It's Really Stupid

Happy Pride to everyone but especially to Arthur and Bert, my interspecies gay finches who are in love and are incubating... something?... in their nest??

When my zebra finch Arthur lost his elderly husband Bruce last December (at eleven years old, which is positively ancient for a zebra finch!), I was really worried that Arthur would have a hard time finding love again. Thankfully, my local bird shop guy had a gay male shaft-tailed finch he was having a hard time pairing AND who was from an aviary that co-housed zebra finches, so that worked out perfectly! After a brief introduction period these two started courting and they are now married and very, very happy together.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”

what I mean by that is colonizers viewed the nudity of black and indigenous people as "obscene" and inherently sexual because of the avid dehumanization of them. it's literally just fascist bullshit spread in people's brains SPECIFICALLY AMERICANS. (my European gf has told me many times that America's weirdness about nudity was strange and I agree)

We're not gonna let "protect the trans" be the new "protect the kids", in which neither party is protected and actually all parties are harmed.

Bodily autonomy means I get to do what I want with my meat vessel (and you with yours), and it remains the most fundamental right. Lose that, you risk everything.

Frankly, if a body makes you uncomfortable: good. Sit with that feeling. Assess your discomfort (do you dislike nudity, or are you being fatphobic? Do you dislike nudity, or are you being racist? Do you dislike nudity, or are you being transphobic? Do you dislike nudity, or do you need to silence your inner fascist?). Then realize you aren't being harmed. And move on.

Someone being naked near you, in your line of sight, does not harm you. There is no argument that holds water against this. Discomfort is not harm. Do not moralize your disgust.

You get to set boundaries for yourself, not for me.

Discomfort is not harm.