extinction

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more.On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost.

I propose that the forces of corporate totalitarianism are deliberately destroying this entire world in order to sell their simulated version of it back to us at a profit.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

I think this was a nice idea we had in this country and a nice landscape to experiment with. But I think there comes a time in almost any experimentation or idea, where you have to evaluate it, maybe our time has come. In the context of the real world, not just the American world but all around, we haven't done too well. We are not a very good advertisement for the idea we represented. If you lose one wheel of the car, you might be able to get to the side of the road, and some freaks can make it on two, but if you lose three, man, you're in serious trouble. I think we've lost three.

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.

Plant life is like the canary in the cage. When it starts to die off, we know we have problems. To ignore plant die off would be like the human race committing suicide. Human extinction would surely follow.

I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for __intelligent] design._ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?

You go into extinction by being obsessed about becoming something else and then travelling in the wrong car while your real self keeps waiting at the bus stop for your unfulfilled return!

There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There's no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman's excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We've all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?

The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?

We should never present flesh as somehow morally distinguishable from dairy. To the extent it is morally wrong to eat flesh, it is as morally wrong _ and possibly more morally wrong _ to consume dairy

If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift.We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an __nimal rights_ movement. If __nimal rights_ means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however __umane_ that treatment may be.We must stop thinking that people will find veganism __aunting_ and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won__. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting __appy_ or __umane_ exploitation as morally acceptable.

The notion that we should promote __appy_ or __umane_ exploitation as __aby steps_ ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The __appy_ meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for __umane_ or "happy_ human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for __umane_ or __appy_ animal exploitation.

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.

Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.

The addition of certain chemicals to the atmosphere will destroy wavelengths of light and it may only be a matter of time before one of these wavelengths of light that is critical for human survival is eliminated. This is called: The Extinction Wavelength