mary-five-roses

[mary-five-roses]

And did you know that being disabled and poor and striving for progress eventually makes you a villain who forsakes all his principles?

But look! Gorgeous lesbians hook up! All worth it :)

I will spend the rest of my days trying to find out How The Fuck spending all that money on a visually striking second season sounded better than actually writing proper character and story arches. Fuck you for ruining both the beat animated series I've ever seen and the plausibility of a great ship. Who isn't horny after your sister locked you in a cell in the middle of a war after your father died? Fuck off.

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Like I get "show don't tell". But you actually have to show otherwise is "don't show, don't tell, you get it right? Just fill in the blanks with these 15 identitcal-sounding songs, it's all vibe-based. What are you, stupid? Time has passed! Jayce has a beard now :)".

I will spend the rest of my days trying to find out How The Fuck spending all that money on a visually striking second season sounded better than actually writing proper character and story arches. Fuck you for ruining both the beat animated series I've ever seen and the plausibility of a great ship. Who isn't horny after your sister locked you in a cell in the middle of a war after your father died? Fuck off.

[mary-five-roses]

I will spend the rest of my days trying to find out How The Fuck spending all that money on a visually striking second season sounded better than actually writing proper character and story arches. Fuck you for ruining both the beat animated series I've ever seen and the plausibility of a great ship. Who isn't horny after your sister locked you in a cell in the middle of a war after your father died? Fuck off.

[mary-five-roses]

Shouting this into the void when high, but lotr Tumblr is one of the most wholesome and reliable tumblrw, love to have it

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It's only a passing thing, this shadow.

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Fantastic reconstruction of an Archaeopteryx I saw at Southampton Fossil and mineral show. It was part of an exhibition of fossil replicas exhibited by Southampton University.

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me core

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(edit: so sorry this has become such a long reply, probably went off-topic as well, and repeated things you said already, but I was carried away! A massive chapter just to say "I agree")

It did more than resonate with me, they are opinions that I hold myself, as well as most people I talk to (which, to be fair, are not many, and that might be part of it). Also I'm sorry you had to deal with protests at your workplace, that's never pleasant.

I think a lot of the difficulty in dealing with these topics, and in undoing the damage done by ARA and such in the public opinion, stems, like in many other topics, from the constant influx of seemingly reasonable opinions to the attention of a population with very reduced critical thinking skills. What makes it worse I think is also than in social media contexts is very hard to point out that "if you just tried to think about it with some effort you'd see where the problem is" without the person taking offense and going hard in the other direction to prove a point.

And that is not even the people's fault. Firstly the medium (social) is really not conductive to good conversation, even in supposedly more wholesome ones like tumblr (although the lack of a character limit makes a massive difference), and so I tend to not engage at all to protect my peace of mind. I realise this might be difficult when you are an active blogger. In this case I am furthering the conversation because I deeply care about the topic of purity wars among the left and the distress that comes from seeing your carefully thought about points of view misinterpreted and shoved into extremes and boxes. Personally it helps me to realise that on tumbrl in particular most people are really young, and therefore tend to hold opinions that are strongly influenced by the internet and not much else: you got to live a little, and meet people outside your bubble, and talk across generations, and read wide before you manage to form a fully fledged opinion on such complex topics. That might not be the case for your anon, but some things they said rang alarm bells in my brain. It is also true that this modus operandi has been filtering through in the "real world" of politics, institutions, newspapers and the like, I'm assuming in an effort to stay relevant by exploiting the extremization of views, so it's actually disingenuous and simplistic of me to imply that the Internet and the "youths" are the problem, but this perspective often helps me to not fall into the rage trap of "how can you even think that?!?!?". Personally the way I protect myself from losing my mind is to address important topics only if I have the space to discuss them in depth, abstaining from one-liners and recusing myself from conversations where I cannot back myself up properly or where I am bound to loose my cool. It's hard work though, and I don't know if it is truly applicable to people with a wider social life than mine.

A problem specific to animal rights, I think, is that most people lack a grasp on concepts that are incredibly basic in biology and related fields (I am myself a biology student, but in my 30s - mature student as we are called), and again, that is not their fault. One of my personal crusades (very quiet and internal really) is that biology, especially non-animal and evolutionary biology, is taught wrong below university level. I realised this because I did an education speed-run, going from foundational, to middle school, to high school certificates in less than 3 years in order to be able to go to uni. And at each level I was told "forget all you learned last year about this topic" WHY. Why dumb biology down until it is almost incorrect. Why have the "tree of life" with the humans at the top, instead of teaching children that evolution does not have a direction? That concept rewired my brain, and I wish I knew it sooner. Once you have a more in depth understanding of the world it becomes much bigger, and more complex, and the nuances become infinite and impossible to avoid. I absolutely agree that emotions have a major part to play in decision-making, but with the right rational knowledge as a base, emotional responses are better informed and more measured, inevitably.

Most people think of themselves as separate from nature because this is how we were taught to think of ourselves from the beginning. Animal and Human. Natural and Not. And it is such a gigantic gap to fill without the proper tools and while being bombarded all day long by intellectually coercive ideas. So yeah, I believe it's a good idea to try not to do all that work yourself and protect your sanity instead!

Hi! Just wanted to say, re:veganism discourse: Excellent Opinions, Great Delivery, Immaculate Vibes 👍 have a great day :)

cheers, ty! it is honestly sort of surprising to me that folks are reading along--as I said to someone else in DMs, I kind of figured that response was mostly something I was putting together in my own head, so I'm pleasantly surprised it's resonating with other people.

I am also just. :| not thrilled to have to be typing up all these "and here's how caring about animal welfare can radicalize you down all these shitty pathways if you add X and Y and Z" because at the end of the day I do think all species are worthy of basic respect; at the end of the day I do think there's nothing fundamentally better about me as a human than any other species. At the end of the day it actually matters a lot to me that my research mice are kept with as much enrichment as I can give them and that their lives and bodies and effort are honored and used wisely. It matters to me that the dogs I teach and the people I teach to train their dogs are learning with minimum stress and maximal confidence. These are all really important planks of my personal code of ethics!

It sucks to feel like I need to sit down and enumerate all the reasons that I think this other perspective of people who start in the same place I do--animals are neat individuals who encompass both the alien and the familiar, which share our lives in a multitude of ways--has developed in such a way that I think it encourages a really toxic way of relating both to animals and ourselves. In general I prefer to focus on places where I can agree with other folks, even if their opinions are different from mine. Someone in the notes brought up "struggle sessions," which are kind of the epitome of toxicity within the left: good values and a desire to help one another get so channeled through perfectionism and backbiting that you wind up with people gathering to literally torture and destroy each other. (Not just in China, either; it keeps happening, cf. Synanon in the US and the dissolution of the Japanese United Red Army.) That's not the kind of way I want to interact with people I'm supposed to be working together with.

So I try not to do that shit too much. I think about the places where people who have values just like mine go down rabbit holes and wind up in bad places, and I try and build barriers so I don't get burned out and angry and dissolve in a puff of flame. (I'm not directly engaging further with this anon for that reason, actually.) But just--aaaaaaaaauuuughhh, ARAs really irritate me because I can see where the roots are, and yet the entire ideology means that there essentially can't be listening. You can see that in the way I'm sitting here going "No, I know what your ideas are, here's why I have rejected them," and still I am getting exhortations to just listen and understand about ARA ideology. No. I did that, the last time there were protests about it in my workplace I went ahead and read the actual detailed IACUC reports released by FOIA that the protestors were shouting about, and bluntly it was a) not convincing and b) exactly the same appeals to emotional knee-jerk reactions and emotional flooding that I decried yesterday. Twenty years I have been checking my responses to these people, and it's never anything different.

I don't think that removing emotion totally from ethics and morals is wise or even possible--we use emotion for decisionmaking and encoding our values, after all, a person without emotion literally cannot decide things--but I do not like or tolerate subcultures that won't leave space to sit, think, and let the first knee-jerk rush of gut response die down. Sometimes, often, I do decide that my gut reaction is right! But I need the space to sit the fuck down and think about it, and if you take that to an ARA space you will mostly get flooded with more emotionally reactive imagery until you agree or leave. And that is coercive.

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love when cats hear that you've woken up even just a little bit and they're like hiiiiiii oh my god oh my god!!!!! i wrote some poems in the night let me recite them for you. this one is called: screaming and knocking your water bottle off your nightstand

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Tag yourself I’m the “Overdressed and Underappreciated”. Artist : http://www.mattadrian.com/ 

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Litany against anthropocentrism

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Finally got a clear shot of noonoo carrying her spring, it's her favourite toy

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[video by soupygarbagejuice. original caption: stuie]