Not being sidetracked by particulars

The recent (Wednesday, January 27, 2010) death of 26-year-old Kansan Daniel Shaull in Portland, Oregon, who set himself afire downtown outside a fur store to protest the wanton and callous cruelty of the fur industry and of those who buy from fur stores and who engage in supporting the fur industry, has promoted much discussion on the Internet.

Man Sets Himself on Fire at Portland Fur Store

A man set himself on fire Wednesday outside Ungar Furs in Portland, Oregon. After dousing himself with gasoline, he attempted to enter the store, shouting “There are animals dying! Animals dying!” After police extinguished the flames, he was taken to Legacy Emanuel Hospital where he later died. The man was identified as 26-year-old Daniel Shaull from Kansas. Among the local activists I have spoken to, none are familiar with Shaull by name, nor recognized him as being a part of the active, long-running campaign against Ungar Furs. Yet the location and witness reports strongly indicate this man sacrificed himself to bring attention to the horrific treatment of animals on fur farms…..

http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/man-sets-himself-on-fire-at-portland-fur-store/

2. The Defendants have literally gotten away with murder…

The courts are no friend to underdogs. They are ostensibly objective, but ultimately, they exist to protect the “rights” of the rich and powerful to bully the rest of the world, including the poor, minorities, immigrants, the working class, and, last but not least, nonhuman sentients and those who fight for them. Grand juries, which are often witch hunts and sometimes violate their victims’ Constitutional rights by imprisoning them indefinitely without charging them with a crime, and stalking orders, which are becoming frequently employed tools of judicial over-reach and creative law enforcement, are the repressive measures of choice that the corporate-state is using to attempt to intimidate and shut-down legal, above-ground animal rights activists….
http://gahc.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/the-defendants-have-literally-gotten-away-with-murder/

http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/man-sets-himself-on-fire-at-portland-fur-store/

Nuancing this sacrifice correctly is going to be a challenge to the AR movement, particularly activists in Portland because, even though Daniel may have wanted to the horrible things being done to animals (albeit rodents, we're often reminded), the attention has been on the burning of oneself.

Ethicists always focus; we focus on the (statistically-frequent) cruel interface between humans and nonhumans for whom some uses, often trivial and indefensible uses, have been invented.

We abolitionists don't separate defensible and indefensible human uses of others against their willful consent; many consequentialists do such a conceptual distinction.

Daniel, who may have said to others that he was going to 'do something' that day and had previously expressed that the (social) world is not as it should be (he has the world's religions and ethical philosophies backing him up there), still seems to have decided and acted on his own (and even his father commented in one interview that his son had never presented himself to his family as being an animal rights activist, though he had presented himself as being troubled about the state of the (social) "world" around us that was filled with so much wanton cruelty.

Whatever solutions we offer need to be adopted as sustainable solutions (such as abandoning ALL animal wearing - I suggest for items other than shoes, though we know quite easily that we can do without leather shoes) and recognizing the personhood of nonhumans - rather, acknowledging that what makes each of us humans persons is something that is not unique to us - individual corporeality, complex nervous systems that coordinate as individual self-aware selves capable of complex outlooks on the world and complex emotions regarding other persons, including persons of other species (demonstrated, WE think and many others think, too) in nonhumans widely.

However, the attention has been reassigned to Daniel's mental status, a mental status that IMHO remains fully capable of recognizing when something is dreadfully wrong with how one class of humans (from whom we expect moral accountability) treats another class of beings (who are structurally marginalized by the society of the dominant species).

This needs the kind of attention that will NOT marginalize or dismiss the atrocity of their even BEING industries of animal exploitation and abuse and will NOT let the definition of the situation drawn tightly around one individual's presumed mental status (a designation made by a relative, not a mental health professional).

"I'm not a big fan of self-sacrifice" in any way, and I've commented often in public spaces to that effect, but some desperation is triggered when society's moral condition reaches such overt depths of depravity that we wear bodies of tortured animals as symbols of status and glamor and pride.

The longstanding issue is NOT the mental status of Daniel Shaull; it's (a) the grave injustice of animal exploitation and abuse AND (b) the moral depravity of a species who, beyond all consequentialist calculations, continues to abuse where there IS no defensible rationale.

This is the year 2010.  Are YOU still eating and wearing dead animals?  [If so, grunt !]  It's time for a profound change in our understanding of our moral relationships with self-aware persons of all kinds, not merely symbolic readjustments or the same-old same-old dismissive marginalizations.

 

Crossposted from http://maynardclark.spaces.live.com

Dr. Leon Eisenberg, Pioneer in Autism Studies, Dies at 87

Dr. Leon Eisenberg, who conducted some of the first rigorous studies of autism, attention deficit disorder and learning delays and became a prominent advocate for children struggling with disabilities, died on Sept. 15 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 87.

Dr. Leon Eisenberg

The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Dr. Carola Eisenberg.

The field of child psychiatry was dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis when, in the late 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Eisenberg began conducting medical studies of children with developmental problems. Working at Johns Hopkins University with Dr. Leo Kanner, who first described autistic behavior, Dr. Eisenberg completed the first detailed, long-term study of children with autism, demonstrating among other things that language problems predicted its severity.

In a similar study among children who were developing normally, Dr. Eisenberg showed that reading difficulties early in school predicted behavior problems later on.

In the 1960s, he performed the first scientific drug trials in child psychiatry, testing stimulants like Dexedrine and Ritalin to soothe the behavior of children identified as “delinquent” or “hyperkinetic.” These studies, which became the basis for drug treatment of what is now called attention deficit disorder, ran counter to psychoanalytic theories on the most effective treatments.

“Leon took a very courageous stand and denounced the way psychiatry treated children, this whole system in which we had a few rich kids and their parents getting psychoanalysis five days a week and still not being cured,” said C. Keith Conners, a professor emeritus in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “No one even knew what a cure looked like. He had this conviction that nothing was being done for the bulk of children who needed help, and that we had very little scientific data to guide us.”

Dr. James Harris, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Johns Hopkins University, said that Dr. Eisenberg was “the pivotal person in 20th-century child psychiatry who moved the field from simple descriptions of childhood disorders to actually looking at the science behind both the diagnosis and treatment.”

Leon Eisenberg was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 8, 1922, the eldest child of immigrants from Russia. He earned his undergraduate degree and, in 1946, his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, before taking an internship at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where he developed an interest in psychiatry. He completed his psychiatric residency at Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Md.

After two years in the Army teaching physiology (Carey incorrectly said psychology), in 1952 he began a residency at Johns Hopkins and his collaboration with Dr. Kanner. In 1967, he took over as chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he continued to publish and, among many other projects, helped formulate and carry out affirmative action policies at Harvard Medical School.

In 1980, he established the medical school’s department of social medicine, with the aim of applying the tools of social science to improving access to and practice of medicine worldwide.

In addition to his wife, a co-founder of Physicians for Human Rights, Dr. Eisenberg is survived by two children from a previous marriage, Kathy and Mark Eisenberg; two stepchildren, Alan and Larry Guttmacher; two sisters, Essie Ellis and Libby Wickler; and six grandchildren.

For two days last week, Harvard lowered its flags to half-staff in honor of Dr. Eisenberg.

In his later years, Dr. Eisenberg became increasingly alarmed at trends in the field he helped establish, criticizing what he saw as a cozy relationships between drug makers and doctors and the expanding popularity of the attention deficit diagnosis.

The diagnosis “has morphed from a relative uncommon condition 40 years ago to one whose current prevalence is 8 percent,” he wrote. “Correspondingly, the prescription of stimulant drugs has gone up enormously. The reasons are not self-evident.”