Synova

  Some things sound so obviously good that they don't need to be examined.  One of those things is the idea of Representation in fiction; movies, television or books.  Entertainment where some people are conspicuously absent would seem to be an obvious problem, right?  A person doesn't have to be "woke" or any sort of feminist to occasionally watch an old television show and realize (for example) that all the scientists and astronauts in an old movie are men. It's as glaring an anachronism these days as watching a show where everyone is chain smoking cigarettes. Entertainment should reflect the diverse nature of real life and society because, in the end, fiction has to be even more real than real life.  If nothing else, it makes that entertainment more interesting to introduce characters with a variety of backgrounds and challenges. And so we're told that diverse fiction is BETTER fiction. The way that this rather obvious truth is often framed, often discussed...

  I originally drew this comic right after Trump was elected and people had to talk their friends down because they were terrified.  I had to talk my own kids down because they'd been exposed to so much outrageous fear mongering that they thought something bad would happen to them...from a President who was the first one EVER to support gay marriage before he was elected and expressed support for letting trans people be, years and years earlier. The profound evil present in people deliberately instilling extreme fear in the most vulnerable people in our communities for something as twisted as political benefit and then having the gall to turn around and answer exactly as this comic shows made me so angry that the original comic was a mess of rage-coloring. Still, I find myself in situations where I want to pull this out and post it so often that I needed to redraw and recolor.  The other was so bad that it would have distracted from the point I wanted to make. Preaching f...

 From a Face Book post by Thomas Eastmond. Thinking about this: (Note after unpacking thoughts: “TL/DR seems inadequate here. Start your own blog, guy.”) The Western liberal tradition, with its principles of tolerance and freedom of thought and conscience, is almost four centuries old. It first developed as, basically, “Thirty Years War insurance.”* The West didn’t invent tolerance (something new and revolutionary in human history, whose rule ever since we were roaming the prehistoric plains had been “whatever you do, don’t talk back to the alpha male/headman/king” or he’ll get mad and smack you with a club”) because a bunch of unusually decent and smart people sat down and decided to reinvent the world. It happened because the particular social, cultural, geographical (Jared Diamond isn’t *all* wrong) and technological circumstances of seventeenth-century Europe has gotten people recognizing that continuing with the old model posed a real risk of actual, not rhetorical civilizati...