DEATH FACTORY

Performative self-flagellation over being white is not a substitute for doing serious introspection about the ways you have been complicit in or rewarded by a white-supremacist society, nor doing the work to dismantle white supremacy.

So I went and did some quick research and

It’s basically as bad as it sounds

They started breaking ground in 2019 but the government has been trying to build this airport since 2011. More and more of the locals don’t want it because of how it’ll destroy the area even though they’ve been offered a lot of money for their land and promised jobs. None of the scientists who work in the area want it. South America like Chile/Bolivia/Peru/Ecuador/etc etc etc are such unique and old places. The ecology in South America is so special and has species that are nowhere else in the world. The landscape is unusual and special. The people there have been able to maintain traditions despite colonization in a lot of cases. The artifacts there are priceless, we’ve lost so so so much to colonization, knowledge, architecture, culture, artifacts. These areas are delicate and need protection. A lot of the governments in South America have corruption, like anywhere else. The people and land are constantly sacrificed. The Atacama desert in Chile has so so much to protect and they’re mining nonstop for copper, polluting water, evicting eighty year olds and disabled people to make way for construction, piping away their water and plowing through a delicate desert ecosystem. There’s a clothes dump so big there you can see it from space

There’s so so much to lose in South America. If you visit the altiplano in Bolivia, there are native farmers living out there essentially off grid. Chile has many indigenous groups still despite being so industrialized. We still have Quechua, Aymara and Mapuche being spoken every day. The landscape MATTERS to us. It breaks my heart to see the land so disrespected and ruined. The people are connected to the land. You can talk to almost any indigenous group and they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s a cultural thing that was passed down for thousands of years. The shapes the mountains make against the sky, the way a lake sits between the hills, flocks of guanaco and vicuña grazing. The landscape is sacred and old

Actually they're not all cults and you're doing the work of making sure actual cults can slip under the radar when you say stuff like that

Cult leaders LOVE that trend, because they can point to it and say, "people will call anything a cult, it's basically meaningless"

tell someone "congratulations!" tell them "I'm so happy for you. I know you've been trying for a really long time." ask them "do you need help with anything?" throw them a party with loved ones where you all give them some gifts in acknowledgement of how expensive it is. celebrate how far along they are. take photos with them so they have a record of being loved while their body changes. allow them to voice fears and doubts and anxieties about how it'll go, and reassure them that they'll get through the intense medical procedure coming up & you'll be there for support no matter what. let them tell you about the gross parts and laugh together. really listen to them when they talk about how amazing and profound it is that the human body can do this. share in their excitement for beginning a new stage of their life.

humans are a weird, opportunistic, hyper-adaptable and variable primate and we have evolved to have a LOT of variety in size, shape, metabolism, and weight retention. this has been essential to survival in hard times and easy times. you know the thing people talk about sometimes how about half the population are night people and about half are morning people so we'd be better able to watch at night as a group? yeah, weight variation is like that: there's a lot of latent variation in human populations because as a community we survive significantly better if some of us are fuckin ready to not die during the longass winter of death and some of us can eat their weight in fish and then run a mile immediately after. this is also why some people gain muscle crazy fast and some people don't: muscle requires a lot of energy, so some people are built to gain a lot during a plentiful season and be really efficient then and some people are built to use less energy over time and be more useful during a long hungry period. cats and almost all other vertebrates simply don't have this kind of complex community variation built in, and tend to be much more uniform in build and weight. humans tend to be really variable in body and brain, and that's one of the biggest factors that's made us so successful! there are just a LOT of ways to be a human being.