Day: May 10, 2001

Wendy McElroy on Feminist Hypocrisy

Back in January, Wendy McElroy gave an excellent speech at a conference about the European Union that was later published on the web, Equality vs. Freedom. McElroy does an excellent job of laying out the case for favoring freedom over equality in general, and highlights an excellent example of feminist hypocrisy on freedom.

Toward the end of the article she writes about debating Kathleen Barry about prostitution. McElroy believes that any sex between consenting adults — including sex for money — should be allowed, whereas Barry is well known as an outspoken opponent of prostitution (as McElroy notes, Barry was asked to write the part of the United Nation’s Code of Human Rights that deals with women).

Anyway, at their debate both Barry and McElroy argued that prostitution should be decriminalized. McElroy writes that by decriminalization she means that laws against prostitution should be eliminated. Barry had a similarly though twisted version of decriminalization. McElroy writes,

Barry meant that no laws should be applied to women involved in prostitution. Only the men should be arrested and punished. In other words, when a man and a woman commit the same act, the same crime, only the man would be legally liable.

This is very different from having one law that is applied unequally to men and women. The law being proposed would specifically and pointedly create two categories of people and two categories of punishment for the same offense: women who are exempt, men who are guilty. For committing the same act. This is a hideous development.

And, of course, a development that is all too common among contemporary feminists.

Source:

Equality vs. Freedom. Wendy McElroy, The Mises Institute, January 22, 2001.

Bush Gets It Half-Right on Military/Foreign Policy

When it comes to foreign policy, the first 100 days of George W. Bush’s administration has been a mixed bag. For the most part, Bush does seem to be following a relatively more non-interventionist path than Bill Clinton did, but at the same time he seems to be giving a lot of weight to Pentagon hard liners who want bigger budgets for exotic new weapons systems. A good example of this mixed blessing is the administration’s proposal for an idea whose time has come — the abandonment of the so-called two fronts military strategy.

The two fronts position says that the U.S. military should be ready to fight major wars on at least two fronts, and pegs the size of the military to fulfill that role. With the end of the Cold War, what little logic there was behind this policy all but disappeared. But that didn’t stop the Clinton administration from keeping it in place.

Now numerous news agencies are reporting that as part of the review of the military Bush ordered, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is preparing to announce that the United States will abandon the two fronts strategy. This is a very good development.

The downside is that although the administration seems likely to recommend significant cuts in the number of military personnel, it is apparently going to argue that this smaller armed force nonetheless will require sizeable budget increases. Apparently the idea is to equip this smaller force with advanced, exotic — and more expensive — weapons systems.

A better plan would be to make significant cuts in both the size and budget of the military and simultaneously extricate the United States from commitments that would lead the nation into a military intervention abroad.

Source:

US ends ‘two fronts’ strategy. The BBC, May 7, 2001.

No Accountability in the War on Drugs

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a brief news item illustrating one of the most dangerous aspects of the war on drugs — an end to holding agents of the state accountable for their actions.

In this case, a SWAT team was attempting to serve an arrest warrant at 6:30 a.m., and knocked on a home owned by 27-year-old Jennifer Switalski. Switalski wasn’t home at the time, but two tenants who rent half of the duplex from her were home along with their two-year-old daughter. When nobody answered the door, the SWAT team smashed the door down, threw the tenants to the floor and handcuffed them.

As happen so often with these supposedly highly trained paramilitary forces, it turned out they were at the wrong house. The warrant was for the house three doors down.

Switalski sued the Milwaukee police department for damage to the door as well as for lost rental income and lost “peace of mind.” Circuit Judge Stanley Miller threw her lawsuit out saying that since the SWAT team was acting on a lawful warrant, they were immune from such lawsuits.

So much for living in a nation of laws rather than capricious power.

Source:

Suit over SWAT team error thrown out. Tom Kertscher, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 6, 2001.

RioVolt Review

I’d already read a number of very positive reviews of the RioVolt MP3 player, so when I happened across one in Best Buy the other day, I grabbed it on impulse. For the most part, the RioVolt lives up to the hype.

Unlike MP3 players that rely on flash memory, the RioVolt plays CDs burned with MP3s (it can also play regular CDs as well). Unlike some of the first MP3 CD players, the RioVolt makes it relatively easy to navigate through a CD that might contain hundreds of songs.

The big advantage it has over something like Philips Expanium MP3 CD player is that the RioVolt can recognize and display ID3 tags which means that when you’re navigating a subdirectory you see something like “U2 – Beautiful Day” rather than “Directory 3 – Track 5.” Currently the RioVolt supports up to 999 tracks on a single CD. The navigation buttons are relatively straightforward and navigating through CDs with hundreds of MP3s is easy.

I burned several different CDs containing MP3s encoded at 128kbs through 320 kbs, and the RioVolt handled them fine. The one disappointment I had on playback was that the much-touted skip protection wasn’t really that effective. I had no problem making the player skip routinely at even low encoding rates.

The buttons on the unit and the included remote control are also extremely sensitive. A number of times I was listening to music with the unit in my coat pocket when slight pressure on the exterior of the coat caused the unit’s Pause or Stop buttons to engage. RioVolt has the standard “Hold” switch feature, so there is a workaround.

The player’s software is also upgradeable. Just copy the latest firmware release off the RioVolt web site, burn it as the only file on a CD-R, put it in the player and turn it on.

Battery life is excellent. It’s rated to play for about 15 hours on two AA batteries. I didn’t actually test the unit to see how long it would last before going dead, but my rechargeables were still going strong after 10 hours of use.

At only $170, as long as you’ve got a computer with a CD-R/W drive and are comfortable burning MP3 CDs, at the moment the RioVolt offers what I think is the best combination of features at a reasonable price.

PETA's Hypocritical Lawsuit Against Ringling Brothers

The Associated Press reported this week that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has filed suit in Virginia against Ringling Brothers Circus. The lawsuit charges Ringling Brothers with using paid investigators to infiltrate PETA by pretending to be volunteers. The spying allegedly took place in the early 1980s.

Of course PETA pioneered this technique of infiltrating groups itself — in fact it came to national prominence precisely because of Alex Pacheco‘s questionable undercover work. Now, however, PETA is complaining that this case is different.

The Associated Press quoted PETA’s Lisa Lange as explaining, “First of all, we don’t steal documents in our investigations. More importantly, we investigate situations where we have reason to belive, either through whistle blowers or industry practices, that illegal and abusive treatment of animals exist.”

Lange’s first statement is an outright lie. In 1997 PETA settled a lawsuit brought against it by Huntingdon Life Sciences over a PETA operative who infiltrated HLS. That operative stole hundreds of HLS documents and video tapes, and one of the requirements of the settlement agreement was that PETA had to return or destroy all materials stolen from HLS.

As for PETA investigating only where there are allegations of animal abuse: a) PETA has manufactured evidence of animal abuse as often as it has uncovered it, and b) given Ingrid Newkirk and other PETA staff members tendency to praise animal rights terrorism, it would not be much of a stretch to wonder if PETA might be engaged in illegal activities itself. Certainly there is at least as much evidence for that as there is for some of the bogus claims that PETA has pursued.

Ringling Brothers, for its part, told the Associated Press that the company had not been served with the lawsuit yet and so could not comment.

Source:

PETA: Circus spied on us. Matthew Barakat, Associated PRess, May 8, 2001.

Surge in Cancer Drugs Demonstrates Importance of Basic Research

Many animal rights activists have an extremely simplified view of animal research which seems derived largely from pop culture depictions of research. Do a few experiments, find a cure, move on. If experiments don’t lead immediately to cures or treatments, many animal rights activists conclude, they must be unnecessary and cruel. The recent surge in cancer drug testing, however, illustrates how progress really occurs in treating diseases.

Over the last few decades, billions of dollars has been poured into Cancer research — much of it for expensive animal tests of one treatment or another. As animal rights activists are happy to point out, all that money and all of those dead animals have yet to produce a cure. A typical example of this view is a fact sheet published by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Cancer: Why We’re Losing the “War”.

But the bottom line is that medical research into something like cancer is going to take a lot of time to see results. The last 30 years have seen an amazing growth in the understanding of cancer, much of it due to animal tests. As the Boston Globe recently reported, all that research is finally starting to come to some fruition. Today there are more than 400 different drug compounds in various stages human clinical trials to test their efficacy at treating cancer.

One of the interesting new technologies mentioned by the Boston Globe are monoclonal antibodies, which it notes are antibodies produced in the lab designed to seek out and destroy cancer cells. Animal rights activists are very much in favor of monoclonal antibodies because there is a distinct possibility that any ultimate cancer treatment based on them could be made without using animals. But the bottom line is that, contrary to PETA’s propaganda, animal experiments and research played a fundamental role in the development of monoclonal antibodies. It’s a technology that wouldn’t exist without animal research.

None of this, of course, means that a cure for cancer is going to be announced next week. But progress is being made thanks to animal research, and it is outrageous for groups like PETA to continue claiming otherwise.

Source:

Cancer drugs surge in pipeline. Naomi Aoki, Boston Globe, April 11, 2001.