Animal Cruelty, Slaughterhouses, Halal, and Kosher

 General, Religion  No Responses »
Feb 092015
 

After a public release of a certain video of animal cruelty found within a halal slaughterhouse, there has been a certain amount of "noise" regarding animal cruelty :-

For the benefit of those too sensible to hit "play", some of the most striking things about the video :-

  1. The workers have no compunction about treating the animals with a great deal of cruelty including taunting them.
  2. Supervision seems to be non-existent. 
  3. The "quick cut with a sharp knife" seems to be a slow sawing with a blunt penknife.

I should say from the beginning that I'm a vegetarian so I'm unlikely to be sympathetic to the problems encountered by slaughterhouses (shut 'em all!). I'm also an atheist so I'm unlikely to have sympathy for religious beliefs insisting on medieval slaughterhouse techniques (if you can find a sheep that requests Halal or Kosher execution, then by all means go ahead).

But the reaction to the videos has seemed to concentrate on point 3 above, Or more specifically the need to kill by a quick cut of a knife.

Whilst I'm not keen in the quick cut method, it does seem to me that the cruelty of that method is outweighed by far, by the attitude of the slaughterhouse staff and the design of the slaughterhouse. In other words, I can easily imagine seeing a video portraying pretty much the same level of cruelty when the slaughterhouse staff are wielding a stunbolt gun. 

It seems to me that to reduce the level of cruelty, we need to have robust supervision by people who are not going to put up with any kind of abuse. People with the power to hit the big red button, and send everyone home for the day. 

Yes, there's an argument about whether the requirements for Halal and Kosher count as animal cruelty, but this video shows far more generalised animal cruelty that can be found at any badly run slaughterhouse. The question is: Just how many slaughterhouses are badly run?

Not Victim Blaming. Risk Reduction.

 General, Security  No Responses »
Jan 302015
 

There's a game called "victim blaming" which is where people decide the victim of a crime is somehow partially or wholely respomsible – the old "if she hadn't worn such a short skirt …".

Which is rubbish of course. The perpetrator of a crime is the one responsible for carrying it out whatever the circumstances.

But the shouting down of the "victim blamers" can perhaps drown out messages that allow risk reduction, and allow certain myths to be perpetuated. For example, many women believe that they are more at risk from strangers whereas most rapists are known to the victim.

Take a slightly less contentious crime – a phishing spam that criminals use to empty the bank accounts of the victim. Whilst the criminal here is obvious – the person who used stolen credentials to empty the bank account, the criminal needed the victim to make certain risky decisions.

2015-01-29_1517As you cannot look at the link contained within that, it's worth pointing out that if you paste the URL into a notebook, you will get a brazilian site … and I strongly suspect that Lloyds Bank is not very likely to use a Brazilian site (.br) for hosting their online account service.

And we call such victims "gullible". In the case of phishing, there are some simple procedures to follow :-

  1. Email doesn't necessarily come from whom it claims to be from. I can send you an email that will look as if it comes from Goodluck Johnathon without having anything to do with his email account.
  2. Don't click on links in emails.
  3. If your bank sends an email asking you to do something, shut down the email and open a web browser and use your existing way of getting to your bank's web site. Same applies to shopping sites, your workplace's IT department, etc.
  4. If you are determined to use a link from an email, copy the link into a notebook and read it. Does it make sense? Does the first part mention an organisation that has nothing to do with the organisation it is supposedly from? Don't trust it.

Plus a whole bunch more.

Detailing and quantifying risks isn't victim blaming; it's empowering someone to make educated decisions about their behaviour

1,000 Lashes To Those Who Lowered The Flag

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 282015
 

Why? Why is our flag lowered to mark the passing of a Saudi despot?

Of course, punishing those responsible with a thousand lashes would be over the top – in the same way as punishing a blogger who says something you don't like with a thousand lashes.

Unlike others I don't think it is wrong for politicians to attend the funeral of the old Saudi king – in addition to attending the funeral they are also there to keep a dialogue going with the Saudi state. And the only thing that isolation causes is a strengthening of those attributes that caused the isolation in the first place. Or in other words, if you want a despotic government to change, you have to keep talking to them and keep telling them what they are doing that is wrong.

And that is one of the jobs that polticians are overpaid to do. It's a nasty little job, but as most politicians are nasty little people it's a job they are ideally suited to.

But lowering the flag is a sign of respect from the nation, and the Saudi despot did not desrve that respect.

It's a bit late, but I've been having WordPress issues!

The Charlie Hebdo Killers Were Not Muslims

 General, Politics, Religion  No Responses »
Jan 102015
 

(Stolen from a Facebook posting)

Sounds daft doesn’t it? Because the killers themselves would have claimed they were doing it for islam. And of course there are plenty of feeble-minded bigots who are now attacking muslims and islamic places of worship.

Now don’t get me wrong: I have no patience with organised religion and think anyone who believes in an imaginary infectious friend in the sky needs their head examining. But they have a right to believe anything they want.

They just don’t have the right to inflict it on the rest of us.

Within any community (religious or otherwise), there are two sorts of people, and yes I’m being overly simplistic here. There are the majority who go along with the community and obey the dictates if they are not too inconvenient. And there are the zealots who take it to the extremes. And amongst the zealots there is a deranged minority who want to inflict the standards of their community on everyone. Some of them use violence to do so.

Now there was some idiot on the news today who claimed that despite Charlie Hebdo publishing a cartoon insulting to christians, that it wasn’t christians shooting journalists. True enough, but it there are christians murdering abortion doctors and harassing those entering abortion clinics, so it is not as if there are no christian terrorists.

Now comes a bit of a leap of faith: These terrorists whatever their faith, have more in common with each other than their co-religionists. They all espouse an extreme form of their faith, are compelled to inflict it on everyone, and resort to violence to pursue their goals.

Their most significant attribute is terrorism and not their religion. Their crimes overwhelm their faith and make their religion irrelevant.

An alternative way of looking at it is a quantitative approach. There were 3 killers involved in the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket. The number of muslims in France is not known precisely, but a figure of about 3 million seems a reasonable approximation for this sort of calculation, which if you work it out makes the number of killers in this incident just 0.0001% of the muslim population of France.

So why were there only three killers? Because muslims as a whole are not terrorists.

Besides which, there is nothing we could do to annoy the killers more than to deny their islamic nature.

Ebola in the UK: Don’t Lick Any Strangers!

 General, Media  No Responses »
Dec 312014
 

Which is ridiculous of course. You could lick every person (including the nurse who was incubating Ebola) on flight AT800 (the plane from Casablanca to Heathrow that carried the nurse) without catching Ebola; plenty of other things! But not Ebola.

Ebola is hard to catch. You have to come into contact with infected bodily fluids which isn’t likely to happen if you share an airplane cabin.

So of course the press is overreacting in it’s usual way resorting to scaremongering to push sales. It is pretty obvious given some of the wild stunts they have come up with that we cannot trust the mainstream press to accurately tell us what is going on :-

  1. The Daily Mail wants the planes involved to be disinfected. Why? Without going into graphic details, unless the nurse was exuding bodily fluids on her plane journey there is no risk from getting on a plane that previously carried someone who was incubating Ebola.
  2. They wonder why returning health care workers were allowed to travel onwards using crowded public transport. Ignoring the fact that treating returning heroes as pariahs is contemptible, there is in practice no risk in allowing people without symptoms to travel in public.
  3. The nurse was allowed to travel onto Glasgow after raising concerns and after being tested for raised temperatures. Apparently her raised temperature was not considered to be significant (there’s lots of things that can cause a raised temperature) and she had no other symptoms.
  4. They are making contact with fellow passengers and are testing two other patients “just in case”. Well of course they are – with something as nasty as Ebola, you take precautions a step or two further than is strictly necessary but you don’t wander off into the realms of the ridiculous.

The press is of course announcing the review of procedures for dealing with those arriving from West Africa whilst implying that things were not up to scratch. Well of course they are reviewing procedures – procedures should be reviewed regularly whether or not there is a problem.

In practice, the only people in this country at risk from Ebola are those who have worked with Ebola victims – either in West Africa, or by nursing those who have caught the disease there. In reality, the rest of us currently are at a risk so low as to be negligible. Even everyone on flight AT800 and the BA flight to Glasgow.

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