Poogona [he/him]

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it’s very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

It’s usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it’s heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn’t have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.

Unto Others has a great section about this. In a bunch of studied tribes who live generally pre-industrial lifestyles, the anthropologists were interested in how they “organize” big projects like building a house, and when they watched them, wondered what made them so willing to just do it.

Long story short, they saw how the kids watched them and subsequently “played” at doing things like building houses, carrying things together, etc. They essentially concluded that the “work” they did was understood more like play–that without any coercion to labor beyond meeting their needs, they were surprisingly eager to do that boring stuff because they made it into the day’s activity rather than grinding “work.”

TL;DR unalienated labor schniff and so on

One common test is the famous “mirror test” where an animal is given some problem that can only be solved by using its own reflection in a mirror for reference, such as a study involving an Australian ant. They put a blue dot made of felt (I think) on the ant’s head behind the antennae, and watched the ant clean itself once it saw that it’s reflection had a weird blue thing on its head. But I don’t know if there are other tests for “self awareness”

Look this is true but AT LEAST it’s how politics is supposed to work, it’s not about choosing the most ethically and morally consistent person, it’s about having a person in the seat who will vote the way their constituents want, no more

Hoooooly shit I forgot about the bedbug meltdown

HE GOOGLED “JEWS AS BEDBUGS” what a classic

Yeah I suppose the OP says “opinion” but this here fact has put me in the situation in the picture more than once

Bugs are not just bugs

Bugs are a subcategory of insects and you are wrong almost every time you call any old insect a bug

No need to go all the way to beatnik wandering artist. I feel like the creative urge can strike any person at any time, and the problem with this is that as things are currently organized, that spark will be smothered. Part of demonstrating to people why they should want things to change is appealing to those who have felt that happen to them. I don’t think a person ever forgets the pain of it, and it can happen to anyone.

I just responded to a pretty similar position below.

It is silly to conflate opposition to the status quo with intellectualism. Those visionaries whose ideas led to paradigm shifts were still building upon previous consensus. Sometimes being correct puts you at odds with the group, but so does being COMPLETELY WRONG.

Sometimes

If I was in college still there’s a part of me that would have wanted to make it my life’s work to reach the same level of “legitimacy” as PeePee Jordanson so that I could spend all my time sabotaging his reputation as publicly as possible

This is an uncomfortable reality but the more recent examples of the sciences and humanities being considered progressive overall gives me hope.

Yeah probably. I don’t like the idea of having faith in science of course, considering that science is done by people, and people aren’t infallible. But it’s the best tool we have for preserving and interacting with past ideas and breakthroughs. I suppose the thing I’d have to have faith in is humanity’s drive to understand a “truth” that holds up to scrutiny, instead of the characterization some have of human beings as creatures that wish only to satisfy existential terror incuriously.

I get what you are saying, but I don’t think anti-intellectualism refers to people being against people who happen to have “intellect.” And also, this claim about being a true intellectual seems like an impossible standard. It’s possible to rigorously scrutinize an assumption drawn from smart types, sure, but nobody has the time to do that for everything that makes up their understanding of reality.

I could tell you right now that sidewinder rattlesnakes don’t use their heat-sensitive facial pits to select thermally ideal ambush sites, they just use their eyes to pick a site that looks good. You could not deduce this without experimentation. (I was part of a study that tested it.)

Now, you could trust that I’m telling you the closest thing to the truth that is known in the world of rattlesnakes, but let’s say you want to be intellectual by your definition and go know it without just taking my (admittedly qualified) word for it. You could go get a herpetology degree, go convince a grad student that it would be worth challenging our conclusion, and spend another three months like we did out in the desert catching snakes and running experiments with thermal cameras.

You probably don’t want to do that, because you probably don’t have the highly specific interest in snakes that we had, and so it would feel like a waste of your time. In the end, I think you’ll probably admit that I know more about this snake topic than you, you’ll accept my conclusion, and go around understanding it without having personally studied or observed it, and that’s a good thing because it will free you up to go figure something out that fits into your interests and you can share your findings with me in turn.