Social Justice

Bring This Essay To Your Next Gun Fight

/ rickeydobbs / 5 Comments

Police have a tough job.

It’s not a particularly high-paying career, especially starting out. You’re expected to deal with people who dislike and distrust you for no good reason, other than that you’re an authority figure. The work is physically demanding and mentally stressful, and there’s a chance you’ll get shot in the line of duty.

Sorry, did I say police? This was supposed to be my description for teacher. I’ve been doing this for 26 years, and I “accidentally” drew one rhetorical weapon when I meant to grab another. But I guess this works pretty well for cops, too.

It seems that cops are getting a bad rap lately, and while we can debate the reason, one possibility is their propensity to kill unarmed people.

While I can’t personally fix that, I can sell you some rhetorical ammunition without a thorough background check. Use the ideas here for your next family dinner, Reddit conversation, or wherever else you might encounter a bootlicker on whom you’d like to viciously dunk.

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Race Against The Machine

/ rickeydobbs / 5 Comments

I’ve done it. I have invented a machine that gives you the power to change your race.

I know! I am as surprised as you are, given my complete lack of scientific and technical knowledge.

But now, with the mere push of a button, you will no longer remain confined to the skin color, hair texture, or facial features assigned by your DNA. Please mail my Nobel Prize and large cash award at your earliest convenience.

Want to try it out?

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Wonder What This Rando Thinks

/ rickeydobbs / 3 Comments

Unpopular opinions are the spice of life. And who doesn’t like spice? Besides people living with irritable bowel syndrome, of course. And the English.

But let’s ignore those contingencies for now. If everyone feels the exact same way about something, it fades out of our active attention. No one spends much time talking about how awesome “blue” is or how much they just love oxygen, for example.

Now, if someone piped up with a hot take on the uselessness of O2, they’d stand out against the backdrop. When a talking plant has an opinion, after all, we instinctively listen. (Source: Little Shop of Horrors).

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Be Kind, Rewind

/ rickeydobbs / 2 Comments

I have a weird confession to make.

It’s going to come as a shock, so I hope you’re sitting down. You probably are, as it’s hard to walk and read at the same time.

Okay, here goes: I haven’t seen that movie.

I know, right?! Crazy. You know the one, the one with that one guy? The one where they go places and do stuff? Yeah, never seen it.

And I’m constantly, irrationally embarrassed by this fact.

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If You’ll Excuse Me, I Gotta See A Man About A Dog

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There is a problem with the bathroom-to-human ratio in my area.

Well, the problems run much deeper than that, but the lack of accessible restrooms is the outcome that most directly impacts me.

This issue wouldn’t exist if it were socially acceptable for people to piss on the ground like 99.99% of the rest of the mammals. Who’s the 0.01% left over, you ask?

Sea mammals. Orcas only piss on the land in the rarest, most dire circumstances.

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These Are The People In Your Neighborhood. Sorry.

/ rickeydobbs / 4 Comments

Every year, the Kennedy Center Honors are awarded to venerable artists in the United States for lifetime achievement and impact on American culture.

I check my mailbox once or twice a year in the hopes I’ll be recognized. Truth be told, I really just want a cool rainbow medallion. I could probably save a lot of time and money with a trip to Michael’s, versus all that “honing my generational talent into a marketable craft” crap. Not to mention I could stop checking my mail outright. I never get anything, except Bed Bath & Beyond coupons and angry letters from debt collectors. Exactly how do you propose I catch up on my bills when Bed Bath & Beyond has such great deals AND an extra 20% off? It’s a vicious cycle. Get off my back, Visa.

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My Eye! I’m Not Supposed To Get Measles In It!

/ rickeydobbs / 6 Comments

A fraction of the population believes that vaccines are an insidious part of an Illuminati-style conspiracy. According to these mental heavyweights, vaccines have been foisted upon the masses by profit-motivated pharmaceutical companies with the blessing and assistance of the United States government.

Occam’s Razor suggests that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. The anti-vaccination crowd, unfortunately, has been boycotting Occam’s Razor ever since Gillette made that “anti-men” video.

When they hear hoofbeats in the hallway, they don’t think the sound is coming from zebras. Come on, that would be ridiculous! Zebras? At this time of year? Localized entirely within your hallway? That’s just dumb.

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A Loaded Red Hat

/ rickeydobbs / 6 Comments

High school boys in 2019 wear “Make America Great Again” hats for the same reason high school boys in 1992 wore Slayer t-shirts: contrarianism and attention seeking. Well, it’s almost the same, except the members of Slayer are actually good at their jobs and worthy of fandom.

It’s the reason we saw University of South Carolina baseball caps around the University of Houston during my tenure. South Carolina is a thousand miles from Houston, and most of us had never been there. But you see, Carolina’s mascot is the gamecock, and their 90’s era hats said “COCKS” across the front. To quote myself and every dude I knew circa 1998 (and 2019, to be fair), “Uh…huh huh…huh huh…he said cocks.” “Cocks” has a much more je ne sais quai than “Cougars,” no?

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Nobody Gets Out Alive

/ rickeydobbs / 10 Comments

We live in a dangerous country. Would it surprise you to learn that the United States has a whopping 100% mortality rate? And it’s projected to remain the same for the foreseeable future. Sad!

According to anecdotes relayed by the President of the United States on national television this week, the scariest source of our countrymen’s fate is undocumented immigrants. From what I can glean from memes posted by racist senior citizens on “the Facebook,” more Americans are killed by immigrants than by every other cause of death combined.

Okay, that seems unlikely, I’ll admit it. But when has your Aunt Gertrude, an angry 80-year-old woman who hasn’t worked outside the home nor left her Midwestern hometown in the last 20 years, ever steered us wrong? Remember 9/11? Well, Gertie said on 9/12 that she’d “always been suspicious of the Moslems,” and I’ll be damned if she didn’t hit the mark with that shotgun spray of post-hoc accusation.

This just in: Aunt Gertrude never said anything about it at the time, but she never liked that guy you just broke up with, either.

Given our President’s inference that we should fear people from other countries, I decided to investigate all of the ways that people in our country find themselves taking long naps on the underside of the terrain. Imagine my confusion when I discovered that, at best guess, only 456 people per year die at the hands of undocumented immigrants!

Now before you go saying, “any murder is a tragedy, and the murderers shouldn’t have even been here!” keep in mind that the overall number of homicides in the US is about 18,624 per year. In other words, if you’re going to get whacked, you’re 40 times more likely to get whacked by a fellow American. That’s why I avoid each of you at all costs, just to be safe. USA! USA!

I was also shocked to learn how many ways to die are more common than “gittin’ kilt by a got-dang furriner whilst on mah way down to the Piggleh Wiggleh.”

And because I cherry picked the hell out of this list for maximum shock value, you should prepare to be shocked, too!

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Bad Stuff Is Probably Happening Somewhere

/ rickeydobbs / 4 Comments

Bad stuff happens everywhere. I don’t mean “bad stuff” like getting in a fender bender. Or even really bad stuff like your Internet crapping out in the middle of streaming your seventh consecutive episode of This Is How To Get Away With A Million Little Scandals With The Stars: Miami.

No, I’m talking about Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse-level bad stuff. Continue reading →