Sunsofold

That one goes there. That one goes there. And that one goes there.

Neither. I just never hear they are going to happen, only that they have happened. The earliest I have heard of any of the recent protest actions was while I was at work and reading that it was already under way.

I hadn't really considered the sex of the authors in what I've read, but looking at my shelves and picking some feminine names in the genre:

• Jacqueline Carey's Godslayer duology (Absolutely amazing. Plays with themes of morality, religion, and war with a deep lore to bring it to life) I've only read the first two of her Kushiel's Legacy series but I've enjoyed those as well.
• Trudi Canavan's Highlord's Apprentice trilogy (not the hardest or heaviest read but quite fun)
• Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's Death Gate Cycle (7 books, massive story with woven storylines and a wild lore creating a world with its own redefined science)

Your username in YELLING CAPS combined with the mundane comment made me chuckle.

'Shut up! You can't tell me what to do! You're not my real mom!'

'What?'

Every time something happens in my area I find out about it the next day.

My old workplace used to encourage people to use all caps on their reports because it hid the fact the people they hired didn't know how to capitalize grammatically.

I've been thinking like that for a long time but recently I've been thinking about it in terms of internalized opposition. One of the most pernicious elements of the fight against stupid and bad ideologies is when their framings gain dominance even in the minds of their opponents.

At some point, someone said 'black people are blah, white people are bleh,' and the person next to them probably said 'What do you mean black people?' because the concept was new but the ideology of race turned into such a common one that people who were oppressed by it were forced to consider what the powerful thought about it, like an atheist prisoner being forced to think about how to convince a Christian jailer to be less awful to them. They internalized it. And now even people who are 'anti-racist' often treat 'blackness' and 'whiteness' as if they were real, and not just conceptually different in the same way you can live in a different country without moving because the lines on a map change. Even as they battle the concept, they try to do it from within the system, prisoners demanding to be free without acknowledging the world outside the prison walls.

Almost no one does one thing to the exclusion of all else, so few, if any, people are getting their knowledge purely from memes, but it doesn't have to be exclusive to have an effect. Someone who drinks a gallon of soda a day isn't necessarily getting all of their nutritional intake from soda, and, to borrow the phrase, god help them if so, but it is going to have effects on their life. Treating politics as entertainment also has secondary effects. Just like drinking soda can train your tongue to expect that level of sweetness, which can lead to troubling dietary choices, political humor trains you expect a punchline in a discussion about policy, which can lead to bad political choices.

And notice there how you changed what I said to argue against a point I didn't make. I talked about jokes as a substitute for sex ed. You talked about jokes after sex ed. There is no mandated political ed class after which to make jokes. The shallow coverage on things like Oliver, tiktok, or other comedy shows is often the deepest, or the only, examination of a political subject people actually ingest, maybe supplemented by a few headlines, a shallow newscast, and an article they didn't finish. They aren't making memes about the thing they learned during an in-depth intended-to-inform class. They are making memes based on the memes they laughed at because of the vague half-knowledge they got from the media atmosphere.

Jokes have their place. No one would argue for a life completely lacking in humor, but, just like your example of rape, a subject that is extremely serious because of the long lasting and possibly life-destroying effect it can have on people, politics is too serious to be joked about in the public sphere. Joking about it fails to take serious something that can leave someone alive, but utterly unable to live.

I get that humor is useful for making hard topics seem easier but some things should be hard. Would you consider dirty jokes an appropriate substitute for a sex ed class? Would drinking away your nervousness be a good way to prepare for a driving test? Serious matters need to be discussed frankly and honestly.

I used to kind of like Oliver sometimes, but then I saw the pattern and it ruined it for me. Every episode is 'Hello joke>subject>mock subject if funny looking, else mock thing next to subject>let's get serious, bad thing is happening>it's really bad>but don't get outraged enough to go do something about it, here's someone else taking care of it for you>callback to joke earlier>HBO-brand anti-capitalist recuperation catharsis complete. Go back to work.

I am leaning harder and harder on 'political comedy isn't comedy' as a rule. 'It's just a joke,' is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn't do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn't supposed to be entertaining. It's the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.

Are you suggesting people are evolutionarily suited to gobbling nuts?