Noem wants to kill more animals

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem obviously has not heard of the maxim that when you are in a hole, you should stop digging.

When news emerged that in her book to be out shortly, she had shot dead her 14-month old puppy Cricket because it had ruined a pheasant hunt and then killed a neighbor’s chickens, there was a firestorm of outrage across the political spectrum. It appears that in her memoir, she also brought up Joe Biden’s dog that had bitten Secret service agents and suggested that he should have met the same fate.

Kristi Noem suggested Sunday that President Joe Biden’s dog Commander should meet a similar fate as her 14-month-old dog Cricket, whom the South Dakota governor reportedly described shooting and killing in her coming book.

“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people. So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog and what to do with it?” Noem, who is considered a potential running mate for former President Donald Trump, said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Commander, a German shepherd, was relocated from the White House last year after a series of biting incidents.

According to CBS News, Noem’s memoir, set to be released this week, also includes a reference to Commander. In the book, Noem says that if she were to make it to the White House, she would first ensure that Biden’s dog was not on the premises. “Commander, say hello to Cricket,” she imagines herself saying, according to CBS News.

[Read more…]

Antisemitism and Islamophobia

The widespread campus protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza has resulted in some claims that it is driven by antisemitism and that as a result some Jewish students claim to feeling unsafe, even if they have not themselves have not been attacked verbally and physically. Some politicians have used that to demand harsh crackdowns on the protests, even though many Jewish students and faculty have allied themselves with the protestors in their condemnation of Israel’s actions that have left a massive trail of death and destruction.

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a center at the University of Chicago, has issued a report based on survey of whatis actually going on. The report is titled Understanding Campus Fears After October 7 and How to Reduce Them: A non-partisan analysis of Antisemitism and Islamophobia among College Students and American Adults based on National Surveys Fielded December 14, 2023 to January 16, 2024. Its Executive Summary says:
[Read more…]

Violent and unnecessary repression of students and faculty

The student protests over what is happening in Gaza have spread all over the country with nearly 2,000 arrests made at over 40 campuses. You can see a map of the nationwide protests. The harshest crackdown seems to have been in New York City where the mayor Eric Adams (a former police chief) and the university president of Columbia Nemat Shafik unleashed a massive assault on the protestors, throwing them to the ground and tying their hands with zip ties and arresting many students and faculty. Adams justified his harsh tactics by saying that the protests had been infiltrated by ‘outside agitators’ but when pressed by reporters to give numbers, was highly evasive, suggesting that he was lying.

Reporter Natasha Lennard that while she has often seen violent police responses to protests, this one was unhinged, and that the justifications for it was ludicrous.
[Read more…]

The problem of maintaining humanistic societies

Humanism is an idea that, like so many philosophical concepts, is hard to pin down. If asked whether I am a humanist, I would say yes, but would struggle to come up with a clean definition. If pressed, I would probably say something along the lines that I believe that humanism privileges feeling solidarity with fellow humans and values a sense of shared humanity that takes precedence over allegiances based on things like race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and the like.

In her book Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (2023) Sarah Bakewell acknowledges that humanism resists sharp definition and indeed humanists tend to avoid creeds of any kind since a creed itself tends to separate people, from those who adhere to the creed to those who don’t. Her book instead gives a series of brief biographies of people down the ages who seemed to consider themselves to be humanists of various stripes and discusses what drove them.
[Read more…]

Academic freedom under threat

The student protests on college campuses against the horrors taking place in Gaza have been largely peaceful and taken the form of setting up encampments in college open spaces and holding demonstrations and making speeches. In response, some universities have responded with inexcusably harsh repressive measures, sending in armed riot police and even snipers to break up the protests and the encampments and arrest students and faculty. It is as if they have not learned the lessons of the anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid protests of past decades where this kind of authoritarian response resulted in strengthening student resolve with even more universities joining in solidarity.

Sarah D. Phillips, a professor at Indiana University, was shocked by the harshness of the police response to peaceful protests and she herself was arrested simply for being there. But she says that the faculty are outraged and calling for the resignation of the president and provost, and that the students are undeterred.

I am a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, where I was arrested this past weekend. After receiving social-media messages reporting a heavy police presence at a student rally, I rushed to the public gathering space on campus known as Dunn Meadow. There I saw my students among unarmed peaceful protesters. I saw state police in riot gear approaching them with batons. I saw still more police toting assault rifles. I could not believe my eyes. A few moments later, I had a riot shield pressed against my face. I was forced to the ground and told to roll onto my stomach. My wrists were cuffed tightly behind my back. I looked to my left — there was my student, likewise prone, battered, and cuffed. I looked to my right — another student, prone, battered, and cuffed.
[Read more…]

A problem I am glad not to have

F. Scott Fitzgerald is often quoted as saying “The rich are not like you and me”. He never actually said that. That is actually a misquote, a paraphrase from part of a longer passage in one of his short stories.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

I was reminded of one way in which the rich differ from me when I read this article about the enormous difficulty involved in getting reservations to chic restaurants in New York City, and the extraordinary lengths that some people will go to to get one. It is no longer the case that a simple phone call is all that is needed. It also used to be that if you are wealthy, you might be able to get a table by quietly slipping the maitre d’ some money. But now the reservation process has become a world of websites that specialize in reservations, bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers and you could be out several hundred dollars or more before you even step foot into the restaurant and even that requires booking days, weeks, or even months in advance. It helps, of course, if you are a celebrity.
[Read more…]

Is shooting a puppy good for a MAGA politician?

The governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem reveals in her new book that she shot dead her 14-month old puppy.

The Guardian revealed Noem’s story, which is contained in a book out next month. In No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem describes her frustrations with Cricket, a 14-month-old wirehair pointer who Noem says ruined a pheasant hunt and killed a neighbouring family’s chickens.

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, saying Cricket was “untrainable … dangerous” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”

Noem describes taking Cricket to a gravel pit on her farm and shooting her. Remarkably, Noem then describes how she also chose to kill an unruly, unnamed, un-castrated goat, first botching the job then finishing the animal off with a third shotgun shell.
…

Dan Lussen, a hunting dog trainer, told Rolling Stone a 14-month-old dog was a “baby that doesn’t know any better”, adding that unruly dogs were the result of a lack of guidance, training or discipline by the owner.

The pressure group Peta – People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals – said: “Most Americans love their dogs, and we suspect that they will consider Governor Noem a psychotic loony for letting this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who would provide her with a proper home.

[Read more…]

Campus protests over Gaza escalate

The horrific situation in Gaza where the Israeli government has unleashed a reign of terror on the people there killing over 34,000 people (two-thirds of whom are women and children), destroying hospitals, infrastructure, and homes, leaving almost two million people destitute and in a state of famine, has galvanized protests around the world. In the US, students at over 40 universities have organized protests demanding justice for Gaza and also protesting the attacks on Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank by settlers, who have taken this opportunity to further encroach upon the lands owned by Palestinians and to attack them, shielded by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Sometimes, a story about one person captures the horror of what is going on better than a recitation of facts and statistics. I was deeply moved by this story on NPR about a 12-year old Gazan boy who was shot by Israeli troops when he went to get food from one of the air drops. He was later kicked in the head by one of the soldiers as he lay on the ground and is now in agony because of the lack of pain medication.


[Read more…]