Jesse Singal wrote an entire article about how the sealion is right (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/of-course-the-sea-lion-is-right). In the comments were people defending the artist's original intention, their defenses sometimes running to several paragraphs or more. Which is something of a self-own: if you need 3+ paragraphs to explain the message of your comic (which is, you know, a visual medium), it's failed in its intended purpose.
I don’t know if I agree with your assessment about a self-own. The comic was written with a certain context (Gamergate at least is the one I took from it). For people reading that cartoon thinking of that context, the meaning is clear and funny. Then the cartoon was taken out of its context to mean “anyone asking you to support your claims is like a sea lion.” In that wider context the sea lion is definitely right. That it would take words explain the context and distinguish between the good and bad versions of the comic doesn’t mean it’s a bad comic, any more than the annotations in Penguin editions mean that those are bad books.
I think the fact that this debate happens every time this comic is discussed is a clear indicator that the comic failed. It's simply not a good comic. It is clearly framed as having a message that the reader should be able to understand, but it's execution is so unclear that you can get five people in a room and they'll all argue about what it means.
I disagree. I think it's a good comic that's gotten hijacked by internet debates. A lot of works with reasonably clear messages have passed through that machinery and gotten mangled as a result.
What I will agree with is that it's not a good comic *to make into an internet meme.* When people see it a million times, or when they see it used (very often badly)as an argument against them, overthinking is bound to result. It's a good comic to share to commiserate with people who have experienced being brigaded by humorless lunkheads; it's not a good comic to use as a manifesto or a put-down, which it all too often is.
I don't know how knowing the "context" changes the meaning of the comic. The woman talking shit about sealions comes off as a jerk and the sealion is being polite but persistent. What context am I missing?
I disliked this comic long before I knew anyone else did, because it does seem so easy to map "sea lion" as an equivalent category to human ethnicity. Being a sea lion is also an immutable genetic characteristic. But I will still concede that "Sorry, I meant it as more like a non-genetic group like Gamergaters" is a small footnote, not a ponderous essay.
Being persistent is not polite if the person has indicated that they don’t want a conversation. Have you not come across people who act entitled to engagement, and who respond to every message stridently, even if they’re being formally civil?
It doesn’t have to be Gamergate; it can be any community or belief system where the standard rhetorical strategy is to simply overwhelm a less-obsessive interlocutor. The other day I came upon a Holocaust denier in Scott Alexander’s comments: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education/comment/57101942. If you read that thread, you’ll see that when it’s clear the commenter is indeed a denialist, everyone talking with him is dismissive and makes assumptions about how the conversation will go, which many would call rude, whereas the commenter is civil. But I think in context not wanting to engage in a fruitless argument is perfectly understandable, and it’s the denialist who’s being rude by trying to hijack a conversation with his ideology. What do you think?
If Alice tweets "You know, I don't really care for black people", Bob (who is black) replies "Why not?", and Alice replies "go away", but Bob doesn't let her get away with it and demands that she explains her reasoning - well, I know who I consider the asshole in that situation, and it isn't Bob. I don't care if Alice has indicated that she doesn't want a conversation: Bob is perfectly entitled to feel insulted by Alice's initial statement and likewise entitled to demand that she explain herself. Perhaps there are more productive ways Bob could spend his time, but I wouldn't blame him for being persistent and not just letting Alice off the hook for expressing a blatantly racist (even eliminationist) statement.
This is why the sealion comic doesn't work the way the artist intended it: in the fictional universe portrayed by the comic, sealions are an intelligent species, and being a sealion is an immutable trait. Given such a state of affairs, I have about as much sympathy for the woman saying "sealions I could do without" as I would for a woman in our world saying "I could do without black people".
Note that it would've been very easy for the artist to rescue his intended message simply by (as Jesse points out) substituting "sea lion" for something else much more low-stakes. If the woman had said "I find obsessive fans of Marvel movies kind of irritating" and the sealion showed up (wearing an MCU T-shirt) to demand that she explain and justify her statement, I would think he was being unreasonable and obnoxious.
Now, the artist and people who agree with his stated authorial intent might argue that the comic obviously MEANT something along these lines - that sealions are just a stand-in for a particular kind of person and the woman is really the aggrieved party. Well, lots of people came away feeling more sympathetic towards the sealion, because the artist chose an unintuitive visual metaphor which didn't convey his intended message properly. If an artist is bad at visual metaphors, maybe webcomics is the wrong medium for them.
Yes, I’ve seen this reading and it’s understandable, but I don’t share it. Basically this comes down to the idea (which almost everyone shares, including me) that generalizing about an ideology is mostly fine, whereas generalizing about a race isn’t. So “I could do without Black people” is not acceptable, whereas “I could do without Holocaust deniers” or “Flat Earthers” or even “Scientologists” (a religion, but one with a deserved reputation) is acceptable. We agree so far? So the question is whether the comic is implying the sea lion is supposed to be more like an aggrieved Black person or more like an aggrieved Flat Earther.
People who share your reading tend to approach the world of the comic literally. In this world, sea lions seem to be a particular “race,” distinct and conscious and all that, so the woman seems to be engaged in racism. Whereas I read it from the perspective that this comic is clearly satire of our world, so I ask what it could be satirizing? Is it the case that when people online (we all agree this is representing online behavior even though the comic doesn’t say so, another sign that reading it as satire is more productive than reading it semi-literally) say something racist, people of that race follow them around and demand explanation? That would perhaps be justified, but no, I don’t think that’s common; people respond to racist assholes with “Screw you, racist asshole.” So, who DOES act that way? Ideologues! Gamergate. Denialists. Flat Earthers. Scientologists. RevComs. People who have learned to handle disagreement by overwhelming and cowing others. When I read the sea lion as one of those, everything clicks: the behavior is recognizable, the comic is funny, and as a bonus it agrees with what the creator has said he’s going for, satirizing a certain behavior. That seems like a good test of the idea that I’ve hit on a good reading.
Of course there’s the problem that plenty of people read it differently: either they read it like you do, where the woman is a racist, or like a lot of folks who think they agree with the comic but take it to mean that any request for clarification or support is “sea lioning.” One could say that means it’s a worse comic. But plenty of satire gets misread! Some of my favorite stories and books have been egregiously misread by multiple sides. And while I’m not going to say that the Sea Lion comic guy is Swift or Orwell, I’m also not going to give back the satisfying recognition I got when I first saw that comic. When read correctly and narrowly, I think he nailed it.
I'll also reiterate that if you need 449 words to explain the "correct" reading of a six-panel webcomic, it probably isn't very well-executed, given that the whole point of the medium is to compress information and express ideas more succinctly than they could be expressed through words alone.
As an afterthought, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot hinges on where one first encountered the comic. I first saw it fairly early and so it was maybe easier to read it as intended; if I had first seen it in the context of someone telling me that asking for evidence is unacceptable, I very well might have read the comic in that light.
Per "Death of the Author", I really resent the idea that any reading of a fictional work which doesn't align with the author's stated intention is hence a "misreading", especially seeing as literally no one follows this belief to its logical conclusion and only throws it out when convenient.
I disagree in part, even as I agree (in part) with the cartoon's author's stated intended message, -but only in part. I also disagree with part of his message which I will explain below.
But 1) this was not a great cartoon because it's intent simply was NOT at all clear to many/most who ultimately read the cartoon. If so much explanation is necessary for most to understand it, then the message was poorly conveyed, maybe not to the core intended audience but broadly speaking.
But 2) I also disagree with parts of the cartoonist's intended message (and your own explination concerning generalizing about ideologies): while it can certianly be reasonable not to want to engage with certain (especially hateful or bigoted) ideologies, overgeneralizing (and often inaccurately so) in public about belief systems actually isn't mostly fine. And no, certainly not almost everyone agrees with you. Doing so is often deeply offensive in fact, especially when such an ideology is core to someone's identity such as is often true with religion.
All that being said, you have the right to offend others. I am also a huge advocate of freedom of expression.
Where I will agree with the cartoon's intent is that while people do ultimately have the right to say something offensive (and wrong!) and while others certainly have the right to challenge them on it, they do NOT have the right to threaten, follow them around (much less into their home!), nor keep insisting they address their criticism after they have said they want to be left alone. This I agree with wholeheartedly!
>That would perhaps be justified, but no, I don’t think that’s common; people respond to racist assholes with “Screw you, racist asshole.” So, who DOES act that way? Ideologues! Gamergate. Denialists. Flat Earthers. Scientologists. RevComs.
Obviously your "lived experience" is very different from mine. I have a friend who's much more "woke" and leftist than me, who told me a story about being in a taxi with a taxi driver who said some hateful things about a particular ethnic group (I can't remember the specific ethnicity offhand). My friend did not reply with "screw you, racist asshole" - he asked him why he felt that way. I once worked with a woman who said she would never get into a taxi if the driver was black, and this is more or less how I responded too. Likewise Jesse Singal, who in the linked article described an encounter in which he overheard someone saying hateful things about Jews and responded by telling the man that he (Jesse) was Jewish, and asking him why he felt that way about Jews.
Do you mean to suggest that, in our failure to respond to racist statements by insulting the people who expressed them, that me, my friend and Jesse Singal have outed ourselves as one or more of "ideologues, gamergaters, denialists" etc.?
Personally, I'm not persuaded that insulting someone who says something racist is a very effective way of dissuading them from their racist opinions (assuming, that is, that dissuading them is your goal at all). I'm fairly confident that the number of people who've been told "screw you, racist asshole" and immediately thought "my God, of course! I must promptly desist from my current beliefs!" is 0.
No, being persistent is annoying (and got socrates killed right? asking annoying questions?). I think the inverse is true and more important a leson: If you don't want to be asked stupid questions don't have stupid opinions." Or at least don't have hard-coded opinions. Opinions are not a replacement for a personality or character.
It also teaches an important lesson to people: If you can't account for your opinion, then it might not be a good opinion.
If people got asked to defend their opinions in proportion with the stupidity of those opinions, that would be a just world. In fact I don't think this correlation is reliable. Again, try reading "sea lion" as "Flat Earther" (as one example of a fervently held, wrong belief system). Is "I don't think the world is flat" a stupid opinion? No, it's a correct opinion. But are you going to be able to defend that opinion to a Flat Earther's satisfaction? Of course not. So should you not disagree with Flat Earthers, or express the view that they're loopy and annoying, unless you're willing to have a full-fledged debate with every one that decides to come along and hold you to account?
A Flat Earther has command of far more arguments about why the earth is flat than I have for the reverse; in other words, they can more thoroughly account for their opinion. That doesn't mean that's a better opinion. In this case, it means they're an obsessive who have learned to shut their ears to contrary arguments and believe they've won an argument when they've relentlessly badgered their interlocutor to the point of bowing out of the debate, at which point they (the Flat Earther) says smugly, "I knew they couldn't defend their opinion." This is a cycle I think the Sea Lion account gets exactly right.
This is well after the fact, but far too many people just assert whatever they are claiming is inherently true. They don’t even try to substantiate their words.
I just read Jessie’s article. It was really good; thanks for the link.
I particularly liked to see that the cartoon’s author had an explanation, and acknowledged that that cartoon wasn’t clear. It’s one of the few internet memes I actually know and it always bugged me. It’s nice to see that the author didn’t mean what it appeared he meant.
I also found interesting Jessie’s discussion about what “proper behavior” should be while on social media. I feel like the general public is (finally!) acknowledging that I’ve been right all along: social media is a useless cesspool and there’s no point in arguing about “proper behavior”. Just don’t use it.
Well, Substack has enough functionality in common with Twitter/X that you could persuasively argue we're both using social media right now.
And even if you shouldn't use something (I agree that society would be better off if most people used social media a lot less) doesn't mean there aren't better and worse ways of using something. No one should inject heroin, but if you're going to inject heroin you're much better off not sharing needles. Some ways of using social media (doxing people, sharing revenge porn) are uncontroversially worse than other ways.
I read Singal's article, and I'm skeptical at how it turns 'I could do without sea lions' into "effectively wishing genocide on sea lions". The woman has a bad opinion of sealions (the rest of the comic may illustrate where that came from) but it's pretty clear she doesn't actually want to murder them.
In the fictional universe portrayed in the comic, sealions are an intelligent demographic within the society. Substitute an intelligent demographic within our society and see how it sounds: "I could do without Jews", "I could do without black people", "I could do without Vietnamese" etc. People have been understandably pilloried as racist for expressing much milder sentiments than the woman does about sealions e.g. "I've no problem with black people, I just don't want them living in my neighbourhood".
Well yes: these phrases are racist, and they are not calls for genocide. Even when the sea lion breaks into the house, the woman tells him to go away, not to die. The way the conversation goes, it seems pretty clear to me that both the sea lion and the woman know that her remark was just plain dumb. The woman is in fact "unable to publicly defend her statement".
This isn’t just the left. This is basic Marshall McLuhan — the medium (online discourse) dictates how things are communicated. Memes end up ruling because online discourse leads us all to have the attention span of toddlers. We probably need to severely restrict the enhanced-virality short-video/meme type of social media if democracy is to survive.
The view of the world as a simple morality play identified by Jeff seems to currently be more common on the left, but I wonder if it is simply because left-wing ideas are currently more in the zeitgeist. A manichaean morality certainly isn't incompatible with conservative ideals either.
I'd say the opposite, but that's probably because of my media consumption. I'd also say that centrists are more likely to have the morality play be "smart vs ignorant" .
It's the Bob Roberts problem -- if you accept that catchy folk songs that tug on the heart-strings are the perfect medium to convey a political ideology, then voters will elect the candidate with the catchiest, most heart-strings-tugging folk song repertoire. It can be used in service of any ideology, even abhorrent ones.
I guess it's also the Sesame Street problem, where all the research that went into making short-form educational video content for children informed generations of ads for bubble gum and toys.
The box cartoon has a different problem, as well: none of the people are *doing* anything - they're passively consuming entertainment! What if those three were playing ball on the field? All of a sudden, boxes may not be the solution: the a tiny guy in center field won't catch more flies or hit the cutoff man with a few extra boxes to stand on. And what if the big guy has a massive hole in his swing and can't make contact with an inside fastball to save his life?
In other words, the idea that merit = ability to consume is wildly wrong. What one produces (or, in earlier stages of life, might one day be capable of producing) is what matters, or ought to.
The "advanced text" on equity vs equality sometimes has an additional panel with the fence removed labeled something like "Justice" or "systemic barrier removed".
Personally, I think the cartoon is pointless because it's always used in kind of a silly way. People are usually just disagreeing about what is fair, usually with two reasonable ideas of what fairness is. But instead of addressing that disagreement, they use the cartoon that illustrates the concept that "fairness" can be ambiguous and accuse the other of not valuing fairness. Matt Bruening (spouse of the Atlantic writer) describes it on his blog:
As soon as I looked at the two-women-horrendously-oversimplifying-the-Israeli-Palestinian-conflict cartoon, my inner thirteen-year-old said “there must be a porn version of this.”
Very few people have an issue with giving extra help to those in need, but in practice equity policies tend to favor handicapping the privileged (because that’s much easier to implement most of the time)
The equity boxes annoys me because all the people outside are STEALING. They didn't pay for tickets - they don't have a right to watch the game! The fair thing to do would be to set up a fund to assist with procuring tickets and then the stadium would have reasonable accommodations for seating required by law. I am not allocating resources to subsidize the box lobby.
I think that including XKCD in the "political meme" category is somewhat disingenuous, since it is literally a cartoonist commenting on a very particular political phenomenon (people complaining about being kicked off of Twitter for breaking the rules). How are you expecting a cartoonist to react, write an essay? It's his job to draw cartoons! (It's also not a meme.)
Is the equity/equality stuff usually considered far left? I'd expect someone posting that to be a Biden or Clinton voter, not a Sanders voter. Bernie Sanders himself doesn't seem too familiar with the concept, based on when he was asked about it on Bill Maher. Matt Bruenig is a quintessential leftist and he uses Bernie's failure to give a left wing dismissal of the concept.
I'm guessing that the far left (or any political group you don't belong to) is going to seem to rely more on oversimplified arguments. When you read a pithy tweet supporting one part of your worldview, you don't expect it to be an exhaustive thesis. But when you read a similar tweet from a perspective you don't agree with, you think of all the things they're not considering. The people that would like all debt forgiven do not read that comic and fault it for not considering the economic costs of the program. To them, it's only a "witty" comeback to a specific argument and there's no expectation that it says anything outside that narrow use.
(This is all the general "you". I don't mean that you, the reader of the comment, specifically do this)
Yeah this. *Everyone* uses quippy and humorous remarks to convey stuff (ideas, feelings, facts, etc) bc that's how humans communicate.
When we relate to it, we perfectly understand the point they're trying to make is just one more musing, when we don't, we somehow assume the artist wanted to express the Truth about All Things and find it wanting.
It's very easy to notice when you scroll the profile of memers with which you agree on some issues but not others
I would add that if I find something funny or entertaining on its own merits, I am less concerned with whether its creator has some ulterior motive. This means that the only jokes that get added to the "this just proves that [conservatives/progressives/whatever] aren't funny" file are the unfunny ones, making it a kind of No True Scotsman situation.
why are the women in the the Palestine cartoon sitting on the ground drinking coffee/tea? The only explanation is that they are at a park (with mugs?) otherwise these filthy women just sit on the dirty ground at their homes/coffee shops.
It's not just cartoons. At this point, I think 21st century social justice artwork has become a specific, definable genre. Look at the cover to any progressive, identity politics-related book published in the last decade, and they are virtually indistinguishable. The art is all gravitating towards a singular style of depicting people (see: Ibram Kendi's "Antiracist Baby"). It has strong Soviet vibes and is creepy as all hell.
I generally don't like arguing from cliches, but "the left can't meme" is proven correct multiple times a day across social media. The usual cope to this is that right wing ideas are simple and thus more easily conveyed via memes, but the real issue is that left wing ideas are also very simple, but dressed up with a bunch of rhetoric to camouflage the underlying idea and they need all of that "context" to hide the dumb.
The problem is. COMEDY!!! It's so easy to get your ideas across with comedy. Good comedy will soften a persons mind and you can get through to them. The problem is that a lot of the left doesn't have much "good comedy" They think good comedy is just insulting the left, or Jk rowling, or John Cleese. It's childish stuff and they don't really try to be self deprecating. Self deprecation is the absolute best way to get someone to listen to you. It shows humility. But also a sense that "hey this isn't that serious we can talk about it." If you don't disarm the person you're trying to convince then how do you convince them?
The problem is the majority of the left isn't interesting in convincing anyone (and yes the right too before anyone gets their panties in a bunch but I will never care about what the right does because I AM NOT ON THE RIGHT and don't want to be I don't like religion, never will again and do not care about them) they're interested in looking very smart to people that already agree with them. Not quite winning the hearts and minds.
“the far right can only process short strings of simple words spoken to them by an imaginary frog” When your ideas are cartoonish to begin with, you don’t need an actual cartoon.
A think a lot of it comes down to the far-left liking to feel they are more sophisticated, educated, etc. than the right, who tends to value more 'folk-wisdom'. Both perspectives are wrong, but they still probably impact communication style. These comics often act as 'explainers' that try to shortly and simply convey some facts and arguments about the world. The fact that these facts are usually wrong and arguments usually stupid is irrelevant; so long as you don't have to be genuinely confronted with this the reader is allowed to consume it and fulfill their need to feel sophisticated and intelligent.
Just my guess, but I've noticed this general trend as well and those are my two cents.
I think the cartoon/comic format is self-conscious superiority. The woman explaining shit about the Israelis is chilling over coffee with her friend because she knows she's so right that her explanation is a form of relaxation. It's an extension of 'I'm so tired' which is just a way of saying things are so obvious that one runs out of energy pointing it out. The comic style also suggests adults trying to simplify things for children. It's smug social signaling designed for likes and not really to be taken at face value.
Jesse Singal wrote an entire article about how the sealion is right (https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/of-course-the-sea-lion-is-right). In the comments were people defending the artist's original intention, their defenses sometimes running to several paragraphs or more. Which is something of a self-own: if you need 3+ paragraphs to explain the message of your comic (which is, you know, a visual medium), it's failed in its intended purpose.
I don’t know if I agree with your assessment about a self-own. The comic was written with a certain context (Gamergate at least is the one I took from it). For people reading that cartoon thinking of that context, the meaning is clear and funny. Then the cartoon was taken out of its context to mean “anyone asking you to support your claims is like a sea lion.” In that wider context the sea lion is definitely right. That it would take words explain the context and distinguish between the good and bad versions of the comic doesn’t mean it’s a bad comic, any more than the annotations in Penguin editions mean that those are bad books.
I think the fact that this debate happens every time this comic is discussed is a clear indicator that the comic failed. It's simply not a good comic. It is clearly framed as having a message that the reader should be able to understand, but it's execution is so unclear that you can get five people in a room and they'll all argue about what it means.
I disagree. I think it's a good comic that's gotten hijacked by internet debates. A lot of works with reasonably clear messages have passed through that machinery and gotten mangled as a result.
What I will agree with is that it's not a good comic *to make into an internet meme.* When people see it a million times, or when they see it used (very often badly)as an argument against them, overthinking is bound to result. It's a good comic to share to commiserate with people who have experienced being brigaded by humorless lunkheads; it's not a good comic to use as a manifesto or a put-down, which it all too often is.
I don't know how knowing the "context" changes the meaning of the comic. The woman talking shit about sealions comes off as a jerk and the sealion is being polite but persistent. What context am I missing?
I disliked this comic long before I knew anyone else did, because it does seem so easy to map "sea lion" as an equivalent category to human ethnicity. Being a sea lion is also an immutable genetic characteristic. But I will still concede that "Sorry, I meant it as more like a non-genetic group like Gamergaters" is a small footnote, not a ponderous essay.
Being persistent is not polite if the person has indicated that they don’t want a conversation. Have you not come across people who act entitled to engagement, and who respond to every message stridently, even if they’re being formally civil?
It doesn’t have to be Gamergate; it can be any community or belief system where the standard rhetorical strategy is to simply overwhelm a less-obsessive interlocutor. The other day I came upon a Holocaust denier in Scott Alexander’s comments: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education/comment/57101942. If you read that thread, you’ll see that when it’s clear the commenter is indeed a denialist, everyone talking with him is dismissive and makes assumptions about how the conversation will go, which many would call rude, whereas the commenter is civil. But I think in context not wanting to engage in a fruitless argument is perfectly understandable, and it’s the denialist who’s being rude by trying to hijack a conversation with his ideology. What do you think?
If Alice tweets "You know, I don't really care for black people", Bob (who is black) replies "Why not?", and Alice replies "go away", but Bob doesn't let her get away with it and demands that she explains her reasoning - well, I know who I consider the asshole in that situation, and it isn't Bob. I don't care if Alice has indicated that she doesn't want a conversation: Bob is perfectly entitled to feel insulted by Alice's initial statement and likewise entitled to demand that she explain herself. Perhaps there are more productive ways Bob could spend his time, but I wouldn't blame him for being persistent and not just letting Alice off the hook for expressing a blatantly racist (even eliminationist) statement.
This is why the sealion comic doesn't work the way the artist intended it: in the fictional universe portrayed by the comic, sealions are an intelligent species, and being a sealion is an immutable trait. Given such a state of affairs, I have about as much sympathy for the woman saying "sealions I could do without" as I would for a woman in our world saying "I could do without black people".
Note that it would've been very easy for the artist to rescue his intended message simply by (as Jesse points out) substituting "sea lion" for something else much more low-stakes. If the woman had said "I find obsessive fans of Marvel movies kind of irritating" and the sealion showed up (wearing an MCU T-shirt) to demand that she explain and justify her statement, I would think he was being unreasonable and obnoxious.
Now, the artist and people who agree with his stated authorial intent might argue that the comic obviously MEANT something along these lines - that sealions are just a stand-in for a particular kind of person and the woman is really the aggrieved party. Well, lots of people came away feeling more sympathetic towards the sealion, because the artist chose an unintuitive visual metaphor which didn't convey his intended message properly. If an artist is bad at visual metaphors, maybe webcomics is the wrong medium for them.
Yes, I’ve seen this reading and it’s understandable, but I don’t share it. Basically this comes down to the idea (which almost everyone shares, including me) that generalizing about an ideology is mostly fine, whereas generalizing about a race isn’t. So “I could do without Black people” is not acceptable, whereas “I could do without Holocaust deniers” or “Flat Earthers” or even “Scientologists” (a religion, but one with a deserved reputation) is acceptable. We agree so far? So the question is whether the comic is implying the sea lion is supposed to be more like an aggrieved Black person or more like an aggrieved Flat Earther.
People who share your reading tend to approach the world of the comic literally. In this world, sea lions seem to be a particular “race,” distinct and conscious and all that, so the woman seems to be engaged in racism. Whereas I read it from the perspective that this comic is clearly satire of our world, so I ask what it could be satirizing? Is it the case that when people online (we all agree this is representing online behavior even though the comic doesn’t say so, another sign that reading it as satire is more productive than reading it semi-literally) say something racist, people of that race follow them around and demand explanation? That would perhaps be justified, but no, I don’t think that’s common; people respond to racist assholes with “Screw you, racist asshole.” So, who DOES act that way? Ideologues! Gamergate. Denialists. Flat Earthers. Scientologists. RevComs. People who have learned to handle disagreement by overwhelming and cowing others. When I read the sea lion as one of those, everything clicks: the behavior is recognizable, the comic is funny, and as a bonus it agrees with what the creator has said he’s going for, satirizing a certain behavior. That seems like a good test of the idea that I’ve hit on a good reading.
Of course there’s the problem that plenty of people read it differently: either they read it like you do, where the woman is a racist, or like a lot of folks who think they agree with the comic but take it to mean that any request for clarification or support is “sea lioning.” One could say that means it’s a worse comic. But plenty of satire gets misread! Some of my favorite stories and books have been egregiously misread by multiple sides. And while I’m not going to say that the Sea Lion comic guy is Swift or Orwell, I’m also not going to give back the satisfying recognition I got when I first saw that comic. When read correctly and narrowly, I think he nailed it.
I'll also reiterate that if you need 449 words to explain the "correct" reading of a six-panel webcomic, it probably isn't very well-executed, given that the whole point of the medium is to compress information and express ideas more succinctly than they could be expressed through words alone.
As an afterthought, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot hinges on where one first encountered the comic. I first saw it fairly early and so it was maybe easier to read it as intended; if I had first seen it in the context of someone telling me that asking for evidence is unacceptable, I very well might have read the comic in that light.
Per "Death of the Author", I really resent the idea that any reading of a fictional work which doesn't align with the author's stated intention is hence a "misreading", especially seeing as literally no one follows this belief to its logical conclusion and only throws it out when convenient.
I disagree in part, even as I agree (in part) with the cartoon's author's stated intended message, -but only in part. I also disagree with part of his message which I will explain below.
But 1) this was not a great cartoon because it's intent simply was NOT at all clear to many/most who ultimately read the cartoon. If so much explanation is necessary for most to understand it, then the message was poorly conveyed, maybe not to the core intended audience but broadly speaking.
But 2) I also disagree with parts of the cartoonist's intended message (and your own explination concerning generalizing about ideologies): while it can certianly be reasonable not to want to engage with certain (especially hateful or bigoted) ideologies, overgeneralizing (and often inaccurately so) in public about belief systems actually isn't mostly fine. And no, certainly not almost everyone agrees with you. Doing so is often deeply offensive in fact, especially when such an ideology is core to someone's identity such as is often true with religion.
All that being said, you have the right to offend others. I am also a huge advocate of freedom of expression.
Where I will agree with the cartoon's intent is that while people do ultimately have the right to say something offensive (and wrong!) and while others certainly have the right to challenge them on it, they do NOT have the right to threaten, follow them around (much less into their home!), nor keep insisting they address their criticism after they have said they want to be left alone. This I agree with wholeheartedly!
>That would perhaps be justified, but no, I don’t think that’s common; people respond to racist assholes with “Screw you, racist asshole.” So, who DOES act that way? Ideologues! Gamergate. Denialists. Flat Earthers. Scientologists. RevComs.
Obviously your "lived experience" is very different from mine. I have a friend who's much more "woke" and leftist than me, who told me a story about being in a taxi with a taxi driver who said some hateful things about a particular ethnic group (I can't remember the specific ethnicity offhand). My friend did not reply with "screw you, racist asshole" - he asked him why he felt that way. I once worked with a woman who said she would never get into a taxi if the driver was black, and this is more or less how I responded too. Likewise Jesse Singal, who in the linked article described an encounter in which he overheard someone saying hateful things about Jews and responded by telling the man that he (Jesse) was Jewish, and asking him why he felt that way about Jews.
Do you mean to suggest that, in our failure to respond to racist statements by insulting the people who expressed them, that me, my friend and Jesse Singal have outed ourselves as one or more of "ideologues, gamergaters, denialists" etc.?
Personally, I'm not persuaded that insulting someone who says something racist is a very effective way of dissuading them from their racist opinions (assuming, that is, that dissuading them is your goal at all). I'm fairly confident that the number of people who've been told "screw you, racist asshole" and immediately thought "my God, of course! I must promptly desist from my current beliefs!" is 0.
No, being persistent is annoying (and got socrates killed right? asking annoying questions?). I think the inverse is true and more important a leson: If you don't want to be asked stupid questions don't have stupid opinions." Or at least don't have hard-coded opinions. Opinions are not a replacement for a personality or character.
It also teaches an important lesson to people: If you can't account for your opinion, then it might not be a good opinion.
If people got asked to defend their opinions in proportion with the stupidity of those opinions, that would be a just world. In fact I don't think this correlation is reliable. Again, try reading "sea lion" as "Flat Earther" (as one example of a fervently held, wrong belief system). Is "I don't think the world is flat" a stupid opinion? No, it's a correct opinion. But are you going to be able to defend that opinion to a Flat Earther's satisfaction? Of course not. So should you not disagree with Flat Earthers, or express the view that they're loopy and annoying, unless you're willing to have a full-fledged debate with every one that decides to come along and hold you to account?
A Flat Earther has command of far more arguments about why the earth is flat than I have for the reverse; in other words, they can more thoroughly account for their opinion. That doesn't mean that's a better opinion. In this case, it means they're an obsessive who have learned to shut their ears to contrary arguments and believe they've won an argument when they've relentlessly badgered their interlocutor to the point of bowing out of the debate, at which point they (the Flat Earther) says smugly, "I knew they couldn't defend their opinion." This is a cycle I think the Sea Lion account gets exactly right.
This is well after the fact, but far too many people just assert whatever they are claiming is inherently true. They don’t even try to substantiate their words.
I just read Jessie’s article. It was really good; thanks for the link.
I particularly liked to see that the cartoon’s author had an explanation, and acknowledged that that cartoon wasn’t clear. It’s one of the few internet memes I actually know and it always bugged me. It’s nice to see that the author didn’t mean what it appeared he meant.
I also found interesting Jessie’s discussion about what “proper behavior” should be while on social media. I feel like the general public is (finally!) acknowledging that I’ve been right all along: social media is a useless cesspool and there’s no point in arguing about “proper behavior”. Just don’t use it.
Lasagna For World
Emperor
Well, Substack has enough functionality in common with Twitter/X that you could persuasively argue we're both using social media right now.
And even if you shouldn't use something (I agree that society would be better off if most people used social media a lot less) doesn't mean there aren't better and worse ways of using something. No one should inject heroin, but if you're going to inject heroin you're much better off not sharing needles. Some ways of using social media (doxing people, sharing revenge porn) are uncontroversially worse than other ways.
I read Singal's article, and I'm skeptical at how it turns 'I could do without sea lions' into "effectively wishing genocide on sea lions". The woman has a bad opinion of sealions (the rest of the comic may illustrate where that came from) but it's pretty clear she doesn't actually want to murder them.
In the fictional universe portrayed in the comic, sealions are an intelligent demographic within the society. Substitute an intelligent demographic within our society and see how it sounds: "I could do without Jews", "I could do without black people", "I could do without Vietnamese" etc. People have been understandably pilloried as racist for expressing much milder sentiments than the woman does about sealions e.g. "I've no problem with black people, I just don't want them living in my neighbourhood".
Well yes: these phrases are racist, and they are not calls for genocide. Even when the sea lion breaks into the house, the woman tells him to go away, not to die. The way the conversation goes, it seems pretty clear to me that both the sea lion and the woman know that her remark was just plain dumb. The woman is in fact "unable to publicly defend her statement".
Very well said (can't leave likes cos substack glitch so have to comment)
This isn’t just the left. This is basic Marshall McLuhan — the medium (online discourse) dictates how things are communicated. Memes end up ruling because online discourse leads us all to have the attention span of toddlers. We probably need to severely restrict the enhanced-virality short-video/meme type of social media if democracy is to survive.
The view of the world as a simple morality play identified by Jeff seems to currently be more common on the left, but I wonder if it is simply because left-wing ideas are currently more in the zeitgeist. A manichaean morality certainly isn't incompatible with conservative ideals either.
I'd say the opposite, but that's probably because of my media consumption. I'd also say that centrists are more likely to have the morality play be "smart vs ignorant" .
It's the Bob Roberts problem -- if you accept that catchy folk songs that tug on the heart-strings are the perfect medium to convey a political ideology, then voters will elect the candidate with the catchiest, most heart-strings-tugging folk song repertoire. It can be used in service of any ideology, even abhorrent ones.
I guess it's also the Sesame Street problem, where all the research that went into making short-form educational video content for children informed generations of ads for bubble gum and toys.
The box cartoon has a different problem, as well: none of the people are *doing* anything - they're passively consuming entertainment! What if those three were playing ball on the field? All of a sudden, boxes may not be the solution: the a tiny guy in center field won't catch more flies or hit the cutoff man with a few extra boxes to stand on. And what if the big guy has a massive hole in his swing and can't make contact with an inside fastball to save his life?
In other words, the idea that merit = ability to consume is wildly wrong. What one produces (or, in earlier stages of life, might one day be capable of producing) is what matters, or ought to.
My favorite response to that was that they could get a better view of the game if they simply purchased a ticket.
Yes! We already have an excellent structure for making sure people have an equitable view of a baseball game: a stadium.
The "advanced text" on equity vs equality sometimes has an additional panel with the fence removed labeled something like "Justice" or "systemic barrier removed".
https://x.com/ClinPsychDavid/status/1407103431718969345
Other times, people will try to score points by pointing out some other flaw, like this guy:
https://x.com/DeRobertus/status/1436647594386759681
Personally, I think the cartoon is pointless because it's always used in kind of a silly way. People are usually just disagreeing about what is fair, usually with two reasonable ideas of what fairness is. But instead of addressing that disagreement, they use the cartoon that illustrates the concept that "fairness" can be ambiguous and accuse the other of not valuing fairness. Matt Bruening (spouse of the Atlantic writer) describes it on his blog:
https://mattbruenig.com/2023/03/05/equality-and-equity/
They are freeloaders.
As soon as I looked at the two-women-horrendously-oversimplifying-the-Israeli-Palestinian-conflict cartoon, my inner thirteen-year-old said “there must be a porn version of this.”
My issue with the boxes cartoon is closer to this Harrison Bergeron-esque version:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRightCantMeme/s/d2Or8fFM4t
Very few people have an issue with giving extra help to those in need, but in practice equity policies tend to favor handicapping the privileged (because that’s much easier to implement most of the time)
The equity boxes annoys me because all the people outside are STEALING. They didn't pay for tickets - they don't have a right to watch the game! The fair thing to do would be to set up a fund to assist with procuring tickets and then the stadium would have reasonable accommodations for seating required by law. I am not allocating resources to subsidize the box lobby.
dumb cartoons are in my opinion a horseshoe theory thing for the far left and far right.
I think that including XKCD in the "political meme" category is somewhat disingenuous, since it is literally a cartoonist commenting on a very particular political phenomenon (people complaining about being kicked off of Twitter for breaking the rules). How are you expecting a cartoonist to react, write an essay? It's his job to draw cartoons! (It's also not a meme.)
Is the equity/equality stuff usually considered far left? I'd expect someone posting that to be a Biden or Clinton voter, not a Sanders voter. Bernie Sanders himself doesn't seem too familiar with the concept, based on when he was asked about it on Bill Maher. Matt Bruenig is a quintessential leftist and he uses Bernie's failure to give a left wing dismissal of the concept.
https://mattbruenig.com/2023/03/05/equality-and-equity/
I'm guessing that the far left (or any political group you don't belong to) is going to seem to rely more on oversimplified arguments. When you read a pithy tweet supporting one part of your worldview, you don't expect it to be an exhaustive thesis. But when you read a similar tweet from a perspective you don't agree with, you think of all the things they're not considering. The people that would like all debt forgiven do not read that comic and fault it for not considering the economic costs of the program. To them, it's only a "witty" comeback to a specific argument and there's no expectation that it says anything outside that narrow use.
(This is all the general "you". I don't mean that you, the reader of the comment, specifically do this)
Yeah this. *Everyone* uses quippy and humorous remarks to convey stuff (ideas, feelings, facts, etc) bc that's how humans communicate.
When we relate to it, we perfectly understand the point they're trying to make is just one more musing, when we don't, we somehow assume the artist wanted to express the Truth about All Things and find it wanting.
It's very easy to notice when you scroll the profile of memers with which you agree on some issues but not others
I would add that if I find something funny or entertaining on its own merits, I am less concerned with whether its creator has some ulterior motive. This means that the only jokes that get added to the "this just proves that [conservatives/progressives/whatever] aren't funny" file are the unfunny ones, making it a kind of No True Scotsman situation.
why are the women in the the Palestine cartoon sitting on the ground drinking coffee/tea? The only explanation is that they are at a park (with mugs?) otherwise these filthy women just sit on the dirty ground at their homes/coffee shops.
It's not just cartoons. At this point, I think 21st century social justice artwork has become a specific, definable genre. Look at the cover to any progressive, identity politics-related book published in the last decade, and they are virtually indistinguishable. The art is all gravitating towards a singular style of depicting people (see: Ibram Kendi's "Antiracist Baby"). It has strong Soviet vibes and is creepy as all hell.
I generally don't like arguing from cliches, but "the left can't meme" is proven correct multiple times a day across social media. The usual cope to this is that right wing ideas are simple and thus more easily conveyed via memes, but the real issue is that left wing ideas are also very simple, but dressed up with a bunch of rhetoric to camouflage the underlying idea and they need all of that "context" to hide the dumb.
The problem is. COMEDY!!! It's so easy to get your ideas across with comedy. Good comedy will soften a persons mind and you can get through to them. The problem is that a lot of the left doesn't have much "good comedy" They think good comedy is just insulting the left, or Jk rowling, or John Cleese. It's childish stuff and they don't really try to be self deprecating. Self deprecation is the absolute best way to get someone to listen to you. It shows humility. But also a sense that "hey this isn't that serious we can talk about it." If you don't disarm the person you're trying to convince then how do you convince them?
The problem is the majority of the left isn't interesting in convincing anyone (and yes the right too before anyone gets their panties in a bunch but I will never care about what the right does because I AM NOT ON THE RIGHT and don't want to be I don't like religion, never will again and do not care about them) they're interested in looking very smart to people that already agree with them. Not quite winning the hearts and minds.
“the far right can only process short strings of simple words spoken to them by an imaginary frog” When your ideas are cartoonish to begin with, you don’t need an actual cartoon.
A think a lot of it comes down to the far-left liking to feel they are more sophisticated, educated, etc. than the right, who tends to value more 'folk-wisdom'. Both perspectives are wrong, but they still probably impact communication style. These comics often act as 'explainers' that try to shortly and simply convey some facts and arguments about the world. The fact that these facts are usually wrong and arguments usually stupid is irrelevant; so long as you don't have to be genuinely confronted with this the reader is allowed to consume it and fulfill their need to feel sophisticated and intelligent.
Just my guess, but I've noticed this general trend as well and those are my two cents.
I never met a sea lion I didn’t like
I think the cartoon/comic format is self-conscious superiority. The woman explaining shit about the Israelis is chilling over coffee with her friend because she knows she's so right that her explanation is a form of relaxation. It's an extension of 'I'm so tired' which is just a way of saying things are so obvious that one runs out of energy pointing it out. The comic style also suggests adults trying to simplify things for children. It's smug social signaling designed for likes and not really to be taken at face value.