
The Ornithologist the Internet Called a Murderer - danso
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/opinion/sunday/moustached-kingfisher-internet-harassment.html
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smackay
There is definitely a "museum mentality" where is something is worth
collecting it gets collected. That does not sit well with, shall we say, an
over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely ignoring
the fate of millions or billions - as the article suggests.

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.

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trhway
>an over-sensitivity to the plight of individual animals while blithely
ignoring the fate of millions or billions

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.

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jhbadger
You are missing the point that in order to save species, often individual
animals need to be killed. Even in the modern era of DNA sequencing, museum
collections tell us much about animals and even work as a sort of time machine
for sequencing. I recently went to a seminar about a project that was studying
the microbiomes from the gut contents of 19th century preserved animals in
order to see if they were different from modern ones. This will help us know
to what degree the greater human impact in the 21st century is affecting the
health of wildlife. If people hadn't collected animals in the 19th century how
could we do this? How will people in the future do the same if we don't
collect animals now?

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trhway
take any nightmarish atrocity and torture committed by people against other
people or animals, and you'll always find a logical and reasonable rationale
for it - at least held at the time by the people committing it.

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jhbadger
Why exactly do you think people do wildlife research? Because they _care_
about animals in a deep way. If endangered species get saved it will be
through the result of their research. The true "atrocity" is the great
extinction period we are going through.

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emiliobumachar
Why are police and prosecutors not paying more attention to online lynch mobs?
I assume at least a few of the death threats were made carelessly and left a
trail. It's not like this stuff is protected speech.

A handful of well publicized jail terms would go a long way towards protecting
the next potential victim.

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ggg9990
Most of the behavior that this article is criticizing is not a crime in the
US. Yes, “I’ll come to your house and murder your family” is a crime, but “I
hope you die alone of cancer” is not, nor is “People like this should be
stabbed in the face.”

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emiliobumachar
Keyword is "most". All we'd need is a handful of well publicized arrests over
a couple of years. I assume there's plenty of “I’ll come to your house and
murder your family” or similar if one were to do a through search for it.

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drb91
How would this dissuade people where it is legal?

How do people distinguish between (subjective) humor and an actual threat
where it’s illegal? Do they outlaw all jokes about killing?

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rwmj
By common sense, and where that fails, the courts and jury system.

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drb91
Wait people are dissuaded by common sense? I’m not sure i follow.

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rwmj
I was answering your second question.

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drb91
Ahh. Well, I do not appreciate the snarky uninformative reply. Have a nice
day.

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sgnelson
Yet another use of the Internet that I never expected 20+ years ago when I
thought it would be the magic bullet to help make people more educated, more
empathetic, and just overall better humans.

Oh Humanity, how you disappoint.

~~~
CodeCube
I remember being so optimistic, exactly as you're describing ... ~20 years
ago. Search engines, the nascent days of the blog community (rss!); open
standards for chat (jabber/xmpp!), microformats for distributed social
networks (foaf!). It was all so great, so empowering, so exciting.

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.

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lotu
While I sometimes feel a lot of these things, I don't think you are diagnosing
the cause correctly. I don't see how the fact that we have a single dominate
social networks, and search engine are the cause. I can't imagine how having a
distributed social network or more competition in the search market would make
people be more civil.

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...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/865523/us-offline-population-
share/) 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.

~~~
CodeCube
This is a good take ... the comment I responded to just triggered a bit of
melancholy on my part ... thanks for bringing perspective :)

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staz
> Many research expeditions are no longer being publicized; in some cases,
> there is a total blackout on media. As a result, the public will grow even
> less informed about the importance of this research.

Thanks Internet crowd...

Seriously, however you feel about this topic it should be discussed
rationally, not via deaths threats

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cataphract
I really can't comprehend how the fate of single animals (ecologically
irrelevant) frequently cause such an uproar online — more frequently cats and
dogs, and never unattractive animals.

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.

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Myrmornis
I did field studies of birds in northern Brazil as a grad student and
collected (killed) several birds that I caught. It is a controversial subject,
with the viewpoints tending to be spread over a couple of different
dimensions.

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.

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imh
>I couldn’t find him on Facebook or Twitter. The man seemed to have vanished.

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."

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olefoo
It is a commonplace of societies collapsing into ethnic cleansing and violence
that a wave of violent rhetoric will precede the actual war crimes.

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classicsnoot
I know this is silly but i firmly believe everyone should see it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Voyqy_dvRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Voyqy_dvRQ)

Edit:it is a clip from Mitch & Webb

