Sometimes I read a post and wonder what these folks are talking about since it makes no sense at all. Often I find that they simply didn't know what they were talking about, had misunderstood some event and gone off on an unrelated tangent exercising one of their bedraggled hobby horses. Once I've untangled the unrelated threads each makes some sense, though not what those who commented had in mind.

Norm me-toos a Mick Hartley post that misunderstood a Stephan Pollard article which questioned a BBC news show. (How's that for a chain of references!).

Working back, the beeb showed Paul McCartney viewing some PETA footage from China in which some cats and dogs were handled roughly during slaughter. McCartney called for a complete boycott of China in retaliation. Pollard thinks McCartney has his priorities confused.

China imprisons and executes thousands of dissidents who dare to criticise the regime. Sixteen years after the protest in Tiananmen Square dozens of those arrested remain in prison. One man, Yu Dongyue, is still imprisoned for having thrown paint on the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, an act of “counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement” for which he was sentenced to 20 years.

Sir Paul and Lady Heather are so exercised by the plight of some cats and dogs that they will now refuse to travel to China, and are demanding a worldwide boycott of Chinese goods.

As for the imprisonment and judicial murder of thousands of dissident human beings, not a pip from either of them.

Not that anyone should be surprised. It is the same liberal mindset that lavishes praise on Fidel Castro as a hero, rather than condemning him as a tyrant. Castro learnt well from his Soviet backers, and rounds up and imprisons opponents just as they did. In March 2003, 75 prisoners of conscience (as Amnesty has designated them) were sentenced to prison terms of up to 28 years for peacefully opposing the regime.

Sir Paul has worldwide fame. He could do untold good campaigning for his fellow human beings. Instead, he chooses to try to save a few animals. Go figure.

Hartley thinks Pollard has missed the point.

. . . what perplexes me is the way people get so outraged about those who campaign against animal cruelty - and we're not talking about animal lib nutters here, just cases like this where we can all agree that unnecessary cruelty is involved. What's the problem? It's not a zero-sum game, where any outrage against animal cruelty automatically detracts from campaigns against people cruelty. . .

Do we really want another celebrity giving us all the benefit of their opinion on every political topic? Stephen forgets that Sir Paul may not share his views: to judge from the political pronouncements of other rock stars, he almost certainly wouldn't. Just be glad that he isn't campaigning for troops out of Iraq now, or a boycott of Israel.

Norm says me too.

It isn't as if feelings of revulsion at cruelty - any cruelty - can be switched on and off at will, anyway. There can be debate about priorities and about the most effective ways of trying to remedy different forms of suffering, of trying to combat injustices of one kind and another. But given how much there is of both the one and the other, the main thing is that people try to make a difference for the better somewhere.

I think they are all nuts and have no clue at all what the Chinese were doing or the context they were doing it in. Each used the PETA footage to beat their favorite drum and not one of them seems capable of critical thought, able to ask the most obvious questions to illuminate the Chinese view and so understand what they saw on the PETA footage. In China cats and dogs are food. The flesh is meat, their fur is fiber for apparel. They are not incapable of affection - consider Pandas - they have different cultural norms and preferences. Just as the French eat horses, horrifying Americans, the Chinese eat cats.

And before you go all veggie and superior consider that field and row cropping kills countless numbers of uncounted species driving some to extinction! Until we learn to synthesize food from air and space rocks animals will die so that we can eat. That's how things work, have always worked, and we don't yet know how to change that. If you want to feel superior - though that's really a character defect you should work to correct - try to be honest about the harm you do simply by existing and be properly humble and grateful that this is so.

But what about Pollard's point that we ought to be protesting cruelty to people instead, and Mick and Norm's neep that it should be "also" rather than "instead", that we ought to protest all cruelty, period? Nonsense. We should oppose cruelty, denounce and renounce cruelty, but to focus on it in countries where millions live in abject misery due to poverty and lack of development seems quaint at best, the fussy alarums of the comfortable. Pollard is right that there is a confusion of priorities, but wrong about what is important.

The developing world is a cruel place to live. It has always been so and some of that is the self-inflicted cruelty of political opportunists such as Pollard's neep about Castro. It is well to remember as Alex Tabarrok reminds us in Democide that the PRC rule of China has murdered 76,692,000 people - 77 million in nice round numbers, and just barley beats out the Soviet Union at 62 million. Hitler was a distant third at 21 million, but he only had 12 years to work. Politics is far more deadly than war, and far crueler as well.

There is some reason to hope that simply helping those nations to develop - to become more materially secure - will do more to reduce cruelty than any political gesture such as McCartney's impotent protest. But they know that. Their protest is for domestic consumption, part of their larger effort to meddle in their own societies and impose their personal views on others. They just used those hapless Chinese schmucks in the abattoir as tools to further their domestic agendas.

The tangled threads of disparate agendas, when separated and examined individually, make sense even if they are mistaken.