Not only do I run into people who think insects and other arthropods don’t qualify as animals, I run into people who know that they’re “technically” animals but they’re of the “opinion” they shouldn’t be.
What are people actually judging by here, though? Intelligence? Because there are definitely vertebrates like us with barely more brainpower than a cockroach, and then there are invertebrates like octopuses, as genetically distant from us as a cockroach but intelligent enough to learn people’s faces and solve puzzles. Are they going by anatomy? That an arthropod is supposedly just “too different” physically to be lumped with us as animals?
Let me show those folks something:
Here’s the animal kingdom. The giant pale blue is all the arthropods, the insects and spiders and crabs and things.
The pale green sliver is the chordata, which contains just three groups. One of those three groups is the vertebrata, literally every single animal with a skeleton: humans, horses, eels, owls, snakes, frogs, all the things people apparently think are “real” animals.
One of the other three types of chordata, your closest possible cousins, are these things, the lancelets:
Just like you, they have a notochord, which during embryonic development becomes your spinal column.
The third kind of chordate, and actually even closer to you genetically than a lancelet, is a tunicate, and here’s an example of one kind of tunicate:
This is a colony of several thousand little bags with mouths and anuses and virtually no other organs. As larvae, they resemble tadpoles and also have a notochord like you once did in the womb, but then they absorb it as they mature. These are our nearest cousins on the planet.
Now unlike the mature tunicate, an insect is a creature with a clearly defined head, jaws, legs, feet, eyes, a complete brain, practically anthropomorphic compared to those bags of filter-feeding jelly, yet it’s the bags of filter feeding jelly that share an immediate ancestor with you. If “bugs” are too weird to be animals then what the hell are we?
Basically if you’re going to say an insect shouldn’t be considered an animal, you may as well say a cactus shouldn’t be considered a plant because it looks funny.
On this day, 2 August 1980, a timebomb exploded in an air-conditioned waiting-room in Bologna train station, killing 85 people and injuring over 200. Carried out by neo-fascists, it is one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history, and was undertaken during the Strategy of Tension: a state security operation in which attacks by the far right or security services were carried out and blamed on anarchists and communists. This is a short account of the program: https://libcom.org/history/articles/strategy-of-tension-italyhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1179978342187314/?type=3
This is how the system of white supremacy operates. The media is used 2 create stereotypes like blk on blk crime.They need black men to fill jail cells for the Prison Indstrial complex
You know what? I’m tired of this. I do not know what exactly they are waiting for. I mean our government comes up with “reasons” to invade other countries, such as Syria, like their government is allegedly violating human rights or something like that. but… I mean for other countries, they do not even have to go deep to bomb the fuck out of this place, they can just look at our media. And this has been happening to people of color since the media has existed.
I’ll never forget this
👇🏾
Did a research project on this in undergrad and the results are extremely alarming because it’s not just in imagery, it’s in language used even in the law making process and within our own communities in a completely different way than expected.
Yuuuup talk about this in our media culture and society class where the exact same Katrina sample was used. White supremacy runs far too wide and too deep to be denied that it exists
Europe is currently being burned alive and people still think climate change is a joke. It’s warmer in North Europe than in the middle eastern deserts.
Nearly all northern countries broke their decades old heat records this week.
Its only in the low hundreds in farenheit??? In America we get that for like a month or two straight every year??? Y'all need to deal is it really normally so cold over there that yall can live with a little heat???
If you’re gonna have an ignorant American attitude then please only stay on American posts. No one in North Europe has an AC in their houses. Stores, animal shelters, elderly houses, no one has AC. the houses are designed to keep the heat in. The people are not accustomed to the heat. A sudden climate shift like this is extremely dangerous to older people and babies specifically.
There are programs being run to inform elderly people what to do to not die in this heat. There was a heatwave in the Netherlands in 2010 in which approximately 500 more elderly people passed away than normally.
Northern Europe is on the same latitudes as Alaska (which also seems so have had a similar heat wave earlier this summer). The nature can’t just simply ‘deal’ with this lol so shut up.
On this day, 2 August 1917, a walkout began on the railways in New South Wales which spread across the country and became known as the great strike or Australian general strike. Workers at the Randwick and Eveleigh workshops walked out in protest at a new time and motion system, which spread across the railways. With the background of big drops in real pay during World War I, coalminers, waterfront workers and seamen also walked out, and were later joined by sugar, timber, meat and gas workers: around 100,000 in total. Prime Minister Billy Hughes, a former union official and Labour Party PM, alongside local authorities, organised strike breaking on a mass scale bringing in middle-class and university student “volunteers” to work as scabs, and militarising Port Pirie. Union leaders called off the stoppage having achieved no concessions on 9 September, which was angrily denounced by workers in mass meetings. Some groups of rail, mine and waterside workers kept striking up until December, but eventually they were forced to return to work defeated. However by 1919 the working class had re-organised, and launched a new massive strike wave and drove out the scabs from 1917.
More info about Hughes and this time period in Australian history in our podcast episode on the IWW in Australia: https://workingclasshistory.com/2019/01/28/e19-the-iww-in-australia
Pictured: women workers and strikers’ wives demonstrate during the dispute https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1179485095569972/?type=3
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
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