Dispatches is up — on the state clean elections program.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Matrix will be back
The denial last week of an application by the Matrix Development Group to build a 744,000-square-foot warehouse at the corner of Route 130 has created quite a stir.
Residents in the Four Seasons adult community, which abuts the Matrix property, and other warehouse foes were ecstatic (read this post from The Blog of South Brunswick), while others were not so sanguine.
Here is an excerpt from a letter from Paul Murray that ran in today’s Post:
Here is a case of everyone involved coming out losers, except, perhaps, Matrix.
Now Matrix will go to court. Matrix may get everything asked for and maybe even more. The township pays the court costs and the senior community will get stuck with the initial warehouses plans.
It appears to me that a great opportunity to compromise has been lost.
As I wrote earlier in the debate, this was not an easy issue. The Matrix plan essentially conformed — aside from a variance and some waivers — and the developer probably had a sense that it should have been approved without much fuss.
But the question is whether the zoning in place is correct now that the senior housing is in place and whether a planning board has the right to consider community attitudes when judging a plan like this.
Should Matrix sue — its lawyers said they would continue to pursue the project but did not say how — I have a suspicion they might win. Does this mean the Planning Board was wrong to deny the application outright, as Dr. Murray has argued? No. I agree that there will be need for some kind of compromise, but I believe the board should have some discretion to listen to residents, otherwise the board is nothing more than a rubber stamp for development interests.
If the courts side with Matrix on this, it will be because the state’s land-use law is rather archaic and protects property rights above all other considerations. There is a need for revision of the municipal land use law to grant more power to communities to take into account health, safety and quality-of-life issues at the time of an application and not just when the master plan is drafted or a municipality’s zoning code is approved. Too often, the detrimental effects that a development might have on neighboring properties does not become apparent until well after the zoning is in place and it is not enough to say that the master plan will protect us.
While it often does, it also doesn’t in too many cases.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
History lessons
As Ronald Reagan might say, there he goes again.
President George W. Bush has once again shifted rhetorical course in Iraq, finally acknowledging this ugly war’s connections to a past American debacle, but doing so with a selective approach to history that reduces the United States’ 20-year history in Southeast Asia.
Our exit from Vietnam led to defeat and violence, he said, during a speech yesterday at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields,’ ”
This, of course, is an absurd reduction of the historical record, which included nearly a million American soldiers losing their lives in an unwinnable and unpopular civil war that fractured this nation and poisoned our politics for more than a generation.
Matthew Yglesias, blogging for The Atlantic magazine, offers this analysis:
He’d like us to believe, I guess, that the crux of the debate about the Vietnam War was that hawks warned that after the war America’s collaborators in South Vietnam would suffer, whereas doves naively said the Viet Cong were going to offer flowers and sweets.
Back in the real world, though, the essence of the matter was that hawks were warning that the survival of political democracy around the world quite literally depended on South Vietnam staying in non-Communist hands. A Communist victory in Vietnam was said to be destined to lead to the rest of Indochina going Communist, from which the Reds — emboldened — were going to march into Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Our allies in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would prove incapable of resisting the onrushing tide. With Communism triumphant in Asian, Western Europe would turn to Finlandization to stave off direct Soviet domination, and next thing you know the New World would be crushed beneath the vast economic might of the Old.
It sounds crazy, yes, and the reason it sounds crazy is that it was crazy and when we eventually left Vietnam it turned out that while hawks and doves alike all made some bad forecasts, the hawkish point of view on the big strategic question was completely wrong whereas the dovish view was completely correct.
But this is too nuanced an explanation of history (for a fuller explanation of what happened and what went wrong, I’d suggest reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest) and, besides, the president wasn’t interested in a history lesson anyway. The president (or at least his advisors and chief speech writers) was attempting to tap into this poisoned legacy of division with his speech, hoping to marginalize his opponents by reminding Americans of the nation’s loss in that war. That’s been a longstanding GOP tactic — to use U.S. failures in Vietnam to question the patriotism of war opponents and the competency of Democrats on national defense matters.
It’s a cheap shot from a man who has lost all credibility — and one that is likely to backfire, I think, because acknowledging the connections between the two wars can only underscore the futility of our remaining in Iraq. Staying will not lead to stability there, anymore than remaining in Vietnam until the mid-1970s led to stability in Southeast Asia.
More than anything, the speech underscores how deluded this president has become.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Runner’s diary Wedensday
I’m hoping the weather breaks before the end of the week so I can get outside. I hate running in the damp, rainy fall — wait, it’s still summer.
Anyway, five miles on the treadmill (45:40) listening to Miles Davis’ A Tribute to Jack Johnson.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
The ethics of animal cruelty
Derrick Z. Jackson, The Boston Globe’s fine columnist, offers an interesting take on the Michael Vick case that raises some serious questions about society’s complicity in what essentially is the business of animal cruelty.
Jackson makes the connection between Vick’s offenses and the legal sport of dog racing.
You can go down last month’s 18-page federal indictment against Vick and his codefendants and see plenty of snippets such as these: “train and breed . . . for. . . competitions”; “destroying or otherwise disposing of dogs not selected to stay”; “executed at least one dog that did not perform well”; “executed at least two dogs that did not perform well”; “Vick possessed. . . approximately 54 American Pit Bull Terriers, some of which had scars and injuries.”
Of course, you can apply the same phrases or similar ones to greyhound racing. Yet dog tracks operate in about a quarter of our states, including Massachusetts.
Jackson, of course, is onto something. The outrage over Vick’s involvement in organized dogfighting is warranted, but “rings a bit hollow,” as Jackson says.
It feels a bit too easy to condemn only this fool sick enough to throw away a 10-year, $130 million football contract with the Atlanta Falcons and his residual millions in endorsements for his mad dashes as quarterback.
Jackson raises the ethical bar by raising questions about greyhound racing.
There is no difference between this and what Vick did, other than that dogfighting is illegal and greyhound racing remains legal in many states.
I think the same qestions can be asked about other sporting activities. How ethical, for instance, is it for us to breed and raise horses for the sole purpose of racing them? Thoroughbreds are treated fairly well, but isn’t there something unseemly about it?
Courtland Milloy follows a similar line of logic, bemoaning the hypocrisy surrounding the Vick case.
For the most part, we revel in a culture of blood sports in which people and animals are pitted against each another. The knockout in boxing, the knockdown in football, the crashes at Daytona and Indianapolis — those are the draw. Without the video images of tigers ripping the hides from zebras, cobras fighting mongooses and other bloody contests played out in the wild kingdom, the Discovery and National Geographic channels might as well go off the air.
More to the point, perhaps, Milloy raises questions about horseracing that we rarely ask:
Consider Barbaro, the horse that broke his leg during the Preakness Stakes last year.
“Caution: Tears will flow from watching ‘Barbaro,’ the HBO Sports documentary,” TV critic Richard Sandomir wrote in the New York Times on June 6. Crocodile tears, maybe.
“Barbaro became a tragic hero whose injury reports were given like presidential health updates,” Sandomir wrote. But wait. Sandomir goes on to say that the documentary’s producers “do not delve into why so few horses get Barbaro-level care when they break down.”
Anybody care about that?
“Like the other innocent animals we love, horses ‘trust us, live alongside us, honoring our many commands,’ the narrator, Liev Schreiber says,” Sandomir reported. ” ‘And when we ask them to — they run.’ “
And when they don’t, well, they die.
Barbaro’s leg could not be fixed, so he was eventually euthanized. For many broken-down racehorses, that can mean anything from lethal injection to having their throats slit — killed just as surely as a wounded dog that can no longer fight.
Not a pretty picture.
And what of hunting or even sports fishing? We no longer live as hunter-gatherers and our diets are no longer tied to the need to track and kill deer, bears and other wild creatures. How ethical is it, then, to track and kill these animals for sport?
I suspect I’ll be hearing from the hunters out there, but that’s OK. I truly want to understand the ethics of this issue. I believe the issues need to be discussed, that questions need to be answered.
Why are we so disgusted with what Vick did? Is it the obvious cruelty to the dogs? Or is it because we have designated dogs as housepets and friends? And why is it that many are willing to endorse the tracking and killing of deer — or bear, or birds, etc.?
Doug Pike attempts an answer on his Hook and Bullet blog:
Recreational hunting is recognized by wildlife experts as the most effective and beneficial population management tool available to them, whereas dog fighting provides no benefit whatsoever to dogs, especially those that cannot or will not fight.
Recreational hunting is heavily regulated by state and federal law to ensure that it does not adversely impact wildlife populations, whereas the only regulation on dog fighting in civilized jurisdictions is the one that makes it illegal. (If only there could be laws against stupidity.)
Recreational hunters pay hundreds of millions of dollars for license fees and dedicated taxes, then donate millions more to conservation organizations for use in programs to benefit wildlife and their habitats, whereas dog fighters bet $50 in sweaty, crumpled bills that the gray one kills the spotted one.
Recreational hunting produces tons of lean, nutritious meat, whereas dog fighting produces mutilated, crippled and dead dogs.
These arguments fail to address the basic ethical question and are kind of circular — hunting is OK because society says it is and here are some other tangential reasons that have little to do with anything. (Lean, nutritious meat? We’re hunting to put food on the table? Please.)
And then there is this column in the Wisconsin State Journal, which makes the case that hunting is a fine and honorable sport because it is a fine and honorable sport and that fine and honorable people have always engaged in it. Bret Fahvre, for instance, the upstanding quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, is an avid hunter.
Deer hunters should feel proud that Favre shares their passion and discusses it publicly. Although few Americans have strong feelings on deer hunting, they’re likely intrigued that someone with Favre’s heart, sincerity and love of family is also a dedicated hunter. Besides, only those on society’s fringe criticize him for hunting.
If Vick and his pals were dedicated hunters, we’d have reason to fret.
Why?
This brings up a tertiary issue in all of this mess. The impact of race and class on the discussion. The hunters mentioned by Pat Durkin in his Journal piece all happen to be white; Vick, of course, is black. I mention this not to diminish what Vick has done — throw the book at him, I say, but to point out the racism lurking in the debate.
This element is explored with interesting results by Tobias Peterson on PopMatters. Peterson compares dogfighting to Balinese cockfighting, relying on the noted essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” by anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Might dog fighting — like cockfighting — be an expression of strength and empowerment among the powerless classes? Is there a cultural divide — split along the axes of race and class — that determine how we react to the Vick story and how we react to the sport of hunting?
Again, I raise these issues not to condemn the hunter — and certainly not to apologize for Vick’s egregious and disgusting behavior (what was Stephon Marbury thinking?) –but because I am having trouble understanding what I perceive as an ethical disconnect. The answer seems to be that society says it’s OK to hunt, provided it’s regulated, so hunting is OK. That’s a bit too circular for me.
Someone, please enlighten me.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
