Nerd is my Gender
What's yours?
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So, now it’s not fashionable to support Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family?
Because when I want to decide which organizations abide by humanist ethics, I look to fashion.
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“The Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For” by Leader Kate Lovelady
Sometimes it seems like we’re waiting for a leader to show us the way. Who are the leaders, but one of us?
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Dolphins are 'people' say scientists
Humans aren’t the only people: intelligent and emotionally advanced beings of any race should be supported. Forget aliens from outer space; we need only look to our own oceans.
From the Belfast Telegraph:
Ethics expert Professor Tom White, from Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, author of In Defence of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier, said: “Dolphins are non-human persons. A person needs to be an individual. If individuals count, then the deliberate killing of individuals of this sort is ethically the equivalent of deliberately killing a human being.
“The captivity of beings of this sort, particularly in conditions that would not allow for a decent life, is ethically unacceptable; commercial whaling is ethically unacceptable.
“We’re saying the science has shown that individuality, consciousness, self awareness, is no longer a unique human property. That poses all kinds of challenges.”
More about dolphins’ personhood from the Daily Mail:
Experts believe that within a generation we will have learned to ‘talk’ to dolphins by decoding their clicks, 200 different types of which have already been identified.
Further experiments have shown that captive dolphins can recognise themselves, and not only in mirrors. In 1995, an experiment in Hawaii showed they can also watch themselves on television.
Analysis shows that in the key indicator of intelligence, ratio of brain weight to spinal cord weight, humans measure 50 to 1, dolphins 40 to 1, and primates only 8 to 1.
As a result, dolphins have the capacity for tool use and emotion.
Like humans and some primates, dolphins are also rare in that they have sex for its own sake, for pleasure, as well as for procreation.Certainly, dolphin brains are differently structured to human brains. As Tom White has shown in his book In Defense of Dolphins, their brains are better wired than ours in the areas that deal with emotions.
Reports state that cetaceans may have three times as many spindle cells — the nerve cells that convey empathy — in their brains as we do. Professor White suggests this might mean these highly social animals have a great awareness of one another’s feelings — precisely because they live together in close proximity so need to get along.
But he goes further, hypothesising that they may even show more emotional self-control, and deeper emotions, than humans.Using their sonar — which acts like an MRI scanner — dolphins can actually see into each other’s bodies. They can therefore detect the temperature fluctuations that indicate changing emotion. In other words, they cannot lie about the way they are feeling the way humans often do!They can also almost literally feel one another’s joy, or pain. This is one reason why they sometimes get stranded on beaches in huge numbers. When one dolphin is sick, its comrades will accompany it, loyally — even to the point of apparent suicide.
The ethical conclusion would be to stop killing dolphins and destroying their habitats. But then, I don’t suppose that humans can have that level of empathy for a non-human person, judging by the way we treat our own kind.
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The Ethicist Contest Winner: Give Thanks for Meat
For me, eating meat is ethical when one does three things. First, you accept the biological reality that death begets life on this planet and that all life (including us!) is really just solar energy temporarily stored in an impermanent form. Second, you combine this realization with that cherished human trait of compassion and choose ethically raised food, vegetable, grain and/or meat. And third, you give thanks.
Translation:
Good news! You can eat meat as long as you place yourself in a very particularly privileged position above the rest of the planet and ignore how most people won’t ever have accesses to the same resources and choices that you do!
What, there’s no way that we can find enough land to produce enough of this sort of ethical meat to feed the entire planet, and even less of a way to make it affordable? Oh, well you should have thought of that before you chose to be born as someone less privileged as myself.
Give thanks to me, for I am to be praised for finding a way to wrap my privilege-denial in self-aggrandizement!
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If the idea that women who have abortions are bad can be a contagious idea, as it has been, then so can the idea that women who make strong personal decisions are good. That’s the message we need to be getting out. The idea itself already has contagious properties, we just have to start infecting everybody with it. George Tiller said: “it’s not going to change, until you change.” …
We work to find religious and ethical language that is not about the victimization of women but instead focuses on the strength and goodness of women. The other side is getting away with misogyny because they focus on the weakness of women. We need to re-envision the image of women as powerful, good, competent, and wise. …
They’re all very positive messages. The most controversial no doubt is the one that says: “Good women have abortions.” And people go “GASP! How dare you say that! You know, you’re saying that if women are good, they have abortions.” “No, that’s not what it says, good women do have abortions, it’s a simple fact.” And it really turns that idea that only bad women have abortions upside down. …
We do want to normalize abortion because, you know what? Women have been normalizing abortion for as long as women have been around.
Genderqueer with a touch of happy humanism.
