So today’s object lesson in obliviousness comes, as it so often does, from the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit.
The regulars there are discussing the important topic “Women are worse than a backyard full of cackling hens,” and one of the fellas pipes up with this, er, observation.
MGTOW dudes, I don’t know if you know this, but men do sex work too. I recommend you take it up for a week and see how “easy” it is.
@Sseba
nononono, what we do is – this will be fabulous – we splice the same genes they used to make a glow-in-the-dark mouse into polar bears!
(the genes are originally from jellyfish, iirc)
Doesn’t that just make you want to rush out and get a secret lab in an underground lair hidden inside an arctic volcano or something? Glowing polar bears! Everyone will want one!
Of course they might make rather challenging subjects to work with …
@Victoria
rings true to me. (not on the spectrum myself, but one of my best beloveds is)
@Alan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlA6oEs3C18
Heritage Minutes on Winnie.
She was the mascot for the CAVC and a pet to the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade Headquarters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnipeg_(bear)
@ opposablethumbs
“Professor Thumbs is currently having their face reattached, so here to accept the Nobel Prize on their behalf…”
(“No fair! That should have been my face.” shouts Viscaria from the audience.)
ETA: ooh, cheers Rhuu
Emma,
I’m guessing penisassociate believes, as so many in the manosphere do, that child care is not real and honest work either. Women just pretend it’s hard so that we have an excuse to stay home and eat bonbons while the men work 50 million jobs to support her. I’m sure he’d be willing to nanny for super easy money, only people won’t let him anywhere near their kids because
he’s a creepof misandry.@Alan
Hahaha! *falls over, laughing*
~
I’m feeling spoiled, as part of this community. Two separate solid facts in one day, both about bears. My mum and I were speculating on how Winnie the Pooh got his name just the other day (my maternal grandma was Winifred).
Plus I found out invisible polar bears have been saving my flat from an infestation of seals this whole time and I didn’t know. I live 15 minutes walk from the sea; it sounds plausible.
@Alan:
I suspect that depends a lot on how you define ‘species’, which is a much messier can of worms than used to be thought. Both black and brown/grizzly bears can have a fairly wide variety of fur colours, but they do tend to be shaped differently. (Grizzlies have more of a shoulder hump, and their shoulders are higher than their hindquarters, whereas black bears usually have their hindquarters higher making them look sloped forward.) On the other hand, there is anecdotal evidence that cross-breeds exist as well.
@opposablethumbs:
Yes. Yes, it does.
Okay, now I have to spread the concept of glow-in-the-dark tie-dyed polar bears to some of my friends that I know would find it amusing…
@Viscaria nailed it re: men, autism, and entitlement.
@Alan
only if you consider wolves and coyotes the same species, or horses and donkeys. They can interbreed, but rarely produce fertile offspring. Same for brown bears and polar bears. probably black bears can mate with polar bears too but I don’t think anyone’s seen offspring from such. Now, American brown bears, grizzly bears, and Kodiak bears are definitely all the same species.
@ dalillama
They probably inherit invisibility from their polar bear parent.
Dalillama presented the species issue better than I did. Brown bears are the same as grizzly bears, but black bears are something different.
Of course, as I noted, the idea of ‘species’ as a silo where everything within a species can interbreed and things outside it can’t is dead. We have things like ‘ring species’: you can have a set of bird populations on islands where the birds from island A can interbreed with the birds from island B, and the birds from island B can interbreed with the birds from island C, but the birds from islands A and C cannot interbreed.
As we have long noted on this site when dealing with the usual subjects: real life is a whole lot messier than the neat categories that people like to try to place things in.
@ jenora
I wrote a terrible sci-fi story once. It was about two highly xenophobic alien species engaged in a genocidal race war. As attrition took toll on their respective numbers, they had to ally with other people so long as they were acceptably genetically similar. Of course eventually both sides tried to recruit the same ally and that’s when they found out they were just at each end of the same ring species. Da-da-da!
Just leaving this here.
https://twitter.com/ThomasSanders/status/794995598285885440
Pictured: an invisible pub. We’re not sure what its opening hours are.
http://s3-media4.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/H-6K7M7RRYaq2AcnDR-40Q/ls.jpg
Grizzly/black/brown bears:
I am convinced that it is the same bear. A Double agent. Now who writes the spy novel about the invisible grizzly?
Re: ring species
That is, essentially, the scientific explanation for why in certain fantasy settings, there are half-elves and half-orcs (where the “half” refers to human) but there are no elf-orcs.
Elves, humans and orcs simply coexist on the same ring species spectrum, with humans in the middle, capable of interbreeding with both (like the birds on island B), and elves and orcs at the extreme ends (islands A and C). Dwarves are usually considered to be outside of this continuum entirely, though that depends on the setting.
As for halflings, well, that also depends on the setting. In Tolkien terms, there exists a largely unexplored connection between humans and halflings (such as being “awakened” or “entering the world” at roughly the same time in history) that would suggest some sort of biological relation, but due to unknown factors*, we never really see a pairing, so it remains a mystery.
*I’m just saying, there could be insurmountable social taboos to the idea of humans and halflings interbreeding, which is why all relationships in records are always described as platonic. So, all your erotic fan fiction about Eowyn/Merry or Frodo/Aragorn could very well be accurate, but due to social pressure, the relationships are downplayed in official records.
…Okay, I’ll shut up now.
> All
Thank you for the information about polar bears. I admit i never made any research about it, and your sayings are interesting. If many are invisible, that is reinforcing the theory they are the cause of global warming, because this implies that they are secretly multiplying themselves ! And if you ever smell some stinky hot air in your nape, it may not be Donald T… i mean, it may not be a heavy breathing pervert with salacious thoughts but an invisible polar bear !
It is not gonna be the Night of the Lepus but the Night of the Ursus Invisus !
Run away !
> Anarchonist
Halfling is warhammer term, Hobbit for Tolkien ! Heresy ! To the pyre !
Just joking.
Anyway, maybe it could be add that, except in too few rare cases, if the half-elf stereotype is often the one linked to the fruit of the love (the feeling, not just the act) between an elf and a human, the half-orc is far mainly described as the consequence of (sorry to say that) rape and it is almost always male orc on human female (in the rare case where a female orc have a child with a male human, it is said to be love, the man being presented as strong enought to overcome the supposed ugliness of the orcess…). Of course, orcs are often depicted as big and brutal thugs, and never white.
Does this ring or remind you something ?
@occasional reader
But… but… Tolkien did use the term halfling. It is the English representation of the Westron word banakil (meaning literally half-person), and it is used both in the books and in the movies. Hobbit is the word they prefer to call themselves, but halfling is what the Dúnedain – and most other non-hobbit folk – call them when speaking in the common tongue.
Anyway, I decided to use the term since it’s a general, catch-all term, to recognize the fact that different versions of halflings do exist in popular culture, but the Tolkien estate is pretty quick to drop legal threats on anyone using the term hobbit outside a Tolkien context. I have no knowledge whatsoever of Warhammer, but it did not come up with the term. Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, originally used hobbit for their diminutive creatures, but switched to halfling after the Tolkien estate made their displeasure known.
But yeah, the racism inherent in most incarnations of the elf-human-orc continuum is… troubling, to say the least. Which is why I have my own weird pseudo-scientific takes on fantasy worlds, and like to work on my own universe with a deconstructive take on fantasy clichés. Including the very problematic racism angle of so-called “evil races” (which, from an ethical standpoint, make absolutely zero sense).
@Alan
I liked the alternative theory better.
http://factoflife.net/upload/images/20160622/funny-panda-pictures.jpg
I’m still hoping that the Others/White Walkers will be revealed to not have an agenda that’s actually evil but only seem evil because their main weapon is puppeteered corpses.
@WWTH
Agreed. Personally, I’ve always assumed the Others to be some sort of physical manifestations of ice, winter and entropy, locked in a battle against fire, summer and enthalpy (or whatever the opposite of entropy is), and that the concepts of human ethics and morality are inconsequential to them. Having some sort of ‘absolute, conscious evil’ in a decidedly amoral universe would definitely be a bit of a let-down. The Others simply being an amoral force makes more sense to me within the context of the narrative as a whole. But I don’t know.
All this talk of bears, pubs and Canadian regiments reminds me of this place, near where I used to live : White Bear pub. A jolly nice pub, with a whacking gurt concrete bear outside.
@Anarchonist:
We could always use the term Pheriannath instead. People will be okay with the non-English suffixes, right?
About evil races: I absolutely agree. There’s a lot of really ugly ideas baked into the generic “fantasy world” that’s spun out of Tolkien and Gygax, and that’s one of the worst. I’d love to hear your deconstructions of the genre, if the opportunity presents itself.
@Malitia:
That’s easily the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. I looked at it, laughed for several minutes, then looked back at it and started laughing all over again.
That reddit post’s reasoning isn’t just wrong, it’s outright disgusting and frustrating.
I just feel that a lot of the rhetoric around women in these contexts apparently being ‘like children’ or ‘spoilt’ just serves to reinforce cultural narratives which infantilise women.
And of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg with these degenerates and their abhorrent ideology
@ malitia
That’s so cute!
@Anarchonist
The last fantasy setting I did that had versions of the ‘traditional’ fantasy races, humans were the beginning. And also lizardfolk, but they’re not related at all to any of the others. Some humans interbred with the fae, and became elves. Others interbred with stranger dimensional creatures, and became goblins. Still others moved into the metal-rich asteroid that destroyed the goblin homeland (apparently they picked the losing side in an extradimensional battle), where the world’s magic field was suppressed. The changed radiations made them short and hairless, and they developed a somewhat better technology than the rest of the world. In the ‘present’, the elves are racist imperialists, the goblins live in ghettos attached to human or elvish cities and sell cut-rate miracles (inspired by the Goblin Markets of folklore), and the lizardfolk and dwarves continue their ancient war (dwarves took to enslaving lizardfolk a while back; the lizards disapprove strongly of this practice).
@BaronJenks
Canada seems to like bigass animal statues:
@EJ
No, you wouldn’t, because once I start talking about it, you’ll never be able to shut me up.
I kid, but I have written quite a few stories with said fantasy universe as the backdrop. I have been interested in publishing some art I’ve made of it and maybe even a serial comic I’ve started working on as a webcomic or something, but I can’t be bothered to learn how things like “starting a blog or a website” work in real life.
I sooooo hate the ethical and moral implications of racism in a universe where it is encouraged to view a certain race as objectively evil. Gimli and Legolas treat murdering orcs as a fucking contest, for god’s sake! And if it seems like I’m harping on Tolkien here*, don’t even get me fucking started on R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden, the supposedly “good” dark elf and his band of orc-torturing serial killers… er, I mean, “heroes”. The fantasy genre has some fuuucked up shit. And this is without even diving into the objectivist or straight-up white supremacist oceans of undiluted vomit fantasy litterature.
*To be clear, I really respect the man and what he did to fantasy litterature, buuuuut… Oh, well, to his credit, Tolkien later in life sort of admitted that there pretty much has to exist non-evil orcs in order for anything in his universe to make any kind of ethical sense.
@Dalillama
That sounds so cool! There is so much fun to be had with experimenting with social dynamics in speculative fiction. My setting also has elements of being inspired by folklore, but folklore with the twist of being explained by cultural differences. For instance, my dwarf-inspired creatures are very different in various parts of the world (miners and crafters in the Nibelungenlied-inspired pseudo-Germany with Tolkien-esque overtones; small, quiet, solitary creatures who often live in human housing and in return help them with their chores in northern lands; malevolent goblins in certain places where humans have all but driven them to the brink of extinction because of mistrust and generally being shitty colonialist assbags, etc.).
Humans count all these types of dwarf as being different types of creatures entirely because stereotypes and all that jazz. In reality, they’re all the same creature, but since they are not a hivemind, they have wildly different cultures, practices and languages depending on their place of residence.
…Yeah. Not a big fan of the “non-humans all share a common language with their kind and are alike all over the world, only humans are varied! I can’t be bothered to create unique cultures for everyone!” fantasy cliché either. Just reeks so much of cultural and racial stereotyping to me.
Here I go again, somebody please get me away from the keyboard.