Cooking for adventure 23 June 2006
Posted by Zach in recipes, visuals.add a comment
Sorry I’ve been away this month; I spent a good bit of June traveling and lately I’ve been trying to find a job.
I’m off to a retreat for the weekend in a few minutes. I’m the cook, and what’s on the menu includes:
- General Tao’s Tofu
- A veganized version of my mom’s Better Homes and Garden’s French Breakfast Puffs
- Vegan Chunky Monkey, which I’m a bit anxious about attempting, by adding chocolate and walnuts to a veganized version of Alton Brown’s Banana Ice Cream
When I get back I’ll probably post the latter two veganized recipes on the wiki, and get back to working on anti-HLS campaign pages and sidebar.
Also, I’m working on a new skin for the site. The “new” one I made a few months ago was I think an improvement, but it is a little crazy, and the one I’m working on now stays a lot closer to the standard MonoBook/Wikimedia skin. When it’s done I’ll put screen shots on a page and whoever wants to can vote on it (that vs. the current vs. the standard Monobook skin).
New look, pages, & blogs 28 February 2006
Posted by Zach in blogs, legal, meta, support, visuals.add a comment
New skin
I’ve been neglecting to write about the wiki proper lately due to the SHAC 7 trial goings-on, but there has been stuff going on. Most excitingly (for me at least), I’ve been for most of the past 24 hours working on a new skin (i.e. layout) for the site. I’ll probably be done in another couple days. I’ve thought for a while that we really needed one – so many people just won’t come back if a site looks ugly – but been too scared of CSS.
Turns out though CSS isn’t that bad. I just jumped in and started messing with it.
What I’m working on will be a good bit simpler-looking than the standard “Monobook” skin we currently have, what with all its lines and boxes everywhere. I think across the top is going to be a banner made up of veggie or animal liberation related silhouettes, not entirely unlike (though not entirely like either) what you see on this site. I spent the last couple hours trying to get a nice silhouette of a rodent of some kind being freed (below), though frustratingly I’ve lost the original link so I don’t know what kind of animal it is or where. I’m not super happy with the graphic, and may not use it in the final skin, but it gives you a general sort of gander of where this is going.
New pages
Perhaps the most important page recently made is Eric McDavid. Eric was arrested back in January, along with a two others, for allegedly planning to destroy some cell phone towers, one or more power plants, and a facility of the U.S. Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics. They were arrested mostly because they, along with many other radical groups over the years, had been infiltrated by a young undercover agent who went by the name of “Anna”.
When I went down for the SHAC 7 trial last week, I met a girl doing prison support for him and the two other activists. I had heard about some recently-arrested activist who was on the third week of a hunger strike because he was being denied vegan meals; it turns out this was Eric McDavid, and that very recently, after about a month, they started feeding him suitable meals.
Still, letters would be appreciated, and if you’re near Sacramento you could visit him. (Also on the vegan prisoner front, Peter Young has been allowed to receive books again. His wikiveg page hasn’t been updated yet though, so see SupportPeter.com for more info on that.)
Other articles include: a Philadelphia page; one on Mary Lou Sapone, an undercover agent who did something tres bizarre in the 80s; Teany, a cafe opened by vegan musician Moby; Huntingdon Life Sciences (did I already mention that before?); elephants, which apparently are more and more frequently being born tuskless due to a certain gene being promoted by hunting (“unnatural selection”).
Finally, there’s an article on soya toxicity (aka soy toxicity). Apparently some sources say that soy in high enough amounts (amounts many vegans get) becomes bad for you. Other sources say this is just dairy-industry propaganda. I’m not sure which is true, but I did notice a long article about this in an issue of Herbivore I have, so I’ll try to read it and add some info from it in the next week or so.
New blogs
There’s what looks like a really good, down-to-business blog on U.S. animal law called Hounded, Cowed, & Badgered. Also, Herbivore just launched a staff blog.
The problems of direct action 15 February 2006
Posted by Zach in activism, direct action, open actions, solidarity vs. division, visuals.2 comments
There’s an interesting editorial on direct action in a recent issue of Animal People (via Animal Writings):
Animal advocates should be aware that seven years before any ALF or ELF suspect used a pipe bomb, a covert operator named Mary Lou Sappone, hired by former U.S. Surgical Corporation owner Leon Hirsch, in November 1988 set up a fringe activist to be caught in the act of planting a pipe bomb in the U.S. Surgical parking lot.
Why?
Because when the public sees purported animal advocates involved in violence, that violence becomes the story—not the violence going on outside in the woods, in the labs, and inside the slaughterhouses.
…
Convincing the world to treat animals with moral consideration requires activists to keep the high ground, not from fear of arrest, but from the likelihood that appearing to be irrational or dangerous will obscure the message and lead to failure.”
Peresonally I agree with the last bit (that I bolded), and agree that a lot of direct actions probably are hurting the public ‘battle-of-hearts-and-minds’.
But I don’t agree with the suggestion that direct action is incompatible with keeping the moral (or more accurately, I think, PR) high ground. The ‘open rescue‘ approach is the best example of this. And I think ‘non-open’ rescues of live animals (the kind ALF usually does) aren’t bad for PR either.
Direct action pro and con
The two main problems, I think, are (1) anonymous property destructions, especially via bombs and arson, and (2) the “we are going to hurt you and enjoy it” tone of many ALF communiqués, such as these recent open letters to HLS business partners.
If direct action activists just minimized those two things, I don’t think we’d really have much of a PR or ‘high ground’ problem. Animal liberations with kindly-worded (but still firm, which of course is a hard balance) communiqués sent afterward shouldn’t set us back. Acts of “open property desctruction”, like that done in the Bye Bye Egg Industry action, shouldn’t set us back either.
So I don’t think I can accept the conclusion of the editorial, which echoes the opinions and tone of most mainstream animal advocates:
“Accepting terrorism of any sort invites infiltration and disruption, and ultimately retards the cause, no matter how much of a vicarious feel-good activists may get from a transiently successful ‘direct action.’”
Point taken as far as many direct actions go, but I really don’t think that actions of the sort I just described ‘retard the cause’. If anything I think they promote it much faster than legal or advertising-based approaches do completely by themselves. To use a cliché (but still appropriate) example, the battle for civil rights in the U.S. would have been won much more slowly if activists had not used civil disobedience (aka open direct action).
Movement unity or division
What does retard the movement, in my humble opinion, is when different wings of the pro-animal movement don’t treat each other with respect. Everyone is at least a little bit guilty of this, the radical wing included, but that doesn’t make it excusable.
Which is why this article makes me a little upset, because it doesn’t just disagree with the radical wing (which is fine), but disrespects it.
For one thing, it uses the terms “violence” and “terrorism” without distinguishing between property destruction and violence against people; this makes it sound like the ALF is out to hurt people, and is a common tactic of the anti-animal lobby. It suggests that activists who use property destruction are only “purported animal activists”, or “fringe” ones. And I think there’s a hint of patronizing in the suggestion that ALF activists are hurting the animal cause but don’t realize it because they are too affected by the “vicarious feel-good” one gets from direct action. I’m sure some ALF kids do get addicted to that good feeling and don’t think hard enough about the long-term PR battle, but being patronizing or disrespectful isn’t the way to reform the movement.
Update: Gary from Animal Writings has posted excerpts from a second article on the same topic (this one from Satya magazine, written by the Vegan MD). Here is a quote from the original article:
Take, for example, the failure of right wing religious terror in this country. Although the morally contemptuous murders of nine abortion doctors and supporters seemed to have reduced abortion availability by intimidating providers and their support network, most analyses view the terror as ultimately backfiring against the anti-choice movement in terms of public credibility. In fact, according to the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, the percentage of people considering themselves pro-choice actually peaked in 1994, the anti-choice murderers’ single bloodiest year.
The animal exploitation industries are drooling to have us hurt someone. [note: as Jerry Vlasak recently called for] They know that our power is our compassion. That’s why they try to take away our power by painting us as violent misanthropes.
Since a couple weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the comparisons between the pro-life and pro-animal movments; there are a lot of similarities between the two issues (and also a lot of differences; I’m not trying to equate them at all, just to be perfectly clear), so I think we can probably learn some important strategic lessons by studying the sucesses and failures of the pro-life movement.
Skin update
I just spent a good couple hours going through HTML/CSS tutorials, in preparation for trying to design a nice skin for the wiki. It’ll probably be at least a week before a start seriously experimenting, and another few weeks until I have a skin ready.
