Slashdot Mirror

Yah, but there are still places like Huntingdon Life Sciences that to do painful experiments dogs

http://www.shac.net/science/vivi_intro.html

If dogs are as intelligent as human 2 year olds is it right for Huntingdon Life Sciences to do painful experiments on them?

http://www.shac.net/science/vivi_intro.html

If the group you protested with were engaged in terrorist actions then you are. You want to go join a BUAV rally thats fine. And I wouldn't dream of calling you anti science. Nor would I accuse you of being anti science for protesting at a Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth rally. SHAC/ALF are a terror group. Attending a SHAC rally, giving money to SHAC, etc. is funding terrorism.

Protecting the identity of a member of SHAC is supporting terrorism.

Seeing as SHAC is a lawful public group, whose members are well-known to the authorities, I doubt it somehow.

The ALF and the ELF share many members and are populated by people who engage at attacks on scientists. If you support the ELF or ALF you are anti science. I'm not equating attending a Greenpeace or BUAV protest with being a member of the ALF.

Now you are descending into self-parody.

Thanks for doing my job for me by making yourself look like a raving lunatic.

"You updated a website protesting animal cruelty vs drug companies. Now we're gonna smack you with a conspiracy charge for 4.5 years in prison."

Try, "you were basically CIO of a terrorist organisation."

Er, no, SHAC are a perfectly lawful organisation, which are still happily functioning, as you can see from their website.

If they were "terrorists", they would have been shut down.

SHAC/ALF are not a group protesting animal cruelty. They are a bunch of anti science luddites hell bent on hurting scientists and engineers.

Nonsense on stilts. The whole point of SHAC is to stop the terrorizing of animals by Huntingdon Life Sciences who, for example, force feed weedkiller to beagles.

SHAC, and myself, are neither luddites nor anti-science. I am fully supportive of the scientific method. I just don't think it is right to inflict pain on sentient beings in the process.

Belief in animal rights and belief in science are totally orthogonal issues.

I'm at a loss why you would think SHAC or the ALF want to hurt engineers, unless they are building some kind of device for torturing animals?

The UK government has acted against SHAC in the way that governments are good at: the people who committed the harassment will be in jail for some time.

Actually, that's not quite true.

The people who committed harassment were never found or charged, and there was no evidence that those imprisoned knew who they were.

The SHAC activists who were imprisoned were the ones running the lawful campaign, and they were convicted of "conspiracy to blackmail" precisely because they hadn't actually broken any real laws.

It was a clearly politically motivated attempt to silence an effective campaign - although the SHAC campaign is still going strong, I might add.

How the hell did this piece of establishment diatribe get modded +5 informative?

ALF - Animal Liberation Front - a umbrella name for an unconnected group of compassionate people prepared to break the law and risk their liberty to defend animals from abuse. They have a strict policy of non-violence to any animals, including humans.

SHAC - Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty - a lawful group that campaigns against hideous abuse of animals at Huntingdon Life Sciences, who have been exposed numerous time for punching beagles, force-feeding them weedkiller, and torturing monkeys.

SPEAK - A group campaigning against a new animal torture facility in the heart of Oxford, UK.

PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - a large mainstream animal rights group, that nevertheless recognises that some people will break the law to help animals in suffering.

BUAV - British Union of Anti-Vivisectionists - a formerly radical but now wishy washy group whose main activities are lobbying politicians, who get much larger bribes from drug companies anyway.

The SHAC website has not been taken down by the UK police.

That would be because SHAC is a perfectly legal group that campaigns against disgusting animal abuse at Huntingdon Life Sciences.

An Indymedia mirror has, probably because the police wanted to check for themselves the claim that Indymedia does not keep logs, rather than trust the site's operators, who are likely sympathetic to SHAC and might be inclined to help cover up the source of the criminal harassment that the police are investigating.

The offending post was the private address of a judge. There was no incitement to harass, although it is against Indymedia policy to show personal details, so it was removed.

SHAC is by no means a terrorist group. If they were, how come they are still functioning openly? - you can see many recent actions at http://shac.net/

They are a perfectly lawful group that got too successful in challenging the abuses of the pharmaceutical industry and were locked up on a spurious "conspiracy to blackmail" charge.

Don't you think there is a reason that they were never arrested, accused or charged with specific illegal acts?

It's because those acts were carried out by unknown people unconnected to them other than by a common goal. This was pure guilt by tenuous association.

I agreed with you that additional evidence can change the outcome of an experiment. But so far you have presented "they attack scientists" as the entirety of your evidence in favour of the hypothesis "they are anti-science". In combination with the evidence "they attack non-scientists", the available evidence does not support your hypothesis.

Then you provide me with a few links to sites which, in fact, provide more evidence that these people are not anti-science:

http://www.shac.net/science/facts.html -- why would SHAC appeal to "scientific facts" [sic] if they rejected science?

http://www.speakcampaigns.org/faq.php/ -- again, there is a (not particularly rigorous, but nonetheless laudable) attempt to meet scientists with evidence-based reasoning.

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Morality/ScienceandMorality.htm -- which seeks to separate the moral argument from the scientific argument, and rejects animal testing on the former rather than the latter.

Feel free to point me to specific pages which you feel demonstrate evidence of an anti-scientific standpoint.

If your only response is a combination of comparing me to the ALF and liberal arts graduates we aren't going to make progress here. You basically agreed with me in the last line of your post, I just assume you haven't done the necessary reading to check up on your opinions, so I will provide you with references. If you want an example of attitudes comparable to antisemitism directed towards scientists conducting research look at

http://www.speakcampaigns.org/
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/
http://www.shac.net/

ALF, not ELF. Animals, not Elves ;)

I haven't heard of links / donations between Greenpeace and ALF before - any sources?

As for ramming boats into each other, from what I remember Greenpeace tends to be in a rubber dingy against a tanker / whaler / toxic waste dumper, which seems about as violent as tickling a tank with a feather. I'd agree they're sometimes over the top, but "violent" is a stretch.

The fringe of the animal movement, though, definitely has terrorists. http://www.shac.net/ seem keen to firebomb people to save rats, among other things.

Yeah, You're referring to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The campaign to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences, a vivisection company (not a phharm company) with nothing but bad history. I'm glad you mention it, and I'm surprised that their case didn't get more press. All HLS had to do was threaten the host (envirolink.org) with the DMCA with copyright infringement, and they removed the site. SHAC just re-hosted in a few hours. It was a typical move by HLS, and a dangerous precedent.