Two items, one error
A couple of totally separate news items today illustrate the same basic error in thinking. This error is fairly new and nearly universal. I'm pretty sure nobody with any sort of sophistication fell into this fallacy 100 years ago.

Item 1: A murderer was actually executed, which is rare enough; he was killed in the electric chair, which is unique. First time in several years. He had to volunteer repeatedly and aggressively to make this happen, and had to overrule a dozen satanic lawyers over and over and over.**

Satan dba ACLU has brought us to this point by manipulating the error I'm discussing. Every possible method of execution is illegally declared to be "cruel and unusual" because it may cause some extra pain in the last minute of life.

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Item 2: Some idiot "professor" has done a Skinner-box experiment on crabs, showing that they can learn to avoid an electric shock.

First of all, this is fantastically redundant. Many millenia of informal experience and two centuries of formal experiments have taught us that ALL LIVING THINGS from bacteria to begonias to bumblebees to bonobos have some way of sensing pain or unpleasant situations; and ALL LIVING THINGS have some way of escaping from the pain or unpleasantness. Our understanding of sensory systems in plants and protozoa is new and still developing, but we've known about animals forever. This is as certain and unarguable as gravity.

Now the idiot "professor" is using the completely unremarkable fact to reach a completely nonsensical conclusion via the same error:

The finding could have important implications for the food industry, where many chefs boil crabs, lobsters and prawns alive in the belief that they are impervious to pain.

Lead researcher Professor Bob Elwood said: 'The experiments show it is likely they experience pain, rather than flinching, and therefore we must start to question how these animals are treated."

Well of course they experience pain. There's absolutely no way to draw a line anywhere in the living world between "critters that experience things" and "critters that don't experience things". Maybe awareness exists only in some phyla and not others; or maybe there's a spectrum from dim awareness to bright awareness; but we have NO OBJECTIVE WAY to draw those lines. If we use the word experience for our action when we run away from a skunk, we also have to use the word experience for the action of a bacterium swimming away from a toxin.

This idiot "professor", and his accomplices in the media who are loudly trumpeting his "special new finding", want to use the "special new finding" about crabs to make us stop eating crabs, because the crabs suffer in the last minute of life.

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Why is that focus so fallacious? Because anything that happens in the last minute of life will not be remembered.

We DO need to focus on humane treatment DURING THE FULL LIFETIME of the critters we're going to eat. A cow or chicken or crab that is unnecessarily deprived, or unnecessarily confined, is being treated inhumanely. It is suffering, and it endures and remembers the suffering for months or years.

Sophisticated religions have always understood this point, and have tried to encourage decent treatment of livestock and careful use of crops, followed by a respectful but not necessarily painless death. Kosher, halal, saying grace at table. Three ways to demonstrate sacred respect toward the animal we're sacrificing.

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** Footnote: The fact that ONLY A THREE-TIME MURDERER can wrestle our official Satans into a sort of temporary semi-sanity, and the fact that it takes TWENTY YEARS for a THREE-TIME MURDERER to achieve this little temporary partial victory, tells us EVERY MOTHERFUCKING THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about the current _____ ______ _____ ______ ______ ______ of what we formerly knew as "Western civilization". [No words exist to fill those blanks, and if they did exist, I wouldn't deflower and contaminate an innocent computer by typing them.]

Labels: Smarty-plants

  ¶ 6:00 PM