Sunday Mammalfest, Episode 7

The teeth of the landwhale

This landwhale is in the water. But for how long?

Apologies for skipping a week. But there is amazing news! Scientists have documented the existence of – the landwhale!

That’s right: long ago, the ancestors of whales split. Most of their descendents became entirely aquatic, losing their legs and becoming incapable of movement on land.

But not all. Some whales can still move on land. And guess what – they can move faster than you. And when they catch you, they will destroy you. Utterly.

Terrorism and Communism: Don’t be Moral

In my last post on “Terrorism and Communism“, I laid out a set of questions that I wanted to ask – the question of rule by the proletariat vs. rule by all classes equally, the question of rule by the proletariat vs. rule by a certain political party, the question of emergency powers vs. constitutional powers, and the question of means, justified by the end or not.

Now, the easiest of these questions to answer is the third – that of exercising emergency rule by exceptional powers, or abiding by the normal constitutional procedures. The reason it’s easy to answer is that almost nobody in the world seriously believes that the same tenor of political activity that’s appropriate in peace is appropriate in war.

For example, if the constitution prescribes a checking procedure that tends to take about 5 days, and the White Armies are 2 days away, the idea that the normal procedures should be suspended in order to make rapid decisions is fairly obvious.

So in that sense, the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, in the main sense that the phrase would have had in the 19th century, as meaning the ‘martial law’ of the proletariat, is easy to justify – it requires only the assumptions that 1) the situation resembles a warlike one, with hostile forces sitting ready to assault each other, and 2) that the victory of the revolutionary forces is desirable. If 1. isn’t obvious then hooray, we’re unrealistically lucky, and if someone doesn’t agree with 2., then T&C is hardly the book for them to be focusing on.

So this post isn’t really going to try and answer that question, with its obvious answer, it’s going to talk about moral goodness, and why sometimes, it’s a bad idea.

Belated Beluga Day

Beluga blowing bubble rings

This is an announcement. Yesterday was Beluga Day. Today is therefore Belated Beluga Day.

The beluga (name drawn from the Russian for ‘white’) is a species of small arctic whale (also an unrelated species of sturgeon fish, but we won’t go into that). It is, by and large, larger than a dolphin but smaller than other whales (with some exceptions – the orca or killer whale is larger, and technically a dolphin).

As well as ‘beluga’, it is also known as the white whale, though not to be confused with the ‘great white whale’, Moby Dick, who was an abnormally coloured sperm whale. Incidentally, sperm whales are actually, as you may have suspected, named because people in the past thought they were full of cum. Actually, they have a ‘spermaceti’ (whale-cum) organ inside their big bulbous heads, filled with a white waxy substance. Its function may involve bouyancy, sound focusing, or even as a shock-absorber to allow whales to competitively ram each other. This ramming idea is borne out by documented cases of sperm whales ramming into and sinking whaling ships many times their size. Good for them.

Mother and Baby Beluga - note that baby is grey

Belugas though have little prospect of sinking anything, and are hunted by approximately four predators: polar bears, modern whalers, traditional arctic peoples, and orcas. Another of their names, based on their great range of noises, is ‘sea canary’. Of course, canaries are named after the canary islands, the ‘islands of dogs’, but nobody knows what those dogs were (they seem to be gone now). Many people speculate that they were actually monk seals (in latin, ‘sea dogs’). Hence, whales named after birds named after islands named after seals mistaken for dogs.

Belugas are highly sociable, very playful, may possibly use their blowholes to blow water to blast sand away from hidden crustaceans, and are the only whale that can swim backwards.

In conclusion, belugas are whales.