Are you predator or prey?

[mixed_biscuits]

Are you predator or prey?

 

[Corpsey]

 

[sus]

Here is a simple test to tell which one you are:

Predators have focusing, forward-facing vision. Prey has peripheral, surveilling vision.

 

[Murphy]

 

[sus]

Predators have focusing, forward-facing vision. Prey has peripheral, surveilling vision.

This is a metaphor; we all oscillate between periods of being predatorial, and periods of being predated. Are your blinders on? Are you so goal-oriented that friends and family members complain about never seeing you? Are you so sociopathically focused on networking the party that you abandon the people you came with?

Or are you anxiously scanning the room, searching for threats? Are you always jittery nervous waiting for the other shoe to drop? Can you not focus on a single task for more than five minutes? Are you flipping between tabs, "browsing," waiting for a notification to ding?

 

[sus]

Walked along beach in Pismo this morning. Sandlings chased the tide along the shoreline, searching for worms. Morning dewdrops made the spiderwebs visible. A squadron of pelican dive-bombers passed overhead.

 

[sus]

This morning I saw an Instagram reel of a pelican stealing a fish from an osprey



The other thing about predator prey relationships is that matchups aren't always transitory. Also predation is nested; there are trophic levels; herbivores are predators to plants. Our little dumpling Ripple is a predator, always pulling in sparrows and songbirds, always toying with her food. But there are birds of prey that can lift her off to high heavens.

 

[sus]

The other interesting thing is that if you're small enough, you're not worth the calories. It's specifically the megafauna—not the mice—that get hunted to extinction in the Pleistocene. I've been reading about bovines and ungulates lately because I think there is something very archetypal about these peaceful, grass-grazing animals that become either slaves or input for meat grinders.

Also because there is some link here to vegetarianism and femininity—e.g. the (Sanskrit/Hindu) Ahimsa principle of non-injury, and the reverence of cows as sacred. Or the classic Berkeley girlie vegetarian who eats salads.

 

[sus]

Frequently herd animals. Large-cusped molars for grinding up cellulose. No upper incisors; reduced or absent canines. Ruminants, with multi-chambered stomachs for digesting tough cellulose. Microbes to ferment plant material before it's regurgitated as cud, back up from the first stomach and into the mouth, where it can be mixed with saliva and re-chewed.

 

[sus]

Their hides one of the most important sources for pre-modern clothing and armor, their wool one of the most important fibers. This is what happens to cattle. This is what happens to practitioners of ahimsa. Life destructures life in order to sustain itself, in order to structure itself. This is a bit of what Waiting for the Barbarians is about. Those who love peace, but cannot or will not defend it from violence, end up extinct or subservient. An old quip: "Pacifism sees the one way to peace as peace."

 

[sus]

Whales and dolphins were ungulates once. They moved to the sea and lost their hooves—becoming carnivorous again in the process of adapting to the new niche.



(Fred Neil was prey, not predator—which is why he never got famous)

 

[0bleak]

Whales and dolphins were ungulates once. They moved to the sea and lost their hooves—becoming carnivorous again in the process of adapting to their new niche.

That's wild.
I assumed most everything moved from sea to land, not reverse and back again.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Wisdom of Solomon 19:19​

“For earthly things were turned into watery, and the things, that before swam in the water, now went upon the ground.”

 

[Murphy]

 

[Murphy]

Ultimately you’re both

For the majority of hominid existence, say 5 million years, we were developing towards apex predation but it took a while, maybe as late as 60,000BC. A blink of the eye in evolutionary terms

Most horror flicks situate humans as prey with disintegrating agency. Late-era capitalism has caught both left and right, so without inheritance or assets, you’re just taxable wage prey

 

[Murphy]

You could push the evolutionary folds too. Humans pushed out further into open savannahs, thus migrating further and further north, due to carrion scavenging

Carrion comes with digestive risks, possibly kickstarting evolutionary uses of fire beyond bush clearances to attract grazing animals to feed on new plant growth, which we might identify with food production - specifically fire as heat source ie cooking

You can get different evidence bases for Neanderthals using fire but none of it is definitive. We bred with them but probably ate them too

Same with language - the subconscious evolved before language/symbolic representation, that’s why our central nervous system still can’t exactly differentiate between fact and fiction, eg storytelling, maybe even poetry

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Here is a simple test to tell which one you are:

Predators have focusing, forward-facing vision. Prey has peripheral, surveilling vision.

I've read that trauma can expand the field of vision in this way.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Here is a simple test to tell which one you are:

Predators have focusing, forward-facing vision. Prey has peripheral, surveilling vision.

Another thing I remember now is that women have a larger field of vision than men.

Women's brains are wired to process visual information from a wider field of view, giving them a broader awareness of their environment. Men, in contrast, tend to have better distance vision and depth perception

 

[mixed_biscuits]

I think the typical leftist acts like and subconsciously identifies with prey, while rightists do the same for predators.