Saturday 5th of November was the 10th anniversary of the death of activist Barry Horne

REMEMBER, REMEMBER

Saturday 5th of November was not just the 406th anniversary of an attempt by a group of religious zealots to seize power, it was also the 10th anniversary of the death of activist Barry Horne (see SchNEWS 330).

Barry died while on hunger strike in Full Sutton Prison, protesting against Neo-Labour’s support of the vivisection industry. This was despite them promising (before they got into power mind) that they would bring the practice to an end. At the time Barry was serving 18 years for firebombing a number of branches of Boots, who were still testing on animals.

Around 200 marched to Huntingdon Life Sciences, while many other demos, actions and gigs (including the SchNEWS benefit) were dedicated to the memory of the man whose commitment brought international media attention and served as motivation for countless activists.

And sadly his battle still needs fighting; HLS are still going – so if you want to carry on Barry’s work see http://speakcampaigns.org

http://www.barryhorne.org

Barry Horne Memorial Demo

cambridge-news.co.uk : HLS demo marks 10th anniversary of activist’s death

source: 11 NOV 2011 # http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news7963.php

Thoughts on an October day – 29 / 10 / 2011

Two comments of the non-ill-thinker

ill and vegan, it’s just ok
A: As a vegan you ought not to fall ill, because if you do, somebody might blame it on your diet.
B: Really?

money makes the values that represent the values of the human system in a “tangible” or “measurable” way
A: I think the monetary system feeds itself also from the demand / consumption pattern, the willingness of people to buy too much. The crux is, without buying power there won’t be any jobs. So either we buy and have jobs, or … what???
B: Something else is the crux, namely that the entire human system bases or an exploitative enmity towards the rest of nature.

fantasy / perspectives

reality / mutual concern

What’s right and what’s wrong?

What makes up a „right“?

Is it you yourself who decides about what you consider to be your “right”? It’s an inner process, isn’t it, that you believe you ought to have a right to breathe, a right to walk wherever you want to, a right to say whatever you feel like saying.

There is another layer of the term “right” that is not an inner process but that marks instead that what the society, or the whole human world considers to be a “right” or your “right” respectively. This form of a “legal right” – lets ground it upon the basis of a generalized form of all legal human rights taken together as, so to speak, a “generic” type of a right the humans actually “grant” you, themselves as a group, or a group within the human group – this generic type of an exclusively human right (our current “legal right”) can be detached and even really be something different than the type of right you give yourself.

Without the outer form of a right that is given to you as a person or that is in contrast NOT given to any other living sentient being, you or any sentient being still has their inner sense of what I would call a right. It’s not so that a sense of right (which has something to do with rights and wrongs, as strange as we may think this would be) is something that only exists if you are told what is wrong and what is right. A sense of what you personally may consider a right is something dependent on the beings socialization, on its social contexts. And yes, I do call the behaviour of nonhuman animals amongst other nonhuman animals too a form of social behaviour.

Now if people say “rights” are nothing natural in the case of “animal rights”, and Animal Rights can only be granted on a more or less arbitrary basis, they are wrong insofar in which one can easily realize that all rights in the purest form are something that has to be dealt with on a subjective and a socio-ethical plane.

Rights are natural, because rights stem from self-experience and social interaction. Legal rights on the contrast are quite arbitrary.

What is important is to distinguish where a moral basis of a right has its validity in the context with the experienced reality of a subjective living sentient being and its broader contextuality.