just another teenage marxist

Nope!

Brain studies find that concern for justice and equality is linked to logic, not emotion.

By Lisa Wade, PhD

A new study finds that people with high “justice sensitivity” are using logic, not emotions.  Subjects were put in a fMRI machine, one that measures ongoing brain activity and shown videos of people acting kindly or cruelly toward a homeless person.

Some respondents reacted more strongly than others — hence the high versus low justice sensitivity — and an analysis of the high sensitivity individuals’ brain activity showed that they were processing the images in the parts of the brain where logic and rationality live.   “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do not seem to be emotionally driven,” explained one of the scientists, “Rather, they are cognitively driven.”

Activists aren’t angry, they reasonably object to unjust circumstances that they understand all too well.

Image borrowed from Jamie Keiles at Teenagerie, who is a high sensitivity individual.

Don’t pick and choose which animals to love.

UN demands investigation into Israel’s fatal shooting of Palestinian teens

A top UN official has called for a transparent and independent investigation into the fatal shooting of two Palestinian teenagers by Israeli border police during a demonstration in the West Bank.

“It is of serious concern that initial information appears to indicate that the two Palestinians killed were both unarmed and appeared to pose no direct threat,” said Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, the assistant UN secretary general for political affairs.

But Vegans Kill Animals Too!!??!?!?

Many vegans have heard it before, “You’re no better than me! Animals die during farming!” This seems to be a last-resort, point of contention to soothe the conflicted, carnist mind. Based on no research at all, carnists conclude that millions of animals are killed every year because of vegans.

It seems the source of this is a paper written by Stephen Davis, called The Least Harm Principle, in which the author argues that because animals (snakes, rodents, insects) are killed during crop harvesting and during the clearing of fields for crops, the least harmful diet would be to eat large grazing mammals (cows) and dairy from these mammals. He admits in the paper that no research has been done to provide any sort of estimation as to how many animals are killed through the tilling and harvesting of fields, but that doesn’t stop him from making up some numbers and going from there.

Let me start by mentioning that when they harvest crops or clear a field, they use large, very loud machinery that would probably scare away most animals before it pulverized them. Insects would probably still be killed, but i can’t imagine anymore than when you drive a car. When they clear a field to make room for crops, they would probably displace a lot of animal habitats, but the majority of deforestation is caused by clearing fields for cattle-grazing, soy production (98% of which goes to farm animals in the us), and palm oil (a product many vegans avoid).

All that aside, let’s assume millions of animals are killed in crop production. I’ll first also assume that Davis and his diehard followers are not only eating a diet of grass-fed beef and dairy from grass-fed, free roaming cows. I assume, being natural herbivores, their bodies also require fiber and plant-based nutrients, like everyone else. So right off the bat, they are responsible not only for the deaths of the cows they eat, but also for the deaths of animals in fields that grow their vegetables.

In my experience, people who use this argument don’t stick to just grass fed mammals and vegetables either. They just eat the typical American diet, but cover it up with this excuse. Assuming that’s the case, we also have to factor in:

deforestation caused by grazing cattle (60% of deforestation is related to animal agriculture)

all the harvested crops their food has to eat (the U.S. livestock population consumes more than seven times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population)

all the marine animals unintentionally caught in fishing practices (for every 4 lbs of retail fish caught, 1 lb of other fish dies. Shrimp has the opposite ratio)

all the other environmental destruction caused by animal agriculture that invariably kills animals and destroys their habitats

the harvesting of the vegetables they also have to eat

However, I don’t want to rule out the possibility that there are people who somehow subsist only on large, grazing mammals and mammalian secretions. While Davis concludes that these people are only responsible for the death of the cows, we still have to factor in fish killed from manure runoff, fields cleared for grazing, methane produced by cows, which contributes to global warming, which kills and displaces animals, flies swatted away by cows’ tails, and perhaps small animals trampled on by cows. I could fudge some numbers and formulate an equation to prove my point, but I see no reason to.

The next issue to address is that when we’re dealing with an ethical concept such as ‘harm’, we have to look not only at number of deaths, but also suffering and exploitation. As any vegan can tell you, the dairy industry is far from idyllic scenes of compassion and pleasure. It is an industry rife with suffering and cruelty (yes, even when it’s labeled “ humane”). Not to mention that raising animals for food is inherently exploitive. Animals are not commodities for us to force into existence, raise, steal from, and then kill. They are sentient beings that deserve the right to their own self-agency and an existence unhindered by man. Maybe an animal is killed in a field by farming equipment, but at least they were allowed to live their life as they pleased before that tragic occurrence.

Despite the fact that he claimed that “this is not a coup”, Prayut’s actions smell, taste and look like a coup. This is from a man who has blood on his hands. Four years ago to the day Prayut oversaw the shooting down in the streets of almost 90 Red Shirt pro-democracy demonstrators. Before the elections in the following year he made public statements against the Pheu Thai Party. He had previously been a key figure in manoeuvring the (anti-)Democrat Party into an unelected government in 2008. He has never been brought to court for his crimes and was on the list of those who would be given total amnesty in Yingluck Shinawatra’s abortive amnesty bill.

The military say that the declaration of martial law is just to maintain peace and security; if so, it is too little, too late. If the military were really concerned with keeping the peace it would have acted against Sutep Tuaksuban’s anti-democrat mobs when they invaded government ministries in order to overthrow the elected government at the end of last year. They would have arrested Sutep and his armed thugs who used violence on the streets to wreck the February election.

Gentrification in Progress