Saturday, 21 July 2018

Morons of the Internet: Natalie Portman

This is the segment where I scour my favourite forums around the internet and find some particularly interesting articles about current affairs told in the words of my favourite human beings.

In this edition we return to our old friends at PETA, who as per usual are recruiting celebrities to try and indoctrinate people into their cult. I wonder what wonderful message PETA have got for us this time. What's that, we're directly comparing the slaughtering of animals to The Holocaust? Oh right, that's the sort of noble things I expect a charity should be doing.
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https://www.peta.org/features/video-natalie-portman-ode-to-isaac-bashevis-singer/
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In case I haven't made it clear yet, PETA isn't exactly my favourite organisation in the world, but I do like Natalie Portman. Not only would I like to sleep with her, which is a privilege any woman on Earth can relate to, but I've also enjoyed her performances over the years in films such as Leon and Black Swan. She's also something of an animal rights activist, and although I'm sure her heart is in the right place, she unfortunately sides with disgusting organisations like PETA. I've written at length about the scummy practices of PETA on this very blog, so I won't bore you with the details and instead focus on what idiotic actions they've settled on this time.

The video presented in this article shares opinions from a literary writer named Isaac Bashevis Singer, who in traditional PETA fashion is about as knowledgeable on animal rights as a cow heading to the slaughterhouse. He's presented as this hero of the masses, who challenged everything from women's rights to animal rights. A quick research returned nothing significant on whether this liberal campaigning is actually a reflection of the man, and there is a noticeable absence of anything relating to his campaigning over women's issues. If we're to believe PETA and Natalie Portman that these issues were a huge part of his life, surely these activities would be repeatedly mentioned across the web. However, I'm sure we can trust PETA as literary connoisseurs to know what they're talking about, and certainly not manipulating the works of Singer to blow smoke up their own assess. PETA continues to show why humility isn't a term they understand by claiming Singer was a predecessor to them pushing animal rights issues into the mainstream. I honestly can't imagine having my head so far up my own ass and claiming that my own charity revolutionised this whole animal rights debate when it's been raging for fucking centuries before PETA even existed, and is even persistent in religious practices thousands of years old. I'm struggling to think what PETA has actually done apart from repeatedly behaving like absolute cretins. Once again we have PETA simply massaging their own ego instead of actually acting in a beneficial way towards animals.

 Just because you've promoted farcical events like this into the mainstream doesn't give you an excuse to pat yourself on the back in the most arrogant way possible.

PETA behaving like idiots is nothing new, but here they've decided to attack meat eaters by comparing slaughterhouses to Nazi death camps. Merely comparing meat producing animals to the millions of Jews slaughtered by the Nazis is astonishingly ignorant. I'm amazed that as a woman from Jewish heritage Portman is able to throw this huge generalisation into such a serious argument without any care in the world. This is the story of your relatives being persecuted, yet here you are using it without a care to massage the ego of a bigoted charity. Not only does this argument create a reductionist view of animal welfare, but it also succeeds in trivialising the horrors that Jewish people have witnessed in the last century. Clearly anyone with a brain can see these are two completely separate issues that shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as each other. If you wish to make a point about the treatment that slaughtered animals go through then that's fine, but don't you fucking dare start comparing this system to the attempted extermination of a whole population for mere shock value. Unfortunately this isn't the first time PETA has pulled a senseless act like this one, and in fact they've quite rightly been banned from showing pictures of The Holocaust in Germany. Why the fuck you would ever consider shoving national tragedies into the faces of citizens in order to promote your cause is beyond me. It's just further evidence that PETA is an organisation run by scumbags.

What is abundantly clear is that neither Singer nor Portman are biologists, or have any background knowledge of global agricultural systems. To compare the suffering of animals to humans just simply isn't possible, so making rash generalisations only fuel shock value to a manipulative argument. What's even crazier is the idea that eating meat makes you a Nazi by proxy. It's all very well Portman and Singer proclaiming that slaughtering is at odds with human society, but for a significant number of people worldwide who live in abject poverty, this isn't a choice they can make. Does that make these people less human merely because they aren't able to make the dietary choices that these privileged individuals do? I find his reasoning contradicts PETA as well. Singer claims that if slaughtering persists there can be no liberty or harmony, yet PETA are more than happy to euthanise their own animals in large numbers, so why not compare them to Nazis? This idea also contradicts the words of Natalie Portman, who in a video linked by this very article claimed that all humans are free irrespective of their diet. It's almost as if she has no fucking clue what she's going on about.

Portman makes such shit arguments. The idea that we should all radically change our lifestyle because some writer who knows fuck all about animals has compared the suffering of Jews to the suffering of animals is ludicrous. You can't just worship the ground someone walks upon and encourage others to emulate their thoughts because you agree with them. In truth you could just as easily encourage people to follow animal rights campaigner Adolf Hitler. He wrote at length about the similarities between Jews and animals, so I look forward to Natalie Portman making a propaganda piece on him. It gets even more confusing when the PETA article starts instructing people to take inspiration from Natalie Portman, who as far as I'm concerned has merely talked about some writer in front of a camera. Does that now count as inspirational? I could just as easily film a piece where I praise Rudyard Kipling's imperialistic interpretation of the natural world, and then claim people should be inspired by me to start burning vast swathes of rainforest for human settlement. It's all very well presenting an idea, but where PETA always seem to struggle is in actually making a formal argument without just becoming provocateurs.

Really this whole charade is just a cheap advertisement rather than a serious topic of discussion, so maybe you could argue that my reaction is somewhat over the top. However, I'm pissed off, and sick of hearing this outrageous comparison that succeeds in nothing other than trivialising atrocities. It's clear in this piece that PETA have no compassion for victims of The Holocaust, they merely want to use victims as a bargaining chip for there provocative propaganda schemes. Just because they can use the untold suffering of millions as a comparison doesn't mean they should, and once again we're left with a shocking reminder of what these moronic campaigners will do for a bit of publicity.

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