Other cartoons that the publisher refused to print before firing Rogers:
A political cartoonist who had satirized every President during his 25 years at the paper is fired for drawing Trump cartoons.
“This is precisely the time,” Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto (often the target of Rogers’ cartoons) said, “when the constitutionally protected free press – including critics like Rob Rogers – should be celebrated and supported, and not fired for doing their jobs. This decision, just one day after Trump labeledthe news media is ‘our country’s biggest enemy.’“
Y'know, like dictators always do under fascist regimes.
to add to this “humans are weird” thing did you know that humans are the only species on earth with the ability to throw things with any significant degree of accuracy and force (apes can throw with about the force of a human ten year old, but cant lock their wrists well enough for accuracy)
and we just never really think about it bc its so easy and simple to us that pretty much all of our sports are based around the concept of throwing things accurately
so what if the concept of projectile weapons takes most species FOREVER to get the hang of, or even come up with in the first place. a human goes onto a ship and throws some trash into the nearest reclaimer, shouts “kobe!” and all the other aliens on board absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDS
I definitely didn’t know this about humans but it’s actually really neat
‘This place needs a dartboard.’ *darts is explained* ‘You… throw sharp objects at a tiny point on a circle with the expectation of hitting it and mock those who do not achieve this amazing feat.’ ‘It’s better if you’ve had a couple of beers.’ ‘You insist that you’re more accurate when partially intoxicated. I have seen you intoxicated. Fine motor control is not something I associate with intoxication.’ ‘The one sport where doping is actually encouraged.’ ‘Humans. How. Just how. ’ ‘You think this is hard, try throwing cards.’
I’m now super enchanted with the idea that there are all these alien racs out there that basically didn’t do projectiles until at least they had geometry and aerodynamics worked out– no throwing stones or slings and arrows, nothing range until catapults with some heavy maths calculations behind them because they couldn’t eyeball it. And some of them not even having that– going from hand-to-hand to computer-targetted bombs, pretty much. And then coming to earth and finding out about spears and bows and arrows and slings and skipping stones– and suddenly there’s a rush on their homeworlds of all these really bad pop-xenopyschoanthropology books about the effect of being able to kill at a distance on our pyschocultural development, how it effects our perception of ourselves and the universe - all these bad science, lurid explanations about how this has effected our strange alien minds to give us warped senses of territoriality or death or social-unit-bonding.
Of all the humans are weird I like this one the most. Feels mundane enough yet just weird enough without making us out to be supersoldiers because I dunno I guess aliens have weak constitutions now or something..
Most ‘humans are weird’ things try to focus on the things humans can do that most animals can’t, but like, they kinda blow it out of proportion. Like sure humans are sturdier than most animals but not by THAT much.
Personally, I’ve always like the combination of facts that A) We’re obscenely flexible compared to anything with else with bones B) We have crazy endurance and C) We’re DTF pretty much whenever. And whatever, for that matter.
Super soldiers nothing, I’m pretty sure Humans would be the Weird Sex Alien.
Those ones are also decent and reasonable “humans can be cool space alien planet of hat biological archetypes too!”
humans:
internal organs are full of acid
eats poison for fun
can throw things like woah
can run for a long time even when normally you would get tired
i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me - actually, many people have - that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex - sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think - but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” - feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
It’s 1 a.m. and I just found this video. I made the gif’s while holding back the tears. As someone who posts horror this I can assure you this is one of the most scariest things in the world. Because events like these are occurring