There are ants in my kitchen. I do not want them to be there.
I can kill them, of course. I do kill them directly on occasion. I do not have a problem with my mother setting out poison for them, though I wonder how it may affect other organisms that might later feed upon those poisoned ants. I will transport spiders and non-destructive native species outside when I can, but I do not hesitate to kill invasives. An ant crawling on a plate as I am eating from it will be executed without hesitation, and yet that same ant would be rescued if I saw it dancing on the lid of my tea kettle and unable to escape the rising heat. I may kill it or allow it to be killed later, but I do not want it to suffer under my watch.
Why does an insect’s death seem wrong to be at some times but not others? Is it merely the amount of attention I give to it? Is sympathy, or empathy, or altruism, or whatever it is, a matter of convenience or depth of thought? It’s easy to “switch” targets – when I feed a cricket to a frog or sacrifice a beetle to a Venus flytrap, I am killing one innocent and nurturing another simultaneously.
Where do you draw the line between cruelty and kindness? What “depth of field” do you choose as the appropriate amount of care to have for other living things, or how do you reconcile your own inconsistency? Is there a pattern to it? At what level of complexity do we draw the line between “organisms that it is absurd to be merciful towards” versus “organisms it is unthinkable to be cruel towards”?
I just rescued an ant from my tea kettle and wondered about hypocrisy.
Are you ok ship
Is there something about wondering about these questions that suggests I’m not okay?
Animorphs fucked me up too my dude. Can’t even swat a fly without thinking about crap like this.
Or even, like, is this spider an Animorph? Are yeerks actually real? Do they think I’m one of them?
She couldn’t use a sign related to fish to name Ariel cause Gabriella is also a fish herself.
This gifset shows how Gabriella gives Ariel a sign name based on her long hair, notice how she use the first letter of Ariel’s name in sign form (letter ‘A’) to ‘write/draw’with both hands the hair of our favorite redhead.
In Deaf culture and sign language, a sign name (or a name sign) is a special sign that is used to uniquely identify a person, just like a name.
Name signs come in all forms. Some are based on the person’s birth name or initials. Some are based on their physical features or personality traits. And other name signs might be based on the person’s interests.
I was interested to know whether there had been any noticeable uptick in searches for “the cask of amontillado” since this meme began and while there has, it’s the exact same uptick which has occurred every fall in recent memory as high school teachers have geared up for their spooky october literature units
it looks very similar to a reading of a heartbeat…..a specific heart…..that won’t stop beating……..from under the floorboards………
male singers who refuse to sing katy perry’s “e.t.” as horny as she did are cowards
i dont even like katy perry but like she! went full on alien-fucking horny in that song. a male cover in that exact voice inflection would’ve been perfect for my venom playlist. but no. straight men are always horny, except when it comes to singing about aliens i guess. cowards.
Some guy in Ancient Greece, pointing at a perfectly climbable mountain: There are gods up there!
The rest of Ancient Greece: Sick, no need to fact check that
I know this is meant as a joke but please, let me scream about Ancient Greek mountain cults for once in my life.
Before I start, two points:
I can attest from personal experience that Olympus is indeed perfectly climbable. I actually laughed at one of the comments on this post that said “but imagine a wacko Ancient Greek going up there in sandals” because that’s literally what I did. I climbed Olympus in a tunic and sandals. Photographic proof here. I’m fairly sure that if I, a skinny Classics student who spends most of her time in the library, could do it (minus a knee injury that meant I had to ride a mule half the way down), then so could an Ancient Greek guy.
Before climbing Olympus, I had to prepare a presentation on its symbolism and religious role in Ancient Greece. This is my source for this post.
Now that’s been said, Olympus as “home of the Gods” is a really, really interesting topic, and the above post highlights one of its core aspects: how come the Gods came to live on Olympus? Many religions place their Gods in the sky (see: Christianity) or in otherwise inaccessible places. Olympus, on the other hand, is clearly accessible: there’s a sanctuary on one of the lower peaks, and an entire Roman army even crossed the mountain range in the 2nd century BC. There seems to have been little interest in reaching the actual summit (more on that later), but people definitely went near and around it.
What’s more, most non-poetic descriptions of Olympus treat it like just another geographical feature, and studying it scientifically doesn’t seem to have been taboo. One Ancient Greek man, Xenagoras, even measured its height. So why did Ancient Greeks point at Olympus and go “yup, there are Gods up there”?
Let’s backtrack a bit and focus on the main God linked to Olympus, that is, Zeus. The name Zeus comes from the Indo-European root *dyew (from which we also get words like deus, Latin for “God”, and šiuš, Hittite for “God”, and týr, Old Norse for, well, you get it). The root *dyew, though, meant “sky”, specifically “bright sky” – meaning Zeusoriginally was placed in the sky!
Now, let’s fast forward to the Mycenaean Era, when the Greeks start settling on the coast of Anatolia (now Turkey). Rocks and mountains were highly sacred to the Anatolian peoples, especially the Hittites, and one of the most important Anatolian deities, the Stormgod, was associated with mountains (given how clouds gather around them, it’s easy to imagine why). Two of them, Mt Harhawa and Mt Zaliyanu, were considered to be his residence. It’s thought that the Stormgod transferred some of his characteristics to Zeus – this is where Zeus as a weather deity would come from (my Mycenaean lecturer made a convincing case for this). It would make a lot of sense if Zeus’ association with mountains, and later specifically with Olympus, the tallest mountain in Greece, also came from here.
We still need definite proof for this theory, of course, but the confusion of “sky God” and “storm/mountain God” is clearly reflected in later Greek literature. Homer uses οὐράνιος (ouranic, i.e. of the sky) and Ὀλύμπιος (Olympian) interchangeably, and opposes them both to χθόνιος (earthly) – which assumes Olympus isn’t earthly. Mortals are also shown consistently praying towards the sky, not towards Olympus. Yet meanwhile, the Gods are shown as living on the actual, physical Olympus (Homer even takes care to describe its geographic location in Iliad 14.225-230).
So that’s how come the Gods ended up living on a perfectly accessible mountain – because in a sense, they also don’t live there. (Again, I find it quite telling that most statements that the Gods live on Olympus are poetic, and also from authors – Homer, Hesiod – who were highly influenced by Anatolian traditions.) That said, for a while the Ancient Greeks seem to have shrugged and gone “sick, no need to fact check that”, but it did eventually cause debate. The author of the Derveni Papyrus (4th century BC), for instance, tried to prove it’s a physical mountain. On the other hand, their arguments suggest other people viewed it as a symbolic/poetic description, or as the sky itself.
Lastly, I said I’d write about why the Greeks weren’t interested in reaching the summit (and I realise 90% of you have scrolled past this post by now, but suck it, you can pry my love for mountains from my cold dead hands). There’s obviously the double-think I explained above, coupled with the idea that just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there in some way – I mean, I climbed Olympus and I’m still a Hellenic polytheist. But there’s also the fact that wanting to reach the summit itself is an incredibly modern, Western idea. It fits right into the context of Europeans conquering the known world, violently but also non-violently, by reaching the highest, deepest, most Northern and most Southern points of the globe (and incidentally, in some cases, proving the superiority of science to the superstitions of local people). The reason Olympus, and so many other mountains, were only climbed in modern times isn’t due to the lack of ability of local people – it’s because these people didn’t want to climb their mountain. Take Kangchenjunga: the first mountaineers to successfully climb it had to promise they wouldn’t “disturb its God” by setting foot on the summit. I’m not saying the Ancient Greeks viewed Olympus the same way, but this attitude is something to consider.
valar apologist 