From: banta@abingdon.Eng.Sun.COM (242 lbs before cooking)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.animals
Subject: Re: A rat is a pig-headed moron is a ...
Date: 8 Jan 1993 18:48:59 GMT
Organization: FizzBall Racing
NNTP-Posting-Host: abingdon

(Michael Hui) writes:
>(Paul Roberts) writes:
>>the stupidity, vacuousness, and just plain pig-ignorance of the "we
>>hate AR" crowd.
>
>Two out of three, I'll give you.
>
>But that crowd is not entirely vacuous.
 
This is simply classic, Mikey.  In one shot, you label your detractors
the same way they label animals:  "They're unthinking and don't know
what's right."

>They are trying to preserve, in their words, "the American way of life".

Thank you very much for your concern and your bald-face conjecture at
my motives, but you're wrong.  I could care less about "the American
way of life" when it comes to animals.  I have no intention of
relenquishing my position at the top of the food chain, and that you
feel some false nobility concerning your voluntary abdication doesn't
put your cause on any moral high ground, in a global sense. If it
makes you feel good, fine.  Don't expect me to do the same, and you're
becoming quite annoying, preaching about the whole thing.  It's that
simple, no "way of life" involved.

The simple fact of the matter is that animals don't have rights.  To
have a concept of rights, one must have a concept of legal discourse
to secure those rights.  Regardless of how hard you try, you can't
make animals live within your legal system, just as I can't make them
live within mine.

In short, you can run around assigning rights of all manner to me,
your dog, the vermin that infest your house, and the animals in a
field.  That these examples can't or won't consent to your legal 
system delineates your rights-brokering with your article: entirely 
specious.

>Determination to promote one's cause is an admirable personality trait.

Really?  I don't have a lot of admiration for you while you run around
spouting ludicrous promotions of your cause.  You make decisions about
what others are thinking and label them stupid, out of hand, because
they don't agree with you.  What's to admire?

>But it's only admirable if one is intelligent enough to choose the
>proper cause to champion, and let outmoded ideas become history.

Oh, I get it.  It's only admirable it you agree with the cause.  Gee,
if I wasn't as stupid as you make me out to be, I'd have to label this
a tautologism.  Gee, Mikey, your moral high ground looks an awful lot
like quicksand ... oops, I'm probably too pig-ignorant to make that
observation.

>Otherwise, one's only distinguishing feature is to be pig-headedly
>determined to be dead wrong until death.

That's the first thing you've said that I can get in line with.  If
you think you can assign animals rights, you're dead wrong.  Let's
make this real clear: I have the right to capture and eat anything I
want, as long as I don't tread on that's entities rights.  That's what
it's like up hear at the top of the food chain.  I eat meat.

You'd do well to remember that dwellers on my level of the food chain
eat dwellers on your level, and I'm starting to get hungry.

>That ain't going to get you into any history books.

How true.  History books are the diaries of lost causes.

andy
banta@abingdon.sun.com
--
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism
 by those who have not got it."
                                -- George Bernard Shaw