1. Stretching personhood to anything sentient is moronic - we use two different words for a reason. We literally have two different words to talk about different things. To say an animal has personhood is to assign it attributes it does not have because it recognises itself in the mirror. This isn't fucking Star Trek.
2. Killing an animal for its meat and what-have-you can be fine under most ethical systems which is what whales are. If you want to say that all killing a whale is wrong for cruelty or because they hold a special significance beyond their individual life then that it another conversation entirely.
>>92797 >we use two different words for a reason
Yeah and that reason is that English is an illogical mishmash of all sorts of things, what a terrible argument.
>Killing an animal for its meat and what-have-you can be fine under most ethical systems
The number of ethical systems there are is unquantifiable, that doesn't make any sense.
but yeah
> If you want to say that all killing a whale is wrong for cruelty or because they hold a special significance beyond their individual life then that it another conversation entirely.
that is what we've all said. Nobody here has said it's about eating whale meat. Who eats whale meat? Fucking hell.
>>92796 >Personhood is culturally relative and has at times in the recent past not included slaves, gypsies or jews. I'm not really sure who you think you're convincing with this line of reasoning.
But comparing the historical treatment of any of these groups with animals is offensive for an objective reason.
>They're capable of suffering, as you say, what more do you need? People don't count as people unless they're Elon Musk? Fuck off.
Capability to experience suffering is a piss-poor metric for anything beyond animal cruelty. You're now arguing that most vertebrates (amongst others) hold personhood.
>>92798 >Yeah and that reason is that English is an illogical mishmash of all sorts of things, what a terrible argument.
No, they're barely on the same metric dear.
Sentience is the capacity to experience through senses. It is a biological term.
Personhood is the recognition of a thing as having the attributes of a person, in a philosophical context this being attached to sapience.
Fuck it yes, human beings are better and fundamentally different than all other animals, which are stupid and serve only as a source of food and entertainment for me, the only way any of the other creature on this planet will get off this rock is on the back of our technology. Whales are too stupid to not drive themselves up a fucking beach repeatedly and I would gladly eat one.
If the whales don't like it, let them come and debate me. Stop presuming to speak on their behalf, you don't know what's best for them they do.
>>92803 Sentience is to know oneself as distinct from the world and perceive the interactions - your cat is sentient, a jellyfish is not.
Sapience is to know things and conduct high-level abstract reasoning - you are sapient, your cat is not (when we're looking).
TNG is especially guilty of confusing the two terms but they're not the same thing.
I don't know who's dafter at this point; the one who thinks dust mites and whales are the one and the same or the other lad who thinks killing whales is a slippery slope down towards holocaust. Get to bed the pair of you, before I turn the wifi off.
It's not even a slippery slope, you don't even need the numbers to know our genocides against other species vastly and unquestionably outweigh the holocaust. If you think it doesn't count just because an elephant has never written a book, then you're just a fucking arsehole, frankly.
The reasons people pick for not killing whales seem entirely arbitrary to me. If it is about pain or fear than that seems to be more universal than animals who can recognize themselves in the mirror, or learn sign language. Even single cellar organisms seem to exhibit panic (in the form of flight) when an amoeba starts digesting them. So what exactly is should be the cut off? where we shouldn't give a shit so we can function guilt free? Because mankind eating a billion chickens annually but agressively protesting less than a thousand whales seems like a weird standard. What's your pet, what's vermin, what's your food, what you wouldn't do but would tolerate all seems about as arbitrary and as well formed ideas as a religion to me and about as indoctrinated.
I presume sea shepherd supporters to by and large be militant vegans who can't win the culture war in their own society so have taken to the sea, and switching the city for the sea doesn't make me anymore more convinced by their arguments. And other than not hunting whales to extinction which is valid, I don't see a reason why we shouldn't just eat them. If anything I find the argument that we shouldn't eat other animals more of a presumption of superiority of humanity than just eating them, it is treating us as somehow divorced from everything else even our own base drives. And if you are going to feel guilty about the things that end up on the plate I don't see why you shouldn't feel guilty about the 'indirect consequences' of other aspects of society that disrupt and destroy the natural world, if it is just a 'having it on a plate feels like pulling the trigger' than I am sorry that is just a baseless emotion argument because you haven't thought about the full ramifications of just having civilisation has had. I would go as far as to say there isn't a single object in your house that is guilt free. Plastics come from oil which randomly leaks and poisons everything, anything plant based meant destroying the habitat of some animals before placing down a mono-culture and spraying pesticides all over it. Metals mean smelting which meant releasing poison into the sky. All of this is by the 'don't kill Whales' standards much much worse and you are participating in that cycle just by existing now. Quite honestly the only way to live guilt free would be to kill yourself, and I don't see a difference between industrialized destruction of the natural world and hunting whales to see why I should care other than that whales have a better PR team.
The main problem with humans, as a predatory species, is that we're too thick to know when we're stepping over the lines. We do think we're above and outside nature, and that's the problem- We don't realise nature will turn right back around to put us in our place eventually. Even in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic we haven't sussed it out yet.
Eating ten billion chickens a year is fine because we have big chicken factories where we breed the daft little twats with no purpose in life but to become food. It's bleak and we probably should feel guilty about it, but we do have to eat, and chicken is both plentiful and delicious. Eating whales, an already endangered species which we have driven into near extinction purely by the callousness of our other actions, never mind the hunting, that's what I'd call excessive. It's not like we need the meat when we've got ten billion chickens- We're really only doing it because it gets our primitive monkey dicks hard to slap our environment in the face like that, as an act of dominance and adversarial self affirmation.
I wish we lived in an anthropomorphic society where there would be at least be incredibly powerful erotic dynamics between predator and prey species.
>>92813 >I presume sea shepherd supporters to by and large be militant vegans who can't win the culture war in their own society so have taken to the sea, and switching the city for the sea doesn't make me anymore more convinced by their arguments.
And "The Masked Singer" is a more important piece of art than The Illiad.
>What's your pet, what's vermin, what's your food, what you wouldn't do but would tolerate all seems about as arbitrary and as well formed ideas as a religion to me and about as indoctrinated.
No more or less arbitrary than how we define personhood, as has already been covered in this thread. How about just eating fruit, vegetables and mycoprotein? They're all essentially fruiting bodies that the plants want to be eaten as part of their life cycle. That's not arbitrary.
>civilisation is terrible
This is just whataboutism. If things are bad, you try to improve them. You don't decide that it's therefore fine to make everything worse.
>>92815 This. There's whole cycles of inter-dependency and interactions that leave us vulnerable to all sorts of unintended and often unforeseen consequences.
Whales for instance are important even when they die, as the carcass slowly sinking through the ocean is central to a lot of other species. If we drove whales to extinction we'd likely see a whole load of other food chains collapse.
Get your pagan rituals out of the festival Christian's have co opted you sickened me. Easter is the celebration of having new things to murder not the preservation of them.
As I said I see the value in not driving them to extinction, but not all whales are endangered, and I think we should eat those.
Also I presume you wanked yourself stupid to zootopia?
>>92816 >No more or less arbitrary than how we define personhood, as has already been covered in this thread
Okay vegan. If you want me to presume you to be bat shit keep talking about how things that aren't human should be people, and make the arbitrary connection between groups of people being treated as a person for the sake of legal convenience and a wild animal like they are the same whilst you are at. I know you think you have some sort of argument here but you actually don't anyone who isn't already in the choir can see a clear distinct difference between a human and a multi ton water cow. Even if you pluck a chicken it isn't a man.
> How about just eating fruit, vegetables and mycoprotein? They're all essentially fruiting bodies that the plants want to be eaten as part of their life cycle. That's not arbitrary.
Firstly let us be clear you have jumped tracks from talking about animals to talking about fruit which should be argument enough of why this point is irrelevant to talking about how we treat whales relative to other animals that might feel.
Secondly there is nothing natural about fruit we have selectively breeding those fruit to not be poisonous to us (not all fruit was 'intended' for animal consumption) and so malformed they don't even produce their own seeds anymore and to produce giant distorted versions of their fruit and we produce it all year round by building factorie over the environment and poisoning anything natural that tries to encroach on them. And that is before we get into modern GM. You are right that isn't arbitrary, that is is the systematic engineering of a new species and the natural world to solely service us.
>This is just whataboutism
My argument was that giving a shit about whales is entirely arbitrary. Whataboutism is the entire point of my argument. This isn't a silver bullet.
>>92820 >but not all whales are endangered, and I think we should eat those.
Why?
Whaling isn't even profitable, it's subsidised by the governments of Whaling countries and they still manage to run up stockpiles of unsold whale meat that winds up in dogfood or forced on schoolkids to get shot of it. Whales aren't like chickens where we can't resist stuffing ourselves to obesity with them, people don't actually enjoy eating whale in commercially viable quantities.
That's the thing hippies always miss: In a purely commercial sense whaling is a gigantic waste of everybody's time and money.
If you just want people to eat everything and anything you'd have a better job trying to get more people to eat pigeons.
>>92820 >Okay vegan. If you want me to presume you to be bat shit keep talking about how things that aren't human should be people, and make the arbitrary connection between groups of people being treated as a person for the sake of legal convenience and a wild animal like they are the same whilst you are at.
You're the one saying that the lines are arbitrary. They're no less arbitrary when drawn between humans and other animals, no matter what your Masked Singer fan crowd might think.
>Firstly let us be clear you have jumped tracks from talking about animals to talking about fruit
You didn't jump the tracks when you started talking about "single cellar" organisms? Or all that dross about how civilisation is bad?
>Secondly there is nothing natural about fruit we have selectively breeding those fruit to not be poisonous to us
Right. I'm going to take a cue from you earlier on, where you dismissed something on the grounds it's not popular, and dismiss you on the grounds that your syntax is fucking awful and I can't be bothered to grapple with your insane run-on sentences. Your brain is broken.
>>92810 That article doesn't actually say anything as far as I can tell. Yes Whales have families and teach one-another to do things, how novel, but they self-evidently lack sapience. There's no artificial (i.e. whale constructed) governance from whale parliament or artificial constructs like whale taxation to pay for whale schools. It's not like blacks in the American South where society had to gear itself on the contradiction despite it being in plain sight and remove passages from slave bibles.
What you need to do is find a new word between sentient and sapient rather than try to claim Whales as people.
>>92815 You should really drop the tedious misanthropy already - it's very 2019.
>>92833 >There's no artificial (i.e. whale constructed) governance from whale parliament or artificial constructs like whale taxation to pay for whale schools.
Firstly, that's not part of the definition of sapience (either the one you gave or ones I find elsewhere) and secondly, you wouldn't know if they did have those things.
Not them but the person you think they are. I would know they don't have a parliament the same way i know there isn't a tea pot in orbit, because they evidently aren't that smart. I know you saw one documentary on how whales care for their young and sing and think they are very special but they really aren't. Chickens have a word for land predator and a different word for air predator. It doesn't make them smart enough to care about them over a different animal which I will either eat or kill because it is an inconvenient.
You know there isn't a tea pot in orbit because they evidently aren't that smart? I know you read a sentence that included some of those words once and it made sense, but that one doesn't.
Chickens have instinctive noises they make in certain situations, whales and dolphins have languages, dialects, and use them to transmit information about various things, including tool use. This is social learning and hard evidence that they do have culture and social structures in the same way we do. You're just wrong about this.
>>92837 >You know there isn't a tea pot in orbit because they evidently aren't that smart? I know you read a sentence that included some of those words once and it made sense, but that one doesn't.
Found the Whale, fuck off back to your parliament.
> Whales and dolphins have languages, dialects, and use them to transmit information about various things, including tool use. This is social learning and hard evidence that they do have culture and social structures in the same way we do.
Again you are very generous in your use of "what we do" for social structures, dolphins do not have an accredited Hydro dynamical Engineer who is sub contracted to the state water company on by a private organisation so they don’t come under head count but instead expenses do they?
>>92843 >dolphins do not have an accredited Hydro dynamical Engineer who is sub contracted to the state water company on by a private organisation so they don’t come under head count but instead expenses do they?
Nor did humans for effectively 100% of all time, what's your point?
>>92842 They have Russians on board, there's bound to be an illegal samovar somewhere on the ISS. For testing vapour mechanics in low gravity or some such.
Is it weird that I instantly recognised that she was in space from her hair and the way her subcutaneous fat was distributed but translated the rest of the image as a basement flat in Hounslow being renovated?
I see what you mean - the space espresso machine looks a bit like a consumer unit at first glance. I don't know what possessed the Russians to paint their half of the station like a 1970s school.
>>92850 I prefer Hager, honestly. If cost matters I might go Wylex though the flex on Hager lids is nice for installation. Shame they fucked over independent shops. MK for posh jobs, of course.
