I’ve only seen this artist reposted on lemmy and never knew the first thing about her other than her comics being pretty bland and art unimpressive despite being frequently posted, what is going on with all these people white knighting for her?? If you like her, cool. If you don’t like her, also cool?? What is the problem here??

The closest thing to “harassing” I’ve witnessed is of those with fairly reasonable criticism of the comic presented to us, accusing them of harassing an artist that isn’t even on this platform.

Can you give me a quick overview of the situation?

I don’t think you’ve spent much time here if you think that “fuck cars” is being said without empathy. None of us think that nobody should be allowed to own a car and that there aren’t legitimate use cases. Just that the vast majority of cases are Not That and for how dangerous and inefficient they are, along with infrastructure that only considers the experience of people in cars, the extent that cars have taken over and define our lives (again, as non-single-mothers-of-seven) is ridiculous.

Also, station wagons used to exist. Mini vans still exist. You could transport this many kids and not have to drive a massive truck that’s likely to mow one of them down in the driveway before you even notice they’re unaccounted for. There are other “real solutions” for this person. In fact, that single mother would have a far more peaceful time transporting her family if the cars around her were both smaller in size and fewer in number. Our interests are aligned, you see.

Have you tried having some empathy for those that are strained by the financial burden of owning a car? Society should consider people that don’t want and shouldn’t need to own a car just as much as it considers people who do need to own a car. Go project your lack of “real empathy” somewhere else cause it’s definitely misplaced here.

Yeah but straight up I’m not getting out of bed in the morning in those temperatures

Sounds like you’re just as comfortable being a member of this passive society as anyone else you named, even if you took the long way around to the same conclusion.

cool. What are you doing to introduce it to others?

Does the amount really matter if the effect is the same?

If you had all the levers of wealth and power in the world, or if you as an individual had access to just one of them, wouldn’t you do your part to build this kind of passive society too? Otherwise you might have to worry about your access to these levers and therefore your power being usurped. There are many ways to manipulate a person to work against their own interests, which are almost entirely concentrated into the hands of the wealthy owning class.

This is a problem of class antagonism, not the complicity and/or ignorance of the individually powerless. As a class we have to rise beyond these antagonisms; their manipulation of us into a class that passively allows them to profit from our labor and pays no mind to their corruption; by teaching class consciousness to the other members of our class. That is just as much on you and I as it is on anyone else.

I mean. Empty promises for things to be paid for by somebody else are kind of his Thing. Walls, Tariffs. It makes perfect sense.

Don’t forget the heritage foundation wonks and oligarch-adjacent folks that debrief him and write all the orders for him to sign. I see the people directly in his administration having much more influential power than any foreign diplomat.

We already had bribery in politics, the media just doesn’t talk about it like they do with Trump and other particularly egregious ‘fall guys’ like Clarence Thomas.

I still think most people are pro-good stuff, just that capitalism incentivises the worst behaviors and makes quite a few bad things overwhelmingly good for whoever is perpetrating them. This includes influencing/manipulating others to believe backwards, bad stuff; which one would have to do by telling them that stuff is in some way “good” actually. Whatever your framework for determining “good” from “bad”.

May I ask what “Chinese censors” have to do with anything? It’s completely feasible to me that this is an all-American problem, imposed on us for the sake of brand friendliness; same as it’s been for other instances of censorship like network censors on television or the YouTube adpocalypse; and carried over into our language now more generally to end up in a place like lemmy. It’s perfectly explained by the attitudes and surface-level friendliness of “polite society” in western culture. I don’t see the point in using a foreign adversary to explain it away, or pretending that censorship is anything different when it’s done by a government vs private entities that shouldn’t have that kind of unchecked authority over what we’re allowed to communicate in the first place. I also have no reason to believe China gives any fucks about the vulgarity of English speakers on the English internet. It just seems weird to me to bring them up here.

There’s always the option that they believe he’s the antichrist and are just rapture accelerationists

tbh I think that’s kinda the point, it’s corporate doublespeak.

I tend to think society should be organized in a way that people don’t need therapy to cope with.

I’m getting the same impression of anarchism from this thread.

I wouldn’t recommend reading anything from orwell personally. Dude was a cop and a hitler apologist. I prefer isaac asimov’s review of 1984.

In this chapter, I will discuss the book, but first: Who was Blair/Orwell and why was the book written?

Blair was born in 1903 into the status of a British gentleman. His father was in the Indian civil service and Blair himself lived the life of a British Imperial official. He went to Eton, served in Burma, and so on. However, he lacked the money to be an English gentleman to the full. Then, too, he didn’t want to spend his time at dull desk jobs; he wanted to be a writer. Thirdly, he felt guilty about his status in the upper class. So he did in the late 1920s what so many well-to-do American young people in the 1960s did. In short, he became what we would have called a ‘hippie’ at a later time. He lived under slum conditions in London and Paris, consorted with and identified with slum dwellers and vagrants, managed to ease his conscience and, at the same time, to gather material for his earliest books.

He also turned left wing and became a socialist, fighting with the loyalists in Spain in the 1930s. There he found himself caught up in the sectarian struggles between the various left-wing factions, and since he believed in a gentlemanly English form of socialism, he was inevitably on the losing side. Opposed to him were passionate Spanish anarchists, syndicalists, and communists, who bitterly resented the fact that the necessities of fighting the Franco fascists got in the way of their fighting each other. The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

From then on, to the end of his life, he carried on a private literary war with the communists, determined to win in words the battle he had lost in action.*

*And he would be heavily propped up as an author by the CIA for doing so:

George Orwell’s novella remains a set book on school curriculums … the movie was funded by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.

The truth about the CIA’s involvement was kept hidden for 20 years until, in 1974, Everette Howard Hunt revealed the story in his book Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. ]

• Martin Chilton. (2016). How the CIA brought Animal Farm to the screen

During World War II, in which he was rejected for military service, he was associated with the left wing of the British Labour party, but didn’t much sympathise with their views, for even their reckless version of socialism seemed too well organised for him.

He wasn’t much affected, apparently, by the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, for there was no room within him except for his private war with Stalinist communism. Consequently, when Great Britain was fighting for its life against Nazism, and the Soviet Union fought as an ally in the struggle and contributed rather more than its share in lives lost and in resolute courage, Orwell wrote Animal Farm which was a satire of the Russian Revolution and what followed, picturing it in terms of a revolt of barnyard animals against human masters.

This would make him a bit of a hypocrite in that regard, no? Perhaps a bit of projection happening?

Yeah lol why would anybody pay inflated prices for a house if government housing was just as good. It’s not the government that’s your problem, it’s the owning class that makes the rules with a vested interest in making sure a) public resources don’t compete with private profit and b) workers have to keep working to survive (which also generates private profit)

Look at the public housing in singapore. Shit’s awesome. You’re telling me the wealthiest nation on the planet can’t pull that off? I call bullshit.

you really just work so you can pay your mortgage.

Of course. Why would we work so hard to keep jobs that most of us hate if we didn’t have mortgages and rent to pay? This is how the machine keeps itself turning. If only there was a motor that wasn’t so exploitative in nature…

Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn’t need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That’s why it’s called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It’s designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.