anarcho-frogge

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This conversation is so fucking funny to me

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i can't stop laughing

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> wake up

> blearily open phone to monster hunter subreddit i left open last night

> first post i see:

> "WE DEFEATED GENDER"

> where were you when you learned about armor no longer being gender locked in Monster Hunter Wilds

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My Tesselated Darter is getting big! I took a moment to check and he's around the 3.5 or 3.75 inch mark. Pretty hefty for this species!

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August 5, 2024 - Palestine Action used a repurposed prison van to crash through the fences and the gates at the heavily-secred Bristol-based research, development and manufacturing hub for Israel's biggest arms producer, Elbit Systems, where they smashed hundreds of thousands of pounds worh of equipment and merchandise.

In this video you can see activists directly smashing high-tech quadcopters that the Israelis have used over and over to gun down innocent people gathering in hospitals or around humanitarian aid shipments. Israel has slaughtered hundreds of people in this way, a naked, unashamed war crime that kind of disappears among all the other war crimes that Israel commits daily, supported by their unconditional american friends Biden and Harris. [video]

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Marvel villain monologs in my notes lads

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god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

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average United States contains 1000s of pet tigers in backyards" factoid actualy [sic] just statistical error. average person has 0 tigers on property. Activist Georg, who lives the U.S. Capitol & makes up over 10,000 each day, has purposefully been spreading disinformation adn [sic] should not have been counted

I have a big mad today, folks. It's a really frustrating one, because years worth of work has been validated... but the reason for that fucking sucks.

For almost a decade, I've been trying to fact-check the claim that there "are 10,000 to 20,000 pet tigers/big cats in backyards in the United States." I talked to zoo, sanctuary, and private cat people; I looked at legislation, regulation, attack/death/escape incident rates; I read everything I could get my hands on. None of it made sense. None of it lined up. I couldn't find data supporting anything like the population of pet cats being alleged to exist. Some of you might remember the series I published on those findings from 2018 or so under the hashtag #CrouchingTigerHiddenData. I've continued to work on it in the six years since, including publishing a peer reviewed study that counted all the non-pet big cats in the US (because even though they're regulated, apparently nobody bothered to keep track of those either).

I spent years of my life obsessing over that statistic because it was being used to push for new federal legislation that, while well intentioned, contained language that would, and has, created real problems for ethical facilities that have big cats. I wrote a comprehensive - 35 page! - analysis of the issues with the then-current version of the Big Cat Public Safety Act in 2020. When the bill was first introduced to Congress in 2013, a lot of groups promoted it by fear mongering: there's so many pet tigers! they could be hidden around every corner! they could escape and attack you! they could come out of nowhere and eat your children!! Tiger King exposed the masses to the idea of "thousands of abused backyard big cats": as a result the messaging around the bill shifted to being welfare-focused, and the law passed in 2022.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act created a registry, and anyone who owned a private cat and wanted to keep it had to join. If they did, they could keep the animal until it passed, as long as they followed certain strictures (no getting more, no public contact, etc). Don’t register and get caught? Cat is seized and major punishment for you. Registering is therefore highly incentivized. That registry closed in June of 2023, and you can now get that registration data via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Guess how many pet big cats were registered in the whole country?

97.

Not tens of thousands. Not thousands. Not even triple digits. 97.

And that isn't even the right number! Ten USDA licensed facilities registered erroneously. That accounts for 55 of 97 animals. Which leaves us with 42 pet big cats, of all species, in the entire country.

Now, I know that not everyone may have registered. There's probably someone living deep in the woods somewhere with their illegal pet cougar, and there's been at least one random person in Texas arrested for trying to sell a cub since the law passed. But - and here's the big thing - even if there are ten times as many hidden cats than people who registered them - that's nowhere near ten thousand animals. Obviously, I had some questions.

Guess what? Turns out, this is because it was never real. That huge number never had data behind it, wasn't likely to be accurate, and the advocacy groups using that statistic to fearmonger and drive their agenda knew it... and didn't see a problem with that.

Allow me to introduce you to an article published last week.

This article is good. (Full disclose, I'm quoted in it). It's comprehensive and fairly written, and they did their due diligence reporting and fact-checking the piece. They talked to a lot of people on all sides of the story.

But thing that really gets me?

Multiple representatives from major advocacy organizations who worked on the Big Cat Publix Safety Act told the reporter that they knew the statistics they were quoting weren't real. And that they don't care. The end justifies the means, the good guys won over the bad guys, that's just how lobbying works after all. They're so blase about it, it makes my stomach hurt. Let me pull some excerpts from the quotes.

"Whatever the true number, nearly everyone in the debate acknowledges a disparity between the actual census and the figures cited by lawmakers. “The 20,000 number is not real,” said Bill Nimmo, founder of Tigers in America. (...) For his part, Nimmo at Tigers in America sees the exaggerated figure as part of the political process. Prior to the passage of the bill, he said, businesses that exhibited and bred big cats juiced the numbers, too. (...) “I’m not justifying the hyperbolic 20,000,” Nimmo said. “In the world of comparing hyperbole, the good guys won this one.”

"Michelle Sinnott, director and counsel for captive animal law enforcement at the PETA Foundation, emphasized that the law accomplished what it was set out to do. (...) Specific numbers are not what really matter, she said: “Whether there’s one big cat in a private home or whether there’s 10,000 big cats in a private home, the underlying problem of industry is still there.”"

I have no problem with a law ending the private ownership of big cats, and with ending cub petting practices. What I do have a problem with is that these organizations purposefully spread disinformation for years in order to push for it. By their own admission, they repeatedly and intentionally promoted false statistics within Congress. For a decade.

No wonder it never made sense. No wonder no matter where I looked, I couldn't figure out how any of these groups got those numbers, why there was never any data to back any of the claims up, why everything I learned seemed to actively contradict it. It was never real. These people decided the truth didn't matter. They knew they had no proof, couldn't verify their shocking numbers... and they decided that was fine, if it achieved the end they wanted.

So members of the public - probably like you, reading this - and legislators who care about big cats and want to see legislation exist to protect them? They got played, got fed false information through a TV show designed to tug at heartstrings, and it got a law through Congress that's causing real problems for ethical captive big cat management. The 20,000 pet cat number was too sexy - too much of a crisis - for anyone to want to look past it and check that the language of the law wouldn't mess things up up for good zoos and sanctuaries. Whoops! At least the "bad guys" lost, right? (The problems are covered somewhat in the article linked, and I'll go into more details in a future post. You can also read my analysis from 2020, linked up top.)

Now, I know. Something something something facts don't matter this much in our post-truth era, stop caring so much, that's just how politics work, etc. I’m sorry, but no. Absolutely not.

Laws that will impact the welfare of living animals must be crafted carefully, thoughtfully, and precisely in order to ensure they achieve their goals without accidental negative impacts. We have a duty of care to ensure that. And in this case, the law also impacts reservoir populations for critically endangered species! We can't get those back if we mess them up. So maybe, just maybe, if legislators hadn't been so focused on all those alleged pet cats, the bill could have been written narrowly and precisely.

But the minutiae of regulatory impacts aren't sexy, and tiger abuse and TV shows about terrible people are. We all got misled, and now we're here, and the animals in good facilities are already paying for it.

I don't have a conclusion. I'm just mad. The public deserves to know the truth about animal legislation they're voting for, and I hope we all call on our legislators in the future to be far more critical of the data they get fed.

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genuinely the dilution of be gay do crimes drives me crazy. that phrase was coined by an anarchist who genuinely like. meant it. it's by io bumlung. guys they meant real crimes. I know annoying queers have co opted it into meaninglessness and it has become a sign of like. liberals who want to pretend they're radical while being scared of poor people but that is for real not where it came from or what it meant

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You can't say Chaya Raichik should be hunted down the way she targets trans people to be hunted, that would be illegal.

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if we want to talk about where trans men tend to be overrepresented in transphobic discourse, it’s in relation to scaremongering media profiles of detransitioners, framing trans men as misunderstood women with internalised misogyny who have mutilated our bodies and are now left ‘ruined’ because of HRT and surgery. This is used to argue for policies that restrict access to trans healthcare, especially for minors (notice how often we are talked about as “young girls”!) putting a ‘sympathetic’ face to transgender hysteria by talking about the “victims” of transgenderism. But this is still an incomplete picture without accounting for transmisogyny, as trans women are the “perpetrators” of this victimisation, convincing “confused young women” to cut off their breasts and take testosterone. It centres around the ‘corruption’ of femininity, as trans men forsake our ‘natural’ femaleness and trans women as ‘appropriating’ it.

This is why Matt Walsh, JKR, and other prominent transphobic figures asks the question “what is a woman?” and not “what is a man?”, it’s why Posie Parker advocates for armed cis men to go into women’s bathrooms to “protect women from men invading women’s spaces,” its why terfs are so fixated on trans women as ur-misogynists, it’s why right wing politicians like Pierre Poilievre & the Conservative Party of Canada focus their ire on blocking trans women from public spaces.

Saying this is not a denial of trans men as victims of transphobia (hello! I am a frequent one!) and its endlessly frustrating that these conversations get derailed into “well what about MY experience where XYZ horrible thing happened to me” as if the conversation about transphobia should only ever remain in the realm of interpersonal violence and victimisation. It’s very handy to stay in that arena because the only rebuttal to that tactic is to deny this random person’s experiences or “ignore their lived reality.” But I’m not talking about experience! Transphobia is a structural force in the world which means we don’t actually need to rely on individual accounts of violence to understand it. taking stock of that structure is only a “threat” to “trans masc voices” if you think structural discussions of oppression are de facto “misandrist”

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31 Jul 24

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"You're so privileged for caring about genocide" is not a take actually.

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There's this whole genre of post on this site that goes like this:

Trans woman: its really bothersome that in [queer spaces/fandom/feminist spaces] there's this constant rising [transmisogynistic behavior]

TME person: [derails post to focus on anyone but trans women]

Trans Woman: You completely missed the point of this post.

TME Person: Oh yeah? Well [immediately viciously engages in transmisogynistic behavior OP complained about].

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the united states of...erm...okay, im not even gonna TRY to pronounce that one

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Rio Grande Lesser Siren (Siren intermedia texana), juvenile, family Sirenidae, found in freshwater habitats in the South TX and NW Mexico

This eel-like aquatic salamander retains its gills. They have only 2 tiny front limbs.

They grow to a length of up to 69 cm (27 in).

photographs by Dick Bartlett