Girl Burned Alive: The Quest for Morality in America

[BigBallinStalin]

So the slavery comparison is apt: farmers enchained by lobbyists and regulators intent on a dumpy unhealthy population. Doesn't make raising animals wrong, makes your special interest groups in the food sector, including those who get gov jobs, a corrupt lot. Undo those chains, lobby against the lobbyists, bring down barriers to healthy food markets. Long live deep cut bacon.

I am not going to blame government or lobbyists for this problem, because independent of those institutions, people have a real desire to consume animal flesh. The only sustainable way for animals to be treated ethically is for people to stop thinking that they are machines to provide us food, and start treating them with the respect one would accord to another human.

That's basically your moral axiom: animals of enough sentience should be treats as morally equivalent to humans.

I'm fine with people restraining that to themselves, but when they become global moralists, then we've got a problem.

[2dimes]

Comparing these two events is just utter stupidity. Comparing my wife's uncle and this girl's killer is the depth of moral baseness. Her killer will be arrested, without needing to shoot him. He will be tried and he will have a bullet put in the back of his head. Comparing shooting him with killing the pig is not right either.

To compare them equally is to deny the very heart of what we consider wrong and right.

I have no disagreement so will defer to others who might.

[Metsfanmax]

So the slavery comparison is apt: farmers enchained by lobbyists and regulators intent on a dumpy unhealthy population. Doesn't make raising animals wrong, makes your special interest groups in the food sector, including those who get gov jobs, a corrupt lot. Undo those chains, lobby against the lobbyists, bring down barriers to healthy food markets. Long live deep cut bacon.

I am not going to blame government or lobbyists for this problem, because independent of those institutions, people have a real desire to consume animal flesh. The only sustainable way for animals to be treated ethically is for people to stop thinking that they are machines to provide us food, and start treating them with the respect one would accord to another human.

That's basically your moral axiom: animals of enough sentience should be treats as morally equivalent to humans.

I'm fine with people restraining that to themselves, but when they become global moralists, then we've got a problem.

Nah, this is wrong. Morals are only meaningful if you want them to be universalized. They're not morals otherwise, by construction. If I believe that it is murder for people to eat pigs as food (and I do), then am I not a shitty human being if I see murder happening all around me and I don't do anything to stop it?

For example, do you think everyone should live by the standard that it's fine for you to commit murder as long as you personally believe that it's morally justified? No, of course not, that would be chaos and people would die for no good reason. Most people are generally fine with becoming "global moralists" as long as it is something that most people agree on anyway (like not murdering innocent humans). So I don't think we really disagree on what it means to push a moral belief, we just disagree on the actual content of the question and so you think my proselytizing is uniquely unfair. Said another way, if you see me keeping black humans as slaves, you had better not just ignore that and let me be simply because I can live my life how I want. That stops being true when living how I want infringes on the rights of other people. If we agree that animals are people, then the logic naturally extends to them. So what we disagree on is whether animals are people, not whether people have rights.

Not going to blame government or lobbyists. Let me guess your solution...let me think...almost there...government and lobbyists? Perhaps telling people what is bad for them? And then protecting them against their badness? And showing them how it is bad from the barrel of a gun?

No, there is no legislative fix for this one. (Though a meat tax would certainly help, and is justified given the mass environmental damage our addiction to animal flesh is causing.) Instead, I am just going to keep telling people that murder is bad, and eventually they'll understand. I think it's inevitable. There may be some holdout speciesists even after the shift happens, just as there are still some holdout racists who believe the South should have won the Civil War, but these people and their backward beliefs are going to be left behind in the dustbin of history.

[_sabotage_]

It's almost like dealing with AI.

Perhaps we should laws against jacking off in front of young computers since it is equivalent to exposing yourself to a child. After the shift, you are going to starve to death. Enjoy consuming your own flesh.

Should we make it a law not to steal honey from bees, give termites squatter rights and be required to fill out a police report when we hit a frog?

Anyways, I know you. You want to protect people from themselves by getting rid of people. Well you're lucky that there are people like me who allow you to live in such a delusional state. But I'd keep your delusions in check, cuz not everyone is so understanding. People don't take kindly to being told they shouldn't exist because it perturbed a wankers sensibilities.

[Metsfanmax]

Should we make it a law not to steal honey from bees, give termites squatter rights and be required to fill out a police report when we hit a frog?

I don't know. What I do know is that the line may be hard to draw, but that's no excuse for picking a line that we know is bad. Saying that we should avoid respecting the lives of cows, pigs and chickens because one day we might have to seriously consider doing the same for termites is the same poor reasoning made by those who now say that we should avoid gay marriage because it will lead to polygamous marriage, and the same poor reasoning made by those who said that we should avoid interracial marriage, and the same poor reasoning made by those who said that women should not vote, and the same poor reasoning as those who said black humans are property and not people. Slippery slope is not a justification for trampling on the rights of people who deserve rights. As human knowledge and compassion grows with time, so does our sphere of moral concern. This is a good thing. Progress in respecting others is good.

If you were alive in the 1850s, would you have stood on the side of the abolitionists, or stood idly by? It is a question all of us should contemplate. We all would like to think we have the moral fortitude to stand up against injustice, but what would we truly have done in those circumstances?

Well you're lucky that there are people like me who allow you to live in such a delusional state.

With friends like you, who needs enemies?

[_sabotage_]

It's not a slippery slope and hence your question is not valid. You have failed to show a discernible link between eating meat and slavery.

Do I agree with industrial chicken farming? f*ck no. People should not have such shitty food thrust upon them. The solution is to make smaller scale, healthier production methods competitive by letting The Big Boys go f*ck themselves. Not because of how they are treating animals, but because how they are treating people by selling them that shit.

Cows in a feedlot are heavily diseased and medicated, it's a shame that some kids will never know healthy food.

If a guy takes a piece of barren wasteland and raises healthy animals, I would expect him to try to give the animal as untraumatic a death as possible, not for the sake of the animal, but for the sake of the tenderness of the product that a human must digest.

How you go from this to slavery is the equivalent to saying Barry Bonds was a high paid slave of the Giants. That slaves had deplorable circumstances, as animals in a feedlot do is well understood, but saying that this is the circumstance of all animals and all systems of animal husbandry is to say that all people are slaves.

As such, do I believe in 2014 that we should emancipate the human population from through taxation? Sure.

[Metsfanmax]

It's not a slippery slope and hence your question is not valid. You have failed to show a discernible link between eating meat and slavery.

What is the reason that we know slavery of black humans is wrong? Well, first we can assume slavery of people is bad. Second, black humans are different from white humans, but are they different in any way that justifies treating them morally differently? Let's see: they have different skin color, maybe they listen to different music and wear different clothes. But none of those things relate to the fundamental attributes that make humans worthy of moral concern: their ability to feel emotion and pain, their ability to love others and to feel sorrow when friends and family are lost, their hopes for the future. Black humans feel these just as strongly as white humans, and so are just as deserving of equal legal rights.

So, then I ask the question, what is the morally relevant difference between a pig and a human? Well, they're different species, but anyone who uses that as an out is no better than the person who said that black people being a different "race" justifies their moral inferiority. They look different, so we should treat them different, is not an answer. Nothing about the black "race" makes them any less worthy of moral concern. But on all counts of the things that made humans worthy of moral respect, like having individual desires and personalities, feeling emotion and pain, pigs also have those. They may not feel them in exactly the same way, just as you and I and anyone else probably experience love and sorrow in different ways. The fundamental reasons for why humans are legal and moral people, apply also to pigs. To disprove this, you have to establish a morally relevant difference between humans and pigs that justifies treating them differently.

The fundamental argument for slavery being wrong has little to do with whether slaves are treated well or not, and the same applies here.

[Metsfanmax]

This shift is happening faster than most people realize.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/ ... Q620141221

An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a "non-human person" unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday.

Animal rights campaigners filed a habeas corpus petition - a document more typically used to challenge the legality of a person's detention or imprisonment - in November on behalf of Sandra, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Buenos Aires zoo.

In a landmark ruling that could pave the way for more lawsuits, the Association of Officials and Lawyers for Animal Rights (AFADA) argued the ape had sufficient cognitive functions and should not be treated as an object.

The court agreed Sandra, born into captivity in Germany before being transferred to Argentina two decades ago, deserved the basic rights of a "non-human person."

[_sabotage_]

Sure we could take the argument back further. What's the morally relevant difference between a species and a kingdom? Between living and non-living. But we aren't going to.

We aren't going to go after cannibal lobsters and put them on trial. We aren't going to have civil suits when a tree blocks out another plants sunlight or tell the wind to be more accountable.

Just as we hold humans accountable for the conditions of the chickens and not the chicken, a chicken cannot be held accountable for killing a person. If you wish for the animals to be master of the world, you are the enemy of people. If we need to be responsible for the well being and also responsible for their misdeeds, then we should just scale humanity right off the planet, so that no harm may come to them through us. And then your sweet fragile heart wouldn't be there to break as they rip each other to shreds, starve to death and shovel shit in each other's faces.

[Metsfanmax]

Just as we hold humans accountable for the conditions of the chickens and not the chicken, a chicken cannot be held accountable for killing a person.

I am not asking for chickens to be held accountable for killing a human. There are differences between chickens and humans, and that will inform which specific legal rights and responsibilities are accorded to them, just as there are differences between child and adult humans that determine which rights and responsibilities are accorded to them. However, in the status quo, a chicken is not even capable of having legal rights in this country, which is what I am currently describing. There is no need to straw man my position: if you want to know what precisely I am advocating for, you need only ask, rather than saying "if you do X, you're the enemy of humans," at which I will likely tell you that I am not advocating for X.

[_sabotage_]

Well you get them to pay tax, maybe you can use some of that money to write them some laws.

How about we pay tigers and then give them the choice of buying fresh meat or a lobbyist.

[mrswdk]

Do I agree with industrial chicken farming? f*ck no. People should not have such shitty food thrust upon them. The solution is to make smaller scale, healthier production methods competitive by letting The Big Boys go f*ck themselves. Not because of how they are treating animals, but because how they are treating people by selling them that shit.

Those people choose to purchase and consume that food, and are perfectly capable of avoiding it if they so desire. Surely your time in China showed you how this sort of market regulates itself. Knowledge of things such as gutter oil and fake meat is widespread - those who wish to avoid such food avoid eating off street carts or at roadside barbecues, those who don't give a shit continue to eat their jianbing and kaochuan'r. If people didn't want to eat those industrially-farmed chickens, they wouldn't buy them.

On another note: your wife used to work in Dongguan, huh? Is that where you met?

[Phatscotty]

I guess it all depends how each individual perceives morality. From my point of view, I see murdering people as wrong, and I have a hard time trying to understand how anyone could burn a 19 year old girl alive.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 14925.html

I understand that evil exists in the hearts of humans, but to think of such a demonic act against another human being and then act on it...it just doesn't make any sense to me.

When things like this happen in the world, I start to wonder if morality can even be restored; and if it can't...then what? And if it can, how do we go about doing it?

and this whole time I thought getting rid of our morality was 'Progress!' We have traded the all seeing eye of God for the all seeing eye of Government. The thought that God sees all we do and that we are accountable to our maker for our actions has no doubt prevented many a person from acting on their temptations. That's the extra mile in restraint as far as human beings go, the fear that God will see what you do, and we seem to have already decided that the extra mile was no longer needed for America as a whole. No doubt it's all because of the few non-believers who think they are so much smarter than everybody else; who try to mock others and their 'sky daddy' which is so much more important to them than that last piece of external authority that a great many people do need most of the time. And all of the people need it at some point in their life. You will see even the most ardent atheist have their secret conversations with God when they are the one's enduring great suffering, attending church and services with the deaths of loved ones, and on their own deathbeds....'If there is a heaven....'

[_sabotage_]

Mrs,

A few points. Yes, they do sell some shitty food and if it kills people, they are severely punished. Regulation doesn't need to make food producers less competitive, but in the US cronyism has paved the way for major corporations to make it so. When business interests are found to supersede social interests, the government will do something in China. If you really want to compare western and Asian eating habits, that's a long topic in itself.

I always took you to be a virgin 19 year-old Norwegian who was over fond of ping pong. What are you?

Mrs is asking if my wife was a prostitute. Dongguan has like half a million of them. When we met, she was the senior assistant to the president of our company. We met first in HK, but worked together on a project in Sanya. She's now a few months from getting her accounting degree. If she was a prostitute, it doesn't really bother me.

She first worked for a Taiwanese factory, goes her alibi. Saved all her money and took night classes in trade and English. She went from RMB800 a month in 98 to RMB15,000 a month plus housing, etc in 2011. Some who had been prostitutes did similar, some did worse.

Yes, PS, Mets is a satanist. He hates anything associated with God.

[Metsfanmax]

No doubt it's all because of the few non-believers who think they are so much smarter than everybody else; who try to mock others and their 'sky daddy' which is so much more important to them than that last piece of external authority that a great many people do need most of the time. And all of the people need it at some point in their life.

No, not all of us feel the need to submit our will to some higher authority. Some of us want to be free. The ironic thing is that you go on and on about how those liberals are trying to take away our freedom, when you are just giving it up from the start for the feeling of being protected.

BTW: I agree that 'sky daddy' is an unfortunate term. There's nothing adult about the God of Abraham. I would now prefer to call him the 'sky child with a temper tantrum because not everyone wants to play with him on the playground'.

Yes, PS, Mets is a satanist. He hates anything associated with God.

What? No. I quite enjoy some versions of God, like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[_sabotage_]

Mets beliefs:

When humans exhale, we are polluting the planet.
Humans are no better than beasts,
Except for those who share his beliefs: the enlightened.
Being enlightened, he is the fittest.
The enlightened should guide the unenlightened towards their demise.
This will show the unenlightened that they aren't fit for survival.
There is nothing higher than the enlightened.
Their enlightenment was randomly determined by nature.
The only consequences are those of nature, and since their enlightenment has been predetermined by nature, those consequences are for others.
Since nature has predetermined their enlightenment and shown them that their enlightenment is true and shown that enlightenment means surviving against the unenlightened and shown that they therefore need to prove their enlightenment through the demise of the unenlightened, it is the responsibility of the enlightened to enforce the consequences of nature on the unenlightened.
Hence, he should try to kill the rest of society and us failing to realize he is a psychopath and taking proper precautions against his insanity, shows our weakness and we should suffer.

Conclusion: Mets is enlightened according to his own definition and a satanist according to mine.

[Metsfanmax]

[mrswdk]

We have traded the all seeing eye of God for the all seeing eye of Government

Doesn't your money have 'in god we trust' written on it?

[mrswdk]

A few points. Yes, they do sell some shitty food and if it kills people, they are severely punished. Regulation doesn't need to make food producers less competitive, but in the US cronyism has paved the way for major corporations to make it so. When business interests are found to supersede social interests, the government will do something in China. If you really want to compare western and Asian eating habits, that's a long topic in itself.

My point was that consumers are capable of selecting out producers that they don't like by themselves - if they don't like low-quality produce (whether from a crappy street vendor or industrial-scale battery farms) then they will stop buying it.

You stated that people are having shitty mass-produced food thrust upon them, but that overlooks the fact that if they don't want to eat mass-produced meat then all they have to do is stop buying it. There is no 'thrusting' involved when a consumer goes to a shop and buys goods of their own volition.

You are of course correct that government over-regulation stifles a lot of those smaller traders, but that is a separate point.

[mrswdk]

And I was just joking about Dongguan

[_sabotage_]

Fine, then your point is more valid than I took it. My excuses.

You can't expect most people to be as insane as me.

Three squares a day, balancing the food groups. We pay taxes, they generate the food for those three square meals according to the food groups and badda bing badda boom, you get a country of fat, unhealthy people.

Do I think people should utterly ignore the government? Yes. But they still use federal reserve notes at the shop after getting them however they do. And those are used to dictate the food prices by the government. They ignore me when I tell them to ignore the government.

As such, when you have a trusting populace and a greedy elite, you get shitty products.

Can we convince people to shred a little dried pork on their noodles and have a family live off a pig a year? No, the system is stacked against you.

Can people be sure that what is written grade A actually means anything? I can't. I can go to a rancher and see how his cows are doing, I can buy one and have it butchered, but to be graded, I'd need to ship it to Alberta and back. If I do get graded meat at the supermarket, it most likely comes from a feedlot and the cow could have been on the brink of death prevented by heavy medication. Government stamps grade A, yep that's the kind of meat we want.

You'd have to be insane to expect your friendly jolly best country in the world's government is causing nasty shit to be marked what every child recognizes as the best.

[BigBallinStalin]

So the slavery comparison is apt: farmers enchained by lobbyists and regulators intent on a dumpy unhealthy population. Doesn't make raising animals wrong, makes your special interest groups in the food sector, including those who get gov jobs, a corrupt lot. Undo those chains, lobby against the lobbyists, bring down barriers to healthy food markets. Long live deep cut bacon.

I am not going to blame government or lobbyists for this problem, because independent of those institutions, people have a real desire to consume animal flesh. The only sustainable way for animals to be treated ethically is for people to stop thinking that they are machines to provide us food, and start treating them with the respect one would accord to another human.

That's basically your moral axiom: animals of enough sentience should be treats as morally equivalent to humans.

I'm fine with people restraining that to themselves, but when they become global moralists, then we've got a problem.

Nah, this is wrong. Morals are only meaningful if you want them to be universalized. They're not morals otherwise, by construction. If I believe that it is murder for people to eat pigs as food (and I do), then am I not a shitty human being if I see murder happening all around me and I don't do anything to stop it?

For example, do you think everyone should live by the standard that it's fine for you to commit murder as long as you personally believe that it's morally justified? No, of course not, that would be chaos and people would die for no good reason. Most people are generally fine with becoming "global moralists" as long as it is something that most people agree on anyway (like not murdering innocent humans). So I don't think we really disagree on what it means to push a moral belief, we just disagree on the actual content of the question and so you think my proselytizing is uniquely unfair. Said another way, if you see me keeping black humans as slaves, you had better not just ignore that and let me be simply because I can live my life how I want. That stops being true when living how I want infringes on the rights of other people. If we agree that animals are people, then the logic naturally extends to them. So what we disagree on is whether animals are people, not whether people have rights.

"Murder" is essentially illegitimate killing. Of course, "murder" is universally bad, but it depends on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate killings, so murder isn't a good example. It's an argument that begs the question.

Your universal stance requires the adherent to possess perfect or nearly full knowledge of the implications on prohibiting the destruction of non-humans (but not plants and maybe rocks--depending on your environmentalism). Then, the benefit-cost analysis ensues. E.g. how does prohibiting the killing of animals affect people living on subsistence in 3rd world countries? What would the costs of prohibition be? etc.

Without knowing that, then I don't find the universality of your moral position to be credible. Maybe it could work in developed countries because the prohibition seems to be more of a luxury good (such societies could afford it).

[Metsfanmax]

So the slavery comparison is apt: farmers enchained by lobbyists and regulators intent on a dumpy unhealthy population. Doesn't make raising animals wrong, makes your special interest groups in the food sector, including those who get gov jobs, a corrupt lot. Undo those chains, lobby against the lobbyists, bring down barriers to healthy food markets. Long live deep cut bacon.

I am not going to blame government or lobbyists for this problem, because independent of those institutions, people have a real desire to consume animal flesh. The only sustainable way for animals to be treated ethically is for people to stop thinking that they are machines to provide us food, and start treating them with the respect one would accord to another human.

That's basically your moral axiom: animals of enough sentience should be treats as morally equivalent to humans.

I'm fine with people restraining that to themselves, but when they become global moralists, then we've got a problem.

Nah, this is wrong. Morals are only meaningful if you want them to be universalized. They're not morals otherwise, by construction. If I believe that it is murder for people to eat pigs as food (and I do), then am I not a shitty human being if I see murder happening all around me and I don't do anything to stop it?

For example, do you think everyone should live by the standard that it's fine for you to commit murder as long as you personally believe that it's morally justified? No, of course not, that would be chaos and people would die for no good reason. Most people are generally fine with becoming "global moralists" as long as it is something that most people agree on anyway (like not murdering innocent humans). So I don't think we really disagree on what it means to push a moral belief, we just disagree on the actual content of the question and so you think my proselytizing is uniquely unfair. Said another way, if you see me keeping black humans as slaves, you had better not just ignore that and let me be simply because I can live my life how I want. That stops being true when living how I want infringes on the rights of other people. If we agree that animals are people, then the logic naturally extends to them. So what we disagree on is whether animals are people, not whether people have rights.

"Murder" is essentially illegitimate killing. Of course, "murder" is universally bad, but it depends on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate killings, so murder isn't a good example. It's an argument that begs the question.

Your universal stance requires the adherent to possess perfect or nearly full knowledge of the implications on prohibiting the destruction of non-humans (but not plants and maybe rocks--depending on your environmentalism). Then, the benefit-cost analysis ensues. E.g. how does prohibiting the killing of animals affect people living on subsistence in 3rd world countries? What would the costs of prohibition be? etc.

Without knowing that, then I don't find the universality of your moral position to be credible. Maybe it could work in developed countries because the prohibition seems to be more of a luxury good (such societies could afford it).

Do you believe we should engage in a cost-benefit analysis on the universality of murder when it comes to humans?

[mrswdk]

Why not? If you're going to prohibit something then you need to have a sound reason for doing so.

[BigBallinStalin]

So the slavery comparison is apt: farmers enchained by lobbyists and regulators intent on a dumpy unhealthy population. Doesn't make raising animals wrong, makes your special interest groups in the food sector, including those who get gov jobs, a corrupt lot. Undo those chains, lobby against the lobbyists, bring down barriers to healthy food markets. Long live deep cut bacon.

I am not going to blame government or lobbyists for this problem, because independent of those institutions, people have a real desire to consume animal flesh. The only sustainable way for animals to be treated ethically is for people to stop thinking that they are machines to provide us food, and start treating them with the respect one would accord to another human.

That's basically your moral axiom: animals of enough sentience should be treats as morally equivalent to humans.

I'm fine with people restraining that to themselves, but when they become global moralists, then we've got a problem.

Nah, this is wrong. Morals are only meaningful if you want them to be universalized. They're not morals otherwise, by construction. If I believe that it is murder for people to eat pigs as food (and I do), then am I not a shitty human being if I see murder happening all around me and I don't do anything to stop it?

For example, do you think everyone should live by the standard that it's fine for you to commit murder as long as you personally believe that it's morally justified? No, of course not, that would be chaos and people would die for no good reason. Most people are generally fine with becoming "global moralists" as long as it is something that most people agree on anyway (like not murdering innocent humans). So I don't think we really disagree on what it means to push a moral belief, we just disagree on the actual content of the question and so you think my proselytizing is uniquely unfair. Said another way, if you see me keeping black humans as slaves, you had better not just ignore that and let me be simply because I can live my life how I want. That stops being true when living how I want infringes on the rights of other people. If we agree that animals are people, then the logic naturally extends to them. So what we disagree on is whether animals are people, not whether people have rights.

"Murder" is essentially illegitimate killing. Of course, "murder" is universally bad, but it depends on the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate killings, so murder isn't a good example. It's an argument that begs the question.

Your universal stance requires the adherent to possess perfect or nearly full knowledge of the implications on prohibiting the destruction of non-humans (but not plants and maybe rocks--depending on your environmentalism). Then, the benefit-cost analysis ensues. E.g. how does prohibiting the killing of animals affect people living on subsistence in 3rd world countries? What would the costs of prohibition be? etc.

Without knowing that, then I don't find the universality of your moral position to be credible. Maybe it could work in developed countries because the prohibition seems to be more of a luxury good (such societies could afford it).

Do you believe we should engage in a cost-benefit analysis on the universality of murder when it comes to humans?

This hinges on the determination of legitimate v. illegitimate killing. Again, you're begging the question.

(see my post to mrswdk's. It's right after this one).