Category: Uncategorized

Gallup Poll on Americans' Views of Animal Rights

Gallup News Service recently conducted a poll of 1,005 American adults and asked them questions about animal rights and various animal-related issues. The poll generally shows a complete rejection of animal rights ideas, but also shows the need to continue to education Americans about the role that animals play in things like medical research.

The poll leads off by asking people if animals deserve the same rights as people, deserve some protection, or don’t need much protection. Seventy-one percent of respondents answered that animals deserved some protection while only 3 percent responded that animals don’t need much protection. But a full 25 percent responded that animals deserve the same rights as people.

That is an odd result, until you look at additional data in which it turns out that these people think that animals deserve the same rights as people in the same way that people who occasionally eat beef tell pollsters that they are vegetarians.

Among those who supported giving animal the same rights as human beings,

  • Forty-four percent oppose banning medical research on laboratory animals.
  • Thirty-eight percent oppose banning product testing on laboratory animals.
  • Twenty-three percent oppose passing strict laws concerning the treatment of farm animals.
  • And 55% oppose banning all types of hunting.

As the Gallup organization speculated,

The substantial numbers of people who oppose these proposals — despite saying they want the same rights for animals that people have to be free from harm and exploitation — suggest that the issue may be more complex than some initially expected. Perhaps the initial question evoked images of pets rather than “laboratory” animals, and the latter question may conjure up pictures of mice and rats rather than, say, dogs and cats.

Americans rejected overwhelmingly banning all medical research on animals, the banning of animal testing for non-medical products, and the banning of hunting. But by 62 percent to 35 percent, those polled favored “passing strict laws concerning the treatment of farm animals.”

Source:

Public Lukewarm on Animal Rights. David W. Moore, Gallup, May 21, 2003.

Appeals Court Upholds Animal Rights Activists Conviction

A three-judge federal appeals court upheld the conviction of animal rights protester Pamelyn Vlasak stemming from a 1999 anti-circus protest in Los Angeles.

Vlasak was arrested and charged with violating an ordinance that limits the size of wooden objects that can be possessed at protests. The impetus behind the law was to limit the possible damage that could be done if a protest gets out of control, specifically from wood used to tote protest signs but the ordinance restricts the size of any wooden object.

Vlasak brought a bull hook to the protest. A bull hook is a metal hook attached to a long wooden pole, whose diameter was larger than the law allows. She was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

She appealed the sentence on First Amendment grounds, but the court of appeals rejected that argument. The court ruled that the ordinance “makes parades and large public gatherings safer by banning materials that are most likely to become dangerous weapons without depriving the city’s residents of the opportunity to parade or protest with traditional picket signs.”

Vlasak’s lawyer indicated that she is not prepared to give up and will likely ask the appeals court to reconsider its decision or appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Source:

Court uphold validity of limit on protest signs. David Kravets, Associated Press, May 15, 2003.

Seth’s New App

So Dave Winer offers up a demo of what he’s looking to do by using the Google API to search through the data at Scripting.Com. But, again, why rely on a third party to accomplish this?

Want to see every time I’ve mentioned Dave Winer on this weblog?

<http://brian.carnell.com/index?body=winer>

Or how about every time I’ve mentioned Seth?

<http://brian.carnell.com/index?body=seth+dillingham>

And, as Seth points out, you see the results in the weblog. Excellent!

Why Didn’t CNN Fire John Zarella?

CNN reporter John Zarella seems to have out-and-out faked a demonstration of an automatic weapon as well as made a gross error/lie about the “assault” gun ban. And yet, no heads are rolling at CNN. Why?

First, Zarella made an error that gun control advocates encourage but that anyone doing reporting on the “assault” weapons ban should know not to make (or else find a different line of work). Zarella featured automatic and semiautomatic weapons in a report on the ban, and claimed that the ban outlawed automatic weapons. In fact, it did no such thing. All the ban did was make it illegal to sell semiautomatic rifles that feature certain external attachments such as flash suppressors, large magazines, etc. (the actual law sets out a complicated test to determine whether or not a given gun is legal or not and I won’t go into that here).

Second, Zarella featured a police officer oing a live demonstration of firing a weapon on semiautomatic and a weapon on automatic fire at a brick. Here’s how The Washington Times describes (emphasis added),

In the first of the two segments that aired Thursday, a Broward County detective fired the AK-47 in semiautomatic mode, and the camera showed bullets hitting a cinder-block target. The detective then fired a legal semiautomatic weapon, and CNN showed a cinder-block target with no apparent damage. On Friday, CNN admitted that the detective had not been firing at the cinder block.

Given the problems we’ve seen with credibility problems at major national newspapers, I don’t see where Zarella avoids the chopping block for deceiving viewers.

Source:

CNN rapped over gun segment. Robert Stacy McCain, The Washington Times, May 19, 2003.

The Matrix as Leftist Agitprop

Warning: Contains speculation about the Matrix that may qualify as spoilers — don’t read if you’re one of those people who can’t enjoy a movie unless you’re in a state of ignorance about it

Henry Hanks links to this bit of commentary about Cornel West’s bit part in Matrix Reloaded. Jonathan Last writes,

Whatever their other merits, the Wachowski brothers have an affinity for junk-academics, which doesn’t speak well of them. They hired the omnisexual campus fixture Susie Bright as a consultant for “Bound” and were so taken with her that they gave her a bit part and included her in the commentary track on the DVD. Now they’ve given West eight or nine seconds of screen time as an excuse to hang out with the rapping professor in Sydney during filming.

For starters, their tastes in faculty worship don’t inspire great confidence in the intellectual underpinnings of their work. But on a more general level, while celebrity cameos are fine for “Friends” they can be disastrous in semi-serious movies. Nothing strains an audience’s suspension of disbelief like a slap across the face reminding you that behind the story are a bunch of famous people snapping towels.

I think Salon.Com’s review got it right (I can’t believe I just said that) — by the time all three films are out, The Matrix will turn out to be an entertaining piece of leftist agitprop.

A couple years ago I wrote about two Matrix-like films, inluding The 13th Floor which in many ways was a much better film than The Matrix. The thing that bugged be about the ending of The Matrix is that no one in the film asked the obvious question — if the real world turned out to be an illusion, how do we know that our new real world is not an illusion as well? Once your idea of reality has been that screwed with, how would you ever be sure that anything was real?

Well apparently, as Seth Dillingham pointed out at the time, that was likely to be the setup for the sequels, and apparently Matrix Reloaded drops a ton of clues that what Neo and Morpheus think is the real world is yet another computer construct.

But how do you resolve the inherent problems with this in a movie without going all Cronenberg on the audience? If you put some finality to the project — that this time the characters are in the real world (which is how The 13th Floor unsatisfyingly ends), the audience is always left wondering how the characters can be sure. But, on the other hand, trapping the characters in a constant state of indeterminancy does not a blockbuster make.

But assuming both The Matrix and Zion are computer simulations, it’s interesting how the two films treat the respective fantasies in a way that fits well within what appears to be the Wachowski’s leftist politics.

The obvious point of the first movie was straight out of leftist media criticism — 99 percent of people have the wool pulled over their eyes. Only a handful of people are able to see through the lies and transcend this false consciousness and they, of course, are persecuted to no end.

As Salon.Com’s review points out, it fits nicely with leftist critiques of capitalism that the films contrast the modern, urban, consumerist and hence inauthentic. The “real” world, however, is marked by apparent poverty, ratty clothes, certainly no shopping malls, and hence authentic.

If Zion is just another computer-generated illusion, then the obvious problem is that The Matrix certainly seemed like a much superior simulation than Zion and Cypher was right all along in the first movie.

I suspect the mix of religion and politics the Wachowski’s favor is going to lead in the end to some Matrix version of liberation theology or even a left wing Christian existentialism. Personally I’d take the bourgeois matrix simulation any day of the week over that.