many „fringe“ movements that go against the grain of society seem to appoint as their leaders the most privileged in standard society, (straight) white men.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsiv9H4A3mFKwMiuLXmjM-A

‘But I love meat lol’ #triggered

to:

any of those 50-100k notes posts i come across, leftist or otherwise aligning with what i believe in, can still be full of misinformation, poorly researched or downright deceptive. you'll follow someone who seems so much more socially aware and knowledgable than yourself, and in the spirit of awe, you'll just take their word for it without question or skepticism. you'll hear about injustice, prejudice, bigotry, feminism, equal rights and how to be a better person overall and just. take it as is. however, especially with veganism, you'll have all the Big Names suddenly toss their two cents in and getting everyone to yesman them with information, ethical propositions, tired strawmen and misrepresentations that are so easily rebuttable and falsified that it's PAINFULLY clear to me how little to zero prior research has been done on the topic to voice your opinion on it

the spirit of research has become truly lost on me at one point as well, and to an extent, it still is. i still have an overall blind trust in those i follow. that's how people work. but i believe in the long run, if i genuinely wish to view myself knowledgable and educated enough on a topic to have it align with my core values and engage into serious discussions even, i can't have all the info i need solely from a single post alone, or the circlejerk that can be this website. we're all still just a bunch of people trying to do, say and believe in the right things, but we have to do more than read headlines and pay lip service to things that sound about right to us

I’m referring to instances like the White and Hall study which people widely cite as “evidence” animal agriculture isn’t that bad for the environment because veganism only results in a 2.6% reduction in GHG emissions. But when you actually read the study and pay attention to the model they’re proposing, they got this number by assuming we would continue growing animal feed AND additional crops on the space freed up by the absence of animals, resulting in us eating about 5,000 calories of almost exclusively corn and grain, lol. I’m working on a video about this now, but Gil Carvalho has a great one on it here for anyone interested. Like, that kinda shit is so disgusting. They KNOW that 99% of the population won’t look beyond the headlines or MAYBE the abstract if they even bother to click on the study at all.

And I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the first author - Robin White - works for the department of animal and poultry sciences at Virginia Tech which, according to their website, “strives to improve the performance, efficiency, and profitability of animal production.” And I’m sure it’s just another silly coincidence that the second author - Mary Hall - works for the US Dairy Forage Research Center.

Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food. 

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know roughly how they sounded (as the person above me said).

We know they had remarkable vision.

We know they had the second. strongest sense of smell in history.

We know from their bones that they grew to a certain size and stayed there until about 14 or so, then absolutely ballooned up to their adult size in about three or four years.

We know they likely lived in family groups, because we have bones with certainly fatal injuries for a solitary animal (broken legs and such) that are completely healed.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)