veganpizza69

Unusually aggressive lone star ticks, common in the south-east, are spreading to areas previously too cold for them

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23919788

2025 marks 10 years since the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 17 goals and 169 targets to achieve global prosperity.

Chapters:

0:00 I. Introduction

1:41 II. What is Necropolitics?

6:45 III. Colonialism and Zombification

9:15 IV. Algorithms and Digital Overseers

14:06 V. Systems and Necropolitical Violence

17:28 VI. Death Driven Feedback Loops

This is our latest attempt to get to the root of what men are going through—not just what’s happening, but why.

It’s worth noting that the later stages of capitalism, along with corporate greed and an evolving career landscape, affect all of us. But the exploitation of grifters in the manosphere is unique to men.

Think we missed something? Leave a comment and help us fill in the gaps

00:00 - Intro: What Happened to Men? Why are so many men falling apart? This isn’t just about loneliness or school stats—it’s about decades of lies, political betrayal, and a fantasy that was never built to last.

00:55 - Chapter 1: The Golden Era That Never Was The post-WWII American Dream promised men stability and status—but only for a select few. When the economy changed, the myth stayed, and resentment took root.

04:46 - Chapter 2: Reagan and the Great Betrayal Reaganomics didn’t just cut taxes—it gutted the working class. A new gospel was born: hustle harder, blame the poor, and ignore the billionaires laughing all the way to the bank.

07:30 - Chapter 3: The Masculinity Vacuum Once purpose disappeared, the grift moved in. Grievance merchants filled the void with rage, cosplay masculinity, and a monthly subscription box for insecurity.

10:46 - Chapter 4: The Right-Wing Pickup Artist The right didn’t rescue men—they monetized their confusion. Trump & Co. turned pain into politics and sold fascism in flannel.

14:30 - Chapter 5: How to Fix It (No Promo Code Required) No more gimmicks. No more gurus. Rebuilding manhood means ditching the cosplay, owning your choices, and choosing contribution over clout.

19:00 - Outro: Build Something Real The challenge isn’t to reclaim a lost identity—it’s to build something better. For those done chasing nostalgia, the work starts now.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23197060

Male bonobos are larger and stronger than females, so researchers have found it puzzling that the female apes enjoy high status in bonobo society. After analyzing three decades of behavioral data, researchers recently shared a study that pinpoints their source of power: female alliances and coalitions.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• research cited

"Draw a circle around the one God loves the most"

Some type of Christian school book.

The choices, ordered like a podium are:

• bottom: plants
• animals
• baby - not baptized
• top: baptized baby

This kind of indoctrination shows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being with some religious "zoom-in" on the human baby and religious identity.

Traditionalism for the world religions includes this long tradition of "natural hierarchy". It's a core hierarchy as a set, and then each religion can extend it a bit with their own flavor of hierarchy; more layers. The core of human supremacism remains, always.

This video has a content warning: lots of flesh, organs, and milk, and assholes.

I am going to have to insist on a hypothesis:

Fascism is carnism in decline.

The youtuber there is not vegan, unfortunately, but I do appreciate the effort to point out a few of the associations between ketobros and carnivores to fascism. She manages to talk about class/status in the last third of the video; much less about hierarchy.

It's also important to note that fascists don't really have an ideology, so it's not useful to focus just on ideology.

In the rat race of the "law of the jungle", these proto and paleo fascists also focus on what's now called "biohacking". Well, the rich get real biohacking like that plant-based rich guy who wants to live forever, Bryan Johnson, and the rest get more and more pseudoscientific products; scams.

The thing with diets is that the if you're not getting acute toxicity or poisons, you don't really grasp how harmful it can be, especially if it's not found in long-term population studies.

It's such a pain in the moral ass. These meat clowns are harming themselves with their ignorance and LARP diets, and that forces me to figure out if I should warn them or if I should just let them earn Darwin awards. Either way, they are feeding a not-so-modern grifting economy, which spreads this contagion of foolishness to others.

The product fantasy of this "meat", raw or not, from whatever animal, is a strange thing.

It is presented in this naturalistic fallacy wrapper, which wraps around an appeal to tradition fallacy wrapper, which actually wraps an empty box of hope that's actually techno-hopium:

It is about a "meat technology", and I don't mean just zootechny.

It's the technology of extracting scarce "dense nutrients", nutrient mining. And so it carries the status of luxury... and not just any luxury, but luxury that provides "powers".

The "powers" aspect is important for the fantasy, for biohacking. Much like the "nofap" types believe in powers from semen retention, the carnivores believe in other powers that they gain. And those powers are useful in the rat race, to dominate others, to win. In their fantasy.

Vegans aren't immune from such beliefs, especially raw vegans; I bet that those are more likely to go from vegan to ex-vegan to carnivore on their "journey".

Anyway, in the old days, this would be a talk about magical beliefs. They're treating meat like an alchemical potion from fantasy games. In modern times, this is about pseudoscience, a power-up.

Any sufficiently obscure pseudoscience is indistinguishable from magic.

That's the spirit of advertising these uber-carnist diets.

MEAT is sold to these "high-status males" (seeking) like those science-fiction pills from last century, those pills that contained all the nutrients and you could replace an entire meal by swallowing a couple of those pills.

They are not actually selling some true paleo diet, they're selling a fantasy of the past packaged as science-fantasy present:

The 🥩red pill.

And the extra layer of grift, because it appeals to extremely ignorant people, is that it works on the conspiracy logic easily:

"the meat pill technology was always there, it was just being hidden by a globalist conspiracy!"

The retroactive implication that the meat power-gaining solution was always there is following the scam method of making the target think that they were always right, that they are smart without knowing that they are smart. That's like a drug for fools and people who believe that they were born perfect.

Of course, the meat pill works only so much for marketing, so it's usually accompanied by supplements.

The conspiracy aspects, which are also seen in the denial of science, are a very obvious funnel to fascist beliefs, with an ecofascist bent.

The retroactive implication of the grift, with its conspiracy, is that common one in fascism: the myth of being fallen. Whether it's fallen from some paradise or fallen from space or fallen from the top of the "food chain", it's about The Fall.

In the paleo-conspiracy, humans, at least a certain... "subspecies" of humans, fell from the glorious past of maximally manly men when the evil Poaceae plants enslaved him 10000 years ago, and it has just gotten worse with industrial agriculture. The grifters promote a cure for The Fall, a restoration to well deserved glory.

The palingenesis consists of that rebirth as Fred Flintstone barbarian macho man model of extremely toxic masculinity.

The nation, however, isn't necessarily identified by nationality. In some cases, it can be, if the nation is based on settler-colonialism which usually came with pastoralist entrepreneurs (very European). But the nation can simply be any cult, any religion, any ethnicity, any special tribe, united in spirit.

The Nation of Meatflakes.

These are not harmless movements, fascism is never harmless.

The rhetoric of “hopium” is failing as ecological overshoot deepens. “Hopium”, a colloquial term that is a blend of the words “hope” and “opium” (as though it were a drug), represents a faith in technological and market-based solutions to address our multiple reinforcing crises, despite evidence to the contrary. We're living in the long defeat and we must own and confront it with courage. Award-winning essayist, Pamela Swanigan, joins us.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.vg/post/2138546

"Understanding and safeguarding the social lives of elephants is no longer optional. It's a necessity for ensuring these magnificent animals thrive in an increasingly human-dominated world."

Paper: Knowledge transmission, culture and the consequences of social disruption in wild elephants | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Cultural knowledge is widely presumed to be important for elephants. In all three elephant species, individuals tend to congregate around older conspecifics, creating opportunities for social transmission. However, direct evidence of social learning and cultural traditions in elephants is scarce. Here, we briefly outline that evidence then provide a systematic review of how elephant societies respond to the loss of potentially knowledgeable individuals or opportunities for knowledge transfer, which we characterize as social disruption. We consider observations from 95 peer-reviewed, primary research papers that describe disruption to elephant societies or networks via the removal or death of individuals. Natural deaths were mentioned in 14 papers, while 70 detailed human-caused deaths or disruption. Grouping descriptions according to consequences for behaviour and sociality, and demography and fitness, we show that severely disrupted populations are less cohesive, may exhibit reduced fitness or calf survival and respond inappropriately to threats and predators. We suggest that severe social disruption can inhibit or break potential pathways of information transmission, providing indirect evidence for the role of social transmission in elephants. This has implications for elephant conservation amid increasing anthropogenic change across their habitats.