Those texts sound like an LLM tbh
Still more intelligent than half the comments on here
The image looks like AI to me as well. By the bearded man’s head, look at the blurry border between the roof and the oddly askew tree/treeline; this house also seems to have a 2nd story window with only one shutter and the two round windows are in weirdly close proximity to each other given their heights and depths. By the beardless man’s face, the house in the background has a 2nd story window nearly as large as the garage door; there is also an odd absence of houses or trees to the right of this house. Using AI to bring about content like this just seems like propagandist echo chamber slop rather than any sort of stimulating or thoughtful media.
? It's a cartoon, I don't see it trying to pass as a real picture of 3 people with a transcript of what was said in regular conversation.
Given the title of "civics", what I understood from this is that anything we say in current politics can be said reasonably, and people can choose to be decent, respectful and gainful in how they interact with each other. Lots of people and places have rules against "politics" talk because we can't behave ourselves. But being divisive is not a requirement of politics, that's just us being assholes.
The people in the cartoon are showing us that you can also talk about these issues respectfully and working together.
For instance, lots of assholes around these parts come in with their pro-Hamas rhetoric talking about how the US is supporting genocide, acting like the rest of us are happy with children being bombed. The difference is not that we support genocide, the difference is that we don't think the answer is anywhere near as simple as they want to make it. That region is full of religious hate and ignorance with roots of bloodthirst that go back thousands of years, and it will not be fixed overnight with any one policy.
And where is the outrage about Sudan? https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/africa/sudan-darfur-humanitarian-aid-intl/index.html
10 million people have fled their homes due to civil war, the WHO says 8.5 million peoples are at emergency levels of food insecurity, and the UN is warning that the death toll could be 4 million people if we don't intervene aggressively https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/08/21/g-s1-18004/famine-hunger-sudan-united-nations-food-insecurity
Let me be clear. My president in the US and his Secretary of State are already working hard on finding a cease-fire deal in Gaza, and the entire West alliance is putting pressure on Israel to end their operations. But who is working to do something for Sudan? While all these pro-Hamas drones are plastering the internet with Hamas propaganda and doing shenanigans at the DNC to get attention, yet nobody gives a shit about 4 million impending deaths by famine because they didn't see it on tiktok. Where are the calls to hear from a Sudanese-American at the Dem convention?
And here we are with this cartoon asking me to find a way to listen to the pro-Hamas tiktok simpletons, and try to communicate with them to find some common ground. It's hard, but it's true that we don't HAVE to be assholes, we just are for now. The one side starts at asshole and goes from there, and it brings out only the asshole out of the other side. Same for any topic. But it doesn't have to be that way, it's just the way we are doing it.
Now, for a practical demonstration, watch the response from the pro-Hamas simpletons.
Comic books are so unrealistic.
Lies! The only way to participate in political discourse is to demand rigid adherence to every point of dogma promoted by my idealized conceptual political system of choice -- only by maximizing ideological purity can we achieve a world worth living in!
Sad that I had to churn this in my brain as how things should be, yet it’s a “comic” that is fictional, but also the idea that society would get its shit together and think this way is also a fiction.
Nah, just make me dictator and I'll fix all the world's problems with my infallible wisdom and experience 😃
