| (no subject) |
[May. 15th, 2013|09:25 am]
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Here's a video called "Vegetarians Fail" by a guy who calls himself The Amazing Atheist. I've linked to it so you can watch it for yourself if you're a bit of a masochist.
One of the reasons it's so hard to respond to guys like him is that his approach to argument is so very scattershot, throwing everything at the wall and hoping that something sticks, so this has to be fairly long to be complete, but we'll deal with the thrust of it rather quickly.
His basic argument, and it's not original to him but is one I've heard for a long time, is that the animals we eat (well, not all of them, specifically chickens, pigs and cows, he doesn't mention fish because they don't fit into his argument--oops) are very "successful" precisely because we eat them. Because we eat them, we farm them. Because we farm them, there are lots of them, which he claims makes them successful.
This argument is a wonderful example of the thinking of the oppressor, who is always happy to tell people how well his victims are doing, indeed, how his oppression actually benefits his victims. This was a popular argument of slave owners in the USA for a long time, and it hasn't gone away.
More specifically, though, the first thing that leapt out at me was that in order to accept the argument, you have to accept that an unnaturally short, brutal life of misery and abuse is better than not existing at all. I don't think that's self-evident. Anyone who has ever had a beloved family pet put to sleep might well disagree with that, and certainly the euthanasia people would. I don't know the reasoning the Amazing Atheist uses to justify this position because he doesn't argue it at all. Rather, he wraps it up into the argument as an a priori truth that you have to accept on faith, and that kind of faith-based argument is not something I've much use for.
The argument itself is presented as a fallacy, specifically the fallacy of the excluded middle. Either there's this short life of absolute domination or complete extinction, which strikes me as betraying a serious lack of imagination. I think even TAA understands how ridiculous he sounds there, because he quickly backs off, adding "or greatly reduced numbers." Two things about that. Firstly, whenever you see someone backing off such a basic premise of an argument warning bells should go off in your head, because chances are it's a terrible argument. Secondly, notice the dishonesty of the statement, please. He presents extinction and a reduced population as if they are similar, but of course they are not the same at all. On the one hand, there are no animals left. On the other, there are. Obviously, not only are they not similar, they are actually contradictions of each other. Extinction vs. non-extinction. It's a neat trick to insist that two contradictory positions both support your argument, but not one anyone with a functioning brain should fall for.
Like a lot of people, TAA tries to dress up his argument by covering it in a patina of science. He talks about selfish gene theory, at one point reciting the statistics of how many cows, chickens and pigs there are in the world, even displaying astonishment that there are more chickens than people, though why that should surprise anyone is beyond me and left unexplained by him. Of course, he misrepresents the science, though I won't speculate as to whether that's on purpose or not.
His basic assumption is that more is always better, which is true dominator culture thinking. Worse, it's not true. If tomorrow koalas started magically breeding like bunnies, there would certainly be more of them...for a while. Then they would fairly quickly outstrip their food supply and all die, which doesn't sound like success to me. Success actually hinges on whether or not a species can live in harmony with a self-sustaining, self-regulating ecosystem. Species that overrun their ecosystems destroy it, of course, and ultimately this is a bad thing, as anyone who has read about invasive species already knows.
TAA's insistence that more is better is actually a cultural value he places on top of the science in much the same way that the thoroughly discredited notion of Social Darwinism was overlaid on the science in order to justify a cultural value. It's a dishonest misuse of science that should not only be rejected outright but mercilessly mocked as well.
But wait, it gets better. Or worse, depending on your sense of humor.
At one point, this guy actually claims to have discovered the meaning of life. I'm not kidding. This is so good I'll quote it directly:
If we can infer the meaning of life by studying the behavior of life, then the meaning of life is to produce offspring and to proliferate your own genes or your own genome. That's got to be one of the most reductionist arguments I've ever heard. Always beware the reductionist argument, which in this case seeks to shrink life down to the size of a cage he might keep a chicken in. Beyond that, half a second's worth of reflection reveals how utterly bizarre it is. It means that anyone who can't have children, or chooses not to, must, by definition, have a meaningless life. Does anyone really believe that? This is the kind of thinking that we might expect from a couple of stoned freshmen lying on their dorm room floor. It's not something that anyone should give the slightest bit of credence, yet people seem to.
The whole package is wrapped in a bunch of bullying taunts meant to marginalize people like me in a kind of pre-emptive attack against reason and logic, because by this point it should be obvious his argument can't withstand even the slightest scrutiny. In the video he goes to a couple fast food joints and gets large sandwiches which he takes home and assembles into an even larger stack of animal parts that he eats, saying something like, "Take that, vegetarians." I don't understand it, honestly. I mean, I get that it's a bullying taunt like the ones Penn and Teller also had in their anti-animals video, but I'm not sure of its function. Do people understand that virtually every English speaking vegetarian used to eat animals? Do people like TAA and P&T think it's somehow shocking? Are they trying to establish some sort of "bad boy" persona? I don't get it.
Another problem responding to guys like this is that I can't always tell when he's serious and when he's trying to be funny. For example, while eating his sandwich, he talks about being sexually aroused thinking of all the animals that died making it. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was joking. If he wasn't, I hope he seeks treatment immediately, because something went horribly wrong with his psychosexual development otherwise. But I'll say it's a joke, though I won't speculate on what kind of a mind thinks dead animals are funny.
But he also talks about eating lions, and herein lies the problem, because I don't think he's joking. I think he's serious. He says that if people are really concerned about the lion population we should start ordering Simba burgers. Then, you see, some enterprising young capitalist will start "farming" them and the population will explode. He doesn't seem to understand that some animals are more easily domesticated than others (hint--large carnivorous cats? Not so easy), the cost factor involved in raising them (they don't eat grass or corn) or much of anything else which would most likely make the final product so expensive that it would price itself out of the mass market, thereby defeating the point he's trying to make. More practically, I have to think that in the long history of man and lion living together some guy somewhere at least once took a bite and said, "Yuck! I do not like eating lion." I don't know what lion tastes like, but I'd wager it's tough, stringy and extemely gamey. TAA doesn't consider any of this and that's why I have to wonder if he's joking or not, which is a bad sign for his "serious" argument. By this point it should go without saying that conservation efforts are just not mentioned at all. Only capitalism, apparently, can save the lion, which is strange because market forces are largely responsible for the lion's peril. Do more of the same and get different results? That's TAA's entire approach.
Hang on, it gets even more ridiculous.
He actually says that lions, gorillas and wolves "suck" (his word) at proliferating their genes. That's simply untrue. They've been very successful for many millenia. If they really did "suck" at breeding, they'd have died out long ago, yes? Again, this is a great example of dominator culture, blame-the-victim thinking. He doesn't talk about hunting/poaching or the rapid and rampant destruction of their habitats. Nope. He just says they "suck" and leaves it at that, pretending he's actually made a point. You can see the level of absolute idiocy to which he descends.
But perhaps his strangest assertion is that factory farms are the "natural habitat" of pigs and chickens and cows. Oh my.
Is he suggesting that they evolved in naturally occuring factory farms? I certainly hope not. Just a couple of quick things.
Chickens are routinely de-beaked. Why? Because when you pack chickens like sardines, they are put under a great deal of stress. This stress makes them go kind of bonkers and they will actually peck each other to death. I'm not talking about a couple of roosters going at it for rights to the hens. I'm talking about hens. This is not natural behavior. If factory farms are the "natural habitat" of chickens, then the industry shouldn't have to perform body modifications on them to protect their profits. I would hope that's obvious to everyone.
Also, sometimes chickens are kept in tiny little cages so small that they can't really move. Their little chicken claws will actually grow around the mesh wiring of the cage so when the bird is removed, it's feet are ripped off, left behind in the cage. This is while the bird is still alive, too. Does that sound like a reasonable evolutionary strategy to anyone? If they evolved to live in this "natural habitat," then such things shouldn't be happening, but they are.
That's how incredibly bizarre his arguments get, and perhaps that explains his need to marginalize the opposition, so his viewers will dismiss them out of hand, because certainly his arguments can stand on their own.
Okay, I think I've hit all the points I wanted to hit.
TAA seems to be very popular. I call him the Bill O'Reilly of youtube, because he never lets facts or reason stand in the way of a well-loved position, no matter how demonstrably wrong he is. What's sad is that so many people seem to agree with him. Have you seen his videos on feminism? They can be safely summed up as misogynistic straw man garbage in which he shrilly rails against something he doesn't understand while simultaneously demonstrating the need for a feminist movement in the first place. But such is this world, in which the stupid and hateful regularly triumph and we make the same mistakes over and over and over, shamefully congratulating ourselves on our wisdom and beneficence. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 5th, 2013|09:39 am]
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It seems to me that we are often cautioned against making decisions based on emotion. I can't help but think that there's a fair degree of sexism inherent in that warning, but regardless, it's something I'd bet most of us have heard at one point or another. I'm not really sure it's sound advice, however, if it goes beyond advising against rash decision making.
For example, I think that the childhood poverty rate in the USA is completely disgraceful and needs to be addressed. That isn't based on rationality but entirely on emotion. It's entirely possible for me to construct a very rational argument that euthanizing those children would benefit the largest number of people in society. Hell, those arguments actually have been made. I hope we all agree that those arguments are not welcome in our world.
Which leads me to gun control, which is a hard issue for me.
Newtown was awful. I sat in front of the TV crying, and I know I'm not the only one. It's somehow bizarre to me that there is so much resistance to any form of arms regulation after Newtown, because to accept the status quo is to accept that we want this world to be a place in which such things happen. Notice that I'm not suggesting that we actually want something like Newtown to happen, but we want a world in which they will happen and not be addressed. It's worth the price, is what I'm saying.
I'm not really sure I agree with that.
On the one hand, strict gun control seems like a no-brainer. On the other hand, I like guns. On the third hand, an armed society tends to be an extremely paranoid society based on fear and suspicion. On the fourth hand, I believe in the right to self-defence. If I had a daughter, I'd want her to be armed at all times. (I recognize the sexism there, but it's how I feel.)
So it's a thorny issue for me and always has been.
Ultimately, I think the underlying problem is with a society that celebrates intolerance, violence and vengeance. Or, perhaps, even more basic than that the problem is with a society that denigrates compassion as inherently weak. Maybe it's both, maybe two sides of the same coin.
Whatever the case, I don't understand why background checks (along with a database that is managed far better than it currently is) and reduced magazine capacity are controversial. Hell, I don't even understand why outlawing semi-automatic weapons is controversial. That doesn't ban all guns, after all, only a specific class of guns.
Everyone agrees, even the NRA, that there have to be limits on arms ownership. Few would argue that I should have the right to stockpile anti-aircraft missiles in the basement. So really, it's just a question of where the line is drawn. A .38 wadcutter in the chest would still be effective in stopping a grown man, even if it didn't come from a semi-automatic weapon.
As for the NRA's idea of turning schools into armed camps in which goofy kid behavior is no longer corrected by a trip to the principal's office but rather a trip to the police station and the juvenile justice system, it should be DOA. Running down the hallway shouldn't result in a disorderly conduct charge. And no, I'm not exaggerating here. It's even worse if you're running while black.
The tears are dried now. I'm not talking about rash decisions that are very radical, at least not from my perspective. But my perspective has shifted a little bit. It had to shift to make room for the pile of dead children that I can't get out of my head. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 15th, 2013|10:32 am]
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If anyone still reads this, can you suggest a good, free video editing program? Preferably one that doesn't come with a ton of adware, but I'll manage. It has to be able to handle. .wmv files, and if it could handle .flv files, that would be great, too, as well as .wav files.
Of, if you know of a cheap program that works well, that would be cool, too.
Any help would be appreciated. |
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| LA face with an Oakland booty |
[Feb. 13th, 2013|12:43 pm]
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I'd forgotten all about this song until I heard the "Glee" controversy about it on the radio (I love you, radio, don't you ever change).
So, for anyone who missed it:
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 5th, 2013|12:34 pm]
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So I'm thinking about starting a youtube channel, where I can be ignored or mocked by even more people.
Thoughts on YT channels in general? |
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| Like GLaDOS... |
[Jan. 17th, 2013|10:04 am]
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I'm still alive. Just not very talkative right now. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 19th, 2012|11:06 am]
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Since I probably won't be back online, Merry Christmas.
...maybe we'll see each other again sometime.
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 13th, 2012|01:07 pm]
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Someone give me a book recommendation. I've been reading whatever seems to float my way and too much of it has been lackluster crap. |
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