For Reasons I Shall Not Discuss, A Tweet

When you kill a healthcare ceo, it’s terrorism. When someone shoots your kid in elementary school, it’s thoughts and prayers for like a week and then they move on. It truly shows the fact that terrorism is whatever the american government wants it to mean.

Findings located, it's cold and there are cats, join us in the fey forest

Today's Republican Christians would accuse migrant Jesus of eating pets and taunt his single mother with 'your body, my choice'.

They would wear 'I can't breathe' shirts to the crucifixion.

#SundaySermon

If I don't start seeing AO3 tags with "no beta we die like the UHC CEO" I'm gonna lose what little faith I have in humanity

reminder what an “animal” is

Not only do I run into people who think insects and other arthropods don’t qualify as animals, I run into people who know that they’re “technically” animals but they’re of the “opinion” they shouldn’t be. What are people actually judging by here, though? Intelligence? Because there are definitely vertebrates like us with barely more brainpower than a cockroach, and then there are invertebrates like octopuses, as genetically distant from us as a cockroach but intelligent enough to learn people’s faces and solve puzzles. Are they going by anatomy? That an arthropod is supposedly just “too different” physically to be lumped with us as animals? Let me show those folks something:

Here’s the animal kingdom. The giant pale blue is all the arthropods, the insects and spiders and crabs and things. The pale green sliver is the chordata, which contains just three groups. One of those three groups is the vertebrata, literally every single animal with a skeleton: humans, horses, eels, owls, snakes, frogs, all the things people apparently think are “real” animals. One of the other three types of chordata, your closest possible cousins, are these things, the lancelets:

Just like you, they have a notochord, which during embryonic development becomes your spinal column.

The third kind of chordate, and actually even closer to you genetically than a lancelet, is a tunicate, and here’s an example of one kind of tunicate:

This is a colony of several thousand little bags with mouths and anuses and virtually no other organs. As larvae, they resemble tadpoles and also have a notochord like you once did in the womb, but then they absorb it as they mature. These are our nearest cousins on the planet.

Now unlike the mature tunicate, an insect is a creature with a clearly defined head, jaws, legs, feet, eyes, a complete brain, practically anthropomorphic compared to those bags of filter-feeding jelly, yet it’s the bags of filter feeding jelly that share an immediate ancestor with you. If “bugs” are too weird to be animals then what the hell are we? Basically if you’re going to say an insect shouldn’t be considered an animal, you may as well say a cactus shouldn’t be considered a plant because it looks funny.

The problem with “senseless violence” narrative around the UnitedHealthcare CEO is that it ignores the inherent violence of the insurance industry. Denying someone lifesaving care is violence. Subjecting someone to drawn out periods of pain before treatment is violent. The industry is made up of millions of acts of violence everyday, with the CEO at the helm guiding it all. This is not unprovoked and it’s not an overreaction; it is just harder to ignore

You know, if CEOs want me to really care about CEOs getting killed by guns, maybe we shouldn't have spent the last couple decades making the US so numb to absolutely horrifying gun violence. I have reached the point where I can not cry when another round of kids in school are murdered with guns. No wonder I can feel vaguely amused when a sleazy millionaire who built his career off denying human rights and dignity is being murdered.

That being said, I don't want to be in charge of ranking who is most worthy of life and making the call on choosing who lives and dies.

Hmmm....You know who does want to be in charge of that?

(Health Insurance CEOs)