Anu Orta Veniya @amphitherels - Tumblr Blog

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

o-kurwa

officialfist

Unrestrained summer fun

why-animals-do-the-thing

One of the reasons I always encourage people to critically assess animal organizations is that, at the end of the day, they’re still businesses run by people and they still have the same problems that businesses in other sectors do. The news article linked below is a really stellar example of that. The rest of this post, and that link, require a big CW for sexual assault mentions, victim blaming, and retaliatory behavior for coming forward about misconduct. It’s really rare that there are news articles that look at issues in the zoo world this deeply, without preconceived politics. I think this is a good article because it uses an acute problem to examine a lot of really systemic issues with the way the field (and especially AZA) handles interpersonal politics.

As I talked about a few days ago when posting my writeup on the need for anonymous reporting within accrediting groups, the zoological field runs on a really hierarchical power structure. Violating that - especially by trying to file a complaint about the conduct of someone higher up the ladder - almost certainly will result in social backlash, and often results in retaliation against you by those affected. This is one of those worst-case scenarios: a researcher was assaulted twice at an industry conference by his boss (who controlled his green card); when he reported it later, AZA straight up was like “lol we don’t have to follow our no-tolerance policy and get her in trouble, she’s a well respected zoo director” even though they’d had multiple reports about her behaving inappropriately when drunk at meetings; then, a number of women involved in the SSP that director was part of worked to ruin the victim’s professional reputation, resulting in him being fired from a research position at another AZA zoo. The victim sued them for retaliation and settled out of court for 2.8 million: I think it’s because what was uncovered during discovery and in depositions was so damning for AZA and the people involved that they’d have been creamed if they’d let the case actually go to a jury trial. (I’ve read all the publicly available trial docs and it’s… so bad.)

The zoo director who assaulted him still has her job as of May 10, 2023, and she had to step down from running the SAFE and SSP programs she was involved in (because she was in a position of power over her victim through them, as he researches that species) … but AZA agreed as part of the settlement to not say anything about that, and to not revoke her AZA membership - which would actually be the appropriate consequence for assaulting someone as per their code of conduct. She was the chair of the AZA ethics committee when the report was filed, and while she was removed from that position when the news of the lawsuit first broke in 2021, the settlement clearly indicates nothing prevents her from resuming that position or taking any other position within AZA other than the two programs she was forced to resign from.

What I find really telling in the whole situation is that AZA has all these really nice words in their policies and code of conduct about dealing with harassment or inappropriate behavior on paper - and felt absolutely no obligation to actually follow through with any of it. An email sent out by the CEO in 2018 acknowledges how often misconduct happens at their meetings, and that they were enacting a no-tolerance policy, and wanted to hear about and investigate anything that might happen. When actually called on that by the victim’s lawyers, they scrambled every which way to get out of the responsibility. We never said that, and if we did, we didn’t mean it, and even so we can’t be held accountable because of this reason we just made up. And then, right before the next annual conference last fall, they changed their code of conduct: they took every single piece of the code of conduct where the victim’s lawyers had found language that meant they were responsible for dealing with problems, and edited it so they can never be held accountable for taking action again.

This article is really worth a read. I’ve been following this case closely for a couple years, and the reporter found a lot of details I wasn’t aware of. The article is unbiased in a way a lot of media about zoos is not, and it provides a lot of receipts for the truly appalling choices made by everyone involved. It also looks at the power imbalances and exploitation that occur when an industry markets itself on the value of research and animal programs… which are run by unpaid staff taking on extra work in addition to their regular jobs. What happens to that research or those programs when human politics can and do often interfere? Well.. the researcher who was the victim here actually identified a huge issue with genetic data getting mixed up in the SSP species he studied! But the women who supported the director who assaulted him tried to ice him out of the program in retaliation… meaning if he hadn’t made a stink and instead had just left, quietly, like so many do? AZA wouldn’t know the extent to which their breeding program was accidentally hybridizing two separate species.

It’s a mess. This is one person, one incident, one issue and all of the fallout. How much more of this is happening that we don’t know about? How much of the work that’s marketed as the value of accreditation is impacted by this type of stuff? We just don’t know.

Amid a pricey sexual harassment settlement, critics paint the Association of Zoos and Aquariums as a den of dysfunction.

animentality

headspace-hotel

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

tyrannosaurus-rex

yanno honestly one major thing no one seems to want to mention about newer pokemon games is how everything is so big and well established and urban now. back in the old games you were treking through presumably shitloads of wilderness, and if you needed to get passed an obstacle it was your own pokemon that had to be able to do it. i understand wanting to create a certain convenience to the gameplay but replacing HMs with someone elses pokemon that comes in and solves your problem, or providing fast travel with a taxi service you get right out the gate. kind of takes away a certain sense of growth.

idk it makes me feel a bit cheated out of a certain level of accomplishment. there was something rly sweet and rustic about working with your pokemon to overcome obstacles or gain new abilities that made the game a little easier. it doesnt feel as cool to just call a taxi, or ride a train. even the camp sites feel just kinda washed out. you go out on a hiking trail in your pristine school uniform and have a nice picnic is rly more how it feels.

i miss the old concept of your trainer being a little ragamuffin loser kid from bumfuck nowheresville sleeping out under the stars by the fire with their pokemon. On their way through the world with big longshot dreams and a long difficult adventure ahead of them. There was so much mystery, so much to learn and overcome. The wilderness was vast and full of unknown secrets. Maybe it was the 3D switch but the games just dont feel like that anymore. Your trainer seems very well taken care of and supported inmediately, the world feels open and already explored, already researched. you used to have to go DEEP into dungeons to find legendaries, now you just reach a point in the game where a small area is opened up and its just kinda in there. There are towns every 50 feet, routes feel short and unmemorable, you get legendaries right off the bat now, technology has connected every inch of the world...

idk im rambling at this point maybe kids think thisnis what adevntures should be now, maybe this is just old man yells at cloud, but I just think somewhere along the way the original vibe was lost and its just not as compelling anymore

tyrannosaurus-rex

yes absolutely this. the creator of pokemon was inspired by his days as a child spent outside catching bugs and critters and exploring the area to learn about the world around him. He wanted to encourage an appreciation of the natural world where people and nature would live in harmony. that message I feel is greatly diminished.

kaijutegu

WE FINALLY HAVE EVIDENCE AS TO WHY SPIDER BALL PYTHONS HAVE THEIR WOBBLE

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.06.475233v1.full

Like most people who know things about neural anatomy predicted, it’s structural, not just neurological. I figured it would come out to be a pigment issue with the neural crest myself, but it’s looking like it’s actually related to the inner ear structure that controls equilibrium.

Either way, it’s definitely inseparable from the morph.

vitariesocks

Comic on having long-COVID as a young person. Sending love to others who may be similarly suffering.

Ko-Fi

(ID under the cut)

Keep reading

vitariesocks

This is getting traction again as cases surge. I want to repeat what I’ve said on Twitter: In the 4 months since I’ve posted this, none of my symptoms have improved. I’m nearing 2 years post-COVID with zero improvement, no answers, and little hope. Take this seriously.

kaijutegu

When people ask why states without tegus are looking to ban them? This. This is why. They are unstoppable. They’re incredibly adaptable. In addition to being able to survive winter conditions almost a thousand miles north of their northernmost invasive range, they can also elevate their body temperatures to deal with cooler non-winter conditions. This defies what we know about pretty much every other lizard, and they can just… do it. Because they’re amazing.

But that amazingness comes with a price. Here in the US, we’ve finally woken up to the reality that this is an invasive species with potential to really spread, and several state governments are scrambling to ensure that it doesn’t happen. Most legislation intends to just ban keeping the animals in states where they could establish or already are established, but the problem is that much of this current/future legislation regarding tegus is really insufficient. It either doesn’t do enough or it does way too much and either way doesn’t actually do anything meaningful to prevent the spread of this invasive species. But people thinking they have some kind of constitutional right to keep as many tegus as they want isn’t helping. If I have to see one more person spouting anti-gun control rhetoric about a lizard, so help me god I will scream. I will.

Honestly though, I think that the state bans are only going to continue. I’m not foolish enough to think that any of the state governments are doing this out of a pure concern for the states’ biodiversity. Aside from what tegus can and will do to endangered species (eat them. they will eat them.), there is a serious bottom line economic consequence to their spread. There’s plenty of evidence that these guys are a serious threat to agriculture, and the exotic pet industry isn’t comparatively big enough for any government to take seriously if the farmers are complaining. Which they will. You know what they call tegus in Venezuela? El lobo pollero, the chicken wolf. They are just that good at sneaking into chicken coops and going for the eggs. They cooperate to do this. And at the end of the day, exotic pet owners’ privileges will be sacrificed for economic protection for US agricultural interests, because that’s how the economy works.

Which is a shame because I do think there is a viable compromise. Perhaps something like this could actually work: 1: Establish FDA licensing for tegu breeders, the same as you have to do if you breed several other exotic species. Licensing would need to include enforceable containment policies and state inspections. 2: Mandate PIT tagging or microchipping for pet tegu owners and enforce legal penalties if there are escapes. This could range from a fine to being disallowed to own a tegu. 3: Figure out a more practical way to do culls of the invasive populations. (This is going to be very hard in the Everglades due to the impassibility of much of the area, but in places with sparser vegetation, tracker dogs trained on the eggs/nests could probably help a great deal with this.) 4: Stop mass imports. The imports are a huge problem. I think they’re actually a much bigger problem than the breeders for two reasons. First, the sheer numbers of imports is a problem. Between 2000 and 2010, more than 79,000 tegus were imported to the US. That’s a lot. We already know that the first and largest invasive tegu population can be traced back to a single importer. We already know that the invasive pythons can be traced back to an importers’ warehouse that was damaged in a hurricane. Limit the market to breeders who are willing to go a step beyond for good containment, and you limit the number of animals being produced. This also limits the number of people who can buy them. If cheap imported reptiles aren’t readily available, you’ll have fewer people impulsively buying them and then releasing them when they get too big or too much trouble. Ban the imports and you solve part of the problem. Now, granted, pet owners releasing their animals isn’t really a huge issue. Most released pets die pretty quickly. But even though it’s not the biggest part of the issue, it is still an issue.

Ideally, tegu owners would be educated enough to buy only from good breeders with good biosecurity practices, take one out of the swamp, or take in a rescue. Ideally, tegu breeders would be more sensible about protecting their businesses by complying with state FWS standards and by taking a more proactive approach to containment. Tegus are burrowers and escape artists, and if tegu breeders who do outside housing would keep that in mind more seriously, there ARE things they could do to actually prevent escapes on their end- things like you do for wild canids. It might be more difficult to sink a fence a few feet or lay a concrete pad, but is it worth it to protect your ability to breed and keep a species you love?

At the end of the day, a lot of exotic animal laws in the US don’t make a lot of sense. They often come too late to actually prevent a tragedy or ecological disaster, and they rarely do enough to prohibit actual irresponsible behavior. We have hard scientific data that demonstrates that tegus really could become invasive throughout much of the southeast US, and with climate change pushing tropical and subtropical climatological zones north, their potential range is only going to get larger.

aquadraco20

I completely agree with everything you said, and I apologize for derailing the post, but what about cats? I feel like outdoor cats are a much bigger problem than tegus are. I imagine culling efforts are much easier to do when people see reptiles as emotionless and unfeeling, but even the suggestion of culling cats ends up with people calling you a monster. How can we change people’s minds regarding outdoor cats? I know things are slowly moving in a more positive direction as far as keeping them indoors, but I fear it isnt moving fast enough.

kaijutegu

We can’t. People are way too willfully ignorant about cats. Like, there is genuinely no way we will ever get people to realize that free-roaming cats is one of the most environmentally destructive things an individual can do because people are absolutely incapable of understanding that their cat doesn’t belong outside. They don’t care. They don’t love their cats enough to try to keep them alive and healthy. They don’t care enough about their local ecosystems to keep them inside. We have the science and people refuse to believe it. We’ve tried the emotional appeals but people like to think that their cat is special and will magically avoid hawks, cars, and other predators. Remember when people thought there was a friggin’ cat serial killer in England and they STILL didn’t keep their cats inside? Some people just don’t care enough about their cats to keep them indoors and I don’t have enough faith in humanity to believe they ever will.

It’s a problem on an entirely different level than tegus.

zookeeperproblems

Wait, why is “The Dodo” bad?

I got quite a few questions and responses about why the online brand / website / Facebook page “The Dodo” shouldn’t be supported. Here’s a quick rundown:

Misguided Anti-Captivity. They are often blatantly anti-captivity, or use anti-captivity language and/or promote anti-captivity views. They use language such as an animal is “trapped” in a zoo or an animal was “saved” from a zoo. They actively support and often get quotes from representatives from ZooCheck, an anti-zoo and anti-captivity organization, and support HSUS (Humane Society of the United States). Their reports on tragedies of animals being injured or dying at zoos are overwhelmingly full of blame, toxicity, and disrespect. Their ideas of anti-captivity are incredibly limited and misguided – they are often pro “sanctuary” with the idea that all sanctuaries are better and they rarely discuss any kind of conservation.

Anthropomorphism over Accuracy. They are wildly, ridiculously, inaccurately anthropomorphic. For example, a picture of a bear leaned against a wall is captioned as: “He looks desperate, depressed, despondent. He stares up, seeming to search for a way out.” They described an owl resting on someone’s shoulder as “missing the man who saved her so much she couldn’t stop hugging him.” A kitten “looks at his rescuers face to be reassured everything is okay.” One of their most recent articles is about a cow “shedding tears” and crying because it is sad. Overall, they are much more concerned with ‘tugging on heartstrings’ of animal lovers than with being accurate about animal behavior.

Unsafe Animal Interactions and Inappropriate Pets. Despite being anti-captivity when it comes to zoos specifically, they have often published videos of exotic pets and/or inappropriate free contact with wild/dangerous animals.

Lack of Primary Sources and Information. They often lack any resources to accurate information about their “news”. Recently they made a 45-second video which claimed that basically any elephant on display (from a Ringling Circus to a rural south Asian performance) was automatically and certainly being abused and tortured. There were no sources or proof to back this up, no resources to explore, nothing. They rarely have any kind of scientist or animal care worker as a source for any video or article, just activists.

Stealing and Editing Videos. You’ll notice almost every video on their site is made by them and hosted there, not shared from somewhere else. They take videos from other sources, add music and text, and call it their own. They almost never link to the original source.

Overall, “The Dodo” is not a news site. It’s a brand. It’s a website designed to get views and make money - it will do anything just to get those clicks. But it tries to sell itself as news, and therein lies the issue. They use strong language, buzzwords, and clickbait titles in order to push a vague, biased agenda that hurts those of us who work in zoos and other animal facilities.

Here is another strong, detailed breakdown of some of their common practices written by Why Animals Do the Thing

twitblr

Keep it going for the 2021 and forever (x)

forgotn1

This just made me realize that news articles always portray poachers as people from the area who killed them for money. But if they’re not being killed when people can’t travel there, then it’s not anyone from the area doing the killing. Makes me wonder how many of the “poachers” were actually trophy hunters from Europe or the US.

mellifluousbenthictones

ALL OF THEM

kaijutegu

In reality, probably not many of them. If any. The modern narrative of who’s poaching and where animal parts end up is very much entrenched in the pulp novels of the 20s and 30s. Most people think of poachers as either a Percival McLeach/Negaverse Steve Irwin/old white guy with a mustache… or as a poor African. But the reality’s a lot more complex and the media’s bad at picking up on it for a lot of reasons- largely because people hate nuance and don’t understand the difference between illegal poaching (always bad) and legal, regulated trophy hunting (complicated. sometimes bad. sometimes good. depends on the situation, the reality of where conservation dollars are coming from, and whether or not you believe one animal can or cannot be sacrificed for the good of the species.)

So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all. When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.

The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies.

They’re selling the horns in Vietnam.

Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdf

Nat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.

The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel. (Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money, dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well…

And you can probably guess who the middlemen are. Often they’re students. Frequently they’re workers. And until recently, they were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese nationals. Now, TRAFFIC notes that many rhino horn syndicates are using white South Africans due to heightened suspicion. (Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/environment/125451/profiling-ups-risk-for-asian-rhino-horn-mules.html)

And normally, there actually is a lot of traffic between China and Vietnam and the rhino countries. I don’t know if people here are quite aware of the relationship between China and several African countries- particularly Kenya, but there’s been a lot of Asian investment into Africa. In Kenya, you see a lot of Chinese workers coming in, working on development projects, and then going back to China. Something like 20% of African infrastructure projects are funded by China; one out of every three is built by Chinese firms. (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere). Most of the part-time labor is local (source: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/801581468195561492/pdf/WPS7614.pdf), but not all of it- and the full time labor, while mostly local, is roughly 22% Chinese citizens. There were well over 150,000 Chinese workers in Africa before the pandemic (source: http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-workers-in-africa). You also saw a lot of Vietnamese workers… before the pandemic. Both China and Vietnam called their citizens home pretty quickly. Vietnam in particular. By July 2020, arrangements for most Vietnamese workers in Africa had come through after a good deal of public outcry, and they were back in Vietnam (source: https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/19011-stuck-in-guinea-equatorial,-vietnamese-workers-forced-to-work-despite-rampant-covid-19-cases).

No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers.

Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed. I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.

Additional sources and information:

https://www.savetherhino.org/what-we-do/reducing-illegal-trade/

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/rich-men-rhino-horns/529455/

https://www.savetherhino.org/thorny-issues/trophy-hunting-and-sustainable-use-rhinos/

http://www.poachingfacts.com/poaching-statistics/rhino-poaching-statistics/

https://www.fws.gov/international/permits/black-rhino-import-permit.html- this oughta give you an idea on what a US import permit entails. If you have the money and time, it’s… really not that hard to hunt a rhino.

pancakeke

For anyone not keeping up, Trump held a rally earlier today, told his supporters to storm the Capitol building with him, then went to hide in the White House.

Protestors tore through 4 layers of barricades and are fighting cops to get into the Capitol building. A possible bomb was spotted and the Madison and Cannon buildings have been evacuated while a bomb squad was called in. And just now the Capitol has gone into lockdown.

But also Pence issued a statement that he is not doing anything with the electors and McConnell denounced Republican senators’ efforts to stop counting the electoral votes.

And as I was writing this, the protesters breached the Capitol and Pence was pulled from the Senate chamber.

pancakeke

The Senate just recessed due to the Capitol being breached.

Cops are doing pretty much nothing to stop any of this from happening btw. Protesters are outside the Senate door.

pancakeke

OK everything got a lot crazier really fast.

Trump lashed out at Pence for not stopping the vote. He is not telling the protesters to leave but instructed them to “support the Capitol police and law enforcement”. Trump later told protesters to “remain peaceful” despite already storming the Capitol.

Ivanka tweeted out calling the protestors “patriots” but then deleted this tweet and replaced it with one saying violence is not patriotic. Meanwhile Rudy Giuliani’s messaging to protesters is to be peaceful and that they are on “the right side of history”. Neither acknowledges the violence.

The Department of Defense denied a request by DC officials to deploy the National Guard. Supposedly it was because they were beholden to Trump and only acted when he decided to deploy them about an hour later.

Guns were drawn by police on the Senate floor as protesters break through windows in an attempt to reach the room. One women was shot in the chest (GRAPHIC VIDEO). It appears she was with those trying to break into the Senate floor. Later reports state that that 5 people have been transported to the hospital, including at least member of police.

Police are making “attempts to deescalate”.

Ted Cruz is sending fundraising text messages to contest the vote despite the escalation of the riots. Screenshot of one here.

Mitt Romney called the riots an “insurrection”.

Emergency procedures were emailed to all Capitol staffers urging them to hide.

Mayor Bower issued a 6pm curfew.

Protestors are climbing all over police vehicles without cops stopping them. Maybe because they’re too busy taking selfies with the protesters.

The potential bomb has been detonated by bomb squad.

Trump is refusing to condemn the protester’s violence despite being urged to do so by staffers which is a stark contrast to his attitude toward BLM protesters. His aids can’t convince him to do anything and the White House briefing room is empty with no preparation to address the nation to be seen.

Only Pence is stepping up to call for an end to the violence and for protestors to vacate the Capitol.

President elect Biden is calling the protesters a “mob” and an “insurrection”.

Chris Christie has been attempting without success to contact Trump and convince him to tell his supporters to leave.

As I finished writing this Trump finally posted a video telling people to go home, but also repeated his false election claims. In it he also calls his supporters “very special” and his opponents “evil” ??

whatareyoureallyafraidof

I pay more taxes than The Manchurian Cantaloupe!

thebibliosphere

Tfw you’re a disabled, self-employed creator who has spent the last 6 years living hand to mouth and you still pay more in taxes than the Evil Cheeto.

kaijutegu

HE SPENT SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS ON THAT SHITTY WIG???

oomshi

blackqueerblog

Rutger Bregman is the Dutch historian who became a global sensation after an appearance at this year’s Davos summit, where he accused attending billionaires of ignoring taxation. Now he has created another viral moment in an extremely uncomfortable interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

Bregman so riled Carson with his accusations of hypocrisy, critiques of Fox’s conservative agenda, and attacks on Donald Trump that the TV host called him a “moron” and angrily told him: “Go fuck yourself.”

Source

Lot more people around the world are going to watch this now than if it actually aired. Speaking truth to power is the best viral content!

redarmyscreaming

Always re-post this.

uschi-the-listener

This didn’t air so I reblogged to make sure people got to see it anyway.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

turboalienjesus-deactivated2021

Spread this like wildfire

lets-do-get-help-deactivated202

STAY THE FUCK HOME AND WEAR YOUR DAMN MASK IF YOU HAVE TO LEAVE

goddess-particle

I was gonna put this in the tags but there was too much: A lot of the symptoms mentioned can be explained by lack of oxygen delivery to the bloodstream. It's called hypoxia, it can cause tremors, delerium/hallucination, even severe nightmares/night terrors. Also brain fog, (something I commonly experience at work after using my n95 for too long), & short term memory loss. Also, being hypoxic for too long basically signals to your brain to increase your heart rate because it allows faster delivery of whatever inadequate amounts of oxygen is already in your blood. Being tachycardic for too long causes extreme body fatigue because your body thinks youre trying to run a marathon or some shit.

Also covid causes such an intense inflammatory response that it results in hypercoagulation of the blood, which can lead to circulatory issues and blood clotting.

ALSO, the reason why people seem to get better and then worse is, from what we've seen, whatever damage is done to the lung tissue seems to be permanent. So I have a patient who's been in the hospital since April, hes currently testing negative for COVID, his viral load is not high enough to be detected anymore, but hes still requires absurd amounts of oxygen and it's taking him months to wean down. Not to mention he needed to be intubated twice and now has a tracheostomy. He is 39 years old with no comorbidities.

But yeah, it's fine if we send the children back to school.