Hi comrade, I’m John. I’m the angry feminist your friend Chad warned you about. I’m trans/demigender (he/they), queer and white and was born in 1989. Saying it that way is easier than changing my age in my bio every year. I’m very, very depressed and severely unequipped to deal with the trials and tribulations of adulthood. I am a soft and tired bear (the gay kind, I’m not kin or furry, but not I’m not judgy). Trans/sex worker exclusionary radical feminists and MAPs are my enemy.
shout out to boys with thick thighs and stomach rolls. to boys with stretch marks. to short boys and boys with high pitched voices. boys who like wearing make up or dresses and boys who defy their “masculine” gender roles. to all boys with acne, eczema and any other skin conditions: you are all valid and worthy of love
I recall at least one of you guys having worked with livestock animals. Why are cows so damn indestructible while horses keel over and die if mercury is in retrograde or a dog barked in Kazakhstan?
Let me tell you a story about how livestock animals work.
In the beginning, God created the horse. God looked at the horse and saw that it was beautiful and strong. “However,” God said, “it breaks too easily.”
Then God created the cow. God looked at the cow and saw that it was more durable than the horse, and tasted good to boot. “However,” God said, “it poops too much.”
Then God created the goat. God looked at the goat and saw that it was perfect.
God looked around and saw that he still had some spare bits of fluff on his work table, but no brains to put into it. So then God created the sheep.
Now let me tell you what my equine surgery professor said on the first day of class.
“Horses are only interested in two things: homicide, and suicide.”
And that’s all you need to know about horses.
Except every goat is just waiting its turn to die of pneumonia
Sorry I’m not over “if a dog barked in Kazakhstan”.
My entirely half-assed understanding of Why Horses Explode If You Look At Them Funny, As Explained To Me By My Aunt That Raises Horses After Her Third Glass Of Wine:
Horses don’t got enough toes.
So, back right after the dinosaurs fucked off and joined the choir invisible, the first ancestors of horses were scampering about, little capybara-looking things called Eohippus, and they had four toes per limb:
They functioned pretty well, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, but they were mostly messing around in the leaf litter of dense forests, where one does not necessarily need to be fast but one should be nimble, and the 4 toes per limb worked out pretty good.
But the descendants of Eophippus moved out of the forest where there was lots of cover and onto the open plains, where there was better forage and visibility, but nowhere to hide, so the proto-horses that could ZOOM the fastest and out run thier predators (or, at least, their other herd members) tended to do well. Here’s the thing- having lots of toes means your foot touches the ground longer when you run, and it spreads a lot of your momentum to the sides. Great if you want to pivot and dodge, terrible if you want to ZOOM. So losing toes started being a major advantage for proto-horses:
The Problem with having fewer toes and running Really Fucking Fast is that it kind of fucks your everything else up.
When a horse runs at full gallop, it sort of… stops actively breathing, letting the slosh of it’s guts move its lungs, which is tremendously calorically efficient and means their breathing doesn’t fall out of sync. But it also means that the abdominal lining of a horse is weirdly flexible in ways that lead to way more hernias and intestinal tangling than other ungulates. It also has a relatively weak diaphragm for something it’s size, so ANY kind of respiratory infection is a Major Fucking Problem because the horse has weak lungs.
When a Horse runs Real Fucking Fast, it also develops a bit of a fluid dynamics problem- most mammals have the blood going out of thier heart real fast and coming back from the far reaches of the toes much slower and it’s structure reflects that. But since there is Only The One Toe, horse blood comes flying back up the veins toward the heart way the fuck faster than veins are meant to handle, which means horses had to evolve special veins that constrict to slow the Blood Down, which you will recognize as a Major Cardiovascular Disease in most mammals. This Poorly-regulated blood speed problems means horses are prone to heart problems, burst veins, embolisms, and hemophilia. Also they have apparently a billion blood types and I’m not sure how that’s related but I am sure that’s another Hot Mess they have to deal with.
ALSO, the Blood-Going-Too-Fast issue and being Just Huge Motherfuckers means horses have trouble distributing oxygen properly, and have compensated by creating fucked up bones that replicate the way birds store air in thier bones but much, much shittier. So if a horse breaks it’s leg, not only is it suffering a Major Structural Issue (also also- breaking a toe is much more serious when that toe is YOUR WHOLE DAMN FOOT AND HALF YOUR LEG), it’s also hving a hemmorhage and might be sort of suffocating a little.
ALSO ALSO, the fast that horses had to deal with Extremely Fast Predators for most of thier evolution means that they are now afflicted with evolutionarily-adaptive Anxiety, which is not great for thier already barely-functioning hearts, and makes them, frankly, fucking mental. Part of the reason horses are so aggro is that if deinied the opportunity to ZOOM, it’s options left are “Kill everyone and Then Yourself” or “The same but skip step one and Just Fucking Die”. The other reason is that a horse is in a race against itself- it’s gotta breed before it falls apart, so a Horse basically has a permanent terrorboner.
TL;DR: Horses don’t have enough toes and that makes them very, very fast, but also sickly, structurally unsound, have wildly OP blood that sometimes kills them, and drives them fucking insane.
FedEx: shits on my box, stomps on my box, kicks it, dumps gasoline on it, throws one of my chickens into the back of the van
UPS: whispers at my front door “is anyone home” as quietly as possible before leaving a “we missed you!” note, tries to gaslight me into thinking my address doesn’t exist
USPS: sets my package down gently where it’s not visible from the road, knocks on the door and kisses me directly on the mouth
Is this…shipping discourse?
Amazon once threw a package at my door and then took a photo while it was midair. Not sure where that fits in this schema but I did want to tell y’all about it.
im so hostile to advertising at this point is ill hear an ad for a podcast (which is something i would be able to listen to completely free), and just subconsciously am like “oh that sounds interesting id listen to that, too bad though”
Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Canada over the past decade has stopped or delayed an amount of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.
This is despite an onslaught of attacks against Indigenous activists over the past few years. Over the last few years, victories won against projects through direct actions have led to more than 35 states enacting anti-protest laws, jail time for protestors, thousands of dollars of fines, and even the killingof prominent activists.
Indigenous rights and responsibilities “are far more than rhetorical devices — they are tangible structures impacting the viability of fossil fuel expansion.” Through physically disrupting construction and legally challenging projects, Indigenous resistance has directly stopped projects expected to produce 780 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year and is actively fighting projects that would dump more than 800 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.
The analysis, which used publicly released data and calculations from nine different environmental and oil regulation groups, found that roughly 1.587 billion metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions have been halted. That’s the equivalent pollution of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants — more than are still operating in the United States and Canada — or roughly 345 million passenger vehicles — more than all vehicles on the road in these countries.
“From an Indigenous perspective, when we are confronting the climate crisis we are inherently confronting the systems of colonization and white supremacy as well,” Goldtooth said. “In order to do that, you have to reevaluate how you relate to the world around you and define what your obligations are to the world around you. It’s more than just stopping fracking development and pipelines and it’s more than just developing clean energy, it’s about actually fundamentally changing how we see the world itself.”