Thanas wrote:Why is it you always ask this question, Simon, in every thread where this pops up?
Because the realization "Wait, WHALES ARE SENTIENT?!" should be more than a pretext for us to ignore yet another Indian treaty, a behavior so typical of Western civilization that I
automatically crank my suspicion up a notch whenever it's the first thing someone thinks of to do with a given argument.
No; if such a thing (commonly advanced) is true, it should have consequences other than the convenient low-cost ones.
Joun_Lord wrote:No offense Simon, because I do respect you and your argument most of the time, the argument of "animals are doing something, why not huge mans" is a terrible argument, not like Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray level terrible but like Eragon level, bad but not completely fucktarded but still pretty bad.
And the argument of Natives being allowed to hunt intelligent and endangered species because they need jobs is little better, I'd love to see the same argument employed to support stealing of copper and meth labs here in Redneckistan because thats is some of the few remaining viable economic activities.
I will address the first half of your argument when you advance something other than "it is stupid." I know you'll do so- I'm just saying.
As to the second half of your argument,
nobody ever signed a treaty agreeing that brewing crystal meth was okay in any part of Redneckistan.
What we've got here is more like, oh... suppose there were a country that the US had repeatedly bombed, invaded, dispossessed, looted, and straight-up genocided whenever it was convenient, until not only had they lost literally everything they had, they'd lost all the growth potential of their land and were isolated on some little desert island in the middle of the ocean- an island we still claimed some degree of jurisdiction over. And we signed a treaty with them saying that to earn some petty cash, they had the right to grow marijuana, and export it- say, this is in the 1800s back before marijuana was illegal.
Later we decide marijuana is illegal. And we go to these people on their desert island, who are the remnant of a population we have bombed and killed and murderized and robbed. And we say "Stop selling pot, you bastards! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!"
On the one hand, on some level it is not unreasonable for us to expect the islanders to nod judiciously and say "You are right. This stuff is bad for you and can cause lung cancer." After all, if an argument like that could convince
us, surely it could convince them.
[Please note, this argument is not about whether or not pot should be legal, and that would be a complete sidetrack]
Thing is... would it be that hard to imagine the islanders going "Fuck you, you signed a treaty. All this stuff about pot being bad for you may be true or it may not, but it's based on YOUR hangups and YOUR opinions after you already took everything we had,
on purpose, and left us this. And now you want this too. So fuck you and fuck the high horse you rode in on, if you want us to quit growing pot, renegotiate the damn treaty you signed with us where we're all stuck on this stupid desert island!"
I honestly don't understand why anyone would consider that an unreasonable stance. If you make a promise you should honor it. If you later decide it was wrong to promise someone something... renegotiate fairly, don't just demand that they stop because "I CHANGED MY MIND DAMMIT!"
Whales are intelligent but not human level intelligent, they don't know right from wrong like humans do. Fuck man, despite the fact humans know right from wrong we still kill the fuck out of each other.
Humans know better then other animals, we have the intelligence, the emotions, the penises to know killing other sentient life is bad, that killing itself is bad. Even the most intelligent other species on Earth aren't at that level of intelligence.
Because we know better we can expect better from us. We can expect humans to not murder and rape and steal and shit in the urinals, we cannot expect that of the even the most intelligent non-human animal. We can regulate human behavior, we can have people being relatively civilized in civilized society, we cannot do the same for other animals. Trying to regulate the behavior of non-human animals is an exercise in futility. They literally don't understand rape is bad, murder is bad, double dipping the chip is bad. They have like the intelligence levels of human babies or young children at the most but unlike those little fucks they cannot learn and grow in intelligence.
Because humans have the intelligence to know right from wrong, something Orcas, Orks, and whales don't have the ability to do, we can preach on our high horses, our soap boxes, how Native whaling for fun and profit is bad. Because unlike the Orcas bitch smacking the whales, the Native dudes know the whale is intelligent, know killing it is wrong.
The native dudes themselves often accept that the whale is intelligent, but
not necessarily that killing it is wrong, because it turns out that their moral philosophies and such are based on different premises and attitudes. Attitudes that would probably have resulted in a riveting debate, over basic values and the way we ought to approach other living things, in philosophy journals and Internet forums and suchlike. Except, oh wait, we killed like 99% of the natives
before we knew killing people was wrong. So we won the argument by default, how convenient!
So now that they are so totally defeated, we don't bother to even have a meaningful conversation with them about their opinions. We just shove them aside, and tell them to do as we say.
Moreover, even if we accept your argument as correct, it still falls into one of the categories I listed in my first post.
If whales are sentient enough to deserve protection, but orcas aren't sentient enough to know better than to kill whales,
we should still protect whales. I mean, wolves aren't smart enough to know better than to kill people. They don't know that intelligent meat is somehow sacred and special compared to unintelligent meat. But if there were a bunch of man-eating wolves, and we had the power to stop them from randomly killing people in our territorial
waters forests, we would do so. We wouldn't just go around saying "it's the circle of life!" as sentient, innocent beings were eaten alive by wild beasts... would we?
Maybe we would, but anyone who would do that loses their right to rant about how stupid the Prime Directive is on Star Trek, and that would be a terrible thing to give up on a website like this.
So if whales' lives are in fact as sacred and special as human lives, such that
we should not kill them for economic activity, they are still sacred and special enough to deserve our active protection from other threats to their existence. Not just our own threat to their existence.
And while Native hunting probably isn't endangering the species, subsistence hunting that is, if the species is endangered (even removing the intelligence factor) allowing them to continue hunting an endangered species, even if they didn't cause the species to be endangered, will only hurt the species and themselves. When a species is endangered especially when its heavily endangered even low level hunting can seriously threaten the species survival. And when the species goes then there will be nothing for them to hunt, endangering themselves.
That is still a numbers-based argument. If the natives are hunting a whale species that
is in fact endangered and cannot support low-level whaling, they should stop- an argument that I suspect the natives themselves would accept. After all, it's not the natives who destroy fisheries on a regular basis by operating massive factory fleets and assuming the sea contains literally infinity fish.
If, on the other hand, the natives are hunting a whale species which is not endangered (say, the east Pacific population of gray whales, which consists of roughly 20000 individual whales, as distinct from the populations of gray whales in the west Pacific which the Asians nearly wiped out and the population of Atlantic gray whales the Europeans entirely wiped out)...
Well, then the natives are simply not hunting an endangered species. The species might
become endangered through massive overharvesting, but unless the numbers say there's a danger of that happening, there's no danger of that happening.
Flagg wrote:Ralin wrote:What on earth does the fact that it's 'nature taking its course' have to do with whether or not we should allow something to happen? When wolves or whatever start killing and eating people we don't shrug our shoulders and say that's just the way they are; we take whatever steps we must to stop it. If we're going to assume that the fucking whales are smart enough that we shouldn't kill them the same principle should apply.
So what do you propose, machine-gunning orca's that get too close to grey whales? Depth charges?
If it were a tribe of human cannibals that attacked and killed other humans, would stopping them with machine guns and bombs be off the table? Or would you be willing to use violence to stop the cannibals? Most people would seriously consider using violence to
kill humans who attack other humans and with whom we cannot communicate. Even those who would not consider violence would consider, say, hitting the cannibal humans with tranquilizer darts and trapping them in pens where they are fed other foods.
And yes that would be interfering with their culture and stopping nature from taking its course. The thing is, if it were humans being eaten we wouldn't care about interfering with culture or nature taking its course.
If it's whales, suddenly we DO care about interfering with culture and nature taking its course, right?
And no one but a fucking idiot would claim that whales are as intelligent as humans, so it's a fucking strawman from the beginning...
Thing is,
either whales are intelligent enough that their lives are sacred and they cannot be killed for economic activity...
or they are not.
If we accept orcas randomly killing whales as "nature taking its course," then we're no longer saying whales are sacred and cannot be killed for economic activity.
We're just haggling over the price.
Grey whales and other intelligent endangered whales are under no threat of extinction from giant dolphins, they were almost driven to extinction by human beings and if given free rein to hunt them again they would be driven to extinction.
The grey whale population that the natives you despise were hunting is not under threat of extinction, and is in fact so numerous that people are starting to propose yoinking big colony pods of these whales and carrying them over to repopulate the Atlantic population which
was hunted to extinction.
Sure, in theory, if this isolated tribe of Indians managed to kill
enough whales per year they could endanger that whale population. But that's not actually going to happen unless they start operating a fleet of massive factory ships out of their little yachting marina on the Pacific coast, so it's a pretty good example of a slippery slope fallacy.
If you're worried that the activity of this one tribe of Indians will set a precedent for other groups that DO have factory ships to start killing the whales in massive numbers, though... well then, renegotiate that treaty!
