The Ornithologist the Internet Called a Murderer
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Museums have come a long way, since the golden age of collecting of Victorian times. A lot of museums run tissue banks, mainly blood, which are an invaluable resource. More of less anyone in the world has access to the material. The animals or birds that are unfortunate enough to enter a museum are put to good use and ultimately mean that a lot less are killed in the name research.
Disclaimer: I knew Chris when I lived in Seattle. He's a stand-up guy.
the fate of the billions isn't ignored. It just can't be changed immediately as if by a magic wand. The process has to start somewhere, and the plight of individual animals who one way or another got some connection to people mind is a natural place to start as people pay attention to those animals, and with time the people would understand and would be able to extend that empathy from those individual to the rest of the billions.
I for one happy to see that cold killing in the name of science doesn't sit ok anymore with a lot of people. 120 years ago scientists were cutting dogs alive without anesthesia. Back then one could also argue about "an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring the fate of millions or billions". Fortunately the plight of those individual animals back then had ultimately got its attention, and animal torture is a crime today.
A handful of well publicized jail terms would go a long way towards protecting the next potential victim.
You'd probably have an uphill battle convincing a court that an online death threat is a "true threat." What percentage of them are acted on? How many decimal places do you have to go to before it doesn't round to 0?
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, please don't threaten people with death, even if you don't mean it, it's gross.
If 100 people perpetrate a crime together -- even if loosely coupled mob, it's not less of a crime than if 1 person perpetrates it alone.
Making a person face criminal liability for making a negative comment because a third party, that your defendant has never met, committed an actual crime is farcically orwellian.
https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/2018/01/fi...
That's a podcast with transcript from a free speech lawyer discussing the fighting words doctrine.
Again, you're super unclear about the exact scenario you're imagining. But the only way that you could be punished for saying "I am going to murder you" under the fighting words doctrine (instead of the true threat doctrine) is if you said it face-to-face with someone and that person was likely to punch you for it.
It is certainly not the case that if you made some statement like "I think you should die in a fire," online and then someone else that you had never interacted with attacked the person that you spoke to, that the fighting words doctrine would have anything whatsoever to do with any case against you.
There are almost no internet comment threads that can plausibly be described as inciting imminent lawless action.
You can read more starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elonis_v._United_States
How do people distinguish between (subjective) humor and an actual threat where it’s illegal? Do they outlaw all jokes about killing?
Is it equally not right to ban saying "black people should die alone of cancer" to a black man?
and the degree to which you hold that view (that its dangerous precedent, and difficult to stop once the ball gets rolling), is the degree to which you accept hate speech banning. But imo yes, in general, if theres no backing threat, then the government should not have any opinion on such a saying. Individuals and corporations can, should, and do, but the government has no business regulating such a thing.
I think I misunderstood your position; I'm in agreement with that statement: there is no difference, and neither should be punished or regulated, unless theres evidence of there being a real chance to transform into (or cause) actions.
>Or why you should allow people or corporations to enforce a ban but not government.
The federal government offers a space for the entire population; corporations offer a space for a (very) limited subset, and individuals offer a space for those in their household.
Due to the sweeping nature of its power (and its slow speed to update), its by far preferable to play conservatively. If you don't have a good reason to regulate, the government should not regulate. The same applies less to corporations, due to limited power, the general availability for its subjects to move to other corporations (which exists for country movement, but much more difficult than corporate).
>There are already things you cannot say. Why not add wishing someone harm to them? What useful purpose does it serve?
Well, you want to limit the amount of speech regulation in general, because again its difficult to regulate, difficult to decide what to regulate, and almost trivially easy to abuse. The problem isn't that keeping that particular statement is beneficial, but that banning such a statement, and statements like it, is prone to buggy behavior.
And of course you want to avoid as much as possible reaching the point where you can no longer criticize the federal government, and the more you regulate speech, the more stable that path becomes. And the federal government is naturally incentivized to take that path if it can: it makes its life far, far easier.
But if we as a society wanted to we could have a lawyer comb through all the comments sent to people that are victims of online mobs and pick out the ones that constitute real prosecutable things.
Might be a sentiment I agree with, but is not one I would express openly without a certain rhetorical distancing for fear of the retaliation that would be attached.
Opinion based violence is a thing. Check your privilege levels; what opinions would people feel unsafe expressing in your vicinity?
This is a new and perverse way of thinking about "privilege" that I've never seen before. I am someone that certain people would consider "privileged" and I've never had anyone ask me that question. (Guess my background.) There's plenty of opinions that I would fear expressing based on my circumstances, things I only talk about with very close friends. And legitimate fears - being fired or evicted. To me, it seems like people who talk about "privelege", especially "white privilege", sometimes over-estimate how far that takes one (he's literally immune to self-censorship!!1!). Maybe some are, but I really doubt it.
Becoming aware of the privilege you hold gives you all sorts of insight into how the world around you really functions.
That insight does not unfortunately; have a moral valence. There are plenty of people who use their insight into the exercise of social power purely for self-interested gain. They can do enormous damage to the organizations that allow such people to accrue power if their self-interest differs from the organizations intended goals.
> People were trying to hack into his Facebook account, which was quickly disabled. The pages of his children were targeted. His wife began receiving phone calls with death threats, at all hours of the night. A petition that stated, “Chris Filardi is a disgrace and frankly does not deserve to breathe another breath,” was signed by 3,798 people.
But I bristle at the use of the term 'SJW', especially here. It's a dog-whistle of a term which has lost meaning unless you subscribe to a simplistic "us" vs "them" mentality about people on the Internet.
Resist that.
Oh Humanity, how you disappoint.
It was all a lie ... all those wonderful things were like chewing Coca leaves, holding great promise and benefits. But everything that came after: centralized social media, one dominant search engine, closed chat networks, centralized media ... it was akin to turning the coca leaves into cocaine. It felt amazing to see such growth, like fire. But ultimately, the sickness and addiction set in, and we see actors exploiting people using these tools. "We" are sick now, and need to figure out a way to regain our agency.
First off, people have always been uncivil both on-line and off-line. If you look at the adoption of the internet it started among "tech" people then it was societal elites, like professors, doctors, scientists, and lawyers, then moved down the chain to office workers, collage students and so on. It should not be a surprise that as the "common" people came on the internet that the sophistication and civility of discourse decreased. The same thing would be observed if you had in-person events with these groups of people.
I argue that this is the cause of decline in civility: https://www.statista.com/statistics/865523/us-offline-popula... not consolidation.
Yes their are problems but, if you look at where hate groups and online mobs appear to be most prevalent it is in the small distributed uncontrolled forums that don't have the manpower or compulsion from corporate overlords to police this type of thing.
Secondly it is incorrect to think the internet hasn't done more enormous good, if you look at marginalized communities and the ability for people to find, connect and mobilize it has been because of the internet. I don't think it is a coincidence that the acceptance of LGBT people corresponded with a massive increase in the ability to communicate with other people.
Just as the printing press did not make all of humanity scholars; the internet has not made humanity civil to each other.
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001, a Space Odyssey (1968)
Something of a prophetic sentence.
Thanks Internet crowd...
Seriously, however you feel about this topic it should be discussed rationally, not via deaths threats
I remember the a couple of years ago the completely disproportionate violent reactions in Spain to the order for the killing of a dog belonging to a nurse that had been infected with Ebola.
It seems not even children elicit these kinds of reactions nowadays.
In South America, teaching of biology at universities seems to me to have a heavier focus on evolutionary biology, taxonomy, biogeography and systematics, and from what I've seen in Colombia, Brazil and Peru, collecting museum specimens is uncontroversial among biologists.
At the other end of the spectrum, in the UK, those areas of evolutionary biology are undervalued, with a much stronger focus on, for example, conservation biology and "hypothesis-driven" science. That, coupled with the greater squeamishness of the pet-loving garden-bird-feeding vegetarian-heavy gun-eschewing Brits (I'm one), means that collecting museum specimens tends to meet with disapproval from British biologists, in my limited experience (did grad school in the US). But it must be said, the UK does very little primary field research of that type.
And in the USA, collecting specimens is an issue which mostly does not affect universities, since most of that sort of field work is done by the natural history museums (AMNH, FMNH, SMNH, etc) with their research wings, staff field biologists, and PhD students doing field work. From what I understand, at the Field Museum in Chicago, there was a more-or-less furious disagreement between the conservation biologists (against) and evolutionary biologists (pro).
In any case, I killed a few birds with a shotgun, but mostly via thoracic compression (take a beautiful small bird you've just caught in its natural habitat and squeeze its chest hard; it will writhe and then have a heart attack and die in a few seconds). These were all small birds. It's not a nice thing to remember. Natural organisms in their natural habitat are one of the most important things in the world to me. But the scientific arguments for preserving examples of an entire body in a research collection are extremely strong and it doesn't endanger the population, obviously you don't kill a bird if there are only tens of them in the wild. So it's up to you and the battle between your personal beliefs about the sanctity of life and the possibility of some sort of consciousness in small birds on the one hand, and the objective arguments that museum specimens help science and help understand the evolutionary lineages that we are trying to conserve, on the other.
Edit:
(1) You would typically collect one specimen per species (or perhaps one male and one female) per locality, only if there were not already existing specimens of that species from that locality. "already existing specimens" = in any museum in the world; you don't collect specimens to add to one museum's research collection. Biologists get on planes and visit museums to examine the specimens there.
(2) This all has nothing to do with the taxidermy of specimens for display to the public. The birds aren't stuffed and displayed artistically perched on branches or whatever. This is collection for the research collection part of the museum: draws and draws of birds stuffed in a standardized non-artistic way allowing the body and plumage to be examined.
What a time we live in. The social internet is weird. It's the source of stuff like this article's outrage, and if you aren't on it, you're weird and "seem to have vanished."
Edit:it is a clip from Mitch & Webb