

It’s so dainty 🥺 yeah, far from the norm here I’m ashamed to say
It’s so dainty 🥺 yeah, far from the norm here I’m ashamed to say
That would probably be a “small” at most fast food drive thrus here. Also, nobody orders a small unless they’re on a “diet” - in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of my friends order a small. Generally everyone gets a large or extra large (because it’s only a few cents more!!), which looks like this here: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/denise-gray-holds-two-extra-large-soft-drinks-from-news-photo/145545668
How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, Mickey7? Stop posting this shitty boomer Facebook humor that is neither accurate nor funny. I understand this is likely a bot account, but maybe whoever manages it will see: We aren’t falling for it. Save your electricity and go post this trash on Reddit
All joking aside, the cup really is too small and the burger really is too lettucey to look authentically American, 100% seriously
My brother, I am someone who is pretty pro-AI art, for reasons too complex to get into, but which basically have to do with latent possibility spaces and the boundary between discovery or creation.
I am typically pissed off and annoyed when people get their pitchforks out at any mention of AI art. I also consider myself a pretty decent amateur artist. I draw, I paint, I 3D model. I also like working with the more core technologies of AI. I have a horse in both races, so to speak.
But this post, this post makes me feel like one of those pitchfork-wielders that typically annoy me. Why? Because you’ve depicted the artist as a rude snob who looks down on poor people, and is thereby getting their just deserts and having their smugness deflated now that they’re no longer needed. This is such a wildly inaccurate perception of artists. 9999/10000 artists make probably less than $40,000/yr in the U.S. Most of them could make more money doing something else, but they don’t, because they love art. They aren’t looking down on poor people, they are poor people.
And no, $60 really isn’t enough. Nobody is getting paid enough these days. Do you have any skills or crafts that took you 4 years of work to become even barely good enough at that someone would even consider hiring you? And if so, how would you like it if someone asked you to work for days at a rate below minimum wage? Don’t people deserve to have not just subsistence lives, but nice happy lives in return for creating something nice and happy for you?
No artist is sneering at your low commission offer on account of you being poor. The sneering is that, you can spend $60 on something that you don’t need whatsoever, whereas they likely need your $60 to buy something like food. These are people who live ENTIRELY off what people pay them for their work, no wage, no tip, etc. How could you ever look down on them for wanting to have a nice life, while at the same time wanting what they provide? It’s fine if you’re not willing to pay $260 for their work, but it’s not fine to look down on them for it, and it’s nonsense to characterize them as a judgemental snob. Unless you’re trying to commission Jeff Koons or something, any artist you talk to is struggling to get by just like everyone else. You aren’t “serving them right” or “teaching them a lesson” by going to AI instead. You’re just making it harder for them to make a living doing what they love, and regardless of whether AI does it better than them, or another artist is willing to live a shittier life for that and therefore charge a lower price, that’s nothing to be proud of.
I don’t want to be mean or make you feel bad, though, I just want you to stop and think about what it must feel like to be a poor artist and see something like this. No doubt they’re suffering extra competition as a result of AI, but should we revel in that? If in my small town, I have a neighbor who makes a decent living by charging $20/ticket to his guitar concerts, and then one day another guy moves in, who plays way better my neighbor, and only charges $10/ticket…such that eventually my neighbor can’t afford to make a living playing his music any more and picks up a job he hates instead…That’s just a shitty situation. And I’m not going to go as far as many others do and say you’re bad for buying the $10 tickets from the new guy. I get it, you’re struggling too, we all are. You want some joy for the lowest price you can get it, and if it’s better, why not? But that doesn’t mean we need to turn our noses up at our neighbor and deem his shows “overpriced” - especially if he’s already living on less money than his patrons to begin with.
Really missed an opportunity to have an element greater than 100% of the screen width causing horizontal scroll into an empty white space to the right of the page
Cease posting
Except the situation they’re describing is a multi-generational one and they’re trying to do what’s for the greater good over time, which is ironically what the more short-sighted “blue no matter who” people accuse them of not doing. Sometimes things need to be permitted to get worse before they can get better. You can’t just follow a simple greedy algorithm of taking the best possible move at every point with respect to the next state of the game. This algorithm is very easily gamed to lead to bad situations.
So everyone who tells people not to vote is a tankie? Real nuanced thinking you’re doing there. I’m happy you found a fun word to use as shorthand for “people I disagree with”, but maybe try to actually understand the people you’re throwing it at first, you tankie
That’s not why anyone abstains from voting. People abstained from voting for Democratic candidates because they felt that they are controlled opposition, who only slow the rate of decline temporarily before the pendulum swings back to Republicans to do the dirty work. The only way to break that cycle is to force the Democrats to run better representatives of the people’s interests, and the only way to do that is to deprive them of power when they run shitty candidates like Kamala and want you to vote for them just because Trump is worse. This is the same thing that’s been happening since the 80s, and if people would have stopped falling for it back then, it wouldn’t have got as bad as it is now. If Kamala had won, we’d still be heading towards he same horrible destination, it would just be slowed down a bit. You could argue that slowing it down is still better than letting it go full speed ahead, and that’s true, but only in the short term. At some point we need to pay the price to turn the ship around.
I don’t know if you find this line of reasoning convincing, but at least try to remember that the reason people abstain from voting is not them being picky or perfectionist. It’s them trying to look at things in a longer-term, greater-good sort of way. I have a 60 year old friend who spent her whole life voting for Democrats she didn’t really like. What did it get her? Bush, Obama, Trump’s first time, Biden. And the possibility of Kamala. And you do realize that if Kamala had won, we’d just be getting all this same Trump shit but a few years later, right? That was her reward for voting “blue no matter who”: the same fucked up situation we’re in now. So she’s tired of it, she doesn’t want to vote anymore for someone who won’t make things better. Her only hope is that starving the Democrats out will force them to eventually run someone who might actually change things in the same aggressive, effective way that the conservatives always manage to achieve.
Again. It’s not about “I only vote for someone who perfectly agrees with me”, and in fact the people who abstain from voting are most likely people who have voted MANY times in the past for people they don’t even like at all, so it’s a really misguided accusation.
I feel ya. I also am very irritated by the tendency of people to say things that are “so brave” and seem to think that they’ve achieved something. It’s too bad I did a bit of that myself there. I don’t know what sort of plan there could be. I think the reality is that the situation is messed up in a way that only wealthy powerful people could effectively fix, and good luck getting them to do that.
I feel like supporting people like Mamdani, especially locally, is the best we’ve got. Yes, I realize the intense irony of the fact that he’s literally a member of the Democratic Party, but he’s far on the leftmost side of it. I was seeing some other good discussions about how parties can change over time. I think it may be possible to drag the Democratic Party kicking and screaming to the left over time, and the way to do it is to absolutely put a stop to “blue no matter who” voting mentalities. They may be the good cop, but they still want their personal money and power. There is some legitimate competition there between the parties: competition about who gets to rig the system most in the favor of their sponsors/companies/etc. As long as people vote “blue no matter who”, the party has literally no incentive to offer more liberal candidates.
You’re right, and I really appreciate you bringing up the statistical angle there. I am a bit of a stats nerd and indeed am aware of the multiple biases present in that sample of insufficient size. However, since the Internet is so full of bots and I don’t really trust the news on this, I don’t have much more to go on. It sucks, but polls seem like straight up misinformation at this point to me
On the other hand, I feel like I only ever see people arguing this on the Internet using examples of other people from the Internet. Every liberal person I know IRL loves Bernie, and many of them even say " But I understand that the party can’t run him because a lot of democratic voters think he’s too far to the left". Like, are these voters in the room with us right now?
People who get heated over declarations that both sides are the same, take note. This is what we mean when we say this. The Democratic Party could not any more obviously be controlled opposition. This entire team is full of venture capitalists, wealthy people, wealth-backed people.
Both sides aren’t the same. In the same sense that the good cop and the bad cop who come to interrogate me aren’t the same. It’s true the bad cop is going to knock me about a bit and scream at me, and the good cop is going to be nice to me. But they both work for the police. They both are trying to land me in jail. They’re on the same side. They’re just trying to get what they want out of me from two different angles. The one angle is direct, it does the heavy lifting. Why do you think the Republicans always get so much done when they’re in power but when the Democrats hold majorities they don’t get anything done? It’s for the same reason that the good cop doesn’t get me set free back onto the streets without a shred of new evidence out of me. It’s unbelievable that people fall for the oldest trick in the book when it’s so clearly presented. The people who think the Democratic Party aren’t controlled opposition are like people who think the circus clown really didn’t mean to slip on that banana peel and land on the whoopee cushion. It’s a show, my god.
Yeah this is exactly what turned me off from it when I looked into it. I kind of like that it would lend a more physical-space quality to it, but ultimately I’m hardly ever online, so it would just be me being totally out of the loop all the time without a bouncer. I know I could figure out how to do it, but it’s a lot of effort for something where I’m not even sure I’ll like what it gives me.
“Everything I don’t like is posted in bad faith”
I totally agree, but I think they could have managed to capture the simple nuance of “in order to care about people and make their lives better, we make a special exception for evil assholes, and we do not care about those people or make their lives better”. If I live on an island with ten people and one of them only wants to beat up the others all the time, there’s not really much hypocrisy in me saying “I want to make everyone’s lives better, but this one jerk won’t let us have that, so I guess we have to settle for making everyone’s life better except for his”. Nothing stops the Democrats from knocking it off with the warmongering while still at least speaking harsh words about the true failings of their political opponents.
Nice strawman, but I’m not saying he’s a pussy for feeling bad for cursing. I’m saying, let me be very clear:
2: The people he’s calling to bully are fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, corrupt, evil powerful people who are currently dismantling the country
3: It’s ridiculous to say “I should have been nicer” when obviously they didn’t lose because they were mean, and if anything being more mean would have helped them, or at least…
4: Being more mean maybe would at least have driven more people to take aggressive action that may have prevented the current situation
It’s just ridiculous for someone who was 20x nicer than the victorious competition to say they should have been even more nicerer on top of that. Why? What good would it have done? Would you rather your mom be kind to a criminal trying to rob her, or hateful? (See how uncool and ineffective that is to try to drag your mom into things?)
So if I didn’t make it clear enough. I’m not looking down on anyone for “having a conscience”. I think Walz doesn’t have enough of a conscience to bolster himself to do what needs to be done and overcome the paradox of tolerance and hate the opposition enough to make himself a strong opponent rather than a polite little pushover.
I couldn’t snore harder. The worst in you is asking other people to be mean? Oh me oh my I’m quaking in my booties. I’m sure if only you had been a kindler gentler gooder boy you would have won the election. Whatever
We need zines to be a bigger thing again