A number also took private flights. Unless you happen to live where its taking place you have to possess the means to afford travel, a place to stay, and potentially legal fees to attend a protest. You also, as you said, need to be able to afford the time off work. This restricts most protests to college students and PMCs with a few locals thrown in.

Fuck, the wanted to hang Mike Pence.

The president and commander-on-chief of the United States had just heavily implied it would be a good idea. Those of them not just caught up in the enthusiasm probably thought they would have military support. Trump always appealed to people that can’t really separate reality from movies and they thought they were living the climax. Reality is, however, much more pragmatic than that and they were lucky they were of the privileged class so they were merely arrested rather than gunned down the way anyone else storming a federal building would be.

Yep, and once you platform enough nutcases no one else wants to be associated with or listen to you.

Infowars had some reputable people in its earlier days too. Rogan seems to be following the same unhinged path.

…although the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.

Despite the “human-like” use of hierarchical syntax to communicate, Suzuki and his colleagues found that whale songs convey less than one bit of information per second. By comparison, humans speaking English generate 10 bits of information for each word spoken. "Although whale song is nothing like human language, I wouldn’t be surprised if some marine mammals have the ability to communicate in a complex way.

Did you even read the article you submitted? I get it, you like animals.I like animals, even humans, some of them. But you’re comparing other animals to humans at the things that humans are demonstratively best at. Its like saying that cattle are sometimes faster at running than cheetahs and maybe we’ve been defining “fast” or “run” wrong. If you move the goal post far enough apart and select the outliers you can find examples of anything, but you’ve proved nothing.

Other animals communicate. Language involves syntax and grammar which only humans are capable of. That also has nothing to do with the fact that intelligence is a human word to describe humanlike capacity.

No animal shows anywhere near the range of neuroplasticity of humans. Humans can exist comfortably on almost all biospheres on earth and even space thanks to the technology we developed. Including the technology of language which features the word intelligence which we use for the way we grow and adapt. That’s what we use our brains for and what we specialize in. We don’t use our brains for sonar the way bats do, but that isn’t intelligence.

Does that make humans inherently superior or give us the right to render the planet uninhabitable? No, of course not, and animals are smarter than many people give them credit for. But calling animal intelligence comparable to that of humans simply isn’t accurate.

Just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it isn’t real or important.