: :DDN: I checked it out. Its the usual small-minded, myopic bullsh_t we've all come to expect from the vacuum sealed, illinformed specieists that make living on this planet a lot less enjoyable and make me ashamed to be human. :Stuart: People who use the word "specieists" are manifestly ashamed to be human….
DDN: How is that different from asserting that people who use terms like “racists” are manifestly ashamed to be white? And what is it that’s objectionable about feeling ashamed of your own species when it behaves ignorantly? Or feeling ashamed to be white when white people engage in violent racist behavior? Or feeling ashamed of ANYTHING that you bare ANY relationship to when it is has done something wrong?
:Stuart: ….But that kind of shame comes from within one's self and not from anything outside of them.
DDN: WHAT kind of shame? The kind I feel when I see us causing misery in our environment out of our ignorance, laziness, and greed? How is it that this shame bares no relationship to what happens outside of me? Are you saying its just sheer coincidence that everytime I see a photo of a rhesus monkey undergoing a live vivisection that I feel intense pangs of shame? I don’t get it.
:Stuart: Nevertheless, we get moral indictments from these types who can't see that they are either animals themselves (and not subject to morality) or they are above them in some meaningful way.
DDN: Obviously we are members of the animal kingdom. I’m not going to waste a lot of breath on this unless you have an argument to the contrary that is based on something other than your flaky, incomprehensible, psuedo religious beliefs. How animal status would excuse us from behaving moraly is something you’ll have to explain to me. At any rate, given that we ARE “subject to morality” and “above them [the rest of the animal kingdom] in some meaningful way”, how does such a status endow us with the right to treat animals any way we want to for any purposes we like? Wouldn’t such a status, in fact, have the opposite meaning for us? Wouldn’t it mean that we are capable and obliged to figure out a way to be comfortable on this planet without causing such intense and widespread grief for the other living things this planet and, consequently, oursleves?
Since when is “above” synonymous with “the right to unecessarily inflict pain”? What exactly do you mean by “above”? That we are smarter than them? Are you smarter than your kids? Does that give you the right to beat them to a pulp if you come home in a bad mood one day, hook them up to field plow and crack them with a whip, or cut them up into little pieces and eat them? We’re the only species on the planet that is actively and consciously engaged in creating multitudes of new ways to destroy ourselves. How “smart” is that?
:DDN: Its ironic that the ignorance portrayed on such websites lends support to anit-specieist arguments. It would seem that specieism is its own demise. A species that lives inside of the illusion that it is completely seperate from its enviroment; that refuses to understand that its actions have consequences that can negatively affect itself; that points to its thicker frontal lobe to justify not having to use it; such a species not only forfeits its claim to king of the mammals, but should and WILL be taken out of commission long before its true potential is realized. Too bad.
Stuart: What is the true potential of humanity, Dad?
DDN: Who the hell knows. I just know that THIS is far far from it. I think, at the very least, we could live comfortably on this planet without destroying it and causing so much suffering for oursleves and the other living things around us.
None.
