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mar_k [he/him]

@ mar_k @hexbear.net

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5
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112
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • Oral tradition can be incredibly rich. Most civilizations in human history had no written language, until very recently. Only a few human cultures created written languages independently (Egyptians, Sudanese, Chinese, Iraqis, and a couple others). Mythology and epics from Ancient Greece, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, were complicated stories passed exclusively by word of mouth from traveling poets. And oral wisdom + verbatim memory were incredibly valued and highly trained skills, so these stories might not have been as distorted across generations as we might assume

    We already know orcas spend their entire lives by the sides of the same group, and that the matriarch leader does in fact pass customs, culture, and practices to the next generations by word of mouth. And they likely have greater brainpower for remembrance than us, so who knows, the matriarchs could have books worth of knowledge all in their heads. (And yea parrots and octopus are smart but definitely not on the level of orcas)

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • There's many cultures of orcas with wildly different documented hunting practices. I honestly feel like you can't generalize orcas in the same way you can't generalize humans, e.g. blanket statements about human nature as evil because of the actions of some cultures

    It's even more complicated when you consider they have literal sub-species, such as Transient Orcas (mammal-eating) and Resident Orcas (fish-eating), with the latter usually being more social, empathetic, & tight-knit. Residents and Transients tend to steer clear of each other and have unspoken beef, with some Transient pods occasionally kidnapping & eating calves from Residents when no one's looking. Even among Transients, some pods regularly cruelly play with whales or seals, while other pods don't appear to do anything of the sort

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • Yeah corvids have (at the very least) simple languages and dialects, and are known to pass knowledge of good vs bad humans across generations. My grandpa nursed a crow back to health when he was in his 20s, and decades later sitting on the same bench in his 80s, crows would still regularly land on his shoulder. No one else's. I assumed they just like looked at a person and made primitive happy or angry sounds, but apparently it's deeper than that

    Elephants are maybe even cooler: vocalization's only a small part of their communication, and they mainly use combination of seismic vibrations from their feet & ultra-specific body language. Their amount of variation between body/trunk/ear posture is way more subtle, complicated, and intentional than anything humans do for body language. It may even be something like a sign language, with its own grammar and syntax. Their feet are also incredibly sensitive, picking up vibrations invisible to everyone else: so they make extremely precise vibration-creating movements to send specific, patterned messages to each other via the ground. They'll also do this with a much louder rumbling when they need to send info to a friend several miles away

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • Yeah capitalists separated orcas from their loved ones to imprison them in a fucking swimming pool, and then acted shocked when a couple seaworld trainers got mauled. Not a single non-captive orca has killed a human: divers actually regularly swim with them (and there's several cases of orcas charging at distant lone swimmers before turning away when they see it's a human)

    There's videos of them uncannily mimicking human words to seemingly attempt communication, as well as offering us gifts of their captured prey, and even seaweed after we refused all the meat

    They also seem to have a pretty good idea that humans have diverse morals and practices. They distinguish individual humans as well as larger groups, and the matriarchs seem to remember and pass a library of information across generations. Historically, they knew to recognize and flee from settler Japanese and the Europeans who hunted them, while maintaining proximity to indigenous Japanese Ainu and certain Native Americans, who revered orcas and developed a symbiotic hunting relationship (and believed to have a deep spiritual friendship with them)

    At the peak of orca hunting, they adapted extremely quick by sharing knowledge across pods, such as the locations of boats containing hostile cultures of humans, as well as evasion strategies. We found out that they literally figured out sailboats moved in the direction of the wind, and that they just needed to feel the wind and migrate the opposite way of that.

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • Orcas also have extremely strong matriarchal communal values, diverse cultures and practices, and complex emotions & grief rituals, with a whole new brain region we don't have but is assumed to be for higher-level emotional/social processing

    We assume lack of civilization and invention = lack of capacity, but you can't build without opposable thumbs (or make fire underwater), and maybe they don't see the point in overcomplicating shit in the first place. Orcas tend to live long lives and rarely die from starvation, and starvation has only become somewhat common due to human overfishing, overhunting, and chemical waste. Modern humans under capitalist overindulgence wreak havoc to everyone's food chain, including our own.. Meanwhile different orca communities go for different foods, almost in a shared agreement type way to intricately balance their ecosystem and reduce tribal competition

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • I say orcas in all seriousness bc I feel they're basically the closest thing to aliens on Earth, rivaling or exceeding our intelligence in many ways (only animal with more forebrain neurons than us), while we've ignorantly underestimated their capacity for complex language until very recently

    Orcas talk with multi-layered ranges of whistles and pulses combined with precise body gestures, and can even send 3d sonogram-like mental images to each other via echolocation. Yet we know next to nothing about what they're communicating, other than there appears to be clear structure, pattern, and organized repetition far beyond random chatter, and unique regional pod dialects passed across generations

    From a linguistic standpoint, our debate on orca communication classifying as true language simply bc it transcends the rules of ours, plus our current complete inability to decode what they're saying, feels worrisome for an alien arrival scenario

  • Vance says he’s ‘obsessed’ with UFO files, calls aliens ‘demons’

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  • God help us all if aliens first try to communicate with a puritanical crybully state like the US, Saudi Arabia, or India, instead of a largely rational society like China, Mexico, or certain communities of Orcas

  • Honestly, the suburbs scare me too...

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  • I've lived in city outskirts all my life and have been getting into mountain climbing and rock scrambling from a club at my college. Maybe it's just my ADHD hyperness, but it's all been surprisingly very easy to pick it up

    I feel like there's no practical concern if you're under 40 & have some athletic ability, and/or go with at least a couple friends/family/clubmates to look out for each other (or at very least on a trail where there's people everywhere)

    I also think it's safer than ever bc of phones, assuming you're fully charged w a battery bank, case-protected, and enable a voice assistant for calls/texts if the screen cracks or you can't reach it. Most areas still have SOS call service when you lose bars, and if you're in an ultra-remote cellular dead zone, if you or someone you're with has a phone from the last 2-4 years then it can text via satellite

  • DOJ confirms FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email was hacked

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  • Honestly, the suburbs scare me too...

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  • It's in the genetic memory of wild mammals to see humans as ultimate apex predators. Research finds everyone from deer to bear will run faster from the mere sound of a human voice than the call of literally any other animal. Humans talking literally invokes greater fear in animals than howling wolves or roaring lions

    The vast vast majority of hiking deaths aren't from the wilderness itself but from completely avoidable things like falls off cliffs, heat strokes from overexertion, drowning, or hypothermia/dehydration after getting lost. Also parasites from drinking river water or some shit

  • Parasitic ant species where every individual is a queen discovered in Japan

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  • Still can't wrap my head around some animals reproduce asexually. Like wtf do you mean they "clone themselves"

  • Locked

    Bulletins and International News Discussion from February 23rd to February 28th, 2026 - FIRST IRAN VS US+ZIONISTS WAR MEGATHREAD

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  • Half the length was literally just from Republicans clapping. Mfs gave him a 30 second standing ovation after every sentence

    And half the speech itself was just showman sensationalism, just constantly announcing a new martyr who was in the crowd. Like they literally had Erika Kirk crying and hugging a crime victim of an undocumented immigrant, then a child who almost died in a car crash from an undocumented truck driver

    Just a bunch of shock value anecdotes all while undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens

  • Dogru is the first European Union citizen known to be living inside the EU to face extrajudicial sanctions imposed by Brussels

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  • Government opinion =/= public opinion. Polls in Germany are more pro-Palestine than polls in the US

  • Dogru is the first European Union citizen known to be living inside the EU to face extrajudicial sanctions imposed by Brussels

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  • They're calling him an asset of both Russia and Hamas

    Literally calling German college kids' encampments a "violent occupation" and claiming he spread terrorist propaganda by simply reporting on them

  • Democracy is when fascists are allowed but communists are no no.

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  • Sure worked out for the Weimar Republic

  • Woman tried to torch warehouse after ICE detention facility sale cancelled, police say

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  • wonder why she didn't wear a mask :(

  • Supreme Court declines to revisit landmark same-sex marriage precedent | CNN Politics

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  • SCOTUS can't codify law it just interprets it, i'm talking about the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act

  • Supreme Court declines to revisit landmark same-sex marriage precedent | CNN Politics

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  • Correct me if i'm wrong, but gay & interracial marriage were codified into federal law by congress in the Biden era, so repealing it wouldn't do anything unless congress repealed that too?

  • On the Internet, what is a dead giveaway that someone is actually a kid?

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  • if you wanna tell apart american gen z from gen alpha, ask them if they know what this is:

    gen z used these smartboards and the teacher always made someone recalibrate the touchscreen to the projection when it was off

    afaik the new spoiled shits all get these in every classroom, they were rolling em out when i was graduating:

    at least in places that can afford it. this might be more true in a few years