Is PETA un-American?

Recently PETA announced that it would be suing Sea World on behalf of five Orca whales at the park, arguing that the whales should be set free.

In the first case of its kind, PETA, three marine-mammal experts, and two former orca trainers are filing a lawsuit asking a federal court to declare that five wild-caught orcas forced to perform at SeaWorld are being held as slaves in violation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The filing—the first ever seeking to apply the 13th Amendment to nonhuman animals—names the five orcas as plaintiffs and also seeks their release to their natural habitats or seaside sanctuaries.

Now I'm all for publicizing the potentially (I'm not a marine biologist and can't make such a definitive claim) harmful conditions under which these Orcas were acquired, maintained and treated but that does not mean that anyone should try to undermine the US Constitution in this manner.

 To be honest, I see this as being a frivolous law suit and one that will do more harm than good for the cause of the whales and PETA. As most people will look at this as a stunt rather than a meaningful issue deserving of their consideration. I base this on the notion that PETA is trying to equate whales with humans. Now, PETA states that this is not the case.

The suit is based on the plain text of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits the condition of slavery without reference to "person" or any particular class of victim. "Slavery is slavery, and it does not depend on the species of the slave any more than it depends on gender, race, or religion," says general counsel to PETA, Jeffrey Kerr.

The 13th Amendment states: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

 Slavery is defined as: the practice of owning slaves.

Slave is defined as: a person legally owned by another and having no freedom of action or right to property.

It seems very clear that the intention of the amendment related only to people as by definition only people can be slaves. To extend this to things that are not people is a corruption of the language and intent of the amendment.

The power to enforce the 13th Amendment was given to Congress and can be found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, formally titled: An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their vindication.

So to have the 13th Amendment apply to whales would require that whales be given the legal status of person.

 I'm sorry, but a whale is not a person.

A game by any other name

The idea of Game has, in my opinion, made many inroads in popular culture. I came to it rather late in my social education and at first was hesitant to acknowledge the veracity of its underlying principles.

When I was first introduced to it it was by a friend who had come to it from pick up artist websites and the like. As a Christian I was hesitant to understand the underlying principles due to the ends that people on such websites were using them. Promiscuity was not on my personal agenda.

 Then I was introduced to the concept in a slightly different form; ladder theory. It laid out some of the core principles without all the bravado of pick up artists detailing their conquests. It was through that that I came to a slow understanding of Game.

What surprised me at first was that rather than trying to force the concepts onto social reality, once I had an understanding of the concepts, when I was able to sit back and watch social situations the concepts were verified.

 As one blog writer I read says, he's not writing the rules of the game, but merely reporting on what he sees. Time and again the basic principles of Game have been reinforced as I watch and experience social situations.

I've had my brushes with the red pill, as another blog writer terms it, and have come to a point where I can recognize those moments in my life when I have been able to display alpha or beta traits to my gain or detriment.

One of the things that has helped to really reinforce the notion of Game or Ladder Theory has been by watching children of various ages interact with one another.

 Young children, boys and girls, before they recognize their sexual difference, play as virtual equals. You can see the beginnings of what would be termed alpha and beta behavior that seems to be ingrained in certain people, but the sexual motivations just aren't there. They are simply interacting with each other as they are. 

As they grow up and begin puberty you can see these ingrained traits come to the fore as they interact with members of the opposite sex. When I was growing up, adults would always joke about how a young boy who pulled on a young girls pig tails, would do so because he liked her. He was displaying interest in her in a way that for some reason came natural to him. The adults would see it as innocent and playful. They might even chuckle over the incident.

 As children grow up though, pulling on a girls pig tails is wrong, or so boys are told. Only assholes would do such an act of egregious effrontery. Boys are told that they need to be nice, to be complimentary, to treat the girl of their desire as a princess. Yet as the boy longs and yearns for the girl of his dreams, it seems to him that there is something wrong with the world because as he is doing everything 'right' but the girl seems to always end up with the boy who does everything 'wrong'; the asshole.

Rather than questioning the advice they were given, they redouble their efforts and either live a life of distant longing or grow to dislike the girl and eventually women. Its either that or he sees reality as working differently than how he was told it would work and changes himself accordingly.

As I watch children interact you can see the differences in how boys act towards girls and how the girls in turn react to the boys. The cocky kid who pulls a girls hair, hits her books or buts in front of her in line is looked on admiringly by girls when the boys back is turned. When the boy is roughhousing with another boy and winning, the same girls are looking on admiringly.

The other boys off to the side or getting the short end of the stick in the roughhousing look on the boy as an asshole. The girls look on him as something they want.

The alphas and the betas.

Many adults and other children look down at the Alphas as being jerks or worse.

Some children recognize something in the Alpha and attach themselves to him.

Many adults will actively fight this, but its natural. Its how people naturally act and function when left to themselves. They are Alpha or they are Beta (or worse) and no amount of telling the Beta how special he is, or how lucky a girl would be to have him, will change reality.

Girls and women want an Alpha male.

Game is the tool that non-Alphas can use to demonstrate Alpha qualities to the opposite sex as a means of gaining success in the social market place.

Reality is a cruel mistress.

You can hate the game but you shouldn't hate the player that plays by the rules.

Nothing new under the sun

Yesterday I commented on the state of the earth's population as it is set to reach seven billion in about three days. In that post I voiced the opinion that the desire for a sustainable population is a good thing but that the methods that would be required to truly bring it about would be of a rather bloody nature.

 Today the BBC posted a decent article detailing the history of population control. Beginning with Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century and continuing on till the present day. One of the main thrusts of the article was to point out the fact that much if not all the major efforts at population control had been imposed on poor people and nations by richer people and nations. It's always been a top-down situation where those without say suffer the most. For much of the past two centuries the main focus of population control has been to protect the economic hegemony of the West.

Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US. 

"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says. 

In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes. Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.

As I stated yesterday, the best way to help reduce the populations of poorer countries is to raise the economic realities of those countries. This isn't my idea, and its not new.

Critics of population control had their say at the first ever UN population conference in 1974. Karan Singh, India's health minister at the time, declared that "development is the best contraceptive".

This coming from the country that forcibly sterilized millions of its poor people in the mid 1970s.

In June 1975, the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency after accusations of corruption threatened her government. 

Her son Sanjay used the measure to introduce radical population control measures targeted at the poor. The Indian emergency lasted less than two years, but in 1975 alone, some eight million Indians - mainly poor men - were sterilised.

Another famous example of enforced population control is China's famous One Child Policy.

The One Child Policy is credited with preventing some 400 million births in China, and remains in place to this day. 

In 1983 alone, more than 16 million women and four million men were sterilised, and 14 million women received abortions.

Of course, it was not without its faulty consequences.

But modern technology allows parents to discover the sex of the foetus, and many choose to abort if they are carrying a girl. In some regions, there is now a serious imbalance between men and women.

Some point to these examples as a means of learning from the past in order to improve population control efforts going forward. Of course the term 'population control' was deemed to have negative authoritarian connotations and so they adopted such terms as 'women's rights and reproductive rights'. Some see women as being the magic silver bullet to end the world's population problem.

According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years. 

"I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society," she says.

I'm a bit skeptical of this.

So lets look at what would be an ideal situation; Canada. A place of vast economic prosperity where women's and reproductive rights are protected.

If a country wanted to simply maintain their population growth at zero (simple generational replacement - two parents have two children - population does not grow or decrease) then the birth rate for the country should be 2.33 per woman. Its been noted that economic prosperity helps to bring down fertility rates as does the protection of women's and reproductive rights.

So Canada, an economically and socially healthy country could be see maintaining the status quo as being sustainable. The Canadian birth rate is 1.58. Canadians are breeding themselves out of existence. How is that a benefit to society?

 At some point a tipping point will be reached when economically rich nations can't make up their lack of numbers by bringing in people from impoverished nations to meet the societal need for workers. As was seen during the immediate aftermath of the black death, as the population fell, there were less workers who were able to earn higher wages due to the decrease in the labour supply.

If economic prosperity reduces fertility rates and lower fertility rates reduce the labour supply pushing up wages, it would seem that rich nations could see a demographic downward spiral that could place their societies in peril.

Lets hope that the women in such societies recognize this pattern and alter their birth rates accordingly. So it would seem that the solution for the world's population problem is the leveling of the economic playing field that would help to decrease the fertility rates of those impoverished nations driving world population growth.

In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a stir with his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which suggested that it was already too late to save some countries from the dire effects of overpopulation, which would result in ecological disaster and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s. 

Instead, governments should concentrate on drastically reducing population growth. He said financial assistance should be given only to those nations with a realistic chance of bringing birth rates down. Compulsory measures were not to be ruled out. 

Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.

That was then. Now they are trying to get away from such heavy handed control mechanisms and its perhaps not surprising to see where they are looking for solutions.

Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue. 

If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC. 

"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."

Economic redistribution.

Its not the poor that are the problem. Its the rich.

 I think that Chairman Mao and Brother Stalin would be happy to see the West finally see the light.

 Of course they both already did their part for reducing the world population by murdering tens of millions.