Posts Tagged ‘ Cruelty ’

If natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty

May 16th, 2015 9:04 am | By

I was asking that question about why revulsion from torture isn’t universal five years ago, too, almost to the day. I’ll just repost it.

Lynn Hunt asks a pertinent question in Inventing Human Rights:

Voltaire railed against the miscarriage of justice in the Calas case, but he did not originally object to the fact that the old man had been tortured or broken on the wheel. If natural compassion makes everyone detest the cruelty of judicial torture, as Voltaire said later, then why was this not obvious before the 1760s, even to him? Evidently some kind of blinders had operated to inhibit the operation of empathy before then.

The facts aren’t enough. Science isn’t enough. There has to … Read the rest

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Guest post: A hotbed of apparently unthinking animal cruelty

May 15th, 2015 9:16 am | By

Originally a comment by latsot on Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun.

For some reason the area I live in is a national blackspot for animal cruelty. People around here keep amassing vast collections of animals they can’t look after and then causing them to suffer until someone calls the RSPCA.

It’s a strange kind of cruelty. These people want the animals and presumably care about them in some sense…. but somehow don’t recognise that they’re harming them. Making them miserable. Ruining their health.

There’s a riding school close to my house. The horses look like they’re in good condition but the owner was found to have a dozen dogs in a cage, some of which … Read the rest

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Guest post: Again the feeling is revulsion

May 15th, 2015 9:10 am | By

Guest post by Michael Šimková, originally a comment on the Facebook autopost of the Torturing animals, for instance, was just good clean fun post; published with permission.

Very interesting discussion. I am not sure what to think about it myself. It does worry me a lot. I believe we won’t survive if we don’t change ourselves to be non-violent, and probably this will require some genetic tinkering. Even if we could survive it is not very pleasant to live in this world of… er… angry chimps.

When I was younger I think in some sense I was more empathic than now, or applied it more universally. I fought my cousin because she cut up live earthworms to see if they … Read the rest

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Creepshots

Oct 13th, 2012 12:02 pm | By

The outing of Reddit’s “Violentacrez” is all over the place. He’s one of Reddit’s most loathsome users (members? denizens? occupants? what’s the right word?), and Adrian Chen outed him on Gawker as one Michael Brutsch, who works at a Texas financial services company  as a programmer.

Loathsome how?

His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for

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And so there was a lot of fear and terrible desperation

Sep 22nd, 2012 10:52 am | By

One of the things religion does is create artificial misery. One of the ways religion does this is by making people feel agonizing terror about eternal torture for themselves or people they love or both, or by making them feel agonizing despair and grief at angering or alienating God. This is especially vile when the putative eternal torture or alienation from God is caused by actions or thoughts that are in no way bad. The misery is doubly artificial (and thus gratuitous and cruel) in these situations: there is no eternal punishment, and the putative Sin is not bad or wicked.

The entrenched belief that not being straight is Sin is a classic and still very active example. Consider Peterson Read the rest

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She wept and begged to be released

Aug 27th, 2012 10:34 am | By

Spare a thought for that little girl in Pakistan who is in jail for “blasphemy” because she (supposedly, allegedly, some asshole saidly) had some pages of the Koran in a bag of trash, or put some pages of the Koran in a fire along with other trash, or some such stupid meaningless unreasonable bit of nonsense. Spare a thought for her, because she wants to get out. She would probably prefer to be at home, with people who love her and take care of her.

According to the BBC’s Orla Guerin in Islamabad, Rimsha’s lawyer said that when he saw her in jail over the weekend she wept and begged to be released.

Her parents have been taken into

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Here’s something for skeptics to debate

Jul 10th, 2012 9:53 am | By

What’s wrong with torturing animals for fun? Why not, after all?

Nothing should be off the table when skeptics get together for a chin-wag, right? So recreational animal torture should be on the table. It shouldn’t be a given that that’s not ok, just the way “treat people as equals” shouldn’t be a given, because skepticism. Right? We can’t just assume that torturing animals for shits&giggles is a crap idea; we have to demonstrate that it is, with evidence.

Why, for instance, is there anything wrong with the fact that someone encased a live kitten in concrete up to the front legs on the property of FLDS (Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints) patriarch Isaac Wyler? Why is it stomach-turning to … Read the rest

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Kill the witch!

Dec 12th, 2011 11:33 am | By

Religion as compassion in Saudi Arabia.

A Saudi woman has been executed for practising “witchcraft and sorcery”, the country’s interior ministry says.

A statement published by the state news agency said Amina bint Abdul Halim bin Salem Nasser was beheaded on Monday in the northern province of Jawf.

She wasn’t stoned to death. That’s the compassion.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpLpy4VSJXE

Amnesty says that Saudi Arabia does not actually define sorcery as a capital
offence. However, some of its conservative clerics have urged the strongest
possible punishments against fortune-tellers and faith healers as a threat to
Islam.

And we can’t have threats to Islam, because if we did, conservative clerics would be out of a job, and no longer in a position to … Read the rest

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Words can’t express

Dec 7th, 2011 3:49 pm | By

Imagine going to Saudi Arabia for the hajj, all the way from Australia, and finding yourself sentenced to a year in jail and…

500 lashes.

To the best of my knowledge, 500 lashes is a death sentence. One hundred risks being a death sentence; five hundred just plain is one.

What did Mansor Almaribe of southern Victoria state do? Torture a lot of children to death? Set fire to a hospital and laugh while patients jumped screaming from high windows? Shoot up a hotel or a night club?

No.

Saudi officials accused him of insulting the companions of the prophet Muhammad, a violation of Saudi Arabia’s blasphemy laws.

And for that they plan to torture him to death.

He … Read the rest

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Another turn of the screw

Dec 6th, 2011 11:44 am | By

The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, according to an article in Wired.

They’re primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain, adaptations that may be helpful in abusive environments but produce long-term problems with stress and anxiety.

“For them to detect early cues that might signal danger is adaptive. It allows them to react, to try and avoid the danger,” said psychologist Eamon McCrory of University College London. However, “a very similar neural signature characterizes quite a few anxiety disorders.”

Absolutely nothing surprising there. Bad things keep happening, so you develop a strong tendency to react quickly…and you’re stuck with it. A lifetime of feeling extra, exaggerated fear and dread. … Read the rest

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The milk of human kindness

Dec 2nd, 2011 2:52 pm | By

And then there’s Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, which told a parishioner - ever so politely, you understand – that her fiancé couldn’t come to the church again, on account of how he’s not a white person. Perfectly understandable. It’s because they (church members who voted on “the issue”) want to promote greater unity among the church body and the community. Obviously you can’t do that if there’s a not-white person at the church when all the other persons there are white. That would promote lesser unity. Everybody would look around uneasily and kind of split apart.

Melvin Thompson, former pastor of Gulnare Freewill Baptist church, proposed the ban after Stella Harville brought her fiance, Ticha Chikuni, to services in

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They’re not here to play

Nov 16th, 2011 4:19 pm | By

Frank Schaeffer fills us in on the world of evangelical child discipline for the glory of god, otherwise known as child abuse.

There’s the Texas judge, there are Michael and Debi Pearl, there’s James Dobson, and there’s Bill Gothard.

And it is not just individuals who are abused. Whole “Christian” organizations are involved. According to a report by Channel 13 WTHR Indianapolis (and many other media sources over the years),

“At first glance, the Bill Gothard-founded and run Indianapolis Training Center looks like an ordinary conference hotel. But some say there are dark secrets inside. “They’re not here to play,” Mark Cavanaugh, an ITC staffer tells a mother on hidden-camera video. ‘They’re here because they’ve been disobedient, they’ve been

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An inspiration

Oct 7th, 2011 12:01 pm | By

Via Libby Anne -

Couple pleads not guilty in homicide of adopted daughter

According to court documents, the couple’s adopted daughter, Hana Williams, 13, was systematically starved, beaten, forced to use an outdoor toilet and
sometimes locked in a dark closet for days by the Williams.

Hana Williams was found dead in May – naked, face-down in the mud in her own backyard – after she had spent much of a cold, rainy day outside as a punishment, according to court documents.

Although she died of hypothermia, there were other contributing causes to her death, including severe malnutrition and chronic gastritis, doctors said.

The Williams had adopted Hana from Ethiopia in 2008 as a diseased little girl to begin a

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One hand is enough

Sep 19th, 2011 2:08 pm | By

It doesn’t matter what you believe. The important thing is how you live.

An Islamic sharia court in Nigeria has sentenced two men to amputation at their right wrists for stealing a bull, with the amputation to be carried out in
public if it is given final approval.

The sharia court in the village of Nassarawan Mailayi in the northern state
of Zamfara on Thursday ordered that Auwalu Abubaka, 23, and Lawalli Musa, 22,
have their right hands chopped off for stealing a bull worth 130,000 naira
($867, 628 euros).

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It is time you resigned as chairman of the universe

Sep 5th, 2011 4:44 pm | By

Here’s a pretty item from Michael Pearl -

A woman wrote to him about her devastation at a miscarriage.

Even now I have nightmares every night. I dream that my baby is crying and when I go to take care of him, I can’t find him. I look everywhere but I can’t find my baby. I have even woken up my husband asking him to help me find our baby. I have dreamed that my baby was beautiful and healthy. I would wake up deciding how my baby and I are going to spend the day and I realize that there is no baby.

He set her straight.

Your anger is based on the assumption that you know better than

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