Rabbits Manage Their Predators
Rabbits manage their predators
We've all seen the graph of lynx and snowshoe hares where the rabbit populations increase and lynx increase with larger litters and increased survival to adulthood in response to the abundance of food. Eventually the lynx outpace the rabbits and eat all the available rabbits and starve themselves to death back down to numbers that can survive on the number of available rabbits at which point the hares, being R strategists can reproduce faster than K strategist lynx and the whole cycle starts over again.
It's used as a classic example in ecology courses of predators preventing prey populations from overwhelming a landscape. And we see it as a cautionary tale about the need for good stewardship of resources and need for population control to prevent the suffering of boom and bust cycles.
That story is not quite accurate. The people who came up with that interpretation where all children of privilege and identified with the predators. It wasn't until more scientists from indigenous and lower-class groups began to make up the ranks that we questioned that story.
The hares are actively starving out their predators through solidarity.
When stress levels build up in hares from constantly being hunted and close escapes, this changes their reproductive system to have much smaller litters. Even when stressed individuals mate with outside hares, they have small litters and males somehow induce their unstressed mate to produce smaller litters even if she would otherwise have produced a large litter.
The entire population of hares effectively withholds their bodies from the predators by not reproducing beyond just enough to keep the species alive while laying low for long enough to starve the majority of their predators to death and force them to have smaller litters in response.
It seems to me there is a lesson in there for us in the midst of Capitalism. Stop having kids and starve the system of labor.
Then let the invisible hand of supply and demand do its magic to raise wages and reduce housing prices.
You can't afford to strike. They might fire you if you slow down too much (I still think a national slowdown is a safe bet). But they can't do jack to you for not breeding (yet).
So focus on your career and having fun and living a life of service to make a better future.
More Posts from Drowningworms and Others
Also rabbits are brutally effective at managing their predators.
Insect Dreams
Recognizing propaganda and reminding yourself why it is BS does a huge amount to reduce the effectiveness of propaganda.
But, let the reader be aware, this does not make propaganda ineffective. It still works. It just takes longer. Some people fight it better than others. But for the average [White] American, the time we are 40 or so, we internalize too much of it find ourselves falling asleep into the American Dream and identifying with White upper middle class suburbia, status quo, the cops, American Empire, Capitalism, and billionaires.
A new myth. A myth is not meant to be accurate history, but to tell a story that conveys a deeper spiritual truth. Stories are powerful.
This myth is the over-arcing story of Genesis to Jesus.
I'm not trying to save you or anything. And I don't think God is waiting for us somewhere else. God is always with us, walking with you and me and every other person through time and never turns away. But home is where the heart is. And God wants us to come home to the heart of God where there is Love, kindness, justice, generosity, Creation, the poor, the oppressed, etc. The things God loves and cares about.
I don't even really want you to believe the truths within the story. I just want you to consider the possibility and see if it resonates for you with history, our experiences, scripture, and who we know God to be as revealed in Jesus. You need to wrestle with this angel and make it make sense to you. Especially if you can't understand. The less you understand the more I beg you to listen again and sit with it.
You might hear a bit of anger or derision especially in the first few minutes. I'm not angry or derisive towards you or Christians in general or Jews at all. Any anger or derision towards people/powers towards those much, much higher up the food chain than you or anyone you know (probably).
As I tell the story, I am using lots of voice inflections to tell the story and that include sometimes a sing-song or sarcastic tone. The tone of the story is never to make fun of the reader or Christians. It's never to say that I'm smarter than anybody or put people down or anything like that.
The purpose of the incredulous voice inflections is occasionally to draw your attention to a joke, but usually it is to highlight the absurdity of the story we were given. The absurdity of the theology we were given. And the absurdity of the judgmental, autocratic, 1-strike picture of God we were given.
I really don't want to convince you of anything. If you have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, and understanding, you'll probably be able to recognize the messages in here.
Rather than looking to confirm or reject the ideas you are expecting to find, please just consider. These are brand new ideas (for you anyway) using old pictures and familiar stories. But they are not the same ideas or messages. I'm telling a different story.
See how it is different.
Consider what's different about this story & consider a few of these as you go:
-what is different from the original stories we were given (as you know them)
-what is different about the meaning
-is it more or less likely to be true than your present understanding of things, given all we know?
-Does it resonate with who we know God, humanity, creation, & the World to be?
-Does it seem truer in meaningful ways?
-Does it somehow misrepresent God or Truth?
-Does it encourage more things of God?
-Does it more things of the World?
-What do you think of the Paul and Philemon story?
Wouldn't it be such a different kind of military and a different kind of country if our brave soldiers were normally used for something other than Empire and oppression for the MIC or deployment against other Americans for protesting too well.
NeSpoon is a Polish artist, born in Warsaw, who mixes the delicacy of lace with the roughness and freedom of urban art
I love tumblr tags so much. Like okay here’s the main post and here’s my little secret thoughts and addendums for the besties
im fucking sobbing why did they kill him twice in a row in the community notes
My personal take that that makes the most sense to me anyway, in light of all we know of history, scripture, context, God, and empires is this:
The Beast from the Sea is the representation of an empire's mix of Oppression/Colonialism/Capitalism
The Dragon-tounged Beast that tells the world to worship the first beast is the Empire's religion.
====================
Here's why:
For John of Patmos, that religion was a dragon in his future.
For us, we can look back upon the emergence of the Dragon-like Beast. We see an empire worshiping religion that twisted a beautiful, liberating story. Enslaving all the world to the Empire Beast and forcing them to worship the Empire Beast and approve or even join in on it's exploitation and oppression.
A dragon-like beast that eventually got reformed a bit here and there to become one of the most pervasive world religions today.
Forms of that reformed religion of empires and oppression are practiced all over this world. A more or less reformed religion also practiced with varying levels of reformation in America that most of us now just call "Christianity".
I wonder how reformed our dragons are.
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