The Nation's Interest

172 British Labour Party MPs have called for Jeremy Corbyn to resign on the grounds that he did not do enough to ensure LP members voted to remain in the EU.  

So, not what he did do, but what he failed to do, i.e. the reason the country is in a total shambles and the self-proclaimed centre has been left with egg on its face and people in Europe are laughing at them, is all down to him. 

The 172 are backed by the likes of Cameron – that vile, duplicitous example of over privileged windbaggery – who also says it is "in the nation's interest" for Corbyn to go. 

Like he has any idea whatsoever about what is in the nation's interest.

Some of those 172 Labour MPS will be responding to peer pressure; some will want to be on the winning side; some will personally dislike Corbyn; some will have been bought off with promises of future political or other benefits; some will be embarrassed by having a bike riding, bearded, principled socialist as their leader, and some will be calculating ideologues who want to drag the party firmly back to the political centre, aka the right.

They all overtly or tacitly support a political system in which two major rightwing parties compete against each other – creating circuses, cults of personality and promoting tribal loyalties to con the electorate into believing they have real political choice. In truth that political system is about ensuring conditions in which global corporate capitalism can operate feely and without having to adjust itself to changes in political direction every 3 to 5 years. 

They knew Corbyn was between a rock and a hard place on Brexit, that like any principled and thinking person he has serious reservations about the EU and its role as a hand servant of neo-liberalism, US imperialism and militarism, and that he sees free movement of labour as being about the ability of business to access cheap labour and to undermine organised labour in more subtle ways than the sledgehammer approach of the likes of Thatcher.

Like any politician, Corbyn has had to compromise. He swallowed his personal beliefs and he stood the party line of remain in the EU and try to negotiate a better deal for Britain. He unconditionally deplored the vile racist and xenophobic lies of the leaders of the Leave campaign and its many supporters in the Tory Party and the media. He stood as firm to his principles as it possible for a mainstream politician and leader of a deeply divided party could. And anyone who thinks that is easy has never been involved in politics. 

Had the Remain camp won they'd probably still have used Brexit as a stick to beat him with but, perhaps by having been so embarrassed by their unexpected defeat, they've added tones of hysteria and unrestrained vitriol to their calls for him to go. 

That they can turn away from attacking the Tories who stage managed this cruelly divisive fiasco, and who are in total disarray, and choose instead to publicly eviscerate their democratically elected leader is almost beyond comprehension. 

BBC Newsnight reported that 45 of the 50 Labour Party constituency chairs they contacted support Corbyn and are furious with the revolting MPs. Clearly there is a chasm between the grass roots of the Labour Party and the MPs it has selected.  

If I was a member of the LP in Britain I would struggle to stay if Corbyn is ousted. I would be torn between the need to fight to retain the name, the history and the resources of the Labour party, and the need to send a message to the Labour light/right that more than ever, there needs to be a strong, united, principled opposition to the short termist, profligate, war mongering, self serving forces which currently are spinning the world into an uncontrollable nose dive. 

Over the top? No. Not even close to the top. In the context of the world as it is today and what it will become unless radical changes are made now, the top is so up there we can't even see it.

More than ever before in their ignoble history,  the Blairites and the spineless fellow travellers who have attached their self interest to the Blairite bandwagon have demonstrated they are Bogus Labour Advancing Indefensible Rightwing Ideology To Eliminate Socialism. 

It's time they did the decent thing and resigned – in the interests of the nation.

Dancing Horses

You may have seen the video of the 'dancing horse' - Blue Hors Matine – the Danish grey mare which came second in the freestyle dressage at the 2006 WEG.  Matine was a glorious horse and mostly excused her trade mark tail swinging – a sign of tension which should result in loss of marks – by judges and audience alike because of how expressive her movement was and because she was white and fans of equestrian sports do so love a white horse. 

Marine had a meteoric rise to the top and a spectacular fall after just one season of competition at Grand Prix.  She was retired at the age of 10 and put down at the age of 13 after a field accident in which she broke her carpal joint (the anatomical equivalent of the human wrist). She had been retired to stud after straining her pastern when she slipped off the ramp of a transporter, and never came right.  It's a common enough story. 

Lots of people see the video – it is the most commonly viewed equestrian video on YouTube – and most think it's an example of rider and horse in perfect harmony, the peak of equestrianism.  But there's a dark side to all equestrian sports, and one that gets darker the higher up you go largely because more money and ego are involved. 

Matine's rider, Andreas Helgstrand, was a proponent of 'rolkur'. This training method relies on extreme hyperflexion of the horse's neck with the alleged aim of building up the muscles of the 'topline'.  It is highly controversial. Opponents of it argue it is cruel and damaging to the horse; advocates and proponents of it argue it is a perfectly safe form of exercise when performed by skilled riders. 

Dressage is supposed to be the 'highest expression of horse training', progressing through stages to the highest possible level, Grand Prix. The outline demanded of the advanced dressage horse is derived from the horse's natural display postures - i.e. arching the neck, and elevating and /or lengthening the stride. The advanced dressage horse has to be – i.e. it is a requirement of the FEI – worked in a double bridle in competition. That's two bits attached to two sets of reins.  The single jointed snaffle element has a nutcracker action and is judged to be less severe; the solid curb bit has a chain that runs under the chin which tightens when pressure is applied to the rein, and has a lever action on the tongue and lower jaw occasioned by the bit's long shanks. The pressure that can be exerted on the jaw, tongue and chin by even moderate rider action can be extreme. 

The picture above is a close up of a horse being worked in by Andreas Helgstrand at a competition.  The way the horse's nose is wrinkling and the fact his mouth is open indicate he was in some distress. The fact that his tongue is blue is as a result of the loss of blood flow because of the pressure of the curb bit. That, and spur marks on the horse's flanks, evoked international outrage and resulted in Helgstrand facing cruelty charges. 

Helgstrand was acquitted of animal cruelty although he was judged by the Danish Dressage Federation to have been using the double bridle and aids 'inappropriately'.  The spur marks were judged by a vet not to have caused the horse harm but the question that was not asked or answered by the vets or the courts was, is why did a supreme equine athlete need to be spurred so heavily? 

The answer may be that the horse was in pain from the bone spurring the vet found on the right side of the animal's lower jaw, which would have been caused by repeated pressure and concussion from the bits. It may also have been that he was in oxygen debt because of the impairment of his respiration, both from having an open and wet mouth, and having his head cranked into a posture that, in effect, almost pinched his airway shut. 

This is another Grand Prix rider employing hyper flexion when working in a horse before a competition.

Anyone who knows anything about the horse's anatomy and physiology knows that extreme hyperflexion both inhibits breathing and prevents the horse from seeing where it is going. It is a simple anatomical fact that when the horse has its nose "behind the vertical".  i.e. it is "over bent", it cannot see properly, nor can it breathe efficiently. The physiology is simple so there is no excuse for how often and how utterly it is misunderstood – to the horse's detriment.

Horses at liberty adopt display postures only briefly.  All horses when exercising at liberty have a closed and dry mouth because the more the horse exercises, the more air it needs. When the horse is exercising it does not want to be producing large amounts of saliva because of the fact that it -– like us – cannot breathe and swallow at the same time.  Unlike us, the horse can only breathe through its nose.When it needs to maximise air intake, it swallows what is in its mouth and closes its mouth firmly which ensures its oesophagus is fully closed off and its airway is fully opened. It flares its nostrils and stretches its head forward which ensures a smooth flow of air into its lungs. Its body is in exercise mode – i.e. adrenaline and cortisol are being produced to kick start and fuel activity and saliva production stops – the mouth is closed and dry. Saliva and/or food in the mouth when breathing heavily means there is a risk of breathing fluid or solids into the lungs  which would result in a severe coughing fit in the short term and aspiration pneumonia in the longer term. 

Put simply, a closed dry mouth ensures no choking and the full opening of the airway. An elongated neck and flared nostrils means the passage of air to the the lungs is maximised. You have only to look at the way the horse stretches its neck down and forward when is is galloping – going flat out – or when it is recovering from extreme exertion to see how important that anatomical arrangement is. 

A bit interferes with those processes by creating confusing signals – i.e. unless the horse is in a state of panic, the presence of something in the mouth provokes autonomic saliva production. Horsey folk are told is a sign of the horse 'accepting' the bit which means that the horse is not panicking but is experiencing competing autonomic signals: something in mouth = produce saliva to aid mastication and digestion; exercising = need for closed, dry mouth to maximise efficient respiration and avoid aspiration of saliva or food particles.

The reason that ALL dressage tests from beginners to advanced have periods of extended or free walk in them are to allow the horse to regain its breath because the head posture required of the dressage horse – even when technically perfect, i.e. the nose being on or slightly in front of the vertical – restricts the airway. It also inhibits vision. The horse raises its head to focus on distant objects and lowers its head to focus on anything close to it. The more "over bent" the horse's head is, the less it can see – its vision is restricted to what is immediately in front of its front feet.  

Being released from a position of severely restricted vision and air intake is the reward associated with the pressure of hyperflexion. Hyperflexion is not about building up the top line, it is all about domination. 

The horse was and remains a potent status symbol. The image of the prancing horse, a powerhouse of brute strength and energy held in check by the rider's hands on the reins is one beloved of ordinary folk as well as megalomaniacs and those who portrayed them in stone, bronze and on canvas. To my eye, these statues below depict horses that are in pain and terror. There is no excuse for this these days.

In case you are tempted to think that cruelty cloaked by tradition is confined to the upper echelons of dressage, think again. This piece of abject grossness below is American saddlebred showing – and there are equally vile and routine abuses of horses in reining and rodeo, in show jumping and eventing and horse racing. 

If you want to see how a Grand Prix dressage horse will choose to position its head when ridden without a bit, this is a demonstration by Polish rider Andrzej Slack. 

Clean, green, hmmm.

We went for a walk up the south branch of the Kowai river a couple of weeks ago.  For those who don't know this small river, it rises on the flanks of Maukatere-Mount Grey, splits into two branches and carves a route to the sea just north of Leithfield Beach village. It often dries up in the summer, sometimes going dry several kilometres inland.  Even when it is flowing, by the time it gets close to the sea it's so shallow and warm and turgid, much of its stoney bed is coated in various forms of algae. 

A couple of years ago there was a massive flood in the Kowai.  Very heavy rain in the foothills after a very wet autumn combined with the extensive clear felling of the exotic pine forest on the lower slopes of Maukatere.  The north branch of the Kowai rejoins the larger south branch a few hundred metres above the SH1 bridge at Leithfeld. By that point the flood was like a lahar  – a torrent of massive boulders, trees, shingle and mud that once it subsided, had raised the river bed by a metre. 

Up above what we call the top ford on Marshman's Road, the damage from that flood is still raw and impressive. At one point the waters would have reached almost 4 metres above the current bed. Huge deposits of yellow and blue clay litter the river bed and everywhere there's an ugly tangle of downed willows. The fallen leaves of the willows that line the banks clog the stream, which was still very low despite recent rain.  Because the area in the headwaters is a mass of gorse, the flood brought down masses of seed and the river bed is sprouting a forest of the vile stuff.

What struck us as we wandered along was there was no bird song. We get used to the background chatter of birds on our own property, but the Kowai was almost completely silent. 

As we walked along I could not help but feel anger and grief at what this sad little river once would have been.  

Maukatere was once covered in east coast beech forest.  The Kowai river would have risen amongst this forest with its complex understory of small trees, shrubs, flaxes, ferns, mosses and lichens, and wound through bush on its way to its estuary where it formed lagoons and wetlands rich in fish and bird life. Its waters, filtered through the bush, would have been pristine. 

Now we have a largely denuded estuary, choked with gravel and exotic tree debris. The river bed along almost its entire length is choked with gravel and mud and festooned with the scars of gravel extraction and the tracks of various off road vehicles which use it as a playground.  It is full of pine and willow debris from the flood, and gorse and broom and a host of other exotic weeds. Its banks are lined with wildling pine, willow and poplar hybrids with blackberry, old man's beard, ivy and convolvulus choking the life out of any native that tries to reestablish itself or which people have planted in attempts to restore a little of what once was there.

It's pretty ugly. 

And when you emerge on the edge of the commercial pine forest that was sold to Ngai Tahu as part of the Treaty of Waiting settlement (*) and has recently been clear felled, it goes beyond ugly. It looks like a war zone, which, in a manner of speaking, it is. The flanks of the bare mountain are scarred by the run off from those heavy rains 2 years ago. Deep gashes that were once bush lined gullies, will continue to pour clay and shingle and boulders down into the Kowai in heavy rain.   

Pinus radiata is not a pretty tree en masse and it pours its toxins into the soils beneath it to deter competitors. Not much likes to grow under densely planted pine trees, and when you plant vast forests of them you create an environment that is hostile to most plants and animals.  Gorse will cope though,  give it a bit of light and it will colonise, and as it seeds several times a year in NZ and its seed is almost indestructible, it spreads with astonishing speed and vigour. If you've ever burned gorse you'll know that it's also highly flammable. 

Someone once said to me when they were looking at my heap of composting horse and sheep poo that, given I grow native plants, I wouldn't need to use it because natives don't need such rich compost.  That struck me at the time as not just wrong factually but also a metaphor for a lot of what is wrong with NZ. 

That person never stopped to consider that the NZ bush is largely evergreen and foliage tends to be quite fibrous and slow to rot down; that it evolved in symbiosis with a vast array and number of birds, and that the deep litter on the forest floor would have been heavily fertilised by bird droppings which are full of readily accessible nitrogen, among other nutrients.  I wonder how much the vitality of our remaining bush is affected by the loss of its bird life.  

I look at Maukatere with its numerous scars and the tiny remnants of its once glorious beech forest and bush and think what a wonder it would be to regenerate it, to turn this symbol of all that is wrong about NZ into a beacon of hope for a greener and more sustainable, planet-friendly future. 

Over to you Ngai Tahu.  

*Ngai Tahu bought the Ashley Forest then a Crown asset, freehold at market value in 1989 as part of the deed of settlement, and granted Carter Holt Harvey long-term forestry rights which were assigned to Matariki in 2005.  Ngai Tahu owns the land and Rayonier manages the Ashley Forest for Matariki Forests which is part owned by Rayonier.  The Department of Conservation manages the top of the mountain, the tiny remnant of native bush at Lake Janet and the tracks which lead up to the lake and the summit. 

On the state of housing

Housing is fundamental to life on many different levels.  It's physical shelter and emotional security and it signals place in a status driven world.

It's accepted as a basic human right by all people of common sense and common decency. 

There are people who think it's okay for there to be homelessness; for people to be paying a massive proportion of their wages on rent or mortgage and to have to scrimp on essentials in order to pay the rent; for young children and old people to die because of their home is cold and damp and mouldy; for landlords to be in receipt of vast sums of public funds which could be invested in social housing; for social housing to be sold off and not be replaced, and for the remaining social housing to be allowed to run down and its occupants to be stigmatised. 

To explain why it is inevitable or even desirable that some people have more than they could ever need while others have to scrape by with barely enough, such people devise all manner of explanations and justifications – from the myth of market forces to the barren belief that people are the authors of their own misfortune – the bad choice mantra. 

All their ideological manoeuvring is an attempt to justify the unacceptable.

I spent a fair bit of my childhood in state housing with a period in a private rental. Being young I wasn't overly aware of the social stigma of the former but I was acutely aware of the stress on my family of the latter.

My parents lost their farm cottage when my share milker father had a bad tractor accident. My mother had a 3-year-child and was 8 months pregnant – with me.  The farm they worked on was very remote; by the time they got my father to hospital his wounds and compound fracture of his leg had infected. He got gas gangrene. They saved his life with penicillin and tried to save his leg with newly developed plastic surgery techniques, using skin from his rib cage. They controlled his pain with morphine. He spent over a year in hospital and came out with a  permanent disability and an addiction to morphine which he fed with various over the counter pharmaceutical drugs like codeine phosphate.  

While he was in hospital my mother lived with her parents until RAF friends of my father's got us housed in a transit camp at Wigram.  They were eventually housed in a small 2-bed 1940s state house in a North Canterbury township. By modern standards it was very basic;  it had no insulation, no reticulated water supply, it was heated by a small open fire in the living room and was clad in asbestos-cement sheets. It's still there – probably upgraded a bit and with reticulated water, town sewage and ceiling insulation but basically it's the same house. I don't know if it's still owned by the state or has been sold off. 

My parents got a 3% state mortgage and built their own small home in another township where my father had got a job. The house was a classic, all-wood, 3 bedroom place on a half acre section. It wasn't insulated, had polished wooden floors in the living room and lino every where else. It was heated by an open fire in the living room, a small incinerator in the kitchen and a diabolically dangerous kerosene heater in the hall. The bedrooms were icy in winter. We had a hot water bottle which heated a small patch in the middle of the bed and was then pushed down to keep feet warm. We had flannelette sheets if there were enough go round all 5 kids, and we wore flannelette pyjamas and woollen socks all winter. Getting up to go to the toilet not only meant braving the monsters that lived under the bed, it meant freezing your feet and butt off on the cold floors and in the bitterly cold toilet. 

But it was ours. Well, it was until the bone in my father's injured leg decided to die and he had to have the limb amputated. He lost his job, they had to sell the house and had no capital gain. We moved to Christchurch into a 2-bedroom plus sunroom private rental because there were no state houses available that were large enough. My older brother had to stay in North Canterbury boarding with another family because there was no room for him in the rental.  

Christchurch was much damper than where we had lived before. The windows in the house constantly ran with condensation.  My memories of it were an unremitting, penetrating cold dampness, my father trying to adjust to losing his leg, and my mother trying to cope with 5 kids and too little money.  Although electricity was cheap we could not afford to run electric heaters and the open fire could never be persuaded to give out any heat.  The electric water heater was useless and inadequate for a large family. 

She had to ask for help – harder than I knew for someone as proud as her. I  found her one day standing over the old washing machine which had broken down. She was sobbing.  When I asked her what was wrong, she screamed at me.  For about 5 minutes I copped all her exhaustion, frustration and humiliation.  I was 12 years old. Then she calmed down, and we hauled the load of sheets out of the machine into the stone tubs, rinsed them in cold water, hand wrung as much water out of them as cold hands allowed and hung them on the line to get as dry as they could on a damp Christchurch winter day. The thing was, we didn't have a linen cupboard full of spare bedding. 

We didn't have to suffer that for very long as we were eventually housed in a brand new 4 bedroom, brick state house in Aranui.  My older brother was able to come home and for the first time in his 16 years he had a bedroom to himself. It was not much more than a box room but it was his own. My mother and father probably felt the stigma of living in Aranui in a state house more than we did but there was no denying that the house was the best we had ever lived in.  

For my father in particular, owning his own home was a visceral thing. The eldest son of a farm labourer, he had spent all his childhood living in tied accommodation.  They managed to scrape together some money and bought a house with another state mortgage. A lovely 1920s villa which my father was as proud of as any man could be.  

He died in it. He was younger than I am now. It died too. Perfectly sound and saveable but in the east Christchurch red zone, it was bulldozed and dumped by a government too far up the backside of a venal insurance industry to be bothered to save it, and my mother was in need of the money tied up in it to pay an equally venal aged care industry when we were no longer able to care for her.

The 4 bed state house in Aranui died also. 

Our little story is worse than some but far better than most when viewed globally and historically.  Despite the crappy housing, we grew up healthy and we thrived – mostly it must be said due to the social welfare systems that are being undermined and starved of funding in the cause of the great neoliberal project of enriching the rich and impoverishing the rest.

The way I live now is at a vast remove from my childhood. I benefitted from free education, from that small window of opportunity that opened up for working class girls like me.  I lived and worked in the UK in relatively well paid jobs and with my partner managed to end up with a mortgage-free house in London. Selling that and moving here before the housing market took off meant we live in a house that is warm, dry, spacious and aesthetically pleasing, and we rent out the cottage we lived in while we were building. 

That cottage is the cheapest rental of its size and quality within 50 kms of Christchurch. That's because we would rather take a loss than be leeching landlords. 

That some people live in absolute luxury alongside others who live in garages or cars or under bridges or in shop doorways is not just unacceptable in a first world country. It divides, it destroys, it stifles and it wastes potential. 

It is the exemplification of all that is wrong with our society.   

Spinning the web

The current wave of outrage about Ken Livingstone’s defence of fellow UK Labour MP, Naz Shah, is a media beat up of epic proportions.  The target isn't Shah – who has even been forgiven by some in the rightwing press because she has confessed her sins and issued a ‘heartfelt’ apology –  the target is Jeremy Corbyn and the left of the Labour Party. The media and rightwing politicos are directing yet another artillery barrage at Livingstone in the hope that it will also wipe out Corbyn.

Livingstone is a hostage to fortune on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in part because he refuses to condemn as anti-Semitic (among other things) the often controversial and contradictory Muslim Cleric, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradwi. In light of the high probability that he would be attacked and anything he said taken out of context and used against him in the court of popular opinion, Livingstone would have been wise to have kept out of the debate. Had he done so we might have been spared the awful sight and sound of John Mann charging up to loudly claim the moral high ground. 

Livingstone also stated in his media interviews that Hitler had once been supportive of a Zionist plan to relocate German Jews to Palestine. In the line with current standards of media accuracy and impartiality, he was promptly accused of saying Hitler had been a Zionist. 

The overall tone of the rightwing media response is exemplified by this comment from The Independent: "A Labour MP has stepped down as an aide to John McDonnell after it emerged that she once backed a plan to relocate the state of Israel to North America".  

Since when has an obviously ironic and amateurish meme on Facebook constituted a "plan"? 

Only a rightwing journo, nose down in the dirt, in hot pursuit of an anti-Corbyn story could produce such arrant nonsense.   

As for the foolish man who is Communications Director for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism who claimed that Shah's action was evidence of "gross and brazen anti-semitism" and an "expression of extreme prejudice towards Jewish people" –  may I suggest a regime of cold baths and deep breaths. 

I suspect there are few people who are more alert to, or critical of anti-Semitism than me. I know how deep and widespread its roots are and how easily it can spring back into destructive life even when people think it has been killed off. I've been vociferously anti-anti-Semitism for as long as I've been vociferously pro-Palestinian rights, i.e. for many decades. 

If I’d seen the meme – which was unearthed from Shah's Facebook page by right-wing blogger and Sun columnist Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) – I may not have shared it because it has spelling mistakes and I am a pedant, but it is clearly meant to be ironic. There is nothing in it to suggest it is anti-Jewish. It is a piece of anti-Israel and anti-American agitprop but however hard the right wing contorts itself, there is simply no basis for arguing that being critical of the actions of the Israeli state automatically constitutes anti-Semitism.  

Another charge against Shah is that she posted a link to an article which draws parallels between al Qaida and Zionism. I'm not sure if it was this one by Catherine Shakdam but if it was, it's worth reading. 

Right wing Zionism and right wing Islamism definitely have one thing in common, and that's a hatred of the political left. Israel and the US and their allies were totally opposed to and actively undermined the moderate leftwing Palestinian leadership.  As stated in Shakdam''s piece and elsewhere, there is evidence pointing towards the US and Israel having fomented extremist Islam as part of a wider move to 'Balkanise' the greater Levant region as part of Israeli expansionism. It's surely worthy of note that the extremists of Al Qaida and ISIL have not directly attacked Israel or Israeli interests – in fact most of their victims are other Muslims and it is Muslim countries which have suffered most from the unrest in the Middle East. 

The Israeli government and its supporters cynically and persistently use the accusation of anti-Semitism to deflect and defuse criticism of Israeli actions.  In so doing, they are busy stripping anti-Semitism of its political and historical meaning and significance.

The actions of the Israeli state with regard to Palestinians are indefensible. The irony and the tragedy is that that they are reminiscent of how Nazi Germany and all its collaborating states and peoples acted towards Jews in the 1930s. 

I've talked to young Israelis travelling in NZ after the end of their military service and been appalled at the unthinking racism some of them display towards Palestinians. It's an almost word for word replication of the bigoted supremacist ideology trotted out by white racists:  Palestinians are stupid and uneducable; they are incapable of running their own affairs; they are aggressive and untrustworthy and innately predisposed towards being thugs and terrorists. 

Those young Israelis didn't arrive at those ideas by themselves, such notions don't pop up out of a social vacuum – they are fed to the young through educational and religious institutions and military service. 

To create the sort of soldier-medic who can shoot a helpless young man in the head with as little thought or compunction as he might step on a bug, or the sort of crazed religious fanatics that can burn a family alive – the 'other' has to be turned into a faceless, soulless, non-human being. The trouble is that the only way people can come to see the 'other' as faceless, soulless and non-human is to become those things themselves.

That is the horror of fascism.  

I abhor Muslim fascists as much as I do Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Buddhist ones. In fact I abhor any ideology that is founded on and perpetuates ignorance, irrationality and bigotry. And I abhor all people of violence – most of all those who dispense their violence from the safe distance and comfort of conference and board rooms. 

There are people – including a few who claim to be of the left – whose support of Palestinian rights owes a great deal to a hatred of Jews.  The political right wing – the traditional home of anti-Semitism – currently fears and hates Muslims more than it hates and fears Jews, except of course for those Muslims who happen to be part of the ruling elites of the likes of Saudi Arabia who are granted a temporary exemption. Such people support Israel because, for the moment, they hate and fear people of another religion more.  Why and how much they hate and fear Muslims varies of course. For most it's ignorance, they have swallowed the toxic ideologies and political spin pumped out by the right wing media, but for others it's a calculated and calculating strategy at the heart of which is the principle of divide in order to continue to rule.

My feminism in a series of tweets

#myfeminism is the product of a deep & unshakeable belief in simple principles of natural justice

#myfeminism understands that humans as a species are inherently social, adaptable, creative & curious

#myfeminism wants a world in which people are able to be social, adaptable, creative & curious

#myfeminism is striving for equality for all by fighting for a social system that’s capable of delivering & maintaining it

#myfeminism seeks to explore and build on what unites people and undermine what divides & separates them

#myfeminism understands the might & the implacable viciousness of the forces that stand in opposition to it

#myfeminism recognises that humanity as a whole is facing a social & environmental crisis of unprecedented magnitude

#myfeminism understands that the overdeveloped world is sucking the life blood from the planet to fuel its toxic way of life

#myfeminism knows that the affluent's right to choose rests on structural realities that deny/constrain the choices of most people

#myfeminism recognises we are not helpless prisoners of our biology but we are the products of it

#myfeminism recognises the harm in being ignorant of and alienated from our biological self

#myfeminism understands there’s a biological binary but much else in reproduction is socially conditioned & flexible

#myfeminism knows that for the vast majority of women in the world, reproduction remains a defining reality

#myfeminism knows that women are capable of being cruel, competitive & self interested

#myfeminism knows that men are capable of being kind, cooperative and altruistic

#myfeminism means I will feel more solidarity with some men than I do with some women

#myfeminism doesn’t demand poor women/women of colour put affluent/white women before their menfolk as proof of sisterhood

#myfeminism recognises that some women are fully & consciously complicit in the maintenance of the phallocracy

#myfeminism deplores media fabrications that perpetuate a shallow & toxic notion of womanhood

#myfeminism recognises the burqa & the bikini are both products of the phallocracy

#myfeminism asks that you ask why governments that hammer the poor are prepared to yield to demands for gender equality

#myfeminism loves to laugh, finds joy in living and doesn't fear death   

#myfeminism knows it can't be adequately represented in a series of tweets but decided to try anyway

Farming Part One : The Pigs

The HUHANZ animal shelter used a Facebook page  to call for action to draw attention to the latest of three fires at a Waikato controlled environment pig farm.  A total of 750 or so pigs have died in these fires; the first fire in 2005 under previous ownership killed 300, a fire 8 months ago under the current owners killed 400, and the latest fire killed 50 sows in farrowing crates.

Farrowing crates were developed by the pig industry because, as a result of selective breeding, sows are very heavy and cumbersome and made more so by a lifestyle that denies them adequate movement, and they have very large litters. The sow’s bulk and lack of fitness, combined with enormous litters, the stresses of confinement and the frustration of the instincts to separate and nest build as farrowing is imminent, can lead to high piglet mortality. 

Hence the crates, in which sows are imprisoned prior to giving birth and for up to 4 weeks afterwards.  The crate does not allow the sow to turn around and it forces her to lie down which allows the piglets to suckle and decreases the risk of them being crushed, smothered or savaged by their over-stressed mother.

In a crate the sow is effectively reduced to a milk machine – a living version of the ‘calfeterias’ that dairy producers use to feed those offspring of dairy cows that are destined to be replacements for dairy herds or to be raised for beef.

Crating is horrible enough when you consider pigs’ intelligence and the frustration of basic instincts, but it enters the realms of the horrific when there is a fire. The thought of any animal trapped in a cage in a fire appals most people and anyone it doesn’t appal is surely missing an essential element of their humanity.

The latest fire at the facility is thought to have been electrical and possibly due to damage to wiring caused by the numerous rats. The owners, who sold a dairy farm to move into intensive pig farming, say they had had problems with equipment failure. Observers have pointed to the absence of an automatic sprinkler system and fire extinguishers.

When the news broke that this facility had had its third fire, HUHA members called for a vigil on the road outside it. It was a small scale affair, quiet and dignified and aimed at raising awareness of the lives and deaths of animals in intensive farming operations.

There was a lot of support for it on the HUHA Facebook page but also some opposition, some of it from people who claimed to be motivated by concern for the feelings of the farmers. One of the most active of the critics, on her own FB page, supported a petition to withdraw the charitable status of the animal rights group, SAFE, which has been a thorn in the side of controlled environment and intensive dairy farming. 

Several of those who were critical of the vigil claimed that the sows would have died or been rendered unconscious by smoke and fumes before the fire reached them which means they would not have suffered.

The fact that people and companion animals often die of smoke/toxic gas inhalation in house fires does not mean that animals in shed or barn fires will die or lose consciousness from smoke inhalation before burning to death.  Whether the smoke and fumes render them insensible or kill them depends on the nature of the combustible material and how the building is constructed and ventilated. 

Most importantly, those who use this rather shabby argument ignore the fact that caged animals who smell and hear a fire will be in a state of utter terror for some time before they are overcome by fumes.  Even if the flames or the radiant heat did not burn the pigs alive, it would not have been a quick or an easy death. 

The critics also avoid the fact that, if the building had had very good smoke alarms and a sprinkler system or other effective means of quickly dousing a fire, and had the owners had plans for responding to a fire – even if the way the fire started was beyond any reasonable person’s ability to anticipate or prevent – the animals may well have been saved.

One of the critics even made the astonishing statement that, if animal rights people were so concerned about the fire risk, THEY should have installed sprinkler systems in the facility themselves after the last fire and, as they hadn’t, they were as culpable as the owners.

Another argument was that the appropriate course of action was to write to the MPI to call for improved fire safety standards and the vigil was highly insensitive to the feelings of the owners who were suffering as a result of the loss of their animals and property.  

The argument is an odd one. The claim is that the vast majority of farmers, including these particular famers, are deeply concerned about the welfare of their animals and do everything they can to ensure their welfare, however, the only way that high health, welfare and safety standards on all farms can be guaranteed is by tighter government regulation.  So, if pigs burn to death it's because the standards are too low which means the government is to blame – not the farmer who chooses to operate at or below the bare industry minimum. 

As to the hurt feelings of the owners of the pig farm, it seems logical to ask, if they had the intention to run it in a safe and professional manner, why did they not do due diligence when buying the facility or, having realised after purchase that the buildings and equipment were sub-standard, why did they not make the necessary improvements immediately, and if necessary, take buildings out of commission until they were safe? 

I believe that if you make your living by locking animals in cage or inside a building and you:

fail to control rodents which might degrade electrical wiring;

do not to install a sprinkler system and/or have other fire fighting equipment appropriate for different types of fire;

do not install and maintain smoke alarms that can be heard from or are linked to the farm house or staff quarters; and,

do not have evacuation plans for the animals – then I am sorry but you cannot claim to care about animal welfare or expect the likes of me to feel sorry for you.  

I don’t care if it's poultry, pigs, cows or horses. If, for your convenience and/or your profit, you lock animals in a cage or a shed, leaving aside the wider welfare issues, you have the moral responsibility to do everything you can to prevent fire and to be able to fight it.  If the current law does not make you criminally liable for harm to animals occasioned by your failure to ensure health and safety, then the law is wrong and needs to be strengthened.

Or we could just ban all factory farming.

Edit: link to FB page hosted by HUHANZ