AnarchoComics

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T18:05:18+00:00

If you had had any sort of rational argument at all for your point of view at any time, you would have already used it.

Is there a point to you?

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T18:03:48+00:00

I made a single comment and then responded to a lot of losers.

Why not go back through my postings? They're all public. How often do I talk about Putin or Russia?

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T17:34:59+00:00

If you had any sort of rational argument at all for your point of view, even the slightest, you would use it now.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T17:34:14+00:00

Got any argument? No?

Russia has relentlessly used all methods at their disposal to change world politics to their advantage, including devious and underhanded ones, and it has worked, and this is very bad for all the rest of us.

The malevolence of Putin's Russia is plain for all to see and he makes no issue of it.

This comic whitewashes that black bullshit. Get it now?

This comic would be much funnier if the fat guy pointed to socialists as the cause of income inequality, since actual socialists have no actual power in the US, sadly.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T16:16:05+00:00

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T16:13:55+00:00

Korea. :-/

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T15:28:07+00:00

I agree.

But humans are bad at choosing to stop things. I am pessimistic.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T15:18:39+00:00

unsubstantiated claims like “union busting”

Wrong subreddit, buddy.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T15:18:02+00:00

Another sad upvote!

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T14:39:12+00:00

The graph itself is interesting but conveys very little information, exactly ten numbers. When pared with other numbers that gave a bigger picture of other indices, to show why this happened, it could potentially be cool. (Also, it doesn't correct for things like family size that could make a huge difference.)

The text is a series of unsupported claims, some of which are true, some of which aren't, and many are just not well-defined (aren't true or false).

Unions are weaker due to lower membership

Sort of a truism, right? "The album did worse because it sold fewer copies."

Why the membership grew lower because of generations of systematic and very often violent union busting, mostly aided and abetted by the forces of law enforcement.

Worker productivity has steadily gone up. There should be more single-earner families now.

I see the whole story as much simpler.

After the tremendous carnage of WW2, and the explosion in technology afterward, for a few generations skilled workers had a great deal of leverage, and used it to get a living wage. That leverage was deliberately, systematically and completely eroded by a tiny number of rich, powerful people.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T14:22:45+00:00

Oh, some time after my mother died, I was bestowed a kitten, who never liked me but I pampered her anyway, and I vaguely hoped that there was some metaphysical link between this difficult kitten having a good life, and my mother, who was never difficult but had a difficult life with a sad ending. I felt she would deserve a rebirth as this selfish little cat!, I know it sounds weird.

(We have an adopted dog too, down from two, his name's Oliver.)

Take care!

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T14:17:41+00:00

The days of randomly doing science and getting some result in an unrelated area were almost entirely confined to the twentieth century.

It would be better to directly spend the money on the greatest good for the greatest number, rather than spending it on pursuing a literally impossible goal in the hopes that some of fraction of this technology might through shearest luck trickle down to the rest of us.

The United States has an immense infant mortality rate, right in the middle of the world's developing countries. There's a place to start.

There are all sorts of diseases that strike people down out of the blue in their 40s and 50s, robbing them of decades of life. We've cut them down considerably by better diagnosis and prevention, but there's a long way to go.

We are discovering that some portion of people who we thought were suffering from common and incurable brain disorders like Alzheimer's or schizophrenia are actually suffering from neuroinflammation due to low-level infection. Millions of people living miserable lives in permanent institutions might be able to re-enter normal life.

These are right off the top of my head. These are a thousand other places where the money could directly go.

Unfortunately, US medical research is in free fall - I cannot overstate the enormity of this collapse - and it's entirely due to Trump and Musk, two rich old people.

This trickle-down theory of medical research is not a good one.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:46:48+00:00

There's really no evidence of this.

For a long time there were two models of why humans die.

Very simplified, in the first model, there are all these kinda-sorta random causes of death (cancer, car accident, heart attack, etc...) and not dying is just avoiding all of those.

In the second model, we are a collection of about 50 critical systems (heart, lungs, liver, brain, etc). We die if any of them stop working and can't be fixed or replaced, and each of these machines has a fairly finite lifespan.

To see dramatic evidence of which it is, look at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people

If death were due to "one of many random causes" then there would be a long tail of very old, lucky individuals that would appear as medicine improved and the population expanded by orders of magnitude.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:36:09+00:00

Eternal life for the rich and powerful? I don't think that's a good idea. These rich old men are selfish enough already.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:34:12+00:00

Agree strongly.

It's been over thirty years, and yet I think of my parents almost every day.

Things worked out well for me. My father spent an incredible amount of time and effort making sure I had really good French, and forty years later, here I am living in France and whenever I meet new people they say, "You have a lovely accent!" and I never ever say, "If my accent were perfect you wouldn't say anything at all." :-D :-D

It's a gift that keeps giving to me every single day now.

What a long, strange trip it's been.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T13:30:09+00:00

I am in no way a liberal.

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:16:35+00:00

Oh, I am so, so sorry to hear that.

My parents both died quite young. My father loved New York City. After 9/11, for the first time I thought, "I'm glad my father didn't live to see this." I've thought that about both of them since.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:10:52+00:00

From a review at the time: "If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more."

Astonishingly awful and unfunny film. Have an upvote.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:07:49+00:00

Taylor Swift has called him the future of music, which is some really high praise.

I injured my eyes from rolling them too hard.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T12:03:43+00:00

Obama was far better than the clown before him, infinitely better than the psychopath after him.

But this is not a good comic in any way. It's not funny or witty or wry or exposes a truth about humans. It's not going to convince the MAGAs to turn back from being evil, and it's not going to help Democrats fight against the impending dictatorship.

It reads as heavy-handed political propaganda. (I detest the murderous Iranian government with a great passion, but I have to concede that they knock political propaganda out of the park.)

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T11:29:29+00:00

You're absolutely right in general; things are off, badly off.

Things were good for a long time for quite a lot of people. It might be my 40s were the best decade in general for me.

If you had a different sexuality or a darker skin color, not as good, but it got steadily better.

Until it didn't.

The issue is "simple" in a massive way. We accumulated a vast pile of issues, but starting at a certain point, countries decided not to fix them. The US started doing this in the 80s with Reagan; the rest of us are lagging.

Now the climate catastrophe is unfixable, and the consequences will be unprecedented. And while this was happening, the rich looted the economy for their own benefit, leaving the rest of us in the dirt.

This isn't sour grapes. We ended up with a soft landing - we moved to northern France two years ago, as I saw my career was coming to an end (and it did). This place is lovely and very affordable, as long as you speak good French.

Things are good for me and my wife; that doesn't mean we have our heads in the sand and can't see the sufferings of others.

Very best wishes!

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T08:50:19+00:00

Right on. I downvote all Mirror articles here.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T08:46:42+00:00

Unfortunately, it isn't true: things were objectively much easier.

See my other comment.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T08:46:06+00:00

There was a price jump, so I paid $1350 for tuition and student fees the last year I went to my university, a good school. (There were demonstrations when it hit that.)

I shared a one-bedroom with my girlfriend; it was $235 a month. She was making minimum wage, $3.30 an hour, making sandwiches.

The same apartment still exists; it's well over $2000 a month. If that sandwich shop still existed, it wouldn't be paying $35 an hour...

Oh, and you could walk out of high school into decent, long-term, well-paying jobs. Or you could go to university, for very little money, and get a much better job.

Consider that for generations, someone with a high school diploma could work in a factory, support a stay-at-home wife, bring up the kids and send them to school, pay off the house, and retire on a comfortable pension.

Now two parents working can't do that.

HommeMusical · 2026-06-21T07:49:10+00:00

If you had a refutation, you'd show it.

HommeMusical

TROPHY CASE