Two years ago, I explained to you why Sheryl Sandberg was more important than everybody who actually died on Asiana Flight 214. Today, we’re going to do some more of that painfully uncomfortable moral calculus, that depressing measurement of “small souls”. We’re going to do it because it is painful, because it is depressing, because it is the right thing to do in the eyes of God and Man.
I’m going to explain to you why black lives don’t matter. Or, more specifically, why black lives don’t matter as much as a few other things.
Do you know who “Cecil The Lion” was? Here’s a precis of the situation if you don’t: An American dentist shot and killed a lion, supposedly after luring him off a protected reservation. The lion turned out to be a “famous” lion with a tracking collar and a name. In the weeks since it happened, the dentist has received the usual death-by-social-justice, with “SJWs” doing everything from vandalizing his Facebook page to researching various civil-courts cases to which he’s been a party. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed an online petition demanding that the dentist be extradited to Zimbabwe. A rumor was spread that the lion’s “brother” was also killed, said rumor turning out to be false.
In the wake of the outrage, most major US airlines declared they would no longer permit their customers to transport game trophies of any kind on their airplanes.
“#CecilTheLion” has been a major trending topic on Facebook and Twitter and the killing of the lion has raised worldwide attention. In Cecil’s home nation of Zimbabwe, however, people don’t seem to care about the lion’s death nearly as much as they do in the United States. Instead, Zimbabweans want to know why Americans have given an implicit stamp of approval to “pressing issues including a failing economy, a repressive regime that has been abducting its opponents, stifling the press and arresting activists”.
More hilariously, Zimbabweans seem to feel that Americans prefer lions to Africans:
“Why are the Americans more concerned than us?” said Joseph Mabuwa, a 33-year-old father-of-two cleaning his car in the center of the capital. “We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange.”
Tell me that quote didn’t make you laugh, or at least smile, a little. Of course Americans don’t give a shit when lions kill Africans. We are socialized from birth in this country to hold animals as equal to or superior to people. We watch ten years’ worth of talking-animals cartoons as children then the Internet drowns us in a sea of LOLcats and baby-animal pictures. Africans, on the other hand, rarely enter into the childhood-media equation. Furthermore, Zimbabwe is an active embarrassment to American progressives. When it was Rhodesia, it was the jewel of Africa. When white rule fell after years of Soviet fifth-column antics and outside agitation by European countries trying to atone for the sin of colonization by using the same ruinous power they’d used against black Africans on white Africans, the world cheered to see black Africans finally granted control of their destinies.
“Peace has come to Zimbabwe/Third World’s right on the one,” Stevie Wonder sang in 1980, conveniently forgetting (or perhaps never knowing) that the three-way war in Rhodesia was financed and supported by the Eastern Bloc for the purpose of eventually obtaining access to Zimbabwean resources. The strongman who took control of the country, Robert Mugabe, has been an utter nightmare for decades. After killing or displacing every white farmer in the country, a policy that turned Zimbabwe from “the breadbasket of Africa” to a recipient of foreign food aid and cost the impoverished country over twelve billion dollars, Mugabe is now talking about inviting the farmers to return. Were I a white Rhodesian, I’d think long and hard before going back.
The lesson of the Zimbabwean famine — that white Africans are people too — has been too hard for Western progressives to swallow. The descent into hell experienced by South Africans of all colors under the administration of the African National Congress has been equally embarrassing. So our media has decided to deal with the problem by ignoring it. Which means that Americans never hear about conditions in Africa, particularly not in the continent’s southern half. Out of sight, out of mind.
Which leads me back to the idea of “small souls” as previously discussed a few times on this website. The souls of black Africans feel very small to us indeed. We know nothing about them. If we have an image of a black Zimbabwean, it’s probably something out of a Disney movie or District 9 or The Economist. I’d bet a thousand bucks that if I asked the next fifty people I met to show me Zimbabwe on a map, they would point vaguely to West Africa. Nor do many Americans have any positive personal experiences with Africans in this country. I’m an exception; my day job keeps me in close contact with some pretty brilliant African immigrants. But unless you live in New York, chances are you don’t know very many people who were born in Africa. It doesn’t help matters that some of the African migrant communities in this country have organized human trafficking and slavery rings with the same kind of vicious enthusiasm their ancestors showed five hundred years ago during the era of the Triangle Trade.
It is as natural and normal for Americans raised in our media culture to value lions over people, the same way we value kittens over baby groundhogs. But there’s also a kind of cruel calculation going on, something like this: There are fewer than 20,000 lions in the world, but the supply of Africans appears to be nearly infinite. Nearly three-quarters of a million Africans shit themselves to death in 2012 and the world was in no way inconvenienced by this fact. The population of human beings in Africa reached one billion in 2009, having doubled in 27 years. It’s now 1.15 billion. To put this in perspective a bit, that means that Africa is adding people at a daily rate of 70,000.
The atomic bomb at Nagasaki killed fewer than 80,000 people.
So lions are far rarer than African humans and we’ve been taught since childhood that lions are extremely valuable. No wonder, then, that the death of one lion hits us harder than the deaths of 644,000 faceless Africans in a year from diarrhea. But the moral problem of this
African Lions > African People
value judgement is trickier than this. African People do not value the lives of African Lions, not as a rule. When an African Lion kills an African Person, the usual response of African People is to kill the African Lion. But this does not sit well with American People. Even though the American People will never see or interact with the African Lion that killed African People, it is critical for the peace of mind of American People that as many African Lions as possible be preserved. So the actual equation is:
(the peace of mind American People have from knowing African Lions are being “conserved”) > (the actual lives of African People)
We, as a society, are willing to let Africans die so our museums have an easier time sourcing lions. It’s just another one of those value judgments:
(Ted Kennedy’s career) > (justice for the family of the woman he let die)
(Woody Allen’s next movie) > (preventing Woody Allen from molesting children)
(The pleasure of watching Kobe Bryant play basketball on TV) > (America’s laws on rape)
(Facebook’s revenue stream) > (Your privacy)
The difference in this case is that it is a deeply racist judgment, to value lions over #BlackLives. So how does the Twitter SJW posse justify it? Your guess is as good as mine. I think it’s because on the face of it, the argument looks like
(Lion) > (cisgender white medical professional with $50,000-plus to waste)
without considering the fact that every penny the dentist spent to hunt the lion went into the pocket of an African. The dentist did a lot more to help African People than he did to hurt African Lions. And the African People were willing to go along with it, the same way American law enforcement professionals permitted a Saudi princess to beat a woman in front of them because said princess had taken the top two floors of the Westin Swan at Disney World. Money is power. Power is force. Force gets its way.
After a few moment’s consideration, I’ve decided to name the “hall pass” given by the Twitterati to Cecil-the-Lion-related-racism the “Foxconn exemption”. We all know that iPhones are made by Foxconn. We all know that working at Foxconn leads to suicide and depression and any number of terrible mental disorders. But you really want an iPhone, and those Chinese people jumping off the roof at Foxconn are, like, so far away. Hardly even people. So you just agree to not think about it.
This is the new morality. It’s feelings-based, not fact-based. It avoids tricky issues of moral calculus by simply declaring them irrelevant. If you don’t feel bad about Chinese workers, it doesn’t matter what happens. If you don’t feel bad about Africans, it doesn’t matter what happens. All that matter is what you feel. If you feel worse about the death of one lion than you do about 644,000 Africans, it’s okay. If you feel that gay people should be safe from harassment but you simultaneously feel that Gawker was right for doing a gay-bashing hit piece on Conde Nast’s CFO, you’re okay to feel that way.
The problem with feels-based morality is that it isn’t universal. It’s not transferable. You don’t feel bad when a gang of “teens” beats some old white guy? I don’t feel bad when an attractive woman with a great rack kills an animal (see top of article). You don’t feel bad that Americans in the Midwest have no jobs? I don’t feel bad that climate change will make your neighborhood just like Venice. Can you see why feels-based morality, rather than delivering the inclusive, diverse experience it promises, only heightens tension between differing groups?
The most charming thing is that modern young progressives think they invented Feelsville. They think that the natural human inclination was towards rigid order and unyielding law until the magic day when they were born. They think that civilization was self-assembling and that they alone have been given the gift of seeing farther than those around them. It does not help that every piece of juvenile literature on the shelves, from Divergent to The Maze Runner, reinforces the idea that some people are just extremely special and intrinsically know the right thing to do.
David Brin wrote The Postman as a reaction to what he perceived as the right-wing, rugged-individualist sci-fi of his time. The central idea of the book is that we’d miss the federal government if it disappeared. I don’t entirely disagree with him. But I would suggest that the Left in this country has made far more headway against conventional Ten-Commandments morality than the right has made against the existence of the federal government. And we will miss that morality when it’s done.
After all, who knows what the feels-sanctified “lions” of the future will be, and who knows when one might find one’s self thrown to them?
*slow clap*
I don’t care about Africa. I probably won’t ever care. But if I’m going to pretend to care… it’s about people and not an animal. This argument hits close to home for me as I work in a Chinese company. I have heard of 1 suicide and it really bothered me. But, like most things, I find a way to make it through. After all, I’m not responsible… right?
*makes phone call on iPhone that is also sold in Islamic countries where women are treated worse than dogs*
Great points that should be required reading for anyone churning out reaction editorials on websites such as gawker. That said, I’m really surprised that you seem to think this is partisan and not generational (and frankly, new media driven). I think that this type of selective moralizing was mainly indulged in during the height of political season by not too bright voters and cynical campaign advisors. Now it’s all day every day, and is used as a basic tool by opportunistic politicians and click bait political rags.
As to your gawker reference…I actually went over there to read that and was appalled to the point of genuine anger. I was somewhat reassured to see that even their reader base agreed and hijacked every subsequent comment thread to denounce the people and practice. It’s not all doom and gloom out there.
I’d like to also add that I have a number of friends that simply do not care about police abuse of black communities, with some even cheering for more. It stems from tribalism plain and simple. They have no minority friends outside of work and see themselves as totally outside the consequence chain. They all also know that this is indefensible in an actual argument and immediately back off when I (went to a black majority high school, lived in plenty of those neighborhoods) start dumping atrocious examples of situations I’ve encountered, that even they admit would have them reacting exactly the same way people in these communities have been.
That reaction? Not allowing the police to operate safely bc of a lack of trust. Go look up what happens when an arrest is made on 125th right now, a near riot with 15+ responding to make a simple handcuff, then literally speeding away afterwards. I just wish they would realize that places all of them right in the middle of the consequence chain sooner rather than later.
Damn Jack, I’ve been meaning to write my own nearly identical thoughts (minus a few middling personal quibbles) on this subject for quite some time now,. Thanks for this, as you’ve done a much more admirable job than I ever could.
‘This is the new morality. It’s feelings-based, not fact-based.’ Perfection! The saving grace is that fortunately the majority of the world still doesn’t live with the same coddled mindset, this new ‘morality’ will not stand the test of time as it built on papier mache and its champions couldn’t possibly miss a nap in order to man the barricades.
I hope others that read your blog are beginning to make the very short step to tie up ‘buying American’ that you advocate and the moral imperative inherent in that advice. As always, the moral choice reveals itself as the long-term practical solution. Morals aren’t just for After School Specials, their universal tension signal fundamental human mechanisms that have consequences far beyond any type of ‘choice’. And if we’re never able to ‘quantify’ them doesn’t make them any less fundamental to living a truly human life. An even simpler take away: dollar votes are worth a lot more than paper ballots at this point.
Zoos put down old male lions (and other “surplus” animals) all the time.”
Note, too, how the SJWs are going after the white American dentist, not his black African guides who, according to local laws, are the ones legally responsible.
To be pedantic, it wasn’t likely that the Somalis’ who traffic in slaves today’s ancestors were involved in the Atlantic slave trade , they’re from east Africa. Henry Gates says that more Africans went into slavery north and east i.e. to the Arab world, than west, so east Africans were more likely to sell other east Africans to Arabs. It was the west Africans that sold other west Africans that ended up in the New World. King Gezo of Dahomey (approx modern day Benin) wasn’t happy about the British navy putting an end to the Atlantic slave trade: “The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people… it has been the source of their glory & wealth”.
Also lost in the feels morality equation is that adult male lions don’t die peacefully of old age in the wild. It’s not something I would ever want to do, but regulated hunting of them won’t reduce the population overall, over time.
Now I want to find my Countdown to Extinction CD…
“The most charming thing is that modern young progressives think they invented Feelsville. They think that the natural human inclination was towards rigid order and unyielding law until the magic day when they were born.”
isn’t the “nothing important happened until I was born” thing true of young people in general? you even see it in car forums when some 20-something says “GM never did anything innovative” or “VW invented the direct-injection diesel.”
Absolutely, and young people always think they invented sex as well.
The right-wing equivalent to Feelsville is all the young people joining churches like Xenos that take a very strong hand in their followers’ lives.
Such a simplistic straw man argument.
African nations, no matter how corrupt, are still run by people and have the option of reform. It may be bloody and terrible, but then, such are most reforms.
But 100 years from now, THERE WILL STILL BE AFRICANS. Will there still be large cats? Will those that follow we lament the loss of biodiversity while we bickered amongst ourselves?
It’s not Agricans who are the small, powerless race here. It’s the soon to be extinct large mammals who literally have no choice in the matter while we debate *their* importance to existence.
I’m not going to disagree with anything you say. But I’ll ask you a question: How many human lives are you willing to spend to keep large cats around, whether those lives are lost to the animals themselves or to Africa’s inability to support a Western standard of living AND the biodiversity?
I would also suggest that we are the only species in history to even consider such a calculus — and Western whites in general are the only members of that species to voluntarily self-abnegate for universal principles or what the MRAs call “race-cucking”.
I wouldn’t sacrifice my son to save a lion. How, then, can I acquiesce to the death of someone else’s son?
I don’t think it’s allowing lions to exist that results in African deaths, there are far greater issues than a few big cats. Lions are no more dangerous than our own mt lions, grizzlies and polar bears, and we didn’t kill those animals back so hard bc they were occupying our land or killing our children. They died bc people like to kill big scary trophy worthy things and for most of our history we didn’t have the capability our inclination to preserve them. I’ve spent several months in africa (not on safari) and it’s definitely urban leopards that present any kind of significant threat. Even then, not really a big deal. Hell, the masai graze cattle on lion hunting grounds with spears for deterrence and take for granted the cat’s fear of them (lubricated by their own ritual hunting of course).
I don’t see why it’s a matter of “spending human lives.” I hunt, I do it for meat. I find what this guy did (shooting an animal- an apex predator, at that- just for a “trophy”) to be incredibly distasteful (and here I’m being charitable.)
I think the difference in our reaction to this guy, and our (lack of) reaction to atrocities within Africa are simply: This jackass is one of us. he did something that a lot of us think is incredibly stupid and pointless. And we think it’s within our purview to castigate one of our own when they do something shitty.
On the other hand, the wars and genocides in Africa are between people who are “not us.” They’re outside of our (for lack of a better term) “monkeysphere.”
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
we can’t empathize and care about them because we don’t know who they are, we don’t know how they live, we don’t know why they’re fighting, they’re simply not people to us. Just like how we were fine with using nuclear weapons in 1945 because “they’re just Japs.”
Good comment, jz.
I’d add that there is an ugly emphasis being placed on the $50k figure. Shooting a lion for sport, well, I don’t mind if others find it abhorrent, even if their reaction is disproportionate to the harm. But of all the details that made this news, the money involved seems to be what makes it truly dastardly in the eyes of the American public.
I knew that I would want to post what I am about to post somewhere in this thread. Your previous comment provides me with a perfect place to hang it.
Very well put “I wouldn’t sacrifice my son to save a lion. How can I sacrifice another person’s son to save a lion?” Bingo!
Years ago I worked as an EDP audit manager for a prominent black Republican CPA. Without seeking credit for doing so, he did a great deal to bring over as many talented young African professionals as he possibly could, and made sure that they had good jobs when they got here.
So in a way, my situation was like yours: an opportunity to work with several talented African immigrants.
Part of what I enjoyed about that job is that all of us could, and did, speak about many things, including attitudes about race, and attitudes about values as they differ in America from values in Africa.
One of my friends there was Udo, a CPA candidate from Nigeria. At the time, I had a dog I had rescued several years before, and who was nearing the end of her life. Udo said that Americans are funny … they think that Nigerians are primitive because some of them eat dog, when that might be the only way that they can feed their children and keep them alive, while Nigerians consider Americans to be barbarians because they are willing to feed a dog, sometimes several dogs, while not caring that people starve to death every day in another part of the world.
He understood that getting rid of my dog wouldn’t change anything, but he wanted me to understand how the average American’s view of the world can be seen as just as barbaric, if not more so, that that of an African who uses dogs as food in order to keep their family alive.
After a life lesson like that, it is difficult, if not impossible, to fall back into a comfortable ethnocentric view of the world.
On a lesser note, another side benefit of the job was, that when the people there, who were predominantly black, saw that I had a sense of humor that went beyond just the mainstream white comedians, they introduced me to Bernie Mac way more than a decade before he became a mainstream star. And his famous but now almost forgotten comedy routines about “Bay-bay’s Kids” is one of the funniest things I have ever heard about what it is like for a man to date a woman who has children from a previous relationship. I will not even begin to try to describe it…
But working with people from other cultures and countries can be very enlightening, if one’s eyes aren’t shut tight.
The issue of undocumented immigrants also took on a different perspective for me, when through a mutual friend I was introduced to a couple from Central America who had left their two preschool daughters with grandparents and had come to the US to earn enough money that their children could get a good education and move from poverty to decent comfortable lives.
They weren’t here to try to get rich and live large…they were sacrificing see half of their children’s lives growing up, in order to give them something that they otherwise could not.
After that, I realized that there are still issues involving crime and immigrants, especially along the southwestern US border, but there are also many other issues involving good people doing brave and dangerous things in order to help their families.
Which is why although I want a presidential candidate who will shake up Washington, for me Donald Trump just won’t do.
Many of the people who don’t want to see new immigrants from south of the border are descendants of immigrants from Europe, immigrants who also were met with signs like “No dogs or Irish” or other rejection based on ethnicity and recent arrival to the US. So I will stand by the need for an orderly process to welcome more people to our country. It is not their fault that our economy has been destroyed by things like NAFTA and multinational tax evasion.
Last time I checked, the Statue of Liberty was still standing. The only question that remains is “what is it standing for?”
It’s not spending human lives. It’s preventing new ones from coming into a shitty existence. Frankly if you have a famine and want food aid, you should have to agree to a moratorium on births for some reasonable timeframe (5 years?).
Bring Back the Malthus.
That, too, is a straw man argument. It’s the same argument made every time the military is brought up.
- “If you haven’t served, you have no right to speak on military issues”
- “If you haven’t been to war, you can’t possibly speak to war”
etc. etc.
If you wouldn’t sacrifice your own son, how can you be ok with someone else’s son etc etc?
The answer, in my mind anyway, is nearly always the same. At least here in the west, my assumption is that people *choose* that life. Regardless of whether or not you agree with it, they make the choice to fight for their country, in the belief that hopefully, they can make a difference and that hopefully, they are fighting for a just and noble cause. I can both respect their decision to do so, and at the same time disagree with the operation of said war machine. It’s not either-or.
Same with Africa. For starters, there isn’t a “lions or people” argument here. There’s no signs I know of saying “One life, one lion - your choice!” anywhere. Instead, there are economic pressures pushing people to make poor decisions because they are the “easy” solutions. If a given populous has to choose between fighting off an evil oppressor or instead turning over every person in your country, I’d wager a not-insignificant percentage would eventually deem those people as not worth their lives, especially if you ad some propaganda (see Japan, Germany, World wars, for example). That doesn’t make the choices right then either.
Yes, hard choices need to be made and battles fought. No, the solution isn’t to sacrifice lions for men, it’s for men to take responsibility, *in spite of* the existence of lions.
I disagree with Jack’s takes on white Zimbabwe farmers/Rhodesia. I disagree with Jack that what the dentist did, his attitude and what it represents aren’t representative of a larger issue.
But the point of this is much broader than the focus on Cecil the Lion, or conservation in general.
It’s a thought provoker, not the tip of a spear.
If I weren’t such a gentleman, and considering this isn’t my blog, I would have preferred to just say, “Get the fuck out of her with your straw man argument, it has nothing to do with the substance of what he wrote.” But I won’t do that because it’d be rude.
“Yes, hard choices need to be made and battles fought. No, the solution isn’t to sacrifice lions for men, it’s for men to take responsibility, *in spite of* the existence of lions.”
I’m liking everything of yours I’ve read on this thread so far, but I want to focus on the hard choices, not use them as a preamble to a non-specific statement.
Preserving the lion population in Africa will cost some amount of human life, if only because the existence of lions threatens villages that are driven by population pressure onto the borders of lion territory. You’ll also have situations where poachers and guards are killed in battle, as we do in America’s “War on Drugs”.
So. If we cannot guarantee that human life will not be lost to preserve the lion’s existence, what benefit does humanity receive from the existence of lions. And why, to make things absurd but not ethically too different, do we not feel the same way about ticks or mosquitos or the strands of DNA that make up HIV? We would eliminate every tick in the world tomorrow if we could. Why do we feel differently about lions?
“So. If we cannot guarantee that human life will not be lost to preserve the lion’s existence, what benefit does humanity receive from the existence of lions. And why, to make things absurd but not ethically too different, do we not feel the same way about ticks or mosquitos or the strands of DNA that make up HIV? We would eliminate every tick in the world tomorrow if we could. Why do we feel differently about lions?”
I think the answer, in the end, comes down (in my opinion anyway) to which class, here, is the defenseless one / underdog / whatever?
ticks/mosquitos/etc aren’t subject to extinction, nor is man. Big cats are, and there’s not much they can do about it directly. I’m not so sure we’d choose to make even ticks extinct tomorrow anyway, lest we cause some sort of unknown calamity - there’s lots of instances of man tinkering with the natural order only for it to backfire in wonderous ways (see killer bees, rabbits in Australia, cats, well, everywhere). But yes, presuming we could confirm there was no “positive” use for ticks, and we had a way to nuke ’em safely and completely somehow, you’re right, we’d probably do it.
Now, my thoughts as to why?
— It would appear that we, as a people, tend to disproportionately want to protect “pretty” things
— “Pretty” appears to have some intrinsic value to the people, beyond simple utility of the underlying pretty thing
It’s interesting to see how this has worked going *way* back into history. Ancient Egyptians, when confronted by “Africans” (which is weird to say because Egypt is in Africa, but you get my meaning I hope) created horribly distorted and exxagerated statues and depictions of their agressors, making them look less “normal” to Egyptian eyes, in the hopes of dehumanizing them to the people.
This, I think, feeds into your “small soul” argument, but in a different way. I think It’s really about how “real” it all is to the average person. Genocide half a world away is so beyond (most of our) own experiences that you can’t really internalize it well. Visualizing a world without large cats is somewhat easier, *and* lots of people have small cats, *and* we’ve humanized them a bit through the Lion King and the like, whereas bugs, not so much (though there was apparently an upswing in ant farm purchases after A Bug’s Life came out, ha!).
So, yes, I do believe that the further something is outside one’s own experience and ability to visualize, the easier it is to ‘ignore” the plight of said thing. That, however, surely doesn’t make it right.
What I’m going to suggest here is that the awareness of a larger purpose that might require the sacrifice of an individual human life is a sign of “consciousness” in a community of humans, the same way that human beings do not fret over the loss of individual cells or minor injuries if it is for a greater purpose.
Therefore, if the human community decides that the existence of lions is worth pruning the human community a bit, that’s a community decision somewhat akin to knowing that you are going to take a minor ass-kicking from your girlfriend’s husband. Your individual cells won’t thank you, but you want something that is more valuable to you than the fate of your nose cartilage.
Hold that thought, because we’re going to return to it later on this week
Beautiful article Jack.
It is really scary sometimes when reality outshines The Onion.
I hunt. Not a lot lately, but I have and will again. I’ve never been on a trophy hunt, and have no real aspirations to do so, but I have friends and family members who have. I have no problem with them having done so, nor do I have any problem with anyone else who wants to legally shoot African game. I’ve explained to my position to my PETA-loving suburban friends thusly:
Before ecotourism became a thing, the only major funding for conservation efforts in Africa came from trophy hunters. Yes, white American dentists with $50,000 in discretionary spending — not counting tips and purchases from local communities — were the reason game preserves were able to exist.
Rich Americans hunters (and a few Europeans) were the revenue source for many regional economies. Their dollars hired guides, cooks, porters. Paid for game preserve fences and guards and veterinarians and scientific ecological studies. And the meat harvested from hunts went back to the local communities to be shared (still does, in fact).
In fact, rich tourist-hunters were used in more than a few instances to shoot “man-eaters” (though professional white African hunters usually do the deed — however, since we’re discussing the death of Africans by lions, one should point out more Africans are killed by snakes than every other animal, and insects kill more Africans than all the continent’s animals combined, as Jack points out).
So lay off the dentist, web warriors. If you got a beef with the loss of lions, contribute to a conservation fund because illegal poaching is the problem, not dentists with hunting licenses and $50,000 to spend. In fact, dentists with $50,000 to burn have saved more lions by hunting lions than every keyboard pounder, ever.
As for #blacklivesmatter, all I’ve got a couple things to point out:
First is the front page of the Chicago Tribune every Monday morning. This week, 23 shot, 8 killed. Last week, 31 shot, 4 killed. The week before that, 20 shot, 5 killed. In 99.9% of the shootings, young black men were shooting at other young black men in the ongoing turf/gang/drug war. Note that many innocents — entire families even — are caught in the crossfire. The firearms recovered are illegal, unregistered. Blacks are killing blacks, and in these neighborhoods, the shooters’ names are known, but black lives only matter when it comes to “police violence.”
Second, my daughter responded to an attempted murder last week (not Chicago). She questioned the witnesses as the paramedics worked on the shooting victim. My daughter (who by now you have gathered is a police officer) found the victim’s sister nearby.
“Do you know who the shooter was?”
“Yeah, I know him.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Yeah.”
“So…?”
“Look, I ain’t gonna look or nuthin’, and don’t you turn around. But he standin’ over there ‘cross the street.”
Daughter walks away from witness/sister, confers with EMT as a guise, then glances across the street to find 20 onlookers, male, young, black, milling around. She walks back to the witness/sister.
“Okay, I’m not going to look. Just give me his description.”
“That’s all I got to say.”
And witness/sister walked away and stood with a group of women. More police cars start arriving, the group of young black men disperse into the night. Daughter hopes her dash cam or local business cameras got a good look at the group of men so the detectives can start to piece the case together.
Look, if it’s hard for white Americans to value black African lives, it’s sometimes as equally as hard for white Americans to think black American lives matter. Until most of us see Rainbow Push marching down Michigan Avenue led by Chicago’s own Reverend Jesse Jackson, protesting the deaths of this weekend (and entire summer), claiming black lives matter especially when they’re taken by people who live in the same neighborhoods, the whole #blacklivesmatter is just as Feelsville as #Cecilthelion.
Some cheesy low-budget movie I watched back in the 90’s had one really memorable scene:
This trio or quartet of street thugs were in jail and wound up sharing a cell with a skinhead. They were all pissy, but he kept smiling at them. He told them he LIKED them and wanted to make them honorary skinheads.
“We ain’t nothing like you!” they protested.
“You are the best thing that ever happened to our cause,” the skinhead replied. “You kill more n*****s than we ever could!”
It is somehow convenient to ignore the fact that we kill more of ourselves than “the white man” does, and it’s not even close. Black lives don’t seem to matter to blacks, unless it’s a white man pulling the trigger. Sad.
I can’t tell from your last paragraph if you either don’t think these protests occur, or if your point is that whites are not aware of these protests. If it happens to be the former, well, let me know so I can post dozens of articles on these protests and marches over the last few years. In Chicago. Led by Jesse Jackson and Rainbow Push. To stand against black on black crime.
I’m not white.
Protests do nothing. Jesse Jackson making speeches is about as effective at stopping BonB crime as Occupy Wall Street was at ending market manipulation and making the 1% give back.
I’m waiting for the riots, which only seem to occur when the assailant isn’t black. How come thousands of “concerned citizens” can throw shit at the police and loot stores, but cant be bothered to storm their neighborhoods and displace drugs and gangsters?
Rob,
As Kvndoon says, I’m not saying there isn’t a vigil at the church or home where an innocent black life was taken in the middle of a drug war shootout. Or even a march. Happens a lot. However, there is no #blacklivesmatter framing to such events. There is sorrow, but little outrage. There are no neighborhood riots.
There’s no denying the loss of innocent lives caught in the crossfire is tragic, heartbreaking, unnecessary. And that’s just it, in the end, they could be prevented. However, good people have to take their communities back front the bad actors. Either by themselves, or hopefully, with the help of the police (and yes, there are police officers of all races and creeds willing to lay down their lives to help do just that).
Not denying police have acted poorly. But understand that for many cops, going into the war zone day after day, with zero help from the locals who are being victimized, as they put their lives at risk while on the look out for unnamed and unidentified bad-guys, is a high stress, low reward endeavor. Some days, it’s like patrolling Kandahar in an Impala. Built up stress leads to snap (and poor) decisions.
I think all that kvndoon and I are saying is when African Americans are as outraged by black-on-black violence (which happens in Chicago, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, LA et al every single night) as much as they are by loss of a black person’s life by the police, #blacklivesmatter doesn’t ring true to me, and feels like #Cecilthelion. In other words, a case of Feelsville.
An aside, I’m really looking forward to what Spike has to say when Chiraq comes out, and how that’ll frame the ensuing national discussion.
Just replace “Cecil the Lion” with “V8 Engine” and I’m pretty the same.
Social media has done far more to move us towards a society with ‘an average drawn upon zeros’ than any other medium. Cecil (ironically the first name of Rhodesia’s founder) serves as the latest example of that.
Right and wrong exist, regardless of whether you’re a progressive or conservative, are pro-life or pro-choice, support or are against Obamacare, or changed your facebook profile pic to a rainbow flag. I only hope I can impart some values to my kids before the next Kony2012 does.
All this talk of “small souls”, “all lives matter”, “black lives matter”… Nineteen comments deep, and yet this topic hasn’t picked up the scent of Planned Parenthood’s aborttoirs?
Spoiler alert, man!
Well, I, for one, won’t be holding my breath waiting for Jalopnik to tell us how many baby parts it takes to pay for a Lamborghini.
I suspect that the uproar over the Cecil the Lion debacle is simply a reaction to the guy who did it. The situation is “the ugly American abroad” and “rich white guy does whatever the hell he wants” rolled up into one. He laid down $50k and he’s damn well gonna get his big game trophy! This is in marked contrast to the way that hunting is typically conducted in the USA: one pays his (or her) money for licenses, equipment and such, then success or failure is subject to luck and the skill of the Hunter. That’s how it is for the hunters that I know, anyway. How sporting is Dr. Palmer’s hunt? To shift gears a bit: When you put down the long green to enter a race, do you *expect* to win a trophy or do you understand that a combination of preparation, luck and skill may (or may not) find you victorious?
So I understand your argument as basically:
1 - yes we’re risking extinction of species, but it pays those living there /really well/, and
2 - lives only matter as much as the lowest common denominator of that class of lives says they do?
Let’s apply that to quintessential stereotyped “white trash”, and, say, Eagles, and see how that fares.
Interesting thread and comments .
Me , I live dead center in the current ‘ 100 days 100 nights ‘ foolishness in Los Angeles and one of my Teenaged Foster Boys was walking out the door of the new 7-11 when another young man was shot to death not 2 feet in front of him .
All ’round us , the new Baskin Robbins (in Lucy’s old building) , the Del Taco on the corner , 108th street and so on .
FWIW , I’m a proud member of ‘ P.E.T.A. ‘ =
People
Eating
Tasty
Animals .
-Nate
I suspect that in the next month or 3, there will be some new “cause du jour” for all the SJW to get their panties in a twist about. I was told many years ago; Find something you are willing to die for, then live for it. Most of these SJW have the attention span of a gnat, and possibly a smaller mass of gray matter, so there is never something they will stand against/for very long.
No, black lives do not matter because if they truly did then 192 homocides in Baltimore, which are mostly black-on-black, would cause a bigger rally than the one in response to Freddie Gray’s death.
Freddie = Cecil
Africans = Baltimoreans
Here is a nice interactive MAP on Baltimore homicides
Excellent comment. Thanks for sharing.
Jack, have you read The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman?
Do small lives (poor and powerless) lives matter? Of course they do.*
The reality is that there are over 7 billion persons on the planet and increasing quickly, except in Japan and northern Europe. Your average person just can not deal with the magnitude of these billions of impoverished people living short, miserable lives in the slums of US cities/Africa/remote Asian Islands/everywhere. Leaving the media out of it we pretty much only care about our families, friends, neighbors and pets. So of course the Crazy Cat Women will get upset about the killing of a big cat, the owners of man’s best friend will not like those who eat dogs and the equestrians will be mad at the French for grilling horse steaks.
*Small lives mostly matter only to those who are in immediate proximity to them.
Ronnie ;
Does it matter that there has never been nor never will be , any selling of baby parts ? .
-Nate