Poogona [he/him]

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it’s very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

It’s usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it’s heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn’t have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.

Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.

Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study

Look this is true but AT LEAST it’s how politics is supposed to work, it’s not about choosing the most ethically and morally consistent person, it’s about having a person in the seat who will vote the way their constituents want, no more

Hoooooly shit I forgot about the bedbug meltdown

HE GOOGLED “JEWS AS BEDBUGS” what a classic

Yeah I suppose the OP says “opinion” but this here fact has put me in the situation in the picture more than once

Bugs are not just bugs

Bugs are a subcategory of insects and you are wrong almost every time you call any old insect a bug

No need to go all the way to beatnik wandering artist. I feel like the creative urge can strike any person at any time, and the problem with this is that as things are currently organized, that spark will be smothered. Part of demonstrating to people why they should want things to change is appealing to those who have felt that happen to them. I don’t think a person ever forgets the pain of it, and it can happen to anyone.

I just responded to a pretty similar position below.

It is silly to conflate opposition to the status quo with intellectualism. Those visionaries whose ideas led to paradigm shifts were still building upon previous consensus. Sometimes being correct puts you at odds with the group, but so does being COMPLETELY WRONG.

Sometimes

If I was in college still there’s a part of me that would have wanted to make it my life’s work to reach the same level of “legitimacy” as PeePee Jordanson so that I could spend all my time sabotaging his reputation as publicly as possible

This is an uncomfortable reality but the more recent examples of the sciences and humanities being considered progressive overall gives me hope.

Yeah probably. I don’t like the idea of having faith in science of course, considering that science is done by people, and people aren’t infallible. But it’s the best tool we have for preserving and interacting with past ideas and breakthroughs. I suppose the thing I’d have to have faith in is humanity’s drive to understand a “truth” that holds up to scrutiny, instead of the characterization some have of human beings as creatures that wish only to satisfy existential terror incuriously.