Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for June 23, 2024

Protesting on a bridge is a bad idea, Rat. Ever see “The Blues Brothers”?

Can Goat explain that to the people throwing paint on Stonehenge or those paintings?

How many drivers would stop for a rat?

Rethinking senseless behaviour? Rat? C’mon now! No one believes that!

Just paint historical landmarks yellow.

“Not orange, like in the news?” You don’t want to just copy what some idiots do.

Protestors like that are not trying to attract believers. They are working to demoralize others, to erode their confidence in civil society.

Really, this sounds like Rats reason for being. Burn them business, Rat!

Don’t bother. The media has given more than 50 years of free undeserved publicity to Trump and that’s all they will ever do, unless you boldly inconvenience Trump for at least 2 minutes.

It’s really easy to aggravate people these days, Rat.

Stopping people going to work or picking up their kids causes a traffic jam, which in turn can also stop ambulances and fire trucks. Why do people think this is a good idea? And, when it’s to protest climate change, it makes all those cars idle, which causes even more pollution. I think somebody hasn’t thought this all the way through.

Just not Goat’s cup of tea ;-)

They don’t want you on their side, they want you to succumb.

Call in Guard Duck to take care of the situation.

Simple solution for people who block traffic:

Pepper spray. Apply liberally.

Stupidity should be painful.

I knew New York had a Rat problem, but this is worse.

Mao Tse-Tung said change must come

Change must come thru the barrel of a gun

Not thru talkin’ and not through waitin’

And sittin’ around just contemplatin’

The facts, ’cos we know what they are

So let Mao Tse Tung be your guidin’ star

Pick up a gun and learn how to fight

All thru the day and all thru the night

‘Til come the day when the last fight’s won

I want you to listen, son

BLM got away with the burning idea.

“might be on my side…” They have to! I’M RIGHT!!! THEY MUST SUPPORT ME OR I’LL MAKE THEM! Don’t you dare click the block button!!!! :D

Try gluing yourself to a runway or vandalizing art, then.

Rat Lives Matter with a page out of the Black Lives Matter Peaceful Protest Playbook. Don’t forget the looting. And assaults and arson and shootings and rapes and murders and the oh so trendy anti-Semitism. Destroying or defacing a work of art in the name of Climate Change is trendy, too. And equally bright. The Count recently saw a t-shirt with a graphic that pretty much sums it up: “I may be old but I’m old enough to remember America before it went to sh!t”.

St Louis, 2014

Stay outa my way. This ain’t Tiananmen Square.

They are usually very young, and almost all young people are fundamentalists of one kind or another, and they inhabit an insular environment where almost everyone thinks like them, so it becomes tribal. What they believe or want is the only important thing in the world, and they approach it with no pragmatism or sense.

Now imagine the reaction if the liability of running over a person intentionally blocking the right of way as part of an unauthorized protest was removed.

He’ll have to get some funding from Big Oil

Perhaps a dig at Just Stop Oil

Even when he thinks he’s doing good, Rat still finds a way to make people miserable.

The comfortable are never on anyone’s side but their own.

Spot on!

Point taken. Now do one about Charlottesville and J6 “protests”.

Surely there are better way to protest. I just don’t know what any of them are.

The MAGAt Cubans in Miami want to protest a billboard by protesting on a highway. Their MAGAt hero governor has signed a law that permits drivers to hit protestors blocking highways.Pardon me, I have to go for a drive.

The lunch counter sit-ins of the late 50s were an excellent model. The students who sat-in were claiming and exercising a right without interfering in the rights of others and they were willing to take the consequences on themselves. The Freedom Rides were another example.

I’m with Goat on this.

The purpose of mass protest is to try getting enough people to put pressure on politicians to change things.

The big problem here is that no matter which party supposedly represents you in the government, they will NEVER give one whit about what you think.

Destroy popular art and historical artifacts. That’ll get the people on your side.

kinda like ‘we feel offended because they call us terrorists, so let’s explode a bomb to show them’

Ooh, electronics career and BBROUGBVGW.

Good idea. Let’s shut down the Golden Gate Bridge and see how that works for us. Kind of like spraying orange powder on Stonehenge?

“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [Black person]‘s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the [Black person] to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letters from a Birmingham Jail

I’m disappointed in your message today, Mr. Pastis. We ignore history at our own peril.

“We’re not gonna protest! We’re not gonna protest!” ~ PCU (Movie, 1994)

Hmmm…Rat starts out a highly annoying woke climate protester simpleton, but by the final panel is reconsidering his past as a full-blown Antifa thug… an individual Leftist ’s evolution?….

This is why I live by this simple motto: “It’s not just WHAT you do, but HOW you do it.”

Yep, been wondering for a long time about the logic in that sort of thing.

Society shouldn’t hang people who disrupt traffic by the neck because they disrupted traffic, society should hang people who disrupt traffic by the neck so that traffic will not be disrupted.

Far be it from Rat to do a peaceful protest.

Why does Steph love triggering people?

If Rat wants to be in a viral protest video, he should try super-gluing himself to a Lamborghini. Then we could just search for “200 mph screaming Rat”…should be an impressive Doppler shift as he goes by…

Unfortunately for society’s disrupters those they despise will soon be pushing daisies. They will be the targets of their more radical spawn.

Goat has a natural talent for understatement.

Most people don’t care about causes. they just want to sail along on the smooth course of everyday life. Forcing them to pay attention usually just scares them.

Burn down the mission. Elton John.

And to think that in the lead up to the American Revolution mobs frequently tore down the houses of Royalist governors by hand, bit by bit, board by board.

Looting and pillaging stores is a good way to get business owners on your side.

Pastis talking out of both sides of his mouth again.

Anything to get publicity.