Is digital art itself bad, because its not the human doing all of it?

It is bad primarily because it plagiarizes historical art in order to undermine the professional trade for future artists.

It forecloses art as a career, thereby depriving future generations of evolution in style and professional craft.

Gate keeping art is silly regardless

The gate being constructed fences off professional artists from the revenue their work produced. And in doing so, it defunds the schools and studios where professionals pass their craft from master to apprentice.

Any university that accepts federal funds is beholden to the federal government.

Historically, the government and university systems have worked symbiotically to produce useful technologies and professional experts for each others’ benefits.

This isn’t simply cash-for-service. There has historically been a big revolving door between state agencies and academic institutions.

The Trump Admin is both cutting financial support to universities and purging state officials with friendly school ties.

You can site your sources. They can site theirs.

I’ve had no problem keeping informed.

Plenty of conservatives will tell you the same shit

Oh no, the Groypers are here.

As the Buddha said in the Vasala Sutta, “Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a brahman. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a brahman.”

Why did the noble Japanese Buddhists boil Portuguese Christians alive? Was this one of those Brahman Deeds?

The Buddha goes on to criticize the various things that brahmins do

Much as Jesus critiqued the Pharasises. And yet modern Christian Dominionists have far more in common with Pharasises - even Roman Pagans - than the fishermen and slaves and prostitutes that were it’s original disciples.

The “liberal” in the USA is not a leftist in the same way a Tankie isn’t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

The term “tankie” was originally used by dissident Marxist–Leninists to describe members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who followed the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Specifically, it was used to distinguish party members who spoke out in defence of the Soviet use of tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the 1968 Prague Spring, or who more broadly adhered to pro-Soviet positions.

Now, the modern day use of the term has shifted much farther to the right. Any form of resistance or dissent - particularly when it comes into conflict with the NATO military apparatus - qualifies, whether you’re a FARC guerilla or a Wikileaks editor of BDS advocate.

Palestinian rights organizers getting dragged of a university campus earn the label. Food Not Bombs charity workers earn the label. Internet slacktivists excited about the latest Deepseek patch earn the label. So, in that sense, sure. You don’t have to be a leftist to get called a Tankie.

Does that mean that the US is perfect?

This appears to be the root of it. America gets some sort of ideological benefit-of-the-doubt, such that My Lai Massacres and engineered famines in Cuba and Korea and blacksite prisons that use genital mutilation to extract confessions are degrees shy of perfection rather than war crimes, atrocities, and holocausts.

Is authoritarian communism better? LOL, no.

Is your problem with the authoritarianism or the communism?

“The very concept of “revolutionary violence” is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.”

― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

I’m pretty sure this meme is CIA funded.

I mean, you joke. But the number of “If you criticize the American Police State, you’re a violent bully” posts on every corner of the internet from accounts with those procedurally generated 4-digit suffixes is a wee bit sus.

You see the same shit from anti-Luigi memes, anti-piracy memes, and anti-Linux memes. They just aren’t well received.

I gotta ask, what exactly is the difference between the Obama “Dronestrikes On Arabs Is Never Wrong” Dickrider Liberal and the Stalinist “driving over Hungarian fascists with your tank is cool af, aktuly” Leftist?

Because I hear a lot about these Far-Left Tankies. But then I see Western so-called Progressives flood their shorts every time we sodomize leadership in Libya with a rusty knife or carpet bomb hospitals in Gaza or unleash another wave of hack mercenaries on Venezuela. Hell, even MacArthur’s saturation bombing of the Korean Peninsula gets love. Does anyone actually oppose foreign military interventionism? Or is it just taboo when a leftist military leader does it?

attach giant balloons to ships

Literally just build a bridge, you hyper-individualistic consumer-centric assholes.

Critical thinking without useful information is just teleology. You’re stuck doing Thomas Acquinus shit or Aristotilianisn when you have an abundance of analytical skill but you’re working from fundamentally biased or outright manufactured sources.

Checking my local newspaper, turning on the TV, and logging into my favorite social media. Everywhere I go it’s the same message - liberals are to blame.

What other conclusion am I supposed to draw?

When was the last time a Buddhist knocked on your door and asked you to find Buddha?

Buddhism (and the Hinduism it is rooted in) isn’t intended to accrued disciples as part of an elaborate religiously flavored MLM. It is intended to justify existing, generational, disparities in wealth, power, and property.

You won’t find one knocking on your door. You knock on their doors, and hope to ingratiate yourself to their superiors by adopting their customs in exchange for status and business relations.

Fucking do it already

Laws are for little people. Nobody in Wisconsin is going to green light this, because nobody has the chutzpah to inconvenience a billionaire.

I feel like MAGA might not come to his defense this time

MAGA isn’t the problem. Corporate media and the Trump AG are the problem.

Removed by mod

Mitch never saw a “War with Russia” bill he didn’t endorse. He’s old school Neocon and was wholly on board with the project for post-Soviet US global hegemony. I don’t think its strictly fair to say “Russia Wins, America Loses” is his fault, because he was working overtime to get to a future in which Wall Street and The Pentagon controlled it all.

But his all-in bet on Moderate Amounts of Fascism tipped the board. He put far too much effort in winning the next electoral cycle in pursuit of a permanent Republican Majority. And when he finally got what he wanted - not once, in '16 but twice with a second GOP clean sweep in '24 - he looked up to discover the prize came with strings attached.

Turns out, the US isn’t the only country that can meddling with elections and affect regime change through soft power. Now we’re getting a wave of modern White Nationalism that’s aligning DC, Moscow, and perhaps London and Berlin depending on how the chips fall in the next few elections. Its not America or Russia that’s winning, but a cartel of plutocrats and their bloodthirsty groyper minions, in an unholy new internationalist Axis of Evil.

So basically government price fixing.

Not even. He’s not doing anything to prevent prices from going up. He’s just whining at businesses for refusing to cut their margins to fund his government.

Isn’t USA supposed to be the pillar of libertarian capitalism?

It’s funny. There’s a couple of think thanks - the Fraiser Institute, the Hoover Institute, in collaboration with the CATO Institute - that are constantly putting out papers saying how America hasn’t gone Libertarian Capitalist enough. Historically, the two places in the world they consider “Most Libertarian” have been Hong Kong and Singapore.

However, over the last decade, they’ve been forced to delist both of these locations as Chinese business investment flooded in and American financial interests were shoved out. So now their new favorite spots are Switzerland, New Zealand, Luxembourger, and Ireland. Incidentally, these institutes are filling up with White Nationalists and other ultra-orthodox Christian Conservatives who refuse to acknowledge any country with brown people in it might have civil or economic liberties. The current issue of their annual newsletter blames a great deal of this shift on pandemic response and subsequent economic relief during the downturn. But there’s plenty of ink spilled denouncing any country that’s breaking away from the MAGA mindset, particularly Canada, China, and Mexico.

As our relationships with the BRICS and the various Latin American, African, and Southeast Asian states have deteriorated, our ability to recognize them as free and liberal have decayed alongside them. And the criticisms internally ebb and flow with the state of domestic politics - Obama ushering in a low-watermark for American liberty, for instance.

Less Robin Hood. More John Brown.

I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

~ Charlestown, Virginia Dec 2, 1859