The recent murder of Sonya Massey really underlines how accurate that is. Massey was fucking joking with the police. Everything was fine. They were there to help her. And then she made a joke the cop thought disrespected him and she was dead thirty seconds later.

It's so fucking sickening and it's exactly how abusive parents treat kids. You have to walk on eggshells 24-7 because there's no telling what will trigger a violent reaction in the abuser - and because the abuser is confident he'll suffer no consequences from his violence, he feels free to resort to violence at any opportunity.

“That being said, I am happy to give up my right to vote as a trade for a significantly better quality of life. It’s cleaner, it’s safer. There’s more opportunity in mobility,” she said.

Plenty of people are happy to make that trade while staying in America. This is why Trump's going to win.

Full disclosure: I don't have the time or patience to watch a thirty minute video, and perhaps the OOP discusses this point somewhere in the video. I don't know.

But I believe vegan activism doesn't require anti-capitalist activism. Or even opposition to capitalism in general.

I agree that capitalism is inherently anti-vegan. The logic of capitalism sees both animal bodies and human bodies as objects to be owned and used for their masters' profit.

I think it's more ideologically consistent for vegan activists to also oppose capitalist systems as a whole.

But vegan activism doesn't require ideological consistency. We're not trying to change the entire world economic system. We don't need to change the entire world economic system. If abolitionists could oppose slavery without opposing capitalism - and win - vegans can oppose the slavery of animals without opposing capitalism. Vegans can win victories and have protections for animals written into law without opposing capitalism. We can and we have.

And if you can be a vegan activist and still be a capitalist, you can certainly just be an ordinary vegan and still be a capitalist.

Frankly, absolute ideological consistency is for heroes in an Ayn Rand novel. Vegans can work with with anybody who puts the animals first. And anybody who puts the animals first can be a vegan.

I agree that capitalism is inherently anti-vegan. In capitalism, both human bodies and animal bodies are commodities to be used to profit their owners (or employers/shareholders/government/etc).

Factory farming as a whole monstrous edifice is a result of capitalism, the drive for profit and the dehumanization of both animal victims and human workers.

In the same vein, capitalism is inherently pro-slavery and anti-worker.

And yet, there are laws and reforms that, in the United States, have nominally abolished slavery and protected workers' rights.

How effective those laws are is an open question, of course. But the laws exist and they are to some degree enforced.

We also have laws and reforms that protect animals, and they are to some degree enforced. For example, it's illegal to eat dogs and cats in many U.S. states, and it is illegal to kill and eat a bald eagle anywhere in the United States. And if you do eat a dog or a cat or bald eagle, you will face not just legal penalties but social condemnation.

So the concept and the precedent exist that, even under capitalism, if society believes killing and eating a particular animal is wrong, we can pass laws to protect those animals, and those laws can be enforced.

I can envision a society that is both capitalist and vegan.

As such, I don't think it's necessary for vegans to be anti-capitalist.

And like the other commenter pointed out, the more purity tests you apply to a movement, the weaker the movement becomes. Do you think using and consuming animals is wrong? Do you want to protect animals and animal rights? Welcome to the club.

What is the source of your quote? I can think of quite a few places where I'd want to share it 😆

Wow. I can only imagine how angry I would be if I had donated to Biden's primary campaign, or worked for his reelection, or even voted for him in the primaries, only to have the Democratic establishment force him out after one bad debate.

This is an incredible propaganda victory for the Republicans and a gift from the Democratic Party to Trump.

And if I were a Democrat, I'd be asking myself whether the Democratic Party even wants to beat Trump, and whether any further donations or campaigning on their behalf would just be wasted effort.

Added to post, thank you!

In a way it is. Colonial empires maintain the support of the proletariat in the imperial cores by funneling wealth from colonized nations back to those people. If you're better off than your parents were, and your parents are better off than your grandparents were, why do you care that your ruling oligarchy is genociding its way across the planet and shoveling stolen profits into its insatiable maw?

English commoners forgave their empire's industrial scale genocide of African slaves on Haitian plantations because that genocide provided white sugar for their tea.

American commoners forgive the wholesale torture and murder of Latin American peasants because we can buy cheap bananas at the supermarket.

The top 20% of Americans control 80% of America's wealth. But they don't consume 80% of the resources America consumes. They don't burn 80% of the gas, they don't eat 80% of the food, they don't produce 80% of the pollution. What's killing the world is the bread and circuses - or rather the cars, cell phones, and factory farms - that give all but the very poorest Americans an artificially inflated standard of living at the cost of the world as a whole.

But telling poor Americans "your standard of living is too high" when the entire capitalist machine tells them they have the right to all the consumption they can buy and the best standard of living they can earn, it's a hard sell, you know?

In the same time period, eating meat at every meal was a demonstration of social status - only the wealthy and powerful had enough livestock to slaughter and eat them routinely.

Like lawns, and meat, and college education, and a dozen other forms of conspicuous consumption - privileges of the wealthy during the Victorian era and earlier, when industrialized society made those privileges cheaper, the middle class seized on them to emulate the upper class, and after a hundred fifty years those privileges became expectations.

And conspicuous consumption as a status symbol, when universalized to the majority of society, led inevitably to unsustainable consumption and the world as it is now.

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.

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.)