Their ability to jump between goofy fun and thoughtful commentary regarding comics and race/gender/identity/sexuality was pretty rare.  They had a great team assembled, and I hope to see them all get paying replacement gigs soon.  But I will miss finding their insights together in one place.

Thanks for the fun and commentary, Comics Alliance.  You will be missed.

It is about street harassment.  I don’t think we men quite realize what (and how early) women are really facing.  It is a challenging and heartbreaking read.  But it is worth it.

Really, I hate the whole, “I’ll bet you $______ if you can just prove ________.”  Sure, sometimes it is a “I’ll give it to charity”…but mostly, it is about boasting rights and usually the expectation is that nobody will take them up.  That is, of course, because usually the claim is a worthless waste of time.  And this is most certainly a waste of time…and this guy wants to waste a judge’s time on top of that.

Oh yeah…evolution DOES contradict a literal reading of the Genesis Creation story.  A non-literal reading?  No, then it does not contradict the Genesis Creation story.  But if you are arguing for a literal reading?  Then you have no damn idea what LITERAL means.

Wow.  These young men had sex with an unconscious young woman.  You know, as Candy puts it… “Rape, Essentially”.  Oh wait, not essentially rape.  It was rape.  She is unconscious.  Their having sex with her was non-consensual.  They raped her.  Then took pictures.  This is not a matter of opinion. This is not a situation with more than one way of seeing what happened.  They raped her, pure and simple.  If you try and make it anything else?  You’re despicable.

Did you notice Trent May’s apology to the young woman, her family and community were for taking and distributing the pictures? He was not apologizing for the rape.

And yet?  We got six minutes from CNN that barely mentioned the victim.

Because, why would you express concern about the victim of the rape, when the real victims in all of this were the rapists and their now tainted futures?!  What does this all mean for them??!

Yeah…this will haunt these guys for most of their lives.  There are, of course options if they actually step back and look what they have done.  If they seek to see why it was wrong.  To try and contribute to society to challenge rape within our culture.  That would be really tough and painful.  And they would have to prove themselves to people.  And yet, none of that came up in six minutes discussing the future of these young men.  No, it was a tragedy… after all, they were good students.  They were good football players.  And it is so unfair that this act of rape is now interfering with their bright and shiny future.

Boo Hoo.

And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the
fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial
entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless — unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there’s a good reason for it.

That’s the — that’s the concern that those of us who — who have some questions about this statute. It’s — it’s a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose — they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act.

Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?

Racial entitlement.  See, really, what he is arguing here is that we should not make sure to make the right to vote equal access.  It is,  his mind, to have laws and regulations that take racial inequality are wrong…because really, the law should be colorblind.  Conservatives can often get hung up on the notion of the law being colorblind.  But the truth is, the law is only successfully colorblind in a culture that is truly colorblind.  Of course, conservatives like to claim the culture is colorblind as well.  This is not just conservatives though…liberals try and claim to not see color as well.

In an episode of Girls this season, Lena Dunham breaks up with her black conservative boyfriend (played by Donald Glover)…and in the midst of their argument, she tries to argue that he is the racist, because she totally doesn’t see color and his being black was something she had never ever noticed or given thought to.  Right.  It was a rather perfect little moment  of deserved liberal skewering.  Dunham’s character is declaring her inability to see color.  But here is the fundamental problem.  We may think we do not see race…but we often make assumptions about race in our daily lives.

A rather distasteful example was an infamous tweet after the Hunger Games hit theaters.  There were several folks that complained that Rue was played by a young black girl named Amandla Stenberg.  Barely 13, she was greeted with commentary like:

Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the little blonde innocent girl you pictured.

She was not alone.  People piled on to complain about the force PC mentality that would alter the original story and change characters so they would not all be white.  Except, Rue was described as being dark skinned in the book.  They are certainly not white.  Yet, these folks all perceived Rue to be white.  In Hollywood, colorblind casting calls often end up going with white actors.  These are not necessarily conscious actions.  But white has been the default of America…most movies and televisions shows were about us.  And when given fiction, we often-if given no instruction otherwise- default to white.

Think honestly…if you were reading a book about a hero cop named Ray Johnson and were given no instruction as to his race by the story…what would you picture?  An asian guy?  A black guy?  I think it is pretty safe to assume that in casting the movie of the book, Ray would be played by Tom Cruise.

Getting back to Scalia’s comments.  The law will never be colorblind as long as our culture is not.  The law will bend to the culture, and if the law refuses to side with equality so it can remain colorblind, the society that sees color will use the law to smash equality, even unintentionally.

And normally?  I would totally agree.  In pretty much any case, this kind of armor is totally ridiculous.  Simone lists a number of good reasons why people can let it slide with Red Sonja…but her first reason is the one that makes the most sense to me.  Red Sonja spun out of this universe:

Listen, if you shot an arrow at Conan and one at Red Sonja, she has about a 30% better chance of surviving.  He is wearing fur briefs.

Gail Simone offers:

But I also have that feeling in the back of my mind that there are always people who want to tell women what to wear, how to present and display themselves. It doesn’t seem out of character to me for Sonja to be wearing something light and unrestrictive. I keep hearing people say she should wear more armor, and I think, maybe for war, if she was prepared, but the barbarians we are talking about aren’t knights or Gondorians, it’s a different level of technology. Some of that does appear in Howard’s Conan but to a much lesser degree.

In the case of Red Sonja, I think  Gail nails it:

To me a much bigger problem has been the posing. If she’s posing like a Penthouse pet, something’s gone wrong.  Sexy and powerful is fine, sexualized beyond context is not.

You can read her thoughts here.  The Red Sonja image is an upcoming cover by the very talented and cool Colleen Doran.

The story began with Amy working for Abaddon Industries, a giant corporation.  She has a massive breakdown at work following a betrayal from her Boyfriend (both in terms of relationship and workplace standing).  Amy goes into treatment in a “new agey” clinic in Hawaii.  She has an epiphany about making the world a better place.  She finds herself connecting to the earth in a spiritual fashion.  Except, the truth is, she is really more interested in what this epiphany can do for her.  Can her new found “compassion” for the earth and people be used to force change in Abaddon Industries?  Except for the kink that instead of her previously higher level position, she is put in the basement IT Group, under the rule of the tyrannical scumbag Dougie (Timm Sharp).  There she befriends meek IT worker Tyler (show co-creator Mike White).  Well, she tends to push Tyler around, under the guise of the greater good, getting him to use his superior computing skills to try and dig up dirt on the company.

Her personal life is also not lining up as she feels it should…her ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson) is a guy who never gave up the party-or the party never gave him up…Amy takes on the task of “saving him” from his addiction.  Her mother (Diane Ladd) just wants her to get her act together, and does not understand her new goals.  By the end of season one, Amy was still hitting her head against the wall, but got Levi to give in and go to the same treatment center.  She has used Tyler’s crush to start hacking the corporate system.

Season Two has Amy starting to get some advancement in her plot.  She and Tyler uncover some info that she takes to an L.A. writer named Jeff (Dermot Mulroney).  This begins a relationship as she digs in to blow the lid on the company.  There are some hiccups, but also some surprise alliances.

But what stands out is the fact that Dern and White pull no punches.  Amy is earnest in her self delusion.  She thinks she is working for the greater good.  She wants to be important, she wants to believe her enlightenment means something about what she will achieve, rather than just another cog in the machine.  She is less interested in helping people and more in helping herself.  Helping people is more about how it makes her feel about herself.  They do not try and sugar coat this, and it is benefits the show that they do not try and convince us that she is this great person.  It, in a way, makes her more sympathetic.  In her enlightenment, she is just as broken up as the people she claims to be wanting to help.

Her inability to connect with people on an honest level, and tendency to use them for her selfish goals of “changing the world” make her intensely human.  And the windows into her friends and co-workers the show gives us works the same.  Levi’s treatment is the opposite of Amy’s as he tries to replicate her experience…but where she saw beauty and and a new life, he finds a trash filled prison.  When he returns to Amy’s life, it is uncertain if Levi had the epiphany he claims, or is trying to convince himself he did.  Even Dougie becomes a sympathetic character as he realizes he has deluded himself as to where he stands within the company.

And her willingness to sacrifice ethics to become a hero who took down a corporation infects Tyler.  To cover their tracks, they set up another co-worker, who loses his job.  Amy uses Tyler’s growing relationship with another employee to build her case against the company.

While season one felt confused about how we should see this conflict, the second season is more confident and the stories are compelling.  As Amy appears to be getting nearer to success in her fight against Abaddon Industries, her life seems to be falling further out of focus.  The writing has been strong with great performances.  I am definitely willing to see where this story goes.