Discontinuing Old Blog File

Dear good people,

As some of you know, I used to program my own blog from HTML, and kept those files up because some people linked to them, and because it offered a list of all my older posts. I am discontinuing that today. As you know, you can make a list of all posts by clicking on the triangles and making them all point down in the archive segment. And anyone linking to my blog should use the current version. 'Nuff said.

Happy trails,

David

My Appearance on AR Zone

Funny how AR Zone rhymes with "Francione," isn't it? That is, if you know the right way to pronounce "Francione": FRAN-SEE-OWN. Having something sound like "own" in his name is kind of cute too, since he overemphasizes property status so much in his theorizing. A Department Chair once pronounced his moniker so that it rhymed with macaroni. When I was invited to appear on AR Zone, I was leery because it was a known Francionist website. There are even pictures out there on the internet such as the following:

Pretty self-explanatory, I suppose. So I was cautious about being ambushed by a bunch of Francionists, naturally. That's what happened when I dipped into ARCO, as I describe in my blog entry of Nov. 21, 2007, when I was verbally assaulted by Francionists. However, as the date of my "chat" session on AR Zone approached, it became clear to me that one of the main organizers, Carolyn Bailey, is thoroughly civilized and would not permit such attacks. They really only happened from one person, Professor Roger Yates, who is also an admin. person on AR Zone. More on that later.

Apparently Francione himself, who appeared in a chat on the AR Zone early on, typically tried to control the situation with that site. He objected to Bruce Friedrich of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) appearing as a chat guest. The Zone organizers let Francione sulk, however, and had Friedrich on anyway. Francione also issued directives to his followers regarding my chat. He instructed them not to participate. As for Roger Yates, Francione made him pay the price of excommunication, not talking to him for the rest of his life, because he referred to me as an animal rights person and was apparently one of the chief driving forces of my appearing in the Zone's chat room. I feel a teeny bit bad that Yates, a Francionist, was cut off from Francione himself since he valued the connection. But I was only the occasion, not the cause. Francione himself is responsible for his tantrums.

When it was posted on the chat site that Francione "instructed" people not to participate in a dialogue with me, I put in: "Well I would not mind if he 'descended' to join us, and anyway his followers are cordially invited to participate. But if Francione has discouraged that, well then I suppose it is a question of obedience." Or something very near to that. Actually, apart from Yates' exemplary rudeness, the whole thing felt like a conference with friendlies. They did honour to themselves with the way they conducted themselves. Yates got away with his behaviour since he is an admin. person who himself kicks people off, and I guess there is also the status thing: he is a professor of sociology somewhere.

Anyway, instead of the chat lasting for the set minimum and normal period of an hour, it took about four hours and twenty minutes by my reckoning! More than half a work day. Wow! And we spent half an hour saying good-byes, it seemed, even after all of that and it being late at night in my time zone (I go to bed relatively early). Eventually, after many hints that I had enough, I had to put in: "Signing off. Best, David." These people were SO nice, apart from Yates. We disagree on a lot of things for the most part but we agree to be civilized. They were more than that. Apart from Yates, they were very patient with me. Since a large bulk of the questions were about issues related to anti-cruelty legislation, I wrote a report summarizing my view of the state of that debate. Posting that took a very long time, and a long length of transcript. I was OK with it because it allowed sophisticated answers to sincere questions. But I am unendingly thankful to all involved for their patience with that: me posting little 250 word blocks of my report for a long time there, and a fair number of pages too. What a great bunch of AR folk! I love being able to say that, after all of the conflict I have had with Francionists over the years. To a significant degree, we really have common cause.

If you want to check out a transcript of the chat, please click on the following: CHAT

I learned from this exchange of ideas too. One important thing is that Francione has abandoned the part of Rain without Thunder in which he recommends incremental reforms for animals in which the law (impossibly, as I've made clear many times) protects 100% of an animal's interest. From what I have heard, too, his opposition to single-issue campaigns (imagine actually FOCUSSING on something to get something done!) might also exclude campaigns to outlaw animal circus acts for example. It is hard to imagine anything more retrogressive, but I will put out an assessment of this change to even more inflexibility in a later post.

I also posted new stuff from my own thinking: many criteria for animal law pertaining to ethics and also effectiveness. I'd like to fill out this thinking in the form of a book one day. But my wife's stained glass image of a snail that I use as part of my self-portrait on my Facebook page is just about symbolic of how the rate of my progress feels at times!

Brandon Becker, ever thoughtful, also asked me to elaborate on my idea that it is OK to use "animals" to refer to "nonhuman animals" without necessarily being speciesist as Joan Dunayer contends (and certainly without being stylistically tedious, as my mother-in-law points out!). I originally commented on this on my blog entry for August 12, 2008, one of the sources of Brandon's question. Another source, of course, was Dunayer's work.

I wish I could just praise everyone in the chat, but Yates disallowed that option. Still, he was in the minority, and he did not at all besmirch the shining example set by the rest of the Zone people. For that and the opportunity to dialogue, I sincerely thank them.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang

Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Tip for Choosing Blog Entries to Read

In my ignorance, I hesitated to switch to blogger software, instead making a home-made blog out of HTML programming, because my old one listed all the articles. But I have just taught myself that you can do the same in this present format. All you have to do is go to the side-bar on the right, and click on every arrow pointing to the right, so they all point down, and THERE you have your complete list! I guess I was timid about doing this before and would click and unclick for some weird reason. But go for it if that is of interest to you! Hope you're having a fine day. Cheers, David

"But wait, I'm an abolitionist too!"

I have already commented elsewhere on how it is philosophically and grammatically nonsensical for Gary Francione and the Francionists to deny that people such as me are abolitionists. My philosophy aims for the abolition of speciesism, animals as property or slaves. Philosophically, anyone who aims for abolition is an abolitionist. Grammatically, it is unintelligible because the same rule holds for accurate grammarians. On dictionary.com the definition of the suffix "-ist" is as follows:

a suffix of nouns, often corresponding to verbs ending in -ize or nouns ending in -ism, that denote a person who practices or is concerned with something, or holds certain principles, doctrines, etc.: apologist; dramatist; machinist; novelist; realist; socialist; Thomist.

Now we are dealing with abolitionism. Abolitionist in my case and those who are likeminded denotes being concerned with something, and indeed adhering to a principle, namely abolition, making the -ist label not only permissible but grammatically inevitable.

I would like to point out on this occasion a standard fallacy which has not been noted before in relation to this question. It is the fallacy of persuasive definition. What this refers to is an illogical move to define a term in such a way as to try to persuade someone of a conclusion. An example would be defining abortion as the murder of the unborn. Built into that definition is the idea that abortion is morally wrong, since murder means wrongful killing. Well, the case is no different with Francione exclusively trying to herd all the abolitionists of the world into his arms, like a kid trying to shoo out other kids from his sandbox. A typical animal rights person might say, "I support the abolition of the property status of animals, so I am an abolitionist. So I must agree with the abolitionists then." If the illogical definition or elitist restriction is accepted, then this charletan move will tend to funnel people into the Francionist camp. Well, I am an abolitionist with respect to this outright abuse of the term "abolition" and its grammatical variants.

FURTHER READING ON ANIMAL RIGHTS INCREMENTALISM

A Selection of Related Articles

Sztybel, David. "Animal Rights Law: Fundamentalism versus Pragmatism". Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5 (1) (2007): 1-37.

go there

Short version of "Animal Rights Law".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Incrementalist Animal Law: Welcome to the Real World".

go there

Sztybel, David. "Sztybelian Pragmatism versus Francionist Pseudo-Pragmatism".

go there

A Selection of Related Blog Entries

Anti-Cruelty Laws and Non-Violent Approximation

Use Not Treatment: Francione’s Cracked Nutshell

Francione Flees Debate with Me Again, Runs into the “Animal Jury”

The False Dilemma: Veganizing versus Legalizing

Veganism as a Baseline for Animal Rights: Two Different Senses

Francione's Three Feeble Critiques of My Views

Startling Decline in Meat Consumption Proves Francionists Are Wrong Once Again!

The Greatness of the Great Ape Project under Attack!

Francione Totally Misinterprets Singer

Francione's Animal Rights Theory

Francione on Unnecessary Suffering

My Appearance on AR Zone

D-Day for Francionists

Sztybel versus Francione on Animals' Property Status

The Red Carpet

Playing into the Hands of Animal Exploiters

The Abolitionist ApproachES

Francione's Mighty Boomerang

Dr. David Sztybel Home Page

Dreaming of Picking Up My Tortoise Pace

Every author dreams of the freedom to write. It must have been hard for many creators to die in poverty and obscurity, such as Oscar Wilde. On the other hand, J. K. Rowling is an amazing story. She was a so-called “welfare mom," but through successful writing, is now one of the world’s wealthiest people, with not only the freedom to write, but the liberty to help oversee her written vision’s translation into the big screen. However, what if you do academic writing as I generally do? It is known that academic writing does not earn its authors significant amounts of remuneration. Therefore it does not, by itself, sustain its authors.

So academic writers depend on getting jobs as professors, and that gives them the freedom to write. Or they are independently wealthy. Or, like me, they come from the weird ranks of working-class scholars and write in their spare time.

Most of the time I now work as a substitute teacher in public schools, minding other peoples’ classes. I thought I'd get some classes of my own. I achieved an A+ in every course at University of Toronto teacher's college, except one course, English, in which I scored "A." It is a top-flight teacher's college in Canada which is characterized as demanding. I had stellar write-ups for practice-teaching. I got a resume expert at my school to help me and by all accounts my application materials are really excellent.

But I found the hard way that public schools generally do not want to hire people with doctorates for full-time teaching. (It is a miracle, I see now, that I obtained this substitute-teaching post, which pays well below the poverty line.) They have to pay you more (except for substitute teaching!), assume you will take off for better job prospects, are "overqualified," or they just do not want to "risk" being alongside a colleague with a Ph.D. for peculiar psychological reasons. If you excel at education to the point of being a person of achievement post-doctorate, the public education system punishes you for it. I kept my doctorate on my resume in keeping with the advice of an "expert" who came to talk to us just before we graduated from teacher's college, who was also happy to sell us his book of advice, and credibly claims to have sorted through thousands of resumes in his time. He said the Ph.D. would be a boost. But meeting another academic doctor, years later, on the substitute teaching beat confirmed my suspicions. He also faced systematic discrimination.

It must have been nice for Renaissance creators such as Da Vinci to have wealthy patrons. Or for Marx to have had Engels’ financial support. They had some fallouts but stayed strong in the end. Marx was no beggar. He gave Engels a great opportunity to contribute to progressive world culture and human history on an unimaginable scale. True, I would say that Marx lacked positive vision and was too given to violence, among other problems I note in my essay, "Animal Absolutes." But Marx also highlighted the problems of capitalism and its destructive side more than any other thinker, which is a great service to the world. Marx's rate of output was inestimably accelerated, and works appeared which would not have otherwise. How long would we have had to wait for the critique of capitalism without Engels? Indeed, Engels himself finished Capital after Marx died, working in daylight hours according to his fading eyesight. Being a co-author gave Engels a special kind of interest. Engels' money, for its part, was much better spent than on a new boat, summer house, decorative objects or the like, and would have given his life an expanded sense of meaning, significance, and purpose. His gift of wealth was used very well indeed. As Henry David Thoreau wrote: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

There is also the case of Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who coined the word and hence the discipline of sociology. He was dismissed from his teaching position and so had no means of income. But until his death he was sustained by subscriptions of supporters who thought his views were important.

If there were no bad judgment there would be no immoral acts, in my opinion. Forging a system of good judgment, that includes judging what is good, is therefore priceless in value. People who have capital arguably have a moral duty to use some of that for the greater good, although obviously there is a great deal of choice as to how to discharge that general obligation, and given these liberties amidst an overflow of things that urgently need addressing, no given cultural creator can point to any individual and claim a right to any kind of material support. The many needs of the world are burgeoning and flood our very consciousness.

To take an even more modern-day example, Bob Barker was the host of The Price Is Right, an absurd game show in which people would guess the price of consumer items—in real life an almost worthless skill—and win prizes. He nobly promotes animal ethics studies where he can, among other important animal rights initiatives. He has endowed law schools to have animal law courses, and granted a million dollars to Drury University, where he himself was educated, to fund animal ethics. Some peoples’ dreams to write (and teach) can come true. Be nice if we had a comparable initiative, or rather several such spear-headings, in my own country of Canada, as well as every other nation on the planet. 
There are no posts in animal ethics in Canada. I have a Ph.D. in animal ethics, true, but there were no undergraduate or graduate courses in the subject that I could take. The closest was having animals covered in a few undergraduate environmental ethics courses, the junior of which I took, and the senior of which I later taught. If there were posts in animal ethics, or even just courses in the subject, I know I’d have a respectable shot at undertaking such employment. I have still managed to teach 13 university courses, with students often ranking me excellent in every category on their course evaluations. But that is not enough to get you a post if they virtually do not exist in your field. Technically, my field is ethics. Since there were no animal ethics courses I got my full share of--you guessed it--ethics courses. But if you teach "animal ethics" you are branded.

It does not necessarily matter that no less august a personage than Professor Michael Allen Fox has proclaimed that my ethical theory of best caring is better than all other ethical theoretical views, better than those of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Singer, Rawls, and so on and on. I am also reputed as having constructed the strongest version of anti-animal rights by philosophers Fox, Evelyn B. Pluhar, and L. W. Sumner. I try to cover both sides. But if you do animal ethics, your application lands in recycling, as it did when I applied for a one-year teaching job at York University, Toronto, Canada. I did not even get an interview, although the people in that department probably never earned such praise for their own work and, no disrespect intended, likely never will. No good reason exists for this tossing of merit into the trash. I guess, then, there are only bad reasons such as wanting to eat one's steaks, strips of cow flesh, without being at least implicitly objected to by a colleague. Indeed, ironically, animal ethics people are better ETHICS scholars. Only oppression excludes animals from serious moral consideration, as I argue at length in my formal writings.

I knew when I signed up for my animal rights doctorate that I might not make it as an animal rights professor. There was nowhere to land with that parachute then, still is not now, and no assurance that there will be such a spot in the future. Canada is a bust for professorships in animal ethics to date. Yet I have a son and cannot and totally do not wish to desert him to go to the United States or elsewhere. Honestly I have never regretted taking the animal rights Ph.D. I think it has been good for the animals, and that is the main reason for following through and keeping on with my animal rights scholarly writing. There are different kinds of success. Having social status in one's job and financial reward is one kind, but in my mind takes rank far, far behind being a good person. I would also rather be a success in winning the affection of loved ones and friends than a cold-hearted individual with oodles of cash. And I would much rather being a pauper-scholar with something to say than the common run of professor who fills professional journals with items of little moment, to say nothing of the many papers that do not even make it that far. It is even better to be an academic exile with views that are much harder to knock than is supposed by many who rush in where angels fear to tread than to be any professor whose views may be noteworthy, but are really theories demonstrably premised upon errors and illusions, lack of evidence, and logical fallacies. My life is not full of moula, but I feel that it is full of meaning. And that makes me happy.

In a capitalist society, good things like writing meaningful books only happen if they either make money or are given money or other resources to be sustained. Or if one is underemployed and otherwise looks to available times in one's life. Thankfully, writing is not an expensive profession to carry out, once you have the equipment. The time to write is the most expensive. On a different and more general note, bad things commonly happen because good things are more expensive, and a growing majority of the world cannot afford good things. Indeed, the better part of a billion people (800 million at the last count I heard) are literally starving.  I can’t complain, although I can comment on how things stand. I don’t want to be greedy, or unappreciative of the good things that life kindly affords me.

I don't feel alone regardless. I know a lot of people are with me in spirit. I feel like I am part of the family of humanity in its highest aspect in aiming to address increasingly urgent human-animal, environmental, and social catastrophes in the best possible way. Many of these are comparable to the Holocaust, which will always haunt my family tree. But the tree of life, our shared heritage, is greater than any single family tree.

Really in this post I am partly reflecting on patronage of the arts, and also fantasizing about having a patron of my own work. It is not asking for assistance. I have no right to ask any individual for such support. Is my fantasy immoral? Some might think so. Why? Do I have an exaggerated sense of the importance of my work? Given the history of ideas and logical errors, that is probable, even if I can't see it. Am I vain? False modesty should never prevent one from doing an important job that one is uniquely qualfied to do. All false modesty aside, I think that Fox is right about my work, on strictly logical grounds, and so long as I think my work is significant for teaching, learning and even legislation, then I have a duty to promote it even if I am mistaken in some way I do not yet understand. I have found objectors to my work to misunderstand it more than anything else. Is my fantasy selfish? I do not need to tell myself what my views are. I know what I think. I work hard at this literary and intellectual advocacy for animals, human and other. Most scholars in my position would have given up long ago. The work is also satisfying to me, but that is by the by. Is it immoral to dream of sources of income that are unconventional or noninstitutional? The capitalist system has failed me. I think my work is usually dismissed or not considered due to speciesism as much as anything else. When institutions fail to support work such as mine through academic jobs and scholarships, I think it is acceptable for private individuals to step in, as in aiding the poor, assisting with education for liberation, and helping out starving artists as Theo helped his brother Vincent Van Gogh. Would it be wrong because there are those needy such as animals and the poor? In that case scholarships would be immoral too. I advocate helping the needy too, and since my work has been found persuasive, it may play some role in sparing the vulnerable from suffering and death by seeking to address the root of such problems. Should I work all the day like everyone else for employers who pay for labour? I am not thinking about anything different, really. A patron would only allow me to work more effectively. I do not think the capitalist market determines which works are worth supporting through attempts to "sell" them. Should I not write about my fantasy because it might offend some people? My comparison of animal treatment to the Holocaust offended some people too. I think people should do what is right even if that offends some people, although upsetting people should be minimized so long as one does what one thinks is right. But I am just day-dreaming anyway. The kind of dream that does not come true, by all normal expectations. Am I immoral for this thinking "aloud"? Then I apologize. Perhaps I am obtuse for not seeing the wrong.

I can at idle moments dream that if I won a lottery (not that I play them), I would work full-time at the financially unrewarding enterprise of academic writing. Or if I could work for some appropriate institution or whatever or whomever, even for just enough to get by, I would work full-time trying to write significant books on animal ethics, human issues in ethics, environmental ethics, liberation movement strategies for legal reform, socialism, the theory of knowledge, and much more. But wait. I am already trying to get these done, at the best pace I can manage, with the freedom to write that I do have and value, plodding along inside my tortoise-shell of the substitute-teacher. The latter profession is not entirely a waste of my abilities. I am doing fine as an author anyway. As I say, I cannot rightly complain. I sometimes hope though of going from fine to better. Rightly or wrongly, I feel a responsibility to write. It is no mere fantasy that I spin. Yet my life does not afford too many idle moments. So, right ho! Now it's back to the real world for me…

VEGAN-MAKER: let's get it out there!

Hi good folks,

There have been record hits on my website with the publication of the cookbook, and what I have now entitled VEGAN-MAKER. That is, a list of clickable films covering many areas of animal exploitation. I think the animal rights movement should get this list out there as it has a lot of potential to sway people to our cause.  Enough said.

Best wishes,

David

VEGAN (TR)EATS! recipe book

Cassandra, my wife, and I do not know anyone who eats better than we do! We want to show animal-product-consumers that there is another way. Often people need some guidance. Who knows, fellow vegetarians might find something of interest here as well. This recipe book covers some basics and also offers a handy assortments of tasty treats. ENJOY!