Bizarro | Naked Cartoonist

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Divisiveness

The Internet has changed the world both for the better and for the worse. And it will likely figure heavily in either our demise or salvation as a species. At this point, it’s easy to imagine either scenario.

Online petitions at first seemed like a great way to get people organized to take a stand against evil things, but it turns out it is also a great way to terrify people about things that are not actually threatening them in any real way, like immigration, and get them to ignore or disbelieve actual threats like climate change.

I’ve signed a lot of online petitions in the past couple of decades but now I wonder if some of them might actually do more harm than good. If a petition goes nowhere after you sign it, it could simply be tricking people into thinking they’ve done something to help the world when they actually have not. It isn’t hard to believe there are bad people circulating petitions in an attempt to lull good folks into thinking they don’t need to attend an actual protest or leave the house to vote because they already did their part by clicking something online.

Below is a cartoon I did about this topic back in 2011.

I was quick to criticize the above-mentioned FB group back in 2011 and I was correct in doing so because it clearly has not made a dent in the number of zombies trying to eat our brains and end the world as we know it. In fact, only five years later, they put one in the White House while plenty of good people who signed petitions sat at home and didn’t vote.

That’s all polluted water under the crumbling bridge at this point but going forward, how do we teach individuals to be effective critical thinkers and not just believe any horseshit some guy (or single “news” network) wearing a patriotic hat tells them? If you have any ideas, I’m all ears.

For now, we here at Rancho Bizarro just keep nailing more boards on the windows and hoping we can get to the polls without having our brains eaten. I don’t have either a petition or a partition for you to sign, but if signing things comforts you, I invite you to toss your email addy into our email list at the bottom of this page. I’ll never share it and will only bug you with one email a week, on average, telling you when I’ve put more words and pictures on this blog.

Now let’s move on to see what kinds of things Wayno was partitioning with his cartoons this week…

Keep an eye on this one. He was fired from his last job for dragging female coworkers into the lagoon.

Robots find that the random clunking noises mask irritating sounds like people reading books or writing on paper.

Dude. She’s only dating you to piss off her parents. (So break into a Mozart symphony after dinner!)

And if he wants to annoy them further, he might choose to snag this week’s featured item from our Bizarro Shop: the edgy, dangerous, Bunny’s Pie Repair cool motorcycle design shirt. It comes in different colors, styles, genders, etc., so poke around the website. And there’s a less dangerous Bunny’s Pie Repair design for those of you who don’t want a helmet to muss your hairdo.

How does he know he’s not a barber who uses a cleaver instead of scissors?

We got a lot of questions about this one and if you’re among the confused, pop over to Wayno’s weekly blog post and see if he explains it. (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t.)

And across the street, at the adult doggy store, you can buy a lifelike leg to hump.

Here’s a bit of super-secret backstory: Wayno originally sketched this one with a tube of K2 Jelly (NOT a typo) on the sales rack where the O2 box currently is. I got a good laugh out of it but in the end, we replaced it with something less likely to get Bizarro canceled from more conservative newspaper markets. His original “smutty” sketch is included in his blog post this week.

Dropping your I.D. at the scene of the crime is such a rookie mistake.

Thus marks the end of today’s clothesline of damp cartoons. Thanks for keeping us company during our chores. If you enjoy what we do and that we do it for free, without ads, please consider contributing to one of the links below. We’ll fashion a marshmallow effigy of you and toast it over the campfire at Rancho Bizarro tonight!

Until next week, be happy, be smart, be nice, and resist ignorance, fascism, and nationalism.

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