Great Books Debate at K5

Kuro5hin has a little “great books” thread taking off on a question posted to Mortimer Adler about which books he would take with him to a deserted island.

Of course the scary thing about online versions of this is the geeks who will chime in with lists of graphic novels and scifi novels they would take. Which is not just to pick on geeks. At least one person there claims that he’s never read anything written before the 20th century, which is just pathetic but an apt commentary on the dumbing down of our educational system.

Now the obvious answer to the books on a deserted island question is that you would want only one book — a copy of “How to Escape From a Deserted Island.”

Barring that, though, I would side with Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Shakespeare come’s close to Dante’s genius, and a complete works of Shakespeare would be a decent consolation prize.

Two authors showed up in the Kuro5hin debate whom some of my friends would agree with but whom I have no use at all for — Jean-Paul Sartre and Umberto Eco. I suppose if you ran out of toilet paper Foucalt’s Pendulum might be useful since it is such a long novel. And Sartre might come in handy rationalizing away your situation as Sartre rationalized away some of the ugliest of human behavior.

Graduation Day

My, Lisa, went through her commencement proceedings this weekend (she doesn’t actually get her degree until August, but here we have a combined Spring/Summer commencement ceremony). She’s finishing up the final touches on her thesis for her Masters in Medieval Studies.

Her sister and brother-in-law from Tennessee surprised her (and me) by driving up for the ceremony after stringing her along making her think they wouldn’t be able to make it. Since they’re the two sanest people in either of our families, that was fun.

The only low point was when the idiot they hired to do a prayer during the commencent had the temerity to compare the WorldCom and Enron fiascos with Sept. 11. Apparently if you don’t pray for Arthur Andersen, then the terrorists have won.

When I received my degree I never bothered with going through a graduation ceremony and was reminded why sitting there on Saturday — there is nothing more boring than watching thousands of people you don’t know get a degree. My daughter was thrilled when the Dean of Arts and Sciences talked about my wife in a mini-speech highlighting students who had made a lot of impact on the university (thrilled because the dean mentioned my daughter). But by the time they got around to awarding the undergraduate degrees, she was bouncing all over the place out of sheer boredom (and I was about to join her).

New Scientist’s Nonsense on Vouchers and Creationism

New Scientist has a bizarre take on the recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the Constitutionality of a Cleveland voucher program. Almost all of the vouchers were used to send students to private Roman Catholic schools, and the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that this did not violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

But to New Scientist, this decisions is all about teaching creationism,

But the decision will mean that even fewer US children will be taught evolution. Repeated attempts since the 1920s by Christian fundamentalists in the US to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools, or at least mandate teaching the biblical account of creation as well, have been defeated in court on the grounds that teaching religion in a state-funded school violates the separation of church and state.

Private schools are under no such restriction. So creationists have turned their efforts towards expanding private schooling. The voucher scheme is widely supported by Christian right wing organizations. One Cleveland voucher school states that “the one cardinal objective of education to which all others point is to develop devotion to God as our Creator”.

But if Cleveland parents were obssessed with having their children taught creationism, why would 95 percent of those using the voucher system send them to Catholic schools? Or is New Scientist writer Debora MacKenzie simply so clueless that she doesn’t realize that private Catholic schools have been teaching evolution for decades?

After all, as far back as 1950 Pope Pius XII made it clear there was no doctrinal conflict between evolution and Catholicism.

It’s interesting that the Catholic Church was able to look at scientific changes and incorporate them doctrinally, but New Scientist doesn’t seem to be able to get over its bigoted assumption that creationist and Christian are synonyms.

SHAC Campaign Seems to Be Sputtering

In 1999, animal rights activists claimed they would shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences with three years. Last year, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty issued claim after claim that HLS was on its last legs and its demise was imminent.

Which is odd considering that HLS recently reported that for the first three months of 2002, its orders were up 46 percent and its revenues increased 15 percent. HLS still had a pre-tax loss of $4.1 million, but that compares quite favorably to its pre-tax $6.1 million loss during the same period of 2001.

HLS marketing director Andrew Gay told the Financial Times of London that May 2002 was the best month ever for the company and that it is gaining more business as, “A lot of pharmaceuticals companies are realizing that they need to improve their drug development pipelines and we are benefiting from that.”

As Mark Matfield noted in an op-ed for Chemistry & Industry, SHAC seems to have won the battle for media attention, but lost the war to shut down the company as HLS has rebounded over the past year.

And certainly part of that has been SHAC’s increasingly extremist tactics causing other companies to realize that if HLS does fail, the SHAC folks will take that as an indication that their tactic work and move on to harassing other companies.

Sources:

Corporate recovery for drugs testing company. Patrick Jenkins, Financial Times of London.

Animal rights & wrongs. Mark Matfield, Chemistry & Industry, June 17, 2002.

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.