Kamala Harris gets coveted xkcd endorsement.

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Here. No surprise, I guess, given that xkcd has in previous years given shoutouts to climate science and the covid vaccine (also here).

I guess that most cartoonists are left of center, politically. On the other side, there’s the Dilbert guy, who seems to have moved from being politically conservative, to being a Donald Trump supporter, to going all-in on conspiracy theories.

Despite their political differences, the two cartoonists have some important things in common. They’re both interested in cool technology, they both have an acute sense of the absurd, and, relatedly, they’re both nerd-friendly cartoonists. Also, both of them have very simple drawing styles. (That’s just a description, not a criticism. I can’t draw at all. The drawings in xkcd and Dilbert do the job. Not everyone can be Riad Sattouf or even Ernie Bushmiller.)

I have a feeling that the xkcd and Dilbert authors have enough political differences that they wouldn’t get along, which is kinda too bad because it would be fun to see a mash-up collaborative strip from them. I assume it would avoid hot political topics such as xkcd’s endorsement of Kamala Harris or Dilbert’s admiration for Charlie Sheen and just focus on some cool tech (not related to vaccines or climate change, I guess).

37 thoughts on “Kamala Harris gets coveted xkcd endorsement.”

  2. Andrew –

    Off topic.

    Have you ever seen a statistical analysis of whether or how much a VP pick changes presidential election outcomes?

    I imagine there’s no way to accurately measure that but maybe with priors and all that jazz because bayesian?

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    • So nobody bit…

      So scratching my own itch, here’s a partial answer from Nate Silver by way of Nate Cohn…suggesting a perhaps 1 or 2 point differential in the home state of the VP pick over the counterfactual.

      I dunno. I’ve been thinking about the conventional wisdom that Harris made a mistake by picking Walz because it might cost her the electoral votes of an important swing state in passing on Shapiro.

      Hmmm…

      Looking past the perhaps equal or even greater effect of the counterfactual of risking electoral votes because of a loss of Arab American votes in Michigan because of a Shapiro pick. Or the effect of losing younger voters all over the country who see Shapiro as in the pocket of Isreal (actually, there’s good reason that’s a misperception, see here – in next comment):

      I just have a hard time seeing a significant number of voters saying “Well, I would have voted for Harris/Shapiro, but now that it’s Harris/Walz I’m going for Trump/Vance (or voting for Kennedy, or sitting this one out).”

      I don’t get why so many folks, including Silver on his substack and on a podcast) are so sure that Harris’ chances in PA are differentially measureably lower with Walz than Shapiro

      Links in next comments. Keeps getting caught in the filter.

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      • Joshua said:

        ‘I just have a hard time seeing a significant number of voters saying “Well, I would have voted for Harris/Shapiro, but now that it’s Harris/Walz I’m going for Trump/Vance (or voting for Kennedy, or sitting this one out).” ‘

        And you’re probably right, *most* people don’t do that. But because Shapiro is popular, if he was on the ticket, more people in PA might get enthused and make the extra effort to vote; or the same in MN because Waltz is on the ticket.

        On the other hand, there are lots of people in groups who’s interests are directly affected by some of the potential candidates, and might well choose who to vote for, or whether or not to vote, based on the VP pick.

        What about Omar’s district? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if people in Omar’s had district explicitly choosen not to vote for Harris if Shapiro had been on the ticket and for them Waltz probably has the opposite effect. That doesn’t mean they would necessarily vote for Kennedy or Trump.

        The opposite is probably true for a lot of jews and/or people sympathetic to Israel, who are typically more conservative Dems. In addition to a few other factors that cropped up during the Biden admin, the recent explosions of anit-Isreali sentiment in the Democrat party have given them ample reason to reconsider their position. A Shapiro VP selection might have reassured them that there would be a strong advocate for Israel in the administration, and I could see them choosing to vote for Harris explicitly because of the selection of Shapiro as VP.

        Personally the possibility of Shapiro as VP gave me a fleeting thought of voting for Harris. but it was fleeting. IMO Waltz was the odd-on pick given the way Democrats think, and Harris picking him more or less demonstrates that the Dems are still living in the 2016 world in which they lost to Trump.

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        • chipmunk –

          But sure why you were moved to write, in the first few paragraphs, basically a chipsplanation of what I just said.

          As for this Waltz was the odd-on pick

          Such bullshit. Shapiro was generally considered the front runner and conventional wisdom was he brought a bigger advantage.

          given the way Democrats think, and Harris picking him more or less demonstrates that the Dems are still living in the 2016 world in which they lost to Trump.

          Nope. He was picked most likely because he runs counter to the “coastal elite” moderate neo-liberal, typical of Dems ever since Clinton’s whole successful “triangulation” philosophy.

          Instead, Walz is a mid-Westerner, economic populist that “progressives” have frustratingly been clamoring for as an alternativeapproach to reaching the “left behind” in flyover country – as represented by his electoral support in relatively red districts.

          Do you ever step outside of your bubble?

        • But I do especially want to thank you for chipsplaining to me how Jews think. I always wondered about that but never thought to ask my family and friends for their thoughts.

        • Joshua:

          When I said Waltz was the “odds on favorite” that was my personal assessment, not a claim about what any other group thinks. It’s a sound analysis of the political positions. It would have been shocking if Harris had chosen Shapiro, considering she’s already declared her support for the party’s left position on Israel, having stood up Netanyahu when he addressed congress and made other statements indicating her lack of support for Israel. Policywise, shes much more aligned with Waltz and the headline trade-off between Waltz and Shapiro in terms of electoral votes is modest. Beyond that, chosing Shapiro would have exposed her to attacks from her own party, potentially negating any broader gains by choosing him.

          BTW, the western US, where I grew up, is packed full of immigrants from central Europe. They left a massive imprint on the character of the US, from Weyerhaeuser to Budweiser to Levis to tens of thousands of local businesses across the US. That’s a hint.

        • chipmunk –

          When I said Waltz was the “odds on favorite” that was my personal assessment

          I’m shocked. I thought it was established fact that you were being kind enough to inform me about 🤔

          But in point of fact, people with inside knowledge of the machinations of the process predominantly thought that Shapiro was the front runner. Now of course everyone is going to have, and is entitled to their own opinions. But let’s look at your reasoning…

          It’s a sound analysis of the political positions. It would have been shocking if Harris had chosen Shapiro, considering she’s already declared her support for the party’s left position on Israel,

          This is absurd. It’s true that Shapiro is widely regarded to be on “the right” side of the Dem Party spectrum on the Israeli/Palestinians issuen (although if you look at that tweet I linked its not a well-founded view when considering Walz vs. Shapiro, and considering Shapiro has been more recent harsh critic of Bibi). But Harris is uniformly viewed likewise by almost everyone on the left side of the Dem party on that issue.

          having stood up Netanyahu when he addressed congress and made other statements indicating her lack of support for Israel.

          Sorry, chipmunk, but it’s really shallow to look at one isolated factor to argue for Harris’ position on Israel. That one factor comes in a larger context. Her actual statements on the issue. Her being a part of the Biden administration. The criticism she gets from the left flank of the Dem Party on that issue.

          Now her apparent enlistment of Phil Gordon as a foreign policy advisor does give some clue that her administration may well tack to the left of Biden. But moving considerably in that direction would still put her pretty much smack dab in the middle of the spectrum of Dem Party constituents on that issue.

          Policywise, shes much more aligned with Waltz

          Again, that’s a nice story but it has no meat to it. Clearly, you’re just narrative surfing.

          Harris has been pretty much all over the map on a whole slew of issues and there are many issues where she’s tightly aligned with Shapiro. Criticizing her as an opportunist in that regard is certainly legit and I’m sure doing so would warm the cockles of your heart, so go for thst instead of just repeating shallow nonsense that echoes what’s out there in the rightwing mass media rhetoric.

          in and the headline trade-off between Waltz and Shapiro in terms of electoral votes is modest.

          I agree it is likely so (I posted links to Silver’s analysis making that argument), with the caveat that a slight difference in PA’s cite could of course be hugely significant in a close election

          Beyond that, chosing Shapiro would have exposed her to attacks from her own party, potentially negating any broader gains by choosing him.

          Stop with the binary thinking. She would be exposed to attacks from within and without the party no matter who she picked. That’s how it works. There has been a LOT of pushback from among Dems who thought Shapiro would have been a much better choice electorally. And for all the constant attack against Walz from the right (just look at the Fox News website – it’s a Walz attackapalooza), the same would have been true about a Shapiro selection (there are plenty of issues they qould have gone after).

  3. Cartoonists definitely tend to break left but there have been notable exceptions. Little Orphan Annie’s Harold Gray was a rabid right-winger who openly celebrated FDR’s death in the strip (Gray would have really hated the musical). Al Capp went from from left to right and made a ton of enemies on both sides.

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  4. The xkcd comic on free speech has aged like milk, like most things from that era to be fair. I guess it’s hard to avoid getting swept up in that kind of thing when your livelihood depends on having your finger on the pulse of that kind of thing.

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    • @Will You mean this one: https://xkcd.com/1357/ ? Still seems pretty reasonable, especially the alt-text: “I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.”

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      • It really isn’t all that reasonable in claiming that if you get boycotted, etc, for expressing your views that your free speech rights have not been violated. It is true that your rights under the First Amendment have not been violated, because the First Amendment protects individuals from action only by the government, not by private actors. However:

        1. There are other sources of legal protection for free speech rights apart from the First Amendment, some of which apply to private actors. California has several. Eg https://splc.org/1992/09/california-leonard-law-high-school/ and https://www.dailyjournal.com/mcle/887-can-employers-fire-employees-for-social-or-political-speech and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins

        2. More importantly, if one believes in natural rights, then of course a person’s right to free speech has been implicated if private actors punish him for expressing unpopular beliefs. For example, I would think that most people nowadays would say that a boycott of a store whose owner wrote a pro-civil rights letter to the editor in Mississippi in 1956 would be an infringement of the owners’ freedom of speech.

        3. And, of course, in On Liberty, JS Mill talked at great lengths about the danger posed to individual liberty by social opprobrium:

        >Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant—society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it—its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

        So,it seems to me that xkcd is correct only in that there is usually no remedy for free speech violations committed by private actors / society at large, but not that those violations are not actually occuring; they most certainly are.

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        • > It really isn’t all that reasonable in claiming that if you get boycotted, etc, for expressing your views that your free speech rights have not been violated.

          Can someone please diagram this sentence?

        • , I would think that most people nowadays would say that a boycott of a store whose owner wrote a pro-civil rights letter to the editor in Mississippi in 1956 would be an infringement of the owners’ freedom of speech.

          I don’t think so. I think most people would just say the boycotters are obviously racists. Many would condemn them.

          But aside from that I’m curious what your remedy would be. What would you propose to prevent people from organizing boycotts?

        • gec:

          I believe it’s intended to mean:

          “boycotts of people for things they’ve said violates the free speech rights of the people who said the things”

          In all of this I’m struck with the idea that some people really believe that they are entitled to an audience and to say whatever they want without consequences of any kind.

          “free speech rights” doesn’t mean “no consequences for speech” and “enforced audiences” it means “the government can not use its pseudo-monopoly on the use of clubs and guns and cages to club or shoot or cage you for saying things”

          People are still free to defend their space from the intrusion of your speech into their organized forum. Anything else is madness. One of the most common internet attacks is distributed denial of service. In which bajillions of machines send unwanted packets to your computers denying you access to the machine because of a flood of unwanted “speech” (yes. packets carry speech). Spam emails are speech. People coming onto forums and flooding them with gross porn pictures is speech. Black intellectuals on Mastodon receiving comments about them being “n***ers” or people born in the US to south Asian parents getting comments about how they should “go back where they came from” or whatever are all speech… But none of those people need to just put up with that behavior. It’s ridiculous to think that people operating a forum who do not accept someone spamming a forum with hateful comments is violating some “right” of the spammers.

          My guess is most people who imagine this stuff as violation of free speech have never once been subject to internet stalking. There was an internet stalker on this forum briefly. I had to contact a probation officer because the person had been convicted of felony online harassment, eventually they put a stop to it. This particular mentally ill person made veiled death threats to the children of professors in Arizona about a decade ago which got them the conviction, but overall had harassed dozens or hundreds of people online. Even if your speech doesn’t rise to the level of breaking a law, it’s still 100% ok for people to block you from their space because you constitute a nuisance.

          Now, the whole situation with the govt behind the scenes applying pressure at Twitter or whatever… well that was a garbagy situation on a garbagy platform that was inherently broken (ie. if not lying, at least misleading people into thinking they would see things they signed up to see)

          Anyway on the internet, you can boil this down to in all communications there is a sender and a receiver, and both have rights. The sender has a right to send things within certain limits (harassment, inducing fear, SWATing, or distributed denial of service are all crimes), and the receiver has an unconditional right to put your crap into /dev/null before they ever see it.

        • Thanks, Daniel!

          To relate gdanning’s point to a recurring theme on this blog, it appears to be related to the “time reversal heuristic”. This “heuristic” is meant to help us identify cases where a replication is not accorded the same status as an original result, even though there is no logical reason for one to take priority over the other. For a recent example, we can look to things like “power pose” where the failed attempts to replicate the original result were dismissed by some of the authors of the initial paper. For a more historical example, we can look at how Millikan’s erroneous measurement of the electron charge persisted because subsequent investigators would find ways to “correct” their results to be closer to his.

          I think the same logic applies to gdanning’s claim, because it grants the “right” of free speech to whoever says something first and withdraws that same “right” from those who want to respond. For example, imagine that I said, “Bayesians are morally corrupt and deserve to be sterilized and removed from society so that they cannot spread their disease to others or to future generations.” If someone responded to me by saying, “there is nothing inherently wrong with being Bayesian, even if it is not as prevalent, it is merely a different intellectual framework,” then my rights would be violated and my respondent would be at fault. On the other hand, if my respondent has spoken first and I responded to them, then I would be the one violating their “right”.

      • If you think people being ostracized and bullied for saying “offensive things” and being “assholes” leads to net positive social outcomes, then perhaps you haven’t been paying much attention over the last 8 years or so. There’s a reason why “cancel culture” has mostly died off at this point: people realized that the same asinine logic of hostile intolerance expressed in the xkcd strip will lead to a Greg Patton or David Shor situation just readily as a Michael Richards situation. “No freedom from consequences” rings hollow when those expressing it care only about dealing consequences at the expense of fairness, civility, or consistency.

        To point: no one swinging the “no freedom from consequences” club has ever simultaneously felt that both Colin Kaepernick and JK Rowling were both “assholes” and were simply facing their own “consequences.” One is free speech, the other deserves to be canceled, and which gets which treatment depends on nothing more than destructive tribal nonsense.

        Thankfully there has been a correction, to those who’ve paid attention anyway. Aged like milk.

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        • Oh yes. Also we should maybe raid people’s offices and arrest them if they use spam filters. Clear violation of the rights of the senders of whatever they marked as spam in the past.

        • You can block facebook/twitter and similar from your devices using the hosts file:
          https://gist.github.com/djaiss/85a0ada83e6bca68e41e

          Lots of people like agitprop echo-chambers, but if thats not for you then best to block them from collecting any data. Ive been blocking facebook this way for about 15 years. It is especially useful on a multiuser windows pc to prevent viruses.

          Also, the suffering and death from future pandemics is on those still pretending the covid vaccines were some kind of great success.

          No one needs to make vaccines that actually work if they can just ignore that eg terminally ill people self-select into unvaccinated group (thus unvaccinated die at ~3x the rate even if no virus existed at all).

          Its just as dumb as the secret service not securing a nearby rooftop. Interestingly, Im apparently the only one I know who thinks the government is capable of that level of incompetence. Everyone else is forced to come up with conspiracies.

        • @Will It’s totally fair to criticize the consequences faced by people and the differing standards to which private organizations hold other people — in fact, this criticism is an exercise in freedom of speech: I don’t think you should be arrested for your comment above.

          I think what makes what Kaepernick did so much more admirable is that he seems to have stuck to his guns, despite facing pretty severe consequences. I strongly disagree with Rowling, and while she’s also maintained her views (indeed, getting more and more entrenched in them), the only consequences she seems to have faced are a loss of support and an unfortunate increase in online abuse against her. But as far as I can tell, she’s still raking it in from Harry Potter, and there seem to be new spin-offs announced regularly.

          Although maybe the ultimate consequence she’s faced is the apparently terminal case of online brainworms as a result of engaging with the online abuse and support while trying to reconcile her beliefs with reality.

          I think the idea that “ostracization” and “bullying” as a response to speech is somehow a new negative is ahistorical. For the vast majority of human history, people have been punished for expressing views which deviated from their social surroundings in gruesome and lethal ways, by both the state and their peers. We see it even today in countries that aren’t as free as the US. Last year, Russian parents whose children drew anything remotely perceived as anti-war were sentenced to prison. From what I can tell, David Shor still holds parties at his house.

          Ultimately, it is true that the interconnectedness of the modern age has changed the scale of public discourse, and it is inevitable that opposing views and standards will come into conflict (as they are in this comment thread). I think we are in a multi-decade long process of establishing standards on free discourse that can be acceptable across our entire species, in its vast demographic and geographic diversity. There will be always be push back to views we express in public, and we must expect that — but very rarely must we expect that hand of the state at our door. That will age like Chateau-Latour.

        • “To point: no one swinging the “no freedom from consequences” club has ever simultaneously felt that both Colin Kaepernick and JK Rowling were both “assholes” and were simply facing their own “consequences.” One is free speech, the other deserves to be canceled, and which gets which treatment depends on nothing more than destructive tribal nonsense.”

          Seems an unreasonably strong statement. ‘No one’ ‘has ever’… Maybe you are only reading/seeing the opinions of highly tribalised respondents. Seems a bit like you are tribalising it yourself by implying people who like Capernick naturally think JK Rowling is an asshole and vice versa. There’s a lot more variation in opinion than your statement allows.

      • nonrenormalizable:

        Presumably the reason it didn’t age well is that the issue wasn’t that no one wanted to listen to “Muskrat” et al. The issue was that the government interfered behind the scences to prevent their views from being aired. So while XKCD guy is entitled to not like what Muskrat et al have to say and not listen to or read what he says, the suggestion that “Muskrat” et al were silenced because no one wanted to hear them hasn’t exactly been borne out and frankly looks pretty stupid in retrospect. I’m not into Twit-X, but AFAIK, Musk has millions of followers today.

        After all, it’s probably fair to say that Musk is the single most successful entreprenuer of all time, having created the first profitable EV company, and the built the first private space launch company, both against staggering technical and fiancial odds. So chances are good that there will be ***alot*** of people who want to hear what Musk has to say for good reason.

        so theres that.

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        • The continuing problem with Twitter/X is that everything happens behind the scenes in ways the users don’t necessarily want.

          Which is why I’ve always avoided it and why when I read Monroe’s comic I imagine it in a completely different context such as the Discourse forums for Julia or Stan or Homeassistant or OpenWrt or the Mastodon fediverse, where people actively moderate what’s going on because they really don’t want people brigading them with unwanted crap.

          Twitter has been a dumpster fire from the beginning, as are all of the big “platforms” as detailed repeatedly by Cory Doctorow in multiple articles about their opaque self serving algorithms.

  6. So nobody bit…

    So scratching my own itch, here’s a partial answer from Nate Silver by way of Nate Cohn…suggesting a perhaps 1 or 2 point differential in the home state of the VP pick over the counterfactual.

    I dunno. I’ve been thinking about the conventional wisdom that Harris made a mistake by picking Walz because it might cost her the electoral votes of an important swing state in passing on Shapiro.

    Hmmm…

    Looking past the perhaps equal or even greater effect of the counterfactual of risking electoral votes because of a loss of Arab American votes in Michigan because of a Shapiro pick. Or the effect of losing younger voters all over the country who see Shapiro as in the pocket of Isreal (actually, there’s good reason that’s a misperception, see here – in next comment):

    I just have a hard time seeing a significant number of voters saying “Well, I would have voted for Harris/Shapiro, but now that it’s Harris/Walz I’m going for Trump/Vance (or voting for Kennedy, or sitting this one out).”

    I don’t get why so many folks, including Silver on his substack and on a podcast) are so sure that Harris’ chances in PA are differentially measureably lower with Walz than Shapiro

    Links in next comments.

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