Macadamia Platypus

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Reblogging this with these tags because oh my goodness

To the person I reblogged this from THANK YOU i am now going to stick this on my pinboard where I’m gonna see it every single day

Cause like

I dont know about anyone else

But I am perpetually hovering three inches above the strong subconscious belief that everyone knows what they're doing at all times except me, so if you change your normal patterns and I notice, then I will assume it is an intentional choice with a thought-out plan behind it and I will avoid interfering

"I feel like I'm the only one who does this chore. Can we start taking turns?"

"I'd like you to ask me how I'm doing more often."

"It bothers me when this area stays messy so long. Can you do X when Y happens?"

"I feel like the onus is on me to initiate X, and it's wearing me down. Could you try making the first move more? Like 3-4 times a week?"

"I'm feeling upset right now and I'd like to spend some time with you."

"When X happens, I feel like you're taking my work for granted."

"I'm feeling neglected. Could you do X?"

"I'm burnt out and need help."

"I feel like I'm the only one putting effort into X."

"Do you notice this?"

"Are you bothered by this?"

"I am bothered when this happens."

"X habit of yours bothers me."

They were just all manner of appalled and furious about the concept, about how much of the legal precedent the world runs on would have to be thrown out, about how humans and business interests would survive having to grant a river what a river needs and take its best interests into account like it was a person, and---

Many decades later, the New Zealand parliament passed the Te Awa Tupua Act, recognizing the Whanganui River as a living being with legal personhood.

The paper written by that professor on the concept of nature having personhood, "Should Trees Have Standing?" published in 1972, was at first received as an utter absurdity; it became, in Macfarlane's words, "a landmark in jurisprudence;" and its discovery by Maori legal scholar Jacinta Ruru helped her put together a synthesis of Maori cultural understanding of rivers as personified entities with a legal framework for treating them as such, resulting in the above legislation.

From Stone's paper: "Each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new entity, each time the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable . . . this is partly because until the rightless thing recieves its rights we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of 'us'---those who are holding rights at the time."

That is: human worldviews tend to be built upon, and along, existing lines of categorization, and changing or challenging the categorization results in a sort of mental pandemonium, a chaotic and complicated wilderness that defies explanation and understanding, and requires significant amount of efforts including mental remapping to figure out.

And a lot of people compare their comfortable existence as some of the (comparatively fewer) rightsholders in a world built around the others' nonrights, compared with the welter and chaos of their potential as some of the (comparatively many) rightsholders with many more rightsholders to take into account and many fewer rightless entities to own and exploit and use, and cling with every fiber of their beings to the call for the rightless things to stay rightless, for the greater good of the existing rightsbearers and for their own continued comfort.

They do this when even a little understanding would put to rest many of their fears. Many, many groups have gained rights over the centuries of human history, including both rightless entities being granted rights at all and rightsholding entities being granted more rights, and humanity has not been toppled by any of it.

We adapt. Our understanding grows. Our worldviews expand and complexify and advance themselves along new lines. We hold concepts in our heads that many of our ancestors would have boggled at, and we do so with ease. Hopefully our descendants manage concepts that we boggle at.

The willingness to explore new concepts is what helps them become. An infinity of shining truths awaits our approach and interaction, our bringing them into being and our understanding of them.

Everything we do today and everything we are today was impossible, right up until it wasn't. The difference is in the effort to make them be.

This about Europe in the years leading up to the development and adoption of indoor plumbing. Well into "civilized times."

Supervisor: Worker 72094. You failed to meet your quota for 3 weeks in a row now.

Worker 72094: I can explain!

Supervisor: You're clearly burned out. I heard you moved recently. Take a mandatory two weeks paid vacation to readjust and report to me then.

Worker 11335: Is it because I badmouthed the company during lunch?

Shadowy Board Member: That is correct. We are very displeased, Worker 11335...

Worker 100100: What's with the mask?

Of course. All Hopeless Inc. employees are due-paying members of Mindless Drones United.

Blood quantum is a nightmare concept. It is essentially how much 'native blood' you 'legally' have according to the government.

It is not traditional, it is not cultural, it is not something Indigenous nations ever used to measure belonging.

It was created by colonizers as a tool of erasure. It literally exists so the government could mathematically subtract us out of existence over time.

Think of it like this;

instead of letting Indigenous communities define ourselves, the U.S. government came in and said, “Your Indigeneity is only valid if we can quantify it like livestock breeding papers.” It was meant to break apart families, stop us from passing on identity and land rights, and eventually reach a point where they could say, “See, there are no real Indigenous people left! So we don't need to think about them!"

It weaponizes nebulous and often finicky genetics against culture, community, lived experience, etc.

It ignores the fact that Indigenous identity is about kinship, belonging, survival, language, tradition, and responsibility to our people.

Blood quantum turns those things into a number. A number designed to shrink until there is nothing left.

Many nations are still stuck dealing with blood quantum rules because of federal pressure and resource control, not because we chose it or approve of it.

And it harms us every single generation. It pits relatives against each other, creates disenrollment fights, and tells half of Indigenous kids they are somehow less real than their siblings because of paperwork.

It also lets the government give a 'good reason' for why we shouldn't have mixed race marriages or 'interbreed' with other races, because then the blood quantum 'goes down' and we may legally not be considered indigenous under the government anymore, which means they can deny us things like certain assistance programs, medical care, etc.

It's literally government mandated eugenics.