on the one hand there are many aspects of academia that should be criticized but on the other hand i’m concerned about the rise of anti-intellectualism as a tool of fascism
Hey yo what the fuck does this say in English? Because if you can’t explain in layman’s terms you’re not doing a good job of getting your point across to everyone.
1. we are right to criticize the many problems in higher education
2. fascists manipulate people into hating anyone involved in higher education for supposedly looking down on them and being worthless to the “real world.” as a result, funding for education is cut, especially for the arts, no one listens to historians who point out that history is repeating itself or speak out against the regime, freedom of speech is lost in favor of the party line, and/or climate change kills us all since no one listens to scientists.
3. therefore, when we criticize higher education, we should be careful not to contribute to fascist tropes that claim that having knowledge is bad/smug/out of touch/useless to society.
Let me try:
1. Universities and colleges with long histories often keep using the power structures they began with: favoring the rich and ruling classes, while society changes around them (That’s how we get phrases like “The Ivory Tower”).
2. It’s good to question this, and to finally get these universities and colleges to be more open to students from less privileged classes (economic, racial, gender, orientation, disability, etc.).
3. But instead of criticizing the power structures, fascists demonize learning and thinking, and say that people who try to learn too much (or learn things “above their station”) can’t be trusted, and are “enemies of the state.”
4. When this happens, people become afraid to question the government or government-appointed “experts,” and tyrants move in and start doing whatever they want (making it even better for the rich and ruling classes, and worse for everyone else).
The original post made perfect sense and didn’t use any amount of complicated vocab (like this is literally barely a high school level of vocabulary) And y'all need to stop confusing a lack of basic reading comprehension and an inability to use Google with something being written in unreadable academic jargon.
“Cops are bad” “hey what the fuck does this say in English?”
How does your dumbass know what the phrase “layman’s terms” means but “academia ” And “anti-intellectualism” are too much?
We left off the #CrouchingTigerHiddenData writeups at a point where I promised you that it is, in fact, fairly hard to secretly move an illicit tiger cub around the United States secretly these days.
While you might have heard in a lot of the “captive big cat crisis” messaging that cubs that leave zoo settings to go into the private sector go missing and end up never being heard from again, that’s not realistic now that we’re almost 20 years into the 21st century. The prevalence of smartphones and the proliferation of the “cute exotic animal” social media frenzy means that pretty much as soon as a cute cub is photographed or filmed in any way, they’ll end up on the internet. Even if the public doesn’t hear about it immediately, the authorities absolutely keep an eye on that sort of media, and do follow up to make sure animals seen online were acquired legally. Most facilities that breed large cats and move them between facilities are part of the Captive Bred Wildlife permitting program, which means that births, deaths, and transfers are tracked in records that must be available to Fish and Wildlife upon request. Given that even PETA is willing to put in writing that there are only a few breeders in the US putting out cubs in enough volume to contribute to the overpopulation problem, it’s really not hard to figure out the origins of the few cubs that are sold illegally.
Here’s a case study: the tiger that appeared in that Logan Paul video in 2017.
Yup. This bullshit. In early December of 2018, headlines started appearing about how the October 2017 video in which Logan Paul forced his stressed out dog to meet a baby tiger had landed him in controversy… because the tiger was owned illegally… and it resulted in the tiger’s owner being arrested. After getting past the “of course that happened” reaction because ugh, Logan Paul, I decided to try to figure out where that tiger came from and where he went. Nothing published mentioned where the cat was bought from, and while news articles said it was placed with a wildlife sanctuary or large animal rescue (some specifying L.A.), there was no specific facility information released.
Cat land is small, so the next thing to do was apply some logic. The tiger in the video was young enough to have to have been sold / given away as a cub, has to be a generic (sub-species hybrid aka mutt) tiger, and had to have been sourced from out of state due to California’s ban on private big cat ownership. There are only a few places breeding lots of generic tigers in the US right now, and only certain ones would be willing to sell a cub that young to some random dude. There’s only one of them currently facing federal charges for violating federal wildlife law for selling big cats illegally across state lines, so that’s a reasonable place to start.
In addition to being on trial for repeatedly trying to take a hit out on the CEO of Big Cat Rescue, Joe Exotic (a/k/a Maldonado-Passage or Schreibvogel) has also been indicted for multiple violations of the Endangered Species Act and the Lacey Act: these include not only shooting multiple tigers at his facility, but interstate commerce without a permit and falsifying paperwork to make the sales look legal. I pulled up the the court filings to see if any of the charges matched the timeline of the video being filmed. Of the 12 specific sales documented, all had known destinations and dates that didn’t match - but other charges in the document state that that “on or about October 30, 2017, in the Western District of Oklahoma and elsewhere, [Joe] knowingly and unlawfully offered for sale in interstate commerce endangered wildlife, namely two tiger cubs (Panthera tigris).” Since the exact dates of the sale aren’t known, and the video was posted October 21st, that’s plausibly the right timeline.
A little bit of social media digging found Joe Exotic posting a bunch of screenshots of text messages and videos, indicating that the tiger was sold by his business partner / the guy who bought G.W. Exotics a few years ago, Jeff Lowe. (Unfortunately the video that was screenshotted by Joe, allegedly showing that tiger cub in the G.W. Exotics nursery, has been deleted from social media - along with a lot of content from the end of 2017.) Tigers stripes are as unique as a fingerprint, and so are incredibly useful for identifying individual animals. The cat in the Logan Paul video has very distinct “loops” on his forehead. I can’t confirm that the tiger cub in the screenshots / video Joe posted is the same as the one in the Logan Paul video, because while the loops look the same, there’s discrepancies in some of the other markings (like the loop on the top of the head). I found video on the G.W. Exotics Facebook page with another cub that is definitely not the Logan Paul cub with similar forehead loops, so it might be possible that there was a litter of tiger cubs with similar markings.
(Top: Media screenshot of the tiger. Bottom: Photos posted by Joe Exotic allegedly of the same tiger and a screenshot from the video he posted.)
Either way, we know that a search warrant was served on Jeff Lowe’s Las Vegas property in November 2017, where he had been keeping sickly cubs that he was using for pay to play interactions without property permits. Joe Exotic alleges in some of his posts that the cubs Jeff Lowe was using for those interactions came from G.W., and the cub(s) visible in the documentation Joe posted appear to be at least related to, if not actually the same, tiger in the Logan Paul video. While we can’t know who facilitated the cub changing hands, it seems highly probable that the tiger cub in the video was born at G.W. Exotics in the late summer of 2017.
So where did that cub go? Somewhere in the L.A. area and to some sort of rescue facility, according to media reports. This part wasn’t as hard to track down: in January, the Exotic Animal Training and Management program at Moorpark Community college took in a young male tiger cub. They’re recieved the call in December that a four-month-old tiger had been confiscated from a “private home” somewhere in California where he’d been kept illegally. Moorpark kept Neil’s origin under wraps because there was an ongoing criminal case, but as soon as photos of him were put online, the big cat community figured out he was the same cat as in the video due to his distinctive forehead loop markings.
(Photo Credit: America’s Teaching Zoo)
It turns out that the Logan Paul video allowed authorities to find Neil, but it wasn’t the first time they knew he was illegally in private hands: a recent news article noted that “In October 2017, wildlife trafficking wardens with the state received an anonymous tip that the tiger was seen in pictures of models that were posted to Instagram.” Once the media announced the criminal case in December, the general public figured out Neil’s origin pretty quickly; it was recently publicly confirmed by a post on the L.A. City Attorney’s Office’s Instagram.
What does this all tell us? It tells us that even before Logan Paul did idiotic things involving animals and made Neil’s existence very public, wildlife officials knew there was a cub being illegally owned in that part of California; it tells us that wildlife officials are actively tracking people who are using cubs commercially and actively enforcing the relevant regulations; it tells us that when animals are used / bought / sold illegally, it rarely stays secret in the big cat community; and it tells us that thanks to the internet and social media, it’s often feasible to trace the origin of a big cat even when very little information has officially been released.
As a bonus example: shortly after Neil’s arrival at Moorpark, the college acquired a young female cub as a social companion for him, named Karma. Neil had likely had very little interactions with other tigers in his young life before being confiscated, and it was really important that he have a companion and get to engage in species-specific behaviors.
(Photo Credit: America’s Teaching Zoo)
While very little information has been publicly released by the organization about Karma’s origins, it’s still pretty simple to figure out where she came from. On January 29th, Moorpark posted about Karma’s arrival on Facebook, saying “a female Bengal tiger arrived a few days ago from a licensed facility to enhance the life of Neil.” That tells us that Karma was transferred from another USDA-licensed facility, not rescued, and that the facility she came from breeds Bengal / generic tigers. That means they’re not an AZA-accredited facility, since generic tigers in that system are being managed to extinction (i.e., not bred and let die off as a population). This information narrows down the options for her origin pretty drastically, because we’re looking for a facility that is breeds generic tigers frequently enough to have a cub the right age to be a companion for Neil. There aren’t very many of those left in the United States - a fact PETA is so sure of they’re willing to put it in writing in court documents. An article from February of 2018 mentions off-hand that Karma “was a gift from a wildlife park in South Carolina,” a fact which Moorpark confirms in a video about the tigers from October 2018. The only facility in South Carolina that regularly breeds generic tigers: Myrtle Beach Safari. As MBS and Moorpark are both USDA-licensed facilities, they’re exempt from the Captive Wildlife Safety Act prohibitions against moving big cats across state lines - but because Moorpark is not part of the Captive Bred Wildlife permitting program (they don’t do conservation breeding), they still couldn’t legally buy a tiger across state lines due to the Endangered Species Act. That’s why they emphasize that Karma’s arrival at Moorpark was a donation - because legally, the only way the facility could acquire another tiger as a companion for Neil was to be gifted one.
When big cats move in the United States, it’s rarely ever kept a secret. It’s incredibly unlikely that thousands of tigers could exist off the radar in country given how much social capital photos of them provide online. Allegedly these backyard cats stay completely hidden until they die, but then, the common narrative goes, the bodies of all the hidden tigers probably end up being sold in the black market. Is that really true? Shouldn’t we know if such a lucrative trade was occurring in the US, especially if there’s supposedly thousands of tigers fueling it? That’s the topic for the next post.
Want to learn more about big cats in the United States? Check out the whole series, tagged as “CrouchingTigerHiddenData”.
this look is a fucking disaster. and i can say that cause gaud blocked me. if you’re going to act as a greedy god towards your following of 13 year olds AT LEAST dress for it. imagine having that haircut in daily life? couldn’t be me. they look like one of my mom’s distant friends that would start a go fund me for their trip to paris.
there’s just so much to unpack here. the kimono, mcdonalds fried hair, stealing art, asking minors for money to eat CRAYONS and then using it to buy champagne instead of paying rent… throw the whole package away
Scotch, you’re amazing as heck but, are you really one to talk here?
Mr gay twink goat porn? Mr I bought cheap alien head alcohol while saying I was short on cash? You think you and your audience of mostly young teens have the moral high ground?
Also, you have only showed up on stream with oversized T-shirts and hair that’s like the white twink version of an afro, you are not really a fashion guru.
I don’t really adore gaud either but fuck, they had some fun, they did something silly for the new year and there is nothing wrong with that.
Despite I don’t even think there was any restrictions on what they could buy with the money and they didn’t promise to buy something special with it.
We are starting 2019 with all sorts of discourse folks!
Oh, well when you put it that way, you’re right! It sure is hard to live on half a million a year!
Every apologia for the rich sounds like a call for revolution.
Now, I’m no fancy accountantmatician, but when counting the three vacations, payments on the second car, children’s lessons, and “miscellaneous” as part of their “left over” income, then this family actually has $52,100 left over every year. Throw in the additions to their food costs of their 26 date nights a year, and their left over income after all standard expenses is probably at least $55,775 the median total income of American households.
This family can pay for all basic needs, a car, multiple forms of insurance, $18,000 a year in charitable donations, and a huge retirement savings account, and still have as much money as the average American family has total.
here’s why a couple earning $500k a year in new york city ends up with nothing besides 401(k) $$
LMAOOO IM SO KIN WITH THIS BLOG CONSTANTLY TRYING TO MAKE MONEY and they’re like almost guilting their followers now
this person is the smartest scammer in the history of tumblr because they’re technically not doing anything immoral and/but it’s fundamentally embarrassing to call them out for doing it
Gaud is not a scammer, we honestly want to see them eat a whole ass crayon.
That… doesn’t make them not a scammer it just means the scam is working
