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Posted in animals | music on August 23, 2006
Willie Nelson says stop eating horses
"If you've ever been around horses a lot, especially wild horses, you know they are part of the American heritage. I don't think its right that we kill them and eat them," Nelson said in a telephone interview Tuesday. [USA Today]
RELATED: Willie Nelson teams with Ryan Adams for new CD
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Posted on August 23, 2006 9:20 AM
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as far as i know, my dog is the only one that eats horsemeat
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 9:54 AM
1 too many joints
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 10:01 AM
Don't the French eat horses?
Posted by Bort | August 23, 2006 10:07 AM
Willie rules!
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 10:14 AM
willie isn't arguing that the french shouldn't eat horses. why should they (the french) care about american heritage? he's saying americans shouldn't eat horses. and i think he's right.
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 10:30 AM
Bob Dylan said that Willie Nelson sucks..
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 10:44 AM
You damn vegans better stop eating them damn horses, Ya heard?
Posted by willie | August 23, 2006 10:58 AM
SAVE A HORSE — RIDE A COWBOY!
Posted by Big & Rich | August 23, 2006 11:06 AM
er, Take 2:
SAVE A HORSE — EAT A COWBOY!
Posted by Big $ Rich | August 23, 2006 11:07 AM
I like the way USA Today informs us that he has recorded two popular songs just to clarify exactly who this Willie Nelson chracter is in case we didn't know.
Posted by will | August 23, 2006 11:11 AM
Although people in the United States rarely eat horse meat, around 50,000 horses are slaughtered each year in Texas for export to Europe, Mexico, or Japan. Horse meat produced in the U.S. is also sold to zoos for carnivore feeding, due to its high protein content...Horse is commonly eaten in many countries in Europe and Asia...Very few horsemeat producing countries specifically raise horses for meat as cattle are; instead they use ex-racehorses, riding horses, horses sold at auction by unaware owners, and also stolen ones...
[From Wikipedia]
Posted by justthefaxmam | August 23, 2006 11:28 AM
I've eaten horse meat in Europe, I have no idea why Americans are against it. It is extremely lean and full of vitamens. Cost more though.
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 11:52 AM
Okay, okay, no more horse. But can I still eat babies? Tender, succulent human children?
Posted by J | August 23, 2006 11:57 AM
Are you the dingo that stole my baby?
Posted by Sheila | August 23, 2006 12:02 PM
er, Take 2:
Are you the dingo that ate my baby?
Posted by Kasey Chambers | August 23, 2006 12:07 PM
The Modern Diet is worthless. I'll chaw me a turnip straight from the soil.
Posted by Dylan | August 23, 2006 12:32 PM
you stupid vegetarians have to take the fun out of everything. You should try a little horse tar tar and I swear you will convert back to the meat eaters side... YUMMO!
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 12:34 PM
the culling of the wild horse herds in the western states is actually necessary so they don't all starve to death when they become overpopulated. this is the main source of the horsemeat used for food from the USA - it goes to France and Japan, and some of it is used for dogfood domestically.
i, too, have heard that horse is more delicious than beef. it's supposed to be good tartare (raw)!
i would also caution the citation of wikipedia as fact considering their history.
Posted by 1000yregg | August 23, 2006 1:34 PM
Was that Rachael Ray telling me to eat horse tar?
Posted by Jeff | August 23, 2006 2:43 PM
Fuck you Willie, I'm eating all the horses.
Posted by steve | August 23, 2006 3:47 PM
brooklynvegan loves his veggie horse burgers.
Posted by willie | August 23, 2006 3:54 PM
Why should we cull facts about horse meat from Wikipedia when we can get them a comment posted on a music blog from a guy with a food blog?
Posted by Anonymous | August 23, 2006 3:56 PM
the wikipedia caution was just that. people on the internet nowadays take a wikipedia citation as fact when that sites entries are written by people without any checks on facts.
meanwhile, my posting makes no such claim. yeah, i could be bullshitting, but i don't claim a citation as authority or the truth. the post is my opinion based upon what i have read. i could probably find a bibliography for you next time - one that is authoritative, not from an internet site with suspect listings.
sorry if you're so defensive about wikipedia. i hope you make some money off them since you clearly feel so much for their cause to defend them sarcastically on a blog. since you post anonymously, perhaps you are just a wikipedia plant to stomp controversy about the site's verity on subjects.
Posted by 1000yregg | August 23, 2006 4:19 PM
"A variety of studies to date have tended to suggest that Wikipedia is of a similar order of accuracy to Encyclopædia Britannica"...[From Wikipedia]
Perhaps you're a plant from some food blog posting about horsemeat on a music blog run by a vegan...
Posted by justthefaxmam | August 23, 2006 4:38 PM
nice wikipedia citation. so it must be true.
and indeed, my meat agenda on brooklynvegan has been exposed- curse you!
Posted by 1000yregg | August 23, 2006 4:51 PM
""This is Gonna Be Good"...worst food blog, ever"... [From Wikipedia]
Posted by wikipediarules | August 23, 2006 5:09 PM
Encouraging signs from the Wikipedia project, where co-founder and überpedian Jimmy Wales has acknowledged there are real quality problems with the online work.
Criticism of the project from within the inner sanctum has been very rare so far, although fellow co-founder Larry Sanger, who is no longer associated with the project, pleaded with the management to improve its content by befriending, and not alienating (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25), established sources of expertise. (i.e., people who know what they're talking about.)
Meanwhile, criticism from outside the Wikipedia camp has been rebuffed with a ferocious blend of irrationality and vigor that's almost unprecedented in our experience: if you thought Apple, Amiga, Mozilla or OS/2 fans were er, ... passionate, you haven't met a wiki-fiddler. For them, it's a religious crusade.
In the inkies, Wikipedia has enjoyed a charmed life, with many of the feature articles about the five-year old project resembling advertisements. Emphasis is placed on the knowledgeable articles (by any yardstick, it's excellent for Klingon, BSD Unix, and Ayn Rand), the breadth of its entries (Klingon again), and process issues such as speed.
"We don't ever talk about absolute quality," boasted one of the project's prominent supporters, Clay Shirky, a faculty tutor at NYU. But it's increasingly difficult to avoid the issue any longer.
Especially since Wikipedia's material is replicated endlessly on the web: it's the first port of call for "sploggers" who create phoney sites, spam blogs, which created to promote their clients in Google.
Wales was responding to author Nicholas Carr, who in a dazzling post (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amorality_o.php) on the transcendent New Age "hive-mind" rhetoric that envelops the "Web 2.0" bubble, took time out to examine the quality of two entries picked at random: Bill Gates and Jane Fonda.
He wasn't impressed by what he saw.
"This is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts," he wrote.
Something that aspires to be a reference work ought to be judged by the quality of the worst entry, he said, in response to the clock-stopped, right-time defense of the project, not by the fact it's got some good articles.
"In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness," writes Carr.
Only it isn't.
"An encyclopedia can't just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success. I would argue, in fact, that the overall quality of an encyclopedia is best judged by its weakest entries rather than its best. What's the worth of an unreliable reference work?"
Why, as an Emergent Phenomenon™ it provides a subject that can be used for countless hours of class study for people like Clay Shirky, of course. Good for him - but what about the rest of us?
Uncountable
Surprisingly, Wales agreed that the entries weren't up to snuff.
"The two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [sic] Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are nearly unreadable crap. Why? What can we do about it?" he asked (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2005-October/030075.html).
Traditionally, Wikipedia supporters have responded to criticism in one of several ways. The commonest is: If you don't like an entry, you can fix it yourself. Which is rather like going to a restaurant for a date, being served terrible food, and then being told by the waiter where to find the kitchen. But you didn't come out to cook a meal - you could have done that at home! No matter, roll up your sleeves.
As a second line of defense, Wikipedians point to flaws in the existing dead tree encyclopedias, as if the handful of errors in Britannica cancels out the many errors, hopeless apologies for entries, and tortured prose, of Wikipedia itself.
Thirdly, and here you can see that the defense is beginning to run out of steam, one's attention is drawn to process issues: such as the speed with which errors are fixed, or the fact that looking up a Wikipedia is faster than using an alternative. This line of argument is even weaker than the first: it's like going to a restaurant for a date - and being pelted with rotten food, thrown at you at high velocity by the waiters.
But the issue of readability poses even greater challenges. Even when a Wikipedia entry is 100 per cent factually correct, and those facts have been carefully chosen, it all too often reads as if it has been translated from one language to another then into to a third, passing an illiterate translator at each stage. (Possibly if one of these languages was Klingon, the entry might survive the mauling, but that doesn't appear to be the case very often).
Here the problems begin, because readability is a quality that can't be generated by a machine, or judged by one. It's the kind of subjective valuation that the Wikipedians explicitly hate: subjectivity is scorned for failing the positivist's NPOV test.
As a delicious illustration, Wikipedia appears to have a quality problem with the word "quality" itself. While Merriam Webster online offers us eight (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=quality&x=0&y=0) major definitions, including "a) degree of excellence : GRADE ... b : superiority in kind", and the Cambridge Dictionary three (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=64728&dict=CALD), of which two are "how good or bad something is and of a high standard" Wikipedia's sister project Wiktionary definition begins this. "1 - (uncountable) general good value"
Now is that General Good Value as in something plucked from a Wal-Mart sale? And "Uncountable"? Yes, indeed.
If this was a Marvel Comic, our superhero Objectivity would by now be ensared in the evil coils of Subjectivity. There appears to be no escape. Or is there?
Not good enough - so what do we wikkin' do?
Re-working Wikipedia so it presents the user with something minimally readable will be a mammoth task. Although the project has no shortage of volunteers, most add nothing: busying themselves with edits that simply add or takeaway a comma. These are housekeeping tasks that build up credits for the participants, so they can rise higher in the organization.
And Wikipedia's "cabal" has become notorious for deterring knowledgable and literate contributors. One who became weary of the in-fighting, Orthogonal, calls it Wikipedia's HUAC - the House of Unamerican Activities prominent in the McCarthy era for hunting down and imprisoning the ideologically-incorrect.
So right now, the project appears ill-equipped to respond to the new challenge. Its philosophical approach deters subjective judgements about quality, and its political mindset deters outside experts from helping.
This isn't promising.
One day Wikipedia may well be the most amazing reference work the world has ever seen, lauded for its quality. But to get from here to there it will need real experts and top quality writing - it won't get there by hoping that its whizzy technical processes remedy such deficiencies. In other words, it will resemble today's traditional encyclopedias far more than it does today.
For now we simply welcome the candour: at least Wikipedia is officially out of QD, or the "Quality Denial" stage.
Bootnote Of the many, many atrocious entries, we'd like to bring one more to the HUAC's attention, and it's our very favorite. As of the time of writing (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeanette_Washington&diff=18654297&oldid=16179591), whoever wrote the entry for soul legend Baby Washington has no idea who she is, but makes a wild guess, then gives up completely with the less-than-helpful advice: "Many have written inacurate information about Washington. She IS NOT "BABY WASHINGTON" from James Brown." (sic).
Indeed. But note that this entry has been edited no less than seven times and can be found replicated at Biography.com, Answers.com, Reference.com, InfoMutt, The Free Dictionary and hundreds of other sites.
You've got to love the web. Just bask in that collective intelligence. ®
Posted by 1000yregg | August 23, 2006 6:06 PM
"Despite passionate protests to the contrary, the consumption of horse-flesh is a moral imperative. We won't make any progress as a civilization until we start eating more horse, preferably raw." ... [from Wikipedia]
Posted by jilly | August 23, 2006 6:40 PM
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Donnas:
"The Donnas are widely considered by critics to be the most musically sophisticated and lyrically complex groups to emerge on the rock scene in early 2000. The hit single 'Take it off' has been praised as a post-modern tribute to a post-industrial world."
I *SWEAR* I wasn't the one who added that. What's even funnier is that there was more "vandalism" after these sentences that some Wikipedian removed, but he left the above sentences, apparently because he thought they were legit.
Posted by Recovering Donnaholic | August 23, 2006 10:44 PM
Horse meat? Don't they serve that at Texas Road House?
Posted by lynch | September 5, 2006 9:31 PM
We really need to do something about this horse eating thing, its very wrong we shouldn't just sit here and let them make the biggest mistake of their lives.
Posted by Morgan | September 27, 2006 3:02 PM
We really need to do something about this horse eating thing, its very wrong we shouldn't just sit here and let them make the biggest mistake of their lives.
Posted by Morgan | September 27, 2006 3:04 PM
We really need to do something about this horse eating thing, its very wrong we shouldn't just sit here and let them make the biggest mistake of their lives.
Posted by Morgan | September 27, 2006 3:04 PM
We really need to do something about this horse eating thing, its very wrong we shouldn't just sit here and let them make the biggest mistake of their lives.
Posted by Morgan | September 27, 2006 3:04 PM
We really need to do something about this horse eating thing, its very wrong we shouldn't just sit here.
Posted by Morgan | September 27, 2006 3:05 PM
We really need to do something about this horse eating thing, its very wrong we shouldn't just sit here.
Posted by Morgan | September 27, 2006 3:05 PM
Almost no matter what the animal, meat is tasty. Nothing wrong with horse meat. It's the beef lobby that is convincing us otherwise.
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Posted by Kassie | October 30, 2006 4:42 PM
i love u
Posted by emily | February 14, 2008 4:53 PM
not too bad
Posted by WOW GOLD | December 2, 2008 11:29 PM