Just another nerd.
A small plane crashed into the tallest building in Milan, Italy, today, creating a huge hole and setting part of the building on fire for awhile. Apparently the fire has been put out, and all indications so far are that it was an accident rather than an act of terrorism.
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Sometimes I cannot believe how utterly stupid people can be when dealing with matters of life and death. I’m probably to the right of Charlton Heston on the right to keep and bear arms, but it never ceases to amazes me just how cavalierly some people treat guns.
A front page story in my local newspaper today is all about one such act of idiocy. A woman in Milton Township, Michigan, discovered a Glock .40-caliber pistol in her kitchen — several people lived in the home, including the woman’s daughter and grandchild, and there is no word yet on who owned the gun.
So what would you do if you discovered a Glock just laying around, and, of course, you don’t want children getting access to it? Make sure the weapon isn’t loaded and lock it in the trunk of a vehicle? Or maybe you make sure the weapon isn’t loaded, remove the magazine, and place it on top of a tall appliance like a refrigerator?
No, of course not! You’d do what this woman did — she put it in the oven. That’s right, the oven.
I’m sure you can see what’s coming next. That night, the family decided to cook a pizza and preheated the oven. There was a round in the chamber, and the intense heat caused the weapon to discharge.
Killing a male infant who was sleeping about 25 feet away in the living room.
The paper seems to indicate that all of the adults in the house at the time were aware that the gun had been placed in the oven earlier in the day, though obviously they had forgotten this fact when the oven was being heated. I hope all of them are charged with negligent manslaughter.
Lord Philip Hunt, Great Britain’s Health Minister, gave a speech this week to the Association of Medical Research Charities in which he outlined the Labor government’s policy on animal research. Hunt said,
Of course, animals should only be used in experiments where there is no alternative. But it is also clear that properly regulated animal research is absolutely essential to the discovery of new treatments, as well as to the assessment of the safety and efficacy of medicines. That is why we have strengthened the law that protects all involved in research — in the private, public and charitable sectors — to ensure that this vital work can continue.
Hunt repeated previous government statements that the sort of situation that occurred with Huntingdon Life Sciences would not happen again. According to Hunt,
The Government endorses the right to democratic protest. Equally, we condemn the violent intimidation that has taken place, and have introduced strong measures against harassment of people involved with animal research.
Predictably, animal rights groups attacked the speech. According to Animal Aid director Andrew Tyler, the speech was “part of a rather sordid and unconvincing propaganda offensive from the Government, because the argument for animal testing is slipping away from them.”
Michelle Thew of the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection complained that, “There is a policy vacuum within the government — no vision, no strategy, no radical agenda for reform and no recognition to reflect the considerable and growing public concern about animal experiments.”
Jan Creamer of the National Anti-vivisection Society chimed in by claiming that “Every time the government has issued licenses to use animal testing, we have been able to find an alternative method.”
Of course, Reuters summed up the reality of the situation noting that,
Currently, most scientists believe that tests in animals are still the best way to study disease or to gauge the effectiveness of treatments before they are tried in humans.
And in most cases they are not just the best way but rather than only realistic way to test.
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Animal research essential, UK government says. Manfreda Cavazza, Reuters Health, April 16, 2002.
Minister defends animal experiments. The BBC, April 16, 2002.
Burger King recently announced that it will offer a veggie burger at all of its 8,000+ outlets across the country. For animal rights activists, that is a double edged sword.
Alex Hershaft wrote an e-mail letter to an animal rights newsletter highlighting the possibilities and perils of Burger King’s decision. Of course Hershaft couldn’t just discuss the issue without first giving a rundown of what many in the animal rights movement really long for,
Once up on a time, in our wildest dreams, we may have picture victory as an array of slaughterhouses and fast food chains lying in smoldering ruins, or at the very least, undergoing bankruptcy proceedings . . .
Smoldering ruins? And people in the animal rights movement wonder why the press tends to depict them as a bunch of nutbags.
But, moving on, Hershaft argues that,
As a welcome reality check, Burger King, the evil transnational corporate giant, has handed us a beautiful present for this year’s Meatout observance: a real veggie burger. Not just in a dozen avant-garde outlets in Greenwich Village, but in all 8,300 outlets throughout America.
Not that this will make much of a difference to the true vegan fanatics, since as Hershaft notes the vegan patty will be grilled along side burgers, the mayonnaise Burger King uses is not vegan, and there is “butter flavor” in the bun (and, lets not forget, “Moreover, BK is still the evil transnational corporate giant.”)
But, still, here is big opportunity for the animal rights movement. Just get everyone in America to buy veggie burgers at Burger King rather than burgers, and save the lives of many farm animals. “One of the nicest things that we can do for these wretched animals,” Hershaft wrote, “is to promote this product to all our friends and supporters.”
This is especially important because, as Hershaft notes,
You can be sure that all the other fast food chains are waiting to see how this product does. If it succeeds, it will prevent the suffering and death of millions. But, if it fails, it will set us back substantially. We absolutely can not afford to let that happen.
So, allow me to go out on a limb here for a moment — this veggie burger is going to fail. In fact, I hope that Burger King at some point releases figures on just how many veggie burgers they sell, because I doubt Burger King’s target market overlaps very much with people who are vegetarians/vegans.
If Hershaft and others are counting on the success of Burger King’s veggie burger to save animals, they’re in for a rude awakening.
Source:
Dreams, Reality, and Burger King. Alex Hershaft, E-mail, April 17, 2002.
This web site got its start over an eye opening look at radical feminism. My wife and I attended a symposium sponsored by campus feminists and we were shocked and not a little disgusted at the extremism combined with the nonsense that passed for wisdom. That our own university was sponsoring nonsense like this was dismaying. Equally dismaying is that some people choose to respond to this feminist extremism with an anti-feminist extremism that borders on (and in some cases cross the line into) misogyny.
My very first experience with anyone connected with the Men’s Movement made me very suspicious of the whole enterprise. I had befriended a man who had a lot of bad experiences with the legal system following his divorce from his wife. The man was understandably frustrated at the very limited visitations he was allowed with his daughter. But his reaction to this was to advise me that my wife, who was pregnant at the time, was not to be trusted and that women in general were anathema to men in general.
This was, of course, simply the tired old feminist dogma about men and women from a male perspective. I was not really interested in dressing up feminist nonsense about the sexes and calling it liberating and gradually my friend and I grew apart and lost touch with each other.
Some of the people in the men’s movement are so hostile to women, that they attack even defenders of that movement such as Wendy McElroy and Cathy Young. McElroy tried to promote the iFeminists.Com web site on a Usenet group frequented by people in the men’s movement and in return received overwhelming hostility from people who consider anyone who calls him or herself a feminist — even an individualist feminist — to be coopted and just as bad as the radical feminists.
The extent of such hostility is on full display in an essay by Ray Remark, “The Boys in the Back Room: Divvying Up the Masculist Kingdom,” which was published recently on the AngryHarry.Com web site. Remark’s article and Angry Harry’s comments in response illustrate the absolute worst that the anti-feminist movement has to offer.
Remark offers up a dark conspiracy theory in which men lack almost all freedom and people like McElroy and Glenn Sacks are simply tools of the matriarchy. Sacks, for example, wrote an article criticizing misogyny in the men’s movement to which Remark responds that,
The evening that Mr. Sacks’ hit-piece was published, I saw Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem capering down Fifth Avenue, wearing top-hats. They tapdanced all night on ground zero, in the cold ashes of what we once were.
Got that? Criticize misogyny in the men’s movement, and you’re just doing Andrea Dworkin’s work for her. Later in his article, Remark hysterically compares McElroy and Sacks’ criticism of the men’s movement to COINTELPRO and the purges that occurred in Communist Parties during the Stalinist period.
But what does Remark have to offer in its place? Not much. According to Remark,
Masculinity is broken, and so is the moral and spiritual legitimacy of the West.
We need nothing less than a resurrected manhood, a New Adam, and he will come from our gutters and prisons, from the despised and outcast amongst us. Our cure, and our redemption, waits hidden in the most marginal, unexplored elements of masculinity. The broken, the psychotic, the betrayed, the autistic, the demonized, the voiceless — these are the shards from which a new masculinity will be formed. They are brilliant spirits, but they burn very hot.
Ah, the new masculinity can be found in prisons and mental hospitals. I can hardly way to see the dawning of that New Age (come to think of it, I can wait a long time for this bizarre Nietzschean world view to come to pass).
Angry Harry simply reinforces the general view that some in the men’s movement are prone to misogyny. Remark is angry that Sacks and others have criticized elements of the men’s movement for criticizing women in general. But, according to Angry Harry, that’s entirely appropriate,
Well, AH has to say that he thinks that women should be attacked in general! After all, women, in general, have done very little to stem the tide of misandry. They have simply remained silent, and watched how the people they so often claim to love — men and boys — are being cheated, hoodwinked, demonised, discriminated against and treated as humans unworthy of consideration or proper justice.
Indeed, women, in general, continue to behave very selfishly, and they continue to take unfair advantage of today’s discriminatory systems, and AH fully supports any legitimate method which attempt to expose this.
Ah yes, that supreme favorite of radical feminists everywhere, the notion of collective guilt. For radical feminists, the average man is just as guilty — even if just by omission — as the hardened rapist, so for Angry Harry, the woman who just works 9 to 5 and tries to do the best for her family is just as guilty of promoting misandry as is any radical feminist.
What Angry Harry and Remark are arguing for is simply that the men’s movement and anti-feminism in general should be nothing more than a twisted mirror image of the radical feminism movement itself. To that I say thanks, but no thanks.
Source:
The Boys in the Back Room: Divvying up the Masculist Kingdom. Ray Remark, AngryHarry.Com, April 14, 2002.
Australian researchers published a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry which found that female stalkers were just as predatory and dangerous as their male counterparts.
The researchers looked at individuals at a mental health clinic who had stalked their victims for at least four weeks and made at least 10 attempts to communicate with their victims. They found 150 males and 40 females who fit that definition. What they found surprised them,
Contrary to popular assumption, the female stalkers were no less likely than their male counterparts to threaten their victims or to attack their person or property. For instance, one female stalker damaged the sports car of her victim, her former fiance. Another painted obscene messages on the fence of her victim’s home. Nine of the 40 female stalkers assaulted their victims, and the nature of the assaults did not differ much from that of male stalkers, except that the women did not commit any sexual assaults.
The major differences between male and female stalkers is that women were just as likely to choose women as men as targets of the stalking and significantly more female stalkers wanted to establish a romantic relationship with the person they were stalking.
One of the researchers, Dr. Paul Mullen, told Psychiatric News, “There is no reason to presume that the impact of being stalked by a female would be any less devastating than that of a man.”
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Don’t underestimate dangerousness of female stalkers, study urges. Joan Arehart, Treichel, Psychiatric News, Feb. 1, 2002.