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i do not โchatgpt,โ i do not โcharacter ai,โ i do not โchatbot,โ i IMAGINE scenarios in my HEAD. and if i DONโT LIKE IT, i DO IT MORE.
"Friend" is an AI wearable device designed to provide "companionship + emotional support"โ i.e replace human friendships. Its literally an AI chatbot that you wear around your neck. "Friend" just paid for the largest ad campaign in NYC subway history
And Every. Single. Poster was vandalised, it literally looks like some of the most beautiful art you have ever seen
sorry i really donโt like just reposting someone elseโs joke but i havenโt been able to stop thinking about Yucky Stinking Tooth for weeks
I am gonna look like the kind of tumblr user with no reading comprehension who is accidentally being exactly who this post is talking about but I assure you I know exactly what I'm doing and am disagreeing for one species and one species only
If it were possible I'd absolutely support driving fleas to extinction. Make a case for their existence! Why do fleas deserve to exist? They cause me daily suffering and serve zero purpose that I am aware of. Why can't we make them go extinct other than the fact that it would probably be difficult to only target fleas
"one species and one species only"
[transcript: flea, the common name for the order Siphonaptera, includes 2,500 species. end transcript]
you might want to do a little bit of research about the organisms you want to drive to extinction before you claim to know exactly what you're doing, but anyway...
there are already a number of people in the notes bringing up these points, which apply to all species, but here they are again anyway:
firstly, nothing has to have "a purpose", but things don't just evolve for no reason and contribute absolutely nothing to the ecosystem they're in. that's just not how it works.
secondly, parasites are basically the Robin Hood of the ecosystems they're in. they take nutrients from large, long lived organisms, and make it available for smaller organisms, thereby redistributing nutrients that would essentially get hoarded away otherwise.
yes, being bitten is annoying, but we can't just kill off everything that annoys us. in fact, parasites being annoying causes their hosts to leave the area, which affects things like migration routes, and helps prevent areas being overgrazed because the megafauna leave due to the parasites before that can happen.
yes, parasites can spread diseases, but it's much more productive and less harmful to ecosystems to put money and effort towards curing and preventing those diseases than trying to kill off their vectors.
everything in an ecosystem (with the exception of introduced species) has evolved together and adapted to each others' presence. you can't just remove an entire species from that complex, interconnected system and expect there to be no negative repercussions
All this plus most of those species won't bite humans anyway. Still, causing irritation to just humans shouldn't be a crime. We're destructive too. We shouldn't want all of nature to be safe and comfortable to us when we've already irreversibly razed so much of it for modern convenience as it is. We even probably caused the extinction of the last big predators that naturally hunted us, we should probably be satisfied with that really.
There are over 3500 species of mosquito on this planet and every single one of them contributes more to the ecosystem than you do.
Here's a new case: those fucking lovebug things that I'm pretty sure are manmade to control the mosquito population and, decidedly, do not do anything of the sort. Unless those things have already been taken care of bc I haven't seen any for like years
1) Lovebugs are not a manmade bug. There is no such thing as a manmade bug. The fact that you didn't even bother to verify the absurd urban legend you cite before advocating for massive ecological changes you clearly don't understand does not help your arguement. Anyway, if it were possible to mass produce bugs in this manner everyone who annoyed me on this post would be getting a complimentary envelope of human host parasitoid wasps in the mail.
2) In the same breath that you advocate for their extinction, you also admit that they aren't even a problem for you anymore. Which means you advocate for it based purely on the fact that you don't like them. You are exactly the kind of person I made this post to criticize.
Lovebugs are a South American species that migrated north and their natural biological controls took a while to catch up with them and level out the population. That's it. You could've done 30 seconds of research before advocating for the extinction of yet another species that did nothing wrong except be alive in a way you don't like
The number of things people think were "genetically engineered" is crazy. Even in 2025 we cannot make a brand new category of animal in a lab from scratch yet people think the government was inventing its own creatures in the 1950s.
We can't even make a virus. I know you all think "bioweaponry" means there are viruses engineered by humans to do specific things but we can't do that either. It has not been achieved. The possibility of modifying an existing virus has been explored both for the military and for efforts to eradicate viruses but we don't know how to control something like that yet.
The thing that always gets me about this is that it’s not even a new idea that just driving things to extinction because we don’t like them is bad for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that often these “annoying” things are an important source of food for better-loved species on an important control on other species who might otherwise throw the ecosystem in which we live out of balance.
Like, Silent Spring was written over half a century ago. The four pests campaign and its resulting famine happened over half a century ago. People think sparrows are cute now, but in 1958 a whole country was willing to kill so many of them that the insect populations they’d naturally been controlling ate all the crops this extermination campaign was supposed to be protecting, and 20-30 million people died as a result.
Somehow it feels like things we absolutely know to be true, through both careful scientific observation and also through common sense and intuition (no more bugs on the windshield, less birdsong, fewer fireflies in the summer, insect voices replaced by leaf blowers), don’t seem to break through to the general population and are actively being denied by the government. The roundup that agribusiness now once again has free license to spray everywhere (thanks to Trump) to kill “weeds” also destroys soil microbe communities and has been shown to make crops nutrient deficient, not to mention the literal downstream effects on aquatic communities and the effects on species who would otherwise feed on insects that no longer thrive in monocrops drowned in glyphosate. Even well-meaning individuals are so eager to think that there is some kind of exception to the rule and that they’ve found it - everyone else’s exterminatory urges are cruel and violent, but somehow ours are practical and rational and an impulse toward the common good.
It’s totally reasonable to be afraid of or grossed out by mosquitos. They carry and transmit diseases that have probably killed more people in history than all wars ever combined. It’s rational to react to them with fear and disgust, but it does not make sense to identify with that fear and disgust so strongly that you cannot process what people who spend all their time studying ecology (including disease ecology) and natural history will tell you, repeatedly, in many ways, about any species you’ve decided needs to be annihilated; this is a bad idea. If you cannot accept that on moral grounds accept it out of self interest. Your fear and disgust may be useful to some small degree; that does not make them righteous or your destructive impulses virtuous.
In any case you’ll have a much better time in life if you can temper those uncomfortable responses with curiosity and respect; things may annoy you but you can also have wonder as a consolation prize. My life got better when I started paying closer attention to invertebrates. My life gets better every time I learn something new about other ways of living. Let it make you grateful for human ingenuity, too. We have mosquito netting. Maybe spiders inspired us to weave. People have all sorts of strategies to keep bugs off their skin, and many of these strategies are very old and not particularly harmful to anyone or anything. Molds gave us penicillin. Things you think are scary or gross may save you.
