im not even the type of guy to go “actually it’s frankenstein’s MONSTER” because a painting by rembrandt or picasso or any other artist is often called “a rembrandt” or “a picasso” as shorthand. so in this respect frankenstein’s monster can be considered “a frankenstein”
darling I love your 8 foot tall patchwork flesh creature, it really livens up the place. is that an authentic frankenstein?
it’s only a true frankenstein if it was produced in the frankenstein region of switzerland. otherwise it’s just a sparkling homunculus
I think it’s a common misconception that domesticating animals is somewhat like enslaving them. It really is more of a symbiotic relationship. No wild animal would have willingly put up with early humans if they didn’t get something out of it. Wolves wouldn’t have stayed with us and become dogs if they weren’t getting food and safety out of it. Many large herbivores that are now domesticated could and would have easily trampled their early human captors or broken their enclosures open if they didn’t have a reason to stay. Sometimes individual animals still do if we don’t give them what they need.
The animals that have stayed with us for thousands of years have evolved to cooperate with us better. Dogs have additional facial muscles around their eyes that wolves lack in order to mimic human facial expressions. Sheep grow their wool perpetually while their wild counterparts don’t because a bigger fleece means they’re more likely to be allowed to breed and be kept around. Domestic dairy cows produce much more milk than wild bovine species and domestic hens lay more eggs. Do you know how energy costly producing eggs or milk is for an animal? It’s pretty intense! They wouldn’t be able to do that if we hadn’t given them the food and safety from predators and the elements to.
And we really need to show these animals respect and gratitude for what they give us by taking excellent care of them. They gave up a lot to be with us, often including the means to take care of themselves in the wild. That’s a huge reason why I’m not against using animal products, but I hate factory farming. They are still living, breathing creatures with needs and feelings. They deserve a comfortable life and, when the time comes, a humane death.
Fun fact! Not only is everything here correct, it’s the reason we haven’t domesticated bears!
This is a bit to the left of my area of expertise, so bear with me (heh), but there had been attempts to domesticate brown bears several times in human history! Vikings were the first ones we have records of (that I know of) and also in the Roman empire, India and even the Victorians. There were absolutely a few generations of tame brown bears, from pets to zoo performers to hunters and war bears. They did have a chance of being domesticated like the wolves had been.
And all of that effort? Resulted in jack shit. Level of domestication remained zero. The bears got out of that domestication experiment with zero genes altered. There is several reasons for that, one of which being that they live too long and don’t breed as fast, and also they are very individual animals as opposed to wolves, so they don’t play well in groups, which is kinda necessary.
But the biggest reason? BEARS DON’T NEED HUMANS. There is absolutely no point in a bear’s life cycle where it’s survival would be immensely impacted for the better by human intervention. They can hunt and forage on their own, no help necessary. They have no trouble surviving harsh climates, so human houses weren’t a temptation. They’re solitary, so they didn’t seek out companionship when alone. They occupy a similar dietary niche as humans so were more competition for resources that an opportunity for mutualism. They certainly didn’t need protection.
So even though humans (being human) tried to domesticate bears, bears weren’t really playing ball with that. They were just fine on their own, and saw no sufficient incentive to change themselves to fit into a relationship with humans. Sure there are some weirdoes who got fairy-napped as cubs and are happy living with humans, but their genes aren’t useful enough to bring into the pool. They saw what happened to the wolves who got too close to the human fire and missionaries are mauled on sight.
Because it’s kinda already happened, but not really? The thing about cheetahs is that they are very, very endangered, part of the reason being that cheetah cub mortality rate is something like 80%, which is abnormally high even for wild animals. Cheetahs don’t make dens where they can stash their cubs, so they have to sort of drag them around with them and hope predators mistake them for a badger and don’t attack them (cheetah cubs have very fluffy fur on top of them as camouflage).
Add in the fact that tjey’re basically horse software running on cat hardware? These guys are an anxious wreck, every single one of them. And if left on their own they will absolutely form a positive feedback loop of scaring each other half to death and be too stressed to breed.
Enter wildlife conservation scientists.
These guys really want cheetahs to stay around, and stay wild animals. They are very fucking careful to let cheetahs be wild animals while making sure they don’t perish entirely to enviroment, starvation and predation, and that they preferably breed.
Cheetahs see humans staying back and keeping a respectful distance but helping whenever they need it. Everyone who knows cats knows this is basically a marriage proposal done right.
So humans want cheetahs to be proper wild animals. Cheetahs have tried being wild animals and said ‘Fuck that shit! That’s hard! Come pet me and keep me safe!’
Add in the fact that cheetah gene pool is so fucking limited they can basically all be each other’s organ donors, you also gotta bolster their diversity, preferably with healthy cheetahs from zoos, and those are so used to humans some of them will just come up to you and demand to be petted. If it’s one of those that was raised with helper dogs? That’s basically an oversized housecat, or at least it really wants you to think it is.
And there is also a historical precedent for this! Fucking pharaos kept cheetahs as pets, and if taken young they can be tamed in, like, a year. Tame cheetahs were noble gifts in the Ming dynasty. The Mughals used them as hunting animals (though it might have been carcals or leopards).
Quite frankly, the only reason cheetahs HADN’T been domesticated so far is because getting them to breed in captivity is real fucking hard, and consistent sucesses were achieved only in the seventies. The males need to have their bromance packs (pardon, coalitions) and females need to have a large area to roam. Kinda hard to arrange without a whole lot of land.
I’m just thinking about how many times I’ve heard my dad on a long call with an obvious scammer and I’ll start begging him to get off the phone because I always think he’s a very easy mark and he’ll just keep going and then after a while he’ll say something like “I died 20 years ago” and hang up.
Virgin Millennial Daughter with 20 hrs of screentime a day: Dad! They’re scamming you! Dad! Stop! They will take your savings and your identity! Hang up before they SWAT you!
Chad Boomer dad with a flip phone he has not recharged since 2014: Well gee I wish I could give you my bank account number after you spent all this time on the phone explaining this car deal with me but I don’t have access to my finances because I am in Rikers for felony murder.
I haven’t actively used this site in years but this grabbed my imagination so thoroughly I had to draw it
imagine: you get your memories back after years of amnesia to find out your whole species is dead and earth doesn’t exist anymore. that the only thing left of your culture is your weird ex and his busted honda civic that barely even works that he stole from the government when he was 13. And he’s been taking members of an alien species for trips in his honda civic and they’re all like “woah it’s so cool” and you get upset because it’s NOT COOL it’s a honda civic, the turn signals don’t even work “wow it can go up hills” yeah OF COURSE IT CAN GO UP HILLS EVERY CAR COULD DO THAT. but they’ve never seen a car before so everything it does is the coolest thing ever. And your ex’s only tool is a fucking screwdriver which is somehow also cool to this dumbass alien species even though it’s a fucking screwdriver so you just look like an idiot screaming about how none of this is even cool it’s actually really shitty but your whole planet is gone so you can’t even prove it but also you’ve had a constant drumming sounding in your head since you were 10 slowly driving you insane. I would become evil too.
One thing the analysts back in 2012 were right about is that they’d stop calling it “Obamacare” the second it started working and lo and behold anytime it was actually threatened under Trump it became The ACA and now Leftists who were in Kindergarten when the ACA was passed think Democrats have added nothing to this country.
I don’t think a lot of people remember pre-existing conditions. Like it was a thing for a long time where my mom fought to try to avoid having my brother diagnosed with asthma because she didn’t want him tagged with pre-existing condition. I wasn’t officially diagnosed with autism or depression or anything because my parents didn’t want to me to have a pre-existing condition when I became an adult that could prevent me from having insurance. Insurance companies could flat out refuse to pay for treatment if you had a pre-existing condition that could have caused the issue you were wanting them to pay for. That’s not a thing anymore. My diagnosis of lupus isn’t going to affect my ability to find insurance or use it to pay for lupus-related care if I change insurance.
Remember that bit from Parks and Rec? Yeah, that’s kind of like what it was like. That was back in 2012. The ACA made it so that:
1. No insurance plan can reject you, charge you more, or refuse to pay for essential health benefits for any condition you had before your coverage started. This means that if you get diagnosed with cancer, insurance companies can’t refuse to cover you. It means that if you have asthma, insurance companies can’t refuse to pay for inhalers because you had it before you signed on with them.
2. Once you’re enrolled, the plan can’t deny you coverage or raise your rates based only on your health. This means that when I was diagnosed with lupus, my insurance couldn’t kick me off or make me pay more.
3. Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) also can’t refuse to cover you or charge you more because of your pre-existing condition. This is actually a big one, because it meant that the only coverage some people could afford wasn’t able to kick you off, refuse to cover you, or charge you more because of something like a heart murmur you had at birth. That was a real concern for us when my oldest was born. They had a heart murmur and we were terrified we would never get insurance coverage for them.
Those were real things that really happened to millions of Americans. They would get diagnosed with cancer and get kicked of their insurance. They would have a semi high blood pressure reading one time and have a heart attack 10 years later and the insurance would refuse to pay for any of it.
Obamacare killed that. And the GOP fought like hell against it. Can you imagine everyone whose ever had COVID not being covered at all under insurance? Or being charged 3 or 4 times more? Or being charged 3 times more and still not having coverage for anything that might stem from COVID? Because that’s where we would be without the ACA.
the ACA had just passed a couple of months before my late wife’s cancer diagnosis and I’m here to tell you it literally saved her life. she was actively dying and she would have died within months without the ACA. the ACA let her not only get her initial doctor’s appointment, but paid for the tests and bloodwork and hospital stays and workups that eventually resulted in her diagnoses (she had more than one diagnosis).
we simply could not have gotten her even diagnosed, much less treated, without the ACA. it gave her five more years of life and that was a huge deal for our family. it also gave her a gentler, kinder death than she would have otherwise had.
do not let Republicans take one bit of credit for the ACA. that was all the Democrats, especially Obama himself.
