4 ms·
Malm Whale
- pottertheotter 8mo agoOk, wow… “The fishermen who first discovered the poor stranded whale started the procedure by poking its eyes out, so that it would "not be able to see us." Over the next two days, the creature was methodically axed, speared and shot until it finally died in a sea of its own blood.” I guess it was 1865.
- AIorNot 8mo agoHumans are the worst species aren’t we
- readthenotes1 8mo agoNo
- squibonpig 8mo agoI think we have the greatest depth and breadth of cruelty
- fellowniusmonk 8mo agoOur capabilities are so high and our population so differentiated we basically hold nearly all the records for everything (barring some extremeophile metrics) so it makes sense.
- squibonpig 8mo agoIt helps we write the record categories. We only measure stuff we find relevant to our existence which happens to be what we probably do sorta well.
- fellowniusmonk 8mo agoYeah, cool, what categories do you have in mind? Sure we have bias but not infinite bias. I'll start! How about sea urchin destruction? I bet otters and sheepshead fish probably have little bookies keeping track and they know which species or virus hold the records! Very fun stuff! I bet they have little tablets to keep track of their records that go back thousands of years? Oh man, yeah, good point about species bias!
- squibonpig 8mo agoTo kinda shortcut the bullshit, I think we should try to think about what cruelty is. I'd say it's a kind of celebration. The cruel animal is celebrating in the most visceral, most direct way the fact that they aren't in the position of the victim. Cruelty necessarily involves a kind of excess. You don't tend to find excess expenditure as much in the animal kingdom as you do among our species' section of it. That's why I feel like we exercise the most cruelty. The records thing is silly. Records are necessarily aggregational, the top performer of many things. Everything sets records all the time at the specific unique thing it does. When we start choosing aggregations of things there's a combinatorial explosion in ways to choose them. We only get by by choosing an infinitesimal subset of those aggregations to consider, and thus to find records in by extension.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ChocolateGod 8mo agoNo that's the domestic cat.
- IAmBroom 8mo agoIf an animal gets its head stuck, predators will casually eat its meat without first killing the prey. This makes sense from their purely selfish point of view, especially as it provides a sort of short-term "food preservation". Ducks have been documented engaging in necrophilic gang-rape. Dolphins use literal waterboarding to rape. Humans are just smarter assholes than other animals. Not worse or better.
- QuadmasterXLII 8mo agoA pretty poor showing by the villagers. whalers were able to kill a full grown whale in at most a couple of hours, while it was trying to swim away, while balancing in rowboats.
- amarant 8mo agoI wonder if the event visible in one of the photos is etymological source of the word festival? The word can be deconstructed in Swedish as fest i val which translates to "party in whale"
- thomassmith65 8mo agoIt surely is; 'fest' is the Swedish word for 'party'. I actually think Swedish or Norwegian (which are practically the same language) are closer to English than even Dutch. Many of the most common, short English words are the same.
- Hemospectrum 8mo agoThe Anglo-Saxon migrations made England English, and then the waves of Viking invasions littered North Germanic vocabulary all over it. You can see it in doublets like skirt/shirt that aren't in other West Germanic languages.
- rob74 8mo ago"Fest" is also German for celebration - but just because several Germanic languages have the same word doesn't mean that it's a Germanic word. Actually all of them got it from Latin...
- thomassmith65 8mo agoI should have checked the etymology, but the way this reply is worded is a bit nitpicky. English did not loan 'fest' directly from Latin. Edit: Though I realise now I misunderstood the original comment re: 'i val'. I took it to mean 'fest' only. No, I don't think 'party in whale' is the root of 'festival'
- tdeck 8mo agoWiktionary says > From Middle English festival (adjective), from Old French festival (“festive”), from Late Latin fēstīvālis, from Latin fēstīvus (“festive”). By surface analysis, festive + -al. Displaced native Old English frēols. The noun is shortened from festival day, from Middle English festival dai, festiuall day (“feast day, festival”). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/festival https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/festival
- martibravo 8mo agoI thought this was about giant IKEA drawers before reading