Search Results

This Week in Authoritarian Newspeak

I’m not saying all protests are intelligent, or that they cannot be criticized. The problem is that, like “political correctness,” the term “cancel culture” paints all civil rights activism with a broad brush and shuts down thoughtful discussion. The right rules in part by means of Orwellian Newspeak concepts that masquerade as objective phenomena, but are really just name-calling.

Now, there is a real tendency for large numbers of people on social media to demand that someone be fired, but this can be good or bad; it depends entirely on the specifics of the case. Social media is full of toxicity and abuse, and I think a lot of issues can be addressed without calling for someone to lose their livelihood (though there are cases where public figures should step aside, and it is perfectly legitimate to express this).  

For further thoughts, I’d check out this essay in TIME by a Muslim woman in Toronto. And as Paul Krugman recently tweeted, “The rage over ‘cancel culture’ is also, I think, part of this syndrome; some people can’t stand the idea that they should be asked to, say, avoid insulting women or minorities, as if that were a terrible imposition.”

Help sustain these comics — join the Sorensen Subscription Service!

Makeover for a Takeover

It kind of blows my mind that callow internet trolls can attain public intellectual status by throwing on a sport jacket and a title at a bogus think tank. There’s an entire infrastructure on the right that funds and rewards extremist charlatans, lending them a veneer of professional respectability that dupes mainstream news outlets into platforming them as thought leaders. (For a recent example, see this article.) 

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

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. 

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

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.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

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.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

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.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

Tips for Dems to Avoid Expulsion

Justin Jones was fortunately reinstated by the Nashville Metro council as I was drawing this cartoon. It looks like Justin Pearson will also be reinstated this week. Their expulsion from the Tennessee legislature was a radically antidemocratic move from Republicans, yet you might not know it given some headlines that appeared last week. According to this excellent TPM article by Kate Riga, the AP went with the laughably anodyne “Amid polarization, minority party lawmakers face penalties.”

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

Train Wreck

This is about the right’s race-baiting response to the East Palestine train disaster, which you can read more about here. It’s clear that one party was trying to prevent such disasters, and the other was doing the industry’s bidding without concern for human health or safety. The narrative being put forth on the right, however, is that because East Palestine residents are mostly white and conservative, they have been “forgotten” by the Biden administration, unlike the “favored” (read Black) populations of Detroit and other cities that supposedly garner more sympathy. Given the high levels of environmental pollution many minority communities are exposed to, this assertion is asinine. It’s also incredibly dangerous.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

You Get What You Pay For

I’m back after using a few reruns over the holidays.

If you’re going to hoard the wealth of the nation and refuse to pay wages that allow people to afford housing, then you at least have to support subsidized worker housing and health care. You can’t have it both ways — denying people both a living wage and public programs to compensate for a lack of the former. Of course people are going to end up on the streets! While it’s true that actual pay is higher than the federal minimum wage in many places, the fact that it’s still stuck at $7.25 in 2023 is utterly shameful.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

New NFTs

Quiz Time: Is it from Russia or the American Right?

The fact that we are seeing so many anti-LGBTQ bills at the state level in the US is not unrelated to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Gay rights have long been used by Putin as an ideological wedge issue to forge a Russian identity in opposition to the “decadent” globalized West. Russia’s “gay propaganda” law passed in 2013 casts a wide net around anything that could be remotely perceived as promoting “non-traditional” sexual relationships to minors. 

For more on the Russian Orthodox leader’s remarks on the war-justifying threat posed by gay pride parades (which are allowed in Kyiv), this article has a decent summary.

Join the Sorensen Subscription Service! Now available on Patreon.

Postal Service of the Future

Conventional wisdom seems to be that the financial difficulties of the Post Office are due to the rise of email. The Postmaster General noted this himself as he announced the end of Saturday delivery. But to only look at competition from email is to miss the larger ideological picture — namely, that privatizing USPS has been a goal of market absolutists for decades. The real “crisis” faced by the PO is the absurd requirement, set by Republicans in Congress, that the agency fund retiree benefits for the next 75 years — paying for future employees who haven’t even been born yet! This article on Alternet provides an overview of how the service is under attack. Never mind that the Postal Service isn’t taxpayer-funded; privatizing it is still part of the Cato Institute’s agenda. It seems obvious to me that replacing USPS with a patchwork of private mail delivery companies would be an unmitigated clusterf#ck. Believe it or not, the private sector is not always the most efficient (see: health insurance).