I wrote something about the Charlottesville riots a few weeks ago, but nasty stuff is always happening in the world, and I don’t keep up with it all, so I felt like maybe the matter was dated by the time I would get the post out, but retro is always the rage somewhere.

[one of those] awful website[s] that I am always complaining about despite continuing to use happened to institute a “code of conduct update” and announce that to all users. the “update” is of course totally pointless; the core rules, treat each other with respect, should cover everything. So the update primarily serves to remind people that they can argue about what “is” hate speech and who is more victimized by hate, themselves or the people they hate.

This completely unremarkable announcement prompted an endless series of arguments by opposed parties accusing each other of being fascists and nazis that resulted in the topic being closed for further remarks within less than a day. Which I suspect happens on EVERY site-wide update, and usually I try not to look too close –this manner of futility is nothing new in the history of the internet– but I have a terrible habit of skimming them in search of ludicrously long, petty comment threads, and happened to end up on this statement:

and I think that cuts to the meep of the matter. Not so much of what people argue ABOUT, but how they are able to continue arguing forever about ANYTHING. Once the previous pseudodiscussion is no longer hot, other dorks want to argue about the argument.
This post is NOTHING except a prompt for more people to agree or get angry at it. The BASE matter, white supremacists feeling more and more empowered and acting accordingly, is not one where “both sides” are equally at fault. But when you engage in jerky acts, you make it seem like it is. How can you claim to be peaceful when you go looking for pointless fights? People like that getting involved in peaceful movements, daring others to hit them so that they can hit back and claim self-defense, they allow the “other side” to isolate their abrasive behavior and apply it to the group as a whole. I am not making a “few bad apples” argument. This is a bad tree, and the tree IS on “both sides.”
I think there is an extremely small group of actual fascists, and legitimately violent “anti”-fascists, but the amount of fear hype about has drawn uncommonly large groups of folks with no clue what is going on into aligning themselves to fight something that doesn’t really exist, or at least promoting the fact that they think they do.

Comments like this accomplish what? Nothing at all. These people see that the arguments are pointless but would rather smirk at the camera like Ferris flippdippin Buehler than contribute in a meaningful fashion. And they will do it anywhere, not just on dumb old furrafinity. And I admit to also going in here primarily for my own amusement, but I don’t gloat about it. I recognize that I have an unfortunate habit. I don’t ENCOURAGE this to keep happening.
The earliest remarker doesn’t even understand the matter, seeming to think that “Antifa” is a person, presumably conflating it with “Anitarai,” the name of somebody who was at the center of the “gamergate” ideology furor a few years ago, whose contributors were equally unwilling to have solved. And I didn’t talk about it, since it wasn’t relevant to my life. But every social conflict looks like it now. My understanding is that antifa is a loose organization of abrasive folks but not necessarily out to break anything.
I think it is a misconception that protest marches are organized with the specific purpose of theft and vandalism. But then there are sorts who claim to belong to protest movements who are only in it because they like breaking stuff and/or stealing stuff, which means they are anti-everything, and not worth trying to please because nothing will ever be enough or more fun than feeling camaraderie while smashing things. It comes to the same thing as “getting popcorn,” except they grab it from somebody else. I do not think that will help them achieve their goals, assuming they have any. But there is not much I can say to somebody who has already given up!

Whoever you are, you can’t win by trying to get revenge or by telling your opposition it is stupid, because you have to share the planet with them. No, killing them is not an option, and “punching” them will only make them less rational. “But THEY would kill ME” I often see as a reply to this, and I do not believe that they would, on the whole. To use criminal outliers as an excuse to demand zero tolerance and pre-emptive punishment for anything and be abrasive forever seems to me like ultimately the same thing. That creep who backed a car into people on purpose, HE is a murderer, as an individual, even if a few people in the car’s path probably WISHED he would do it. Those wishers are also individuals, and not helping themselves or their friends, but not responsible for a murderer’s actions, either.

The “alt-right” movement exists by fixating on the most ridiculous and aggressive “liberals” and painting them as terrorists to distract from its actual irrational and unattainable root values, that non-straight and/or non-whites have to go, which is only deeply considered by a very small group. I guarantee you most of those “right wing” people don’t follow it to the core; they wouldn’t actually kill their target if given a chance. They claim that isn’t actually their goal, and I think if forced to admit that it WAS, or was the goal of their leaders, they would be embarrassed and go back to being privately jerky.

If modern day confederate support is not about hate, it is about ignorance. Enemies of the union should not have monuments to them on union land, and nobody should die for having a problem with that. The dumb old statue is just an excuse to reignite the fight. At the same time, I believe in self-preservation. The driver who killed a person and injured others plainly was out to cause damage, and is rightly being charged as a murderer. But unprotected people should taunt at cars driven by people who want to hurt them, since the car has all the power in that scenario. If you sincerely believe somebody to be a nazi, you ought to believe they have a nazi’s regard for the lives of those they disagree with. I just said I don’t think there are many who truly believe in killing for this, but there certainly are some. Having a person die as martyr does get attention to your cause, but I wouldn’t want to a belong to a group that encouraged its members to put themselves in danger needlessly. This is not China, this is not Afghanistan. We do not need to do that. From my perspective, white supremacists seem to be losing in this country. They are dying out and getting more desperate, and behaving like cornered rats. But they are human beings, and have legal rights that rats do not, so there is no situation where it makes sense to corner them that is in aid of peace. Somebody is going to get hurt, and it will be a crime either way. If your goal is to remove the entire legal system which grants equal rights in this manner then that is another matter entirely.

My thoughts drifted to “Crispy kat,” a proud nazi cartoon artist, who I mentioned several years ago. Yes these are the people that I know about, unfortunately. I had to check and sure enough Crispy has a predictable opinion on all this. I didn’t even guess that Crispy was pro-confederacy, but I guess just IS by default since that looks controversial and gets people annoyed. This person appears to think that since there were Union supporters who owned slaves, the confederacy should not be treated as emblematic of slavery. But it is only the south that fought to protect slavery. The northerners with slaves may be analogous with multinational corporations now, that exploit workers, don’t pay taxes, and don’t clean up after themselves, but that doesn’t mean that a lesser, more isolated injustice should be permitted, because that just keeps the powerless fighting each other. Crispy also feels that since soviet Russian imagery is not stigmatized, neither should nazi germany’s be. Again trying to confound the issue instead of taking responsibility. Instead of protesting offensive imagery, they present counter, deliberately offensive imagery, and then act smug about it. I must confess I don’t encounter people “who proudly fly the hammer and sickle,” but then I only know about Crispy’s proud swastiking by weird chance, and will believe that other inappropriate use of oppressive dictatorship imagery occurs. But the hammer+sickle are not iconographic in the same way that nazi swastikas, or “stars and bars” are (in fact Crispy, as much as she loves to change the subject and get off on a technicality, doesn’t even realize that “stars and bars” HISTORICALLY referred to the first national Confederate flag that nobody uses now since it looks too much like the Union’s flag). Since soviet Russia continued to exist with the same symbol for decades after its worst atrocities, the symbol became somewhat normalized and almost comical, when it became synonymous with cold war absurdity. And of course the current non-soviet Russia has its own issues with oppression, and also with neo nazis, as it happens. I, personally, would accept the swastika becoming innocuous and laughed at like that, and I think the confederate battle flag is well-designed. But they aren’t innocuous now, and probably are not going to be soon, and I would solve nothing by conspicuously enshrining them. I wish people could, or would, see where they stop fighting for justice and start fighting just because they like fighting. Crispo correctly identifies overpopulation and carelessness toward the environment, palm owls notwithstanding, as primary factors in the sad state of the world, so why continue to do stuff that gets people bickering over inconsequential symbolic issues?

At one time I considered that nazi furry-artwork was poorly executed satire, but now I just think it is mental illness. There are people who call themselves “furry raiders,” a group founded by somebody called Foxler. I cannot accept political rhetoric as sincere from somebody who role-plays as Adolf Hitler as a cartoon animal and wears a nazi-style red armband with a paw print instead of a swastika. Such a person has a very slight grasp on reality, and it would be irrational to argue with him. He even missed calling himself “Adolphin Swimler,” after eh. In a sense, it is unfair to ban him or his adherents from any conventions because most of your attendees in general are going to be people who live a weird fantasy. Although he also supposedly practices bestiality and sexual predation toward minors, while simultaneously criticizing furries who are outwardly perverted for giving the fandom a bad reputation.

When you experience dimwitted political conversations, somebody will often expound on what they think Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd would do or say in that situation, and can probably find a quote to fit any viewpoint that is antithetical to his actual viewpoints. Imagine if we talked about what Hitler would do. He would have EVERY suspected furry shot and shoved in a ditch, regardless of whether they pretended to be a cartoon fox allegory of him.
And so, I think, this gang actually aren’t Nazis, but they get off on being able to sport nazi-like regalia and attitudes in public and claim that isn’t what it is. They are enrapt in the petty sub-fight, of complaining about media bias and non-existent conspiracies targeting their heritage or whatever. Gosh the English lost the war of 1812 and nobody has a problem with THEIR “heritage” displays, because this isn’t really about that.

My older brother reads a lot and knows a lot, but expresses his knowledge in a way that gets people angry at him, and call him a fascist, and post nazi-punching memes at him, so he doesn’t really solve anything, and I fear that he enjoys not solving anything and feeling targeted. He wouldn’t go full crispy but if he but if he put a backwards swastika on a bag and called it a manji and carried the bag in a flagrant manner so somebody would try to put him in the hospital, that would STILL surprise me but it is more plausible. And my other brother has his own frustrating ways about that. It is very challenging to untangle the whole mess because there is always another story to shift focus to that I haven’t heard of and therefore cannot dissect, and half the time they turn out to be completely made up.

I do believe it is counterproductive to “tell it like it is” in a way that hurts marginalized people. That is not my goal. There is criticism about those who “crawl into a victim space” and in truth heavy conservatives were doing it first, with their wars on Christmas and assault on good old American Values talk. It may just be human nature to view yourself as the most wronged, and I would prefer to live with the less violent of the aspiring victims, if I had to choose, but I think I am stuck with both. Negative lifestyles cannot be magically changed, only eased out of.

What do I stand to gain, really, from talking about this? Nothing, probably, but I hate seeing people pat themselves on the back and solicit donations for saying dumb trash like “WE don’t support HATE” and “punch a nazi today!” and selling little trinkets with slogans on them. That, as usual, doesn’t help anything and it doesn’t take any courage to do that. And it doesn’t take courage because nazis are a minority and there is an extremely low chance you will run into more than one in any location where there isn’t a greater number of people who ostensibly advocate punching them. And so they will feel justified in using terrorist weapons, like automobiles against you. The real problem is people acting without empathy, and taking easy actions based on what their support groups, families, churches, whatever, encourage. Our president exacerbates this. He is seen as a hero by white supremacists, but since he can point to the fact that he never openly endorsed white supremacy in itself, he thinks doesn’t have to DO anything to stop it. He won’t take charge of a role he has but did not choose unless it serves his desired image. This is somebody who looked straight at the dumb eclipse (which I didn’t see at all but never mind) three times while everybody told him not, and he did it just BECAUSE everybody told him not to. He might do himself permanent damage, he might not, but he got to show off people who act like they think they are smarter than him.

Consider this: I have a niece, and sometimes I am asked to look after my niece, even though I am terrible at it and have things to work on. I could say: I don’t drink beer, I don’t do sex, I will never have children, and know I should not have children, and consequently there is no reason I should have any role of responsibility over this or any child. That would be “fair” in a sense, but it would cause animosity, hurting my family and alienating me from them, and in the end it would be my fault.
I say let the “nazis” have their rallies. The low turnouts speak for themselves. You can get a few thrown in jail by provoking them to extreme violence but never win in that manner.

This reminds me of Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring. When he tries to steal The Ring, even knowing that the point of the quest is to destroy the ring and the evil it permits to exist, he starts fantasizing about NOT destroying the ring and using its power to lead great armies. He wants to fight great wars forever, not prevent them, since that is all he understands, and all he enjoys. And I almost removed this bit of text, thinking it was better to refer to real acts by real people, but nobody I know seems real anymore, so perhaps I should exclusively use fictional examples.

This is the only thing I know how to draw now!

unsightly | How could you say such a thing! | !

page 49 of that, redrawn. compare to that if you need proof this was justified.

I had to remove some visually interesting details from the exterior shot for more consistency, Even with all the silly nonsense going on it seems to be important to me to have some basis of what is and is not so. and so also i have filled in interior details which i only established existed when i first drew the page after this one, and unconcerned about consistency as I was then, never made so.

But now I wonder about the validity of a medieval watch tower on kumquat’s “property,” since everything else inside seems to be either dirt or industrial, as if kumquat is dwelling in an abandoned, converted factory. I re-considered the tower to have a shoddy sheet metal exterior, but that contradicts earlier shots of the spiral staircase whose specific mood, with the presence of a torch, was dependent on the walls being stone.
I could retroactively claim, if I ever “reveal” that kumquat IS in an old factory, that the tower was bought at a yard sale or was inflatable, but that would mean going out of my way to clarify an inconsistency that most people would not notice. And therefore I would need to show kumquat buying something ELSE at a yard sale with the tower there incidentally, which would be too strange to be funny unless it were the focus. And so i would need to show kumquat inflating a different stone structure, but I do not know when that would ever come up.
I COULD indicate that -all- the exterior details are fake, as if wallpaper or an exceedingly eccentric paint job are involved, but i would still need to redraw the interior of the spiral staircase.

Additionally, the next page shows pog emerging from a body of water that plainly is not the one near kumquat’s house, because that is full of blue dope goop and the dope was not able to climb out of it easily, despite having, presumably, greater reach than pog does. But THIS page shows pog in a little boat.
i could remove the boated pog, but that is the only interesting background detail here. Although the dope pond is shown to be a short distance from the house(s) rather than immediately beside and certainly not behind them, so this may still work. The other vessels behind pog on the following page are disconnected enough from “serious” details that I do not need them to seem plausible.
I wish I had given half as much thought as this ten years ago! Or just never thought of it at all since on further reflection the “i am known by many names” frame makes least sense of all and I never considered changing that.

this ought to be the last page which requires a complete redrawing, since I never really finished drawing it to begin with. and doing this brings me back mentally and it makes sense that i was looking for ways to not draw it. But it is not the last one that needs loads of work on it. And if I want to be able to show an example issue at the one art show I attend, in october, I will need to get through fourteen more. oh!

I ruin some middling to decent material by talking about it too much. But I feel I must explain here that this is meant to be funny, even if, had it potential to succeed that it now lacks through my saying so, and I am not wanting of ways to block stupid banner advertisements. If I couldn’t do that I would have dug a hole and lived in it ten years ago. This is not a desperate depressed cry for help. I could not GET help by doing that.

What brought this on: I started my a web-browser which happened to have an unfortunate part of my image-posting routine in it when I last closed it, and the ad-blocker did not load fully before the ads did, and so there was PREGOO right in front of me. Necessary to share with others in some manner but too stupid to speak about. Immediately the above illustrated situation struck me, and I refreshed the page about 20 times to see what else might come up that I could also include. And some in there are from YEARS ago. I would see those things inadvertently and save them for a reason that I did not yet have. THIS is not the stuff I am tormented by and hide from. This trash is so stupid that I enjoy how stupid it is. It is not likely to fully engulf the culture around me and ruin my life for a year. I can complain about this without being silently shunned by the small amount of supporters I have. I think. If it turns out I can’t, I am better off without those people, since pretending I didn’t care how stupid this was got me nowhere for eight years.
How can an energy drink be inherently “furry” without having fur in it? And how can music, for that matter? Without being full of animal noises? Which it wouldn’t be because the whole point of furries is that they take themselves seriously and magically disassociate themselves from the inherent absurdity of their preferred visual subject matter. These advertisements are aimed squarely at an extremely narrow range of people who are religiously devoted to the thought of talking cartoon animals and are looking to spend ludicrous sums of money just to buy products from other people that they believe reinforces their own outward appearance of being an enthusiast. “Gamers” have even stupider stuff targeted at them but for the time being I have no audience deep amitz them, and so I am spared awareness.

I have a half-written articloid on the topic of the first frame, which pre-dated whatever instigated this petty comic strip, and perhaps you will see that later.

Page 25 of this
After three irrelevant pages, why did I add another? I almost didn’t but I felt, since day 2 began like this, I would be skipping an opportunity for day 3, to do it in a manner, while still irrelevant, less frivolous ultimately. To prove that I COULD, perhaps. I resent when people refer to this as if it is totally random, dismissing it after reading one page completely out of context, like it is Peanuts or Garfield or [something considerably less lucrative], but pages like THAT one certainly do not help my case.

I should be drawing these with thicker lines. i do not have control over the thin lines and those scale down better.

8-10 230am howdy. i have a comic page -almost- done but i hurt my back and am presently using that as an excuse for not having it ready on 8-9 even though I did not actually create this problem until around 1 am, unless we pretend that I live in alaska. And if pretending I live in alaska gives me less anxiety about going to bed before finishing a job for the sake of my health, why do I still feel compelled to announce this?
————————

this ad is making several key misconceptions about my mental state. first of all, that if I have specific favorite misheard lyrics, there are enough of them that I classify them by topic type, and that there enough in the food category alone that I can choose 8 standouts without exhausting my supply, and that a marketing company knows which ones those are. and then also that I would like to watch sock puppets — at all, but especially to act out misheard food lyrics, when whoever designed the advertisement isn’t even that into it, choosing instead to fixate on the graphical possibilities of the number 8.

which reminds me:

gosh FINALLY. Dial For Men. No, not a 1970s gay porn film, but Dial SOAP to be USED by men. For the first time in history, it’s gonna start raining men may bathe themselves.

For comparison, here is what regular, apparently woman-only dial looks like.
beets since when is SOAP not masculine enough? Is this marketing reacting to a demand, or trying to make men self-conscious about not having a manly enough soap?

gosh even the number 8 needs to be harder and manner. How long before Dial for MEN invades regular Dial’s territory citing an ancestral claim to the power berries?

I am not surprised at all that there are more transvestites than ever. The harder you push this “gender must permeate every object you own” agenda, the more people like me will turn away from it. And the more normal men will become insane and convinced there is a “war on men” just because the world is less unilaterally made for them. And then push more products like this, and they will keep getting oafier. With that said, I won’t feel inclined to buy Zest Tranny Clean soap once that starts showing up, because it would have the same message: you are defined by the non-personality-related products you buy. The companies who make these aren’t giving you anything. They are looking for sneaky ways to get money out of you in perpetuity, and to shut out their competitors who don’t yet offer man-only soap

It is true that there are hard biological differences between women and men, and perhaps different soaps are in order, although I always understood that was what dodderant was for, and I already do not feel comfortable buying that unless I am unaccompanied and in a store which allows self-service scanning. Already every product marketed at children has a gender-coded character or object on the package, which increasingly is impossible to avoid unless you buy off-brand stuff that status-conscious kids will still pick on you for owning, but at least adults are still free to have neutrally aligned noodles out of a can. Maybe some day there will be his and hers water and oxygen and there will be an indicator on your forehead if you try to use the wrong one without asking the government’s permission first.

I was in Washington DC this year during what apparently was “Capital Pride Weekend.” Outside of New York City, I cannot think of any place with less of a pride deficiency. Specifically it means non-caucasian non-heterosexual non-male pride, but it uses the gay pride colors, but we can’t say gay pride because that offends trans people who think they aren’t gay and you still can’t change your race because that’s racist and even if you’re trans everybody knows you are trans and still identifies you with what you were born as and on and on and we pretend this isn’t fascism garishly disguised as freedom. Anyway people who formerly were not comfortable are supposed to be proud of themselves, even though chief executive also in that capital doesn’t actually believe in this. And the ones who run Connecticut sure do not, either, lest we incite the gods to send a cursed storm of blood over our crops.

You get a F or an M that is assigned to you and you cannot have the other unless you pay thousands of dollars to have your body destroyed, and you DEFINITELY cannot have neither. This is absolutely crucial to you being able to drive a car or buy liquor (requiring the same card for both was a great idea). And apparently now to washing yourself too. Maybe someday people will be proud of themselves just for taking a shower. Like a small child would be, and perhaps then they will share their princess/truck-branded soup with the rest of us.
They will take pity on us knowing we came from a culture which temporarily thought this was acceptable. This conclusion makes no sense but I like that it tied together. Therefore I win.

Or somebody other than the custodian does.

pitylance artist
This could be seen as hypocritical since I myself do not often retweet things, but I also do not encourage garbage endeavors unless I WOULD retweet them. I do not say things I do not mean unless backed into a corner, and I do not invite corners to tea. “Hey, this thing that didn’t work that I won’t even touch, you should keep doing that since it privately benefits me just a scrap.” I imagine the person or persons who instigated this comic strip have no idea that I interpreted their actions this way, but I get terrible/insulting advice from just about everybody, and I followed it for years and got nowhere. I am still nowhere but it is my own nowhere. And just since 2016 I have had four different people whose interests and goals are totally apart from my own use relationship talk toward me, up from none ever prior to then, so I must be doing somenothing right.
Anyway the point of the “snake” comics are always that the snake is a loser. Seeing it lose amuses me.