Like Ringo and Karen, minus the drum skills and the heat vision. Recovering pre-med // Former diaper model // Stunted musical theater kid // Sentimental & extroverted // Film, travel, science, food, Disney, and positive change enthusiastÂ
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatâs a big deal! Iâve never thought about it before but now that I have, itâs ridiculous to me that thatâs not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donât we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itâs July 20th. Thatâs the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iâm ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iâm going to have a goddamn potluck. Youâre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
Actually your society is the freaks for shooting everything that moves and burning half your "nature reserves" every year so that upperclass dandies can eat leaded pheasant. North Americans are the well adjusted ones here, your country has become a desolate suburban lawn in island form
my opinion as an american is that we spend way too much time trying to save african megafauna and nowhere near enough time making fun of the english for turning an entire island--which was once a hazelnut food forest--into a goddamn lawn.
bill bryson once actually wrote down in a whole book and got published that the english were superb gardeners and i about threw the book out the window i was that outraged. the english!!! the fucking ENGLISH. them? that's who you want to laud? the english
the
THERE ARE A GRAND FUCKING TOTAL OF ZERO STAPLE CROPS ORIGINALLY OR EVEN PRIMARILY CULTIVATED BY THE ENGLISH. NONE OF THEM. NOT POTATOES NOT WHEAT NOT TURNIPS NOT RYE. THEY GNAWED THEIR ISLAND DOWN TO A NUB FOR NOTHING. THE WOLVES AND BEARS ALL GONE FOR NOTHING. THE WILDCATS AND BIRDS AND MUSTELIDS AND INSECTS, GONE IN THEIR THOUSANDS, FOR NOTHING. FOR SOME SHEEP. FOR
THEIR MAIN AGRICULTURAL EXPORT IS FAMINE
anyway the english approach to agriculture, biodiversity, and environmentalism is roughly on par with a dog's approach to someone else's homework and everywhere in the world that has inherited their cack-fisted disdain for nature has suffered immensely. i can't overstate enough how bad things have been and still are.
please make fun of them. it's the least they fucking deserve.
Vaguely reminds me of how much Australia gets flack for its "cracked up"/dangerous wildlife. Or the emu war. Like at least they have biodiversity. People act like the world is solely OUR playground and the animals are an obstacle which couldn't be further from the truth.
Folks, this is not the UK. This is the entire western Europe. My grandpa was a mountaineer who have climbed most of the peaks in Iberia. My usual Saturday morning activity until I was 15 or so was to go for a hike in the mountains with him. My family home is also literally at the border of a forest.
The only wildlife bigger than a cat I've ever seen (birds aside), is some deer. From very, very, very far away. I've seen foxes maybe a dozen times? And that's it.
Also, I don't think there is any single point west of Vienna and south of Stockholm where you can be more than 30 km away from a village or other kind of permanent human settlement. Hell, if you don't count the Alps and the Pyrenees, I'm pretty sure you could reduce that to 10km. We literally don't have any old forests, and we haven't had them for centuries. I assume that north Africa and the middle east are similar, for similar reasons: lots of humans living in an area for a few millennia. We are just the orcs of Saruman.
Yeah! A full 2401 of them! All of them heavily monitored and living within a couple of national parks!
The fact we have A FUCKING LYNX CENSUS may tell you how common they are. The 2401 number is a huge success, because back in 2002 there were only 94 of them left.
children outside screaming: annoying but ultimately for the greater good. children need Going Outside and Screaming Time for proper emotional development. an auditory burden I am willing to bear
neighbor with his car he made louder on purpose: jail for neighbor. jail for ten thousand years
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatâs a big deal! Iâve never thought about it before but now that I have, itâs ridiculous to me that thatâs not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donât we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itâs July 20th. Thatâs the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iâm ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iâm going to have a goddamn potluck. Youâre all invited.
the situation in sudan is dire. allied militants are targeting sudanese people in darfur on the basis of nothing but their ethnic identiy. telecommunications in sudan have all but shut down, impeding access to details of the atrocities that are being committed as we speak. people are being killed, their homes are being looted, they're having to relocate to other cities--only to fall prey to militant forces again, which are going out of their way to pillage more and more areas. although it's been difficult getting hold of footage in sudan, the ones that have managed to come out have been entirely horrific. just like palestine, sudan is falling victim to ethnic cleansing.
ramadan is coming soon, and it's a time of selfless giving and kindness. as we come closer and closer to it, please consider donating to ramadanforsudan--an initiative started by SAPA to raise humanitarian aid for sudan. as always, even the smallest penny counts. if you can't donate, make sure to spread this to someone who can. this is extremely time-sensitive, and it could use all the donations and coverage it can get.
if you havenât seen any footage about sudan yet, itâs because they literally have a telecom blackout, giving militant forces the perfect chance to go on committing atrocities with no one the wiser. even so much as giving a sudanese journalist spotlight puts a target on their headâthatâs how dire the situation is getting. itâs important to elevate sudanese voices that are trying to communicate the severity of the mass cleansing happening in real time.
with that in mind, please consider donatingâhowever little it may be.
anyone else remember being a child and seeing the very neat handwriting of other little girls and somehow knowing that you were a different genre of person than they were
Many Afrikaners welcomed the end of apartheid, but 30 years on, theyâve found Black-majority rule in South Africa hard to live with.
This article is from 2022, but it came up in the context of Palestine:
Here are some striking passages, relevant to all colonial aftermaths but certainly also to the forms we see Zionist reaction taking at the moment:
Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by this white minority [i.e. the whole white population post-apartheid as a minority in the country], particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. As with white South Africans who had celebrated the end of apartheid, their enthusiasm often belied, just beneath the surface, a striking degree of fear, bewilderment, disillusionment, and dread.
[...]
Yet these progressivesâ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent. Contemplating South Africa after apartheid, an Economist correspondent observed that âthe lives of many whites exude sadness.â The phenomenon perplexed him. In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheidâs horrorsâand the regimeâs violence against those who worked to dismantle itâthe ANC encouraged an attitude of forgiveness. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to some perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes.
But as time wore on, even wealthy white South Africans began to radiate a degree of fear and frustration that did not match any simple economic analysis of their situation. A startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as âa sewer of betrayed expectations and thievery, fear and unbridled greed.â
What accounted for this disillusionment? Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, weâre showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. Youâll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.
The article goes on to discuss:
"Mau Mau anxiety," or the fear among whites of violent repercussions, and how this shows up in reported vs confirmed crime stats - possibly to the point of false memories of home invasion
A sense of irrelevance and alienation among this white population, leading to another anxiety: "do we still belong here?"
The sublimation of this anxiety into self-identification as a marginalized minority group, featuring such incredible statements as "I wanted to fight for Afrikaners, but I came to think of myself as a âliberal internationalist,â not a white racist...I found such inspiration from the struggles of the Catalonians and the Basques. Even Tibet" and "[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] also fought for a people without much political representation ⊠Thatâs why I consider him one of my most important forebears and heroes,â from a self-declared liberal environmentalist who also thinks Afrikaaners should take back government control because they are "naturally good" at governance
Some discussion of the dynamics underlying these reactions, particularly the fact that "admitting past sins seem[ed] to become harder even as they receded into history," and US parallels
And finally, in closing:
The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated. [...]
He just couldnât forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. âThe Bible was right about a thing or two,â he wrote. âIt is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if ⊠the gift is mercy.â
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