the year is 2018- how am i getting this much use out of this photo? is there this much ambiguity about a basic craft which has been practiced before humanity figured out mud bricks that people are still confused about how sheep work?
A lot of people today have extremely limited understanding of how anything rural works, thinking only of animals in the abstract.
Hence people who don’t understand that cows can continue to give milk way longer than their calves need it, or that you don’t have to kill sheep to get their wool, or who think that a good way to save the bees is for everyone to stop eating honey.
Like, if people don’t want to eat meat because they don’t want animals killed, and want to avoid eggs because of the cruelty prevalent in that industry, or milk because yeah, there are a fair number of issues with the dairy industry too… I will support that 100%.
But then there are people so woefully misinformed I can’t take them seriously at all.
its baffling- if you assume wool requires a sheep to be killed, thus each sheep in its lifetime will only provide one ‘crop’ of wool, then how freaking expensive would you then assume yarn to be? youd assume mutton would then be exceedingly common in the meat market as well
they make a logic tangent, and obviously abandon it two seconds after it passes where they want to go because thinking too hard will reveal that to be stupid
I have discovered that usually, the most militant and unpleasant vegans absolutely have no fucking idea how farming works. Ecological, sustainable farming – not massive, planet-damaging, animal-torturing industrial farming. If you don’t know that sheep have to be sheared before summer or they can literally die of heat, I am not going to listen to you. If you don’t realise that it only makes sense to use leather from animals if you kill them to eat them and that your vegan ass buying cheap plastic shoes three times a year is doing more damage to the environment than me buying leather shoes every five years, I’m not going to listen to you. If you refuse to consider that cows’ udders get painful if they don’t have a calf and aren’t milked, I won’t listen to you. And if you don’t have the basic biology knowledge required to realise that properly, sustainably raised farm animals have their place in the biosystem and that it would not, in fact, be a good thing to stop raising them, I am not going to listen to you.
I was told by a vegan I am otherwise good friends with that “all farmers lie about everything to do with farming” and I just ???? do you have any idea how exhausting it is to fucking farm no one has the ENERGY to lie about stuff like “we need commercial bees as pass pollinators for fruit farms so you might as well eat honey tbh since they’re making an excess anyway”
by all means campaign for safer and better slaughterhouses (which btw is a current hot-button issue in the uk and is something one of my clients is backing and pursuing legally) and better animal welfare and make a point of pushing high-welfare products over shitty ones but demanding that everyone stops buying wool coats on the basis of a lie is stupid because the alternative is artificial fibres which are polluting the fucking oceans and killing off all the fish
This. We need to do better on animal welfare, as on so many things. But if you’re coming from a standpoint of ‘all farmers are evil soulless murderers’, then… I don’t really know how we’re going to have a conversation, so I’m going to politely back away.
How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.
Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).
And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!
The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet.
We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk.
Some resources to consider creating or joining or doing:
Repair cafes – create or join your local repair cafe! Repair stuff, learn how to repair stuff, teach others how to repair stuff.
Map of Makerspaces – make some things! learn how to make some things! teach others how to make some things!
Community Garden Map (note that this is US-only, and not a complete list) – join a local community garden
Learn some basics on passive solar design – clever use of the sun can create extremely energy efficient homes and buildings. You can use these principles to save on energy bills, even if you’re renting.
Free USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2015 revision – cut down on personal food waste! Learn how to safely preserve food. Very useful if you suddenly harvest / purchase for crazy cheap in season / dumpster dive a ton of perishable food.
Donate to One Acre Fund, which provides training and capital to farmers (making them more productive and pulling them out of poverty) in various east African countries
Donate to Bridges to Prosperity, which provides technical expertise, money, and volunteers, to help local people build and maintain their own footbridges in extremely isolated rural areas
joining r/solarpunk, and sharing links/ideas/art/music with the community. Also, upvoting stuff for greater visibility. There’s over 900 members!
Mary Jane Rathbun, Inventor of the Marijuana Brownie.
In the 1980s, Mary Jane was baking over 4,000 brownies a week for Californian AIDS patients after she realised it eased their suffering and depression. Despite multiple convictions, she remained an active marijuana advocate until the day she died.
I had to fact check this and her Wikipedia page made me like her even more:
“She was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she attended Catholic school. At the age of 13, she was involved in an altercation with a nun who tried to cane her, but Rathbun fought back.”
“Social activism appealed to her from a young age; she traveled from Chicago to Wisconsin to campaign for the right of miners to form unions. In the late 1940s, she worked as an activist promoting abortion rights for women in Minneapolis.”
“Rathbun often appeared in public wearing polyester pantsuits, and she was said to have a ‘sailor’s mouth.’”
some heroes wear polyester pantsuits
IS SHE WHY ITS CALLED MARY JANE???
wine mom? vodka aunt? no, no, this is weed grandma
..I always thought marijuana was called Mary Jane because people were seeing it as Maria-Juana and then anglicizing. I had no idea there was a real Mary Jane.
I was reading a book containing a collection of secular Polish poems from before 1500 for my thesis and most of them were all pretty serious – either love poems, odes or satires – but at the very end I found my favorite one:
“This is my rhyme: Warm bread with butter in it.”
From a book containing a collection of Old Polish texts (as found in a 1460 Latin codex):
“Kind God, give [me] calmth, [give me] peace And a loaf of bread with Czech cheese.”
Death By Catchphrase 