True evil, succinctly expressed
Duncan Bayne
> > Sausalito, across the bay, own 80,000 acres of land in Kenya? What are
> > they doing with it? They are setting it aside as a nature preserve, in
> > order to keep poor people in Kenya from hunting animals for food on
> > those 80,000 acres.
>
> There's no shortage of people in Kenya. The animals are another story however.
People on this group often wonder why myself & others are so opposed
to environmentalism - the answer is because environmentalism (as
opposed to conservation for human enjoyment) puts 'nature' ahead of
humans, as so coldly, callously expressed by the above statement.
"There's no shortage of people in Kenya."
IOW lets let the darkies starve, or be shot while trying to feed
themselves.
IOW human lives don't matter a jot, but let's be careful not to harm
the forest or the animals that inhabit it.
Tarla, did you *really* mean what you said, in the way you said it? I
find it difficult to comprehend that someone could really place such
little value on human life. It's saddening.
Alan Liefting
Do not judge all environmentalists on one comment. The comment may have
been tongue in cheek.
Environmentalists tend to be humanists and pacifists.
Duncan Bayne
> Do not judge all environmentalists on one comment. The comment may have
> been tongue in cheek.
Perhaps, & perhaps not - hence my asking for clarification.
> Environmentalists tend to be humanists and pacifists.
Really? Consider David Graber, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, October
29, 1989, p. 9:
> Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as
> a wild and healthy planet....[The ecosystem has] intrinsic value, more
> value to me than another human body or a billion of them....Until such
> time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only
> hope for the right virus to come along.
Or perhaps, from the San Fransisco Gate Chronicle (Friday, August 20,
2004):
> Now, Kenyan authorities and organizations such as Sausalito-based
> Wildlife Works, which owns and operates Rukinga Wildlife Sanctuary, are
> attempting to tame the flourishing domestic trade in bush meat
> ...
> So where do nearly 100,000 snared animals end up? On Kenyans' dinner
> plates. While beef sells for around $1 per pound, a pound of bush meat
> may cost 20 cents. With half the population living below the poverty
> line, the temptation to poach for bush meat is strong.
Or perhaps the environmentalist record on DDT, from
http://www.sacredlands.org/hatred_of.htm:
> Every year, about half a billion people become ill with malaria --
> that's ten percent of Earth's population -- and several million die,
> mostly children.
>
> Since its inception in the 1940's, the use of DDT has prevented the
> deaths of about six hundred million people, an average of ten million a
> year.
>
> From 1993 to 1995 DDT was banned in Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. Malaria
> increased ninety percent. In the same period, DDT's use was increased in
> Ecuador, and the incidence dropped sixty percent.
>
> Its introduction in India, in 1960, reduced in the span of a year the
> number of malaria victims from a million to a hundred thousand, and in
> Sri Lanka from half a million down to almost zero. Soon after DDT was
> banned there, the number of victims climbed back to previous levels.
> Still today,environmentalists keep advocating a worldwide ban on DDT.
>
> They must be proud of their record.
For a further chronicle of human-rights abuses by environmentalists, see
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/navigator/articles/nav+rbidinotto_death-by-environmentalism.asp:
> Sure enough, the high energy taxes have worked exactly as the
> environmentalists planned: they have reduced energy consumption. Seeking
> ways to cut their electric bills, French citizens realized that air
> conditioners consume more energy than almost any other household
> appliance. For the poor and the elderly, especially, air conditioning
> simply became unaffordable. So, by the millions, they decided to forgo
> the amenity that environmental taxes made so expensive. Air
> conditioning, so universal in America, became in France an indulgence of
> the well-to-do. As Chantal de Singly, director of the Saint-Antoine
> hospital in Paris, put it in Le Monde (August 19, 2003), the heat wave
> revealed two classes of French citizens: "the France of the air
> conditioned versus the France of the overheated."
> ...
> That is roughly comparable to the loss of life in the destruction of the
> World Trade Center . . . except that it's repeated every year. According
> to an analysis by USA Today (July 2, 1999), since their imposition in
> 1975, the CAFE requirements have been responsible cumulatively for a
> whopping 46,000 highway deaths. If, like the National Academy of
> Sciences, one multiplies that number by ten to estimate serious
> injuries, one arrives at total casualties approaching half a million
> people.
> ...
Anyone philosophy that does not place the rights and happiness of
individual humans above anything else (e.g. God, society, the environment,
etc.) is evil - and the above instances prove that environmentalism is no
exception.
To forestall the inevitable rants: no, one doesn't have the right to use
ons property in a way that violates the rights of others (e.g. dumping
nuclear waste), and conservation (preserving wilderness & wild animals for
enjoyment by humans) is perfectly moral when voluntary and run by private
individuals or organisations instead of by Government through compulsory
taxation & theft of land.
--
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| Duncan Bayne phone (+64) 027 2536395 email dhb...@ihug.co.nz |
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+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
| "The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly |
| is to fill the world with fools." |
| |
| - Herbert Spencer. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
<snip>
>
>Anyone philosophy that does not place the rights and happiness of
>individual humans above anything else (e.g. God, society, the environment,
>etc.) is evil
Why? What's so special about human beings?
John D Smith
And Wooly headed, dope smokers,
--
John D Smith
John B
> On Mon, 27 Sep 2004 21:28:17 +1200, Duncan Bayne <dhb...@ihug.co.nz>
> wrote:
> <snip>
>>
>> Anyone philosophy that does not place the rights and happiness of
>> individual humans above anything else (e.g. God, society, the
>> environment, etc.) is evil
>
> Why? What's so special about human beings?
What's so special about governments (human beings?).
--
John B
Duncan Bayne
> Why? What's so special about human beings?
Oh look, another environmentalist who's a humanist pacifist ... or maybe not.
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
What's so special about steamed puddings? Piss off, hairy legs.
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
>Sue Bilstein <sue_bi...@yahoop.com> wrote in message news:<5mpfl0945pebak775...@4ax.com>...
>> Why? What's so special about human beings?
>
>Oh look, another environmentalist who's a humanist pacifist ... or maybe not.
You made a claim:
"Anyone philosophy that does not place the rights and happiness of
individual humans above anything else (e.g. God, society, the
environment, etc.) is evil"
- can you advance any reasons to back it up?
Duncan Bayne
> "Anyone philosophy that does not place the rights and happiness of
> individual humans above anything else (e.g. God, society, the
> environment, etc.) is evil"
>
> - can you advance any reasons to back it up?
Yes. Parenthetically, it's kind of sad that I have to - I mean, on an
intuitive level, surely one ought to see that self-sacrifice is
monstruous evil? But I digress ... & I suppose I'm being unfair too,
I used to be a member of the Youth Alliance :-)
This link explains it nicely (I've copied the contents below, as well)
...
http://importanceofphilosophy.com/Ethics_LifeAsMoralStandard.html
Man's Life as His Moral Standard
"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those
who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that
it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the
good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who
preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents
on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and
that the good is to live it."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Life is the process of self-sustaining and self-generating action.
Life requires action, and action requires values. Philosophy in
general, and ethics in particular, attempt to answer the questions,
"What do I do?" and "Why?" People study philosophy so they can know
how to live their life.
So that you can live life successfully and happily, you must learn
which values to hold and how to achieve them -- this is your life as
your moral standard. All moral questions (questions of right action)
are questions of how to live happily and successfully, and all moral
principles must be measured against how they promote and benefit your
life and happiness. Your life as your moral standard holds all things
promoting your life as the good.
To every living thing, there is one primary choice, and that is to
live or not -- to engage in the action required to further its own
life or to engage in action that destroys its own life. The only other
alternative is death. Choosing life as your standard of value is a
pre-moral choice. It cannot be judged as right or wrong; but once
chosen, it is the role of morality to help man to live the best life
possible.
The opposite of choosing life is altruism: the moral doctrine that
holds death as its moral standard. It holds sacrifice as the only
good, and all things "selfish" as evil. According to altruism, it
doesn't matter what you do, as long as it does not further your life
it is considered good. The more consistently a person is altruistic,
the closer their actions are to suicide. The consistent altruist will
give up every bit of food he owns to other people because that is what
he considers good, and die because of it.
Your life as your standard does not mean Hedonism -- the spur of the
moment instant gratification, doing whatever you feel like. Your life
as your standard means acting in your rational self-interest. Rational
self-interest takes into account the long-term effects of every
action.
Your life as your standard does not mean trampling on other people to
get what you want. This is not in your rational self-interest. It is
in your interest to be benevolent.
Nor does your life as your standard mean cheating people to get ahead,
even if they don't realize it and you never get caught. Fraud is not
in your rational self-interest because you lose your independence and
you sacrifice honesty to an unreality that you have to maintain to
perpetrate your fraud. This is self-destructive in the long run.
In order to know what is good, which actions are objectively in a
person's self-interest, we develop virtues which are principles of
action.
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
<snip>
If your own interests are your moral yard-stick, it seems that you
cannot make a moral judgment where your interests are not involved.
So you and I, Duncan, can have absolutely nothing to say about a game
reserve in Africa, for example.
thing
You only have to hear the complaints if a dog or cat gets munted in a
movie to realise people have some priorities all wrong.
But anyway, if you do not establish and protect some wild life reserve
areas, once all the wild life has been eaten the population is going to
starve anyway....too many people and not enough food that is a disaster...
So I guess your stuck between a rock and a hard place....not good.
There are millions of kilometers of land in Africa, preserving a few
hundred thousand is a tiny percentage of that. Protecting it after the
Africans have desolated everywhere else at what point do you say stop?
regards
Thing
Duncan Bayne
> But anyway, if you do not establish and protect some wild life reserve
> areas, once all the wild life has been eaten the population is going to
> starve anyway....too many people and not enough food that is a disaster...
But there were no wildlife reserves when other societies made the
transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture, & that was back when
agricultural technology & techniques were so poorly developed, you
could tell which socities were practicing agriculture by examining the
fossil records; their skeletons showed damage from manual labour,
malnutrition and early death.
> So I guess your stuck between a rock and a hard place....not good.
Not really - the way I look at it, I'd rather a bunch of African
humans got to hunt their food, than a bunch of African animals got to
not be food for humans.
> There are millions of kilometers of land in Africa, preserving a few
> hundred thousand is a tiny percentage of that. Protecting it after the
> Africans have desolated everywhere else at what point do you say stop?
At the point where you're starving people. I would say that if a
group of people are routinely using a tract of land for hunting, some
kind of aboriginal title would rightly apply here, as they're 'mixing
their labour' with the land.
I don't think that buying the land to make it into a conservation park
is a good idea, and I *certainly* don't think that brushing it off by
saying that Africa has no shortage of humans is moral.
Sue Bilstein
wrote:
>thing <red.is.nutty....@thing.dyndns.org> wrote in message news:<_%t6d.5854$mZ2.5...@news02.tsnz.net>...
>> But anyway, if you do not establish and protect some wild life reserve
>> areas, once all the wild life has been eaten the population is going to
>> starve anyway....too many people and not enough food that is a disaster...
>
>But there were no wildlife reserves when other societies made the
>transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture, & that was back when
>agricultural technology & techniques were so poorly developed, you
>could tell which socities were practicing agriculture by examining the
>fossil records; their skeletons showed damage from manual labour,
>malnutrition and early death.
>
>> So I guess your stuck between a rock and a hard place....not good.
>
>Not really - the way I look at it, I'd rather a bunch of African
>humans got to hunt their food, than a bunch of African animals got to
>not be food for humans.
But how can you possibly make a judgment on this case, Duncan? Your
own private interests are your only yardstick according to Ayn Rand,
and this matter does not touch your interests.