SJW

Char, she/her, disabled, queer. Indigenous, sephardi, and black.

[powerfulwizard]

the dodo: the zoos are evil captivity is unethical let animals be free 

also the dodo: look at this amazing man who has a bear and a tiger living in the trunk of his van

[stefeficent]

The dodo: animals need to live as they do in nature

Also the dodo: look at this totally adorable cold-adapted animal is in this shadeless cage in a sanctuary in Texas! He’s friends with this animal from a fully different continent that shares this rundown pen with him. Cute!

[sonofthe-bat]

Never forgt that the dodo is run by peta

[narwhalsdisguised]

I didn’t know it was run by peta. Ew.

[monsterhunter439-deactivated202]

The same PETA that annually organizes the mass killings of every animal they’ve “saved.” If an animal is injured, the only medical attention it gets is euthanasia. Every shelter they have kills its inhabitants, and next to none come out alive.

[wildlifemajor]

RBing for the additional content. This makes so much sense. @sonofthe-bat where was the source for it btw?

[kaijutegu]

I just can’t bring myself to feel sad about Opportunity.

I don’t see her shutting down as a tragic, I see it as a long, peaceful sleep in a place she taught us to love. A place she explored for fifteen years, a place she saw as a home. After all these years, she gets to sleep now. She’s not truly lost, and she was never truly alone. She rests with Spirit and Sojourner, and one day will be joined by Curiosity. Death is a natural part of life, even for robots. Nothing lasts forever, and I think there’s something really beautiful in that; since nothing is permanent, we should take joy in the transient and celebrate how long Opportunity travelled, and all that she showed us. 

I don’t blame anybody for mourning. But I can’t feel sad. Proud, yes. Inspired, yes. She was a robot, a machine, and we love her for it. That love doesn’t have to end just because she’s gone silent. 

[timemachineyeah]

Random The Good Place Headcanon

Everyone else is saying fuck and being censored, but Chidi really is just saying “fork”.

[mad-march-hares-tea-party-deact]

Jason has forgotten that they’re being censored and has been saying fork because everyone else is saying fork

[fumblebeefae]

(1) Had a long discussion today with a bunch of biology studants (I am one myself) about zoos, all of them were anti-zoos. The most absurd thing I've heard was that zoos that meet walfare standards are not zoos, but "sanctuaries", because zoos are always evil money-making places that keep those poor animals in cages. When I told about the educational role of these places, they said "but there are other ways, like going to the animal's habitat". Like sure Jan, everybody can afford a trip to...

t(2)Africa to, maybe, see a lion. I talked about how some animals can’t be returned to the wild and they said that we should always try release these animals like 10 times before we be sure to keep the animal (but not in cages to the public see, never this). And I’m so tired, man, to see that many biologists, zoologists and people in academia using ARA bullshit. And some of them weren’t even vegans, but equally annoying.

Biology undergrads (which biology is such a broad field so I doubt many of them would be specifically studying zoology) aren’t biologists / zoologists or academics. They’re students in training. There’s always ARA-like bio students but they often end up quickly dropping out. But implying actual zoologists and biologists are majority ARA-idiots that don’t know our own research field or the basic animal-welfare standards we helped to study and implement, is not only so very incorrect and doesn’t even reflect a fraction of what actual zoologists are like, but it so very rude especially coming from a biology student.

The vast majority of zoologists and biologists aren’t anti-zoo. Hello most of us work with our study species via zoos! You really shouldn’t be generalising actual zoologists based on undergrad students of all things. 

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I think I can shed some light on why the OP had the experience they did, at least if they’re in the US / Canada. 

Here’s the thing: the anti-zoo groups that run animal sanctuaries in the United States and Canada have spent at least the past decade (probably longer, I just can’t source it) actively confounding what the public understanding of a “sanctuary” is. We’ve talked about it a little on WADTT in the past, but this is a great time to come back to it. 

“Sanctuary” as a concept has been marketed to not just mean somewhere that captive animals are safe and secure, but a non-exploitative setting in which resident animals have respect, dignity, peace, and the rights to self-determination and bodily liberty. It’s often also talked about as a state of mind: animals “being at” or “finding” sanctuary, rather than living “in a sanctuary”. ”Depending on which sanctuary group’s messaging you’re looking at, you’ll actually notice that their definition of “sanctuary” is purposefully designed so that zoos can never meet it. For instance, one elephant group feels that asking animals to ever do anything on a schedule influence by human priorities infringes on their right to self determination - so a zoo animal, who is asked to shift indoors and stay indoors while the outdoor areas are cleaned (even voluntarily), is explicitly not able to have Sanctuary. 

You may be thinking that my definition sounds kind of “far out” and that the sanctuaries you may like or follow don’t adhere to that rhetoric, but if you look at how they talk about the work they do - and why they’re different than zoos, or other places they feel animals are abused in - you’ll start seeing those sentiments reoccur. The most common and easily identifiable claim that sanctuaries don’t exploit animals “like zoos do” because they facilities don’t exist for entertainment or profit; when you look closer, the reasons they believe that zoos are exploitative will be things like the human gaze is fundamentally disrespectful to animals, or that it’s okay to enjoy seeing animals but that being entertained by them is immoral, or that active management of animals in human care is antithetical to that animal’s bodily liberty. As some concrete examples I’ve seen: having tigers in a zoo is bad because they’re exploited, but you can come see them at our sanctuary and it’s ok because we respect them and don’t profit from it; elephants not being able to go wherever they want whenever they want denies them a fundamental right to choose how they spend their day, even if that means that cleaning can’t be done regularly; etc. 

This is also why a lot of people have negative reactions to “bars” and “cages,” but the exact same exhibit without the visual barriers is much more acceptable to a lot of people: anti-zoo marketing from animal rights groups relies heavily on metaphors involving human slavery and incarceration, specifically because that conditions us to project our emotional reactions to those topics onto captive animals. It defies logic - moated exhibits often leave animals with less usable space than if they were built with solid fencing - but it’s been a very successful marketing strategy. Sanctuaries have capitalized on this by using rhetoric that references those analogies, saying they don’t “imprison” their animals in cages (even though they often use much more “cage-like fencing than most zoos) or force them into “slavery” for people’s enjoyment. 

While you might not recognize that sort of rhetoric in this blog post, it’s something people are pretty darn familiar with - a long time ago, I asked blog readers to tell me what their associations are with the word “sanctuary” and a lot of you conveyed some of these sentiments in your response. That’s not a bad thing, but you should recognize that people have put a lot of money into ensuring that you have that sort of strong emotional association with the word. 

So, it’s really not surprising to me that you’d have biology undergrads end up repeating a lot of that rhetoric. It’s something I hear from people in every walk of life, no matter their education level - I even hear it repeated by people employed in the zoo industry who don’t realize they’ve been taught to sort of inherently denigrate their own work. You ran into a bunch of really well meaning, probably passionate kids who grew up in the era of The Dodo’s omnipresence who probably never encountered accurate positive media about zoos or were taught to think critically about the sources they’re getting their animal management and ethics information from. Heck, they could even have college professors currently teaching them that rhetoric is accurate - I’ve run into that a bunch of times, too. They’re just at that point of higher education where they feel like they know everything, right before they’ve learned how to also identify what they don’t know… and so that manifests as total surety about their positions on things, in this case, the difference between zoos and sanctuaries. If you’d met me when I was a sophomore in college, I’d probably have said very similar things for exactly that set of reasons. 

[protect-and-love-cats]

Puma Rescued From A Contact-Type Zoo Can’t Be Released Into The Wild, Lives As A Spoiled House Cat

[brightsunnydaysofcastamere]

@why-animals-do-the-thing not sure if you’ve already seen this or not, but this post raises about a million red flags right?

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Yes, absolutely. I’ve gotten tagged in this post a ton of times (not a bad thing!) so let’s take a look at it. This story is a prime example of how clickbait news sites perpetuate really dangerous interactions with animals as cute. 

I’m just gonna burst the bubble on this: Messi is not a rescue. Messi is an exotic pet - and one being managed in a very dangerous, irresponsible way. Period, full stop. 

Messi was one of three cougar cubs born at the Saransk city zoo in Russia, and involved in some sort of soccer fandom event. When it was over, all three cubs were given to the local “contact” zoo, wherever they were in Russia (I still haven’t been able to track down that facility’s name). The owners went to the zoo, saw the cub, and in their own words “decided they had to have him.” After thinking about it for a few days, they went back to the zoo and convinced them to let them purchase the cub. For whatever reason - whether Messi was sickly and they didn’t want to deal with it, as they say, or simply because it was profitable - the zoo sold them this cougar. Exotic pets are common in Russia, and they have to come from somewhere, so I’m really not surprised that a zoo would be willing to sell one of their animals if someone was really willing to pay.  That is not rescue. No matter how they or the media try to frame it, these people literally went “I want one” because cougar cubs are cute, and then followed through on it by buying him. 

There’s a whole bunch more in the IG thread they’ve posted about his history, but I’m not going to bother embedding the screenshots. Basically, it says: he was super sick and needed a lot of medical attention, they made their house nice for him, and then they started taking him to group dog training classes, and he can’t be released because of his health issues. Let’s break that down. 

Yes, it’s imaginable he was really sick when they got him. The images I’ve seen of the cubs when they were first brought in for the promotion show very, very young animals that are no longer with their mother. According to the posts by the owner, Messi has had issues with underdeveloped cartilage, bone density, and other indicatiors of malnutrition; you can see in photos how messed up Messi’s conformation is even now. I genuinely don’t know if the zoo would have kept him alive with those health issues or if they intended to euthanize him, but it’s really important here to note that the zoo was not looking to rehome Messi to someone who would care for him - he was simply lucky that this couple decided they wanted a pet and offered to buy him. 

The way he’s being managed is utterly irresponsible and is setting them up for a tragedy. Yes, they built a lovely indoor setup for him that most domestic housecats would love - but Messi is still a wild animal with  wild instincts, and allowing him to free-roam in a house with people and interact (even on a leash!) with small animals is dangerous. Remember that spreadsheet of all the maulings and deaths caused by pet big cats in the US I’ve got? Cougars are the second-most common species for involvement in incidents. He may be small for a cougar, but he still has claws and teeth and predatory instincts that no amount of “love” can erase. At some point they will kick in, and either a person or another animal will get hurt. 

Yeah, that screenshot looks like a totally positive interaction between Messi and the housecat. Notice there’s small dog that’s running around unrestrained at the bottom right during the interaction. 

My biggest issue with this whole thing is the way they take him out in public. If they want to endanger themselves and their pets, that’s one thing. But what they choose to do with this cat in public is dangerous and irresponsible. It angers me no end that it’s being lauded as super-cute by so many American media outlets when - if you did anything similar with any big cat in the United States - it would either be illegal or you’d be facing some serious problems with regards to public endangerment. I guess it’s cute when it’s in another country that we don’t feel the need to hold responsible for their animal management practices, right?

One, they take this cat out in public all the time. They don’t secure it when driving (good luck not getting mauled if you’re in an accident and the cat is in pain / escapes), they walk it into pet stores like it’s a domestic animal (and just have to hope it doesn’t go after any of the other pets?), and they take him to fucking group dog training classes. In the extended history that I didn’t bother to screenshot all of, they tell basically this story: they couldn’t find anyone who had ever worked with cougar, so they went to this one guy who had worked with a bobcat once, and then they started taking him to group dog training classes after a while. I’m sorry, but are they actively trying to get other people’s pets killed?? Predatory drift is real, and being in a small enclosed space with a lot of other small animals whose behavior is unpredictable is a great way to set that cat up for failure. Everything they’re doing with that cat is just so stupid and irresponsible I can’t even with it. 

Lastly, the claim he can’t go “back to the wild” because of his size is bullshit. That cat can’t be released into the wild because a) cougar are not native to Russia and b) he’s been hand-raised, used for promotional material, tamed, and kept as a housecat. It’s not probable that he even knows how to hunt, and if he was somehow released into the US, he’d turn into a nuisance animal - one that seeks out humans for resources and/or companionship - almost immediately. 

The way Messi is being kept goes against every scientifically-backed standard for responsible big cat management. (I can tell you with pretty decent surety that even the people I know who have circus or private non-professional big cat ownership backgrounds would think it’s inappropriate and dangerous. I know it goes against the standards and best practices of even those professional institutions that do allow things like free contact work with big cats). Just because it looks cute does not mean it is safe or an appropriate way to interact with an exotic animal. I’m not kidding that, if you tried even a fraction of what they do with Messi in the US - even just admitting that you have a pet cougar you’re free contact with in a state where that’s legal - the harassment, protesting, and potential lawsuits wouldn’t end until that cat was removed. However, slap a “rescue” label on the situation, put a bunch of cute photos online, and suddenly the internet decides that all welfare and safety concerns somehow no longer apply. So much so that his story is being shared by sites like OneGreenPlanet, which are rabidly against animals being cared for professionally in zoos but apparently fine with people having exotic pets. After all, Messi is now famous on IG and Youtube, and I’m sure his owners are cashing in on his popularity: until someone gets injured or killed because of his owner’s management practices, the groups writing feature articles about Messi don’t have to think critically about what they’re promoting because the word “rescue” is involved. I just feel really bad for the people who will, inevitably, try to emulate Messi’s owners and set themselves up for a tragedy. 

[ramdaughter]

the words “poc representation” are interesting to me cause a lot of the time they’ll be attached to works that the liberal sj crowd flocks to despite lacking in creative input and overall insight from the people a given work claims to represent. and often times being merely represented isn’t enough. 

when we pose questions that matter like, “is it accurate?” “do these characters resonate with me?”, “can i identify with the experiences being portrayed?” “do i like how my story was told?” a lot of media almost immediately falls apart. and the same people who cite poc representation as an obligatory reason to support a work almost never go nearly as hard for media that have the body and soul of people of colour, both behind and in front of the scenes (ex. the handmaiden, get out, smoke signals. etc.).

for a lot of you, i don’t think poc representation is what you want to see, nor is it something you care about. i think that you just wanna get some ally points by paying some lip service to whatever’s palatable and easy to consume while bullying into poc into wasting time on media that doesn’t have their best interests in mind. 

and media like that is easy to consume, because it’s not subversive or life changing. it’s mainstream white media -their stories, their perspectives, their influences- with people of colour sprinkled in to give a veneer of equality. but will it challenge your views? no. and it won’t satisfy the questions i posed earlier. so basically what i’m saying is y’all gotta stop flinging the words “poc representation” into our faces in order to defend works i don’t give a damn about tbh.

[kierralondon-deactivated2019102]

i don’t mean to like! intrude but it’s true lmao this is a really good point i bring up constantly and i feel like it often goes ignored by a lot of people. when it comes to representation of this kind it has to go far past visibility. yes, we SEE these characters but are their stories still being told by cishet white people? are they the ones constructing their dialogue? are they the ones characterizing them? oftentimes the answer is a glaring yes.

the issue here really rests within the audience. it comes from this odd voyeuristic need to experience the stories of people of color while still being in control of them! that way it can be manipulated to fit any necessary agenda or so that it can be watered down for the audience in order to make our experiences relatable, marketable, and ultimately unauthentic.

representation based off of visibility is legitimate trash 😅 it doesn’t do anything for the most part but push a white narrative through an often stereotypical black or brown body in an attempt to garner viewership versus actually making a difference w/ real diversity in mind.

[sofarawayy-deactivated20210922]

Diversity as a buzzword

[halleycomets]

confession: i am Not sick of uptown funk at all i still throw down every single time i hear it and will for the entire rest of my life. catch me at 100 years old hearing “DUP. DUT DOODOOT DUT DOODOOT,” launching out of my wheelchair and screaming WOOAHHH THIS HIT THAT ICE COLD

[marsnmango]

The Net Neutrality issue summarized

You (or your parents) pay approx $40-$100 or higher for internet. 

So that you can all use youtube, google, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. etc. etc. This isn’t limited to social media.  

Net neutrality says, “Okay, since you already paid x amount of money for the month, you don’t have to pay for each asset individually. Enjoy your internet.”  NO net neutrality means that your service provider (comcast, at&t, verizon, whatever it may be) gets to say “ACTUALLY, it lines our pockets so give us an extra $5.99 for Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, but that doesn’t include Tumblr; that comes with our premium package. That’ll be $5.99 on its own as well. Now about your Google docs and email… 

That’s why it’s important. That’s why I’m spamming Net Neutrality crap. If you’re using the internet, it’s YOUR problem. 

-Email your congressman (text resist to 50409) It’s easy, you don’t have to talk to anyone. 

-Tweet the FCC. https://twitter.com/FCC

-Tweet THIS guy. https://twitter.com/AjitPaiFCC

-CALL. https://www.battleforthenet.com/

-This site does the heavy lifting for you.

-Sign this.  

-Sign this. 

-Email your congressmen (that’s what I’m doing) https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

-Swim the #NetNeutrality tag on Twitter. Seriously, it’s helpful. 

And lastly, GET THIS TRENDING. It’s trending on Twitter but it needs to trend here too. This is everyone’s issue. 

[mlmdavesprite-deactivated201706]

it costs $0.00 to

its free

[hechodeoro-deactivated20180924]

it’s always white cis lesbians that say “femme” is an exclusively lesbian term

[orriculum]

True irony is that post of the screencaps where Wednesday Addams monologues in red face in that first thanksgiving play, and people lauding the point her speech makes, add the comment “Wednesday addams is my spirit animal”

[2kool4kool]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/30/its-hard-to-be-chinese-in-paris-sometimes-it-can-be-deadly/?utm_term=.447ddb5dd407

http://time.com/4716126/france-paris-chinese-asian-community-shooting-protest/

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3205695/paris-riot-police-shoot-kill-shaoyo-liu-chinese-man/

[2kool4kool]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F61M1F75x9g)

[draikinator-archive]

dogs are so good

[healingheartdogs]

I’m so glad this shows different types of dogs as service dogs. So many people I know think service dogs MUST be breeds like labs, golden, or poodles. I saw a post not too long ago where a woman was accusing someone of having a fake service dog because their service dog was a Staffy and “that is very obviously NOT an allowed service dog breed.”

ANY BREED CAN BE A SERVICE DOG BREED. THERE ARE NO BREED REQUIREMENTS FOR SERVICE DOGS.

[jenniferrpovey]

Right. The key is the appropriate temperament and size.

Where people get the idea that they’re all labs/goldens/poodles is because those are the most common breeds used by blind people (although GSDs also make great guide dogs). Why? Because a blind person needs the handle to fall at convenient hand height, and it’s easy to find a dog that’s the correct height in those breeds. Plus, there are established breeding programs with dogs being produced just to be service dogs (if you love labs or goldens and want an already trained dog, then it is sometimes worth contacting the service dog training programs, because they often have perfectly good dogs that washed out because, for example, they couldn’t focus well enough through distractions).

Mobility assistance dogs also need to have a certain size to them. There was somebody with a Siberian Husky as a mobility assistance dog at PhilCon. Nice size for the job, very well trained and well-behaved dog.

There was also somebody with a chihuahua as a service dog. I don’t know what the dog was trained to do, and it would have been rude to ask, but yes chihuahuas can be service dogs. They are excellent for medical alert and some psych.

If a dog is wearing a jacket or a marked leash, they are a service dog. It is nobody’s place to judge whether they “look” like one or are, you know, “the right breed.”

[boomeyer]

Do yourself a favor. Learn to code. Here's how.

I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.

Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.

(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)

But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:

Novice

Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:

Dash - by General Assembly

CodeAcademy

w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)

Intermediate

Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:

Khan Academy

CodeAcademy - Ruby, Python, PHP

Difficult

If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.

Programming problems

Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems

Talentbuddy

TopCoder

Web Applications

If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial - it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.

Django Tutorial

I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.

Rails Guide

If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:

Cake PHP Book

Symfony 2 - Get Started

Yii PHP - The Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion

If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.

If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.

Best of luck!

[lunetta-suzie-jewel]

Guys, Direct Relief (directrelief.org) is one of the highest-rated charities with 99% of donated money going directly to their programs. As I’m sure you’ve heard, Aleppo is about to be completely destroyed. DO is assisting with the Syrian Refugee Crisis and can use all the help they can get. If you are in a position to donate, please do so.

Whether or not you can donate, please reblog.

[justsomeantifas]

idk how relevant this is but did yall know by 2020 85% of the dams in the usa will be past their life expectancy, and furthermore the society of civil engineers gave the usa a D in dam safety.

[heartofoshun]

I’ve read other studies about this as well. I don’t think I live near a big dam! Seriously, dams have a finite lifespan. 

[lizaleigh]

There are 90,000 dams in the US and 14,000 of them are HAZARDOUS.  This is to say nothing of the ‘deadbeat’ dams, the ones that serve no purpose anymore due to more efficient irrigation systems, land use changes, or local development.  Most are impassable barriers to fish, and pose serious hazards to boaters/swimmers.  

Hi, I work for American Rivers, and this is kind of our thing.