Malm Whale | Hacker News Reader

Malm Whale

atlasobscura.com

32 pointsthunderbong20 comments

Ok, wow… “The fishermen who first discovered the poor stranded whale started the procedure by poking its eyes out, so that it would "not be able to see us." Over the next two days, the creature was methodically axed, speared and shot until it finally died in a sea of its own blood.”

I guess it was 1865.

Humans are the worst species aren’t we

I think we have the greatest depth and breadth of cruelty

Our capabilities are so high and our population so differentiated we basically hold nearly all the records for everything (barring some extremeophile metrics) so it makes sense.

It helps we write the record categories. We only measure stuff we find relevant to our existence which happens to be what we probably do sorta well.

Yeah, cool, what categories do you have in mind? Sure we have bias but not infinite bias.

I'll start!

How about sea urchin destruction? I bet otters and sheepshead fish probably have little bookies keeping track and they know which species or virus hold the records! Very fun stuff! I bet they have little tablets to keep track of their records that go back thousands of years? Oh man, yeah, good point about species bias!

To kinda shortcut the bullshit, I think we should try to think about what cruelty is. I'd say it's a kind of celebration. The cruel animal is celebrating in the most visceral, most direct way the fact that they aren't in the position of the victim. Cruelty necessarily involves a kind of excess. You don't tend to find excess expenditure as much in the animal kingdom as you do among our species' section of it. That's why I feel like we exercise the most cruelty.

The records thing is silly. Records are necessarily aggregational, the top performer of many things. Everything sets records all the time at the specific unique thing it does. When we start choosing aggregations of things there's a combinatorial explosion in ways to choose them. We only get by by choosing an infinitesimal subset of those aggregations to consider, and thus to find records in by extension.

No that's the domestic cat.

If an animal gets its head stuck, predators will casually eat its meat without first killing the prey. This makes sense from their purely selfish point of view, especially as it provides a sort of short-term "food preservation".

Ducks have been documented engaging in necrophilic gang-rape.

Dolphins use literal waterboarding to rape.

Humans are just smarter assholes than other animals. Not worse or better.

A pretty poor showing by the villagers. whalers were able to kill a full grown whale in at most a couple of hours, while it was trying to swim away, while balancing in rowboats.

I wonder if the event visible in one of the photos is etymological source of the word festival?

The word can be deconstructed in Swedish as fest i val which translates to "party in whale"

It surely is; 'fest' is the Swedish word for 'party'. I actually think Swedish or Norwegian (which are practically the same language) are closer to English than even Dutch. Many of the most common, short English words are the same.

The Anglo-Saxon migrations made England English, and then the waves of Viking invasions littered North Germanic vocabulary all over it. You can see it in doublets like skirt/shirt that aren't in other West Germanic languages.

"Fest" is also German for celebration - but just because several Germanic languages have the same word doesn't mean that it's a Germanic word. Actually all of them got it from Latin...

I should have checked the etymology, but the way this reply is worded is a bit nitpicky. English did not loan 'fest' directly from Latin.

Edit: Though I realise now I misunderstood the original comment re: 'i val'. I took it to mean 'fest' only. No, I don't think 'party in whale' is the root of 'festival'

Wiktionary says

> From Middle English festival (adjective), from Old French festival (“festive”), from Late Latin fēstīvālis, from Latin fēstīvus (“festive”). By surface analysis, festive +‎ -al. Displaced native Old English frēols. The noun is shortened from festival day, from Middle English festival dai, festiuall day (“feast day, festival”).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/festival

It's definitively not the source of the word, but it might very well be the reason the decided to have a "fest i val". Gothenburg is famous for their puns, and even today they open up the mouth of the whale for visitors on two occasions - valdagen (election day) and Valborgsmässoafton (Walpurgis eve).

Göteborg - dad capital of the world!

Making a note to visit on one of those occasions!

I thought this was about giant IKEA drawers before reading

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