Letters to the Editor
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Never mind the people in the pen...
...I'm surprised more of the gun-toting audience didn't shoot each other.
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Blah Blah Blah, Scientists are bad.
This cartoon: what a crock of shit.
Thank you Carol Lay for supporting the derogatory myth of the evil scientists.
Sad for you that much of the good in the world around you, you owe to caring and respectful scientists.
Blah Blah Blah, watch the feminist bash others and get upset when people bash her.
Of course we hate nannies Carol, it's all because of your vagina.
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And why did no one think to shoot Anonymous?
For the same reason that nobody shot the experimenter. People never kill the people that need to be killed.
In the 1960's, when blacks rioted about what white people did, did they hurt any white people? Naah. They burned down their own homes in Watts and Harlem. They burned out the stores operated by non-white Koreans and Indians.
My sister once asked me to find The Anarchist's Cookbook so she could get a formula for nerve gas. She intended to plant a bunch of electrically-triggered nerve gas bombs under her neat suburban Saint Louis lawn. That way, when the "N-words" came boiling out of the ghetto to rape and kill all the whites, she'd trigger the gas bombs and kill them all. She even hid a rifle in her teenage son's bedroom and gave him instructions on how to use it to defend them.
She won't need the bombs. If there are riots, she'd be as safe as if she was on the moon. Enraged people don't think, and therefore don't take the time to aim at the right targets.
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One person, one bullet
I'm a science-junkie so my question is: The ones who are shot before they get to shoot their own guns...do their (loaded) guns get to be used by someone else?
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The last man standing
Gets a red star. For Freedom, for the Proletariat, for Joan Walsh.
Kiss me, I'm Radical!
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Zapp
As a "Science-junkie" you should pay better attention to details. The people being shot didn't get guns.
This isn't really about "Scientists bad!" this is more about how people don't question authority. There was an experiment years ago where people were told to shock a person in another room by pressing a button. The other person wasn't really being shocked, but the shocker didn't know this and most simply went along, increasing the shock whenever they were told. The same can be seen in the torturing our country has been doing. The people that performed it were "just doing their jobs" despite not having any leanings in sadism beforehand.
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Anonymous skims the surface again
Leave it to Anonymous to completely miss the point. Last week, Carol merely speculates if there is a gender angle to the lexicon shift from "police" to "nannie" and Anon has a raving fit about vaginas that still continues. This week we have a comic about superficial judgment with a little blind obedience to authority mixed and he takes it scientist bashing.
Anon, you are obviously hear at Salon to tweak our liberal noses. That's fine. But at least put a little thought into it. The first criticiam that comes to your head just might not be the right one. Try reading the content for the actual information they provide, and then make a judgment, rather than just looking for things to stab at along the way.
Your mind may change or not. But I think the discourse would definitely improve.
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Reminds me of....
....the quintessential "blind obedience" case study - the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment:
http://www.prisonexp.org/
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Btw, I don't at all agree with Anon's knee-jerk rage about Carol's latest strip....but Carol has indeed shown some pretty heavy-handed antipathy toward the "evil" of scientists over the course of her "WayLay" work.
She's free to have her opinions, of course. And truth be told, I often admire her comics (this latest one included)....
But we scientists aren't all evil, amoral and hellbent on world domination/destruction (cue "Pinky and The Brain" theme music ), dear Carol. I myself am working on cataract and vision research that might someday help keep your own eyes nice & healthy to keep drawing & writing...so why not take us out of your crosshairs every now & then? =)
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All you defending Lay should look at her own images and words....
It has nothing to do with authoritarian traits in free people. The people that bad bad scientist used were already in jail cells.
If she wanted to discuss issues of authority apart from some weird specious setup involving jailed people told to shoot each other to death, why not pick some examples a bit more realistic and timely and having nothing to do with science?
Is Lay such a poor comic/political cartoonist she can not discuss the loss of civil liberties in the US? Or discuss Giuliani's call for us to give up our freedom in the name of freedom?
Lay this week and last week shows her own innate prejudice against classes of people that are different from her. Last week it was vagina hating men, this week it is cruel and inhumane scientists.
In both cases she misses the truth: nanny state has a completely different meaning than police state. Scientists are very prominent in fighting for human rights, in waging peace, in ending suffering, and frequently discuss the ethics of their research and how it is conducted.
Would that feminists should do the same.
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@ Anon
Right, because feminists have no interest in human rights, peace, suffering or ethics.
It has nothing to do with authoritarian traits in free people. The people that bad bad scientist used were already in jail cells.
They're not in jail cells, they're in cages - they're lab animals. Her point being that they didn't deserve to be there or experimented on. I hope you don't mean that anyone in jail is fit for medical experiments. And I won't start on the ethics of using animals for this.
And unfortunately it's pretty easy to find experiments done on humans taken from a disposessed, controllable population - just Google Josef Mengele, Unit 516 or the Tuskeegee airmen.
Lay's work is often allegorical - beefing about some timely outrage or malaise in particular, but not always. This may be the case this week - I haven't kept my nose in the news - but even if not, you would have to admit, for all the good it's done, the history of "science" (as if it were a monolith) has been punctuated with some pretty shortsighted, destructive or just plain soulless achievements.
At its core, science is just disciplined investigation. When it gets us in shit is when it is undisciplined, done without regard to its cost, or when the truth of its findings are perverted.