What If Lions Are Better Than People? – My NEW Taki’s column

Impossible to predict the comments this week…

Last week, I was perturbed by the widespread implication from some of my fellow conservatives that I was incapable of being—or had no “right” to be—simultaneously disgusted by the senseless slaughter of a lion and the sale of human remains.

In their attempts to maintain the moral high ground, those on either side, ironically, only advertised their own puny capacity for compassion.

Then I discovered the limit of my own. After a day or two, the online arguments veered in another direction:

Real and would-be “old Africa hands” on the left began defending big-game hunts because they benefit the locals.

And the trouble is—having endured 50 years of commercials showing teary-eyed little black kids still covered in flies, as well as the sick joke that was Live Aid—my feelings about “the locals” are bookended by Heather No. 1’s eye-rolling “God, aren’t they fed yet?” and Sam Kinison’s “You live in a desert! Get out of the desert!!!”