Never rebut an enlightened anthropos – how dare you!

Why it is amazing how Animal Rights sets ITSELF on the right fundament. No question that it does exactly that, Animal Rights is a story, dynamic in itself.

However some birthhelpers who are perhaps a couple of eons too late are fighting for their new inventions of the wheel notwithstanding. Ok, what I’m talking about is the question of the futile fight of humans against their own perpetually continued ANTHROPOCENTRISM.

A lot of focus is currently set by the AR community on just that impotant question, which is good and a thing to do overdue because it helps you see reality clearer. Reality about the political implications of Animal Rights for Human Rights and Earth Rights mostly, I believe.

But what exactly is anthropocentrism?

Also … Why is a term chosen that strictly seems to omit the animal nature connection as the KEY point and only focuses on the human towards animal relation in a critical way though. What about that, what completely stands out of the reach of us the anthropos??? Ok, so we see the question at stake here is the perspective, we want to avoid looking at the world from a strictly homocentric viewpoint. But how far do we have to go with that.

I was recently criticised for criticising an AR advocate who is against anthropocentrism and who claims that Animal Rights find a reasonable argument in the similarities between beings – humans and nonhuman animals that is. This is an old string of argumentation when animal acvocacy issues are being discussed. But: do we want to land at comparative studies where we check one brain against the other to find out how much rights you should be entitled to be granted? Well, the amount of speciesism in the enlightened field of AR advocates is just plain tiresome. I just stop this rant at this point and ask you to continue it on your own behalf if you will.

An end to philosophical validity can lie in what we perceive to be reality

The human continuum with its cultural values is not necessarily one, and can’t necessarily be unified with its diverseness.

Every individual has the right to hold her or his own views.

Thus I can be for Animal Rights INASMUCH as I can be for Human Rights, for example.

No philosophical school can propose me their argumentation as valid IF it asks me to see nonhuman animals other than I see them now as an Animal Rights person.

Philosophy should stay out of attributing different “life forms” with their labels of value or meaning.

Otherwise philosophy becomes as bad as how religions function – as doctrines based on belief. Homoncentrists believe that nonhuman animal life matters less than human life,  and they believe that the world relevant to nonhuman animals and the systems meaningful to nonhuman animals life must not be regarded as a complete world in its own rights in their own terms.

universities – ‘institutionalized’ thinking

Universities – ‘institutionalized’ thinking


Why criticize universities, they are the only real location where you can develop your free thinking together with others on an intelligent and sensible plane … ???

The reality of universities is more than an ambiguous one. Hanging between reasonable discourse and hierarchical oppression. Language, logics, proof, deduction, induction, theories, argumentation, discussions cloak so many truths unspoken of.

Without the noble and legitimate dress

a naked truth glimpses through, that seeks to escape another type of truth. One that you can only find in the nightlight, within the space inbetween being and notbeing.

Academia Lost

Knowledge that circles round

Some take separate terms, and build a logic simply on these terms as pillars. But in reality nothing is so separate that it should become a carrying pillar. The building risks to stand on the wrong pillars.

To avoid being a bad constructor I want to acknowledge how each phenomenon becomes explicable only in the entireness of its “environment”!

Highlighting a few terms out as central “pillars” of my argumentation – around which all other relevant aspects have to settle themselves – lets me build a roof upon this construct, that seems logical in itself. But again, the fullness of life does not work itself in any fully contrivable logics.

A logic that lies within “something” is not mirrored in a logic contrived by my singling out some of its aspects and sticking them together so that they fit … .

When I want to prove how knowledgeable I am however, I can’t really leave my argumentation a lot of space to breathe. Everything has to be waterproof, for no leaks to let fallacies to become instantaneously visible. My opponent can rebut me.

No this circle of yay and nay just wastes a lot of time. And it is possible to differentiate within more or less fully integral settings.

Animal Rights: why there is a similar concern for establishing them alongside human rights

Hello friend: if you read this post or look at it, make sure you have a look and this tumblr entry too. Please talk with your friends about the atrocities of animal sacrifices,be they for religious craziness or for whatever … http://niceswine.tumblr.com/post/12614331791/i-heard-about-the-killing-of-camels

Animal Rights: why there is a similar concern for establishing them alongside human rights

What do you feel are your rights dependent upon? The first instance when you learn about how important it is that you have rights is as a child. If you don’t have rights, anybody might marginalize you because you are weaker than them. Other humans can be in that negative sense the “stronger” ones, that they can potentially just violate the integrity of your individuality completely.

Your rights depend on the basis that the social context amongst which you live shows respect towards you, and accepts that you are weaker in some sense. Additionally the social context around you must leave you the space to “fulfil yourself” to a meaningful (for yourself) and reasonable extent.

Rights have basic social patterns which they require, in order to function “organically” almost. And even more, rights require in their social context and embedding a broader frame of fundamentals. Within this “frame of fundamentals” you will find the entire environmental contexts – nonhuman animals included at the forefront.

The environment is not something passive that is born out of causalities that started off with a big bang universe theory … and nonhuman animals are not the biological instinct bearers as the natural scientists might want to explain them in an oversimplified yet extraordinarily body-centred way. When we make assumptions about what is important in the assumed “instinctual life of an animal”, we just put our assumptions about the animal’s priorities right over them like a cloak under which the real animal will not become to be seen. When I understand that some bird species does some specific singing because he/she wants to mate, then I assume that is what is happening, but I should not claim my assumption to be mirroring the truth of the nonhuman animal. That what is not understood, what remains a world not fully understood by me, can still be a measuring standard in it’s own terms, even if outside my cognitive grasps reach.

Overall, the habitat in which we live is way too complex to be described in solely logical terms, even. On the irrational side yet again, that what we can see in nature is what religions have “sterilized” by setting against natures own (incomprehensive) complexity their single mighty god/divine concepts, as some all inclusive surrogates – with hidden features like a human miracle- producing brain that creates the world and universe and so on. In real life we all have a direct connection to the grandiosity of nature though, that basically totally independent of any prescribed views on it. After all we are part of this universe too. In our singularity. As lonesome single beings.

To come back to where I initially started, animal- and humans rights need each other to go hand in hand, because if we separate our desired rights as superior to what we might only see as the “needs” of animals, then we should ask ourselves: on which planet do we live and with whom are we dealing here? If we will stay and head into a prolonged thinking of us as the centre of the universe, then we will isolate our capacities of thinking and feeling to a perversely narrow circle of ourselves reflecting just what we want to see.

Where do you draw the line, when asking others to act up – ethically?!

Where do you draw the line, when asking others to act up – ethically?!

chatty <3

I often wonder myself about what i can ask of others and what i can ask of myself, as when it comes to: what’s ethically ok, what can we do, and what is asked too much for most people (and even understandably asked too much?).

I don’t want to imply in any way with what I am saying here, that the “do whatever you want to” approach would be a recommendable path to seek in our daily practiced ethics.

What I mainly find worth highlighting in the context is this:

How about letting others down who really need my help and I could help them? Ok many of us would think I am talking about things relating to friends and family. but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is – extend your circle: helping “strangers”.

It shouldn’t be provocative to ask, my question is: is having ones “own” kids a form of letting “others” down by denying the “others” the support I could give them if I instead would chose to feel responsible just as much for them as I would for my own kids?

The other day I heard a fellow vegan talk about vegans who don’t care if exploitative “cheap” labor or any oppressive means were involved in the production process of vegan produce bought, that a vegan person’s care should ideally reach out to the questions of human rights inasmuch. This of course is an undeniably important critical point to bring up. Also this vegan person highlighted the need of a stronger awareness in the fields of veganism and environmentalism and how these two go together, and finally she briefly discussed the importance of making your kids aware of speciesism.

Thinking about vegan parenting made me think of the dilemma everybody of us faces when confronted with the decision: my life as how i would (possibly) want it for myself (having kids) or what about the kids that are born but who really don’t have much of a chance in the world for how we all are setting this world up anew every day.

I’ve taken the decision now. I don’t feel extravagant for having decided to put all my support into helping other’s kids,  nonhuman and human alike, primarily.


 

on the multiplicity of meaningfulness

A concern is a concern, and should and can be “of concern” / “something that concerns one”, even if it’s not a concern to many people.

An issue is of importance, even if that issue is not a story that makes the headlines. We get easily drawn into the streams (!) of uniform opinions, thoughts and feelings, when one issue is played up and stands on the main menu of “today’s top stories”. We easily lose out of sight that our individual thinking and actions need more independence and that our thinking and actions should not be a play-ball of the “moods of the masses”.

When our own individual thinking becomes only a part of one big uniform stream of opinions (that heads just in the one “either-or” direction), our existence shrinks to a binary reducedness. We could end up being one of those “zombies” that we run into every day. Those type of people that are straight one of the stupid or one of the smart side. Life however goes beyond us being stupid or smart, I think life is so complex that leaving all our doors of perception open to what we can learn from it, requires us to allow a full multiplicity of a meaningfulness that does cover more than just our own “insight/s of humanity”. We need an outlook onto all concerns. Beyond homocentrism.

 

a linoleum print by Farangis G. Yegane

The Parallel, fragment about the position humans take towards “nature”

The Parallel, fragment about the position humans take towards “nature”

The homocentrical human considers himself to be in a parallel position to the other natural phenomenons. Nature is felt as if merely producing itself out of an almost passive condition, nature is seen as a huge complex of causalities with interlocked phenomena.

The subsumation: “nature” stands in homocentrist terms for something passive, “nature” has been banned into a virtual state of a “meaningwise” non-existence, while the idea of “the human” is thought to exclusively represent a comprehensive awareness and meaningfulness.

There is an imaginary parallel condition, and on one hand you have the so called passive “natural world” and on the other hand you have the so called “aware” human state of being.

That means in other words that what is external to the human state of being, is localised and being put into the dimension of standing in opposition, in a specific type of way. This type of way is most easily to be compared with the parallel: THE PARALLEL STANDS IN RELATION BUT WITHOUT AN INTERCHANGING (DIRECT) CONNECTION.

A parallel, which represents an ideal circumstance for measuring the one side to the other, seen from the perspective of denying the existence of the others by classifying everything except the “self-concept” as being relatively narrow in function. That what is other, is not simple enough to be fit into the simplicity of the system of homocentricity. The reality of Animals and the Nature is too complex – obviously.

This also means, a highly complex form is subjugated to being translated into the simplifying procedure of scientific proof, to then be considered as a bit more important on its side of the parallel. The complexity remains on its side of the parallel, and cannot jump the line, but can increase in meaning alone by its being existent in the same dimension as the human being is.

The separation, that the parallel creates, stands in dependence of the understanding of “self” (the self-concept), since nothing else would be able as effectively to banish the one immediate reality, that could threaten to run into the acts of definition, human inductions and deductions.
THE REAL could end up dissolving the homocentrical tendency for creating determinisms … .

From hell to hell

From hell to hell

The slaughterhouse, the „animal farm“, the places of „breeding“, the „animal industries“ are the most atrocious attempts to establish the illusion-of-a-fact, that Man (the human species) is the one who can decide about “heaven” and “hell”, and animals can, without impunity, be condemned by him/her to be to be born, to live and to die in hell – to go through hell. Humans have decided that the animal is predestined to not ever be able to ever escape the Man-given fate, brought about by the defamation and by the homoncestrist philosophy and practice that rules the acts and the thinking in his/her society.

On this basis an artificially established sense of a fake “heaven” can be equally aroused and set up by creating enclaves of “rights shareholders”, a contractualist construction and plotting, to which all humans theoretically belong, on the scale of being more of a “master” or more of a “slave”.

We all are except from the man made hell, and we all destined this not-place to be the place for animal life.

We think, we plot, therefore we CAN be the unpunished culprits, we think … .

What lets you escape the plot of man-made hell, is to understand and to set forth that A BEING IS, AND THEREFORE HE/SHE/IT THINKS, AND THERE FOR YOU THINK because you bond with the worldly phenomenons. The plotters consider such a perspective as invalid, and under his/her terms as “un-objective” – within the frame of reference his thinking allows him the draw. With this perspective onto our shared world, we would indiscriminately share this type of a “thinking” with everything/everyone that/who just IS.

We set up a demarcation line, cemented by that “hell” we create on all scales everywhere where the not-human space IS.

It’s a massmurder on the biological argument.

Another concept of a hell

I reckon that the real hell, that I think humans tried to combat as an idea, by establishing their own game’s rules, the real hell is the consciousness that creates an inner pain in the soul when one knows that one does injustice to others.

The artificial hell of unfair judgement i.e. injustice, destroys the logic of responsibility, respect and love, and it punishes the good and “protects” the wrongdoers or rather evildoers.

But the question will remain forever though. Injustice can never be sold as justice, on the long run. Injustice brings more injustices with it. There is no “human order” such as we hold it for real now. The natural order always encompasses the human concern with it. The natural order is not that what we want to make out of it in pure self-interest and evilwill.

The question remains: where our conscience will take us to: to heaven or to hell, within our own thinking.

From hell to hell – I am. And therefore I think.

The animalesque features of the devil show how much at absurdity our humanity lies with itself, when it comes to who is the evil and who receives the evil.

This is a fragment. I have written a longer and more “prosaic” or structured (or less poetical) essay about how an assumed “human good” seeks to establish itself towards an unjustly attributed “animal(-esque) evil”. I hope I get around translating that text sometime soon. For those of you who can read German, here is the link: http://www.simorgh.de/own_public/pl_vom_guten_menschen.pdf

WHAT ARE “RIGHTS”?

What makes up a „right“?

Image: Farangis Yegane http://moosh-o-gorbeh.farangis.de

Is it you yourself who decides about what you consider to be your “right”? It’s an inner process, isn’t it, that you believe you ought to have a right to breathe, a right to walk wherever you want to, a right to say whatever you feel like saying.

There is another layer of the term “right” that is not an inner process but that marks instead that what the society, or the whole human world considers to be a “right” or your “right” respectively. This form of a “legal right” – lets ground it upon the basis of a generalized form of all legal human rights taken together as, so to speak, a “generic” type of a right the humans actually “grant” you, themselves as a group, or a group within the human group – this generic type of an exclusively human right (our current “legal right”) can be detached and even really be something different than the type of right you give yourself.

Without the outer form of a right that is given to you as a person or that is in contrast NOT given to any other living sentient being, you or any sentient being still has their inner sense of what I would call a right. It’s not so that a sense of right (which has something to do with rights and wrongs, as strange as we may think this would be) is something that only exists if you are told what is wrong and what is right. A sense of what you personally may consider a right is something dependent on the beings socialization, on its social contexts. And yes, I do call the behaviour of nonhuman animals amongst other nonhuman animals too a form of social behaviour.

Now if people say “rights” are nothing natural in the case of “animal rights”, and Animal Rights can only be granted on a more or less arbitrary basis, they are wrong insofar in which one can easily realize that all rights in the purest form are something that has to be dealt with on a subjective and a socio-ethical plane.

Rights are natural, because rights stem from self-experience and social interaction. Legal rights on the contrast are quite arbitrary.

Palang Latif, Animal Rights and Politics, I had previously posted this specific fragment on our visual opinions workshop blog http://www.farangis.de/blog/what-are-rights

People just trash everything

When you are good to them, or you try to be, they trash it
When you happen to be a plant, they trash it
When you are honest to them, when you are helpful
they trash it
Just cry about it, you will be trashed anyway, and we are gonna celebrate it

When you are happy or unhappy, they trash it
with what aim?
with what aim do they kill, destroy, disable your agency wherever and however they can?
WITH WHAT AIM?

WHOAAAAAAA

We who are trashed are gonna recycle ourselves,

and we are never gonna need you