Only in Silence, the Word

"In a historic “first-of-its-kind” agreement the government of British Colombia has acknowledged the aboriginal ownership of 200 islands off the west coast of Canada.

The owners are the Haida nation, and rather than the Canadian government giving something to a First Nation, the agreement admits that the “Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaai” or the “islands at the end of world,” always belonged to them, a subtle yet powerful difference in the wording of First Nations negotiating.

BC Premier David Eby called the treaty “long overdue” and once signed, will clear the way for half a million hectares (1.3 million acres) of land to be managed by the Haida.

Postal service, shipping lanes, school and community services, private property rights, and local government jurisdiction, will all be unaffected by the agreement, which will essentially outline that the Haida decide what to do with the 200 or so islands and islets.

“We could be facing each other in a courtroom, we could have been fighting each other for years and years, but we chose a different path,” said Minister of Indigenous Relations of BC, Murray Rankin at the signing ceremony, who added that it took creativity and courage to “create a better world for our children.”

Indeed, making the agreement outside the courts of the formal treaty process reflects a vastly different way of negotiating than has been the norm for Canada.

“This agreement won’t only raise all boats here on Haida Gwaii – increase opportunity and prosperity for the Haida people and for the whole community and for the whole province – but it will also be an example and another way for nations – not just in British Columbia, but right across Canada – to have their title recognized,” said Eby.

In other words, by deciding this outside court, Eby and the province of BC hope to set a new standard for how such land title agreements are struck."

-via Good News Network, April 18, 2024

Brian David Gilbert getting himself adopted by Dropout is one of the best trades of the century

columbia administration is threatening to call in the national guard tonight

That being said if James Derry Girls did come out as a trans woman I think the girls would be supportive for all of like 2 seconds before being like "You may be a woman Jane but [disgusted glare] you'll never stop being English"

I think the episode where James Derry Girls comes out as trans would have the girls be overenthused in their support and try to teach her about girly activities, only to reveal that 1) none of them are actually that good at the activities they think all girls should be able to do and 2) they can't really even reach a consensus on the activities that they think all girls can do. James is debating between various new names but keeps getting shut down because they're either a) Irish names b) people insist that the names are Irish even when they're not, because they know an Irish person with that name, or c) she keeps picking names associated with a terrible event in Irish history and after a while Michelle loses it and goes "For fuck's sake you may as well go by Margaret Thatcher." Orla casually reveals an encyclopedic knowledge of trans culture and politics but gives no satisfactory response when asked how she knows any of those things and also keeps forgetting what pronouns are and asks James about her preferred adverbs

“I’m going to drive through Appalachia, should I be scared of the inbred hill folk and the cryptids? 😱😱😱😱” no bitch, be scared of sliding off a mountain into a valley and not being found for months or years.

they’re going to be insinuating Bigfoot got you in YouTube docs while your Ford Taurus is upside down at the bottom of a mountain

The Western US has guard rails everywhere they could possibly be needed, but in Appalachia, guard rails are for sissies

I think a lot of us would like to have guard rails. It’s not a matter of pride but a matter of infamously shitty and neglected civil infrastructure in Appalachia as a product of local corruption and perpetual state underfunding.

In 1977, the mayor of Vulcan West Virginia wrote to the Soviet Union and East Germany requesting foreign aid to replace the only bridge leading into town, an old swinging footbridge that had collapsed. This was the final straw that forced the West Virginia Legislature to cough up $1.3 million dollars to replace the bridge. Not the fact residents had been fording the river or using unsecured crossings to get to their homes for two years, the bad press generated by a Soviet journalist visiting the area to assess the situation.

It’s been almost 50 years since that and to be honest not much has changed. A lot of the bridges that would have been considered unsound at that time are still up and being driven over everyday.

Driving on poorly maintained roads over flat land is scary enough but driving on a poorly maintained, cracked, potholed, far too narrow road up the side of a mountain with a sheer drop and no guard rail is enough to give anyone a panic attack. Driving over 125+ year old, narrow, rusty one lane bridges that span rushing rocky rivers is something you SHOULD be scared of in Appalachia.

Yumna Al-Arashi, Axis of Evil (Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq), 2020

in Leica Fotografie International (LFI) magazine:

[...]

People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.

For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.

The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.

So yes, I’m going to pirate and support piracy.

Symbiosis isn't just mutualism. Parasitism is symbiosis. It's uncomfortable to confront parasitic relationships if you want to see your human ideas of good and bad reflected in Nature.

But gazing into something huge and utterly Other, being uncomfortable means you're engaging your mind with it. "Uncomfortable" is actually a whole spectrum of emotions that become a vivid and satisfying rainbow.

There was a post a while back with some artwork of Dendrogaster, a crustacean that parasitizes starfish, and its body is like this branching fractal of fleshy lobes made to fit inside the body of the starfish mirroring its structure, and I was absolutely horrified to look at this, and this horror was the same emotion as a strangely visceral wave of sympathy for this parasite.

Creative works about parasites often invoke the horror of bodily invasion, which is visceral and strong for me, but this artwork inverted that horror, instead showing the horror of being made so perfectly for fitting within someone else that you lose everything you are and become unrecognizable.

I also think of the post about the cowbird chick. It's awful that the bird pushes its siblings out of the nest as it grows, and the mama feeds it because she instinctively must feed her chick, but the cowbird is just a baby. Was it wrong for him to hatch, to be alive, to be hungry, to be a baby and to need love?

Symbiosis is intensely beautiful, and sometimes it's beautiful because it's grotesque and terrible. Of course, the symbiosis between two organisms isn't an allegory for a relationship, it just is a relationship, but looking at the way organisms become entwined feels like you're seeing things that, if words described them, would also be human experiences.

Being invaded by a parasite is a horror of powerlessness and loss of autonomy, but being a parasite is also defined by powerlessness. In many cases, the parasite will die without the host, but the host can live without the parasite. I wonder why it is expected to sympathize with one and not the other.

Your immune system fights against internal parasites like a tapeworm...Imagine being a tapeworm. The body of your host is your universe. Do you find your world to be kind? Benevolent? Does your god love you?

Sometimes people call disabled people "parasites." When I think about my future sometimes I'm uncertain and afraid.

But when a rare non-photosynthetic orchid blooms in the forest, this is not the forest's weakness and failure, but its crowning glory.

This is a fascinating way of thinking about parasites (and they are fascinating creatures on their own). I think people are confusing the definition of symbiosis with mutualism, here:

@thejakeformerlyknownasprince

There's something Animorphs in there

Yesssss. Yeerks being forced into parasitism - having no way to express huge parts of their culture without hosts - is so much of what makes them tragic. They're stuck being the shape and size and function of brains. They didn't ask for this.

when doctors ask if i have any history of cancer in my family and i have to say that yes my grandmother had 2 types of gastrointestinal cancer and they're like oh wow okay so we'll keep an eye out for that but i'm like no it was probably just all the nuclear radiation and they're like ok hm ok what the fuck do you mean and it's very weird seeing the look on american doctors' faces when you have to explain to them that believe it or not atomic bombs were dropped on this earth 2 generations ago and it did have consequences

—

Dr. Jack Geiger, quoted in Rebecca Onie’s Ted Talk  What if our healthcare system kept us healthy?

“In 1965 Dr. Geiger founded one of the first two community health centers in this country, in a brutally poor area in the Mississippi Delta. And so many of his patients came in presenting with malnutrition that be began prescribing food for them. And they would take these prescriptions to the local supermarket, which would fill them and then charge the pharmacy budget of the clinic. And when the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, D.C. – which was funding Geiger’s clinic – found out about this, they were furious. And they sent this bureaucrat down to tell Geiger that he was expected to use their dollars for medical care – to which Geiger famously and logically responded, “The last time I checked my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.“”

(via mdintraining)

Defund and abolish is making more and more sense. End qualified immunity for police, too.

How many more are buried there?!!!

This is hitting me more than most posts I see about police violence. Probably because they didn't tell her. Like I don't know the details but I imagine she filed a missing person report. With the police. And they know where he is. He's dead and they know and they know where they buried him without ever telling his mom and why? Cause they don't want anyone to know a cop ran him over? This is insane. It's fucking ghoulish. Abolish the police right now

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

wow. really hope this isn't actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn't facebook, you don't need to know people before following them

this is the '10 year mutuals you've never spoken to once' site

why is it always the fancylad boy-king type whos the bottom. maybe his tough loyal knight who uses his body to protect and defend him and lives to serve him wants to get railed

maybe i just like it when masc dudes with scars and calluses and a devotion complex bigger than the moon get topped by troubled prettyboys with hands thatve never worked a day in their life. who said that

Thank you for your work soldier 🫡

listening to the columbia student radio show covering the ongoing situation around student arrests and protests, something easy to put on to feel less disconnected right now

context that upwards of a hundred columbia students and allies have been arrested after the occupation of a campus lawn as part of a protest of the college’s continued affiliations with israel, here’s the demands of columbia university apartheid divest or cuad (columbia is the largest private landowner in the city of new york)

A MILLION YEARS

the ep11 slumber party

I can't read this, but you should!