Thursday, July 9, 2009

An Explicit Illustration of the Anti-Humanism of "Animal RIghts"

Animal rights is both explicitly and implicitly anti human. The movement often tries to obfuscate this view, but occasionally, a liberationist makes the agenda explicit. Such is the case of a screed by an associate of the the violence promoting Jerry Vlasak named Jason Miller. From his column:

Despite the nearly unanimous anthropocentric belief that we human animals are superior to nonhuman animals, we are equal-AT BEST. In fact, our collective malevolence, greed, apathy, belligerence, arrogance, selfishness and tendency to dominate, exploit, and mutilate the Earth and its other inhabitants, have me convinced that we are inferior to other animals, both morally and, in a perverse way, intellectually...

Nonhuman animals are sentient, and an increasingly impressive body of peer-reviewed research scientifically legitimizes the empirical, common sense observations that many other animals are also 'subjects of a life' in that they lead relatively rich and complex intellectual, emotional, and social lives. Intentionally killing them is as much murder as it is to kill a human being.

No it's not, and anyone who thinks it is has no business preaching morality to anyone. But it gets worse:
[I]f our cravings for flesh consumption, our desires to wear the skin of another, our cowardly compulsions to stalk defenseless creatures and riddle them with bullets or pierce them with arrows, or our perceived need to subject other animals to heinous torture to "advance our science and medicine" are too strong to overcome, we need to put human flesh on the menu, stock the store shelves with shoes and coats fashioned of human skin, turn our hunting rifles on human targets, and fill our research laboratories with human subjects. After all, if we're going to use, abuse, and slaughter sentient beings to please our palates, enhance our lives, and vivisect, in order to restore justice and to put an end to abject hypocrisy, we need to include our own species in these activities.
And then comes the thinly veiled threat of murder:

If the corporatists and their faithful flock can shoot, trap, slash, cage, enslave, cut, gut, slit, slaughter, butcher, burn, shock, inject, beat, stomp, rape, wear, eat, and brutally murder voiceless sentient beings, how can we anti-speciesists, in good conscience, allow them to operate unchallenged and with impunity?...We needn't worry about maintaining the moral high ground. Dante wrote an unpublished addendum to the Inferno that includes a Tenth Circle–just for our opposition.

In the corporatist state's legal system, which principally serves to protect profit and property, an activist who killed a factory "farmer," a vivisector or a hunter would be punished as a murderer. Yet in the court of nature's higher laws, those who didn't engage in some form of activism (be it direct or indirect, violent or non-violent) to defend nonhuman animals would be tried as accomplices to murder. Apathy is complicity. With whom do you want to ally? Thanatos or Gaia?
Understand this: These people mean what they say. They are anti human and appear to be coming closer to lethally lashing out. The only people who can stop the pot from boiling over are other animal rights believers. But they are quite as church mice.

3 comments:

  1. The most bizarre facet of this philosophy is their negative use of the term "speciesism." First, every species is speciesist in that they favor member of their own species over any other. We are in most ways the only species that even begins to value other species for their own sake. The common term for a non-speciesist species is "extinct." What they call speciesism, I see as the mechanism of evolution.

    Secondly, they are "speciesist" themselves. They want to protect "sentient" animals, but why does being sentient give beings value? Because it makes them more human-like. This is also why AR's focus their publicity on primates, dogs, and other higher level mammals used in research, ignoring the rats, amoebas, and while I'm at it, human embryos.

    And of course it's ok for other creatures to kill and eat each other. It's ok for some wasps to paralyze animals with venom and lay eggs in their body to feed on them. It's ok for sharks to take a bite out of its prey and swim away until it bleeds to death. But if humans kill prey it's wrong, some say unnatural. I wish one of them would explain to me how humans stopped being part of nature.

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  2. Maybe we should do as he says. Add humans to the plate etc. I assume he is volunteering to be the first in line for this, along with his other misanthropic buddies ? Surely they are clamouring for the privledge of saving an animal like that.

    If they aren't willing to throw themselves in front of the knife to protect an animal, their moral better apparently, then surely they should be called on this rampanat hipocrisy.

    They are no better than the deep-eco morons that complain about over population while still taking up real estate.

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  3. This is only one thread of web of atheistic and suicidal thinking that is ripping apart the soul of the west. One thread tells us that humans are just animals, while another thread - the homosexual, abortion and contraception one - tells us to act like animals. When the toll that all this takes leads people to depression and other mental illnesses we're told that the solution is to drug ourselves, i.e., prozac, xanax, whatever. If there is any observable proof that man is being made in the image and likeness of God it is to be found by look at what happens to us when we're told that we're an animal - society falls apart, as it's doing now.

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