CSotD: Mash note with Nib link
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If you haven't put the Nib on your regular diet … well, thanks, because it means you have to come here for clues of when you should go there.
But you're probably missing some comics that would tickle your fancy but don't particularly tickle mine.
Not to suggest that my fancy isn't wonderfully ticklish, mind you. But curatingeditorperson Matt Bors does two things that make it important you go there on your own:
One is that he publishes thoughtful work that I don't always laugh at or even agree with but that often makes me think.
The other is that longer works are generally uploaded in pieces and I feel guilty about reproducing anything that requires me to snatch more than one image. Which may be part of his cunning plan, and, if so, it's working.
The mission at CSOTD in large part is that I'll spotlight a cartoon and readers can then use the link to begin following that artist's work, which is why I generally link to main sites rather than to the specific piece.
So, for instance, I already had Wiley Miller's piece of curmudgeonly schadenfreude pulled out for today. And while I assume most serious comics fans know where to find Non Sequitur if they want to read it, here's the link.
I had that ready to roll, but then came to the Nib and Jonathan Rosenberg's bitcoin gag, which, paired with Wiley's gag, would make a good Juxtaposition of the Day, but which, in any case, is brilliant and funny and deserves to be seen:
Now, usually, a comic that long would have been posted in chunks, so I would have shown you the first panel and sent you to the Nib for the rest.
But Matt Bors sits up nights obsessively thinking of ways to make me look foolish, so, this time, the whole furshlugginer piece was posted in a single chunk.
It's still a good example of what's available there, even though it's a lousy example of what I wanted to show you.
I should mention that comics often appear on the Nib that are not on the originating artists' web sites, so you'd do well to check both.
And I'm glad to report that Matt pays cartoonists. And I'm also glad Rosenberg has made money with these, but I sure wish they'd quit being relevant.
So here's a better example:
If I disagree with a cartoonist, I almost always disagree with the cartoon. For example, not only do I support the ACA in theory, but I was able to sign up and now I can afford health insurance coverage for the first time since I went freelance five years ago.
So when somebody does a cartoon about how you can't sign up for it, or it costs too much, or suggesting that the temporary subsidies while the system gets up and running cost more than indefinitely having taxpayers underwrite emergency room care and hospitalization for uninsured patients, well, yes, I disagree.
But since three minutes of honest inquiry would provide the facts, I dismiss the cartoon not simply as "agreeing to disagree" but as promoting a deliberate, partisan lie.
Which places it under the protection of the Prime Directive, because I don't post cartoons of a class that a certain Nib editor once curated at his own site as "turds." (I report, you decide.)
But, while there are some millennialist true-believer cartoonists at the Nib whom I avoid, there are also cartoonists there who often raise issues in ways I appreciate, even if we come to different conclusions.
Here's Liza Donnelly's piece on the "bossy" controversy and it's just the first panel so you have to go there to see the whole thing, which means she's illustrating both my points, bless her heart.
But to our point of disagreement:
I've worked for more women than men, and I've seen a divide between a number of women who became leaders because they acted like men and a smaller number who made it without that factor.
Which fits in with what I've written about inequity in the classroom, based on how the "seeking common grounds" approach female students typically take in discussion can be so totally overwhelmed by the aggressive "my point wins" typical male approach. (I didn't claim to have made it up.)
But outlawing the term "bossy" is not in accord with the goal of encouraging a management style that seeks common ground rather than insisting that women who want to ascend to the heights must adopt the "conquer and destroy" method.
Nor am I convinced that "bossy" is the word we need to fret over anyway.
In my experience, nobody applies the term "bossy" to anyone much above the age of seven.
Older girls and women who play "my way or the highway" get called barracudas and bitches and the c-word and all sorts of nasty sexist things, but "bossy," AFAIK, is pretty much reserved for know-it-all big sister types.
Beyond that, the move to "ban bossy" assumes that "bossy" is a negative term applied to positive behavior.
It's not.
The problem isn't that women who are referred to as "bossy" become discouraged from aspiring to management, but that men who are referred to as "pricks" don't and, in fact, seem to be rewarded for it.
I've worked for some bossy women and I've worked for some real pricks and I gotta say, I don't have a preference, except a very, very strong preference instead for the good, effective, competent managers — male or female — whom I've also worked for.
And here's the thing: I suspect that if Liza and I were having this conversation face to face, we wouldn't end up yelling at each other.
I wish more cartoons sparked that kind of process.
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