Slashdot Mirror
Neuroscientist Halts Research to Stop Extremists
FleaPlus writes "UCLA neuroscience professor Dario Ringach, known for his contributions to our understanding of how the visual system processes information, has been forced to give up his experiments by the actions of animal-rights extremists. Although he and his family had endured harassment and vandalization by animal-rights activists for years, Ringach reconsidered after extremists tried to firebomb a colleague's home and accidentally left their Molotov cocktail on an elderly neighbor's doorstep. Ringach sent an email to animal activist groups saying, 'You win... please don't bother my family anymore.'"
Why can't get get rid of our home grown ones?
Yay, I have a sig.
Shouldn't these be the terrorists the government goes after?
. . . nutcases interested in firebombing executives in the copyright cartel, they might be able to accomplish some good.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Although he and his family had endured harassment and vandalization by animal-rights activists for years, Ringach reconsidered after extremists tried to firebomb a colleague's home and accidentally left their Molotov cocktail on an elderly neighbor's doorstep.
I don't get it. Aren't humans "animals", too?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
That would be too good. Better would be to use them for the experimentation that they deem unfit for animals. Everybody wins!
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Is why these groups are allowed to continue to exist. I'm sorry but I don't buy this crap of "We applaud people who do things like this and we don't stop members from doing it, but really it's not our fault that it happens!" Sorry, like with corporations, I think if there's consistent bad action by our members and if your policy encourages that, then you are liable, regardless of if it was "official" or not.
While you certainly can't be expected to control all the actions of everyone who belongs to your group, there's still a duty not to turn a blind eye on purpose, and then pat them on the back after the fact.
Bah... these are the real terrorists... You don't agree with what someone is doing, then sue them... that's the american way... and if that fails, then try and get a law passed to make it illegal... starting your own personal war based on your morals is no different than the actions of those the US is currently calling terrorists. But hey, this is in the country who's government doesn't believe in teaching evolution anymore...
Times like these I'm happy to live in a country where the worst thing activists do is slow down traffic, and hold marches.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Fucking terrorists. They're the same as abortion clinic bombers, using violence to induce fear to achieve their political goals.
And I want to say that he should have stood up to them, that if you give in like this, the terrorists win... but the guy's put up with years of harassment, and now violence against his coworkers, with a very real threat to his family and to people unlucky enough to live near him. So it's understandable why he's packing it in; under the same circumstances, I would have given up years earlier. But it still fucking sucks.
The most grating part of it is that I'll bet the assholes from UCLA Primate Freedom who posted his picture and contact info think they can wash their hands of the inevitable results of their propagandizing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yeah, China really figured out how to handle malcontents the right way. Thats why there's not a huge outpouring of social unrest there these days. Find then, arrest them, and jail them.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
It's interesting to note that the LA Times article calls it a crude explosive (which could be anything from firecracker to pipe bomb) while the other article calls it a Molotov Cocktail (which IS crude, but more specific). All that aside, obviously these people (if they did it) are complete and utter morons. One does not light a Molotov Cocktail and place it on a porch. One lights a Molotov Cocktail and throws it through a window (or air vent on a Soviet tank, which was the device's original purpose). The glass container breaks, spraying flammable liquid all over the place which then ignites, burning the place down. THAT is how one firebombs a house correctly.
WTF?
You demand violence to stop violence that was meant to stop violence. You do realize your idea only helps the problem spiral, right?
If caught, feed these idiots to the tigers at the zoo. I'm a member of PETA......people EATING tasty animals!
And into the character of his family members, and of his neighbors too, I suppose?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
They're incomptently destructive assholes, as well - and you can bet that if the Molotov they left on the old lady's door did ignite, none of them would have come forward to accept responsbility for the murder of an innocent person (despite the obvious contradiction with their so-called moral imperative).
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
GW Bush doesn't care about American terrorists. Why aren't they in jail? Oh yea, he's too busy doing illegal wiretaps and spending crazy stupid sums of money on shiny new technology which won't work nearly as well as advertized, and forgetting that they way you catch terrorists is with smart people doing old-fashioned police work.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
We can manufacture bullets faster than they can manufacture destructive eco terrorists.
Can someone actually tell me what he did to the animals.
Sure, I've gone and petitioned against trees being cut down. Indeed, we've even hugged a few and prevented their demise. But vigilante retribution was never the way to save animals. There have been transgressions on one side, but that doesn't justify the other side from commiting brutality.
Replacing cruelty to animals, with one towards mankind doesn't solve the problem - mainly because there is no Noble Savage unlike what Rousseau dreamed.
This is like terrorism with its own ecological brand (call it another religion if you want).Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
We complain when people who hold strong views don't censure their extremists. I would be a hypocrite if I didn't say this.
Violence isn't the answer. These people are destructive. These people are assholes. However, the answer is not to shoot them. They should be arrested, tried and, if found guilty, fined and/or imprisoned for their crimes.
Fantasies of "first against the wall, motherfuckers!" are briefly satisfying, but ultimately degrading to the person having the fantasy.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't get it. Aren't humans "animals", too?
Didn't you read Animal Farm in high school? It's been clearly stated by the pigs that while all are animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others. Sheesh.. try to keep up with us for a change.
AccountKiller
Are you seriously putting the firebombing of the home of a little old lady in the same category as peaceful dissent?
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
...I am going to torture 25 monkeys to death. Just for fun. Not for science, just good old fashioned fun.
Make that animal rights terrorist, you twit.
And the good news is that bullets can be made with no animal by-products.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Filthy savages! They exhibit behaviour much like they have de-evolved to the level of primates, or other animal behaviour.
Nexy they will be throwing their own fecal matter at each other.
You know how cute animals are. Well animal rights activists are at their cutest when they loose invasive species from laboratories on the unsuspecting indigenous flora and fauna the way they did in the British Isles.
Seastead this.
So, uh...yeah. With all of the talk about the War on Terror these days, what is being done about this kind of crap. Isn't the instillment of fear with threats of violence to obtain political victories terrorism? I don't see GW talking about terrorism that happens in our own country (you know, by Americans) in the news....
The University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture was firebombed in 2001 by the ELF. The terrorists who did this will be charged under new anti-terrorism laws and will likely spend many, many years in prison. I hate these extremists - they only damage their own cause. But I can't blame the guy for not wanting to put up with the constant harassment.
The fear of the modern radical environmentalist-wannabe is that man is going to disrupt nature, ending the vibrant life cycle that has taken so long to develop here, and the morals necissary to continue a 'balanced' life. That's a valid fear - but science is the last thing to attack if that is your fear.
I cringe when people honor people who commit these actions with the title environmentalists. These bullies are instead waging war on the very forces in society with any hope of stopping a blind march towards environmental disaster. Scientists 'harm' animals so that worse harm does not have to happen to both other animals, and to people in the future. Perhaps their hope is that mankind will someday fall and nature continue - but mankind is a part of nature, and the very intelligence that drives us to exploit the rest of nature to the extent that we do now isn't going to drop away from the planet without a WHOLE lot of the rest of nature going with us.
The idea is to avoid mass death, to allow the greatest morality to the greatest number - not close your eyes and mind to the realities of life and death. Science is our best way to keep our eyes open.
But because these bullies can't fight society at large, they instead attack scientists. In the same way that religious extremists angry that society won't adopt their religion will strike at the weakest enemies they can find in hope that their brutality will shock the innocent into following them, these idiots seem to think that extremist bullying will somehow serve to save nature. Few things could be more disgusting in my eyes.
Ryan Fenton
He raped them. Anally.
Instead of the bullet through the skull the parent suggested maybe these people should be arrested and made to work as free vets for the rest of their lives. It gets these crazies off the streets and if they love animals so much this would be their ideal job.
Insanity is nothing more than a difference in perspective.
Well, according to the terrorists and their enablers, "Each monkey is first paralyzed, then has coils glued to her eyes during a single session that lasts up to 120 hours, and finally killed." It says nothing about why he did this or what the purpose was, which, I suppose, would make a difference.
Also, according to them, people at "Huntingdon Life Sciences" "punch baby beagles repeatedly in the face". I'm not sure what to make of this. Do researchers punch puppies? That seems kind of... odd. What's the point of that?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And the more you kill, the more will rise up against you. You assume that everyone in our society who isn't an animal rights extremist is going to stand by and let you kill people when the death penalty is already a very contoversial topic. You are risking the ire of various fronts, not just the one you oppose.
Might I add, your method of killing people is quite similar to how it is done in fascist states. This would not go unnoticed by the general public, and would likely lead to some form of civil unrest.
These same violent pricks and bitches would no doubt cry "Fascist!" at any cops that participates in an effort to control a globalization protest or some other left-wing cause. Yet here they are, engaging in many of the classic coercion tactics of the brownshirts. Fear, intimidation, violence.
It's always "activism" when the left does it, but fascism when the right does it. I hope the FBI nails these fucks hard because they are a much greater threat to this country than any Islamic nutjob. Why? They're potential voters. They're violent extremists who actually act on their rhetoric. They're the closest thing we have to an organized domestic terrorism problem.
And before anyone brings up abortion clinic bombers, you want to know why it isn't a problem? Because there are a lot of Christians like me who wouldn't hesitate to shoot those violent fucks if we caught them in the act. Why? Our religion teaches that preserving life is a duty of all Jews and Christians.
I believe abortion is murder, but so is murdering a doctor because as much as I'd like to call it equivalent to a concentration camp, I can't because it's too insidious and two wrongs don't make a right. These guys don't care about such moral complexities. To them it's just murder so they go out and murder. This is the essence of "judge not lest you be judged," not the crap about blindly accepting everyone's personal choices as being as good as the next guy's.
So, in short, I wish the FBI and police the best of luck. May they hunt down these violent little brownshirts and lock their asses away. Even the protestors. As far as I am concerned, the first amendment does not extend protection to protests done outside someone's home. That is fear and intimidation and the police are quite justified in arresting and charging every "protestor" as harasser or stalker.
You see, the problem with the current response is that in giving in because an elderly couple was accidently targetted means that friends and neighbors of such people will now be held hostage. The only effective way to use violence to stop such researchers is to target elderly neighbors...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Not that it justifies a firebombing at all, but what exactly was he doing to get the activists so upset? I know many of them can be irrational, but they do tend to concentrate efforts on the worst offenders in general.
I'm not siding with them at all, but I am curious as to what he was doing in his labs that made him such a strong target. Is it possible that he was being overzealous in his experimentation? I'm no fan of PETA, but there is a limit to the amount of cruelty I think should be visited on animals for our benefit. What were his supposed "crimes"?
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Science may not dictate morals, but I don't think Peta should dictate morals either. Such things should be left up to God.
This quote serves a 2 part purpose it's speaking on terms of not being afraid of man, and man being superior to animals.
Matthew 10:26-31 So do not be afraid of people. Whatever is now covered up will be uncovered, and every secret will be made known What I am telling you in the dark you must repeat in broad daylight, and what you have heard in private you must announce from the housetops. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather be afraid of God, who can destroy both body and soul in hell. For only a penny you can buy two sparrows, yet not one sparrow falls to the ground without your Father's consent. As for you, even the hairs of your head have all been counted. So do not be fraid; you are worth much more than many sprarrows!
God spoke to me.
What the crap are you talking about? Have you been reading too much LGF about how liberal Slashdot is? You'll notice that the majority of the comments are calling the "animal-rights activists" terrorists. Were you expecting something else?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"Why can't get get rid of our home grown ones?"
For the same reason that humanity has never known a moment of peace since it's beginnings.
Or for that matter, their political environment and freedoms versus ours? I'd be damn pissed if I couldn't do what I want, when I want, and spend my money how I want. Pissed off enough to be violent, likely. We, on the other hand, are still somewhat free... and we have full legal systems to handle every complaint these American terrorists have. It's called lawsuits (civil or criminal) and voting. Don't like testing on animals? Convince voters to agree with you to vote in like-minded politicians -- don't firebomb shit.
...when there are plenty of extremists you can use?
That scientist should grow a pair.
The animal research still needs to be done, and because of assholes like these, it's all going to china.
In China, the concept of human rights is laughable- do you think the government there gives a shit about animals?
Or that they would hesitate to beat down any Animal Liberation Front jerks, quite literally?
There should be laws against this kind of behavior, they should be enforced, or there should be a local law enforcement culture that encourages a violent beat down of people who carry on this type of harrasment campaign.
Congratulations, morons. You will accomplish the opposite of what you intended- more animal research, and no government oversight to ensure they are being treated even vaugely humanely.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Animals don't have rights. It's not that much of a leap from the fantasy that anmials have rights to the justification that it's OK to firebomb people to protect animals.
Reality never intercedes because it was left behind when the animal rights activists refused to complete the transition to adulthood and the realities and responsibilities that come with it. Some people just decide to live in a cartoon world.
When animals agree to a set of minimum behavioral norms that define a civil society, then they'll have rights. Until then, it's the law of the jungle that defines the lives and fortunes of animals.
Anyone else remember the right-wing bloggers posting maps to the home of the journalist who did a fluff piece on Rumsfeld's vacation home? And the barely-veiled exhortations to their followers to go out and wreak havoc? Which were not rescinded, even when it was revealed that the whole thing was cool with Rummy?
Or pro-lifers who don't condone the Army of God or clinic bombers... but they don't condemn them, either. Same plausible-deniability nonsense.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, after reading up on the experiments, I'm with the so-called "extremists". And I'm a scientist - tough luckily not in nearly as disgusting a field.
I'm constantly amazed at how far "activists" will go to further their agenda...it becomes a big game to them. Ridiculous.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
all of a sudden it's okay to kill people to save a couple of lab animals?
Doctor: "Are you for animal rights?"
Nutjob: "Yes."
Doctor: "No penicillin for you. It was tested on mice." (with an Indian accent, of course)
Nutjob: "But... but... I have a cold." (obligatory, unrelated reference to prescribing antibacterial medicine for viral infections.)
Far-right and far-left zealots have a lot more in common than they like to admit. Their shared radicalism leads to a desire to tear down our institutions and force society into a mold more to their liking. This means violence and force, lots of force.
What kind of animal research? What sort of ethical issues did you run into, and how did the system handle it? We hear that animal researchers are bloodthirsty scoundrels, cruelly vivisecting for the fun of it. Did you go through an IRB process, and what did that entail? What restrictions were placed on what you did?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
a swift baseball bat to one of their kneecaps would quickly end it.
Remember, it isnt attempted murder if you shoot below the waist
there are soo many far more horrible examples of animal cruelty and they pick something that has a purpse besides fitting well.
what a bunch of jackasses
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
I'm not going to comment on whether the actions taken were right or not. However, animal testing is digusting, period. Why not pay human volunteers? Non-humans are unable to willing volunteer under the guise that they will help out with vital research (or otherwise simply line their pockets). Haven't humans already caused enough species to go extinct without deliberately torturing the remaining ones as well?
"While you certainly can't be expected to control all the actions of everyone who belongs to your group, there's still a duty not to turn a blind eye on purpose, and then pat them on the back after the fact."
Hell yeah! Now if you'll excuse me. I have some content creator to "infinge" upon.
BTW don't forget to mod me up. Thanks.
Granted, that's only the first line, but you get the idea. Fascism always involves the state repressing people. These terrorists -- make no mistake about it, terrorists they certainly are -- are not fascists. Some of them are socialists or communists, perhaps, but not fascists.
How many animal rights people are pro choice and willing to do violence to humans.
I don't like the idea of stooping to their level, but something should be done. Why not give them a piece of your mind?
http://www.uclaprimatefreedom.com/
UCLA@PrimateFreedom.com
http://www.animalliberationpressoffice.org/
press@animalliberationpressoffice.org
Maybe someone can dig up individual's phone numbers/email addresses/actual address so that we can better convey our dissatisfaction. Use that freedom of speech.
I thought that must have been a typo. But nope, these assholes burned down a $4.1 million research facility that was breeding trees because one of the researches was working with genetically engineered samples in the lab. Not releasing them into the environment. Just looking at them in the lab. Unbelievable. They're lucky no one was hurt, or worse.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I wonder if monkey tastes good... watching those videos while hungry was probably not a good idea.
*heads to local zoo*
Registered Linux user #421033
Ooh, and here's an example:
Way to go, retards...
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
The ignorant ones are those who think they can talk to unreasonable people into being reasonable people. One of these days, these violent assholes are going to terrorize the wrong person who can do 3" grouping, or better, at 25 yards.
Let these buttheads be warned, with Bio Tech Corps moving to Florida, FL being a Shall Issue state with some very strong home owner laws, don't plan to do that in FL, and live.
I'm going hunting tomorrow morning. I don't care for what. I'll just take my twenty gauge and a couple of boxes of shells; go out into the woods near my house; and start the massacre.
And in the afternoon?
Fishing with dynamite, baby.
You animal rights terrorists may have won a round against the researcher, but I am a one-man animal sadist terrorist cell... and I've now been activated.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Too many people. Too much research. Too much of everything.
Moving to a "sustainable" use of resources would solve this problem. It would require a moderate reduction in population to something like 200 or 250 million people - about the population in 1800 to 1850. That would be a level of resource consumption and waste generation that would be sustainable. Natural processes would then reprocess waste products into resources ready to be used.
This would only require killing off about 1 million people a day for 20 years or so to reach this level. I'm sure these activists would be all for this to reach a level of sustainable resource use.
It's similar to how they do it because they are the ones I took the idea from.
And killing Animal Rights Terrorist Activists will only cause ire amongst the Activist Advocates for Liberal Animal Rights Terrorists.
What a fascinating analogy. When macaque monkeys start firebombing houses, please notify me.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Humans are capable of abstract thought. I'm not sure if I have my biology down right, but I believe that is one of the defining factors that seperates humans from other animals. An animal relies mostly on instinct to survive, while a human is able to figure out and think for himself.
After all, there are plenty of terrorists for GWB to kill right here in the USA.
These PETA-type folks are no better than Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, etc.
Yeah, down with artists having rights to their own works!
Not to mention that the GPL relies on the idea of copyright.
"Sufferin' succotash."
While it is true that the support and furtherance of violence is morally deplorable, you play with free speech laws, which as most slashdoters can tell you, is a dangerous thing indeed. I agree that if they order specific violent action, they are criminals, (you can't yell fire in a crowded theater) but otherwise you are penalising a person for their opinion. If you start to do that, the metaphorical slope is very slippery. People who support a war could be called murderers: they are patting on the back people that kill people, who in some people's opinions could be considered murders. People who defend pro-choice could be called murders as well: they are sanctioning abortion, what in some people's opinions is murder. People who criticize the government could be called traitors, because they do often support large change, and that in some people's opinions undermines the country.
The key term is "some people's opinions". In your opinion, supporting this behavior is murder, but not theirs. For the market place of ideas, and ultimately democracy, to work, all ideas must be allowed, no matter how extreem they are or dissagred with they are. As Voltaire wrote, "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
For once I can say without sarcasm:
The terrorists won.
FIrebombing, attempted firebombing, repeated assault, and even attempted murder (or manslaughter at the very least) are serious crimes that usually demand prison terms--sometimes lengthy ones. The animal rights activists probably think highly of themselves as brave and courageous but truth be told they just do these incredibly mean and destructive things, then go back to their drab little lives and 9-to-5 jobs at the end of the weekend. They probably believe they are making great sacrifices for their cause, and even compare themselves and their cause to the great causes they've all read about.
But, comparing them to those who have truly sacrificed for their cause they fall embarrassingly short. Think what you may about characters like Ghandi but he spent a significant amount of his adult life in prison for taking the actions he took. These bozos don't expect to be caught, tried, or punished. "I can't go to prison. I have to pick up Muffy from daycare at 6."
What's really depressing is these "cultural terrorists" are winning. {sigh}
Wow. I just heard how a judge narrowly decided that man who is charged with killing an animal can't be charged with civil rights violations. But the day is coming. Soon we will legally starve and kill people but it will be against the law to hurt an animal.
While I don't think we should be going out and mindlessly inflicting pain on animals, I don't give a flying fuck if we stick some needles in them to save a few lives. I would gladly strangle every single panda on this planet, with my bare hands, to save an 80 year-old AIDS infected hooker with one leg.
Can't you see yourself? You're just their mirror image.
You see a "terrorist" (or hear about one on TV -- no difference to you) and you instantly transform yourself into a terrorist capable of even greater violence. You two scumbag armies go back and forth, fighting each other, except you both have really, really bad aim so most of the time you're attacking innocent bystanders.
Quite aside from how one feels about animal testing (I'm for it, fwiw, which is significant considering i'm a vegetarian for moral reasons), the issue at hand is that murder in defence of one's position is wrong
Not only is it damaging to the cause, but it's just plain morally wrong to harm a human being, regardless of what he's done
If you can't tell the difference between:
- holding protests
- waging action through the courts
- firebombing someone's house, threatening their neighbors and their family
then I suggest you return to grade school and play one of these things is not like the fucking others until you're ready to join us at the grown-ups' table.Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And that is how you deal with it.
I don't support harassment if that is what you are implying, but just as they have right to loudly shout their opinion, you have the right to shout at them that they are wrong. Use freedom of speech as the power it was meant to be.
I give bread to the poor, they call me a saint.
I ask why the poor have no bread, they call me a communist.
PETA Anti murdering animals Pro killing babies
the Political Inquirer
Crazy devil's advocate idea here, but what's to say they didn't make it a dud on purpose? There are some bad criminals out there, but they did have the fellow's home number, and a Molotov cocktail is not exactly rocket science to detonate. Furthermore, as destructive as their actions may be to property, ELF and ALF activists are vewry characteristically anti-murder. If you look at a large number of ELF and ALF actions, you'll find that in many of them someone 'almost' gets hurt. But, morality of property damage aside, it's only non-living matter that ever bears the brunt of their actions. I myself am no supporter of eco- and animal rights terrorism, but I understand where these people are coming from, and I don't think they're as stupid a lot of amoral bunglers as the media would have us think.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
How is it possible to equate "animal rights activist" with "liberal"? These folks are (1) miseducated and (2) nutjobs. My dad was a college professor who built his career on animal experimentation, and whose politics--- well, let's just say that the most liberal US politician you can think of looks pretty right-wing from his position.
I hope one day they come to realise the error of their ways. It would be ironic if these extremists (too kind a word, really) are affected in years to come by the halting of this research. If they have a condition that affects how their brain visualises things or the part of the brain is damaged through a stroke, how quick would they be to change wind and want a cure?
I personally don't like the idea of animal experimentation (as an animal lover myself) but I can truly accept that sacrifices are necessary to advance the world. Unless, of course, these people are willing to put themselves forward for these experiments instead, they have no right to interfere and intimidate the people who work hard to make our lives better.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
If you are unhappy with their project you can always send them a email.
Their email address is on the site: UCLA@PrimateFreedom.com
Write constructive things and not slander... slander is easy to computer generate.
Well that depends.
If, for example, a bunch of Animal rights extremists were killed while trying to bomb a building and/or commit murder, I don't think most people would care.
Or maybe targetting dead relatives...
Ubuntu Music Project: OSS for music tech geeks
I suppose that's a biased an inaccurate video of some guy punching a dog in the face. Also, I'd link to the university's refutation of the ALF's claims if the university made said refutation. Their silence is understandable in some ways (I doubt anything they said would convince these people), but it's not helpful to people like me trying to wrap our brains around the thing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As was pointed out on Penn and Teller's Bullshit! the CEO, director, whatever you want to call this person of PETA is diabetic. So she needs insulin to live. Well insulin was tested on animals, and certain strains are made by animals. So for her to live she must abuse animals. Now the point being natural selection should have kicked in here at some point, and well taken care of her, but because humans use research on animals to help humans AND animals (the vet didn't learn how to take care of cats and dogs by magic) with sickness, this person lives to make her wacko friends blown crap up.
Also pointed out was that PETA spent some money on a large freezer. This freezer was used for cadavers, animal cadavers, because they end up euthanizing animals they take in but cannot find homes for, ie what the Human Society has do sometimes. Check out the episode, its on 2nd season I believe which is out on DVD.
So the moral of this story is that, fine have ideals, have crazy ideals no normal person would find moral, but don't be a hypocrit...makes you look like an asshole.
Selex
Seriously, I'd love to know what medications those a**holes have ever taken in their entire life. If any one of those jerks really cares about the cause, he/she should stop taking even a simple aspirin -- every single medication is on the market after years of careful animal research. This is a critical step that has to be taken. Every SINGLE discovery that has helped the human health condition had a solid basis in model organism research. These people should really ask themselves whether or not they have ever benefited even from a friggin' vitamin supplement. Even better, how about they volunteer to be the guinea pigs and personally save each animal ...
Honestly, if PETA is your source you're argument is not a good one. I've been involved in several cases where PETA (or a subgroup they fund) has just flat out made stuff up and fabricated or exaggerated video to prove unethical treatment of animals. I USED to be am active member of PETA and I used to bitch at people about treatment of animals all the time...then at one point members took on the place I worked. It was crazy They were insane and they had the press up our butts and on their side and it was all because they wanted to "free" animals who had never been free in their lives to another facility (a PETA contributor). It was ridiculous. They had video they had filmed "undercover" and most of it was flat out fraud. There was one part of the video they had where I am convinced a member abused one of our animals just to make it look like we did it. The fact that PETA has videos of abuse makes me believe that abuse doesn't exist. I'm sure that made that up too. Granted, most of the damage done to me was by groups who aren't directly called PETA but if you trace them back. PETA just doesn't like to get it's hand's dirty with local stuff.
I wasn't talking about the proper action if the scientist in question had, while armed, come across one of these scumbags in the act of bombing a house. I was talking about the proper action now, after the fact. Delicious libertarian fantasies of shooting the damned hippies mid-firebomb don't apply.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Given that you can't tell the difference between monkeys and people, your little hypocrisy test applies to you, and you alone.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Might I add, your method of killing people is quite similar to how it is done in fascist states. This would not go unnoticed by the general public, and would likely lead to some form of civil unrest.
When I run into this problem I just click on a few of the people and turn them into Elvis. Problem solved.
It's easy to have twelve-pound brass balls behind a keyboard. This guy wasn't just being threatened himself. He was receiving threats to his family, to uninvolved neighbors. Would you feel comfortable not giving in to intimidation if people around you, people who hadn't made that decision, would pay the price for your "pair"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
it is so obvious it seems to have alluded so many people here
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Yes, man is the only primate ever to have shown abstract thought.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
...if the thought is this...
:)
Everybody should have a choice - humans beings and animals alike. Because animals are incapable of indicating their choice, they fight for the right of those animals. You could argue that early-state/non-viable fetuses are incapable of indicating their choice as well - but I'm sure they would argue that aforemention fetuses are not yet classified as being human beings.
If looked at that way, I don't find it all that strikingly odd/interesting
( I may not agree, but that's another subject )
770.719.5348
quiver@bellsouth.net
She owns the web site that advocated the harrassment and terrorism of these scientists.
I have been inside a lab. I spent 5 minutes there to re-wire a wall-plug. I told them to apply at Dachau for their sparkies & left. Believe me you wouldn't want to go there. I'm with the 'terrorists' on this one.
My fav units are dead Mavs
Humans, homo sapiens, are primates.
What is the moral difference, then between conducting medical experiments on unwilling humans and on unwilling chimpanzees or other primates?
OK, if you find me a human that flings shit at when I walk in front of his home, I'll agree that we should dice him up and see what makes him tick!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
That's a nice little sentiment. But unless you're a quaker or a mennonite or another TRULY pacifistic person then you are most likely talking out of your ass. If someone was trying to kill you, would you not use violence to defend yourself? And if you were rendered incapable of defending yourself would you not want someone who was witnessing this to help you? please tell me...
I love how people can self-righteously talk about how ANY violence is wrong when it doesn't affect them but when they are being harmed they quickly reach for the phone to call the cops or reach for a weapon.
Most sane people consider it morally justifiable to use small amounts of violence to prevent greater violence. This guy was killing 30 primates a year. so he got a little shaken up? big deal. not that I'm advocating what these people did, because frankly, it's a losing battle. and most people don't care one bit about other animals being harmed(human or otherwise) but was it an immoral act? no.
I imagine this exchange between him and his kids:
"Daddy? why are they mad at us?"
"because at daddy's work he cuts monkeys brains open then kills them"
"monkeys? I like monkeys! like the ones we saw at the zoo? "
"don't worry, honey, it's for science."
If animals had the capability to capture and experiment on people, I'm sure they would show us no more mercy than we show them. Animals, in order to survive, continuously brutalize, murder, and devour other living organisms. Many animals prefer to eat their prey live. What makes this any different than what they do? I'll admit I think it's wrong for animals to be tortured, but I will not under any circumstances concede that we have a moral obligation not to experiment on animals.
For the love of God, mod parent up.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
You're willfully ignorant, or stupid, or lying.
The issue was never with "any surveillance... ever". The issue was never with secret surveillance. The issue was with breaking the law.
Here's how it is. The administration wants to wiretap people. There's a method called FISA for doing this. FISA allows for immediate taps in your smoking-nuke situation, as long as paperwork is submitted to a notoriously rubber-stampy court, which operates in secrecy, within three days. There is nothing that the administration needs to do other than file some paperwork. They have refused to do this. FISA clearly states that for wiretapping to occur, it must be used.
The administration is claiming that it has the authority to wiretap people secretly, whenever it wants, with no judicial oversight, ever. Despite that the law clearly says it can't. I'm going to put this in italics, so you pay attention. The President is not a King. He is subject to the law. If he doesn't like the law, he can act to change it. He cannot just ignore it.
The only possible reasons for doing this are (1) the President wants to wiretap his political opponents, (2) he wants to flex his Presidential balls. We can't know which, and neither will anyone else, because this all goes on in secret, with no accountability, not even to a secret court.
Now, if you make the claim that the ACLU and company are against any and all wiretapping again, I'm going to bap you in the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. You have no excuse.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And you really, truly believe that using PETA videos are the best way to go about this?
What are you, a hippee? Oh wait...
Anyone who doesn't know the difference between a singular pronoun and a plural pronoun has proven he lacks a decent education.
Yeah, down with artists having rights to their own works!
More like, down with publishers having rights to artist's works.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
You think macaque monkeys are people, with all the rights attached thereto. I do not think that macaque monkeys are people. Because of this, we are incapable of communicating meaningfully.
Ah, well.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
It's these kind of extremists(on both sides of the political spectrum) that give people's beliefs and ideals a bad name. I'm a Christian, and would probably consider myself Republican, but does that mean I hate everyone who doesn't agree with my views, and consider any idealsfrom them contrary to mine. No, of course not. I have my own views about the way the world works, but that doesn't mean I'm going to force them down everyones throats, or kill them in the process. One of the main principles of the Constitution is free speach, and I think people frequently fail to understand(or misinterpret) what it really means.
Think about it for a second. On CNN, two people with opposite views can engage in a debate about a topic. What will happen because of this? Nothing. The government won't come into the room and take the offending person to some penal colony in the middle of nowhere for eternity. At worst, one or the others reputation may be slightly slandered, and a few people may have been swayed one way or the other, but otherwise, very little will have occured. You are able to write a point of view or opinion to your senators or represetntatives, and no ill will befall you because of it. You can go to Washington and form a protest stating anything you want, and nothing will happen. All the internet debates and disscussions you have will have absolutely no adverse effect on you. This is one of the most beautiful things about our country. This is also why you should be glad that they aren't lined up against a wall and shot
However, the Constitution also guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By my interpretation, this means that you should be able to live without having firebombs on your porch. There's nothing wrong with protesting the treatment of animals, as long as it doesn't infringe on my or another person's right to a peaceful life. This is why these people should be put in jail. If they want to change the treatment of animals, they should get together, give reasons convincing people of their point of view, in the hopes that they will care about it enough to elect officials who will change the laws.
I personally believe that experimentation on animals is okay. My religeous beliefs teach me that a human being is much more important than an animal, and my own concious tells me that if several or more animals die in research that may allow people longer lives, or rid them from a disease such as aids, that that is perfectly exceptable.
That isn't the same as animal cruelty, however. Animal cruelty would be if you killed the animal purely for the sake of killing something, and that if the animal had come to a state where it was no longer useful for reasearch, or if it was no longer needed, it should be quickly euthanized, and not forced to suffer longer than it has to.
Remember, these are my beliefs and ideals, and the Constitution gives me the right tout them about however I want, and allows you to reply to them in any way you feel nessecary. I would urge future posters to construct their posts in a manner that communicates the ideals and message they are trying to convey.
In my area of the world, there was a famous white supremacist who was always squeaky clean. Eventually, one of the kids who hung out with him on occasion killed someone. The family sued the white supremacist for "contributory" reasons, and won. They took everything he owned.
Easy enough. Do the same thing here. Go after the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) for encouraging this kind of thing. It's right on their website, the masks, clearly instruments of anonymity and terror. Take 'em down, they have it coming.
C//
Ah, Preview button, how I passed thee over. 'Very', that should be, and a couple of timely indentations also are lacking.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
People have the right to protest - the right to free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment and affirmed by court after court - both in their property and in public spaces. The fact that you oppose people who have done something wrong (in this case firebombing a scientist) does not justify your own transgressions against liberty.
I'm very sad that it is so easy for you to believe that a scientist would needlessly torture macaques. What exactly are you credentials when you say "it is difficult for me to believe, given the state of neuroscience, that these experiments on monkeys were so much more valuable than would have been experiments on say, mice, or salamanders, or what-have-you"? Honestly, I'd love to know about all that "research" you did on google to arrive at that conclusion. IF you really want to know, tried going to www.pubmed.org and search for the primary literature. You'll realize that Dr. Ringach has done some really pioneering work on determining the precise wiring of the visual cortex. I'm not sure how to explain this to you, but hopefully it will suffice to say that he is not some crazed sadist sitting around poking out monkey's eyeballs. It is also extremely difficult to explain to a lay-person just how many hoops a researcher has to jump through before conducting animal research, let alone primate research. Let's just say you don't do it unless there are absolutely no other options. The cost and bureaucracy associated are prohibitive to "torturers" as you put it. Dr. Ringach studies the brain, not eyeballs. You can't just pick any animal for that (BTW, your opinion on primates could just as easily be someone else's opinion on mice, or flies for that matter). If you want to know the real scoop instead of jumping to the same conclusions these terrorists did, I encourage you to look at the primary literature. If you are still not convinced, I encourage you to lobby against this research, and maybe put your money where your mouth is by refusing any and all medication (you do know they are tested on animals, right? especially stuff like vaccines).
I was part of an experiment to determine the effect of caffeine on heat tolerance. Every morning for two weeks I got some pills which may or may not have contained caffeine. I wrote down everything I ate and drank. I had blood drawn every other day. I consumed no chocolate, coffee, tea or broccoli. (Apparently broccoli affects your body's metabolism of caffeine.) I saved my urine. All of my urine. (They wanted their caffeine back, I guess.) At the end of it, I did a heat tolerance test, where I got on a treadmill in a hundred-degree room at hundred-percent humidity and walked for four miles an hour for a little over an hour, until my core body temperature went up too high for me to safely continue.
It was inspiring to do my part for science, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. As a side benefit, it no longer bothers me to have blood drawn. (I guess I got used to it.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Who's in charge of law enforcement these days?
:)
Republicans.
So who's to blame except those who are in charge of making and enforcing the laws?
Why hadn't Bush called on the FBI to deal with this like he does Osama Bin La... oh wait, he is. Sillyme.
Word up to all the Bushites sitting around tonight with mod points and a big fat grudge against the truth.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
So here's what we do.
1. He should either change his phone number or force his phone company to let him use a whitelist type thing. That is, the network should auto-terminate any call placed to his phone not coming from an authorised number.
2. Firebomb the people that firebombed him. Hell, if he even manages to make a Molotov cocktail that actually detonates, or if he even gets the address right he'll be ahead of these fucking morons.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Put the crack pipe down!
Having read the article you provided, there is still some debate about whether she is actually thinking through the actions she does, or whether she is merely acting on the reward that is given to her for correctly signing different words. Also, I don't think that an animal learning sign language qualifies as abstract thought. It doesn't actually know that it's learning sign language. It knows that by correctly signing a word, it will recieve praise of some kind, whether it be kind words or food.
I'm looking forward to the day when homo sapiens agrees on a universal minimum behavioral norm and sticks to it.
Until then, it's the law of the jungle that defines the lives and fortunes of humans.
Just for your ignorance, you tree hugging animal porkers, I'm going to VIRUTALLY Club a seal!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
That is one of the stupidest mentalities I have ever seen, read, or heard of. Someone who values the life of animals more than the life of human beings and is willing to kill people to keep animals from being used for research. You have to be a sick person to agree with that kind of an idea.
Lauren Gazzola was, according to her supporters, "alleged to have operated a website that reported on and expressed ideological support for protest activity against Huntingdon and its business affiliates. For this they are charged with "terrorism" and face an aggregate of 23 years in Federal Prison."
Wow, that sucks. I mean, operate a website and go to jail? Pretty fucked up. We're living in a fascist nation. Time to join the revolu--oh, wait. Apparently they posted home addresses and phone numbers, and exhorted their members to engage in exciting activities such as:
Yeah, they're just like Gandi.
Who could have ever foreseen that such acts could have legal consequences?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Kind of like this pledge for opponents of embryonic stem-cell research?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How bad can his aim be? He advocated shooting them point blank.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
In China they'll use political prisoners.
If I were him, I would continue my research to stop extremists.
The lives it could save!
Ooh, you could piss off both the far-lefties and the far-righties with that.
But seriously, what sorts of things were you researching? Would one of these ALF nuts be able to twist your work into "this person stabbed baby rats in the eyes with forks and then killed them"? It doesn't sound particularly cruel the way you're describing it, and I'm trying to reconcile your descriptions of animal research with ALF's.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
This is the kind of news item that completely enrages me. If you visit the UCLA Primate Freedom site (http://www.uclaprimatefreedom.com/), you will discover that there are no email contacts for the members of the project, but plenty of information for terrorist targets, including said neuroscientist and many others. So ultimately I cannot tell them what I think. But of course, they don't care what I think. They have already broken the social contract, and such individuals don't deserve to be a part of our (free) society.
These "tough on terror" types can't tell a terrorist from a tomato. Or, maybe they can tell, but they don't bother making the distinction. He's probably in the supermarket right now, tearing up the produce section.
And while you're at it, offer some support to the blacklisted "vivisectors". Don't know about you, but a read-through of their web site (I believe in doing my own research) has got me really steamed. This was mentioned in another post, but the fact that these hypocritcal criminals list their targets and don't have the guts to stand up and say their own names says it all.
Well, if your biology was learned in 1950 that would be about right!
Very few researchers in animal intelligence would accept this sort of dichotomy. There are degrees and forms of intelligence and abstract thought. The idea that it is an all-or-nothing proposition only surfaces when people try to persuade themselves that it is ok to treat them in ways that would be obviously morally wrong if it were done to
The parent post wasn't off topic. It was a discussion of the Bush's administration's selective enforcement of the war on Terror, and its obvious effects upon one of our citizens, culminating in this news story.
I'm sorry if you can't follow the relevant points past the nose on your face, but now you have three more mod points to use up against me. And then I'll be back. Over and over and over again.
Or you could waste that time writing your President or your local Republican congressman and asking them to enforce the war on terror even when the victims are the scientists your leader hates so much.
Oh wait, I can see it now. "-5, connect the logical points error."
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'll bet you're OK with sacrificing human embryos to do stem cell research, huh?
I hope the sanctimonious pricks who boycott lipstick and shampoo that has been tested on animals also boycott medicines, vaccines, and surgical treatments that have been tested on animals, and refuse to be treated by doctors who have dissected animals.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
http://www.aesop-project.org/Israel/Experiments_ex posed.html
Then I'm sorry to say, I'm glad activists reached their goal. I don't approve of their methods, but I don't approve of vivisection either.
Pick a team. The humans win. Animals lose. If you want animals to win it is too bad. Beyond the simplicity of those few true statements, it is an unforgivable shame that a respectable, productive scientist is forced into retirement because of animal activists. The sliding scale of morality and pain and suffering and all of that has a clear line, and that is humans. There is no compelling reason to claim good or evil whatsoever (no definition of it at all), so once you are left with realizing that there is no better thing to do than pick a team...humans, if you are one. Anything less than that is not merely anti-social. What would bees do if one of them left the nest to inform the wasps? Nothing, because they are just bees. But what would they do if they were human? They'd be pretty upset.
As was pointed out on Penn and Teller's Bullshit! the CEO, director, whatever you want to call this person of PETA is diabetic. So she needs insulin to live. Well insulin was tested on animals, and certain strains are made by animals.
Yes, it was tested on animals, but looking at the wiki page on insulin, it looks like the bulk of the R&D happened 20-30 years ago, or more. There's just a little difference between benefiting from animal based research going on today, and stuff that happened decades ago. Especially when your life depends on it. Just how long would this person have to wait to be able to use insulin? 20 years? 50? 200?
So the moral of this story is that, fine have ideals, have crazy ideals no normal person would find moral, but don't be a hypocrit...makes you look like an asshole.
Of course, the anti-PETA people are just as irrational and as crazy as they accuse PETA of being, which is hypocracy too.
Would I stop someone in that case? Of course. How about another case: I'm walking down the street and see someone cutting a woman open with a knife while she's screaming in terror. What would I do? I'd draw my gun and send them to whatever god they wished. However that doesn't mean I'll cap a doctor who's cutting someone open for a medical reason in a hospital. The questions isn't WHAT is being done it's WHY and HOW.
If you really believe animal testing and senseless animal cruelty are one in the same, you need to get your head checked. Calling it torture shows you don't understand the word. Torture means "the infliction of intense pain to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure." That's not what they are doing in labs. Most of the time the animals are given pain killers (moral reasons aside, an animal in pain is hard to work with) and the reason for their work isn;t punishment or sadism, it's science.
What it comes down to is if you want to ban animal testing you want to either ban biomedical science, or force it to be done on humans. So which is it? Should we just outlaw it, and let people die from treatable diseases? Please remember that things like insulin came from animal testing, we aren't talking minor discoveries here. Or do we start using people? Criminals maybe? Or the poor? Or the insane?
You can't have it both ways. You can't demand a stop to testing but want a continuation of the research. If you want biomedical science to halt fine, but then have the stones to say to and don't compare testing to abuse. If you don't well then accept animal testing as a necessary part.
Experimenting on primates in the US is legal under the Animal Welfare Act. It would seem that the most prudent course of action (if you are morally opposed to such experimentation) would be to make such activities illegal through the normal legal channels (ie congress) not through terrorist acts.
Arson, bombs, the communication of threats, and other terrorist acts are not cool no matter how high your moral high ground is.
As an aside, I watched the linked videos and, while some of them are unsettling, especially if you are unfamiliar with standard experimental methods or animal research in general, none the scenes in them appear to be overt violations of the law. Where, specifically, is the abuse which is implied from the burb?
But which member of your family would you attack with the bat?
This is precisely what I was going to suggest as a punishment...if they're in a morally high enough position to justify threatening people & destroying property, they should be dedicated enough to be willing to sacrifice themselves. ALF doesn't like animal testing? No problem, we'll just fill the labs with the rank and file of their organization. Anything less is hypocrisy on the order of MaryBeth Sweetland's.
When moderating, assume I have not yet had my coffee.
Sure it would be their ideal job, but giving them access to the "blue juice" wouldn't be good for the animals.
it should be PITA as in Pain In the Arse. And they're the more/less moderate ones. Yes, it sucks to be a dog (or a cat) in Asia but I wish I had it as easy as my families pets here in this country. Yes, it sucks to be a cow in the US but it probably isn't much better in places like India either.
281 comments and no link to the Captain Bananas article? Now that's obscene. http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29083
And what about that site makes you think its account isn't sensastionalized? I guess it's easy to condone killing just about anyone if you interpret what they do as extreme as you want to. Luckily, we have laws.
Do it. Great episode of Bullshit!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-756280091 0863882593&q=peta+bullshit&hl=en
Torture means: the infliction of intense pain to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure. That's not what's happening with animal testing. Don't use an emotionally loaded term to try and push your point. It's not torture, unless you twist the definition of torture as to be meaningless.
When my doctor injected my foot with novocaine to remove warts, it was the most painful thing I've ever felt. I was screaming as loud as I could from the pain. However he wasn't torturing me, he was causing me pain because it was necessary to prevent worse future pain, and because I needed a medical procedure done.
Torture is in the reason, not in the action. Also, primates in these studies are under anesthesia, so they don't feel pain.
Thank you for the explanation. I don't think that scientists are ogrish puppy-punchers, but you must admit that they look kind of bad when they're hidden in some lab somewhere and the only easily available explanation for what goes on in there comes from ALF wackjobs who conveniently leave out the part about anesthesia.
And, like it or not, a lot of the institutional safeguards against puppy-punching are there because of animal-rights activists.
Also, people bring up vaccines and drug tests a lot, but the research in question was basic, not applied. You can't really refuse benefits of this kind of research, because the benefit is knowledge that's not directly practical. More's the pity, I suppose; it could really be poetic.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I will kill 10 animals. Congratulations, you have just activated another cell.
The actions of animal rights groups are another symptom of the neurosis demonstrated by the far (MoveOn, ACLU, PETA etc).
PETA types are actually guilt ridden and anxious types with great inferiority and self hate. Many fell to this condition hating their parents (who were often easy to hate)and acquiring a shame based identity. The human ego and pride often dictate that people with these debilitations will go into denial and develop compensations.
Such people hated their parents and they transfer their hate to other authorities. PETA types have no real virtue - due of course to their inner hateful and judgmental nature. They disguise their seething nature by projecting it at usually harmless targets and then "waging a war" against a perceived injustice. Such people were often the victim of bullies and somewhat cowardly when it comes to facing a real threat. That is why they must go on the attack against safe targets such as their own government while often supporting real billies such as Islamo-facists - with whom they share their seething nature.
In a metaphysical sense, a virtuous human being is the top of the pyramid of creation. People who fall into a seething nature are evolving from their lower animal. This is one reason PETA types identify with animals so much. In truth, they are themselves often lower than the animals who they put on a pedestal.
These same people will attack genuinely virtuous and/or courageous people because it reminds them of their own failings - which they are desperately trying to hide from. This is the reason some people turn against their own countries (and especially male leaders who ger projected towards them the failings of their own fathers.)
Bad people can't do virtuous things and they will resent those who do while they also wage compensatory wars on society.
None of this is to say a George Bush and his party are always right because they aren't. But they aren't dangerously psychotic and self destructive like the left has become. Many people on the left are just like cancer cells attacking the body that supports them. The ACLU, PETA and Moveon.org are the collective tumors.
Pam Anderson is a PETA supporter and a good example of s person who is pretty lost with no character, and who becomes a heroine in her own eyes trying to save chickens while Attacking a safe target like KFC. The applause she gets from her fellow kooks is what keeps her shield of false virtue functioning.
We need a healthy political left because the absence of a healthy one discredits some genuine criticisms they can offer. But these people presently on the left really are
deranged.
Some quick googling yielded this MySpace page with comments by some of the freaks who terrorized this guy.
Pretty disturbing to read them, they sound exactly like brainwashed cult members.
You demand violence to stop violence that was meant to stop violence. You do realize your idea only helps the problem spiral, right?
You realize the police use force or the credible threat thereof to enforce laws, don't you? If your alternate plans for dealing with these eco-terrorists involve the police, you are merely sub-contracting the violence. Never forget that.
Now, in general , it is right and good to let the police maintain order insomuch as they can enforce the law. However, when they fail to maintain order, that does not mean that violence is no longer the proper and moral method of maintaining or restoring order.
Historically, vigilantism only rises when law enforcement fails. It is better than letting evil rule the streets.
If you don't want to see vigilantes, see to it that law enforcement can and does act.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I knew an old sailor who claimed to have eaten monkey brains in south-east Asia. They bring the monkey - still living - out to the table, fasten it in place, and lop off the top of the monkey's head so that you can eat the brain out of the skull. Apparently it tastes terrible, although I'm not sure if that's more because of the actual taste of the brains or its...presentation.
...and a Molotov cocktail is not exactly rocket science to detonate.
So, does that mean it's safe to say that they aren't rocket scientists, or that they are? And if they are smart enough to know how NOT to ignite a Molotov cocktail, AND smart enough to plan attacks where people are only "almost" hurt yet still terrorized, how come they planted the bomb on the WRONG doorstep. If one of these "almost" attacks goes wrong, do they say sorry?
But, morality of property damage aside, it's only non-living matter that ever bears the brunt of their actions.
With "non-living matter," do you include the human value of the heirlooms in the house of the elderly neighbor? The cherished belongings someone has spent a lifetime to collect. Heirlooms like family photos, or the wedding dress Grandma wore and the granddaughter wants to wear when she gets married? Is it only this "non-living matter" that bears the brunt of its destruction?
I don't think they're as stupid a lot of amoral bunglers as the media would have us think.
Maybe not, but I'd feel safer if they were caught. They are no different than the kind of people who bomb abortion clinics.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Well, it's possible you were too lazy to do the cursory research required to discover the points I outlined above. It's also possible you're just lying about what the controversy was because you were wrong and don't want to admit it.
Again: do you have any, any way of knowing that other than the fact that the government assured you this was so? How do you know this program isn't being abused horribly? Why do you trust the government that much? If you know they're willing to break the law in this instance, what makes you think they'll respect it in any other?
Then please, please enlighten me. The only difference between wiretapping with FISA and wiretapping without it is that the wiretapping is carried on without any shred of accountability whatsoever. Why do you hate accountability so much?
I, also, disagree with their second amendment stance. This has anything at all to do with the wiretapping controvery because... ?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
As an artist, my rights include the ability to sell out to a publisher. If they don't include that ability, I don't have any rights at all.
Thanks for playing.
I don't get it. Aren't humans "animals", too?
...You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals...
--
This behavior is disgusting for several reasons:
1) This scientist's research on the human brain will benefit mankind. Any breakthrough found will be published and used by other scientists in their research, preventing them from having to kill these primates. Stopping this scientist now only means that some other scientist will have to start her research from the beginning, effectively nullifying the already sacrificed animals.
2) The primates killed by the scientist are dying making a permanant contribution to mankind. Compare this to the animals killed by cosmetic companies, who abuse animals testing every new product. If the activists are concerned about animal abuse, they would do better to harrass and firebomb cosmetic company presidents.
3) This scientist kills 30-40 primates a year, according to the article. I don't know the numbers, but I an relatively sure that more animals are killed in the destruction of the rainforest. If these activist are concerned about number of animals killed, they should go after logging company presidents.
4) If for some reason the activists are anti-animal research made by scientists seeking to benefit mankind, they should go after the scientsists source of FUNDING, like the NIH institute in Washington, which undoubtedly funds the deaths of countless animals in the pursuit of saving millions of lives. The harrassed scientist's money will go to another scientist to do the same work.
This is a short sighted "victory" of there ever was one.
There is no group I loathe as much as these animal activist nutcase fuckers. I love animals more than any human being ought to, and I think these people are fucking insane. I have a family member that runs an investment firm that invested in a company they didn't like - it didn't matter that they were trying to put a management team in place to clean up the operation. They immediately moved to the threatening-my-family's-life stage.
I would shoot these fuckers on sight without even the slightest of qualms, long before I would harm an animal. These people have lost any shred of humanity they once had. Threatening people's lives and their family's and friend's lives doesn't make them support your cause, it makes them capitulate. But they also end up carrying guns and wouldn't think twice about wasting you on sight, and no sane person would blame them either, including any judge or jury.
These people are terrorists. They get about as much sympathy as Al Qaeda and friends in my book, which is to say I cheer when somebody shoots them.
Wow. This is really stupid even for an AC.
You are inappropriately using the principal of identity- person who kills people=person who kills people. The principle is perfectly applicable to integers, which are entirely defined by the single characteristic: quantity. NOt so applicable to any human action or characteristic. You are wrong to equate anyone who kills with anyone else who kills because neither motives, methods or effects are taken into account.
A person who blows up civilians, children, or indiscriminate public gatherings of people is NOT the same as the person who kills him for it. Nor is it relevant (really) whether this is done to stop further outrages, as a deterrent, or as simple revenge.
It's not even that hard to differentiate them, really.
The last bit about the 'armies' of your little analogy shooting the imaginary 'innocent bystanders' therein because of their imputed poor shooting ability...wtf??
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
His research was looking into how the eye works. I doubt that will save anyone's life.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
It's the truth.
If George Bush was truly serious about stopping terrorism and if his end goal were not a POLICE STATE, these animal rights terrorist turd burglars - who are by definition liberal and by definition an enemy of the Conservative (and in the case of this group, any sane) cause - would be locked up in Guantanamo by now.
That's not in any way anything close to spin. It's the solid truth and it's about time our leaders start making an account of these horrendous missteps instead of ignoring their citizens' pleas to take real measures to stop terrorism while these violent, stalking nutballs are left free to pick us off one by one.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
This is truly a sad day for Science...
I think it's time some Los Angeles residents start picketing Jerry Vlasak and his wife Pamelyn Ferdin (another animal-rights extremist), and leaf-letting his neighborhood with claims that they are terrorists and/or terrorist supporters, so that they can get a taste of their own medicine.
Further information contact information for them can be found at http://www.targetofopportunity.com/adl.htm.
Someday, one of these zealots will have a child and that child will go blind or get a brain tumor... The scientists will say, "you know, we where on the way to curing that, but you made us stop because of the animal testing...".
Now, I love animals, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. If productive research can be conducted in an ethical manner (this will cause some debate) and with minimal unnecessary harm to the animal, then that's the line.
Repeat after me: us, them; us, them; us, them.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The difference is we are Humans and they are not. If you don't think there is a difference, you can always volunteer to take a turn.
Now, either take one of those chimpanzee's place or STFU.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Violence only spirals if you're not willing to use violence to really end the violence instead of just taking worthless potshots at the problem. If you rounded up every animal rights activist in America and put them against the wall, it would stop. We don't like the negative sentimentals associated with that action, therefore the asymmetrical warfare will favour the guerillas, who can attack us when and where we won't retaliate because it offends our sensibilities.
Surrendering to them by 'stopping the violence cycle' and letting them win just encourages the violence moreso. It is demonstrating weakness and requiescence to a party with the power to hurt you. That's insanity.
Violence has stopped violence throughout history, and has been more successful as a tactic than peacemaking and only comes up second to the spread of materialism as a way to pacify populations. It is only recently that we've lacked the stomach to follow through and actually *kill our enemies* whether or not they hide behind civilians and civilian organizations. I don't think Julius Caesar would have let the Britons march their chariots through his camp just because they were driven by women and children.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
While I am profoundly uncomfortable with the totalitarian nature of the US's "war on terror." Where the hell is Homeland Security?
Why aren't these people being tracked down and prosecuted as terrorists? Is it because they're Americans? Is it because of some PETA lobby? Is it because those who bomb abortion clinics are also terrorists, but part of a Fundamentalist "Christian" group, so it's ok?
Seriously, if they can't catch people who live here, what is Homeland Security doing with all their funding? Find these people and lock them up! If I have to live in the land of the Patriot Act, so should they.
Perhaps it was no accident that the Molotov cocktail was left instead of being tossed into a house. Perhaps they didn't have the criminality necessary to burn a house down and possibly burn men, women and children to death. One would hope so.
Viditur isn't a word. I think you're looking for videtur. Or you could just go with the Latin from the linked article and stop trying to make word mods you don't understand. :)
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Human beings and other primates clearly have very important differences. We have art, religion, science, civilization. We also have moral self-awareness. Do these differences give us greater moral worth than other primates? I'm not sure. You certainly haven't proven that we have the same moral worth. Instead, with no justification you have taken this to be the default position, and put the burden of proof on any claim otherwise. Ideally, we would have the luxury to try to advance science without killing animals. But this costs human lives. I would rather bet on the worth of human lives than of primate lives.
PETA may in fact be using Homeland Security against us.
Under the USAPATRIOT Act, there are very few ways that you can hide your home address. Most notably, under the anti terrorist/anti money laundering clauses in Sections 313-316, you have to have your home address on record with the bank or EQUIFAX will tell them there's a discrepancy and they'll lock your account. So if said scientist has a bank account, his family's physical location is a known fact, and he cannot hide it. Furthermore, his driver's license is the same way. No PO boxes, you need your home address on the card.
But I have managed, myself, to hack my way through the California DMV; I went there in person (you have to do this in person, it seems, for this hack to work) and wrote in my Mailboxes Etc. address and it got put on my Driver's License. EQUIFAX has not nailed me since. I suspect that EQUIFAX culled my Driver's License information and took that as my home address; my bank has my Mailboxes Etc. address as well, and thus there's no section 313 discrepancy. Everything in the universe has since come to my MBE address.
USsearch.com and several other places I'd paid to retrieve my records, has never had my real home address on file. And my title to my house is in someone else's name (another long trick for another slashdot post).
Yes, I guard my privacy with my life.
The scientist in question, may not know how to hack the system as I know how; as such, any garden variety PI can have his home address in a minute. Now, more so than before, because of the very law meant to stop terror.
Now PETA can just go online and stalk you with a few mouse clicks and some cash having been forked over, and it's on.
I've been warning people about this for 2 years now......
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Brains are very, very high in cholesterol. I'm not sure what that would make them taste like, but it can't be very good for you.
2^5
I want to say that this study says something about broccoli intake affecting caffeine metabolism, but I don't speak biologist enough to know.
Aha. Apparently this all has to do with enzyme CYP1A2, which breaks down caffeine (under "substrates") as well as many other drugs, and whose action is increased by broccoli, as well as by chargrilled meats, insulin and certain drugs such as Prilosec.
By the way, the study I was in was published as a dissertation as well as in Aviat Space Environ Med.. I hadn't had call to look it up until now. Neat!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Photos and the video, maybe? I mean, it's a live monkey with wires sticking out of his brain. No "sensationalization" necessary here.
Rod Coronado, you burned down a research lab at Michigan State University, you dickless wonder! Why don't you go back to medieval times and imprison Gallileo with your intellectual forebearers? We debate ethics here! We protest here! We do not commit acts of arson. You are a nothing but a loathsome terrorist, and you should be thankful each day that your reckless acts haven't killed anyone yet.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
I can't wait to meta-mod some of the comments in this thread. It's filled with all sorts of retarded, jingoistic bullshit.
Did you see that comment that said something like, "sadly, most terrorists are muslim"?! Some of you trolls are fucking insane.
Once slaves agree to a set of minimum behavioral norms that define a civil society, then they'll have rights.
Point being, we as human beings are curiously elitist when it comes to deciding who should and should not have rights.
Would it be wrong to kidnap humans to do experiments on? Why is this not okay but it's okay to capture other primates to experiment on? Is the lack of ability to speak mean that it's okay to cage a primate and perform experiments on them?
Silly, that's what Wars are for!
And if it's not wrong to experiment on primates I suppose it's also wrong to abort fetuses and end the life of terminal patients and prisoners and Terry Schaivo. After all, what's the difference between a bunch of humans, primates, deviants, and injured or brain dead animals? Some people may have a problem with ending the life of healthy animals, but predators and diseases in the wild sure don't have any problem with it...
Personally, I think the animals that get expiremented on have it pretty good: Clean cages, good food, a pleasant social environment, etc. The only catch is they end up dying at some point, possibly a little earlier than they would have in the wild. Almost never are they subjected to extensive pain and suffering, and if they could hold the concept in their minds they would probably be glad they're not out in the jungle battling predators, parasites, and disease.
Perhaps the problem is that some people are not associated with the basic facts of the natural world; namely that death and suffering are the norm, and have been since the beginning. Only now are humans approaching the ability to transend death and suffering, but until we have a thorough understanding of biology, death and suffering are a necessary evil. We limit it as much as we can.
What you propose is a farce. To relate the slave revolts to primate research is inane and reflects your stupidity. Revolts are a means for a subjugated group within a society to advance their standing. The ELF and other fringe animal rights activists are presupposing a wrong committed against a group and taking action. That is not a revolt, but an assumption of superiority. Who gave you the right to speak or act on the behest of this group? How do you know that your words and actions are supported by said group? To be a member of a revolt requires you to have been wronged. If you have not been wronged then you are not a member of the revolt but a supporter and as a supporter you cannot dictate what is appropriate.
Furthermore if you believe that violence is a means to solve a problem then you have forfeited your right to live in society. Heard of the social contract, heard of democracy? If you choose to live in a society you must abide by its rules. If you do not agree with the rules you can petition to change those roles. If you are oppressed and petitioning does not work then you can protest, but a protest does not imply violence. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr were able to change their group's position within society by non-violence. If you truly believe in your cause then convince others in a nonviolent manner. If the society does not agree with your cause then you have two options: continue to protest in a nonviolent manner or do not live in that society.
Let us further analyze the violent stance you are supporting. If you believe that it is appropriate to use violence to achieve your ends, then what prevents others from using violence on you to achieve their ends? Also, stop hiding behind the first amendment. Yes, the first amendment gives you the right to peaceably assemble, but it does not give you the right to harass. I do not disagree with the right to peaceably assemble. I myself have protested, but I did so in a nonviolent manners abiding by the rules of society. I am very passionate about politics, but I would never deem it appropriate nor do I feel that the first amendment gives me or others the right to take my protest and threaten an individual and his family. By supporting ELF and those fringe groups that use violence as a means to achieve an end you are inviting chaos. If Elf and other fringe groups use violence to successfully further their cause, it will embolden others to do the same. Thus violence and not the rule of law will be the arbitrator of justice.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
How convenient that you only used the first line. But even here you fall flat since "the dictionary definition of 'fascism', straight from the OED:" apparently includes those who observe "The principles and organization of Fascists."
And those principles might be (from the less noble American Heritage Dictionary):
1. often Fascism
a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
Organizations which advocate through the use of such principles are providing prima facia evidence of the type of government that they would impose on the rest of us and, therefore, it would appear that under 1b we are NOT limited to using the term fascist with only existing governmental entities.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0813-01.ht m
The NY Times a few weeks ago had this story about resuming the practice of using prisoners as test subjects for drug research. The implicit and flawed moral reasoning draws from a notion of reduced rights, and the bogus suggestion that somehow the prisoners that agree to be tested would later be beneficiaries of the research. I disagree with these premises on two counts. First, punishment was meted at out sentencing, adding later punishment gussied up in the name of research is just that: additive. Pronounce the sentence once, and only once. Indeed, given that prison populations show a racial bias the slippery slope is overwhelmingly repugnant. Second, since when does anyone close at hand benefit when the balance of power is clearly favorable to one side? Absolute bullshit. This is not much different from corporations going into third world countries and paying a pittance for whatever resource is desired with the in time trickle down promise.
Will these same extremists start lining up at prisons to protest minimally tested medications foisted on prisoners? And, no, do not think that anyone in that situation really would be given free will to say no. Will they be able to see past their own hate and acknowledge that those same prisoners are human and according to their own reasoning of equal status to animals in medical research? I doubt it. They'll be too busy dreaming up their next act, because the black/white mentality goes quite far in its ability to rationalize and reinforce selective reasoning, in an of itself an axiomatic characterization of all extremist ideologies.
The nit-picky, leftist, Clinton-appointed, obstructionist judges who rejected around one out of every five thousand warrant applications? Could you be more specific about the warrants that were "all" rejected during GW's presidency? Perhaps we're talking about a different FISA court, though I don't see how.
Your faith in the government is touching, really, but I don't think I should have to hand power without oversight to people and then trust them to do the right thing with it. (And what does "he doesn't want to get impeached and shit" have to do with anything?)
Yes, darn them, with their "constitution" and "the President has to follow the law" and "checks and balances".
No, the point is that we don't have to trust one person or group. This is why we have separation of powers. This is why we don't allow power to be centralized in one place.
And what makes the NSA "ordinary people", but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court "bureaucracy"?
Speaking of Clinton, would you be kosher with Clinton wielding this sort of power? Would you be okay with the knowledge that Clinton could be wiretapping anyone, anywhere, and nobody outside his administration would ever know? Would you trust him not to be wiretapping RNC headquarters? If not, doesn't your faith in assigning these kingly powers (and make no mistake, this "unitary executive" nonsense where the president makes up his own laws is nothing if not kingly) to the office of the President mean that you simply trust the man? Are you comfortable with the next administration having the power to make up laws as they see fit? With the next Democratic administration doing so? And if not, why are you convinced that the government, once given this power, will politely put it away and never use it again?
Well, your claim above that FISA warrants were being denied was trivially debunked. Were you lying and hoping that I wouldn't look it up? Had you seen the claim somewhere and were just parroting it back at me, being too lazy to look it up yourself?
And if calling you a liar is all I can "hack up these days", why didn't you respond to my initial questions about why the President, if he needed some powers he didn't have, didn't actually ask for them? That is how our system of government works, you know. The legislative branch makes the law, and the execu
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
PETA and other nutjobs are hypocraps can go to hell. Animal research is nessary to improve medisence and to prevent desieses among humans (they don't like black death for instant, it still happen in USA for instant). Thease antianimal research pepole are nothing more then terrorist, since they both threten pepole and firebomb research labs, cosing millions worth of damage and backslashing researchs.
No animal testing, no medical medisense. It means that black death (still happens in the 21st century) can become a plague as it once was, or the flue (it actually can kill some pepole, if they don't get medisence) can kill even more pepole that are weak for it. When it comes down to it, I don't think this PETA and other animal activist are going to stick to there cose if things get hard.
Sure, but a human being is better than a monkey. Killing monkeys is unfortunate, but if killing a few of them will save even a single human life or restore sight to blind people then I'm enthusiastically in favor of it.
Humans are better than other animals. Period. I have a cat that I love dearly. He's intelligent, friendly, and enriches my life greatly, and I'd kill him with my bare hands if it would restore sight to a blind person I'll never even meet. I'd weep at the loss of my beloved pet and have to take bereavement time off from work, but I'd never for a moment doubt that I'd done the right thing.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
The state maintains (or attempts to maintain) a monopoly on violence. This is how it gets its authority. The idea is that the state will act more justly than a million Hatfields and McCoys seeking bloody revenge. Yes, if the terrorists decide to hole up somewhere and build a patchouli wall to keep out the feds, violence could ensue. But there's an important difference between vigilante justice and the state's criminal justice system. The ends may in some cases be the same, but the means do matter.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wow, I didn't know they made dictionaries with only one definition per term! Here's what you forgot to mention when you were making the semantic argument against torturing animals (using just def 1 for the noun form that wasn't even used, sheesh):
noun-
2. Excruciating physical or mental pain; agony: the torture of waiting in suspense.
3. Something causing severe pain or anguish.
verb-
1. To subject (a person or an animal) to torture.
2. To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another). See synonyms at afflict.
3. To twist or turn abnormally; distort: torture a rule to make it fit a case. (cite: online AHD)
So when the GP said (quoting) "torturing monkeys" -- a valid moral concern, assuming that afflicting physical or mental pain to sensate/sentient beings is, you know, undesirable -- your entire post could have been just this: "Also, primates in these studies are under anesthesia, so they don't feel pain." That would have been sufficient to rebut his claim with out all the pandering bullshit.
So -- when I got all my wisdom teeth out and had stiches in my jaw-muscles I'll honestly say the next few weeks of trying to eat were... torture. I agree though, having some warts removed might not be torture.
In short, you can torture people and animals without punishment, coercion or sadism in mind! Cheers!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Another thought that recently occured to me about the people that are protesting against animal cruelty is that, they often times miss some animals. Where are the protests against things like the senseless destruction roaches and mosquitos. Surely little Johnny crushing that fly with a swatter has to rival feeding a few researched medicines to a chimpanzee. Where, I ask, are the fly swatter burning demonstrations. "Brown recluse have rights too", anyone?
I think I've figured out why radicals anger me. I have a strong patriotic streak. I believe that the system we have, while nontrivially flawed, is a good system. And when someone says, in effect, that the system is garbage, no better than Russian under Stalin, and that we should throw it out and seek political change through violence, well... it seems demeaning to the whole liberal democracy experiment---and insulting to all those who sought to build and improve the country, as if to say that all their contributions don't mean shit.
Radicals really piss me off.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
One of osamas stated goals was to end the occupation of saudi arabia by the US military. Crusaders out of the muslim holy areas in other words. They never called it occupation, but full time extensive bases constituted occupation for all practical purposes.
Since 9-11, soon thereafter, the US no longer maintains extensive bases in saudi arabia. They were "invited to leave" by the royal government there, and did so, even though they didn't want to of course.
coincidence?
... firebombing farmers, gardeners, landscapers or anyone else that might own a lawnmower or weedwhacker? Plants are "alive" and deserve equal respect, right?
And where are the virus/germ rights activists? Shouldn't germs and viruses be deserving of protection from those who would intentionally harm them with anti-biotics and other medication? Just because they have less cells doesn't make them inferior.
You activists are really getting lazy in your work. Stop supporting only "certain" living things because you think they're cute, and start protecting all forms of life, no matter how undesireable you think they are.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Damn. I didn't post soon enough to stop you from repeating the same myopic definition again! Torturing means "To bring great physical or mental pain upon (another)." It is fair to say that a man beating a dog is torturing it. It's fair to say that pulling the toenails off an ape (for Science!) is also toruting it. These same actions repeated while an animal is anesthetized are pretty creepy, but not torture (in any common sense of the word). Tying anesthetized apes and dogs in knots is torture in a different sense (vis. their tortured forms). :p
7 &cid=15988113
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19510
You're doing a good job making your other points, you don't have to rely on semantics (sense three of the word in the online AHD). It's not worth it!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I do research which can have an adverse effect on the environment if an accident occurs. If one of my UAVs crashed, petroleum distillates can leak out of the aircraft and hurt some grass, or whatever creature might live in the crash site. Is it my intent to hurt any living creature? No. Do I feel bad if something like that happens? You're damn right. However, if some "activist" is going to come to my home and threaten me, he's going to get a big surprise when he finds out that I'm also highly proficient with a .45 automatic and .30-30 long rifle. I'm sure glad there are "stand and defend" laws where I live.
Simply, salamander != human. However, if a human is going to threaten violence against another human, the attacker had better be prepared to accept violence in return, possibly with greater force.
Discharging a firearm in a human's general direction is using lethal force. Why do you think that police cannot shoot to maim?
Thank you for your excellent work especially given the historical, unprofessional nature of your opponents. Most of /. appreciates your work and would like to assist you.
Should you ever wish to resume your pursuit of excellence please just post a list of your immature opponents in this forum and I'm pretty sure that, through the use of methods they are familiar with, they will be quickly and quietly rendered incapable of bothering you, your family or your friends anymore./p>
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Environmental activists have always confused me. The very basis of their thinking seems wrong.
What causes them think the earth is a natural occurrence in the first place? Every other planet in the universe (that we know of so far) is barren and hostile to life. For life itself to cling to this rock, which spins about in volatile oblivion, is an abnormal occurrence. Why then do we aim to remain environmentally transparent, as if our presence will somehow alter the "natural" occurrence of life here? The universe is naturally barren. Maybe we should strive to return the earth to its natural state, and snuff out all life upon it? Burn the Earth. Burn every last tree, and snuff out all life, so that all things will be at equilibrium. I could start my own corporation, like PETA. We'll just go around and kill everything, and burn every forest, in an attempt to restore natural order in which everything is dead. And I'll sell t-shirts made from the leather of the animals I kill with "Burn the Earth" inked on them, or made from the purple dye of crushed worms, whichever you prefer.
The idea is ludicrous, as is boycotting wool because it's sheep abuse. I'm sorry, but life isn't natural. Let's do everything we can to preserve this abnormality, not worship it as some kind of irrational, barely sentient god that was must bow down to.
Sometimes, animals are used in scientific research. Yeah, it's cruel, but you know what? Life sucks and things die. This is simple as math. You wouldn't prefer human testing would you? Either we progress scientifically, or we kid ourselves in to thinking the stone age is where we belong.
English, does not have an adequate word for this kind of struggle, but ironically Arabic does: jihad.
Why not crusade?
Technology and science are no longer at the state when animal research is absolutely required. The problem that most people do not care about the pain and suffering of others, and it is very easy to justify anything with the words "scientific interest" and the "for the good of mankind" - without verifying is this is really true. But even then, companies providing fur for your clothing probably causes much more pain and tornemtn on a much larger scale... But nobody is going to "bomb" a multinational fashion company. Yes, other animals do kill other... But if we use it to justify our means, we are no better, or more precisely nothing more then an animal. a primate. Do we care more about the suffering of others ? And do we do at least as much against it, even if it would be very easy ? And if we see it each day, we get used to it. We dont care, as long as it does not affect us personally. And what frightens me, this is not much different from the animal rights issue. We simply became ignorant.
You know which one, That big ol' can of whoopass. He should have run the assholes into the ground, teased them on tv by eating rabbit stew. I personally would send them pictures of my ass with lips painted on. All he has done is reward a bunch of fucking asshole kids, his family will only be safe when he pulls them out of the woodwork and kicks their asses so hard their kids will feel it. This is the same kind of jerkass that will burn new cars to protest air polution, they don't need people to give in to them, they need people to track them down and tar and feather their sorry asses.
What about self-defense?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
...but they're still criminals. 'Terrorist' is the strongest word we can use against an unknown band of criminals these days. In my classification of crime, this falls short of terrorism. Animal Liberation Front is pretty extremists. But ALF swears not to use violence against people and has a good record upholding this. I'm sure the FBI knows this, if this media did some research they'd know it too.
In my book, there is a line between threat of force and use of force. Between destroying an empty structure and killing someone. They're all crimes but the criminal who refuses to harm humans doesn't scare me the way a criminal who wants blood would.
I'm kinda surprised the victim just gave up -- the media was just starting to call the harassers "terrorists"
Terrorists.
This kind of death-to-all-fanatics preaching about how everyone who resorts to violence without state support is supposedly indentical sickens me. An animal rights whacko who attacks a cosmetics company or a staunchly conservative christian who delibrately injures an abortion doctor is not nearly as bad as a complete psychopath who kills vast numbers of uninvolved people primarily because of some ancient piece of fantasy literature.
Having said that, I'm outraged by this too. Neurology is damn fucking important, and those who have the nerve to stand in the way of it should be dealt with by heavy handed means, if neccessary. The bastards who threaten to kill scientists doing such important work should be taught a lesson that they and anyone who sees them will never forget, although I wouldn't mind it if they were just gotten rid of(perhaps they could have pit bulls unleashed on them, that would be great for irony). And the people who support these stone age proponents need to have a bit of sense beaten into them too.
Now, I doubt you're capable of listening to a more reasonable view on this, but I'll try to spell one out for you anyway. A fundamentalist who engages in terrorism is a fundamentalist, that is why they are dangerous. If they were a little less violent, they likely wouldn't be terrorists, but they would still be fundamentalists, and odds are they would still do other damage due to being fundamentalists; perhaps they'd have inbred children, perhaps they'd vote for and support fundamentalist politicians, perhaps they'd support terrorist orginizations financially, perhaps they would commit an honor killing, perhaps they'd beat children who are reluctant to buy into their shit, the possibilities are numerous.
If the good doctor is really serious about his research, he can take it offshore. There are likely plenty of places in the world that would allow him to do pursue his endeavor freely; hell, some might even provide him a few unpersons to practice with if those silly animals ever get too fast to catch. Might inconvenience him and the family a bit, the grant may not be as lucrative or the facilities so world-class, but I'm sure he'd be comforted in knowing that his work on behalf of all of us would continue. Of course, if this becomes a trend, it could create an "animal torturers gap" that only Dr. Strangelove would appreciate.....
"The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated." -- Mohandas Gandhi
This country stopped being great with Shay's Rebellion, so I guess the seeming ethical contradiction of learned men of science torturing animals so their studies *may* save a few of their fellow men should not be surprising. The end justifies the means, after all, and, really, ethics are only for humans, right?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
I love that book, so I made a shirt about it. Check it out.
There's a reason there's such a high penalty on kidnapping: like blackmail, once it's successful it'll be repeated by both perpetrators and copycats.
I think the good professor Dario Ringach has just excluded himself permanently from any work that may have even the slightest whiff of controversy surrounding it. After all, he now has a track record for caving in under pressure.
What he could have done was simply make the fact public as it would create strongly negative publicity for the animal rights terrorists (no, not activists), or change jobs gradual over time so he'd get out of their firing line without giving them a reason to crow victory.
Instead, what he has now done is help the very people that have made his life 'miserable': he's embolded them to go on. A bit like a successful blackmail - he'll never be alone again. I bet he's also already been signed up to the Grand List for Double Glazed Salespeople.
Will society EVER stand up to these fucking retard activists? It's time RIGHT NOW to firebomb a PETA or ALF office. Follow a PETA or ALF member and fucking take a baseball bat to their knees and skulls. Make a few of them into vegetables to send a message. It's not like they are using their brains in the first place.
KILL ALL STUPID PEOPLE. KILL THEM NOW!!!!!!!
Seriously. If you are at the point where you can support terrorism in the name of fuckhead animal right, the best favor you can do is to kill yourself, because your brain has degenerated into uselesssness. You are a worthless ssack of pig shit, and need to just fucking DIE so that people with functioning neurons and continue to invent things and make the world a better place. YOU ARE FUCKING ZEROS WITH NO PURPOSE! KILL YOURSELVES. JUST FUCKING DIE!!! I CAN'T TAKE YOU SHIT FILLED ATROCITY IDIOTS ANYMORE.DDDDDIIIIIEEDIEIDIEIDIIEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
>So for her to live she must abuse animals.
Eli Lilly takes good care of the genetically engineered E. Coli that produce insulin. I'd hardly call it abuse.
Insulin from cows and pigs is really a niche product these days. Our late cat got Humulin even though pig insulin is more biocompatible for a cat, just because you can actually get Humulin at the drugstore.
So, not much hypocrisy there, but if she's ever had a flu shot, well, look up how the vaccine gets made.
I have no problem with animal right activists protesting the use of animals for experimentation .
However , they should do so peacefully , rather than threatening his family and using firebombs . Otherwise , they are no better than other terrorists ( they have different reasons for doing so , that's all)
Slipping shoelaces ?
You apparently didn't understand the analogy. "Bad aim" is the misdirection of attacks. Both the "terrorists" and the "anti-terrorists" believe that they're doing the right thing; they both believe they're only attacking evil, guilty parties. The truth of the situation is that they're both insane with paranoia and desperation, and the majority of their casualties are innocent. In addition, they keep reinforcing each other's ranks by attacking innocent third parties.
If you're going to wage a "War on Terror," you'd better go out of your way to make sure you're only attacking the "terrorists." As you're waging it now (and I say "you" since you seem to clearly support it), your rather extreme delusions about this are effectively making you identical to the self-righteous terrorists.
The problem is that these nuts are .001% of the population. They're a very, very small minority of a real-world-detatched elitist minority. The vast majority of Americans either have killed their own dinner before, have eaten food someone they know has killed, or at the very least is friends with someone who has.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The same logic you use is why some people claim that all Muslims are evil.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Everyone seems to forget that many countries had to wage in killing for their independence. This is exactly about killing other with different threating ideas so that you can exist peacefully in your beliefs. Extremism does not exist without non-extremists (who are by definition the majority). This isn't about what is morally correct or incorrect. Its about what the group with the most power thinks is correct or incorrect. What these "extremists" do is stupid because their tactics don't work, becuase of how civilization is currently structured.
And our world does operate by natural selection. But I see a lot of people try to justify against the extremists using moral arguments. If you believe in natural order and selection, then morals are completely subjective and unreliable. I'm not supposing that there isn't such a thing as acceptable behavior, but I'm just saying that the way we divide our world is based on beliefs that are history-dependent. If one thinks ends justify means (as in the case of coming up with vaccines to better our future), then can we really feel bad about displacing and killing off most of the native tribals that used to live in the USA(or similarly for other countries)? as opposed to lab animals, they are still classified as humans. We didn't experiment on them (??), but we just about converted or killed every last one of them (in the US). So, people like to think that we don't use the argument of ends justifying means when humans are at stake, but we do. And we use it towards animals, by extension, with lesser regard.
So, what i think... Its okay to kill animals and other humans, or anything else for the matter of beliefs. But it is an ineffective method when used with regards to humans. Call the environmental extremists dumb, but not insane.
Which is why historically, only truly shortsighted, ignorant, or evil people have been anarchists.
Yeah, damn that Jidahi Ted Kaczynski, and his manifesto demanding that the US be governed according to islamic law. And I distinctly remember Timothy McVeigh's whole deal about needing a cell with a window facing towards Mecca. You're so correct! I see the trend now...
I used to look after lab animals. Damn that was a great job. The friendly rats, the squeaky mice, the rabbits that bit me. The mother rat that tried to kill me for briefly taking her babies away. The finches that kept getting free and flying around the hallways. The really fat rat that I had to weigh every day. Good stuff. It was always sad when a shelf of rats was suddenly gone, but at least they gave they lives for a good cause. Something to do with brains or learning or swimming or something.
You know, this is sounding better and better. After all, why should Iraq and Afghanistan be the only nations to have their terrorists removed? Don't Americans deserve to have peace and safety?
I thought the Life of Brian jokes about the Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea was a joke aimed at the left wing factions of the day? So not so much useful as a starting point to consider the Middle East as a look at ourselves?
In the UK (where the Monty Python team was based) there was a dizzying number of left wing parties who seemed to spend more time in-fighting than working together against their common enemy (the right). For example, a quick look at recent left wing parties in the UK throws up the Workers' Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of Great Britain...
Fact #1: PETA is a mainstream non-profit organization which acts within the law and does not condone violence. There is close to a zero chance that PETA would remain a non-profit if it participated in violent direct actions. The most extreme thing PETA does is send out scantily clad women wearing lettuce-leaf bras to try to convince men to become vegetarian. Groups that can be more accurately called as 'terrorist' include the ALF, SHAC, and the group mentioned in this article. Please provide citations if you know of any contrary evidence.
Myth #2: Animal rights activists are terrorists.
Fact #2: In my experience, roughly 99% of animal rights activists cannot by any reasonable definition be classified as terrorists. As an animal rights activist myself, the most extreme thing I have done is organize a film screening. There is a predominant selection effect in the news media that leads to extreme misconceptions. Most of the press from the animal rights movement comes from direct action such as the one in this article. When someone hands out booklets arguing why one ought to be vegan, trust me, there are NEVER reporters. Any reasonable analysis of the animal rights movement should take this media bias into account.
There are a few schools of thought in the animal rights community about tactics. First is the very vocal minority direct action contingent. The second is argued most effectively by Dr. Michael Gregor ("The Vegan MD") in an article from Satya magazine....his premise is that ethics aside, violence is a very bad tactic for the animal rights movement (leading to public opinion backlashes like this thread), and that you don't even need to consider the more elusive question of moral justification. And there are also animal rights activists (like many members of the Humane Society!) who would agree whole-heartedly that the tactics mentioned in this article are honest-to-goodness terrorism.
I'm not really surprised at how slashdot readers reacted to this article (i.e. without much critical thinking or use of facts) because of the way the article was framed. It is a very common logical fallacy to say that if some followers of a movement are terrorists, then the movement must be evil. Arguing about whether their tactics are justified is a red herring...it takes away from the real issue of whether animal testing is justified.
I think you will find that they (the extremists) feel that using the normal political channels will not save the animals that they know are being abused, as in, right now. As when a human child is kidnapped and abused, society pulls out all the stops. Guns are pulled. Roadblocks. People are inconvenienced. Rather than people lining up with signs and saying, "dear mr. abuser, please stop, signed, the community." To understand what is happening here, you have to look into your kitten's eyes and imagine some scientist (or busnessman) pouring some noxious substance into them, making a mark on a chart, then moving on to your daughter's kitten, pouring, next, ad infinitum. These extremists are able to generate empathy -- lots and lots of it -- for animals they've never met, at the same level you can for your kitten. Assuming you can do that, of course. Most people can. But most people are also able to forget about the abuses happening, especially when they're never called to task on them. Who speaks for the animals that are not pets? Very few. So what happens? We make shoes out of them, pour stuff in their eyes, eat them, etc. But when a person comes along who *cannot* escape the vision of the harm being done to them, I'm inclined to think they're a better person than those who make that escape.
Sure it'd be great if the protests were non-violent. But for that to happen, they'd have to work. There's a strong parallel with the terrorists in the middle east here. They feel they don't have any other options that will work, or so it appears to me. Looking at this event straight in the eye, the extremists won this round -- dr whoever has stopped. Hard to argue with that, especially if the argument for using animals as experimental victims is that "it gets results."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think you'll find that they can "manufacture terrorists" faster than you can find them to shoot them.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I don't agree that people like this has lots of empathy. What they _do_ show they have far less empathy than most, if any at all. They are extremists with a "cause". The most dangerous kind.
But I do agree with one thing, tactics like this often "wins" against a civilized society, unfortunately.
(a) argues that the President gets to make up laws. It's this "unitary executive" bullshit. (b) is impressive only in its twelve-pound-brass-balls nature, as the President is effectively telling Congress what they meant. Apparently if you squint hard enough at an authorization to send troops, it looks like an authorization to tap phones. This is nothing more than the rankest wishful thinking by the administration, and we do our system of laws a disservice when we take it seriously.
And furthermore, if the administration thought they weren't doing anything illegal, they wouldn't have lied about it.
You mean that the Attorney General showed it to some buddies, or that they actually voted on it, making it, y'know, law? Because the first one doesn't actually make anything legal. Not even kinda legal. The Attorney General admitted this (see above.)
I really, really want to see where the Times editorialized in favor of the President having unaccountable, secret wiretapping capability. I want to see where they asked for him to have the exact same powers he had under FISA, but without even the small degree of oversight he had before. I want to see where they asked for this. I look forward to eating some delicious crow.
The issue what I have with it, the issue that the ACLU and the New York Times have with it, is that it places secret, unaccountable power in the hands of the President. He was secretly breaking the law for years, and when it was revealed, he claimed that he had the power to break the law all along. If he wanted this secret, unaccountable power, he should have asked Congress.
But he didn't. The only two reasons I can think of that he would engage in this are (a) brass-ball swinging, to assert that he has kingly power. This is a bad reason. (b) wiretapping political opponents. This is also a bad reason. If you can think of another reason, I'm all ears.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Write a letter which is addressed to families of patients who could potentially benefit his research in future, explaining how it might help in the future, and how it potentially could help such patients in future. Tell them what kind of acts of terror animal right activists have done...
Finish it with list of names, home addresses and phone numbers of people who you consider responsible for the acts, and ask them to ask the animal rights activists to stop.
Then send it every family which has a member that could of potentially benefitted from the research. If thats too costly then send it to such families in California and Texas.
California because its where the research is done. And Texas for some other reasons. If thats too costly, then pick 500 families in california and 1500 in Texas.
©God
Thanks; I should be more polite about this, but I really do want to bap the guy on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. And the frustrating thing is that I'm going to keep seeing this kind of trivially-debunked nonsense for the next ten years or so. There's as much excuse for it as there was for Ted Stevens' "series of tubes!" comment.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Gosh,I don't think I could back down from that.
I already run crackheads off at gunpoint.Whats some bunnyhugger to me.
If I were righteously conducting research to improve humanity and someone was using strongarm tactics to make me stop just cause some bunnies died.....
Their central offices,homes etc.anyone associated with animal rights wouldnt be safe.
I would logically see them as an enemy of humanity and that coupled with the threat to my family.
I probably could build bigger bombs.Think of more severe tortures.Hell,I even know how to skin!
When family is involved,any retaliation no matter how sick,is justified.
(no animals were harmed in the writing of this response to moron activists of any cause)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
During the Apartheid years Lady Thatcher said Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. But now her replacement is all buddy-buddy with Nelson.
1 222111.ece
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Utter tripe. You could comfortably fit the population of planet earth into an area the size of Texas. We already have far, far more food than is needed, the only thing that is running out is oil, and thats not going anywhere for another 50 years at least. Then, well, look at Brazil. Neither power nor waste disposal are significant long term issues, and scientific advances are making them less and less significant. When you look at earth, you see a blue marble. When I look at earth, I see a gigantic world of which we have only properly explored less than a third. And thats only of a few miles thick of crust.
This desire to "reduce the population" I see talked about over and over on slashdot is just a stale hand me down from gnosticism, a tribal urge to reduce competition for resources, a silly grab for wealth.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Sorry , but that's no excuse to me . if you hurt people because they hurt animals , then you are no better then them . It's sad because animal right activists used to know this . Even more , they make themselves less popular towards the people . I would support any peacefull action , but i will never support violence .
Slipping shoelaces ?
If we cannot defeat terrorists on and from our own homeland, why did we have to lose so many of our rights and freedoms to fight terrorism?
Animal research takes place at almost every university in the USA. The animal rights extremists seem to be active in only three or four locations. If the guy wants to continue his research, there are dozens of universities in the Plains states, the Western states, and in the South that would love to have this guy. He could write his own ticket. There are privacy techniques that can limit the ability of his enemies to find his new home. Move. If it's the work that counts, the location doesn't really matter much.
Exactly -- without the ability to sell ourselves into slavery, we're not really free!
Thanks for playing.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Artists being enter into unconscionable contracts is one thing, but the trotting out of the GPL each time intellectual property is debated is tiring and wrong. GPL hacked copyright, creating a license which, if unenforceable, would render copyright itself unenforceable. So while it technically "relies" on copyright, there would be no need for it if copyright didn't exist.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
I am just interested: how can you judge a scientific experiment based on a photo? As one who have been in an operating theatre: surgical procedures on humans are often very messy, and even involves hacksaws and hammers. But the end result is good. So, how can you judge the suffering and the scientific goals based on only a photo? (And the experiments with direct brain contacts have already lead to the first test on paralyzed and blind humans. So to say that this research has no benefit medically also requires a supporting rationale.)
It is pro-death, I actually usually just refer to it as baby killing. However, I wanted the comment read before it was modded down to minus infinity. Opposing views are not welcome on slashdot.
When you state that you're glad they reached their goals, you are implicitly supporting the activists/terrorists, and their methods. You are supporting an ongoing campaign of intimidation and violence against a researcher, his family, his neighbours. I don't know, maybe you really think that's okay?
The photos primarily look horrible because of what looks like exposed brain. That red stuff on top of the macaque's head isn't brain, it's dental acrylic. Which is normally pink, but the colour balance has been played with to make it look a deep red. Go to the zoo someday -- how many macaques have that colouration in eyes and fur?
The surgery desciption is a combination of pure sensationalism and ignorance. The "special device that was attached to him through the ears, eyes and mouth" is a stereotax -- a device used to provide coordinates relative to the major stable features of the skull (the optic and aural sockets), and is used so that the craniomoty can be placed precisely, rather than relying on guesswork. The screws placed in the skull are tiny, used to give the skull some texture to which the dental acrylic will bind (hence the number used). The reason the dental acrylic is put in place is to affix the recording chamber (the metal tube at the rear of the head cap), which allows for multiple recordings to be done from the same animal without doing a surgery each time -- a significant progress, from a welfare perspective, over just using a fresh animal for each experiment.
The "steel wire [inserted] into his eye" is a fine loop of stainless steel wire attached to the ring of ocular muscles surrounding the eye. It isn't used to fix the eye in place, but instead is part of clever method of monitoring eye position. The "eye coil" system is slowly being phased out in favour of non-surgically invasive techniques for doing the same; if you want to speed things up, lobby for better scientific funding so that scientists can afford the $30,000+ it would take to switch.
The head bolt -- the structure on the front of the head cap -- is used to fix the animal's head in place during an experiment. In a visual experiment, this is necessary to remove any possible confound arising from uncontrolled head position. You can't simply instruct an animal, "don't move your head," and the conclusion has been that the headbolt is less distressing to animals than other options such as external clamping mechanisms or neuromuscular blocking.
And so on and so forth. Of course the researchers didn't know as much about anesthesia as the veternarian; the veternarian wouldn't know jack about cortical organization either. The point is that there was a vet on hand, for exactly that reason. Telling tasteless stories during the surgery? Then don't spend time with surgeons, because they stuff they'll joke about would make you faint.
This is what the anti-vivesectionists do on their most charitable days: find photos that people find squeamish and shove them in people's faces without context or explanation. In this day and age, where you can find images of Clinton and Hitler shaking hands, and when even reputable news agencies have problems making certain that their photos haven't been touched by Photoshop, why do people insist on taking the press releases of the ALF at face value?
And if you're wondering why this is an AC post, you haven't read the parent article.
Interestingly, what you just described is the fundamental business model of government.
(Everything government does and could possibly do is backed by violence or the threat of violence, government being defined as the organization holding the unique "right" to employ coercion against others as their means.)
I would like to know what these terrorists would say if they got a painful, deadly disease that would have become treatable with informations coming from Ringachs research...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
So now thousands of amateurs will have to cut open cats to figure out how they work, rather than one person who knows what they're doing performing proper research. I hope the terrorist protesters go blind because research they needed won't be done in time to be of use to them.
makes sense to me
Another unfortunate victim of terrorism.
These anti-society extremists need to be stopped.
Well said!
While it's certainly interesting (although not surprising) to see that PETA's self-righteousness obscures some of there own misdeeds, I wonder if you are aware of the nature of he website you linked to? Don't imagine for a second that the "Center for Consumer Freedom" has your best interests in mind. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_ for_Consumer_Freedom
These dipshits run all types of websites that seek to "tell you the truth" about the Food Police (dietitians?) Environmental Scaremongers (scientists?) and Tobacco Nazis (oncologists?) that are ruining this Great Country. They are run by Rick Berman (not the Star Trek producer) who lobbies for tobacco companies, beer companies, restaurant chains, etc. They suck!
Differing opinions are good, but take care to understand who is voicing them (which can be hard on the internet).
Personally, I think these "animal rights" fucktards should all be rounded up and used as research subjects instead. Think of all the animals whose lives will be saved. :D
Wait, you're quoting Gandhi to support a violent action? Are you really this shameless, or was it to deliberately provoke angry responses?
More than mere navel gazing.
Fact: PETA enables, excuses, and protects the people who make death threats and burn down homes. And people like you try to pretend that because most PETA members haven't personally engaged in such acts, PETA isn't responsible for them.
That's no different from saying that America isn't responsible for the situation in Iraq, because most Americans aren't soldiers.
Clear, Dark Skies
As a matter of fact, it did. By the time the Crusades got going, Muslims had invaded Spain and forced the Jews to either convert or be killed. They did the same to the Christians. Had the Pope the audacity to start the Crusades many years earlier, the multitudes of Jews in Spain and Jerusalem could have been spared their lives.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
No, but a person who blows up civilians IS the same as a person who kills up unrelated civilians in retribution. You're part of the second group right now.
It's a pity you are misanthropic about these things, accepting human nature is an easy step from your currently exposed worldview, and it could bring you happiness and success. Accepting reality, rather than having an angst generated by failure to match an ideal. I speak from experience, you too can learn to love the chaos of life. This all assumes that your screen name holds any real meaning.
http://www.uclaprimatefreedom.com/
They seem to be gloating.
The site contains the profiles of various reseachers, including addresses, phone numbers, etc. They continue to list the man's home address and phone number. They offer cash prizes to anyone who helps further their goals, regardless of means.
Please let them know how you feel about their actions.
Primate Freedom Project:
(310) 495-0429
info@UCLAPrimateFreedom.com
Animal Rights is an important issue but what in the fuck? You don't go fucking firebombing people. You don't make a good case for anything by running around blowing shit up and setting people on fire.
1) They're "hidden in some lab somewhere" because of the likes of ALF.
2) "the research in question was basic, not applied." How the fuck do you think one gets from "no science" to "applied science"? Magic?
Nagasaki was an industrial center in Japan and Dresden was a communications center for Nazi coordination on the Eastern front. As for civilian casualities, Nagasaki's was due to the sheer power and after-effects of the atomic bomb and Dresden was through a series of bad timing (refugees had recently entered the city), the tight proximity of buildings and there was a large propaganda campaign launched by Goebbels and the SS which muddied after-reports. (Reports range from 30,000 to 100,000. Thats a BIG difference.)
Worst post ev4r. Nobody wants to hear you whine about your post getting screwed up.
Exactly, this is the problem with extremist political philosophies. At the fringes, you have communism, anarchy, and laissez-faire capitalism. All totally unworkable, and the one that has been tried resulted in a global depression so extensive that it earned the adjective "great". Slightly more moderate, you have socialism, libertarianism, and free market capitalism. Not bad, but the one that's been tried nearly destroyed Russia and brought the world a number of terrible wars. And then you're left with the absolute middle ground that every nation converges towards: the welfare free-market capitalo-republicracy ultraman thingy.
There seems to be a thread in the comments suggesting that animal experimentation is condoned. This would suggest that the topic has arisen and been discussed in a public forum. My experience, as a data analyst, is that animal experimentation is only publicly discussed when brought to the fore by radical protest groups. The existence and conduct of animal experimentation is kept as much as possible out of the public view. Even the results are presented in such a way as to obscure or hide the nature of the actual experiment (no surprise, those in the field will know approximately, if not exactly, what would have been done). Permission for experimentation (when it is requested) is obtained quietly and out of the public view. Experiments, if they are reviewed at all prior to their occurence, are considered with an eye to potential validity of results rather than any care whatsoever towards the animal subjects of the experiments. Therefore it is inaccurate to say that animal experimentation is condoned as if the public had spoken. It just happens under the authority of a very restricted subset of the population, like many other things. Since it rarely affects anyone directly, it is ignored.
The public treats animal experimentation as it does anything which is an inconvenience.
The public does not want to know about it.
The public does not want to think about it.
The public wants simplicity and convenience in its life.
And the government knows this. (added for the paranoid)
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Correct. I'm not free, as long as all of my contracts have to be run by the desk of "Ph33r th3 g(O)at" for social-acceptance approval.
That's the real game we're playing, right?
Animals due have rights. At least some animals in some places. In Spain the supreme court declared earlier this year that great apes (orang-outangs, chimpanzee, gorillas) have the right to life and liberty. This means they will not be kept in zoos any longer.
In north-african countries there was a lot of fuss in the press about this. They compared the apes in Spain, who do have right to get out of the cage, to the muslim people held in Gitmo cells. They are being deprived of fundamental rights.
I love vegetarians --- some of my favorite foods are vegetarian.
They're 'freedom fighters' or 'the resistance', or 'heroes' ... anything but terrorist and/or criminals.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I sent the following email to the link ucla@primatefreedom.com:
Jean Barnes (quiver@bellsouth.net, administrator and technical contact for the domain uclaprimatefreedom.com) responded:
I responded:
WTF? Why do they need to contact him in order to take him off their target list? Are they waiting for a statement of contrition from him or something?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
It was the Christians who forced the Jews to convert, not the Muslims. Jews held high political positions of power in Muslim Spain. It was not until the "crusade" that conquered Spain by 1492, that Jews were ever persecuted. At that point, a huge exodus of Jews left Christian Spain for Muslim North Africa.
...that the ALF and other environmental groups are labeled as "terrorists" by media and law enforcement, but pro-lifers who shoot doctors and firebomb abortion clinics are not. I'm just sayin'.
We only want a quiet place to finish working while God eats our brains.
--Bruce Sterling
"So that leaves us with a question: why do groups like PETA and ALF"
Why do ignorant morons pretend ALF is a group, and why do they pretend PETA has anything to do with it? I realize being an ignorant loud mouth is SOP around here, but PETA does organize letter writing campaigns, protests, and legal challenges about food production. They have had serious impacts on the welfare of animals being raised and slaughtered.
When animal research is crippled in the US and EU, it will move Singapore, Korea, Japan, and China where there are fewer intellectually lazy bourgeois kids who want to play at being revolutionaries. If Western society has degenerated to the point where it won't stand up to these bomb-tossing anarcho-idiots, we deserve to lose our technological leadership in the biomedical field.
I see a debate here on whether the animal welfare regulations we have are good as they are or need to be extended. As a research biologist, I'll go out on a limb and say that we have too many restrictions on animal research and need to repeal a few.
* Anytime experimental data take us in a new direction, we have to justify our protocol ammendments to the local IACUC. Needless red tape, which adds up over the course of a year and slows the pace of research while costing the institution money that will in no way ever benefit human patients.
* IACUC has a history of rejecting certain experiments on the grounds of pain and suffering despite a very solid scientific rationale. An example from my field is hyperoxia. We are no longer permitted to study the response of mice to excessive oxygen levels. This line of research is directly relevant to human patients undergoing operations under anaesthesia.
* In many institutions (not ours, thank goodness), IACUC refuses to allow mice to die from old age; they have to be euthenized instead. Because allowing them to live out their natural lifespan is considered painful and cruel (although when it happens to you and your family, apparently it's not cruel). So if you're trying to study longevity and the biological aging process at one of these institutions you're shit out of luck.
* The mousetraps our janitors place around the lab wouldn't meet the stringent animal welfare requirements that our procedures with experimental mice have to meet.
* Mouse housing density can be at least 25% higher than it is, and cages can be changed less often than they are, with no harm to the animals but with a substantial savings on per-diem costs. But we don't do this, because of the existing animal welfare regulations.
* Money is wasted developing training programs that experienced animal technicians and scientists are forced to waste their time taking every year. What, they're worried we forgot from the previous year? This is the second biggest joke in our lab after the "security awareness" quizzes we're supposed to take.
Health care for you, your family, and your pets costs more than it needs to, and advances slower than it's capable of, because of the animal welfare red tape the animal rights activists have already foisted on you. It's not enough to prosecute the ones who aren't satisfied with the legislative damage they've already done. Now that it's becoming more and more obvious that their agenda is to hamper progress in the life sciences and they never were dealing in good faith, we should lobby to repeal the laws they helped railroad through.
You can be against vivesection without using violence, you know.
That would be the game if I weren't but one of millions of people who ackowledge those contracts are unconscionable. Not that I would be anything but a kind and benevolent dictator, given the opportunity, of course.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
I think two extremes are colliding here: using animals for basic research and harassing people for going that.
I approve using animals for testing of drugs, but torturing animals for basic research is too far fetched. Basic research needs stricter ethical guidelines than preclinical testing of drugs.
When Muslims go on Hajj to Makkah, they are allowed to kill only 5 types of animals over there, all of them - mortally dangerous to humans (snakes, scorpions, like that) (besides the sacrificial animals of course).
Animals DO have their rights, according to Islam, there should not be wonton killing of animals.
Basic research is a questionable area of that.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The end justifies the means?
I am not talking street thugs, but former cops from the tough side of town with connections to local law enforcement, for some pro-active security. Coddling and hiding from these 'activist' will only make the situation worse for academic labs.
It amazes me that such ideas receive the degree of respect they do from an otherwise generally well-educated section of the population.
A term already exists to describe someone able to project their own mental states onto a kitten and call it "empathy," at least to a degree where they could countenance violence against another sentient being in an imagined defense of unrelated kittens. Such a person would be rightly described as sociopathic. Of course, they might claim that the consciousness of an animal grants it a right to the same moral status we typically ascribe to humans (unless we happen to be "animal rights extremists.")
Thinking that an animal's consciousness has the sentient capacity to suffer from death to a degree even approaching that of a human's does not reflect higher ideals, greater awareness, or anything other than a plain ignorance of how the structure of the brain relates to consciousness. A person who makes such claims is on no less unscientific footing than a creationist. Granted, considering the state of the Anglo-American education systems, it is unsurprising that basic scientific truths are not widely known. Still, I would hope that a person would take time to become educated as to the basis of their ideas before engaging in something so frighteningly, permanently stupid as murder.
Of course, a sociopath wouldn't. And in these sorts of cases, they obviously aren't. No wonder the Brits send them packing for long stretches. With all their talk of higher ideals, mentally, the only difference between such a murderer and your garden-variety thrill-killer is the object of narcissistic fixation: an animal in the former, sensual and emotional pleasure in the latter. There are far too many people behind bars in the United States, but with the prognosis for sociopathy generally grim, these are the individuals from whose predations a system of justice is designed to protect society.
Realistically, most of the people one might encounter mouthing animal rights polemic would never murder another person. They thrill vicariously in the stories, and passionately defend violent criminals, but luckily for the rest of us they are harmless and misdirected chasers of moral superiority. Their lack of a disposition to murder doesn't exactly redeem their moral idiocy, but at least it protects others from the tragic ends of sick reasoning.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
This story made me sad, so I stomped on some puppies.
Of course, we call them freedom fighters, or heroes today. Back then, the ruling government (Britain) considered them terrorists.
There are plenty of stories of other state officials being beaten, tarred and feathered, having property destroyed, and so forth, in the time leading up to the actual Revolutionary War. While the tactics used may seem somewhat tame today, there were also less people involved, less communications, and less effective ways of getting your hands on stuff that really creates damage, but for what they had they managed to create quite a stir.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
I wonder if the aliens have any pressure groups against human abduction and anal probing? Sure hope they do!!
The treatment of Jews under Christian reigns at the time were also varying. Several monarchs protected their Jewish subjects. However, as with the Muslim-ruled regions, the clergy and the mobs they incited actively sought brutality and bloodshed. Christian monarchs were also by and large poorly educated and superstitious so the worst of them were as bad as the clergy and their subjects. Jewish populations were generally far less secure, enough so that some sided with Muslim rulers in battle against Crusaders. The ultimate end of this was the acts by Ferdinand and Isabella that forced the Sephardim to leave Spain, convert or die. Many emigrated to the eastern Mediterranean where the Ottomans among others welcomed them as skilled craftsmen and traders who could aid against the Crusaders. The Jewish people have experienced many ups and downs and you can't blame just Muslims or just Christians.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
Wow, that's a lot of words for what amounts to "Nuh-uh!". Not that I condone the terrorists that did this but if these scientific truths are so basic, why don't you enlighten us? You seem awfully certain. Is there a study out there that proves animal suffering isn't worth worrying about?
Many people want to restrict the right to bear arms because of terrorism. They forget that founding fathers established the right specifically to allow us to commit acts of "terrorism", to attack our government if need be to reclaim our rights and freedoms. In fact, as our freedoms are becoming more and more restricted the time may be soon when this right is most needed.
...but personally I'd be more than tempted to give these "extremists" an eye-for-an-eye. They want gorilla tactics, they'll have them.
They are entitled to their opinion but they have no bloody right to enforce it on others.
I don't know how horrible this researcher has been to animals (I hope not), but there are other means to express your "concerns" to him in any case.
(I'm sorry guys, but when I see people so headstrong in their views that they want to force them on others, I get berserk).
Where I live the so called "environmentalists" are more of a group that blindly opposes anything they think might harm the environment, when at the same time they approve other things that are a lot more damaging to it.
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
Meat eaters first, they've got some payback due.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
5) They realize that most farmers would have no moral qualms about killing someone who threatened their kids, and that no rural jury would convict. It's orders of magnitude easier to pick on a suburbanite than to face an armed man who has no compelling reason not to shoot them.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"Is there a study out there that proves animal suffering isn't worth worrying about?"
No, and I wouldn't suggest that humans can ethically disregard animal suffering. The issue at hand in the original post is whether that suffering can justify violence towards a human.
Those who believe that animals suffer to the same degree as humans (who, in addition to pain, have a capacity for horror dependent on conscious situational awareness) are making an empirical assertion. Now, in humans, we easily accept that loss or damage to the brain can remove the capacity for self-awareness. Yet looking at animals and conjecturing about their conscious states in human terms (I love a line from elsewhere in the post, "what does the rabbit think while the scientist...") is such common behavior that people rarely question it, despite the fact that in doing so, they are asserting capacities in the animal that cannot be demonstrated to arise from the brain of the animal. Severe damage to the sophisticated frontal cortexes brings the cessation of awareness; the absence of such even DNA encoding for such structures indicates the same in both theory and experiment. This isn't the isolated matter of "a study." It's the lesson of over a century of study into the workings of the brain. Denying it is on no different scientific footing than denying the common ancestry of humans and apes.
The assertion that pain experienced by animals places a duty upon humans to avoid inflicting that pain is philosophically defensible, although rarely are the defenders consistent enough to avoid the infliction of pain on any life-form that can experience it, preferring to focus on the cute and furry animals. And the assertion that animals have human feeling is understandable; much of the enjoyment of a companion animal derives from our ability to represent the animal's comfort and affection towards us as components of a loving relationship in human terms. The error comes in representing our own behaviors and feelings toward an animal as certainty concerning its inner states in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary.
When that mistaken certainty is wheeled out as justification for violence towards a human, the behavior is sociopathic. Animal rights extremists are a leftist variant on the fringes of right-wing Fetus People. Both assert an unknowable (epistemologically) and unlikely (empirically) quality of a particular life form, and then use that assertion to justify violence against humans. Fortunately, as I stated in my earlier post, the majority of such extremists are extreme in text and speech only. And indeed, the majority of those who are concerned with animal suffering are also concerned with human suffering, and understand the stupidity and immorality of violence for the sake of ceasing violence.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
I've heard the phrase "civil society" bandied around here a lot.
Are we a civil society?
Some people seem to feel it's OK to kill a doctor to save something that looks suspiciously like a cabbage patch doll prototype. Others are willing to kill scientists (and their neighbors, apparently) to save a poop-flinging banana lover. And still others would maim a lumberjack to save a tree.
People will kill other people for all sorts of reasons: they want their money, they want their land, they want their women, they want them off their land, they want them off their women, or they just plain get drunk and pissed off. They are sometimes considered criminals for doing so, but not always. Sometimes its OK to kill other people, because they were killing us, or we suspect they MIGHT kill us, or maybe they just happened to get in the way of people we were trying to kill.
Some people kill other people so they can be in charge of everyone else. If they are really good at it, they get to be. If no one kills them first.
We will kill each other over choices of lifestyles, sexual habits, skin color, religious beliefs or talking about something we don't want to hear. Some people will even kill just for fun.
Sometimes we hire people to kill people, because we have learned that specialists are better at it. Sometime, we have so many people killing eachother that we have to give them uniforms to tell them apart. We spend billions of dollars every year designing and building tools just for killing. We sell them to anyone who wants them.
No, I think we are most decidedly NOT a civil society. I think we are all animals, and the law of the jungle STILL rules. We are just the first animal species in the history of evolution to feel vaguely guilty about it.
It's still a long way from here to Childhood's End.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
People can be against abortion without believing that fetuses have human rights. For instance, there's the ever popular "punish that slut!" model, which has nothing to do with the fetus at all, but still leads to opposition of abortion.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
My state has a "make my day law" that says you can use violent force to stop parties who appear to be using violent force on your property. This law doesnt always stop the D/A from pressing charges. Even when the D/A tries to prosecute the property owner, juries routinely side with the defendent.
Now, let's assume I've had my property damaged, gotten a number of harrassing phone calls emails etc. Basically, I've been wronged, repeadly, by an identifiable group. Then, one day, I have a mob of folks in front of my house, screaming on a megaphone about how they're going to kill my family. I would consider this a "credible threat". It's a lot more evidence than Bush needs to wage a WAR for goodness sake. I'd call the cops and tell them to get their butts over to my house, because if one of these bozo's so much as rattles the doorknob I'm opening fire.
Seriously, at some point the threat is real, and you DON'T have to wait for them to act if they've given you cause to fear for your life. Besides, these zealots are happy to operate outside the law to make a point, they should be delighted to be martyr's for the cause, right? Kill a half-dozen or so and let the jury figure it out.
If experimenting on near sentient (if not fully sentient in some cases) primates is permissible, then why not perform experiments on human babies, young children or perhaps people with cognitive disibilities and the elderly?
Certainly there would be much more practical science to be discovered if we would stop limiting outselves to the arbitrary species boundary? Whatever principle makes a 2 year old monkey a better test subject than a 2 year old cat would likely hold even better for a 2 year old human child.
For that matter, experimentation on the homeless and mmigrants could also be a valuable aid to research. Certainly testing a drug on 50 welfare recipients would garner better scientific data than the same experiment on 50 monkeys.
Might makes right doesn't it?
If we regard a creature's capacity to feel distress and suffer as well as feel joy and happiness as irrelevant in the consideration of who we are going to do experimentation on, then we are hypocrits when we pretend that we actually "care" about the wellbeing of other beings of any catagorization (including human).
It is certainly more costly and more time consuming to do some research without animal experimentation.
But even if the research was impossible without an animal test case, I still ask the question: Where do you draw the line?
What will you do when you find an experiment which can ONLY be performed on a human being. Why stop at that species boundary? What if you can save many people or cure a great plague if only a few unwilling human test cases were required? What if you could save 10 people for each 1 unwilling human sacrifice?
It is unscientific to hold that human suffering is intolerable while animal suffering is irrelevant.
It is unscientific to hold that any amount of animal suffering whatsoever is worthwhile to reduce some arbitrarily small amount of human suffering.
It is also unscientific to refuse to experiment on human beings simply because they are of the same species as the researcher. If that is the ONLY reason then white researchers can be hired to experiment on black victims and vice versa. (or else non-interbreedable species of human being could be created for that purpose with genetic manipulation)
clearly before any additional suffering is inflicted on anybody or anything we need to establish a scientific basis for determining where we should draw the line.
The free market doesn't care about who gets hurt. And the only reason we currently dont do involutary human testing is because it is pollitically incorrect. Without the scientific arguments for OR again it, it is just a matter of time before some jurisdiction begins to allow testing on involuntary human subjects, and then all the talk about killing a monkey to save a person is nothing more than fluff, because we will be killing humans AGAIN.
And apart from appealing to theological arguments -- I haven't see a justification as why we should not force humans to be test subjects which wouldn't also capture the higher primates and some other animals in its umbrella.
Until this is sorted out it seems to be unethical to engage in this kind of research.
As for the violence etc.. it all seems childish. adults ought to be able to reason and debate and reach the objective reality of the matter. Especially parties purporting to have scientific reasons for their behavior.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Putting the life of some stupid test animal above scientific advancement - deplorable. These "activist" groups are no better than the close-minded terrorists of the Middle East. Freedom of speech is all well and good (and deserves the best of protection), but violence as a form of protest should be obliterated. And what this this poor guy's family have to do with the animals, anyway? The doorstep bombings on colleagues and relatives sound like something out of a bad Mafia movie. Message to activists: next time you feel the urge to do something violent and irrational, go back home, eat some tofu, and chill!
quia potentia mens mentis
It's so disappointing when fundamentalists have to go and screw it up for the rest of the human race. That seems to be the trend these days, all over the world. :P
:-P
This story seems to contain yet another example of the press/media tendency to misconstrue certain facts in order to further their FUD-based agendas (no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. It is a well-known fact that FUD sells-- See "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley!)
Molotov cocktails are not bombs. Bombs explode. Molotovs burn. They are what's known as an "incendiary". A molotov will only burn when thrown and allowed to rupture, thus spreading the flammable contents and furthering its incendiary goals.
In summary: Incendiaries do not ablate! They conflagrate!!
If you light a molotov (let's assume one made of a glass cola bottle filled with gasoline and stuffed with a pretty blue cotton shop rag) and leave it sitting there, you'll end up with a poorly-ventilated flame after the rag finally burns away. Up to that point, it will behave like an oil lamp, wicking up the fuel until the liquid level drops below the rag's lower height.
Once the flame reaches a certain point, oxygen can't get down into the lip of the bottle due to the heavier fuel vapor filling the container, so the flame goes out. The flame will never burn hot enough to melt the glass bottle. In the end, you're left with a slightly charred hot glass bottle full of warm fuming gasoline. Shatter the bottle before the flame extinguishes, and that's a whole different story.. With many flammable liquids, the efficiency is relative to the amount of surface area exposed to the oxidizer. Combustion engines vaporize the fuel and mix it with air at or before the intake vent, in order to maximize this surface area..
I know these things from personal experience. I did my share of experimentation as a kid, and I learned all the dynamics of the standard childhood-discoveries arsenal: firecrackers, bicycles, gasoline, tennis balls, anthills, slingshots, BB guns, nudie magazines.. (nothing beyond the normal teen hijinks, mind you. I'm no delinquent!)
Back to the subject.. For anyone to "leave" a molotov cocktail, lit or unlit, is just plain ineffective. It's like those people who believe that you can ignite a service-station full of gasoline just by dropping your lit cigarette in a puddle.. Not true! I've extinguished lit cigarette butts in gasoline, and they all just went "sssssst!" as if I'd dropped them in water. Again, it comes down to the lack of oxygen.. It's difficult to consider anything a "bomb" or "explosive" (and certainly not "ablative!") if it isn't capable of self-oxidizing
Just my $0.02 Ameros. (cringe)
--Weasel
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that all self-oxidizing flammables are ablatives or incendiaries. It varies; for example, thermite is self-oxidizing, and is definitely an incendiary and not an ablative.
[BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY]: X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVI
If not in a lab, then certainly on the first human user.
A certain cosmetic preparation company found in nearly every mall in North America boasts, "Not tested on animals". Sorry, somewhere, somehow, every single ingredient was tested on an animal. Every single formulation was tested on an animal.
Scenario:
You have some dread disease -- dandruff perhaps. I cook up a concoction I'm sure will work.
I say: "Here try this".
If you do, that's testing, and I can no longer claim it was never tested on animals.
On the other hand, perhaps you're not a complete idiot, and want proof that it works, so I test it on...
Myself. Nope that won't work either. Not only am I an animal, I'm also not a complete idiot.
A carrot. Nope, they don't get dandruff.
Somewhere, somehow, everything is tested on animals.
Sigh.
Actually, no, a just dessert would be the people actually performing the tests being subjected to their own battery of testing. This is a basic eye-for-an-eye sort of equivalency. The just dessert for the ALF would be subjecting them to threats and attempted firebombings.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
I'm more than pro-animal rights/anti-animal cruelty, but throwing molotov cocktails at people's houses is just wrong. There is no reason to attack families. I'm not suggesting this, but why not just bomb the research facility or something? Humans are animals too. Bombing that family would have harmed more than done good. It's just sickening the extent some people go to to prove a point. You don't like animal testing. Would you like to not be able to see? If people didn't know how the eyes worked, you wouldn't have contacts or glasses. Sure humans aren't volunteering but that's just the way it is. I's like me saying, "I hate that they cut so many trees down in this neighborhood," as I go home, walking on cherry wood floors, sitting on solid oak furniture and living luxury at nature's expense. I'm for the environment... That doesn't mean I'm going to get rid of my computers and bomb Dell/HP/Microsoft, etc. That's what I hate about these extremists. As musch as I hate it, animal testing is going to happen to help secure the existance of humanoids. These people flip over animal testing, yet wouldn't be arsed to move out of their houses and apartments to live in the woods with their dearly beloved bunnies and rats.
-- me
...Jew-inspired miscarriage of justice, isn't it, Hershell?
So, we go from "don't trust your government with unchecked secret powers" to "nobody should ever trust anybody". And sorry, but your assurances that the NSA is staffed with Really Nice Guys doesn't cut it.
The legislature has exercised their oversight; they specifically outlawed what the President is doing under FISA. Haven't you been paying attention? The administration is claiming that Congress doesn't have the power to check the president's authority.
Later on you can explain where the Constitution says that we become a dictatorship in time of war.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't want to "hand over power to the judge". See, the judge doesn't have absolute authority. The President doesn't have absolute authority. It's called separation of powers, and it's why we have three branches of government instead of just one.
I believe in our system of laws, which provides for certain rights to the accused. If we chuck those laws because "ooh, it's important this time", then we never believed in them in the first place.
Unaccountable, secret government power is like the One Ring. Nobody can be trusted with it. Not the strong, not the wise. Hundreds of years of statecraft have been devised to avoid putting all the power in one man's hands. The point is that we don't have to trust anyone; we have accountability because we don't trust them.
Do you know this somehow? Do you have an inside line to the White House? Is there the slightest reason to believe this scenario other than that it sounds good to you?
So... if the President does anything short of that, he's beyond criticism?
The legislature outlawed this kind of stuff with FISA. If a few senators are craven enough to attempt to retroactively legalize, that still doesn't change that fact. Do you think they should have made it more illegal somehow? Written "MR PRESIDENT THIS MEANS YOU" on the bill in large, block letters?
An honest misunderstanding. I'll explain how I came to it.
Your remark "(I bet Hillary had more to do with it, seeing as how they're mostly women (butt-ugly women that Bill wouldn't be interested in))" played off Bill Clinton's well-known reputation as a skirt-chaser. The contrast that you appeared to be making was that Bill wasn't interested (in a sexual fashion) in "butt-ugly women", but Hillary was. It's a common epithet thrown at Hillary (there was a "cuckolded dyke" Googlebomb a while back) by people dumb enough to think it's an insult. See how I could have been confused?
These words actually mean something. For instance, in your initial claim that the ACLU was opposed to all surveillance of anyone, anywhere, you made up an opponent who was
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"But the words meaning can only be defined by how it was originally intended."
Arguably..(but words do change meaning over time..)
Regardless don't think people will take in consideration what the definition of a word is. Even if there were a consensus about what words mean. Some words may have definite meaning in cultural contexts, but not to outsiders, or worse, have a different meaning.
http://www.bibleandscience.com/archaeology/exodus. htm
which proves that:
a) anyone can write anything on the internet, and
b) anyone can link to that content
Blah blah blah
Neither point affects my faith in Jesus Christ as my savior.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I'm not an expert in ancient Egypt, but it seems to me that a historical document contains specific details about the exodus. I am a student of the Hebrew scriptures, and they contain a great deal of information (for a document from antiquity) about the matter. As far as Egyptian documents, it seems unlikely to find such a thing. How much reason would there be for them to have been routed by an enemy without weapons, who were formerly slaves?
There is a great deal of secular archeological evidence supporting many of the events in the Hebrew scriptures. If many other parts of that set of documents is consistent with secular evidence, why wouldn't the whole thing be more credible before a secular audience?
With respect to the accuracy of the scriptures affecting my faith, it comes down to this:
God created the universe, including two specific people who made the choice to reject God's rules in favor of becoming "like God"
God, who is perfect and Holy, was unable to have relationship with people who were imperfect, and could have, in the name of justice eradicated them and created new people. But He is rich in mercy and longsuffering, so He made it possible for them to have relationship with him through a system of animal sacrifices which would allow the blood of the animals to cover the imperfections of the people.
Ultimately, God sent Jesus - perfect and holy - unstained by the sin of Adam - to live a life of perfection and to become the ultimate sacrifice. No longer would a continual flow of animal blood be required to cover up sin. His sacrifice on the cross and resurrection from the dead provided the final sacrifice for sin.
I am an imperfect man who chooses far too often to reject God's plan in favor of my own. My hope in maintaining relationship with God is based not on my performance but on the promise of scripture that Jesus would make a way for an imperfect man like me to have relationship with a perfect and Holy God in spite of my flaws. More than that, I have the hope that God is working in me to make me more righteous all the time.
My hope is in the promises of God that I find in the scriptures. If the Hebrew scriptures are unreliable, then the "problem" that Jesus solves may not be a problem after all.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?