We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I rather like Kendall Jones I have been watching with mild interest as a furore brews over a very pleasant looking US huntress called Kendall Jones, posing with a variety of African animals who have snuffed it. And so in this intolerant age in which we live, there are howls of outrage that she dares post pictures of her prey, with demands that facebook ban her.
One might be moved to speculate how many of the people complaining will then go a stuff their faces with factory farmed meat products produced in what are effectively concentration camps for animals, and yet see no irony in their indignant outrage.
No prizes for guessing where my sympathies lie…
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Nice to see that you got one of what we used to call in Hawaii “Big Pig”.
Judging by the size of the beast in THAT “trophy photo”, you’re a slacker, AND nowhere NEAR as pretty, in a photo, as Kendall Jones. You know there are folks that hunt THOSE things with a pointy stick, right? 😉
OK, how do I prevent a nice, simple, old school, emoticon from autotransposing into a vile and despised (by me) “smiley face” graphic?
I have no idea what lion meats tastes like but that boar made a lot of awesome salami 😀
Actually, many of the so outraged will make a point that their meat has been farmed and killed out of necessity (for food), while the lion in question has not. Yes, to me the difference is moot, but not to them. Still, others are actually vegetarians, or yet worse, vegans. Worse, not because of their being vegetarian or vegan, but because of their being preachy and outraged vegetarian or vegan. All of which is to say that the ‘stuff their face…’ point is moot. It’s all about people who just know what’s right, regardless of what they eat or what they do for fun.
A lot of people are complaining she’s killed an endangered species, and they aren’t buying the usual excuse of “hey, we paid for the tags to legally hunt these animals. It’s for conservation, and goes to help the people of this African nation.”
I just hope if any of the anti-hunters try to fulfill their promised death threats that Miss Jones takes a picture with those recent kills.
The ignorant and foolish simply do not know that hunting and conservation are not just compatible, but complimentary.
But, for me, killing does always require justification. In the case of plants or insects that justification is pretty easy to come by. As you go up the chain of intelligence/sentience/consciousness the bar gets higher. For a species like lions, trophies or foolish superstitions don’t make the grade. But killing as part of a conservation program most certainly does; it’s win-win. So does killing for food.
Vegetarians may have a point that humans can choose to kill less intelligent or sentient species (such as plants). But store-buying meat-eaters who object to hunting for food don’t have a leg to stand on.
Pah!
If she’s so great, why ain’t she doing something useful like shooting socialists?
Because you can’t eat ’em JM. They’re not just green with envy, you know—it’s bile.
Spoils the meat.
Anyway, OT, there’s an interesting post at Powerline about libertarians, and the administrative state, and other stuff. Comments quickly dissolve into the usual finger pointing between libers and cons and the rest, but there’s a few good ones.
The repressive nature of the overarching administrative state is the subject of a new book that’s also discussed. Enjoy.
I’m curious about where you think the solution may lie to this problem. Something that we just have to accept until they come up meat that can be grown without the animals? If they ever figure out a way to produce meat in a lab that tastes, smells, looks, etc. like something you would want to eat, that would certainly obviate the need for using animals, but short of that, I don’t think we have any realistic alternatives. Dedicating all the necessary land to go back to free range production on a large scale seems unlikely. What else is there?
Tedd, I happen to agree, but only as long as by ‘justification’ we mean something that is within the realm of moral judgement, not legal one.
Anon:
I agree. Baring a significant improvement in several technologies, there is no *realistic* alternative right now. And indeed whilst I tend to avoid the factory farmed stuff when possible, I have no ‘moral’ objections to what feeds a big chunk of humanity. My point is that I suspect quite a few of the people snorting about hunting are often people feeding themselves via factory farms in which animals have a pretty miserable life, and yet who see themselves as motivated by notions of ‘animal welfare’. I have the advantage of actually being largely, though not entirely, indifferent 😉
The way I see it, that miserable life may be unfortunate but it is also probably unavoidable if several hundred million people are not going to starve to death.
Soon.
There’s always Soylent Green. Might as well get the cannibalism out of the spiritual realm and into the physical where it belongs.
VeryRetired- would socialists taste good? I don’t think so.
Alisa, perhaps we could extract urine from righteous vegans by calling them ‘high vegans’, like a church group?
Happy I.D. to any Americans dropping in. Honestly, as an Australian, I don’t think too much of it, or about it, except that it inspired Britain to expand the Empire to the southern regions. Otherwise, the French might have colonised Australie, or we might really have become New Holland!
CaptDMO: Code tags might work
:)?When I was growing up my Dad taught me to butcher – for a living – in the family grocery store. I also spent 3 months working in a meat butchering facility.
I saw an inadvertently amusing sign on a Butcher’s shop- Family Butcher. Was he a cannibal who eat whole families, or was his clientel handed down to him from father to son?
Mid, there will be those who will find that morally objectionable (and therefore, necessarily, subject to a legal prohibition) too.
Not really, even factory farmed meat uses far more land and resources than crops do to produce a given amount of food energy. If feeding the world is the concern then crop farming is vastly more cost effective and efficient than meat farming.
Ok let me rephrase that then:
…but it is also probably unavoidable if several hundred million people are going to have any access to meat. The alternative to a totalitarian system being introduced in which what people eat is completely regulated at gun point. As humans are omnivores, bad things can happen when they do not eat any meat at all, what with “food energy” not actually existing in any biologically fungible sense. If it did we would just live on sugar.
“Factory farmed” only applies to some production — chickens, yes, cattle, no.
Productivity comparisons are highly flawed. Efficient crop farming is a strip-mining operation and is terribly destructive to other things that could be growing or living on the land. And a whole lot of land cannot be used in a Big-Ag (or even little Ag) way, and instead is productive because grazers and browsers happily consume things we cannot.
It’s a crazy shock, but farmers and ranchers use their resources as efficiently as possible, responding to the market as well as the market-distorting subsidies & regulations.
I remember back in the day, when leopards were judged to be endangered, and it became illegal to sell the pelts and such.
South African farmers, faced with the elimination of their sheep flocks*, simply set out poisoned bait to kill the leopards, and THAT nearly succeeded in eliminating them. So the wildlife authorities changed their minds, and allowed leopard hunting again, albeit with a horrendously-expensive licence fee (don’t remember what it was, exactly, but in today’s money it would be around $125,000). To their amazement, there was a waiting list of applicants, and the revenue pretty much saved that section of the Parks Department.
Which leads me to my only question about Kendall Jones: where the hell is she getting the licence fees from? I mean, a male Cape buffalo tag can cost up to $25,000 nowadays — I can’t imagine what a leopard tag costs — so where does a college student get the scratch for all her licence fees?
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*Leopards are highly destructive predators. Faced with a flock of say fifty sheep, a leopard will kill as many as it can before its gets too tired to kill anymore — maybe twenty or thirty sheep — before taking one away and eating it at leisure. Then it will come back the next day and do it all over again. Small wonder that farmers hate them. Where I used to hunt, on a farm in the northern Cape, any sign of a leopard and all the area farmers would band together to find and kill the beast before it could do any serious damage. When my hunting buddy offered a farmer a thousand bucks to (illegally) hunt a leopard on his property, the old man nearly wept with gratitude — he’d been planning to set out poison.
Kim: subsidized student loans, of course.
In other words, they think just like domestic cats and are a great deal bigger. And like humans, they hunt for fun and not just food 😉
Alisa:
At the moment, we mostly regard law as a pragmatic exercise. Even such abstract legal notions as freedom of speech are justified in consequentialist terms. (“We need free speech for a functioning democracy.”) So it’s easy to simply say that law is created by us and applies only to us, end of story.
But when I think about how the law would apply to sentient machines (a question we may soon have to answer) or to sentient aliens, I have a hard time coming up with satisfactory answers that don’t also logically imply that it must, to some degree, apply to existing non-human species, as well. So I think that we ultimately will recognize legal rights for non-human species, to varying degrees depending on the nature of the species. But I’m not making any predictions about how long that will take.
Tedd, to me law supposed to be a mechanism which enforces formal contracts and other, less formal mutual agreements and conventions. What is usually referred to as ‘human rights’, to me is simply a set of such unwritten, multi-party agreements and conventions (we all agree not to kill and rob each other, and we also agree to punish people who do). In other words, and as our friend Mid likes to put it, rights are based on reciprocity. If so, then it doesn’t really matter if some parties to this set of agreements are sentient machines, or animals, or aliens, however defined. What matters is, are they sentient enough to reciprocate – i.e. are they capable of entering into a mutual agreement not to kill and rob? I know that some animals are, but only to a limited degree. Most cannot. Show me an animal or a machine
thatwho can, and I will gladly and fully accept them as members of society, and extend to them the same rights to life and property as they are capable and willing to extend to me and the rest of us.That is not to say that there is no room in human society for protecting the lives of less-than-fully-sentient beings, anything from worms to lions. But since they cannot reciprocate, their lives would have to be protected by means of property rights of their owners, rather than by means of rights extended to them directly. IOW, if you and I, and a bunch of other animal lovers want to keep some lions alive (and I do), we’ll have to purchase an area where they can thrive, and which would be protected from potential poachers based on our property rights.
Alisa:
I’m aware of your and Midesterner’s theory of legal rights, and I think it’s interesting. I don’t believe it’s currently an established legal theory, so it doesn’t really apply to what I said. However, since I’m speculating about how the law might work in the future, I can certainly consider the possibility that this view will some day become entrenched in law.
I’m not sure it would change my argument above much. In practice it will probably prove difficult to draw the line that defines when a machine becomes capable of voluntarily entering into reciprocal agreements. It’s likely that in the process of drawing that line we will come to realize that it is not so different from a similar line drawn between humans and some other biological species. So we’re back to the same problem I outlined above.
What of the severely handicapped or brain damaged: if a human is mentally incapable of recognising or entering into a reciprocal acknowledgement of rights then do they have no inherent rights themselves?
Kind of like young humans?
hennesli,
There are only two alternatives. One is to take (violently if necessary) the property of one individual in order to support an individual the person doing the violent taking admits is incapable of managing their own self. The other is to let the people who care about those who are incapable of caring for and managing themselves assist them voluntarily.
When I was young, my parents actively supported an orphanage both with financial and time support. Whether strangers or family members, there is no shortage of people wanting to help others. Paul Marks can elaborate the history of public philanthropy in great detail.
In virtually all situations that I am aware of, the helpless live better (as compared to the strong) in a free society than they do in one that practices redistribution with the claimed intent of helping the helpless.
Somewhat like that. The legal status of children is that they have all the same rights as any human, but someone (and people differ on who that someone is) needs to exercise some of those rights for them, until they’re deemed to have the capacity to exercise them, themselves. Whereas with a machine or an animal there is no such expectation that the individual will develop such capacity. So the issue is different in that we’re not talking about the same rights, merely deferred, we’re actually talking about a different set of rights. Hence the need to decide what (if anything) is different about the set and, more importantly, why.
But, as you rightly pointed out earlier, there should be, maybe not currently, but soon enough for us to begin thinking about it now.
Actually, I doubt it would be all that difficult, because the machine will let us know by trying to kill us in self defense (or by trying to kill us, period, if it is an anti-social machine, just like there are now anti-social humans).
On children, for all practical intents and purposes, they used to be (and in many parts of the world still are) considered the property of their parents, social (as opposed to legal) conventions about the decent treatment thereof notwithstanding. Of course, since the advent of compulsory government education they ceased to be property of their parents, and instead became property of the state. But that’s a bit OT. Point is that even with children, drawing that line shouldn’t be all that difficult either: ‘You think you are an adult, and don’t need me to tell you what to do and how? Well, great: why don’t you move out, find a job, and get on with your life. Come and visit often, but please no bringing your laundry here. And don’t forget to obey the law, because if you don’t, you are on your own, literally….Oh, so you are saying you are too young after all? Well that’s fine too, but then my house, my rules’. Etc.
This is why I think that the new Star Wars series will replay some American history- the American (un)Civil War, with Intelligence Rights being the new battle-cry. I don’t know where C3PO would put money- maybe robot clothing will be a new industry! Perhaps Automata would need to pass an I.Q. test, and could then become citizens (on minimum wages, no doubt).
Alisa:
Yes, that would certainly resolve the question!
Meanwhile, moral high ground, 21st century edition.
…and an excellent blog post explaining how the actions at the above link might logically be regarded as the moral high ground, with the necessary premises in place.
Great links both, Tedd, thanks.