Armed and dangerous

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/09/11/nine-facts-about-terrorism-in-the-united-states-since-911/

Which is more violent: MMA or ecoterrorism?

Nick Norelli defends MMA:

http://rdtwot.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/sports-and-ethics/#comment-43696

We could extend his argument by pointing out that MMA is safer than radical environmentalism and animal rights activism:

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/ecoterrorism.asp

Whale Whores

Whale Wars, which glamorizes ecoterrorism, has begun a new propaganda season. This season, the Sea Shepherd crew is rescuing tuna fish as well as whales.

This reflects the irrationality of the secular animal rights movement. On a Darwinian worldview, fishermen are animals, just like fish. The fishing industry is simply a case of human animals killing nonhuman animals. That’s no different than animals killing other animals. That’s no different than sharks or barracudas killing other fish. Meat is a natural part of the human diet.

For that matter, our closest evolutionary relative is allegedly the chimpanzee, yet chimps kill and consume other animals. Chimps are carnivorous as well as herbivorous. Why does the Sea Shepherd obstruct human primate consumption, but does nothing to obstruct nonhuman primate consumption? What could be more speciesistic?

There’s the claim that we’re fishing certain species to extinction, but even if that were true, nature is no respecter of species. Mass extinctions are a fixture of evolutionary history.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2027723/Aliens-vs-humans-Eco-friendly-extraterrestrials-wipe-planet-Earth-protect-civilisations.html

Bullet with butterfly wings

Whale Wars is wrapping up its fourth season. I’ve blogged about it before:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/07/meat-is-murder.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/07/human-virus.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2009/08/world-is-vampire.html

Now for a few random observations:

i) For a Far Left organization, the command structure of the crew is amusingly chauvinistic. Men hold the upper ranks in the faux navy. And it’s the men who see most of the action.

For the most part, the viewer is shown reaction shots of women looking tearful, aghast, or perplexed.

So what exactly are the women there for? What’s their contribution of the onboard mission?

If I were cynical, I’d suspect they are there to supply a floating bordello for the male members of the crew–who are away from wives or girlfriends during their lengthy excursions to the Antarctic. But I’m far too idealistic to offer such a jaded explanation.

ii) Most of the time there’s not much going on. So the show has to pad out each episode. This often involves a behind-the-scenes explanation of their sneaky tactics and strategy in attempting to outfox the Japanese whaling fleet.

But isn’t that counterproductive? The Japanese aren’t stupid. They watch the show, too. That simply forearms the Japanese whalers to take countermeasures when the next whaling season comes around.

iii) Paul Watson has cast himself in the role of the noble, indefatigable environmentalist and animal-rights activist. However, another interpretation suggests itself. He’s 60 years old. That means he came of age during the Sixties counterculture.

For many radicals, that was the highpoint of their life. It was all down hill after that. The rest of their life was an anticlimax.

So what do you do for a second act? Well, what about becoming an ecoterrorist?

iv) One of the crewmen (Vincent Burke) is a very heavyset. One wonders how he got so corpulent on a vegan diet.

v) As an interesting sidelight, Whale Wars illustrates relativity of reference frames.

Occasionally one of the Japanese vessels collides with one of the Sea Shepherd vessels, or vice versa. Shipboard cameras on the Sea Shepherd vessel show the Japanese vessel apparently swerving to ram the Sea Shepherd vessel while shipboard cameras on the Japanese vessel show the Sea Shepherd vessel apparently swerving to cut off the Japanese vessel. A game of chicken on both sides.

Fact is, with two boats in motion on the open sea, there's no way of telling which one changed course in relation to the other, since there's no fixed point of reference. From one angle, it looks like one did it–from another angle, it looks like the other did it. 

"The world is a vampire"

Last week’s episode of Whale Wars (on Animal Planet) was a funeral service for a whale. We were treated to the grief-stricken reaction of ecotoerrorists to the demise of a whale at the hands of a harpooner.

I’ll venture a few comments:

1. I think it would be unfortunate if Japanese whalers hunted certain species into extinction. Mind you, I don’t know that certain species are actually endangered by whalers.

2. That said, the show is manipulating the viewer’s anthropomorphic empathy for the plight of whales as a staking horse to promote a radical agenda. This isn’t just about the conservation of whales. The whole thing is a propaganda device to soften up the audience for something it would resist if ecoterrorists were more forthright about their ulterior motives.

3. Harpooning a whale and then shooting it to deliver the coup de grâce looks brutal. However, it’s no more so than natural predation in the animal kingdom. It’s not as if sharks, barracudas, killer whales, piranhas, wolves, lions, and so forth humanely euthanize their prey before consuming it.

So there’s something deeply incongruous about environmentalists who mourn the death of a whale by whalers. They act as if wild animals are house pets.

Hunters who live off the land are far more in touch with mother nature than yuppie urban environmentalists.

Likewise, is a whaler who harpoons a whale any more or less brutal than a farmer’s wife who wrings the neck of a chicken?

4. Perhaps they’d objection that it’s unnatural to harpoon a whale. But does it matter to the victim whether it dies by natural or unnatural causes?

Moreover, from the standpoint of naturalistic evolution, there’s nothing prescriptive about the natural order. The natural order is not a moral order.

The human virus

Radical environmentalism is becoming mainstream. For example, I notice that the Animal Planet channel is busy glamorizing an ecoterrorist organization (“Whale Wars”).

Radical environmentalism has found powerful allies in the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress. Radical environmentalism also uses front organizations like the EU and UN to get its policies enacted through force of international law. Global warming is the current Trojan horse in the successful effort to domestic radical environmentalism.

In view of the inroads which this movement is making, we should be on the alert for what the worldview of radical environmentalism amounts to when carried to its logical extreme. Here is one lucid statement of its means and ends:

But the reality is that what is happening now is the result of the collective actions of us hominids. We are the ruthlessly territorial primates whose numbers have soared far beyond the level of global carrying capacity for the deadly behavioural characteristics that we display.

Today, escalating human populations have vastly exceeded global carrying capacity and now produce massive quantities of solid, liquid, and gaseous waste. Biological diversity is being threatened by over-exploitation, toxic pollution, agricultural mono-culture, invasive species, competition, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, oceanic acidification, ozone depletion, global warming, and climate change. It's a runaway train of ecological calamities.

It's a train that carries all the earth's species as unwilling passengers with humans as the manically insane engineers unwilling to use the brake pedal.

The trends are all around us and in the process of rapid escalation. Of course, it is easy to dismiss this and go about our business which is the ignorance-is-bliss-school of thought.

But, would we do this if we were diagnosed with a terminal disease? No, as depressing as that revelation would be, we would address possible remedies. We would look for a cure. We would try to survive.

The planet's ecosystem is a collective living organism and operates very much like the human body. Water is the blood of the earth. It provides the same function in the body as it does for the earth. Water transports nutrients to the land and transports waste to the sea or more specifically the estuaries and salt marshes that function as the liver for the earth, cleansing the water of the toxins. Water circulates through the ecosystem from the sea into the clouds falling back onto the land and returning to the sea again. It is pumped by the energy of the sun, the heart of the earth. It's a continuous cyclic movement of nutrient bearing, waste removing action that keeps the land fertile.

A river is an artery and a vein, and streams and brooks are capillaries. Put a dam on a river and you cut off an artery preventing nutrients from moving downstream and you cut off the vein preventing the waste from the land from being removed and cleansed.

Plankton, plants, and especially forests are the lungs of the earth, removing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. Overfishing, plankton harvesting, and deforestation is literally diminishing global lung capacity.

Species work interdependently to develop mutually beneficial strategies that maintain and strengthen ecosystems. Every species removed diminishes the system and weakens the collective body of the biosphere.

Humans are presently acting upon this body in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system. A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet's life support system. We are killing our host the planet Earth.

I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the "AIDS of the Earth." I make no apologies for that statement. Our viral like behaviour can be terminal both to the present biosphere and ourselves. We are both the pathogen and the vector. But we also have the capability of being the anti-virus if only we can recognize the symptoms and address the disease with effective measures of control.

I remember walking along the beaches in Vancouver harbour a few decades ago. Every single stone overturned sent a flurry of disturbed baby crabs scurrying to find new cover. I was fascinated by the sheer number of tiny crustaceans that I observed on those walks. Today, I have not found a single young crab under a single rock on those beaches. They were picked clean by Vietnamese immigrants that descended like locusts onto those beaches and stripped them clean. And criticism of that exploitation immediately elicited accusations of racism.

Today racism, cultural rights, and the right to exploit nature for commercial gain are the weapons used to defend gross over-exploitation of species and the destruction of natural habitats.

There is only one cure, only one way of stopping this rising epidemic of extinctions. The solution requires an extraordinarily immense effort by all of human society but it is achievable.

We need to re-wild the planet. We need to "get ourselves back to the garden" as Joni Mitchell once so poetically framed it.

This is a process that will require a complete overhaul of all of humanities economic, cultural, and life style systems. Within the context of our present anthropocentric mind-set the solution is impossible. It will require a complete transformation of all human realities.

We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.

In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference.

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe.

We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units like windmills, waterwheels, and solar panels.

Sea transportation should be by sail. The big clippers were the finest ships ever built and sufficient to our needs. Air transportation should be by solar powered blimps when air transportation is necessary.

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.

Preferably vegan and vegetarian diets can be adopted. We need to eliminate herds of ungulates like cows and sheep and replace them with wild ungulates like bison and caribou and allow those species to fulfill the proper roles in nature. We need to restore the prey predator relationship and bring back the wolf and the bear. We need the large predators and ungulates, not as food, but as custodians of the land that absorbs the carbon dioxide and produces the oxygen. We need to live with them in mutual respect.

We need to remove and destroy all fences and barriers that bar wildlife from moving freely across the land. We need to lower populations of domestic housecats and dogs. Already the world's housecats consume more fish than all the world's seals and we have made the cow into the largest aquatic predator on the planet because more than one half of all fish taken from the sea is converted into meal for animal feed.

We need to stop flying, stop driving cars, and jetting around on marine recreational vehicles. The Mennonites survive without cars and so can the rest of us.

We need an economic system that provides all people with educational, medical, security, and support systems without mass production and vast utilization of resources. This will only work within the context of a much smaller global population.

Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.

This approach to parenting is radical but it is preferable to a system where everyone is expected to have children in order to keep the population of consumers up to keep the wheels of production moving. An economic and political system dependent on continuous growth cannot survive the ecological law of finite resources.

Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.

http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/editorial-070504-1.html

Meat is murder

The liberal media blamed prolife organizations for the assassination of George Tiller. This accusation takes various forms. Even though mainstream prolife organizations preach nonviolence, their “incendiary” rhetoric is said to incite acts of violence against abortion “providers.”

Likewise, we’re told the prolife position, if taken to its logical extreme, leads to violence against abortion “providers.”

I’ve already addressed the “logical” argument. Now I’d like to approach the argument from a different angle.

There’s a parallel phenomenon on the left. That involves ecoterrorism, viz. Earth First, Earth Liberation Front, Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Army, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, &c. These groups use incendiary rhetoric. Moreover, they resort to forms of ecotage like arson, car bombing, and tree spiking. They consider this to be a logical extension of the conservation ethic.

However, their guerilla tactics are denounced by mainstream environmental organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Society.

If the liberal media were consistent, it would draw the same linkage between ecoterrorism and the environmental movement which it hypes in relation to “Christian terrorism” and the prolife movement.

We could also draw a parallel with the anti-globalization movement.