magenser.
i once saw some ducks with a bunch of midsized babies and some more tiny babies 💖☺️
Mallard ducks in particular seem to take the view that as long as someone’s looking after the ducklings, it doesn’t really matter whose is whose.
Commie birds
Someone on Lemmy is going to suggest exterminating the tankie ducks now.
I think I saw her once, actually! A crow was harassing one of the small ones – it looked like it was trying to catch it to eat, probably?
A seagull saw what’s going on and went full-blown “I’m a parent as well, you absolute damn fucker!”, and chased the crow away. And really not just a few tens of metres away or so, but really chased them away from the whole general area where the mom with really cool hair was swimming with her family!
When the seagull came back, I gave it something nice to eat, because, damn, flying rat or not, that was a cool move! And I happened to have something seagull compatible, not just some bread that will do more harm than good.
Crows are complex, though. The ones that live around my house can often be found ganging up and chasing away the red-tailed hawks that like to snack on the squirrels. The squirrels repay the favor by chasing off the crows who come to eat the peanuts I leave out for them (and eating the peanuts themselves). One time the crows flew around above me making a godawful racket until I went to the back yard and freed a baby raccoon that had accidentally gone into the box trap I leave out for groundhogs; they immediately flew off as soon as I let the little guy out.
Crows are generally awesome! I’ve only ever met one that I really didn’t like. Want to read a story featuring that one? 🙃
Fuck yeah, I do!
Sorry for getting your hopes up. It’s there a couple comments up from this one :)
I was promised more crow stories. I demand more stories. Entertain me! /s
Once upon a time there was a crow who was befriended with a talking cow that really, really liked to sit in a swing! (The original name of the book actually implies that the cow has a child, which is kind of freaky, because there is zero mention about the child, and actually reason to believe the child is nowhere around anymore. Why is the book not talking about the cow’s trauma at all?!)
In any case, once the cow had climbed to a tree for fun, and it was very important that the farmer won’t notice, because cows are not supposed to climb trees. The crow did a good job warning the cow when the farmer was approaching and damn it, I cannot remember what the hell the book tells, wait, maybe in the children’s room there’s another book about the same two animals!
…nope, couldn’t find it. But, would you like to hear a story of a father who recently found three children’s books that should have been brought back to the library a week ago?
I hope this story about a crow sated your appetite for crows!
You’re awesome. Thank you.
You need to do a children’s book inspired by those three paragraphs
What was it? A plastic 6-pack ring?
Something even more seagull-compatible than that. I don’t remember what food I happened to have with me, because this happened some, 5-ish years ago? (It also was not a surgical mask, BTW!)
Hopefully a good time instead. Seagulls love MDMA.
More-ganser
In cartoon ducks: overly simplistic but cute, naive, and innocent
In humans: pronatalism. weird disgusting pseudo colonial bullshit that’s the dark mirror to “just” wanting kids.
Edit: sorry for throwing cynicism into a cute comic’s comment section. Promise I’m fine 😅
No one else said, and it seems like you’re catching on, but it needs saying out loud: today, you suck.
But if she found more baby rather than “make”, doesn’t that imply adoption?
True. Lots of pronatalists tend towards eugenics, so doubt they’re huge fans of adoptions.
OTOH, even nurture-over-nature pronatalists would be problematic. “I’m better than everyone else so I should have an outsize impact on the next generation by adopting as many children as possible” is only slightly better than the eugenic variant.
I think you need to go outside and look at some wildlife or something.
But not ducks, clearly
I can’t tell if you hate ducks or are simply a pro-natalist. Regardless go watch a movie or play a game or something, may I suggest Red Dead Redemption? It’s currently on sale on steam.
Just hopping in to say that the RDR franchise is great and worth the money.
I’ve spent so many hours just riding around hunting or collecting herbs. One of the few games you can genuinely turn off your brain and immerse yourself in the world.
Also undead nightmare is unironically one of the more unique takes on zombies. Not necessarily because they do anything particularly interesting with the zombies themselves but moreso because the closest thing to zombie Western I know of is a bug in the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas where an infinitely spawn of ghouls can occur at the test site. Never been able to replicate it on PC and I don’t know if it was specific to me or not.
I can’t tell if you hate ducks or are simply a pro-natalist
That’s an impressively incorrect reading of the comment.
Can’t see any other point they were making then. Unless they are just trying to call hypocrisy towards folks thinking animals having lots of babies is cute while humans doing the same is bad. Because if that is the point that’s missing so much fucken context that if it was a physical object it’d be a fucken mountain range, mostly because most animal babies die pretty fucken often. From experience chicks alone have like a 60 percent mortality rating if humans aren’t directly involved in taking care of them, roosters apparently love to eat chicks.
They’re saying that “more babies = more success” is a funny and cute idea when expressed by a cartoon duck, but is extremely harmful when expressed by humans in the real world. I honestly can’t imagine how you reached your interpretation of the comment because it seems to have very little in common with anything they said.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, because it looks like the duck had 1 baby, then adopted 20 others.
Obviously ducks are cuter than humans.
Not sure why you think someone hates ducks.
Because the way they wrote their comment is often times used to draw direct comparison and critique between two different things. It’s basically the meme of the two castles fighting each other with text like “our glorious leader” vs “their ignoble tyrant”. But then again I am very much in favor of death of the author so two different interpretations of a single work can exist once published, I think that can apply to a comment.
I have never heard of this meme format, thanks for the education!
I see where you’re coming from but no, I’m very much not pronatalist, and my opinion of them is literally what I put in the comment.
I was going for “amusing juxtaposition” but the vote balance on my comment shows you were not the only one who didn’t take it that way, my bad!
Edit: I also do not hate ducks
I was going to comment that this comic is going to draw in antinatalist weirdos but I am beaten to the punch. Lemmy has a weird overgrown community of people who are exactly as hateful as the densest MAGA blockheads but in entirely different directions, it’s wild how easily hate seeps into people about the oddest things.
Hey, the world is beautiful, do what the other user suggested and go out and experience it.
Anti-natalism is such a wild and depressing position to have. It’s not just not wanting kids personally, or even just not wanting to be around kids, but that giving birth is immoral and horrendous.
I don’t really plan to have kids myself, but I have a nephew and he is so amazing and my sister is doing an amazing job raising him.
I’ve heard (well, read) from one anti-natalist that thinking children are wonderful to be around is akin to cult language. As if anti-natalists don’t sound like they are in a cult themself.
Thank you for coming to my TedTalk
I’ve always thought if they actually believed what they said they would be against all animal life as well. If existing is such misery and we need to like, end experiencing the universe broadly or whatever their main idea is, then definitionally we would also need to end all animal life, they have existed far longer, are also sentient largely, and suffered far worse than any humans over any stretch of time.
But for some reason they get real shifty when you start trying to dismantle their ideology.
It’s almost like it has more to do with their parents than wanting a better world.
As someone who understands, if not necessarily openly espouses, anti-natalist ideology, I can give a bit of elucidation from my perspective of the philosophy of utilitarianism, which I am happy to debate. It would be nice to be proven wrong here.
It comes down, in my opinion and understanding, to the following argument:
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an entity is inherently unable to consent to its own creation. [A postulate]
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suffering has a net-negative effect on the (perceived or actual) value of existence [precept of utilitarianism]
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suffering knowingly enacted against any entity which cannot give informed consent is eqquivalent to the suffering of an entity which is actively not consenting [by which argument paedophilia is a crime]
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The potential suffering inherent in life is foreseeable, as is the potential of a human life to harm the lives of others. [The basis of the concept of negligence]
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An entity that is not created does not harm or cause others to suffer, nor does it experience harm or suffering [postulate]
From propositions 1 through 5:
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You are personally, morally responsible for the life which you create, both its actions and its experiences, as all of its experiences and actions are exclusively contingent on the act of its creation. It is from this moral duty that parental responsibility derives.
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there is a foreseeable possibility that the entity being created could endure enough suffering (or be the cause of same) to make the value of their life net-negative
From propositions 5 and 6, and the various observations one might make of the world (from climate change, to the renewed rise of fascism and the far-right, and a myriad of other “natural shocks which flesh is heir to”), they suggest:
- On cost-benefit analysis, the expected value of a new life which I might create is net-negative.
From which:
- it would be irresponsible (read: negligent) to procreate.
That is the basis. If you can prove each of those propositions, then from a utilitarian perspective, I think anti-natalism follows. I am personally convinced up to proposition 6, and I am personally waiting until I no longer feel that 7 has a chance of being valid before I have children. There are plenty of ways you can argue against the propositions, but as they stand, there is no indication of a moral duty to end already-extant life or to engage in mass-sterilisation of animals. There are certainly people who try to come at it from a nihilistic perspective, and it’s MUCH easier to argue pretty much anything from nihilism than from utilitarianism, but I, being primarily utilitarian, hold with the above.
I also think that the person saying “anti-natalists think children are awful to be around” is presenting a ridiculous strawman. I’m a public school teacher, and I love being around kids. The wonder with which they view the cosmos is forever inspiring to me, but many of my students have experienced truly awful things. I believe my moral duty involves doing everything I can to minimize the suffering of entities that exist. I think that, once a child has been created, you now have a moral duty to make that child’s life as free from suffering and as fulfilling and rich as possible (without imposing suffering on others, of course)
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