Whoa, Oglaf had a very insightful panel today. As you can tell from the fact that I’ve blurred out part of that first panel and have cut out most of the comic, it is most definitely not safe for work — it takes place at a sex competition — but that last line is wonderful.
Sex exists by replicating itself but not for anything.
Now I’m wondering if Trudy Cooper has a background in evolutionary biology, because that’s a really interesting comment — and a very deeply Darwinian insight, that it’s a mistake to impose a purpose on a consequence.
It’s too bad I will never, ever be able to use an Oglaf comic in a classroom without having the administration descend on me like a stooping, enraged hawk with my contract grasped in its talons. But then, that’s what the blog is for.
When does oglaf update?
I have an open tab and I’m always behind.
:(:(
Every Sunday.
ohholyshit
the whole cartoon is beyond awesome
.
sorry
.
Yes, PZ.
but Sunday is not a precise temporal … um … thingy
That is the only degree of precision you get.
I would offer that “it’s a mistake to impose a purpose on a consequence” is right up there with other concepts the hair-on-fire far right cannot comprehend, such as evolution is both open-ended and is not goal-directed. Life has neither goal nor purpose beyond more life. And life is not the “thing” the right would confine and control, life is a process, a ride, an immense journey, an infinitely branched exploration in which mankind is only one participant.
The Fiji Times is the first newspaper published in the world today.
oh, goody
I made more sense than peterh.
Next you’ll be saying drinking is a meaningless act. Pshaw.
I tend to use compound sentences. Sorry.
Chigau, it was not updated as of 3 am New York time (I usually check after my Saturday night D&D game. Yeah, I’m that big of a nerd). I checked again sometime in the middle of the day and it wasn’t updated, but that was unusual. I think it was late going up today.
Does anybody know why the big foam penis is labeled “Rupprecht”?
Er, what? It’s not a mistake. It’s something we do, because we do come up with (or impose) purposes ourselves, because those are clearly useful to us. To claim it’s a “mistake” is to suggest it’s not useful to enjoy sex (for example) because it isn’t somehow fundamentally meant to be enjoyable — as if it mattered whether it’s fundamentally meant for anything, since we and our purposes presumably don’t count for shit. The problem is clearly that it’s just not a free-floating kind of thing that somehow “exists” fundamentally. That would be absurd. But we make it, and we ourselves are made of some fundamental stuff, which you might also notice isn’t “meant for” making humans. But that isn’t what I’d call “deep” or especially “wise” either. I would say that you’d need to move away from a “Darwinian” viewpoint to get there, otherwise you risk falling off the reductionist cliff Alex Rosenberg style, where you just deny all of it or say “it’s all an illusion” or some incoherent thing like that.
frog #11
♥
I believe Rupprecht is a sly reference to the Michael Caine-Steve Martin film, “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”. In one scene Steve Martin plays a sexually-dysfunctional deviant named “Rupprecht”.
That’s all I’ve got.
Oh, and Oglaf is frequently brilliant.
*cough*
twitter.com/oglaf
*cough*
Oh, look. Technical issues, today.
Not that I check it a lot on Sundays. Oh, no.
Censored here. Might be interesting. Not that I don’t have a dirty mind of my own. Blurred images are mighty helpful in that ballpark.
The main mistake I see is that these are people with conflicting views of what the “one true meaning” is. But they are talking about a subject with multiple uses/meanings etc, not one. They are advocating false dichotomies and trichotomies and all of that. That’s the main mistake.
The Star Child character’s words are important in biology, but not very wise in this context.
I think the best Oglaf ever is one of the clean ones:
http://oglaf.com/labyrinth/
@ PZ
Oh LAWDY! What have you gone and linked to now!? I am already starting to cringe at the prospect of a massive new wave of nuance:
I am not condemning PZ for his views on cartoon porn. I am asking him and his colleagues to act ethically consistently when judging others … {insert here 2000 words of anodyne pontification} … Oglaf … {insert here 3000 words of anodyne pontification} … I know that PZ and his colleagues can justify the above behaviour by reference to context, humour, intent, or charitable interpretation. And in many cases I agree with their justifications. I am not condemning PZ for any of this behaviour. I am asking him and his colleagues to act ethically consistently when judging others.
{gumbyquote failure}
@danielrutter, #19:
It’s sequel is good as well.
consciousness razor #13
And yet, that’s exactly what a huge number of people are claiming, which is why it’s necessary to point out that it’s absurd. In an ideal world, this point would be “yeah, duh”, but this is not such a world.
#1, chigau
You could always use an RSS reader of some kind.
http://oglaf.com/feeds/rss/
#12, ahcuah
There’s another character in a past strip called Ruprecht, but he doesn’t do anything naughty at all so it might just be a coincidence.
http://oglaf.com/muster/ (SFW)
I disagree, brianpansky. I think the Star Child is being incredibly wise. The point is not how many branches there are to the di-, tri-, or n-chotomies, it’s that they are all artificial constructs being presented as the fundamental purpose of the act. The objection is not to how many different “purposes” can be ascribed to a given act, the objection is to mistaking one’s personal purpose (in which case either sex for fun or sex for procreation are perfectly valid) for a fundamental purpose of the universe. It’s the difference between thinking “this place would be a great place for me to live” vs. “the universe/God/Odin/spirits/ancestors made this place great so that I would live here.”
I gave up trying to understand Oglaf sometime around the centipede giraffe.
I like to read in bulk though, so I forget to read it for a few months and am then happy when I get to read several pages at once.
It’s quite an insight; after all, when sex isn’t “for” anything, that means that you can’t pervert its purpose, as it is purposeless. It’s a fine line to walk, though, as “it is what it is because that’s what it is” walks the fine line of essentialism. We have to be careful to remember that sex isn’t what it is just because that’s what it is, but because being what it is happens to make it successful at existing.
I have been asked by a number of species to pass on this protest of the blatant outcrossism shown by this post and its comments. Here it is:
The fetus’s statement is just a special case of “Reproduction exists by replicating itself but not for anything.” I think the issue in the cartoon is whether sex is for reproduction, as asked in the second panel, and denied in the third.
That sounds like plant mutilation.
I believe the official schedule for Oglaf is something like “last thing Sunday night, Australian time”, which works out to about midday GMT, or about 4:00 PM EST.
The penultimate statement in the strip (“If you want to have an existential crisis, go to a bar!”) has me laughing.
Who is Ruprecht? This comic is about the real meaning of/purpose of/etc. And it’s xmas time, so we come to the real meaning of xmas, so I’m leaning toward Knecht Ruprecht (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knecht_Ruprecht). Note that the comment when you hover over the comic is: “I’ve forgetten the meaning of mnemonics” — which isn’t terribly helpful in answering the question at hand.
I love the comic but I don’t feel I can’t share that love on Facebook because of various family members.
Wait, was that actually Joe Felsenstein upthread??
On Behalf of Tardigrades everywhere & by the Powers invested in me as The Most August & Benevolent Dictator for Life, by the Politburo & the full Assembly of the The Committee of the 37th Pleniary Commission of the 7th Convocation for the 3rd Five-Year Plan of the Peoples’ Comintern of the Ministry of Peace of the Pharyngulite Peoples’ Republic of Southern The Endless Thread, but principally by Unilateral Fiat, I hereby promote you, Joe Felsenstein, to full membership of the Thunderdome Politburo.
No. “More life” isn’t a goal or a purpose; it’s just an outcome.
Yes.
:(
polysemy strikes again.
A. ‘sex’ = ‘sexual reproduction’
B. ‘sex’= ‘the [human sex] act(s)’
The comic is pretty obviously about B.
It’s not “a special case of “Reproduction exists by replicating itself but not for anything.”” It’s about behavior. Parthenogenic whiptails are irrelevant.
To rephrase then, people get horny because horny people tend to make more horny people.
*shrug*
Yes; people who don’t get horny – and don’t live in a society that’s patriarchal enough to force them anyway – tend to be underrepresented in the next generation.
Not even that. Life just happens to make more life, it’s not a goal, it’s just a thing that it does. Nobody’s gonna judge the life that fails to make more life, or renders the process unnecessary by making itself perpetual.