Letters to the Editor
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Hey Dick
You've never heard of it because most people don't think their lines of reasoning through to the very end.
Think about it--pro-life and animal rights is all about empathy and suffering. If a partial human fetus could have a similar ability to suffer as a complete chicken (and could you really prove it doesn't? No, you can't), then you can't dodge the issue by claiming that a fetus is just an egg laid by a "companion" chicken. The argument isn't about the COMPLETENESS of a being, it's about "does _________ have the ability to feel pain or suffer?"
Sure, there's nothing that says you can't care about both people and animals, so there's no inherent conflict there. BUT, if you're really putting the "rights" of an animal above the "rights" of a fetus, that's just plain misanthropy.
Have to make clear again that I'm NOT pro-life. I'm genuinely curious as to how fundamentalists of the left and right get around their black and white rulings in a morally grey world.
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@kenwolman
Have you ever spent time with a pig? Why are they not as special as dogs and cats?
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nope doc it's putting the rights of something than can suffer over the rights of something that cannot
as indicated by overwhelming evidence. I'm concerned about a doctor of medicine OR philosophy who can't get this.
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@ Dick
I'm not a doctor. Do you always assume that these cute handles we go by online have something to do with our jobs? If so, you'd better change yours.
And for the sake of argument, how do you know that a, say, 8 month old fetus can't suffer? Really. PROVE it to me. You ever talk to an ardent pro-life supporter? It's JUST like talking to you about animals.
Because you can't prove it. You've just decided that that's the case because it supports your own personal ethics. What you do is what everyone else on the planet does to get by in everyday life--make an arbitrary and pragmatic judgement based on one's own culture or chosen peer group.
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8 month fetuses aren't aborted unless the mothers life is in danger, or they are going to suffer and die anyway and nobody thinks they should be
you are either the perpetrator or the victim of propaganada lies
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there is actually a huge amount of relevant scientific data bearing
directly on both of the questions here.
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@ Dick
"you are either the perpetrator or the victim of propaganada lies"
No, this is just a thought experiment for me. "Devil's advocate" if you will. Lighten up.
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ok, maybe I was too quick but it's a common winger lie
that the ability to get "abortion on demand" exists though the ninth month, or the sixth month.
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kenwolman question
kenwolman: You do not kill and eat somethingn with a soul that can talk to yours if you are not so closed-off and ignorant that you can't sense it's there.
I read two things in Kenwolman's comment. First, the Chinese are closed-off and ignorant. Better add the Koreans, who also famously (in Western media) consume dog. And that's just the beginning: so big a world, so many ignorant races, ethnicities and creeds.
Second, Kenwolman asserts the existence of a soul - of an ontological thing independent of the electrical, chemical and other material processes of the brain. Like Gautama Buddha, I don't agree with that.
But apart from that, no "soul" is needed to construct an argument for humans to categorise and imagine special types of relationships to nonhuman species - which species should be used for food, which are the forebears of totemic clans, which are appropriately deified, which should be endowed with human characteristics, which are to be demonised, which are visible or invisible. That is just normal discursive social process.
Dog and cat societies organise themselves by tooth and claw. They kill members of their own and other species for both food and "sport". Ask Caesar, the dog whisperer. Mapping human-like identities over their alienness is just the normal human impulse to colonise, own, control. Mapping inhuman identities onto ethnic, religious and national Others is likewise a normal human impulse.
Kenwolman, can you make a succinct argument against eating dogs without recourse to mystical or spiritual "forces"? Can you then make cultural and political arguments as to why an international sporting and commercial event should cleave to the cultural biases of a great imperialist nation such as the U.S. rather than to the cultural biases of a lesser imperialist nation such as China?
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you can make a good argument that dogs and cats have feelings, but it's difficult to make a case that they are fundamentally different from a pig
apart from the dogs or cats greater apparent capacity for social and emotional relationships as manifested in the relationship that we experience with them. With dogs at least I think you can make a reasonable case that the evidence shows that canine social relationships are of a qualitatively different nature than those of even other mammals. With cats the evidence seems less definitive. Yes all mammals bond with their mothers and most have some herd sensibility. There's a difference though between a general herd bond, yes I know they know they can distinguish individuals, and what a dog has with people which is a very strong emotional bond. Dogs have been domesticated a long time too, it may be that their relationship with humans now has evolved biologically.
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Dog and cat societies organise themselves by tooth and claw. They kill members of their own and other species for both food and "sport"
Human societies do the same thing, so if you are, as you seem to be, implying that this fact says something definitive about the species in question I'm not sure what it is.
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China politics boiler-plate, part 1
This is my boiler-plate “observation” article which I will present on forum boards and websites in which I feel there is a lot of mis-understanding about what China and Chinese people are really like, what they believe, etc. Please feel free to help me improve the language, grammar, or content of this article
1. China is not a totalitarian state. It is authoritarian. The government will sometimes arrest people who publish or broadcast views which the government considers “splitest” or inciting anti-government rhetoric. However, the government does not care about or censor speech between individuals or generally insert itself into the private lives of its citizens (which is what Totalitarian governments do). Chinese people do not live in fear of their government. It is more appropriate to say the government of China is a “technocracy”, meaning, that the government derives its legitimacy based on how well it technically governs.
2. China is not a “Big-Brother” state. There is not propaganda all over the place. People are not brainwashed any more than anyone else in the world. In fact, there are way too few police officers on the streets. There is way too little government regulators around to enforce regulations.
3. The Chinese people and government greatly fear “chaos” and the breakdown of social order. This is not just government propaganda. Chinese people feel that when the government is not strong, society will fall apart. And when society falls apart, many people suffer greatly. When this happens, China invariably becomes a collection of warring states controlled by strong-men who don’t care about the common man. This view is informed from history: from ancient times (“the Kingdom coalesces, the Kingdom falls apart; that is the cycle” – Romance of the Three Kingdoms; 15th century) to the social upheavals of the 20th century (The Cultural Revolution).
4. Chinese people discuss politics. A lot. I hear people having discussions about current events and politics all the time on the street…much more so than in the United States. However, this may be because there are more Chinese people “on the street” and at train stations than in the United States.
5. In general, most Chinese people are very dissatisfied with their government. This quite possibly includes the people who work for the government. But they all feel that having a some-what repressive, over-controlling government is better than having “Chaos”. And chaos comes from letting the idiots and un-educated the ability to select who governs them.