By David Futrelle
In these troubled times, it’s good to know that the guys at One Angry Gamer have their priorities straight. Forget police violence, forget the tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths caused by Trump’s utter mishandling of the coronavirus. The crucial issue of our time is exactly how short the shorts of Faye from Cowboy Bebop should be.
As you may know, Cowboy Bebop is a famously sexy Japanese anime show from the nineties that Netflix is resurrecting as a live-action series.
But one element of the original might not make it into the reboot: the exceedingly skimpy clothing of the character Faye. In an interview with io9, you see, show writer Javier Grillo-Marxuach mentioned that Faye’s outfits will be toned down a scootch because “we need to have a real human being wearing that.”
Naturally this has made Billy D of One Angry Gamer even angrier. Accusing Netflix of having
a certain kind of formula … which almost always undermines the original work to push some kind of subversive, Left-wing oriented message,
he laments that their version of the
Cowboy Bebop show will not be faithful to the original, especially when it comes to how sexy Faye is supposed to be dressed.
Who likes short shorts? Apparently not Netflix.
Billy is especially outraged by the idea that cartoon Faye wears clothes not fit for a real human.
So basically, wearing short-shorts, thigh-high stockings, thong suspenders, and a cropped V-neck sleeveless halter-top isn’t something “a real human being” would wear?
Well, no, it’s not. I’ve seen plenty of skimpy outfits in my day but I’ve never seen anyone dressed like Faye walking down the street.
You mean to tell me that real women have never worn what Faye has worn?
Generally speaking, no.
So the women who attend sporting events in the summer wearing cropped tops and short-shorts aren’t real human beings?
He then shows women wearing much less revealing shorts than Faye. And without the thigh-high stockings.
You mean to tell me that celebrities like Lady Gaga wearing cropped tops and short-shorts with heels are women who aren’t real human beings?
Well, no, but to be fair Lady Gaga once wore a dress made entirely of meat that has its own entry on Wikipedia. One time she wore this. And another time she wore this. In other words, she’s not really a good bellwether for “what real people wear” in the real world.
In the comments, One Angry Gamer’s completely normal readers responded in completely normal ways.
“I’m just done,” wrote one.
let this shitty society burn and let the kikes take over and let everyone go extinct
Another responded:
Nah.
lets burn the kikes instead and take BACK the society we once held dear
only this time, no more sympathy for subhumans
Huh. If I were running One Angry Gamer I’d be a little more perturbed by my own readers’ inhumanity than by the exact shortness of Faye’s short shorts.
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That doesn’t make voting meaningless or useless. This isn’t an either/or – either you riot or you vote, and only riots accomplish anything. That’s not reality.
I’m interested in your solution to the problem that the system is rotten. I don’t think anyone here has ever argued that the system is perfection, despite you trying to put words into my mouth earlier. I’m pretty radical actually, so wow me with your totally workable, very practical and implementable solution to the issue that doesn’t involve voting at any stage.
@Leliel
You do know people can go back and read what you, PoM, and WWTH said before, don’t you?
“what exactly is bullshit about the opinion that voting in a voting based system is bullshit”
“Every amendment to the Constitution of the US, and the Constitution itself, was passed by voting.”
“I will never understand why there should ever be a conversation about voting versus direct action. It’s not either or.”
All of these are contentions that voting brings about change, presented in direct response to my describing the sentence “Things change when people get out and vote.” as bullshit. I.e. arguing against it.
Re: Lincoln, I don’t give a damn how he felt in his secret heart, I’m talking about his stated policies as a Presidential candidate, which did not at any time include Abolition. Upon his election, Southern slaveholders who had convinced themselves in the absence of evidence that he meant to immediately end slavery presented secession documents in the Congresses of what soon became the Confederate States of America, and also opened fire on Fort Sumpter. In response, Lincoln wrote ” My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” He later issued tye Emancipation Proclamation in an effort to create servile rebellions behind Confederate lines; the slaveholding Union states were exempt from the Proclamation.
Also, to address one of your previous ‘points’, which had nothing to do with voting,
Not a fucking vote, is what I call it, you dense fuck. It’s direct action, which I’ve been pointing out is how change is accomplished.
@PoM
Oh wait you’re serious.jpg. You’ve been around this place quite a while, my old, and you’ve expressed numerous opinions, beliefs, and personality traits during this time.
Yes, it is, because the people who riot cannot just go talk to their fucking Senator, and if they manage to, the Senator will fucking ignore them. This is not hypocritical, it is the lived fucking experience of everyone who isn’t a member of the dominant caste and/or has proposals outside the bipartisan consensus (which, again, is white supremacy and always has been). That is, in fact, the problem, and the reason why voting doesn’t fix jack or shit.
I wonder what Ian Danskin would think about someone repeatedly using his videos to portray their opponent as proof of horseshoe theory.
So what is stopping you from describing me? I’m genuinely curious as to what parts of your purity test that I’ve failed.
@Policy of Madness
From what you are coming off as someone that sees Dali as some impractical holier than thou far leftist. Which is odd since Dalil has already pointed out multiple times where Direct Action is working including the George Floyd Riots Right Actually Now.
@Ooglyboggles
Not at all. What I do think is that voting does more than not voting. Not voting is what bought us Trump in office. There is a reason why voter suppression is so important to Republicans; if they honestly believed that voting was pointless, they wouldn’t care if felons or black people or brown people vote. People fought and died for the right to vote, and throwing that down the toilet is exactly what Republicans want you to do.
Do riots work, too? Yes, in some circumstances, like the ones in which we find ourselves. Riots in my hometown are having measurable effects, mostly because the protesters have a concise list of demands. Are those effects perfect? No. But, for instance, limitations on no-knock warrants are better than none, even if that’s not as good as an outright ban on no-knock warrants (which is what was originally demanded). I doubt we’d even see that much, however, if the makeup of the Council were different from what it is, a makeup that was shaped by (wait for it) people getting out and voting for the candidates that made the most sense to them in prior elections.
Does voting work? Not as well as it could. It’s a half-measure, but half is better than zero in my book. Maybe you disagree.
@PoM
The fact that even my catastrophic excuse for episodic memory allows me to recall that when I do, you treat it as a personal attack and pitch a fit. Since you’ve apparently forgotten, the least confrontational way I can put it is that you are the target audience of the famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, which I recommend you look up and read carefully.
No, that would be the Electoral College
By George, I think she’s got it! Almost; there’s still this pretense that Democrats oppose voter suppression in any meaningful sense, rather than being active participants in the Law and Order ethos that’s lead to so many people convicted of felonies being denied the vote, as well as the Drug War, which is explicitly aimed at imprisoning Black people, other PoCs, and white leftists on felony charges, which, hey guess what, prevent them from voting. Voting never changes anything because the people who actually want change are actively denied a voice, in a bipartisan fashion.
And if there weren’t riots, exactly zero of those changes would ever have been suggested, let alone implemented, regardless of who people voted for.
Except that it’s not a half measure. It’s nothing whatsoever. You’re effectively never going to get a chance to vote for anyone who will fix anything without being forced to do so by good old direct action (which, I remind you again, is no limited to riots, but includes strikes, sit-ins, bus boycotts, and all the other things people have done to actually get change in the US.) Voting, by itself, has so far utterly failed to accomplish any change, because what we are seeing right now is the system acting exactly as it is designed to do, by trying to put down dissent with violence. The fact that cops routinely brutalize peaceful protesters, target medics, disappear people from crowds, and commit murder at will is not news to anyone except the white people who keep voting for the status quo in the unevidenced belief that it will change anything. People, in short, like you.
I would still argue that voting can be a part of activism, even if only so much that out can be used to elect politicians more able to be affected by direct action and less likely to declare marital law in an attempt to maintain the status quo.
That said, I am not in a demographic that has been systemically disenfranchised (and for all of Canada’s many, many electoral flaws, they do make it pretty easy for folks to vote, what with us having the ability to register at the polls on the day of the election if we want to), so I acknowledge that my view on the ratio of how much effort it takes to vote versus the impact that it potentially has may be significantly skewed, especially when it comes to US politics.
I see we’ve reached the NO U stage of the debate, which is the point at which I lose interest.
Kopp@PoM
Excellent demonstration of my point there. You reacted in precisely the way I predicted, taking the description as a personal attack and throwing a fit about it, because it saves you from having to acknowledge that you’re wrong. Your white fragility again makes you part of the problem, and in active opposition to a solution.
JUST KISS ALREADY
Since I admittedly started skimming the last page, I’m just going to start making my points.
1. Yes, votes are always dullited by a large population at a federal level, and yes, the electoral college is a distortion shitshow. But here’s the thing; even when a person’s vote is distorted by the electoral college, THE VOTES STILL COUNT! I understand that being .00003% of an electoral vote is not very exciting, and it may even be a smaller percent than what someone in a smaller state has, but it is still something.
2. Dali correctly hammered me on voter suppression of minorities. It goes without saying that they, and all of us, are passionate about voter suppression of minorities.
One of the easiest ways to suppress votes by a particular demographic is to convince that demographic that voting doesn’t matter. An example if this is the Russians who posed as black American activists in 2016 and to campaign for black Americans to stay home in “protest” by claiming that Hilary Clinton was just as racist. And it worked to some extent. (If they wanted to say “fuck you” to the democrats they could have just voted for Jill Stein).
If you care about voter suppression, you have to accept that getting out to vote for someone is important to begin with. Full stop.
3. There seems to be this weird false dichotomy being presented here between direct action and voting. Has anyone said that direct action is not needed because of voting? That voting alone changes thoughts and ideas, and leads to progress?
Here’s why voting matters- it’s the only way in which we can remove politicians other than the guillotine. Direct action is important, because it is the way that we change hearts and minds. But direct action alone is not going to do much against a stable government that’s backed up by tanks and missles.
ETA, since I may have started this thread, I said;
Notice I said nothing about protesting or striking or direct action at all.
Do I think that it’s voting that changes the behavior of politicians, and specifically politicians? For the most part, yes. There’s simply no consequence for a politician to ignore the message of protests or strikes unless the protest changes voters themselves.
Do you see how those two points of yours contradict each other?
“The only way to influence how a politician acts is by changing your vote!”
“You can’t not vote for the Democrats if you don’t want the Republicans to win!”
Doesn’t this imply that so long as the Democrats are even one iota less shitty than the Republicans, that they should receive the votes? And if they receive the votes by merit of simply being marginally less shitty than the Republicans, and all politicians care about is votes, then why would the Democrats be incentivized to become any better?
Don’t get me wrong, in your two-party hellscape of the USA, people should definitely vote Democrat during the elections to limit some of the damage.
But Democrats also engage in unjust wars, police brutality, racism, unlawful detention of immigrants, etc, and none of that is going to be changed simply by voting. It never will. The system is designed to protect all those things, and working within the system will not stop that.
@Moogue
And you are demonstrably wrong to think that, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly. Note that a week and change of massive demonstrations and burning some shit has made more progress in police reform than Democratic politicians (at all levels) have made since 1965. Note that black people have overwhelmingly voted Democratic that whole time. Note that they got exactly jack shit from that: Dems continued the War on
Drugs Black people, Dems voted for Law and Order bills, Dems swelled police budgets and destroyed what minor social safety nets had been implemented (“Ending welfare as we [knew] it”). Voting for Dems has achieved jack and shit. Rioting has gotten results.Despite this I recommend voting for Democrats over Republicans. Democrats aren’t ideal by any means, but it’s like choosing between stomach bug and stage IV cancer. Or choosing whether to be shot in the foot or the head. There’s no fun outcome, but one is clearly better than the other.
@Dalillama
And if the changes are going to over stick 10 or 20 years from now it’s only because the opinion of the public has changed, and people are going to maintain pressure through long term voting behavior over decades and decades. I’m old enough to remember all the other riots that failed to produce long term results as soon as people stopped rioting and the majority stopped caring.
You’re still making this weird false dichotomy between voting and demonstrating/rioting/campaigning/whatever that no-one else here has made. Please, by all means everyone should do their thing. But again, what is the long term plan? People can’t riot or demonstrate nonstop forever. The problem isn’t just that the Democrats/Republicans don’t care, it’s that the police and their unions themselves are extremely politically powerful. And they’re not gone yet.
@Catalpa
Yes I do, but they’re actually 2 seperate arguments. In this thread I was more discussing the importantance of voting in general v. my feelings on voting in this particular race.
I do feel that we should vote blue no matter who on the federal level for the time being, just because I think the Republicans will do so much more damage there. However I’m pretty sympathetic to people like Dali in that I’m tired of of the Democrats taking people for granted, and I’m more than happy to see the party bleed below the federal level, or for everyone who would have stayed home to vote 3rd party. But it probably helps that I live in a very liberal area anyway.
ETA: let me also just point out that telling minorities “you shouldn’t vote, it’s never made any progress anyway” is literal Russian propaganda and maybe we should view literal Russian propaganda with just a little bit of side eye as the Russian government doesn’t exactly have minorities backs in their own country.
Problem with that is, come redistricting time Republicans in the state legislature will gerry the boundaries to make it even harder for Dems to win at any level, including federal. So Dems need your votes at the state level too …
Arguably, people’s votes are even more impactful on the state and municipal level than they are on the federal level. Smaller voting pools mean more impact per vote, and a lot of things that deeply impact the most vulnerable members of society are managed at the State and municipal level, especially in the US, where “States rights” are used to excuse horrible rulings within a state’s boundaries.
I’m very much of the opinion that people should vote for the lesser evil whenever possible, and I disagree that voting is meaningless. However, I also recognize that just having the lesser evil isn’t going to fix things, and that gerrymandering and voter suppression and disenfranchisement has almost entirely destroyed any semblance of democracy. It doesn’t suprise me that people are losing faith in a system that has never protected them or listened to them.
@Moogue
How about you fuck yourself sideways, you ignorant tool? Vote all you want, but don’t pretend it’s going to change anything when you do. Change requires more than voting, and when you vote Democratic, pat yourself on the back for a job well done, and pretend you’ve accomplished something you become part of the problem. As I noted before, ~60 years of voting Democrats has increased the number of Black people in prison, increased police violence, and left Black poverty rates functionally unchanged. That does not constitute meaningful change. Voting, in and of itself, is a purely symbolic act in the US as it stands today, and it will not achieve change unless it is accompanied by large-scale action. There’s no dichotomy, anymore than saying that turning the key won’t change anything unless you put some gas in the tank is a dichotomy. Voting, by itself, is just turning the ignition over and over becasue this time the engine will surely start. If you actually give a shit about addressing the problems that exist in the US today, statements like “Things change when people get out and vote” are actively counterproductive.
…
Actually has there been a single time, in the last few months that this topic has been brought up, that anyone has said this? Sure, it’s been said lots of times how little of an impact voting has actually had historically, but I don’t think the idea has ever actually been floated that we should go around telling people not to vote because of that. The difference kind of matters, at least if you’re not committed to horseshoe theory.
How did we even get to the point of accusing people of spreading Russian propaganda? Based on what? Liberal democracies have had a rough time getting people to have faith in them right from the jump. Did Putin go back in time and influence Robespierre and Dessalines?
I get that there have been operations with the purpose of spreading propaganda and influencing various Western elections. At some point, though, it just feels like an excuse. Facebook isn’t Russian. Twitter isn’t Russian. Cambridge Analytica isn’t Russian. The Republicans aren’t Russian, and if they have ever been influenced by Russians, it seems everyone agrees that it’s a relatively recent thing. Foreign trolls may have sown conflict online, but the conflict has always been there, and predates modern Russia and the internet.
Looking back, this started when Dali said that the U.S. is founded on white supremacy, and its mechanisms are designed to keep white supremacists in power. This is the context and basis from which we’ve been having this argument about the impact of voting on changing the country for the better. So it has made me increasingly uncomfortable with how strongly people have opposed and forcefully reframed this argument. If the disagreement is simply about whether people should make an effort to vote, I really don’t think that deserves the level of hostility I’ve seen.
I’m seriously starting to wonder whether, at least for some of the participants, preventing Trump’s reelection is even the real motivation behind their words.
@Dalillama
I have not seen anyone here claim that voting is the only action needed, but instead that it is an essential part of effecting change.
Your response has consistently been to claim that anyone who disagrees with your claims that voting changes nothing has been to accuse them of claiming “all you need to do is vote,” which again, no one has done.
As for hissyfits and personal attacks, I have not seen others tell you to “fuck yourself sideways.”
Voting does matter. All the other vital actions are essential to making those votes happen and count. This is not an either/or situation, and the onkyperson treating it as such has been you.
@Dali
Wait, there was less police violence during the 1960s during the civil rights movement? And it was Nixon who really started all the law and order crap, and he wasn’t a Democrat. I’m not going to defend the Democrats who were also complicit with it, but remember that there were protests and riots in the 60s too. You can’t say that voting was powerful enough to drown them out to the point of making things worse, and then say that voting isn’t powerful.
So are you saying that turning the ignition (voting) IS a vital part of starting the engine/making progress? That was confusing in your earlier posts.
If we’re going with this metaphor, then what I said is “a car starts after you turn the ignition” and then you complained at me because I didn’t mention that there also has to be gas in the tank within the same post. Well no kidding gas is needed.
WE ALL AGREE.
@An Impish Pepper
They’re multinational, just like this site, just like the internet. Some of the people in this conversation are not American, and yet here we all are. Russians on those sites literally posed as black rights activists to spread propaganda encouraging American minorities not to vote. And they certainly didn’t invent anything, all they did is place their thumbs on the cracks and press, but the goals were to suppress the vote in order to influence the election, not to help American minorities.
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=WdPfXo_PEYym_Qb37JLQCA&q=https%3A%2F%2Fjournalism.wisc.edu%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F41%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F09%2FUncover.Kim_.v.5.0905181.pdf&oq=https%3A%2F%2Fjournalism.wisc.edu%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F41%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F09%2FUncover.Kim_.v.5.0905181.pdf&gs_lcp=ChFtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1ocBAMOgIIKToFCCkQkQJQkyNYkyNg1FZoAHAAeACAAekCiAHpApIBAzMtMZgBAKABAqABAbABDw&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-hp#sbfbu=1&pi=https://journalism.wisc.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/41/files/2018/09/Uncover.Kim_.v.5.0905181.pdf
BTW, pointing out that this is Russian propaganda that should be side-eyed wasn’t to be nasty or make personal attacks. I also supported voting for 3rd parties, does this make me a Russian troll? I can make an argument, but also admit that it’s problematic, or that it can be misused, because I’m not my arguments, and neither are you, and neither is Dali.
Actually I don’t disagree that the system sucks, which is why I asked Dali that if the system sucked so badly, then what system would they like to see? We were sidetracked by arguing over voting, but I’m still rather confused as to what they want, rather than what they don’t want, other than direct action. We all agree that direct action is GREAT and should be done.
It’s incorrect to assume that since there have been improvements in some areas against racism, that everything has improved.
Incarceration in the US, especially incarceration of black men, has undergone a huge spike since the 70s. The number of black people in prison per capita today is higher than it was in the 60s, during the civil rights movement, by almost 5 times as much.
And given the abuses and violence that prisoners and those arrested endure, and the rates at which the system has been targeting the black community, it is not an unreasonable assumption to make, that more black people are being brutalized by the police today than they were in the 60s, not just in terms of raw numbers, but proportionally as well.