Messages

[Adams]

Ennis has done some amazing work outside of 2000AD but weighing his 2000AD output against Adams' Hope and Max Normal strips.... it has to be Adams

[Morrison]

Morrison Dante is a masterpiece

Of course it's a no-win situation. The white president wants the black people to just be murdered quietly.

Or to meekly accept their oppression.

Having recently watched the Battle Angel Alita film I was left pondering how much (if any) influence those strips were on Yukito Kishiro.

[Hebden]

Hebden for Meltdown Man

I hope so - he's blocked me on social media as I think he got sick of me calling him out on the memes and "news" articles he posted so I've no idea what he's doing these days. It made me realise just how easily people can become radicalised though - very scary.

But it's a shocking leap to suggest that the phrase "eugenics works" (even more especially when surrounded by caveats such as "I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy") somehow leads to there being an automatically attached justification of "death camps and mass sterilization". Catch oneself on.

That's not quite what I was trying to say - maybe my choice of wording was poor. Just to be clear I fully accept that Dawkins is in no way advocating death camps or mass sterilization. His follow up is clearly distancing himself from that position.

What I was trying to say is that for someone already enamoured with the idea of a superior Aryan man and whose personal morality values genetic purity over individual freedom/suffering they've now got a leading geneticist telling them eugenics would be successful. They will quote his tweet as evidence for thier position and that I find deeply concerning because it can help convince others of the validity of their arguments. Maybe my experience arguing on this subject with the previously mentioned ex-friend has coloured my feelings on this somewhat. He would post pro-eugenicist material from sites like Stormfront and when called out on it would try to validate it with quotes like this.

I imagine a braying herd of angry but well-meaning folk dragging Dawkins out to the scaffold chanting "dickhead" and "nazi" and afterwards, when asked what he had done to deserve his fate, they listed the crimes:

- he apologized in a half-hearted way
- he tried to discuss biological science and we misinterpreted his motivations
- he compared a book that says all non-believers should be forced to bow down before their one true god to another book that says all people of a particular creed aren't human and should be "removed"
- he said we shouldn't lie to children
- sometimes he was impatient

Oh well then. I suppose he deserved it.

I find this scenario equally disturbing and I agree we do need to be able to have conversations about topics like this without it blowing up into finger pointing and name calling. I'm also pretty convinced that Twitter isn't the medium via which those conversations are going to happen. It's hard to know what point Dawkin's was trying to make with his tweet without the context of why he decided to broadcast that opinion to thousands of people. It seems ill-considered imo but I wouldn't condemn anyone for that (I'd be a massive hypocrite if I did as I'm plenty prone to placing my foot in my mouth as I think I've proven nicely here).

Started on the Durham Red book last night; the art in The Scarlet Cantos seems really blurry, was wondering if it's a printing error.  It's really hard to tell what's going on in some panels, feels like there's a lack of distinction between foreground and background making it hard to distinguish detail.  Things seem to improve in later stories (I'm about halfway through Vermin Stars now) which is a relief.

This might be the first Abnett thing that's not really gelled with me. Durham was better when she had the contrast of Johnny. With 2 ideological extremists as companions she's left trying to occupy the moral high ground and I'm not sure that's a position that really suits her. The characters also seem lost in the vast space opera Abnett is constructing around them - the art probably doesn't help with that.

Skimmed a few of the Future Shocks too. My speculations had this volume down as being a reprint of The Best Of Tharg's Future Shocks and whilst there is considerable overlap between the two it's far from a straight reprint.  We get a bit more Morrison than that collection (in fact pretty much all his FSs bar Wheels of Fury, not sure why that got excluded) and a bit less Milligan. We also get a few more early FSs which seem to have been chosen for O'Neill and Bolland art and a couple of Millar FSs. The early stuff I read last night is very much of it's time - nothing up to the standard of the Moore book yet.

Checked in with an equestrian friend, her comments on genetic selection in horses - " a thoroughbred, for example, now has really thin leg bones that really easily snaps and their feet are brittle".  So yeah another great success for eugenics there.

I think what Dawkins was rather clumisly stating was we can selective breed for specific traits, which I'd agree is an inarguable fact. But I'm not sure it can be claimed that doing so really "improves the genetic quality", which as I understand it is the aim of eugenecists. Most recent evidence seems to be showing that a more diverse gene pool is the best way to improve overall genetic quality and for me that's a much stronger argument against eugenics than saying inacting a eugenecist policy would be morally deplorable. What's considered morally acceptable is somewhat subjective after all.

Cows that produce more milk - and suffer more mastitis. I mean if you set a narrow goal and ignore all the side-effects then yeah eugenics "works". If on the other hand you actually look at it holistically (and surely we should always be looking at life holistically) then I'm less convinced.

Dogs are always my favourite example of this, we've selected an arbitrary set of characteristics for each breed and selected for them over generations. In the process we've given then a set of genetic defects which in some cases would kill the animals without human intervention and in non-fatal cases significantly reduces their quality of life. There are a couple of breeds that are unable to reproduce withouth medical intervention ffs - how is that improving anything?

If your definition of "works" is so narrowly defined that it only measures the single characteristic you bred for then yeah eugneics works - but I'm not even sure that's a good definition of eugenics. Wikipedia defines it as:

"Eugenics (/juːˈdʒɛnɪks/; from Greek εὐ- "good" and γενής "come into being, growing") is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

I'd argue that genetic quality has not been improved in dogs, cows or pigs (I'm not familiar enough with roses or horses to comment). Both cows and pigs are more productive sure but I'm not sure that equates to improved genetic quality unless we measure everything in terms of economics.

A few years back I had an old friend who disappeared down the alt-right rabbit hole - I think he got sucked in via the toxic mess that was gamer-gate. He was a big Dawkins fan precisely because in Dawkins he saw a top level academic who was validating his racism and islamaphobia. And that right there is my biggest gripe with Dawkins - he provides a veneer of credibility to the beliefs of some deeply unpleasent people and it's hard to believe he doesn't know that (he's far from an idiot after all). Following up your initial message with:

"For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn't mean it wouldn't work."

basically validates a redefinition of morality which values the genetic purity of the human race as more important than individual human suffering. And at that point you're just a small step away from justifing death camps and mass sterilization. Ugh.

[Edginton]

Has to be Edginton . It's hard to compete with his superb worldbuilding.

Really tough one for me - I'm a relatively recent subscriber and my exposure to the older progs has mostly been through the Hachette collections which means I've only really read certain strips (mostly Devlin and Simping Detective). The extension to the Ultimate Collection looks set to improve on that but that doesn't help me now - hmmm I think I'm going to abstain on this one.

Ewing's done some great Dredd plus Damnation Station, Zaucer and Zombo but for me this one has to go to Abnett.  Kingdom and Brink are both always highlights when they're in the Prog and Lawless was the main reason I started subscribing to the Meg. Plus all that fantastic word play in Sinister Dexter. Yep Abnett.

I really want to say Eglington for Thistlebone as that was one of my top thrills from last year - but overall I think it has to go to Miligan.  If we'd had another series or two of Thistlebone then this might have gone the other way.

Michael's writing is far more consistent than Pat's imo, the 90s were dark days for Slaine and the Warriors. But with Defoe showing Pat's still got some great work left in him I think I've got to hand this one to Pat.