Ik this is about TikTok kids glorifying ADHD from the outside. But I’m also allowed to be happy, I’m allowed to have days I don’t hate myself, I’m allowed to not spend every moment wanting to change a huge part of me that I can’t fix. Yes ADHD sucks, but also sometimes it’s cute and sometimes it’s fun and sometimes I get so happy I do a little dance and sometimes I can talk for hours about my favorite thing of the week and sometimes I’m happy. I know it’s frustrating when you’re struggling and people think your life is easy. But it’s also frustrating when I’m finally done hating myself and people insist that I remember how hard my life is and insist I remember that my ADHD makes me miserable and I should fix it.
Imho the idea of ‘cruelty free’ products or food shouldn’t mean that nothing died to create it, but rather that anything and anyone involved in the creation process hasn’t been exploited or harmed.
Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.
Factory farms, abuses of the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat, the focus profit and productivity over all else - that’s the fucking issue here. It’s capitalism folks.
If the idea of an animal having a horrible life before it ended up on your table bugs you, then try buying kosher meats!
In kosher practices, not only is there a guarantee that the animal was killed in a humane way, but also that it had a reasonable high quality of life before it happened!
I’m not Jewish, but @prismatic-bell is, and I’m sure that if they can’t answer your questions, they’d be willing to pass you along to more relevant sources :D
You are correct! Jewish law requires that an animal:
—be fed and watered before you eat
—be put under shelter before you hide in a storm (keep in mind these rules were originally written for desert nomads)
—be given all appropriate medical care
To be kosher, it is ALSO necessary for an animal to be “unblemished.” Means no injuries or diseases, which are best avoided not through battery-farm “just shovel in more antibiotics” practices but rather through good food, clean water, and plenty of roaming space to allow animal-appropriate exercise. “Okay, but Nina, what if they just don’t slaughter until it’s obvious it’s not sick—” Won’t help. That animal was ill and its liver was scarred by the illness? Unclean, must be discarded or sold to a nonkosher butcher (for a price much, much lower than the shochet, or kosher butcher, could have expected to make had the animal been kosher, because now it’s at wholesale). It looked just fine but then you get to the cutting-it-into-meal-sized-pieces stage and discover it had undiagnosed parasites? Theoretically you could sell it to a nonkosher butcher who can use varying procedures to kill the parasites and render the meat edible, but more likely, the whole animal is a loss. You take off the hide and find scarring where the animal was left in a too-small enclosure? Not kosher. Now you’ve lost three animals out of your herd, and you’re a small time butcher with a limited clientele. What has that done to your business? Can you even keep it open? You probably just lost ten thousand dollars or more. You can very quickly see why a shochet has every interest in treating his herd almost better than his children.
So moving on, we’ve established the meat will be well-treated while it’s still on the hoof or wing. (I didn’t touch on this, but—one of the easiest ways to prevent the kind of infighting that causes pecking injuries among chickens is to give them plenty of food and outdoor space. They don’t have to get vicious to have their own territory and they’ll use up some energy gleefully chasing bugs instead of each other.) What happens when it’s slaughter time?
The rules for a kosher butcher are thus: the shochet must be a Jew well-versed in Torah, to ensure the rules for kosher slaughter are being followed; his tools must be kept clean; his blade must be razor-sharp; and he must have extensive training, because if he fails at even one of the next steps, the animal is rendered nonkosher, and we’ve already gone over why that is Not A Good Thing not just in terms of following kosher practice but also in terms of the shochet not having a whole lot of room for loss.
The animals must be kept in an area free from stress, where they can neither see nor hear the slaughter and thus have time to fear their own death. (This is considered to count as animal cruelty.) When an animal is brought to the slaughter block, the shochet must kill the animal with a single stroke of the blade, which must sever the artery, the corresponding vein, and the windpipe. Done correctly, the animal will be unconscious before it even knows it should be feeling pain.
Now the bit that’s probably on your mind: how do you know it was done, and they’re not just saying it’s “kosher” the way some farms will slap “organic” on things?
First, kosher meat is almost exclusively purchased by religious Jews. If you don’t do your job right, you’re causing them to break the mitzvot. (Which, by itself, is breaking a mitzvah. There’s a whole lot of cultural stuff going on here that’s the purview of another post, so suffice to say this is A Really Big Deal and you Just Don’t Do That.) If anyone finds out you haven’t been doing the job right and calls you out on it, guess what: you don’t have a job. Pick up and move to another Jewish community? They’re going to ask who your presiding rabbi was, and you’re going to have to admit you lost your certification. Get slovenly as a shochet and you’re done. Permanently.
Second, that thing about a presiding rabbi: in addition to the local health board doing their thing, you have to get your premises and your procedure overseen by a rabbi. This rabbi, by virtue of the nature of kosher meat, will be Orthodox, meaning “as by the book as you can possibly get.” He will be as serious as a heart attack about you doing this right, and if there’s even a suspicion you’re not, you will not receive his certification—which means even if you do everything right, your meat will not be considered kosher and people will not buy from you. So you have to do it correctly, and you also have to be aware that the rabbi may come at any time he chooses just to check in. You’re not going to cut corners. There’s too much at stake.
Also: if you’re struggling to find a kosher butcher, see if you can find a local halal market. I’ve actually had a couple of Muslims pop onto posts where I’ve explained this before to be like “you literally just described halal slaughter.” The only real difference is the blessings that are said (and halal meat must be butchered by a Muslim, not a Jew).
And finally: our communities are very small. There are only 16 million Jews worldwide (to put that in perspective: before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews. We still have not recovered to pre-Hitler levels). Purchasing from a kosher butcher gives business to a community that could use the support and, contrary to stereotype, is actually more likely to be quite poor than to be rich. It’s an act in which everyone wins: you get cruelty-free meat and a local business belonging to a vulnerable minority gets more funds.
A message to the comic book ‘fans‘ who are defending Hydra Cap by saying “they’ll change it back.“
Imagine this: You go to a nice restaurant. Five stars, great reviews, lot of history, staff are friendly, an ideal place to eat. Then, one day, a new chef decides to make a change to a popular recipe. You try it, and it gives you food poisoning. As well as everyone else who eats it.
Even if the chef changes the recipe back to normal so it’s no longer bad, that doesn’t change the fact that they gave you food poisoning. You wouldn’t forget that, would you? Well, you shouldn’t. And neither should they.
I went to see Captain America: There’s Even More Punching This Timewith@rostheriveter today and it was lovely, but also this thought occurred to me:
Why make a big deal out of Tony’s turn-your-memories-into-cinema tech in the beginning of the film and then never mention it again? I get that the purpose of that scene is to remind us all that Tony is still fucked up about his parents. But why not make it serve two purposes?
We all know there shouldn’t be a video of the Winter Soldier killing Howard and Maria Stark. There’s no reason for there to be a security camera in the middle of the woods. And even if there were a security camera there, the singularly highly trained so-legendary-he’s-somehow-also-a-ghost best-ever HYDRA assassin who was specifically instructed not to be seen is not going to do a double murder on camera, then flounce right up to the camera like Beyoncé in Lemonade so that it gets a perfect shot of his face, and then destroy it.
Like. Wouldn’t he case the joint first? Or whatever it’s called, don’t look at me, I don’t do crimes. I’m just saying, the fucking Winter Soldier would probably have the powers of observation to be like “Oh, a camera. In the woods for some reason. I’ma shoot it to preserve my status as the world’s best super-secret ghost-slash-legend, and also so that HYDRA tortures me slightly less when I return to them. Bang. A-murderin’ we go!”
BUT I DIGRESS.
Wouldn’t it be super cool if Zemo stole Tony’s memory-projection machine, and then somehow forced Bucky to use the tech to project his memory of 1991, and that was how Zemo tore the Avengers apart?
Advantages:
Gets rid of the ridiculous “security camera in the woods” thing.
The memory would be from the Winter Soldier’s perspective, which provides a cool visual opportunity to explore both how the Winter Soldier saw the world and how Bucky remembers it–is it perfectly clear? Is it choppy? Is it vivid? Is it extra super horrifying? (Yes, probably.)
Tony’s tech would come back! I’m really interested in the intersection of memory and technology and these movies are always teasing me with little bits and then never following through.
Everything about it is way more painful, and I’m into that.
she hit me with this right as we were walking out of the theater and then was like ‘so do you want to get coffee?’ and so i was trying to process this idea that both made TOTAL FUCKING SENSE but also was EXTRA HORRIFYING as we tried to figure out if there was anywhere nearby we could get a drink and talk.
(there is Not Much in Sturbridge, y’all, except a movie theater that is halfway between the two of us)
(well, there is Old Sturbridge Village but that’s not really the kind of place you go to have Serious Superhero Emotional Overloads)
Some people take their coffee with cream or sugar. I take mine with HORRIFYING EMOTIONAL PAIN.
