Just another nerd.
The House of Lords voted 317 to 68 to reject the portion of a recent bill that outlawed fox hunting in the United Kingdom. The Peers also voted 249 to 108 to reject a proposal to continue fox hunting but only with heavy regulation. Instead, the Lords voted to allow fox hunting to continue in its current, self-regulated form.
Peers reject fox-hunting ban. Ananova, March 26, 2001.
Yikes. I never thought I’d see John Tynes’ byline in Salon.Com, much less on an over-the-top insider’s account of his time working at Wizards of the Coast right after Magic: The Gathering took off (Death to the Minotaur).
This is part of a series, with the next installment appearing Monday.
A couple weeks ago I was in Detroit for the first time in several years. If you’ve never been to Detroit but want to get the same experience go to a local video store and rent the cheesy John Carpenter film, “Escape from New York.” The cityscape of Carpenters’ futuristic New York isn’t that different from Detroit (the Detroit Free Press/Detroit News building, for example, has enormous fences and brick walls as protection and looks more like an armed fortress than a newspaper).
Ironically Detroit police can’t seem to do much about crime even though they routinely violate the civil rights of suspects and now, it turns out, witnesses as well. The Detroit Free Press reported this week that last year a federal prosecutor contacted Detroit police chief Benny Napoleon to warn him that his department’s policy of arresting witnesses to crimes was unconstitutional.
Apparently the police have a written policy such that when investigating murders they arrest witnesses, family members and anyone else in any way contacted with the crime on top of arresting any suspects. As Michael Steinberg of the American Civil Liberties Union tells the Free Press, “Arresting people and interrogating them without probable cause to believe they committed a crime is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Witnesses can apparently be arrested if they are likely to flee, but this requires the approval of a judge. Detroit cops were simply arresting everyone in the vicinity, taking them down to the police station for interrogation, and then releasing them — sometimes not until several days later.
And of course since this is Detroit, even the fact that the city was paying thousands of dollars to settle civil suits over the practice didn’t motivate Napoleon to put a stop to it. According to the Free Press, Detroit last year settled a false arrest suit for $500,000, and yet the policy remained in place.
Police had been warned: U.S. prosecutor and chief discussed witness arrests. David Ashenfelter and David Zeman, Detroit Free Press, March 22, 2001.
Researchers at Kansas State University are using new techniques in analyzing plant genetics that have already discovered two genes that make wheat resistant to Russian wheat aphids.
By identifying genetic markers, the researchers can show breeders how to quickly identify whether a crossbred wheat variety has retained the aphid resistance gene. The find should greatly accelerate research into aphid-resistant wheat. Already the Kansas Agricultural Experimental Station has released a wheat variety resistant to the aphid as well as leaf and stem rust.
Source:
Scientists Discover New Russian Wheat Aphid Resistance Genes. Kristin Danley-Greiner, AgWeb.Com, March 19, 2001.
One of the major underpinnings of much animal rights thought is the notion of speciesism — this is the claim, advanced by animal rights philosophers such as Peter Singer, that there is no rational basis for commonly held moral distinctions between human beings and non-human animals. Singer, and many others in the animal rights movement, maintain that the impetus behind such distinctions is based on an irrational attachment to the importance of human beings above all other species, which is deplorable in much the same way that arguing in favor of special moral distinctions for whites vs. non-whites or men vs. women is deplorable.
Critics of such views have maintained that not only is speciesism morally justifiable in ways that racism or sexism are not, but that animal rights advocates do not apply the concept of speciesism in ways that are internally consistent. In fact, most animal rights activists seem to veer away from the genuinely radical implications of speciesism.
But not Singer. In an article published in the online magazine, Nerve, the philosopher takes the speciesism idea to its logical extreme and argues that there is no rational reason to deplore sexual relations between human beings and non-human animals. The condemnation of inter-species sexuality, according to Singer, is just another example of a speciesist distinction.
In reviewing Midas Dekker’s book, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, Singer explicitly defends the morality of inter-species sex. First, Singer argues that although the origin of the taboo against bestiality probably originated in the general taboos on non-reproductive sex (a questionable hypothesis in my opinion), this doesn’t explain the basic revulsion that most people have toward the practice. “But the vehemence with which this prohibition continues to be held,” Singer writes, “its persistence while other non-reproductive sexual acts have become acceptable, suggests that there is another powerful force at work: our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals.”
In other words, the bestiality taboo is just another way that human beings reinforce speciesism and cast themselves as completely separate and distinct from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Singer then launches into a lengthy discussion to make it clear that he doesn’t think sexual acts that involve violence with animals are permissible, but seems to leave the door wide open for non-violent sexual acts between humans and non-human animals. Describing a woman who live with Orangutans and was almost sexually attacked by one of the animals, Singer writes,
The potential violence of the orangutan’s come-on may have been disturbing, but the fact that it was an orangutan making the advances was not. That may be because [Birute] Galdikas understands very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.
This doesn’t come right out and say that bestiality is okay, but it is hard to imagine what Singer is getting at if he still thinks such contact is immoral. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Debra Saunders contacted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to get its take on the Singer piece, and Ingrid Newkirk carefully hedged her words, telling Saunders, “It’s daring and honest and it does not do what some people read into it, which is condone any violent acts involving an animal, sexual or otherwise.”
I’m not sure how daring it is for a man who has previously said that retarded infants and Alzheimer’s patients can be killed because it is for the greater good is exactly making a “daring” statement by endorsing bestiality, provided it doesn’t include violence against the animal involved. That Newkirk is apparently willing to stomach this nonsense (going so far as to talk about the philosophical issue surrounding animals and the concept of consent) demonstrates just how radical and far reaching the animal rights view is at its core.
If Singer’s claims about animals and pain are true, this conclusion about bestiality does seem completely consistent with that view, and represents another example of just how incoherent the animal rights philosophy is.
Source:
Heavy Petting. Peter Singer, Nerve.Com, 2001.
Hamrick Software has an interesting little web application. You type in your last name, and it pulls up a map showing how common that last name is throughout the United States based on several different data sets.
For example, here’s a map of Carnell,
