tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-30718022623372029372024-03-05T17:00:38.961-08:00Vegetarian Polemic of the MonthA vegetarian's beef.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-48831855928430785852020-05-26T02:17:00.000-07:002020-05-26T02:46:03.596-07:00I am human, but I'm not a humanist<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">and I’m not the kind of Marxist that reads Marx, but I did attempt the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 because I was interested in the idea of “species being”- the “conscious life” and “conscious activity” which Marx ascribes only to humans, who make their own lives ‘the object of [their] will.’ </span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-3ae619e2-7fff-f12a-381e-c8f2b4418599"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marx defines humans against other animals: only humans fulfil themselves (“produce”) best when their basic physical needs have already been met, while other animals have their whole purpose, according to him, in meeting those needs. But capitalism destroys our species-being (this “advantage over animals”). We're reduced to working for survival, while the value created by our labour goes into capital, and we are alienated from each other: “each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br />(And doesn’t it feel obscene, the masque of workplace interactions: me simpering ‘hello’ at my boss, who could sack me, or the man I saw standing at a self-service checkout, sneering “Yes please?’ into the void to activate some functionary to work the machine for him, as if that function was all they were?) </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">Philosophical definitions of the human tend to identify human attributes by declaring their absence in other animals (who are inattentively lumped into a totalised Other long after the publication of The Origin of The Species in 1859). For Adam Smith, only humans barter, for Lacan, only humans lie, for Levinas and Heidegger, only humans really die - Derrida discusses this in The Animal That Therefore I Am. But, as primatologist Franz De Waal writes, the traits that distinguish us belong to a pattern of specialised traits marking out different species, all developments from a common evolutionary history, solutions to the same problem of maintaining life. We can understand ourselves better in relation to other life-forms than in opposition. Like apes, humans negotiate the world very much through our hands - we have a</span><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dt0jDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT118&lpg=PT118&dq=de+waal+handy+intelligence&source=bl&ots=tTvfInOPYn&sig=ACfU3U3hO8YMmLjAiKCSG5NsqiHwm7Vy2w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7q-_Lvs7pAhXwRRUIHQQkDNoQ6AEwA3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=de%20waal%20handy%20intelligence&f=false" style="font-family: Tinos; font-size: medium; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: normal;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “handy” intelligence</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">. Like horses, we</span><a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/7/12/87/htm" style="font-family: Tinos; font-size: medium; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: normal;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> prefer places with views</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Humans thrive, like other animals thrive, by being free to enjoy our particular nature, and what De Waals calls our “magic wells” of ability - for humans, things like language, communication, arts and sciences - the things that I think are meant by what Marx calls our “spiritual inorganic nature.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marx writes that humans are part of nature, and nature part of the human mind, “the material, the object and the instrument of [our] life activity”. At the same time, the polarisation of humans and other animals is fundamental to his definition of species-being. His figurative language also uses the human:animal binary to show how humans are denatured: the worker under capitalism is made “bestial”, “an animal reduced to the minimum bodily needs”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The way the idea of ‘the animal’ is used to represent degradation reflects human actions towards animals, rather than some mindless and wretched quality actually belonging to every other creature in existence. Because of what we do to them, animals represent bodily life that is brutalised and exploited, while the disembodied mind represents mastery - the force which is able to exploit.</span><a href="http://vegetarianpolemic.blogspot.com/2018/11/blue-collar-beasts-review-of-history-of.html" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> This dynamic</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> has been fundamental to how people are treated under capitalism, whereby the rational force (the coloniser, the capitalist) subjugates the gross, lucrative body (women, workers and colonised people).</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclSYtiyMwVjvE8PlGETBik9ONE90zl4CeL0SfCNezJQtRISHLf-XY6L5Dr0ZWX_z7sTl2cqILaVvwgDK7L1taqU0ttg6eOoxO3GPXzWaeCSpp6pBNO7B0Pjqvn_fCsEI-HUD706qSTGeV/s1600/dolphin_human_forelimb_300w.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="327" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiclSYtiyMwVjvE8PlGETBik9ONE90zl4CeL0SfCNezJQtRISHLf-XY6L5Dr0ZWX_z7sTl2cqILaVvwgDK7L1taqU0ttg6eOoxO3GPXzWaeCSpp6pBNO7B0Pjqvn_fCsEI-HUD706qSTGeV/s320/dolphin_human_forelimb_300w.jpg" width="293" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Marx writes that communism is “the restoration of man to himself”, giving us “time for intellectual exercise and recreation” and ending the corruption of human relationships by the hierarchies of the workplace. I think left wing politics should always focus on this connectedness: social connection and solidarity; self-determination and purpose in our actions; connection with the rest of nature. Marx equates communism to humanism, but to focus on the supremacy of the human, almost making a religion of our species, seems to me to be at odds with the reality of what we are (a product of evolution whose traits are</span><a href="https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_09" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> homologous and analogous</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> with those of other creatures), and how we live (in ecosystems, baby! Getting bat disease!).</span></div>
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<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_Felix_Krull" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Life has not always existed and will not always exist”</span></a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">; “the shapely feminine arm… is simply the hooked wing of the primordial bird and the pectoral fin of the fish”. What a delight, what a fucking boon, to be part of the world! If we value ourselves, we have to value all of it. Politics should be about living our best life (as I believe Marx put it), which we can only do as animals, and in nature.</span></div>
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-29907312919552320082018-11-03T04:30:00.002-07:002018-11-03T04:41:37.289-07:00Blue Collar Beasts: review of 'A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things'I read books, unlike you, you fool, and have just finished <i>A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things</i> by Raj Patel and Jason Moore. In brief, it describes capitalism as an ecological model which draws on natural resources, including human work, and also shapes them. Different chapters describe the appropriation and control of territory, energy, labour, care, food, money and human lives, processes of cheapening which serve each other. For example, production of cheap energy allows the cultivation of cheap food which fuels cheap work &c.<br />
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Patel & Moore take a holistic view of the ecological and humanitarian devastation that fuels capitalism, and refuse to see its activities as outside nature. In support of this perspective the concept “work” is applied to nature - the Earth and animals in their capacity as providers - as well as to things humans do.<br />
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Inexorably obsessed with animals, animals on my mind, on my jumper, photos of dogs surrounding me, howling and panting softly under my breath, I was interested in the authors’ conception of animal “work”. The term’s used broadly to describe what capitalism’s instruments do to enable profit. I thought this was useful in detaching will from work - so much of the labour extracted by capitalists has been forced and without volition, or else the volition is a mask forged by necessity, which is why my cover letters always insist that I’m “passionate” about tedious occupations that fundamentally make me puke.<br />
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However I think the multiple meanings of the word meant several ideas were at risk of becoming clotted over the course of the book. At one point it gets etymological, the Latin root of <i>travail</i> being <i>trepaliare</i>, to torture (though conversely the root of the English <i>work</i> is <i>werk</i>, as in “to werk it in a sexy manner”). The authors discuss the werk of survival, which is not always fun; work done under conditions of exploitation; work being historically “integral to life” but also, under capitalism, an “organising principle” and means of control. Necessary or not, most of the work described is negative, but the authors gesture in one chapter to the potential of work to be uncoupled from drudgery. Creativity, the building of communities and cultures, is also work.<br />
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When this came up I felt there were more careful distinctions to be made between human work and the work of nature, particularly that of animals. It’s made clear in the book that the opposition of humans:nature or humans:animals is artificial, and also that this opposition is a “real abstraction” made actual by the assumptions we make and the way we live. It bears stating that animal work, above all that of livestock, has distinguishing factors. Humans are immiserated and destroyed in various ways, but they’re not farmed. For animals there’s no redemption of any work that serves human purposes, it can’t liberate them because it’s not for them. It’s not work that can be organised against by its subjects either. And while subjugated humans are made into “things” (“things” which have often been conceptualised as animals), livestock is literally made into inanimate matter, into food. The word “work” sometimes means things for people that it doesn’t mean for any other life form - after all, it’s a human word.<br />
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This isn’t to undermine the book’s argument, and definitely not to downplay atrocities visited on people, but the distinction is needed, because without recognising the difference between the way humans and animals are used, there’s a risk that referring to “animal work” is to make rhetorical use of their presence as an exploited resource, but then to turn aside at the “work’s” apotheosis. At that point the human:animal divide is a very real abstraction, easy to see in slaughterhouses, and in cellophane-wrapped or jarred or tinned components of creatures in the supermarket aisle.<br />
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The book once refers to “acts of chauvinism against human and animal life”, and gestures several times to the grotesqueness of the meat industry, especially the quantity of animals reared and destroyed. But it doesn’t pursue this idea of animals as real lives, and as victims - for the sake of its argument, they are still “things”. In that way, the authors perpetuate the human: nature distinction without questioning it. Granted it’s not an animal rights book, but it didn’t need to be - to acknowledge the differences between human work and nature’s work would only take a few words, and words are cheap.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-30225379321032459172018-08-17T02:10:00.001-07:002018-08-17T02:10:44.683-07:00Taking the Michael<div>
<i>What follows is a portrait of Michael Gove - the methods, the man, the<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMpBN_MmX7o" target="_blank"> mango</a> - through three news stories in 2018. </i></div>
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1. Infamous Grouse</div>
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It's grouse shooting season, and though most of us will not have bagged any grice, a lucrative industry exists around the hobby, which sees an<a href="https://www.league.org.uk/grouse-shooting" target="_blank"> estimated 700, 000</a> of the birds shot each year. The practice has a range of environmental consequences, from the collateral shooting of other wildlife to habitat damage, decline in species such as mountain hares and hen harriers, and massive <a href="https://www.animalaid.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/callingtheshots.pdf" target="_blank">carbon dioxide emission</a> from burning heather.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">A campaign group's<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/12/michael-gove-accused-of-letting-wealthy-grouse-moor-owners-off-the-hook" target="_blank"> FOI request</a> revealed that Gove met with owners of grouse moors<b> </b>and encouraged them to make a voluntary (non-binding) "commitment" (yes I'm doing plenty with my punctuation, enjoy) to end heather-burning, so the government could fend off a <a href="https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7709" target="_blank">compulsory ban</a> on the back of an EC investigation into its potential infraction of european environment law. Two of those attending the meeting were Tory donors. </span></div>
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This chat between friends was the scene of a particularly blantant statement of intent from a government which, with reverse performativity, will "demonstrate its intent" to act, to ensure that action will never take place.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><i>This early stage in the portrait reveals a politician of impervious dishonesty, barely bothering to cover his tracks, but I can't think of a time when members of this government have faced consequences for telling lies.</i></span></div>
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2. He sold us a pup*</div>
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In February this<span style="background-color: white;"> year, Gove's "cavalier" Animal Welfare Bill was<a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvfru/709/70902.htm" target="_blank"> found wanting</a> by</span><span style="background-color: white;"> a Commons committee.</span> The first clause of the Bill aimed to enshrine animal sentience in British law, stating that ministers should have "regard" to the welfare needs of animals when making and implementing law. <span style="font-family: inherit;">It failed, how<span style="font-family: inherit;">ever, to define key terms including:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;">a)The definition of “sentience”; </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">b)The definition of “animal”; </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">c)The definition of “welfare needs of animals”; </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">d)The definition of the phrase, “Ministers of the Crown should have regard to”; </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">e)The scope of the legislation, i.e. whether it should apply to all policy areas;"</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">meaning that if passed it could have led to a chaos of unproductive legal challenges of literally anything on animal welfare grounds, all without offering meaningful protection to animals.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The committee noted that while Gove had at one point made headlines by talking big about how leaving the EU would allow us to reform the breeding and trade of puppies, the proposed bill didn't include any measures pertaining to these "</span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">professed</span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> objectives." Its limited scope and lack of accountability mechanisms were criticised, and it was added that the "symbolic" intention of the Bill "to reinforce that the government recognises sentience in(some) animals was probably unnecessary," as precedent for this already exists in British law. </span></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Now I see a former Minister for Education lacking in the most basic academic or ministerial competence, and a windbag bloated with empty promises and specious </span></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">justifications. But I also wonder to what extent Gove's ineptitude is a deliberate form of planned</span> <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">obsolescence in his own laws, and how much comes down to laziness and indifference. </span></span></i></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">3. Promises, promises </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">As the boss at DEFRA, Gove has a significant role to play in warding off the apocalypse, which bodes well. At the start of this year the Government put out a <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/693158/25-year-environment-plan.pdf" target="_blank">25 year environment plan</a>, setting out policies on sustainable farming, landscape preservation, increased efficiency, reduced waste, marine and global environmental protection, amidst a rhetoric of nationalist schmaltz. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Last month, the </span></span><a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvaud/803/80302.htm" style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">Environmental Audit Committee </a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">met to discuss the plan and an upcoming bill to be based on it. It was found that the plan "lacks details of how [its] objectives will be achieved," and that its proposals don't support the government's "stated ambitions" for the </span></span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">environment</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">. The preservation of EU legislation after Brexit hasn't been safeguarded and work towards effective legislation has been pencilled in,</span></span> </span><span class="Conclusion" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">"expressed in terms of further</span><span class="Conclusion" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"> consultations and long-term aspirational targets without supporting delivery plans." </span><span class="Conclusion" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">A</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">s with the Animal Welfare Bill, its language was called out for being imprecise. </span><br />
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In January Gove promised to reform the current system of agricultural subsidies for landowners (including grouse moor owners), payments which are primarily based on the amount of land owned rather than the use made of it. This is an area where leaving the EU is an opportunity for massive improvement. <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/michael-gove-decides-farm-subsidy-cap-is-disposable-d7fxj7tqs" target="_blank">By June he was rowing back</a>, suggesting that he would reduce subsidies for all farmers rather than put caps on payments to large landowners. If Gove was in any way committed to reform - to redirecting subsidies towards environmental good practice, to protecting and restoring wildlife - it's not clear why he's cronying up with large landowners who gain most from dysfunctional subsidies, and scheming to protect heather-burning.</div>
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<i>Perhaps it's not the hottest take to suggest that Gove is systematically disingenuous, or that his stupidities merge seamlessly with his cunning. These three stories from this year show a consistent strategy of using vague language in the service of anti-feasance. Gove isn't the first to use words about the environment and animal welfare to make himself more palatable. This practice is yet another way of treating animals and the natural world as an exploitable resource, not just for profit but for soothing ideas and vacuous, consoling lies. </i><br />
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<i>*</i><span style="text-align: center;">According to Wikipedia, the phrase 'to be sold a pup' comes from "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: center;">an old </span><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/swindle" style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0b0080; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none;" title="swindle">swindle</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: center;">, where one would be sold a bag purportedly containing a </span><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/piglet" style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0b0080; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none;" title="piglet">piglet</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: center;">, but which actually contained a </span><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/puppy" style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0b0080; text-align: center; text-decoration-line: none;" title="puppy">puppy</a><span style="background-color: white; text-align: center;"><span style="color: #222222;">."</span></span></div>
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-46265247585061714942017-04-12T04:55:00.000-07:002017-04-12T05:24:47.235-07:00Never Mind<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/number-of-vegans-in-uk-half-million_uk_573c2557e4b0328a838b92a3" target="_blank">People’s diets are changing</a>. Not enough, but a fair bit: people are increasingly cutting down on meat (or decreasingly cutting up meat) and that’s grrrrrrrrreat. But I’ve still got a bone to pick. (Hah!)</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-cb8289fc-61bc-1176-a7fb-4042d2f66ded" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Something that’s happened in my life more times than I can count is that someone explains to me that they’re eating less meat, not because they care about animals, but because of the environment. (I say ‘more times than I can count’, but now I come to think of it, I remember every fucker who’s ever said this to me, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the look on their face </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">when they said it.) And I always want to respond, Why? Why don’t you care about animals? Is it because you’re a knob? (I’m a great laugh to go to the pub with, and have loads of friends too.) </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is a conviction deep-rooted in our culture that humans and animals are fundamentally different, and that whatever the genetic and behavioural similarity between us, we can’t ascribe to them feelings that we would recognise in ourselves. This is considered the intelligent and objective viewpoint, despite the fact that it has all the logical credibility of maintaining that, when your eyes are shut, you can make everything stop existing.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwfj88OiLgIk6EsLBVcGEtvdhv2EatI1J4Xb6wqgYaIMI8BvHeF2Hoi45JOC8fCXmGW-UjGKu9n3PookGM4yymUByZuTX3K4_CxMJgKqx4YnJYcOw1sOrpwE3XOMsVjPSmDPTeY6SxJpP2/s1600/doctordolittle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwfj88OiLgIk6EsLBVcGEtvdhv2EatI1J4Xb6wqgYaIMI8BvHeF2Hoi45JOC8fCXmGW-UjGKu9n3PookGM4yymUByZuTX3K4_CxMJgKqx4YnJYcOw1sOrpwE3XOMsVjPSmDPTeY6SxJpP2/s320/doctordolittle.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"where's your hat mate?"</td></tr>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read an excellent review by Francis Gooding of <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n04/francis-gooding/thinking-about-how-they-think" target="_blank">this book </a>by Frans de Waal, which points out the similarity of emotional behaviours between humans and other animals. A favourite extract (from Gooding, quoting de Waal):</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: red;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #666666;">"Apes often greet each other by 'placing their lips gently on each other's mouth or shoulder and hence kiss in a way and under circumstances that greatly resembles human kissing'".</span><span style="color: #38761d;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">For de Waal, </span></span><i><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: "arial";"><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">'Dubbing an ape's kiss 'mouth to mouth contact' so as to avoid anthropomorphism </span><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">deliberately</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> obfuscates the meaning of the behaviour'.</span></span></span></i></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To acknowledge this </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">gesture of affection</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> for what it is - something we have all experienced (except for you, Billy No-Mates) - risks being held as a dewy-eyed projection of sentiment. A stupid fallacy: believing that</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: blue; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">experiences are defined by the fact that they occur in us, so</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a priori</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">refusing to accept that they can be real in other species. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Gooding’s words, our understanding of ethology has been skewed by studies which "set out to prove the scientists’ preconceptions instead of basing [their] conclusions on close observation". This striving towards ignorance has a clear agenda: to justify our treatment of animals, as if their consciousness is of no value. To excuse the most miserable cruelty because their pain isn’t the same as our pain, just like their love isn’t the same as our love. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s why it’s ok to rip a calf from its mother and slaughter it, or keep it for a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/dairy-scary-public-farming-calves-pens-alternatives" target="_blank">short life in a metal box</a></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s why it’s ok to eat whatever you want, because it tastes good to you. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4098837/" target="_blank">This paper that I read</a> (heroic of me to read something so boring - I did it for you) is a nifty example of that kind of bad science. It makes the point that core ‘emotion states’ are a shared evolutionary feature, not just among mammals, and that these shared states manifest in various ‘characteristic species-type behaviours’. The authors base their claim on neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and observation. </span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdsKG56PTCJvY0WfZzVeCqLYMOHbpl3V42r0F6s-ZO0yeKP1rdXRwj54CwHP2wU6SiwXySin6E9uttM9Y2wXf9SQ4eTlKhlF2ctHwWaxskgMFp-xnN2_4gdZ4TepSjUHEQqi90YLQbEeiY/s1600/darwin+pic+of+emotional+expressions.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="308" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdsKG56PTCJvY0WfZzVeCqLYMOHbpl3V42r0F6s-ZO0yeKP1rdXRwj54CwHP2wU6SiwXySin6E9uttM9Y2wXf9SQ4eTlKhlF2ctHwWaxskgMFp-xnN2_4gdZ4TepSjUHEQqi90YLQbEeiY/s320/darwin+pic+of+emotional+expressions.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration of emotions as expressed across species (upon seeing your mum), <br />
as found in Darwin's <i>The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals</i></td></tr>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So far so good. The authors then argue that two things follow on from emotion states: behaviour and ‘feelings’: the subjective and conscious experience of emotion. We have no certain way to understand the latter in other animals, so according to the authors, their distinction between emotion states and feelings ‘frees us of the need to identify human-like feelings (or indeed any feelings) in other animals’. What they don’t explain, but merely take as read, is why it is necessary to be ‘free’ of this need. Is it rational to assume that a shared trait suddenly fractures into total ontological difference, existence vs nonexistence, between us and every other species of animal, based on nothing but the fact that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">we understand ourselves</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as if there could be nothing else to understand?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Talkin bout species? Talkin bout specious anthropocentric arguments, am I right?!!!</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One reason for wanting this distinction is unpleasantly suggested in the phrasing of the final sentence in the article, which compares scientists that research the ‘elusive property’ of emotion ‘in humans and those working on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">less complex but</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more experimentally tractable model systems</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’. My italics. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; clear: right; color: black; float: right; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img alt="Image result for hello clouds hello sky" src="https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2168/2317768279_742175afda_z.jpg?zz=1" /></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So at the risk of coming across a bit hello-clouds-hello-sky, what I want to say is that animals are incredible and complicated and sensitive and amazing, and often in ways that are directly relatable to the way we are. Features that scientists have historically claimed are unique to humans</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: red; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(tool use; self-awareness; empathetic perspective taking; episodic memory - that is, awareness of time; ability to use language)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text" style="color: black;" target="_blank">are time and again proved to be shared by different species,</a> and not only mammals: crows, for example, have evolved a capacity for individual inventiveness, just like the apes that we are, because they faced the same challenges to survival. The real foundation of our ‘objective’ structure of ontological isolationism is nothing but ignorance, an ignorance that many of us gain from preserving. </span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is an unknowable aspect to other animals, much as there is to Tories, but this shouldn’t be a reason to set limits on the spectrum of our empathy. What we do know (and, if we look, can often see quite clearly) is much greater than what we don’t know. They have emotions, they experience suffering and its obverse. I can’t see any excuse for overlooking this. It should be no more acceptable to say ‘I don’t care about animals’ than it is to say ‘I don’t care about humans’. </span>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-33343194471129964122016-06-04T03:02:00.000-07:002016-06-04T11:08:53.789-07:00Meat the Packers<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It’s not much to my credit, but I’d never given a thought to the welfare of people who work in the meatpacking industry until recently, when I read this </span><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-11/poultry-workers-in-diapers-as-bathroom-breaks-denied-oxfam-says" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">harrowing and gross article</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It describes a stressful, abusive culture, where workers report being denied access to toilets during shifts. This industry has been notorious for its abuses for over a century - certainly since Upton “Funk” Sinclair published his hyper-depressing novel of alienated labour,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Jungle</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in 1906 - though, I admit, this had passed me by. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf1ammecz62Diy_p5oKsdytRo-GkI03rB8uBUcC_sRKxkHBbBmrwdezRRJMypG2eoAKq7AI-qzG96AfaqS5g50qvEz96Tqf3qiGNZi1aEYeUcXqUJlSlDyv6amEFeAxhNFehnn5JULSwRG/s1600/jungle+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf1ammecz62Diy_p5oKsdytRo-GkI03rB8uBUcC_sRKxkHBbBmrwdezRRJMypG2eoAKq7AI-qzG96AfaqS5g50qvEz96Tqf3qiGNZi1aEYeUcXqUJlSlDyv6amEFeAxhNFehnn5JULSwRG/s320/jungle+3.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Within the last decade, similar reports have been made about meat-processing firms in the UK (for clarity, meat-processing firms are the ones where animals go in, and denuded salmonella- and ecoli-ridden mislabelled polyfillered corpses come out, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">you eat them</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, you weirdo). In 2010, the EHRC <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8564632.stm" target="_blank">released a report</a> that detailed exploitation of migrant employees, who are less likely to seek redress; health and safety violations; verbally and physically abusive working environments, and, again, refusal of toilet breaks during shifts. Seriously, meat-guys, just let people go to the toilet, sheesh. </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More recently, in 2015, the Guardian published <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/dec/22/uk-chicken-farming-puts-workers-and-food-safety-at-risk" target="_blank">this report</a> on the poultry industry, rehashing the old formula of punitive conditions, abuse of rights, poor hygiene, strain and exhaustion. Some poultry barons got in a flap, claiming this report was not representative, but the way that the same types of abuse recur over years and across continents suggests that these problems are endemic in an industry which relies on “the product”, as employees call it, being processed on a vast scale, extremely quickly.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(All this is without addressing the psychological damage done to workers by being made cogs in a killing machine, more on which later …. ) </span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m chary of comparing humans to animals, mostly because people find it insulting & I am a woman of extraordinary politesse. But it’s hardly surprising that an industry for which sentient creatures are fodder should treat the dignity and well-being of its employees with equal indifference. They are fodder too. As Keston Sutherland writes in an </span><a href="http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_1.1/KSutherland.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">analysis of Marx’s language</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, capitalism is cannibalism. Labour is reduced to </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gallerte</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a jelly of extraneous meat, bone and tissue: workers’ time and energy, “brains, muscles, nerves, hands,” are ingredients in the production process which must be obtained cheaply and used economically to maximise profit. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtzWMb3TnajvUYIze2Bbisa2Lkben0EFGRdgPueoasU-hVa6Go0edvNFdGxQla_6ZRKzZuU1sZTYVEzVE6b1QHLwzQ-6ejdWRO0HK8PCpxfj7JV4A8mLglguwR9KywjLFNCZmK6_rIK3gL/s1600/Karl_Marx_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtzWMb3TnajvUYIze2Bbisa2Lkben0EFGRdgPueoasU-hVa6Go0edvNFdGxQla_6ZRKzZuU1sZTYVEzVE6b1QHLwzQ-6ejdWRO0HK8PCpxfj7JV4A8mLglguwR9KywjLFNCZmK6_rIK3gL/s200/Karl_Marx_001.jpg" width="140" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I don't think you're ready for this jelly.</td></tr>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(As a point of interest, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Jungle</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> nauseated its readers with accounts of the filthiness of meatpacking, based on Sinclair’s research. The one aspect of his descriptions never to be substantiated was that workers had been known to fall into the pork grinder and join their flesh with the pigs’, to be eaten by unsuspecting members of the public. Invention or not, the idea is irresistible simply because it finishes the picture, makes the missing link. In the grinder, “product” and labourer become one, as they are: in buying anything, we pay for the making as much as for the thing itself.)</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-346bf627-1abc-9107-d6a5-968112ad46df" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There’s a flip side to my reluctance to compare humans and animals - there is a danger that in doing this animals are reduced to a metaphor for human suffering. But they are the real deal: helpless, with absolutely no potential to challenge their exploitation; totally unable to protect themselves from industrial structures; devalued. Almost no cruelty is considered beyond the pale in a meat industry whose ethical regulations are weak and go virtually unenforced. When it comes to suffering, animals are the real deal. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another flip side (grease the pan, boys!): </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While I hate what they do, it would be unfair not to see the workers in the meat industry as victims. They’ve got to earn a crust, same as we all do (apart from my boss, a lazy fat-cat who sits on her arse all day). The work that they do is not just physically dangerous, and demeaning (toilets toilets toilets); it has been linked (<a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1016401" target="_blank">by Jennifer Dillard</a>) to Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress, a disorder resulting in nightmares, flashbacks, paranoia, dissociation, amnesia. You can bang on as much as you like about how nature is red in tooth and claw, but most of us are not freakin’ White Fang; violence reverberates back on the perpetrator, in various psychological forms. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, victims, yes. But Dillard also links the presence of meatpacking industries to increased local rates of violent crime. Cruelty to animals is a psychopathic trait signifying reduced empathy; meat-processing essentially hothouses violent behaviour. It follows that the effects of brutalisation within the industry will bleed out beyond its confines. Most meat-eaters are able to separate their personal kindness from the horrors of the production line; for those unfortunate enough to be on the factory floor, the reality must be much messier. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-25768257404273028082016-04-10T09:57:00.002-07:002018-07-16T04:53:41.891-07:00The apersonal is the political (your Dave is problematic)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The ranks of the dead</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCbV49iB8TPvsSBxoP9Naa13JrOYhPdU7ZTB29Yzpbo98zDAPxrM1JI2pv2mimgCQTgeb4jKZnYwD12h0fHJhMQ2egx9gl-OK1QIfS8Q6_9O7zOUq3DYkJs9SMXkOgxV5o0VDLYCe_aFQ4/s1600/elebaby.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCbV49iB8TPvsSBxoP9Naa13JrOYhPdU7ZTB29Yzpbo98zDAPxrM1JI2pv2mimgCQTgeb4jKZnYwD12h0fHJhMQ2egx9gl-OK1QIfS8Q6_9O7zOUq3DYkJs9SMXkOgxV5o0VDLYCe_aFQ4/s320/elebaby.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> A sure-fire winner in any argument is to say, ‘I don’t care’. This sentiment remains frustratingly acceptable in debates about vivisection in particular (it’s the ultimate standpoint of Prof Tipu Aziz on </span><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04fc70m" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">this interesting radio programme</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">), and pretty much defines media (non)coverage of most animal welfare issues.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Even among really excellent, self-critical thinkers, there tends to be an assumption either that animals don’t matter at all, or that they are far, far down a priority list so long that it becomes binary, divided into what does and doesn't matter. This binary in turn becomes oppositional: anything that advances humans is good, and animal interests must not be allowed stand in its way; time and energy given to the protection of animals is time and energy taken away from a more worthy cause. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As far as I’m aware, there’s no orderly shopping list of actions to eliminate suffering worldwide. The instrumentation of injustice tends to be systemic, and the effects intersectional*</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and in many cases there is no opposition between animal welfare, environmental and humanitarian agendas. Mass livestock farming, for example, tortures and destroys animals on an oceanic scale, but the environmental devastation it causes is likely to get messy for humans in the near future, even here in the loveable west. Looking out for animals is an integral part of global progressive movements, not some kind of Marie Antoinette-ish dilettantism.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But where there actually are competing interests of humans and animals (notably in the case of medical research, until science progresses) - I’d say that it’s bad to the point of evil to categorically dismiss any harm done to animals provided humans benefit. Forms and scales of suffering are comparable between species - pain isn’t an exclusively human property. I don’t deny that victims can be ranked and prioritised, nor do I question (for now) the social contract that compels us to value humans most. I’m just saying that animal concerns shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand - the scale and severity of harm felt should be given due weight, and thought given to whether humanitarian ends can justify cruelties that most of us wouldn't want to imagine.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> There are orders of suffering and, as discussed below, some are worthy of privilege. But this principle shouldn't be used in service of the binary outlined above, or in any other way to invalidate entire groups because they’re not top of our list.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“A Private Matter</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<div style="line-height: 1.38;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> If you have the stomach for it, I’ve got some beef with a parallel and related binarization of suffering: that of the concrete over the abstract, the individual over the many, the case study over the graph. As much as I don’t care for “I don’t care” as a comeback, it’s not always better to reduce problems to what we are able to care about. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 20.24px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">This week, David Cameron has learnt to his visible discomfort that his privacy isn’t as sacrosanct as he thinks it should be. The fact that the prime minister initially thought of his dodgy tax-avoidance as meriting the electorate’s delicacy is symptomatic of his class arrogance, and also of a doublethink regarding politics and private finance that is </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/03/money-morality-right" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">not exclusive to members of the cabinet</a><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Some of Cameron’s defenders have claimed, weakly but not implausibly, that he was trying to protect his family from embarrassment. Few have bothered to respond to this: Cameron’s family loyalty obviously cannot trump his accountability as Prime Minister. But I'm sure that Cameron would dogmatically put his family’s wellbeing, and privacy, above anything - and until now he has quite successfully presented this as a virtue, not a moral limitation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> In fact, Cameron and his family have publicly lived through perhaps the most unspeakable of personal tragedies: the loss of a child. It feels and, probably is, incredibly vile to mention this at all, because in</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the ranks of suffering children have a special status. That kind of loss is untouchable, and it feels unacceptable to bring it into partisan discourse. Privacy serves here as a protection of the child and of the family’s grief - this is not public property</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But, uncomfortable as it is to attack him on this, Cameron has repeatedly brought his bereavement into his political statements, and used it to blur the neglectfulness of his government towards families who care for disabled children without the support of massive personal wealth. Cameron cannot be unaware of the way that his programme of austerity has targeted people with disabilities, </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/21/disability-child-david-cameron-cuts-to-support" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">including children</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. To pretend that he can relate to parents hit by his policies seems like the height of hypocrisy, but a hypocrisy which it feels like a violation to address. Reverence for individual examples of suffering is a silencer; this can be abused.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Je ne suis pas ...</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> As a tad bit of a utilitarian, I’ve been thinking occasionally about what makes a child’s suffering worse and more important than an adult's. It’s one of those things that it seems stupid as well as a bit tacky to analyse, but here goes. It’s not just that children are helpless - so are many adults - and innocent, by which I mean a combined lack of understanding and power - which animals have </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>par excellence</i></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And it’s not simply that they have a lot of potential life left, and so their loss is greater when they die - it’s not like we lose sympathy for chronically ill children with shortened life-spans (unless we’re an old-school Nazi, which we aren’t). The privilege of their helplessness and innocence comes from the fact that it’s transitory: they aren’t adults, but they will be adults, and are valued for a positive absence. The special status relies on them being one of us, but not yet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I would not and could not for a moment dispute the special status of children, in life and in suffering. But in political discourse there’s an extent to which this regard itself has to be ring-fenced. The exploitation of the special status for children can lead to grotesque hypocrisy.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_L2QTzOaOswo6nIuKLvtcKrivlLtKNRBxeb8N7lmiSftIUVa-sdyfJs_tswBbqMajrR7rNOHYPrqf7FPPcdOjbiSXOqbYWrlbDE_5E1reoAsGvpih6mME6Cj5K75T0C7Fq5RIyxycqIlh/s1600/kurdi+protest.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_L2QTzOaOswo6nIuKLvtcKrivlLtKNRBxeb8N7lmiSftIUVa-sdyfJs_tswBbqMajrR7rNOHYPrqf7FPPcdOjbiSXOqbYWrlbDE_5E1reoAsGvpih6mME6Cj5K75T0C7Fq5RIyxycqIlh/s320/kurdi+protest.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> When Alan Kurdi died many of the expressions around his death felt offensively tasteless, none more so than the adults who lay on a beach dressed as him. This was crass and presumptuous because though of course we should identify with refugees, who are dehumanised by distance and anonymity, we cannot ‘je suis’ the death of a little boy - we are not him. We don’t have that innocence. Another eyesore was a mawkish cartoon of his soul floating to heaven on angel wings, a child as cute as he is dead - this published in the Mail, that famous defender of migration rights. Why pity a child, when you can’t pity the adult that the child could have grown into? And why pity one child, when you can’t pity thousands? Why should greater magnitude drive tragedies further down our priorities list?</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN3u-8_rpsWrHd_GUi6iiflnSHtQJNAVKDhNooFWSoHj7cT2FQZlrkF_W98AV5x33Xl3VYbJV7AAlwZpyjFb-TNGuaFlqn8w_YcLffTizJVCbpYer4BTThZuWENXiD448JI14JnKuiHZJz/s1600/aylan+hebdo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN3u-8_rpsWrHd_GUi6iiflnSHtQJNAVKDhNooFWSoHj7cT2FQZlrkF_W98AV5x33Xl3VYbJV7AAlwZpyjFb-TNGuaFlqn8w_YcLffTizJVCbpYer4BTThZuWENXiD448JI14JnKuiHZJz/s320/aylan+hebdo.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Relevant, timely or conveniently bite-sized examples of suffering have their uses in forging the emotional responses that allow us to form ideas of justice, and shape our politics. But focusing on the particular can skew perceptions, and lead to woolly, self-indulgent thinking, and hypocrisy. Suffering should be contemplated in broad and utilitarian terms, weighted not according to who or what is suffering but, where possible, by scale and degree. The problem is the harm done, not the victim.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-47033616638580816832015-10-27T10:29:00.000-07:002015-10-27T10:38:12.188-07:00Get thee behind me, hipster<div class="c2">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Millennials come in for a lot of flak, what with being incoherently blamed for misfortunes imposed by take-the-money-and-run capitalist boomers etc, but if you ask me our one unforgivable fault is a tendency to get cute. Thus we cutely spend our time debating whether Emma Watson should appear on our ten pound notes alongside the motto </span><span class="c1"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">illegitimi non carborundum</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, then in May when the Tories get in we’re all like :’(</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the many minute things to grind my minute gears in recent weeks has been this bit of aw-shucksery from <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/17/reasons-to-cook-a-roast-dinner-stuart-heritage-roasts-a-handbook" target="_blank">the Guardian</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The centrepiece of a roast is usually a giant hunk of meat dripping in its own juices. A monstrous piece of animal that you now have full dominion over. You’re setting an example for the rest of the world. You are all-powerful now, and all the creatures of the Earth must tremble before you, lest you cook them as well.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I know, it’s meant to be tongue in cheek. But it’s not really ironic, because it does really suggest that eating meat makes you feel powerful, and, recognising the idiocy of that, doesn’t question it, but treats this grotesque thought process as an adorkable part of a gratifying culinary experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The violence of this attitude might ring a bell with readers of Carol J Adams’s </span><span class="c1"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Sexual Politics of Meat</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, along with a sicklier grace note. Meat is objectification: something that’s been dominated and extracted from consciousness or agency, the object having more value because it once had consciousness and agency which was taken from it. In a nutshell (which is how a hipster would probably serve it), meat represents much of what is despicable and odious in masculinism, but also, because it’s food, has a feminised and domestic facet that can appeal to ‘new men’, who tie their big beards behind their pinnies and experiment with ways of making their base sense of entitlement look most palatable. Not that women don’t do this: I think that for women too interactions with meat can combine masculine and feminine, and sexual, motifs in a particularly self-indulgent way. Possibly the most hateful example of this is </span><span class="c1"><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession</span></i></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> by Julie Powell, a journey of unnecessary self-discovery via the mutilation of corpses.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a class="irc_mil i3597" data-href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/food/restaurants/article3983006.ece" data-noload="" data-ved="0CAcQjRxqFQoTCLzTzeuU48gCFQTNFAodljIKKQ" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRxqFQoTCLzTzeuU48gCFQTNFAodljIKKQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Flife%2Ffood%2Frestaurants%2Farticle3983006.ece&bvm=bv.105841590,d.d24&psig=AFQjCNH6fI1Vyrnl5h_WxPqX4g45mQb9ww&ust=1446052840690987" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img class="irc_mi" src="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00509/6837710a-8386-11e3-_509900b.jpg" height="213" style="margin-top: 0px;" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">3 victors in a 'trying to look like a burger' competition</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Artisanal butchery is not down to earth, it’s a retrograde affectation. Think of the lumbersexual, of the Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall on his photogenic smallholding, of TV chefs proving their authenticity by <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/jamie-oliver-the-silencer-of-the-lamb-564804" target="_blank">executing lambs</a> live on camera. “It’s the natural order, people have always eaten meat,” says the straw man. This aspect of the meat conversation is bullshit: people have always been murderers, rapists and genocidal despoilers, but that doesn’t make it ok. And since it’s increasingly obvious not just that we don’t need to but that we mustn’t indulge in this killing, the last thing we should be doing is fetishizing it, allowing it to seem naughty but nice, or even (gawd help us) sexy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a final mention, just because I think it’s worth saying, animal issues are not isolated from other liberationist movements. As Adams points out, violence inflicted on animals is violence that will, in some form, be visited on oppressed humans; it belongs to the same paradigm of objectification and entitlement. First they came for the pigs, but I was not a pig so I said nothing. Then they came for me ...</span></div>
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<br />V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-9684241389224522472015-08-20T07:45:00.000-07:002015-08-20T11:31:55.789-07:00My Vegetable Love<br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> <span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reading the Guardian at the moment feels a bit like speaking to a “left-wing” relative and realising that she doesn’t realise that her views are somewhere to the right of Sadiq Khan. But cheers to it anyway for publishing Jeremy Hance’s </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/aug/04/plants-intelligent-sentient-book-brilliant-green-internet" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">review</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> of </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Brilliant Green </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. </span></span><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hance’s article got me thinking about plant sentience and behaviour, and made me much more aware of the complex ways plants negotiate and interact with their environments. They have (at last count) 20 senses as opposed to the human 5; they are able to communicate within and between species, cooperatively and aggressively; they register and respond to being damaged, and dying.</span></span></b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of my friends - Tree looked depressed, so I gave him a beer.</td></tr>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Allowing for some semantic give-and-take, we can say that plants feel pain (also that they are dickheads, see below).The former idea can be a sore point for vegetarians and vegans who get ribbed about cruelty every time they eat a salad. As Hance points out, plants have evolved not to be individuals in the way animals are - Mancuso conceives of single plants as ‘colonies’, many of which are designed to be eaten, or at least to survive the odd nibble. And, of course, plants are so ontologically different from animals that it’s not easy to ascertain what pain is to them. </span></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That said, it is undeniable and of interest that plants do feel. They send out distress signals when attacked; they deliberately set each other on fire (lookin at you, eucalyptus); someone once told me that flowers scream at rival species, like the bodysnatchers. I have included a 1914 account of a carrot being tortured below this post, for anyone who wants to feel as weird as I do.</span> </span></b></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a data-ved="0CAcQjRxqFQoTCJG9o8Pxt8cCFUVWFAodu7kMXw" href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAcQjRxqFQoTCJG9o8Pxt8cCFUVWFAodu7kMXw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcinephilesandra.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F10%2F17%2Fhalloween-horror-overload-day-eleven-invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-1978%2F&ei=PebVVdGqAsWsUbvzsvgF&psig=AFQjCNFp-T26BNWiZ506PuEJ8zeBRu41dg&ust=1440167629536553" id="irc_mil" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk;irc.il;" style="border: 0px currentColor; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lb49owwAMy1qcy1poo1_400.gif" height="214" id="irc_mi" style="margin-top: 90px;" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(spoiler alert)</td></tr>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That’s all fairly creepy and opens up visions of a sentient and suffering universe that might encourage those so-inclined to stop up their moral ears and think “anything goes”. And on the flip-side there’s a risk of turning into some </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Avatar</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">-watching pantheist (kudos to a film that thinks it can mask its crass racial stereotyping through cunning use of the colour blue). But a more curious and even respectful attitude to Auntie Flora might be a good thing, because 1.) plants make the planet habitable, and that’s a bit of an issue, and 2.) I think being, in principle, is worth something, if only in the sense that destruction shouldn’t be unconsidered or gratuitous. Attentiveness to things is a bit of a trendy concept, but a good one. Philosopher Simone Weil wrote that attention presupposes love, which I believe, though being attentive does not entail anything as alienating as soppiness, so it’s a good starting point in unfamiliar ethical territory.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: red; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></b><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In case you were wondering, mate, I am not going to stop eating my green brethren. We understand much more about the suffering of most farmed animals than about the suffering of plants. Harm felt by animals is harm we can understand, unless we choose not to. Comparing humans and animals (especially other mammals) makes endlessly more sense than comparing animals to plants, on account of the shared genetic material and all that. But comparing plants to Donald Sutherland, it turns out, makes the most sense of all. </span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-479e19fe-4b82-1414-9160-58b4e3ef3ee6" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><em>"In a room near Maida Vale there is an unfortunate carrot strapped to the table of an unlicensed vivisector. Wires pass through two glass tubes full of a white substance; they are like two legs, whose feet are buried in the flesh of the carrot. When the vegetable is pinched with a pair of forceps, it winces. It is so strapped that its electric shudder of pain pulls the long arm of a very delicate level which actuates a tiny mirror. This casts a beam of light on the frieze at the other end of the room, and thus enormously exaggerates the tremor of the carrot. A pinch near the right hand tube sends the beam seven or eight feet to the right, and a stab near the other wire sends it far to the left. Thus can science reveal the feelings of even so stolid a vegetable as the carrot."</em></span></b></div>
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Extract from Sir Jagadesh Chantra Bose's article in <em>Nation</em> magazine, quoted in <em>The Secret Life of Plants</em>, Tompkins and Bird)</span></span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></b>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-47894176492358656222014-05-24T09:57:00.002-07:002014-05-25T05:45:14.339-07:00Having it large with Nigel Farage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeJsjCaW8DmDQ4U0p_pmBwa2RH3S4-w2dmLPtpkKd3zHWzsrDQpWaqIN0inT2UA8-i0KBL0gsPQn2qs1rziUpUP6uPq6t22olHLngqbToZL1IlP-B_AAepiLk8CHD7q32upVx_1ih2hBvO/s1600/nigel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeJsjCaW8DmDQ4U0p_pmBwa2RH3S4-w2dmLPtpkKd3zHWzsrDQpWaqIN0inT2UA8-i0KBL0gsPQn2qs1rziUpUP6uPq6t22olHLngqbToZL1IlP-B_AAepiLk8CHD7q32upVx_1ih2hBvO/s1600/nigel.jpg" height="304" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">i.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I had a dream about Nigel Farage last night. Essentially what happened, minus details, was that I went to a party at his place and, after initial hostility, unbent to his view that he really wasn't that bad once you got to know him; the dream ended with him holding me tenderly against him in a paternal hug. Before any low-minded types start jumping to conclusions, I'd like to say that the hug was entirely chaste, with only, at most, a vestigial erotic frisson. I woke up with some lingering warm feelings towards him, but cured them by looking at his photograph.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This dream was not (as the low-minded might say) related to the state of my psyche. It was about you, England. It was about the reasons we may sink into Farage's embrace. To the sensitive dreamer, watching Newsnight is like eating a piece of bad cheese, and I was probably influenced by a particular vox-poppin' fresh who had been featured the previous night, saying that he voted Ukip because they 'answered his questions' in a way that no other political party did.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, the thing about Ukip is that they don't really answer anyone's questions, they just point away from them - literally away: Farage's answer to all our questions about welfare, unemployment and poverty is 'foreigners', and his answer to most other questions is 'beer'. The recent success of Ukip could be put down to them tapping into <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/23/ukip-success-local-elections-two-party-system-crisis" target="_blank">deep anxieties</a>, but in both their media image and their <a href="http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/themes/5308a93901925b5b09000002/attachments/original/1397750311/localmanifesto2014.pdf?1397750311" target="_blank">policies</a> it seems that what they primarily address is our need not to think about our problems.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Window posters for the local elections said 'I'm voting Ukip. No more leaflets, thank you'. They are a party you vote for to express embattled impatience with everything. Every time I look at a Ukip manifesto I age ten thousand years, but in abstract the party's vibe is pretty tempting to those of us who basically hate everything and don't want to think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ii.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the theme of this post is 'Not Thinking', rather than 'Fantasy Liaisons with Reactionaries', then I can manage a tenuous link to a vegetarian issue. The recent heavily-processed kerfuffle over halal meat being served in the country's two most hallowed institutions - Nando's* and Oxford University - was, as many have pointed out, not about animal rights. There would never have been a big scandal if a secular abattoir was neglecting to stun animals before slaughter - it's the fact that Muslims did it that really freaks people out. This outbreak of halal horror is tied up with the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-27258014" target="_blank">Trojan-horse</a> idea that the UK is going to be taken over from the inside by something that is not itself (even though the place has never been culturally homogeneous, but whatever).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The point I'm gradually getting to is that two things that have been pointed to as consequences of foreign invasions - unemployment (one of Ukip's focal points) and and cruelty to animals - are fostered by long-standing structural faults and iniquities in</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> British society. You could say that these issues are being used as a smokescreen for xenophobia and racism, but it's also true to say that xenophobia itself acts as a distraction from whatever's rotten in the UK. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is no self-contained safe place to scuttle back to, and if</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> we feel threatened by outside influences we should look at ourselves and see what kind of utopia would be left if we created some kitsch fantastical hermetically-sealed Middle England. But, as Nigel came to me and told me in a dream, it's easier to go around sticking pitchforks into straw men.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*ok, it's South-African</span>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-45207173488754273312013-04-17T09:34:00.001-07:002013-04-17T09:34:12.652-07:00Something Special<div style="text-align: center;">
<img height="639" src="http://i1.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article1837152.ece/ALTERNATES/s615b/George-Osborne-appears-to-be-crying-during-the-funeral-of-Margaret-Thatcher-1837152.jpg" width="548" /></div>
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"Call her once before you go.</div>
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Call once yet.</div>
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In a voice that she will know:</div>
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'Margaret! Margaret!'"</div>
V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-31827909058888292862013-02-06T00:22:00.002-08:002014-05-25T05:43:35.065-07:00Holla atcho Proles<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<img alt="" class="imagecache imagecache-mast_image_landscape imagecache-default imagecache-vertical_horizontal" src="http://www.theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/mast_image_landscape/mastimages/Meades%20MAIN.jpg" height="202" title="Essex man: the stone-faced Meades in search of 'a Cockney Shangri-La'" width="320" /></div>
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Look at Jonathan Meades. He is the coolest person in the world. Why doesn't everybody dress like that?</div>
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In a rare moment not spent reading the Mail Online or re-watching my favourite film, <em>Blades of Glory,</em> I i-playered his latest documentary, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01qfr95/Jonathan_Meades_The_Joy_of_Essex/" target="_blank">The Joy of Essex</a>. It ended with a brilliant if slightly jingoistic tribute to 'The People's Essex', which he presented as a sort of surreal architectural lost-property bin that shits all over stylistic uniformity and where 'DIY resourcefulness and <em>bricolage </em>were employed in the service of a better life'. He also expressed plenty of scorn for the people who don't like it, including 'bien-pensant environmentalists of all shades'. It made me think of a fallacy that I quite often encounter in people who care about other people, one which puts the claims of social equality and those of the environment ('Nature, whatever that is,' as Meades says) and animals in competition with each other. There's an idea that animal rights or the preservation of rural areas are a distraction from more pressing concerns.<br />
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There's something in this - environmentalism, vegetarianism, organic food-fancying etc, are the sorts of issues that the bleeding-heart bourgeois have the luxury to get puffed up about, like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zac_Goldsmith" target="_blank">Zac Goldsmith</a>, or celebrity tub-of-guts Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The stable feature of the neo-conservative green movement is its blatant hypocrisy: remember the economic fat-times, and the whole <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/oct/06/david-cameron-green-agenda-fades" target="_blank">vote-blue-to-go-green</a> thing? David Cameron on a bicycle with his <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4953922.stm" target="_blank">shoes</a> being driven behind him? That didn't last long. Even the ones who believe their own beliefs don't even remotely practise what they preach - I refer you to Prince Charles, who I will not even bother to insult here.<br />
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These clowns use the green thing to sell us stuff, or reinforce their feudal sense of privilege, or distract from the cartoonish evil of their governments, but we shouldn't let their corruption taint the causes that they use to conceal it. Of course it is no good sentimentalising nature, but even the most realistic among us shouldn't be ashamed to admit things that are not man-ufactured (oh snap, what a pun!), things like trees and animals, are not only pretty good mechanisms for running a planet, but are also worth protection and love and respect. If it matters that people are comfortable and are spared suffering, with or without the balm of some imposed teleology - Marxist, religious, whatever - then surely it follows that other life forms matter too? <br />
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By all means be hard-nosed, pragmatic and anti-nostalgic when thinking about Mother Nature - she doesn't love you, she doesn't stand for comfort and all she ever intended for any of us is an un-palliated death. But any politics that places an intrinsic value on human happiness ought to question the grounds on which it separates this Good from the wellbeing of other animals, and the places where they live.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAnle_b1HZxCzNxPzC7F0f7w-E8P9PniYw3NRqHxUAszbmGlbYyvNd6QprMWpeQUVizUah5gIr1qokVfEWpB4IUMbfIIOnGwzCmnU7UVncpd-ISDqymFpm4j60Cgg1gYROhAY9Z-r20sw0/s1600/meades.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAnle_b1HZxCzNxPzC7F0f7w-E8P9PniYw3NRqHxUAszbmGlbYyvNd6QprMWpeQUVizUah5gIr1qokVfEWpB4IUMbfIIOnGwzCmnU7UVncpd-ISDqymFpm4j60Cgg1gYROhAY9Z-r20sw0/s320/meades.jpg" height="320" width="210" /></a></div>
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-9749974643732834772012-08-21T13:55:00.000-07:002012-08-21T13:56:06.492-07:00In the Dog HouseYeah, I'm back and, readers, I bet you missed me. All of you. Millions of readers, I've got.<br />
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I was perusing the Mail Online this evening, as I often do, and clicked, as is my wont, on all the animal-related stories. <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2191541/Bad-boy-Craze-dogshaming-sweeps-internet--cats-arent-safe-owners-scorn-either.html" target="_blank">Here's a doozy</a>: they ran a feature on a Tumblr blog devoted to 'dogshaming', where people post photos of their dogs along with signs written in the first person describing (or 'confessing to') whatever 'crime' the dog in question has committed.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEYtfihHn8YKBkKbaBFLUZiNJSaB0lN28Bqv5hpiNjWVTbQVgsX7CFUGYzDbwyFfS_dEbpYSMxkN7jC0QBue08PEJv1i2QDzwY8N93tzwtLXAp1XnKBNvj7R0E1L19vd0aK2uUMqrJjT4z/s1600/dog+prozac.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEYtfihHn8YKBkKbaBFLUZiNJSaB0lN28Bqv5hpiNjWVTbQVgsX7CFUGYzDbwyFfS_dEbpYSMxkN7jC0QBue08PEJv1i2QDzwY8N93tzwtLXAp1XnKBNvj7R0E1L19vd0aK2uUMqrJjT4z/s320/dog+prozac.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I'm not saying I didn't find any of them funny - the dog who pukes under the bed looks like a lad, and I like the one about humping the cat - but scrolling down a page of these images began to feel more and more unpleasant. The problem was that the signs were not always celebrations of the fundamental wack-ness of dogs. They were accusations written in character but expressing the frustration of owners who seem to see behaviour that is either natural (eating everything they can get hold of) or the result of poor training as genuinely shameful. But dogs have no shame, only submissive responses to disapproval.<br />
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Look at the <a href="http://dogshaming.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">site</a> if you think I'm exaggerating: there is one dog that is shamed for destroying carpets when left alone - this is a well known symptom of <a href="http://pets.webmd.com/dogs/separation-anxiety-dogs" target="_blank">anxiety</a> and boredom. There is a dog that is obviously unhappy whose sign reads 'I like peeing on everything'. That is another classic <a href="http://www.usask.ca/wcvm/herdmed/applied-ethology/behaviourproblems/suburine.html" target="_blank">symptom</a> of anxiety and fear.<br />
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These pictures are posted as jokes but many of them depict attitudes to animals that are potentially if not actually abusive. I like animal pictures, I like dogs, I like the Daily Mail (yeah, shoot me) but seeing this just made me think more than ever that there should be legal processes in place to make pet ownership less easy to walk into. A dog is a dog and it cannot be publicly humiliated by having its picture online. The desire of some owners to revenge themselves in this way on dependent animals is the real exhibit in the dogshaming gallery. And it's not funny.<br />
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Addendum: the twat who runs this blog has put up a message encouraging viewers not to 'waste [their] breath' on criticising the premise of the site. 'Shaming people for shaming dogs is a tad ironic, no?' sayeth the twat. I don't think he/she has a very strong grasp on the location of the irony in this case.<br />
<br />V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-87186858968330242432012-04-16T10:23:00.001-07:002012-04-16T10:25:39.835-07:00Riding MeatHorseracing. That's still a thing. Once a year the Grand National happens and Britain's papers are filled with pictures of women in hats and disingenuous headlines that refer to the death of some horses as a 'Tragedy' despite the fact that it is really more of a Formality, and is anything but unexpected. Two horses were injured so badly they had to be put down at Aintree last weekend; the same thing happened to five horses at Cheltenham last month. This is par for the course.<br />
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The races are sick. That's obvious. But the systematic cruelty of the industry behind them is less well-publicised. The champs that get to die at Aintree are only the tip of the iceberg: Around 380 horses can be expected to die each year on courses or in training, and around 2,000 will be slaughtered before that stage if their bodies are found to be 'unsuitable' - sometimes it's hard to be a woman. I mean horse. In terms of inhumanity and waste, horseracing can be compared to factory farming, but this isn't for food, it's for fun.<br />
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The Grand National has been adapting the courses a little bit to try and cut down on the corpse-count, but since everything about horseracing is cruel, the practice should be scrapped, not reformed. Inbreeding and the stresses of jumping over fences (a noble cause!) leave the majority of racehorses with conditions including gastric ulcers and bleeding lungs. And as <a href="http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/horse/ALL/1569//" target="_blank">this report</a> explains, vivisection is being used as a method of finding solutions to this problem. Inflicting suffering to find a cure for suffering that is completely unnecessary. If we don't allow fox-hunting or bullfighting, then why is this bloodsport still legal?<br />
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Especially considering the only part most people are interested in is Ladies' Day. Hooray for an opportunity to call women fillies and pore over photos of them while saying how stupid they look! And people pay to be treated like that. Fair enough if they enjoy themselves, though they might have a rethink if we renamed the event Whoresracing, and laid bets on who would turn up the least dressed and orange-est. I'm not sure if the people who make the Telegraph's Worst Dressed List get taken out and shot, but it would be keeping with the spirit of the occassion.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-64634151937729121962012-04-01T01:29:00.010-07:002012-04-01T07:58:40.482-07:00Hey vivisectionists, why so tense?<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Why don't you make your blog about something interesting, like vegetarian recipes? That way, people might read it."</span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Shut up, Mum."</span></em><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Two good things happened last month. I mean, good in my opinion: Wales decided to scrap its proposed badger cull, and it was revealed that all relevant ferry companies and 64 airlines are refusing to import lab-animals to Britain. This has happened as a result of what the <a href="http://www.buav.org/" target="_blank">BUAV</a> refer to as 'reasoned argument allied to letter writing by our hundreds of thousands of supporters.' On the other hand, ex-Labour Minister Lord Drayson said that medical research was being 'choked off' by 'extremists' who target 'weak links' in the chain of the animal-transporting industry. The violence of Drayson's language suggests a campaign of intimidation of which no evidence is provided, but it is clear that the pro-vivisection movement feels threatened.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Writing on the 14th of March, respectively for the Times and the Guardian, Drayson and the BUAV's Michelle Thew both claimed (in Drayson's words) to be 'speaking out for science and democracy.' Both plausibly claimed to have public opinion behind them: given this country's conflicted attitude to animal welfare, it isn't difficult to believe that the majority of people are 'against causing suffering to lab animals' but in favour of animal research.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The benefits of animal testing are also debatable. Some scientists argue that it is the only way to ascertain the effect of medication on an entire body, not just specific cells; others consider it to be increasingly outmoded and ineffective in the treatment of human bodies. What I take from Drayson's article, in which he claims that the loss of just 1% of Britain's lab animals will directly and definitely cause 'more people to suffer and die', is the sort of sensationalism and emotional blackmail that is stereotypically the domain of animal rights activists.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Here is a selection of responses to Thew's article from the Guardian online comments section.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"This fluffy bunny flim flam attitude doesn't help anyone."</span></em><br />
<em><br />
<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"> </span></em><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><em>"Perhaps if you spent a little more time paying attention in Science lessons, and a little less going "Awwww, look at the little fuzzy-wuzzy... he's so cuuuuute" you'd realise..." </em></span><br />
<em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></em><br />
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><em>"You are regarded as nutters by the large majority of the population."</em></span><br />
<em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></em><br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> "Is it only the fluffy ones you want to protect?"</span></em> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><em>"I once asked one of these anti-testing loonies who she'd save from a burning house first: a child or a mouse." </em></span></span><br />
<em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></em><br />
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"God, I lived with one of these anti-vivisection loonies at university. They are so unpleasant...<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">muchelle, we need to experiment on animals to save lives. I hope that you refuse any treat for any illnes or disease you have in the future. If not, you are a hypocrite like PETA's vice-president because she uses insulin, a medication derived from animal testing."</span></span></em></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Well, </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9G4J9dSSiE" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I've got hurt feelings</span></a><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I've chosen the most extreme and least fair responses to show that the tactics of hysteria and intimidation can be found on both sides of the vivisection argument. I also feel these remarks demonstrate the problems that rational animal rights campaigners have in being taken seriously. The trolls quoted above rely on dismissing both the value of animal lives and the intelligence of anybody who cares about them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Why do they get so angry? Well, if they believe in the medical efficacy of animal testing, fair enough. No one likes cancer, heart disease or Alzheimers, no one wants to pass up any chances of finding cures. But the aggression shown towards people who are really only encouraging progress - focusing on the development of humane and accurate research, moving on from the brutal techniques of the past - seems to me like a sign of cowardice. These commentators, whose general attitude is basically considered normal and not 'unpleasant', refuse debate, and, by belittling the motivations of anti-vivisectionists, close their eyes to the full moral difficulty of the animal rights question.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Some people are frightened of widening the boundaries of ethical responsibility. Making decisions is much easier if we focus solely on human needs, to the exclusion of animal welfare. It is as natural to do that as it is to prioritise people's immediate comfort over the protection of the environment, or people close to us over people we don't know. Campaigns like the BUAV's threaten the progress of medical research, in its current models. They demand change and development in social, scientific and humanitarian practices. It is a daunting prospect.</span>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-33816059440892550372012-02-17T03:17:00.002-08:002012-02-26T02:29:25.000-08:00In the LoopholePart One<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 6pt 6pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">2012 looks like it’s going to be a good year for broken promises. Back in July 2011, when this blog and I were young, Lynne Featherstone<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> made and later reaffirmed a pledge to ban the practice of animal testing in the making of <strong>household products.</strong></span> This story, like most animal-related policies, floated briefly into the media’s field of vision like a dead fish bobbing to the ocean’s surface before sinking away to rot in obscurity. Now it transpires that the government is considering weakening its policy by permitting manufacturers to use ingredients that have been tested on animals, so that the ban will only apply to finished household products.</span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 6pt 6pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This government seems to have settled nicely into a long-beloved paradigm for dealing with animal rights: make a pledge, wait a bit, then break it, or introduce a loophole so big that there’s more hole than law. In March 2010 Featherstone stated in Parliamentary Questions that the ban would apply both to finished products and all ingredients, ‘although in practice mainly the latter are tested’, so she can hardly be unaware of the extremity of the planned betrayal. Animal testing will insinuate itself into the household cleaning industry in much the same way that eggs from <strong>battery farms</strong> have been allowed into the market through the back door, as ‘liquid’ ingredients, even while the ‘solid’ products can’t legally be sold.</span></div><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Cameron’s government shows an incredibly healthy lack of respect for the birds and the beasts, as well as the British voter: neither its own laws nor public opinion (about battery farming, vivisection or, for example, Andrew Lansley’s death-and-glory healthcare reforms) will stop them from doing exactly what they want, which apparently is to destroy every form of welfare. If you can think of one nice thing that this government does, please send your answer to me on a postcard.</span><br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Part 2</span><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 6pt 6pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am exaggerative, but it’s fair to say that the majority of elected representatives seem to be actively against most measures in favour of animal welfare. The movement for banning <b>animal-tested cosmetics</b> is not controversial, but it is embattled. A law banning it, agreed on in 1993 and meant to be put in effect in 1998 was delayed first to 2000, then to 2002, and now its promised fulfilment in 2013 looks likely to be delayed by another 10 years. This issue is currently in the hands of John Dalli, European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy, who in 2011 told the Humane Society that he ‘would not commit to supporting a legislative ban on selling animal tested cosmetics.’</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Supporting measures like this is not worth a politician’s effort, because it alienates businesses while gaining no significant political rewards, and backtracking generates little scandal. The impermeability of the British media to animal rights can be demonstrated by the fact that an open letter to Dalli from <b>Leona Lewis</b>, sent on Valentine’s Day and asking him to support the ban, barely got any attention. Leona Lewis! Don’t pretend you don’t know who she is. I certainly do.</span></div><br />
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: inherit; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">The question is, can anything save the Humane Society’s ‘Cruelty-free 2013’ campaign if <b>celebrities</b> can’t? They’ve got some really good ones – even Ricky Gervais has taken time out from calling people mongs to fight the good fight. The government isn’t interested, the media isn’t interested – perhaps the public isn’t very interested either. But I’m not the first one to be troubled by the arrogance that leads politicians to break promises, not in the face of overwhelming necessity, but simply because they know they can get away with it.</span></span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt1Wa6EtlmtpZjA1cXLBnGCMPHiknJdGUebzgWo_TItFmEI7aEREcy3A8GpaN5hsBTnYmD2xnkoYbW48fuy2LZP4wVtamBF26XPca5LWflZ45pv0kFamL_X8YNpfcp_fOYQCo8eAdyUwVX/s1600/gervais+bunny.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt1Wa6EtlmtpZjA1cXLBnGCMPHiknJdGUebzgWo_TItFmEI7aEREcy3A8GpaN5hsBTnYmD2xnkoYbW48fuy2LZP4wVtamBF26XPca5LWflZ45pv0kFamL_X8YNpfcp_fOYQCo8eAdyUwVX/s320/gervais+bunny.jpg" width="214" /></a></div><br />
<div align="center"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Unapologetic: Ricky Gervais is not ashamed of his third nipple.</span></span></div>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-768152922370273232012-01-22T12:26:00.000-08:002012-01-23T10:23:11.034-08:00Chicken OutI never bother with New Year's Resolutions; rules are made to be broken. A pledge that is already wavering this January is the one made by the European Union in 1998 to phase out the use of battery cages for hens by 2012. They were laudably unambitious; they gave themselves 13 years to do it in. Nevertheless, it recently transpired that 15 member states are still failing to comply with the new regulations. I'd like to be surprised, but I can't be bothered.<br />
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There's been a bit of squabbling between states: speaking to BBC1, David Cameron made the querulous accusation that the rest of Europe is undercutting British farmers by continuing to favour cheap cruelty over expensive renovations, which drive up prices. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16540769" target="_blank">Then it turned out</a> that up to 500,000 hens in the UK are still kept in battery cages, and that Agriculture Minister Jim Paice doesn't see fit to do much about it.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Q71J9dAoxC40RpQP7-WOEvQHL9v-dg5BnEm7s85xAxfaqMPza23Sid5yPNsUzkoDZiPnHBRACYqmoYtCumjyV1teQMqhs9QMONePhU0f3xHAk-InvWsMmC6tlnqzqELGXb2b9Hj4OfwV/s1600/jim+paice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Q71J9dAoxC40RpQP7-WOEvQHL9v-dg5BnEm7s85xAxfaqMPza23Sid5yPNsUzkoDZiPnHBRACYqmoYtCumjyV1teQMqhs9QMONePhU0f3xHAk-InvWsMmC6tlnqzqELGXb2b9Hj4OfwV/s320/jim+paice.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div align="left" style="text-align: justify;"> (Jim Paice)</div><div align="left" style="text-align: justify;">Interviewed on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b019fxj3/Farming_Today_18_01_2012/" target="_blank">Farming Today</a>, he said that since the offending farmers will be unable to sell their produce as 'shell' eggs (there is no formal system to prevent them selling eggs to manufacturers who will use them in other products - 'liquid' eggs) they will be unable to turn a good profit, and therefore will have to fall in line. He said he sees no reason to take immediate legal action to penalise these farmers, despite David Cameron's threats that Britain would take other EU countries to court if they 'don't put in place the changes they've signed up to.' </div><div align="left" style="text-align: justify;"><br />
</div><div align="left" style="text-align: justify;">Paice has also spoken of a voluntary agreement made by certain manufacturers not to buy battery eggs, a choice which can be supported at the consumer level. Mr Paice clearly adheres to the popular fallacy that the market can look after our morals. This is demonstrably shaky thinking, and Britain is a very good example of the way it doesn't work. The British, bless us, are quite nice about animals; whereas in Mediterranean Europe no one gives a shit, the British hate the idea of battery farming, and 1% of us even believe that it is a legal requirement that hens listen to 4 hours of classical music each day to chill them out, presumably having confused chickens with Inspector Morse. But if the British heart is soft, the British wallet is stingy, and people will gravitate towards cheaper products without even thinking about the dirty backstory behind cheaper bacon or eggs. In general, we need laws to do the right thing for us, and these laws should be stringently applied. Jim Paice may be right about renegade farmers being forced into compliance by financial concerns, but it would be neater and quicker and more convincing if he would prosecute people who are breaking the law.<br />
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One last thing:<br />
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It seems incredibly difficult to implement the smallest change. The truth is that the new regulations achieve relatively little, even when they are in place. The new type of crate will give hens perching and scratching places, but will still provide less usable space per hen than an A4 sheet of paper. Battery farming is not dead; it is 'enriched'. If you are enriched, buy only RSPCA-approved, free-range eggs. If you are not very rich, I don't know, have some cake. Unless it has battery liquid egg in it.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJB64T778X8Gl7K00lnJqrpMtZ8m8HcsbhAaXFoPKGrbDWJrvquZYqnX17H_Hlt6rUE8iRR2zzxAjwRqOK7Lx7aW7DU0Z2jJw7q8wxkqG7yw0Ta_NhCqM_yrhKq5AC5rVsc0gN07lltTP5/s1600/Cameron-and-Chicken-22_04_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJB64T778X8Gl7K00lnJqrpMtZ8m8HcsbhAaXFoPKGrbDWJrvquZYqnX17H_Hlt6rUE8iRR2zzxAjwRqOK7Lx7aW7DU0Z2jJw7q8wxkqG7yw0Ta_NhCqM_yrhKq5AC5rVsc0gN07lltTP5/s320/Cameron-and-Chicken-22_04_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> Don't trust him, chicken. He's not your friend. </div>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-84734030512531210002011-12-08T12:15:00.000-08:002011-12-12T08:41:41.461-08:00The Milk of Human KindnessThis week I've been reading <em>The Human Stain</em>, and I'd like to thank Philip Roth for reminding us exactly how similar women and cattle really are:<br />
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<em>The creamy-colored cows...for whom chomping at one extremity from a fodder-filled trough while being sucked dry at the other by not one or two or three but four pulsating untiring mechanical mouths - for whom sensual stimulus was their voluptuous due. Each of them deep into an experience blissfilly lacking in spiritual depth: to squirt and to chew, to crap and to piss, to graze and to sleep... the aura they exuded of an opulent, earthy oneness with female abundance...</em><br />
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Yeah, Philip, I know where they're coming from. But cool as these sisters are, they're not as right-on as Liz Jones's heifers. Jones, a self-castigating Daily Mail columnist who I'm pretty fond of, has started selling dairy products whilst under the impression that she is actually working for the animals, or at least that they have formed a vocal trade union. I'm a bit of a fan of animal rights but even I don't believe that a cow is entitled to an<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2030855/LIZ-JONES-Cows-rights-thats-Im-paying-pension.html" target="_blank"> 'income' and a 'pension'</a>.<br />
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Jones is equally in touch with other members of the farmyard community: "Our eggs will be from hens that can fund their retirement by selling us their eggs." Well done Liz. No one's going to think you're an idiot after that little gem.<br />
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Obviously, a cow is not an entrepreneur. If we are going to use milk there is no point pretending that it isn't exploitation; what is at steak (HA! HA!) is how cruel the exploitation will be.<br />
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Jones and her business partner's new brand, Cow Nation, will produce small quantities of high-price organic whole-milk. What it won't do is slaughter the calves that cows are made to produce regularly so they will lactate, or feed cows damaging growth hormones that cause mastitis and birth-defects. Also apparently the milk will be creamy and delicious, just like it was in the olden days blah blah blah.<br />
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Given the increasing popularity of zero-grazing dairy farms in the UK, in which cows are kept indoors or undergound in battery conditions, Jones's enterprise seems timely. Cow Nation is not a realistic solution to the problems of large scale food production but it's a good thing to raise awareness about the ethics of dairy farming, and encourage people to buy Soil Association certified milk in the same way that many buy free-range eggs. This should be a curb on zero-grazing practices.<br />
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In general, though, the dairy industry is horrible. Drinking milk may seem wimpy but it's tied up with the slaughter of cows in infancy or, if female, after about 1/6th of their natural life-span, by which time their bodies are crippled and depleted from drugs and overmilking. Life parts from Philip Roth's fantasy of placid superabundance: female milk, like female patience, can run out.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-49917516766993943082011-10-20T04:08:00.000-07:002012-08-21T13:56:29.046-07:00The right to own and the need to killYesterday a 62 year old man, Terry Thompson, turned 56 exotic animals loose on his Ohio neighbourhood and then killed himself. At the time of writing the animals - apart from a single monkey - are no longer a danger to the public. 48 of them have been shot dead.<br />
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The slaughtered animals include 18 Bengal tigers and 17 lions. Numbers of tigers have been reduced by 95% since 1900; every sub-species of tiger is on the critically endangered list. The combined actions of Terry Thompson and the Ohio police have, in 24 hours, significantly added to the waste of a dying species.<br />
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The police have defended their shoot-to-kill policy: the animals had been abused and underfed; they were dangerous and aggressive and were roaming in a domestic area. One unspecified 300.lb animal was shot with a tranquiliser dart and subsequently "went crazy" and had to be killed anyway. <br />
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The rights and wrongs of the mission to destroy a menagerie of exotic mammals could be debated; the police have a duty to defend the public and feel no such obligation to value the lives of wild animals. The unbelievably weak restrictions on exotic pet ownership in Ohio - among the weakest in the United States, which is saying something - are indisputably to blame for this episode, which is not exactly unprecedented: Thompson had been in trouble before about animal escapes, and a neighbour was quoted as saying she had been living in fear for her family's safety. Besides, Ohio has one of the highest rates of injuries and deaths caused by exotic pets.<br />
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Once again, the price to pay for our lack of respect for animals, and their right to live a natural life in a safe and protected habitat, has been paid by the animals themselves. Their deaths reward our stubbornness and stupidity, and the misguided sense of a human right to ownership that was encoded in Ohio's very lack of legal restrictions.<br />
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The last monkey, by the way? It has "a herpes related disease". So when it is found, as a safety measure, it will probably be shot.<br />
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-20041820564863808432011-09-20T06:22:00.000-07:002011-09-20T08:40:16.249-07:00Drawing the Line<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfi106kvacN_lTdeVkIlyjYuVE0xRmnpp2NIcXIHHRkdkjB6NeUZgcLuOp4zEqR0YM2myurSB5xskEQ-TjDflwTwxfghBlHJlB8mkK-8CewthV5XhKFnvclQpv84EreFVrK6WpPtru2f3v/s1600/scan+spider0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="303" rba="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfi106kvacN_lTdeVkIlyjYuVE0xRmnpp2NIcXIHHRkdkjB6NeUZgcLuOp4zEqR0YM2myurSB5xskEQ-TjDflwTwxfghBlHJlB8mkK-8CewthV5XhKFnvclQpv84EreFVrK6WpPtru2f3v/s320/scan+spider0001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div> If you asked me what my most dearly held principle is, I would say, "That we should respect life and that all life is sacrosanct," and then I would assume an expression that combined smugness with wounded piety and gaze, for the next ten minutes, into the middle distance. If you showed me I spider I would run, screaming "Kill it! Kill it! Before it kills us!"<br />
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Does this make me a bad person?<br />
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Yes.<br />
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It is quite instructive for a vegetarian actually to want something to die, and be willing to kill it - usually by proxy because I am too cowardly to do it myself. There are some people who will think that I'm worse than Hitler for this propensity; many others will think that I'm making a fuss about nothing. I certainly believe that I shouldn't kill spiders, I also know that I have done so and very possibly will do so again.<br />
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It's hard to feel that smashing the odd insect really matters, but you're on dangerous ground if you consider that one thing is qualified to live but that something else is not. I think that the only time you're justified in killing something is when it's about to kill you, and despite my attavistic convictions, the average British household minibeast isn't going to do that. Killing like this is one of the small brutalisations that make us live in a horrible world with horrible people in it. But the world's a pretty violent place, with or without humanity, and in a way it feels a bit precious to want to tiptoe through this gory battlefield, patting things on the head.<br />
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We should probably try. There's a certain providence in the fall of a spider, and by drawing inept and hideous pictures of them, maybe I will inure myself to their vile anatomies. Maybe I'll feel the love.<br />
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Failing that, I hear conkers are a good natural spider repellent. I'll pin my hopes on that.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFgyHT75kk5H9WvHV5W82msKxwJYtBvcQBwvJBfIJmh_O2xCOsbEBeMf3y5sLIVOtpjgQQF1yIWZBLc_EnMiiFfrhcBYZS3IcdVugyOmP1sq4JrrB-07YJZc1bgA1pozcwyClv6bMyaeJ/s1600/scan+spider+20001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" rba="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFgyHT75kk5H9WvHV5W82msKxwJYtBvcQBwvJBfIJmh_O2xCOsbEBeMf3y5sLIVOtpjgQQF1yIWZBLc_EnMiiFfrhcBYZS3IcdVugyOmP1sq4JrrB-07YJZc1bgA1pozcwyClv6bMyaeJ/s320/scan+spider+20001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-39186730728267913522011-08-28T08:27:00.000-07:002013-10-05T01:41:44.607-07:00A New HughI don't know whether to feel annoyed or vindicated. Presumably prompted entirely by my cartoon of him looking like a pig when eating pigs, then looking like a fish when eating fish, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/aug/26/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall-vegetables">appeared in yesterday's Guardian</a> dressed as a cabbage, to announce that these days he is almost completely vegetarian.<br />
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Since you are obviously reading this, Hugh, congratulations. Your article finally acknowledges that "we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm." He (I think I can drop the vocative now) still believes in "being a selective omnivore", which seems to me pointless dallying when he's already admitted that meat eating is cruel and environmentally damaging, but I'm ready to call a truce. I'm just glad that I didn't completely miss the opportunity to roundly insult him before he went public with his "small revolution."<br />
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It looks like my years of passionately loathing this particular man are over, but nevertheless I am pretty glad. His unexpected conversion from the church of bacon is a single step in a slow but inexorable movement away from meat. It may be that his aubergine and green bean curry looks like dog-sick with grass in it, but I am the last person to discourage anyone from eating it.<br />
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-73936078317857149652011-08-20T13:45:00.000-07:002011-08-20T15:26:49.990-07:00The Badger as GeezerWhen AC Grayling invites me to become a fellow of his private university, New College of Humanities, I intend to accept, though, like Richard Dawkins, I will only be in it for the money. I see a future for myself as a professor of Badger Studies. In the absence of a job, conventional hobby or social life, I would like to relate my findings on the portrayal of badgers in various media, and the impact of this woodland critter on the popular consciousness.<br />
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Unit 1. The Badger as Geezer.<br />
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Anyone who was a child in the early 90s has to be against the badger cull. To us, the idea that badgers live in the countryside at all is strange and unnatural, since our young minds were formulated under the influence of a badger who is far from rural in his lifestyle. Badger is a perennial child, mischievous innocent and lovable cockney. For us, to kill the badger is psychologically unhealthy. To kill the badger is to kill yourself.<br />
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Unit 2. The Badger as Gentleman.<br />
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</div>Kenneth Grahame's Badger, in <em>The Wind in the Willows</em> (1908) is more of an establishment figure, treated with deference and senior to his companions both in age and wisdom. His outlook is conservative. It surprises me that any patriot or traditionalist can be in favour of culls, when surely Badger is the embodiment of a nostalgic ideal. It suggests to me that conservatives who favour the culls were not read to enough in their childhoods, and this parental neglect expresses itself in an attitude to authority which both espouses old-fashioned values and vents their subconscious desire to kill their fathers, who wounded them with emotional detachment. <br />
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3. The Badger as Fear.<br />
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</div> Now we have it. This is the badger as chaos, as enigma, as a threat in teddy-bear's clothing. Notice how the badger multiplies uncontrollably, and is associated with poisonous elements of nature. The twenty-first century badger combines the menace of wildness with the alienation of highly developed technology. It is a subversion of the friendly and humanised badger of the twentieth century. It may even be in some sort of gang. It's starting a riot.<br />
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Unit 4. The Badger as Badger.<br />
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That's better.<br />
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I feel a bit sick after this mammal-themed wallow and I think I know why. It's because pictures of animals have little to do with animals. It's because we grow up lavishing affection on Peter Rabbit, or a pet rabbit, but also with the gradual absorption of the idea that it's ok and more adult to enjoy the same creature in the form of rabbit pie. It goes back to what I said about Nim Chimpsky: we enjoy animals when we give them aspects of the human, but take away those fictionalised attributes and leave them as they actually are - real, sentient creatures - and it's ok to treat them with complete callousness. Saying this, as we do implicitly, is saying that we only care for ourselves. Or, that we can admire something cute or beautiful, but the enjoyment we get out of it does not extend to respecting it, or valuing things that are outside of our enjoyment.<br />
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I expect anyone who looks at this will have grown out of cartoon animals. It would be nice if adulthood necessarily meant growing into caring about the real thing.<br />
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V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-50397691823797210302011-08-14T06:54:00.000-07:002011-08-14T07:09:15.466-07:00Lions and Tigers and BRICS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVZVNC4LOurntbRT-H_3J6GbndOiflK-k8X5RBTKDhr5kSMD-pheG0tJxPUenT9BphgVKH9qwEXIFyVFW-WYphKiUkzaMlqi96hEGWEGmfhKJLm2L5Wd2CF3sX3cd_AFd7Zk6of614ganm/s1600/Wizard-of-Oz.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" naa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVZVNC4LOurntbRT-H_3J6GbndOiflK-k8X5RBTKDhr5kSMD-pheG0tJxPUenT9BphgVKH9qwEXIFyVFW-WYphKiUkzaMlqi96hEGWEGmfhKJLm2L5Wd2CF3sX3cd_AFd7Zk6of614ganm/s320/Wizard-of-Oz.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>While Britain discusses the benefits of taking its poorest and angriest people and throwing them - and their families - out on the streets, international news suggests that our housing problems are going to be upstaged by the end of the century, by which time we will need <a href="http://www.earthsummit2012.org/earth-summit/earth-summit-2012">'at least another two planets'</a> to 'sustain consumption patterns.'<br />
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Two items in the news that have caught my attention this week have been:<br />
<ol><li>Reports of the growth of illegal trading in ivory and rhino horns, fuelled by China's economic boom.</li>
<li>The Environment Investigation Agency's press release on the 11th of August, accusing China of opening a loophole in its ban on trading tiger pelts.</li>
</ol>In case anyone's wondering, this isn't my annual bash-China weekend (I align mine with Morrissey's): these stories relate to the failure of laws protecting endangered animals, and in both cases the market is straining against regulations. As a booming country, it would not be surprising if China had bowed to pressure from commercial tiger-breeders to relax the trading ban, although it has not admitted to doing so. This lack of transparency and discomfort with the world's reception of its environmental and wildlife-related policies is, again, unsurprising.<br />
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Both stories fit in nicely with my general sense of helplessness about the future. Summits trying to safeguard the world from the environmental consequences of the development of a new economic A-team (the big players of which will be Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa: BRICS) have shown a tendency to flop. The worst example is the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, a watered-down, ineffectual agreement drafted by the US, China, India, Brazil and SA that is not legally binding but merely to be 'taken note of'. The next big thing on the agenda is the Rio Earth Summit, 2012, but it's hard to be optimistic about its success in forcing developed and developing countries to behave themselves in a big way. The Earth Summit website says 'The current paradigm <em>cannot </em>continue,' but nobody's found a good way to put the brakes on: if a country wants to shirk on or break its promises, we just <em>cannot </em>stop them. I'm blaming capitalism for all this. You can blame something else if you want to.<br />
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Today's cheerful message (by the way, it's my birthday) seems to be that tigers are going extinct, and so are rhinos, and so is the earth. C'est la vie. At least we have two new planets to think about. How about keeping things peaceful by giving one to the rich and one to the poor, so that the second ends up like a big teeming council house but the first one is comfortable? And another planet, perhaps, for people who refuse to believe that any of this is happening at all.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-23189342669952013382011-08-09T13:21:00.001-07:002012-04-01T02:50:26.564-07:00Fish Fight: a bit of a cop-out.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEHpEflb_6BbwEDlcEjU9gSCXCw6ppPa8sTofQ2Kjjkq4AFUdUDNVhjyD26AZPQkereSxb9jqes8r4ny6Bf4n_yfkX54b9WMLUWj2DMMcoCC3EsnTA1mroHS-yDHWLvATegQR01NGUVm_o/s1600/fish+fight0001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="155" naa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEHpEflb_6BbwEDlcEjU9gSCXCw6ppPa8sTofQ2Kjjkq4AFUdUDNVhjyD26AZPQkereSxb9jqes8r4ny6Bf4n_yfkX54b9WMLUWj2DMMcoCC3EsnTA1mroHS-yDHWLvATegQR01NGUVm_o/s320/fish+fight0001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<a href="http://www.channel4.com/programmes/hughs-fish-fight/4od">Hugh's Fish Fight: The Battle Continues</a> surprised me with Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall's transformation from foodie Etonian pig-in-a-wig to smiley-but-slightly-drawn campaigner for marine conservation.<br />
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In a nutshell, Hugh is succesfully drumming up interest in reforming the EU's Common Fisheries Policy. As it stands, the CFP's quota-based system of controlling how many and what kind of fish a fisher can legally bring in to land results in a lot of fish, dead or half-dead, being chucked back into the sea after having been caught. A hideous waste of life, or, as Hugh puts it, of 'lovely edible fish.' <br />
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My impression throughout the programme was that Mr F-W is less concerned by the serious ecological consequences of over-fishing (which is destroying habitats, destabilizing and contaminating eco-systems and endangering species) than by the idea that some of the plundered sea-creatures will fail to end up on his plate. Hugh's attitude to most living creatures is a meal-minded form of compassion which is alright in its way, but falls short of a real respect for life (eating a pig is not respecting it, Hugh) and of realistic sustainability: you cannot feed the world from a high-minded smallholding, nor does Fish Fight strike at the heart of the overfishing problem.<br />
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Fisheries Commissioner Maria Damanaki has <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-12596829">expressed support</a> for Hugh's anti-wasting campaign; she has also said, 'We are not going to fish less because of this ban on discarding.' That is good news for fishermen but does not acknowledge the fact that we're going to have to fish less - a lot less - given that the world is predicted to run out of wild-caught seafood by <a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-11/aaft-b2a102706.php">2048</a>.<br />
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Fish Fight highlights an important issue and has achieved some good things: it was a driving force behind the reformation of the CFP, the new version of which should be put into action from 2013. Nevertheless, it never properly acknowledged the importance of not eating fish, and it has been shown that while it has boosted the sales of 'unpopular' fish it has not dented the <a href="http://neweconomics.tumblr.com/post/8685235987/bravo-to-fish-fight-but-we-still-need-to-eat-less-fish">overconsumption</a> of endangered ones.<br />
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Besides, anything touched by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is bound to carry the taint of food-snobbery: that smug whinging over having to be seen holding a Tesco bag; that cringing conversation with fellow organic-fetishist Prince Charles where Charles was appalled to learn that cod is still the public's favourite fish: "They can't get off it!" Shame on you, you nation of plebby cod-heads! Haven't you heard of Hugh's Mackerel Mission?<br />
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The fact is that producing meat and fish ethically, sustainably, cheaply and plentifully isn't an option. Not until they start selling stem-cell meat, that is. But I can guarantee that the organic brigade will be out waving their pitchforks at the first mention of that.<br />
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</div>V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-48645584885441531072011-08-06T13:41:00.000-07:002011-11-02T14:59:07.238-07:00AgriCullture<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx3bzdUq5uUYTu5jK9i2ZbKDkqqBA5aZp4Hn88MZqlUdBZBpnmXurc6HtftRCaWKIWj0-HQIsRBMbfDpjqp4BrsnimT0HeM-UtiJIb5ifZNUQempOMW-V0oREc14BrTV5NkUFEYbIC3eqF/s1600/badger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx3bzdUq5uUYTu5jK9i2ZbKDkqqBA5aZp4Hn88MZqlUdBZBpnmXurc6HtftRCaWKIWj0-HQIsRBMbfDpjqp4BrsnimT0HeM-UtiJIb5ifZNUQempOMW-V0oREc14BrTV5NkUFEYbIC3eqF/s320/badger.jpg" t$="true" width="320" /></a></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/06/badger-cull-vs-vaccination-splits-countryside">Very good article</a> in the Guardian today, which describes the badger vaccination programme being deployed in Gloucester over the next five years. As well as starting with a thrilling mini-adventure about a badger called 007 (lured into a cage with peanuts, hence the cartoon) the article discusses the pros and cons of using vaccination to deal with bovine TB, instead of culling. On the one hand, it is humane and doesn't cause perturbation, which is a major drawback with the culling method. On the other, vaccination will not result in immediately dramatic improvements in TB hotspots (it's a vaccination, not a cure: there will still be infected badgers) and it is prohibitively expensive. <br />
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The coalition government is characteristically uninterested in planning for long-term solutions when it can butcher budgets: five vaccination schemes were cancelled in 2010 on cost grounds, though <a href="http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/livestock/badger-vaccination-project-was-too-expensive/32909.article">one potential contractor</a> claimed that estimated costs were inflated by 'red tape and bureaucracy.'<br />
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The thing to remember is that bTB is a disease that badgers caught from cows, and cows (or rather, the farming industry) are the reason that we all have to fuss about badgers being poorly in the wilderness. The obvious solution, and one that is much more practicable than taking potshots at a protected, wild, nocturnal animal, is to vaccinate the cows.<br />
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Bureaucracy really is the villain here: cows that have been vaccinated against TB may have a positive reaction to the tuberculin skin test, which the EU uses to identify infected livestock. I can identify with this experience - when I was at school I wasn't given the BCG vaccine because when they gave me the skin test I came up with a rash like a plate of salami. It meant that I was already immune. Because they get these reactions, immunised cows cannot be declared TB-free, according to EU law, and cannot be exported. It's all pretty stupid.<br />
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I am in favour of vaccination programmes like the one in Gloucester. I am even more in favour of developing an oral vaccine. But for the speedy easing of a crisis that can cost farmers up to £3.5 k a month, and has demanded hundreds of millions from the taxpayer over the last ten years, changing the EU testing method so that it can distinguish immunity from infection, thus enabling the vaccination of cows, is by a long way the most sensible solution.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3071802262337202937.post-46693647082077011312011-08-01T05:45:00.000-07:002011-08-06T19:04:02.824-07:00Theatre of Blood<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJpZotRm2kKIKKdsYxyf9uUo9SLBYsIantoZaio-7KDQGIO_6ZlbJCOE5-KBJvUw7vrcFKeLlAn4nZh19k3_GKShUekbJtIvWgwuibjvcTf4cnkYoQHTCY9hYkT2yfTxSNpvJarLfcKSO5/s1600/estelada.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJpZotRm2kKIKKdsYxyf9uUo9SLBYsIantoZaio-7KDQGIO_6ZlbJCOE5-KBJvUw7vrcFKeLlAn4nZh19k3_GKShUekbJtIvWgwuibjvcTf4cnkYoQHTCY9hYkT2yfTxSNpvJarLfcKSO5/s1600/estelada.jpg" t$="true" /></a></div><br />
Readers who, like me, keep a keen eye on those goofy animal stories halfway down the Daily Mail homepage (<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020855/Medical-marijuana-mans-best-friend-Seattle-company-develops-pot-patch-dogs.html">stoner chihuahuas</a>, anyone? <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020998/Kit-Kat-crushed-grapes-How-aquarium-staff-weaned-Gary-gourami-addiction-chocolate.html">Chocoholic fish</a>?) will have noticed that bullfighting in Spain is to be 'developed and protected' in the face of well-publicised movements to institute a ban. <br />
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A statement made by the Ministry of Culture, which described corrida de toros as 'an artistic discipline and cultural product' reinforces the bloodsport's status as a symbol of Spanish nationalism, and comes as a direct response to last year's banning of bullfights in Catalonia.<br />
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The Catalan campaign against bullfighting was itself interpreted as a defiant reaction to the striking down of Catalonia's statute of autonomy in July 2010. The campaign - to extend animal protection laws to include the bulls and horses that are (ab)used in bullfights - was called Prou! - 'Enough!' in Catalan. The language issue highlights the political tensions between Spain and its autonomous communities: public use of Catalan was repressed under Franco and although its usage has been restored and encouraged since 1975 it is still a language that asserts difference from the Spanish mainstream. <br />
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Historically bullfighting is no less Catalan than it is Spanish, but corrida in the twenty-first century is posited as a kind of blood-soaked national anthem, and marketed as a tourist industry. Despite its cultural status, it does not necessarily mean much to ordinary citizens: most spectators of bullfights in Madrid are tourists, while in 2010 more than 60,000 inhabitants of Madrid signed a <a href="http://www.thereader.es/spain-news-stories/4010-60,000-signal-petition-to-outlaw-bullfighting-in-Madrid.pdf?lang=en">petition</a> calling for a vote on banning them. The regional government's response was to declare the corrida protected as a part of Madrid's cultural heritage.<br />
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As is often the case, what should be a question about fundamental animal rights has been overshadowed by different political and emotional issues, in this case disputes about regional autonomy and national identity. Ideally EU animal protection laws would be stringent and comprehensive enough to protect all animals under its jurisdiction; the right to life should not be subject to cultural relativism. It is disgraceful that a tradition that involves the torture and slaughter of goaded and frightened animals can still be defended and even praised as an 'artistic discipline and cultural product.'<br />
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A country can embrace its history of warfaring, imperialism, slavery or head-shrinking, as the case may be - the past should not be forgotten or censored, good or bad. The continued development and protection of a practice that is clearly in breach of internationally accepted standards of animal welfare cannot be justified or, I hope, sustained.V.P.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09510068119362069965noreply@blogger.com0