Tag Archives: closed belief systems

Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

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Hi no infighting, but a bunch of people rally for closing down animal shelters and bring this argument forth as their academic output from within Animal Rights + Animal Liberation scenes. You may call a clear cut stance > a critique within movements “infighting”, while we simply talk about messages. One must be seriously upset about of the amount of speciesism that’s being tolerated as part of antispeciesism. To us it’s time to take the unhandy step of an explicit even more far reaaching seperation from these currents even if they are the norm/mainstream within all that what we conceive as animal advocacy.

We wrote on social media:

“Wir können ja auch jegliche Schutzeinrichtung für Menschen aufgeben wollen und es bleibt trotzdem unethischer Quatsch. Wir sind gerade allen entfolgt die den hier benannten und kritisierten Akademiker*innen folgen, welche dafür plädieren … lest selbst > https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/regarding-henry

Tierrechts- und Umweltschutzthemen machen klar, dass weiblich gelesene Personen gleichermaßen zur Verantwortung zu ziehende culprits sind, wie ihre männl. gel. couterparts, nur nehmen sie in dem Theater eine andere Rolle im gemeinsam getragenen Skript ein. Subjekt closed!”

“We can also want to give up any protection facility for people and it still remains unethical nonsense. We have just unfollowed all those who follow the academics named and criticized here who advocate this … just read for yourself > [Nathan Winograd brought up the issue and wrote an exccelent critique] https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/regarding-henry

Animal rights and environmental protection issues make it clear that female-read people are equally culprits to be held accountable as their male-read couterparts, with the only difference that in the theater they take on a different role in the shared script. Subject closed!”

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The tipping point really has been reached by ths call Nathan Winograd criticises here, where to academic animal advocates unitedly call for closing down shelters – and wtih that proposal they imclicitly undermine all the crucial efforts of the no kill movement in the USA:

“The Anti-Heroes: Katja Guenther and Kristen Hassen betrayed animals for self-aggrandizement. They now want to abolish animal shelters and leave animals to fend for themselves on the streets.” https://news.nathanwinograd.org/p/the-anti-heroes

This, while are the same time some proponents of Total Liberation within the Animal Liberation field seek to undermine discursive pluralism and normal democratic behaviour as animal advocates calling divergences, critical analyses of specieism and animal objectification and debate signs of “infighting” and suggesting that Animal Liberation was only to be acieved when advocates would speak in unisono, and obviously consider themselves to be one political body in itself (thought I assume they do secondarize animal issues in regards to any other issue that might lay in their interests – otherwise why would they even consider Animal Liebration to work in a more simplified way that Human Liberation, etc.).

How can people assume that Animal Rights issues should not be evaluated using all possible ethical criterions that apply – and that from people coming from all political angles. Animal Rights subjects are not a “world in itself” that stands outside of all other political issues. They are to be understood exactly like Human Rights: They are our direct concerns. And no one can lay a claim on being the authorative main movement with an unquestinable entitlement.

Just learn to think of Animal issues like Human Rights issues and Animal Rights like Human Rights, and you can understand the approach our group choses. And it times of human conflict we may chose to do so decidedly.

Decolonialism doesn’t explain forms of nonhuman objectification

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Fragment

Decolonialism does not explain forms on nonhuman objectification and human “ruling via definition” in regards to “(nonhuman) animality” (which in itself is yet a term to be argued about and to be analyzed).

Decolonialism is one thing, Animal Objectification has its own histories, even when problematics converge and overlap e.g. in terms of ecological, eco-social contextualities. Brining decolonialism in as the solution for forms of animal objectification puts all hope on intra-human cultural diversity and ignores the dilemma of human definition of animal identity, which is simply not considered to be a historical major mistake seen in itself.

Decolonialism applies to intra-human constellations while the schism between “animal” and “human”, as some form of great hierarchically applied identities, stands outside of intra-human conflicts.

The notion of “human“ and the notion of “animal” differs with individuals, differs in different times and in different cultures. Bringing us all together under the assumption of functionability can’t solve the source of conflict between the predominant varied human notions of “human” and varied human notions of “nonhuman and animal” which resulted in today’s settings that we persistently have with animal objectifications.

Also, the problem with decolonialism to be applied as a tool to dismantle animal objectification raises the question of why the histories of animal objectification can’t be addressed with their own complicated specifics.

Antibiologistic Animal Sociology

Subversion and Oppression

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Who pretends that subversion functioned differently in society than oppressive patterns, with both relying on similar basic assumptions about the human-animal-nature schisms – mostly in regards to the phenomenons of “existential meaningfulness” and the question of “self-authority”?
antibiologistic animal sociology

Earthworms and animal rights

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We believe that if our common notion of animal rights excludes invertebrates, like earthworms, we need to a.) analyze the speciesist paradigms that segregate animality, and b.) question the legitimacy of a solely humancentric (ethical, legal and philosophical) conception of a fundamental “right” on life and freedom.
Antispeciesist Animal Sociology

The mild speciesism continuum

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mild_speciesism_1e conscious

Conscious about speciesism
And yet you study nonhuman animals
Through indirect, abstract, theory-driven lenses
Not through the uniquely and ultimately
emancipated channels
of perception
your antispeciesist views would take.

– Palang LY

See also thought: Defining Nonhumans as ‘INSTINCTUAL’ is species-derogative and biologistic

Anti-Speciesism, another angle

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FRAGMENT

Making Anti-Speciesism itself a subject

We rightly want to ask people to do more than donate money to animal advocacy groups. We rather hope that people make others aware of veganism – in ethical terms. So only or mainly talking about vegan health and cooking (for instance) isn’t doing the job (far less is promoting vegan consumerism).

In which way to thematize speciesism?

1. By comparison …

A lot of the drawings of analogies are taken in reference to racism and sexism. In the discussions though the weight tends to lay more on the specifics of racist and sexist psychology, in those analogies, than on the juxtaposed speciesist type of psychological mindsets.

2. With cases …

On the other hand activists who discuss actual on the spot atrocities that are taking place and which mark those faces of speciesism, they do show the sheer extremes of killing, and those extremes again can’t be directly compared with other forms of discrimination. (At least we are confronted here with the fact that every category of an atrocity has own contextualities.)

How do you thematize speciesism?

In the frame of human anthropology? Or by comparing biological observations and findings on nonhuman / humans … ? Sociologically?

How?

My first suggestion is – cos I really do see that too little we describe how speciesism psychologically works in practice, is: let us have a look at the HOW’S of how speciesism manifests in basically many varying forms.

This is a highly fragmentary list for going into that direction:

QUOTE:

Many forms of speciesism

Objectifying nonhuman animals takes various forms:

– in legal terms nonhumans are classified as property

– in religious terms the separation is being made spiritually, man is preferred and given the right to dominate all that is on earth

– philosophical schools may give an array of different reasons for why whichever form of speciesism might be ethically sound or a right view to maintain

– the natural sciences differentiate between beings driven by instinct, the lower forms of life, the higher forms and man with the supposedly most complex make up of mind and brain.

– carnism could be said to be a term for one form of speciesism that classifies domesticated farm animals only (or finally, as in the case of horses and some exotic animals that are eaten such as ostriches) as “meat” or suppliers of food.

– pets on the other side are. in spite of being loved by our society, also affected by speciesist views on them.

– wild animals are forced to make up the object for hunters and hunting culture’s needs to re-exercise continuously the idea of a primeval and supposedly ideal condition of man as the hunter and gatherer.

– but also wild animals are affected by argumentations that target them in terms of whether they are intrusive species or should be seen as protectable.

For every animal species we seem to get one or more forms of speciesist views, classifications, argumentations. In every aspect that defines the human view on his or her environment we seem to come across a derogative stance on nonhumans.

When we discuss speciesism we should bear in mind how complex and difficult to analyze the subjugative view on animal life is in our cultures and societies.

-ENDQUOTE, source

I think taking a direct look at the cloaked psychology behind speciesism (itself), we can get closer to the framework that enables a speciesist society in the first place.

With ‘cloaked psychology’ I don’t mean a model such as it was discussed with the ‘carnism’-term, which focussed on two forms of speciesism basically: pets that are loved, yet have no rights, and so called farm animals that are being killed for “food”, and have of course also no rights.

With ‘cloaked psychology’ I mean questions of why as a fact human traits are valued over nonhuman animal traits, or the same goes for ‘interests’, features, attributes, realities, etc.

By breaking down the probably manifold components of the speciesist framework, we can find our way through a mess of a collective-psychological character, I think.

 

People like this: Camas Davis

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People like this: https://twitter.com/CamasD prove that speciesism can indeed be compared to racism, sexism … as far as the fact is concerned that the problem lies 100% in the deranged psyche of the perpetrator. It’s a given pretext that is employed to make things look as if the targeted subject had features, characteristics or otherwise such an ‘essence of being’ that the very obvious injustice inflicted by the oppressor against a chosen victim would be thus justified (yeah really usually the gravest forms of injustice are brought about by some rational argument – rational in the view of the oppressor).

The reasons of course why a victim is chosen by a sadistic human group has political implications, each in own complex forms.

Nonhuman animals are picked as victims, in the case of a speciesist agenda, to seek dominance via the complete physical annihilation in order to make the own species “manifest” as the winner species, as the super-ordinate god-like form of existence, as an all knowing, an all controlling species, that can even declare “the other” to be “just a piece of meat” – which is but something digestible and palatable. (see for that: Eating, crushing, as a form of wielding power over other living beings … Elias Canetti in ‘Crowds and Power’ pp. 210-211.

This female person works for http://wusthofedge.com/ and she runs her own “meat collective” in the state of Oregon where she seeks to intellectually make speciesism look like a necessity for the human condition.

Instead of accepting human cultural (and thus ethical) re- and evolution, this person puts all her fantasy and physical eager into trying to get us where nobody except the sadist even came from: she literally takes carnism to a wannabe intellectualized level.

A sad horizon for anyone

She goes to “humane” farms, dares to put her sadist hand onto the nonhumans to “stroke” them, to later involve their tortured bodies into her group-driven-ritualistic abstractions of what is one of the most extreme forms of speceisism that I’ve seen to date.

The severity of speciesism in her case bases on an idea of promulgating flesh-handling in connection with the ideologization of objectifying nonhuman animals as a form of a supposed overall human ethical enlightenment. She is one of those speciesist ideologists that wish so hard to undermine the very ethics and morals that base on the pure and undeflected commonsense human form of reasoning.

A thought about religious slaughter

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Ban religious slaughter in the European Union – Occupy for Animals, PETITION

What upsets me specifically about religious slaughter is that it’s done on behalf of a religion, on behalf of a god. When our messed up society, our morally derailed society craves for dead corpses of tortured nonhumans I can say, well of course, our society is totally unethical, they don’t respect animals and basically also not humans, and not nature. What counts in our society is good old greed and profit.

But when a religion teaches its adherents that you ought to slaughter, then that what should stand for the sanctity of phenomena – the act of religion / being religious, having created religion – turns into the total negation, and really the TOTAL negation of life and of the value of life.

If people can’t respect other animals because the natural sciences have designed an explanatory model that puts humans of top of everything biologically, then that’s one thing, but if religion degrades life and tries to sell its lies of “love” then the world stands upside down.

I don’t understand why some people respect religion more than life.

 

Necrophilia and art

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Conlflating the Topoi

FLEISCH. Material, Objekt, Denkfigur | 83. Kunsthistorischer Studierendenkongress vom 29.11. bis 2.12.2012 am Institut für Kunstgeschichte der Universität Wien http://www.univie.ac.at/kskwien.

This congress dedicated to the subject of “meat” or flesh, “as a matrial, object and figure of thought” fully mistook or intentionally conflated the notion of flesh in term of lust and it’s religious “stigma”, and factual death.

The conflation does exist – not just here but it has a long historical tradition which itself sheds light on the anchor-points of the working dialektics of speciesism.

The flesh of lust is the protected flesh of the privileged human being, in a world that separates animal vs. human.

The meat on the other hand is the wish to digest death, to become the master of torture, who rules over the life and death of beings we as humans will never understand, since we cling to our phantasy of human superiority, our human megalomania.

“The human” as the center of the universe is already questionable. Now “the human” (a concept) leading humanity itself ad absurdum through his/her wish for an ultimate domination will be an interesting decay of mind and life to watch in the individual fates.