorphic catfish) are each prowling the Uz . Swamp – suffering from a head injury and gripped by a delusion that a TV cowboy has sent him to infiltrate the Flauf Tanko campaign – is playing spy/provocateur, while Schitt hunts dangerous subversives.

What unfolds is a funny, bitter, superb piece of political satire that could not be better timed.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/11/uninhabited-zone/#eremption-season

[schooltrashers]

Watch "Why WOKE Straight Men Won't Date Dylan Mulvaney According To Woke-Man" on YouTube

[these-posts-arent-real]

warrior cats dash sim anyone?

#no canon characters #sorray guys thats too much #im just gonna do some made up dudes

0 notes

🔲 yourfave-tunnel-guy-deactivat

Guys I hate tunnellers. Lmao.

🌱 dirtdigger-23 Follow

By StarClan, I hate this mindset. Tunnellers are such an underappreciated part of WindClan society. Just because we don't do as much running or typical hunting doesn't make us less valuable than you. Op and cats like him are so stupid.

🌻 l1llyst3m Follow

Crow-food-worth reading comprehension lmao. It was satire (the url clearly states "tunnel.") Also, her*

🌱 dirtdigger-23 Follow

Ok I see where that was probably satire (OP should have made that more clear though) Where are you getting "her" from though lmao. OP's url is "yourfave-tunnel-guy"

🌻 l1llyst3m Follow

I'm getting "her" because I'm OP. This is my new account. I'm trans. Hope this helps.

#i said so in the tags of the last addition #but as i said. crow-food-worth reading comprehension #prev probably didnt even read my tags lmao

2,209 notes

🌾 barncat-vibes Follow

I am goingto fucking kill Jadestar. Lmao.

🌾 barncat-vibes Follow

WRONG BLOG

🐱 berrrrry-o Follow

Clanblr user barncat-vibes is from rc confirmed??

🏞 trouttail-prefers-bass Follow

Haha I already knew that, I'm mutuals with them on their main, plus we're IRL friends. Forgot that wasn't common knowledge.

🐱 berrrrry-o Follow

tbh I always assumed they were wc since thats the clan closest 2 the barns...

🪵 i-eat-moss Follow

Uh sorry ar ewe just glossing over how @barncat-vibes and @trouttail-prefers-bass are IRLS???!!!!?

#mutuals i can understand since they have the same ideas on like #social justice stuff... they both post trans stuff sometimes #but #IRLS? #SOMEONE is fucking with me #i met trouttail once at a gathering #nice dude #suuuper weird to imagine him knowing barncat-vibes

27 notes

🌅 kit-names-inspo Follow

I've decided to make a full post on this, since I've noticed this issue a lot lately. So let me make this clear:

I am NOT comfortable with "transgender" cats using my name suggestions to pick out new names. The service I provide is to help queens who have or are having kits, not confused males who think they're mollies.

STOP using my blog for your delusions.

🌅 kit-names-inspo Follow

Go ahead and unfollow me. I didn't want you 200 transgenders on my blog anyway.

🛤 carnation-stem-02 Follow

Anyone else find it funny how after this post OP lost 200+ followers? Anyone?

Anyway for a better source of names for trans mollies, toms & enbies, @name-lists-by-theme has much better names, sorted much more cleanly, AND she's not a transphobe.

#trans #fuck transphobia #fuck transphobes #fuck terfs #<- kit-names-inspo is a self-proclaimed radfem&terf btw

17,092 notes

🔁 🐍xviper-the-fagx reblogged

🤍 snwtl Follow

I can't believe we're being told to "normalize" cats becoming kittypets now. Do you have any idea how many cats would just abandon their families if it became socially acceptable to run off and live with the twolegs???

🍲 ex-thundrclan-kipper Follow

Honestly (as someone who left the Clans because I had a mate in the twolegplace), I haven't seen this to be as true as you're saying. I've seen one cat who "abandoned" his family to become a kittypet, if you count his abusive ex-partner, but for the most part, the cats we leave behind are understanding and okay with the fact that we have to move on. I wasn't meant for warrior life, and I left it, and I'm happier for it.

🤍 snwtl Follow

The fact that you would even imply it's okay to abandon your family for a life as a kittypet only serves to prove my point. You make me sick.

🪺 robbbinpaw Follow

Crow-food-worth reading comprehension

#yeah #snwtl (snowtail i think?) needs to use their eyes lmao #starclan this place gets on my last nerve #thinking of taking a break from clanblr because of shit like this

847 notes

🌱 dirtdigger-23 Follow

Uhh... where am I. My dash looks weird...

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON ― Hundreds of mostly white women gathered at a swanky downtown hotel to hear prominent conservative speakers and strategize with other moms about how to spread their message across the country. Decked out in everything from stylish pantsuits, light-up American-flag jackets and, obviously, Donald Trump swag, the crowd at the Moms for Liberty Joyful Warriors National Summit cheered and hollered as speaker after speaker spewed hate about transgender people ― all under the guise of protecting children.

[...] At the 2024 summit this week, the focus was on fearmongering about trans kids and criticizing school employees who support them. “There’s no such thing as a transgender child,” Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, told HuffPost in an interview. Her position is a common one among conservatives, who have taken to attacking trans rights around the country ― even as less than 1% of the U.S. population identifies as trans. The right wing has attacked gender-affirming care as “child abuse,” though the American Pediatrics Association says such care can be lifesaving by reducing the risk of suicidal ideation.

Seth Dillon, CEO of the conservative satire website Babylon Bee, talked about “gender madness” when he addressed the crowd. Actor Rob Schneider, who had a prime-time speaking slot on Thursday night, claimed that children were getting “mutilated.” Texas state Rep. Shawn Thierry, who lost her primary this spring, announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party in part because of members’ views on transgender youth. Maud Maron, a former New York City community education council member who was removed from her post for sending anti-transgender text messages, claimed men were playing in women’s sports. “I think the federal government pushing child abuse really concerns American parents,” Justice said when asked why there was so much focus on trans issues at the summit. “Cutting off the healthy body parts of children is pretty extreme, right?” she said. “We’re cutting off the healthy body parts of girls.” She was referring to gender-affirming surgeries such as mastectomies, which are very rarely performed on minors.

At a panel on writing laws that protect parental rights, the session was laser-focused on transgender children. The speakers addressed the audience about how, through legislation, they can put a stop to “secret social transitions,” or schools transitioning children without telling their parents.

“We’re getting calls from parents saying this is happening at our school,” claimed Matt Sharp, senior counselor at Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing legal group. (It is not uncommon for transgender children to be out at school but not at home if they don’t feel safe telling their parents.)

[...] January Littlejohn, a Florida mom, had a similar story. She said her daughter wanted to transition after some of her friends did. The school held a meeting with the child, Littlejohn said, but refused to tell her the details of the meeting. Littlejohn had a warning to the parents in the room. “Parents of young children and grandparents, you need to be actively inoculating your children against this,” she said, claiming that “the faucet of gender ideology is free flowing” on social media. She also railed against allyship, claiming that children were being “indoctrinated” into being allies. “If you see buzzwords like ‘inclusivity’ and ‘safe and welcoming,’ that means gender ideology is alive and well in that school,” she warned.

At the Moms For Liberty’s Joyful Warriors National Summit this weekend, numerous speakers, including Tiffany Justice, Seth Dillon, and Rob Schneider, uttered out anti-trans statements.

[mister-christmas]

hello guy who acts like a 12yr old who just discovered reddit and atheism and thinks he's hot shit. You have two choices before you: 1 Become a normal, well adjusted human being 2 keep shitting your fucking pants screaming "HERESY!! BURN THE HERETIC!! GET ME THE HEAVY FLAMER!!" whenever you see other people minding their business and enjoying the same hobby as you

Alas. Did you know warhammer 40k originally intended the Empire of Man, and all it's silly "muh human superiority all xenos must die" to be a satire? That aspect, of course, has sort of lost a lot of it's value over the years, due to the ludicrous amount of writers that the franchise has had over the years, but it is still rather apparent. I mean take a look at the ordo chronos wars, with people getting executed because getting the date wrong is heresy. Or take a look at, fuck, i don't know - the Thunder Warriors, who were all killed by the Emperor of Man because they 'outlived their usefulness'. Did you know that before he began the holocaust, Hitler ordered the deaths of mentally and physically disabled Germans? Many of whom were veterans of the first world war, whom he was supposedly aiming to avenge in his campaign of 'retribution' and bringing the Reich back to it's former glory. Eugenics, as the idea that 'genetically imperfect' humans don't deserve to live (note: the first human right is the right to live, ya doofus. Yes even awulf, wretched wastes of air like pedophiles and rapists have this right, as it is unalienable. It is also there so that people falsely accused of rape do not immediately get killed for a crime they did not commit) is called nowadays, was also surprisingly popular in the USA before and during the war. The shining bastion of democracy and justice lobotomized people it found too hard to deal with so that they would become easier to manage. It also banned interracial marriage. Something I also found curious, did you know that antifa means antifascist? Sorry to break it to you bud, but if you're antiantifascist you stand with the fascist. And if you are, sincerely, a fascist then i hope you do like Hitler and shoot yourself in the head <3

Man, you wrote an entire essay and managed to say nothing of value. But I've got time to kill so let's go through this.

It's interesting you think I, a Christian man, act like a reddit atheist

"Burn the heretic" is a meme, you clod. It's a joke. And when people are minding their own damn business I don't care about their little nonsense headcannons. But quite often they want to change the whole hobby to suite them.

Of course the Imperium is evil! It's fucking called the Imperium! Every faction in 40k is evil, that's the point! It's grimdark! It invented grimdark!

I see we're just completely going off the reservation today. No shit nazis, eugenics, lobotomization, and racism are bad. Is there a point to your ramblings?

Ah, well that makes the rest of this meandering tirade make a little more sense. You're stupid enough to think antifa has a monopoly on being against fascism. I can disdain both fascists and antifa. Being the enemy of my enemy doesn't make them my friend. Moreover just because they call themselves antifa doesn't mean they're actually fighting fascism or doing anything worthwhile.

[mattbors]

"Justice Warriors: Vote Harder is a heartening sign that genuinely subversive political satire remains possible" - Ryan Zickgraf writes in Jacobin

[smashpages]

Smash Pages Q&A | Matt Bors + Ben Clarkson on ‘Justice Warriors: Vote Harder’

The creators of the dystopian satire sequel graphic novel talk about their secret origins, being ‘plagiarized’ by real-world events, meatball riots, buddy-cop bro-mances and more.

[missandrisky]

I am so tired of so-called feminists bitching about how other people go about Female liberation. oppressors DO NOT respond to reason & I DO NOT cater to respectability politics. Regardless of whether or not I monetize my male hatred there are in existence cucks that will masturbate to it. I am not here to coddle any part of the male ego and I will continue to echo the opposite of the extremist views that combine sexuality, biology and worth that are mandated to be taught to girl children around the world in order to make them complicit participants in their subjugation. I will not explain satire, method acting or sociology to every keyboard warrior with an inflated sense of justice.

You are welcome to continue to provide my page(s) with engagement but let me make it clear that I do not care what anyone thinks about what I am doing with this account.

XOXO,

Miss 💋

[virtualmemoriespodcast]

Episode 564 - Matt Bors

With The Nib, cartoonist & editor Matt Bors helped build an online (and print!) venue for political satire, graphic journalism and non-fiction comics that featured some of the best names in comics and gave space to a bazillion up-and-comers. Matt & I sat down during CXC to talk about his decision to close down The Nib after 10 years, how it felt to bring together the best political cartoonists under a single online umbrella, how tech money giveth and taketh away, and what this fall's farewell tour means to him. We get into what comes after The Nib (like Justice Warriors comic), how it felt to see one of his comics displayed on the floor of the House of Representatives, the challenges & rewards of building a diverse roster of cartoonists, why he always wanted a print companion of The Nib, and how mainstream comics and dystopian science fiction have always held an appeal for him (and why he'd love to do more with his Wasteland characters). We also discuss how it feels to have traded America for Canada and how the move has changed his perspective, the ways his post-Nib self spends less time getting mad online, how he plans to catch up on all the comics he's missed in the last decade, what it's like having his first two-week stretch as an adult without immediate editorial deadlines, and more! Follow Matt on BlueSky, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our Substack

Check out the new episode of The Virtual Memories Show

[alfvaen]

Novel Snow

Up here in the Great White North, we finally got some snow last month, which is probably a good thing (moisture to help ameliorate next year's forest fire season, hopefully, and increase the Earth's albedo), though it can also be inconveniently cold. Meanwhile, I read some books last month and I'm going to tell you about them.

Possible spoilers below for Jack L. Chalker's Dancing Gods series, Gerald Brandt's San Angeles series, and Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric series. (I generally try not to spoil the actual book I'm talking about, but no promises for earlier books in the same series.)

Jack L. Chalker: Demons of The Dancing Gods, completed November 3

Continuing with my "Dancing Gods" series reread. The first book, The River of Dancing Gods, was named after an actual hydrographic feature in the book's fantasy world, though it wasn't super-relevant to the plot. And also, there was no mention of what dancing gods the name of the river might even be referring to. I guess it's possible I'll find some reference to them that I'm forgetting about, but at the moment it seems like it's just being used as a repeated title element to indicate the books are in the same series…which means it might have been done strictly for humorous purposes as a fantasy pastiche. But it does indicate that maybe there might be demons in this book.

For reasons that I can't quite recall right now, the back cover of my copy of this book is extremely tattered. It looks like it may have been chewed on by some kind of animal, perhaps? (I may have to include an actual picture of it to do it justice.) I can't even recall if it was like this when I bought it (doubtless second-hand, but even then, I don't think most stores would stock it like that), or what animal might have chewed on it if it happened after I bought it. Anyway, it makes it low-key a bit annoying to read, like any cover abnormalities do.

The best thing I have to say about this book is that it introduces the one element that I remembered about the series even years later. One of the characters (Joe the former trucker, a.k.a. barbarian warrior Joseph the Golden) gets bitten by a pekingese dog and discovers that he has been inflicted with the curse of the were. He is not a were-pekingese, though--he is just a "were". Which means that every night of the full moon, when the sun goes down he turns into…whatever animal he is closest to. An identical copy of that animal. And that includes humans (and, in the context of the world, fairies, too). I don't know if this concept was ever used anywhere else, or if it's unique to Chalker, but it's pretty interesting. And of course they use it several times in the plot, and while at least once they completely forget about the effect until it happens, overall it's portrayed mostly as a boon.

The book as a whole, though, does not hold up. It takes forever for things to get moving, and it's just like…go here, and have an incident on the way. Then have some boring description and local colour, and some half-assed satirical references. Marge becomes more fully a fairy (a made-up kind of sex fairy, to be specific) and alternates between angsting about it and losing her entire personality for a stretch of time. The "were" thing happens randomly in the middle of a wizard's convention (and said convention doesn't even get used for any proper convention jokes--where's the funny panel concepts?) and seems entirely serendipitous/gratuitous. A new female character is mentioned and gets a backstory but barely any personality. The main bad guy turns out to be supposedly motivated by trying to improve the world, by bringing over innovations from our world, and is defeated in a magical duel by the living manifestations of the bad things about modern society. The underlying worldview of the book seems to be pretty fatalistic; bad things will always exist, corruption is the same everywhere, everybody will do bad things if they get into power, etc. And by and large, the plot feels…perfunctory. The whole book feels perfunctory. And are there more demons than the first book? Not so's you'd notice.

So that's two strikes against keeping it--bad physical condition, and underwhelming contents. But there's still three more books in the series, which I am not 100% committed to finishing, but I guess I'll try. If there isn't improvement in later books, though, odds are the whole thing will get weeded. (And the ragged Demons copy will get thrown out.)

James Clemens: Wit'ch Fire, completed November 8

This is the next random new author trying, male edition (i.e. the book I was technically supposed to be reading last month instead of The Art of Prophecy). Definitely picked this one up second-hand, it still had the sticker on the cover, and I knew little or nothing about it. The reason it bubbled up to the top of the list is because I saw the cover somewhere, probably in one of those "have you read this book" poll accounts.

If I had a nickel for every book I read this year with an in-universe (Watsonian?) introduction talking about the book, this would be getting me my third nickel. First one was You Feel It Just Below The Ribs, the "Within The Wires" podcast tie-in book; second was the Jenn Lyons The Ruin of Kings. This one is warning its readers about how dangerous this book is (because its author lied, of course), and that the only reason that they get to read it is because they're taking a course about it, as part of an attempt to demystify this long-banned book by trying to associate it with boring academia. Unlike the other two, it doesn't actually contain footnotes and commentary throughout or not, so I'm not sure what the point of it is.

So the original book comes from 200-300 years before the introduction, and what does it do right away? Include an except from even farther back, like 500 years or so, as a prologue. What's most jarring to me about that, though, is that this 750-year-old ancient text is…written in modern prose in what looks like standard close third-person. In our modern, non-fantasy world, you go back that far and, well, you get (for instance) Middle English, and I'd be surprised if you got any prose in modern style. Ancient text should be in, like, KJV biblical style or something. Epic poetry. And the thing that it reminds me of most is the horrible prologue to an otherwise amazing book, Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, as you have a dialogue between two people on the eve of a momentous battle. Luckily it manages to get better than that and things actually happen.

Then we get to see the young wit'ch girl herself…okay, I have to say something here about apostrophes. This book is bad for apostrophes. I mean, "wit'ch" is bad enough, but it could just be one thing. But no. We have og'res. We have elv'in. We have moon'falcons and rock'goblins. Not to mention people with apostrophes in their names--not everybody but enough. It seems to me that there are are basically two valid reasons to have an apostrophe in something. (Well, three, but the English possessive "'s" suffix is strictly limited.) Either you've omitted some letters and the apostrophe is showing that, or it's an actual phonetic symbol. Like in the Hawaiian "a'a", it's a glottal stop sound, and it's used that way in a number of languages. (And in "Hawai'i" itself, properly. And yes, technically in Hawaiian it's not an apostrophe, but close enough.) In the Russian transliteration into the Roman alphabet, it's more like the "y" sound of palatalization, like in the Ob' river. And apparently it's used in some transliterations to show that adjacent letters are in different syllables or different morphemes (like we do with dieresis sometimes in words like coöperation).

In fantasy worlds, apostrophes have a long history as well. Tolkien didn't use many, I don't believe, but Robert Jordan certainly had a few. (Mostly these are in the Old Tongue so we can conjecture that sometimes it's phonetic and sometimes it's morphological.) Pern (yes, not really fantasy, but sort of) used them explicitly for the "omitted letters" purpose in the dragonriders' names. But in Wit'ch Fire they have yet to have any purpose that I can see except for annoying some readers.

Anyway. The book does do a good job of bringing in additional characters, even if things do get fragmented in the second half as we switch POV between different characters encountering other sets of characters. When the new characters are introduced, the POV characters at least, we get a sense of their own personal concerns and some inkling as to why the series is called "The Banned And The Banished", as everyone seems to be an outcast of some sort or another. They are even somewhat organically brought together, with reasons for staying together that make sense for each character, though it takes a long time before all the threads meet up, and what you might think is just a brief stopover as the characters flee to safety turns out to be a morass that takes up the whole rest of the book. (And apparently we did need the close third-person flashback after all; it's just not believable as a historical chronicle.)

In the end I was happy with the book and will try to hunt down more in the series, and brace myself for more exceedingly gratuitous apostrophes.

Gerald Brandt: The Operative, completed November 12

I read the first issue of "Ghost Rider 2099" in my latest Marvel Unlimited run, and in an interesting departure from the usual "possessed by the vengeance demon Zarathos" or whatever of previous Ghost Riders, it turned into "what if Neuromancer created a skeletable robot body for Count Zero after he died while jacked in". Like somebody had eaten too much William Gibson and then threw up all over their comic script. Characters named Case and Jeter. Anyway. For some reason it made me want to read something vaguely cyberpunk. And since I do have a reread of the Cyberpunk Trilogy scheduled (sometime after the Dancing Gods series, so it'll still be a while), it seemed like a good time to slot one in.

I do actually have William Gibson's The Peripheral on my shelf, after I bounced off the Amazon Prime series, but I wanted something a little zippier, so I went with the next book in Gerald Brandt's San Angeles series. Gerald Brandt is another one of those authors that I actually met at conventions before he was published, and it's even possible he may recognize my name and/or be able to pick me out of a lineup.

The San Angeles books are a dystopian series centered mostly around the titular megalopolis, a gigantic seven-layered paved-over city that sprawls down most of the California cost (San Francisco to Los Angeles, see). It's the early 22nd century, the world has mostly gone to hell, corporations run everything, fresh water is scarce, and rich people hide out in the top levels of the cities (where only they get to see the sun) or up in the satellite stations. The first book, The Courier, is about a motorcycle courier named Kris who gets entangled in intercorporate shenanigans and eventually recruited by love interest Ian Miller into an organization called ACE that is notionally trying to keep corporations in line. So it's really more ride-around-on-a-motorcycle than hack-into-cyberspace, but it still feels cyberpunk-adjacent.

In this book, Kris is being trained as an operative for ACE, but her training is cut short and she finds herself back in San Angeles, finding out everything she thought she knew was a lie, and in particular that ACE is not as free of corporate entanglements as she thought. She's got a little PTSD after the last book, and she picks up a friend who has even more, and there's also a big tech secret that the corporations want and we don't want them to get. This is one of those books with one first person narrator (Kris) and several third-person narrators, which is not a pattern I like, but I'm mostly inured to it now.

It starts out in a hopeful place, but things go downhill. Our characters seem to have too little power, and struggle to get anything accomplished against forces arrayed against them (on both sides). Their triumphs are too few and too small, and that makes this a fairly depressing book. The third book, The Rebel, sounds like we'll be getting to the "tear it all down" rebellion stage of the dystopia, but at this point I don't have a lot of confidence it will actually fix anything. (Which may be the point, but it's a depressing one if so.)

Lois McMaster Bujold: Demon Daughter, completed November 14

I have of course read a lot of Lois McMaster Bujold (and recently), but that's all her SF stuff. (Yes, I believe that all of her SF is Vorkosigan-saga-related.) But at some point she got into writing some fantasy, too; first her standalone The Spirit Ring, and then The Curse of Chalion and a couple of novels in what she calls the "World of The Five Gods", and then the Sharing Knife series. And then she started the Penric series.

The Penric series consists mostly of novellas and novelettes (with one novel-length work), set in the world of the Five Gods, following the titular Penric's life and career. Like the Vorkosigan series, they have sometimes been published out of chronological order. They've also mostly been self-published direct on Kindle, with sometimes only a matter of days between the the story being announced and being published. Bujold is mostly retired at this point, so this is really her retirement project. (This is also the same timeframe in which she wrote "The Flowers of Vashnoi", and also a novella in the Sharing Knife world, "Knife Children".)

The World of the Five Gods…well, there's five gods. Kind of like the seven gods in the Song of Ice And Fire series, really; there's the Mother and the Father, the Son and the Daughter, and then there's the Bastard. This was mostly introduced in The Curse of Chalion and the other novels (Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt, for completeness), but frankly I mostly just remember the parts referenced in the Penric stories because it's been a while since I read the other ones.

So basically: demons exist. They may start out as "elementals", minor spirits who usually find some small (vertebrate) animal to dwell in, and they tend to produce chaos (in a Second Law of Thermodynamics sense, mostly). When the animal dies, they jump to another animal, usually a more powerful one because they are more powerful themselves. At some point they become a "demon" rather than an elemental. At some point a demon may jump into a human body, and if it takes control of the human, then it starts wreaking havoc. But if the human can take control of it, then they are now a sorcerer and can use the demon's powers for their own. Demons fall under the purview of the Bastard, and many servants of the Bastard's Order have demons under their control. (And the Bastard can destroy demons as well, mostly through his Saints, humans that they have blessed.) Now I've forgotten now how much of this is universal and how much of it just applies to the Bastard, so read the Chalion books to find out more.

Anyway…in the first story, "Penric's Demon", Penric is a minor noble who stops to help an injured scholar of the Bastard's Order, but she dies…and then her demon jumps into him. They come to terms with each other, and he helps her (the demon, who he dubs Desdemona at some point, has dwelt in mostly female hosts over the two centuries of its existence) and she helps him. Penric ends up joining the Bastard's Order. He has other adventures, meeting druids (who can do some other type of magic involving animals and blood), going on a mission, falling in love and getting married, and learning about how to use "uphill" magic (anti-entropic, which involves a greater increase of entropy somewhere else) to do healing and other useful tasks. As the series goes on, the stories have become more…"cozy", perhaps? I fell behind a bit because the plague story "The Physicians of Vilnoc" came out in 2020, just before the pandemic, and so I avoided it for a while. Luckily (?), there weren't any new stories for a couple of years, so I'm only currently behind by the two that came out this year, of which "Demon Daughter" is the first.

The basic premise of the story is that a young girl ends up in possession of a fairly new elemental, and Penric ends up having to teach her how to control it. And then presumably a decision is doing to be made about whether she keeps her demon or it gets destroyed by a Saint. (I'm betting on the former, myself, but I guess we'll see.) Penric does pick up a few strays throughout the series, though not all of them end up in his household.

Jack L. Chalker: Vengeance of The Dancing Gods, completed November 18

I was a little bit confused about what the next book was; I picked up Horrors of The Dancing Gods first, but then realized that it must come later because we'd moved on to one character's offspring, so I checked the dates and then picked the right one. It turns out Goodreads was also confused about this book, because it didn't show up when I did a search for "Dancing Gods"; in fact, somebody had screwed up and made Vengeance another "edition" of Demons, so it claimed I had just read this one a couple of weeks ago. So I put a note in with the Librarians Group to get that fixed, and in the meantime I pretended to be reading an omnibus of the book and the next one.

I am definitely feeling like I am not going to be keeping this series. They continue to be kind of meh, by-the-numbers, and not even up to Chalker standards. It's like he felt that because this is supposed to be a fantasy pastiche, he didn't have to take it seriously. That might work better if the book was particularly funny…but it generally isn't. There were two parts that were amusing (though not laugh-out-loud funny): the bizarre fantasy soap opera performance at the beginning of Chapter 2, and the bit where the always-has-to-talk-in-rhyme Oracle character has to keep around a guy named Porange Chilver in case he accidentally ends a line with "orange" or "silver". But the whole Oracle side-trip, which includes a body-swap where one of the main characters literally loses their entire personality, is then fixed with magic and barely impacts the story (well, except that one character is now a mermaid). I expect more lingering personality changes and body horror from my Chalker, thank you very much.

They also end up having to return to Earth, where our bad guy has set up a megachurch, and…well, I guess let's say that this book was written and published during the Reagan years, which in hindsight was basically the prequel to the Trump era, so Chalker was feeling a little bitter and cynical about people at the time. He asserts that everything was getting worse, that the world was on the edge of nuclear apocalypse, and that people in general were just stupid. And in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that maybe doesn't seem too far off, but still seems pessimistic.

I guess this does avert the problem some books have with things being too easy for the protagonists. Instead, things feel like they're too easy for the antagonists sometimes, and that can make for more tension in your story, assuming that then they don't succeed too easily in the end as well, or through deus ex machina. Again, in a Chalker story it feels like you should succeed but only through losing your identity, physical and/or mental, and then spend the next book (if any) having to deal with that.

Still, it more or less comes together in the end; our protagonists are kept in the dark about the plan, which means it works, and it provides another genuinely amusing moment. I'll probably continue on the reread but still probably will say goodbye to them at the end.

Karen Traviss: City of Pearl, stopped reading November 20

This wasn't the book I had been planning to read next. It was supposed to be trying out a new non-male author, and at some point I had settled on Linda Nagata's Vast, with Ann Logston's Exile as a backup. I knew that Vast wasn't the first book in the series, but it was the one I'd picked up (library discard, it looks like), and it looked like maybe the books were loosely enough linked that it wouldn't matter. But by the end of the prologue it sounded like the characters were all ones introduced in earlier books, with either prolonged or suspended lifespans, so I decided to put it down. And then the Logston one turned out to also be a sequel, which I hadn't realized before. (And I had wanted something non-fantasy anyway.) So I grabbed the first book I found which had "Science Fiction" on the spine, which turned out to be this one.

It's possible I've kind of gone off a lot of science fiction, though. Space opera is mostly fine, as long as it's not too much into the military side, which I often find kind of boring and politically strident. I had a subscription to "Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine" for years, and I came out of it kind of tired of that kind of SF. And this one feels like it might be one of those.

It's mostly a lost-colony story; a human colony (of religious types) has been coexisting on a planet with some alien races, about which little is revealed at first. A ship is sent from Earth to make contact…or something. We're not entirely sure because the mission head (a POV character) had a lot of the member of the briefing suppressed so she doesn't know everything about it, just that it persuaded her to take the job (even though she was just days away from retirement! lol). The trip takes 75 years, mostly in cryosleep, so good thing she had no ties back on Earth or anything either.

Now she's arrived, with half a dozen scientists and slightly more marines, and made contact with the humans, who let slip about the aliens (I think the Earth humans haven't actually met any sentient ones yet). Meanwhile there's an alien named Aras who's been spliced with human DNA through some possibly-contagious means, who lets annoyingly little information slip through his close third-person POV. It moves excruciatingly slowly.

Anyway, I got about a hundred pages in and elected not to finish it. It was being too slow to get started, I wasn't invested in the characters, and I was getting a little frustrated at how slowly information was being dribbled out to the reader. But mostly I just didn't care what happened next. I have had some good luck recently with some of the new authors being tried--the James Clemens and J.V. Jones, which of course were both fantasy--but I do still give myself permission to bail on them.

Greg Keyes: The Briar King, completed November 27

A few days earlier I had spent some time thinking about some male-author books to read next. Often a book will sit on the shelf for years waiting patiently for me to decide the time is ripe to read it, and I'll pass it over dozens of times before suddenly deciding, "Now is the time."

The only things I've read by Greg Keyes (or J. Gregory Keyes, as he is sometimes billed) are his Babylon 5 tie-in novels. They had some decent ones that came out after the series--Peter David's Centauri trilogy, Jeanne Cavelos's Techno-Mage trilogy, and Keyes's somewhat looser Psi Corps trilogy centered around good old Alfred Bester--one book about the events leading up to Bester's birth, one about his rise to power, and then one about his final days being hunted down by Mr. Garibaldi. I know he's also done other tie-in books, some Star Wars I think, and some Elder Scrolls books which I'm somewhat curious about.

The Briar King was the first of his own books that I saw, and I picked it up at the time; my wife has read the series, but I never got around to it. Until now. (The series itself is apparently called "Kingdoms of Thorn And Bone".)

It starts with a Prologue and a Prelude. The Prologue is one of those that depicts events that happened centuries ago, though unlike Wit'ch Fire it doesn't look like most of the characters who appeared there will also appear in the main timeline. It mostly establishes that humans were once enslaved by a race called the Skasloi, but they fought their way free with the help of a new human group called the Born Men. These Born Men turn out to be the "Vhirr Genian" or "Virgenyan"…led by a woman named Genia Dare, the Born Queen. Yes, that's right; if you didn't spot it before it's more explicitly spelled out at the end of the Prologue, these Born Men are actually the lost Roanoke colony, who got transported to this fantasy world somehow. The mystery word "Croatan" seems like a reference to this land, or to magic itself, it's not quite clear.

In the Prelude, much closer to the main timeline, we see the young princess Anne Dare, whose father (King William) is the ruler of the Empire of Crotheny (a time-blurred version of Croatan, I guess). Why he's called King and not Emperor is far from clear. Anne is a nigh-stereotypical wilful princess who is, fortunately, only one of our POV characters, because she has a loooot of maturing to do. Our other main characters include Aspar White, a "holter" whose job is to keep the King's Forest clear of poachers and riffraff; Stephen Darige, a somewhat naïve monk who's good with languages and history and anything that can be found in a book, not so much with the real world; Neil MeqVren, a Scottish-analogue squire who's coming to the Imperial capital for the first time, and gets tangled up with the royal family; and an Italian-analogue feckless fencer-type named Cazio who turns up somewhat later in the book. Oh, and we got some from King William and Queen Muriele, who have a handicapped son Charles (presumptive heir), and two other daughters besides Anne; William also has twin siblings Robert and Lesbeth. And somebody is conspiring to try to make sure that when the Briar King wakes, there is no queen…because apparently this is very important.

I quite enjoyed this book, and will definitely want to continue in the series. There are definitely Song of Ice And Fire comparisons to be made, but the fantasy genre existed before George R.R. Martin too. The Dare family/Roanoke thing seems a little random, but maybe there'll be some payoff later in the series for it, I don't know. Let's just hope that Anne grows up a little.

This month I also pushed forward (largely on the day I gave up on City of Pearl) and finished the Ed Yong book An Immense World that I'd started a while ago. It's not like it wasn't interesting, going through the various senses (including far more than the standard five) and examining their roles in the animal kingdom, which animals have much better or much worse or much different versins of them. Part of the problem may be from the physical book itself--it had a little "step-back" cover which wasn't particularly annoying, but the edge of the inner cover page started to get a bit curled from normal reading, which did start to bother me. And also the type seemed smaller than I'm comfortable reading these days, particularly the footnotes. And there were colour plates that are of course of a stiffer material and can make reading uncomfortable too. But I learned a lot. I have a stack of eight or nine other nonfiction books waiting for me to look at them, but for now I've picked up Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar: A Bittersweet History again, a book I started quite a while ago but don't always have to stamina to read for long because while it's ostensibly about sugar, it spends a lot of time on slavery on sugar plantations in the New World, which is an important topic but not one I can read about for very long.

I also read another one of those Love & Rockets e-omnibuses I got a while back, this one being another Gilberto Hernandez "Heartbreak Soup" collection called Ofelia. I had read some of it before in comics (the Pipo stuff in particular) but hadn't revisited nearly as often. It had its ups and downs, and I wasn't always invested in every character; the largest plotline seemed to be the troubled romance between Pipo and Fritzi, but we also had Gato-Guadalupe-Sergio, Khamo and Luba, a new guy named Hector who was involved with Luba and Fritzi's sister Petra, some weird guy named Fortunato who may or may not have been a supernatural being of some sort, a few guys from the "Love & Rockets X" storyline, the unexpected arrival of old weird child Boots who is now an old weird adult and hasn't grown an inch, and oh yeah, Ofelia herself once in a while. It sounded like we might end up revisiting Palomar in the near future, which might be a nice change of pace.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Justice Warriors

Today (May 22), I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

Tomorrow (May 23), I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch for Red Team Blues that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

The internet did not create Matt Bors, but the internet would be a much poorer place without Bors and his acerbic, scorchingly funny webcomics, which he publishes at The Nib (a site he founded), amongst some of the web’s most iconic humor:

https://thenib.com/

Founding The Nib and creating a home for all those great webcomics would be legacy enough for one creator, but Bors monumental accomplishment with The Nib is topped by his savage creation, Mr Gotcha, the single most effective rebuttal to the most annoying Reply Guys on the whole internet:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Dayenu: if he had only founded The Nib, it would be enough. If he had only created Mr Gotcha, it would be enough. But Bors continues to amaze and delight. In Justice Warriors, a graphic novel he co-produced with Ben Clarkson, we get a distillate of all the weird, crazed things both grotesque and lovable about the net of a thousand lies:

https://membership.thenib.com/products/justice-warriors

Justice Warriors is what you’d get if you put Judge Dredd in a blender with Transmetropolitan and set it to chunky. The setup: the elites of a wasted, tormented world have retreated into Bubble City, beneath a hermetically sealed zone. Within Bubble City, everything is run according to the priorities of the descendants of the most internet-poisoned freaks of the modern internet, click- and clout-chasing mushminds full of corporate-washed platitudes about self-care, diversity and equity, wrapped around come-ons for sugary drinks and dubious dropshipper crapola.

Outside of Bubble City is the Unoccupied Zone, which is very much occupied with a teeming assortment of motley mutants, themselves gripped by endless crazes, fads, and trending subjects. The Uzzers are Bubble City’s hated underclass, viciously policed by the Bubble City cops, who mow them down with impunity, crying about their impending PTSD as they work the trigger.

Justice Warriors is a cop buddy-story dreamed up by Very Online, very angry creators who live in a present-day world where reality is consistently stupider than satire. As Bors told Cy Beltran in Comics Beat, “The current moment is so many things at once, it’s an omni-crisis of politics and attention — that’s what felt important to tap into, that sense of frenzy you can barely keep up with.”

https://www.comicsbeat.com/matt-bors-justice-warriors-interview/

That’s the feeling of Justice Warriors, all right. As Bors puts it, they tackle “social media derangement, celebrity culture, investment schemes, mass movements, and A.I.” in a tale with more sight-gags, densely packed literary references, and savage takedowns per page than anything you’ve ever read.

The art in this book is spectacular, styled a bit like those ultra-busy Al Jaffee full-page MAD Magazine spreads, or the Moss Eisley Cantina, or the wild alien scenes from Ben Hatke’s YA classic Zita the Space Girl kids’ graphic novels:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/06/25/zita-the-space-girl-delightful-kids-science-fiction-comic-thats-part-vaughn-bode-part-mos-eisley-cantina/

But Justice Warriors is grosser, busier, and more frenetic than any of them. As Bors describes it, they created “a chaotic mutant-infested city that tops the most sensory-overloading cities in all of comics and animation.”

Justice Warriors is a mind-altering experience. If you liked Bubble, Jordan Morris and Sarah Morgan’s apocalyptic comedy podcast/graphic novel, you’ll love Justice Warriors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/21/podcasting-as-a-visual-medium/#huntr

This is a comic book the internet needs. In a century, when our mutant descendants wonder how it all went wrong, they can use Justice Warriors as a Rosetta Stone to make sense of the detritus of our civilization.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in DC, Toronto, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/22/libras-assemble/#the-uz

[Image ID: A panel from Justice Warriors depicting a mob of motley mutants protesting over the financialization of bread. One shouts, 'Stabilize the economy!' Another shouts, 'Bread is not money!']

[day-dreaer]

Week 10: Behind the Screen: Victims of Malicious Keyboards

In the era of digital technology, people can connect with each other more easily than ever. Along with the undeniable conveniences, a dark side of the internet is also rising strongly: online harassment, especially racist behavior. Sadly, those who hide behind the screen choose to spread hatred instead of peace and understanding.

First, let's imagine a world where everyone loves and respects each other. Wouldn't that be great? But unfortunately, those are just distant dreams when millions of people still have to face cruel words, just because of their skin color or origin. Apparently, these harassers seem to have a magical ability: they know how to hate someone without meeting them.

These "keyboard warriors" often justify their behavior with absurd arguments such as "it's just a joke", "freedom of speech" or "I'm just telling the truth". In fact, if freedom of speech is understood as the right to spread venom everywhere, then perhaps this definition needs to be reconsidered. It is interesting to see how one person's freedom can become another person's horror.

In essence, online racism is like a toxic virus, spreading quickly and causing deep damage. Every negative word, every negative comment is an invisible knife stabbing at the victim's self-esteem, making them feel isolated and losing their self-worth. If harassers understood the power of words, perhaps they would think twice before pressing the "send" button.

Another equally ironic aspect is how society often ignores this issue. Social media platforms always pride themselves on smart algorithms and strict policies, but the reality shows a different picture. Discriminatory words are still rampant, while actions to stop them are slow and ineffective. Indeed, the invention of artificial intelligence technology does not mean the acquisition of emotional intelligence.

However, not everything is hopeless. The online community has also witnessed strong waves of protests from conscious users who are willing to stand up for justice and humanity. They are the real warriors in the fight against racism, constantly spreading positive messages and demanding justice for the victims.

In conclusion, online harassment related to racism is not just an individual problem but a common challenge for the whole society. Each of us has a responsibility to create a safe and healthy online environment. Only when we truly understand and appreciate cultural diversity can humanity move closer to a truly peaceful and just world. Until then, keep satirizing and mocking these negative behaviors, because sometimes, satire is the only way to awaken conscience.

Reference list

Banaji, M.R., Fiske, S.T. and Massey, D.S. (2021). Systemic racism: Individuals and interactions, institutions and society. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, [online] 6(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00349-3.

Bliuc, A.-M., Jakubowicz, A. and Dunn, K. (2019). Racism in a networked world: how groups and individuals spread racist hate online. [online] The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/racism-in-a-networked-world-how-groups-and-individuals-spread-racist-hate-online-109072.

Frueh, S. (2022). The Far-Reaching Impacts of Racism and Bias. [online] Nationalacademies.org. Available at: https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2020/12/the-far-reaching-impacts-of-racism-and-bias.

Kornegay, S. (2021). Online Racism Leads to Real-World Mental Health Challenges. [online] UCONN. Available at: https://education.uconn.edu/2021/02/25/for-students-of-color-online-racism-leads-to-real-world-mental-health-challenges/.

#mda20009

[lighthousenewsnetwork]

WASHINGTON D.C. – In a move lauded by proponents of "increased judicial openness" and mocked by literally everyone else, the Supreme Court has announced a groundbreaking new initiative: mandatory mood rings for all justices. Yes, you read that right. The esteemed jurists who shape the very fabric of American law will now be sporting those groovy, color-changing gems on their pinkies. "This bold new policy will usher in an era of unprecedented transparency in the highest court of the land," declared Chief Justice John Roberts, his own mood ring currently flashing a reassuring teal (calm and collected, folks!). "The American people deserve to know exactly how the justices are feeling when they make those earth-shattering decisions. Is it a 'Second Amendment Sunday' kind of day, a fiery crimson filled with Second Amendment fervor? Or maybe a cool, blue 'States' Rights Saturday'?" The science behind the initiative, according to a press release from the court, is "irrefutable." Justice Antonin Scalia's ghost (who, we're assured, still hangs around the chambers) apparently channeled the spirit of a 1970s mood ring manufacturer during a particularly heated debate about stare decisis. This spectral entity, in a move that historians might call "unprecedented," relayed the groundbreaking information that mood rings, with their cutting-edge thermochromic liquid crystal technology, could accurately reflect the emotional state of the wearer. The benefits, as outlined by the court, are seemingly endless. Imagine the clarity these mood rings will bring! A fiery red ring during Second Amendment arguments? We all know how that one's going to swing. A calming lavender during a case on environmental regulations? Breathe easy, green warriors! Of course, there are some minor concerns. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose mood ring has been a constant source of amusement for the court stenographers (it's currently a stormy purple, for the record), expressed reservations about the initiative. "Is this really the best way to ensure public trust in the court?" she quipped, before disappearing behind a heavy sigh and a stack of unsigned opinions. "What about privacy?" a reporter bravely inquired, only to be met with a collective eye roll from the assembled justices. Justice Clarence Thomas, his mood ring an unwavering black (enigmatic, perhaps?), simply stared impassively. Then there's the question of accuracy. Can a simple mood ring truly capture the complexities of legal reasoning, the years of precedent, the nuanced arguments before the court? "Look," said Professor Bartholomew Bartholomew, a renowned mood ring analyst (yes, that's his real name), "these things are more like disco balls than crystal balls. They might tell you someone's generally fired up, mellow, or somewhere in between, but they're not going to tell you the difference between strict constructionism and textualism." But hey, at least it's entertaining, right? Imagine the live-streamed Supreme Court arguments, complete with a split-screen analysis of the justices' mood rings flashing like a malfunctioning Christmas tree. Now that's some real "gavel-to-gavel" coverage we can all get behind! (This is where the satire kicks in) Of course, the real joke here is the very notion that a mood ring can provide any meaningful insight into the complex world of judicial decision-making. The Supreme Court's legitimacy doesn't rest on the color of a plastic gem, it rests on an independent and impartial judiciary that is free from political pressure and emotional whims. So, the next time you hear about "transparency" in the legal system, take a moment to question the methods being proposed. Sometimes, a little mystery is all that keeps the scales of justice balanced. And hey, maybe if we focus less on the color of the justices' fingers and more on the quality of their arguments, we just might get a court system worthy of the public's trust. After all, a thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion is infinitely more valuable than a disco ball on your pinky.

#Humor #judicialtransparency #moodrings #Satire #supremecourt

[comicbookclub]

H. Jon Benjamin and Jefferson White Want You To 'Vote Harder' In New 'Justice Warriors' Trailer

H. Jon Benjamin and Jefferson White star in the new animated trailer for AHOY Comics Justice Warriors Vote Harder. Watch it here.

This is the most important election of our lifetime. And what I’m about to show you might be the most important comic book trailer of our lifetime, too, as H. Jon Benjamin and Jefferson White star in the new teaser for Justice Warriors 2: Vote Harder from AHOY Comics. Created by Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson, Justice Warriors is a wild satire of capitalism, the police, and politics — and it looks…

[mattbors]

An election thriller for our deranged times...

JUSTICE WARRIORS: VOTE HARDER. 

An original graphic novel hitting shelves on 9/11. Pre-order link below!

Pre-order for from your local shop or online here: