“Baby Chimp Rescued from Chains is Finally Happy and Free”

From The Dodo:

HSUS endorses Hillary Clinton

WaPo reports:

…Now, even America’s animals are breaking their silence to voice opposition to Trump.

Okay, not really the animals themselves. But last week, the lobbying arm of the nation’s most prominent animal welfare group, the Humane Society, broke with its own tradition of not making endorsements by coming out in support of Democrat Hillary Clinton and releasing an attack ad against Trump, calling him “a threat to animals everywhere.”

…

Trump “has assembled a team [of] advisors and financial supporters tied in with trophy hunting, puppy mills, factory farming, horse slaughter, and other abusive industries,” Markarian wrote in a blog post announcing the Clinton endorsement.

The president, Markarian noted, has influence over several agencies that create policies that affect animals, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Bureau of Land Management. Donald Trump Jr., who is seen holding up a severed elephant tail in the Humane Society ad, has expressed interest in joining the Department of the Interior.

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But animal lovers shouldn’t just vote for Clinton out of fear of Trump, the HSLF argues. As the organization has written before, Clinton has a robust record on animal issues. As a senator, she sponsored legislation against animal fighting, puppy mills and slaughtering of horses for human food. As secretary of state, she led international efforts to police wildlife trafficking. The Clinton Foundation has fought elephant poaching, and Clinton’s official campaign website has a section on her positions on animal welfare.

If that’s not convincing, Markarian wrote, consider how the Clintons have shared their homes with Socks the cat and other animals, while Trump “would be the first president since Harry Truman without a pet in the White House.”

…

It should be noted that not all animal advocates are pro-Clinton. In response to the HSLF endorsement, Ecorazzi, a news site that says it has “an unapologetically vegan voice,” argued that there’s no point in looking for animal advocacy from politicians or officials who play roles in regulating the meat industry. The only hope, it says, is a “grassroots vegan movement.”

Look, Ecorazzi, there are two plausible options here: Clinton or Trump. A continuing grassroots vegan movement is necessary regardless. How do you think that would fare in a Trump presidency?

Recommended: Wild Tales (2014)

I loved this film despite hating its underlying premise.



As the title suggests, and the opening credits make explicit, Wild Tales is based on the notion that we’re a heartbeat away from “regressing” to our animal nature. As expected, this nature is characterized by: violence, vengeance, irrationality, lust, the reflexive defense of kin and tribe, greed, and gluttony.

This sort of speciesism – which itself underlies a great deal of racism, sexism, and political repression - we can and should avoid, particularly in works that aspire to political satire or social criticism. Director Damián Szifrón has discussed the film’s theme:

Despite the clear common theme of violence and vengeance, what connects the accounts, according to the director, is ‘the fuzzy boundary that separates civilization from barbarism, the vertigo of losing your temper, and the undeniable pleasure of losing control’. This is explored through the concept that human beings have animalistic features. Szifron considers the main difference between human and animals is the capacity one has to restrain oneself as opposed to animals who are guided by their instincts. Humans ‘have a fight or flee mechanism, but it comes with a very high cost. Most of us live with the frustration of having to repress oneself, but some people explode. This is a movie about those who explode’. It deals with ‘daily life’ aspects and ‘is a movie about the desire for freedom, and how this lack of freedom, and the rage and anguish it produces, can cause us to run off the rails’. The main issue, according to Szifron, ‘is the pleasure of reacting, the pleasure of reacting toward injustice’. (my emphasis)

The Freudian distinction between a repressed “civilization” and a “barbarous” freedom, in addition to isolating the human characters with their alleged instincts and drives, presents an obstacle to working out a real approach to political freedom and social justice. As I said, I loved the film, but it could have been a much stronger work of art, a stinging and biting social satire, had it questioned and challenged received wisdom about “civilization” and “barbarism,” “human” and “animal,” rather than reproducing it.

Recommended: Sherpa

Tremendous documentary, now on the Discovery Channel. (One aspect I emphatically do not recommend are the subtitles. Why anyone would place small white subtitles with no box behind them over a snowy, icy landscape is beyond me.)

Quotes and photo of the day - monster

“‘Although this animal is huge I was not that surprised it existed’, Mr Lightsey said. ‘We have come across lots over the last 20 years that have been only a little smaller. But what really drew our attention to this animal was the fact that it seems to have been feasting on the cattle on my farm, because mutilated body parts were found in the water. It was a monster which needed to be removed’.” [Source]

“‘A big alligator nonetheless, but they are not going to have an official measurement because it's not going to beat the record’, Tony Young, spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said in a phone interview.” [Source]

And here’s an alligator at the Merritt Island Wildlife “Refuge,”* presumably thinking, “No, I’m not a rock, you idiot leaning over the water and extending your appendages. Go get your glasses.”

* I don’t think any of us would consider a place where people can suddenly hunt us for sport to be a refuge.

Shooting video

(I agree – he’s one of them.)



[Source]

The creepiest ad

The advertisements featured in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, an alternate history in which the Confederacy has won the US Civil War, are among the movie’s most striking elements:







They hit home through the familiarity of their form and their resemblance to real commercials today (as the first video above notes, some are based on real twentieth-century brands; the reference of the last should be obvious).

For those who know the reality of dairy and meat production, the new Freschetta Pizza ad evokes a somewhat similar dystopian sensation. Meet Tilly Mae:



Commercials like this seem to be reviving tropes - like the plantation “family” and the “happy darky” - developed in the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. This seems particularly to be the case, for some reason, when they feature cows and chickens.

I AM MORGAN

Historical quote of the day - the drive for life and the drive for destruction

“It would seem that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed. By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s [sic] sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities…. In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions which make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies – either against others or against oneself – are nourished.”

- Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 181-182

Terrifying rightwing mobs rampage in Israel

US media remain silent. State officials continue to encourage racist rioting. As Rania Khalek argues, “As Israel’s culture of hatred spirals out of control, the media outlets concealing the incitement from top Israeli leaders and the ‘death to Arabs’ riots they help spawn are complicit, again.”

Meanwhile, this is the march the vegwashers want some activists to see.

COWSPIRACY

Now on Netflix:

Quote of the day – when analogies prove more thought-provoking than intended

“Farmers Weekly journalist Johann Tasker said it was like ‘appointing a pacifist as shadow defence secretary’.”

- offered in response to Jeremy Corbyn’s appointment of vegan Kerry McCarthy as shadow secretary for environment, food, and rural affairs, quoted here

In PR and censorship news…

The sleazy, repressive, illegitimate regime in Honduras has hired Ketchum (for more about which, see here, here, here, here, and here) to do its spin. It also helps to silence real journalists.

Quote of the day – almost unbearable

“We arrived at midnight on Tuesday and stayed until 3am. I have been at protests which started at 5am, but this was my first that started at midnight, and I was so comforted by the activists who came to be there at such an odd and early hour. We stationed ourselves in a spot where the truck would have to stop at the red light that is actually on a busy highway, but it is quieter at this hour.

We were able to rush to the side of the truck to be near the chickens. Although to avoid us, one truck driver drove through the red light.

Every truck was different as was the placement of the chickens in the crates—some facing us, some not. But one, who I can still see, was a small chicken lying on her side facing me. I could see her baby blue eye and her exhausted face staring back at me, blinking. She was on her side and looked like she was being crushed.

This is where bearing witness becomes almost unbearable. Watching her look at me and not being able to get her out is one of those situations where you fear losing your sanity because you lack the ability to do anything, much less comprehend why this gentle little bird was about to smell death, experience even more fear, and of course, die herself.

As I sit here now, my heart hurts and my eyes burn from the idea that she was probably gone within hours of me seeing her along with so many like her—thousands of them. The image of her will forever be in my heart and mind.

And all I can tell myself is that at least I was able to tell her (and all of them) how sorry I was and that I loved her. Which I repeated over and over…”

- “Bearing Witness”

Quote of the day

“Over the past couple of years, SeaWorld’s visitor numbers have fallen, its stock has plummeted, lawsuits have confronted their business practices, legislation has challenged what goes on at Shamu Stadium, and reported profits were down 84% on the previous year.

People ask me whether this is a win. I can only say that it was inevitable, and that I hope it’s only the beginning. Today’s kids are increasingly becoming part of the ‘I can’t believe we used to do that’ generation. They know that killer whales are not suitable for captivity.”

- Gabriela Cowperthwaite, director of Blackfish

So cute

Even better, I saw this, with other touchingly cute pictures, in a story about a California couple who have become vegans and started an animal sanctuary, and are converting their goat’s milk cheese business into a vegan cheese business.

Quote of the day: state-backed censors

“Protecting the private interests of a powerful industry, which produces the public’s food supply, against public scrutiny is not a legitimate government interest.” – Judge B. Lynn Winmill, striking down Idaho’s unconstitutional ag gag law

Hooray! The first domino to fall. You can read the whole decision at the link here. It’s a lesson in the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Congratulations and thanks to the ALDF and all the other plaintiffs.

Historical quote of the day

“Nothing like the battle of Omdurman will ever be seen again. It was the last link in the long chain of those spectacular conflicts whose vivid and majestic splendour has done so much to invest war with glamour.

…This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills. It was not like the Great War. Nobody expected to be killed…. To the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.”

- Winston Churchill, My Early Life: 1874-1904, quoted in Sven Lindqvist,‘Exterminate All the Brutes’: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1992), pp. 53-54

Historical quote of the day

“The enterprise of deculturation turns out to be the negative of a more gigantic work of economic, and even biological, enslavement.

The doctrine of cultural hierarchy is thus but one aspect of a systematized hierarchization implacably pursued.

…The apparition of racism is not fundamentally determining. Racism is not the whole but the most visible, the most day-to-day and, not to mince matters, the crudest element of a given structure.

...

This precise cultural element, however, has not become encysted. Racism has not managed to harden. It has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance. It has had to undergo the fate of the cultural whole that informed it.

The vulgar, primitive, over-simple racism purported to find in biology – the Scriptures having proved insufficient – the material basis of the doctrine….

Such affirmation, crude and massive, gave way to a more refined argument. Here and there…an occasional relapse is to be noted….

These old-fashioned positions tend in any case to disappear. This racism that aspires to be rational, individual, genotypically and phenotypically determined, becomes transformed into cultural racism. The object of racism is no longer the individual man but a certain form of existing. At the extreme, such terms as ‘message’ and ‘cultural style’ are resorted to. ‘Occidental values’ oddly blend with the already famous appeal to the fight of the ‘cross against the crescent’….

Racism…is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people….

…In reality the nations that undertake a colonial war have no concern for the confrontation of cultures. War is a gigantic business and every approach must be governed by this datum. The enslavement, in the strictest sense, of the native population is the prime necessity.

For this its systems of reference have to be broken. Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder, are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking. The social panorama is destructured; values are flaunted, crushed, emptied.

…

For a time it looked as though racism had disappeared. This soul-soothing, unreal impression was simply the consequence of the evolution of forms of exploitation. Psychologists spoke of a prejudice having become unconscious. The truth is that the rigor of the system made the daily affirmation of a superiority superfluous. The need to appeal to various degrees of approval and support, to the native’s cooperation, modified relations in a less crude, more subtle, more ‘cultivated’ direction. It was not rare, in fact, to see a ‘democratic and humane’ ideology at this stage. The commercial undertaking of enslavement, of cultural destruction, progressively gave way to a verbal mystification.

…

The habit of considering racism as a mental quirk, as a psychological flaw, must be abandoned.

…

It is not possible to enslave men [sic] without logically making them inferior through and through. And racism is only the emotional, affective, sometimes intellectual explanation of this inferiorization.

The racist in a culture with racism is therefore normal. He has achieved a perfect harmony of economic relations and ideology.

…

Race prejudice in fact obeys a flawless logic. A country that lives, draws its substance from the exploitation of other peoples, makes those peoples inferior. Race prejudice applied to those peoples is normal.

Racism is therefore not a constant of the human spirit.

It is, as we have seen, a disposition fitting into a well-defined system. And anti-Jewish prejudice is not different from anti-Negro prejudice. A society has race prejudice or it has not. There are no degrees of prejudice. One cannot say that a given country is racist but that lynchings or extermination camps are not to be found there. The truth is that all that and still other things exist on the horizon. These virtualities, these latencies circulate, carried by the life-stream of psycho-affective, economic relations…”

- Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” in Toward the African Revolution, first presented as a talk at the First International Congress of Black Artists and Writers, Paris, 1956

Quote of the day

“If realized in Honduras, charter cities will be founded on mass land theft, violation of human rights, and repression and criminalization of popular movements fighting to defend their communities.”

- Heather Gies

The Honduras Solidarity Network, Food First, and other US organizations and activists in solidarity with the people of Honduras will be protesting the neoliberal event “FREE TO CHOOSE CITIES: New Opportunities for Enterprise & Governance in Honduras and Beyond” in San Francisco tomorrow (Monday, June 8, 2015).

The organizers of the charter cities event are familiar names from the US and Latin American rightwing network. Kind of an inauspicious moment for such a meeting. The Honduran “president” has decided to send a representative rather than appear in person.

You can read the interesting analysis of OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, the federation of Honduran indigenous peoples’ organizations) in Spanish here.

...Ciertamente en Honduras se vive un caos inducido, que ha colocado a la democracia al borde del abismo. Recientemente la Organización Mundial de la Salud señaló un promedio de 102 asesinatos por cada cien mil habitantes, cifra que lo califica como el mas violento del planeta. La impunidad alcanza al 95% de los homicidios, y el debacle causado por el saqueo de instituciones estatales ha destruido el sistema de salud nacional.

No obstante la solución que pretende un grupúsculo de políticos y empresarios de rematar zonas del país al capital extranjero, donde se les permitirá una tabula rasa jurídica, es un simple negocio de la elite de poder, que dará lugar a islas de afluencia circundadas por un mar de pobreza y violencia. El fracaso de Honduras esta relacionado directamente con la condición de piratas de aquellos que han ejercido el poder y se han asociado con el narcotráfico en las ultimas décadas, permitiendo el colapso del sistema jurídico y la putrefacción de las fuerzas de seguridad.

Mientras en San Francisco se planifican las nuevas formas de gobernanza para Honduras, en la isla de Zacate Grande, golfo de Fonseca, se ha declarado un toque de queda; casualmente en un paraje vecino a donde pretenden los libertarios colocar en un inicio sus plataformas flotantes....