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Terrorism by any name Why is this scum called animal rights activists?
A notorious extremist group says it has tampered with more than 250 items containing the antiseptic, which is mainly used to treat children suffering from cuts and grazes, as part of a long-running campaign against an animal testing laboratory.
The group, calling itself the Animal Rights Militia, said it targeted Savlon in a “clear and uncompromising” manner because it believes its Swiss manufacturer, Novartis, to be a client of the research centre Huntingdon Life Sciences.
And it warned its campaign would continue unless the pharmaceutical firm ends its links with HLS.
The Telegraph article seems to serve as a platform for their statement and agenda instead of a report that these criminals have been arrested and appropriately dealt with.
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“All animals are equal, some animals are more equal than others.”
And Humans, in the so called “minds” of those criminal thugs, have no rights at all.
There was here a debate about “animal rights” a few days ago.
I find that the concept of “animal rights” debases and maybe nullifies the concept of human rights.
Maybe that’s the point and aim of these vandals – an attack on human rights.
I used to associate with a few people like that. Some of them actually believe that what they’re doing for the animals is right because it’s for the animals, and that humans are irrelevant to their decision-making.
I avoided the animal-rights asshats, usually, except when showing up to the campus Leftie-Dumbass-Unity potluck with a bunch of wild game and spinning them up by talking about cruelty to yeast when they got into the beer.
The enviros, strangely, didn’t seem to go in for the watermelon thing. Sure, the average of them was a socialist moron on other matters as well, but the tree-hugging was coincidental.
O/T : “The Telegraph article seems to serve as a platform for their statement and agenda”
This can be said of the Telegraph on also most every issue especially: Islamic terrorism, Pro EU super-state,
Welfarism, Gordon Brown – what a great guy..etc
If there is a line they are on the wrong side of it these days, The views tend to be in the comment pieces but the editorial line has weakened to almost nothing.
I think with the exception of Islamofascists Animal Rights zealots are the biggest no-lifers on the planet. I remember a few years ago a cougar attacked and horribly maimed a little girl and she survived. She was on a trail a ways behind her father. He couldn’t pay the insurance as she required a tremendous amount of surgery so he asked for help by setting up a fund. I can’t imagine the horror this child experienced mentally and emotionally as well.
Fish and Wildlife had to kill the cougar and they found she had a cub (no doubt she was protecting) in the immediate vicinity. As the father struggled hoping folks would donate, local Animal Rights activists established a fund for the cub to be cared for in a private sanctuary to live a safe and healthy life. They had no comment about the little girl.
I have to say, I don’t see how the Telegraph article is in any way supportive of their stupid actions. It just reports the facts. Most normal people will read the article & be disgusted by the idiot “activists”.
If they want to write a piece condemning the actions (which seems about as necessary as writing one condemning murder), the editorial pages are the right place for it.
I can see the Telegraph’s reluctance to really wade in, after the way they were expensively hung out to dry over the Galloway thing. Libel, it seems, is now simply saying something which offends someone, even when it can be proven true.
And anyway, what else is one supposed to read on a lazy Saturday morning?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Booker and Charles Moore. Once they go, the Telegraph’s finished. I’m still not convinced Andrew O’Hagan isn’t a Craig Brown spoof.
Maybe the Telegraph prints the drivel put out by the Animal Rights Nutters because sunlight is the only antiseptic available at the moment…
There is a occasionally strong undercurrent of some kind of anti-life nihilism running through many animal rights (even mainstream) organizations. They seem to be dedicated to removing humanity from the picture yet, in a superficial paradox, they kill massive numbers of domestic animals in the name of ‘animal rights’ and, perversely, ‘humaneness’. A Humane Society branch near here had a very high kill to placement ratio. There was a power struggle and the animal lovers took over from the animal ‘rights’ type of people.
We went to the new management facility to adopt our two dogs. The animal lovers who run it now actually have sometimes seriously ill animals operated on by the veterinary school and then they rehabilitate them and place them. On our visits, it was obvious that the new staff understood and thoroughly enjoyed the symbiotic relationship between humans and animals.
Understanding the existence of these two entirely different mindsets can be a useful tool for picking up subtle clues as to an advocate’s true values. There are some truly evil sociopaths masquerading as animal rights advocates. There really are some people out there that make your skin crawl and your blood boil pretending to be acting on behalf of animals.
A terrorist is in it for the power. They paint themselves in political colors to cover their lust for power. They lack the common political ground to raise a political solution from the populace, if they really cared to try.
By wearing a political cloak, they confuse the well educated and literate. They hide among this society and receive support from sympathizers. If they were seen as naked killers and thugs they would receive limited support.
Look at the actions of every terrorist group when they assume complete power. They abandon the lofty words and become just more thugs with guns taking what they want by force…
It is only the literate who buy into the cartoon/comic book mentalities that cloak violence in dubious arguments and lofty phrases. It is adolescent fantasy shared by killers who care not about what their supporters believe…
I’ve known a lot of folk in bio/med research and I can assure you I’ve not meant one who was sadistic towards animals. Kids who are sadistic towards animals wind up as serial killers, not zoology or biochemistry post-docs.
Not that I’m saying there isn’t sadism in biochemistry – anyone who has ever had to hack their way through Lubert Stryer’s magisterial standard text on the subject can attest to it being a “cruel and unusual punishment”. I had to borrow a copy for a little biophysics module. I don’t think I’m 100% even 13 years later.
Basically, I think the likes of the ALF are at the far end of a deeply entrenched ignorance and dislike of science in our society. Personally, I blame tossers like William Morris. I got sick to the back-teeth at University with arts students with 4-As at A-level deriding science as “uncreative” or “dull” or “rigid” or “dry”. I created a little QBasic program to plot planetary orbits one rainy Sunday after a bird had dumped me and a history student who saw it complemented me on how it must’ve taken a lot of time to put in all those dots. I just let it pass because there was zero point in saying that I was simply using a Runge-Kutta integration.
They just don’t get the power of science. They think it’s memorizing dreary facts by rote.
The ALF are just a reductio ad absurdum of this complete pig-ignorance of and rejection of science. A lot of them are probably quite into “ecology” of the WooWoo spiritual, “let’s dance naked through the glade” variety yet they still release mink from fur farms in England with bloody awful ecological results.
Now take a look at this and try the exam and then try to convince me that the nation of Newton, Maxwell and Darwin hasn’t decided to piss on science from a great height.
Question 5 is absolutely un-fucking-believable and it is not the only one.
Physics is the keys to the Universe. Britain has dropped them through a grate into a sewer and isn’t bothering to even call the locksmith.
Mid,
You are absolutely right. I would add that a lot of the animal rights types display moonbattery of the first water in exactly the sense that Adriana defined it.
“Definition of a ‘barking moonbat’: someone who sacrifices sanity for the sake of consistency”
They fail to understand that I can enjoy a nice bit of sirloin, wear leather, use drugs tested on animals (i.e. all of them apart from homeopathic junk) but I still love my jellical cat and give him as nice a life as possible. bloody hell – he’s the only creature in this house with private health insurance!
They really fail to understand that my strictly vegetarian (no meat, fish or leather) wife has no problem with animal research or drug-trials. And they’d go apoplectic if they ever heard that she has no more trouble with the fur trade than the leather one – leather being essentially “shaved fur”. Is the demonization of fur because it’s perceived as a luxury. It wasn’t in Moscow when my wife lived there. She once saw the milita chipping a
I once thought I had a killer argument against the Animal Rights nuts – “So what do you test vetinary medicines on”… Alas, it didn’t work. I was given some guff about “alternative therapies” and the idea that vets were involved in some sort of conspiracy…
NickM, being a recent biochemistry graduate you have my greatest sympathy. I must be inured to it though ‘cos I’m starting a DPhil in October.
I think part of the problem is that too many people try to apply an ideology to Nature; this is a problem common between both the animal-rights lobby and the greater cult of ecology which is so popular at the moment.
Actually, I do agree with animal rights activists that animals shouldn’t be used for product testing and medical research.
Animal rights activists should be used for product testing and medical research.
cutaway,
I think part of the problem is that too many people try to apply an ideology to Nature; this is a problem common between both the animal-rights lobby and the greater cult of ecology which is so popular at the moment.
Brilliant! Stalin apparently didn’t approve of fermions because they refused to “collectivize” – refusing to all take up identical quantum states. He much preferred bosons. Yup, and 2+2=5.
Best of luck with your DPhil!
And remember the reason they call it research is because you always have to do it at least twice.
Damn.
Sabota beat me to it.
It would be better than a jail term.
They could be reversed into HLS in cages.
Sam Duncan has got things about right.
There are few good journalists are left in the Telegraph group – but most people there are standard “media people”.
A journalist is someone who digs out facts and checks them (rather than just repeating press releases) – and is someone who is open about EXPLAINING what they think is going on (which means being open about their own view of it).
As for this phony (American “prgressive movement”) distiction between “news” and “editiorial”.
“Objective, scientific journalism” is just lazy leftism.
A Frank Johnson (now dead) or Christopher Booker, would investigate a story, find out what was really happening, and explain it.
The modern lot have not got the minds to that. They can not look beyond the press releases because they have the same basic attitudes as the people who wrote them.
It shows up all over the place (a lot worse than this). Animal rights terrorism may be beyond the pale, but most other P.C. things are just assumed (without thought) to be true and this is reflected on the “hard news” pages.
That is because it is not possible to write “hard news stories” without a view of the world.
One can either be aware of one’s view of the world (Frank Johnson, Christopher Booker) and argue for it, or one can just be a puppet of the what one was taught at school and university.
Which is what the “objective and scientific” modern journalists are – they express a view of the world (on the news pages) without even knowing they are doing it.
No animal “rights” activist is entitled to receive any treatment or medicine which exists as a result of animal research.
triticale beat me to it: any of these terrorists should be denied medical treatment that is in any way connected to animal testing.
When I wrote my article a few days ago on the blog, I tested out the idea of animal rights and found them wanting, for reasons that many commenters had interesting things to say; my problem with animal rights is that the idea of rights does not really fly unless the being possessing such rights is potentially able, or has been able, to respect the rights of others. Animals don’t. I think we should avoid cruelty wherever possible; if modern science can mean we can dispense with testing animals, great. But as several folk have said today, a lot of the animal right folk don’t seem to like humans all that much.
That’s a great line. I haven’t been able to read his columns since he defended the odious anti-semitic outburst of Mel Gibson a few months ago. The D. Telegraph is in danger of going down the tubes.
I have been a scientist, on and off, for all my life. We do not seek to kill animals for fun, nor to inflict on them unnecessary pain or suffering. Some of us are the kindest, most sensitive and empathic individuals you could ever hope to meet. My father too, on retirement, expressed the view also that he was glad not to have to painlessly kill another well-fed, healthy, agreeably pliant white rat or mouse, ever again.
Furthermore, if animals had rights, then they would also have duties, to each other and towards other creatures of all kinds. They clearly behave as if they do not, and so the “Rights” argument falls over on its face stone dead.
These diaboloids who go about terrorizing science establishments, live in an (imaginary) world of atavistic beliefs, wherein everything was “Eden-perfect”, “Man” lived “in harmony” with “creation”, and there was no suffering. Man (not “Man”, if you see the difference) has corrupted and debased Gaia’s creation, introducing harm, inanimate rhythmic sounds, machines, pain, mechanisation (especially of agriculture, (that, that, above all, aggrieves these diaboloids the most of all, strangely – many may be Houston-Stewart-Chamberlain nazis in disguise) and hierarchical relationships between “species”. This is the root of their supposed beliefs (I have argued with a few over the years, from the Alternative Bookshop onwards.)
It is convenient for them, currently, to team up with other dark forces that are opposed to Western Civilisation and all it does for poor-people, but for different reasons and from different standpoints – such as Americaphobia for example. Bush-haters and MacDonalds-burners are more commonly found in the A-R ranks than even among the British as a whole. This is not a surprise to me.
In my view, they are in the long term many, many times more dangerous to Humanity as an entity, than, let us say, Al-Quaeda or however you spell it. If they want to level Homo Sapiens alongside “animals” (which curiously mainly seems to include “higher large animals” often with liquid brown eyes and fur, and not the far more numerous phyla like invertebrates or bdelloid rotifers, etc, etc etc) then they have no understanding of whar “Rights” are, as opposed to “rights”.
Although States in all their acts are primarily to be deplored, I would, while the State is still a necessary evil, expose these droids, in droves, to exemplary punishments, of unimaginable ferocity and duration, far far worse than is currently meted out officially or otherwise to paedophiles.
It is no accident that the men in Watership Down smoked!
(Bright eyes, shitehawks like fire…)
“Now take a look at this and try the exam and then try to convince me that the nation of Newton, Maxwell and Darwin hasn’t decided to piss on science from a great height.
Question 5 is absolutely un-fucking-believable and it is not the only one. ”
Wow, just wow. I went through half the test in around 5 minutes. And I have minimal training in Science. Just a couple of college level physics courses.
If I didn’t know better, I would have assumed that this test was for 7 year olds.
I thought it was bad here in the United States.
What is unbelievable is that people are complaining that this test is too difficult.