The Internet plumbs new depths: anti-vaxers harass parents who lose children

March 21, 2019 • 2:00 pm

This article from CNN (click on screenshot below) shows about the worst Internet behavior I’ve seen—behavior that makes the Young Adult Fiction Police look like saints. Read and weep copiously:

What happens here is that parents who lose children from disease, and mourn for them online, are viciously attacked on social media by antivaxers. The reasons are various, but none come from those who favor vaccines. Parents are either accused of killing their children with vaccines, of spreading the “false gospel” of vaccination, or are simply attacked when, if their child died because he/she couldn’t be vaccinated, they campaign for other children to be vaccinated. Those campaigns really get the trolls exercised. Here are a few examples:

On May 6, 2016, Promoli put her toddlers Jude and his twin brother Thomas, down for an afternoon nap in their home. Jude had a low-grade fever, but he was laughing and singing when he went down for his nap.

When his mother went to check on him two hours later, he was dead. Promoli said the next few weeks were “a living hell.”

“Having to go in and plan a funeral and find the ability somehow to even take steps to walk into a funeral home, to make plans and decide whether to bury or cremate your child — it was just all so horrifying,” she said.

When an autopsy came back showing Jude had died of the flu, Promoli started her flu prevention campaign.

That’s when the online attacks began.

Some anti-vaxers told her she’d murdered Jude and made up a story about the flu to cover up her crime. Others said vaccines had killed her son. Some called her the c-word.

The worst ones — the ones that would sometimes make her cry — were the posts that said she was advocating for flu shots so that other children would die from the shots and their parents would be miserable like she was.

“The first time it made me feel really sick because I couldn’t fathom how anybody could even come up with such a terrible claim,” Promoli said. “It caught me off guard in its cruelty. What kind of a person does this?”

Want more?

Serese Marotta lost her 5-year-old son, Joseph, to the flu in 2009, and is now chief operating officer of Families Fighting Flu, a group that encourages flu awareness and prevention, including vaccination.
In 2017, she posted a video on the eighth anniversary of her son’s death to reinforce the importance of getting the flu vaccine.
“SLUT,” one person commented. “PHARMA WHORE.”
“May you rot in hell for all the damages you do!” a Facebook user wrote on another one of her posts.
She says a Facebook user in Australia sent her a death threat”She called me a lot of names I won’t repeat and used the go-to conspiracy theories about government and big pharma, and I responded, ‘I lost a child,’ and questioned where she was coming from, and she continued to attack me,” said Marotta, who lives in Syracuse, New York.
viz.:

One more:

Grieving mothers aren’t the only targets of anti-vaxer abuse.

Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Hastings School of Law, has received countless vile messages, and as with the mothers, many of the messages are gender-oriented. Over the years, she’s become pretty blasé about it.

“‘Whore’ is pretty normal,” said Reiss, a pro-vaccine advocate who has written extensively about vaccines. “I’ve also been called a [c**t].”

Sometimes Reiss, who is Jewish, receives comments that mention the Holocaust.

One Facebook user made a meme with a photo of her father with “Proud Supporter of the Vaccine Holocaust.” Reiss says her father has nothing to do with vaccines.

Another meme shows a photo of Reiss holding her infant son and it says that Reiss is “FORCE-injecting” her baby with vaccines.Below the photo is written: “Because one holocaust wasn’t enough.”

There are threats on the lives of pro-vaccination doctors like Paul Offit, messages far more hateful than anything I’ve ever gotten. I don’t even want to repeat them here, but you can see them in the article.

Facebook is trying to moderate this debate, and I heard on the news that although they’re not going to ban anti-vaxers, they will “moderate” discussion. I am conflicted about banning, as these morons are urging actions that can cause widespread and near-immediate harm; but on balance I think they should be allowed to speak, for that sparks a debate in which their claims can be refuted. (Harassment of individuals, and the use of threats, however, are not protected speech and can be prosecuted.)  Facebook did say they would give anti-vaxer comments a lower profile on their pages, which I guess is a decent solution. They will, however, try to prevent targeting of individuals like those above.

Finally, there’s some interesting material about “spies” who infiltrate anti-vaxer groups like Stop Mandatory Vaccination and find out that, despite the denials of that group’s officials, the members urge each other to harass parents whose children have died.

This is one reason why I don’t like anonymity on the Internet. Even if we don’t ban anti-vaxer discussions, at least the people involved should be required to give their real names, and thus held accountable for their statements. And their actions are disgusting: this onslaught of harassment of grieving parents is the lowest to which our species can sink. All we can do is educate ourselves about the benefits of vaccination and keep arguing.

The CNN article ends on a sad note: this made me tear up a bit:

When she sees anti-vaxers talking about parents in their closed groups, [Erin] Costello, the online pro-vaccine spy, gets in touch with those parents to warn them they may be getting nasty messages from the anti-vaxers.

When Costello reached out to the mother in the Midwest, she explained why she was contacting her.

“I know you’re likely getting many horrible messages on Facebook right now,” Costello wrote to the mother. “Children such as [yours] are the reason why I do my part to fight for overwhelming acceptance of vaccines as well as fight against the lies and misinformation that are recklessly spread around against vaccines.”

The mother wrote back.

“I appreciate the strong role you take in helping protect families like mine,” she said.

After hundreds of Facebook comments from anti-vaxers, the mother turned off comments on her page, and deleted many of the ones she received.

Some are still in her head, though. She weeps as she remembers the one that was hardest to read.

“The ones that said this was a fake story. That he wasn’t real. That my child didn’t exist,” she said. “Because when your child dies, that’s the biggest fear — that he will be forgotten.”

That’s how low these jerks will sink.

 

h/t: Diane G.

How do we deal with anti-Semitic philosophers of past centuries?

March 21, 2019 • 11:45 am

Here is a strange but timely article from the New York Times‘s philosophy column, “The Stone.” Laurie Shrage, a professor of philosophy at Florida International University, asks how we should deal with the palpable anti-Semitism of early philosophers. But in the course of her lucubrations, she conflates four distinct questions. Read the piece by clicking on the screenshot:

Here are the four questions conflated in the article which purports to deal with a simple yes or no question: “Should we continue to teach thinkers like Kant, Voltaire, and Hume without mention of the harmful prejudices they helped legitimize?

1.) Do we mention the anti-Semitism of European philosophers as part of their character when we teach their work?

2.) Do we investigate and teach how we think their anti-Semitism permeated their work—if it did?

3.) Do we teach philosophers outside the Western “canon”—people like Maimonides, Philo, or Confucius, rather than adhere to a philosophical “image of the West as racist thinkers have fashioned it?”

And there’s an unspoken question:

4.) Should we marginalize or even not teach the work of Western philosophers who were anti-Semites?

Shrage also spends a bit of time indicting the teaching of philosophy because, in the last hundred years, Jews weren’t hired to teach philosophy because they weren’t really regarded as “Western”. Well, that problem no longer exists, so I’m not sure what this potted history reveals. It certainly sheds no light on the questions above.

My answers are as follows:

1.) We should mention the anti-Semitism of ancient philosophers only insofar as it affected or informed their philosophy. After all, almost everyone in Europe before the 19th century, including (or maybe especially) educated folk, were not only anti-Semitic, but racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. Our change in morality should certainly be studied in history or sociology classes, but something sticks in my craw when people demand that long-dead people who lived in bigoted milieu be constantly indicted for bigotry. I don’t mention Darwin’s own bigotry in my evolution class (he was an abolitionist but also denigrated black people), but I would if I were teaching the parts of his work in which he speculated about racial hierarchies.

2.) As for Kant, Hume, and Voltaire, I’m not sure how much of the philosophy taught as “theirs” is affected by bigotry. That would be up to individual teachers. It’s clear from what Shrage said that these people did publish anti-Semitic stuff, but it’s not clear to me that this is the stuff taught in philosophy classes.

3.) Of course we should teach non-Western philosophers; I’m sure there is a lot of good thought there that deserves airing. Because most academic philosophers are taught the Western canon, and teach it themselves, this may require “non-Western philosophy” courses, but I’m all in favor of that.

As for religious philosophers, I’m a bit more dubious. How much real philosophy is there in religious philosophy, given that lots of it involves assuming gods for which there is no evidence? Do we really want to ask why God would permit the existence of evil if we don’t think there’s a god? This is why, when founding the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson stipulated that it would have no theology department or divinity school.

On the other hand, it may be useful to acquaint people with some of the arguments used by religious philosophers, like the First Cause argument, simply because we live in a religious society and those arguments are not only part of history, but are ongoing now. But if we teach those, and the ancient Greeks, we have to be aware that philosophers like Plato, Aquinas, and St. Augustine justified slavery.

4.) No. If we sidelined every academic throughout history who was bigoted, we wouldn’t be teaching anything.

Curiously, Shrage doesn’t “unpack” (to use the argot) these questions, and winds up assuming that their work does reflect their bigotry, with the implicit view that we need to teach that. Here’s her last paragraph, which conflates three questions at once:

With the resurgence of old hatreds in the 21st century, philosophers are challenged to think about the ways we trace the history of our discipline and teach our major figures, and whether our professional habits and pieties have been shaped by religious intolerance and other forms of bigotry. For example, why not emphasize how philosophy emerged from schools of thought around the world? In the fields of history and literature, introductory courses that focus on European studies are being replaced by courses in world history and comparative literature.

There has not been a similar widespread movement to rethink the standard introduction to philosophy in terms of world philosophy. There are philosophers who contend that such projects inappropriately politicize our truth-seeking endeavors, but, as some philosophers of science have shown, objective truth involves the convergence of multiple observations and perspectives. Moreover, the anti-Semitic theories of Hume, Voltaire and Kant show that philosophy has rarely, if ever, been insulated from politics.

But the question is whether the philosophy has been affected by bigotry. 

Maybe students would be better served by teaching them philosophy then by minutely scrutinizing every philosopher in history (and artists and writers and scientists) for ideological impurities.

 

The New York Times has an ongoing soft spot for astrology, but not everyone there has drunk the Kool-Aid

March 21, 2019 • 10:00 am

by Greg Mayer

After Jerry posted about the recent New York Times piece touting astrology and its harmlessness, I came across some good news, and some bad news. First, the good news: some of the Times‘ writers continue to be able to exercise their critical faculties. In a piece, “#MAGA Church“,  about a loony, apocalyptic church in New Jersey, Sam Kestenbaum writes the following about its pastor, Jonathan Cahn:

He devoured the writings of Nostradamus, the Virginia psychic Edgar Cayce and far-out conspiracy theories about ancient astronauts. Mr. Cahn soon stumbled on “The Late Great Planet Earth,” the 1970s best-seller that argued doomsday prophecies of the Bible were playing out with events like the Cold War and Israel’s Six-Day War. Mr. Cahn bought the book thinking it was about UFOs; instead he was given a crash-course in Christian eschatology.

It’s a longish piece, and you should take a look at the whole thing. It’s a great example of how fascination with woo, and the inability to reason about it, can lead further and further down the epistemological rabbit hole. If the only harm that comes of this is one person’s derangement, it’s harm enough, but this church is leading a whole flock of people– and their money– into a warren of woo, not to mention what those people might do.

The bad news is that the piece critiqued by Jerry is not a one off. I did a search at the Times’ website for “astrology”, and the results were intriguing, verging on appalling. The first 9 results were all supportive of astrology; and all had appeared since since July 2017. Many treated astrology as a “he said, she said” affair, which is bad enough, but often the astrology critic was a token. If a respected news outlet treated climate change, evolution, or gravity this way, we’d all be rightly outraged. (This search did not catch the latest astrology article on which Jerry posted; I’m not sure why.) The 10th astrology result was from 2011, an article about a race horse named Astrology.

The astrology articles are in a number of sections: “New York”, “Asia Pacific”, “Style” (2), “Arts” (2), “Sunday Review”, and (!!!!) “The Learning Network” (2). They are all by different authors, except for two by Amanda Hess. One of Hess’s pieces is not so bad, but in the other she suggests “online mysticism is filling a legitimate need”, and favorably compares the amount of “woo-woo crazy” in Goop vagina jade eggs to flat Earthism! She’s a little concerned that people are making money off of all this, but concludes that “retreating into the mystical internet feels like a quite rational move”. The diversity of authors and sections suggest there is not a particular editor who has a thing for astrology; rather, impairment of the critical faculties has seeped through many parts of the paper. The author of another Times article, not picked up in the “top 10” of the search, suggests that some people believe that criticism of astrology is misogynistic. (I hasten to add that there is no indication that the author of this piece concurs– she is reporting, not advocating.) But the Times is not merely avoiding criticism of astrology (perhaps to ward off the woke); it keeps bringing it up when there’s no evident impetus to do so.

I also noted that all 5 “NYT Picks” of readers’ comments on the piece critiqued by Jerry are pro-astrology. Here’s a sample of what the Times‘ editors found worth reading:

As to Mercury, when it is out of phase, being a Gemini whose ruling planet happens to be Mercury, it helps for whatever it’s worth to be aware when it comes and goes.

Yeah. Whatever it’s worth. My critical comment, to the effect, “Why did you publish this?” did not make it past the Times‘ moderators. I’m not sure why, as many commenters (including some WEIT readers, alerted no doubt by Jerry’s post!) said much the same thing.

The Times is clearly not all bad, and remains an essential news source, but I’ve been wondering lately if I should at least try out a subscription to the Washington Post to see how it’s doing.

(Links to the top ten search results, in order of their listing, are below the fold.)

Continue reading “The New York Times has an ongoing soft spot for astrology, but not everyone there has drunk the Kool-Aid” →

New Zealand bans semiautomatic and “military style” weapons

March 21, 2019 • 8:45 am

On March 13, 1996, the Dunblane Massacre took place in Scotland. A man named Thomas Hamilton assaulted a school with four legally-owned handguns, killing 16 children and a teacher (and wounding another 16) before committing suicide. Reaction was swift, and within two years the government had passed two acts banning all handguns in England, Scotland and Wales; the exceptions are “historic and muzzle-loading guns” and a few other types of large “sporting” handguns that are large.

Following the two mosque shootings on March 15, New Zealand has acted even faster. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whom I much admire, just announced that New Zealand is banning not only the sale of semiautomatic weapons, but ownership of them, which will end via a government buyback scheme. (The weapons used in the mosque shootings had, as I recall, been bought legally but modified illegally.)

Tvnz reports (click on screenshot):

Ms Ardern had previously stated that New Zealand would see gun law reforms “within 10 days” of the Christchurch mosque shootings which left 50 people dead. She took six days to act.

“The attacker took a significant number of lives using primarily two guns, assault rifles purchased legally on an A class licence.

“The time for the easy availability of these weapons must end, and today it will.

“In short, every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country,” Ms Ardern said in a press conference this afternoon.

High-capacity magazines and attachments will also be banned along with the “military style weapons.”

Low calibre .22 semi-automatic firearms used mainly for pest control and duck hunting will be exempt.

The Prime Minister also announced a “buyback scheme” will be made available to those who possess any of the now banned weapons.

Wait a tick! Why do you need semiautomatic weapons for pest control and duck hunting? That’s unfair to the ducks!

At any rate, the announcement of the ban and buyback has already appeared on the New Zealand Police website, and you can see the “Hand in Firearms form” here.

It’s telling that the Federated Farmers, Fish and Game New Zealand, and the National Party (an opposition party; Ardern is from Labour) have joined in supporting the Prime Minister in the ban. It’s going to happen, and happen soon.

You know my opinion and my question: the U.S. should do the same, and do we have any good reasons why not? The Supreme Court has interpreted our Second Amendment, designed to enable militias to defend themselves against tyranny, as giving private citizens a right to own guns. An “originalist” like Scalia should recognize that, and everyone should recognize that this interpretation of the Amendment is an unconscionable stretch, designed to satisfy the NRA and gun-happy Americans. At the very least, handgun ownership should be banned in America, and so should semiautomatic weapons.

I can see no justification for America’s love of gun ownership save the oft-repeated claim that if guns were banned, only the “bad guys” would have guns. But we know that self-protection using handguns costs fewer lives than the accidental deaths caused by owning those guns. As the L.A. Times reported, in 2012 the number of defensive “justifiable homicides” using all firearms was 259, less than half of the “fatal unintentional shootings,” which numbered 548. And on top of this, that year saw 8,342 criminal homicides using guns and 20,666 suicides using guns (about half of all suicides). The Times report concludes this way:

So what conclusions can we draw from this? The notion that a good guy with a gun will stop a bad guy with a gun is a romanticized vision of the nature of violent crime. And that the sea of guns in which we live causes exponentially more danger and harm than good. It’s long past time to start emphasizing the “well-regulated” phrase in the 2nd Amendment.

But it’s unthinkable that what just happened in New Zealand could happen in the U.S. For one thing, it goes against the courts’ construal of the Second Amendment, and on top of that it’s unimaginable that the Republican Party would support such action.

The prevalence of guns in America is not constitutionally permissible under any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution, and doesn’t make our citizens safer. Perhaps we can have rifles for hunting, but they should be kept under strict control, as they do in the UK. In the end, New Zealand’s immediate and rational response to gun violence stands in stark contrast to the refusal of our government, in the face of repeated mass shootings, to do anything but wring its hands, offering “thoughts and prayers.”

h/t: Infiniteimprobability

End of the pledge drive: a final plea for a donation to Feline Friends London

March 21, 2019 • 7:30 am

Here’s one more cat rescue story designed to prompt those of you who haven’t yet donated to the Official Website Charity® (Feline Friends London) to ante up a bit of cash. So far we have about £2500 pounds donated, but if every subscriber donated just one pound we’d have nearly £60,000! I really would be happy if those of you who read this site regularly could kick in a pound or ten (donation information below).

I will continue importuning you from time to time by enclosing endearing cat rescue stories and photos of cute kitties.

As I’ve explained before, FFL is a no-kill cat rescue organization that saves the street cats of London. It operates on an all-volunteer basis and the budget is tight. All donated money goes to rescue cats, much of it for vet bills to help injured or sick strays, or to spay, neuter, and de-worm them.

And here’s the story of one rescue of two black kittens, who happen to have been adopted by readers Laurie and Gethyn. Laurie wrote this a few days ago and sent two pictures (one cat is named after me!):

One month ago, two rescue kitten/cats moved into our lives.

They experienced immeasurable upheaval in their compendious little lives: born in a market in East London and extricated from these frightening confines before being dispatched forthwith to a fosterer, then swiftly replaced to the rescuer to be conveyed to the Vet to be neutered, vaccinated and microchipped before being conducted finally to the fosterer to await adoption.

We named them Alcestis Jerry (yup, Jerry!) and Octavia Sadie and upon arrival [JAC: Laurie is a classics scholar], they persisted inside their carriers.  On the first day, they ate and drank nothing, remained in their safe room and for the first week; we disquieted ceaselessly.

Alcestis Jerry

However in four short weeks, they have taken behemothic strides: they haltingly emerged from the safe room and we began to distinguish indications that they were curious about us.

Today is day 22.  They prospect the entirety of the flat (including rooms colonised by us), confidently insert themselves upon surfaces of varying altitudes, advance up onto our bed (albeit briefly) whilst we repose in it, boisterously and uproariously play with us and each other (in fact, they keep me awake most nights and love their laser pointer), nom healthily, take treats from our hands and revel in rubs; purring emphatically.

Octavia Sadie

They are enduringly restive and occasionally scamper away from us if we move too swiftly. They have not yet been in our laps and we have not held them.

We are delighted that we are able to give them their FURever home, and we will endlessly love them.  The little jerks.

We have not had rescues previously; so, special mention to Uncle Jerry for your guidance.

Click on the screenshot below to donate using your credit card. And I assure you: every penny will be well used and will help distressed cats. Remember too that I’m giving two autographed books out to two lucky donors selected at random (each book will have a cat of the reader’s choice drawn in it).

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 21, 2019 • 6:30 am

It’s Thursday, March 21, 2019,  and the first official day of Spring!

Two ducks arrived at the pond yesterday, though they don’t include Honey. It’s National French Bread Day, though you are guilty of cultural appropriation if you eat it, and all of the days below:

I guess people like to put these things on the first day of Spring.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on screenshot) is interactive, and a first. As Pitchfork notes:

In honor of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, Google is launching its first ever AI-powered Google Doodle. Users will be able to input their own melody, which the Doodle’s machine learning model will craft a harmony to in the Baroque style of Bach. The interactive Doodle was made in partnership with Google Magenta and Google PAIR and will offer facts aimed to help users learn the basic fundamentals of how machine learning works. It’ll be available from March 21 (Bach’s birthday) to 22.

Try it!

In the Old Style calendar, Bach was born on March 21, but in the Gregorian calendar it was March 31.  To get started, click on the screenshot below, which takes you to the Doodle:

On this day in 1556, according to Wikipedia, “On the day of his execution in Oxford, former Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer deviates from the scripted sermon by renouncing the recantations he has made and adds, “And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine.” This is the day that the Bahá’í calendar began in 1844, and is celebrated as the New Year by members of that faith. On this day in 1871, journalist Henry Stanley began his long search to find the explorer David Livingstone. He did—on November 10 of that year, though Stanley’s words, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” may have been an invention.

On this day in 1925, Tennessee’s Butler Act went into force, prohibiting the teaching of human evolution (note: not evolution, but human evolution). It was this act that Scopes violated when convicted in the 1925 “Monkey Trial.” On March 21, 1935, Reza Shah Pahlvavi, the Shah of Iran, requested that the international community start calling Persia by its native name of “Iran.”

On March 21, 1963, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary in San Francisco bay closed for good. You can still visit it, though, on tours by the National Park Service. I highly recommend a visit.  On this day in 1965, Martin Luther King led 3200 people on the third (and successful) civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  Here’s a short video history of the three marches:

Here’s another one I just learned of: on this day in 1983, according to Wikipedia, “The first cases of the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic begin; Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of poison gas, but the cause is later determined mostly to be psychosomatic. That is a weird one!  Finally, it was on this day 13 years ago that Twitter was founded. Many are addicted to it or swear by it; I use it but am appalled at the hatred and rancor it engenders.

Notables born on this day include Joseph Fourier (1768), Modest Mussorgsky (1839), Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (1867), Julio Gallo (1910), Éric Rohmer (1920), Walter Gilbert (1932, Nobel Laureate), Rosie O’Donnell (1962), and Cenk Uygur (1970).

Notables who croaked on this day were few, and include Pocahontas (1617, the real one), and Bobby Short (2005).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cadging for noms in the guise of social justice:

Hili: We have to repair the world.
A: OK, where do we start?
Hili: With my bowls.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy naprawić świat.
Ja: O.K., od czego zaczniemy?
Hili: Od moich miseczek.

A cartoon from my undergrad adviser Bruce Grant:

A meme from reader Keira:

From reader Barry. This is either a brave woman, a stupid woman, or the gator is tame, but one thing is for sure—she’s an animal lover.

https://twitter.com/AwardsDarwin/status/1108163353044811777

From reader Nilou. I think the sparrowhawk won this round, but she’d better get out of the road pronto.

From reader Jiten. This looks deeply suspicious: the groping and thigh-rubbing by the TSA agent is far more extensive than seems warranted. Perhaps he likes to grope; even in my gropiest experiences I haven’t gone through what this kid did.

Tweets from Matthew. I can’t believe that a). a bird can make a noise like that and b). the cat doesn’t seem to care!

Look at that mess of puffins! (Does anybody know what a group of puffins is called?)

Remember the strutting woodcock from yesterday? Look how cryptic they are:

The tweet below exemplifies Pinker’s thesis that morality has gotten better:

Tweets from Grania, including this romantic dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Lumpy:

A gruesome but unique relic:

I love this. Yes, ducklings can’t fly like that, but who cares: I’m a sucker for ducks. The thread’s comments are nice, too:

Male turkey acts as crossing guard for his flock

March 20, 2019 • 2:30 pm

Here’s a video of wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) that appeared on the Cheezburger site, and it’s amazing:

In Litchfield, New Hampshire, a turkey fully stopped traffic and stood guard until all the other turkeys crossed safely! The turkey guard did not cross until the last turkey was passing. Thanks to resident Donald Pomerleau for capturing the incredible footage!

Now my first thought was that this looked like a male herding a bunch of females. I then wondered whether wild turkeys form harems, and it turns out they do. The Cornell website, an authoritative source, says “flocks of young males or a dominant male with his harem of females may number several dozen or more.”

I counted 11 crossers, as well as the big male, in this group. And the others sure look like females.

Note how the big tail acts as a flag to help stop traffic.

h/t: Su