I'm just a bit confused as to specifically the online aspect- I've seen some people saying DONT post, and others saying DO post but ONLY about Palestine
I'm not sure whether I'm doing it either way, but I am wondering about this part since I'm seeing strong takes on both versions
My understanding is that the strike applies to things outside of the internet (excluding shopping) more than posting. Bisan ask people to strike from work for the 8 days if possible, to avoid purchasing when possible (either in stores are online), to avoid patronizing shops, restaurants, cafes when possible. obviously utilize this time to also attend local events in your area in support of Palestine, to post and boost information including how to help, but our actions aren't expected to be limited to the online sphere and they shouldn't be
obviously, if you work a 9:00 to 5:00 retail to put food on your table and a roof over your head, I think people aren't going to come to your house and yell at you for going to work anyway, but I had the ability to stock up on groceries beforehand and I plan to only make purchases of gas for my car during this time so that I can continue my harm reduction outreach work in my community. I am participating as much as I can which is what was asked of us, and that includes making some sacrifices like not going to cafe or buying a treat or whatever, but it's worth it to me and solidarity requires sacrifice
frankly, the people whose kneejerk reaction to bisan asking for a global strike form the 21st-28th is to say that it takes years to organize a general strike are really unhelpful! no one is saying otherwise, but palestine will be a smoking crater if we all wait for years to do anything - bisan is asking us to do something now. Like are we only supposed to do something if we can do it perfectly??? At some point it’s a valid critique about the work that goes into social movement, and at another point I feel like some people are just trying to absolve themselves from not putting any effort into observing a week of economic inaction.
like idk! I get it, okay! People have bills to pay that don’t magically go away for a strike, we don’t have nearly enough social infrastructure in place to support people to fully stop going to work for a week. But fuck, dude! Stop immediately responding in such a defeatist way! Cut out unnecessary purchases! Try to shop local! Put more effort into promoting Palestinian voices online! Attend a protest, call a local rep, do something!
Ultimately, the context of this (these) calls are different than ignorant calls for a general strike in the past for a few reasons:
1. It is being called for by someone affected by the situation. Social media calls in the past have often been called by people unconnected to the struggle or without any sort of connections to the work or others involved in the fight. Who are you calling for a strike? What is your role? Which gets into
2. Demands. With these calls for a strike, there are specific demands coming out for those in power to respond to. It’s not general dissatisfaction with capitalism, it’s not vague response to bigotry and oppression, there are goals. Ceasefire. Flow of humanitarian aid. End of occupation.
3. Very crucially, there is a spectrum for what is included in the general strike and a blatant recognition of how there isn’t time to prepare. Take off work (if you can), don’t go to school (if you can), don’t spend money (if you can), keep up pressure and protest (if you can), amplify Palestinian voices and sources, continue boycotting.
“Well I can’t call off work.” Neither can I, but there are items on the list I CAN do. Many people can’t attend protests but can pressure their reps. Many can’t pressure reps but can spread word on social media. Or financially support Palestinians. Or babysit for someone going to a rally. Or or or.
My law school once had a walkout. Those who couldn’t walk out wore something to show support. Signed petitions later. Pressured admin. If you “can’t do anything,” show support for those who can.
This is NOT the same as disorganized naive calls for strikes with no goals, no planning, and no thought.
Do not treat them the same if you cannot do everything asked. And do not waste your time asking Palestinians to forgive you for what little you can do when you could be doing any of the shit on this list instead.
California faculty at all CSU campuses will be striking the first week of the semester because tuition has been repeatedly increased while professors and lectures have nothing close to a livable wage, and now admin is trying to get students to snitch on professors who cancel classes as part of the strike. Absolute trash behavior.
Would be a shame if the system was clogged up with a bunch of bogus submissions.
Dear friends,
Thank you so much to all of you who have supported me s… Gilbert Ramsay needs your support for Get 5 year old Marlin out of Ga
If anyone wants to directly help a Palestinian family reunite in the UK, this young graduate student is trying to get her daughter out of Gaza. The UK government makes the visa process as difficult as possible, and the only thing that makes it easier is money. This fundraiser has already raised a good sum, but I know from experience that every penny counts, so please donate or share if you can.
#she only has a limited time before her visa switches over and the Tories have made it impossible for families to reunite on graduate visas (@archaeos)
"Connecting Humanity" is in handwriting at the top left corner, and "Connecting Gaza" is written in a different handwriting font near the bottom right.
"What do you expect from war, there's going to be collateral damage"
Collateral damage is a made up concept by people who can inflict unheard amounts of damage on a people.
Wiping out entire families, blowing up hospitals, and torturing and imprisoning civilians is not "collateral damage," or in other words *incedental* to combat. They were intentionally targeted.
I know you dont want to give Palestinians any humanity, but at the very least, don't excuse their martyrdom and displacement as something necessary.
Once again I have to change the needs. C had to go to the hospital last night and after a year of trying to figure out what was wrong with him, they found that he has gastric cancer and he has a couple masses on his stomach, surgery and a g-tube insertion are needed. His insurance covers most of it but it leaves $2,118 (also covers getting his g-tube). A spot just opened up on the 15th (next week) for him to get his surgery! I'm doing tarot and tea reading and resume help (pay what you can) and @scarsofbeauty and @saturnpandora are doing art commissions on their pages. i just noticed the typo, it's monday the 15th! For those who are unaware, C and R are my deceased best friends sons (7 & 3) who are currently in my custody.
$845 and 1 day left for c's surgery. 😞 updates for c will be in tags
Alligator Body Language and You, or: How To Know When An Alligator On Social Media is Being Stressed for Views
Alligators are wild animals. Despite the idiotic claims of animal abusers like Jay Brewer, they cannot be domesticated, which means they are always going to react on the same natural instincts they've had for millions of years. Habituated, yes. Tamed, yes. Trained, definitely. Crocodilians can form bonds with people- they're social and quite intelligent. They can solve problems, use tools, and they're actually quite playful. Alligators are also really good at communicating how they're feeling, but to somebody who doesn't spend much time around them, their body language can be a bit mystifying. And it doesn't help when social media influencers are saying shit like this:
That is not what a happy gator looks like.
That's a terrified, furious gator who isn't attacking because the ogre handling her has her in a chokehold. She's doing everything she can to express her displeasure, and he's lying about it because he knows his audience doesn't even know how to think critically about what he's doing. He knows that because his audience doesn't know anything about these animals, he can get away with it. This I think is why I hate him so much- he deliberately miseducates his audience. He knows what he's doing is factually inaccurate, he just doesn't care because attention means more to him than anything else in the world.
Let's change that! Here are two really important lessons for understanding alligator body language on social media.
Lesson 1: Alligators Don't Smile (in fact, most animals don't)
So what's going on in this video? Jay Brewer is aggressively choking his white alligator Coconut while scrubbing algae off of her with a toothbrush. And make no mistake, he is digging into the creature's throat while she is visibly distressed. He claims she's happy- but she's not. He is willfully misrepresenting what this animal is feeling. That's a problem, because people... well, we actually kind of suck at reading other species' body language. The reason for this is that we tend to overlay our own responses on their physical cues, and that's a problem. For example, let's look at an animal with a really similar face to ours, the chimpanzee. Check out Ama's toothy grin!
Wait, no. That's not a happy smile. That's a threat display. When a chimpanzee "smiles," it's either terrified and doing a fear grimace, or it's showing you its teeth because it intends on using them in your face.
How about a dog? Look at my smiling, happy puppy!
Oh wait no, this is a picture of Ryder when he was super overwhelmed by noise and people during a holiday party. He'd hopped up in my sister's lap to get away from stuff that was happening on the floor and was panting quite heavily. See the tension in the corners of his mouth and his eyes? A lot of the time when a dog "smiles," the smile isn't happy. It's stress! Why Animals Do The Thing has a nice writeup about that, but the point is, our body language is not the same as other species. And for reptiles, body language is wildly different.
For instance, look at these two alligators. Pretty cute, right? Look at 'em, they're posing for a Christmas card or something! How do you think they're feeling?
Well, I'll tell you how the normal one is feeling. He's annoyed! Why is he annoyed? Because the albino just rolled up, pushed another gator off the platform, and is trying to push this guy, too. I know this because I actually saw it happen. It was pretty funny, not gonna lie. He's not gaping all the way, but he was hissing- you can actually see him getting annoyed in the sequence I took right before this shot. Look at him in this first shot here- he's just relaxing, and you can see he isn't gaping even a little bit.
By the end, he's expressing displeasure, but not enough to actually do anything about it. He's annoyed, but he's comfy and that's where one of the best basking areas is, so he'll put up with it.
Reptiles open their mouths wide for a lot of reasons, but never because they are actively enjoying a sensation. Unless they're eating. No reptile smiles- they can't. They don't even have moveable lips. If a reptile is gaping, it's doing so because:
It is doing a threat display.
It is making certain vocalizations, all of which are threats. Alligators are one of the rare reptiles that do regularly vocalize, but most of their calls aren't made with a wide open mouth.
It is about to bite something delicious or somebody stupid. Check out this video- virtually all of the gaping here is anticipatory because these trained gators know darn well that the bowl is full of delicious snacks. (I have some issues with Florida's Wildest, but the man knows how to train a gator AND he is honest about explaining what they're doing and why, and all of his animals are healthy and well-cared for, and he doesn't put the public or his staff at risk- just himself.)
It's too hot and it has opened its mouth to vent some of that heat and thermoregulate. This is the main reason why alligators will often have their mouths part of the way open, but sometimes they'll open all the way for thermoregulation. This is what a thermoregulatory gape looks like- usually it's not all the way open, kinda more like < rather than V, but you can't say that 100% of the time. Additionally, a thermoregulatory gape... typically happens when it's hot out. If they're inside, maybe they've been under their basking light for too long. Heat's the dominant factor, is what I'm getting at.
There is another reason that a captive crocodilian might be gaping, and that's because it's doing so on command. Some places have their gators trained to gape on cue, like St. Augustine Alligator Farm and other good zoos. They have the animals do this in presentations that are genuinely educational. They ask the animals to open their mouths so that they can show off their teeth and demonstrate how their tongues seal off the back of their mouth. They'll also do it as part of routine healthcare, because looking at their teeth is important.
In this case, the animals aren't gaping because they're stressed, they're gaping because they know they're gonna get a piece of chicken or fish if they do it. And what's more, they're doing it on cue. They have a specific command or signal that tells them to open wide. It's not an instinctive response to a situation. It's trained. If the animal provides the behavior after a cue, the situation is much less likely to be negatively impactful.
It's also important to remember that there's a difference between a partially open mouth and a gape! As discussed above, alligators will often have their mouths a little bit open just to maintain temperature homeostasis. It helps them stay comfy, temperature-wise. These guys are all doing thermoregulatory open-mouthed behavior- that slight open and relaxed body posture is a dead giveaway. (That and it's the hottest spot in the enclosure.)
Lesson 2: A Happy Gator Is A Chill Gator
So if alligators don't smile or have facial expressions other than the :V that typically signifies distress, how else can you tell how they're feeling? One way is stillness. See, alligators subscribe to the philosophy of if it sucks... hit da bricks.
Basically, if they hate it, they'll leave. Unless, y'know, somebody has their meaty claws digging into their throat or is otherwise restraining them. (Restraint isn't always bad, btw. Sometimes the animal is going through a medical thing or needs to be restrained for their safety- which a responsible educator will explain.)
Let's look at a very similar scenario, in which a captive alligator is getting his back scrubbed.
As you can see, it's quite different. First, he's not being restrained at all. Second, look at how relaxed he is! He's just chilling there vibing! He could simply get up and leave if he wanted to, because he's not being held. Towards the end of the video, as he lifts his head, you can see that his respiratory rate is very even as his throat flutters a bit. I'm not sure what this facility is, so I can't comment on care/general ethics, but like. In this specific case, this is an alligator enjoying being scrubbed! And you can tell because he's not doing anything. A happy gator is content to be doing what they're doing.
Why Should I Listen To You?
Now, you should ask yourself, why should you listen to me? Why should you trust me, who does not own an alligator, versus Jay Brewer, who owns several?
Well, first off, there's no profit for me in telling you that what you're seeing on social media is in fact not what you're being told you're seeing. I'm not getting paid to do this. That's the thing with people who make social media content. The big names aren't doing it just for fun. They're doing it for money. Whether that's profit through partnerships or sponsorships, or getting more people to visit their facilities, or ad revenue, you can't ignore the factor of money. And this is NOT a bad thing, because it allows educators to do what they're passionate about! People deserve to be paid for the work that they do!
But the problem starts when you chase the algorithm instead of actually educating. A "smiling" alligator gets the views, and if people don't know enough to know better, it keeps getting the views. People love unconventional animal stories and they want those animals to be happy- but the inability to even know where to start with critically evaluating these posts really hinders the ability to spread real information. Like, this post will probably get a couple hundred notes, but that video of Coconut being scrubbed had almost 400,000 likes when I took that screenshot. Think about how many eyeballs that's reached by now. What I'm saying here is that it's just... really important to think critically about who you're getting your information from. What do dissenters say in the comments? What do other professionals say? You won't find a single herpetologist that has anything good to say about Prehistoric Pets, I can tell you that right now.
Another reason you can trust me is that my sources are not "just trust me bro," or "years of experience pretending my pet shop where animals come to die is a real zoo." Instead, here are my primary sources for my information on alligator behavior:
Dragon Songs: Love and Adventure among Crocodiles, Alligators, and Other Dinosaur Relations- Vladimir Dinets
The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles- J. Sean Doody, Vladimir Dinets, Gordon M. Burghardt
Social Behavior Deficiencies in Captive American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis)- Z Walsh, H Olson, M Clendening, A Rycyk
Social Displays of the American Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis)- Kent Vliet
Social Signals and Behaviors of Adult Alligators and Crocodiles- Leslie Garrick, Jeffery Lang
Never smile at a crocodile: Gaping behaviour in the Nile crocodile at Ndumo Game Reserve, South Africa- Cormac Price, Mohamed Ezat, Céline Hanzen, Colleen Downs (this one's Nile crocs, not American alligators, but it's really useful for modeling an understanding of gape behaviors and proximity)
Thermoregulatory Behavior of Captive American Alligators (Alligator mississippiensis)- Cheryl S. Asa, Gary D. London, Ronald R. Goellner, Norman Haskell, Glenn Roberts, Crispen Wilson
Unprovoked Mouth Gaping Behavior in Extant Crocodylia- Noah J. Carl, Heather A. Stewart, Jenny S. Paul
Thank you for reading! Here's a very happy wild alligator from Sanibel for your trouble.
Another thing that I really really like about how iwtv the show adapts the books . that a lot of people seem to not have noticed or be willfully ignoring. is that—much like how louis is not only no longer a slave owner but a black man with a complex relationship to exploitation, which provides a much needed critique of anne rice’s racist fetishistic view of new orleans and nostalgia for the old plantation south—the show doesn’t Just change armand’s character from a teenager to an adult. it also creates a critique of the incessant pedophilic fetishization of armand’s youth in the books through the rashid charade.
Armand in the books is constantly subject to the gaze of anne rices old guard of western civilization characters (marius, david, even lestat). he is constantly referred to as little devil, cherub, imp, child. but he’s described as tall and strong. he looks young but can pass as an adult. “little cherub” reflects his background as a child slave more than it does his physical appearance . there are points of quasi self awareness in his narration where it is obvious he is very tired of this perception of him. he is a teenager in the books but even then there’s a gulf between his actual traumatized and immortalized youth/young adulthood and the constant sexualized infantilization put upon him. (funnily enough fans of the book seem to constantly perpetuate that in their art and fic that depicts him as significantly younger than seventeen/eighteen)
“Rashid” is clearly an adult but there are obvious shades of that mischaracterization. he’s wearing clothing that makes him look smaller and slighter. Louis gives his weight at 138 lbs—which is already unrealistic—and daniel makes it even more glaring later in episode 7 when he misquotes it as “130 lbs soaking wet”. louis saying "rashid, you're in your twenties." And of course daniels “rent boy” comment. obviously the perception of rashid's relative powerlessness is upended in the final scene when he starts flying and says hes 400 years old. but the trailer/preview material also makes it really clear how much the vulnerability and youth of rashid is an act. a false perception. like laughably false and daniel (and clearly . much of the audience) fell for it. just as it's false even in the godawful source material. Bc this armand is in his late twenties and looks it. he is Broad shouldered. six feet tall. and left to his own devices slicks back his hair like a mafia don. All this to say i know it's often with normal intentions but i wish people would stop calling him a twink and saying they miss his cherubic curls . like pay attention.
WE ARE CURRENTLY: 1.6% OF THE WAY THROUGH NEEDED FOR THE TOTAL SUM ($818/$50’000)
If you want me to draw something for you, please send me proof of donation and I will be more than happy to help. If you can donate or spread the word I would be eternally grateful, please. They’ve already been displaced three times.
I HAVE BEEN GOING THROUGH HELL AT THE HANDS OF A WHITE PERSON IN MY COMMUNITY TRYING TO REPEATEDLY DEMONIZE ME AT NOW THE BUREAUCRATIC LEVEL FOR MY DISABILITIES AND RACE IN THAT WE ARE INDIGENOUS AND HAVE SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DID. AND THAT OUR SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DID (OUR "SCARY PERSONALITIES") ARE THE POINT OF FUCKING LITIGATION AND JUSTIFIED VIOLENCE AGAINST ME. IM ASKING ANY AND ALL PPL WHO SEE THIS FUCKING SHIT TO JUST. HEAR ME FOR A SEC. TOSS ME SOME CASH. WEVE BEEN GOING THROUGH HELL AND ON TOP OF IT ALL THERES A FUCKING COLD SNAP COMING THAT'LL PROBABLY PUT MY HOUSEHOLD OUT OF POWER FOR A FEW DAYS, SO WE'LL NEED MONEY TO GET PORTABLE CHARGERS AND OTHER SUCH TO STAY WARM AND CONNECTED THRU THE SNAP.
ANYTHING HELPS. IM REALLY JUST FUCKING EXHAUSTED THIS IS HAPPENING TO ME. DO NOT TAG THIS EITHER.
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