Author: Brian Carnell

Just How Gullible Is Robert Cohen?

Apparently there is no factual error enough to big or small for Robert Cohen to avoid. In his latest NotMilk Newsletter published on June 28, 2002, Cohen reprints an article he wrote about Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka.

Patterson’s book compares animal agriculture with the Holocaust. Cohen writes,

I have just been informed by Mr. Patterson that his Eternal Treblinka has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Sorry, Robert, but this is yet another lie you have let slip in your newsletter.

Here’s the reality. According to online bookstores, Eternal Treblinka was published in February 2002. As such, if it wanted to be considered for the Pulitzer Prize, the author or publisher would have had to send $50 and four copies of the book to the Pulitzer Prize folks by July 1, 2002.

Patterson, along with probably 800 or 900 other people, apparently did this. Anybody who wants to pay $50 and supply four copies can enter any book published before June 30, 2002 into the Pulitzer Prize contest. This is about as impressive as Patterson saying that they may have won $10 million from the Publisher’s Clearing House.

When the media say a book has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, what they really mean is that it is a Pulitzer Prize Nominated Finalist. These are books that juries have selected as finalists for the ultimate Pulitzer Prize. As a Pulitzer Prize FAQ on terminology notes,

Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided.

Eternal Treblinka has not been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Patterson just sent off his $50 check like anybody else who published a book in the first sixth months of 2001 could have done.

What is interesting is that Cohen is not the only animal rights activist pretending that an animal rights-oriented book has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In fact Cohen’s nemesis, VegSource.Com, has several articles (see here or here for just two examples) that claim that John Robbins’ Diet for a New America was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

This claim is widely repeated on animal rights sites on the Internet — including quite a few who upgrade Robbins’ alleged prize, claiming that “Diet for a New America” was a Pulitzer Prize winning book.

In fact, a quick look at the Pulitzer Prize web site finds it is not listed as either a Nominated Finalist nor a winner for any year between 1980 and 2000 (the book was published in 1987).

Isn’t there anybody in the animal rights movement with even a modicum of integrity?

Sources:

Eternal hell for cows. Robert Cohen, NotMilk Newsletter, June 28, 2002.

Pulitzer Prize Terminology.

Peter Singer Reaffirms His Views at AR 2002

CNSNews.Com wrote an interesting summary of Peter Singer’s speech to the AR 2002 conference over the weekend. For his part Singer did not back down from any of the ridiculous positions that he’s developed over the years.

Does he still believe that it is morally permissible to kill newborns within the first 28 days of birth? CNSNews.Com quotes Singer as saying,

If you have a being that is not sentient, that is not even aware, then the killing of that being is not something that is wrong in and of itself.

. . .

I think that a chimpanzee certainly has greater self-awareness than a newborn baby.

. . .

. . . there are some circumstances, for example, where the newborn baby is severely disabled and where the parents think that it’s better that the child should not live, when killing the newborn is not at al wrong … not like killing the chimpanzee would be.

According to CNSNews.Com, Singer did back away slightly from the 28 day window outlined in his book, Practical Ethics saying,

So in that book, we suggested that 28 days is not a bad period of time to use because on the one hand, it gives you time to examine the infant to [see] what the nature of the disability is; gives time for the couple to recover from the shock of the birth to get well advised and informed from all sorts of groups, medical opinion and disability and reach a decision.

And also I think that it is clearly before the point at which the infant has those sorts of forward-looking preferences, that kind of self-awareness, that I talked about. But I now think, after a lot more discussion, that you can’t really propose any particular cut-off date.

Singer now apparently believes that such decisions should be made “as soon as possible after birth” without setting any specific time period.

Singer also again repeated his view — controversial even among animal rights activists — that human-animal sexual contact could be consensual and therefore, to Singer’s mind, morally permissible. CNSNews.Com reports that,

When asked by CNSNews.com how an animal can consent to sexual contact with a human, he replied, “Your dog can show you when he or she wants to go for a walk and equally for nonviolent sexual contact, your dog or whatever else it is can show you whether he or she wants to engage in a certain kind of contact.

Singer also cited “mainstream” and “conservative mainstream fundamentalist” Christianity as a major obstacle to the animal rights movement since adherents of those views “want to make a huge gulf between humans and animals.”

Unfortunately, CNSNews.com chose to interview Barry Clausen as a counterpoint to animal rights extremism. Clausen has written several books about environmental extremism and is occasionally cited in the media as an expert on animal rights and environmental terrorism.

Clausen generally has the same problem with the truth that animal rights activists have. He vastly overstates his evidence and has on a number of occasions been responsible for spreading fictions disguised as fact. Clausen tells CNSNews.com for example that,

I have not come across one of these people [animal rights activists] who I did not consider to be mentally ill.

That statement is absurd beyond belief, especially coming from Clausen who in turn praises Lyndon LaRouche-associate Rogelio Maduro. Clausen and Maduro edit a newsletter, Ecoterrorism Watch.

The last thing we need is anti-animal rights activists who are every bit as prone to bizarre accusations and shoddy research as the animal rights groups they are criticizing.

Source:

Christianity harmful to animals, says animal rights godfather. Marc Morano, CNSNews.Com, July 1, 2002.

Abortion=Suicide Bombers

Star Parker has a column in USA Today in which she compares women who have abortions to suicide bombers.

Parker opens up her column by claiming that,

After Sept. 11, some evangelical ministers suggested the moral state of our country might have helped provoke the attacks — and they were condemned for saying so. But their basic point — that a moral accounting should be part of our national assessment of what went wrong and what needs fixing — is correct. That so many Americans don’t see this as relevant is an indication of the problem.

Count this writer as one of those who did not see the point in watching Americans investigating their alleged sinfulness. Frankly, I’ll take American-style decadence over the sort of morality that religious extremists of various faiths would prefer.

To recap, what went wrong on Sept. 11 was that a bunch of Muslim extremists used box cutters to hijack several jets and crash them into buildings. It had nothing to do with abortion, pornography, divorce, school prayer, gambling, or other alleged social ills.

Parker goes on to compare women who have abortions to Palestinian suicide bombers,

The claim that “I own myself,” that I am the ultimate arbiter of life and death, defines the common ground of the suicide bomber and the abortionist.

This is not a matter of defining at what point a fetus is a human being. This is a question of the attitude of the mother-to-be who says what is most important is that I choose, and not what the choice is.

It saddens me that Palestinians kill themselves and innocent civilians because they don’t like the choices they have. The Palestinian people have been given many choices, from the considerable territory given them in 1948 to the major territorial concessions made at Camp David. They choose death instead.

The same politicization of human life that produces suicide bombers has crept into our own society. More than 1.3 million fetuses are aborted each year.

This is the worst sort of argument by analogy — and terribly unconvincing to boot.

Source:

Countries in glass houses shouldn’t … Star Parker, USA Today, June 27, 2002.

Nickelodeon Should Be Ashamed

Glenn Reynolds pans the Hey, Arnold! movie,

But forget the lame plot. The animation sucked; the drawings all looked faintly blurry all the time. It wasn’t even up to Hanna-Barbera standards. And it wasn’t bad projection — the previews were sharp, and so were the titles. It was just crap.

That ain’t even the half of it.

I spent several years reviewing films and videos for the local Gannett paper and I thought I had seen some real dogs in my time, but this movie was so godawful retched that it defies all logic. I would rather be forced to watch The Punisher repeatedly than have to sit through Hey, Arnold! again.

And I’m a huge fan of the television show. My daughter and I were both anticipating this movie and I rearranged plans to take her to see this movie.

The animation was so bad it made me want to vomit. As Reynolds notes, the previews and other promotional materials gave the impression that the movie was going to be of professional quality (like the Rugrats movies have been) but instead Nickelodeon simply use their in-house facilities to do a 70 minute or so episode of the show and then printed that on film stock.

But what looks great on my 36 inch television looks like wretched crap on a movie screen. Didn’t they test screen this dog to anyone?

Reynolds also disses the plot, which was one long anti-gentrification screed. But more than just the plot, the movie lacked completely the quirky atmosphere that makes the television show so much fun. There is a lot of ambiguity in the characters and situations in the show (which is one of its strengths — it avoids the moral platitudes and mini-lectures that adults always want to insert into kids’ shows), so it was weird seeing this simplistic black-and-white morality tale. Much of the time the movie looked like what Hey, Arnold! might be if the idiots responsible for Fern Gully took over the show.

Nickelodeon should be ashamed of itself for unloading this piece of crap film on unsuspecting fans of the show.

Brian 1, Project Entropia 0

Back in September 2000, I posted an article wondering if the proposed online game Project Entropia was, in fact, just a scam.

And what do you know — Project Entropia now has potential serious legal problems including a raid by Swedish authorities who found game’s maker, Mind Ark, using hundreds of pirated software titles and at least one player who is convinced that the game is a scam.

The reason I was suspicious of Project Entropia was because it promised to allow players to make real money transactions in the game. Rather than using fake gold coins or some other pseudo-currency, characters in Project Entropia would use real money. I noted at the time that I thought this would run afoul of all sorts of money laundring problems.

I did back away from that early last year conceding that it might be able to survive in the same legal grey area that PayPal has. But details in a Wired story about the raid suggest that even if it’s not a scam, it’s not very careful with its players money. Exhibit A,

MindArk stoked these dreams by promising that a “dollar millionaire” would emerge from Entropia within a year of the game’s release.

But enthusiasm for the game has been hobbled, as a series of bugs wiped out some players’ inventories and deleted others’ long-assembled characters entirely. That’s a big deal in any game but an outright disaster in Entropia, where those hoards are paid for with actual cash.

“It seems more like a scam than anything,” Entropia player Joao Coelho wrote in an e-mail.

Another player, whose account mysteriously disappeared, added in a post to the Entropia message boards, “I’m going to be calling my credit card company to get my stolen money back.”

Scam or not, I doubt Mind Ark can pull off all of the things that would be needed to make a game like this succeed. There are just too many obstacles to overcome.

Source:

Pirate Cops Raid MS Gaming Foe. Noah Shachtman, Wired, June 28, 2002.

Panda Porn

Many male pandas in captivity are generally uninterested in mating and will often spurn advances from female pandas. What to do, then, to increase the population of these endangered animals? Panda porn!

When male pandas reach maturity, zoo officials are showing them videotapes of pandas mating.

(Don’t let Catharine MacKinnon find out — this is probably inherently oppressive to female pandas).