Posted on 09/24/2016 7:51:38 AM PDT by kevcol
They wrote that in a fair and just world, “there would be no pets at all, no fields full of sheep, and no barns full of pigs, cows and egg-laying hens. There would be no aquaria and no zoos.”
“If animals matter morally, we must recalibrate all aspects of our relationship with them. The issue we must confront is not whether our exploitation of them is ‘humane’ — with all of the concomitant tinkering with the practices of animal-use industries — but rather whether we can justify using them at all,” they concluded.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
His only job, which he doesn't realize is a job, is to growl at strangers walking by the house and bark (he's got a 60 lb bark on a 20 lb dog) and go berserk if a stranger comes to the door. It's fun to watch them ring the bell and then hurry back down to the bottom of the steps. Also, to bark when he hears those deer hooves on the drive.
Damn! What a cushy slave life. Let him run free and the damn coyotes will eat him. In the winter he would have to deal with a couple feet of snow and -20 temps. If he could talk and I asked him, "Slave or free?" He would pick "slave" every time.
Wouldn’t his plan require killing all domesticated animals to extinction? Captive animals like giraffes could be released into the wild, but that doesn’t always turn out well either. What about dogs, cats, pigs, chickens? How would their world, or ours, be improved by letting them run wild?
Dogs think: this person is feeding me. He must be god.
Cats think: this person is feeding me. I must be god.
10-4 on the vet bills! No such thing as a free cat. Love your screen name, BTW.
Amen. Cats are convinced of their intellectual superiority.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot medium.com ^ | 9/16/2016 | Nassim Nicholas Taleb Posted on
9/19/2016, 12:45:55 PM by Darnright
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us
1) what to do,
2) what to eat,
3) how to speak,
4) how to think… and
5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time.
People are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons. Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking.
They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP).
The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI. Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry. The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”.
What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.
While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club. More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI).
Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.
The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism. Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains.
In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).
The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.
The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba; he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.
He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation. But a much easier marker: he doesn’t deadlift. Postscript From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal. PostPostscript The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé).
(For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)
Chicago and ISIS is working on that.
Several years ago, Prof. Pianka at the University of Texas in Austin lectured he was all for Ebola killing out 90% of the human race. He's still teaching his students that. Austin is the arm pit of liberalism in Texas. UT is the arm pit of liberalism in Austin.
... My dog has better health care than I do. Most dog’s food is inspected better than food for human consumption. My dog wants for nothing.
He rules the house. He considers everything ‘his’ -— best seat in the car, has a BarcaLounger, takes up most of my bed, spreads his little stuffed toys all over the house, goes to the groomer and gets an oatmeal bath once a month, eats treats all day, has his own Roadtrek camper 2016 ————— now how in the 7734 is that slavery ... Stupid Educated Idiots in your ivory towers ?
Our family cat was inherited from our daughter and family when they got posted to Japan.
We let her out (or she sneaks out) every day for a few minutes when the front door is open, usually just to get some greens and sunshine.
Sometimes she will even taunt us and hide under a bush, but if it lasts too long, all I have to do is bring out the water spray bottle while the Mrs. opens the front door and she goes right back in. She could easily outrun or hide from the two of us. There is a good reason that she doesn't.
True to the extent that some malevolent owner keeps a dog chained to a stake 24/7. Otherwise demonstrably false.
What do I DO?...I’m hungry and starving!
I stopped eating animals because you told me to, now you tell me plants have feelings and they talk to each other.
.......and NOW you say plants and animals are OFFENDED when I look at them in hunger.
Ok, OK...I’ma be an Air Fern until you tell me that offends whatever.
Did MARTIN LUTHER KING really have pets?!! If so, the
monuments that honor this SLAVE TRADER of PETS must be
torn down!!!!
DUB & BOO-BOO say “tell this guy to KISS THEIR LITTLE
PET BUTTS!!”
Leftist professors speaking their inane thoughts was once considered “news” ... now, it’s just conversation among fools.
Mt two cats come and go as they please. They will come to me to flee a mean neighbor cat, get fed or sit on my keyboard and annoy me.
If my Rottweiler and German Shepherds were offered the choice of either giving up the good life here or helping the professor off this mortal coil,he’d need to name his beneficiaries.
The inane protestation of this professor are just some manifestation of 2-year old behavior, “Look at me, watch me!”
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