CSotD: Doublechecked Cartoons

Bill Bramhall takes a shot at New York City’s new and improved “We (heart) NYC” logo. I won’t dispute him on whether the place has too many rats, because I’m not a city person to begin with and NYC is not high on my list. If I had to live in a city, my first choice would be Montreal, but, alas, while my French is good enough to live there, it’s not good enough to make a living as a writer there.

And Boston is nice, if you park your car in Newton and take the T into town. Chicago and Pittsburgh are good collections of blue collar neighborhoods, though Chicago’s weather puts me off.

However, it is my well-considered opinion that the City of New York should have held onto its “New Amsterdam” label and let the other 57% of the people in the Empire State call their place “New York.”

Or vice-versa. Makes me no never mind which, but when they report something on the news as having happened “Upstate,” that means Yonkers or maybe Kingston.

What it really means is that the newscaster doesn’t give a damn where it happened, except that it was in the part of New York that doesn’t really count. The part with no Rockettes.

Back in 1977, when they came up with “I (heart) NY” we all knew they didn’t mean us, but we could pretend otherwise and the state did a whole tourism thing promoting the many many many many many places in the state from which you cannot see the Statue of Liberty.

Which is in New Jersey, home of the Jets and Giants.

Anyway, they — the people who matter — seem now to have decided that the new motto should be “We (heart) NYC” and I suppose it’s more honest, but it’s not my NY, so I won’t argue with Bramhall over how it might apply to rats.

On to more substantive matters:

Tom Stiglich (Creators) refutes the possibly maybe pending eventual indictment of Donald Trump by, first of all, assuming that the Manhattan DA can only prosecute one crime at a time, a theory he may have gotten from watching “Law and Order.”

Second, he assumes that crime is up in Manhattan, which isn’t true even though you might have read it on Truth Social.

Yep. Even though Donald Trump said it, it somehow turns out not to be true.

Astonishing, eh?

After awhile, you begin to wonder how much indulgence you should allow for honest mistakes. The failures of SVB and Signature banks happened over two weeks ago, and this Chip Bok (Counterpoint) cartoon just appeared yesterday.

Seems like plenty of time to get the basic facts straight.

As widely reported those two weeks ago, the Fed scrambled to avoid a panic that would bring down other banks, by removing the executives of SVB and Signature as well as voiding the holdings of their investors. The only guarantee — granted, a substantial one — was that the FDIC would lift the limits on depositor insurance in order to protect depositors.

That was, however, to protect the “passengers,” not the driver, who, the above dialogue notwithstanding, did have insurance, just not enough.

The administration’s point was to avoid a Bank Meltdown Contagion, which would be extremely bad for the American economy.

Which makes it very important to get your facts right.

Depending on your goal.

Dana Summers (Tribune) is also apparently hoping to encourage the type of needless, pointless panic that could crash the economy. I’m not sure why: I didn’t think 2008 was that much fun.

But I’ve certainly been accused of lacking a sense of humor.

I did get a laugh out of John Deering (Creators)‘s response to the Congressional flogging of TikTok.

The hearings were praises as “bipartisan” but I’m not sure that’s a such good thing. I’ll admit I didn’t sit down for a heapin’ helpin’ but what I saw and heard reminded me of Sen. Ted Stevens’ remarks in 2006 about the Internet being a series of tubes.

I’m not particularly opposed to rules keeping TikTok off government computers and phones, but, beyond that, that room started to smell like censorship.

It’s possible to be bipartisanly ignorant as well as bipartisanly hostile, and there seemed to be a fair amount of both going on.

And I would say so even if I didn’t believe that TikTok is a candy mint.

Jeff Danziger (Counterpoint) offers my standard haystack defense, which is that the more they gather, the less they can process, and that most of what is posted on TikTok is of dubious value overall, never mind of any value to spies.

Granted, of course, they could add filters to sort out certain topics. Someone at the hearing asked, for instance, if TikTok had taken down references to the massacre at Tiananmen Square or the oppression of the Uyghars, which would be a sensible question, if TikTok were available in China, which it is not.

ByteDance, which owns TikTok, has a different social app in China, which is, indeed, highly censored and on which kids under 14 may only spend 40 minutes a day. Which sounds pretty good, if your goal is to have a government like Beijing’s, though Clay Jones indicates that it’s not his.

In fact, Jones has a really good blog entry on the topic, by which I mean we agree pretty much down the line and he quotes lots of smart people, which I mean people who agree with both of us.

But Walt Handlesman wraps it up in a neat package with a bow, pointing out that, while TikTok may well be tracking our kids, so is everyone else. All them tubes on the Internet got to lead somewhere, gosh durn it.

Still, let’s be reasonable. As Mike Smith (KFS) says, we’re only concerned with protecting our children.

From the Internet tubes, that is, not the kind of metal tubes that bullets come flying out of.

Nobody dares hold a hearing about those.

11 thoughts on “CSotD: Doublechecked Cartoons

  1. Moments when I’m grateful that I’m too old to bother with anything newer than Facebook.

  2. “But I’ve certainly been accused of lacking a sense of humor.” – Really? I think you’re funny as hell in a George Carlin way. Good New York map. I live in Western New York and I can see Canada from my house, you betcha.

  3. I have to admit that I was amused by the “We Own NYC” t-shirt, but then I’ve never worn a “heart” t-shirt, and I’ve never seen a rat the few times I’ve been to NYC, and have seen rats in other much smaller cities. So I know the slogan isn’t fair.
    I realize the bank cartoons are to own the left and to remind folks to hate the government, but are there really some conservates who really want to remove the protection for small depositors? Or am I reading too much into them?

  4. New York City isn’t even the rattiest city in the nation. According to Orkin, that title belongs to Chicago. But NYC is #2, so yeah…the cartoon works. I do own an “I Heart NYC” shirt but my belly has outgrown it.

    Facts don’t bother Tom Stiglich or Chip Bok.

    Out of all the TikTok cartoons here, including mine, I like like Walt’s the best. I wish I woulda thought of that.

    Thanks for showcasing me again.

    1. Chicago used to be home to the super rats, the ones that could gnaw through concrete like butter. We do not get much news about a rat problem because Chicago has become a good urban habitat for coyotes and foxes which prey on rodents.

  5. (1) Reason I’m supposed to be worried about TikTok: Chinese government could access the collected data.

    (2) Reason I’m more worried about Facebook, Twitter, “Truth” Social etc.: *anyone* can buy the collected data.

  6. That map doesn’t even properly represent how NYC people view the state. On their (our? since I went to college there and my family is from there) version of the map, there are three labels: “NYC”, “Long Island”, and everything else is “Upstate”. So, yes, Yonkers or Kingston is Upstate, but so is Albany or Buffalo. One of my friends in college argued that our school in The Bronx was “Upstate”, because it took him an hour and he had to cross two bridges to get there from his home in Queens. I fought him hard on that one.

    Whereas people from any of those other regions labelled on that map will argue that the part labelled “Upstate” is, in no way, shape, or form, “Upstate”, and is, at best, “Downstate”. I grew up in what that map calls “The Champlain Valley”, and my wife from the CapDist says that Upstate doesn’t even start until you reach The Adirondacks.

    And, please. In the New York City resident’s view, there are parts of New York that very much count that have no Rockettes. They’re called “The Outer Boroughs”, or, to everyone else, the other four boroughs of NYC besides Manhattan.

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