Walton Ford and the power of history and art to think the revolution

This is just a placeholder to look more at Walton Ford's work! He is thinking of animal-human conflict and conflating the real and the fabulous, natural history and myth. Such is the work of a revolutionary!

Why are animals attacking?

Bookmarking for later:
Nice reflection on the pressures put upon nature by human cultural demands upon the planet
http://www.gq.com/story/john-jeremiah-sullivan-violence-lambs-future-human-race 

Sealions... reclaiming the sea

"One moment the US fishing enthusiast was posing triumphantly with his prized catch — the next, a hungry sea lion was dragging him underwater to what he feared would be his certain death."

"So many times, you see videos of cute seals, sea lions, but I'm sharing what happened to me because I want parents to realize these are wild aggressive animals that can take you down."

Killer Rabbits

Medieval documentation of the animals in revolt!

Useful details as to why
As Christianity took hold in western Europe, hares and rabbits, so firmly associated with the Goddess, came to be seen in a less favorable light — viewed suspiciously as the familiars of witches, or as witches themselves in animal form. Numerous folk tales tell of men led astray by hares who are really witches in disguise, or of old women revealed as witches when they are wounded in their animal shape. In one well–known story from Dartmoor, a mighty hunter named Bowerman disturbed a coven of witches practicing their rites, and so one young witch determined to take revenge upon the man. She shape–shifted into a hare, led Bowerman through a deadly bog, then turned the hunter and his hounds into piles of stones, which can still be seen today. (The stone formations are known by the names Hound Tor and Bowerman’s Nose.)

From the 11th to the 13th Centuries, rabbits became reviled for their pagan connections to sexuality, easy fertility, and as the important women's religious symbol: the moon. A carved stone, southern portal of Chartres Cathedral shows a lewd, laughing rabbit-man tempting and carrying off a chaste young woman. An 11th century Latin text catalogues ominous and frightening sights including a sea dragon, a Viking ship, and a rabbit.

Rogue Owl Terrorizes a dutch suburb

"Dubbed the 'terror owl' by residents of Purmerend, north of Amsterdam, the aggressive European eagle owl is suspected of more than 50 attacks on humans, swooping silently from above and leaving many of its victims bloody and bruised."
"Many people were afraid to go out of their homes."

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".