Please Please Please

the TERF i saw last night that was posting in the "conservation" tag had this post on their blog

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the blog was a side-blog of a popular terf blog, it was called "eco feminism" something I forget but they were trying to...connect with other terfs in the biological sciences?

...except they're not in the biological sciences, they're trying to "how do you do fellow STEM" with elementary school biology concepts that have been outdated for 50 years.

"how and why biological classifications are formed" is one of the thorniest, most complicated and debated topics in biology with many open unsolved problems.

Nowadays, organisms are classified into groups almost exclusively according to the information their genetics provides about their most recent common ancestors. Phenotypic traits that can provide information about the evolutionary history of a group are called character states, and they can be considered to "diagnose" or define a clade, but character states are used to support the grouping of organisms into a single clade, NOT the other way around.

For example, lactation has been recognized as evidence that all living mammals share a common ancestor that is not the ancestor of any other living animal (that is, mammals are more closely related to each other than to anything else). However, the definition of "mammal" is not "animal that lactates." A non-mammal could convergently evolve lactation (arguably, several already have) and would still not belong to "mammals," and a mammal could evolve to not lactate anymore and would still belong to "mammals."

This is why a shared trait is not by itself considered diagnostic of a clade, and taxonomists have to use a great deal of caution because their interpretation of organisms as belonging to a group will affect how they interpret those organisms' traits.

Today's taxonomic system does not just group organisms by similar traits. Traits often are lost or evolve several times separately.

"Biological classification" does not actually mean anything except "organism #1 and organism #2 have a more recent common ancestor than #1 and #3 do." Two organisms being classified as more closely related than another doesn't mean they share more phenotypic characteristics. This has been the dominant approach for decades.

Now, for my favorite part of this post:

I struggled to grasp what was meant by "that ridiculous argument they have about fish not being real" for a a solid few seconds before I realized that "they" doesn't refer to scientists, it refers to trans people.

this person thinks "fish aren't real" was made up by trans activists

In regards to research:

Don’t accept witchcraft books for history. Read history texts. 

Don’t accept witchcraft books for mental processes. Read psychology and biological texts. 

Don’t accept witchcraft books for mythology. Don’t accept witchcraft books for religion. Read original texts and papers written researchers credited in their fields. 

Use witchcraft books for witchcraft, and witchcraft alone. That is what they specialize in and what they are published for. If it branches out into a different subject, be suspicious and research the topic later. 

Legit though, we should start turning ecosystem restoration and work to make our world more tolerant to the effects of climate change into annual holidays and festivals

Like how just about every culture used to have festivals to celebrate the beginning of the harvest or its end, or the beginning of planting, or how whole communities used to host barn raisings and quilting bees - everyone coming together at once to turn the work of months or years into the work of a few days

Humble suggestions for festival types:

Goat festival

Besides controlled burns (which you can't do if there's too much dead brush), the fastest, most effective, and most cost-efficient way to clear brush before fire season - esp really heavy dead brush - is to just. Put a bunch of goats on your land for a few days!

Remember that Shark Tank competitor who wanted to start a goat rental company, and everyone was like wtf? There was even a whole John Oliver bit making fun of the idea? Well THAT JUST PROVES THEY'RE FROM NICE WET PLACES, because goat rental companies are totally a thing, and they're great.

So like. Why don't we have a weekend where everyone with goats just takes those goats to the nearest land that needs a ton of clearing? Public officials could put up maps of where on public lands grazing is needed, and where it definitely shouldn't happen. Farmers and people/groups with a lot of acres that need clearing can post Goat Requests.

Little kids can make goat-themed crafts and give the goats lots of pets or treats at the end of the day for doing such a good job. Volunteers can help wrangle things so goats don't get where they're not supposed to (and everyone fences off land nowadays anyway, mostly). And the goats, of course, would be in fucking banquet paradise.

Planting Festival and Harvest Festival

Why mess with success??? Bring these back where they've disappeared!!! Time to swarm the community gardens and help everyone near you with a farm make sure that all of their seeds are sown and none of the food goes to waste in the fields, decaying and unpicked.

And then set up distribution parts of the festival so all the extra food gets where it needs to be! Boxes of free lemons in front of your house because you have 80 goddamned lemons are great, but you know what else would be great? An organized effort to take that shit to food pantries (which SUPER rarely get fresh produce, because they can't hold anything perishable for long at all) and community/farmer's markets

Rain Capture Festival

The "water year" - how we track annual rainfall and precipitation - is offset from the regular calendar year because, like, that's just when water cycles through the ecosystems (e.g. meltwater). At least in the US, the water year is October 1st through September 30th of the next year, because October 1st is around when all the snowmelt from last year is gone, and a new cycle is starting as rain begins to fall again in earnest.

So why don't we all have a big barn raising equivalent every September to build rain capture infrastructure?

Team up with some neighbors to turn one of those little grass strips on the sidewalk into a rain-garden with fall-planting plants. Go down to your local church and help them install some gutters and rain barrels. Help deculvert rivers so they run through the dirt again, and make sure all the storm drains in your neighborhood are nice and clear.

Even better, all of this - ESPECIALLY the rain gardens - will also help a ton with flood control!

I'm so serious about how cool this could be, yall.

And people who can't or don't want to do physical stuff for any of these festivals could volunteer to watch children or cook food for the festival or whatever else might need to be done!

Parties afterward to celebrate all the good work done! Community building and direct local improvements to help protect ourselves from climate change!

The possibilities are literally endless, so not to sound like an influencer or some shit, but please DO comment or reply or put it in the notes if you have thoughts, esp on other things we could hold festivals like this for.

Canning festivals. "Dig your elderly neighbors out of the snow" festivals. Endangered species nesting count festival. Plant fruit trees on public land and parks festival. All of the things that I don't know anywhere near enough to think of. Especially in more niche or extreme ecosystems, there are so many possibilities that could do a lot of good

Now that's what I want to see when opening tumblr

I haven't interacted with my beloved Servamp in a good while. do not ask me why I drew this

There is a new subreddit called r/PeriodPantry that allows people who need period products to post wishlists. Many people are forced by poverty to chose between menstrual hygiene products and other necessities, and may end up skipping meals or suffering health problems or social isolation as a result of lacking hygiene products. Please feel welcome to post a period product wishlist, fulfill a wishlist, and/or reblog this post to help it reach others.

Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you’re done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation.

—Hao Jingfang, ‘Invisible Planets,’ in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, tr. & ed. Ken Liu

If I had the motivation to write again I would write an MHA fanfic. I don't know about what, but definitely one of those fics "What if that happened differently" and probably Izuku centered.

Probably a villain!deku fic because I can't find any good ones that are completed.

There'll be a moment when you realise you're 27 when yesterday you were just 17; and you wouldn't be able to tell how a decade passed away and your life got divided into before and afters. The fury of youth will subdue and nothing will really change but everything will feel different when you look at old photographs and blurry videos taken on cheap mobile phones. Scents will remind you of childhood and certain friends you don't talk to anymore, hangouts will become reunions and mom's burnt pie will become the best food you ever had. And I know on some days you won't be able to show anything of those 10 years but I hope you remember to breathe, and let go of the knot in your chest. I hope you go out in the sun and live a little, because tomorrow is 37.

Edit- I added the visualizer for this piece on my YT, check it out here

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The Flesh I Burned

One of the most reliable and popular instagram accounts covering what has been going on in Gaza @/sbeih.jpg has started a free online crash course about Palestine history and the decolonisation movement to help educate more people and spread awareness. It is on instagram @/palestine.academy and their website is thepalestineacademy.com. It is completely free and has tons of resources on how to get informed, find further information, and how to help Gaza right now. If you have the time I recommend exploring the website and following their instagram!!!