Sunday, November 06, 2011
Smart move, stupid reason
The Dutch government is about to approve a ban on both kosher and halal meat in Holland. Apparently the pressure for this move comes from two fronts: Populists and animal "rights" loonies.
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The Populists are on the right track. Religious tolerance and multiculturalism seemed like good ideas, but in practice have turned out to be suicidal. A single nation works best when it contains a single culture. Minor variations are OK, but we've learned from deadly experience that you can't force highly dissimilar groups to work together.
Stalin understood the point first, and used it for his own evil purposes. He kept Russia under his thumb by physically transporting one ethnic group into the middle of a dissonant group, generating disorder that required a brutal government to keep calm.
Stalin's successors and infiltrators in the West (eg Comrade MLK Boulevard and Comrade Betty Friedan) carried out a softer version of the same policy with similar results.
Muslim countries, generally saner than post-Christian countries, are currently acting in a positive way on this basic fact. They are trying to eliminate foreign influences and foreign religions.
Some Euro countries are just beginning to act on this understanding, including Holland.
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As for the animal "rights" loonies, they have no case. First of all, the whole concept of "rights" is insane. Our creator endowed us with a whole lot of amazing stuff, beginning with negative feedback and subsidiarity, and building from there to cells, organs, bones and a brain of infinite power. All of those miraculous things are observable.
But if these "rights" are also endowed to each human at conception, where are they? In the mitochondria? In the breastbone? Distributed down the spine, with one "right" packaged in each vertebra? Are the left-wing "rights" like abortion and fag marriage contained in the left lung? Are the right-wing "rights" like guns and religion contained in the right kidney?
Or maybe the "rights" are software, hard-wired into the brain. If that's the case, how come nobody noticed them until around 1750 in England? And how come new "rights" can only be discovered by Soviet saboteurs wearing black robes? When Comrade Harry Blackmun discovered a new "right" to kill your own children, did that "right" magically become part of the bones or software in each child born after the date of Roe v Wade? Or did it get transported via time machine all the way back to the first Homo Sapiens and then re-endowed through each birth?
And if all non-human animals also have these "rights", where are they contained in a mouse? In a cockroach? How about a jellyfish, which has no brain and none of the same organs as a mammal? Did the newly discovered "right" to kill your children also become part of the innate equipment of every cow and jellyfish and bacterium?
No, that's crazy. We've been basing our entire system of political thought on a completely delusional demented theory. No wonder we're fucked.
More practically, the animal "rights" loonies appear to believe that kosher and halal slaughter techniques produce excessive pain for a few seconds before death. Totally absurd. Directly parallel to the worry about "cruel and unusual" methods of execution for humans. If you're going to die immediately after the suffering, you won't have any memory of the suffering by definition, so it doesn't matter.
I'll go along with the animal "rights" loonies when they protest feedlots and factory chicken farms. Those modern inventions provide an excessively painful and nasty life to conscious animals who deserve better. It would be worth paying more for meat to eliminate or moderate those practices. ¶ 4:38 AM
= = = = =
The Populists are on the right track. Religious tolerance and multiculturalism seemed like good ideas, but in practice have turned out to be suicidal. A single nation works best when it contains a single culture. Minor variations are OK, but we've learned from deadly experience that you can't force highly dissimilar groups to work together.
Stalin understood the point first, and used it for his own evil purposes. He kept Russia under his thumb by physically transporting one ethnic group into the middle of a dissonant group, generating disorder that required a brutal government to keep calm.
Stalin's successors and infiltrators in the West (eg Comrade MLK Boulevard and Comrade Betty Friedan) carried out a softer version of the same policy with similar results.
Muslim countries, generally saner than post-Christian countries, are currently acting in a positive way on this basic fact. They are trying to eliminate foreign influences and foreign religions.
Some Euro countries are just beginning to act on this understanding, including Holland.
= = = = =
As for the animal "rights" loonies, they have no case. First of all, the whole concept of "rights" is insane. Our creator endowed us with a whole lot of amazing stuff, beginning with negative feedback and subsidiarity, and building from there to cells, organs, bones and a brain of infinite power. All of those miraculous things are observable.
But if these "rights" are also endowed to each human at conception, where are they? In the mitochondria? In the breastbone? Distributed down the spine, with one "right" packaged in each vertebra? Are the left-wing "rights" like abortion and fag marriage contained in the left lung? Are the right-wing "rights" like guns and religion contained in the right kidney?
Or maybe the "rights" are software, hard-wired into the brain. If that's the case, how come nobody noticed them until around 1750 in England? And how come new "rights" can only be discovered by Soviet saboteurs wearing black robes? When Comrade Harry Blackmun discovered a new "right" to kill your own children, did that "right" magically become part of the bones or software in each child born after the date of Roe v Wade? Or did it get transported via time machine all the way back to the first Homo Sapiens and then re-endowed through each birth?
And if all non-human animals also have these "rights", where are they contained in a mouse? In a cockroach? How about a jellyfish, which has no brain and none of the same organs as a mammal? Did the newly discovered "right" to kill your children also become part of the innate equipment of every cow and jellyfish and bacterium?
No, that's crazy. We've been basing our entire system of political thought on a completely delusional demented theory. No wonder we're fucked.
More practically, the animal "rights" loonies appear to believe that kosher and halal slaughter techniques produce excessive pain for a few seconds before death. Totally absurd. Directly parallel to the worry about "cruel and unusual" methods of execution for humans. If you're going to die immediately after the suffering, you won't have any memory of the suffering by definition, so it doesn't matter.
I'll go along with the animal "rights" loonies when they protest feedlots and factory chicken farms. Those modern inventions provide an excessively painful and nasty life to conscious animals who deserve better. It would be worth paying more for meat to eliminate or moderate those practices. ¶ 4:38 AM
