<sighs> Poor dog.

[Parlez]

RIP Doggie. DAMN YOU CARS!

 

[Raeven0]

I can honestly say I don't care much about the starving people in Africa

I care about the people who are in my 'world'

Deaths by famine there are just numbers to me.

my dog is worth far more to me than 1 random unknown, 10, 100 or more

In a subjective view (your own) people are certainly not of equal worth.

So you essentially restated exactly what I said about you sorry lot. Why so angry?

 

[Narcolepsy]

Raeven0, you just engaged yourself in a battle against the nature of humanity. Good luck.

Also, read this: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

______________________________________________________

Poor dog. I'd be replaying the walk home in my mind over and over again... thinking of anything different I could have done.

 

[PvtRyan]

So you essentially restated exactly what I said about you sorry lot. Why so angry?

Ooh, quoting out of context, I can do that too, look here:

PUPPY

sucks

kid

in Africa

LOL! You just said a puppy sucked a kid in Africa, you so funny!

..

Ok, again, I made a few points in my post:

1) You do not tend to truly care for people that you don't know exist. A famine in Africa is a number, they're not individuals to us. I can only say I wish that situation there would improve, but I can't truly feel sad for them because they don't exist to me as individuals.

A dog died that Raziaar knew, but he shouldn't care about that, because there's people who have no relation to his life whatsoever who are also dying, somewhere.

2) Saying you care is not the same as actually caring. You don't really care about a famine in Africa. So stop lying.

3) People are not of equal worth in an individual's eyes (of course, they should be to an objective institution like the government) unless you really wanna claim your mother/father/wife/girfriend is of equal worth to you to any other person on earth.

But lets forget the dog example for a second, animals apparently mean nothing to a heartless bastard. Lets say that not a dog was hit by a car, but a little boy that you knew. By your logic, you still wouldn't be allowed to care about it, because for that boy, another thousand people died somewhere. In the minute the boy died, a few babies in Africa died before they even had a name. In fact, we shouldn't be allowed to sympathize over anything because there's always some greater suffering going on in the world. Any idea how much suffering there is in this world? Inmeasurable. That's how much.

But my priorities are with the people and animals that actually exist in my limited scope of the world. Now, that's not necessarily just people I really know, but for example people on this forum, or someone in a documentary about some sort of suffering. As long as they're presented as individuals, not as a statistic. Two people dying every three seconds is a meaningless statistic. "Bumped my toe again, but can't complain because there's a statistic of three people dying every two seconds to think of, or was it two?"

Now, if you'd actually address me on the points I'd make instead of worthless quote jokes, that'd be great. Your quote also makes me look like a radical leftist eco-terrorist. But I'm not, I'm not even a vegetarian. I couldn't ever kill a cow myself to eat it though, because then it would exist as a individual I had to kill, I however have no problems with eating one that had no emotional attachment to.

On the subject of animal and human ethics, Richard Dawkins made an excellent point in A Devil's Chaplain. When is something 'human'? It would be interesting to see how our view of ethics would change if we would be able to clone our ancestors by reconstructing their genome. If we could clone an Australopithecus, would we consider it human? Would it be granted the same rights as a human? Would you come forward with the argument when one is hit by a car: "It's only an Australopithecus, theres PEOPLE dying in Africa!! Priorities lol"? What about a Homo Erectus? Neanderthalensis?

Where does being human begin or end? Or isn't it a species thing, but would a human have self-consciousness? Then, some primates and dolphins would be 'human', while a coma-patient or some other disabled person would not be 'human'. There's no closing definition.

I think, in the end, the value of something depends on what the individual attaches to it, not whether it's human or not. I value my dog highly, I really enjoy its presence. Anyone telling me when it dies that "it was just a dog" can die in a fire as far as I care.

And who's the sorry lot here exactly? You come here telling people to not sympathize with Raziaar, or Raziaar not to sympathize with the dog. I think you qualify as the bitter prick.

 

[AKIRA]

PvtRyan, what you're saying is true to a degree, but there are people who see those dying kids on tv or in person or whatever and truly do feel bad for them and truly want to help them...i don;t think it's buying off your conscience at all when you truly want to help those people who you see are clearly suffering.

About the dog, I do feel bad for it, really. I love dogs, never had one, but in general dogs are awesome. They truly are like the happiest beings on the planet. The best is when they just want to play, they run up to you wagging their tales so excited...not a worry in the world....i'd love to be a dog...so carefree and happy

 

[function9]

Mmm, stir fry.

 

[Geogaddi]

Raeven0, you just engaged yourself in a battle against the nature of humanity. Good luck.

Also, read this: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

That's a very good link and he's very right. F*cker.

 

[Raziaar]

Raeven0, you just engaged yourself in a battle against the nature of humanity. Good luck.

Also, read this: http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

______________________________________________________

Poor dog. I'd be replaying the walk home in my mind over and over again... thinking of anything different I could have done.

That is one AWESOME link there! Explains it exactly

 

[Raeven0]

point lost in sea of text

How's that for a worthless quote joke?

My point: you are overreacting, the lot of you. And you can blame it on some imagined subjective reality (subjective thinking is the downfall of society, by the way), or on your intellectual incapacity to comprehend and be concerned with the supposedly immeasurable amounts of suffering in the world (a limitation with which, apparently, I am not afflicted), or on your fickle emotional attachment to mundane things that evidently shields your mind from the rest of the world (again, there's plenty of me to go around); and you can post links to decidedly unscientific, speculative, pseudo-Freudian articles using the same Web space as, say, The Great Internet Porn-Off; but that's all horribly, woefully ineffective at proving or even suggesting that you might not be dispensing a vastly disproportionate response to the relatively unnoteworthy occurrence of the random death of some cur who happened to follow a guy home one day.

Or, in fewer words: Don't presume that everyone else is as care-deficient as you openly profess to be.

If you want to talk about unscientific, pseudo-Freudian human nature, why not start there instead? How people seem to have a natural tendency to project their own qualities on everyone else. Gay people suppose that everyone is a little bit gay, intelligent people suppose that everyone must have some reasoning capacity, and apparently, people who can't fathom a world beyond what they know suppose that everyone else on Earth is equally incapable.

 

[Raziaar]

We get it Raeven0... you think you're better than everybody else because you don't care about dead animals. You can stop posting now.

Just remember that YOU are the one who started the argument in this thread... by trying to criticize everybody elses opinion, when you are now trying to defend your own.

 

[Que-Ever]

Does this mean I get to run over raeven's dog?

 

[Raeven0]

Does this mean I get to run over raeven's dog?

Run over the dog, shoot the family, burn the house, steal the possessions, rape the friends. You'd get to see me sigh audibly that you'd waste so much time, effort, and resources on destruction that could have been put to better use. At that point I'd probably be accused of pretentiousness again (because selflessness is obviously equivalent to arrogance--a good person would get angry about losing what most people didn't have in the first place), and I'd get the fun task of figuring out how to salvage a life. Maybe the sudden change would drive me mad.

In any case, yes, further discussion is clearly impossible. I value all people; you value everything you can profess to know personally. (I imagine I'm not included in that group, or surely you'd have spent more time thinking about what I told you than throwing out random insults and attacks.) Apparently, whose concern is better spent is up for debate.

 

[jondy]

I value all people.

Of course you do.

 

[Azner]

Oh Joy

 

[Raziaar]

In any case, yes, further discussion is clearly impossible. I value all people; you value everything you can profess to know personally. (I imagine I'm not included in that group, or surely you'd have spent more time thinking about what I told you than throwing out random insults and attacks.) Apparently, whose concern is better spent is up for debate.

But you're wrong though... at least since you were initially talking about me in the thread.

I don't value JUST people I know personally. How do you know that? Because I didn't explicitly state that fact. So you shouldn't make assumptions. Just because I post about a dog, doesn't mean I wouldn't care about something else that is further removed from myself. If you'd look back in a lot of past threads explaining the sad ways others have died, I generally express sorrow.

You're full of assumptions.

 

[PvtRyan]

Whehehe, now he starts claiming he values all people equally. Stop lying. Seriously.

And it's not that I just value people I know, it's that I value that people I know exist. Only if they're presented as individuals. Could be from a tv-show, could be on the intertubes. Which doesn't mean I don't care about a famine in Africa at all, but further than saying "ah crap for them" and sending some money it won't go.

And about that link, handn't seen it before, but it explains what I'm trying to say. Saying it's pseudoscience is a nice easy retort, but I don't think it makes the claim of being a scientific paper at all. However, being such "pseudoscience", it should be easy for you to point out where the flaw of reasoning lies. Do people really care about people outside their monkeysphere/scope of the world as much as they do about people within it?

You say you do, but how do you express that care? Do you take it beyond saying "ah crap for them", or "that's a shame", or do you cry in a corner all day from the suffering in this world? I doubt you do, which makes you as care deficient as me (funny, because I so far expressed more care about stuff than you in this thread, you come here telling people not to care).

 

[Raziaar]

I don't see why you would need scientific articles to justify or explain human social interactions anyways. All the science you need is locked away in our brains... and unless you deny the existence of human intelligence and uniqueness... you can't even begin to deny the things mentioned in that article, claiming they have little relevance.

 

[Narcolepsy]

Hey Raeven0, why aren't you rebuilding New Orleans right now? See, there was a hurricane there a year ago - destroyed much of the town, left people's lives in shambles. Your brothers and sisters are wasting away without food and shelter! You're arguing on an internet forum while PEOPLE ARE DYING OVER THERE! Some way to treat family.