The Far Side

Update below.

I am in a FB group "The Best of 'The Far Side.'" I always loved the comic but didn't have all the books so about 20% are ones I have never seen before.  I may unfollow it soon, as it does produce half-a-dozen posts a day and it's getting a little repetitive. It's been a good two months.

Injecting political or social commentary is punished swiftly: instant banishment from further commenting, no second-chances. It's there to be funny. But people just seem unable to contain themselves.  They have to find hidden sermons in Gary Larsen's work, or relate the cartoon immediately to how stupid some group of people is. They insist to us what his philosophy, his politics, and even his theology must be, as revealed in the panel. It's bad enough when they do this jumping off from the main point, but sometimes it is dug out from unimportant details. People project their own opinions on to the cartoonist. I think opinion X is good.  I like Larsen. Therefore he must also think opinion X is good.  Aha! See there is evidence right here. 

It is nearly always liberals who do this, especially environmentalists.  I would have thought there was a slight tendency in that direction, but this is not slight. I traced back the last month and it's over 90% of those banned. And note, there are some God-portrayals that religious people might not like, plus some consistent rooting for the animals over the hunters that could be taken amiss by gun-rights people. I think he was just going for the irony. I'm not offended.

There may be a sample bias.  The group might be 90+% liberal, so the more frequent banning isn't significant.  But I doubt it.

Upon further review:  I was interested in more precision on the environmentalist vs general liberal question, and decided it gives a different impression that way. Reflexive environmentalists are not entirely contained in the liberal circle if you did it as a Venn Diagram. I was assuming they were liberals and were counting them that way, but that's not entirely defensible.  The more exact numbers are 3 liberals, 1 conservative, 7 environmentalists.  With that 3-1 being a very small sample size, so a single addition or subtraction - or a single misinterpretation on my part - changing the impression drastically, it would be more accurate to conclude this is more of an environmentalist than general liberal issue.