UBON'S PROFILE

also god Lib I'm so upset that that 'when' is more of an 'if' these days

Harper has spent his term cultivating voter apathy and misdirecting public opinion and in spite of his monstrous negligence he has a fair shot at holding his position

a fixed term of office would be a really nice thing to have right now!

the plant thing is the point at which I start tugging my collar and going 'well now we MUST be anthropomorphizing things that don't really feel, right', but I think that's largely just because I'm very uncomfortable with the connotations and don't want to think about them too much. it isn't a long shot to say that if something as decentralized as a jellyfish can have something approaching a guiding intelligence, then so can plants, and past that I just kind of grit my teeth and say 'well, killing one thing or another is the only way living things like us can survive ourselves, so if plants can feel it's regrettable but unavoidable'

until we get chlorophyll of our own or whatever

also re: your edit, Lib, I'm no expert but it's probably worth mentioning that a lot of northern Canada is currently a food desert, and prices of basic staples are inhumanely inflated! we're absolutely terrible at provisioning northern cities, to the extent that the Harper government has been (justifiably, imo) accused of starving the north intentionally, so the transition to a metropolitan capitalist lifestyle may not be quite that seamless

this is a tangent but the seal hunt is

• a vital part of the livelihood of a large group of native people
• something that its practitioners actively altered to be more humane when faced with criticism, something that corporations with far less life-or-death stake are far more reluctant to do despite the much greater impact and scale of their own inhumane practices
• generally only a concern for people in the first place because seals are cute and it's easier to focus on animal cruelty as some far-off crime perpetrated by wicked stereotypes

author=Kylaila
Edit: You guys, you are having quite the masochistic/sadistic sense of enjoyment.
Makes me really sad to watch.

I am the Stone Monkey, Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and I love a fight

e: that's meant to be self-effacing, the Monkey King is an ultraviolent chump + I am truly still too similar to him in my outlook

cognitive ability and emotion are not necessarily linked to one another, self-awareness is damnably difficult to study and quantify, and no one was really broaching the subject of which emotions 'matter' in the first place

the rest is veering dangerously close to a boring determinism argument and I'm much happier saying 'we're filled with mysteries and angry slime' and breezily swaying away from the topic

I have incredible liked-by-animals powers in general! animals are neat + I like them a bunch and most animals' criteria for a loose + tentative friendship are as simple as 'doesn't seem intent on eating me, acknowledges that I'm very important'

I helped to test Free Spirits! on the whole I think it was worth sacrificing the aesthetic I so painstakingly built from a lifetime of stolid uselessness

also I think that having such a small amount is just as funny, if not moreso, as having none at all tbh

(though I might have to just bite the bullet and accept earning a lot more eventually)