My ebike has unironically changed my life.

Shout out to Aventon.

Ideologies that require harming others do not have the right to be promoted.

This will just enforce the status quo. For instance, if the current regime is fascist and requires a revolution in order to overthrow, you have effectively outlawed talk of regime change. To be fair, a fascist regime would do that already, but the fact that a fascist regime would do it is another bad sign for your proposed law.

Maybe we could carve out an exemption for “harming others in self-defense”?

I actually agree with her pro-women, pro-trans, liberal takes. My problem with her comics is they’re lazy. She’s just preaching to the choir.

This is evidenced by the fact that she never criticizes the Democratic Party. When Democrats do things that hurt everyday people – for example, when they vote to increase ICE funding, send more money to Israel, bail out corporations that are “too big to fail”, etcetra etcetera – someone with Pizzacake’s following has an opportunity to demonstrate their values by making a (less popular) comic. Instead, she just parrots viewpoints that her audience already agrees with. This is grifter behavior.

Lemmings have decided to upvote Pizzacakeslop and downvote anyone who criticizes these comics. They’re lazy as hell, and there are many better artists out there, but Pizzacake has a winning formula of posting agreeable political positions.

Doesn’t matter that the art is bad and the comics aren’t funny, people agree with the main point.

Beat me to it. I was going to ask whether any non-science fiction readers would know this famous opening line. IIRC, Gibson himself notes how the interpretation of the line changed with the change of technology.

The richest country in the world has homelessness, poor infrastructure, malnutrition, terrible education, stagnating wages, etc. Meanwhile China was able to go from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse. There are a few lessons to be learned here if we’re willing to learn them.

I can’t speak from experience but Beehaw.org is supposed to be a pretty chill place in theory. Don’t know if they pulled it off in practice though so YMMV

Do people not known about the ACP (American “Communist” Party) branching off from the CPUSA and pushing for “patriotic socialism”? Do people agree with the ACP? Or is this getting downvotes because people don’t care about leftist spaces?

I am genuinely curious so I read the article and looked into its primary sources. The scientific citations actually contradict the premise of the article.

They begin by noting the earliest written connection that we have of the Easter bunny and hiding eggs:

But it is in the folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany describe children hunting for Easter eggs hidden by the Easter hare, much as in the United States today.

Written accounts from England around the same time also mention the Easter hare, particularly in terms of traditional Easter hare hunts and the eating of hare meat at Easter.

The historians I cited earlier said as much. Then the smithsonianmag article notes a scholarly hypothesis from the novelist/linguist/mythologist Jacob Grimm:

In 1835, the folklorist Jacob Grimm, one of the famous team of the fairy tale Brothers Grimm, argued that the Easter hare was connected to a goddess he imagined would have been called “Ostara” in ancient German. He derived this name from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, who Bede, an early medieval monk … mentioned in 731 C.E.

The connection between the goddess and the Easter hare was speculated by brother Grimm in the 19th century and has no ancient basis. Bede never links Eostre to hares, rabbits, or any fertility symbols. See Lauritsen et al, which smithsonainmag.org cite as support of “pagan roots”, explicitly noting the lack of evidence:

Easter is similar to Yule in that Bede derives the name of the Christian festival from a name for an Anglo‑Saxon month, which in turn derives from the name of a pagan goddess (Shaw 2011). Bede notes that a festival celebrating the goddess Eostre occurred in this month (approximately April) but does not suggest that this coincided with the date of the Christian festival of Easter … Nor does it specify a link between the Anglo‑Saxon goddess Eostre and rabbits or hares.

The suggestion throughout Lauristen et al is that the name Eostre, the name of the month, was pre-Christian. Similar to how “Thursday” comes from “Thor’s Day” (but that doesn’t mean we worship the Norse god Thor). But there is no evidence, as far as I can tell, that a pre‑Christian festival celebrating Eostre coincided with the Christian feast of the Resurrection or involved any of the animals now associated with Easter. The claim that early Christians reappropriated pagan traditions appears unsubstantiated.

Lesbian spider queen of mars (retro arcade done right), Dead of Night (great zombie tower defense), fancy’s pants saga, Papa’s Pizzaria, Champions of Chaos

But here is a list of classics in a more digestible format: https://backloggd.com/u/robinnn/list/flashpoint-hall-of-fame/

Again, I’m not a historian but there’s some evidence to the contrary. The TL;DR is that Easter is a Christian holiday but secular traditions became associated with it centuries later:

"The earliest certain attestation of the Easter bunny dates to 1682, in a pamphlet titled Satyrae medicae continuatio XVIII disputatione ordinaria disquirens de ovis paschalibus (‘continuation of a medical satire no. 18, enquiring in a serial disputation on the subject of Easter eggs’) by G. Franck von Franckenau, published in Heidelberg,…:

In Germania Superiore, Palatinatu nostrate, Alsatia et vicinis locis, ut et in Westphalia vocantur haec ova di Hasen-Eier a fabula, qua simplicioribus et infantibus imponunt Leporem (der Oster-Hase) eiusmodi ova excludere, et in hortis in gramine, fruticetis et c. abscondere ut studiosius a pueris investigentur, cum risu et iucunditate seniorum. Et revera saepe leporum, h. e. Imprudentium nomine possunt venire, qui eiusmodi ovis exposititiis non solummodo iocos quaerunt: Siquidem saepe cum illis ovis pueri valetudinis suae magnam inveniunt iacturam; quando dein, semoto arbitro, ista iusto avidius per ingluviem ingurgitant, sine sale, butiro, aut alio condimento; …

In Upper Germany, (my) native Palatinate, Alsatia, and neighbouring regions, as also in Westphalia, these eggs are called ‘the Rabbit Eggs’, because they have a custom for simple people and children that a Rabbit – ‘the Easter Rabbit’ – hides the eggs in such a manner, and conceals them in gardens in the grass, fruit trees and so on, for them to be hunted out very carefully by children, to the laughter and amusement of their elders. And in fact people can sometimes come by the name of ‘rabbits’, that is, fools, if they search when eggs are hidden in this way not just as a joke. In fact children often do serious damage to their health with these eggs, if their guardian is absent, if they devour them too greedily out of gluttony, without salt or butter or other condiment …

(The pamphlet goes on about the eggs, but doesn’t mention the rabbit again.)

There are claims floating around that there’s an earlier reference to the Bunny dating to 1572. As pointed out to me earlier this year (offsite) by someone going under the name of ‘Marvin’, this is a misattribution derived from a 1933 article –

Vielleicht spielt auch schon Fischart in ‘Aller Praktik Grossmutter’ (1572) auf den Osterhasen an, wenn er sagt: ‘Sorg nicht, dass dir der Haas vom Spiess entlauf: Haben wir nicht die Eier, so braten wir das Nest’.

Perhaps Fischart also already played on the Easter Rabbit in ‘All Grandma’s customs’ (1572) where he says: ‘Don’t worry if the Rabbit escapes from the spit: if we don’t have the eggs, we’ll cook the nest’.

However, the 1572 source doesn’t contain this line: it actually comes from Sander’s Gargantua und Pantagruel vol. 3, page 420, published in 1787. How the 1933 article came to misattribute the line is beyond my knowledge.

Anyway, that means the line is nearly a century later than the actual earliest attestation. Franck von Franckenau, in 1682, remains the earliest source for the Easter Bunny.

There is incidentally no evidence for any link between rabbits and the pre-Christian English goddess Eostre, attested by Bede in the early 700s. I once thought this link was suggested by Jacob Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie (1835), albeit purely as a speculation, but now that I look at Grimm again I don’t find any such suggestion there. I’m not certain what the origin of that supposed link is.

There are various reports of alternative Easter critters in Germany up to the early 20th century (and potentially later), such as the Easter Fox and a Franconian Easter Stork. To the extent that they are legitimate, they would tend to indicate that the Easter Bunny originates in a German Easter Critter of indeterminate species, but I don’t have anywhere to point for good documentation for them: I can vouch for Franck von Franckenau’s Oster-Hase, I can’t vouch for the other critters."

If this is true, then the order goes Easter --> secular/Germanic traditions rather than traditions --> Easter. But this is not my area of expertise and I am open to evidence that the r/AskHistorians person quoted above is wrong.

Or bunnies laid eggs to celebrate his resurrection…

Apparently the idea that Easter is appropriation of a pagan holiday is a myth. The history is a bit more complicated; here are some historians who can explain it smarter than me: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sd7bgp/does_easter_symbology_have_pagan_roots/

Or if you prefer video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q31k28_rdTg

edit: The internet will downvote what they disagree with rather than engage with the scientific literature / historical record every time. I’ve wasted way too much time looking into this so believe whatever you want I guess.

Was going to comment this myself. The library is immense and the nostalgia is real: https://flashpointarchive.org/faq

This largely misses the point

1. My criticism of Pizzacake stands independently of who agrees with me. So if you attempt to say that I am wrong because of other people, that is a guilt by association fallacy. Downvote all you want, it’s just a poor argument.

2. You are free to point out that this other person is problematic; if what you say is true, then you are correct in doing so. Again, this has no bearing on the point above.

3. We could substitute the critical comic with many others. Do you think everyone who criticizes Pizzacake is a Nazi? This is not an uncommon view. Maybe you can evaluate the substance of the claim (i.e., Pizzacake comics are lazy) without appealing to ad hominem responses?

Having made these distinctions the supposed inconsistency vanishes. This is not the “gotcha” moment you think it is.

But at this point I suspect people are just dogpiling. Anything I write will be downvoted, this is not a reasoned debate. Since Lemmy doesn’t turn off reply notifications for individual comments, I have to block you. I’m open to other points of view but doubling down on fallacious arguments is not arguing in good faith.

This argument is blatantly fallacious. If Alex Jones thinks the government is filled with pedophiles, the fact that he’s an idiot doesn’t make him wrong on that point: it damn sure doesn’t make everyone who agrees with Alex wrong. This is a guilty by association fallacy, a type of ad hominem.

The fact that people are upvoting your ad hominem because it confirms their previously held opinion is, ironically, the exact complaint I had about Pizzacake comics. No one cares about whether it’s a good argument/comic, they will upvote regardless.

In which case I’m wasting my time. These comments are just a popularity contest for opinions, no one cares about the substance.

We could all be doing better things, but here we are.

I agree, other people can and should criticize America. But that’s all she does. She doesn’t make any comics about Canadian politics, presumably because they don’t get the same traction. It’s a grift. Which might be fine if her comics were of good quality. But most of them read like this:

Surely there are more clever ways to mock Trump/Elon/MAGA, etc. It would be great if we stopped supporting slop just because we agree with the message.

I think Ben Shapiro is a shameless grifter who only cares about making money. Do you think I should go copy Ben Shapiro?

This argument doesn’t make any sense. I don’t agree with what Pizzacake’s doing, why would I want to do it myself.

I’m glad you asked: Subnormality (Political but actually good), XKCD, Poorly Drawn Lines, Olaf (funny but NSFW), SMBC, Adamtots.

These artists have something to say and can draw (with the exception of xkcd). There are so many examples of quality comics but you people keep upvoting slop. Yes, I am complaining about it because I actually give a shit about the medium.