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rat/mouse ownership fundamentally changes how a person views animals

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I feel like ppl get bogged down in semantics so let me make it real simple for you. A zionist is someone who supports the state of Israel. Zionism is the belief that a Jewish ethnostate called Israel should be developed in the Levant region (Palestine and Lebanon and Syria) regardless of the existence of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon and their people. When any pro-Palestine person says someone is a Zionist, that's not a synonym for Jewish, nor is another word for "person I don't like". When we call someone a zionist it's because they support the existence of Israel as a colony. And just so we're clear: it does not matter if a zionist says they're sad about Palestinian suffering or they want to "live in peace" with Palestinians because as long as they support the existence of a colonial ethnostate called Israel then they're still doing Zionism. If I came to your house and just started living there and tried to starve you out and torture you so you would leave your house, it wouldn't matter that I felt "sorry" for you because I'm the reason you're suffering at all. That's why when you try and say "well, Neil Druckman says he wants the war to stop" that doesn't matter. He's still a zionist. He still wants Israel to exist as a colonial state which will always be at the expense of Palestinians. Do not fall for liberal Zionists. Get it in your fucking head that there's no "progressive" Zionism because there's no "progressive" way to support a state that necessitates the elimination of whole peoples.

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would you guys like to see a real illustration from an actual published scientific paper? of course you would

link to the paper

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i think the takes that have gotten me the most hate on here are:

children are people and it’s not appropriate to randomly insult them

smoking etiquette is generally context dependent and “this is rude” isn’t the same as “this is an unforgivable sin”

it’s not women and minorities’ fault that white men become nazis

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“Settlers are not immigrants. Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations.”

— Decolonization is not a metaphor (pg. 6-7)

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thinking about when my professor told me how the boards of companies/orgs/etc. will sometimes hire on a CEO/whatever who they know will basically take a chainsaw to existing infrastructure, let them fuck as much shit up as possible, and then promptly fire them as soon as they've accomplished what the board wanted them to do. then they can point the finger at that guy & look like they're the heroes and the problem is resolved because he's gone now. and they still get to keep all the changes they wanted that nobody else did.

anyway I think it's fun and all to watch the two most divorced men on the planet publicly divorce each other. and also. maybe keep that in mind, is all.

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hi gang. reminder that we are some of the best sweaters in the animal kingdom (second only to equines) allowing us to stay cool and keep moving in hot weather. we have 10 times the density of sweat glands compared to other great apes.

we are ALSO insanely good at smelling rain (specifically geosmin, found in the soil and activated by rain) with the ability to smell 10 parts per trillion. this is speculated to have helped our ancestors survive!

we ALSO have absolutely batshit diets compared to most other animals. caffeine and chocolate are completely toxic to most animals but we can eat it without even feeling sick. even avocados are severely toxic to many animals to the point where it can be fatal to eat, but humans love it!!!

we are ALSO the best endurance runners ON EARTH out of ANY other species. we beat horses in endurance running. you know, the animals that gradually evolved away most of their toes in order to be the best runners?? yeahhh.

and to top it all off. our lifespan is unusually long for our species' weight/mass. typically, the bigger a species is, the longer its average lifespan (e.g. domestic mice live for 1-3 years, whales can live over 200) but we're very small for how long our average lifespan is. big cats like tigers live around 14-15 years, brown bears 25 years, yet here we are expected to live around 75-85 years. that is NUTS.

humans as a species are so extremely cool. it's not just our intellect that makes us amazing. we may not be the fastest or the strongest in the animal kingdom but we're super cool in many other ways. next time you sweat you can go wow!!! humans are so cool I'm able to keep moving because of my absolutely insane number of sweat glands! thank you evolution!

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The most sinsister thing i've seen is how people have been insisting for years trans men can't have chasers because its a "trans woman thing"

Like idk who needs to tell y'all this but just because you don't listen to other people and only care about your personal experience and issues doesn't mean others don't go through similar things

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My dad raises grass-fed beef cattle and I help him sell it, mainly by maintaining an online presence. For a while, I kept having the most ridiculous conversations with people who I assume were marketing students. I didn't want to be rude so I'd try to let them down gently but this one guy just kept insisting that with his magical marketing skills he could grow our business.

What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.

Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.

But also, what are they teaching them at marketing school and how is it so disconnected from reality?

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Me: Exercise does not cause weight loss. This is a fact that has been demonstrated so robustly in research that even doctors, who hate and fear evidence, are grudgingly starting to admit this.

Someone reading that post: Cool, but have you considered that exercise leads to weight loss?

Me: I am going to eat you

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So many people who claim to care about trans issues will see conservative transphobes rave about "cutting off healthy breast tissue" and "girls mutilating themselves," rage or clown on male pregnancy, constantly share post-op photos of top surgery scars and phallo skin grafts to illicit outrage, transvestigate male celebrities to "prove he's secretly a woman"--and then turn around and declare that the Right forgets that trans men and mascs exist. I'm so tired of it.

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our new job launched its mandatory ai transcription program designed to streamline our workflow and not only does it melt down the moment it has to transcribe non-white customers but it keeps hallucinating the existence of a mysterious boy named dorian who shows up in every third call summary

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Sometimes the things that "middle-class" imperial core ppl casually say make me feel like that one painting of the bolshevik soldier in the throne room of the imperial palace.

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what fucking millennium is it