One Of The Funniest Things Ive Noticed Rereading Gideon Is That There Are MULTIPLE Times When Cytherea

How come pro-nuclear leftists never actually address the documented environmental damage and poisoning of indigenous communities of nuclear waste?

Welcome to Night Vale: Ep. 100, Toast

buddy

so as a third world transfem there's a bit of a parallel that ive noticed and it goes kinda like this:

if you live in the Imperial Core (or maybe even first world countries in general tbh), you never have to consider the third world in your worldview. what i mean is, you can be born, have a long, rich, fulfilling life and then die of old age, never having thought of any of us beyond the 5 minutes after you get shown some sort of news piece. there's vast, vast swathes of people that think of mexico, or nicaragua, or argentina, or or or or - as basically just names on a map, if that much. we're not people to them, not really. and when we stand up and say "no actually, we are human beings, people worth just as much as any citizen of the Imperial Core", they get upset! because we are shaking the fundamentals of their worldview.

and there's not necessarily any malice involved! like, obviously some people that feel like this are malicious, but their personal feelings are irrelevant. the point is that their position insulates them both from knowing us and from any consequences of not knowing us, while we most assuredly are not protected from either of those things in response.

if you are not transfem, even if you are also queer in some way, a similar concept applies. you can have a full, rich, fulfilling queer existence while never having to take us into account! you can go to queer and inclusive events, watch queer and inclusive creators and shows, read queer and inclusive books, and so on and so forth, where we don't feature at all, or if we do, we are a throwaway! and so, when we stand up and say "hey actually we deserve as much space and respect as anyone else", they get upset! because we are shaking the fundamentals of their worldview.

im not saying they're related but ultimately both of these worldviews stem from a position of privilege, and can only be eliminated by destroying that privilege. i dont really know how we do that but this is mostly meant as an observation rather than a solutions post.

maybe not the absolute best thing about les miserables the novel (it’s a long book) but the one that stood out the most to me and has remained with me most strongly is that when the book is explaining to us the plight of fantine, who basically like finds herself poor and knocked up bc iirc she hooked up with some fuckboy who was never gonna stick around, victor hugo really takes pains to be clear that fantine did a lot of really dumb shit. she made stupid ass choices. she was naive and impulsive and unwise and myopic. it’s not a story where a tragic heroine did everything right and still got screwed. but the moral argument put forth by, i mean, to some degree the entire novel but particularly (to my recollection) by this section is essentially like, isn’t it so fucked up that we live in a society where someone can be functionally condemned to a life of suffering for the crime of being a fallible human being in their youth? isn’t being young and stupid and getting to move on from that a human right that we are denying people? shouldn’t you be allowed to be kind of an idiot without ruining your entire life? it’s such a clearly and expansively empathetic view and it’s an idea that people obviously continue to struggle with based on Any Time Anything Happens Ever and also one that i feel like continues to be rare in narrative art or media, at least expressed this fully or strongly.

smth you have to just internalise about nutrition is that people who get famous for obsessing about it on the internet are almost always of an economic class & health status where actual nutrient deficiencies are not a real practical risk for them, & for the poor and medically at-risk people for whom such deficiencies are a genuine current threat, the #1 thing that would help is simply consistent access to a sufficient amount of calories, and secondarily access to as wide a variety of foods as possible

One thing I can tell you as someone so zoology obsessed is that books, articles, blog posts, any literature at all is highly likely to let you know if an invertebrate or reptile has ever been known to eat its own young but not nearly as likely to admit how many widely beloved mammals will do the same (most of them) or how often (way way more often than the scorpions or snakes)

A beautiful Mesolithic amber figure of a bear. It washed up on a beach at Fanø in Denmark from a submerged Mesolithic settlement under the North Sea. 12,500-3,900 BCE, now on display at the National Museum of Denmark.