Superbat is great, partly because of [gestures] but ALSO because Bruce Wayne, famous person and billionaire and like, random reporter. He might be a well known and liked reporter, but random. Reporter. From Kansas.
You know what the most frustrating thing about the vegans throwing a fit over my “Humans aren’t Parasites” post is? I really wasn’t trying to make a point about animal agriculture. Honestly, the example about subsistence hunting isn’t the main point. That post was actually inspired by thoughts I’ve been having about the National Park system and environmentalist groups.
See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done.
BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back.
And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels.
There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.)
They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed.
So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem.
And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable.
And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer.
But apparently the idea that subsistence hunting might actually not be a moral catastrophe really set the vegans off. Woopie.
it bugs me that this is not a very creative redraw but also i’m inexperienced with colors + was feeling kinda lazy. it still came out nice i think, and i got to spend a healthier amount of time on it :D
No new Project Voltage song this week, but some more official art showcasing Kaito being a Water-type trainer and working alongside Miku. The artwork is titled “with the sea” by iximaxima.
I wonder if we’ll get a few other Vocaloids during the Project’s break weeks?
“My father told me once, he said, “If you see something wrong happening in the world, you can either do nothing, or you can do something”. And I already tried nothing.”
he’s forty years old. he’s babygirl. he’s unhinged. he’s creating problems for himself and everyone else. he’s god’s favorite punching bag. he’s a whore. he’s pathetic. he’s my poor little meow meow
fatphobia and ableism is so insidious. You can look up like, food, and it’ll say “eating a lot of food causes diabetes” and you’re like oh dang what? I thought we didn’t know the cause of diabetes. So you look up what causes diabetes and it says “we still don’t know what causes diabetes” bruh they’re just making shit up to give people eating disorders
it’s becoming clearer that “being fat makes you diabetic” is actually misapplied observation and like, backwards cause and effect. insulin resistance is the main factor in type 2 diabetes. it was thought being fat made you insulin resistant. turns out it’s the other way round; insulin resistance causes the body to store fat at a greater rate. like yes, once the weight is gained it can then contribute more to resistance and things can snowball, but the initiating factor is not being fat.
Also worth mentioning how hard it is to find good advice around healthy eating or exercise because almost all of the information available assumes your goal is to lose weight. So you’ll find a hundred articles for how you can reduce calories, but nothing about how you can eat more vegetables while managing a budget and still feeling satiated. Because professionals assume your goal is to lose weight, not to feel better in your body. It’s so incredibly frustrating.
As a chronically Ill/disabled fat person who just got diagnosed with full blown diabetes:
They want to blame us, because then it’s our faults and they can feel good about themselves for ‘doing everything right’. That’s it.
Diabetes can’t ‘just happen’ because then it could happen to anyone. The same with every other illness and disability. If it can ‘just happen’ then this perfectly ‘healthy’, skinny person could do everything ‘right’ and still one day develop diabetes or other illnesses. They can’t handle that, so they pick at every little possible thing that a fat/ill/disabled person has ever done until they find that thing you supposedly did ‘wrong’ to cause this thing that they so desperately don’t want to happen to them.
And this goes for everyone, including doctors and other medical professionals because they have been taught this same thing. That there must be a reason this thing happened to a person, and it’s easier if it was their fault. To look for that thing the patient must have done wrong, because then you have the ‘answer’ and the blame. And then you, the medical professional, are not culpable for any misstatements, misunderstandings, misdiagnosis, that you have done or will do.
And the cycle will continue forever as long as self-proclaimed healthy, skinny people continue to live in fear of ever not being healthy, skinny people. Being fat and sick is one of the worst things they can ever imagine to happen, and it must be our faults because if not… if not then what horrible, terrible things to then happen to them and their precious bodies?
