Category: Blog

Gun control…please? Please, people…

I’ve listened to right-wing bloviation blaming the victims. (Check Salon. I’m not willing to give these idiots a click through). With that, I don’t feel it’s out of place to speak up.

Can we please, please dispassionately and intelligently re-examine the Second Amendment? Is it possible – just POSSIBLE, mind – that a provision that made sense to the framers more than two centuries ago might not have the same relevance in our modern democracy? While we’re at it, can the NRA ratchet down the hypocrisy and stop pretending that gun ownership is under some kind of organized assault at the hands of the evil, nasty left? The NRA is one of the most massively funded, and widely successful lobbying organizations in history. But their default position – even as Glorious Leader feels like the most appropriate first response to the Virginia Tech shootings is to throw some red meat action their way – is to act like this will be the end of guns for all those law-abiding members of the citizenry who really, REALLY need an assault rifle. For hunting.

The Right in this country goes into heat threatening a new Constitutional amendment to ban abortion, prohibit gay marriage and make flag burning a crime punishable by death just about every 14 seconds these days.

Can those of us on the Left get over our fear of upsetting these idiots and start calling for a serious re-examination of the right to bear arms?

Avarosis can suck it (though he’s probably too much of a man to admit that he’d actually like to)

Susan Striker wrote a well-thought rebuttal to the crap Avarosis Salon piece I wrote about a couple of days ago, that makes several of the points I was trying to make much more coherently:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/10/11/transgender/

Striker corrects Avarosis bullshit view of queer history, for one thing, and rightly calls him on the claim that trans-inclusiveness isn’t something being forced on the queer community “from above” as Avarosis has repeatedly tried to claim (apparently he’s really on a roll over on his own blog; I’m loathe to give the idiot the clicks, but some of the comments to Stryker’s piece on Salon are fairly telling).

I suspect, though, that what’s really going on here is that Avarosis is one of a long line of “straight-acting” gays who really wish the gay movement would get back to providing him with fuckable nuggets of appropriately butch, straight-acting man candy instead of peskily bothering with equality for queers Avarosis has no particular interest in sleeping with.

Fundamentally, this comes back around to the question of just what we really mean by equality. Straight acting fags assume that conditional tolerance is good enough, but that comes at the cost of genuinely supporting gender variant people (gay, bi, straight or otherwise) who can’t or won’t conform to social expectations of gender. You simply cannot claim to “support” the rights of transgendered and transsexual persons while simultaneously claiming that they’re expendable in your quest for “pragmatic” political action. There’s no such thing as a scarcity of justice (to steal and rephrase an excellent point from one of the Salon commenters). Justice for all means absolutely everybody, which is an idea that even conservative gays like Avarosis ought to get behind, but he (and they) won’t…because the dirty little truth here is that he simply doesn’t believe in justice for everybody.

Hmm. Maybe it’s time.

I hate to say this, but maybe the trans community needs to organize itself, separate and apart from the gay (and here, I think I very specifically mean gay-as-in-gay male) community.

I’ve been debating the pragmatic vs. idealistic argument with regard to the ENDA with several people, and I’m slowly coming to the realization that relying on the gay community for anything at all is probably going to end only in frustration for transfolks. The ironic thing is that gay people themselves have been told the same thing for decades. This exact argument – precisely the same – has been used by supposedly progressive Democrats in the past with specific regard to nearly any gay positive state or federal legislation. For more than two decades – or, nearly the entire time the US has had a visible lesbian and gay civil rights movement – gay people were told by (supposedly) well meaning straight folks in positions of power that we’d just have to wait for our time to come, and that now just wasn’t the time to try and pass a hate crimes bill or add “sexual orientation” to a nondiscrimination law. We’d have to wait until society caught up. We swallowed this until we simply refused to keep swallowing it. A generation of people my age and younger, who grew up in a post-Stonewall world, radicalized by AIDS activism were simply unwilling to wait for society to catch up.

What painfully short memories we have.

Or maybe there are just more folks like John Avarosis out there in the world and I’ve been giving the gay community credit it doesn’t actually deserve. Maybe most gay people really only care about protecting against sexual orientation discrimination and nothing else. Folks have made this claim, publicly, before – Somewhat famously, Roseanne did, not long ago, and was excoriated for it in gay circles.

Maybe it’s true.

Maybe it’s time for the trans community to stop asking for acceptance from a GLB community that from appearances doesn’t understand T* folks, and actively resists trying to. I’m ashamed of us queers for even coming to this place, but I’ve been beating my head against a wall with gay people who (I’ve said) really ought to know better.

You know what? We ought to know better.

But we don’t.

We don’t want to. Or, at least, we sure as hell seem not to.

I wish this wasn’t where my head was at around these issues, but for better or worse this is where I’m at.

But I’ll tell you this: the first pissed-off trans person who gets radicalized around ENDA – or whatever the next signal event happens to be – and starts a separate movement will have a few queer supporters throwing dollars his or her way. Because, ultimately, if it really does take a separate trans* movement to pry open the brains of the queer community at large, the organized GLB money machine won’t be getting any more of mine.

On Chanting Hare Krishna

Excerpt from Krsna Consciousness The Topmost Yoga System
© Bhaktivedanta Book Trust

HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA, HARE HARE, HARE RAMA, HARE RAMA, RAMA RAMA, HARE HARE is the sublime method for reviving our transcendental consciousness. As living spiritual souls, we are all originally Krishna Conscious entities, but due to our association with matter—since time immemorial—our consciousness is now adulterated by the material atmosphere. The material atmosphere, in which we are now living, is called Maya, or illusion. Maya means that which is not. And what is this illusion? The illusion is that we are all trying to be lords of material nature, while actually we are under the grip of the stringent laws of material nature. When a servant artificially tries to imitate the all powerful master, it is called illusion. We are trying to exploit the resources of material nature, but actually we are becoming more and more entangled in her complexities. Therefore, we are engaged in a hard struggle to conquer the stringent laws of material nature, but we are ever more dependent on it. This illusory struggle against material nature can be stopped at once by revival of our eternal Krishna Consciousness.

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare is the transcendental process for reviving this original pure consciousness. By chanting this transcendental vibration, we can cleanse away all misgivings within our hearts. The basic principle of all such misgivings is the false consciousness that I am the lord of all I survey.

Krishna Consciousness is not an artificial imposition on the mind. This consciousness is the original energy of the living entity. When we hear the transcendental vibration, this consciousness is revived. This simplest method is recommended for this age. By practical experience also, one can perceive that by the simple chanting of this Mahamantra, or the great chanting for deliverance, one can at once feel a transcendental ecstasy coming through from the spiritual stratum. In the material concept of life we are busy in the matter of sense gratification as if we were in the lower animal stage of life. A little elevated from this status of sense gratification, one is engaged in mental speculation for the purpose of getting out of the material clutches. A little elevated from this speculative status, when one is intelligent enough, one tries to find the Supreme Cause of all causes—within and without. And when one is factually on the plane of spiritual understanding, surpassing the stages of sense, mind and intelligence, he is then on the transcendental plane. This chanting of the Hare Krishna Mantra is enacted from the spiritual platform, and thus this sound vibration surpasses all lower status of consciousness—namely sensual, mental, and intellectual. There is no need, therefore, to understand the language of the mantra, nor is there any need for mental speculation, nor any intellectual adjustment for chanting this Mahamantra. It is automatic, from the spiritual platform, and as such anyone can take part in vibrating this transcendental sound vibration without any previous qualifications. In a more advanced stage, of course, one is not expected to commit offenses on grounds of spiritual understanding.

In the beginning, there may be the presence of all transcendental ecstasies—which are eight in number. These are: 1) being stopped as though dumb; 2) perspiration; 3) standing up of hairs on the body; 4) dislocation of voice; 5) trembling; 6) fading 7) crying in ecstasy; and 8) trance. But there is no doubt that chanting for a while takes one immediately to the spiritual platform and one shows the first symptom of this in the urge to dance along with the chanting of the Mantra. We have seen this practically. Even a child can take part in the chanting and dancing. Of course, for one who is too entangled in material life, it takes a little more time to come to the standard point, but even such a materially engrossed man is raised to the spiritual platform very quickly. When it is chanted by a pure devotee of the Lord in love, it has the greatest efficacy on hearers, and as such this chanting should be heard from the lips of a pure devotee of the Lord, so that immediate effects can be achieved. As far as possible, chanting from the lips of non-devotees should be avoided. Milk touched by the lips of a serpent has poisonous effects.

The word Hare is the form of addressing the energy of the Lord, and the words Krishna and Rama are forms of addressing the Lord Himself. Both Krishna and Rama mean the Supreme Pleasure, and Hara is the supreme pleasure-energy of the Lord. The Supreme Pleasure Energy of the Lord helps us to reach the Lord.

The material energy called Maya is also one of the multi-energies of the Lord. We the living entities are also the energy—marginal energy—of the Lord. The living entities are described as superior to material energy. When the superior energy is in contact with the inferior energy, an incompatible situation arises, but when the superior marginal energy is in contact with the Superior Energy, called Hara, it is established in its happy, normal condition.

These three words, namely Hara, Krishna and Rama, are the transcendental seeds of the Mahamantra. The chanting is a spiritual call for the Lord and His Energy to give protection to the conditioned soul. This chanting is exactly like the genuine cry of a child for its mother’s presence. Mother Hara helps the devotee to achieve the Lord Father’s grace, and the Lord reveals Himself to the devotee who chants this Mantra sincerely.

No other means of spiritual realization is as effective in this age of quarrel an hypocrisy as is the Mahamantra.

HARE KRISHNA,
HARE KRISHNA,
KRISHNA KRISHNA,
HARE HARE,
HARE RAMA,
HARE RAMA,
RAMA RAMA,
HARE HARE.

Flood Relief in Pakistan – Food for Life Global

October 2 — Food for Life Global affiliate, SKBP team visited the Hyderabad district and set up an outdoor kitchen at one of the many refugee camps. Relief Spokesperson, Vanamali das said, “We made many types of vegan meals, including basmati rice, vegetable curry and biryani, and served 500 to 600 woman and children. Our main challenge at this time is a reliable vehicle to transport the meals and supplies. We are urgently appealing to Food for Life Donors to continue supporting our efforts and specifically to help us obtain a reliable van or truck.” Please continue supporting this effort.

Please Donate to Food for Life Global. Any amount helps.

Bill of Rights for Animals

I generally agree with the following Bill of Rights for Animals:

All animals are born with an equal claim on life and the same rights to existence.
All animals are entitled to respect. Humanity as an animal species shall not arrogate to itself the right to exterminate or exploit other species. It is humanity’s duty to use its knowledge for the welfare of animals. All animals have the right to the attention, care, and protection of humanity.
No animals shall be ill-treated or be subject to cruel acts.
All wild animals have the right to liberty in their natural environment, whether land, air, or water, and should be allowed to procreate. Deprivation of freedom, even for educational purposes, is an infringement of this right.
Animals of species living traditionally in a human environment have the right to live and grow at the rhythm and under the conditions of life and freedom peculiar to their species. Any interference by humanity with this rhythm or these conditions for purposes of gain is an infringement of this right.
All companion animals have the right to complete their natural life span. Abandonment of an animal is a cruel and degrading act.
Animal experimentation involving physical or psychological suffering is incompatible with the rights of animals, whether it be for scientific, medical, commercial, or any other form of research. Replacement methods must be used and developed.
No animal shall be exploited for the amusement of humanity. Exhibitions and spectacles involving animals are incompatible with their dignity.
Any act involving the wanton killing of the animals is biocide, that is, a crime against life.
Any act involving the mass killing of wild animals is genocide, that is, a crime against the species. Pollution or destruction of the natural environment leads to genocide.

http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/BillofRights.htm

CCTV in UK Abbatoirs? What happened to “better” welfare standards?

I came across this Guardian article (via this post on Vegan.com) about a proposal to require CCTV in all UK slaughterhouses, in the wake of an Animal Aid investigation that found significant abuses and acts of cruelty in six of seven slaughterhouses they secretly installed cameras in.
A few things to consider.

I think this points out the fundamental flaw in accepting, uncritically, the notion that better welfare laws magically equate to better conditions for animals. Without question, the legal standards for animal welfare are better in the UK (compared to the US) on several fronts. But does that actually mean anything? I’d argue no. It would appear that even given the UK’s more stringent legislation, that doesn’t actually mean anything if the legislation isn’t enforced.

But Animal Aid is itself sending something of a mixed message; they’ve launched a campaign to get supermarkets to put pressure on UK abattoirs to install CCTVs in all slaughter facilities in the United Kingdom, and to pledge to only purchase from slaughterhouses that have cameras installed going forward.

Of course this is problematic on at least a couple of fronts.

If the legal welfare standards in the UK were actually effective, would Animal Aid have found significant illegal abuses happening in nearly every one of the slaughterhouses they investigated? If the UK’s welfare standards aren’t especially meaningful, why assume that this move to install cameras will be any more successful? If there’s no particular oversight of the industry to enforce the existing welfare standards the animal welfare movement in the UK is so proud of, why should we assume that there will be much (or any) subsequent oversight of this particular CCTV measure?

Further, all we’re still really saying with this is that animals don’t care that we kill them; they only care how we treat them while alive. This is more of the same wrongheaded line of thinking that supposes that the act of eating animals is rendered morally neutral so long as we tell ourselves the animals in question have been well cared for (with standards of care as defined by us, largely for the sake of making us feel good – which the lax enforcement of the existing legislation drives home to me.
Animal welfare regulations are not about animal welfare. They’re about making humans feel better about needlessly killing and eating animals.

On Honey

We had our monthly D&D game with some friends, and, as it usually happens, various issues around my veganism cropped up; a friend was making a curry sauce that called for honey (my friend kindly made me a vegan version using maple syrup instead) and naturally, the question of “What’s wrong with honey?” cropped up among our players.

I tried making the typical vegan animal cruelty case – at least some bees are inevitably killed in harvesting honey, we have plant-based substitutes that don’t involve the use of animals…the usual cases.

Of course, folks hearkened back to friends and family who raised bees themselves in small family farm, bee husbandry operations, where, perhaps unsurprisingly, bees were “never” killed.

Now then, we know this isn’t actually the case: just because beekeepers in small collectives or small bee farm operations may take extra care to minimize animals killed, it hardly makes any reasonable sense to claim that bees are NEVER killed even in these harvest conditions. Of course bees are killed. Bee husbandry isn’t being done for the benefit of bees; it’s being done for the collection of honey for profit. The lives of any individual bees are not even a secondary concern; maximizing profit is the issue.

…Because bees are seen flying free, they are also often considered free of the usual cruelties of the animal farming industry. However bees undergo treatments similar to those endured by other farmed animals. They go through routine examination and handling, artificial feeding regimes, drug and pesticide treatment, genetic manipulation, artificial insemination, transportation (by air, rail and road) and slaughter.

http://www.vegansociety.com/animals/exploitation/bees.php

Source: T. Hooper, …Guide to Bees and Honey, Blandford, 1991

Of course, the larger issue is that a majority of honey produced for sale isn’t even coming from small “family” farming operations; it’s coming from the honeybee equivalent of the dairy, beef, and chicken factory farm.

Factory farmed bees suffer many of the same abuses and exploitation as any other factory farmed animal, from transport in suboptimal conditions (leading to significant numbers of animals killed) to bees killed during harvest, or arbitrarily killing the queen of a given hive to stimulate hives that are less commercially useful. Couple this with the fact that honey is one of the EASIEST animal products to actually avoid: there’s no nutritional requirement for humans to eat honey at all, and vegan substitutes like Agave nectar are readily available, and looks and tastes so much like honey that there’s simply no good reason not to use it.

Fundamentally, animals are simply not an exploitable resource; we have alternatives. A quick five-second Google search on typical honey production practices yields the following:

…Unite weak colonies. Select the best queen of two colonies. Kill the less desirable queen…

http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G7601

…Basically what you are doing are forcing your bees into a population “explosion” without letting them get into a swarming mode…

http://www.tnbeekeepers.org/pubs/Optimizing%2520Honey%2520Production%2520-%25201999%2520ABF%2520Workshop.pdf

…The most common pesticide kill is to adult bees. The beekeeper may find a large number of dead bees in front of the bee hives in the apiary. On occasions the beekeeper may observe bees on leafs that seem to be drunk. Chemicals generally affect the nervous system so that bees have trouble flying, walking, or remaining upright.

http://www.beeclass.com/dts/201lessonten.htm

…Mail-order queens are usually available by the last week in March. Queens should be replaced if their brood production is lower than average. To requeen a colony, find, kill and discard the old queen, then introduce the new queen in her cage as described in the section…

http://www.ent.uga.edu/Bees/Get_Started/Honey_Bee_Management.htm

Eating animals does not honor them

From Open Salon:

If you’re going to kill an animal, at least have the good sense to honor it by appreciating the sacrifice it made.

Would you call it an honorific if your pet was killed, skinned and cooked? Would it really honor your dog or your cat – presumably a companion animal you shower with love and affection – if that animal was served to you on a plate and you ate her?

Of course it wouldn’t.

I’m well aware that most people will not go vegan today, tomorrow, or ever. But please: ideas matter. Eating animalsdoes not honor them. Pretending that it does may be something humans need to tell themselves to try and dance around the ethics of doing it, but it’s not “kind” or “honorable” to the animal to consume her flesh.

I’m aware that many of you may choose to see eating animals as a “personal choice,” but it’s not really about you. It’s about the animals you’re killing. I don’t mean to be tedious and pedantic here, but ideas matter.

I’m not drawing a comparison to pets to try and draw on your heartstrings. The point is that we routinely do things to pigs, cows and chickens we’d never dream of doing to dogs or cats. This makes absolutely no sense. My aim here is just to get the people I can get to see to open their eyes and see. Most people, mired in conventional thinking, are unreachable.

But it’s not really about the unreachable.

If I can get even one person to open their eyes and see, to really see, then it’s worth it. I understand that it’s not a popular idea, and like all unpopular or unusual ideas, it’s easy to write all of this off as just the ranting of yet another moralizing vegan.

Most of the people reading this will only read that into it. I accept that.

But a few people won’t.

I have a moral obligation to try and drag this culture, kicking and screaming, if need be, out of its selfishness and wanton sadism where its treatment of animals is concerned. Killing and eating animals is optional. It’s completely optional. Causing optional suffering and death to sentient life – life that is not, in any meaningful way different from the pets we shower with affection – is not an honorable act. It will never ever be honorable. Merely calling it honorable does not make it so.

I know many people choose to see eating animals, and the ethics of eating animals as a “personal” choice. But it is not, in any way, personal. Lives are taken for no purpose other than satisfying our tastebuds. That’s not a personal choice. It’s not honorable.

Open your eyes. See. Really see.

Hits the nail on the proverbial head.

This is precisely why I don’t like the term “partner” – especially when we buy into using a “less-than-equal” term on our own to describe our relationships. In this society, your married-other-half who is a woman is your wife. If your married other half is a man, he’s your husband. There’s no reason heterosexuals get to own these terms. From the Prop 8 trial testimony:

Chu: How does getting married change things.

Zia: In most immediate sense, it was in how our families related to us. When we first got married. We have a niece, 2 years old, only known us Auntie Helen and Auntie Leah. WHen she saw Leah and me, she gave us a big hug, said, Auntie Leah, now you’re really my auntie. I thought, well, you’ve always known her as your auntie. Somehow it made a difference. It made a difference to our parents.When you say you’re a domestic partner. When people say …who’s this person? I can’t count the number of times who said …Partner in what business. We’d say …partners in life. Often it was bewilderment. What business is life, do you mean life insurance. It’s a matter of how our families relate to people. For me to show up at every event. People ask who’s she. For her 90-something auntie to say, here’s Leah’s friend. She must be a really good friend, suddently there were able to say, Helen is my daughter in law.