"Hold your hand in front of your eye,” she said, “ and look at those strange and clever animals with love and gratitude, and tell them out loud: ‘Thank you, Meat.’"
Jesus, I hadn’t even thought of this, but of course.
This is something that historians have been warning about for a couple of decades. How much of our history was not just on Twitter, but on MySpace, on blogs and web sites that came down after a few years, on e-mail, on texts. None of that leaves a record. Once the file is deleted, the server shut down and scrapped, the backup disks decay into being unreadable junk, that history is gone.
Does anyone remember when Obama and Clinton each held town hall campaign events on MySpace? Good luck finding anything about those now other than some news articles that say they happened. How many business zoom calls have formal meeting minutes taken? We are not saving histories. We aren’t even writing letters. I’m as guilty as anyone. My art is online and kept in the cloud. I make my Christmas Card every year, but I haven’t printed and mailed one in over a decade. It’s all sent electronically. Meaning that a generation from now no one will remember.
So the problem is bigger than Twitter. We are now a couple of decades into an age that will not leave any detailed historical record.
It’s thought this might just be a black spot of knowledge, there are organizations working to stop this — archival websites primarily, but these are not able to penetrate all these corporate gated gardens, where paywalls, sign up walls, and more block access to. There is an ongoing campaign by megacorps to shutdown as many archival sites as possible.
This coupled with the fallibility of hard drives, CDs (make sure to back them up! They only have a 20-30 year lifetime!), and more and there is a chance that even though there is more information than ever before, more primary and secondary sources than ever, we may become just a strange blank spot in societal and cultural history. Digital decay is a terrifying concept that we are already beginning to live through.
This is exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s a loss of history. And, given how important it has been for activists of all sorts, it will be a loss for the future as well.
One of my favorite thing I’ve learned about animals studies is that you should avoid using colorful leg bands when you’re banding birds because you can accidentally completely skew the data because female birds prefer males with colorful bands
Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double
So like you can completely frick up the natural reproduction of a group of birds by giving a guy a bracelet so stylish that females CANNOT resist him
Me, putting a red bracelet on the leg of a male red wing blackbird: ON GOD we gonna get u some pussy bro
I remember reading a study where researchers realized that female birds of a certain species preferred males with a darker breast. So they created what they literally called a “Super-Sexy Male” by catching a male and coloring his chest with a marker. They then ran dna tests on the eggs in the area.
Previously when the researchers had run these tests, they found a certain amount of infidelity was common for these birds. Somewhere around 10% of eggs were fathered by males who were not the primary mates of females.
After the advent of the Super Sexy Male, however, stuff got crazy in bird world. Infidelity skyrocketed, with upwards of 25% of ALL EGGS in the area being fathered by this specific male. Furthermore, his mate’s eggs were 100% his.
This is just insane to me. Just imagine you’re living your bird life when suddenly somebody scribbles on Dave’s chest and the ladies can’t stop throwing themselves at them. It’s stupid that we theoretically can wreck this kind of havoc on an ecosystem.
If ur arabic ur great
If ur arabic and muslim ur great
If ur arabic and queer ur great
If ur arabic and muslim and queer ur great
I know it seems hard to believe but you’re not bad you’re not awful
Hey if you’re not arabic can you reblog this? I hardly ever see any positivity towards us and I just wanna spread love to my Arab siblings
My BiL is a neurologist who has done a lot of sleep research and one of his favorite areas of study is circadian rhythms. He says that being a night owl is real, it is predicated on the genetic structure of the brain, it is not just “laziness,” and it is not a disorder. He hypothesizes that its original evolutionary purpose was basically to produce night watchmen—people who can stay awake and alert at night to protect the domicile while the early birds sleep.
So we’re not lazy, night owls; we’re the fucking late shift lookouts. Gonna grab my torch and patrol the perimeter if anyone would like to join me.
Y'all know that individual health behaviors - choices around nutrition, exercise, smoking, etc. - only account for about 25% of a person’s health status? The determinants of health are largely social: income and education level, the safety of one’s physical environment (e.g. working conditions, clean water), and degree of social support. Trauma is far worse for health than fast food.
It’s tempting to subscribe to a just world theory, where good things happen to good people (or people who make good decisions), and problems befall problem people, but that just isn’t the world we live in.
Most sick people have spent their lives fighting against oppressive circumstances. They don’t invite illness and hardship with their bad decisions, they are miracles of survival in a sociopolitical environment that’s hostile to their very existence.
I am asked again and again, how I came to change my position on LGBTQ+inclusion, specifically regarding the biblical text. Here is the outline of my process: (HT: Stan Mitchell who gave these words)
1. Through the years, both professionally and personally, I met and was acquainted with a large number of LGBTQ+ people.
2. I started listening to them instead of just talking at them or outright dismissing them.
3. I began to actually know them.
4. My experience of them and the fruit of their lives stood in direct contradiction with what I thought I knew.
5. The accumulation of these incarnational/human/personal experiences was not congruent with my received doctrine or understanding of scripture.
6. I did not choose to reject scripture and what I had been taught because of this dissonance.
7. Also, I did not choose to dismiss these experiences.
8. I realized this tension between experience and doctrine was not a new tension but one that has always been a part of Christian history.
9. I remembered that Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, said multiple times, “You have HEARD it was said BUT I say unto you.” So, I followed the Christian hermeneutic or interpretive tradition of allowing new experiences and information to drive me back to the text asking the faithful question, “Have I read and interpreted this text properly?”
10. After a significant period of studying scripture, reading more books than I can recall (from both sides) and a lot of prayerful soul-searching, I came to believe that my understanding on this matter had been wrong.
11. I changed my position and treatment of LGBTQ+ people, first personally and then professionally.
12. Because I think the traditional position is deeply hurting people, I now feel called to advocate on behalf of those who are being hurt in an effort to end the religiously produced wounds they are experiencing.
13. In good conscience, I can’t not do 12.
14. I am still open and learning.
15. I am admittedly and obviously a flawed human who wrestles with the frailty of mixed motives, pride, fear and insecurity. And yet on this matter and these dear people, to the best of my ability, my heart is clean and conscience clear.
16. For me to try to compress the details of all of my study and introspection into Social Media posts or emails etc. is absolutely impossible. To inspire others to do their own work on this is my hope.
Thank you for the humility and courage you have shown. Doing this inner and outer work saves lives!
60725
