Skywritings

The cheap sensationalist dimension of PETA — as in some of its perverse pubic ads about fur — is obviously pathological.

The trouble is that mass movements and causes of any kind — good and bad — also tend to attract the lunatic tail of the Bell Curve. And some in PETA seem to think that any kind of attention is good attention.

And of course, as in all charities, there is a split between good works and fund-raising.

It’s so hard to say whether on balance PETA does more harm or good.

I appreciate the way they monitor and call attention to abuse (sometimes terribly graphically — but I’m beginning to think that that might be necessary, with most of the planet unaware of the horrors, or in denial).

I don’t know if the petitions and campaigns end up reducing suffering. I sign. I’m informed about the appalling scope and scale of the abominations. I hope. And I’m trying to find a non-token way I can help.

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The distribution of vegan burritos to the homeless in Montreal is good: It helps people. It also proves that vegans don’t care only about nonhuman animals.

But just about everyone is in favor of helping people (whether or not they actually do it). And most people are not contributing to harming people, or in favor of it.

Not so for animals. Most people are contributing to harming them, and most are not opposed to — or even aware of — the unimaginable scale of that harm.

So I think animals need help even more than homeless people do. And of course there are incomparably more of them, purpose bred, industrial-scale, for exploitation.

(And I deplore the way urban homeless people acquire animals to share their fate (or sometimes just their life-style choice) and soften people for a handout. I’ve even seen them sitting on St. Denis in the cold holding on to shivering kittens or cats they’ve co-opted for that purpose, very much the way the Romany use their own babies for begging; similar practices in India. We protest to the use of the babies; no such chorus for the animals. — No, the ones that need help the most, and most urgently, are animals. While we continue to countenance the treatment of animals as property we will never treat people properly either.)

(And if we used the arable part of the planet to grow food to feed people instead of to feed it to animals that we purpose breed, brutalize and butcher to feed ourselves, there would be more food to feed more people. And a far more humane attitude toward both human and nonhuman animals.)

Two remarkable women have collaborated in the creation of this profoundly unsettling and unforgettable glimpse of the immeasurable suffering being imposed at every instant, all over the planet, on its most helpless and undefended inhabitants. All that agony is being imposed by us, needlessly, and, for most of us, unknowingly. The Ghosts in Our Machine is Liz Marshall’s and Jo-Anne McArthur’s historic attempt to loosen the scales on our own eyes by allowing us to gaze into eyes of our victims.

They do not try to overwhelm as with graphic images of horrors. Apart from one fleeting, grainy moment toward the end of the film, we witness only the miserable conditions in which the victims are caged and restrained throughout their short, hopeless lives, awaiting their ultimate fates — which are left to the far more merciless medium of our own imaginations and consciences, rather than the camera. The camera is reserved for eye contact with the (countless) Damned and the few Saved — whisked away in the last moment to a Sanctuary.

Everything is profoundly and passionately thought through in the composition of this powerful and beautiful documentary: The Ghosts are the then-doomed (and now-destroyed) feeling creatures who look us in the eye throughout the movie. The Machine is the industrial complex that breeds, brutalizes and butchers them for the market’s palates, fashions and entertainment. And the market is Us.

Apart from Liz and Jo-Anne’s formidable artistic skills, we also sense and share their agony at being unable to rescue their subjects, and their yearning to mobilize us to power down and phase out this monstrous machine.

One would have to be a psychopath to witness this film and leave saying and feeling: well, it’s too bad, but that’s the way it’s going to have to be: my palate, fashion and entertainment are worth those animals’ continuing agony.

Why on earth should the democratic opposition seek electoral victory?

Viktor Orban has robbed the country blind.

Even if the opposition wins the next election, Orban’s long-term appointees, oligarchs, croneys and infrastructure will be there to make sure the opposition fails and Orban gets quickly and triumphantly re-elected the next time round.

Meanwhile, the poop is set to hit the propellor in the next few years, big time, as Orban’s Ponzo Kleptocracy implodes.

And the Hungarian populace is fully media-primed to pin the blame for the catastrophe on the opposition yet again, if they are in government at the time.

So it seems to me like lose/lose for the opposition to aim for electoral victory.

The opposition should instead pull out all stops on telling it how it is, whether or not the populace is yet ready to believe it — and this seems to be exactly what Ferenc Gyurcsany’s Democratic Coalition is doing.

Let the public hear the truth, loud and clear, vote for Fidesz just the same, and then face the consequences.

Just deprive Orban of his supermajority, which allows him to paper over every piece of piracy with a new law.

The economic catastrophe of the next four years is now inescapable: Let it fall on Orban’s head, deprived of the superlegislative power to protect him from the consequences.

And let the free and foreign media trumpet the Democratic Coalition’s message loud and clear throughout.

Hungary is beyond any quick fix now; but allowing effects to coincide with their causes is the only hope of awakening the gormless Hungarian electorate to who and what is the real cause of their misfortunes.

Both Pinker’s dreary scientism and Wieseltier’s spirited critique are stunningly superficial, and the reason is simple:

“Science” is just systematic common sense: thinking that is constrained by reason and by fidelity to tested and testable facts. These are not the monopoly of disciplines that call themselves “sciences.” (They are not even always faithfully practiced by them!)

The English word “science” is an empty scientistic label that attempts to confer a crisp authority where boundaries are fuzzy: “science has found“; “scientists say.” Other languages partition knowledge as consisting of the physical sciences and the human sciences rather than the sciences and the humanities — and by the “human sciences” they don’t just mean “evolutionary psychology” or “cognitive neuroscience.”

There is, however, a much simpler distinction that does capture a difference worth noting (though on this both Pinker and Wieseltier are in agreement in their distaste for “postmodernism”): the difference between conclusions based on evidence and reason and conclusions based on interpretation and opinion.

Roughly speaking this is the difference between empiricism and hermeneutics. But there is a component of the latter in just about all knowledge, except possibly mathematics. So that’s no basis for mapping out two distinct territories either; it’s just a difference in degree.

How multitudes of people
can gather to gawk daily
at these magnificent, miserable creatures,
all brutally wrenched
from their devastated families
and forced to perform round after round
of cheap Skinnerian circus tricks,
pitilessly imprisoned
for the rest of their wretched, ruined lives
in holding containers,
tormented day and night
by the bouncing echoes
from their own hopeless sonar cries,
food-deprived and “trained”
to do whatever it takes
to draw delighted cheers
from grinning crowds of humans of all ages…

Did it really require this revealing new movie, Blackfish, to open our eyes to the ugly, shameful fact that this, and all things like this, are wrong, horribly, unforgivably, wrong?

That we provide the mindless market for such heartless abuse, in order to make our children laugh, is as much a condemnation of the sociopathic spectatorship as of the merciless, mercenary management of sadistic sea circuses — and all their land counterparts.

Perhaps the most chilling anomaly is how the “trainers” — of whom some, clearly, “turned,” eventually, after years of having been willing accomplices to the abuse of these helpless animals — were themselves “trained” (by the management along with self-deception) to overlook the obvious, in exchange for the fees and the celebrity (“just following orders”? “being professional”?). It seems to have been various blends of venality and sensation-seeking, though some got into it naively, and then got attached to their prisoners and stayed so as to use what little leverage they had to make their fates less worse, rather than abandon them altogether. — Or maybe that was just what they said for the camera? (I hope not.)

But most macabre of all was that some professed to have become Seaworld trainers to fulfill a dream that Seaworld itself had instilled in them as a child.

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Tilikum’s punishment for having been savagely kidnapped and relentlessly abused for decades:

Solitary confinement
to provide sperm
for breeding more orcas
to be wrenched from their mothers
and put into entertainment servitude
for the rest of their miserable lives
to inspire more children
about the wonders of the sea

And if you have the courage
to face the cost of your lunch:

This is how it’s done
day in and day out
24/7
worldwide,
industrially

— and for ye “faithful,”
scripturally

If this does not make you a vegan,
you need to ask yourself whether you have a heart…

Anyone who replies that this is natural or justifiable
makes an equally good case for torture, rape, slavery and murder.

All in our genes. All practiced in self-interest.

But wait for the day when it is for you and yours
that you must plead for mercy
from the monstrousness you have ignored, tolerated and drawn upon
lifelong.

And from which you avert your gaze now…

“Samuel was less than a day old when he was torn away from his mother. He was a young jersey calf whose mother was kept continually pregnant in order to keep her milk production unnaturally high so it could be sold for human consumption. Although nature intended the milk for Samuel, none was afforded him. Samuel was penned alone, chained at the neck and unable to interact with the other calves.

“The day I found Samuel, he had been loaded into a transport trailer with many other young calves and taken to a Canadian livestock auction. But Samuel was very sick and should never have been loaded and transported. He was so sick, in fact, that he could not even make it through the auction ring.The auction workers dragged Samuel to the back of the auction and discarded him there with no food, water or medical attention. There he was left to die alone, just as he had lived alone.

“I saw Samuel buried in the straw with only his small face poking out and thought he was dead until he started convulsing. My first thought was to load him into my car and get him to a vet who could peacefully end his suffering but he was too far gone. Samuel died in my arms while I stroked and comforted him. Sometimes this is all we can do for the animals we find – provide them with the dignity, care and comfort that they’ve never been shown.

“Samuel is the hidden face of the dairy industry – one that profits off the milk of a mother who will never nourish her child. Veal calves are sickly, traumatized and lonely. Their mothers are forced into a life of production and are heartbroken, forced to endure an endless cycle of birth and loss.”

Source: Twyla Francois, director of investigations at Mercy For Animals Canada.

PHOTO: is of Samuel (R.I.P.) dying and discarded at a Canadian livestock auction

How can anyone with a shred of decency believe that deliberately causing suffering to the innocent creatures that are the symbol of Christ’s suffering can be the way to atone for Christ’s suffering?

The insightful March 8 essay on Hungary’s Self-Destructive Demons, by poet/journalist Thomas Orszag-Land described the complex and sinister relationship between the stunning success of Viktor Orban’s opportunistic megalomania and his unscrupulous exploitation of the unreconstructed cultural affinity of the Hungarian populace for the ugliest and most vicious forms of denial, scapegoating and xenophobia. 

Apart from a couple of points on which it (forgiveably) goes a bit over the top (about the potential for kingship and the triple “junk” quote), Orszag-Land’s March 8 essay is temperate, timely and telling, and has since been not so much overtaken as confirmed by events, with the self-ratification, by Orban’s supermajority, of the constitutional amendment self-indemnifyng Orban’s new constitution from oversight by the constitutional court.

Orszag-Land raises the interesting hypothesis that although Orban has successfully used his supermajority (as well as the pork-barreling of the electorate, party faithful and oligarchs) to entrench his power far beyond the possibility of reversal even under any ordinary electoral majority defeat by the (shamefully and self-destructively divided) democratic opposition, he may yet be undone by having profoundly alienated the only forces that can sustain the dictator of a small, poor country in modern times: either powerful international economic interests or the support of powerful surrounding nations.

And there is another potential contingency: Orban is not stable. He has already demonstrated himself to be a psychopath, has already been showing signs of mounting paranoia, is rumored to be under treatment for bipolar disorder, and seems to be less and less aware (or perhaps less and less in control) of the fact that Hungarian is translatable into any other language — and diffuses at lightning speed in today’s online era — so that his so far successful double-talk (in contemptuous jingo for his compatriots and sugary demagoguery for the rest of the world) may yet prove his undoing, impelling his hitherto intact cult following to jump ship out of self-interest, rather than to continue to sink with their leader, as his antics become more and more dissociated and pathological. 

Hungary is not, after all, North Korea (and not just because it lacks China to prop it up, come what may).