I ate meat for most of my life. I stopped in my twenties for a year or two but up until recently I have taken the TopOfTheFoodChain line, albeit with increasing reservations. AJ Grayling's maxim on speciesism - that If all the animals in the world got together and formed a religion, man would be the Devil - troubled me a lot, twenty years ago and I became a picky consumer, you know the type, Oh, fuck me, I won't eat this and I won't eat that, Oh, this animal had a good life, look, it's got a welfare stamp on its flesh, so that's alright; I wouldn't eat offal or pies or sausages, it had to be the good stuff, expensive cuts; I felt, somehow, that the more I paid, the less the animal would have suffered. Eventually, it had to stop and an example of animal cruelty in Gaza, orchestrated, it must be said, by the PBC, revolted and distressed me so much that just a passing comment, here, by mr black hole sunset, prompted me to lay down my steak knife, once and for all.
I feel a whole lot better, in my mind, and my blood chemistry hasn't suffered; I eat loads of dark, green stuff - kale, cabbage, leaves and bags and bags of watercress. I'm not Earnest and Worthy Monty Don but we do grow herbs and eat loads of them; this is as we have done for decades, just without the flesh on the plate and when the cows stick their heads over the wall or I meet the sheep in the lane I can pat their heads without guilt. But that's just me, my sentiments, the coincidences of my life and there's no moral high-grounding. Except when it comes to this shit.
If I was ever close enough I would beat this fucker to a pulp, I would pick-up the nearest heavy object and beat him with it until I could beat him no more, I would kick him until my foot broke, be he fucking muslim or fucking jew or any other kind of bastard stone-age lunatic, see how he likes it.
Some would point to a dissonance, here; I do not advocate the beating of paedophiles or sexual/sadistic killers, what's so bad about hacking a sheep to death, jeering at it, insulting it - can you insult a sheep; why is a slaughterman any worse than Ian Brady? Well, I suppose it's that I believe that the Bradys must, somewhere along the line, have been victimised, themselves, or felt some corrosive pressures which separated them from common Decency, torturing a child is so aberrant, something triggered it, let's find out what, and try to spare other children and let us bring Brady to an understanding of what he has done and to remorse and redemption. That is what we believe, that is what our legislature prays for, before every sitting - Father, forgive, that is the foundation stone of our civilisation, of our law, our art, our architecture, our ethics and our philosophy.
Why not, then, forgive the sheepstabbers? I don't know, my views are discordant, I can't help it, Brady just did what he did, he didn't weave it into some fucked-up religion, it wasn't his job, he was independently, even boldly monstrous, claiming no higher calling and it's just that the endorsement of such cruelty as this, in the name of Allah or Jehovah, brings out my inner Crusader, but be that as it may there is something of the hand of Jack Straw, here, in this barbarism, something of Roy Hattersley,
A bucket of lard speaks.
What, Sparkhill, my constituency, the most Northerly banana republic in the world? A judge said that? Full of crooked muslims, rigging votes? Well, I know nothing about that, I was just the MP.
I'm a fearless journalist now. No, no, I'm only in the house of lords for the grub. And the booze.
of their importing and bribing a block vote and calling it democracy, of their nurturing and permitting and obscuring the vile and the gross, be it the whoring of Rotherham's children or the tormenting of dumb animals, there is something of Jack and Roy and Denis McShane,
something which is as wicked as the crimes themselves, if not moreso.
Hissing Jack Torture, of course, working for KosherJehovah, lied his poxy arse off at the UN, igniting a firestorm over the ancient, holy lands, a firestorm from which strode Mr ISIS and his vengeful, incendiary band.
A bucket of lard speaks.
What, Sparkhill, my constituency, the most Northerly banana republic in the world? A judge said that? Full of crooked muslims, rigging votes? Well, I know nothing about that, I was just the MP.
I'm a fearless journalist now. No, no, I'm only in the house of lords for the grub. And the booze.
of their importing and bribing a block vote and calling it democracy, of their nurturing and permitting and obscuring the vile and the gross, be it the whoring of Rotherham's children or the tormenting of dumb animals, there is something of Jack and Roy and Denis McShane,
Hissing Jack Torture, of course, working for KosherJehovah, lied his poxy arse off at the UN, igniting a firestorm over the ancient, holy lands, a firestorm from which strode Mr ISIS and his vengeful, incendiary band.
Jack Torture, hissing his self-righteous lies and distortions, doesn't give a fuck about what he's done to the world, so he's not likely to care about a few sheep but NewLabour's cynical Islamisation of large tracts of our cities is, for native and immigrant, a hateful abomination of which this scandal is an illustration; pandering to traditional Jewish or Muslim cruelty should be the refuge of the spiv, not the parliamentarian. This wicked practice, halal or kosher, should be proscribed.
If cruelty is part of your faith, if you must hack animals to death in order to pacify your hateful god, then fuck off to Pakistan or Jordan or Israel and practice it there; you are not welcome in my country.
God said to Abraham: I want you to kill your son. Just to prove you love me.
OK, boss, if you insist.
What should we expect from the fervent adherents of Abraham, what else but cruelty and vice?
OK, boss, if you insist.
What should we expect from the fervent adherents of Abraham, what else but cruelty and vice?
29 comments:
Bit of a nasty bastard, old Abraham: blood and shit smeared through history and all for the whims of a Jealous God.
Eyes at the side, run or be fried.
Eyes at the front, watch out, here's a cunt.
You are right about Foxe Mr. Ishmael. I've read it too. Kept a copy under the bed as a child, the pictures, the pictures...
In fact, you're right about most things (including morphine). Pleased to see you too are a fan of Mr. Brady. I don't feel musically safe without a vinyl copy alongside my 'Kind Stranger' CD. Interested to find out how you rate his 'Primitive Dance' period; I suppose he had bills to pay (which kind of flags up my own opinion).
Were we all to follow your example, Mr I, I suspect that there would be far fewer domestic animal heads in the landscape for you to pat. That said I admire a stance based on principle. Regarding the sheep stabbers, after your foot breaks I'll lend you mine. I despise people who inflect gratuitous suffering on helpless creatures. If we are going to breed and use animals, the least we can do is provide them with a decent life and, indeed, as quick and painless a death as can be managed. To do this would likely involve less and more expensive meat in our diets for which we would probably all be healthier.
Glad to see you're still alive, looking like a saint, mr mirage. Aye, I suppose there may come a time, when Morphine's blessings outweigh her tantrums - or there may be something better - but for now we sleep in separate rooms, she and I. In fact, I forget the last time I had even a paracetemol. My pain strategy is in the words, it's about the Ownership of pain, I own it, it is mine, I will medicate it or not as I see fit, somebody wants to take it from me, they can manage it; there is a way in which Endurance is the best prescription, just as long as there is a stock of something, just in case.
I think the Minnesotan Russian Jew captured the terrible Abraham and Isaac story better than anyone, in Highway 61 Revisited..........God said, you can do what you want, Abe, but the next time you see me comin' you better run...
Ever since Planxty, Brady has been one of those unfairly gifted ones. I don't know the period you mention; I will have a look.
I hope that this corner of Cyber Pan Alley has amused you, as you've passed, and that you continue to venture out, get your strength back and feel better.
No, I was trying hard, mr sg, not to claim exemplarship, I wasn't proselytising and I am well aware that the meat industry creates as well as takes life. You enjoy your meat.
My ranting was at ourselves, as much as at these halal and kosher bastards. If I only had a pound for every time I had eaten a cheap Balti in Birmingham's Ladypool/Stratford Road area, never thinking of how the goats and sheep had been killed.....But it was Oh, fuck me, isn't this multiculturalism great, you can get all this food, for a fiver, and you can go down the Asian supermarket, just down the road and buy a bottla wine and they'll open it for you, here, and there's all this Nan bread, and you can eat with your fingers, what we need is mote Balti housed, innit great, being a liberal multiculturalisedcurry-scoffing moron.....
Dismal, really, the way we fool ourselves. Some filthy cunt in MediaMinster tells us that multiculturalism is the new Beatlemania and the next morning we have le posterieur flambee Vesuvius, our lavatories are splattered with liquid foulness, everybody's shopping for ginger and coriander, the nation is in the grip of an epidemic of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and our children are being pimped by nasty stone age savages who hate us.
Another philosopher you may find bracing on the matter of our attitude to animals is Stephen R L Clark. He's also I think one of the more impressive theistic philosophers but we mustn't hold that against him. Anyway worth a look.
It's about not degrading where we live and who we live with, I think, all of this.
This eating of meat thing is a bit of a bugger. We know that, pyhsiologically at least, we are designed to eat meat as well as plant stuff, but ...
I became vegetarian over 30 years ago. Part of my job at the time included necking a couple of dozen chickens a week, or killing as many rabbits. I did it quickly - even became expert after a while. And it made me feel sick every time. So I just decided one day, that if I didn't like killing them, I really shouldn't be eating them and it was as simple as that.
Still dream about that first blackened slice off the roast beef joint though ... :-)
Been a non-meat eater since my teens. The only exception I make is chorizo sausage when I'm in Spain - though I think that's mostly testicles, eyeballs and blood.
Thanks Mr I - I will for now at least. However, by mid-century, when you and I will probably be 'deed' and gone, livestock farming as we know it will likely no longer exist - save as a niche business supplying the tables of the rich. People will still eat meat, in all the cuts we have today, but it will be produced in factories by the genetic engineers. Nae room for farms or even factory farms with 10 billion or so people on the planet... But perhaps they will have the wisdom to leave what is left to wilderness...
Isn't that what all sausages consist of?
Dutch food technologists are already producing locust burgers, insects being a very efficient means of protein generation, ten times more efficient than beef, five times more than poultry, I'm not kidding; halal or kosher insect slaughterperson'll probably pull their wings off, Bismillah, Oi vay.
You're right, soon it'll just be for the rich, like in the good old days.
Your IBS comment strikes a chord Mr I but I wonder about the cause - all those cereals and all that pasta the nation's been scoffing since the eighties... I don't recall the obesity crisis either, back in the seventies, when we all went to work on an egg. Excess of wheat and gluten - most people are now at least mildly intolerent - according to my Dr.
Mr I: I was thinking about your Birmingham baltis this morning - put me off my golf. Are you sure its goat you were eating?
No, i'm not sure mr mike. There were public health scandals about Chinese takeaways and dogs but I don't recall any such Balti stories but just look a the way the council in Rotherham reacted to an epidemic of child rape and worse; an easy matter for a multiculturalist council to turn a blind eye to CatCurry. I stopped eating-out years ago, anyway; fuckwit NewPeople with filthy hands and nasty minds handling my food? I should fuckimg co-co.
Mr I: I have come to the same conclusion re dining out. Seeing all those TeeVee chefs repeatedly putting their fingers in the sauce, and we can only guess where those fingers were previously, although the pages of Hello give us some clues, has put me completely off. Thats not to mention the serving staff, tattoo'd and in need of a good wash.
I have thought for a long time that IBS is simply the result of introducing to a well established Northern diet all sorts of spicey shit with which we are constitutionally unfamiliar; there were very sound reasons for regional and national diets being the way they were but within a tiny space of time many people's systems have been overwhelmed by alien ingredients. No wonder so many people have the shits. Proper British cooking is wonderful, balanced, colourful, seasonal and nutritious; much French cuisine makes an interesting occasional change, but Thai, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Caribbean, those people live in different climates, with different growing conditions and different dietary need. That's why we eat the Roast Beef of Old England and they eat curried vermin, with ginger and chiles and lemon grass and fuck knows what else. That fucking Jamie Oliver, the NHS should sue his fat arse off. throw him in jail and feed him bread and water.
I have a different theory re IBS. I eat a very high carb diet (pasta, potatoes etc), lots of nuts and pulses, and drink lots of wine. I have lots of herbs and spices (Viet is my favorite cuisine). Although Anglo by birth, my diet is anything but. I have a shit every morning at circa 5am (you could set your clock by it) before going to play golf.
The key, I think, is lack of exercise resulting in a sluggish system which allows stuff to fester in the intestines.
It was late in the last century, mr mike, that I read an interview with Hollywood's Christopher Walken. He was asked about his favourite restaurant. Do you think I'm insane? Badly-paid, unhealthy, poorly treated strangers, working in dirty conditions, handling my food? That I'm gonna put inside me? You outta yer Goddamned mind?
That did it for me.
Yes but you are nomadic, mr mike, and have acclimatised yourself to this stuff and you live in a partially Pacific climate. And you are well educated and capable.
You take a NewPerson, brought up on burgers and fish fingers, living in Halesowen and stuff him full of raw fish, chile and coriander and he'll have the runs; he won't wash his hands as he should because nobody does and he'll give ten other people the runs but it won't be down to the raw fish, fuck no, that's sophisticated, that is. Must be that bug that's going around.
Bang-on about the exercise, it should be compulsory.
You've just reminded me, Mr I. Its 12 noon down here, my wife's out delivering meals-on-wheels, and I haven't taken the dog out yet for his walk and morning poo.
Last time I started cooking bacon sarnies at 1am I got shouted at.
Perhaps it's the gulf of advantage between man and beast, rendering any interspecies conflict utterly one-sided, which weighs so heavily on our conscience.
Whatever the reason, nothing can unite previously disparate groups into a fearsome paleface jihad quite like animal cruelty.
Atavistic, innit, at least in the UK, apart from the noble fox-hunting fraternity. It is true,though, that criminologists often find instances of iknsect and animal cruelty in the childhood behaviour of those who become sadistic killers; maybe the revulsion indicates a species-revulsion at poihtless cruelty; torturing prisoners and enemies, of course, and Otherists, that is another matter.
Nah, I'm wrong again, we have a rich history of bear-baiting and cock fighting and Christ knows what else; Fuck it, I'm away to bed, out of which I will probably fall, raving.
I don't think that you are wrong, Mr Ishmael, but it is about intent. There is nothing wrong with tucking into a big steak hacked from a dead moo cow but there is everything wrong with kicking the animal into its slaughter pen.
I didn't think you thought that I though you thought I was wrong. I enjoyed meat for the longest time but then it just started to choke me, blood and flesh, in my mouth, but that's just me, too sensitive or getting soft. The cruelty, by intent or default, or worse, as part of some mad, religious stricture, is something else, though, as you say.
It was more of a general concern at how easily most, myself included, could be riled up by the willfully cruel treatment of animals but I'll be staying away from curries all the same.
I was going to suggest an alternative fate for the halal tough guy but the most fitting end which came to mind would've likely attracted a cyber-fatwa.
Recently went veggie for ethical reasons, have lost 10lbs in under a month. Chips'n'beans, plus the occasional Gyppo curry - half mushy peas, half beans, good curry powder, onions and mushrooms. Wife kicks up, but no animals were harmed in the making of the farting.
-richard
It's been a while, now, since I changed. I had a blood test, recently, to check my iron levels and everything was OK but I do eat dark green leaves by the handful - kale, cabbage, bunches and bunches of watercress; lots of leeks, celery, parsley, onions, garlic and I do have some of those quorn products. If I lived where you do, mr richard, I would be eating dulce every day, without fail. I've tried drying the seaweed from my shore but it's not the same as the stuff they used to dry on the hedges at Donaghadee. Maybe someone supplies it mail order.
I like dulse and have collected some at Ballantoy up the Antrim coast. Our local greengrocer has it, top notch, in the summer. He gets annoyed if you ask for "dillisk" - I suspect the Plantation of Ulster.
-richard
What's his name, please, mr richard, I will call him, see if he'll post me some.
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