Written By:
Zetetic - Date published:
10:52 am, April 14th, 2010 - 3 comments
Categories: animal welfare, Conservation, International -
Tags: whaling
Have you heard of Cyanide and Happiness? A web-comic that walks the line of funny and too far. More popular, according to Alexa, than the NZ Herald.
Anyway. They have an annual ‘depressing comics’ week. No punch lines. Given our Prime Minister’s aim to restore commercial whaling and the anti-whalers’ success in blocking the Japs from half their target of kills, thought this one would be appropriate:
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.
This actually happens too…
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10582613
Sadly, if you were to read through the whaling posts/comments here you will see umpteen references to Japanese in the same breathe as whaling as though all Japanese were whalers…or favoured the eating of whale meat. Much of the msm is guilty of the same lazy stereotyping. And that feeds the racial garbage behind the bullying and beatings of kids like Ryotaro.
But should that be a reason to be silent on whaling? I don’t think so. But I think it should be a reason to much more careful in the choice of words or phrases that people use.
How absurd would it be to lay all the bad shit perpetuated by Fonterra and the dairy industry at the collective and individual foot of all of New Zealand and all New Zealanders? Same thing applies for whaling. Given the levels of existing racism, it would be nice to see no ( at least here on thestandard) comments that lazily tar all Japanese with the same brush…but I’m not holding my breath.