Gordon says:
> >There doesn't seem to be any contradiction between
> >prohibiting cruelty to animals (no quotes -- I think it is
> >possible to be cruel to an animal) and prohibiting standing
> >armies and weapons of mass destruction, and which one one
> >did first could be selected on a basis of opportunity. So
> >the question is completely vacuous.
> >
> >As for Americans caring more about non-human animals than
> >human animals, this seems like a matter of personal choice
> >and disposition.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> ***** http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,41733,00.html
> FBI Goes After Bonsaikitten.com
> by Declan McCullagh (declan at wired.com)
> 10:10 a.m. Feb. 9, 2001 PST
>
> ...In December 1999, President Clinton signed a law that makes it a
> federal felony to possess "a depiction of animal cruelty" with the
> intent to distribute across state lines -- such as on the Internet.
> During a floor debate, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.) claimed that
> "sick criminals are taking advantage of the loopholes in the local
> law and the lack of federal law on animal cruelty videos."... *****
>
> It's not a matter of personal choice but what is compatible with
> capitalism. You _can't_ prohibit standing armies & weapons of mass
> destruction unless you abolish capitalism, whereas you can pass laws
> prohibiting "a depiction of animal cruelty" (however futile such laws
> may be), as Clinton, etc. did, without disturbing capitalism at all,
> merely bringing _hypocrisy_ (it is _cruelty_ to torment cute furry
> creatures, but it is _patriotic honor or military necessity_ to kill
> or injure human animals, be they enemy soldiers, enemy civilians,
> soldiers of one's own & allied armies, or even civilians in whose
> name one is fighting) in the USA to a higher level.
Now that you've retreated from your implied slander of my friends at Food Not Bombs, we have less to argue about. However, we still don't know if your nemesis-of-the-middle-class deejay buddy will likewise retreat, persist in the argument, or disappear, nor whether the mighty "animal-rights people are all Nazis" canard will reappear. I must conserve my strength!
However, I'll give the short form of the argument. There are those who believe that "Man", having the power, has therefore the right and perhaps the duty to freely do whatever he wishes to the inanimate environment. Likewise, there are those who believe that "Man", having the power, has therefore a similar right or duty to do whatever he wishes to non-human animals of whatever apparent degree of sentience. It is not much of a step from these propositions to the proposition that some instances of "Man", having the power, have therefore a right or duty to do whatever they wish to other instances of "Man", especially because the latter are of a certain class, caste, ethnicity, or other deprecated category. There is no basic contradiction between crushing humans, crushing non-human animals, and crushing the earth in general, and there is no contradiction between opposition to one of these and opposition to another. The philosophic fabric of all three crushing procedures is one and the same: "Might makes right."
One can draw some arbitrary philosophical or legal boundary around human beings, but one could just as well place it around White males of property, or master races of various sorts, as was done not so long ago in the past. Once the principle of death and domination is established, it's easy enough to move the line.
The laws about the depiction of animal cruelty are, of course, a complete sham, as well as being obviously unconstitutional. I don't see the point of mentioning them. No laws will be made actually outlawing "Man's" inhumanity to non-"Man", just as no laws will be made actually outlawing "Man's" inhumanity to "Man". The purpose of the Law is to perpetuate such things, not abolish them. But shams are always welcome.
Michael Pugliese:
> ...
> Anyway, when did some become all? Saying a few upper-middle class yups like
> their pups more than people ("Up With People!" as the Michael Curb
> Congregation said circa 1970 ) seems to me not to be denigrating animal
> liberation or rights but, pointing out the stunted moral sensibilities of
> those who feed their pooches the best while telling the homeless beggar at
> the subway entrance to get a job. ...
Yoshie's deprecation was generic; Mr. Deejay followed her up, giving anecdotal support and saying nothing in qualification or mitigation. Rhetorically speaking, then, those remarks inherited fully the generic quality of the (unjustified) deprecation they supported. And I wonder, as below (in lbo-talk), is it so above (in the airwaves); are the fearsome Middle Class of animal-rights telphone activists regularly struck down between this record and that? It would be nice to know that somebody's fighting for the working class against the depredations of cat-lovers.
As for moral sensibilities, there in your last sentence; we should feed every hungry person on earth before we feed our cats and dogs, or what? Or should we turn them out to fend for themselves, or just kill them all? (I believe that's PETA's theory.) How about other people's animals, people who lack our moral exactitude -- should we deal definitively with them, too? After all, they might be Middle Class!
What's your moral proposal here?