She/her. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. New to the Fediverse, literally just picked the instance that seemed the most frictionless. Progressive new urbanist vegan in New England.

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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: January 29th, 2026

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  • This feels like a “read the room” kind of comment.

    All humans are biologically considered animals, and there are many times when I feel that viewing human behavior through that lens genuinely encourages compassion and understanding, and yet: there is a long history of people being called “animals” as a dehumanizing measure in order to justify doing the same horrible things to them that humans routinely do to non-human animals. This is particularly true for historically marginalized groups.

    Likewise, there is a long, racist history of white people calling Black people “apes” or “monkeys” to justify racist systems and treat Black people the way they view monkeys and non-human apes, as resembling humans but not fully human.

    This representative is specifically responding to a video shared by Trump, who has a long history of racist behavior, in which the Obamas were depicted as distinctly non-human apes (I cannot recall the specific ape and cannot readily look it up. Gorillas, I think?), echoing that racist trope.

    When someone responds to Trump trafficking in racist tropes with “Black people aren’t apes,” they are not getting into the nitty gritty of taxonomical clades, they’re countering that trope. “Well, actually”-ing about humans technically being apes is undercutting the focus on countering Trump’s racism. Time and place.













  • It sort of has something to do with EVs, in that it’s hard to find EVs made before this was standard, so if you’re looking for cars without it it’s hard to find one that doesn’t have an ICE engine.

    (Where cars aren’t avoidable, I do prefer they be electric, as, I’m sure, do many, but the privacy concerns are apparently very real.)

    (Edit: hydrogen cars are indeed very neat and more environmentally friendly than electric cars, and in the most ideal scenario what unavoidable car/truck/van usage there was would be hydrogen-powered. It is not AFAIK practical for the average consumer at this time and requires substantial infrastructure updates which the individual consumer can’t really do much about beyond lobbying reps, so when it comes down to an individual who does need a car weighing what kind of vehicle to buy, I think it is fair to say that electric cars are better than ICE for the environment but, due to being newer, have more privacy concerns than old ICE vehicles. Neither is as good on either criterion as being able to just go car-free, of course.)