The Political Thread

[The Legendary Shark]

The government of Iceland is helping its citizens out by giving $1.25billion in debt relief to mortgage holders: washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-MX0VXI6S972H01-34GAU5TRU0OO8HQHVJ2ATVIRJI

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And what is our government doing to help its citizens? Why, far more sensible things like chucking people off benefits, imposing a bedroom tax and giving as much money as it can to the banks.

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[NapalmKev]

The government of Iceland is helping its citizens out by giving $1.25billion in debt relief to mortgage holders: washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-MX0VXI6S972H01-34GAU5TRU0OO8HQHVJ2ATVIRJI

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And what is our government doing to help its citizens? Why, far more sensible things like chucking people off benefits, imposing a bedroom tax and giving as much money as it can to the banks.

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Our Government is a shower of shit.

Iceland also has around 90,000 firearms compared with a population of about 300,000; and yet their statistics for violent crime seem to be one of the lowest I've ever seen. (i know 300,000 isn't large by any stretch but consider the fact that we're looking at a ratio of one-to-three for gun ownership).


http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25201471


Cheers

[The Legendary Shark]

Guns don't kill people, cultures kill people.

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Say - you think if we asked real nice and promised not to fight back those lovely Icelandic folks might invade us?

[COMMANDO FORCES]

They must live in a state of permanent fear to have that high a percentage of gun ownership. I want to know why they feel the need to own so much firepower!

[NapalmKev]

They must live in a state of permanent fear to have that high a percentage of gun ownership. I want to know why they feel the need to own so much firepower!

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1ry4do/til_that_iceland_has_one_of_the_largest_gun/

Or, from a different angle...

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-02/in-iceland-when-police-kill-a-gunman-they-apologize.html


It looks to me that they're not actually "in fear" of anything. The majority of gun ownership is apparently for the purpose of hunting. And the people themselves seem to be pretty easy going.

Cheers

[Tombo]

They must live in a state of permanent fear to have that high a percentage of gun ownership. I want to know why they feel the need to own so much firepower!

Three words - Drunken Polar Bears!

[The Legendary Shark]

Damn polar bears - off out on the lash all night and then could murder a manbab on the way home...

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I was brought up around shotguns and I know a lot of people who own one (I don't own one, although I had one as a teen for clay-pigeon shooting with my dad). This is why I can understand places like Canada and Iceland but not the US.

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The First Law of Guns: Never point a gun at anyone, ever. That was drummed into me by every gun owner I knew and is still the Number One rule. There is an immense respect for what guns can do around here. A gun is looked upon in the same way as a car or a power drill - as a potentially lethal tool (like Iain Duncan Smith).

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In the US the opposite seems to be the case - a gun there isn't a tool but a statement and you can point it at whomever one dashed well chooses, dagnabbit.

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Everyone should be required to carry a six gun all the time - this, I am sure, would lead to a vast increase in politeness and mutual respect (after the initial novelty holocaust, of course).

[Richmond Clements]

No polar bears in Iceland, as far as I know...

I'm sure there's a cheap food joke here somewhere, but you can do that yourself.

[The Legendary Shark]

Well...  www.newsoficeland.com/home/environment/item/2128-polar-bears-on-their-way-to-iceland

[TordelBack]

Well at least they'll be ready for them.  Although I hope they're better armed than Sharky - wouldn't fancy going up against a polar bear with a shotgun.  Chances are at least one of those bastards is on the CIA Death List.  But then who isn't these days?

[The Legendary Shark]

Shark v Polar Bear... I feel a Shako v Hookjaw crossover coming on...

[Tiplodocus]

They must live in a state of permanent fear to have that high a percentage of gun ownership. I want to know why they feel the need to own so much firepower!

To protect themselves from cyclists?

[NapalmKev]

Tax breaks to encourage Fracking, and other quality gems from Mr Osborne!


http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-25225532


The guy's an absolute Cock!


Cheers

[The Legendary Shark]

I was just watching "Breaking the Set" on RT and it contained two fascinating interviews that got me thinking.

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The first was with a U.S. lawyer who put a good case for awarding animals equal (or near equal) rights under the law as human beings. The main thrust of his argument was that we do not really need to use or consume animals any more and therefore we must stop slaughtering and abusing them for no reason. From memory, he quoted figures of 58 billion land animals and a trillion marine animals being slaughtered annually. Just because humans have evolved eating meat, he argued, is no reason to continue - humans have also evolved as sexists but we are beginning to see this as wrong, so why not ban all animal exploitation? To the argument "it's okay to kill an animal so long as it's well treated in life and killed humanely" he wondered how humane it was to take newborns away from their mothers to be slaughtered for products like veal - just because we like the taste. He likened it to one person killing another - it would be okay for me to shoot you in the head while you slept but bad if I tortured you first.

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Of course, this argument just got me thinking who would benefit from such a ban, or at least a curb, on animal use and my cynical mind leaped straight to the usual suspects like Monsanto and B.P. During the adverts I wondered if the university this lawyer worked for had received any funding from these or similar corporations and if some of that funding was being used to push this point of view into the public eye in order to scare politicians into taking measures suggested by certain industry lobbyists. I grumbled to myself about this all the time I was making a cup of tea.

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I was still thinking about it when the second half of the show came on and the second interview started - which was with some feminist going on about how women are marginalised, or something.

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Yes, that was my attitude - yes, yes, love; women are equal, I get it, I agree, now can we move on please? I know women should be equal, I want women to be equal - you're preaching to the choir, sister - so I wasn't really listening - at least not at first.

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Throughout recorded history women have been regarded as property - incubators belonging to men. This has only really started to change in the last forty years, and then only in some societies, and then with limited success. The view that women are property runs very deep still, especially in old established organisations like religions and governments which still try to own the female incubator through the imposition of things like abortion laws. The very existence of abortion laws, she argued, proves that women are still seen as owned incubators - that it is illegal for a woman to interfere with the function assigned to her. Irrespective of whether a foetus is a baby or not, it is growing inside a woman's body and therefore IS her body; outlawing abortion, then, is like outlawing amputation.

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The second part of her argument was also interesting. She thinks that womens' movements all around the world are missing the point by trying to make compromises or find common ground. If the abortion argument begins revolving around the age or condition of the foetus it still implies that the woman is merely an incubator, merely property. The question is, do men own women or not? Do men decide what women are, what their function is and what they can or can't do or not? All other discussions about "equality" are moot until this core question has been addressed.

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Wow, love, you really got me thinking, there.

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The first interviewee had used the fact that we have evolved as sexists to bolster his own argument and (in the hopes that this isn't some subtle KGB/CIA media manipulation psi-op programming technique designed to get people like me putting two and two together to make five) I suddenly wondered if this might be at the heart of all our problems - the concept of 'ownership'.

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The first interviewee questioned the ownership of animals and the second questioned the ownership of women - both hinting that it is a kind of instinct. Searching within myself, trying to explore my own instincts, I think they are both correct. My instinct is to stop anyone from stealing my pet dog - even if they could give him the ideal life far superior to anything I could provide, I would resist it. When I have been loved by women (yes, it has happened - but in a longer time than I'd care to admit) I found that love to be a precious thing and would resist losing it.

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Herein may lie the problem: As a male, I regard the love given to me by a female as mine and mine alone - it feels great and I want to keep it. It is only a small step from there to believe that because I own the love I own the female and if I can own another human being I can own anything from slaves to land to DVDs. (I have been using the word 'love' a lot - take that as you will but I mean it as the instinctive bonding and mating instincts leading (hopefully, from an evolutionary perspective) to the parental and familial instincts.) A male guards his female jealously in order to pass on his genes. I don't think we can really help feeling like that, no matter how much we resist, deny or ignore it. Women are not exempt from this instinct - I have lost many women because I refused to 'fight for them' - as if they regarded even themselves as little more than a prize to be awarded to the worthy winner. Not being female, of course, I can only speculate as to their true feelings on the matter - maybe they just thought I was a wanker and any old excuse would do...

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So, is that at the heart of all the world's problems? The unconscious male desire to own women (and, by extension, Everything Else) and the unconscious female desire to be owned by men (putting themselves in the same category as Everything Else)?

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Is it time to stop thinking that males are superior and fighting for females to be equal? What does sexual equality even mean, anyway? How can two different things be equal? Does teaching a woman to do things the same way as a man so she can succeed in a male-dominated sphere make her equal or just an honorary man?

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I think it's time we started regarding men and women as complimentary; humans and animals as complimentary; corporations and the planet as complementary.

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This is, of course, unlikely to be a new thought or a fresh observation but I thought it might spark some interesting discussion. Is feminism a dead end? Does it simply exacerbate the differences instead of integrating them as compliments?

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Any of you pretty little ladies want to worry your pretty little heads about this pretty little topic - please feel free to witter away to your pretty little heart's content... 

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[TordelBack]

You do a lot of powerful thinking, Shark!

My main contribution here would be to note that humans have a clearly established set of inherent rights (however much we seem to enjoy denying them), and the main issue facing everyone is ensuring that those rights are accorded equally across all genders and none, whereas the rights of animals are far less clear or established, and agreeing these is still a necessary step.  Feminism is thus a matter of movement by humans towards an equal application of existing human rights, with actors and subject being one and the same, and I'm not sure it equates at all easily with animal rights where the actors and subject are entirely different, and thus I don't really see how relevant issues of 'ownership' are.

In this framework the question of abortion is essentially about the definition of human, and on the basis of the answer to that puzzler the negotiation of conflicting rights.  As it refers to so many diverse species with diverse qualities, there are many different grades within the term animal, and it lacks the absolute nature of the terms we tend to apply to human.