Month: October 2004

E-Bay Auction Finally Over

My E-Bay auction finally ended and I ended up paying $31 for this:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals threatened to distribute these to kids at McDonald’s back in 2000, though they apparently never followed through. I’ve been trying to get my hands on one ever since, and someone tipped me of to a journalist who had received one and was selling it on E-Bay.

I almost got outbid by an individual who works at an anti-animal rights group, but apparently I’m the only person dumb enough to bid this much for a piece of PETA epherma.

So that’s out of the way. I’m still looking for a Burger King “Bloody Crown”, however, if anyone has one or knows someone who does.

Unveiling New Design for AnimalRights.net

Back in January I decided that most of my web sites needed a serious re-design, and I decided to start with my most heavily visited site, AnimalRights.net. In April, I contacted Yanisar Enterprises about doing such a redesign, and seven months later you can see the fruits of that collaboration here.

I initially chose Yanisar because I was impressed with some of the other projects they’d done and they had experience with Conversant, the content management system that drives this site. The project started out being largely a cosmetic makeover of the site. But as it progressed, it became clear that bigger changes were needed and pretty much every major part of the site was both re-designed and re-configured. The end result is a site that highlight just how flexible Conversant is as a CMS.

One of the things I’m most pleased about, for example, is being able to provide context-sensitive information and links for popular search terms. Look, for example, at what the user sees if they search for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. That is something that never occurred to me but the folks at Yanisar suggested and after a couple of fits and starts trying to figure out how to get it to work, it works like a charm.

The site’s home page is an excellent mix that combines a weblog-centric view of the site with all sorts of links to related stories, recent discussion group threads, etc. One of the challenges we faced in redesigning this site is that there are more than 2,000 articles there about the animal rights movement, and an additional 1,100 or so topical pages along with the discussion group that has something like 75,000 posts. The home page design that Yanisar came up with slices through all that and gives a quick web-site-at-a-glance view at the underlying foundations of the site.

The Discussion Forum also received a much-needed overhaul. It is now much easier and friendly to use than before.

There are a couple of features still to be implemented, including a system for doing user profiles, but as it is now the final results far exceeded my initial expectations. When I started out, the goal was simply to give the site a cosmetic facelift, but as the project actually got underway it resulted in a lot of structural changes that have really improved the site’s usability dramatically over what it had been like.

I’d wholeheartedly recommend Yanisar Enterprises for someone wanting to do a redesign, and I personally plan to keep them busy redesigning my other websites.

Lesbian Activist Murdered in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone homosexual rights activist FannyAnn Eddy was found murdered in the office of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association on the morning of September 29. Eddy was 30.

According to Afrol news,

While she was working alone in the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association’s offices the previous night, her assailant or assailants apparently broke in to the premises. She was raped repeatedly, stabbed and her neck was broken.

Eddy and her organization documented attacks and capricious arrests directed at gays and lesbians in Sierra Leone. In April of 2004 she testified at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva that,

We [members of sexual minorities] face constant harassment and violence from neighbors and others. Their homophobic attacks go unpunished by authorities, further encouraging their discriminatory and violent treatment of lesbian, gay, and transgender people in Sierra Leone.

US-based Human Rights Watch issued a statement saying,

FannyAnn Eddy was a person of extraordinary bravery and integrity, who literally put her life on the line for human rights. Now, she has been murdered in the offices of the organization she founded, and there is grave concern that she herself has become a victim of hatred.

The Associated Press reported that police are searching for an individual who allegedly made threats against Eddy.

Sources:

Gay activist killed in Sierra Leone. Associated Press, October 5, 2004.

Murder of Sierra Leone’s lesbian activist condemned. Afrol News, October 5, 2004.

Sierra Leone: Lesbian Rights Activist Brutally Murdered. Human Rights Watch, October 4, 2004.

Mbeki: Complaints about Rape Rate are Racist

South African President Thabo Mbeki and South African activist Charlene Smith have been battling it out in that country’s press this month over just how serious of problem rape is in that country. Smith said that Mbeki is in denial about the true extent of the problem, while Mbeki responded that critics like Smith are racists who want to portray black Africans as savages.

The backdrop of this was an official report showing a minor drop in South Africa’s sky high rape rate. According to official South African statistics, the rape rate declined from 115.3 per 100,000 in 1994 to 113.7 per 100,000 in 2003/04.

Smith and others questioned those statistics and charged the drop is the result of “massaged” statistics. Frankly, that’s rather moot since 113.7 rapes per 100,000 population is unbelievably high. To put it in context, in 2000 the U.S. rape rate was just barely over 32 per 100,000. As a whole, South Africa has a rape rate three-and-a-half times as high as the United States. That is a mind-bogglingly high rate and does, as Smith claims, demonstrate just how crime-ridden South Africa is.

Mbeki responded with an article on the African National Congress web site saying,

She [Smith] was saying our cultures, traditions and religions as Africans inherently makes African man a potential rapist . . . [a] view which defines the African people as barbaric savages.

In fact Smith never said anything remotely like this and never mentioned race at all in her critique. instead she criticized the government for failing to take rape victims seriously, noting numerous problems with the way that rape allegations and rape victims were treated.

Mbeki seems to be using the same script here that he used to defend his atrocious policy of denying that HIV caused AIDS and refused for too long to allow pregnant women to be given anti-retroviral drugs. The script goes like this — find someone white who is making the criticism and then claim it’s all about colonial oppressors trying to disparage blacks. Who cares, after all, if black women are the major victim of South Africa’s out-of-control crime rates?

After all, what sort of government is pleased that rape rates fell from 115.3 to 113.7 per 100,000 over a 10 year period? That’s not progress, that’s dereliction of duty.

Sources:

Mbeki says crime reports are racist. Mail & Guardian, October 6, 2004.

Mbeki slammed in rape race row. The BBC, October 5, 2004.

Rape has become a way of life in South Africa. Charlene Smith, Sunday Independent, September 26, 2004.

Mbeki blasts crime stats critics. Sapa, October 1, 2004.

Swedish Politician Proposes Tax on Men to Fund Violence Initiatives

What used to be called sexism is now being called progressivism by some Scandanavian politicians.

A number of Swedish female Members of Parliament have signed onto a motion that would impose a tax on men and use the money to fund treatment of violence against women.

Gudrun Schyman, Member of Parliament and former Left Party leader, wrote the motion which reads, in part,

When the costs of this aspect of socially destructive male behavior are added up, it becomes clear how much money men’s violence costs society – money which could be used to increase women’s income, for healthcare, better working environments, and so on. It’s then only natural to ask how men collectively should take economic responsibility for men’s violence against women.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald,

The Left Party says the idea of men collectively paying for the social costs of violence towards women is similar to the principle of poor people paying less tax than the rich.

Ah, yes, collectivism taken to its logical outcome — who needs individual responsibility, when you can just assign people to groups and treat them as such? I believe in previous eras that this was called things like sexism and racism, but in the 21st century it’s what passes for progressivism among some.

Even in Sweden, however, the proposal won’t come close to having enough support to actually pass.

Source:

Sweden debates hitting men with domestic violence tax. Telegraph (London), October 5, 2004.

Schyman in equality policy shock: tax men. TheLocal.Se, October 5, 2004.

Tax on men for violence on women proposed. Reuters, October 5, 2004.

The VP Debate and Abortion

Watched the vice-presidential debate last night. As far as I’m concerned, Dick Cheney’s the only one of the four people involved in the race who would actually make a decent president. He obviously has a much better command of the issues than Bush, and his conservatism is far more libertarian than Bush’s.

Just an observation — I’m subscribed to a bunch of feminist/pro-abortion mailing lists, and I keep receiving press releases about how if Bush wins its the end of legal abortion in the United States, but it’s really odd that the abortion issue hasn’t yet really come up at all. I’m pro-abortion, but I think the anti-abortion movement has really done an amazing job transforming the issue and moving the terms of the debate to areas that are far more friendly to it (such as the whole “partial birth” abortion controversy).

Part of the problem, IMO, is that pro-abortion groups are so far to the Left that their message alienates moderates and libertarian oriented conservatives who might otherwise be more receptive to their message.