>Shithead, Aaron Sorkin
Posted on 02/14/2011 5:25:46 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
(Editor's Note: We spotted this piece and realized it hadn't been published yet. No time like the present, right? In this open letter written Dec.9, 2010, Opposing Views expert and Rutgers Professor Gary Francione tells Aaron Sorkin that he's dead wrong about using animal products -- and Sarah Palin is 100% correct.)
Aaron Sorkin
The Huffington Post
Dear Mr. Sorkin:
In a recent blog on The Huffington Post, you criticize Sarah Palin, whom you quote as stating, in response to criticisms of her hunting and killing a caribou on her reality TV show:
“Unless you’ve never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather chair or eaten meat, save your condemnation.”
You acknowledge that you eat animal products and have shoes and furniture made of leather but you claim to be able to distinguish yourself from Ms. Palin. You state to her:
"You weren’t killing that animal for food or shelter or even fashion, you were killing it for fun. You enjoy killing animals. I can make the distinction between the two of us but I’ve tried and tried and for the life of me, I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho sh*theads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face."
Sorry, Mr. Sorkin. I cannot think of a single thing that Sarah Palin has ever said with which I agree. Ever. Really. Ever. But on this, she’s dead right and you’re dead wrong.
You object to her killing the caribou because it was unnecessary; she did it because she enjoyed it.
And why do you eat meat and animal products?
That’s a rhetorical question. There’s only one answer: Because you enjoy it.
There is no necessity involved. You do not need to eat animal products to live an optimally healthy life. In fact, mainstream health care people are telling us every day that animal products are detrimental to our health in one way or the other. But you do not even have to agree with them to agree with the plain and indisputable fact that we do not need to eat animal products to live a healthy life. It’s a matter of palate preference and nothing more.
And animal agriculture is an environmental disaster.
The best–indeed, the only–justification we have for inflicting suffering and death on 56 billion animals annually (not counting fish) is that they taste good. And it does not matter whether you eat conventional animal products or the “happy” meat and animal products promoted by various animal welfare groups and advocates in their attempt to make the public feel better about consuming animals: all of the animals we use for food, including the most “humanely” raised and killed, are treated and slaughtered in ways that, were humans involved, would, without doubt, be characterized as constituting torture.
The fact that you pay someone else to do the dirty work is morally irrelevant. If you pay someone to kill another human, try telling the judge that the actually killer enjoyed the act of killing but that you just paid for it. The judge will tell you that you’re both guilty of murder. You’re both equally culpable.
I won’t bother to comment on the shoes and furniture. Again, those choices reflect nothing more morally weighty than your aesthetic taste and that has no moral weight at all.
As for Michael Vick, as I have argued, Vick apparently liked sitting around a pit watching dogs fight; the rest of us like sitting around the barbecue pit roasting the flesh of animals who, under the best of circumstances, have had a worse life and death than Vick’s dogs. To criticize Vick for his morally unjustifiable acts while we engage in conduct that is morally no different is nothing more than hypocrisy.
Sorry, Mr. Sorkin, as someone who embraces progressive politics and who finds Sarah Palin objectionable on so many levels that it is difficult to count, she’s right on this. You have no moral standing to criticize what she did.
I would ask that you consider going vegan. It’s easy; it’s better for your health and for the planet. But, most important, it’s the morally right thing to do.
Sincerely,
Gary L. Francione Professor, Rutgers University School of Law–Newark
Obviously has never eaten an "on sale" steak from Kroger.
Amazing.
Let me paraphrase some of Sarah Palin's hateful statements:
"I love this country."
"Nothing is more important than your family."
"I respect hard work."
"We're lucky to live in such a great country."
I guess this guy disagrees with all that.
There is nothing healthy of moral eating vegetarian. A pretty unhealthy diet. Humans need amino acids.
Pray for America
Vegans ignore the foundational principle of nature, eat or be eaten.
I can’t decide which side to take. I hope they all go to heck with themselves....
>Shithead, Aaron Sorkin
Just make jerky out of it.
And then, in Hollywood, Sorkin became a big-deal screenwriter, producer . . . and crackhead.
“You got hooked on crack?” Stahl said.
“I tried it once, and that’s all that you have to do,” he said. “I should have died several times.”
He was on crack when he wrote both “Sportsnight” and “The West Wing.”
After a stint at the Hazelden Rehab Clinic, he stayed clean for a while. But in 2001, he was caught at an airport in California with drug paraphernalia and arrested.
He seems to be having a second career these days going after Palin. In an essay for the Huffington Post he called her a “witless bully.”
“I think that we have big problems right now,” Sorkin said. “And Sarah Palin? She needs a therapist, okay? We need the smartest guys, the best Ph.D.s around to be solving these problems. I don’t have any patience for the glamorization of dumbness.”
“You see Aaron, when you have others do your dirty work for you, you don’t really understand all that goes into getting that meat, chicken, fish, and leather to you. It becomes a product, not a natural commodity that must be harvested. Palin is superior to Sorkin because she understands what it takes to provide all those things. Instead of sitting in a Hollywood palace having those things delivered by servants, and then looking down her nose at those that do the dirty work.”
http://lonewolfarcher.blogspot.com/2010/12/aaron-sorkin-is-idiot.html
Better than the ones at Winn-Dixie.
Sorkin:
I am not a fan of the Internet.” “Not a fan” is not a euphemism for “I’m ambivalent”—it’s a euphemism for “I hate it.”
His 2001 drug bust for possession of mushrooms, pot, and cocaine is still eminently Googleable
He discusses his wavering First Amendment absolutism (“While everyone deserves a voice, not everyone deserves a microphone”) and his appetite to understand the right-wing talk-radio demagogues who hate everything that he, as a “liberal Hollywood elite,” stands for. He touches on anti-Mexican xenophobia, the bigotry
After reading tripe such as this, one can almost admire the late Pol Pot, dictator of Cambodia, who emptied out the universities and sent the “intellectuals” into the jungle to fend for themselves. He didn’t even have to shoot them. They starved by the thousands.
Our experts, who can tell the rest of us how they want us to live, would be just as feckless if they couldn’t live off the productiveness of better men than they are.
aaron sorkin is the perfect representation of liberals in hollywood. Ridiculously unintelligent and uninformed, ignorant beyond belief, yet with the galling arrogance to insist that he is better than everyone else. The charm, wit, and common sense of Palin far exceeds Sorkin’s abilities.
He wrote Social Network plagiarizing others, fortunately, film critics and awards are wising up and giving more accolades for the King’s Speech. Boycott social network and rally for King’s Speech! All just to make sorkin look like the failure he is.
It would perhaps be better to refer to anti-hunting vegetarians as "Starvationists."
Bookmark
Hunter/gatherers typically subsist on roots, seeds and herbs. On this diet meat is an occasional and highly desirable dietary supplement. Surely we are privileged to have access to the most remarkable diet in human history. Vegans are indeed starvationists.
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