This is the most astonishingly fucking heartless thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
Who in this entire fucking universe gives you the right to say a single bird is worth more than one thousand people? I like birds, I think they are beautiful majestic animals, but I would never even consider saying something like this. Anyone who does is an asshole in my not-so-humble opinion.
Then, topping this, you said
So essentially, if something is natural than a death from it is A-OK with you then?
I guess my parents and family and several doctors are wasting their time treating my grandfather for cancer. According to you this is natural, so its goodbye grandad.
How about AIDS? Would you say that everyone who had AIDS deserves to die from it and they shouldn’t be treated? What about innoculations for smallpox or measels? Should we just abandon modern medicine completely and let the sick suffer in agony while they waste away?
You’re no better than those who say AIDS is God’s punishment for nymphomanics or homosexuals. Fuck you, fuck the house you live in, and fuck your parents for bringing such a foul, hideously twisted son-of-a bitch into this world.
Methinks thou needest a link in the other thread to this thread. Also, naming the subject in the OP (or the title)might help because, without it, foolsguinea stands a very slim chance of ever coming in here to defend those statements.
Unless that’s what your goal was.
My opinion is that I agree with both sides to an extent. I think foolsguinea’s biggest flaw is not being able to differentiate quantity from usefulness. If those 800 birds provided such a needed service that, without them, we’d all die, then we sure as hell better protect them. But if not, there’s no obligation for us to go out of our way.
I believe that Rachel Carson said it quite well in this statement:
“Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself…[We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
If you want to put it on a strictly selfish human level I could do that. I will point out that one species of plant or animal may contain genetic material that could potentially lead to cures for cancer, AIDS, and many other disease we haven’t even encountered yet. The loss of a single species could spell doom for TENS of thousands, if not millions of humans.
BTW, love that Rachel Carson quote… It’s right on the money. I’ll add another one, a famous buddhist saying, “One life is worth more than all the treasures in the world.” Note the conspicuous absence of the word “human” in that sentence.
Please. It’s so extremely fortunate that people who think like the OP are in such an extreme minority that their opinion doesn’t count up to actual influence. It’s disgusting to have to listen to their drivel though.
In case I wasn’t clear about which side I was refering to as disgusting, it wasn’t the argument of the OP, it was the people who try to make arguments that equate animal life to human life.
Does anyone remember that experimental transplant case some years ago in California? A tiny baby with a bad heart was given in transplant the heart of a baboon? It didn’t work and the poor baby(as well as the baboon)died. I heard a coworker(PETA material if there ever was one) say “They shouldn’t have killed that poor baboon just for an operation on a human.” What if it had been YOUR kid? Some people have a funny sense of values. I think subconsciously they must have self esteem problems.
My take on the natural world is shaped by my religious views(I’m Christian) We humans were put in charge, so to speak, by the Owner. So that doesn’t mean we can do anything we damn well please with the property. We aren’t supposed to wantonly destroy it or be unecassarily cruel to the tenants.
For someday we will be called to give an account of our stewardship. The language in Genesis, when humanity was “given dominion” over the natural world, is the same language used to describe the rule of a king and his subjects. Sure, a king is on the top of the heap, but as such his obligation is to see as best he can that those lower down get a fair shake too.
My, my, sorry this was long. As Stephen King once said, I have had diarrhea of the word processor.
When compared one-on-one, every species is going to come up short when measured against humanity by humanity. The flaw is the same as trying to decide which rivets are important to holding up a bridge, or which strand in a net catches the fish. Every one removed makes all the others more critical, and long before they’re all gone, the bridge collapes or the net tears.
Humanity almost certainly cannot survive on this planet as the only animal species, or even one one of only 10,000. Drastic changes in the ecology will result, and there’s no guarentee that when it stablilizes again, it will be suitable for us. Just ask Triceratops, or any trilobite you happen to see. Only difference is we have the capability to bring the house down upon our own heads, instead of just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There’s a lot of parameters that go into making this planet habitable - gas mixture of the atmosphere, total pressure, tempature span, radiation that gets to the surface and that which doesn’t, patterns of percipitation, chemical makeup of the oceans, all of which are mediated by some extent by the biosphere. You don’t have to wipe out all life on the planet - something we almost certainly can’t do, but we don’t have to go anywhere near that far to really make it tough or impossible for the planet to support humans.
Speleophile
You’re quite right of course, but that in no ways justifies the concept that animal life is more important than human.
I never got the chance to say it in the original thread, but since it’s in the pit now:
foolsguinea you are one ethically twisted, morally bankrupt sick fucker. If your argument was even logically consistent I could tolerate it, but you seem to be basing the whole thing on the assumption that a ‘species’ lives forever if not killed by people. What a crock of left wing, heartless, tree hugging, dandelion-sniffing, hippy crap.
Nope. Because we aren’t using bird embryos for research in curing human ailments. We’re using human embryos.
Also, I don’t have nearly enough information about this controversy to have a knowledgable opinion. Does anyone know any good, unbiased sources of info? I’d do a websearch, but I’d rather not risk getting my information from a site which may claim to be impartial but really isn’t.
How about i put it this way, if some guy is going to hurt my cat, and some other guy is gonna shoot up a high school, I’m gonna stop they guy attacking my cat first.
I’d die to protect my cat. But i wouldn’t die to protect you.
I don’t completely agree with FoolsGuinea (what two humans ever completely agree?), but he has a valid point. We humans are in a frame of mind where we consider ourselves above and outside of the natural world. We also consider every one of the nearly 6 billion human lives on this planet to be sacred. I, for one, don’t agree with that philosophy. Human beings are not sacred; we are a dime a dozen, and it’s time we woke up to that fact. I believe that there is a definite possibility that human beings will breed/poison ourselves into extinction, and if we manage to do so, we deserve our fate. The universe has no sympathy for a species that can’t live successfully within the confines of their environment, and neither do I.