I think much of the criticism of “single-issue campaigns” assumes that we (as people involved in any particular advocacy) overestimate our own influence and underestimate the ability of individual people to think on their own. I will try to explain. Suppose that a person witnesses a SIC and thinks to themselves “Those people were [...]
Crossposted at ARZone You’ll often hear about how (in the US anyway) we’ve had 200 years of animal welfare and still, nothing has changed except that the rate of use and the killing of other animals has increased. Fair enough. I wonder about what that means though as far as what we should do [...]
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Did you know that as of Dec 31, 2010, approximately 450 out of every 100,000 white men in the US were serving time in state and federal prisons? Did you know that as of Dec 31, 2010, approximately 3000 out of every 100,000 black men in the US were serving time in state and [...]
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
When people talk about how human slavery was abolished in the US simply or mostly as a result of some great moral crusade, I believe that they are misreading history to the effect of either ignoring completely or severely underestimating the controlling structural social and economic factors in play. When we then extrapolate from [...]
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I wrote a blog post in September of 2010 that I called Steve Best’s Worst Idea. In it, I described what I saw as Dr. Best’s wrong answer to an important question about the use of “aggressive confrontational militant actions.” No long afterwards (and with the help of someone who commented on that post) [...]
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Being vegan is difficult, and if it is going to mean anything, and result in anything, then it must be difficult. Being vegan is not simply an individual life-style choice through which a person opts out of consuming other conscious beings. Being vegan is a political and social statement against the oppression and subjugation [...]
Friday, November 11, 2011
I challenge anyone who would like to try, to explain the data on the availability of products derived from other animals from 1909 until 2009 in the US in a way that supports the idea that welfare reform has caused an increase the use of other animals. That data clearly shows that the percentage increase [...]
Saturday, October 29, 2011
I really don’t get the point of this recent examiner.com article by Corey Wrenn, although I am uncomfortably used to not getting her point. In it she lists a handful of “abolitionist podcast(s)” so that her reader might listen and learn about “abolitionist non-human animal rights theory.” Sounds like a great way to spend the [...]
Saturday, October 1, 2011
What is a counterfactual and why should you care? Suppose that I say, “If only Thomas Jefferson had championed the cause of the abolition of slavery then slavery in America would have been abolished when the United States was founded.” That’s a counterfactual. It poses a solution to a problem (or a cause for [...]
Friday, September 23, 2011
I wrote a post the other day about how I think most vegans think about the way they became vegan. I could be wrong, but there is research that indicates that when people join a particular group or movement, they tend to adopt as their own the narrative of the group. So, for example, people who [...]
