Who's 'We', White Man?
More a place to put a few links from the opening page. When I get the hang of this webpage lark I'll endeavour to make the whole site a bit more colorful and exciting. I am personally neither colorful nor exciting, and it's important that my website convey an utterly unreal image of me. For example, here's a picture of me taken at work:
So if you ever get to talk to me on the phone, now you can picture me as I really aren't.
Ending the Corruption of Charities
Pet Replacement in the Urban Environment
Here's an advertisement extracted from the Classified advertisements at the Australian Taxation Office's intranet.
20/10/04 10:14:04
Expires
10/11/04
Canberra Area
Pets
Wanted
Title:
DOG WANTED
Cost:
NEG
WANTED - A dog that is at least 2 yo that
is great with children, does not require much exercise, does not dig holes or
insist on destroying every plant in the back yard and is preferably one of
these breeds: Cocker Spaniel, King Charles Cavalier,
Contact:
Charles Stuart Jnr, St James's Palace, London
It struck a few people that the person putting in the ad (not King Charles II, incidentally) didn't actually want a real-life dog. It struck me that what this person really wanted was a slave. Slaves are often fourteen in human terms, they're great with children (in the US they were used to raise children), they can exercise themselves, they don't dig holes and they don't destroy plants (indeed, in the United States they did the exact opposite).
The Internet is absolutely useless for finding out any actual data, but it's reasonable to think that the people of the US, and indeed any comparable country (let's say OECD member nation here), spend a lot of money on their pets. They could just as easily keep a slave for the same amount, at least in the style to which most of the world is accustomed.
There may be a moral quandary here. But slavery has existed for the bulk of human history. Some people maintain that it still exists in certain countries in the Middle East, and that it was alive and well in the Republic of South Africa prior to 1994. So there you go.
The urban environment is not pet-friendly. Pets need to be kept outdoors, exercised in parks, cleaned up after. Slaves can live the same life as free people. The urban environment is slave-friendly.
There are laws preventing, or at least punishing, cruelty to animals. These laws could be expanded to prohibit, or at least punish, cruelty to slaves.
A slave cannot make important
decisions about their own life. But as the growth of help desks and
service centres and 'quality and training purposes' shows, people are loathe to
make decisions about their own lives anyway. A slave can always drop hints
about what they will and won't 'do - and can be dismissed from service in
exactly the same way that a free employee can now.