Casio CZ-3000, Fela Kuti
im actually not sure what this guy is. im assuming something in the order Order Polydesmida. so so cute though! photos by me
Anyone know what the deal was with that Canadian residential school thing? A lot of people described finding graves and darkly hinted at them as being like… murder camps, where the children were sent to presumably be lined up against a wall and shot or something to that effect
And I’m not sure if there’s much to say they were murder camps so much as, like… kids just fucking died back in history-times. Especially children at Orphanages. And you couldn’t just leave them lying around so you buried them. 1800′s orphanages (especially in cold countries) are pretty famous for being miserable and tragic.
I guess sending a kid to an orphanage when you don’t need to back in the 1800′s was, like… similar to murder. Like you increased their chances of dying due to starvation/disease before puberty from like 40% to 60%. Like a 20% Marginal Murder Rate Increase.
I dunno, it’s one of those tricky things where like, it looks like a lot of people are mischaracterising an event, but the event was still really really bad anyway, but just not the same level of bad. It’s like if a bunch of people were insisting that 600 million Jews died in the holocaust and you couldn’t try and get them closer to the actual 6 million figure without feeling like a genocide denier. You don’t want to be the guy to be Defending something really bad, but also you wanna be clear on what actually happened. All the messaging I saw around it when the story came out was mostly Dark Hinting - a few snippets and numbers implying something dreadful and then the assumption that the reader would be too filled with rage to read any more.
I think some of it was abusive discipline/ pinishments that occasionally lead to deaths? Iirc with similar scandals in Irish homes run by the church that later found unmarked graves that was an issue.
But yeah the darkly hinting stuff is annoying.
I guess some of it is a thing of ‘if you didn’t want us to assume the worst you shouldn’t have hid it and should have reported what happened at the time’?
Yeah a lot of what people write about them is misleading in a way that’s a little annoying because the reality was bad enough, but it never seems worth objecting to because the reality was bad enough. You kind of have to understand it as an “angle” to advance related causes in the public sphere.
Basically: the purpose of the schools was forcible cultural assimilation, many involved permanently breaking up families (not all, but the ones that didn’t also sucked), and the schools were shit for all the reasons you’d expect when funnelling a population of subaltern children into an often-Catholic hegemonic institutional structure far from their home. But the deaths themselves were mostly just deaths from disease, and while they were probably exacerbated by neglect and mistreatment (which as one might imagine is well attested), the fundamental issue was similar to what you’ve seen with those migrant family separations in the US in recent years, on a much larger and longer-term scale: of course if you go out of your way to break up a bunch of families and entrap the kids in Child Prison with no recourse, it’s going to be awful. Even if the death rate had been identical to the poshest white boarding school it would only have been slightly less bad, since to reiterate this whole project was just about forcibly assimilating kids who came from normal functioning families which the state objected to solely because they were culturally distinct.
As to the question of why the discussion of this has focused on the mass graves, idk, I think honestly it’s a bit more impressionistic and symbolic than anything specific – as you say, a lot of it is based on creating an impression of “newly discovered mass murder” when in fact it was already known what went on there and (in most cases) what the death rate was. That said, probably looking into the gravesites in more detail will help give closure to specific families and uncover issues with specific institutions. Ultimately this is just how you play the media game, and the timing is important: the truth and reconciliation stuff is fairly recent, the government has been dragging its feet on key promises, and Trudeau is a lot more vulnerable to pressure and embarrassment on the issue than the Conservatives would be.
press has been focused on the death aspect because the actual survivors of residential schools who have been telling everyone about the systemic abuse of the children (these places were used as essentially stables of captive children for the clergy and administration to sexually assault during their entire tenure at the school) have already been ignored for a century for reasons ranging from “white settlers think all the ‘indians’ are already dead” to “majority north american cultural opinion is that this stuff doesn’t matter” (mmiw, starlight tours, et al). but yes residential schools for indigenous children had a much higher death rate than other boarding schools of the time and this was considered a feature of the project. it is part of the larger project of genocide. starvation, intentional infection with disease, and medical neglect were all used against the children to nudge that mortality rate up as high as possible.
child deaths were also often concealed from the families by reporting that the child in question just “ran away”. all the same tactics that were used at single mother and baby homes in Ireland.
edit: children in residential schools were also used as human subjects in experiments on malnutrition and disease, and diseased students were enrolled intentionally in order to increase casualties. one school we actually have numbers for had a 69% mortality rate among enrolled kids. they really are not comparable to orphanages for white children during the same time period.
225-million-year-old petrified opal tree trunk located in Arizona.
lets hear it for being a faggot at the beach
editor's note: op is a woman and does not have faggot slur privileges. she is using it because she is homophobic
A young American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) rides on the back of its mother in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas, USA
by Rick Dunlap
i need to stop picking at my face but the problem is theres Textures On There and i would prefer if there Werent
Absolutely Devastated to discover that attempting to Remove The Textures will cause new, much more Textured Textures To Appear
Surely if I remove this new Texture, however, it will be gone forever.
By Talos, this can’t be happening.
Makes potion of deliciousness
Potion of makes you feel warm and loved
I will say I get the vibe that a lot of peoples interest and support for strikers is a bit too much for a vicarious ‘burn it down’ thrill, rather than for the actual goals of a strike.
Like UPS has agreed to come back to the table and it is very possible they will concede to Union demands and avert a strike. And if that happens (so long as the union does not make concessions on its key demands) it’s a good thing. It’s a victory for the laborers. It is the same ultimate conclusion that a strike would intend to produce except without the workers having to go on (not so great) strike pay for a week or two.
as an empath there are many bony fish species i can't make eye contact with because their emotions flood my brain at such high pressure it gives me nosebleeds but cartilaginous fish are no problem as 700 years ago i was a smalltooth sawfish
