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Dagorlad

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Name: Dagorlad

Location in Peter Jackson films: Tongariro National Park, Te-Ika-a-Māui.

Summary: A treeless plain to the northwest of the Black Gate. A lot of epochal battles are fought here. It is not considered by anyone a nice place to visit. 

The Battle of Dagorlad.

Unlike previous stops on our odyssey, Tolkien dedicated scant time to describing the stark plain of Dagorlad. It’s a historical battlefield, renowned for the important events that happened on its grounds, with little to distinguish it topographically. I can attest to the banality of preserved battlefields — I grew up near Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia, the site of two American Civil War battles fought in 1861 and 1862, and most of the spectacle there is forestry and split-rail fences. Travelers stop here because of what it stands for, namely two military victories of white supremacist separatists. The Confederacy’s victories at the Manassas battlefield went beyond merely strategic (perhaps unsurprisingly — the Confederacy was a structural clusterfuck): they saw the canonization of Stonewall Jackson, a deranged general renowned for standing his ground in battle before eventually getting shot by his own men and dying of pneumonia. 

But our subject is a different white supremacist war with an exponentially smaller bodycount. Sauron’s corruption of Númenor is the apex of his fight against Elves and Men. Númenor, the apex of mortal Men in Arda, is an Atlantis-type legend in The Silmarillion and an expression of the corrosive effects of evil typical of Tolkien’s Catholic theodicy — starting noble and godly, then falling to temptation and the hubristic whims of godless men. Sauron’s influence inevitably corrupts it, and by the time of The Lord of the Rings Númenor has fallen into the sea. Stylistically, Númenor shares Mordor’s trait of being defined by its absence and obviation. Its presence is keenly felt, but as a concrete presence it has long since perished. The war against Sauron is a culture war: the Second Age of Middle-earth concludes with the Battle of Dagorlad, the culmination of a seven-year siege of Mordor by the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, an act of vengeance for the lost kingdom of Númenor.

Dagorlad, a nondescript plain, fills in for Númenor and other fallen scions of the West. It’s where their deaths are litigated in great, bloody battles. Nothing happens here because everything happens here. It’s worth noting that Tolkien, while writing stories full of wars and great heroic deeds, spends relatively little time on descriptions of his villains and battles. Certainly some of this is down to Tolkien’s non-normative idea of heroism, a staple of his work. The Hobbit is a story of a protagonist being thrown into the wrong story, his novella Farmer Giles of Ham sees a misanthropic farmer completely abject traditional notions of heroism, and The Lord of the Rings lacks a central protagonist after The Fellowship of the Ring. The Fellowship’s split sees Tolkien forge a narrative where war severs close personal ties and individual heroism is an ahistorical folly. …

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IDSG Ep88 The Long Shadow of New Atheism, with Eiynah Mohammed-Smith

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And so, episode 88 is finally here.  And we found the best way to deal with it. 

In this episode, we welcome back the brilliant Eiynah Mohammed-Smith – of the Polite Conversations podcast – to talk about the long shadow of New Atheism.  In the process we also talk about some of the crop of IDW-criticism proliferating these days, and our issues with it.  We also talk about other things.  Rude things.  *Jack blushes*

Content Warnings.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Show Notes:

Polite Conversations Soundcloud

Eiynah on Twitter

Eiynah’s Patreon

Friendly IDWsphere photo tweet

Video connected to those photos.

4chan hate campaign against kink at pride

Richard Dawkins wants to lovebomb Iran — with erotica

James Lindsay “Woke Jews” tweet

James Damore at Portland State (2/17/18)

  • Event hosted by Andy Ngo, introduced by Bret Weinstein. Heather Heying, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian were the panelists. Event disrupted by protestors, which made international news.

Anti-Trans Bills and the Bigoted History of “What About The Children” – SOME MORE NEWS

Eve Fairbanks, The Reasonable Rebels

Donna Minkowitz, Why Racists (And Liberals!) Keep Writing for Quellette

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

Wikipedia, Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries

  • The US incarceration rate peaked in 2008 when about 1,000 in 100,000 U.S. adults were behind bars. That’s 760 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of all ages.[27][25] This incarceration rate was similar to the average incarceration levels in the Soviet Union during the existence of the infamous Gulag system, when the Soviet Union’s population reached 168 million, and 1.2 to 1.5 million people were in the Gulag prison camps and colonies (i.e. about 714 to 892 imprisoned per 100,000 USSR residents, according to numbers from Anne Applebaum and Steven Rosefielde).[37][38] Some of the latter Soviet Union’s yearly incarceration rates from 1934 to 1953, however, likely were the world’s historically highest for a modern age country.[39] In The New Yorker article The Caging of America (2012), Adam Gopnik writes: “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag under Stalin at its height.”[40]

Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”…

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This Particular Lunatic (Book Three, Part 10: The Dragon, Batman: Gothic)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s first major hit was Arkham Asylum, a Batman graphic novel whose dense symbolism included, among other things, the Tower card and the Great Dragon.

This particular lunatic claimed he was the Biblical Anti-Christ and promised to return to Gotham one day, on the eve of the battle of Armageddon. -Grant Morrison, Batman

This suits Crowley’s larger signification, but is tangental in the extreme, relying on Dīs Pater’s later conflation with the more traditionally bestial Orcus, who provided the roots for the French ogre and Italian orco, from which Tolkien’s orcs and the ensuing high fantasy trope emerged. More abstractly, however, the presence of a fire-breathing mouth implies a dragon, and Morrison’s association of the figure with primal chaos cements this tidily, suggesting again a flaw at the heart of things.

Morrison states that the dragon is opposed by reason, represented by the spear. Within the lore of DC Comics, then, this would imply Batman, the world’s greatest detective. Unsurprisingly, however, things are not that simple given Morrison’s conception of Batman. In the gallery at the end of the book that serves as a cast of characters, Batman is given a brief, anxious narration: “Criminals. Criminals are a terror. Hearts of the night. I must disguise my. Terror. Criminals are Cowardly.  Superstitious terrible omen. A cowardly lot. My disguise must strike terror. I must be black. Terrible. Criminals are. Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot. I must be a creature. I must be a creature of the night. Mommy’s dead. Daddy’s dead. Brucie’s dead. I shall become a bat”. This invocation of “creature” makes it clear that Batman is not some dispassionate force of reason who can combat the Great Dragon within the Tower, but rather a force of the Dragon. The clear implication—which Morrison pays off—is that Batman is only ever confronting himself as he battles his way through the Asylum.

It is worth stressing that this is not all a bunch of mystic interpretation being imposed onto the text. Arkham Asylum makes active and extremely literal use of these symbols in accordance with their occult implications. The aforementioned passage in which Amadeus Arkham’s journals transition from talking about the Dark Tower to the Dragon plays out as narration overlaid with Batman encountering Killer Croc, a relatively recent addition to Batman’s rogue’s gallery created by Gerry Conway in 1983, with “And face the Dragon within” appearing in a half-page panel of Killer Croc. The Dragon easily gets the better of Batman, hurling him out a window. McKean draws this with clear resemblances to the Pamela Coleman Smith rendition of the card—a tall panel in which Batman crashes out of an upper spire of the Asylum, lightning crashing behind him. Batman falls, then catches himself, pulling himself up to find a statue of Saint Michael defeating Satan. 

This, of course, is the event described in Revelation when the “great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his head,” provoking a “war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.…

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All Towers Men Build a Lesson Teach (Book Three, Part 9: Arkham Aslyum, The Tower)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison made their debut and early reputation in the US with a relaunch of DC’s Animal Man. But soon after came the comic that would establish them as a superstar.

Like Babel, meant to heaven reach
All towers men build a lesson teach
Lightning, descending from the sky
Reminds man there’s but one most high.
-Alan Moore, Promethea

Morrison pitched what would become Arkham Aslylum at the same February 1987 meeting where they successfully pitched Animal Man. The exact terms in which Morrison sold it are not entirely clear, but their earliest allusion to it in a January 1988 interview described it as, “you know the asylum from Batman stories? – yeah, well it’s April the first and the inmates take over the Asylum. They are holding hostages, and they demand that Batman be sent in because he belongs in a nut-house with the rest of them! So it’s a sort of psychological thriller, with Batman going through all sorts of mental and physical cruelties at the hands of his worst enemies. The story draws its inspiration from the medieval Feast of Fools and the World-Turned-Topsy-Turvy ceremonies when the rich would swap places with the beggars, criminals would become clergy and they’d all enjoy a day-long orgy of role-playing. So we look at all the familiar Batman paraphernalia from the viewpoint of these insane villains.”

The project faced a number of delays—Morrison claims it “took a year to research and was written in one fevered month in 1987, generally late at night and after long periods of no sleep.” Given the pitch date, a late 1987 composition seems most likely. By early 1988 Dave McKean, a fellow Brit who had pitched alongside Neil Gaiman at the same 1987 meeting, had been put on art duties. McKean, however, was doing a three-issue Black Orchid miniseries (with 48-page issues) and the first ten covers of Sandman at the same period, and so was slow in getting the 128 pages of Arkham Asylum finished. A final delay from Warner Brothers corporate to coordinate around the release of the 1989 Batman movie meant that the comic did not see light until October of 1989, by which point Morrison was well into both their Animal Man and Doom Patrol runs.

From DC’s perspective, Arkham Asylum was clearly a spiritual successor to Moore and Bolland’s The Killing Joke—a bespoke Batman story by ambitious British creators. But where Moore and Bolland were known properties teaming up on one of DC’s most popular characters, Morrison and McKean were unknowns being launched to prominence with a major Batman project launched so as to coincide with a movie. 

Given this, there is a certain perversity to the book, which sees Morrison at their most ruthlessly obscurantist, crafting a story that was absolutely drenched in occult symbolism and references both literary and philosophical. The story was that of a dark night of the soul for Batman—a transformative and cathartic experience in which he descended into a personal hell and emerged stronger for it.…

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Human Bondage: You Only Live Twice, or Critical Support for Blofeld

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After a (Jesus) 7-month hiatus, Of Human Bondage, or Human Bondage as we’re rebranding it, is back. Kit and I have functionally rebooted the project, with a co-host lineup change, new theme music, and losing the preposition. Otherwise it’s the same show, and Kit and I are still cracking jokes and being insightful about James Bond movies. We’re pleased to announce that our friend James Slater-Murphy of Pex Lives celebrity has joined us for our grilling of You Only Live Twice, an execrable piece of anti-Japanese schlock that we nonetheless have a lovely conversation about. As always we include a content warning, particularly for the troubling 10-minute segment at the head of the show, but afterwards things go quite smoothly. We hope you enjoy the show at least once; or even twice, to match your number of lives. …

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With His Blue Cock on Proud Display (Book Three, Part 8: Grant Morrison)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison conceived of Animal Man as a postmodernist comic, a school of thought that was in many ways comparable to their beloved school of Chaos Magic.

The God of Watchmen was far from shy. He liked to muscle his way into every panel, every line. He strutted into view with his blue cock on proud display, and everywhere you looked the Watchmaker was on hand to present his glittering structure for our approval and awe. —Grant Morrison, Supergods

As Morrison explained it, “Chaos Magic as I understand it is simply a description for a type of modern quasi-shamanic practice which incorporates ALL other magics, allowing the practitioner to choose from a constantly changing postmodern menu of techniques, gods, cosmologies, rituals etc. Chaos Magic might use a traditional Enochian ritual as the framework for an invocation of Clive Barker’s Pinhead or Mickey Mouse. Chaos emphasizes work and results over abstract theorizing. In addition to sorcery, it makes use of Reichian body therapy, NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis to facilitate the creation of multiple creative selves.” 

More directly related to Animal Man, however, is the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, mentioned by Morrison in several interviews as an influence on their work. Like chaos magic, this is an influence that can be found on multiple Morrison works, including explicitly in their Doom Patrol run. But two stories apply particularly to Animal Man. The first is “Pierre Menard, Autor of the Quixote,” which Borges writes in the form of a mock essay analyzing the work of Pierre Menard, a man who threw himself into Don Quixote and the life of Miguel de Cervantes with such vigor that he was able to recreate Don Quixote from first principles, composing a version of it which is in practice word for word identical to the original. Borges’s story, with straight-faced humor, then proceeds to elucidate the ways in which these identical works are in fact profoundly different, discussing how  “It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Pierre Menard with that of Miguel de Cervantes. Cervantes, for example, wrote the following (Part I, Chapter IX):

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

This catalog of attributes, written in the seventeenth century, and written by the “ingenious layman” Miguel de Cervantes, is mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.

History, the mother of truth!–the idea is staggering.” There is a clear line from this sort of game and the metafictional play of Morrison’s interpolation of Crisis, cheekily remixing “I Was the Man With Animal Powers” into his narrative as an actual comic, at once a living origin and a cast off piece of pre-Crisis continuity.”…

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IDSG Ep87 James Lindsay’s Conceptual Penis

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In this bumper edition, we begin a projected trilogy of episodes on James Lindsay, Twitter’s favourite anti-Critical Race Theory obsessive and bullying prick. 

This time, we track the earlier part of James’ career as a professional reactionary, leading up to the embarassing ‘Conceptual Penis hoax’ of which James still seems inexplicably proud. 

Daniel demonstrates (to a Jack still groggy from all the AstraZeneca nanobots coursing through his brain) that James was pretty much always the obnoxious douchebag he is now, but simply needed to learn through experience (of being called on his bullshit) how to successfully present his obnoxious douchebaggery as a profound quest to save Western civilisation from standpoint epistemology or something.

Content Warnings.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Show Notes:

James Lindsay [Twitter] https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames

James Lindsay [Wikipedia] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_A._Lindsay

James Lindsay’s PhD Dissertation, [Combinatorial Unification of Binomial-Like Arrays] https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/723/

Joe Rogan – Exposing Social Justice with Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlqU_JMTzd4

CPAC 2021: James Lindsay on How Critical Theories Work to ‘Tear Apart’ the Values of America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad5ldf8jXI8 

Serious Inquiries Only (formerly Atheistically Speaking) https://seriouspod.com/

AS83, Category 5 Shitstorms, with James Lindsay http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as83-category-5-shitstorms-james-lindsay/

AS84, James LIndsay Part Two http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as84-james-lindsay-part-2/

Peter Boghossian “Proud of Being Gay” [Tweet] https://web.archive.org/web/20150501060350if_/https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/527862167152758784

James Lindsay, [Not Pride and Not Prejudice: Is “Pride” Right for Uses Like “Gay Pride?”] https://web.archive.org/web/20170717143654/http://goddoesnt.blogspot.com/2014/10/not-pride-and-not-prejudice-is-pride.html

“Knowing him, and having bothered to discuss it with him more thoroughly, Peter’s point is that the term “pride” carries certain meanings (here: in reference to achievement, in particular) that may make it somewhat inappropriate to apply to a concept like “gay pride.” As he has done in the past–controversially with groups wedded to certain other terms and ideas connected with them–he has asked for a disambiguation of the term “pride” in this context. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though for some legitimate reasons, there was a rather substantial blowback to his request to carefully consider the terminology being employed as dispassionately as possible.”


Greta Christina, [Peter Boghossian, and What Gay Pride Actually Means] https://the-orbit.net/greta/2014/11/01/peter-boghossian-and-what-gay-pride-actually-means/

“Okay. Fine. As a fully licensed and registered LGBT person, I will spell out to Peter Boghossian what, exactly, “gay pride” means. (Actually, to be precise, I will point out what “LGBT pride” means.)

“LGBT pride does not mean being proud of having been born lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans.

“It means being proud of having survived.

“It means being proud of living in a homophobic, biphobic, transphobic society — a society that commonly treats us with contempt at best and violent hatred at worst — and still getting on with our lives. It means being proud of flourishing, in a society that commonly thinks we’re broken. It means being proud of being happy, in a society that commonly thinks we should be miserable. It means being proud of being good and compassionate, in a society that commonly thinks we’re wicked.…

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The Most Escapist of Fantasies (Book Three, Part 7: Continuity, Postmodernism)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moving towards the end of their run, Grant Morrison began paying off the threads they’d been setting up for more than a year, moving the book towards something nobody else at DC was willing to engage with: Crisis on Infinite Earths.

The old world had been too incompetent and incomplete for words. The new world was the world as we’d always dreamed it could be—a golden dawn rising on an age of miracles undreamed of, except, perhaps, in the most escapist of fantasies.—Neil Gaiman, Miracleman

Some of this, to be sure, was a product of precisely what Morrison was doing, which was manifestly not trying to undo Crisis on Infinite Earths, a proposal that DC would never have let them do anyway. And outside of their distinctly idiosyncratic approach there weren’t a lot of uses for a villain whose existence fundamentally challenged the prevailing consensus of how the DC universe worked. But it wasn’t just Psycho-Pirate that nobody but Morrison was willing to touch; it was the entire vast and weird edifice of Crisis on Infinite Earths. As the 90s dawned, Morrison was the only writer at DC with the combination of bravery and foolishness to poke the bear of what, exactly, collapsing a multiverse into a single universe meant.

It was not that this was an intrinsically weighty and worthy topic. The implications of Crisis on Infinite Earths were not some towering literary mountain to scale. In any context outside the narrow and obsessive concerns of comics fans it paled before their earlier furious rants about animal cruelty. But it was a conspicuous ring to grab for—something that any fan who looked at the DC Universe of the late 80s immediately saw and wondered about. And Morrison was the lone writer to look at it and decide to go for it. More than that, they went for it almost immediately, beginning the plotline less than a year after their DC debut on the very first title they got. This may not have been literary ambition, but it was very clearly ambition all the same—a brash drive to stand out from everyone else in the field.

Beyond this, Morrison had a tangibly distinctive approach to the material—one that was well-tailored to mitigating the most obvious flaws in tackling something as abstruse as the nature of the erased multiverse, a concept that on its surface has few obvious paths to human relatability. For Morrison what was interesting about the idea was not the bombastic grandeur of “worlds will live, worlds will die,” but rather in what deleting universes from continuity meant for the people in them. As Animal Man confronts his pre-Crisis version in his peyote vision, his predecessor rages, “What happens when the continuity changes? What happens to all those lives? Who’s responsible? They twist us and torture us. They kill us in our billions. For what? For entertainment,” insisting that “Our lives are not our own. It’s not fair.…

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IDSG Ep86 Internet Drama News Roundup

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In this News Roundup episode, we take a look at the ‘debate’ between Professor Richard Wolff (public face of Marxism these days, sadly) and ‘Destiny’ (AKA Steven Bonnell II), a liberal YouTube livestreamer, and Bonnell’s total lack of real and honest curiosity about socialism.  We then take a look at Nick Fuentes’ extremely not mad reaction to YouTuber Thought Slime’s video about him, and discover various things about Nick, including why he doesn’t believe in dinosaurs.  Or, y’know, the Holocaust.  We also check in on Bret (Weinstein) and Heather (Heying) (of the Dark Horse podcast) to correct some of their pernicious bullshit and see what they think the cops should be allowed to do to protestors who are DESTROYING CIVILISATION.  Daniel draws the various threads together and, in a stunning third act twist, reveals what all these things have in common.

Content Warnings Apply.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

Episode Notes:

Destiny, “You Are Just WRONG! — Richard Wolff Debate Gets Heated” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcA5szcnESY

Matthew Gault, “Twitch Streamer Destiny and an Economist Debate Capitalism, Achieve Nothing.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg8x77/twitch-streamer-destiny-and-an-economist-debate-capitalism-achieve-nothing

“Twitch streamer and philosophical gadfly Steven “Destiny” Bonnell II spent 90 minutes of his day on Wednesday debating the merits of capitalism and socialism with noted economist Richard Wolff. Thirty-five minutes into the “debate” and the pair were arguing over the basic definitions of capitalism and socialism—economic systems whose relative merits and performance they were supposed to compare. It was not how either party had said they wanted the conversation to go.

It was also a clear picture of the state of online-led political conversation—one side stalls the conversation to demand strict definitions and gaming personalities soak up too much time and attention.

[…]

“The pair went back and forth, both often heated. Wolff is old school and a college professor. His style was collegiate, sometimes condescending, and often sounded like a lecture. Destiny is used to debating on the internet where talking fast and fussing about specifics throws off an opponent. It was a weird pairing.”

Rad Shiba’s video on Richard Wollf, ‘A Wolff in Marxist Clothing’ https://youtu.be/JG7FhC2LeGE

ThoughtSlime, “Nick Fuentes is the hate nerd” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eRoYhTQDuo

Nick Fuentes response on AF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzBo3NcurE

Nicholas J. Fuentes | Responding to Th*ught Sl*me’s Hitpiece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX4QO8nPKFQ

Avi vs Nick Fuentes On the Holocaust and Trans Issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30qlCoYLfSc

Dark Horse Podcast Q&A 76th DarkHorse Podcast Livestream,
“Should Police Be Allowed to Kill Rioters” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7wWmzmBw6I&t=3414s Starts at 56:5…

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Live With The Contradictions (Book Three, Part 6: Animal Rights, Psycho Pirate)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Grant Morrison’s Animal Man contained frequent political issues, particularly ones focused on issues of animal rights.

Sometimes you can’t live with the contradictions, Grant. —Alan Moore, as quoted by Grant Morrison

Arguments against animal cruelty rooted in a sense of animal rights reach into antiquity. The Pythagoreans argued for vegetarianism based on the fact of animal suffering, while animal rights based arguments in Indian culture date as far back as the 8th century BCE. More contemporaneously, the 19th century led to Richard Martin helping to form the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824, while philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Arnold Schopenhauer made ethical arguments for the legitimacy of animal rights. 

Come the 1960s and animal rights began to mingle with the rapidly fomenting political radicalism, commingling with the larger environmentalist movement in the form of things like Greenpeace’s anti-whaling protests. In the UK people opposed to blood sports like fox hunting formed the Hunt Saboteurs Association and embraced direct action, sabotaging hunts and sparking increasingly fraught confrontations with hunters. In 1972 an offshoot group, the Band of Mercy, itself a precursor to the Animal Liberation Front. This group embraced even more militant tactics, most infamously arson and raids on farms and laboratories.  These increasingly radical strains of activism coalesced in 1973 when philosopher Peter Singer published an article in which he coined the phrase “animal liberation,” expanding the notion in 1975 to a full-length book in which he critiqued the idea that animals have a lesser degree of rights than humans as “speciesism.” Singer went on to argue for the non-voluntary euthanasia of disabled children.

Among those influenced by Singer’s book was Ingrid Newkirk, who in 1980 helped found People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In 1981, working with members of the Animal Liberation Front, the group shot to national prominence in 1981 when they brought attention to the conditions of lab monkeys in a lab in Silver Spring, Maryland. They quickly became known for their ostentatious and eye-catching tactics like their “I’d Rather Go Naked than Wear Fur” campaign, in which celebrities posed for tasteful nude photographs to protest the use of fur. This deliberately confrontational approach did exactly what was intended: to garner attention, including that most effective form of it, controversy. Indeed, the animal rights movement was generally good at this, with its steadfast moral condemnation of everyday activities like eating dinner or wearing boots and its insistence on radical, fundamental change to day to day life.

For Morrison’s part, the thing that radicalized them was being “horrified by harrowing scenes from the animal rights documentary The Animals Film, and a single viewing was enough to bring about my conversion to vegetarianism.” This film was famously aired by Channel 4 in 1982 on its third day of transmission, with cuts demanded by the Independent Broadcasting Authority on the grounds that scenes could “incite crime or lead to civil disorder.” As Channel 4’s contract with the filmmakers forbade them from making cuts, meaning that they had to go back and negotiate exactly how to handle it.…

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