Comments on: Danger! Loss of Perspective! Danger!

By: Jens Fiederer

Jens Fiederer — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:12:50 +0000

Actually, this one doesn't strike me as THAT bad.
The killing of the humans is an INTENTIONAL effort.
The scaring of the animals may have been UNINTENTIONAL.
There is some chance terrorists might be willing to listen to an appeal on the latter topic.

Multiplying the likelihood of a request to spare the humans (pretty much zero) with the value of lives (no matter how high that is) spared might VERY well generate a lower value than the likelihood of not scaring little birdies multiplied with the value of calm birds.

By: happyjuggler0

happyjuggler0 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:28:20 +0000

Hey, this isn’t right. People are animals too!

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:28:29 +0000

To liberals, terrorism is just another form of warfare, and in conflicts like the one in Sri Lanka, the two sides are morally equivalent.

By: Dave Moelling

Dave Moelling — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:32:21 +0000

It was the same think with "Nuclear Winter". The prime assumuption was that the Soviet Union and the West shot off their entire nuclear arsenal at once. Somehow the idea of every major city in the northern hemisphere destroyed with consequent fall out and chaos was not chastening enought, we had to then create a climate catastrophe.

Implicitly the assumption was that humanity had it coming to us, but it was unfair to involve deer and chipmunks. The green version of original sin pervades most of this type of thinking.

By: Bearster

Bearster — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:20:48 +0000

Not an accidental loss of perspective, but a deliberate attempt to destroy the distinction between murder of people vs. property damage–and then to rewrite the concepts so that animals are elevated above humans.