The Sorensen Monologues

Thinking Big

The “big ideas” described in panels one and three are absolutely real. OceanGate submersibles co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein recently described his plans for a 1,000-person colony on the hot and gassy planet of Venus, noting that some parts of its toxic atmosphere have Earth-like temperatures. And disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried had been planning to buy the island nation of Nauru with his brother in order to build a doomsday bunker and laboratory to perform experiments on “human genetic enhancement.” Never mind the little detail that Nauru is not for sale. 

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Quackery Quotas

In reality, universities already contain a mixture of political views — you’ll find plenty of Republicans in business schools, economics departments, and law schools (see also: Frat Row). They also sit on boards of directors and comprise a large chunk of the donor class. But the right’s revolutionary project will not be satisfied until students stop learning facts that contradict the movement. Feminism, gender studies, the ugly parts of American history, climate science — it all must go! And so we get cries for “ideological diversity,” which sounds fair to well-meaning people who believe in good-faith debate as a way to arrive at the truth. But truth is not the goal here; the goal is power.

In Ron DeSantis’s Florida, new standards for teaching K-12 African-American history include a recommendation that the curriculum cover “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” As this excellent LA Times editorial points out, there is no reason for this other than to whitewash the horrors of slavery.

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Striking Back

This week’s comic was largely inspired by Disney CEO Bob Iger’s comments on the writers’ strike during a lengthy interview on CNBC last week. He absolutely stepped in it when the subject of the WGA came up, calling the strike “very disturbing” and “very disruptive.” What wasn’t mentioned in the conversation is that Iger stands to make some $54 million over the next two years while writing and acting jobs have been so degraded that they’re no longer sustainable. Residuals from streaming are often miniscule, with payments in the pennies. Media companies are deleting their own shows from streaming platforms so they no longer have to pay residuals at all. The amount of spec work has grown, leaving writers without income for long periods of time, sometimes never to be paid a cent. The fact is, it’s not the creators who are the aggressors here. To the extent that they are being “disruptive,” they are responding to how their jobs have been destroyed.

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Pick Your Social Network

The mad scramble for social network dominance has reached a fever pitch, with Meta/Facebook launching its new Threads app recently. Word is it feels soulless and corporate, and your feed is filled with influencers with large followings that you can’t opt out of seeing. The head of Instagram, to which Threads is connected, says the platform won’t be encouraging politics, as such topics aren’t worth the scrutiny or negativity. (Downplaying “politics” is also convenient if your company has done some extremely questionable political things involving, say, genocide and selling data to unscrupulous presidential campaigns. In fact, it’s great for dictators and aspiring autocrats in general!)

I did finally sign up for Bluesky last week, so please follow me if you’re on there.

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Hanging Workers Out to Dry

As the Texas Tribune has reported, Gov. Abbott just signed off on a bill that will eliminate ordinances in Austin and Dallas requiring a ten-minute water break for construction workers every four hours. This is part of a larger power grab by the state aimed at overriding the more progressive policies of cities. Businesses complained that the “patchwork” of laws created an unreasonable burden. Now, I don’t see what’s so difficult about remembering to give workers water so they don’t die while they’re building a skyscraper in Austin or Dallas. What this actually seems to be is corporate authoritarianism, an effort to destroy any democratic ability to protect the public interest.

A few readers have pointed out that Saguaro cactus doesn’t grow in Texas, and they are right! I was using desert cartoon tropes without thinking about the actual location.

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Titanic Failure

The CEO of OceanGate had brushed off warnings from dozens of experts, accusing them of insulting him personally and trying to shut out a new player in the submersibles business. Since drawing this cartoon, I learned that he was also hoping to eventually market his subs to oil and gas companies for deep sea exploration.

To be clear, I am not opposed to technological solutions to the climate crisis. What I’m referring to here is the faith in future carbon-sucking devices and other dubious ideas that oil execs and their political allies use an excuse to keep drilling.

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Bipartisan Reflections

Every line in the third panel was taken from something that was actually said in response to the Trump indictment. In a now infamous tweet, Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins ominously stated, “This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.” The term 1/50k is a reference to military maps, and in this context “know your bridges” seems to be about seizing infrastructure in a civil war-like scenario. 

Also via the same Huffpo article, Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona tweeted ”We have now reached a war phase. Eye for an eye.” Fox host and longtime Trump propagandist Mark Levin stated “It is a war on the Republican Party. And it is a war on the republic…”

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The PGA-LIV Bonesaw Classic

The PGA Tour recently announced that it was merging with its competitor, the LIV Golf tournament. LIV is owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. You may recall that the Saudi regime drew international condemnation only a few short years ago for the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a bonesaw. As Human Rights Watch notes, this splashy move into professional golf is an attempt by the Saudi regime to “sportswash” its heinous record of abuses.

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Junk Jargon

Obviously we can’t ignore the creep of fascist ideology, as it leads to real people being threatened and harmed. But we can become aware of these narratives and contextualize them, and understand how they are part of a hateful, abnormal agenda rather than just another point of view. I recently came across a good post on Kottke.org which quoted a Heather Cox Richardson essay on a U.S. Army pamphlet from 1943 on fighting fascism in America. 

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”

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Corporate Suffrage

This eyebrow-raising story came to my attention via Common Cause, which has been fighting a bill that would allow LLCs and other corporate entities that own property in Seaford, Delaware to vote in that city’s municipal elections even if the business owners are non-residents. Adding to the extremely problematic nature of this proposal is the fact that only 300-600 voters typically participate in local elections, and this bill would make 200 LLCs and other “artificial entities” eligible, more than enough to affect the outcome. I consider this a sign of the times, part of the larger juggernaut of corporate interests steamrolling actual human beings.

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Negotiating to Nowhere

Trump demolished the budget with tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, and R’s raised the ceiling three times without a peep. And yet, after saying they wouldn’t negotiate over the debt ceiling, it appears the Dems are very much negotiating. Biden has been insisting that these are parallel budget negotiations, but they are, as Joan McCarter of Daily Kos notes, actually about the debt limit. Could this be merely a strategy to appear bipartisan before the Dems unilaterally invoke the 14th Amendment, as many legal scholars argue they are Constitutionally authorized to do? Perhaps. But given Obama’s precedent of caving to extortion in 2011 and the Dems’ long history of squishiness on all matters, I’m not holding my breath.

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Return of the Selective ‘Free Speech’ Warrior

There’s a certain cadre of pundits who get a lot of mileage out of posing as open-minded defenders of ideas and debate, but in reality they are stuck in the right-wing narrative that the threat is from the left rather than overwhelmingly from the right. It should now be obvious to anyone with half a cortex that the right’s screeching about “wokeness” and free speech is disingenuous, part of a larger strategy to impose their own radical ideology on America and undo all social progress of the 20th century. Creating a moral panic about public schools and universities is all part of the plan. Somehow these useful idiots (as depicted by the above cartoon character) tend to overlook the fact that today’s GOP is openly looking to the illiberal dictatorship of Hungary as a model. Orban has seized control of that country’s universities and cultural institutions to promote what he calls “Christian” values and “national identity.”

For more on the subject, I highly recommend this excellent essay from Dave Karpf.

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