• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2023

help-circle



  • Nah, son. Thylacines have, in a way, become cryptids since their extinction, complete with cheesy travel shows where some bogan tells you all about how they totally saw one time and they’re 100% sure it was a thylacine they barely saw from a distance running away through the tall grass after sunset. I’ve seen similar shows about Bigfoot, Nessie, Mothman, and others. They don’t exist anymore, making your chances of seeing one alive no more likely than seeing Bigfoot, which is the point I was making. Animals thought to be extinct being officially rediscovered is a pretty rare occurrence; I assure you it doesn’t happen “regularly”. It’s a big deal when it happens because it’s quite rare. Yes, I’m familiar with the stories of all the other extinct species you mentioned as well. The ivory-billed woodpecker is still considered by most ornithologists to be extinct, and the last widely accepted sighting of any individual was in 1987, despite some supposed (but not universally accepted or entirely conclusive) sightings every once in a while. In 2020, a guy working for Fish and Wildlife claimed to have ID’d one in video footage, but it must not have been very compelling because the very next year Fish and Wildlife proposed declaring it officially extinct. People claim to have sighted the ivory-billed woodpecker not infrequently, much like the thylacine. What is infrequent is any compelling evidence whatsoever, however.


  • There have been many sightings and footprints found of Bigfoot, too. I live in the Bigfoot sighting capital of the world and new sightings are routinely reported. If the “Portland” in your name is in reference to the one in Oregon, you do too.

    The last widely accepted sighting of a wild thylacine was in 1933, nearly a hundred years ago. Even if any tiny, isolated pockets had managed to escape extermination (which is unlikely on an island without much mountainous terrain or dense forest, especially when everyone and their grandma was out hunting them for the bounty the government put on their tails), they’d be in big trouble owing to genetic drift by now. You always hear people say “I know what I saw,” but do they really? It makes me circle back to the Bigfoot thing. At least some of the people who claim to have seen Bigfoot genuinely believe they really saw him.



  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlSociety
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    28
    ·
    1 year ago

    This chart really makes no sense at all. How does Lord of the Flies lie at the intersection of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451?

    One’s about an ultra-conservative theocracy, one’s about government surveillance and propaganda, and one’s about destroying books because people’s attention spans have reduced past the ability to read and they’re too long/confusing/depressing. I guess authoritarianism might lie at the heart of all these? Meanwhile, though, Lord of the Flies is more about the dangers of unchecked groupthink and how it can lead to violence and cruelty.







  • “History is written by the victors” is a tired cliché that doesn’t always hold up super well if you spend a moment to consider it.

    Who conquered Rome? Surely, it was a people remembered for their great military prowess, right? Nope, still commonly remembered as barbarians thousands of year later.

    The Mongols had one of the largest empires in history, and yet in much of the lands they conquered, they’re remembered as being monstrously ugly brutes, which is where words like “mongoloid” and “mongrel” come from.






  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldbritbong brexit life
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Very nice. Now let’s see how rich it’s made you, OP.

    The best part of this meme is that Brexit had literally nothing to do with it whatsoever, the guy just decided to expand his markets to other places, which he could have done either way, and well might have. He expanded his international enterprise across a wider part of the world, and you mean to tell me he started making more money? That’s pretty amazing! Why isn’t everyone doing this?


  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldtru do
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    44
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Perhaps in the short term regarding albedo, though IR still largely shines through. Once the smoke dissipates soon though, it’ll be back to “normal”, except now with a large boost in CO2 levels, leading to more heating. Except it won’t be normal because the blackened forests then decrease the albedo even further than it was before. Burnt forests also get less snowpack, which again further reduces albedo. Anyone who’s dealt with heavy wildfire smoke knows the smoke tends to trap heat under it like a big blanket, too.

    Wildfires (especially as big as we see them today) are definitely a net bad thing for the environment, health, communities, etc.