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In the Minority

I spent a lot of time last week reading Muslim cartoonists’ responses to Charlie Hebdo, as well as interviewing some myself. Many hold complex views like the one in the fifth panel of this cartoon. All support free speech and deplore the attacks, despite having varied opinions on Charlie. Many operate under threats themselves. Some mention cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who was assassinated in London in 1987. Most Westerners don’t even know about this.

I haven’t seen any cartoons yet from the perspective of a French Muslim immigrant wrestling with these difficulties. One Charlie cover, in reference to killings of Muslims in Egypt during the 2013 coup d’etat, showed a Muslim man holding a Koran, both being sprayed with bullets under the caption “The Koran is shit.” Were this a Jew holding the Talmud, we would rightly recognize that as anti-Semitic. To say such a cartoon in this context is only about religious cosmology is a narrow, literalist interpretation worthy of our current Supreme Court. Religion and identity are hopelessly intertwined here, amidst a backdrop of history that hasn’t always been pretty.

I’ve seen a number of statements to the effect that we cannot — must not — talk about the Charlie Hebdo cartoons because that would be tantamount to blaming the victims. To be clear, I disagree with the Pope’s oddly-pugnacious phrasing that if one mocks religion, one can expect a punch. That’s a very unsettling way of putting it that excuses violent behavior. I do, however, agree with many Muslim cartoonists that we can blame the terrorists AND exercise our freedom of expression to talk about the cartoons. We can hold these two thoughts in our head. They are not mutually exclusive.

The next cryptocurrencies

As I was penciling this, Paul Krugman’s latest column on the Bitcoin bubble went up. Krugman makes some of the same points I make in the cartoon.

For more on the incredible energy use that goes into mining Bitcoin, this Arstechnica piece is a good place to start. This site has some eyebrow-raising stats, such as the fact that the number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin is 4,252,394. To quote from this Motherboard article making the Denmark comparison:

Even in the optimistic scenario, just mining one bitcoin in 2020 would require a shocking 5,500 kWh, or about half the annual electricity consumption of an American household. And even if we assume that by that time only half of that electricity is generated by fossil fuels, still over 4,000 kg of carbon dioxide would be emitted per bitcoin mined. It makes you wonder whether bitcoin could still be called a virtual currency, when the physical effects could become so tangible.

Emphasis mine. It’s extremely ironic, then, that a currency this inefficient and destructive to the planet — it’s mostly powered by Chinese coal-burning plants, according to Digiconomist — has become the darling of Libertarian utopianists who think they’re creating a futuristic paradise.

This Week’s Cartoon: “…Rand Justice For All”

I seem to have a number of libertarian readers, or at least, I used to before I drew this cartoon. As I anticipated, some have complained that Rand Paul doesn’t speak for them. But according to several prominent libertarians quoted in this nicely-researched TPM article, Paul’s take on the Civil Rights Act is well within the mainstream of said political philosophy. Apologies for the lengthy quote, but this stuff is just so great:

Paul’s stance is “very reasonable, and quite close to the Libertarian position,” a spokesman for the Libertarian Party told TPMmuckraker.

“If some private business discriminates we think that’s unfortunate, but we don’t think the government should get involved in banning it,” said the spokesman, Wes Benedict. “That’s just a negative that we have to tolerate in a free society.”

Walter Block, a libertarian professor of economics at Loyola University, and a senior fellow with the libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute, went further. “I think anyone who doesn’t believe that isn’t a libertarian,” he said, calling Paul’s comment “a very mainstream libertarianism.”

“I’m delighted that Rand Paul said that,” an enthusiastic Block added. “I think it’s magnificent. I didn’t realize that he was that good.”

“The spirit of non-discrimination,” said Block “ends you right up in compulsory bisexuality.”

DOH! One minute you’re requiring restaurants to serve blacks, the next minute, everyone has to shag everyone! Such a slippery slope!

Am I saying libertarians are racists who hate the disabled and women in the workplace? No. Am I saying their ideology is impractical to the point of silliness? Well, yes. As I was saying over on Facebook, what really gets me is the quaint notion that violations of our freedom only come from “the guv’mint.” In the cases of slavery, the segregated South, and Lilly Ledbetter, the market wasn’t exactly doing a good job of regulating itself. Libertarianism may champion the ordinary individual, but in practice, it lets the bullies win.

This Week’s Cartoon: The O’Reilly Method

Rush Limbaugh’s vile diatribes against Sandra Fluke have made him a lightning rod for public scorn, and rightly so. But what bothers me more than Rush — who, let’s face it, has a long history of saying vile things — is the extent to which his views are echoed throughout the world o’ wingnuts.

When I checked out tweets using the #IstandWithSandra hashtag on Twitter the other night, I saw Idiocracy-level comments like “Shouldn’t that be #ILayWithSandra?” And then, of course, there’s Bill O’Reilly.

Yes, the same man who settled a sexual harassment lawsuit in 2004 after apparently being caught on tape by a female employee (read the sordid filing here!) could not resist moralizing about ladies’ sex lives on his TV show the other night. Over the course of a smarmy and woefully ill-informed six-minute monologue, O’Reilly dropped pearls of wisdom such as:

“Sandra Fluke… believes that all of us should pay for her sexual activities.””The progressive colossus is demanding payment for Ms. Fluke so she can go through law school with a healthy social life.”

“Ms. Fluke and millions of other women have many things they’d like to do, on our tab.”

Never mind the fact that we’re talking about Georgetown’s health insurance plan, not a taxpayer-funded program — a distinction O’Reilly blurs repeatedly, not unlike his blurring of the distinction between a loofah and falafel — or the fact that contraception coverage reduces health care costs, or that even with insurance, the Pill costs women money out-of-pocket. O’Reilly also supports Viagra coverage because it’s for a medical condition. (Hint: It’s only a condition if you want to have sex!) My hat is off to Sandra Fluke for having the bravery to stand up to bullies like O’Reilly, who undeservingly possess a much larger megaphone than she does.

Related cartoon from the 2008 elections: remember McCain’s deer-in-headlights moment when confronted with his support for covering Viagra but not contraception?

Obamacare 101 with Professor P

While I’ve received many encouraging comments on my recent comic for Kaiser Health News (“My Experience With Obamacare”), I’ve been struck by certain accusations that suggest widespread misinformation about how the Affordable Care Act actually works.

Clearly there’s a massive effort on the right to paint the ACA as a big, bad welfare program that’s transferring money from hardworking folks to undeserving scapegoats of some sort. Indeed, this seems to be the only lens through which many conservatives seem capable of looking at the world. (Not that I don’t support a strong social safety net.)

Here’s how the funding of ACA subsidies actually works: The cost is covered by a combination of cuts to Medicare overpayments to private insurers, cuts to the growth rate of Medicare reimbursement to hospitals, taxes on companies that stand to benefit from the ACA (such as medical device makers and insurance companies), and a tax increase on the top 2%. More info here and here.

So, unless your household is making approximately $250,000 a year, your tax dollars are not marked for the subsidy program. Note that federal income taxes for the rest of us have not gone up.

For the record, I pay a lot of money in taxes, from the federal income tax to the double payroll taxes faced by freelancers on their Schedule C income (both the employer and employee portion), sales taxes of 8.25%, and Austin’s very steep property taxes. I’m funding public schools even though I have no kids, which is something I don’t mind doing. I’m also funding plenty of things I don’t support – drone warfare being one example.

I do empathize with those people stuck with premium increases they can’t afford. This seems to be partly a function of the high cost of living in certain places — another complication from America’s soaring economic inequality. But I wonder how many of the people complaining about their premiums (and shaming those of us who qualified for tax credits) supported the public option when it was on the table. A single-payer system is a far more efficient way of providing insurance – it’s what I’ve always supported, and would prefer. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no need for private health insurance companies to exist at all; they are bureaucratic middlemen whose profitability runs contrary to the job they are supposed to do.

I have to admit, though, that I’m kind of enjoying the spluttering of wingnuts who pose as champions of entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and rugged individualism, as they tie themselves into knots opposing a law that frees people to pursue those very activities. Some of them are even trying to cast people like me as irresponsible, erroneously suggesting that those who get insurance through their employer are somehow subsidizing those of us who work for ourselves.

It’s more like the other way around. In addition to the double payroll taxes enjoyed by the self-employed, we don’t receive health care benefits tax-free the way employees of a company do. This is a subsidy for the traditionally employed. We can take a deduction for our premium payments, but the income we use to pay them is still subject to taxes. The ACA is a step toward making the individual market more like a company insurance pool.

Here’s a great article about other subsidies enjoyed by many critics of the ACA.

Yes, Obamacare is an imperfect solution to an enormous health crisis plaguing the richest nation in the world, but don’t blame the guy who actually tried to do something about it. Instead of hurling invectives at those of us who finally have some peace of mind after agonizing over health insurance for years, why not focus your ire on extreme price-gouging by hospitals — $137 for a $1.00 IV drip bag, anyone?

In short, if you’re not making over $250,000 and you’re spewing this “I’m subsidizing you” nonsense, kindly put a sock in it. If your premiums went up, I’m sorry — but others were subsidizing them before, sometimes with their lives. If you are making over $250,000, you should support a program that makes America a fairer and better country. It’s a clear step in the right direction, if not the perfect solution.

Cartoon Flashback: The Aristocratic Old Grandpa State

Continuing with our “classics for the holidays,” here’s a personal fave from 2012. As I wrote at the time:

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing smug Republicans toot their success horns while nagging the rest of us to work harder.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to oppose anything that might help American workers get ahead — unions, a robust safety net, minimum wage hikes — and then blame those workers for not earning enough money to pay federal income taxes (never mind all the other taxes they do pay). You can’t have it both ways! You can’t upend people’s lives through corporate takeovers and then call the downsized “irresponsible.” You can’t sow market chaos through deregulation and scoff at the small business owner who can’t survive the downturn. The disconnect is astounding. But such is the power of ideology.

Unfortunately, Big Plutocracy has only gotten bigger since then.

A couple of housekeeping notes: A few people have mentioned that the Facebook share button isn’t working anymore. I clearly need to do some site maintenance, which has become less of a priority since Google ads started paying crap and I decided to direct traffic to paying clients instead. Hopefully I will get a chance to make some updates over the holidays.

Secondly, sincere thanks to those of you who have joined my subscriber service. As time goes on, reader subscriptions will play an increasingly important role in sustaining the cartoon. So if the thought of getting each cartoon hot off the press, delivered to your inbox along with a smattering of commentary each Tuesday morning appeals to you, please consider joining.

Oddly Familiar Talking Points

Apologies for the late posting this week. I had to dig myself out of a post-holiday pileup of to-dos.

Let me start by saying I consider myself to be somewhat to the left of Bernie. I favor a Scandinavian-style social safety net — heck, I am Scandinavian. And I admire Elizabeth Warren more than just about anyone. So this comic is not coming from the perspective of a milquetoast centrist Democrat, or even a strong Hillary partisan, as I’m guessing some will assume in our world of fun political binaries. What concerns me is that I’m seeing fundamentally right-wing concepts being adopted by those who self-identify as lefties or progressives. You might say I’m criticizing the left from the left.

To address a few points raised in the cartoon: I shouldn’t need to even spell this out, but as a gentle reminder, Russia is an authoritarian regime that crushes free speech, dissidents, LGBT rights, and now, apparently, my own health insurance. This didn’t just happen to Hillary; it happened to all of us. It’s pretty much the definition of what should be a non-partisan concern. Mountains of evidence exist for Putin’s attempt to swing our election (and others), and to minimize the problem is nothing short of laughable. And yes, I do think the interference had a substantial impact.

Hillary has certainly frustrated me at times over the years, but I came to admire her intelligence and poise over the course of this election cycle. Her performance at the debates with Trump was nothing short of heroic. She also ran on the most progressive Democratic platform ever, but since policy has become almost completely divorced from politics, that doesn’t get talked about much. I could go on, but as my husband says, this was not so much an election as an exorcism, the culmination of a decades-long smear campaign by the right.

The term “political correctness” has been the cornerstone of conservative efforts to transform the ideas of civil rights and equality into something frivolous and stupid. The right loves plucking silly examples from obscure, powerless people and blowing them up into huge “culture war” issues that supposedly threaten the nation. “PC” is an insult that plays into their hands.

Along these same lines, “liberal elites” — long a Fox News favorite — is designed to shift attention away from the actual economic elites hoovering up the world’s wealth and resources, such as the Koch Brothers or Trump, and instead make one think of poodle-owning urbanites supposedly looking down their noses at everyone (while in reality voting to raise the minimum wage). It’s a frame, not a fact, and hides a deep anti-intellectual agenda. By definition, I would say a liberal is someone who cares about the less fortunate. So a liberal “elite” would be a liberal with power. However, the term is thrown around as a pejorative to smear just about anyone — feminists, college student activists, etc. — rendering it meaningless, and an effective right-wing language hack that divides the left.

So don’t fall for these con-job concepts! We progressives need to be strategic in our opposition, not Fox News Lefties.

This Week’s Cartoon: “The Aristocratic Old Grandpa State”

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of hearing smug Republicans toot their success horns while nagging the rest of us to work harder.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to oppose anything that might help American workers get ahead — unions, a robust safety net, minimum wage hikes — and then blame those workers for not earning enough money to pay federal income taxes (never mind all the other taxes they do pay). You can’t have it both ways! You can’t upend people’s lives through corporate takeovers and then call the downsized “irresponsible.” You can’t sow market chaos through deregulation and scoff at the small business owner who can’t survive the downturn. The disconnect is astounding. But such is the power of ideology.

Real Man vs. Economy

In case you missed it, there’s been a substantial propaganda campaign from MAGA elites to convince the masses that Trump’s destructive economic policies will make men more “masculine.” The dialogue coming from the TV in the first panel of this cartoon is taken directly from a Fox chyron, “TRUMP’S TARIFFS WILL MAKE YOU A MAN?”

We see a lot of talk about mining these days while Trump is actually dismantling rules that protect miners from silica exposure. Far from creating strong “alphas,” these jobs make men sick.

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George Will’s Bowtie Rebellion

Conservative commentator George Will made news over the weekend with his announcement that he was leaving the Republican party over Donald Trump. The last straw, it seems, was Trump’s statement that a judge of Mexican descent could not be trusted to preside over the Trump University lawsuit impartially. You might get the sense that Will is deeply troubled by racism, until you start looking at stuff he’s written over the years.

Here’s further context for the quotes and paraphrased statements in the cartoon.

1. Willie Horton ad — From Will’s 1995 column, “22 Questions for Colin Powell”:

What exactly was objectionable about citing Horton and his rape victim as a consequence of that prisoner-release program?

(A common refrain on the right is that Al Gore introduced Horton during a 1988 debate with Dukakis, which is debunked here; Gore only brought up the furlough program.)

2. George Wallace — From 2007 Newsweek column on third-party candidates:

A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice—e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the ’60s tumults.

An aggrieved minority? Oh-kay.

3. Hurricane Katrina — From September, 2005 column “A Poverty of Thought”:

America’s always fast-flowing river of race-obsessing has overflowed its banks, and last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois’s freshman Democrat, applied to the expression of old banalities a fluency that would be beguiling were it without content. Unfortunately, it included the requisite lament about the president’s inadequate “empathy” and an amazing criticism of the government’s “historic indifference” and its “passive indifference” that “is as bad as active malice.”

That flooding metaphor sure was tactful three weeks after the devastation of New Orleans. Will proceeded to lecture the locals on out-of-wedlock births.

4. More on Will and voter ID here.

This Week’s Cartoon: “Search Engine Wars”

More often than not, I am impressed by whatever tweaks Google makes to its products. The recently- improved image search that expands the photos as you roll over them is very cool. I am not a fan, however, of Google Instant. The ever-shifting search results are distracting, introducing a sense of clutter to the minimalist aesthetic that helped make Google so popular. Thankfully, you can turn it off. And I have. But the whole episode made me wonder: what kind of world do we live in where the normally-fast Google is not fast enough? Do we really need those few seconds Google Instant claims it is saving us? And what will we do with them, aside from waste more time on the internet?

As a slowpoke, I find society’s efforts to push the upper bound on speed to be more a sign of sickness than anything. Increased worker productivity has won workers no higher wages, but more stress. At a certain point, you have to wonder: what’s the point? Aside from rushing to an early grave?

This Week’s Cartoon: Post-Election Punditspew 2010

You know, as upset as I am that the Democrats didn’t go on the offensive enough, I kind of feel sorry for them. Obama bends over backwards to be bipartisan, faces an unbudging wall of opposition that includes some members of his own party, and the Dems still get blamed for not reaching hard enough across the aisle. Meanwhile, Republicans can be as fiery and filibustery as they want to be. To illustrate this double-standard, I thought it would be a good occasion to bring back Mr. Perkins as the flaming conservative. You can see his previous appearances here, here, and here.

I was pleased to see a reader on the Slowpoke Facebook page noticed the spelling of “faeces.” I like to think the Latinized spelling adds to Mr. Perkins’ pomposity, and also classes up the joke a bit. In general, I try to keep scatological humor to a minimum, although I could not resist the idea of projectile-evacuating pigs here.