Ooh, I’m Dangerous

One of the fun things about having a popular web site is watching one’s enemies scurry in fear at your presence (really, I’m not kidding).

An animal rights activist took it upon himself to lift the full text of one of my articles and posted it on a popular animal rights/vegan site, VegSource.Com.

Another activist replied to that message with a post claiming that I was trying to deceive people into thinking my anti-animal rights site was really a pro-animal rights site and had some other criticisms of my site.

So I posted (the first time I’ve posted there in more than a year) that the main difference between my site and VegSource.Com was that I don’t ban people who dare disagree with me (which VegSource.Com is notorious for).

In less than an hour or so I was IP banned completely from VegSource.Com — a site which, ironically, has as its tagline “All Are Welcome At VegSource.Com”. The site’s owner, Jeff Nelson’s, probably afraid I’m going to post links to articles like this or this or even even this.

Far from bugging me, I think it’s kind of cool that a site with the budget and traffic that VegSource.Com has (which certainly dwarf the traffic I receive) is apparently deathly afraid of exposing its users to me. That’s how I measure effectiveness.

It is interesting, though, that no major animal rights group I can think of has an open discussion area. In fact, very few have any sort of discussion forum at all. Personally I’ve always thought it was important to let even people I think wholly irrational to speak their mind.

Then again, I don’t have to defend ridiculous propositions such that animals have rights. Maybe I’d feel differently if I was stuck with that position.

Jeff Nelson Just Can't Stop Lying

Normally I don’t write about the few conflicts I have with animal rights activists here, but Jeff Nelson and VegSource.Com offer such a case study of animal rights group think that this time I’m making an exception.

Back on July 12 I posted an article about on ongoing debate over at an Animal Rights 2002 Memory board hosted by VegSource.Com (see http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2002/000244.html for the details of that).

Anytime animal rights activists disagree in public, somebody chimes in that this is just helping their enemies, and at least one person pointed out my article. On July 14, Adam Weissman posted the entire text of the article in a post called “An Article About this Discussion Board by an Animal Rights Foe.”

Another activist responded to that by attacking my web site. In order to prove a point, I posted a reply noting that the main difference between AnimalRights.Net and VegSource.Com is I don’t spend most of my day banning people who disagree with me. In fact I give free reign to animal rights activists who want to come to the site and criticize me. I’ve always felt that allowing such unfettered communication, regardless of how uncomfortable or heated it may get, is the best way to ensure that my claims are as strong and accurate as possible.

Of course within an hour or two, Nelson deleted my post and banned the computer I was using from even accessing his site. This is what VegSource.Com’s tagline that “All Are Welcome” really means.

Nelson followed that up with “Note regarding banning and post removals from this board in which he writes,

VegSource provides this board to FARM for their use. VegSource moderators do not remove posts from this board and don’t have the password to do so, nor do I remove posts from this board (with one exception having to do with a disreputable anti-animal rights site attempting to get traffic from us, a site which is supposed to be blocked from our full site).

That is as hilarious as it is pathetic. Apparently some VegSource.Com visitors actually fall for this lame explanation that I am “attempting to get traffic from” VegSource.Com. Yeah, that’s right, Adam Weissman and I are such buddies that he’s now doing my marketing for me by posting my articles to VegSource.Com.

The reality is that Jeff Nelson doesn’t want anyone linking to or discussing any of the articles I’ve written pointing out that he is just as factually challenged as his current nemesis Robert Cohen (see http://www.animalrights.net/faq/people/pro_ar/jeff_nelson.html for a rundown). VegSource.Com promotes the worst sort of groupthink by not only banning its critics but even animal rights activists who disagree in some way with VegSource.Com’s agenda.

The funny thing is that I rarely visit VegSource.Com — there are too many ads and it is impossible to find anything there with the convoluted web design. Still, it’s gratifying to know that little old me is apparently public enemy number one in Nelson’s book.

And just a note to people who do post to VegSource.Com. Do you really think it is just a good idea to let Nelson publicly display your IP addresses? I have run across some boneheaded practices at web sites before, but this takes the cake. I’ve seen posts, for example, where people clearly posted from work or at universities where the IP address and the name would make it extremely easy to track down the people posting.

This sort of information is collected by every web server — only Nelson is stupid enough to make it publicly available to anyone who happens across his site.

Alleged Animal Rights Assassin Goes on Hunger Strike

The Financial Times reported this weekend that Volkert van der Graaf, the animal rights activist and alleged assassin of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, has gone on a hunger strike to protest is prison conditions.

According to his lawyer, van der Graaf is being held in solitary confinement and monitored via video camera in a cell that is lighted 24 hours a day.

Dutch prison authorities say they have taken such measures because they are afraid van der Graaf will try to commit suicide.

Source:

Fortuyn suspect on hunger strike. Ian Bickerton, July 14, 2002.

Vegetarianism in America

Occasionally some animal rights group or another will make some wild claim about the popularity of vegetarianism (witness PETA’s recent clever manipulation of data from a poll it commissioned on America’s eating habits). As part of a recent cover story on vegetarianism, Time Magazine commissioned a poll of 10,000 people who were asked about what they eat. The results show that if vegetarianism/veganism is the heart of the animal rights movement (as is often claimed), then the movement is in deep trouble.

Of no surprise is that almost nobody is a vegan. In the Time poll only 1 out of every 500 persons interviewed claimed to be a vegan.

A much larger total of 3.8 percent of people interviewed did claim to be vegetarians, but they are an odd sort of vegetarian. In fact, 60 percent of the self-identified vegetarians also said they had eaten meat, poultry or seafood in the last 24 hours! As Time put it,

Perhaps those surveyed thought a vegetarian is someone who, from time to time, eats vegetables as a side dish — say, alongside a prime rib. If more than one-third of people in a large sample don’t know the broadest definition of vegetarian, one wonders how they can be trusted with something much more difficult: the full-time care and picky-picky feeding of their bodies, whatever their dietary preferences.

Once those folks are left out, only 1.6 percent of respondents were vegetarians by a sensible definition of that term and almost all of them are going to anger Karen Davis and company for exploiting chickens.

So in the 22 years since the founding of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the animal rights movement has managed to convince a whopping 1.6 percent of Americans to give up all animal products except eggs. Even among the vegetarians, only 27 percent said they became a vegetarian because of animal rights, love of animals or religious reasons.

Yeah, that’s a movement that’s really lit a fire under the American psyche (which, of course, is why it increasingly resorts to lighting fires at American businesses).

Source:

Should We All Be Vegetarians? Richard Corliss, Time, July 7, 2002.

Veggie statistics. Alex Hershaft, e-mail communication, July 14, 2002.

Hilariously Hypocritical Big Brother 2 Lawsuit

Krista Stegall, who was a contestant on “Big Brother 2”, has filed a lawsuit against CBS over the criteria it used to choose contestants.

In one episode another contestant, Justin Sebik, apparently put a knife to Stegall’s throat and ask if she would be mad if he killed her. He claimed he was joking(!) but CBS kicked him off the show.

Clearly she’s got a good civil lawsuit case against Sebik, but her case against CBS contains an oddity. Her lawyers maintain that since Sebik had prior arrests for assault that CBS never should have allowed him on the show. Stegall’s attorney, Clayton Burgess, told the Associated Press, “I don’t think there’s any doubt (CBS) made a huge mistake letting him in and keeping in him in.”

That certainly makes sense, but her lawyers forget to mention that this standard would also have kept Stegall herself off of the show. Stegall lied to the producer’s of the show by telling them she had never been arrested. In fact she was arrested on March 27, 2001, for simple battery after a 4 a.m. fight with her boyfriend.

The police report noted that both Stegall and the boyfriend had “physical marks” indicating that both had committed “battery on each other.”

Like Sebik, Stegall was never actually prosecuted. Stegall’s boyfriend told the prosecutor he wanted the charges dropped and the prosecutor declined to proceed with the case.

Sources:

‘Big Brother’ player sues over knife incident. The Associated Press, July 4, 2002.

The Smoking Gun (Krista Stegall).

Go On, Drink the Palladium Kool-Aid

I didn’t really follow the whole Palladium disclosures from Microsoft until a coworker asked me about it the other day. My current take on it is that buying a Palladium-enabled computer would be a bit like drinking Kool Aid at Jonestown(1). They’ll try to tell you it tastes sweet, but the whole thing is pure poison.

Cryptome.Org has mirrored the long press release that Steven Levy wrote about Palladium for Newsweek. Levy buys into Microsoft’s hype that the Internet is on the verge of collapse (or something like that) due to the preponderance of e-mail viruses (thanks largely due to Microsoft’s e-mail client), viruses (thanks in part to bug-ridden versions of MS Windows) and file sharing (no thanks to MS, apparently).

Microsoft’s solution — “Trust us — we’ll control what goes in and out of your computer and you’ll never have another problem ever.” Just drink the Kool Aid and ever-lasting bliss is yours.

But, like cyanide-laced drinks, Microsoft’s solution is much, much worse than the problem. Here’s one of Palladium’s proposed features,

Palladium is all about deciding whatÂ’s trustworthy. It not only lets your computer know that youÂ’re you, but also can limit what arrives (and runs on) your computer, verifying where it comes from and who created it.

Notice that it is not you, the user, who gets to decided what does and does not run on your computer, but rather Microsoft. Load a music file onto your computer that doesn’t have all the right permissions? Sorry, Palladium will decide you can’t run it. Control of your computer no longer resides with you, but with Microsoft who is far more interested in pleasing large corporations than it is in helping end users.

The reality is that for every single use that Microsoft offers as legitimate for this sort of technology, there are already plenty of ways to achieve the end result without such a scheme. Dealing with spam, getting rid of viruses, ensuring that e-mail communications are private — all of these things can be done without handing control of your computer over to Microsoft.

Palladium is simply the latest proposal in a growing trend to turn the personal computer into a high-powered television-like device where what users can do with their machines is highly circumscribed and limited.

I don’t think Palladium will succeed, but it should be a big wakeup call that such a system is even being proposed. In the early late 1970s, the personal PC revolution began. Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA, and others are now actively trying to bring out a counter-revolution to slam the lid on the Pandora’s Box that is the PC.

1. Yes, I know Jim Jones was so cheap that his followers died drinking the knockoff Flavor-Aid.