Tag Archives: thoughts

Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

by

Followerism and no infighting against Animal Objectification

“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 reaching separation 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. Subject 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 bringing up the issue and writing an excellent 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!“

—

The tipping point really has been reached by this call that Nathan Winograd criticizes here, where two academic animal advocates unitedly call for closing down shelters – and with that proposal they implicitly 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 at 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 speciesism and animal objectification and debate signs of „infighting“, and suggesting that Animal Liberation was only to be achieved when advocates would speak in unisono, and obviously consider themselves to be one political body in itself (though 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 Liberation 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 unquestionable 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 in times of human conflict we may choose to do so decidedly.

 

—

rev. 24.10.24

Dedication

by

Animal Rights includes both:

An affirmation of the respect we hold for Nonhumans (the bridge of “dignity”, as holding a respectful stance)

A fight for clearing messed up terms, that allow for systemic and other factual harms and devaluations of Nonhumans.

@RadicalAntispe

A repost from our > Visual Opinions Workshop > https://tierrechtsethik.de/dedication/

 

Always oppressive specifics

by

What if it’s really illusionary to heal one evil by applying another evil? Like trying to fight an -ism
while (or with) sustaining another -ism – maybe inadvertently?
We don’t need/see/want an antisexist society where birds are still being objectified as food.
Any -ism … has its own specifics. Being against all neg. ‘-isms’, implies acknowledging their cases.

antispeciesist Animal sociology, Gruppe Messel

A fragment on insect mythologies

by

Slightly edited repost of: https://simorgh.de/niceswine/fragment-on-insect-mythologies-and-representations (2014)

A fragment on insect mythologies and insect representations, and why symbolism is not sufficient to explain the relation

Insects in mythology are mostly explained as a phenomenon that stands for a “symbolism”. It seems that authors/researchers find it hard to imagine that for instance the Scarabaeus (attributed in the Egyptian pantheon to the God Kheper), a “dung beetle”, was appreciated for more than just that, what humans attributed to him in terms of their own anthropocentric concept of the earth, its meaning and the universe.

What if for instance the early Egyptians did see a world of unique value in the life and activities of the scarab beetles?

It could likely be that it was fascinating to observe, how the beetles rolled this ball of soil and dung, to think about what meaning the beetles might have given to their existence on earth overall. Maybe it was that ancient civilizations/cultures had an ability to take nonhuman animals as cultures? A small beetle that rolls a ball like a planet, from which new insect life would spring forth … .

A typical thought you find on the topic of nonhuman animals and nature in mythologies is, that humans would imbue nature with meaning. Quite contrarily, people could have felt that nature did in fact have meaning, and that nature (being) is meaning in itself.

As far as I could find out now, the most prominent mythologies about insects and alike, evolve around: bees, butterflies, spiders, scorpions, cicadas and the scarab beetles.

If we add the heavy weight of underlying such a relationship in mythology to our today’s definition of “symbolism” – that is if we say that i.e. such insects were mere symbols for anthropomorphic attributions – then we should scrutinize more closely the epistemological history of “symbols” and the term’s etymology to shed light on the construct that we apply here.

 

Decolonialism doesn’t explain forms of nonhuman objectification

by

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

Critique of mainstream Animal Allies

by

Those most visible of today’s animal allies (the animal rights and animal liberation movement) are equally unwilling to abstract from the biologism they apply to their perspectives on animality in a seemingly unquestioned manner, not different to any perspectival view on animality expressed in the conventional foundations of “human” hybris.

They equally limit their view to the equation: human > reason; animal > instinct. The paradigm-shifts in concepts of culture, languages, and sociability/socialness themselves haven’t taken place in human emancipation yet, to extend to nonhuman groups and individuals. Manifoldness and heterogeneity do not appear on the human map, outside of hierarchical hegemonic ideas of life and living beings in general.

Argumentation routinely lays a burden of proof in a comparability of nonhumans to humans, as if a.) some unique standard of measurement always had to be taken, and b.) as if “human” could be grasped as a single monolith, when in comparison to “nonhuman”.

antibiologistic animal sociology

 

Ethics and Rights, as always

by

If you conflate the facts of ecological human destructivity with the factuality and bare existence of animal bodies, by statistically and quantitively adding up the array of damages caused by the existence of animal bodies in animal agriculture, then you make these animal bodies responsible for human actions of animal objectification.

Why don’t you instead name the injustice that animal bodies live through and die under? Do you assume that ecological destruction has nothing to do with the violations of nonhuman spaces? At least you never seem to talk about the harsh facts of injustice towards nonhuman animals when you discuss the ethical fallacy of anthropocene destructivity.

Reminder: Ethical talk without (animal) rights isn’t plausible.

Antibiologistic Animal Sociology

Alternatives for the term speciesism

by

PREAMBLE

We need a term that describes the broad discrimination/s or injustice/s exerted by human collectives and human individuals towards nonhumans animals and towards nonhumanity overall – in all its facets in which these oppressive mechanisms, thoughts and actions occur in different human cultural layers, such as religion, science, law, arts, etc.

Also, we need a term for the overall phenomenon of human destruction and destructivity in these regards. I refer to it as faunacide, as far as nonhuman animals are concerned. Some criticize the term “speciesism” on various grounds, I ask everyone to come up with more descriptive terms for what we witness and might conceive differently.

antibiologistic animal sociology

Alternative terms for speciesism

SPECIES/ANIMAL-DEROGATION

SPECIES/ANIMAL-DEROGATIVE

-DEVALUATION

-HUMILIATION

-…

antibiologistic animal sociology

Animal portrayals in language 1

by

CN: animal portrayals in language

Why do speciesists and antispeciesist alike verbally make/cite basic similar descriptions when it comes to talking about Nonhuman activities, referring to instinctual behavior patterns more or less? Observationwise they both obviously fetch their language from the same biologistic box. As if lived subjectivity, outside that of a “human” self, was non-describable. As if an idea of generic pictograms ruled our language about what in reality is the nonhuman autonomy missed by these portrayals per definition.

antibiologistic animal sociology