Food Not Bombs has a cookbook with a similar style of “protest food” recipes.

To be fair, people are choosing capitalism because they have to make money, buy food, and pay rent.

Graphic designer, writer, commissioned artist, were jobs people could do entirely online. And a lot of highly online people did one or the other, or have friends who did one or the other, and they see AI as the existential threat to their livelihoods that it, in fact, is.

And I feel for them. I really do. If you bought food and paid rent by making art online - especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job - AI tools have destroyed your career. And it sucks. There’s no getting around that.

But the core of the problem is not AI. The core of the problem is the lack of a safety net. Some of the enormous profits from the AI boom should be funneled back into society to support the people who are put out of business by the AI boom. But they won’t. Because capitalism.

I deleted most of this comment because it wasn’t as civil and understanding as I wanted it to be and it’s probably better off lost to history 😆

But let me summarize my thoughts: your mother, and presumably you, eat a lot more meat than the average person. The 10% of human foods that aren’t plant-based and can’t easily be made plant-based are overrepresented in your meat heavy diet.

And meat heavy diets are bad for your personal health and for the health of the planet, for reasons we both know very well.

Which is to say: you are universalizing your personal experiences. It’s not difficult to go vegan. It’s difficult for you to go vegan, because your diet and lifestyle are so heavily focused on animal products. That’s not an indictment of veganism; it’s an indictment of the Western diet, and big agriculture, and capitalist food science that studied what flavors and textures trigger dopamine release so they could pack food with them and sell more product, and the whole vicious capitalist PR mechanism that convinced Westerners to eat a meat heavy, highly processed, unhealthy diet and convinced Western governments to subsidize it. And, to a much lesser extent, it is an indictment of your personal choices.

It’s difficult for you to go vegan. But that’s not on veganism. That’s on you.

Frankly, I think your comment exemplifies how correct this article is.

“Cooking vegan is hard” - no, it isn’t. 90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients. You don’t need any different cooking methods to make pasta sauce without meat or fried rice without eggs. Dairy is slightly more complicated because milk does very particular things to the texture and chemistry of food but you can find guides to non-dairy replacements in literally 30 seconds on Google.

“I will be a social pariah/I can never eat out again” - that’s catastrophizing. If you personally live in a food desert where no vegan food exists, or you personally have relatives who will emotionally abuse you for eating vegan food - I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, in the age of Trump there are some conservatives who think eating tons of red meat (and smoking cigars and rolling coal) virtual signals their loyalty to conservatism, and I hope they enjoy the heart disease they’re giving themselves - then eat non-vegan food in public. That’s okay. Veganism is about avoiding animal products as far as is reasonable and practical.

But what I see a lot is people saying “I can’t be vegan because there are no vegan restaurants in Kansas” when they live in California. I see people saying “I can’t be vegan because people at church give vegans the stink eye” when they don’t attend church. I see people saying “veganism is wrong because there’s tons of land useless for agriculture that can only be used for grazing” when the meat they eat comes from soy fattened factory farm feed lots. I see people saying “veganism is wrong because hunting is a traditional lifeway of Native American people” when they are not Native American.

How does a lack of vegan restaurants keep you from cooking vegan at home? It doesn’t.

Will you actually get criticized at family reunions if you bring a potluck dish without meat in it? As if there are food inspectors going through all the side dishes to make sure the required quantity of animal product is in it? Even for conservatives, that’s ridiculous.

What I see over and over again is people bringing up reasons why other people can’t go vegan in order to explain why they don’t go vegan, even though the reasons that apply to those other people don’t apply to them at all. And that is deflecting. And that’s exactly what the article calls out.

If you came up to me and said, “You know CHEESE is ABUSE” I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn’t have lab-grown cheese yet.

I’m going to pick this sentence specifically to respond to, because. With all due respect.

If you said “I torture animals for pleasure and I’m not going to stop” we would consider you a sociopath.

But you’re saying “I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I’m not going to stop”, and we’re supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?

Look. Torturing animals is wrong. You know it’s wrong. You are admitting it’s wrong. It hurts your feelings to be reminded that you are doing wrong.

That’s a fair and understandable feeling and I don’t care. Because you are torturing animals, and if you feel bad when someone reminds you, it’s because you should.

There is value in gentle persuasion. And there’s also value in ranting about the sheer fucking hypocrisy of carnists. This article is the latter.

Generated output is a gimmick that will be used by people who have no intention of making art.

Without getting into the definition of “art”, yes, people will use generated output for purposes other than “art”. And that’s not a gimmick. That’s a valuable tool.

Rally organizers can use AI to create pamphlets and notices for protests. Community organizers can illustrate broadsheets and zines. People can add imagery and interest to all sorts of written material that they wouldn’t have the time or money to illustrate with traditional graphic design. AI can make an ad for a yard sale or bake sale look as slick and professional as any big name company’s ads.

AI tools will make the world a more artistic place, they will let people put graphic art in all sorts of places they wouldn’t have the time or money or skill to do so before, and that’s a good thing.

Both can be done, of course, and we live in a world with limited resources. There’s no reason to commit resources to nuclear when those resources can, demonstratively and statistically, be used far more efficiently to implement other options.

It’s like saying, yes, I can buy a used car for $5k cash now, or, on the other hand, I could pay $50k to get on the waiting list for a Tesla Cybertruck to be delivered in like five years.

And when I point out that the Cybertruck is less reliable, more expensive, and will leave me without a car for 5 years while I’m waiting, you say “well, why don’t you buy the used car and put yourself on the Cybertruck waiting list?”

And I haven’t even touched on the moral and environmental issues with nuclear power. I shouldn’t have to. New nuclear is clearly the least efficient form of non-emitting power generation in the world. That should be the end of the discussion.

Yeah, nuclear is temporary, and yes, nothing stays in place longer than a temporary solution, but it’s a known and can be built now rather than yet another 5-15 years of waiting for untried tech solutions.

I guess you could say nuclear power can be built “now”. From a certain point of view.

The last nuclear reactor to go online in the United States took 14 years to build - from breaking ground in 2009 to going online in 2023 - at a cost of thirty billion dollars.

And that wasn’t even a new nuclear power site, it was a additional reactor added on as an existing site, so planning and permitting and so on were significantly faster then a new nuclear power plant would be.

So yes, we could start the process of building a new nuclear reactor in the United States and commit 30 billion in taxpayer money to it. And after 20 to 30 years that reactor might come online.

Or we could commit 30 billion dollars to subsidizing wind and solar power, and get that power generation online in the next few years, at a significantly lower cost per kilowatt.

It may have suffered, but it’s distinctive.

The webcomic space is flooded with generic “good art”. If you want to stand out and build or maintain your brand - you need a unique look. Artists want their audience to be able to look at a character and instantly know they drew it.

(The best example of this is perhaps the worst human being in webcomics today. You can recognize his style in the first three lines of a face.)

I think PA was in kind of a bad place, because they were popular so early in the webcomic boom and so many people copied their style that their original art became generic. What’s going to attract a new teenage reader to PA if it looks just like every other crappy “two guys on a couch playing video games” webcomic they’ve seen?

So PA had to change their style. And say what you will about it, there’s no doubt who drew (or had an AI tool draw) those characters.

I agree. Times change. Putting people out of work is not inherently a bad thing. How many oil workers and coal miners will be out of work when we ban fossil fuels? How many jobs emptying chamber pots and hauling dung were lost when cities installed sewer systems? Hell, how many taxi drivers were put out of work by Uber, and how many Uber drivers are about to be put out of work by self-driving vehicles? When specialized labor is replaced by technology that can do it faster and cheaper, that’s good for society as a whole.

The problem is, society also needs better support for people whose jobs are replaced by technology, and that’s something we don’t have. The logic of capitalism requires unemployed people to suffer, so workers fear losing their jobs and don’t oppose their bosses. OP’s comic shouldn’t be read as an attack on AI, but as an attack on capitalism.

The limitations of actual physical printing led to some amazing art.

The Bradford pear was considered sterile. Until it wasn’t.

It’s modeled after the Texas abortion law which allowed anyone to sue anyone else who “aided or abetted” a prohibited abortion - so if you were a doctor, a nurse, a driver taking a woman to a clinic, a family member who helped pay for the abortion, any random Texan who knew about the abortion could sue you and get a bounty for doing it.

That law became irrelevant after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, of course. But I believe that strategy - giving ordinary citizens the power to file weaponized lawsuits against your political enemies, giving them a financial incentive to do so, and then turning them loose - is going to be seen as transformative in American politics. It’s one of the greatest Republican legal innovations in the last two decades. It gives those tiny radical conservative special interest groups, populated by Quiverfull homeschooled kids who went to law school and joined the Heritage Foundation to fight for God in the courtroom, an enormous amount of power - and it means, if you’re doing something Republicans don’t like, you have an enormous potential liability, because anyone could sue you at any time. And since you’re guaranteed to have a conservative judge in most jurisdictions in the United States, very few organizations are going to take that risk.

Conservatives spent the last two generations fighting to capture the judicial branch. And they succeeded. And now they’re trying to funnel more and more power away from other branches of government and to the judicial system so they can exploit that power. And they’re doing it very, very, effectively.

Literally. That’s why the United States didn’t ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Recognizing the rights of children would have limited the rights of parents to control their children. It would have made parents less free to do whatever they want to their kids. And we can’t have that.

(Edit: also the freedom of states to execute juvenile offenders. Forgot about that. The freedom to kill kids is vital to American culture.)

Dude would have been a great president, and having him at the helm instead of Bush would have drastically change global politics to this very day.

People keep saying that and they keep being wrong.

There was no daylight between Bush and Gore on foreign policy, and very little daylight between Bush and Gore on domestic policy.

A hypothetical Gore administration would have invaded Afghanistan. It would have invaded Iraq. It would have implemented the Patriot Act and instituted the policy of destabilizing Muslim countries to honeypot terrorist groups into civil war (the so-called “Bush Doctrine”), all the vicious realpolitik warmongering that Kissenger taught Clinton and Bush and Obama to do so well.

Understand: we have lived under the Kissinger Administration from 1972 to the present day. Anybody who thinks a different President would have made a difference in global politics is fooling themselves.

But it could be hard to ever pinpoint exactly, which animals do.

So that’s why we should err on the side of caution, assume that animals who act like they have emotions actually have emotions, and give them the respect and rights they deserve as fellow thinking feeling beings?

Oh wait, no, let’s torture, kill, and eat them because we can’t “prove”, to whatever arbitrary “scientific” standard, they have the same intellectual and emotional capacities we do.

That’s why you have multiple security teams, each reporting to you through a different chain of command, so that disloyalty in one group won’t spread to others and one leader can’t win the loyalty of all your forces.

And that’s why you have additional security teams whose job is to spy on the others and report disloyalty back to you.

And that’s why your security teams are not deployed where their families live, so if one team stages a coup their families will be elsewhere, in the hands of other, hopefully loyal, security forces.

Oh hey you just reinvented government.

Is this really a surprise? Both candidates are 80-year-old rich white men. They don’t give a shit about the environment personally, because they’re going to be dead before things get really bad. They don’t give a shit about the environment for the sake of their families, because their families have enough generational wealth to guarantee them a seat in the metaphorical ark. And when politicians have no personal investment in a cause they don’t talk about it. Shocker.

Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I’m frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they’d lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates’ obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Yes. Stealing. From the taxpayers that maintain that forest. From the public who owns the property.

And from the indigenous people who originally lived there - these people are very clearly not Aboriginal Australians.

I’ve heard Native American activists argue that white influencer style permaculture is inherently racist when performed on American soil, because it’s modeled on a romanticized ideal of white settler lifeways and has nothing to do with how permaculture was actually practiced in North America before the genocides. I’m not sure how I feel about that argument. But having a family of white Australian permaculturists literally stealing from public land to maintain their settler lifestyle… it’s a little too on the nose.

So here’s how laws criminalizing homelessness work and why they’re so fundamentally repulsive.

You’re homeless. Let’s say you just got evicted and you’re broke so you’re sleeping in your car.

A cop sees you being homeless in the wrong place. You get a ticket with a fine.

You can’t pay the fine, because you have no money, because you’re homeless.

The system sends out a notice for you to appear in court. Which you don’t get, because you have no mailing address, because you’re homeless.

When you don’t show up for court, a warrant is put out for your arrest. Along with a bigger fine.

You get arrested and thrown in jail.

The prison charges you $50 a night.

When you get out, you have to pay the prison fees. Which you can’t, because you’re homeless.

Meanwhile, cops keep writing you tickets for being homeless. Which you can’t pay, because you’re homeless.

And you keep getting arrested for not paying, and you keep going back to jail, for longer and longer periods, because now you have a criminal record.

And by this time you probably have PTSD from the torture and other forms of abuse which are routine in American prisons Franklin, which doesn’t help you at all.

And ultimately you go from “temporarily financially unstable” to permanently institutionalized in a for-profit prison. Your state government pays the prison $400 a night to house you, and a fraction of that is paid back to the politicians who passed the anti-homeless laws as campaign donations and legal “gratuities”, so everyone benefits except you and the taxpayers. And even if you had a legal route to fight back, the odds are you wouldn’t be physically or mentally capable of it at that point.

And once the Supreme Court makes forced labor in prisons legal again, those for profit prisons will rent your labor out for agricultural work, and you’ll be even more profitable working the fields for the rest of your short, ugly life.

And this is how the system is designed to work, because capitalism only works if people fear poverty enough to accept abusive working conditions, and the worse America becomes for the unhoused the more power capital gains over labor.

Welcome to capitalist America. Please leave your unalienable human rights at the door.