In contemplating where things stand regarding the threat of terror attacks on our homes from radical islamic groups, we have tended, perhaps understanderbly, to overlook sources of trouble closer to home. An article
in the wonderfully revamped website of the American Spectator, a conservative leaning journal, describes the aims and methods of extremist environmental groups. It makes for worrying reading.
Like their better-known terrorist brethren who hate America and its capitalist system, ELF undertakes actions it knows will have no direct consequence beneficial to its stated goals. It merely looks to inflict harm, hoping that will cow people into living in teepees and biking to work. ELF members are sustained by hate against infidels who don’t share their extremist religion, and are eager to commit violence against their “enemies.” So far that violence has been targeted against property, but as the more radical members come to realize that burning down a few houses and vandalizing SUVs aren’t accomplishing anything, and fueled by their demonizing rhetoric, violence against people is not far off.
There is no great surprise in this. Witness what happened to the staff working for the Huntingdon Life Sciences business. Witness the constant vandalism of genetically modified crops. If you are in the grip of an ideology that holds “nature” and its creatures as inviolable, and believe that all sentient creatures have “rights” then it is perhaps inevitable that some folk are going to resort to physical violence to get their way.
As Virginia Postrel noted on her blog some time ago (cannot find the exact article, I am afraid), we need to hear from mainstream green lobbies about how much they deplore violent acts. So far, I have heard diddely squat from any such group on this matter.
I do not believe I am being hysterical in suggesting that it is only a matter of time before quite a few folk are going to get killed by enviro-nuts. There is not much we ourselves can do apart from show vigilance. However, what we can and must do is to constantly challenge their ideology and continue to champion the achievements of reason, science and technology that have lifted us up from the swamps. These nutters would have us return whence we came.
It will be interesting indeed when ELF finally manages to murder someone in the US.
Until they become murdering terrorists, as opposed to property destroying vandals, it appears they are considered a nuisance, and won’t be dealt with.
Have you read Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six”? It’s only a matter of time when some green terror group gets inspired.
All it takes is for an act of arson to claim a life. These shits really dig arson, and it’s only a matter of time before there happens to be somebody in one of their targets. And once that line is crossed, there’s no going back, so they will undoubtedly escalate. I can’t see them going “oh shit, we fucked up and killed somebody…we’ll stop now”.
“ELF” has struck here in my hometown, destroying luxury SUVs by fire and damaging others with paint…. Shame on them, of course….
But who are they? My understanding is that there is no such “organization” and that it is individuals acting in anonymity and claiming they act as part of ELF, when really there is no membership, no real organization (aside from a website). The problem here is that there is no ELF to stop, just small groups or individuals bent on destruction. So a person who murders in the name of ELF will not get the ELF in trouble (aside from really bad plublicity) ……
I might have this wrong – maybe a real ELF has sprung up, but I have been under a different impression.
The biggest problem with combatting ELF terror is the group is decentralized. Anyone who believes in their ideology is advised via the internet to vandalize and sabotage technological civilization.
ELF members for the most part don’t know others in the loosely defined group. It is more an ideology than an organization. Because of this you can expect very little progress from law enforcement in stoping ELF terror.
The animal rights point is vexing. Animals are either property or they are self-owning — I can’t see how they could logically be anything in between.
Recognizing self-ownership would create an absurd an impossible result: the mind reels at the foreseeable consequences. But conceptualizing animals as property is uncomfortable too.
Is there no distinction between animals and other property at all? For example, if I saw a man torturing his puppy with a blowtorch, say, would I be justified in rescuing the puppy by force? I can’t answer other than yes, but how does that make logical sense?
I haven’t followed recent developments, if any, but I seem to recall that there was a history of environ-vandalism, including arson, in the area of Southern California that just got toasted. Lots of new developments out there that are a favorite target for ELFies.
If they ever catch the arsonists who started it, they might well discover that it was radical environmentalists.
I believe the body count stands at 10. Regardless, when you play at arson, you will kill someone sooner or later.
Oops – I believe the body count stands at 20, not 10.
This fellow has the answer to dealing with these eco-terror types (article) – basically his notion is to take the cost of undoing the damage these ELF retards do out of the EPA’s budget – absolutely brilliant.
I once read an article in an “alternative” newspaper describing an interview with an alleged ELF operative (i.e., someone who had taken part in an act of vandalism in the name of ELF). Among other things, the reporter mentioned that he found the ELFer sitting in an old pick-up truck badly in need of a tune-up, which he left running the whole time. The ELFer was also chaining smoking using a butane lighter, throwing the butts out the window, and drinking Coke out of a plastic bottle.
The reporter didn’t comment on these details, but he certainly made a point of including them. More seriously, the reporter noted that the ELFer did not seem to be able to articulate the overall purpose of his vandalism and expressed no concern that security guards, bystanders, emergency workers, or even, hmm, animals could be injured during ELF activities.
Was the interview for real? Even if it was, is the dimwitted litterer somehow representative of ELF and their ilk? I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine that for many people who join movements like this, radicalism is an end in itself. The hypocrisy, the violence, the demonization of everyone who won’t act and think like you….well, that’s not their fault. That’s what they’ve been driven to. By the Man.
More recently I read some radical environmentalist ranting about the movement solidarity’s with the IRA, the Shining Path, Native Americans, sexual abuse survivors, etc. What to even make of that??
What to even make of that??
They’re a bunch of fucking whackjobs?
Abby says:
Personally, I do not think you would be so justified. The dividing line is set, animals are not self-owning therefore they are property. The moment you start giving in to the line that they are not mere chattel, and enact ‘animal protection’ laws you set the scene for the increasing protection of animals in law until their very utility is removed (which ironically puts them most at risk.)
The fact that most people find causing unnecessary harm to animals unpleasant does not and should not have any impact on the legislation. If a man wishes to buy dogs and systematically torture them to death, that’s his business, they’re his property.
Animals are tools that breathe.
Any other view is simple weakness and illogic. As Abby says, ‘how does it make logical sense?’
It doesn’t. Trust your mind.
The animal rights point is vexing. Animals are either property or they are self-owning — I can’t see how they could logically be anything in between.
Recognizing self-ownership would create an absurd an impossible result: the mind reels at the foreseeable consequences. But conceptualizing animals as property is uncomfortable too.
Is there no distinction between animals and other property at all? For example, if I saw a man torturing his puppy with a blowtorch, say, would I be justified in rescuing the puppy by force? I can’t answer other than yes, but how does that make logical sense?
I may be cold-hearted but animals are property IMO. Any resource that is not human is eligible to be property as property is merely a process between a human mind a resource bringing value to it. Animals serve humans for many reasons, physical and mental, as property. In extremely rare cases someone may get satisfaction from hurting an animal (as in the case a year or so ago of a man in California who carved up his dog to win back his girlfriend’s affections ???). The question is should the State make laws against harming animals. I don’t believe so, no matter what, though I will certainly choose to think lesser of someone who does. —————————————————————————-It will be interesting in the future if technology allows a blurring between human versus non-human qualities.
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ELF is a logical product of the dissolution of property rights and collectivist paradigms in our culture. I understand that these folks do not think they are doing anything wrong as individual property rights are an illusion and that the uses to which resources are put are invalid and the destruction thereof is not a crime. The Ego makes the head spin.
It might be that if you haven’t heard it may be because you haven’t been listening.
Abby,
I’m not sure it is correct to divide the world into the two categories property and self-ownership. A property relationship is fundamentally a legal concept, which can be defined by humans in a number of arbitrary ways. It is rarely absolute even in the most libertarian societies. Even self-owning entities, like human beings, can’t stage their own suicides for profit; legally at least. And there are property objects which are deemed common, which no individual in particular owns.
Now a puppy may be property or may be feral. However, one of the rules of our society, the same society which makes property laws, is that one doesn’t go out and torture animals. This reflects the inner sensibilities of the majority of the members of most societies. Could I rescue the puppy by force? I could certainly call the cops in on the offender and, if a policeman myself, could enforce the anticruelty laws.
Toolkien, I must admit to being a bit perplexed by your remark that you would think less of someone for torturing their animals, in light of the remainder of your post.
It seems as though you might have an emotional, but not a logical or moral basis for lowering your opinion of such a person. If animals are in no way rights-bearing entities, then by what criteria do you judge torturing them to be wrong? And if torturing them is not wrong, in any strict and objective sort of way, then by what criteria do you judge this person blameworthy?
Your own deduction seems to indicate that a dog is not one whit more, in terms of the moral universe, than a car or a rock. Torturing one, then, doesn’t seem to have any more moral freight than, say, breaking a random pebble into two.
So why think less of the person? I suspect that you intuit some incongruity between animals as objects and behavior consonant with such a view. Sadly, the logic of libertarianism and “the world as property” does not produce reliably moral results, at least as we understand morality. That’s not to say that libertarianism doesn’t give is the best way to order society. It might. But insofar as it produces moral results, it is not because of anything in the theory which forces moral outcomes. In short, it allows for morality but doesn’t assure it.
Your post seems to confirm this view of mine.
Hey, Wretchard, been reading your stuff at Belmont Club– first rate, planning to give you props in a post here soon. Glad to see you have found us here at Samizdata.
Abby – animals, especially wild animals, have a somewhat uneasy relationship with property law. Domestic animals are comfortably categorized as property, but wild animals are either no one’s property (meaning not property at all) or the state’s property (boo, hiss) more or less by default. Many of the traditional philosophical underpinnings for attaching property rights to something don’t work very well at all with wild animals. So a strict binary “self-owned/property” ideology doesn’t work always and everywhere – I can live with that.
I personally have no problem carving out some exceptions to the general principle that you can do what you want with your property, in order to protect animals from gratuitous cruelty. The bundle of rights that we summarize as “property” is already riddled with exceptions (especially real property), so I don’t think exceptions relating to animal cruelty are a unique danger to the concept of property rights generally.
I would have no hesitations or qualms about intervening in a most definite fashion in any situation involving gratuitous cruelty to either wild or domestic animals. Law be damned.
The basis of my view is that a person is free to do with their property what they wish as long as they are not harming another human or their property. I will not use the force of the state to stop them, nor will I likely stop them myself. I will reserve to myself suspicions about this persons character in my future dealings with this person if there are to be any. As for morality, I don’t support torturing animals for the pure enjoyment of it, and would likely react viscerally to a dog being tortured (as I have two myself) so how much my attitude is logical (if this person enjoys this what other behaviors will he exhibit) or emotional (unidentifiable disgust) I may not fully know. It would be wrong by my value system, but that value system is not fodder for the making of laws based on the first sentence. Libertarianism doesn’t assure much to my mind other than the freedom of the individual to do as they see fit as long as they are not harming another or their property. I don’t have to like it or think it is logical or think that it ‘right’ based on my system of beliefs. But that is the point that the State should be a disinterested party to the furthest extent possible regardless of my own personal feelings.
I’m unsure of what you mean about common property, Wretchard. Would that be unclaimed natural resouces? If so, I would think that they are property which (as yet) is unowned, rather than property owned in common.
Also, I think that property is both a moral and legal concept. The law merely recognizes self-executing moral rights, it cannot create them.
But while I do have a preference for natural law concepts, I accept that this preference is not universally shared.
Sage — your observation is thought-provoking.
Thanks, Abby.
I’ve just been giving a lot of thought lately to the idea of what what Toolkien refers to as “value systems.” The idea has a certain resonance among libertarian circles, being one part J.S. Mill. But Moses didn’t recieve the Ten Values, so it represents a real departure in our way of thinking about the principles that bind us (like the right to property or life).
A problem I’m wrestling with is the notion that a libertarian order could be free of the imposition of values. I don’t think it can. This attatchment to property rights as a supreme value is itself part of a value system which precludes others. So there is the affectation of relativism, or at least of laissez-faire morality, coexisting with a rather dogmatic insistence that the libertarian conception of rights is objectively valid. It only pretends to neutrality on moral questions, because libertarianism makes moral claims.
I’m thinking of what Thomas Hibbs calls the “Pyrrhic victory of radical individualism.” If personal choice is the ultimate Good, then any particular decision–torturing animals, as an example–must be measured against that standard. A consequence of this seems to be that determining whether a choice is a good one is merely a question of determining whether it was in fact chosen! So grand questions of morality and right conduct are to be judged by the same criteria as one’s favorite candy bar.
In such an environment, choosing to protect liberty seems arbitrary and capricious. It is self-referential. Freedom to choose is good because we choose to be free. Libertarianism is the right social and political “choice” because it allows the greatest choice–but that itself is a criteria set forth by libertarianism alone. Objective and universally-binding morality is denied, but the objective legitimacy of the theory itself isn’t. Strange, and difficult.
It is no wonder Locke insisted our rights come from a transcendent and universal God, rather than simply describing them as “self-evident.”
Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, but I can see why some people think libertarianism is an attempt to make a moral case for nihilism–a problematic formula indeed.
Not trolling, mind. I’d rather be libertarian than anything else, since it seems to definitively resolve the question of who shall rule (nobody in particular). I’m just thinking out loud.
I am also wrestling with this problem, Sage. One of the things I find appealing about the libertarian argument is that it recognizes innate, self-executing rights. I regard the existence of natural law to be an absolute truth.
The difficulty is tracing the source of this law and defining its contours. So much of my thinking in this area is really just my mind trying to justify what my instinct tells me is right.
I cannot rely as Jefferson and Locke did on the notion of rights as gifts of the Creator, so the property paradigm provides a pristinely logical alternative.
But the moral outrage I experience at the thought of, say, torture of a dog, comes from the same place as my sense that liberty is innate.
I find it difficult to reconcile these two impulses with anything approaching logical coherence. In my mind, this sort of moral tension would be a constant threat to a libertarian society. Humans are instinctively intolerent of behaviour they regard as wrong.
Nihilism would indeed seem to be a greater friend to liberty than any value system.
I would like to empty my 9mm into the brains of an ELF member. Where can this take place?
If I blast Oi PoLLOi, will they come?
thank god for ELF. showing money hungry fucks whats up.