Global Warming: White Man's Problem

[sabar]

We only care about humans because they are close to us, not because they are more important on some moral scale.

If you by on a train track and you had to divert a runaway train onto your pet dog 5 feet away or a random person 10 miles down the tracks, most people would pick their pet. If no one was looking (i.e. no society to judge them), people would probably choose their pet in any scenario.

It becomes clear that this is the case when you lower the human and the thing. If you have a stray mutt on the tracks and a serial killing rapist, who do you value more?

By the way, when arguing animal rights people should not compare humans and animals. Mostly because one is sentient and logical while the other is not. This is wrong:

Animals eat meat, so humans can eat meat

Because it implies logic such as:

Animals rape animals, so humans can rape humans

Animals kill their own kind, so humans can murder humans

Animals cannibalize their young, so humans can cannibalize their young

This on the other hand is a real argument:

It is rational to want to avoid pain, so we should not cause animals pain

It is rational to want to avoid death, so we should not cause animals death

Sentience makes you aware of your own life, you must have sentience to have a right to life

Animals have no sentience, hence no right to life, so we can eat animals as long as we don't cause them pain, as causing pain is immoral

So on and so forth.

For the curious:
1. I eat meat
2. I'm pro animal rights
3. As long as animals are raised well and killed humanely, they live a better and longer life than they would have in the wild not raised for butcher. More good is brought into the world from eating meat than bad is from the slaughter process.
4. I think pollution control only hurts us in the global scope to stay on topic
5. When we kill fossil fuels through subsidies, will the government ban exporting them to countries that burn them gladly?

[sam1617]

What does killing an animal humanely entail?

Personally, with pets that have had to be "put down" in the past, a .22 to the back of the head seemed to work pretty well, as they died pretty damn instantly, but I have been told by some people that it isn't humane, and I should take them to a vet for a shot.

[Extra Stout]

This is going to offend a lot of people, but if you had to choose the life of a human and a cow, which would you choose?

First, determine which is undisputably more destructive to its surroundings. Cows fart for sure; they contribute to the nitrogen cycle too but a lot of that flatulence can't be good for the environment.

However, a random human probably eats meat, drives a car that gets under 40 mpg and uses energy to power his or her house.

So you would choose the life of the cow. No, actually you will claim that is not what you are saying at all, although clearly that is what you are implying. I know that game.

So the human is destructive to the environment and therefore his life has less value than that of the cow. Now, that implies that the condition of the environment matters. There has to be a reason why the condition of the environment matters. What is it? Is it because life in general has to be preserved? I hardly think over the scope of millions of years that anything we do is going to snuff out life. It's fairly likely that Earth has experienced both its crust being seared by asteroid impact so that rock was vaporized into the atmosphere, and its being totally enveloped in ice. Yet life perseveres.

So then the condition of the environment right now or at least in the short to medium term matters, then? Well, why would that be? Is it because we must place supreme value on plant and animal life currently in existence, so much so that the value of a cow exceeds that of a human being?

Did your professor really mean that the environment must be protected in order to preserve humanity in general, which would imply that human beings have some inherent value that we should care about?

I'm majoring in anthropology right now (or misanthropology if you prefer) and one thing anthropologists stress is that one should not be ethnocentric, that is, one should not assume that a culture is superior to another's.

And you just take that for granted like it is a given. There is such a thing as being so open-minded that one's brains fall out. This is one of those cases.

In the past, Westerners took it for granted that theirs was the greatest, most advanced, most civilized culture and everyone less was either in some lesser form of civilization or outright savage. Repudiating this kind of chauvinism seems now to an obvious requirement for dispassionate study of people groups. Starting off with the assumption that civilization X is a bunch of barbaric godless heathens tends to color one's conclusions.

But to take that kind of scientific discipline and generalize it like it is some kind of moral axiom is ridiculous. Everyone has values and beliefs and evaluates the world around them in terms of those values and beliefs. For example, if a person believes in human rights, it would be ridiculous to say that he could not evaluate this society or that one in terms of its respect for human rights. If one person looks and says, "Hey, the Sudan commits mass slaughter against its minority groups and Sweden doesn't, so in terms of treatment of minorities Sudan is worse," and you respond, "You can't say that because that is being ethnocentric" that doesn't make you a enlightened bright -- it makes you an incoherent moron.

It doesn't make much sense to measure something like a Human Development Index if one cannot go so far as to say that a higher number is better, much less that trying to raise the number is a worthwhile goal.

It would be kind of hypocritical to be species-centric too, from that point of view, and that's what a load of humans are. There was a flood not too long ago in Houston in which 10,000 species of animals died in the basement. They were put there by humans.

And see, here's what happens when you start off with a stupid assumption. You took for granted that it is an indisputable moral axiom that no culture is better or worse than another, and now extend that to claim that is an indisputable moral axiom that no species has greater or lesser value than another. Non sequitur.

So if animal life is the same as human life, then if I see a cheetah run down an impala in order to eat it, has the cheetah committed a crime? Of course not, you'll say, that's part of the natural order. OK, so if humans should avoid being species-centric, then shouldn't we consider ourselves part of the natural order? Well, no, you'll say, we're different because we're sentient beings, accountable to morals and ethics, whose rational faculties have allowed us such technology as to have moved beyond the natural order. Oh, so then are we fundamentally different or are we not?

You might want to give a few more details about your flood story, for it is tremendously misleading. People might tend to think you are talking about residents who placed their poor helpless pets in the basement to die while they fled from the flood, which of course is absolutely not what happened. But I see your simplistic thinking -- animals put someplace by humans died, therefore humans bad.

On a side note, I don't believe eating meat is evolutionary. Early man actually had very little of it and was a scavenger. We have evolved to choose for ourselves, even if our instincts seek to force our hand.

Really? There are no prehistoric people who were hunters? When the term "hunter-gatherers" was coined, was it referring to how early humans "hunted" for berries before they gathered them?

How exactly did human beings come to be omnivrous if they didn't evolve that way? Can I really eat anything I want? Can I eat leaves off a tree like a giraffe? Can I eat a 2x4 like a termite? Hey, why is it that Europeans can drink cow's milk while most other people groups are lactose-intolerant? Is it because Europeans through the sheer force of will chose to drink cow's milk?

You are doing a great job of convincing me of the enormous difference between the pure sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, and the like and studies like anthropology, history, economics, which have a teensy bit of evidentiary science mixed together with large helpings of groundless conjecture and untethered ideology masquerading as "science."

Valenzetti equation, anyone?

Please tell me you did not just use the storyline from a prime-time science-fiction drama to make a serious point about the end of civilization. The Valenzetti equation is not, um, real.

[DarkReign]

What does killing an animal humanely entail?

Personally, with pets that have had to be "put down" in the past, a .22 to the back of the head seemed to work pretty well, as they died pretty damn instantly, but I have been told by some people that it isn't humane, and I should take them to a vet for a shot.

There was a thread in the club with a Youtube video of a slaughter house here in the states.

Let me say this as a person who would never try and pass himself off as an engineer...I could design a cheaper, more efficent machine to kill than this atrocity.

It is not humane.

Cliff notes: Cows are herded into a single-file line in a pen, first in line steps into a giant, cow-sized revolving chamber (think of the cow as a "bullet" being put into a revolver), the revolver spins the cow upside down where it is chuted down a set of rails on its back about 6'-8' (2-2.5m), at this point some guy with a curved blade comes over to service the cow by cutting its and tearing out its eso us in one deft move. The cow is then dumped into a separate pen sans its eso us to kick around, stand up, fall down, mule and generally create a giant disturbing image of which will never leave my mind.

Its a troubling video, to be sure, but a necessary view for those who wish to know where packaged meat comes from.

[Extra Stout]

And while eating vegetables may be more energy efficient, vegetables are much harder to raise for developing countries than raising meat animals. A cow is more likely to survive a drought or storm than a plant crop, and the cow, even if it dies, will still provide food, unlike a crop.

So let me get this straight:

Option 1: Raise food crops for subsistence.

Option 2: Raise meat animals. Raise food crops both for subsistence and for the meat animals.

And you're saying Option 2 is easier. Methinks you did not think your argument through.

[DarkReign]

Oh, to be clear, a .22 to the back of the head is quite humane. Its instant, man or animal.

[ElNono]

Please tell me you did not just use the storyline from a prime-time science-fiction drama to make a serious point about the end of civilization. The Valenzetti equation is not, um, real.

I LOL'ed at that too. My reaction was like..

[LnGrrrR]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-animal or anti-environment. I'm just pro-human.


In the mind of your typical environmental zealot, there exists a mythical utopia called "the balance of nature". They seem to believe that there is some optimal state of climate, flora, fauna, etc. which CLEARLY doesn't exist. Species of animals have come and gone LONG before the existence of humans. We've had wildly changing climates, extreme hot and cold, long before humans were driving pickups and SUVs.


The alarmist AGW community will tell you we have to do something now before we hit the so-called "tipping point". I'm always a bit puzzled by these mythical "tipping points". If there was a period of time in the geologic history that was much hotter and when the atmosphere contained much higher levels of CO2, why didn't the Earth reach a tipping point then? Hmmm.

I think the whole point of concern is that life right now seems optimal for humanity.

There's no disagreement that the earth has varied wildly throughout its lifetime, and many species have passed on. However, if things were to change NOW, it might also affect the way humanity lives. It hasn't so far, but there's always the chance that it could.

[Extra Stout]

I think the whole point of concern is that life right now seems optimal for humanity.

Apparently some in the third world disagree.

There's no disagreement that the earth has varied wildly throughout its lifetime, and many species have passed on. However, if things were to change NOW, it might also affect the way humanity lives. It hasn't so far, but there's always the chance that it could.

To the third world, the argument looks like this:

For most people, life sucks. Rich people far away claim that if poor people don't stop trying to improve their lives, life at some point in the future might suck. So the choices are between life definitely sucking for the forseeable future, or life potentially sucking at some point in the future.

[LnGrrrR]

Apparently some in the third world disagree.


To the third world, the argument looks like this:

For most people, life sucks. Rich people far away claim that if poor people don't stop trying to improve their lives, life at some point in the future might suck. So the choices are between life definitely sucking for the forseeable future, or life potentially sucking at some point in the future.

Yes, of course. But is it any surprise? Those who have polluted to get on top see the folly of their mistake, and try to warn others. The others though, look at them as hypocrites, and continue on.

It's the same story that parents and children have been playing out for millenia. Parents make mistakes, and impart this wisdom onto their children. The children then, seeing that their parents made it out ok, or thinking they are smarter than their parents, make the same bad mistakes. The parents then scold/guilt/punish the children, and the children note truthfully that the parents did the same thing as a child, labeling them hypocrites.

It's the circle of life!

[LnGrrrR]

What does killing an animal humanely entail?

Personally, with pets that have had to be "put down" in the past, a .22 to the back of the head seemed to work pretty well, as they died pretty damn instantly, but I have been told by some people that it isn't humane, and I should take them to a vet for a shot.

Eh, to me, it's not the killing, but the life they live before their death. They're usually jammed into filthy cages, eating filthy food.

[Phenomanul]

If only the "climate warriors" shifted their focus to viable solutions instead of lofty ideals engendered by bad science... I mean if they are going to classify CO2 as a pollutant why not H2O? After all, it is a more potent greenhouse promoter.

Now, fields like waste management, and the search for more efficient energy sources... those right there are worthy of our attention...

[SonOfAGun]

Anyone who doesn't think man was meant to eat meat has never had good venison.

[Marcus Bryant]

To the third world, the argument looks like this:

For most people, life sucks. Rich people far away claim that if poor people don't stop trying to improve their lives, life at some point in the future might suck. So the choices are between life definitely sucking for the forseeable future, or life potentially sucking at some point in the future.

Essentially. A not too small number of rich people proclaim to care about improving the lives of the poor, until that begins to ruin the view.

[Extra Stout]

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's) are industrialized farming. Engineers have calculated the absolute minimum amount of space animals need not to keel over dead. The animals are fed the cheapest food possible, much of which contains leftover matter from animals already processed (cannibalism-yay!). The conditions are so unhealthy that the animals have to pumped full of antibiotics in order not to get sick and die in the short time it takes for them to grow to processible size. Oh, the time it takes for them to grow has been scientifically reduced through the generous administration of artificial hormones.

The animal waste is diverted to large tailing ponds where it is left to "digest" (i.e., decompose). These ponds account for much of the pervasive stench in the Texas Panhandle. The ponds are contained in a cheap plastic liner, which sometimes fails, causing the waste either to seep into groundwater, or simply overflow into the nearest lake or river.

The government has done a reasonably good job of concealing public health issues related to CAFO's. When Farmer Bob's entire crop dies because a tsunami of flows into his fields, it's out in the middle of nowhere, so nobody hears about it unless they talk to Farmer Bob.

The practice of feeding cows with meal made in part from ground-up cow brains might seem like a potential way to spread Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which of course we never had in the United States. One way we contain CJD ,should prions spread throughout the food supply, is by lying and saying that the people in the hospitals died of something else.

It might seem like the rampant use of antibiotics might have something to do with the rise of antiobiotic-restraint bacteria strains, but most people will never make the connection and just blame it on doctors overprescribing things.

And the rampant use of hormones in the meat supply to make animals bigger, or to stimulate milk production on the dairy farm, might have something to do with various biological changes in American citizens in recent years (no, I am not going to blame my gut on bovine growth hormone, but rather my lack of self-control combined with my wife's elite culinary skills).

[SnakeBoy]

if you had to choose the life of a human and a cow, which would you choose?

Depends on who the human is. Does the human think it's inhumane to kill a cow?

[Phenomanul]

Eco-warriors want to grandfather our motto... "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness..." to apply only to the citizens of countries that have already attained that exclusive 1st-world status - nations not quite there won't get the chance to enter anymore... at least not at the risk of 'depriving the lives' of the citizens from the former list... by *gasp* having to endure the consequences of a 2-degree shift in global temperature...

Then again one could argue that countries like China and India haven't fought to improve the lives of their citizens on a more important arena such as "human rights" and so they aren't quite ready to handle the superfluous excesses of Western civilization... Why then should we care that their economic progress is stiffled if they are imposing a much harsher limitation on themselves already??? Do we really want a world in which Communist China is the world's leading superpower? A nation with the power to dictate, and influence the weaker nations around her, based solely on her economic might even though the plight and the condition of her common citizen is deplorable? But I digress, I doubt the typical 'eco-warrior' has given it that much thought to begin with...

[101A]

There was a thread in the club with a Youtube video of a slaughter house here in the states.

Let me say this as a person who would never try and pass himself off as an engineer...I could design a cheaper, more efficent machine to kill than this atrocity.

It is not humane.

Cliff notes: Cows are herded into a single-file line in a pen, first in line steps into a giant, cow-sized revolving chamber (think of the cow as a "bullet" being put into a revolver), the revolver spins the cow upside down where it is chuted down a set of rails on its back about 6'-8' (2-2.5m), at this point some guy with a curved blade comes over to service the cow by cutting its and tearing out its eso us in one deft move. The cow is then dumped into a separate pen sans its eso us to kick around, stand up, fall down, mule and generally create a giant disturbing image of which will never leave my mind.

Its a troubling video, to be sure, but a necessary view for those who wish to know where packaged meat comes from.

I need to find that; not sure what slaughter house that was; I've got a buddy who actually shoots the .22 in a local establishment.

[101A]

So you would choose the life of the cow. No, actually you will claim that is not what you are saying at all, although clearly that is what you are implying. I know that game.

So the human is destructive to the environment and therefore his life has less value than that of the cow. Now, that implies that the condition of the environment matters. There has to be a reason why the condition of the environment matters. What is it? Is it because life in general has to be preserved? I hardly think over the scope of millions of years that anything we do is going to snuff out life. It's fairly likely that Earth has experienced both its crust being seared by asteroid impact so that rock was vaporized into the atmosphere, and its being totally enveloped in ice. Yet life perseveres.

So then the condition of the environment right now or at least in the short to medium term matters, then? Well, why would that be? Is it because we must place supreme value on plant and animal life currently in existence, so much so that the value of a cow exceeds that of a human being?

Did your professor really mean that the environment must be protected in order to preserve humanity in general, which would imply that human beings have some inherent value that we should care about?


And you just take that for granted like it is a given. There is such a thing as being so open-minded that one's brains fall out. This is one of those cases.

In the past, Westerners took it for granted that theirs was the greatest, most advanced, most civilized culture and everyone less was either in some lesser form of civilization or outright savage. Repudiating this kind of chauvinism seems now to an obvious requirement for dispassionate study of people groups. Starting off with the assumption that civilization X is a bunch of barbaric godless heathens tends to color one's conclusions.

But to take that kind of scientific discipline and generalize it like it is some kind of moral axiom is ridiculous. Everyone has values and beliefs and evaluates the world around them in terms of those values and beliefs. For example, if a person believes in human rights, it would be ridiculous to say that he could not evaluate this society or that one in terms of its respect for human rights. If one person looks and says, "Hey, the Sudan commits mass slaughter against its minority groups and Sweden doesn't, so in terms of treatment of minorities Sudan is worse," and you respond, "You can't say that because that is being ethnocentric" that doesn't make you a enlightened bright -- it makes you an incoherent moron.

It doesn't make much sense to measure something like a Human Development Index if one cannot go so far as to say that a higher number is better, much less that trying to raise the number is a worthwhile goal.


And see, here's what happens when you start off with a stupid assumption. You took for granted that it is an indisputable moral axiom that no culture is better or worse than another, and now extend that to claim that is an indisputable moral axiom that no species has greater or lesser value than another. Non sequitur.

So if animal life is the same as human life, then if I see a cheetah run down an impala in order to eat it, has the cheetah committed a crime? Of course not, you'll say, that's part of the natural order. OK, so if humans should avoid being species-centric, then shouldn't we consider ourselves part of the natural order? Well, no, you'll say, we're different because we're sentient beings, accountable to morals and ethics, whose rational faculties have allowed us such technology as to have moved beyond the natural order. Oh, so then are we fundamentally different or are we not?

You might want to give a few more details about your flood story, for it is tremendously misleading. People might tend to think you are talking about residents who placed their poor helpless pets in the basement to die while they fled from the flood, which of course is absolutely not what happened. But I see your simplistic thinking -- animals put someplace by humans died, therefore humans bad.

Really? There are no prehistoric people who were hunters? When the term "hunter-gatherers" was coined, was it referring to how early humans "hunted" for berries before they gathered them?

How exactly did human beings come to be omnivrous if they didn't evolve that way? Can I really eat anything I want? Can I eat leaves off a tree like a giraffe? Can I eat a 2x4 like a termite? Hey, why is it that Europeans can drink cow's milk while most other people groups are lactose-intolerant? Is it because Europeans through the sheer force of will chose to drink cow's milk?

You are doing a great job of convincing me of the enormous difference between the pure sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, and the like and studies like anthropology, history, economics, which have a teensy bit of evidentiary science mixed together with large helpings of groundless conjecture and untethered ideology masquerading as "science."


Please tell me you did not just use the storyline from a prime-time science-fiction drama to make a serious point about the end of civilization. The Valenzetti equation is not, um, real.

Oh holy crap, not sure V2freak will ever post again after that s acking. Wow.

[101A]

It might seem like the rampant use of antibiotics might have something to do with the rise of antiobiotic-restraint bacteria strains, but most people will never make the connection and just blame it on doctors overprescribing things.

People are getting taller; ties are getting bigger.

It's true.

My boy (15 - and working out with his wrestling and football teams) was told to drink half a gallon of whole milk a day: "it's like taking Human Growth Hormone!" Probably because it IS taking growth hormone.

btw: he's 6'2" 220 lbs - no fat.

[LnGrrrR]

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO's) are industrialized farming. Engineers have calculated the absolute minimum amount of space animals need not to keel over dead. The animals are fed the cheapest food possible, much of which contains leftover matter from animals already processed (cannibalism-yay!). The conditions are so unhealthy that the animals have to pumped full of antibiotics in order not to get sick and die in the short time it takes for them to grow to processible size. Oh, the time it takes for them to grow has been scientifically reduced through the generous administration of artificial hormones.

The animal waste is diverted to large tailing ponds where it is left to "digest" (i.e., decompose). These ponds account for much of the pervasive stench in the Texas Panhandle. The ponds are contained in a cheap plastic liner, which sometimes fails, causing the waste either to seep into groundwater, or simply overflow into the nearest lake or river.

The government has done a reasonably good job of concealing public health issues related to CAFO's. When Farmer Bob's entire crop dies because a tsunami of flows into his fields, it's out in the middle of nowhere, so nobody hears about it unless they talk to Farmer Bob.

The practice of feeding cows with meal made in part from ground-up cow brains might seem like a potential way to spread Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which of course we never had in the United States. One way we contain CJD ,should prions spread throughout the food supply, is by lying and saying that the people in the hospitals died of something else.

It might seem like the rampant use of antibiotics might have something to do with the rise of antiobiotic-restraint bacteria strains, but most people will never make the connection and just blame it on doctors overprescribing things.

And the rampant use of hormones in the meat supply to make animals bigger, or to stimulate milk production on the dairy farm, might have something to do with various biological changes in American citizens in recent years (no, I am not going to blame my gut on bovine growth hormone, but rather my lack of self-control combined with my wife's elite culinary skills).

Edit: Maybe that's why 16 year old girls in high school look like they're 21 and older

[dimsah]

Edit: Maybe that's why 16 year old girls in high school look like they're 21 and older

Note to self: Keep young daughter away from LnGrrrR.

[LnGrrrR]

Note to self: Keep young daughter away from LnGrrrR.

LOL

Coming from someone with a picture of Quagmire as their avatar, I found that highly amusing.

Anyways, I'm a bit too old NOW to think of that, but I remember being 19 once and hitting on a female, only to find out she was 15. I was flabbergasted.

[dimsah]

LOL

Coming from someone with a picture of Quagmire as their avatar, I found that highly amusing.

Anyways, I'm a bit too old NOW to think of that, but I remember being 19 once and hitting on a female, only to find out she was 15. I was flabbergasted.

Just messing with you. I get it though.

I didn't know if it was me that was not able to tell the age of these girls anymore because I'm older now or if they were just maturing more rapidly than I remembered from my youth.

[v2freak]

^ Great example of what's "wrong" with the far left.


Answer me this? Do you get upset when animals are killed by other animals for food? Or only when humans kill animals for food? Do you get upset when animals die because of natural disasters? Or only when domesticated animals die in natural disasters?

Do you think other omnivorous animals should go vegan? Or just humans?

By the way, you stated that you don't think eating meat is evolutionary. Why do we have incisors and canines?

If you are actually asking me a question, the incisors are for tearing, while the molars are for chewing. If eating meat were evolutionary, vegetarianism wouldn't be possible for humans, and yet many humans are able to live long, healthy (healthier, in many supported studies) lives. My point is, it is not mandatory to eat meat. For me, it's not a matter of suc bing to natural urges, but being able to choose for oneself. Humans are sentient, as one person pointed out, even though the same person believes animals, for some reason, are not.

I am also not 'far left' so there isn't really a reason to throw a punch in the air. You'll have to look elsewhere for your anti-liberal tendencies.

Lets not go there...

He is clearly wrong in his entire position. To value animal life over human life is grounds for a complete dismissal of his argument.

Oblige me.

I won't be so arrogant and presumptuous as to paint any opinion right or wrong. You're en led to yours.

Under your avatar, your quote reads "live by what you speak." I really like this. Gandhi once said 'you must be the change you wish to see in the world' and I will assure you, I will do right by your quote.

So you would choose the life of the cow. No, actually you will claim that is not what you are saying at all, although clearly that is what you are implying. I know that game.

So the human is destructive to the environment and therefore his life has less value than that of the cow. Now, that implies that the condition of the environment matters. There has to be a reason why the condition of the environment matters. What is it? Is it because life in general has to be preserved? I hardly think over the scope of millions of years that anything we do is going to snuff out life. It's fairly likely that Earth has experienced both its crust being seared by asteroid impact so that rock was vaporized into the atmosphere, and its being totally enveloped in ice. Yet life perseveres.

So then the condition of the environment right now or at least in the short to medium term matters, then? Well, why would that be? Is it because we must place supreme value on plant and animal life currently in existence, so much so that the value of a cow exceeds that of a human being?

Did your professor really mean that the environment must be protected in order to preserve humanity in general, which would imply that human beings have some inherent value that we should care about?

I think what you're asking is "do we really need a planet in order to survive." And I don't think I will justify that question by answering. If this is a strawman fallacy, by all means, please reiterate what you are saying. I would love to understand your counter point.

And you just take that for granted like it is a given. There is such a thing as being so open-minded that one's brains fall out. This is one of those cases.

In the past, Westerners took it for granted that theirs was the greatest, most advanced, most civilized culture and everyone less was either in some lesser form of civilization or outright savage. Repudiating this kind of chauvinism seems now to an obvious requirement for dispassionate study of people groups. Starting off with the assumption that civilization X is a bunch of barbaric godless heathens tends to color one's conclusions.

But to take that kind of scientific discipline and generalize it like it is some kind of moral axiom is ridiculous. Everyone has values and beliefs and evaluates the world around them in terms of those values and beliefs. For example, if a person believes in human rights, it would be ridiculous to say that he could not evaluate this society or that one in terms of its respect for human rights. If one person looks and says, "Hey, the Sudan commits mass slaughter against its minority groups and Sweden doesn't, so in terms of treatment of minorities Sudan is worse," and you respond, "You can't say that because that is being ethnocentric" that doesn't make you a enlightened bright -- it makes you an incoherent moron.

I would hate to think genocide has something to do with African or Swedish culture, as you seem to be implying. Don't confuse politics with culture. The caveat that ethnocentrism can destroy an objective analysis of a culture is based on looking at one culture without making judgements, not looking at what its government has done. I'm not trying to nit pick your analogies, but you're missing a pretty big point here.

Instead you could say "the Aztecs were savages because they did human sacrifices." A lot of these "pro-human" people would probably find that disgusting, as do I. But look at it from an ancient civilization point of view. They were operantly conditioned to do human sacrifices because when they did, more often than not their prayers for rain and good crops would be answered. To say they were savages however, would be ethnocentric.

It doesn't make much sense to measure something like a Human Development Index if one cannot go so far as to say that a higher number is better, much less that trying to raise the number is a worthwhile goal.


And see, here's what happens when you start off with a stupid assumption. You took for granted that it is an indisputable moral axiom that no culture is better or worse than another, and now extend that to claim that is an indisputable moral axiom that no species has greater or lesser value than another. Non sequitur.

I'm trying really hard to be civil here and I'm also having difficulty just trying to find substance in your argument. You think the idea of not being ethnocentric is stupid, okay I get it. You think that extending its use from application to humans shouldn't be extended to animals, and for what reason? I won't even try to guess what reason that is, but it probably has something to do with your belief that animals aren't sentient and shouldn't be granted the same rights. You believe it to be non sequitur, but I believe a good principle can be applied across multiple subjects. Occam's razor, for example, is a practical principle that is meant to be applied to the scientific process. But why shouldn't it be applied to everyday life as well? I don't see how it's non sequitur, or why you think it's completely unrelated. As someone else pointed out, all humans and animals share this world, we fall under the kingdoms together and we are a part of nature.

So if animal life is the same as human life, then if I see a cheetah run down an impala in order to eat it, has the cheetah committed a crime? Of course not, you'll say, that's part of the natural order. OK, so if humans should avoid being species-centric, then shouldn't we consider ourselves part of the natural order? Well, no, you'll say, we're different because we're sentient beings, accountable to morals and ethics, whose rational faculties have allowed us such technology as to have moved beyond the natural order. Oh, so then are we fundamentally different or are we not?

You're right, I wasn't clear enough on my stance for this. "If humans should avoid being species-centric, then they should consider themselves part of the natural order." This is a really interesting idea. I believe animals are sentient, but they unable to change their habits, at least willingly. Farmers that feed their cows meat and bone meals for example, is completely unnatural (and a cause of disease) and not good at all for the cow. Cheetahs are the other hand, must eat meat. But what makes humans so great? They're omnivores, meaning they can swing either way, and in addition to that, they have almost total control over their lives. I believe humans are one of the only species who is no longer subject to evolution, because they have become humane, and technology has eliminated the need for our species to breed the strongest, fastest, smartest person. Now who has ever become an animal and lived to tell about it? NO ONE. I believe animals to be sentient because it's clear they feel pain and pleasure, some animals can recognize their reflections in the mirror and most are able to communicate. But I don't know if they have the discipline to be able to perform a task. That may very well be specific to humans. As the famous saying goes, "God has made man sufficient to stand but free to fall." Whatever your beliefs on how man came about, I find the second part of the saying to be absolutely true. I find humans to be naturally full of vices, as it used to be advantageous for erectus to be manipulative in order to gather more food, for example. But I also believe that they, as Obama puts it, can change, and as such, are so special. However, you will almost certainly find this answer to be unsatisfactory, as your opening sentence, "I know that game" seems to imply your love of black and white thinking. Yep, I can play the assumption game too.

You might want to give a few more details about your flood story, for it is tremendously misleading. People might tend to think you are talking about residents who placed their poor helpless pets in the basement to die while they fled from the flood, which of course is absolutely not what happened. But I see your simplistic thinking -- animals put someplace by humans died, therefore humans bad.

Certainly. Wikipedia forces its editors to give sources, so why should I be excluded? The storm in question was Tropical Storm Allison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison) back in 2001, for anyone who might remember. The animals died in the basement and they were put there for scientific research. I don't believe the people that put them there were so callous that they intended for the animals to die so horrifically, but they were not there by natural means and were not rescued either. It may ease your conscience to know that while many animals did die in that basement, only a few humans - the death toll under 50 - died from the flood. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston#cite_note-27

Really? There are no prehistoric people who were hunters? When the term "hunter-gatherers" was coined, was it referring to how early humans "hunted" for berries before they gathered them?

How exactly did human beings come to be omnivrous if they didn't evolve that way? Can I really eat anything I want? Can I eat leaves off a tree like a giraffe? Can I eat a 2x4 like a termite? Hey, why is it that Europeans can drink cow's milk while most other people groups are lactose-intolerant? Is it because Europeans through the sheer force of will chose to drink cow's milk?

Excellent questions, sort of. Hunter-gatherers was a term coined before there was scientific evidence to suggest early man up until Neanderthalensis, which had a more advanced tool complex, was primarily a scavanger. Caves that were littered with the bones of early humans were once thought to be hearths, but they bite marks in human skulls instead suggest early man was a meal of an ancient predatory cat. I'm sure if humans weren't at the top of the food chain, a lot of you would be singing a different tune. So why did they start to eat meat? Here's my theory. Early man, around ergaster or earlier, could not find the vegetation that it needed, and happened to come across carion. Unknowingly he or she ingested it and soon spread the news that it was good (let's be honest, meat does taste good IMO) spread until humans developed the necessarily skills to move to the top of the food chain. There is no evidence however, to suggest that all early humans ate meat or that it was necessary for survival. Again, vegetarians today are able to live long, wholesome lives.

You are doing a great job of convincing me of the enormous difference between the pure sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, and the like and studies like anthropology, history, economics, which have a teensy bit of evidentiary science mixed together with large helpings of groundless conjecture and untethered ideology masquerading as "science."

Someone once told me, the difference between stating and convincing is this: stating is simply saying something once for people to hear, while convincing requires knowledge of the opposition's stance and takes it into account while presenting an argument. I have answered your questions despite your hostility, because you asked for my opinions, and because you seem to have a desire to be more well-versed in a groundless conjecture-based subject anthropology. By the way, evolution is cross listed as a subset of biology, a "pure science". However, I'm no expert in english. If your whole post was a satire littered with rhetorical questions, then I half-heartedly apologize.

Please tell me you did not just use the storyline from a prime-time science-fiction drama to make a serious point about the end of civilization. The Valenzetti equation is not, um, real.

I'm glad you at least know what it is, but I believe it to be extremely close-minded to dismiss a "prime-time science fiction drama." Disciplines like english and literature exist because they offer real life insights into the world we live in. I would tread carefully. Many people consider the contents of The Bible to be hard to believe, but an accusation such as "IT'S NOT REAL" could end in disaster.