natec writes:
This article was published in todays Metro newspaper (May 30) in the UK.
Morrissey: we'll get you! - The Metro
Singer Morrissey has branded Oxford the 'shame of England' for allowing a controversial new animal testing laboratory in the city.
The former frontman of The Smiths warned laboratory workers 'we will get you' during a concert in the city to promote his new album.
The 47-year-old, who is a strict vegan and animal rights activist, also told his fans: 'If you agree with vivisection, go and be vivisected upon yourself.'
It is not the first time the outspoken singer has courted controversy on the issue – earlier this year he claimed violence was the only language laboratory scientists understand.
Oxford-based anti-animal testing group Speak was invited personally by the singer to run a stall at the concert,exposing the fate of the animals that will be tested on at the Oxford University laboratory.
A Speak spokesman said that, although the group did not condone violence, they were pleased Morrissey had raised awareness of the issue.
He added: 'We need to talk about the violence being committed upon animals. I applaud the fact that Morrissey's been brave enough to stand up and say what he thinks.
'I suspect when he said “we will get you” he wasn't talking about violence at all, but about exposing these people for what they do.'
Last week, Oxford University won a legal appeal to extend an exclusion zone around the £20million biomedical centre to keep demonstrators away from the building site.
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Belligerent Ghoul also sends the links:
Star launches attack over lab - Oxford Mail
We'll get you, Morrissey warns lab staff - Manchester Online
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BlueGirl also sends the link
Morrissey attacks Oxford lab - NME.com
Hehehe "strict vegan" (Score:2, Funny)
Well, maybe Canada won't feel so bad now
(User #14907 Info | http://missgosh.livejournal.com/)
I wish the day would come (Score:0)
I wish the day would come
Until then, these kind of news items stike as
utterly uninteresting and boring.
(User #14586 Info)
I Love Morrissey's comments (Score:0)
NOBODY says anything these days. Apart from "I'm Loving it (McDonalds)" of course.
Respect!
this is why i love the man (Score:0)
to all the haters , why don't you take your negative comments elsewhere.
Death to the animal rights protestors (Score:0)
thank you moz (Score:0)
i love you xxx
Right on! (Score:1)
(User #10050 Info)
Yeah, of course you will. (Score:1)
A really great way to get yourself and the cause you espouse taken seriously - issue an empty but nasty threat.
"It's the only language they understand". Morrissey has said this about animal research scientists for twenty+ years, and he's still wrong.
"We'll get you" - sounds like a school bully.
"It's the only language they understand" - sounds like a beer-fuelled fascist.
(User #12542 Info)
Juvenile (Score:0)
experimentation (Score:0)
You Go boy!! (Score:1)
I suggest truckloads of watermelons - those must be great over the Burger Kings, and this horrid Oxford lab.
By the way, if you think these protestors are inarticulate simpletons, I hope you have read Moz's interview on February's NME, and I wished you could read "Le Monde N'Est Pas Une Marchandise" (The World Is Not A Merchandize), a book in which Bové gives very detailed and well developped accounts on how the meat industry fonctions as a multinational empire. These are the true fascists!
(User #14157 Info)
Vegetarians... (Score:0)
What's comical is when vegetarians repeat tropes about their cause that have already been debunked.
Animal testing is absolutely beneficial and crucial to medical advancements. Anyone who argues otherwise is a member of the "Flat Earth Society." Most of the people involved in the cause get their information from biased sources that are devoted to the movement, so it's impossible for them to know the truth.
There's a reason why they're not taken seriously by the scientific community.
It's bizarre when you have far left types selectively arguing against science in the same way that Creationists selectively argue against it. However, if it were to involve a mutual politcal interest, such as global warming, then suddenly the opinion of scientists is asbolutely valid, and must be heard.
The irony is lost on many.
No one is reporting (Score:1)
Anyone who has seen films of animal testing must agree, it is the torture of terrified creatures, and it is viscerally horrible. The question is, is it ever really justified? It is a long and complex argument, and it will only end when we find non-animal laboratory protocols, which will take money, moral backbone and political motivation.
Morrissey was reacting emotionally that night, not intellectually. That is what he does, and of course it gets him into trouble. Who would Morrissey be if he stood on stage and said things like "lets all be adult about this and come to some sort of compromise"?
He may as well have called a certain album "Meat is not Very Nice."
(User #14203 Info)
Morrissey the cultist (Score:1)
98% of the animal research at the Oxford lab will be done on fish and rodents. fish don't even feel pain! I realize Morrissey was a flunky at school, so perhaps he should go to a library and study up on fish.
Whatever the case, I trust that if Morrissey ever gets AIDS, cancer, or another disease, he will stick to his guns and refuse accepting any treatments developed with the help of animal research. We know many of these PETA types are huge hypocrites in this respect. One of the higher ups at PETA is on insulin, for example.
Morrissey will not let us down. When he gets ill he'll do the right thing and die.
Meanwhile, I see that the animal rights extemists have caused a backlash in England. I guess people still do support science and progress after all.
(User #778 Info)
Violence After Oxford gig (Score:0)
Burger King has a MySpace profile (Score:0)
Morrissey=Fallaci (Score:0)
Animal rights "militia" (Score:0)
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1787388,0
Bluebirds
Good on you Mozza! (Score:1)
(User #3100 Info)
Self sacrificing? (Score:1)
On a smaller scale, when you have a headache do you take paracetamol, or do you just sit and suffer because paracetamol (and ALL legal drugs) have been tested on animals?
If drugs were tested on humans right from the start we would almost certainly cause many more disastrous incidents like the recent one that landed 4(?) men in intensive care, possibly kill many people, and open the way for exploitation of vulnerable individuals.
We need to test on animals to save peoples live. Unless of course every animal rights protester volunteers to be tested on?
(User #14254 Info)
Morrissey has every right (Score:0)
Drug companies are not "charities" and their main aim is not to "make good" for the human race - the main motivation is money.
It's pointles to speculate whether some pain killers have been tested on animals. There are only a very few specific pain killers available and they have been available for a long time! Aspirin, Paracetamol, codeine, etc. Whether they were tested on animals back a long time ago, I don't know, but people these days are not short of pain-relieving tablets. And we don't need more.
The reason why drug companies carry out animal tests is to gain more profit and to out-do other companies.
Why isn't there a cure for cancer or AIDS already? There isn't and there never will be. To carry out more tests on animals will not change this fact.
Hey Jack the Rippers! (Score:1)
'“What rights should animals have?”
Animals should have the right to equal consideration of their interests. For instance, a dog most certainly has an interest in not having pain inflicted on him or her unnecessarily. We are, therefore, obliged to take that interest into consideration and to respect the dog’s right not to have pain unnecessarily inflicted upon him or her. However, animals don’t always have the same rights as humans because their interests are not always the same as ours, and some rights would be irrelevant to animals. For instance, a dog doesn’t have an interest in voting and, therefore, doesn’t have the right to vote because that right would be as meaningless to a dog as it is to a child.
“Where do you draw the line?”
The renowned humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, who accomplished so much for both humans and animals in his lifetime, would take time to stoop and move a worm from hot pavement to cool earth. Aware of the problems and responsibilities that an expanded ethic brings, he said, “A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to aid all life which he is able to help … He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy … nor how far it is capable of feeling.” We can’t stop all suffering, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stop any. In today’s world of virtually unlimited choices, there are plenty of kind, gentle ways for us to feed, clothe, entertain, and educate ourselves that do not involve killing animals.
“It’s fine for you to believe in animal rights, but why do you try to tell other people what to do?”
Everybody is entitled to his or her own opinion, but freedom of thought is not the same thing as freedom of action. You are free to believe whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt others. You may believe that animals should be killed, that black people should be enslaved, or that women should be beaten, but you don’t always have the right to put your beliefs into practice. The very nature of reform movements is to tell others what to do—don’t use humans as slaves, don’t sexually harass women, etc.—and all movements initially encounter opposition from people who want to continue to take part in the criticized behavior.
“Animals don’t reason, don’t understand rights, and don’t always respect our rights, so why should we apply our ideas of morality to them?”
An animal’s inability to understand and adhere to our rules is as irrelevant as a child’s or as that of a person with a severe developmental disability. Animals are not always able to choose to change their behaviors, but adult human beings have the intelligence and ability to choose between behaviors that hurt others and behaviors that do not hurt others. When given the choice, it makes sense to choose compassion.
FAQs - www.peta.org
(User #12673 Info)
what (Score:0)
Here is a thought... (Score:0)
Cut and paste this in to your browser: (Score:1)
A picture tells a thousand words...
It is wrong, and no amount of balancing which species has the most right to hold on to its own life can change that.
(User #3100 Info)
Vegetarianism (Score:1)
It is not reasonable to claim that cats have responsibilites, and therefore it is not reasonable to claim that cats, or any other animals, have rights.
A more logically coherent argument would be to state that human beings have responsibilites.
Let me give you an example.
Several months ago, I found a bird entangled in my son's goal net. After much hassle, I managed to free the bird and put it in a box, but it was still in a very poor way. The RSPCA came and took the bird away, and it was eventually freed. I gave the RSPCA a donation.
I didn't free the bird or hand it over to the RSPCA because it had rights, but because I had a responsibility (it was my son's goal net) to help the bird out of its suffering. However, had the bird not been entangled in my son's net, but was still suffering, I still would have felt responsible, upon seeing its suffering, to try and alleviate it.
[In fact, this happened a couple of years ago, when I found a chick who had probably fallen out of the nest. Rather than let it suffer and perish through starvation or the next door neighbour's cat (who, I decided, probably wouldn't feel the same sense of responsibility) I put it in a box and phoned the RSPCA.]
Part of upholding our own human rights is having the responsibility to alleviate suffering. Logically, this would only extend to having responsibility to fellow people and we could therefore leave defenceless birds who happen to fall out of their net, and other animals, to suffer. We might, however, help animals whose suffering we had caused
However, what about our responsibility to alleviate suffering which we have created?
To take another example currently in the news (bear with me, if you can be bothered), people are currenty talking a great deal about our responsibility to the planet. Why? Does the planet have rights? No. But we have a responsibilty, not only to future generations of pople but also to the rest of the inhabitants of this planet. Why? Do these non-humans suddenly have rights? No. But as we are responsible for global overheating (like me with the football net) we are responsible for the welfare of those we have inadvertantly caused suffering. Therefore we have a responsibilty to do something about global overheating.
If one agrees that humans have a responsibilty to alleviate suffering which they have caused, then where does that leave the meat industry?
It's a moral and philosophical choice - one either embraces one's responsibilites regarding suffering or one ignores them.
Consider this statement: Animals suffer when they are killed for meat. If this is true and one is responsible, then one will be a vegetarian. If this is not true, then one can eat meat.
Consider this statement: Animals suffer when they are reared for meat. If this is true and one is responsible, then one will be a vegetarian. If this is not true, then one can eat meat.
Sorry - I'm probably too late to elicit any responses.
(User #12542 Info)
Morality and mammalian objects/subjects (Score:1)
• Human beings, over the decades and sometimes centuries, have developed time-honored methods of inquiry that enact, bring forth, and illumine basic dimensions of being-in-the-world.
• For example, phenomenology and introspection enact, bring forth, and illumine the first-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world ("I" or subjectivity);
• hermeneutics and collaborative inquiry enact, bring forth, and illumine the first- and second-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world ("thou/we" or intersubjectivity);
• empiricism and behaviorism enact, bring forth, and illumine the third-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world ("it" or objectivity);
• And ecology, functionalism, and systems theory enact, bring forth, and illumine the third-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world ("its" or interobjectivity).
• There are many other important modes of inquiry, but those are a few of the historically most significant, and certainly ones that any integral methodological pluralism would want to address.
• The collective or communal dimensions--the inter-subjective and inter-objective dimensions--are not something that can be derived from the interactions of subjects and objects, but rather, the inter-subjective and inter-objective dimensions are there from the start, along with subjectivity and objectivity, and not something that "comes after" subjects and objects.
• Inter-subjectivity is not more fundamental than subjects and objects, which don’t "come after" or "out of" inter-subjectivity (if so, any genuinely individual creativity would be nullified, which is not supported).
• The four quadrants are not four different occasions but four different perspectives on (and hence dimensions of) every occasion. (That is, various perspectives--such as first-, second-, and third-person--are not merely perspectives on a pre-given single event, but rather bring forth and enact different aspects or dimensions of an event, and hence these perspective-dimensions are ontically not reducible to, nor interchangeable with, each other.)
• The whole point of a quadratic (I, you/we, it, its ) approach is that all four dimensions arise simultaneously: they tetra-enact each other and tetra-evolve together: - ‘transcend and include
• Western history (basically, an amalgam of traditional, modern, and postmodern currents)--and specifically America, has been recently going through a period of rampant scientific materialism (‘flatland’) and the "nothing but surfaces" of the extreme postmodernists.
• Interiors are out, exteriors are all; there is no depth. This puts an intense selection pressure against any sort of psychology that emphasizes solely or mostly the interiors/subjective (e.g. psychoanalytic, humanistic/existential, transpersonal, animal welfare).
• This is compounded by numerous specific social factors, such as the medical/insurance and "managed care" industry supporting only brief psychotherapy and pharmacological interventions i.e. biological psychiatry, behavioral modification, cognitive therapy ( a manipulation of the sentences one uses to objectively describe oneself).
• Silly things like trying to find out why you behave in such a fashion, or trying to find out the meaning of your existence, or the values that constitute the good life, are not covered by insurance policies, and so, in this culture, they basically do not exist. Three of the four forces (psychoanalytic, humanistic/existential, and transpersonal) are thus, once again, selected against; a negative cultural pressure is moving them to extinction and in some ways has already succeeded, so that these major forces are one jot away from dinosaur status. These pressures affect the decisions that our society makes about, for example, immigrants, animals, the aged etc.
M. Nussbaum, eminent professor
(User #12673 Info)
Anti-depressants (Score:0)