Update Day: Pets

UPDATE!!: Wherein I direct you to Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Excellent in large part because it manages to remain levelheaded in that New Yorker sort of way, which as I mentioned previously is not something that people writing or speaking either on the subjects of pets or vegetarianism manage to do very often.

For example, she manages to succinctly sum up the crux of the problem when she writes:

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” Unlike Foer’s two previous books, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” his latest is nonfiction. The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,” Foer writes.

Like I said in my fairly recent post on the subject, while there are certain ethical issues at stake in my view towards animals, it is more interesting for me to think how 'we' and various other cultures imagine humans relation to (various kinds of) animals or more generally how 'humaness' and 'animality' is variously constructed and understood. The fact that most people I know and meet alternatively fawn over their pets and dismiss or even mock any sympathetic sentiment for any other kind of animal is thus interesting to consider, though only facilitates the most defensive kind of intellectual engagement on the topic of animals, if that. Which is ok, because I get the feeling that most people would rather not be so engaged.

Update Day: the unintelligible crisis update

UPDATE!!: The economy still sucks. Last week's employment numbers made me more anxious about a right wing populist resurgence than I had been in, well, little over a year. My previous posts on economic topics suggested that the initial decisions to save the economy (in Warren Buffett's analogy, the patient on the table) were not ideologically neutral, but in fact shaped considerably by political and ideological concerns. Turns out the most pragmatic and effective option would have been to pass through a much bigger stimulus, and a policy towards banks (nationalization, for example) that actually increased lending, stopped foreclosures, and discouraged risky activity (perhaps by forcibly modifying executive compensation schemes), and dealt with the 'too big to fail' dynamic that necessitated the bailouts in the first place. Of course none of this happened, evidently because the advice of many leading economists including former IMF chiefs was too left wing and anti-capitalist for a newly elected, supposedly progressive president with a strong democratic majority and a mandate to reimagine this country's economic structures. We'll see if the upcoming financial regulation bills do something close to this.

The one thing that hasn't changed between my initial post and now is that I still don't have a degree in economics. I'm just another libtard that agrees with everything Paul Krugman writes. That being said, I'd rather side with him than the technocratic, Goldman-Sachs "pragmatists" currently in office. For them, I'll direct you to another of my previous posts in saying that all of them must go.