Ethical treatment of animals - Part I

Treating animals with a greater sense of equality, with an understanding of cohabitation will correspond to greater treatment of fellow humans.  The treatment of animals influences how humans can be dehumanized. Because nonhumans are cast into a harmable category the effect of dehumanizing holds significant weight. The undoubted effectiveness of the dehumanization process, indicated by frequency of usage, should not be underestimated since even genocide can arise from skillful application.

What is it that makes the deprivation of "humanity" status such a destructive eventuality? Why is perceiving a human being as nonhuman seemingly enough to allow every vile and crude misfortune to come her way, be it discrimination, abuse, torture or collective eradication? What is so wrong, so unforgiving, so horrendous and incredibly dangerous about being on the nonhuman side of this imagined divide?

Perhaps because nonhuman animals are a priori ‘already’ part of acceptable or necessary death that their treatment is somehow excusable. It should be stressed at this point that it appears not to matter that, biologically, humans are animals.

Treating animals disrespectfully, cruelly and with no regard for their feelings of pain as they aren't what human beings might recognize as 'meaningful' feelings of pain, opens the way for treating anything vulnerable as expendable.

Miriam Rothschild, a British natural scientist and author with contributions to the fields of zoology, entomology, and botany, noted that ‘just as we have to depersonalize human opponents in wartime in order to kill them with indifference, so we have to create a void between ourselves and the animals on which we inflict pain and misery for profit’.

A central resource in processes of dehumanization is the notion of a ‘bridgeless chasm’ between human beings and other animals. For, as soon as human beings are successfully constituted as ‘animals’, individual persons or entire groups are immediately rendered as ‘moral inferiors’, who behave ‘just like animals’, or behave like ‘misfits’. It allows society to hide away those who we deem to have lost their humanity. These categories have moral and practical importance that can be used as tools to dominate, exploit and kill.

If you care about human beings, you can't exclude animals from that care as to treat a vulnerable animal as meaningless says an awful lot about who we are as human beings and what we're capable of.

I think anyone with a heart really does care about it when they learn of slaughterhouse conditions. Hopefully we can move in a better direction when more people don't just ignore that out of guilt. Ethical treatment of animals gives something back to humanity by depowering the societal power of dehumanization.

edit: On coming to power in January 1933, the Nazi Party passed a comprehensive set of animal protection laws. These laws tried to abolish the distinction between humans and animals, not by treating animals as persons, but by treating persons as animals. Kathleen Kete writes that it was the worst possible answer to the question of what our relationship with other species ought to be.

last pope post

Of Popes and Men

A short addition to the previous article on the issues with an African pope.

In many African countries church organizations show little understanding for calls for greater rights for homosexuals, a stance which also influences political decisions.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, one of two African cardinals who could succeed Ratzinger when he retires later this month would become a strong political figure in the homophobic anti-equality movement in Africa.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) rights in Africa are limited in comparison to many other areas of the world. Homosexuality is outlawed to various degrees in 38 African countries.

In Mauritania, Sudan, and northern Nigeria, homosexuality is punishable by death. In Uganda, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone, offenders can receive life imprisonment for homosexual acts.

For Nigerian priest Raphael Adebayo, there is no doubt about this topic. "The Church can respect human rights. But if human rights conflict with God's commandments, then a judge will never support them."

South Africa stands in contrast to its neighbours with formal recognition for LGBT rights and is among an elite few countries that have equality for all under marriage laws.

Yet I digress with crazy notions of equality and justice.

Cardinal Turkson has been a vocal homophobe in Africa. He has previously lent support to Uganda’s “Kill the Gays Bill,” which would apply the death penalty to those convicted of being gay.

Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Bill, labeled the "Kill the Gays bill", is a proposal that would broaden the criminalisation of same-sex relations in Uganda. Included in various drafts of the bill is a provision for the death penalty as a sentence for those convicted.

This is a bill that has had been internationally condemned, with many media outlets characterizing it as barbaric and objectionable. This bill has also seen widespread condemnation from various Christian organizations including the Roman Catholic Church; Turkson must not have got the memo.

Note: I am aware that my map is missing a few countries including Lesotho and South Sudan, chalk it down to google images not having great maps available for free online.

No to a black Pope

Soon the Catholic world will have a new pope. For many, this is a non-affair; there is a bizarre spectacle that takes place at the Vatican where votes are made, smoke comes out a chimney, and in a small amount of time we have a new person to take over wearing the most famous funny hat.

Yet there are real consequences to the outcome. While some may support the ascendance of a black pope from Africa, this would be detrimental to Africa and to the fight against AIDS.

Spiritually speaking, Africa is a superpower -- both the world's largest manufacturer and consumer of religion.  In 2002 the Daily Telegraph said that an "African papacy is the logical outcome" given that the majority of Catholics now live in the developing world, and in particular, the African Catholic Church "has grown by 20 times since 1980”. Thirteen percent of the Catholic world population is in Africa. Africa can't help but seem an oasis of vibrant faith for the Catholic Church that is seeing a steady decline in Europe and America.

According to Financial Times, an African such as Francis Arinze would "boost the popularity" of the Church, which is facing strong competition in Africa from Pentecostal, Baptist, and Evangelical churches. Yet he is not alone. In the next conclave, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana has been called "the most likely" candidate from Africa. A lot of this comes down to their respective ages with Arinze seeming a poor choice at the age of 80.

Either one of these Cardinals would strengthen the position of the Catholic Church in Africa, which is far from a positive outcome.

In the past 30 years, concurrent with a tripling of church membership in Africa to almost 150 million people, the AIDS pandemic has ravaged the continent, killing millions, orphaning more than 11 million children, and infecting more than 22 million with HIV - including 91 percent of the world’s HIV-positive children.

In 2011, an estimated 1.8 million people in the region became newly infected. An estimated 1.2 million adults and children died of AIDS, accounting for three quarters of the world’s AIDS deaths in 2011.

Pope Ratzinger has said that condoms were not the answer to the continent's fight against HIV and Aids and could make the problem worse. The Roman Catholic church encourages sexual abstinence and fidelity to prevent the disease from spreading.

Through their myopic insistence on abstinence as the only solution, the Catholic Church has been an obstacle to the urgent project of putting in place institutions of prevention, harm reduction, and safer sex.

The Catholic campaign against condoms has included a bishop claiming, according to a BBC report in 2007, that some condoms from Europe are purposely infected with HIV to kill Africans. The synod general secretary for Africa at one point claimed that condoms don’t work well in tropical heat. Church leaders assert that condoms give people a false sense of security, which leads them to have more sex, thereby increasing their chances of infection.

All of this ignores what has become an international scientific consensus—that prevention is the key to stemming the epidemic, and condoms properly and consistently used are an essential part of prevention.

The spiritual and institutional weight of the Catholic Church continues to be thrown on the side of the virus. The result can be measured in the deaths of Africans. The virus of Catholic fundamentalism infects that beleaguered continent. 

NOTE: It’s amazing to me that this is an issue at all.
If you want to minimize your chance of getting AIDS, then use a condom.
If you’re not monogamous, then use contraception.
If you’re having sex and you want to protect yourself, then use contraception.Look at how easy that is. 

Life is so much better when the Pope isn’t your sex ed teacher.

Israel both is and is not an apartheid state.

There seems to be a deep-rooted problem with calling something what it is, of giving it a label, a description. We can’t call something a war it has to be called a conflict. Squabbles over whether something is a massacre, or a genocide, or a holocaust arise and inevitably we get bogged down in a semantic debate.

Israel is an apartheid state. The issue with giving it this label is that the immediate comparison that comes up is South Africa. Unfortunately, this is a poor comparison and again allows us to bypass the description as detractors can rightly say ‘Israel is nothing like Apartheid South Africa’.

The situation in Israel is not like South Africa, nor is it like any other country in the world. The comparisons to other countries and to other historical regimes fall flat. Israel is not a Nazi state, there is no Holocaust happening. These comparisons both diminish the scope of the Holocaust and paint a very poor picture of the current plight of the Palestinians. The situation in Israel has no useful comparison.

Yet, Israel remains an apartheid state. The 2002 Rome Statute defined apartheid as ‘an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime’.

note: the term "racial discrimination" in this context was further defined as any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.

As such, apartheid was declared to be a crime against humanity, with a scope that went far beyond South Africa. While the crime of apartheid is most often associated with the racist policies of South Africa after 1948, the term more generally refers to broad discrimination based policies in any state.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, there are Jewish-only settlements (Israeli Arab citizens are not allowed), separate roads for Israeli and Palestinian citizens, military checkpoints, discriminatory marriage law, use of Palestinians as cheap labour, Palestinian West Bank enclaves, inequities in infrastructure, legal rights, and access to land and resources between Palestinians and Israeli residents in the Israeli-occupied territories.

Some of this is for security reasons and Israel does have a right to ensure the safety of its citizens.

Still, at what point do we call something what it is?

Labeling Israel as an apartheid state does not delegitimize the Israeli state, it delegitimizes the status quo. It does not lessen Israeli claims to land, nor to its existence, nor does this label advocate a single state solution. It just says that 4.5 million people cannot be left out of the discussion.

Corruption in America

In a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria Al Gore stated that he America has become ‘functionally corrupt’.

Gore noted that ‘because our elected representatives now have to spend most of their time begging rich people to give them money, begging corporations and special interests to give them money, they spend more time worry about the effect of their actions, votes and speeches on these big donors, some of them anonymous, than the time they should be spending thinking about how to serve the interests of the publics they represent.’

What Al Gore was highlighting is that corruption has become institutionalized into the American system. Corruption harms the poorest people in particular because it diverts funds away from providing services they need the most.

The 2012 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index ranked the United States 19 of 34 OECD countries.

Corruption lowers the public trust. The lack of trust fed by corruption is considered critical in that it undermines government efforts to mobilize society to help fight corruption and leads the public to routinely dismiss government promises to fight corruption.

Reinforcing this is the role of the media in America. With one network in particular blatantly fabricating their own statistics and “facts” to pursue their own political agenda.

The fiscal effects of corruption are difficult to measure but are huge sums. One of the main ways in which corruption reduces state funds is through its negative effect on tax income by opening up loopholes in tax collection.  Tax policies in corrupt countries often favor the rich, well-connected and powerful to begin with. Tax evasion through corruption as well as poor tax administration where some of the revenue “disappears” before it reaches government coffers reduces the tax base and adds to the progressivity of the tax system.

The private sector often has an ingrained relationship with ongoing corruption of the state. The private sector can essentially capture the state legislature, executive and judicial apparatus for its own purpose. These broad forms of corruption highlight that the rot of corruption can spread throughout society impacting all levels.

An ongoing problem when tackling corruption stems from how it is defined. The widely accepted definition is the abuse of public office for private gain. However, there are key differences in the definitions used in the official laws of America and how it is defined by public opinion. Corruption is not just confined to the executive and legislative branches of governance, it is a social act and its implications are better understood when factored into the social relationships between people in specific settings.

Since corruption can be a symptom of many ills of a society, the fight against corruption has to be multi-fronted. If America is to become serious about fighting corruption they must pay attention to reforming the role of government in the economy, particularly those areas that give officials discretionary power which are hot beds for corruption. Additionally, attention must be focused not just on the bribe-taker, but also the bribe-giver.

Though the war against corruption has to be fought on a national level, the important battles will be fought locally. Individual citizens, the small towns, the NGOs and other concerned citizen’s groups, large and small corporations, individual public and private organizations, local governments, national governments, international bodies all have to fight against corruption in their spheres of activity.

The anti-corruption discourse would benefit from an engagement with alternative understandings of corruption. Addressing what corruption actually means in different spheres of America, in different communities, and what needs to be done to engage leaders and citizens in consideration about the substance of the public good, and the pursuit of collective ends. Ultimately anti-corruption must be normative and be defined by the ethics of individuals and the broader community.