Enough depressurized blobfish. I’m here to spread living blobfish propaganda.
Look at them. Gorgeous. Wonderful. Living comfortably at depths to over 1,200 meters in the ocean. Be nice to them.
The fact that the dead version is in kid’s books and cartoons is the saddest part; they’re endearing children to basically a different, fictionalized animal and telling them that’s how it really looks. It was declared “world’s ugliest animal” based on a busted up corpse :(
This is an adorable young hognose snake exhibiting natural behavior. They’re not the smartest snakes in the world, and they’ll happily spend all day exploring the same place over and over if you let them. Mine loves to weave between my fingers like this.
“The forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems are not to be found in one political party or another, or in one or another wing of any single political party. Democrats have no unsullied history of egalitarianism. Nor are liberals free of domination agendas. Republicans have housed abolitionists and white supremacists. Conservative, moderate, liberal; right, left, hard left, far right; religious, secular, socialist—we must not be blindsided by these Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola labels because the genius of fascism is that any political structure can host the virus and virtually any developed country can become a suitable home. Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power.
It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).
When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas ‘marketplaced’, our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.”
— Toni Morrison, “Racism and Fascism”, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches and Meditations (2019)
This is a major cause for alarm, and I’m not seeing much news about it yet on my feeds. The Supreme Court will hear several cases regarding the Indian Child Welfare Act in their October 2022 term (Texas v. Haaland, Brackeen v. Haaland, Cherokee Nation v. Brackeen, and Haaland v. Brackeen), and the outcome(s) could clear the way for the destruction of Native families, land, and tribal sovereignty.
