The Joke at the End of this Comic

Who are you talking about now? I hope you're not seething about the writing in the comic.

>rich people and corporations having an unequal say in how the government is run gradually increasing the unequal say rich people and corporations have in how the government is run
But that's what the founding fathers were all about. Only landowners could vote, meaning America's "democracy" was designed to be run by elites like every republic before it.

"using limited meritocracy to develop a co-opted class depending on their relative privilege"?
This is absolutely vapid. Even the meaning you can fill this formally correct construction with is vapid and superficial.

user, you've already had it explained to you very clearly by .
Don't dig this hole for yourself. There's literally nothing wrong with not understanding everything on the first go.

I was aping the comic. It is stylistic drivel.

Emphasizing words to highlight your point in a text-driven comic is stylistic drivel? Don't be stupid.

I got most of it but I don't get the joke.
But yes, I suppose comparing the every-man in america to a simple colonist who has no say in their representation is sort of accurate to how it feels these days. It's not completely decided by the haves, As I think the rich weren't that supportive of trump in general -- even though his policies would benefit them, I feel like they would look at him as a bit of a sociopath and prefer to steer away.

But then again, someone making this argument might just ignore the presidential election altogether. It's just a popularity contest after all, just some entertainment while you buy representatives and get actual stuff done.

>got confused on the word co-opted
>had to look it up
>realize this whole time I've thought of it as "appropriated" or "taken" when it isn't that
man I'm retarded

Based. This comic has stuck to the same formula for like 15 years but it's such a good formula.

Oh look, populism.

>I got most of it but I don't get the joke.
I feel in its most simple terms it's that the way the USA will collapse through "self-colonization" is so stupid that it's a joke.

While this is true, the problem has gotten a lot worse. "Land owner" back then by and large meant a small farm or estate. That's qualitatively different from a multinational conglomerate owning a whole number percentage of the earth's surface.

Don't get me wrong, the original vision of the founding fathers is indeed very elitist and needs to be uprooted. But this is definitely worse.

I do get it, but I really despise the format. I find the implications raised by some outside force "developing a class" particularly vile. It promotes an "US versus THEM" thinking that completely undermines the roots of the systemic failure it so presumptuously predicts.
Also, the question why a colony's ""security force"" would care about "the welfare of the colonized" should be self-evident.

You just gotta treat it like it's a Nancy comic.

Attached: the joke.jpg (1560x2083, 1.02M)

Of course it's self evident. It's a rhetorical question. This really isn't that hard.

>I find the implications raised by some outside force "developing a class" particularly vile.
The whole problem is that it's not an outside force, it's coming from within the US. It's outside of the US government in the form of US corporations, but then, you're not really denying that these corporations are influencing government are you?
>It promotes an "US versus THEM" thinking that completely undermines the roots of the systemic failure it so presumptuously predicts.
I don't follow. There are forces outside of "us" and acknowledging them isn't inherently vile.
>Also, the question why a colony's ""security force"" would care about "the welfare of the colonized" should be self-evident.
It was already a rhetorical question.

This is a really shitty comic, but I'm glad people are finally realizing that the colony/metropole binary doesn't line up with reality.

>That's qualitatively different from a multinational conglomerate owning a whole number percentage of the earth's surface
That's just capitalism taken to its foregone conclusion, and its unironically the best economic system possible. None of the comforts we enjoy would be so widely available if Amazon wasn't allowed to buy a nation.

>I feel like they would look at him as a bit of a sociopath and prefer to steer away.
They're all sociopaths, or at the very least were raised by sociopaths. Trump is just an Emmanuel Goldstein. Come the end of his presidency, he'll release a book that Amazon will refuse to publish or ship while your bank cancels the accounts of everyone who ever Googled it. Two-minute segments of Trump's speeches are shown at rallies for both parties, where they do nothing but scream "Traitor!" at the top of their lungs before showing their open palms to the screen and chanting the initials of their leader.

>That's just capitalism taken to its foregone conclusion,
Correct.

>and its unironically the best economic system possible.
Also correct, but only from the perspective of raw output with no consideration for any other priorities.

>None of the comforts we enjoy would be so widely available if Amazon wasn't allowed to buy a nation.
Correct but not even remotely worth it. I'd much rather have to wait a few days to get my new shiny whatsit if it meant I could actually have a say in how my country is run.

>Come the end of his presidency, he'll release a book that Amazon will refuse to publish or ship while your bank cancels the accounts of everyone who ever Googled it.
This unlikely hypothetical involves companies choosing not to make money. Trump is going to milk his post-presidency for all it's worth, and every organization that pretends to disparage him will offer all the free advertising they can, because they're all on the same train. There's a reason Amazon sells MAGA hats.

maybe I should be more specific. While it naturally is rhetorical, I find it goes against the point the author seems to make, depending on how much scrutiny is applied. Naturally, the answer is the finite nature of resources (i.e. money). And of course you could spin that in a way that portraits the unison of government and big corporations as self-serving, given how much money is spent in directions the general populace has no benefit from. More neutrally put, however, distributing resources is one of the core aspects of what a government is supposed to do: coordinating infrastructure. Of course you can disagree with how this coordination is done, you can discuss systemic problems, but the immediate answer to the rhetorical question is simply that it is their fucking job. My next point relates to that particular perspective.

>The whole problem is that it's not an outside force, it's coming from within the US.
That is not what I meant by outside force, but I was being inaccurate in my language, I'll try to be more clear below.
>It's outside of the US government in the form of US corporations, but then, you're not really denying that these corporations are influencing government are you?
In general, corporations influencing the government is a neutral fact. I would not even go against corporations communicating with the government in principle. The point of contention that you express is that this influence is taken to corrupt extremes. And that is likely the case.

(see next post)