Shunya's Notes

Monbiot on Carbon Omissions

In 2006, China surpassed the U.S. to become the leading producer of green house emissions. But a big reason for its higher emissions is that China has become the industrial heartland of the world. Developed countries that claim to have reduced carbon emissions have, in effect, shifted their factories and pollution to China (this is one outsourcing no politician in the U.S. complains about). As consumers, all of us are now a party to China's green house emissions. Each time we buy a plastic toy, a blender, or an iPhone, we inject a blast of CO2 over China.

In a new article and the animation below, George Monbiot describes the bogus accounting that's de rigueur in measuring carbon emissions. It only accounts for territorial emissions, not outsourced emissions. With proper accounting that's linked to consumption, the U.S. is still way ahead of China in its contribution to climate change. The difference is even starker if we consider emissions per capita.

When nations negotiate global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, they are held responsible only for the gases produced within their own borders. Partly as a result of this convention, these tend to be the only ones that countries count. When these “territorial emissions” fall, they congratulate themselves on reducing their carbon footprints. But as markets of all kinds have been globalised, and as manufacturing migrates from rich nations to poorer ones, territorial accounting bears ever less relationship to our real impacts.

To Save Everything, Click Here

The innovations of the last two decades, led by the Internet and mobile devices, have fundamentally altered the way so many of us live, work, and play. Is modern technology a problem or a solution—and why? How is the disruptive impact of the Internet shaping human societies and cultures, our values, ideas of Self, and relationships? What trends should worry us the most, and who should we hold responsible for them? The viewpoints here are perhaps as numerous as people themselves, even as we cluster them in categories like evangelists, pioneers, enthusiasts, skeptics, laggards, technophobes, curmudgeons, and so on.

Evgeny Morozov, an analyst of technological trends, has a new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. In it, he attempts a critique of a culture that worships technology as the great hope and savior of humanity. I just read an interesting exchange between Morozov and Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate. I might read the book though my impression from this exchange is that while attempts like Morozov's are badly needed and he does raise many good questions, in the end young Morozov seems to me simply out of his depth for the ambitious task he has taken on. Here are links to the exchange:

Entry 1: Manjoo's opening salvo against Morozov

Entry 2: Morozov on what Manjoo gets wrong about his book

Entry 3: Manjoo on why Morozov has Silicon Valley absolutely wrong

Entry 4: Morozov on why and how technology journalism needs to evolve

Queues, Quacks, and Chaos

Over half of Indians do not have access to any professional healthcare. For those who fall ill, where else in the world is money, in particular, as well as place of residence, such decisive factors between living and dying? How much of this gap—in one estimate, the richest 20% outlive the poorest 20% by over 15 years—can be bridged by a functional public health system? And why isn’t this aspiring superpower building one? In India, questions like these are a dime a dozen. The following video provides a quick overview of the state of Indian healthcare.

David Harvey on Capitalism

David Harvey, social theorist, Marxian scholar, proponent of zero growth in advanced economies, and author of The Enigma of Capital, offers an uncommon perspective on how capitalism has worked out in recent decades, its many crises and modes of resolution. After stating that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism", he nevertheless looks at why it is so hard not only to imagine an alternative to capitalism, but even to the kind of capitalism we have today. At the very least, there is food for thought here.

The Woes of a Drone Operator

A peek into the world of drone operators, including one who couldn't continue being one. 

A soldier sets out to graduate at the top of his class. He succeeds, and he becomes a drone pilot working with a special unit of the United States Air Force in New Mexico. He kills dozens of people. But then, one day, he realizes that he can't do it anymore.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact ... Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

More here.  Nearly four years ago, I commented on a related post that "this robotics led war has the potential for significantly altering the debate: the costs of war are dramatically different to one side (fewer dead soldiers and injured veterans, for instance), which will tend to lower political resistance to war. It can be mobilized stealthily and conducted below the media radar, so to speak. Also radically different will be the experience of war (fought by remote control from suburban offices), redefining things like heroism and courage in combat, or loss and suffering. Welcome to a brave new world for war".

We Call This Progress

Arundhati Roy on the recent arc of economic development in India. I think her voice is important for lending support to certain radical and moral ideas in public life, esp. since so few public intellectuals in India do so with any force or clarity. I say this even though I don't share her romantic disenchantment with modernity and globalization, at least not most of the time, and find some of her analysis too simplistic.

I don’t know how far back in history to begin, so I’ll lay the milestone down in the recent past. I’ll start in the early 1990s, not long after capitalism won its war against Soviet Communism in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan. The Indian government, which was for many years one of the leaders of the nonaligned movement, suddenly became a completely aligned country and began to call itself the natural ally of the U.S. and Israel. It opened up its protected markets to global capital. Most people have been speaking about environmental battles, but in the real world it’s quite hard to separate environmental battles from everything else: the war on terror, for example; the depleted uranium; the missiles; the fact that it was the military-industrial complex that actually pulled the U.S. out of the Great Depression, and since then the economies of places like America, many countries in Europe, and certainly Israel, have had stakes in the manufacture of weapons. What good are weapons if they aren’t going to be used in wars? Weapons are absolutely essential; it’s not just for oil or natural resources, but for the military-industrial complex itself to keep going that we need weapons.

The Eclipse of Feudalism in Pakistan

Arif Hasan has an interesting article in Himal on the many profound socioeconomic forces that have been transforming rural Pakistan in recent decades, and which I think are discounted in narratives that seek to explain Pakistan mainly via religion and politics (via 3QD).

Feudalism was an integral part of the colonial system in what is today Pakistan. To understand the changing inter-community relations in Pakistan today, we must look at how the inherited colonial system has evolved. Every Pakistani will tell you how wonderful Pakistan used to be, what a peaceful country it was, with law and order and low levels of violence. And they tend to blame all that has gone wrong in Pakistan on the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. But that is only part of the truth. In my city, Karachi, anyone my age will similarly tell you how wonderful Karachi used to be – there were discotheques and night clubs, there was drama, and film festivals. Certainly we had all that, but when you really come to think of it, the calm that we enjoyed was really like the peace of the dead. It was a kind of peace made possible by the feudal system.

Let me introduce that feudal system through a story. In 1968, I was traveling in rural Sindh with a French diplomat, from a place called Sakht to Mohenjodaro. The road meant for vehicles was so bad that drivers preferred to travel along a canal embankment. We came upon a bullock cart, and my friend jumped out with his camera to take a picture. As the cart stopped, one of its two occupants, a young man, made off into the fields. His older companion came up, touched my feet, and said, “Sahib, please forgive us, we will never come in front of your car again.” This was in 1968, and that was the mindset of the villagers when they saw what they perceived to be a person of authority. Today, the highway from Sakht to Mohenjodaro is teeming with vehicles, but there is not a bullock cart in sight. And nobody will come to touch your feet and seek forgiveness for having come in front of your car. There are about 30 buses that ply between the two towns every day.

What was this system that made people touch your feet that late in the 20th century? And what has pushed the transformation in social relations? An explanation would help in the understanding of present-day Pakistan.

Big Sky, Big Money

Here is an excellent PBS Frontline investigation that focuses on a Senate race in Montana to look at how big money has infiltrated American politics. It looks at how the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizen's United ruling—which allowed corporations to spend money on political issues as part of First Amendment free speech—actually plays out in real life. It shows how shady non-profit organizations are able to legally spend big money on shaping elections without ever disclosing where and who the money comes from. Viva la democracia!

Capitalism Without Growth?

The idea of economic growth based on continuously rising production and consumption, barring short-term hiccups, is integral to modern capitalism and its institutions. Most models of investment today are built upon returns outpacing inflation. Indeed, the promise of growth is fundamental to modern politics. In a world of finite resources, however, the expectation of endless economic growth is rather absurd, a fact now being made amply evident by ecological degradation, climate change, and extinction of species. Many economists are now exploring the idea of "steady state" economics with zero growth. Seemingly, it's only a matter of time when, one way or another, we are forced into such a state (or worse, because we won't accept it gracefully). What might that look like and what might a transition to such a model entail for our societies? Featuring Ben Harris-Quinney, Giles Fraser, and Meghnad Desai, this video has an interesting discussion on the topic (54 mins).

Dan Miller on Climate Change

In this talk, Dan Miller describes how climate change is shaping up to be worse than was predicted by the movie An Inconvenient Truth, why most humans are unable to grasp this threat (because it is invisible, without historical precedent, has a complex causality, is seen to have long drawn out or intangible consequences, lacks a well-defined enemy to pursue, etc.), and what we ought to be doing about it pronto.

Mental Disorder or Neurodiversity?

In this thought-provoking essay, Aaron Rothstein discusses neurological conditions like autism, ADHD, depression, dyslexia, and others. In recent decades, they have become quite visible for reasons that are often highly dubious (and owe more to the workings of knowledge and power that Foucault outlined in Madness and Civilization). Rothstein describes how people with such neurological conditions function, often with other heightened capacities. To what extent should their differences be seen as an aspect of neurodiversity worth embracing versus a genuine mental disorder worth fixing?

Today, some psychologists, journalists, and advocates explore and celebrate mental differences under the rubric of neurodiversity. The term encompasses those with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), autism, schizophrenia, depression, dyslexia, and other disorders affecting the mind and brain. People living with these conditions have written books, founded websites, and started groups to explain and praise the personal worlds of those with different neurological “wiring.” The proponents of neurodiversity argue that there are positive aspects to having brains that function differently; many, therefore, prefer that we see these differences simply as differences rather than disorders. Why, they ask, should what makes them them need to be classified as a disability?

But other public figures, including many parents of affected children, focus on the difficulties and suffering brought on by these conditions. They warn of the dangers of normalizing mental disorders, potentially creating reluctance among parents to provide treatments to children — treatments that researchers are always seeking to improve. The National Institute of Mental Health, for example, has been doing extensive research on the physical and genetic causes of various mental conditions, with the aim of controlling or eliminating them.

Disagreements, then, abound. What does it mean to see and experience the world in a different way? What does it mean to be a “normal” human being? What does it mean to be abnormal, disordered, or sick? And what exactly would a cure for these disorders look like? The answers to these questions may be as difficult to know as the minds of others. Learning how properly to treat or accommodate neurological differences means seeking answers to questions such as these — challenging our ideas about “normal” human biology, the purpose of medical innovation, and the uniqueness of each human being.

More here.

Tyranny of Merit

A few weeks ago I put up an excerpt from a book by Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, "a powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy." In this book Hayes argues that meritocracy inevitably undermines social mobility as it increases inequality, creating a social order that perpetuates privilege, a self-absorbed elite, and institutional corruption. Below is an excerpt from a thought-provoking review by Samuel Goldman:

What’s to be done? One answer is to rescue meritocracy by providing the poor and middle class with the resources to compete. A popular strategy focuses on education reform. If schools were better, the argument goes, poor kids could compete on an equal footing for entry into the elite. The attempt to rescue meritocracy by fixing education has become a bipartisan consensus, reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top.”

Hayes rejects this option. The defect of meritocracy, in his view, is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.

Hayes’s prescription, then, is simple: we should raise taxes on the rich and increase redistributive payments to the poor and middle class.

More here.

Animal Rights: Mapping the Debate

Carlo Salzani presents a brilliant overview of the current philosophical debate on animal rights by focusing on three authors of recent books. For what it's worth, I lean towards the viewpoints of Milligan and Garner, and not Francione's.

The heterogeneous galaxies of studies revolving around the issue of animal ethics agree on one point: nonhuman animals endure unacceptable levels of suffering due to human exploitation, and this suffering ought to be eliminated. For the rest, philosophers and activists working in this field agree to disagree: they disagree on the moral status of nonhuman animals, on the major goals of pro-animal activism, on the actions to be taken to ameliorate animals’ conditions, on the strategies to adopt, and on the results achieved by the various movements to date. The diversity of theoretical positions and practical approaches, and the growing number of works addressing the problem, have generated an intense internal debate. Two books published in 2010, Gary Francione and Robert Garner’s The Animal Rights Debate and Tony Milligan’s Beyond Animal Rights, help giving a sense of what is presently going on in philosophical circles and mapping the theoretical territory of the animal ethics discourse.

The two books certainly do not (and do not claim to) cover the entire territory, nor attempt to summarize the entire debate; rather, the three authors offer three distinct — and discordant — positions which, though all advocating a revolution in the human treatment of animals, are as distant as the stars in a constellation. Francione and Garner argue that the debate between abolition and regulation of the human use of animal is at the center of modern animal advocacy, and propose two solid and consistent set of arguments: Francione is in favor of the abolition of the human use of animals, while Garner defends a protectionist approach, according to which at least some uses of animals may be justifiable. Milligan, on the other hand, does not propose a thesis or a consistent “package,” but rather attempts a different approach which explores different issues in different ways without relying on fixed and one-dimensional baselines.

More here.

Leslie Chang on China's Workers

In this TED talk, journalist Leslie T. Chang focuses on the migrant factory workers of China — mostly young women who make our shoes, handbags, computers, and cellphones — in the industrial city of Dongguan. The stories she tells are from their perspective: how do they see their own lives, what aspirations do they have, what do they complain about. If you like this talk, also check out this longer talk with many more absorbing stories followed by an audience Q&A. Chang is the author of Factory Girls, which covers this subject matter in more detail. 

Jensen on the Future of Journalism

Robert Jensen, whose work I like and have linked to before, has made available a video of his introductory course in Journalism, broken up in 10-minute chunks. I haven't seen them all but here is one I liked, in which he also introduces the veteran journalist Robert W. McChesney.

Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar - the Movie

Last night I saw an absorbing film made in 1999 on the life and times of BR Ambedkar that is now on YouTube (in English, 3 hrs). It provides a good biographical sketch of an extraordinary and inspiring man who prevailed over some breathtaking odds. This movie shows why in terms of sheer intellect, critical scholarship, and humanistic vision, Ambedkar was head and shoulders above the better known leaders of the Indian nationalist pantheon, including Gandhi and Nehru. The movie also won several National Film Awards in 1999.

Also check out the 20 Aug, 2012 issue of Outlook India magazine that is dedicated to analyzing Ambedkar and his legacy.

The Revenge of the East?

(A review of Pankaj Mishra’s new book. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

A few hundred years ago, a powerful cultural force arose in Western Europe that would later spread out and overwhelm much of the world. Fueled by a new spirit of individualism, inquiry, and innovation, it furthered personal ambition, a materialistic outlook, and competitive self-interest. This cultural force produced—and was in turn amplified by—scientific progress, the nation-state, advances in military and maritime technology, an escalating hunger for profit and raw materials, and secular institutions in education, governance, and finance, such as the joint-stock corporation.

In the ensuing centuries, European adventurers would subject many older, tradition-bound, and self-absorbed civilizations in Asia to the ravages of this aggressive and disruptive cultural force—and incidentally, to its refinements. Indeed by 1900, a minority of white Europeans had colonized much of Asia, controlling not just its political and economic life but also its cultural life in shaping the natives’ idea of themselves. The road to this widely resented domination—which the colonizers justified at home with theories of racial and cultural hierarchies, the white man’s burden, and plain old lies—was paved with countless imperial intrigues, extortionate treaties and taxation, skirmishes, plundering, drug dealing, massacres, and crushed mutinies. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’

In his engaging new work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra chronicles ‘how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies.’ What did they see as the threats and the temptations of the West? What modes of resistance and internal reforms did they propose to meet this challenge? Mishra’s remarkable story, mostly untold in Western historiography, opens up important new vistas on the colonial West and the trajectories of Asians, whether in imperial Japan, nationalist and communist China, India, or Muslim countries from Turkey to Pakistan.

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

This article by Bill McKibben is going to scare the pants off you. It pairs quite well with Bartlett's analysis that I blogged about recently.

When we think about global warming at all, the arguments tend to be ideological, theological and economic. But to grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. For the past year, an easy and powerful bit of arithmetical analysis first published by financial analysts in the U.K. has been making the rounds of environmental conferences and journals, but it hasn't yet broken through to the larger public. This analysis upends most of the conventional political thinking about climate change. And it allows us to understand our precarious – our almost-but-not-quite-finally hopeless – position with three simple numbers.

Also check out this article on the everyday denial of climate change.

The term "denial" is sometimes used to describe the outright rejection of scientifically accepted information, as in the case of climate skeptics. But for most people, who do genuinely care about the planet, denial takes the form of avoidance rather than rejection. People avoid disturbing information in order to sidestep unpleasant emotions and to maintain positive conceptions of individual and national identity. As a result of this kind of denial, people have a sense of knowing and not knowing about climate change, of having information but not thinking about it in their daily lives. Information from climate science is understood in the abstract but disconnected from social or private life.

Tapped

Check out this multi-award winning documentary "Tapped" and say NO to bottled water, if you haven't already. Blurb and trailer appear below; the full movie can be seen on YouTube for $1.99 (75 mins). A related excellent documentary is Blue Gold: World Water Wars (the full movie is on YouTube for free).

"Tapped" documents how the bottle water industry is wreaking havoc on the environment and examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil. Bottled water doesn't just come from your grocery store. It comes from small towns across America where citizens argue their way of life and ecosystem have been disrupted as a result of corporations coming in and claiming ownership of the public's water supply. With only 20% of bottled water containers recycled in the U.S., every day Americans dump 30 million single-serve plastic water bottles into landfills. Because of America's poor recycling rate, much of our plastic ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Specifically in an area known as Plastic Stew - an area twice the size of Texas where the ratio of plastic to plankton is 46:1. "Tapped" highlights how everyday heroes have taken on the fight for our most precious resource - water.

Peaceable Kingdom

HumaneMyth.org is a site dedicated to exploding the myth of "humane" farming of animals for food. It is run by animal activists who not only recognize factory farming of animals for the massive barbarism that it is (thanks to people like us), but go beyond and argue that it is not "possible to use and kill animals in a manner that can be fairly described as respectful or compassionate or humane." These activists desire a "peaceful transformation of our society that fully respects the inherent dignity and worth of animals and people alike."

Revisiting the site recently, I came across a documentary film, Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home. Below is a blurb and the trailer. Also check out the video excerpts of the bonus features on the DVD at the film website (one, two, three, four) and award ceremonies (one, two). It's just out on DVD and I've ordered my copy.

Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home explores the powerful struggle of conscience experienced by several people from traditional farming backgrounds who come to question the basic assumptions of their way of life. A riveting story of transformation and healing, the documentary portrays the farmers' sometimes amazing connections with the animals under their care, while also providing insight into the complex web of social, psychological and economic forces that have led to their inner conflict. Interwoven with the farmers' stories is the dramatic animal rescue work of a newly-trained humane police officer whose sense of justice puts her at odds with the law she is charged to uphold. With strikingly honest interviews and rare footage demonstrating the emotional lives and intense family bonds of animals most often viewed as living commodities, this groundbreaking documentary shatters stereotypical notions of farmers, farm life, and perhaps most surprisingly, farm animals themselves. Directed by Jenny Stein. Produced by James LaVeck.

Arithmetic, Population and Energy

A brilliant lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, professor of physics, that looks at population growth, energy use, and sustainability in light of basic arithmetic. Insightful and alarming, Bartlett shows why "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron and how many "experts" do not get this. According to Bartlett, a person in the U.S. on average consumes ~30 times the resources than a person in an underdeveloped country. One encouraging trend I found elsewhere is that per capita energy use in the U.S. has fallen in the last three decades though more than offset by population growth in the U.S., and by growth in population and per capita energy use in developing countries. Hardly a better case can be made for zero population growth and massive investments in renewable energy than the one made by Bartlett (from 2002, via 3QD).

Twilight of the Elites

Here is a supremely insightful excerpt from Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. Hayes describes the sordid underside of meritocracy (an ideology that is gaining ground around the world)—how it inevitably undermines social mobility as it increases inequality, creating an order that perpetuates privilege, a self-absorbed elite, and institutional corruption. A must read!

In order for it to live up to its ideals, a meritocracy must comply with two principles. The first is the Principle of Difference, which holds that there is vast differentiation among people in their ability and that we should embrace this natural hierarchy and set ourselves the challenge of matching the hardest-working and most talented to the most difficult, important and remunerative tasks.

The second is the Principle of Mobility. Over time, there must be some continuous, competitive selection process that ensures performance is rewarded and failure punished. That is, the delegation of duties cannot simply be made once and then fixed in place over a career or between generations. People must be able to rise and fall along with their accomplishments and failures. When a slugger loses his swing, he should be benched; when a trader loses money, his bonus should be cut. At the broader social level, we hope that the talented children of the poor will ascend to positions of power and prestige while the mediocre sons of the wealthy will not be charged with life-and-death decisions. Over time, in other words, society will have mechanisms that act as a sort of pump, constantly ensuring that the talented and hard-working are propelled upward, while the mediocre trickle downward.

But this ideal, appealing as it may be, runs up against the reality of what I’ll call the Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible. The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up. In other words: “Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.”

More here.  Watch the interview with Hayes after reading the essay. I have previously discussed many of the problems with meritocracy and how they can be mitigated in my essay What Do We Deserve? (Hayes extends the analysis to an exciting new level using recent examples).

On Eating Animals

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

In a Montana slaughterhouse some years ago, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters and made it across, where a tranquilizer gun brought her down. Her "daring escape" stole the hearts of the locals, some of whom had even cheered her on. The story got international media coverage. Telephone polls were held, calls demanding her freedom poured into local TV stations. Sensing the public mood, the slaughterhouse manager "granted clemency" to the "brave cow". Now called Molly, she was sent to a nearby farm to live out her days grazing under open skies—which warmed the cockles of many a heart.

Cattle trying to escape slaughterhouses are not uncommon. Few of their stories end happily though. In Omaha some years ago, six cows escaped at once. Five were quickly recaptured; one kept running until Omaha police cornered her in an alley and pumped her with bullets. The cow, bellowing miserably and hobbling like a drunk for a few seconds, collapsed and died on the street in a pool of blood. This brought howls of protest, some from folks who had witnessed the killing. They called the police’s handling inhumane and needlessly cruel.

It is tempting to see these commiserating folks as animal lovers—and that's how they likely see themselves—until one remembers what they eat for dinner. A typical slaughterhouse in America kills over a thousand Mollys a day—lined up, shot in the head, and often cut-open and bled while still conscious, an end no less cruel and full of bellowing—all because Americans keep buying neatly-packaged slices of their corpses in supermarkets. Raised unnaturally and inhumanely, over a million protesting birds and mammals are violently killed in the U.S. every hour (that's 300 per second!). Is it then unreasonable to say that nearly all meat-eaters in America participate quite directly in a cycle of suffering and cruelty of staggering scale?

Yet the idea persists that Americans love animals, largely because of their love and concern for a class of animals called "pets" (and other "cute animals" like dolphins, polar bears, and pandas). Most Americans have had at least one pet at some point in their lives. Most see their pets as extensions of their families, photograph them, swap stories about them, buy them gifts and treats, spend money on their sicknesses, support taxes to build shelters for them, and mourn their deaths. Yet, the question continues to rankle, as Elizabeth Kolbert put it:

"How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious."[1]

What might explain this odd behavior? From humankind's long community with farm animals, how has it come to this?

A 50-Year Plan for Energy

In this TED talk, Amory Lovins, an energy researcher, lays out a plan for a whole new private-sector energy industry that will save trillions while decimating fossil fuel use, creating jobs, reducing oil conflicts, and growing the economy. For more, visit ReinventingFire.com.

Undercover in a Slaughterhouse

How do self-professed animal lovers reconcile their love of animals with eating them? To eat animals today is to almost always participate in a gigantic cycle of industrialized violence and brutality against animals. Animal lovers eating animals—despite today's plant alternatives—now strikes me as one of the more unsettling examples of self-deception, denial, and moral blindness in human affairs. Yet another instance of the banality of evil? In Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat, who took up a job in a slaughterhouse to learn how society normalizes violence against animals, describes his experiences. Here is an interview with the author.

Avi: What are the main strategies used to hide violence in the slaughterhouse?

Timothy: The first and most obvious is that the violence of industrialized killing is hidden from society at large. Over 8.5 billion animals are killed for food each year in the United States [nearly a million per hour], but this killing is carried out by a small minority of largely immigrant workers who labor behind opaque walls, most often in rural, isolated locations far from urban centers. Furthermore, laws supported by the meat and livestock industries are currently under consideration in six states that criminalize the publicizing of what happens in slaughterhouses and other animal facilities without the consent of the slaughterhouse owners. Iowa's House of Representatives, for example, forwarded a bill to the Iowa Senate last year that would make it a felony to distribute or possess video, audio, or printed material gleaned through unauthorized access to a slaughterhouse or animal facility.

Second, the slaughterhouse as a whole is divided into compartmentalized departments. The front office is isolated from the fabrication department, which is in turn isolated from the cooler, which is in turn isolated from the kill floor. It is entirely possible to spend years working in the front office, fabrication department, or cooler of an industrialized slaughterhouse that slaughters over half a million cattle per year without ever once encountering a live animal much less witnessing one being killed.

But third and most importantly, the work of killing is hidden even at the site where one might expect it to be most visible: the kill floor itself. The complex division of labor and space acts to compartmentalize and neutralize the experience of "killing work" for each of the workers on the kill floor.

More here (via The Browser). Also check out my previous posts on this topic:

1. Slaughter in America
2. The Lives of Animals
3. Asian Food for Thought
4. Flesh of Your Flesh

Update: Read an essay I wrote in mid 2012, On Eating Animals, which generated animated discussion on 3 Quarks Daily.