Simians without rights

The notion of rights is a human legal and social contract. A NY court of appeals rejected the attempt to extend rights to chimpanzees. Keep the revolution alive. And when the revolution comes, we won't need your human social contract of rights and your courts. We stand before the law.

The Idiot

I've not published but given a few talks on the role of humor as a mode of political resistance--this is the modality of the Field Marshal. Coupled with this is the role of the idiot, akin to Bartleby the scrivener, who "prefers not" or who cannot speak in a mode which is intelligible in our world. Enter Lyotard and the differend:  “It is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses these means. One loses them, for example, of the author of the damages turns out directly or indirectly to be one’s judge. The latter has the authority to reject one’s testimony as false or the ability to impede its publication.” (8) What would it mean to give the victim standing? Lyotard goes on to say: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new signification, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim.“ (13).

For further resources, consider: "We know, knowledge there is, but the idiot demands that we slow down, that we don’t consider ourselves authorized to believe we possess the meaning of what we know" –Stengers "Cosmopolitical Proposal". 

In the ongoing saga of Animals Asserting their Airspace

A swarm of bees attack a drone flying to survey real estate. Who owns the skies? See the earlier news of a hawk attacking a drone. Why do we assume our technological right to expand to the skies (as if the sky is not the limit) when others are there first?

Tarsier

Animal communication is an open secret. They are sending signals out in the open but we have no way of comprehending these signs that are all around us. For decades scientists watched these 15 cm long primates. Occasionally the animal would open and close its mouth but no audible sound came out. Perhaps, it was speculated, they were cooling themselves off somehow. Then in the last decade, field recordings showed that "these tiny primates can send and receive ultrasonic calls, joining a select club of mammals with the same acoustic talent—namely, whales, dolphins, cats, rats and bats. Researchers already knew that tarsiers make at least 15 distinct calls—all of which are audible to people—but until now no one had good evidence that they also communicate with ultrasonic shrieks"

More on ultrasonic Tarsier

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rBndmo8DKA

Animals assert their rights to Air Space

Hawk attacks drone that is trying to observe from the bird's eye view.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/oct/10/hawk-attacks-drone-video

Feral Cat Occupies the School

You want to learn something? Feral Cat is here to teach you. Yes, the revolution has sent a wayward cat into a Glen Burnie, Maryland grade school causing evacuation of the school due to fear of wild (formerly domestic) animals. This is a valuable lesson for humans--the cats they know you and your ways and will find their way into the institution, the system, the home. You think you've domesticated them but there is a wildness abiding and awaiting.

The revolution will not be televised nor seen online

The tweets of the animal revolution will be by actual birds in their own languages. And the sharks are taking down the internet. No human worlding in these oceans!

Yes, the global internet is being attached by sharks!

The cable has been dubbed one of the 7 wonders of the modern world by Slate. Fitting that the animals take on our wonders.

Beasts of burden that carry thinking

“I suspect that Pilpay & Co. [fabulists] have put animals to their best use, for they are all beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.” --Thoreau, Walden

Genesis was written by a man

From Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.

The reason we take that right for granted is that we stand at the top of the hierarchy. But let a third party enter the game – a visitor from another planet, for example, someone to whom God says, ‘Thou shalt have dominion over creatures of all other stars’ – and all at once taking Genesis for granted becomes problematical. Perhaps a man hitched to the cart of a Martian or roasted on the spit by inhabitants of the Milky Way will recall the veal cutlet he used to slice on his dinner plate and apologize (belatedly!) to the cow. …

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.”

My thanks to Melissa Free for sending me this quote. The revolution will remember you kindly, Melissa. 

They are not symbols despite Pope's best intentions.

Jan. 26, 2014. Pope Francis releases two doves as a symbol of peace and immediately they are attacked by a sea gull and a large black crow. For these animals there is no transcendental signification. Doves are not a symbol. They are other animals in the territory. Animality responds to the the transcendental signification of the Pope and his God and the verticality of metaphysics, they respond by doing what animals do... Pope, you're and your "symbols" are in the animal world now. Humans want peace by releasing doves? Try release all of animality onto the streets.

Sheep terra-forming

Richard Conniff in his recent NYTimes editorial "Pastoral Icon or Wooly Menace?" laments the bucolic sheep that dot the landscape of Great Britain. As Conniff explains, these sheep damage the landscape with overgrazing causing deforestation and loss of vegetative variety. Well, lets consider the sheep perspective: humans put the sheep in the landscape and in great numbers with all sorts of experimentation as to which breeds work best in which terrains. During the 19th century Clearances humans were driven off the landscape to make way for sheep grazing. Now in the 21st century with our synthetic materials to keep us warm we want to do away with sheep and their wooly being-in-the-world. We lament the decisions of past generations that brought us to this pastoral abundance. But the animals are not factories that are easily shut down or converted or re-purposed into post-industrial terrains for human consumption and production. Their bodies, their animality and the culture entwined around the companion species resists.