Sorry as someone who teaches rhetoric this is a wonderful response to the Paradox of Tolerance. I cannot tell you how many times my students have had debates about this. This is the response. This does indeed fix it. I cannot wait to tell this to my classes now. Philosophically and rhetorically this completely resolved the Paradox of Tolerance and I am floored by its simplicity and angry I never saw it before.
it also made me very sad at one point one of the kids said her dad was being hateful towards drag queens and that he had a very skewed/incorrect view of what a drag queen was and wouldnt listen to her and told her she was “too naive” when she tried to explain
and i replied “if i remember correctly when youre at this age it seems adults will wave off any of your life experiences even if they lack their own because they refuse to see those younger than them as their own people” and EVERY SINGLE KID AT THE TABLE turned and said EXACTLY
and i was like. oh. so i wasnt alone in that. but also. i dont have to BE that. im not doing that. im listening and actually talking to them. i hope that there are older people in their life doing the same.
um. i dont know how to say. please listen to the children in your life. its true sometimes youll know better but, often times they have perspectives we may miss and dismissing them hurts everyone in the end. we have so much we can share and learn together.
When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*
Wow.... so you’re telling me you took an action that resulted in the death of one person...... to save the lives of many people.... who would have died if you did nothing??? that sounds so familiar
Me when I'm in a "give your child the worst name imaginable" competition and my competition is any millennial couple
In related news I met a kid with older sisters named Kelly and Molly today (normal, fine names) and I'd like my lovely followers to take a guess as to what the youngest's name was
Great guesses! Some were pretty close! Unfortunately,
Okay. Round 2, submitted by my friend. A real baby born this year to actual millennial parents. She is a girl. Her name starts with L and is six letters long. Put guesses in the tags.
Good ones, gang! However,
we find our lovey dovey couple in the middle of a reconciliation
GULLS WILL DECIDE WHAT TO EAT BY WATCHING PEOPLE
Herring gulls (Larus argentatus) can perfectly thrive in coastal and urban landscapes, however, these birds will steal your food as soon as you are distracted. Urban gulls pay attention to human behaviour in food-related contexts, and will mimic what humans almost all the time, a new study shown.
In a simple test, researchers studied how herring gulls behave in front person eating snacks on Brighton beachfront, UK. They gave the gulls the choice between two differently coloured potato chips, and when the human were eating potatos chips from one color, seagulls approached the food, and chose the same colour that the experimenter was eating, the 95 per cent of the time.
Seagulls were able to use human cues for stimulus enhancement and foraging decisions. Given the relatively recent history of urbanization in herring gulls, this cross-species social information transfer could be a by-product of the cognitive flexibility inherent in species who steal food, called kleptoparasitic species. This success in urban environments is suggested to result from behavioural flexibility, which is likely to require specific cognitive adaptations. In food-stealing birds, success is said to reflect an ability to integrate and use information about both the environment and other individuals, and kleptoparasites generally have usually larger relative brain sizes than their hosts.
#me when I see my coworker eating potato chips
I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.
About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.
The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.
It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.
Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.
They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”
“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”
It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone.
And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”
The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”
When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.
They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.
When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”
After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.
Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.
It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.
We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.
She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”
Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”
“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.
“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”
And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.
every time i see this post i cry a little just out of sheer overwhelming emotion. gosh. but so I have a bit of a story that started as a tag ramble but got too long, and it’s… not similar, exactly, except for how it is, I think, because it’s about keeping the world blooming into something better.
so i was realizing i was queer and not actually a fan of the conservative party about the same time OP was. i’d been raised conservative and evangelical, in the southwest and also in florida, and everyone i knew for most of my life was that way.
so in early 2005, I hadn’t really followed anything about gay rights or anything like that until extremely recently. I didn’t know much about gay rights, but I knew gay people had gotten AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and I knew that they weren’t able to get married or join the army, and I knew my favorite character in First Wives Club was Annie’s adult daughter who was a lesbian college student and was complete #stylegoals for me in the early aughts.
In fall of 2004, I’d met some other kids who were about a grade behind me at a NaNoWriMo event, and I’d ended up going to see the tour of RENT that came through with one of them. They became, quite quickly, my very best friends, and all three of them were queer (two of them even started dating around when I met them, I think). They weren’t religious the way i was, they were liberal (as much as you generally got in high school in 2005), and they were newish friends but they were kinder and more supportive than anyone i’d ever met through church. They were the ones who’d reach out to me when i was having a rough time to make sure i was okay, they were the ones concerned about my wellbeing when i wasn’t sleeping or something. They were queer but… they were good people and i could recognize that in them. I thought that maybe they shouldn’t be doing gay stuff, but I was also starting to wonder why that was a bad thing in the first place. Literally could not figure out what harm could come from two girls or two boys loving each other.
I remember a month or two before i finally came out to those friends and kissed the girl who is now my wife, my mom and i got in a fight about me being friends with them because they weren’t “appropriate friends”. and i was mostly just tired and annoyed and prepared to go ‘okay mom’ until she was done rather than it being a fight, because I’d heard this before about my friend Willow and done the same thing.
but then she said “people LIKE THAT won’t be there for you when you need them. they will abandon you at the first sign of trouble.” To this day i’m not 100% sure if she meant non-christian or if she meant ~QUEER~ (or both), but either way i went from ‘just wait it out and pretend to agree’ to absolutely incandescently angry in the time it took me to parse what she’d said.
I lost my temper completely and for once I didn’t and still don’t feel bad about it. I screamed at her at the top of my lungs over this: about how they were the only ones who’d BEEN there for me, about how they didn’t need me to be perfect to be acceptable, about how they loved me even when i screwed up and had never ONCE made me feel like i was unworthy of love because I didn’t live up to some standard I could never quite reach. Unlike everyone i’d ever met through church and ESPECIALLY unlike her and my dad.
and in retrospect while i turned my sexuality over in my head a bit longer to be sure, i think that’s when i knew i was queer and that I wasn’t ashamed of it and was in fact proud of it. I parsed it at the time as pride in my friends, but looking back? It was pride in me. Because i didn’t want to be part of any family that would talk so cruelly about people who’d been so kind, just because of who those people loved and who they did or didn’t pray to. And I knew I DID want to be part of a family of misfits and outcasts who refused to sit down and shut up while people treated others like that.
In 2005 it was scary sometimes even just to openly be an ally of queer people, let alone openly queer yourself. Things had improved in a lot of ways, but it was still scary. You still couldn’t get married, which meant that if something happened to you, your spouse had no legal rights to make medical decisions, keep custody of your kids, keep your possessions, plan your funeral. You still couldn’t come out if you were in the military. There weren’t feel good queer stories that were easy to find - even the well written stories were almost exclusively tragic. (I discovered To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in late 2005 or early 2006, and it was the only story I had for YEARS where there were queer characters and they got a happy ending. I relished it. I still do.)
The point of all this is that I was proud, I wanted to be queer and to not sit quietly and assimilate but be loud and proud and unapologetic, but by fucking god it was scary and not always safe, so sometimes I did end up hiding it. And then things got better. Not everything, but… I was able to get legally married to my wife. I was able to get a testosterone prescription without needing to be psychologically pathologized. I was able to find a job in the midwest of all places where I can have “he/him” in my email signature but still wear skirts and not have any of the people I work with (at one point they’d all been 40+) question it or push back. We were helping the world keep blooming into someplace that doesn’t suck so much all the time!
But it’s starting to get worse again. My state’s passed legislation trying to dictate public bathroom use based on genitals. The supreme court is overturning many landmark decisions, and I know the moment they can, they’re coming for Obergefell v. Hodges, the legislation that made my legal marriage valid in all states (including the one I currently live in), not just the state I was married in (which is not the state I currently live in).
So we need to keep fighting. We need to get incandescently angry and we need to be there for each other. We need to scream at the top of our lungs at cruelty and injustice, and we need to be kind and support each other, especially when times are rough. We need to BE a family of misfits and outcasts who refuse to sit down and shut up while people treat our siblings and ourselves like this. Because that’s what they want. And we can not give it to them.
tbh i don't really get why we divide the oceans into different oceans because they're all connected it's the same ocean
no metaphor here just pure confusion...is there a line where one ocean stops and another begins? or is it like a smooth gradient of percentages of one ocean shading into another ocean?
Yes, there is a line. There are confluences you can see and touch and they are NOT subtle in the slightest.
That's the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a particularly pronounced day.
This is the Indian and the Pacific. It's not always this obvious everywhere but the dividing lines are very much there.
Oceans have their own properties as far as temperature and salinity and unless something like a storm or a current forces them to mix they won't. Mostly this applies to vertical mixing and it gives you things like thermoclines and haloclines but water is wierd and won't mix horizontally either.
The ocean basins tend to have their own currents that go in a circle and define that ocean, and those patterns mix the water within that ocean. Like a washing machine.
The Caribbean has a little loop of its own that not on this map, but that current keeps that ocean pretty internally consistent. It's got clear warm water because of the shallow bowl of limestone sand it sits in. Where it meets the Atlantic with wildly different conditions the water is traveling in opposite directions, and it acts kind of like an oncoming lane of highway traffic. Species that have adapted to a narrow band of temperatures and salinities (most fish) can't cross, while species with a stronger homeostasis hang out there on purpose, (marine mammals, turtles, sharks). Plankton, that cannot control their horizontal movement in the water column, are held in their home territories by these barriers.
This is cool as fuck
I love learning
Earth is weird as fuck I love it
Can you elaborate the story of the ”Free Willy” orca (forgot his name). From my understanding the orca couldn’t survive in the wild and imprinted on hunans to the point that he seeked out human compaionship
Oh Keiko. His is a sad story. In 1979, he was tragically captured from his native Icelandic waters as a calf and, after bouncing around for several years, was sold to an amusement park in Mexico City that would eventually become Six Flags Mexico. It was here that he found fame as the star of Free Willy, a very sweet and very fictional story (a favorite of mine as a child!) that later spawned a trilogy, all while convincing the public that it’s easy to free a whale.
The tank you see in the movie is the same tank Keiko lived in during his time in Mexico. Intended to house dolphins, it was incredibly undersized, and the water was far too warm for an orca. Worst of all, he was isolated from others of his kind, with only the companionship of his human caregivers and a few bottlenose dolphins. The years of poor husbandry took their toll on poor Keiko, and he was lethargic and in ill health when his story because known throughout the world.
Although many parties were involved in what happened next, Warner Bros. studios (the filmmakers behind Free Willy) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS, my beloathed) were at the forefront. Once it became public knowledge that the real Willy was not, in fact, returned to the wild to live with his family and was still living in that too-tiny pool, many of Keiko’s fans (mainly children) began writing letters asking for their favorite cetacean movie star to be released.
Doesn’t that warm your heart? *she says sarcastically*
Some time—and an incident in which Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson) tried to purchase the whale for his personal collection—later, Keiko’s owners relented. It was decided by the newly formed Free Willy-Keiko Foundation, founded by Warner Bros. and cell phone mogul Craig McCaw (and still in operation to this day, unfortunately), that it was time to make fantasy a reality and set Keiko free. In 1996, Keiko was transferred to the Oregon Coast Aquarium for rehabilitation, where he would spend two years.
Under the quality husbandry and veterinary care Keiko received in Oregon, his health began to improve. In my opinion, this beautiful habitat, with trainers who loved and cared for him, should’ve been his forever home. One would think this was the plan all along, considering his trainers were still doing waterwork with him. That doesn’t exactly scream “this animal is a candidate for release!”
But the HSUS and Free Willy-Keiko Foundation had promised the children of the world that Keiko would return to the wild. Think of the children, people.
In 1998, Keiko tasted the crisp saltwater of the Icelandic seas for the first time in nearly two decades. For the next four or so years, Keiko lived in a sea pen, with the intentions of gradually habituating him back to his native environment. Over time, his trainers took him on longer and longer “walks” in the open ocean. One day in 2002, the walk didn’t end.
Keiko was free.
15 months later, he was dead.
The cause of death was pneumonia, the most common disease of cetaceans both in the wild and in human care. He was 27 years old (average life expectancy of a male orca is about 30 years).
Perhaps it would’ve been worth it, had Keiko spent those last 15 months with his long-lost family. But he didn’t. Though he was occasionally observed trailing pods of orcas, Keiko never rejoined a wild pod. Instead, he spent those 15 months traveling the coasts of Iceland and Norway seeking out the only family he knew. Humans.
Keiko would approach swimming children, allowing them to ride on his back as he had with his trainers over the years. He would follow boats in search of food and companionship, as his caregivers had interacted with him from boats during his ocean walks. These escapades became so frequent that the local government passed ordinances to stop its citizens from interacting with the whale. Although the HSUS claimed otherwise, Keiko was never again a truly wild whale. He was a whale dependent on humans, humans who ignored the advice of experts and tried to bring fiction to life. In 2009, the journal Marine Mammal Science did a retrospective review of Keiko’s rehabilitation and release. They determined it was a failure.
Despite this, Keiko remains a poster child for anti-zoo activists. The still-hypothetical Whale Sanctuary Project (my even more beloathed) uses Keiko as an example of why their experiment is a good idea, tugging at heartstrings of well-meaning animal lovers like HSUS did all those years ago.
In reality, Keiko was quite possibly the worst candidate imaginable for release. He was a fully mature male, with a history of poor health, who had spent decades in the care of humans with absolutely no contact with others of his kind since he was basically a toddler. The decision to release him was made entirely on emotion and carried out by movie executives and animal rights activists. For further insight into the political and financial woes of the release, I highly recommend Killing Keiko by Mark Simmons, one of Keiko’s caregivers throughout the rehabilitation process.
RIP Keiko. You were a beautiful, sweet man who inspired millions 🐳
With the recent news of Miami Seaquarium’s intent to “release” their elderly killer whale Lolita (Tokitae), please remember Keiko. Much like him, Tokitae was captured from the wild as a youngster (nearly a decade before Keiko himself was taken) and has lived with only the companionship of humans and smaller dolphins. She has spent over half a century away from the wild and other orcas, and it has been genetically confirmed that none of her wild family is still alive. Like Keiko, the only family she knows are humans.
Don’t let Keiko’s death be in vain. Don’t let the same fate befall Toki.
Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions
I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.
i can't believe i have to fucking say it because i'm an educator so like how is it possible nobody else has said this.
unless a person is actively making materials/etc for children, they do not need to worry about your kid.
your child gets respect as a human. that's it. nobody's private life/artistic endeavors/unrelated interests must be controlled for the sake of your kid.
educators and athletes and artists do not have to live in chastity because your kid might see us on our days off. we do not owe it to your kid to only write poems about bunnies and only sing songs about tying your shoes. i do not care how much a person has given to children, if they are acting as an adult in adult spheres, they are allowed to. they are adults. it is your job as a caregiver to raise your kid and keep them out of adult spheres, not our job to keep ourselves out of those spheres just in case.
guess what! adult role models are going to bars and hooking up and dancing and being adults! this is so they have the mental energy to do all the child-centric things.
"it makes me feel weird to picture them like that!" i don't know how to tell you this but actors aren't actually their roles. the customer-service personality your waitress has is probably not her actual personality. the way teachers interact with students is not the way that they interact with their private lives, and it shouldn't be.
"this tells kids this kind of behavior is okay!" actually it's showing kids a normal and natural progression of a person's life, boundaries, and bodily autonomy. it's showing kids that adults are dynamic human beings. kids already know this. they know there's places they're not allowed and things they don't understand yet. it's just that you have icky feelings because you were raised in a society with black-and-white morality.
celebrities don't owe your children perfection, modesty, sobriety. and you know something? it's way healthier when they don't. "this is a person, who gets up every morning and does their job - but also has adult interests, which you'll learn about later" is way healthier as a role model than "you should be perfect like the curated image of this person and if you're not perfect you should be deeply ashamed."
anyway. idk why "think of the children!!!!" is making a comeback as a popular stance. but to be clear? it's a way of saying "this makes me feel uncomfortable, but i don't know why, and i don't feel like untangling it, so i'll blame you for it and hope you feel guilty about my children."
This was on a post discussing shit parents doing a new satanic panic. Valid points all around but. But I’m crying. This is the funniest lie ever, no parody I could come up with this will be this funny. Nonbinary Julius Cesar
It's him, Julius xi/xir
Barbie (2023) // The Good Place (2016-2020)
this looks like the same party
they’re shouting back and forth across the club
If you have the funds to spare please consider donating to Duncan's medical fund so I can get him to a neurologist. If you'd like to see videos / pictures of Duncan I have a ton on my blog under his hashtag (#Duncan).
As stated in the GoFundMe description, any extra funds received will be set aside for future medical bills for Duncan or my other pets. I appreciate any help I receive so, so much. If you cannot afford to donate please consider sharing this post so it can reach more people.
this doesn’t have a fake answer and i know earnest polls get reblogged less. but uh…… what if i ask nicely.