Category Archives: what’s really ethical

Can you think without your professor?

Posted on by PalangL

Can you think without your professor?

The academic discussion about animal concerns and where they meet human interests, is so detached from the reality of Animal Rights, that the discourse of these kind of animal ethicists seems in the core substance no more but a blast of sophist lapses branching out on a subject matter here only for secondary purposes but not because of Animal Rights themselves. What I think of are the heady discussions lead academically on the subjects of speciesism and anthropocentrism. Things may sound good, yet little way is given to nonhuman Animal Rights terms which would leave space for a nonhuman animal autonomy protecting against the human definition of “self” and “other”.

If we had a similar phenomenon in the academic discussion in regards to Human Rights, we would find ourselves in a futuristic soulless science fiction setting, where humans are no more but calculable sources to serve the interest of a hole.

The terms needed for and relevant to Animal Rights become politically practically useless when taken only to their abstract side and not to the side where a term is instilled with the aspects relating to the practical side of life – life’s daily political questions, that are concerned with environmental questions and the questions relating to Animal Rights concerns.

The worst form of an abstraction would be to go back to point zero and ask: what are Animal Rights again and which animals should have what exact rights. From an Animal Rights standpoint we take Animal Rights as a given ethical imperative and prerequisite. Similar to the understanding of RIGHT in Human Rights, my right is not dependent on any holy issue or on any group’s decision to grant me rights or even on the evolutionary side of being a humanoid. The sheer fact of existence grants the right that will take its own shape in the individual, and of course rights do conflict, and still we should try to live peacefully if we want to or if we can.

Political Animal Rights

So far we haven’t gained as much and enough political momentum as is needed in the inner national and supra-national political settings that constitute themselves with the political party systems, umbrella orgs, lobbyism driven by economical factors, NGOs, philanthropists and yes even grassroots work that we do in our communities directly or over the internet.

To rely on the possibility that academic discussion would take us any further with the needed political momentum for the Animal Rights movement, and how general society perceives the question of Animal Rights and how AR can go together with Human Rights, will be a long and disappointing wait.

Academia coins terms, but these terms become shallow after they go through the entire digestive system of the typical academic brain.

Which terms would we need, however?

We need to fill the space of the Animal Rights discussion basically with the same soul, with the same concern, idea, words, deeds …  such as we apply to our own concerns. Theories have their good, but the practice of life that in the end of the day makes up our political side of life, needs the individual strength of thought and deed.

We are able to talk about our own concerns, and we are also able to talk about the concerns of our fellow animal friends.

Never rebut an enlightened anthropos – how dare you!

Posted on by PalangL

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

Posted on by PalangL

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.

What about the cult of flesh

Posted on by PalangL

What about the cult of flesh

It seems to be enough today to eat veggies for a day or adopt the vegan or vegetarian lifestyle for a period of time and then go round pose as a post-vegan informer of a real truth about “meat”-eating or hunting or any other speciesist and non-vegan-compatible action.

When we think about the ideally vegan world, with a vegan society, and I really mean a society with society here, then we don’t think about the ideology of speciesism and how that is installed in our societies, most likely anywhere today on the globe.

Veganism is a moral education to some extent, but morals don’t create legally binding rules.

If human rights were dependent on the moral understanding of people alone, we’d still have torture and killing all around pretty much I think. We as ethical vegans should not overlook the dangers of speciesism. When we ask people to go vegan, we should bear in mind that the “habit” of “meat”-eating didn’t start just because the humans of the past just happened to be speciesist. The human past evolved from being speciesist to still being speciesist exactly on the grounds of held views, beliefs, attitudes, thoughts, philosophies.

Changing the lifestyle only does not go deep enough. One or more thousand years of deeply embedded ways of thinking within a society have to be changed, both on the individual and on the societal level. And the tragic thing with speciesism is, that humans built their understanding of what humanity means mainly on the basis of considering nonhuman animal life as a “lower” life form in a comparative measure to their own life form of being > HOMO SAPIENS.

What we as ethically driven vegans are asking for is a revolution. This encompasses a change in behaviour most of all firstly, but inasmuch it needs a change in thinking – well of course! And that’s where the question about what that cult of flesh is sets in.

I recently had this short exchange on diaspora that I want to close this blog entry with. It’s about just some examples of vegans-turned-animalkiller.

Why Suckerberg is a speciesist? Cos there are too many of them

Posted on by PalangL

Why AR people in particular should not use Facebook and start using Diaspora

A person doesn’t even have to have a “typical” blemish on his track record in regards to human rights or environmental issues to be proven on the wrong side of morality.

Being a pronounced speciesist is a problem that should make us AR people take a decision on such a morally vain person, especially if the person even acts up upon his or her speciesist attitudes and actually engages in harming and/or killing nonhuman animals.

Facebook makes politics with the individual image of it’s founder Suckerberg. And exactly that’s why you should take his “personal activities” serious enough to leave the services of his company FB alone, if you were ever on there or freeze your usage of it down to a minimum.

Suckerberg stands for the individual that explicitly socially lives out our commonday societal collective egotism. And he is hiped exactly for this. Socially shared egotism is the “social” phenomenon that FB triggered most predominantly. (Someone rightly noted that FB tuned the term “to LIKE something” into a useless word, an interesting observation about the warped psychology of Facebook and its users.)

UPC’s Karen Davis has written about Suckerbergs speciesism and she sheds a light on the gruesomeness of his stance towards nonhuman animals life:

http://www.upc-online.org/thinking/110613only_connect.html

Both, our views on the world based on an abstract scientifically led philosophy of life-as-a-whole and otherwise also our religiously influenced views, they both fail to allow a non-homoncentric approach towards our co-species. If a person is set within either a biologically driven view or stands in a religious tradition of one of the abrahamic religions at least, we can probably not expect him or her to understand more of the world than that it should be subjugated to what we suppose to be the human concern. This is a gigantic problem.

(Also, a person being rich and enormously skilful in these our societies, does not prove for this person not to be a whackjob at the most important moral concerns.)

Well, and for the sake of it, let’s take a look at Suckerbergs human rights track anyway. In which way is FB involved in human rights violations “indirectly” …

This video by http://craig-antweiler.com gives you an overall idea

Diaspora* Next Online Revolution

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mMSxWEnjU

To close this, see the Diaspora creators and join a pod or set a branch up yourself

the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqxQgfQD24M

Speciesism isn’t …

Posted on by PalangL

Speciesism isn’t like something that has to be assumed like a “status quo” that we are just condemned to be living with for ever. Speciesism is always an almost inexplicable disaster for which we lack any real terms to fathom that what is happening.

It’s not an issue that’s less pressing than violations of human rights.

Even if Animal Rights are not legally pronounced anywhere in our homocentrist human societies now, the world consists of an autonomous natural world too (in a parallell form) of which nonhuman animals are the inhabitants and nonhuman animals are rights bearers in the vital positions they hold in the environment /nature.

Our manipulative and destructive mingling in their matters does not change anything about the animal-nature connection – which is far more fundamental than our conceptions of might and force are, which we have set against them.

My friend ‘Comet’ adds rightly: “The entire existence of humanity is not something that goes “way back” as far as the universe and its age is concerned. So all of humanity from the start until now – although “ages and ages” to humanity – is still a catastrophic event in the eyes of the universe, as much as Nazi Germany was a catastrophic event to humans. So one can look at the whole of humanity and say ‘that event went totally wrong, time to start over ‘”.

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

Posted on by PalangL

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?!

Posted on by PalangL

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.

 

 

Does life have to be tragic?

Posted on by PalangL

Does life have to be tragic?

Certainly people create situations for each other as human beings, but far more than that even for other, nonhuman animal beings and the natural world and the world as a whole, situations which can’t even be hardly fathomed anymore by a word such as “tragic”, situations which leave the one who experiences them horrified and terrified, sad to the highest extent.

“Tragic” is something personal, something that can’t be really located in the broad and politically relevant context, when it refers to the experience of an individual.

No matter what though, we all do suffer from tragic fates, caused by the impacts humans create.

How do we handle our personal tragic experiences, and not let ourselves be emotionally drowned by the bad experiences and thus by others causing such feelings in us?

I think it’s important that we connect that what happens to us personally (I mean on the very private and personal scale) to that what happens in the world and with the world overall. Our personal tragedy is caused by humans who ignore that their lifestyles in all aspects (the ideas the propagate, their behavior, the practical impacts of their doings and their “havings”) affect the actual life of single individuals on really all possible scales.

Humans in the western world on average seek to rationalize their lifestyle by terms such as what is “in” and what “I should have” / own / possess, what is “normal”, what should be everybody’s standard, what is it that “I like”, that “I want”, that I “need”.

The question about the broad “you” is not interesting and even a no no. One simply works against it. The “you” is something like an opposing principle.

We need this “you” to live though! But we should be aware not to reduce it to be a fake “you”, which would consist just of clones of ourselves. It’s a matter of perspective. There is a difference between a collective egotism and an individualist “concernism” or altruism.

Tragedy hinders us from connecting to the other, we become locked within the perspective of the “I” involuntarily. But as we can’t share the feelings of an egotist who causes us to feel tragic in the first place, we end up suffering from the separation we feel between a locked “I” and an out-locked “you”.

Let’s break out of the locked “I” condition when we feel our tragedy, and let’s always see that we are connected with the many “you’s”.