I watched this as a kid and internalized it for forever
Lilo and Stitch really said “This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little, and broken, but still good. Yeah. Still good.” And i still live by that
You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is? I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.
See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done.
BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back.
And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels.
There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.)
They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed.
So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem.
And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable.
And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer.
But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off. Woopie.
I fully understand why westerners thought the platypus was a hoax at first. I’m looking at a real live one moving around and it STILL looks fake.
The one thing that could have made them sound any more made up would have been if you said the boys have secret viper fangs that can absolutely fuck you up with venom, and they do, on their goddamn feet.
cursed platypus facts: * five (5) X chromosomes * only the left ovary works * produces milk but has no nipples. the mother just kind of sweats milk out their chest. nature is beautiful * was nearly called the “duckmole” * swims with its weird fish eyes and ears closed, hunting entirely by electroreception * born with teeth, but then they fall out
my favorite era in history is the one where people discovered you could make cartoons out of typography and newspapers would run articles that were just like “today dennis the intern figured out how to draw a dog with the typewriter so here it is”
YEA. i had a relationship with someone and she dropped the “te amo” super quicky and i was like…………”thats ok, thank you, but im gonna be honest w you….i’m not saying te amo until i really feel it” thats how serious it is.
te amo IS very serious, very deep, very intimate. when you want to tell someone that you love them without it being massive, the term you want is te quiero
cant believe no one had contributed this
Same for German imho?!??? Ich liebe dich is THE confession. You don’t drop it in a joking way.
It might just be me, but I wouldn’t randomly pepper Я люблю тебя into conversation either. It feels… too much.
Maybe it is the English one that is weird
I tell my close friends “I love you” all the time. I think It’s different if I were to say “I’m in love with you”.
In these non-English languages, do parents not tell their children “I love you?” Or is it only romantic?
Oh, I’m monolingual but I know a bit about this one! :D
So, in a lot of languages, there are multiple verbs that mean, “to love,” which are each situational, while, in English, we derive the meaning through context
Like, “Te quiero,” refers to love for friends and family, aka platonic love, while , “Te amo,” or, “Ai shiteru,” in Japanese, is so achingly tender and romantic that you might as well write the other person a receipt for your heart, because it’s theirs now
At some point, English did have multiple verbs for, “to love,” but eventually English speakers decided, “to hell with it, I only want 1 broad term for these big mushy feelings,” because we hate having multiple words for things almost as much as we hate punctuation
TL;DR: cultures that are non-English speaking do tell their kids they love them, they just have multiple words that mean, “To love,” and English is the odd man out because it got tired of that and went
The ancient greeks really had graves for dogs. And they carved stuff on the stone like “carrying you here, I now feel as much grief as I felt joy when I carried you home” and “you never barked without reason, but now you are silent”. The human urge to tell a story spans centuries and millennia, and the loss of a really good dog makes you want to tell people - even people centuries in the future, who will never know your name - that there once was a dog who was a very good girl, but now she no longer is and you aren’t sure what to do with all this sorrow.
This is my very favourite thing.
Last year, I found this one tucked away in a corner of the archaeological museum in Istanbul:
The inscription reads:
“His owner buried the dog Parthenope, that he played with, in gratitude for this happiness. [Mutual] love is rewarding, like the one for this dog. Having been a friend to my owner, I deserve this grave. Looking at this, find yourself a worthy friend who is both ready to love you while you are still alive and will care for your body [after your death].“
On so many of the other funerary carvings, the text was often more about the person who commissioned the carving than the person the carving was commissioned for. This one, which is for a dog, doesn’t even identify his owner—it’s entirely about a very, very good boy named Parthenope, who was loved so much that he will be remembered forever.
