love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

cheers

as a fifty push-up real man he Starmzy doesn't wanna stop the lads going dahn the boozah to catch the ronah

He's following the polling there, definitely. The majority of the country agrees, dunno if that's lockdown fatigue, worry over livelihoods or that people have absorbed the government messaging that really everything is going to be fine now.

Be interesting to see how that breaks down according to region, though.

i opened that biodiversity report btw, with one part particularly in mind

In the recent past the GB has intercepted two species (Asian hornet Vespa velutina
and raccoon Procyon lotor), eradicated three species (African clawed toad Xenopus
laevis, fathead minnow Pimephales promelas and black bullhead Ameiurus melas)
and eradication is underway for a further four (water primrose Ludwigia grandiflora,
topmouth gudgeon Pseudorasorba parva, monk parakeet Myiopsitta monachus,
American bullfrog Lithobates catesbeianus).
GB’s first contingency plan for an INNS, the Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) has been
adopted and measures implemented, leading to the destruction of two confirmed nests
in England since 2016 so far preventing their spread into the UK (Defra 2017).
On a larger-scale, the GB Ruddy Duck Eradication Programme, which began in 2005,
is almost complete. The population has been reduced from 4,400 to around 20-25
birds. Control is ongoing.

tf is wrong with monk parakeets and ruddy ducks u fucking loons

also raccoons! altho i can see why they'd be disruptive. but raccoons!

xp combo of lockdown fatigue and the government somehow conveying the impression that they've got covid done and wow a thousand deaths a week became background noise even quicker than I predicted

there is wild colony of parakeets in my locality, they've been there decades apparently and it was nothing to do with jimi hendrix. What a beautiful sight they are.

I don't know what Greenpeace's endgame is imago, roll back to a pre-Norman ecosystem? Pre-Roman? Pre the last ice age land bridge?

If they go after the wallabies in the peak district I'm gonna form an armed militia to shoot on sight tho

What a beautiful sight they are.

Noisy fuckers tho

the parakeets you usually see are ring-necked, and the bat is def out of the bag there

monk parakeets are smaller and newer. absolutely no idea why they need eradicating. i suspect they don't

*cat, even

Monk parakeets don't seem to be much of a threat to 'native' wildlife but apparently they build large communal nests that can disrupt electricity supplies

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/24/monk-parakeets-culled-dangers-species

The key problem is the huge communal nests built by the monk parakeets as these can cause blackouts when built on pylons and then drenched by rain. The US has already spent millions of dollars removing nests for this reason. The nests have also been linked to fires.

I assume this isn't all parakeets - our living room is at treetop level and we've had a couple of parakeets hanging out there for much of lockdown and no one is fucking with them at this point.

https://www.windycityparrot.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Monk-parakeets-nest-transformer-blog-2.jpg https://static01.nyt.com/images/2009/04/17/nyregion/12Journal.600.jpg

What's wrong with Ruddy Ducks?

Those don't look especially safe, give them time and the monk parakeet will probably end up eradicating itself.

otm

The majority of the country agrees, dunno if that's lockdown fatigue, worry over livelihoods or that people have absorbed the government messaging that really everything is going to be fine now.

About half the population round here is milling around as usual, no masks and no distancing and bleak looks for anyone who tries to scramble out of a 1m radius, so definitely seems to me like both #1 and #3 are happening.

Re Tundra, I grimaced at that tweet and its replies, but as with another Jewish friend of mine who used to be v v Labour but hates Corbyn - I don't believe JC was antisemitic and think the claims against him were almost entirely made in horribly bad faith, but I also don't want to skate too close to implying to Jewish people that their concerns were made up by saying anything even least-worst-option about Corbyn, so... time to shrug and leave the room when these topics come up, I guess?

sorry, this post is v boring and parakeets are much better, more parakeets please

Ruddy Duck is even more sinister tbh - it's to prevent it interbreeding with the v similar White-Headed Duck in Spain. basically it's eugenics

let the birds breed however they want, your priority is protecting the fucking ecosystems u fucking racists

I wdn't throw shade on any Jewish person hating Corbyn for antisemitism, fairly or not, but the tweet upthread was pure melt realism re: how to win an election by promising not to change anything

white-headed duck are a protected species in spain and if they disappear, the ecological protections afforded to their habitat will be eroded - it is about protecting the ecosystems xp

environmentalists in having a weird platonic notion of speciation shocker

basing protection of ecosystems on the genetic preservation of a single species is absolute madness, i will not budge on this

are you seriously telling me that if we end up with ruddy/white headed miscegenated superspecies then the Spanish government will wave in the fucking bulldozers

afaict if two species can interbreed to produce fertile offspring then really are they even two species anyway

wetland habitats are being protected becase the white headed duck are threatened; if they all hybridise with ruddy duck then the habitat will no longer be given protection by the spanish government - their habitat will be opened up to hunting and yes, development

lol at this offtopic tangent

also it seems to me that the problem is not the ruddy duck there

i mean it's not like there are no other rare species in the spanish wetlands

this all feels completely insane to me

can't we just trust the evolutionary process? the white-headed duck was not distinct enough to survive, it is a total toilet duck

if you want to protect habitat, a threatened species is your trump card - hence the newt thing with boris

it's not like there are no other rare species in the spanish wetlands

yeah but you need something that has some sort of marketability, some rare water lice or dull-looking sedge is hardly going to cut it with bringing in the tourists

We had a bit of problem with raccoons on ILX once.

they have pratincoles do they not?

also this isn't off-topic i'm getting to the dark racialised heart of the european mindset

also the fucked celeb-species-centric conditional biodiversity protection protocols

protect foxes. protect mice. protect crows. protect fucking ants

Re Tundra, I grimaced at that tweet and its replies, but as with another Jewish friend of mine who used to be v v Labour but hates Corbyn - I don't believe JC was antisemitic and think the claims against him were almost entirely made in horribly bad faith, but I also don't want to skate too close to implying to Jewish people that their concerns were made up by saying anything even least-worst-option about Corbyn, so... time to shrug and leave the room when these topics come up, I guess?

Tell me about it.

I wdn't throw shade on any Jewish person hating Corbyn for antisemitism, fairly or not, but the tweet upthread was pure melt realism re: how to win an election by promising not to change anything

Oh I absolutely agree with that

just, it was tempting to reply drawing comparisons (maybe not even so much to the original tweet but a reply doing the whole "why won't people get behind Starmzy" thing) but even hinting at Corbz as least-worst option in certain circles - which tbf it's possible neither MT or my old friend belong to but I don't want to test it - results in a "how can you not see why I absolutely won't acknowledge that man as ever having been slightly less of a very real threat than our current Johnson government" and that way lies nothing but pain

anyway. I like ducks

"We don't want to look like we care more about trans rights than jobs"

Substitute "gay rights" for "trans rights" and you'll read a sentence which could have been said in the 1980s. Gay people didn't want to be the centre of debate back then either. It was their opponents who decided otherwise.

Starmer's team lack understanding of minority rights. pic.twitter.com/wTfYYhELeT

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) July 2, 2020

Useless shower

a few years ago our internet started to get unreliable and very slow and eventually as it continued to deteriorate we called BT round. engineer made a few cursory checks and then disappeared outside and came back to report that the wire from our house to the nearest pole went through a tree: squirrels ate our internet. am I even allowed to say what sort of squirrels they were or will imago throw me in jail?

Imago is no friend of the greys iirc.

user imago believes in the free market of natural selection and will happily leave our humble, troops-supporting red squirrels behind, just as he would consign to oblivion the entire cosmic order upon which #towns rest. fortunately he is part of a minority of rootless neoliberal over-educated elitists and the british people have voted so that they can speak plainly about predatory gangs of grey squirrels gnawing through cables without being told they're racist

well i can't exactly argue with that, love a #town tho (within reason)

RLB's melt replacement supports the govt's compulsory school attendance in sept, but not fining parents of students who don't return. No opposition just for the sake of opposition.

it's all very well finding yourself accidentally aligned with the countryside alliance on the broad topic of conservation until you realise they just want to hunt grouse and shoot hen harriers so that they don't get the grouse instead

oh sorry an actual politics has happened

Pretending that you can make a decision on September now is ridiculous – the conditions could change massively by then.

Fines should be opposed on principle, but the real question today isn't "do you support it', it's "we now have to time to preapre, so what are the plans for sustained schooling under the four phases, and what are you doing to support the likeliest scenarios?". This "we'll open schools come what may" is the "GBD we're leaving on Dec 31st GBD" approach, and both could end the same way.

if shadow education listened to teacher's unions she might be fit for purpose because they are talking more sense than the UK govt, but unions are bad in the Labour party now.

fuck off apostrophe, I'm multi-tasking at the moment - not as if my grammar is shot at the best of times!

banging revive

Why bother doing elaborate photoshops of Keir Starmer in an attempt to make him look bad when you can just post this clippic.twitter.com/Upv5ZFLOzT

— Labour 'Legitimate Concerner' (@LabConcerner) July 2, 2020