Founder of Sea Shepherd Arrested in Germany

[ponderingturtle]

Move out of the way, starting at what time? The time they actually started their engines, or some previous time?

I thought the point was their engines were at idle.

 

[Furcifer]

If the Gil could only reverse at 15% of its forward speed, that's almost 5 knots. More than enough speed to back out of the way.

1080hp is going to pull that boat back significantly faster than 5 knots, but anyway. You can contest that the Gil wouldn't be a screaming demon in reverse, but it was perfectly able to move out of the way; there's just no question.

That's probably more in line with what they are capale of doing in reverse.

Of course you can't just jam a boat into reverse and hit the gas and expect to start moving backwards. There this thing called inertia. Add to that the fact the boat was what, 70 feet long?

They were playing a game of chicken all season long. It's not surprising that someone finally got hit. I'm pretty sure that's what the maritime court was saying in their ruling. You play with the bull you get the horns.

 

[NoahFence]

deleted

 

[NoahFence]

Plus those Japanese ships are extremely fast for their size. Someone more familiar with the Sea Shepard might chime in, but I believe it was a naval pursuit boat and it was getting lapped by the whaling boats. Sufficed to say despite their size they're no slouches in the water.

That's exactly right. The harpoon ships are designed for speed and maneuverability, which is actually highlighted in this incident, where the thing is practically horizontal, it's turning so hard and fast.

 

[NoahFence]

If the Gil could only reverse at 15% of its forward speed, that's almost 5 knots. More than enough speed to back out of the way.

1080hp is going to pull that boat back significantly faster than 5 knots, but anyway. You can contest that the Gil wouldn't be a screaming demon in reverse, but it was perfectly able to move out of the way; there's just no question.

You are simply ignoring the fact that a ship who itself is extremely fast and maneuverable, is bearing down on them. The reaction was far too slim.

 

[Seismosaurus]

In the end, it all comes down to whether you think whales count as moral entities.

If you don't, if your entire moral universe consists of people and what they want to do, your position makes perfect sense. The Sea Shepherd organisation is annoying humans, the only beings who matter, to protect whales, that don't matter at all. Thus the Sea Shepherd people deserve to be killed...

Oh hang on, that doesn't actually follow. You need some additional stupid ideas to make that argument work, including placing a very low value on human life.

I place a very low value on some human lives, yes. Those who are deliberately endangering others for going about their lawful business fall into that category.

However if you think that whales actually matter, and that it actually matters whether they are killed inhumanely, then your position is clearly immoral.

Actually I'd say not. If you do think that whales actually matter, then the thing to do is push to change the law to prevent whaling. And indeed much progress has been made through that strategy, for those who like whales. Going out and acting irresponsibly is not the correct way accomplish anything.

You have a scientific problem on your hands here, which is that there's no good scientific reason to put humans on a pedestal as the only beings that matter. We're just another species of animal like chimpanzees, dolphins, gorillas and whales. Drawing an arbitrary line between humans and animals is no more intellectually defensible than drawing an arbitrary line between men and women, or white people and brown people.

Actually I don't, as it isn't a scientific issue to me. I put humans on a pedestal because I am a human. The line is indeed arbitrary, but I'm perfectly comfortable with that.

Beings should be judged by the qualities they have, not what arbitrary label you put on them.

A fine viewpoint that I don't share.

 

[NoahFence]

Actually I'd say not. If you do think that whales actually matter, then the thing to do is push to change the law to prevent whaling.

I'm sure the International Whaling Commission thought that's exactly what they were doing when they made it a friggin SANCTUARY for crying out loud.

The LAW doesn't matter to these scumbags.

 

[Checkmite]

That's probably more in line with what they are capale of doing in reverse.

Of course you can't just jam a boat into reverse and hit the gas and expect to start moving backwards. There this thing called inertia. Add to that the fact the boat was what, 70 feet long?

The length doesn't matter; what matters is the displacement.

Here's a video that I consider supports my overall argument:



That's a 40' cruising catamaran, which vessels average between 9 and 10 tons of displacement. It is already moving forward, but notice how quickly it is able to gain significant speed within just a couple of seconds of the throttle being opened up. And consider that sailboats aren't generally designed for that kind of speed, forward or reverse; the boat's two 115-horsepower engines aren't particularly concerned about that.

The Ady Gil, conversely, displaces 13 tons and carries two 540-horsepower engines. That's 30% more displacement, but with 400% more power to move it! It cannot take that vessel more than a couple of seconds to establish a positive speed, forwards or backwards. Yes, the vessel is not as streamlined facing reverse as it is forward; and yes, there are propellers that are more somewhat more efficient driving forward than they are in reverse; but I feel safe saying that it's impossible that a motorboat that size designed to move forward in the water at 32 knots can present such a poor reverse-hull shape and have such a forward-biased propeller that its more than 1,000 ponies are suddenly going to be as responsive as an oil tanker when thrown in reverse from a standstill.

 

[tyr_13]

That's pretty questionable. No humans have actually died, but hundreds of whales have (and hundreds more perhaps been saved). So if whale-life counts at all in your moral calculations you can't discount the possibility that the risk to human life is justified by the difference made to whale life.

Depending on your point of view it might or might not matter that the whales are innocent parties, whereas someone who has signed on for a Japanese whaling ship is not.

It's not questionable. That's pretty obvious. Humans have actually died from the types of mistakes and actions that SS has engaged in, even though the specific acts of SS haven't happened to result in any human deaths yet. Swerving around on the highway, driving while drunk, or putting people who have no idea how to operate a motor vehicle can and have resulted in deaths so it wouldn't be questionable to point that out even if in a specific case it did not for example. This is the same with the SS people. By objective measure of safety at sea, their actions are dangerous and potentially deadly. Calling it 'annoying' is using a weasel word.

More on the whales below.

Only if you think actual, live whales with brains are equivalent to fetuses, and that the desire to not carry an unwanted baby to term is equivalent to the desire to eat some whale meat as opposed to the other available alternatives.

Otherwise it's not apt, it's utterly idiotic.

No, only if one considers that to the people bombing the clinics they are, then the analogy is apt. To them, they are saving human lives so rather than go through the legal work they commit acts of violence, just like the SS people. No need to equate the desire to eat a specific meat. No analogy is equivalent in every way. Utterly idiotic would be to expect otherwise.

To the SS people, saving some whales in a violent manner is more important than the wishes of the whalers. To me, saving humans from the sex trade or murder by their dictators is worth that tactic.

Indeed. Ends do justify means, sometimes. Outside the realm of children's cartoons, anyway. You'll find that outside of Superman comics it's rarely possible to stop all the bad people without some risk or consequences.

Poisoning the well is more childish than what you accuse me of.

Appeal to popular stupidity.

Drivel. Appeal to the positions and opinions of other experts and advocates in the same field, not to popularity and certainly not to stupidity.

They're clearly reaching the ends - whalers are going home having killed far fewer whales than they are allowed to kill. I think some people want to believe Sea Shepherd are ineffective because that narrative suits them, but the facts are simply not on those people's side. From a skeptical perspective it's clear that Sea Shepherd are effective. Some people are just butthurt about the fact that they are effective and are casting about for some excuse to say "lol stupid hippies they never achieve anything".

No, from a skeptical perspective a 'limit' is the max, not the goal. From a skeptical perspective other possible causes must be considered before declaring an element causal. From a skeptical perspective there are other forces at work that could be confounding factors such as the pressure from other groups than the assclowns at SS.

Declaring your view to be the skeptical one in order to cast it as the 'correct' narrative is wrong. So is asserting motivations to those who disagree with your assessment. Calling the SS people 'hippies' is an abuse of the word.

(I guess they missed the kill markings post, listing the whaling ships that Sea Shepherd have dealt with in the past. Of all the things to criticise Sea Shepherd for, ineffectiveness is clearly a very foolish and ignorant choice).

Yes, everyone else is unskeptical, utterly idiotic, butthurt, foolish, ignorant, and basing arguments on Superman comics but you. You're capable of actual honest discourse, so stop with the straw, the name calling, the poisoning the well, etc.

There is an actual discussion here on if the whales in question are moral agents worth killing humans to protect. Now I would at this point disagree with that on the whales that are being hunted. While I think they should not be hunted, I don't see them as worth human life. One can't cite how one type of whale might be morally complex and expect that to be valid for all whales any more than one can cite humans and claim that all primates are self-aware. On a slight tangent, I'm for responsible medical testing on animals for the same basic reason the SS people justify their violence. It isn't that I don't see the animals, monkeys specifically, as worth protecting but that I see the saving of human lives as worth the sacrifice. Protecting the whales from an ecological standpoint is a lot less defensible than their protecting the tuna as the whales in many (not all) cases are being sustainably harvested.

At some level we all find things worth fighting, dieing, and killing for. For abortion clinic bombers, it's their believe in the fetus being a human life with a soul. For the SS people, it's protecting whales. For the Founding Fathers, it was representative government. No one has convinced me yet that those first two means are justified by their ends, and that's not coming from a comic book but an assessment of both the means and the ends.

 

[Checkmite]

You are simply ignoring the fact that a ship who itself is extremely fast and maneuverable, is bearing down on them. The reaction was far too slim.

Nonsense, as proven by their own video:



You'll notice that immediately after the collision (which, despite the whaler "turning so hard it was almost horizontal" managed to end up more of a side-swiping than a head-on ramming), at 22 seconds the Ady begins to reverse and picks up significant momentum without delay. Considering that the two vessels were on convergent courses rather than perpendicular courses, reversing would've taken the Ady not only away from the whaler laterally but astern of it in a way that the whaler couldn't steer to compensate for and keep a collision course.

 

[Furcifer]

The length doesn't matter; what matters is the displacement.

Here's a video that I consider supports my overall argument:



That's a 40' cruising catamaran, which vessels average between 9 and 10 tons of displacement. It is already moving forward, but notice how quickly it is able to gain significant speed within just a couple of seconds of the throttle being opened up. And consider that sailboats aren't generally designed for that kind of speed, forward or reverse; the boat's two 115-horsepower engines aren't particularly concerned about that.

The Ady Gil, conversely, displaces 13 tons and carries two 540-horsepower engines. That's 30% more displacement, but with 400% more power to move it! It cannot take that vessel more than a couple of seconds to establish a positive speed, forwards or backwards. Yes, the vessel is not as streamlined facing reverse as it is forward; and yes, there are propellers that are more somewhat more efficient driving forward than they are in reverse; but I feel safe saying that it's impossible that a motorboat that size designed to move forward in the water at 32 knots can present such a poor reverse-hull shape and have such a forward-biased propeller that its more than 1,000 ponies are suddenly going to be as responsive as an oil tanker when thrown in reverse from a standstill.

My phone won't play the video so forgive me I'm going from memory. I believe they were low on fuel but making sweeping passes in front of the Japanese vessel, several times in fact without incident. It's only the last time where anything changed, and that was the Japanese boat suddenly veering and hitting the other boat.

Maybe I'm mistaken but I recall it being very clear. I'm surprised anyone is arguing otherwise. But I am going from memory.

 

[Chris_Halkides]

sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander

I place a very low value on some human lives, yes. Those who are deliberately endangering others for going about their lawful business fall into that category.

It seems to me that this notion cuts both ways. The Ady Gil had a right to be where it was, and the Japanese vessel cut its bow off. It would have been nice if the Japanese authorities had cooperated with the investigation, and then we might be able to make more definitive statements about fault. However, it is difficult for me to see that the Japanese ship is not at least partly at fault, and someone might have been killed.

 

[NoahFence]

They had just taken on fuel from the Bob Barker, and were waving goodbye. The Shonan Maru, tailing them, watched the whole thing. Because the Ady Gil stopped in the water, no doubt to simply relax, that's when the Shonan Maru decided to take action, because the smaller, faster, more maneuverable ship was idling. It was their only shot to attempt murder, so they took it.

 

[Checkmite]

The video taken from the Ady Gil...



...shows the crew being aware of and indeed watching the approaching whaler from a significant distance as it closed, and at no time taking any action to evade the obviously on-coming ship.

FWIW, it seems to show that the Ady was also slowly motoring forward on a steady course the entire time. The crew seems to have something of a "it's not like they're actually going to hit us" demeanor as they and the whaler continued to close.

Looking at other videos of the "Sea Shepherds" in action, it seems to me that one of their harassment tactics is attempting to force the whalers to change course by repeatedly getting in their way and threatening collisions. I believe this was such a case. The Ady didn't intend to collide with the whaler; it was supposed to pose a hazard and the whaler was supposed to have to turn to avoid it. This time it just didn't work out that way.

Frankly it was only a matter of time, IMO.

 

[AlaskaBushPilot]

The LAW doesn't matter to these scumbags.

The irony bell just cracked.

 

[Wildy]

Are they doing it in a protected sanctuary under the guise of "research"?

(AKA Lying their asses off about it?)

They are doing it in a protected sanctuary under the guise of "this is a tradition of ours to kill whales". The sanctuary in question is the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary, the best map of which I can find is here. The islands in question are Solor and Lembata, both of which are more or less directly below Sulawesi (the island shaped like a funny looking 'K' on the map), well within the sanctuary.

I don't think there's any question the Japanese vessels are commercial fishing vessels. They even have commercial processing facilities if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, because as the Japanese themselves admit they sell the meat afterwards.

The fishing done in Canada, Norway and even in parts of Japan is done with recreational vessels.

Are you sure about that? (Just to make things clear, I'm asking you for evidence for this claim.)

If that's what they use in Indonesia it's probably not what would typically be considered "commercial". The sale of fish isn't as much a determination as is the capacity to catch fish. If you fish all day with 2 poles and sell your fish you're not considered commercial. Use 3 poles, or a net you start getting into commercial fishing territory.

If the words in this Daily Fail article are correct the villagers there spend about six hours stabbing at a whale until it finally dies.

But then this pretty much goes back to something I said earlier. The difference between what these Indonesians are doing and what the Japanese are doing is simply a matter of scale. How this scale relates to it being a "commercial" activity probably depends more on local conditions compared to global ones.

I think the fact the Japanese are fishing in intenational waters and not coastal waters, like all of the other whaling operations, is a defining point. It's not like they're wandering a few miles off shore, they're scouring the globe. That's a level of organization only available to commercial operations.

So nothing else can come up with levels of organisation like that?

If it's "technically" OK to "research" whales with a harpoon, then it's "technically" OK to park your boat anywhere on the ocean. If chaos ensues because of this, well so be it.

Hyperbole aside Japan is doing this under Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling which permits scientific whaling. The issue that everyone is having is that it's rather obvious that Japan is being a rules laywer. Because there is nothing in the convention saying that you aren't allowed to sell the bits of the whale that aren't being used for science, i.e. most of it.

This is a political issue that isn't being addressed and maybe a little activism is in order.

But part of this activism should also be pressuring countries to close the loophole in the convention.

I mean "technically" Ms. Parks was breaking the law. "Technically" it would have done her some good to walk a few more feet to the back of the bus.

Except that in this case Japan are, essentially, obeying the law, not breaking it.

The problem is that as long as Japan is actually releasing research based on the whaling, such as the ones they claim here and here they haven't violated the permits.

By the way, just going through the titles I'm going to say you don't need to kill whales to do DNA studies. I'm guessing they came about because of the hunting and not the other way around.

"Technically" isn't a good answer when it means turning a blind eye to the underlying condition.

And of course the best way to solve this problem is by ramming/getting rammed by the Japanese fleet and as far as I'm aware doing nothing else about it.

I'm sure the International Whaling Commission thought that's exactly what they were doing when they made it a friggin SANCTUARY for crying out loud.

The LAW doesn't matter to these scumbags.

If that was correct then they wouldn't bother with the pretence of issuing research permits. As far as I'm aware research whaling is still permitted in the sanctuaries, as is apparently "traditional" whaling.

 

[George 152]

They had just taken on fuel from the Bob Barker, and were waving goodbye. The Shonan Maru, tailing them, watched the whole thing. Because the Ady Gil stopped in the water, no doubt to simply relax, that's when the Shonan Maru decided to take action, because the smaller, faster, more maneuverable ship was idling. It was their only shot to attempt murder, so they took it.

Go back to the video and watch the wake behind the Ady Gi go from light to fully aerated.
This, to me being somewhat nautically minded, is the sudden increase of power that drove them under the bow of the whaler

 

[Cain]

Humans worship power. Seismosaurus skirts the morality of the issue by emphasizing what people are legally doing. Well, sometimes the law ain't right.

Humans have actually died from the types of mistakes and actions that SS has engaged in, even though the specific acts of SS haven't happened to result in any human deaths yet. Swerving around on the highway, driving while drunk, or putting people who have no idea how to operate a motor vehicle can and have resulted in deaths so it wouldn't be questionable to point that out even if in a specific case it did not for example. This is the same with the SS people. By objective measure of safety at sea, their actions are dangerous and potentially deadly.

People are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, we agree. The current U.S. president has authorized numerous drone attacks known to take innocent human life. Yet, for these actions, Barack Obama's not generally referred to as human "scum" (policies broadening health coverage are more likely to trigger the label, but that only shows how upside down the world is). In fact, he's a Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

Watson and crew pursue identifiable ships, not people hiding in bumble-**** Pakistan. The Sea Shepard has successfully disrupted attacks without a single loss of human life (while presumably saving many whales). It's funny how frequently critics say "that by some miracle" liberationists have not yet killed anyone. The very same people will hem and haw when it comes to defending mass-killing by their governments.

Anyway, these liberationists are not "scum". They're heroes. The problem is humans are awed by power, not morality.

 

[Checkmite]

Humans worship power. Seismosaurus skirts the morality of the issue by emphasizing what people are legally doing. Well, sometimes the law ain't right.

Sea Shepherds invokes the law. They explicitly claim they are justified in using the tactics they use because under their interpretation of international law, what Japanese whalers and Costa Rican tuna fishermen are doing is "illegal". Yet the tactics Sea Shepherds uses, such as colliding with other vessels and structures and deliberately impeding free navigation of other vessels, are objectively illegal.

The high seas are not the US; there's no such thing as "citizen's arrest" if you see a crime being committed. International maritime law is rather emphatic that only warships and other vessels appropriately marked as representative of national governments are legally allowed to pursue, attempt to detain, or otherwise act upon vessels that are allegedly violating the law.

Breaking the law as a response to lawbreaking is generally considered bad form even when governments do it, let alone private citizens. Terms like "lynch mob" are commonly invoked in such situations.

 

[Furcifer]

@wildy- it seems my post didn't make it, must be my phone. anyhoo...
Commercialism is a matter or scale. It's pretty obvious when you see the other traditional hunts around the World what the Japanese are doing is commercial. I don't think you'd let a kid convince you a bazooka and a bottle rocket were the same thing despite a small matter of scale. Unfortunately that's the same logic I see being applied here when people say "Well I don't see the difference".