The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Rivka Wald:

Kevin, if someone raised rats to be docile in captivity and then released a bunch of them so Cheney could kill them, I would indeed be concerned.

I don't see anyone in this discussion who's being squeamish about where meat comes from, or indignant about the extra-special rights of cute animals, so there's not much point in your continuing to repeatedly argue those two points.

What I find distasteful about the pheasant hunt is that it was transparently done to tap into the symbolic power our culture invests in the act of Man Killing Animal.

Even if Cheney does plan to eat all 70 pheasants, how come he's chosen this particular act of self-sufficiency, killing his own meat, instead of other acts of self-sufficiency like planting his own tomatoes and weaving his own cloth? Why aren't there publicity photos and admiring news stories about Cheney and his buddies at a quilting bee?

Because our culture has invested Hunting with symbolic significance for male power and potency and manliness, that's why. Cheney killing animals - in the right way, with proper symbolic trappings - is supposed to convey certain things to us about what kind of man he is.

And it has to be the right kind of killing. Cheney and his buddies wouldn't work the chicken-beheading machine at a slaughterhouse for an hour, now, would they? It's not the kind of thing people want to do - and if they did want to do it, everyone would think they were freaks. And he doesn't walk around the grounds of his Undisclosed Location with a .22 rifle in case the rabbits are getting into the garden and he can pop a couple for dinner. No, it needs to be killing invested with the symbolism of the Mighty Hunter, for it to have value as promotion of Cheney's manliness.

I find that whole system distasteful enough that it really turned me off when John Kerry went out and shot a couple of ducks, or whatever, for a photo op. But this is a ludicrous parody of the Mighty Hunter Scene - gross overkill, not even the slightest fair chance for the animal, no risk to the hunter. It bothers me that I'm supposed to think it was a manly act. It bothers me that it was done largely so that I and others would think it was a manly act.

Jon Meltzer wrote:
And some people still naively believe that there will be free elections in the United States next year.

Jon, I'm always puzzled when I hear things like that from people who aren't, like, manning the barricades and raising armed insurrection against the government.

If you genuinely believe that the 2004 elections won't occur, or will be so rigged that to believe in their honesty is "naive," what are you doing about it? Why aren't you gathering a resistance movement?

Nancy, the general reason why fundamentalists don't approve of RPGs is because they think that demons, magic, dark forces, and so forth are actually real. Not superstitions or allegories for the darkness that can exist in the human soul, but real physical actors on the world.

If you think that stuff is real, it makes sense that it would be dangerous to mess with "pretending" about it. And that's especially true if you believe that Satan is constantly trying to trick humans into doing evil, and that righteous people must always be on guard against him. Then RPGs look like the devil's snare - people get innocently involved thinking it's just a "game," when unbeknownst to them they're meddling with real dark forces that will drag them into evil.

It's funny how the people who argue that gay parents are harmful to children never cite any data. Maybe that's because the data looks like this:

Anderssen, N., Amlie, C., Ytteroy, E.A. (2002). Outcomes for children with lesbian or gay parents: A review of studies from 1978 to 2000. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 43, 335-351.

Abstract: Reviewed 23 empirical studies published between 1978 and 2000 on nonclinical children raised by lesbian mothers or gay fathers (1 Belgian/Dutch, 1 Danish, 3 British, and 18 North American). 20 studies reported on offspring of lesbian mothers, and 3 on offspring of gay fathers. The studies encompassed a total of 615 offspring (age range 1.5-44 yrs) of lesbian mothers or gay fathers and 387 controls, who were assessed by psychological tests, questionnaires or interviews. Seven types of outcomes were found to be typical: emotional functioning, sexual preference, stigmatization, gender role behavior, behavioral adjustment, gender identity, and cognitive functioning. Children raised by lesbian mothers or gay fathers did not systematically differ from other children on any of the outcomes. The studies indicate that children raised by lesbian women do not experience adverse outcomes compared with other children. The same holds for children raised by gay men, but more studies should be done.

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