Is it cannabalism if you only eat vegans?

[dalebert]

Also, Christians, please don't kill your children.



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[Jim Johnson]

yes

[dalebert]

yes

Party pooper.

[Jim Johnson]

  What? 

[blackie]

Is it cannabisism if you eat your weed?

I have been making vegan marijuana ice cream.

[dalebert]

I will expound on this concept in the next Flaming Freedom. All will be revealed.

[dalebert]

Video of this episode now available.

Christians, please don't kill your kids. Full episode 2014/06/01
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcqeo8bhfCA

[dalebert]

Veganism as a religion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW7N3h6ksrk

[dalebert]

A Vegan Diet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHHksOoShOQ

[blackie]

Richard Dawkins says you have a discontinuous mind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism

Richard Dawkins argues against speciesism as an example of the "discontinuous mind".

Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, argued against speciesism in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), The Great Ape Project (1993), and The God Delusion (2006), elucidating the connection with evolutionary theory. He compares former racist attitudes and assumptions to their present-day speciesist counterparts. In the chapter "The one true tree of life" in The Blind Watchmaker, he argues that it is not only zoological taxonomy that is saved from awkward ambiguity by the extinction of intermediate forms, but also human ethics and law. Dawkins argues that what he calls the "discontinuous mind" is ubiquitous, dividing the world into units that reflect nothing but our use of language, and animals into discontinuous species:[16]

    The director of a zoo is entitled to "put down" a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might "put down" a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! ... The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.[17]

Dawkins elaborated in a discussion with Singer at The Center for Inquiry in 2007, when asked whether he continues to eat meat: "It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.

[MaineShark]

I don't know about Dale, but I don't care what species someone or something is.  If that critter is a person, then it's a person regardless of species.  If it's not a person, then it's an animal regardless of species.

[dalebert]

"Speciesist" is already a word?! Damn. I thought I made it up. I guess there are no new stories, as they say. We just retell them in various ways. Oh well. As for Dawkins, I supposed even a fully functional clock stops now and then, to vary an expression.

I don't know about Dale, but I don't care what species someone or something is.  If that critter is a person, then it's a person regardless of species.  If it's not a person, then it's an animal regardless of species.

Chimps and dolphins are dancing the line of sentience to the point of deserving to have rights but only barely. Chimps tend to be extremely aggressively violent and dolphins aren't as peaceful as people seem to think either. They've been known to rape people. The poor males have testicles the size of cucumbers. Sheesh. When we have a means of communicating and reasonably come to an agreement about mutual respect for rights, then I'll start calling them persons too.

On a side note, SourceFed just did a video about how bestiality is still "shockingly" legal in many places and I've had a lot of fun chatting with folks in the comments. I've been arguing that it shouldn't be illegal here and here.

[MaineShark]

Chimps and dolphins are dancing the line of sentience to the point of deserving to have rights but only barely. Chimps tend to be extremely aggressively violent and dolphins aren't as peaceful as people seem to think either. They've been known to rape people. The poor males have testicles the size of cucumbers. Sheesh. When we have a means of communicating and reasonably come to an agreement about mutual respect for rights, then I'll start calling them persons too.

I don't think "chimps and dolphins" are people.  Some particular chimps and some particular dolphins might be.  The odds are extremely low that any particular example will be, though.  I wouldn't just up and kill a chimp for food, because the risk of killing a chimp that happens to be a person is small, but present, whereas the benefit of eating it is pretty low, so it's a poor decision.  On the other hand, compare that same small risk to the extremely high benefits of using a chimp for medical research, and it's a wise decision.

If we live in the world, we always take risks.  If I'm driving along, I may hit a deer, causing me to swerve into oncoming traffic and kill a whole family.  Which would be horrible.  But the odds are pretty darn low, and the benefits of driving are pretty darn high.  We can't live in any meaningful way without taking certain risks.  The key is to manage risk.

So, my willingness to kill or injure a living creature is related to a risk/benefit analysis of the potential harm versus the potential benefit.  A won't kill or injure a high-level animal without serious cause to do so.  On the other hand, I'll set mouse traps and never worry about it; there's no sane chance that a mouse is a person, so there's no meaningful risk that I'm actually harming a person by doing so (plus, if any mouse were actually a person, something as simple as a mousetrap would not fool him).

Similarly, I won't flinch at defending my life from a human attacker.  The fact that he is attacking me demonstrates that he's not a person; just a vicious and dangerous animal.  People don't act like that, so he's an animal, regardless of his species.

Personhood relates to the ability to reason, not just act and react.  Sapience, not mere sentience (which is the ability to feel).  Species that are known for having large numbers of persons in their ranks will get extra caution - homo sapiens, I will consider persons until proven otherwise (the NAP is a good test for that).  But that's all it is - extra caution on my part - no member of any species is automatically a person based upon species membership.  Nor is any member of any species automatically an animal based upon membership in that species.

[blackie]

If people aren't animals, vegans can eat people.

[dalebert]

I wouldn't just up and kill a chimp for food, because the risk of killing a chimp that happens to be a person is small, but present, whereas the benefit of eating it is pretty low, so it's a poor decision.  On the other hand, compare that same small risk to the extremely high benefits of using a chimp for medical research, and it's a wise decision.

If you think about it, that's kind of the basis for all those decisions. It's a cost/benefit analysis. I also would find it appalling if they have a chimp who's speaking with sign language and use it for potentially dangerous medical research. That chimp is far more valuable to the world for better psychological understanding of chimps that might some day tell us whether they have the potential to be persons. And there are other animals that aren't good to us for much else than food so there's no need to kill chimps and dolphins for that. Same thing goes for pets. If someone tries to eat MY cat, I'll be rather upset, to say the least. That animal is for more valuable to me as a companion than the tiny bit of food she could provide and killing her would cause pain and suffering to ME. On the other hand, I'm not going to pitch a tizzy because they eat dogs in some places. I recognize that my judgment with regard to dogs is biased and it's not a big deal as long as those dogs aren't anyone's pets.