Big Game Hunting In An Age Of Virtual Reality - Why Not Shoot To Kill?

Reed Reventlow had been a big game hunter until both Kenyan game laws and American public censure shut him down, but not before his trophy room was hung with bighorn sheep taken in the high Sierra, cougar and mountain lion from the Absaroka mountains, and leopards, cheetahs from the Serengeti. 

As a young man in India he and an Indian Army Colonel had hunted tigers in Assam and wild boar in the forests of Madhya Pradesh. He was proud of the fact that he had taken down big and small game in every continent, and his reputation as a fearless stalker and dead shot preceded him.  He was never one to use beaters to drive his prey into the open for an easy kill, and was as fearless as his native African guides whose forbears had tracked, stalked, and killed with arrows and spears. 

He was not interested in rhinoceros, although many of his mates said there was nothing like standing your ground before a massive charging two-ton brute and putting a bullet between his eyes at 50 meters.  He preferred big cats - somehow the affair seemed more equal, and fair play and equality were all part of the hunt. 

An American associate residing in Delhi who had gone to Manipur to hunt tiger; but the hunt was anything but fair. His Indian guides tethered a bleeding goat to a stake while the American sat in a high blind in a a mango tree, waited for the tiger to approach the goat, and then shot him. It galled and angered Reed to see the trophy - the head of a magnificent Bengal tiger shot from the treetops at close range. 

Hunting animals caused Reed no particular moral concern  There was no difference between a lion and a Texas longhorn or a chicken, slaughtered in the tens of thousands every day.  Higher order, intelligent animals like pigs, dogs, and monkeys were killed, grilled, and enjoyed in Africa, Asia, and the Americas without a hint of remorse. 

Animal rights activists cry foul, and say that sentience exists up and down the phylogenetic ladder, and that vegetarianism is the only moral option. If fish can feel pain when hooked, and that every fish from Johnny roaches to marlins suffer needlessly, then anglers are certainly cruel to their prey.

Gary Varner in his book “Which Animals Are Sentient” (2012) developed a list of criteria; and those animals which met all or most of them felt pain.  Fish met all the criteria (nociceptors, brain, nociceptors and brain linked, endogenous opioids, response to damaging stimuli similar to humans).

Sneddon  et al (2014) elaborated on Varner’s classification, dividing fish into different phylogenetic categories and adding more behavioral criteria.  According to their research, bony fish (the ones commonly caught by recreational and commercial fishermen), met all standards for pain.

Commercial fishermen might claim that netting of fish is painless; and while such techniques avoid spearing or hooking, those hundreds of bluefish, mackerel, or sardines flipping and flopping around on the deck of a trawler are actually going through the agonizing death throes of asphyxiation.

In other words there is no painless way of killing fish except by drugging them in fish farms.

Given this recent, extensive, and exhaustive research, one might well conclude that fish do indeed feel pain and if animal rights activists are right, then all fishing which causes pain should be stopped.

There is no real humane way for Aleuts to kill whales because no one harpoon thrust can be a coup de grace and no bullet always and unerringly finds its way into the animal’s cerebellum for a quick and painless death.  

Earlier tribal hunters on the African veldt wounded a wildebeest or gazelle and then tracked it for miles until, after hours, it died a painful death.  Only skilled and practiced hunters can bring down an elk or antelope with one deadly shot; but there are far more amateurs out there than professional marksmen, and thousands of animals, legally hunted, die bloody and painful deaths.

This killing-animals-for-food argument would have to hold for lobsters.  Throwing them into a pot of boiling water and watching them bang around the pot until dead would have to count.   Sushi lovers in Japan would have to forgo their passion for fresh sushi (slices taken from still live fish).

What about oysters? All oyster-lovers know that the way to tell if oysters are really fresh is if they twitch a bit when you squeeze lemon on them.  They have a nervous system and they respond, but they have no brain; so is feeling pain without making any sense of it still feeling pain?

All well and good say animal rights activists, but culling for food is different from killing for pleasure; but why exactly?  One animal is the same as every other regardless of end use, so shooting tigers and lions for trophies should have no moral opprobrium attached. 

Again animal activists object.  These beautiful creatures should remain in the wild for human beings to see, appreciate, and love.  A zoo, simply an inhumane, torturous way to preserve the life of formerly wild animals, is no answer. 

 

However, argued Reed, we have entered a new, radical, revolutionary period of human evolution.  Virtual reality and the eventual replacement of the 'real' by its computer-generated images will change human perception, experience, and ethics.  The technology is in its infancy, but when brain-computer interface is made possible, then the virtual world will become the real world.  There will be no difference in the two, and the participant will 'be' on the savannah with tigers, lions, and gazelles. 

There will be no need for actual wild game to roam the veldt and the African plains can be opened for more productive human activities - agriculture and cattle raising - and big game hunting.  The reason why poaching remains a problem in Tanzania is because poor Africans are hungry - park preserves have limited their well-being. 

Ahh, say naysayers, nothing will ever replace 'the real thing'; but the new technology will create the smell, the feel, the sound of a light breeze in the grass, the entire experience.  To deny this is simply whistlin' Dixie. 

Reed's big game hunting days are over.  Paying over a million dollars for the privilege of a 'cull', an organized, orchestrated hunt of an overpopulated prey, is not what hunting is all about.  Better to retire in a trophy room filled with good memories.  

Of course there were still plenty of deer, elk, antelope, and moose to shoot and few restrictions in the West, but that was but a diluted, uninteresting replacement for the real thing. 

As virtual reality becomes more advanced and accessible and especially when a seamless interface exists between mind and machine and the whole, vast, immeasurably rich environment of virtuality becomes ordinary, no one will bother going to game parks which will reopen for hunting  Reed would be an old man by that time, so hunting will be for his grandchildren - who, as often happens in families, might well find something else do in the new, changed world. 

Misogyny Or A Bad Streak Of Nasty Women? There Are Enough Of Them Out There To Make A Man Wonder

Robbie Norton had had an unbelievably bad string of luck when it came to female bosses.  There was Betsy, hounded by management for low sales figures, a natural bully, and a bad marriage.  She tried to keep her noxious badgering and open hostility for her staff under control, but there was no tamping down such a one-track, simple mind; and each one of her senior staff dreaded the call, hauled on the carpet for God knows what inefficiency, infraction, or error. 

The thing of it was, she had the CEO's ear - rumors had it that they had been particularly friendly at one time and the job was subsequently hers.  Of course she was no dummy, and her performance in lower-level positions in the company hierarchy was creditable, so the rumors were scotched although never completely forgotten. 

In any case the CEO was no dummy either, so when he saw sales in Betsy's department fall off, he did not hesitate to call her upstairs, give her a good talking to, and send her down with clear marching orders. 

That of course was a clarion call, and in a hastily assembled meeting of her department, she was a dervish of fierce, wild energy.  She howled and yelled, thumped her fist on the table, banged the sales chart until it rocked on its hinges, and said in no uncertain terms that she would have the scalp of anyone who failed to meet his sales targets. 

 

Now, all of this might be excused or explained because of the nature of sales, a brutal business by any measure, a no-holds barred gladiatorial combat with fields of battle littered with dead and dying bodies; but Betsy brought more than just an uber-competitiveness to the table.  She was a mean, nasty, arrogant bitch of a woman who had torn through every office she had worked in and every one of her failed marriages.  

Robbie had heard of the woman's reputation, but caught her on a good day, offering an important position and a generous salary, so like most men, he was certain he could handle anything that came his way.  When the buzz saw was powered up, and Betsy slashed her way through office and cubicle, he knew that he would have to do some fancy footwork to escape her. 

'She's a cunt', said Harold Bates, one of the more recently culled, 'no ifs, ands or buts about it'.  She was a devouring, castrating, man-eating machine, and Bates was glad to be out of her way. 

Here Robbie paused and reflected on the scene.  He had always been pro-woman, if not a feminist then close to it.  He had been raised by a sensible, talented, and ambitious woman who made her way nicely in the business world while keeping a good home and raising a respectful family.  His sister was a sweetheart, a bit shy and retiring, but honest, true, and temperate.  

Politically he had joined progressives in their demands for women's rights, and saw no threat whatsoever to the rising enrollment in professional schools and the ubiquity of women in senior positions; so it was with great reservation that he even listened to his colleague's misogynist harangues, for that was exactly what they were. 

Nevertheless, Betsy was indeed a harridan, a vixen and a succubus, there was no way around it.  He had worked for tough, ambitious, and disciplining women managers before, but there was no precedent for her swath of scorn, distaste, and laying waste. 

She was a product of three failed marriages all of which went to court and ended in sheer mayhem and nastiness, so anyone knowing this and working for her would reasonably assume her guilt.  This was a woman who must have been born a cunt and only developed into an even more vile one as the years wore on. 

Misogyny is not defined as the hatred of a single woman, but of all women; that is, that women as a class are innately manipulative and misandrous - born that way.  God gave them two X's instead of a Y, and sent them on their business.  The Bible after all, makes it clear that the human race was condemned to a life of penury and pain because of a woman.  It was Eve after all who tempted Adam to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge to satisfy her own arrogant demands. 

Robbie had not come to the misogyny conclusion but couldn't avoid the following.  Bryce Patton's wife, sick and tired of his desultory inattentiveness, his slavishness to his work, and his clueless and childish fixation with Sudoku puzzles, took a series of lovers, bolted off to St. Bart's with the last, and never gave her husband the time of day thereafter.

Sister Mary Joseph, Mother Superior of the Convent of the Sacred Heart and chief catechetical supervisor of St. Maurice's Church, singled out every boy in Sunday school, berated him, humiliated him, and badgered him for his disrespect to Our Lord and Savior and to God Almighty himself.  

Sister Mary Joseph had made her way up the ecclesiastical ladder by currying favor not with priests and the archbishop but with her cohorts whom she favored and pleased. Men, whether close to God and the Pope or little snotty boys from Broad Street were not worth her time and whatever fraction of the day she had to spend on them, it was to make them penitent and miserable. 

Miss Turnbull was the fifth grade teacher at Jarvis Elementary School, and she was as brutal and nasty as any teacher that had taught in the public school system.  She was an execrable menace, and took out her animus and deep-seated resentment against the boys in her class whom she blamed for every disturbance, annoyance, and problem; and she did her best to neuter them before they graduated, making life easier for Miss Fenwick, the sixth grade teacher only slightly less carnivorous than she. 

August Strindberg was accused of misogyny throughout his writing career, and critics pointed especially to Laura in The Father, and Julie in Miss Julie, women of will, defiance, and certitude who thought little of men and chose to ignore or dismiss them.  Laura in particular was an unstoppable female force out to eliminate her obtuse, clueless, staid husband from her life.  Iago-like she sows doubts about the paternity of their daughter and drives him mad, has him institutionalized and rendered incompetent.  Thanks to all this she gains complete control over her daughter. 

Miss Julie makes the valet, Jean, jump through hoops like a trained animal, and takes pleasure in humiliating and disgracing him.  She willingly sleeps with him, then gets her comeuppance and wanders off incoherently after he refuses to go with her.  

Strindberg, critics said, created a hateful, misandrous character but one who at the same time is so weak and emotionally feeble that she falls under the spell of a virile, confident man.  Double trouble. 

Robbie was on the fence - child of a loving, caring mother; brother to a warm, affectionate sister, lover to a number of lovely, adoring women; but subject to the insults and horrible abrasive nastiness of many others.  He knew that Betsy, Sister Mary Joseph, Miss Turnbull, and Bryce Patton's wife were just the tip of the iceberg.

It all came down to this - a savvy man is always comfortable around women, knowing them as well as he does.  He could be a Casanova, a good husband, or a trusted employee.  Women do not perplex him or surprise him.  Therefore the misogyny-nasty women debate is moot.  He knows how to deal with women, come out on top, or leave the scene before the battle begins.  Washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom, calling when late works wonders.  It doesn't take much to keep things on an even keel and to make out just fine. 

Cynical? Hardly, just a bit of field strategy in the War Between The Sexes. 

Robbie was a happy man because of this insight, this skill, and this savvy.  He found many women irresistible, fascinating, complex, alluring figures, and others not worth spare change; but life was like that, a complicated mish-mash of conundrums, puzzles, and traps.  Most men were befuddled by women and by life.  Not him. 

A Social Reformer's Last Gasp - Tesla, Trump, And A Dire, Inconsequential End

Harry Lott had never been an intemperate person, one quick to fly off the handle or given to bouts of uncontrollable anger; but there he was running down the street away from the Tesla dealership where he had just incinerated a Model Y, a stand-in for the White House, home to the most despicable President in the nation's history. 

 

Harry had always been a progressive, a lifelong one in fact, long before the term was even used. In his earlier days there were simply liberal Democrats like LBJ, and Adlai Stevenson and Henry Wallace before them, politicians who embraced the poor, the working class, and the disadvantaged without making a big deal of it, before lionizing the black man and before gender hoopla.  

When liberals became 'progressives', Harry became an activist.  No longer would he just think about social reform, progress, and the path to a more verdant, peaceful, and compassionate world, he would do something about it. 

Now, political ideologues are nothing new to the American political landscape. Union Square in New York seemed to attract the most wildly prophetic of the lot, doomsday-sayers, latter day visionaries who warned of complete economic collapse, who pointed to signs of a nuclear holocaust, a breakdown in moral, ethnical, and spiritual values, on and on ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 

Most Americans pay no attention to this hyper-ventilation and take things as they come, pros and cons, ups and downs, plusses and minuses, good and bad in equal proportion, and sure to come and go; but there are those who find this whooping and hollering validating - a lonely hearts club whose members suddenly have some meaning to their lives.

Harry's life on the margins of political activism had been worthy but unsatisfying.  He had been an observer not a doer, a committed liberal but with nothing to show for it.  At least the old men who had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, spent airless, stale hours on Freedom Rider busses, and had been beaten by Bull Connor and attacked by his dogs had some blood spattered on their resumes, but Harry had no red badge of courage.  A donor to the right causes, votes for partisans, Hate Has No Home Here signs on his lawns, and humming the Internationale, Harry had done nothing really of note.  

When Donald Trump came to town, Harry felt this was the time, his time, the time to make a difference.  Although he and his progressive colleagues had been unable to defeat Trump at the polls, the reign of the man could not continue.  

 

There was a heady zest to the air among progressives once the dust of defeat had settled and they could see exactly what electoral victory meant.  Trump meant business and so must they.  Harry and his mates would be latter-day freedom riders, Black Panthers, Weathermen, and insurrectionists. 

At first the Left was simply dazed and confused, an inchoate, unassembled lot, but when Elon Musk, an unelected, self-important Rasputin, an evil counsellor who with his fabulous wealth and corporate reach was untouchable and invincible, assumed unheard of power in the White House - they coalesced.  This this fascist thug, this SS Gestapo goon, had to be stopped. 

Finally the Left had a real, palpable villain. Trump might sign disabling executive orders one after the other, but Musk was on the streets with his storm troopers storming into federal offices, rounding up bureaucrats, herding them into boxcars and sending them off to some distant Auschwitz. 

And so it was that the attacks on Tesla, Tesla dealerships, and Tesla owners began - finally Harry and his colleagues could do some damage of their own, show the world that progressive Democrats were not sitting on their hands, and that the Left had chutzpah, motivation, and defiance. 

By the time Harry had sent his Molotov cocktail under the Model Y, the new Attorney General had already set the trap - attacks on Tesla were to be federal crimes, hate crimes, to be punished without recourse; so Harry threw his bomb right under fifty surveillance cameras and was rounded up before he made it to the corner. Federal agents had been waiting for him.  

What a pathetic sight it was to see old Harry Lott, good Democrat, proud progressive, man of principle and moral judgement stripped searched, thrown in the back of a police van, paraded down the concourse of Pennsylvania Avenue like a Hun down the Appian Way, and shackled and chained like a runaway slave. 

What prompted such an unintimidating, armchair liberal to undertake such an insane action?  What corner of his brain had acted up so impulsively, synapses firing away willy-nilly, propelling him to certain doom?

He was a novice, an amateur, a man of limited intelligence but general good will, moved to tears over the plight of the black man but never moved to violence; and here he was behind bars, a common criminal, all higher intents and purposes lost, all previous rectitude and sanctity gone, surrounded by black men.

The prison movies were all true - brutal trusties, slop, rats, roach runs, dim lighting, stench, and black men everywhere - his black men, the black men he worked so hard to keep out of prison, the black men supposed to be at the top of the pyramid, ready to put a knife in his ribs or far worse. 

He waited for the clank of iron keys, the footsteps of authority, but most of all the sounds of protest.  His associates, his comrades, would be right now assembling outside the prison demanding his release, a political prisoner, a slave to autocratic rule, the first of many to be slapped in irons, never again to be seen.

But nothing but silence outside the walls. No demonstrations, no protests, no loud demands.  Life went on as though nothing had happened; but Pam Bondi and her FBI thugs, scary versions of Hitler's Gestapo, had made sure that an attack on a Tesla dealership would be considered an attack on America, and nothing but the harshest punishment would suffice. 

'Who?', asked LaShonda Williams, brassy, outspoken leader of Black Women for Social Justice, but a woman completely unconcerned and unbothered by that white boy's stupidity when Mephistopheles sat in the Oval Office. 

'Firebombing a Tesla?' She laughed at the childishness of it all, the unnecessary diversion from the truth, the real black battle; and so it was that Harry was left to rot in his cell, not even an irritant or a fly in the soup, a loner who had sat so long theorizing that this brained fried, he went crazy and turned into a hopeless insurrectionist wannabee.

Progressivism was on its way on a steep downhill - no cogent policies, all Sturm und Drang.  The whole movement was grasping at straws and so clueless about the radical counter-revolution taking place and the new, conservative zeitgeist that would follow that they turned on each other.  Climate, gays, blacks, women, Cesar Chavez, Jim Crow, transgenders, neo-Marxism all fought for traction, splitting an already inchoate party into a greasy, unappetizing stew. 

Progressivism back in the day of Debs and Lafollette, was a unified movement; but now it is a side show - bearded women competing with dwarves and two-headed babies.  

LaShonda got out while the getting was good and went back to Louisiana boiled shrimp, biding her time but never once fussing.  It was all about opportunity, never philosophy, and while Harry languished in a cell, Lashonda had herself a fine old time.