Some Things Taste Good

I just wanted to share an awesome song parody written by a fat-acceptance blogger. Christmas prominently involves food and along with that come all the crazy issues that society has created around food. I myself, being essentially just some bones, have rather the opposite issues from the majority, but I loved the song anyway.

Remember: capitalism needs you to need. It needs you to keep buying out a desperate desire to make yourself feel better with some new thing. It presupposes scarcity and anxiety and wherever possible it seeks to create them.

In such a context, self-acceptance can be, in its own way, revolutionary.

Merry Christmas.

Temporary Resolution of Guinea Crisis

The official government left over from the death of President Conté has given up and submitted to the new military government. The coup’s leader, Moussa Dadis Camara, seems to have been broadly recognised within the country as the effective ruler.

Hate Speech Against Animals

There has been quite a lot of work in the animal liberation movement that treats our abuse of animals in an abstract, philosophical manner – books where ethicists consider certain possible ethical theories and ask themselves whether those theories are reasonable or consistent. And that’s all well and good.

But there’s been a comparative lack of engagement with the abuse of animals, and the attitudes that support it, as a concrete ideological system. Feminism, for example, has been quite good at identifying patriarchal structures of thought and imagination, like the Madonna/whore dichotomy, and thus illuminating the actual existing ideological structure of patriarchy. I’ve not come across much such work in the animal liberation movement.

In this post I want to do something to remedy that, discussing how what I will call ‘human supremacism’ acts in the same way as other ideological structures of oppression.

Why Pet-Ownership is Oppressive But Necessary

It is often said that there is a crucial analytical difference between the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed. The violence of the oppressed is not violence standing alone – it is violence that springs from the violence of others and tries, in different ways, to end that violence.

But some cases require a third, more extreme category: the violence of those whose whole natures have been created by oppression. I say this in relation to a news story that reports a postal worker almost having an arm ripped off by household dogs, all of which were then killed, and which moreover reports that about 5000 postal workers per year are attacked by dogs.