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.

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.

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 the thing. Just Stop Oil is performing symbolic disruption and vandalism. And they are doing it to exactly the targets you say they should - for example, Taylor Swift’s private jet.

And they are also performing symbolic vandalism against works of art and history.

And I submit the way you feel about them targeting Stonehenge is very similar to the way a wealthy conservative feels about them targeting private jets - it offends you even though it does no actual harm because it’s an attack on something you value and something you feel should be respected, which makes you feel like it’s an attack on you personally.

Just Stop Oil has been very clear about why they symbolically vandalize works of art - because every dollar you spent on preserving human art and history is meaningless if the human species drives itself to extinction, and anyone who cares about art and history needs to get off their asses and demand political change. They do it because people who care more about art than the environment are the people they’re trying to shake up and motivate.

Preserving art is a bourgeois luxury. If we as a species don’t get off our asses and fight climate change we won’t have any art left to preserve or any human beings left to appreciate it.

The essence of white Berkeley liberalism.

How naive. True change doesn’t come from offending moderates - true change comes from making moderates comfortable, so they feel secure and confident that the change you won’t harm them. Any protest that makes people uncomfortable about society or their own actions is counterproductive and just makes things worse.

Take Colin Kaepernick. Taking a knee during the national anthem before a football game was exactly the wrong way to protest racism, because it angered people who loved football and loved America, who should have been his natural allies. What Colin should have done was been even more patriotic and sung the anthem even louder, to express how much he loved America and how he wanted to see it become better. That would have inspired people who supported his cause, without offending people who disagreed with him, and there would have been no controversy.

That’s the way white moderates want to see people protest. Being conformist and forgettable is how we make change.

Am I still being too subtle?

You don’t understand. That protest provoked an emotional reaction in me and I didn’t like it. Responsible protests don’t hurt people’s feelings. They went too far.

Wait, do you really expect British citizens to fly to the US or China in order to commit vandalism?

What do you think they’d put on their visa application? “Purpose of travel: throw paint on the Statue of Liberty”?

In a world full of bad faith “I support your cause but not your methods” attacks on environmental activism, this is one of the most ridiculous ones I’ve ever heard.

We only discuss their tactics briefly when they do something dramatic and get on the news.

When people hear about their tactics, ask why they’re going so far, and look into environmental issues as a result, I think that can have a much longer lasting impact.