- Testet ikke drikken på lam - Aftenposten.no

Especially after all the lamby goodness from the other day.

Just to translate quickly, a new drink for lambs (”Lammedrikk Pluss”, or “The Lamb Drink Plus”) was put out on the market recently by Tine, the company who also produces most of Norway’s dairy products. The lamb drink wasn’t thoroughly tested since the demand for it was so high–they only tested it out on baby goats and not lambs. It turned out to kill the poor lambs! They got so full of gas their bellies blew up like balloons, and it took them a long time to die. It’s been taken off the market, and the producer is compensating the farmers with 350,- NOK, about 60 USD, for each lamb that died from imbibing this product.

Such a sad little piece of news. Poor lambs. This is not good press for Tine.

At least one of my readers here knows about my discomfiture at my husband Johannes’s decision to “boycott” the US since the US-VISIT program went into effect. Half Changed World linked today to a really good post on Decomposition. The author the the post manages to concisely state a lot of the ideas I’ve had running around in my head about Johannes’s kind of “activism”.

Does a company do something you don’t like? Go ahead and boycott, but don’t bother organizing or informing the public or even taking the five minutes to write the company and tell them why you’re boycotting. In effect, of course, you’ve completely disempowered yourself, because the company will have no idea why you’re not buying their goods and is just as likely to determine that it’s because their ads don’t feature enough young naked women. All of the effective boycotts in history have been large, well-organized and public. Boycotting a store or product by itself may be an important expression of our personal values, but it will not effect social or political change.

These statements are relevant to a lot of what we call “activism” today. I’m guilty of this kind of laziness, too.

It’s a little too early for me to be posting now; I hope to post a more well-thought out discussion of my thoughts on this subject. For now, though, thanks to Athena Dreaming for this bit of inspiration.