The Old Hack

Please do not be ridiculous. It requires neither culture nor any particular kind of brains to use technology. Any murderer can pick up and use a gun. This does not make him a culture. Certainly. It is merely a ritualised form of the same sort of genocide most European countries have committed all over the planet. Unfortunately for the Aztecs they failed when confronted with the Spanish, who turned out to be much better at genocide than they were. That depends entirely on your use of the word. And there is indeed such a thing as peoples without a civilisation. 'Civilised' means 'citified', and again, that is the basis of culture. Once you have a sufficiently large and stable civilisation, culture -- a way of living -- can begin to develop on a large basis. A parasitic group that stages a hostile takeover of a number of cities and use their power to promote an agenda, however -- they are not a culture. Both the Nazis and DAESH merely appropriated the trappings of culture from elsewhere and used them to masquerade as a nation or state.

Actually they can't. Pretty much by definition. Culture requires civilisation.

False. That is propaganda. Religious extremists do not for a culture make anymore than murderers do. If you do a minimal bit of research you will find many Muslims who CONDEMNED this attack. DAESH, like the Nazis, are not a culture. They are a manifestation of barbarism.

Pffft. I still haven't recovered from "The Mummy."

If it is culture against culture in an organised manner, this is usually referred to as warfare, not murder. Of course the point is still moot because war is not really a culture, either. If it is a single person of a culture on a lone crusade against another culture, some might consider it to be murder and others a vendetta. At that point we are getting into semantics. But again it is a moot point for the same reason as above. A vendetta isn't a culture, either.

The one pair of teens or near teens in this comic we have documented evidence of having had sex is the elder Dunkels.

They would turn into Bob Woodward. This might not be a bad thing.

My opinion of that is entirely irrelevant in most cases. It depends on the people of the cultures he is borrowing from and their identity. Gaiman could be perfectly respectful of Norse mythology but might unintentionally have insulted or misused myths of, say, the Cherokee. What matters is if you have a cultural identity and the writer dresses it up in clownface and makes it do inappropriate acts in the name of entertainment. Let's say someone makes a story in which George Washington is a transvestite stripper and prostitute with artificial oversize buckteeth as well as a complete coward. This is just a vague feeling of mine, but I bet that at least some Americans might feel a bit uncomfortable as the rest of the (non-American) audience howls with laughter and agree what utter prats these revolutionaries were. Understood and accepted. You couldn't have known what a massive trigger Shriver's arguments were for me. Now that I can understand and empathise with and I apologise for completely missing your point. And there are many valid parallels. Unfortunately this is a signal to noise ratio problem, one which the Internet unfortunately tends to amplify due to the presence of trolls and attention seekers. The argument "they are just looking for reasons to be offended" is not wholly untrue, because every legitimate cause with people who are genuinely trying to deal with a problem will attract parasites who do just that. If your argument is "please try to understand that I am doing my best and that I can stumble," I can only say that I respect that and will do my best. I am truly sorry that communication failed in this instance even if it did prove an inadvertent example of exactly what you meant.

Yeah. It hasn't exactly turned me into a genius.

Yes, and I was not saying dictionaries are useless. They are not. They are in fact very useful tools. But tools is all they are and too many people treat them as books of law. She used an entirely irrelevant and deliberately absurd point to ridicule the very idea of the concept of what she was attacking. This is a common method used to discredit the opposition. Let me give you an example. A noted TERF used a similar method in an attempt to discredit trans people. She said, "A man cannot just decide he is a woman. It would be like if I said I was Australia. If I did, would I be Australia?" Does this strike you as a fair and reasonable equivalent? And yet, Shriver did the same thing when she equated being a murderer to being of a foreign culture. For that alone I could despise her, and I do. You are. But that is not what Shriver did. She was all but yelling at us of 'lesser' cultures that we have NO right to get mad when someone takes our cultures and treats them with utter contempt just because they think they have a funny idea. Here's what I think of that. When someone takes my nation's myths and legends and decides to take a dump on them, I will damn well protest and Shriver can take her thin skinned whining and insert it rectally, hard. There are actual Nazis trying to use the Norse gods and their symbolism because they think it looks cool. They tried that during WW2, too. BUGGER THAT. There are other and less extreme cases. Many I might not even be bothered to object to. For example, Jack Kirby took Thor and made him into a superhero. But he did it as a modern retelling of a legend and made a lasting cultural contribution of it, and yes, I consider comics to be part of our culture. While that was technically cultural appropriation, it was a different time and age and he did it with a good deal of respect for the material, so he gets a pass. Then there is the Japanese anime Ah! my Goddess. There they took Verdandi, one of the three Norns -- or Morrigu, or the Kindly Ones, or whatever flavour of Indo-European you like -- and turned her into Belldandy. A freaking housewife. They also took Ash Yggdrasil and made it into a supercomputer. And so one of the three Fates, She who Is, got turned into a waifu in a harem anime. Do I find that offensive? Hell yeah. But whatever. If anyone is dumb enough to ask me for my opinion, I will give it to them. And I refuse to invest as much as a penny in their garbage. But will Shriver let me do that? No. She says I should get over myself. Then back to Thor. The recent movie Thor: Ragnarok, to be exact. They grabbed the most sombre and serious part of Norse mythology, the Twilight of the Gods, the End of all Things, and turned it into a sodding PRATFALL COMEDY. Again, do I find that offensive? YOU BET YOUR ARSE. This one I really had to fight hard to not go on the 'net and complain about. Shriver is saying that is not an option I should be allowed to have. I didn't take it, admittedly, but there is a difference between choosing not to complain and being told you can't do it. And that's just Denmark. Denmark actually has a huge advantage a lot of other cultures don't. We retain our sovereignty, we are part of the wealthiest nations on Earth and we can hit back when someone pisses on us culturally. A lot of people from poorer countries or just plain without a home nation to call their own don't have even that. They might for good reason feel offended. For example, let's go back to the swastika. For thousands of years it was an important symbol for many cultures; a variant of it even exists in Norse mythology where it is known as the Sun Cross. Then the Nazis grabbed it, shat on it and now it is one of the most hated symbols on Earth. A Hindu family went to the West and sent their innocent daughter to school wearing her swastika. They came from a part of the world where WW2 as it played out in Europe is not very well understood and they were aghast when their daughter was sent home and told she could not wear it anymore. This, according to Shriver, is JUST FINE. There are people still fighting similar appropriation in many places. And some of them are being seriously hurt. They have every right to object as far as I am concerned. And yes, of COURSE there are idiots abusing this for fun and profit. There are idiots abusing everything they can for fun and profit. That does not mean that the cause they are abusing is invalidated. And I will not shut up because idiots like Shriver feel butthurt by that. Period.

'Tries to do better' is a very vague term. But for me it does NOT stretch far enough to cover 'using dubious propaganda methods to discredit something I do not understand because I am pissy at people who do not understand it either and abuse it to get attention.'

Dictionaries are overrated. Also, even a dictionary can have an agenda and usually does.

http://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-010

Lionel Shriver lost me around the point where she equated cultural appropriation with someone writing from the perspective of a murderer without having committed murder, and her grip on me was already very shaky before that. 1) Being a murderer is not a culture. In fact, I would almost call it the antithesis of culture since most cultures I know of are based on living together in a certain way. Not on killing. (And yes, I would not call Nazism a culture; it is barbarism of the crudest sort, its icons and symbolism... appropriated... from cultures that had nothing to do with it.) 2) Cultural appropriation is not defined by these cherrypicked and extreme examples that Shriver likes to wallow in. Cultural appropriation is when someone grabs something from another culture that 'looks nice' and then uses it heedlessly of its origin and without respect for its original meaning. It is not 'cultural appropriation' to cook and eat sushi. It is cultural appropriation when one takes an ancient and respected religious symbol of another culture and then makes it the symbol of a barbaric agenda of genocide and mass murder. Yes, that is where the Nazis got their swastika from and there are people who revere the swastika and wear it as Christians would wear the Cross, and these are of course HURT and HORRIFIED when they come to Europe or the US and are told that they are foul Nazis for revering their sacred icon. That is an extreme example, of course, but THAT is the essence of cultural appropriation. Shriver's pathetic and self-indulgent complaint utterly ignores that. She has taken the exact wrong lesson from what she has heard: that it is forbidden to use anything from another culture in order not to hurt anyone's tender feelings, which is not true, hyperbole invented by opponents of the concept. What it means is that when one takes something from another culture, one should damn well investigate its origins and use it with some respect for the source material. The sushi menu does not count. On the other hand, if that sushi menu was served by waiters wearing yellowface in WW2-propaganda style outfits and they spoke with a fake 'Asian' accent (most likely not sounding remotely Asian, let alone Japanese) while extolling the virtues of committing harakiri for dessert, then yes, it would be cultural appropriation. As for Shriver's ludicrous demand that you wait on street corners and beg for permission of people of that culture that happen to walk by, that is worthy only of contempt, an extreme example selected by a moral coward who knows that if she actually states the problem in reasonable terms she will lose the argument. This is the age of the Internet, people. Research has NEVER been easier. If you want to use elements from a foreign culture, LOOK IT UP. If you got this far, you know how to read. Use Google. Spend as much as half an hour reading articles about the subject matter. Then you will have a basic idea. And if you want to be thorough -- a concept entirely foreign to Shriver, it seems -- there is such a thing as social media where you can reach out to the people of a specific culture and ASK them for information. If you do it politely and respectfully and you have done at least a minimum of homework first, odds are that you will find someone who is glad to help. Or, like, you can do as Shriver seems to recommend and happily write African characters as blackface-wearing Vaudeville clowns from the late 19th Century and Irishmen as jolly uneducated chronic drunks who get into fights all the time and French as Pepe le Pew-accented onion sellers who duel to death with loaves of bread. I'm sure you won't offend anyone that way, and good luck with that. (Yes, an extreme example like Shriver likes to use -- notice how TOTALLY not offensive that is?)

Butt me no butts.

I can't imagine that anyone could create an agendaless comic for reasons I have given above, so I suspect they advertised it that way. And Justin did use the phrase 'selling point' which I have most often seen in the context of marketing and advertising.

Trolls come of all ages and times. The EGS forums ten years ago had a full complement of them. They just used slightly different tactics to poison and ruin debates. I am sad to say that the basic techniques of attacking the person and not the position as well as the constant moving of goalposts remain the same. Sigh.

See, there's this: having an agenda is not necessarily a bad thing. It can even be necessary. Let's say you sit down and write a truly agendaless story. You write about how the sun rises, a person (gender carefully left indeterminate) awakens due to the touch of sunlight on their face. After a while, they rise, and driven by biological pressure relieves themself. And so forth. You are so careful to remove identity and motivation from the story that nothing is actually going on. Things are just happening. And even then it turns out that you have failed because someone decides that your agenda was to demonstrate how inchoate existence that is all reaction and no action is. I am currently writing a book. Do I have an agenda in it? Darn straight I do. I want to show a protagonist who wants to do the right thing but runs into the issues of her own limitations, the fact that the right thing is not always obvious and that sometimes impulse and anger can make you do some very much not right things. I want to tell a story of human beings muddling along where some of them do some terrible things that nonetheless seem right to them. And most of all, I want to tell a story that people can have fun with so I will hopefully make money off it. Yeah, I said it. Writing for fun and profit. My point is, you can't really avoid having an agenda. But there is a difference between letting the agenda just be a part of the tale with as few seams as possible and hammering your agenda home with the force of an anvil dropped from the top of the Empire State Building. Dan's agenda is fairly obvious. He wants to tell tales of genderqueer and/or LGBTQ teens struggling with their identities and to demonstrate that even if you are not vanilla cishet, you are still a person like anyone else. Also, I strongly suspect, he wants to have fun and make some money. I see Dan's agenda as being obvious without actually having hammer force applied to it. He is not trying to hide it but nor is he forcing it down the reader's throat. When it comes to those people who scream about agendas, virtue signaling and the like, they are almost always trying to 1) discredit the writer/artist and 2) draw attention to themselves. In this case, they are the ones with hammer and anvil. They are attacking the artist, not the work itself. It is a shabby tactic and one I find largely worthy only of contempt. Of course, that means that someone who says they don't have an agenda may simply be doing so in self defence so as to shield themselves from such creatures. But on the other hand, it is also very often done by these exact creatures themselves because they pretend that being status quo minded or even reactionary is the norm -- and ignoring the fact that promoting a norm or a return to older values is in and of itself an agenda.

But that is in and of itself a social agenda. What you are doing is a denial of their arguments even being worth discussing, which is not the same as refuting them but nonetheless acts as a brake on discussion. A good example would be a certain European nation some eighty to eighty-five years ago. Its new leadership was taking it in a direction a lot of citizens found distressing. The national leadership exercised heavy control on what the media could and could not show. One particularly clever minister noted for his instinctive grasp of mass psychology realised that he could not convince all the nation's moviemakers to produce the state message but decided that this need not be a problem. Instead he gave them the go ahead to freely make movies and plays that celebrated the good old times or romantic comedies or similar stuff. This way, he figured, the people who didn't like the political development could be soothed into not objecting as much because they had entertainment that let them forget about it. And it worked as intended -- the moviemakers, relieved that they did not have to make entertainment tailor made to please the State produced exactly this kind of material, incidentally pleasing the State.

It is possible that it is a reference to the upcoming new comic from 'Diversity & Comics', which putatively is supposed to champion a return to the 'good old days' before the 'social agenda' ruined comics. Gail Simone happened to retweet an example of it posted by the creator. I am providing a link to the sample here but I warn in advance that it may be offensive to some. Click at your own risk.

If that was all they wanted, why would they even bring 'social agenda' up? As you yourself pointed out, the claim itself is suspicious. And to be frank, I disagree with the 'intentionally' part of your definition as it is definitely possible to have a social agenda without being aware of it. In fact, as soon as you write a classic superhero story, you are already promoting a social agenda -- if nothing else, the idea that if you have power, you ought to use that power for good and that using it selfishly and without regard for others is bad. Writing a story without a social agenda is approximately as viable as writing a story without tropes.

I'd like to see Soccerillards. Or maybe Table Marathon Rugby.

http://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-009

https://egscomics.com/comic/tlod-008