Month: November 2002

Portland State University Faculty Criticize Labeling Extremists as "Ecoterrorists"

Portland State University’s faculty senate passed a resolution earlier this month that criticized use of terms such as “ecoterrorism” saying that they unnecessarily links nonviolent political dissent to terrorism. The resolution passed 46-9.

And what sort of nonviolent political dissent are Portland professors concerned about defending? The kind that involves arson and setting fire to trucks.

The resolution was co-written by Mary King, chair of PSU’s economics department, and Barbara Dudley, adjunct professor of political science. King told Willamette Weekly’s Amy Roe that she was inspired by the plight of one of her former students, Jeremy Rosenbloom.

Rosenbloom received a bachelor’s degree in March but more recently was one of four environmentalist extremists arrested for allegedly setting fire to three trucks belonging to a logging company in June 2001.

King is horrified that society might actually punish Rosenbloom for his crime,

I know him, and the idea of him spending a big part of his life in jail appeals me.

Oh the horrors — that someone might actually be punished for a premeditated arson that destroys property and places firefighter and others in harms way.

The final resolution deleted a phrase that King and Dudley had written that implied that such acts of destruction were not terrorism, but the intent is still clear as Roe describes it,

The resolution decried the use of “inflammatory terms such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘ecoterrorism,'” which could be prejudicial and “dramatically increase potential sentences.” It was sent to the mayor and city commission.

Dudlely says she wanted the resolution to apply to the Muslim community as well as as environmental activists.

What I guarantee you will never see in these sort of resolutions and approving comments is any suggestion that the actions of pro-life extremists or other right-of-center extremism not be considered terrorism.

Had Rosenbloom firebombed vehicles belonging to an abortion clinic instead, you can bet that the faculty senate would have been considering other business — as it should have. So why does environmental and animal rights extremism receive a free pass from Portland State?

Source:

Profs Decry “Terrorism” Label. Amy Roe, Williamette Weekly, November 20, 2002.

Ronda Roaring's Plan for Rodeo Footage is 15 Years Too Late

Ronda Roaring, Executive Director of the New York State Coalition for Animals, posted an unintentionally amusing letter on an animal rights mailing list offering advice on how to get activist footage of rodeos on the air. Roaring claimed that, in a nutshell, the FCC has regulations requiring the broadcast of such footage. The only problem is that Roaring’s brilliant scheme is about 15 years too late.

Roaring wrote,

Provided I get a decent video, I can deal with NBC in NYC and my NBC affiliate as far as the rodeos are concerned, but it is up to the rest of you to deal with your local affiliates. The FCC’s 1974 Fairness Report is long, but here’s the part that applies for you to quote to your local affiliates. The station manager will be familiar with this. Print the citation in parentheses just as I have it.

1974 Fairness Report (48 F.C.C.2d 1, 30 R.R.2d 1261)

“(1) the broadcaster must devote a reasonable percentage of time to the coverage of public issues; and (2) his coverage of these issues must be fair in the sense that it provides an opportunity for presentation of contrasting points of view.”

What this means is that licensees are not required to provide equal time or a forum for discussion on the same program, but they are required to make provisions for opposing views as part of their general programming.

Now you’d think that given she was citing a 28-year-old report on the Fairness Doctrine that she might want to check if anything has happened in the intervening years to supersede that, but such research has never exactly been the forte of animal rights activists.

What happened in the intervening years was that the Fairness Doctrine disappeared. In 1984, the Supreme Court overturned regulations on the disbursement of Corporation for Public Broadcasting monies in FCC vs. League of Women Voters. Congress had required that CPB monies could not be given to noncommercial educational stations that engaged in “editorializing.” The Supreme Court ruled that this was provision violated the First Amendment and, in a footnote, the majority hinted that the Fairness Doctrine — which had been upheld as Constitutional in 1969 — would likely face the same fate on largely the same reasoning.

In 1987, the FCC concluded a several years-long evaluation of the Fairness Doctrine by repealing the requirement cited by Roaring on the grounds that it stifled rather than encouraged debate (the main impact was for many broadcasters to simply avoid covering controversies at all, so as not to have to accommodate various sides arguing about how balanced their coverage was).

In both 1987 and 1989 Congress overwhelmingly approved bills to restore the Fairness Doctrine, but both were vetoed by Presidents Reagan and Bush, respectively.

I would just love to see the faces on local television stations when some animal rights activists quotes to them an FCC regulation that was overturned 15 years ago. Then again, it might do some good. Maybe a smart station manager might wonder if the activists can be so off with their information about FCC regulations, maybe they haven’t done their homework about the rodeo either.

Source:

FCC’s 1974 Fairness Report. Ronda Roaring, E-mail, November 22, 2002.

Goal Achieved – 4 Million Page Views in 2002

Last year I had 3 million page views on my various web sites, and this year I set a goal of increasing that by at least 1 million page views. Yesterday I hit the 4 million mark.

One of the major increases was at AnimalRights.Net, where average traffic has more than doubled from about 1,500 page views per day in 2001 to more than 3,500 page views so far in 2002.

The major reason for the huge increase traffic there are Conversant’s knowledge management related tools which let me draw the thousand or so essays there into killer topical pages. The upshot of that is that on Google, those topical pages are returned as the first result on literally dozens and dozens of animal rights-related search terms. Looking for information on Ingrid Newkirk on Google.Com? Results numbers 1 and 2 are for pages at AnimalRights.Net.

In fact, the site as a whole has climbed from number 8 to number 3 on search results returned for “animal rights.”

Easy-to-use knowledge management tools are an absolute necessity, in my opinion, in differentiating web sites at a time when Google today is indexing more than 3 billion web pages.

Anti-Leech.Org Morons

The folks at Slashdot are having a field day over Anti-Leech.Org.

Anti-Leech.Org is marketing software that blocks people who use pop-up blocking software from accessing a web page. So when I visit the page above, I get a message that since I am using a browser which blocks pop-up ads (Mozilla), that I cannot view the site.

I think using such software would be a big mistake, but I don’t have any problem with it — if a site wants to make it a condition of viewing their content that I have to allow them to open up additional windows, then I’ll go somewhere else.

Where they descend into moronic hype is this paragraph on the main page,

An average of 15% of your visitors use advertising blocking tools when visiting your sites and the major part of all webmasters will try to copy the content you publish. Therefore we have engineered several ways to protect your website, read more.

The majority of all webmasters steal and republish content? I’d like to see them find support for that. In fact since it is a copyright violation to do so, only a tiny minority of people ever engage in such behavior. And the fact is that the techniques that Anti-Leech.Org is selling are circumvented rather easily by someone who knows how.

In fact the protection for their scripts is pathetic since it constitutes little more than breaking up SCRIPT tag into several separate Javscript document.write components. That’s trivial to get around for anyone paying attention (which is why they apparently beg users in the comments not to try to get around their techniques).

Virginia Authorities Investigating Apparent ELF Attacks

Police in Richmond, Virginia are investigating whether or not numerous acts of vandalism in the area over the past few months are the work of the Earth Liberation Front.

On Sept. 27/28, activists used a glass-etching cream to damage a total of 38 windows at two McDonald’s and a Burger King fast food restaurant. Also in september, a glass-etching cream was used to damage 25 SUV’s at a Richmond dealership.

On Oct. 5/6 two SUVs were hacked with hatchets and a note was left behind that the work was of the Earth Liberation Front.

For the moment, The Earth Liberation Front Press Office says it hasn’t received any information taking credit for the attacks,

We have received no statement of claim for those actions at this press office so we are not able to pass along the motivations of these acts, other than to say that they are in keeping with other E.L.F. actions that have targeted pollution, roads and vehicle culture through attacks on vehciles such as S.U.V.s.

Unfortunately, it is also apparent that the local officials likely don’t have a firm grasp on the ELF. Wade Kizer, Virginia’s Attorney for the county that includes Richmond, told The New York Times,

Police are tryi got dtermine if there are any links to other incidents around the country. [It might be the ELF] but it might be some local people who have just heard of the organization.

But that’s all the ELF and ALF have ever been — a group of people with no ties to any larger organization who commit acts of vandalism and violence and take credit on behalf of ELF. In a very real sense, there is no ELF, but rather just isolated opportunistic acts of vandalism and violence carried out by individuals who have little or no connection with each other (which is what makes it so difficult to prevent ELF and ALF-style actions).

Source:

Rash of vandalism in Richmond may be tied to environment group. Lisa Bacon, The New York Times, November 18, 2002.

Pro-Hunt Activist Arrested for Inspiring Racial Hatred

As I mentioned earlier this week, pro-fox hunting activists in Scotland and Great Britain are adopting a novel tactic in their fight to keep fox hunting legal. They are arguing that since Jews and Muslims are both allowed to kill animals without stunning them first in order to satisfy religious requirements for food preparation, that to ban fox hunting amounts to cultural persecution under European human rights conventions.

Whether or not that is a valid argument that will succeed in court is one thing, but certainly simply making that argument, as I have done above, should not be a crime. But, in fact, this week the British government arrested Daily Telegraph columnist Robin Page for making just this argument at a pro-hunting rally.

According to the Daily Telegraph,

Mr Page also told his audience that Londoners had the right to run their own events, such as the Brixton carnival and gay pride marches, which celebrated black and gay culture. Why therefore, he asked, should country people not have the right to do what they liked in the countryside.

Mr Page said yesterday: “I urged people to go on the march and I urged that the rural minority be given the same legal protection as other minorities. All I said was that the rural minority should have the same rights as blacks, Muslims and gays.

“What is wrong with that in a multicultural society? I said nothing that could possibly be interpreted as racist.”

The Telegraph goes on to point out that back in September a letter from the Prince of Wales was leaked to the media that made essentially the same argument.

Yet Page was arrested and charged with stirring up racial hatred.

Source:

Pro-hunting writer held in cell after race claims. Neil Tweedie, The Daily Telegraph (London), November 20, 2002.