this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
1055 points (97.1% liked)

Comic Strips

24985 readers
3384 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

Rules
  1. 😇 Be Nice!

    • Treat others with respect and dignity. Friendly banter is okay, as long as it is mutual; keyword: friendly.
  2. 🏘️ Community Standards

    • Comics should be a full story, from start to finish, in one post.
    • Posts should be safe and enjoyable by the majority of community members, both here on lemmy.world and other instances.
    • Any comic that would qualify as raunchy, lewd, or otherwise draw unwanted attention by nosy coworkers, spouses, or family members should be tagged as NSFW.
    • Moderators have final say on what and what does not qualify as appropriate. Use common sense, and if need be, err on the side of caution.
  3. 🧬 Keep it Real

    • Comics should be made and posted by real human beans, not by automated means like bots or AI. This is not the community for that sort of thing.
  4. 📽️ Credit Where Credit is Due

    • Comics should include the original attribution to the artist(s) involved, and be unmodified. Bonus points if you include a link back to their website. When in doubt, use a reverse image search to try to find the original version. Repeat offenders will have their posts removed, be temporarily banned from posting, or if all else fails, be permanently banned from posting.
    • Attributions include, but are not limited to, watermarks, links, or other text or imagery that artists add to their comics to use for identification purposes. If you find a comic without any such markings, it would be a good idea to see if you can find an original version. If one cannot be found, say so and ask the community for help!
  5. 📋 Post Formatting

    • Post an image, gallery, or link to a specific comic hosted on another site; e.g., the author's website.
    • Meta posts about the community should be tagged with [Meta] either at the beginning or the end of the post title.
    • When linking to a comic hosted on another site, ensure the link is to the comic itself and not just to the website; e.g.,
      ✅ Correct: https://xkcd.com/386/
      ❌ Incorrect: https://xkcd.com/
  6. 📬 Post Frequency/SPAM

    • Each user (regardless of instance) may post up to five (5 🖐) comics a day. This can be any combination of personal comics you have written yourself, or other author's comics. Any comics exceeding five (5 🖐) will be removed.
  7. 🏴‍☠️ Internationalization (i18n)

    • Non-English posts are welcome. Please tag the post title with the original language, and include an English translation in the body of the post; e.g.,
      Sí, por favor [Spanish/Español]
  8. 🍿 Moderation

    • We are human, just like most everybody else on Lemmy. If you feel a moderation decision was made in error, you are welcome to reach out to anybody on the moderation team for clarification. Keep in mind that moderation decisions may be final.
    • When reporting posts and/or comments, quote which rule is being broken, and why you feel it broke the rules.
Banned Artists

The following artists are banned from the community.

  1. Jago
  2. Stonetoss
  3. GPrime85

It should be noted that when you make reports, it is your responsibility to provide rational reasoning why something should be removed. Saying it simply breaks community rules is not always good enough.

Web Accessibility

Note: This is not a rule, but a helpful suggestion.

When posting images, you should strive to add alt-text for screen readers to use to describe the image you're posting:

Another helpful thing to do is to provide a transcription of the text in your images, as well as brief descriptions of what's going on. (example)

Web of Links
Other Comic Communities of Interest

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 36 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

how does Jesus getting crucified forgive my sins? Is it some sort of ancient Christian bar bet?

Speaking as someone literally brought up in a cult like environment, it's just one of the many nonsense word-salad doctrines that people live by when those people were never able to separate their feelings from their world. IE: there is a segment of the population who do not have a distinction between an outside world, separate from their feelings about it.

This is a reflection of how the brain works at a most basic level. It's not a logic tool for reasoning out problems, not by default at least. It's default instruction state is to assemble experiences and associations to write a story to explain how you feel, and it doesn't actually have objective understanding about the world, so those stories do not need to make sense.

When you really, truly internalize and digest this fact, you will understand so much about yourself and others. You can overcome some depressive episodes and know how to make people like you, how to manage addiction and unhealthy behavior and how to avoid being manipulated by others, and so much more. It's vastly important we understand this about our brains.

You have to actually train your brain to actually analyze and understand the world around you in a way that shows you how you and the world relate to each other. Most people don't do this work, but brains are good enough at taking advantage of your environment that they can still get through life... but it leaves a lot of room for huge errors in reasoning. In fact, it's not conscious reasoning at all, it's story-building followed by total acceptance of this story without question because you think it's you reasoning, but it's just how your brain weaves narratives in your mind.

So for the people who never learned this distinction, they just feel a thing, and then either let their brains assemble a story to explain it, or they latch onto someone else's supplied story. This is how people are manipulated on mass scales.

"Jesus died for your sins" makes no logical sense, but it's not meant to, it's meant to make you feel like something is being done about the thing you worry most about, if you're going to see your loved ones again in heaven. That's a paralyzing fear for almost every human who's ever lived. Our awareness of death has opened a huge vulnerability in our reasoning skills and caused us more death and harm than if we didn't worry about it so much.

Once you have a McGuffin that makes you feel protected from this thing you fear most, you are more likely to reinforce and build further narratives around this idea to protect it. To not protect it, to dismantle it and try to figure it out is literally painful to many people, because it invites in the question... What if you're wrong?" and even approaching that question makes people who have never processed these emotions absolutely fall apart.

edit: I want to add one thing, that the more you think about the really hard thing, your inevitable end, it becomes easier to accept and make peace with. Especially as you get older and more aware of your own limitations and realize you're kinda stuck on rails in this life. There is no bigger story or experience you will miss out on.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Truly excellent post, and a special thumbs up to the use of McGuffin in this context.

You are describing Critical Thinking Skills, something that gives people the ability to recognize and dismiss propaganda, among other things. Critical Thinking is how we are meant to process information, and without it, people substitute the kind of chaotic thinking you describe.

Conservatives recognize Critical Thinking Skills as dangerous to their important propaganda machine, so controlling education, and suppressing the overt teaching of Critical Thinking Skills is an important on going mission.

I was lucky to have three years in high school with a subversive English teacher that used his subject to teach us Critical Thinking Skills, and hone them. I didn't recognize what he had been up to until years later, and I was so pleased that he was so much more subversive than I ever knew.

[–] AnanasMarko@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In what way did he teach you critical thinking skills?

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

In 10th grade English, we had to write a few papers where we had to defend a position, using strictly documented sources. That taught us how to organize our thoughts, and rely on sources, not our own opinions.

In 11th grade, we had Shakespeare 1, in which we read several plays, and discussed them in class from the directors perspective so we had to decide how to best tell the story, and defend our choices. The desks were arranged in a giant circle, so that when you were debating a point, you had to face the person you were debating with. The ultimate lesson was that the objective was to decide on the best idea, not just win the debate with your inferior concept, and that sometimes means leaving your own idea behind, in favor of the better one. We learned that there is no shame in acknowledging an objectively better idea.

12th grade was Shakespeare 2, and more polishing of our skills.

I thought we were just learning Shakespeare, whom he taught me to love to this day, decades later. It wasn't until years after high school, when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh when he first came on the scene, and wondered why his obvious propaganda wasn't seducing me like it was seducing other listeners. That was when I realized that my Critical Thinking Skills were better than most peoples,' and that all tracked back to Mr. Clark's English classes. He's the one that taught me how to think properly, as I thought I was just enjoying Shakespeare.

Mr. Clark was a flat out fucking genius.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is absolutely about critical thinking and I wish we could all be so lucky to have a teacher like you did.

But I realized in typing this out that I have stopped saying the term "critical thinking" years and years ago, because like other terms it has basically lost all meaning, like "gaslighting." People just say it without any idea what it means, so I stopped saying it. Instead I try to explain it to people without naming it, because people on both sides of every issue think they know what it means.

We need some kind of new order with a nationalized Mr Rogers type system for teaching people the most basic shit all over again. Literally, I am astonished how people missed even the most basic lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, I feel like a huge segment of the population were watching G.I. Joe as kids and routing for Cobra or booing the public service messages at the end.

[–] BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 2 points 6 months ago

I tried to get in touch with Mr Clark at one point, but he had passed away about 5 years earlier, so I honor him by talking about him now and then. Easily the most influential teacher of my life, the kind of teacher ALL teachers should aspire to be.