#Conservation Movement

[nickysfacts]

The conservation movement was born in loving memory of a good boy

🌲🐺🌲

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Reflecting on Baker’s Holistic Approach

[greencheekconure27]

hey what's your beef with peta? if it's that they operate "kill shelters" you might want to read the newsweek fact check https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-peta-responsible-deaths-thousands-animals-1565532 (tldr: "Just as a hospice has a high mortality rate, so does a shelter that takes in those near end-of-life, feral, aggressive, dying and discarded animals." "Cherry-picking animals to only allow in the most adoptable at shelters with limited admission (otherwise known as 'no-kill') policies doesn't help and often leads to people dumping animals, or neglecting them in other ways,")

Oh no it's so much more than that.Constant spreading of pseudoscience and misinformation, ableist campaigns (such as "drinking milk causes autism", racist and antisemitic campaigns (comparing pig farming to the Holocaust for instance), sexist campaigns under the guise of feminism (veganism is feminist because cows have a womb they are women too) more misinformation and pseudoscience, financial scams, at least one instance of abducting someone's beloved and cared for pet to euthanize it, harassment, using emotional manipulation on children ("your mommy is a murderer because she eats meat" etc), harassing and breaking into zoos and research labs , frequently killing the wild animals they rescue, that one bullshit monkey photograph lawsuit, being against ALL animal agriculture and hunting EVERYWHERE, being opposed to pets (yes cats and dogs too), actually paying people to abuse farm animals for staged videos, cultish behavior,absolutely insane ideas, and oh, misinformation and pseudoscience.

As to kill shelters, it's the lies and the hypocrisy that bothers me, because these are the same fucking people who will insist they're doing good by keeping animals alive when they have no quality of life to speak of anymore. One moment they're gushing over some poor piglet born without trotters or blind legless bird being kept alive and miserable for months, the next they're all pro euthanizing healthy animals en masse, all while they collect donations for both.

I know a lot of people donate to them in good faith but don't. Even if you are vegan. They're not doing anything good with that money.

[ravensvalley]

#TheRavenKeeper

I'm still very busy but I always have the time between 2 trails for a quick stop to say hi.

So Hi Folks! And hope you all having a good day so far.

[alwaysbewoke]

[lady-raziel]

hilarious that with each new day that passes a new bit of dirt from JD Vance's past gets discovered and plastered over the internet...it's almost as if this is why presidential campaigns have always announced their running mates well before the convention...so that if glaring issues with a candidate came to light quickly there would be time to replace them on the ticket before they were officially locked in...it's almost as if certain things in political campaigns were done for a reason, donald...because the very same critical failures had happened before...but no i'm sure you and your guys attempt to recreate a fantasy version of history while ignoring all the reasons that history was a disaster will work this time...because you are built different and the 10000th time trying fascism will work like a charm...

[wachinyeya]

From water-testing polluted rivers to measuring radiation levels, ordinary people are taking environmental research into their own hands.

[relaxedstyles]

[philosophicalconservatism]

Are the angry American women who are flirting with embracing South Korea's 4B movement also going to embrace that movement's rejection of Transgenderism?

[tra-archive]

I didn’t need any more reasons to be proud of my decision to join the 4B Movement, but this popped up on Xitter anyway. At least the likes aren’t bad but still.

This is what many men want. They want us to be second class citizens, slaves to men and their misogynistic religions (yes all of them). And they’ll try to do that in any way possible, so just stay away.

Meanwhile, How to Make America Great Again:

1. Men stop talking

[thashining]

Did they ever really learn about CRT... No they didn't. We all know what to call this.

@theconsciouslee

[ravensvalley]

#WildHabitat

It should be built the simplest way as possible to not disturb the environment… always in tune with nature. Be concerned with protecting the natural environment and the planet.

[leaning-right]

4B

To all the liberals abstaining from sex during Trump’s next presidency… thank you for making your ideals extinct!

[philsmeatylegss]

Just as someone who studies and loves history, if you ever are wondering what a key sign is that someone knows quite literally nothing about history, it will come in the form of a person saying “I wish I lived in the 80s (or before)” or “life/relationships was so much easier in the 80s (or before).” Like that flat out just tells me you’ve never opened a history book in your life

Because when you ask why, usually they will say some variation of problems that happen today didn’t happen back then (usually referring to being gay, drugs, cheating, freaky sex, bdsm, abuse, mental illness, etc). And if you open one fucking history book you would know all of that shit was happening as much, if not, even more than it’s happening right now, only it was a lot more dangerous

Yeah, gay people existed in the 50s. There were secret meetups that men (many married with kids because they were forced into) went to and hooked up with other men in. Men being sexually assaulted or raped by men was practically unheard of and unprosecuted until like the 80s-ish. Literally a man was violently raped by John Wayne Gacy, went to police right after, was blown off by police because the concept of men raping men was nuts, this guy did his entire own investigation, finding out where Gacy even fucking lived, and was still ignored. That guy ended up being a key eye witness in Gacy’s trial to prove he was sane.

People were heavily addicted to drugs all throughout history. It was an epidemic among housewives in the 40s-60s who were depressed being forced to stay at home and were just given pain pills to help cope. Most housewives, usually experiencing domestic violence on the regular, used opioids and other drugs to cope with the abuse and unfulfilled life. Most of them were severely depressed.

Nuclear family American dream didn’t die. It never fucking existed. Everything was just kept behind closed doors. And doing surface level historical research, I literally mean reading a few books or watching a few documentaries, make it clear.

People romanticize the daily life for Americans in the 40s-80s so much without realizing 1) that was the reality for only white, middle to upper class people 2) it was all for show.

“If you could go back and live in any decade which would you go to?” None! I’m a mentally ill lesbian. I’m so fortunate to be living now. Living in previous decades, especially the 1990s and earlier, would suck balls

Open a fucking history book

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A rare view of the Statue of Liberty from the balcony on its torch. This point of view has been closed since 1916.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 30, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 01, 2024

Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.

During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.

Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.

As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.

In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.

When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.

It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.

But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.

Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.

To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.

Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.

Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.

To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.

Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.

When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[kick-a-long]

The first concert I have felt totally safe and excited at since Oct 7th. Yo la tango puts on a yearly Hanukkah concert and night six was amazing.

Love child opened. David Sadaris performed some amazing raunchy limericks and short stories. Yo la tango was incredible. Swamp dog has an amazing voice and told stories about the 70s pissing off Nixon with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland (KLUTE!)

It felt so good to have a room full of Jews all around. The sterile cool and aesthetic only identity politics, the Token language and regurgitated opinions of “correct” language and politics of so many concerts I’ve been to the last year was gone. It felt honest, funny, the opposite of repressed, unchristian, kind.

I miss talking to people like that. I miss being unafraid of language and tone and ideas. I miss seeing and reading and hearing things that aren’t pre approved, sterile, zombie talking points. I miss being allowed to have opinions in public free of the fear that people will think it’s distasteful to someone else somewhere else. I miss seeing genuine passion and good art. I miss seeing wit and clever writing that turns anger and pain into jokes and motivation rather than panic, pessimism, and shallow wallowing in the misery of others. I don’t have conservative opinions. I’m happy I finally got to enjoy being surrounded by people who are fed up with shit and laughing and dancing, unafraid of fucking social media and its control over what you’re allowed to feel and how you think about yourself and the world.

Sorry for the rant. I’m just so fucking happy to see a fucking menorah on stage and hear people reacting genuinely and creating art for themselves and not the search engine optimization of it all. It’s weird to say but this concert was one of the first times I’ve been out where the entire thing from the crowd to the bands to the comedians didn’t feel performative.

I even got David Sadaris’s autograph.