My grandmother was very much a catch, but there’s no way I have a picture of her friend, who married a whole family. I don’t even know her first name, because despite a 50+ year friendship, they met as adults and called each other Mrs. Lastname.
I do think this woman must have been an incredible cook or something. Her companion was by all accounts a very dedicated priest otherwise, but that’s the only story I’ve ever heard where a priest gets any quasi romantic leeway (obviously, the church was far too lenient with sexual abuses, but the real reason for the vow of chastity has always been to avoid splitting loyalties and to control expenses, so a 60+ year financial and emotional commitment to a woman approximates that much more closely than the abuse).
My grandmother had a good friend, who was widowed young. Her brother in law remarried her, as I’m told was slightly old-fashioned, but not unheard of at the time. He then died in WWI, and the other brother was a priest. He got special dispensation to support her financially, and they lived together with two bedrooms they after his retirement. In their eighties, they moved into one room, with two twin beds and two attached dressing rooms, ostensibly for safety reasons, but we never knew if they were in love.
Voter suppression is widespread. I didn’t vote. I would have liked to, but I live 3k miles from the nearest polling center and my absentee ballot came a week after the election. I know people who can’t vote because of DUIs (not defending DUIs, but they aren’t a valid reason to silence someone imo). Even among people with the right to vote, if you have to wait three hours in line with no access to food, water, or shade, that can be difficult to impossible depending on your health condition and employment circumstances.
A big argument against them is that they prefer euthanizing homeless animals to keeping them as pets. I understand the instinctual outrage upon hearing that, because I grew up with dogs and now have a cat, and pets are 100% family members to me. However, I think most people, if given the choice between being euthanized or being kept in comfort without any agency or ability to leave, would at least say they prefer the former (pethood is certainly more comfortable than most prisons, but I do things like pick my cat up and pet/cuddle her that we would see as a special kind of hell if we were kept by someone and physically overpowered and stroked by someone, even if we thought we liked it at the time), and I understand the ethical position of bestowing that dignity on pets. I think the application of it is abhorrent, but I can see how someone could believe it’s right.
Given that we’ve bred passivity and love for us into dogs and that cats will just follow a person home or walk into a house and stay there, I don’t think it’s so clear cut as choosing what we would want for them. Especially with outside cats, who ostensibly choose where they want to be, but that brings up additional issues, like their effect on local wildlife. Even in MENA, where they’re native, humans have artificially increased their population to the point that they still present a threat to the ecosystem.
It’s a giant mess of a moral conundrum, imo, and there is no way to proceed without the possibility of harming pets. I definitely don’t think the right response is to euthanize all pets, but I can see why they do. I think euthanizing them all is monstrous, but I worry that my cat would see my keeping her inside as equally monstrous. I believe she loves me and would prefer to be with me than not, but I can only go off her body language. Hell, it could even be that house pets are suffering from a form of Stockholm syndrome and they would be happier without us and they don’t realize it, let alone communicate it to us.
I don’t have a solution. Again, I have a cat, so I’m clearly acting as though pet ownership is morally acceptable, but I think I’m avoiding really thinking it out because I’m afraid I might settle on it being ethically wrong. I love my cat and want to adopt another when we move into a larger space, and I don’t want to deprive myself of the joys of future pets, which is pretty cowardly, but I’m okay with that right now, tbh. I feel a little guilty about that, but it’s outweighed by my love for Nora.
Older people grew up writing less than younger people have, because of texting, so they’re more accustomed to taking their time with the proprieties of grammar. Younger people began using grammar as a tone marker differently from how it had previously been used, so they tend to see a bigger difference between “no” and “No.” as an answer to a question than older people do. For younger people, the latter tends to seem more abrupt and final, which could come across rudely.
!blurrypicturesofcats@lemmy.world