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 [...]
Saturday, January 7, 2012
When it comes to males who think that they must act violently in order to show their control over nature, what they are really showing is that either they do not understand the reality which confronts them, or that they feel afraid and powerless in the face of that reality, or both. Ample social/psychological [...]
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 31, 2011
The lion hunts the antelope, in a dance of death across the plain, where blood will flow and bodies will cease to breathe and then we’ll say, “It’s natural”. But on those days so long ago when the mind of man was not the mind of god and we were neither created nor creators, [...]
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
If you think that the sentience of other animals is sufficient to afford them rights, then please explain what sentience consists in and how we can recognize it. For example, we know from carefully controlled experimental observation that bacteria (an animal life form — oops! this is incorrect, although certainly a life form, bacteria [...]
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
It is a mistaken view of freedom that sees the world as one solely of individual choices, when in fact those choices impact on the lives of others. In complex societies, where millions of people seek to live in harmony with each other, there are beliefs that we respect, in general, that many of [...]
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 [...]
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
A list of Frequently Asked Questions commonly heard by many vegans. Please click on any question to view the response. A vegan is one who fully respects the lives and well-being of others. A vegan strives to avoid harming others and does everything possible to avoid using any living being as a resource or a [...]
