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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you ever seen a sheep be sheared? It’s violent and bloody. If your barber held you down and cut and scraped scraped the hell out of your scalp while shaving your head, you’d fire them.

Also, sheep too old to produce good wool don’t get a peaceful retirement. They get slaughtered and turned into dog or chicken food. The same thing happens when there’s a disease epidemic - common because of the crowded and filthy conditions in factory farming - or crop failures or drought. As soon as it’s not profitable to keep the sheep alive we kill them.

But neither of those points are actually the point of the conversation at all. The point is it’s immoral to use an animal as an object to benefit humans. If you wouldn’t keep humans in pens and shave them to make clothing, you shouldn’t do the same thing to sheep. Simple as.

How about spaying or neutering them and letting them live out their natural lives?

Yawn.

“Genocide” only applies to humans. The correct term for animals is “extinction”.

And I remind you: we humans control when and if our domestic livestock breed. And we let specific breeds of domestic livestock go extinct all the time. There are dozens of breeds of cows and chickens and sheep that are now extinct because they were replaced by other, more useful breeds - or the cultures that bred them were wiped out. Consider the Tautersheep, for example.

Let me be blunt. If scientists developed synthetic wool that was chemically identical to sheep wool but ten times cheaper, domestic sheep would be extinct within a decade. And nobody but sheep farmers would complain. So when carnists argue we have a moral duty to the species of domestic sheep to continue breeding them for human use I just roll my eyes.

Stupid children. Don’t they understand personal consumption is irrelevant and “carbon footprints” are industry propaganda? If they actually wanted to make a difference, they should have spent more time shitposting about the 100 corporations that produce 70% of fossil fuel emissions.

in no small part because it’s much more difficult to get the nutrition you need from a vegan diet without money.

Lol. Compare the price of a pound of beans and a pound of beef and get back to me, would you?

I can’t get more specific about costs unless you get specific about what you mean by “nutrition”, but studies have consistently found plant based diets are both cheaper and healthier than omnivorous diets. Especially the average American diet.

Nothing makes the average person angrier than telling them their consumption matters.

Blame governments! Blame Taylor Swift! Blame the 100 fossil fuel companies that produce 70% of the world’s fossil fuels, and the factory farms covering entire states in corn monoculture to fatten billions of tortured animals, and the multinational corporations producing useless plastic garbage!

But don’t ask who is buying that plastic garbage, or eating those animals, or whose cars and homes are burning those fuels.

Don’t you dare expect me to change what I eat and wear and drive.

Nothing is more punk than food not bombs. It’s just feeding everyone who shows up whether the government likes it or not.

Yes, and, Food Not Bombs is a great example to bring up, because they don’t only feed everyone, they also share literature and talk politics and organize community action. From FNB’s how to guide:

Your meal is not a Food Not Bombs meal if you don’t provide literature and display a banner. Otherwise the public will think you are a church and have the impression your group believes that our political and economic system is fine and that all we need to do is care for those who are not able to make it. We are not a charity, we are seeking to build a movemnet to end the exploitation of the economic and political system.

I think very few orgs do “the personal is political” better than FNB.