Hm, I think there are different subgroups of vegans that lead to this ambiguity. Many queer and other marginalized people tend to emphasize with other emancipatory struggles and have an intersectional awareness. Being vegetarian/vegan comes naturally with this.

On the other hand, many vegans I’ve seen online or that explicitly identify with veganism itself, are heterosexual cis men that made it their identity to be vegan. Maybe a secondhand marginalization they choose in “behalf of the animals” as a way not to confront themselves with their own position of privilege.

I feel like any vegan organization will be full of the latter sort because it is about identifying strongly with veganism. That’s how Peta has made sooo many discriminatory advertisements and why vegan organizations often are shitty to marginalized people. If they had more of an intersectional point of view, this would certainly not happen!

I’m vegan and trans btw :)

Was curious, so I looked it up: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/o7-slang

Für DmMacniel, mich und sehr viele andere trans Personen ist dieser Begriff sehr negativ konnotiert. Auch wenn vielleicht nicht vergleichbar mit dem N- oder Z-Wort, ist die Diskussion darum, was nicht-betroffene Menschen für Wörter benutzen ähnlich. Wenn du nicht weißt, was du für Wörter benutzen kannst, die von der entsprechenden Community befürwortet werden, dann hast du doch jetzt schon einen freundlichen Hinweis darauf bekommen, dass der Begriff, den du benutzt, nicht gut ankommt. Deine defensive Haltung und das versuchte Erklären der eigenen Diskriminierung zeigen aber, dass du dich wie sehr viele priveligierte Menschen verhälst und dich dazu berufen fühlst, über uns Betroffene zu urteilen. Das tut dann wirklich mehr weh, als jedes Wort, das du sagen kannst und zeigt deine eigentliche Haltung, dass du dich insgeheim über uns und all den anderen von dir aufgezählten Gruppen von Menschen stehend fühlst…

Because no one should give Google any more money! Buying second hand/refurbished is the only way it makes sense for me to get a device by a large corporation like that.

I’ve had a couple of refurbished pixel phones and they’ve each worked well for years. The battery health was at about 95% when I bought them I think.

Yup!!

I think baby-like facial features are just a part of the domestication syndrome. There has been this long-going domestication experiment with silver foxes that could show that when only selected for tameness the foxes still expressed most of the traits found in other domesticated animals, too.

Belyaev was correct that selection on tameness alone leads to the emergence of traits in the domestication syndrome. In less than a decade, some of the domesticated foxes had floppy ears and curly tails (Fig. 2).

Over the course of the experiment, researchers also found the domesticated foxes displayed mottled “mutt-like” fur patterns, and they had more juvenilized facial features (shorter, rounder, more dog-like snouts) and body shapes (chunkier, rather than gracile limbs) (Fig. 3).

Aw sorry, didn’t get the irony in your original statement…

The older, nicer version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYbWjJsLymE

The newer, more extreme version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COOxP3_HFcM

It’s shows a wasp and not a bee…

Well, if you look at any animal species, assume variations to occur. There are so many different sexes, genders and sexualities out in the animal kingdom, but our society’s cisheterosexual bias has conditioned us to believe that all animals are straight and cis…

As a reading suggestion you may look into Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden

Yeah, I’ll probably do the same :)

Have fun with iNat!

Sorry, what? I don’t understand what you mean :/

Oh nice, I’ve thought about contributing to osm for a long time but this makes it so much easier to do that!!

I’ve looked into what I can do in my close vicinity and there are many roads that still miss their width. However, the app suggests to install an app (streetmeasure) to measure the width. This app is however based on Google AR services (that don’t work on my degoogled phone. How do you guys deal with that? Do you just ignore those tasks or do you guesstimate the road width by eye?

Oh, and another thing: If you like something to do on your walks, may I suggest also looking into iNaturalist (and the companion app Seek), too. While you are walking around you can find so much stuff out there that you’ve previously overlooked. When I go through any street now I spot bugs and plants everywhere!

Das ist mal wieder so eine scheiß Panikmache, um das eigene Thema (und Buch!) besser zu verkaufen. Dabei ist die Schwere von dem eigentlichen Problem leider unmöglich einzuschätzen, weil es hier so aufgebauscht wird. Ich würde mir eine sachliche, neutrale Berichterstattung wünschen. Das hier ist eher auf dem Niveau von “alle haben Vitamin D Mangel und müssen SOFORT Präparate schlucken!!!”… :(

Und dann noch der casual Heterosexismus nebenbei:

die liegt für Frauen bei etwa einem Glas Weißwein am Tag oder einer Flasche Bier für den Mann

So unnötig 🙄

Cycads have palm-like leaves though, so veeery different! I’d say baobabs are not too different in their growth habit from other Bombacoideae (Malvaceae). Compare with e.g. Ceiba, Pseudobombax, Cavanillesia. And the leaves look just like most Malvaceae plants as well ;)

Fun fact: Pseudobombax trees can actually do photosynthesis with their trunk, which is green (or at least has green streaks).

Stimme euch beiden zu. Sowohl klingen so abstrahierte Beschreibungen plötzlich viel komischer. Aber bei den meisten (allen?) kulturell als “natürlich” oder “immer schon gewesen” wahrgenommenen Traditionen/Denkweisen ist es wichtig, immer wieder zu überlegen, warum man das eigentlich tut oder denkt. Warum essen wir unbefruchtete Menstruationsprodukte und woher kommt der komische Glauben an einen eierlegenden (oder zumindest versteckenden) Hasen? Zweiteres ist harmlos, ersteres nicht…

1000%!! Over the years I’ve lent it to various people and they all loved it very much. It has been the most influential book for me regarding how I view society, capitalism and anarchism.

Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn’t hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn’t want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don’t like sharing that power.

Reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science…

Wikipedia says the following:

The use of the common names frog and toad has no taxonomic justification. From a classification perspective, all members of the order Anura are frogs, but only members of the family Bufonidae are considered “true toads”. The use of the term frog in common names usually refers to species that are aquatic or semi-aquatic and have smooth, moist skins; the term toad generally refers to species that are terrestrial with dry, warty skins. There are numerous exceptions to this rule. The European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina) has a slightly warty skin and prefers a watery habitat whereas the Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) is in the toad family Bufonidae and has a smooth skin.

Reading the introduction of the study (first link), they completely fail to explain why they call this language. Like, first they explain that fungi also have action potentials and that this seems to work like neurons and then they immediately jump to talk about how this could be a language. Am I missing something here? This seems like a legit paper, but why don’t they even attempt to explain or discuss this?