Again, like someone here noted, “No one ever said that did Agatha write ANOTHER crime novel?”

Oh my shit, has Frank Miller drawn another Sin City with the same exact style?

Is Miyazaki going to publish another Ghibli animation?

What, is King still writing horror books, can’t the man try something else?

Why is every single Predator movie about predators hunting, they’ve been doing that since 1980’s?

See. We don’t want beloved things, art, music, series, characters etc. to turn something new because this person has been doing this same for so long and ughhhh I’m SO bored, I want King to start to write romance novels and Miyazaki better start to draw Moomins or something, and next Predator movie needs to be about struggling office worker trying to keep her house instead of scifi.

ALT

I know dozens of people who use meth, coke, and fentanyl. While heroin is harder to get I do know some folks who use it when they can. Some of these drug users are my neighbors, some are my clients, and some are my friends & family. One does not cease to be human just because they use a substance you find scary.

Community doesn't mean you need to invite them to your home and look away if they smoke there. It means you don't call your property manager because you suspect your neighbor uses. It means you don't require drug tests for homeless shelters and housing services. It means the very idea of someone who smokes meth in your community doesn't make you go, "what the hell."

Genuinely kind of a wild thing to see in the replies as someone who has been professionally practicing harm reduction for years.

Considering recent events over here in the States, this seemed like a good time to bring this back. Over the next four years, expect an increase in discourse around "undesirables." This will include but not be limited to drug addicts.

Also, from someone who works at a smoke/head shop: WAY MORE PEOPLE ARE DRUG USERS THAN YOU THINK. Way more people are addicted to opiates, meth, whippets, cocaine, you name it, than you have been lead to believe, and on top of that, they are often the "normal" or "functional" people you see every day, not just the person tweaking out at the gas stations. Judges, bank tellers, grandmas, teachers, the nice lady who runs your bakery— all of them. You are ALREADY IN COMMUNITY WITH THESE PEOPLE. Start fucking acting like it.

I'm gonna keep repeating this: 'community' is not a fucking friend group.

It's not a clique. It's not you and the people YOU think are cool and funny.

Drug users are your neighbors whether you're too much of an obnoxious self-righteous asshat to be aware of that or not. You don't *get* to say drug users don't deserve to be meaningfully connected to and included in the populations they call home (which is what community actually means, btw) and the mere assertion that you can is a big part of why ppl seek connection in drugs in the first place.

It doesn't matter if ppl use or not but tbh if we really wanted to cut down on addiction all we'd need to do is have fewer stuck up motherfuckers who look down on 'undesirables' in the first place.

'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.'community' is not a fucking friend group.

This is why I think “tag warning” culture is kinder and more constructive than cancel culture / “no problematic content” culture. One size does not fit all, but if we learn to be more aware of the fact that the same thing can be emotionally validating or cathartic to one person and upsetting to another, and pick up a general mindset of thinking before we post, “what might people need a heads up for in this content?”, we grow more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more understanding of the differences in people’s experiences.

You can also smoke your meats and make them into jerky basically. It’s not as juicy as pickling them though.

Also medieval peasants had more meat than you’d think because of these preservation methods. You can feed a pig scraps for the whole year and then butcher it at the start of winter and preserve the meat. Because of this they also often had access to lard.

Medieval peasants also didn’t eat chicken very often. That’s a source of eggs. If you’re lucky enough to own a cow it’s also unlikely you’d eat it unless it’s on its way out anyways. That’s a good source of milk. It’s more advantageous to keep a cow or chicken alive than to eat them.

These days chicken is usually the cheapest form of meat available. If someone is eating a chicken in a medieval setting though it’s either because they didn’t need that chicken anymore or because they’re rich enough to have chickens for eating.

If we’re talking mutton, European sheep are more often kept for wool or milk while middle eastern or African sheep are more often kept for eating. Europeans would of course eat sheep sometimes but it’s another one of those cases where it makes more sense to keep the animal alive rather than eating it.

Fat from a fat tailed sheep makes for good cooking fat if your setting is more middle eastern or North African inspired. European settings would prefer butter, lard, or olive oil depending on where exactly they are.

Goats weren’t super popular in Europe during medieval and ancient times. Very common in the Middle East and North Africa though both for milk and for meat.

A cow or ewe must have a calf or lamb every year to produce milk. Half of those offspring will be male, and thus will not produce milk. Ergo they were eaten, because you only need one bull or ram for a much larger number of breeding females.

The limiting factor for livestock keeping in the medieval period was winter fodder--there was enough summer grazing for the spring births in fallow fields that they fertilized with their manure , but not enough hay and grazing to get them through the winter. So the lambs--all the males and some of the females--would be butchered in the fall. A bull calf might be butchered as veal (or "baby beef", depending on timing) its first fall or might be over-wintered and butchered as beef the following fall. A few of the older ewes would be butchered as mutton, replaced with female lambs from the spring births. A female calf would be traded, sold, or kept as a replacement.

Similarly, half of the chicks born would be male, destined for spring/early summer butchering. (Or caponed, castrated, though that's much more difficult with a bird.) Chicken is a lean meat, though, and rather tough in a free-range bird, so it was usually stewed rather than roasted. Capon was a bit of a luxury food due to the difficulty of castrating them. Geese were much more popular due to the fattier meat.

Pork was plentiful due in part to the large size of a sow's litter. Over-winter one sow, and you get eight piglets or so, much more than a cow's single calf or a ewe's one to four lambs. Even if you didn't keep your own sow, buying piglets to raise and fatten was common. Most medieval pigs would forage rather than being fed scraps--hence the ubiquity of swineherd as a humble occupation.

CRITICAL FUCKING REMINDER

Keep a close eye on biases in yourself and others that might differentiate between folks with low and high support needs or over emphasize contributions by low support needs disabled folks to academia and/or production.

People with high support needs are just as deserving of life and respect. And no one should have their right to life determined by their "productivity" or "contributions to society" (both in quotes because of the emphasis by society on capitalism-serving contributions only)

If you're worried about this and care about combatting eugenics, you should be wearing a high-quality mask in public. A recent statistical analysis found that covid and long covid affect all the aforementioned groups at 2-6 times the average. Don't just reblog this post and move on: find a KN95 or better and wear it. Keep yourself and others safe from viral eugenics.