The depths of human depravity

I know that there are sadistic sociopaths out there who delight in the suffering of other people and animals. But despite that awareness, I am still capable of being shocked by the depths of depravity exhibited by some, like those involved in this story.

A British woman has pleaded guilty to being part of a global monkey torture network.

Holly LeGresley, 37, from Kidderminster in Worcestershire, admitted uploading 22 images and 132 videos of monkeys being tortured to an online chat group.

She was charged after an investigation by the BBC into the torture of monkeys overseas. The investigation exposed a global network involving a private online group paying people in Indonesia to kill and torture baby monkeys on video.

The BBC said LeGresley used the username “The Immolator” and ran a poll for members of the group on which method of torture should be inflicted upon an infant monkey.

That people could even conceive of a scheme to torture and kill baby monkeys and then find people around to world willing to fund it just boggles my mind.

Appalling behavior by NYC mayor and police

The mayor of New York City Eric Adams and the police department have used the claim of outside agitators to justify their use of force in clearing the protestors from Columbia University. Adams pointed to the presence of Nahlia Al-Arian as the “tipping point” in his decision to authorize the military-style raids on the campus.

Who is she? Jeremy Scahill writes about how this 63-year old retired fourth grade teacher and grandmother, whose family is from Gaza and who has lost about 200 of her family and friends in the recent Israeli onslaught there, ended up as the embodiment of ‘outside agitators’ that required such brutal force.

Al-Arian has five children, four of whom are journalists or filmmakers. On April 25, two of her daughters, Laila and Lama, both award-winning TV journalists, visited the encampment established by Columbia students to oppose the war in Gaza. Laila, an executive producer at Al Jazeera English with Emmys and a George Polk Award to her name, is a graduate of Columbia’s journalism school. Lama was the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Alfred I. duPont–Columbia Award for her reporting for Vice News on the 2020 explosion at the port of Beirut.

The two sisters traveled to Columbia as journalists to see the campus, and Nahla joined them.

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Racism rears its head again at the University of Mississippi

Both the university and the state have an ugly history of racism that they would like to bury. But the response by one group of white male students of a fraternity to campus protests over Gaza serves to show that such attitudes are still there.

The university’s chancellor, Glenn Boyce, said that a conduct investigation had been launched into one student and more might follow in the wake of Thursday’s volatile scenes on campus. The clash occurred after a diverse group of about 30 students protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza were outnumbered by almost entirely white counter-protesters at a ratio of 10 to one, according to the Mississippi Free Press.

A video that has since gone viral showed one of the white male counter-protesters jumping up and down and making monkey noises in front of a Black woman with the pro-Palestinian protest group. Other white men then echoed the racist noises, and began chanting: “Lock her up!”

Some of the protesters were dressed in Stars and Stripes dungarees, others held aloft US and Donald Trump flags. They threw water bottles and cups at the pro-Palestinian protesters and yelled: “Who’s your daddy?”, “Take a shower”, and “Shave your legs”, among other offensive chants.

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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.

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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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