Month: January 2019

A very fair and accurate picture provided by Christopher Adam. Yes, Budapest is still in many ways a wonderful city, worth visiting. But this is despite Orban’s corrupt and autocratic regime, not because of it.

And, yes, the Orban regime is hypocritically using the memory of the Hungarian refugees of 1956 as part of a cynical and demagogic foreign campaign to capitalize on former worldwide good will toward Hungary to camouflage the regime’s current shameful hate campaign against refugees, soon to culminate in a “Referendum.”

Orban’s domestic hate campaign (now being masked by his charm campaign in Montreal and elsewhere) is not even being conducted primarily because of visceral hatred on the part of the Orban regime. There is real hatred there too, of course, but Orban cultivates it in the Hungarian populace mainly out of self-serving opportunism: Orban systematically foments fear, anger and loathing to distract the Hungarians from his depredations on both their civil liberties and their public funds (along with his enormous cut from all EU subsdidy funds) and their liberties, which he steals to enrich hmself and his accomplices and to keep increasing his personal autocratic powers.

Hungary’s cultural charm is real. The Orban regime’s cynical charm campaign is repugnant, reprehensible, and should be unmasked by all decent, thinking people, Hungarian or otherwise.

Stevan Harnad
Canadian-Hungarian Democratic Charter

Hard to say whether “dottoressa” is just a fatalist/pessimist or a closet Turul triumphalist. His/her/its/their admirer “e-2016” certainly sounds more like a TT (or should we add the T for Trump too, or our fourth T-word)?

Yes, malign self-interest has a long arm, but without donning Pinker’s rose-tinted specs, slavery is now mostly outlawed; the subjugation of women is on the decline; rape, violence, torture, homicide and genocide are widely condemned and even sometimes punished. The absolute number of human-inflicted horrors is still increasing, but their proportion is decreasing (at least if we count only human victims), so if civilization can master population control, maybe even absolute wrongs will one day begin to shrink.

The day is long, and human nature is raw and savage, but the evidence is at least as supportive for positive developments as negative ones, even in the area of human rights and governance.

In any case, fatalism is self-fulfilling. With Pascal, we have to wager that a good outcome is at least possible.

Perhaps in a completely information-controlled dictatorship (which is hardly possible in the online era, though maybe North Korea comes closest) the “politicians” are to blame if the populace makes the wrong electoral “choice.” But in most of the world, despite the polarized media, it is still possible to make informed choices, if the populace makes the effort.

Yet in the case of Clinton vs. Trump this is not even the problem. One just has to hear Trump (1-2 times) to see that he is a brainless, heartless, cheap, vulgar, self-aggrandizing, lying tycoon. That all non-psychopathic american voters don’t immediately and totally reject him with revulsion is not only an extremely sad — indeed tragic — fact about far too large a proportion of the US electorate, but it is open and shut evidence about who is to blame if he is elected: Trump certainly couldn’t have done it without them.

In Hungary today, with its own Turul Trump, the situation is somewhat different — because the press is highly controlled, the electoral ridings are gerrymandered and rampant conferral of extra-territorial citizenship has stacked the cards, the constitution has been gutted and guttered, checks and balances are nearly gone, mafia-style corruption pervades the regime and its supporters, and the pervasive, systemic corruption together with a partly perverted police and judicial system have intimidated the citizenry — the situation is not the same as in the USA. But the electorate is still to blame for the fact that they keep voting in Orban. The handwriting was already on the wall in 2008, well before the electoral gerrymandering, media control and constitution-busting, with the majority’s readiness to jump aboard Orban’s shameless and completely (completely) groundless FUD campaign of slander against Gyurcsany.

The Hungarians bought that, then, despite its transparent meanness and mendacity, just as Trump supporters are doing now. And they got what they deserved for their unthinking (and unadmirable) somnambulism.

Of course the populace (whether they choose to vote or not) is to blame for their electoral outcome: Who else?

Jane Mayer: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells It All
The New Yorker July 25 2016.

What a shocking article! And yet we all knew it already. It has been there all along in every word Trump mouthed, every grotesque grimace, every vulgar gesture, and the limitless emissions of nasty, mendacious braggadocio and shameless hype. And the utter vacuity.

Schwartz, for all his purported pangs of conscience, is not worthy of sympathy for his part in this lurid lay of lies. He is most Trump-like when he effects remorse for having “made” Trump: No, he took some of Trump’s vile tricks and made them his own, using them to spin a tall tale that would enrich them both. He became a Trump(et). The ghost in the megalomane. It’s no wonder that his confessions are now being channelled by Jane Mayer rather than being told in his own voice. It is indeed his own credibility that he has done in with his self-serving strumpetry. (And yet it’s better that he’s decided to come clean, and now, before the election, rather than after. If (and only if) he is genuinely repenting, his own story has a tinge of tragedy, whereas Trump’s is all heinousness and hubris.)

But at least Schwartz is not running for president of the United States. Surely the most shocking part of all this — and the one that is the most to blame — is this charlatan’s open-eyed, cheering following. Has the US indeed become a Trump nation, ethically and aesthetically blind, oblivious to all this, or an accomplice in it?

Yet the homology with Hungary’s Viktor Orban is loud and clear too: the lies, the hype, the manipulation, the philistinism, the megalomania… the psychopathy. And a fair harbinger of what’s in store in the U.S. if Trump’s tranche of the electorate prevails.

“…I wish to reiterate my admiration for your veganism…”

Admiration? For veganism? But it is so simple and easy — not at all what people (including me) imagined. No sacrifice, no hardship — and no reduction whatsoever in gastronomic pleasure: in fact, quite the opposite.

I now realize that not only is it true (as we have all heard many times) that our species is neither herbivore nor carnivore but omnivore, but that this consists of two contingent “modes.” When a human consumes animal protein, most alimentary needs are fulfilled, so there is very little need or desire for herbivory. (That’s why it’s hard to get meat-eating kids to eat vegetables.)

But when our metabolism gets the cue to switch to herbivore mode — the cue is the complete absence of animal protein (meat, fish, dairy, eggs) from one’s diet — then the taste of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains all transforms and becomes incomparably more delicious and satisfying than when one was in carnivore mode.

It is for this reason (and not the opposite, as people imagine: not because vegans can’t find enough tasty things to eat) that many vegans are so obsessed with food, recipes, cooking! It is because everything tastes so good, and such a rich variety of potential gustatory pleasure is opened up by the complete switch to the herbivore mode. For most of my life, while I was still just a vegetarian, still eating dairy and eggs, hence animal protein, I never bothered to cook. It wasn’t worth the effort. Since I became a vegan 6 years ago, my pleasure from and interest in food have grown so much that I have not only taken to cooking things, but I have discovered that I may even have a little talent for it!

And one last thing: The reason I (politely, and appreciatively) decline admiration for being a vegan is not just because it is in reality so trivially easy and rewarding, but out of the belief and hope that in fact I am absolutely no different from the majority of human beings: the majority are decent, and are eating meat only because they mistakenly believe two things to be true that are in fact untrue: that (1) we need to consume animals in order to survive and be healthy and (2) that this can be and is being done in a humane way that does not involve suffering for the animals.

Both (1) and (2) are in fact untrue. And (2), in particular, is untrue in a monstrously horrific way.

So I decline admiration for becoming vegan because I think the only difference between me and the majority — who, like me, would never knowingly cause needless suffering — is merely informational. I (and many others) just happen to have learned already that the animal suffering is (1) indeed needless and (2) indeed suffering, terrible suffering. Hence it is our duty to inform and awaken the rest of the decent majority who are still so tragically misinformed.

Indeed, the fact that the only relevant difference between us and the majority of humanity is informational, and hence remediable, is the only hope of the countless tragic victims of humanity’s greatest crime. (The Holocaust was humanity’s greatest crime against humanity, but our treatment of animals is humanity’s greatest crime tout court.)

If vegans weren’t exactly the same as everyone else, it would mean that animals were doomed to eternal, inescapable agony.

Booth, D. A. (1985). Food‐conditioned Eating Preferences and Aversions with Interoceptive Elements: Conditioned Appetites and Satieties. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 443(1), 22-41.

Booth, D. A., & Simson, P. C. (1971). Food preferences acquired by association with variations in amino acid nutrition. The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 23(1), 135-145.

Young, P. T. (1957). Psychologic factors regulating the feeding process. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 5, 154-161.

Young, P. T. (1948). Appetite, palatability and feeding habit: a critical review. Psychological Bulletin, 45(4), 289.

I have been thinking about morality from a very early age (partly, no doubt, because my parents were survivors of the Holocaust in which much of my family was killed).

I don’t know at what age I began thinking about it, but I do know that I became a vegetarian when I turned 17, and that it was because it was only then that I found out that it was possible; I would have done it much earlier if I had known. I don’t blame myself for not having inquired and found out earlier then, but I do blame myself for not having inquired and found out until almost 50 years later that it was possible to be a vegan too.

I am not a believer in gods or the supernatural (apart from a very brief period when I was very young). I am a naturalist.

And I know that nature (i.e., physical laws and Darwnian evolution) are amoral, i.e., psychopathic. The only criterion is (morally blind) causality. Nothing matters. There is no good or evil, right or wrong. In the biological realm, causality has led to mechanisms that engender survival and reproduction.

In the causal system that has evolved in the earth’s biosphere, at some time, and for some cause as yet unknown but no doubt related to survival and reproduction, sentience evolved. And with sentience, the capacity for pain and pleasure. Organisms feel.

Hence morality, too, evolved only then. Not just with the capacity for feeling, but also with the capacity for empathy (feeling for the feelings of others) — mainly present in organisms toward their young, and especially pronounced in mammals and other K-selected species.

Apart from that, there is no law, either physical or mathematical, that engenders, dictates or adjudicates morality, apart from whatever causal forces that led to the evolution of sentience, and of empathy and altruism, no doubt in the service of survival and reproduction. That also means there is no rational basis for morality, if “rational” means deduction or justification via reasoning (assuming that reasoning means inferences based on logic and evidence).

Logic can indicate what follows formally from what (from axioms to theorems). Empirical evidence can indicate what is probably the case in the world. But neither of them can engender or dictate morality, because both the object and the subject of morality is feeling (sentience) itself. Without feeling there is no morality.

What do feelings have to say about morality? Only one thing. It is wrong to hurt. From this it follows that it is right to minimize hurt. Nothing follows about pleasure, at least not morally, except where being deprived of pleasure hurts.

The rest is all about determining what minimizes hurt. And that necessarily requires inferences, predictions, hypotheses. If there were a way to know when we have a valid hypothesis about how to minimize hurt, then the rest is just implementation and can perhaps be described as applied negative utility calculations.

But pleasure (other than pain from pleasure-deprivation) has no place at all in the moral equation, any more than mass, momentum or position do.

The only border case is painless euthanasia, and for this I can only propose the ad hoc moral intuition that depriving a sentient organism of its life needlessly is much the same thing as hurting it.

The mission of all animal advocates (indeed of all those who are concerned with right and wrong) should be to minimize pain in sentients. (Nothing to do with pleasure, or maximizing pleasure.)

“Speciesism” is a misnomer, in an effort to liken animal mistreatment to racism. There is some validity to the intuition, but it does not generate a general principle, because if applied to all sentients based on numbers, it could lead to absurd (and immoral) conclusions such as: euthanize all sentients other than the most numerous ones, insects, in order to minimize overall net pain (if we bracket the ecological uncertainty).

So “minimize” hurt needs another constraint, based on conflicts of vital interest: Minimize needless hurt, where “need” refers to vital needs in cases of conflicts of vital interest.

And since humans are the only species that are in the position to conceive or implement moral principles, their own vital interests must take some sort of relative (but not absolute) precedence (otherwise we are again left with the strictly numerical option of euthanasia and insects).

To summarize: By my lights, morality is rational, but it is not based on rationality. It is based on sentience (feelings) and on feelings about the feelings of others: the moral intuition that hurting is wrong. The only feelings that are morally relevant are negative ones: hurt. (We have intuitions about pleasure too, but they are not moral intuitions, except if somehow correlated with pain.)

And I would repeat that if pure selfishness — obliviousness to the hurting of others in the pursuit of one’s own interests, vital and non-vital — is psychopathic (much the way Darwinian evolution and physical causality are psychopathic), so to is pure selflessness — obliviousness to proximity, consanguinity and collateral damage — in the strictly numerical dispensation of net welfare across sentient organisms (and time) according to formal calculations. (Purely formal calculations are as psychopathic as causality and evolution.)

Video: The Mirror-Neuron Initiative

Transitional Plan: (1) Use the recent amendments according animals the status of “sentient beings with biological imperatives” (as in Quebec) to (2) adopt laws making 24-hour CCTV video/audio recording mandatory everywhere animals are commercially bred, transported, used or slaughtered, (3) mandate the permanent open web-streaming of all the videos to allow crowd-sourcing surveillance to ensure that all existing regulations are complied with. If (as is to be hoped) the widespread awareness of the reality in the videos sensitizes the majority to the fact that the animal industries are intrinsically cruel and need to be scaled down and phased out, then (4) mandate a gradually increasing tax on all animal products and production — on the consumer, the vendor and the producer, (5) allow a full rebate on the tax for all consumers, vendors and producers who instead buy, sell and produce non-animal alternatives. (6) Any tax surplus should be designated to use for (6a) sanctuaries for animals liberated by the switch to alternatives (i.e., subsidies so they should not be killed) and (6b) any residual should be used to fund research on non-animal alternatives.

Harnad, Stevan (2015) To Close Slaughterhouses We Must Open People’s Hearts. HuffPost Impact Canada

Matthieu Ricard débute toujours ses entretiens concernant les animaux avec la question: « S’il vous plaît lever la main si vous êtes en faveur du fait d’infliger la souffrance sans nécessité ». Personne ne lève la main. Ensuite il demande « S’il vous plaît lever la main si vous mangez de la viande ». Beaucoup de mains se lèvent, mais avec beaucoup d’hésitation et de murmurements inquiets.

Comme le dit Dr. Kona-Boun, on cherche à sensibiliser le public concernant deux faits fondamentaux: (1) Manger de la viande n’est pas nécessaire ni à la survie ni à la santé humaine et (2) la quantité de souffrance infligée aux animaux par notre consommation de la viande est indiciblement horrifique.

Les activistes sont motivés par une foi en la décence humaine: Lorsque les citoyens sauront que (1) et (2) sont vrais, il vont certes vouloir cesser de manger de la viande et vont vouloir fermer les abattoirs: Brefs, ils deviendront des activistes aussi.

On ne peut pas faire le changement du jour au lendemain (malgré le fait tragique que ça prolonge les horreurs) sans l’accord de la majorité. D’abord on sensibilise les gens (avec le CCTV dans les abattoirs, diffusé sur Internet), pour que la majorité décente appuie l’adoption d’une taxe progressive (pour le client ainsi que le producteur) sur la viande, remboursée (pour le client et/ou le producteur) s’ils achètent/produisent une alternative non-viande. Toutes les taxes non-remboursées paient les sanctuaires pour les animaux ainsi sauvés.

There’s nothing to admire in the slogan (or sentiment) “I’m the greatest,” whether from Muhammad Ali or Donald Trump.

Maybe it’s an effective way to pump yourself up for combat if you’re a prizefighter, but that calling’s not one to admire either.

Muhammad Ali had at least had the real experience of being the victim of bigotry; his aggressive response — combat and braggadocio — is understandable, even excusable, since no one has written an etiquette book on how to behave politely when you are being systematically discriminated against.

But Trump’s life has been lucre, luck and lechery from the start, and the only thing it has inspired in him is the crudest form of narcissism and demagoguery.

If the American electorate has any sense (and decency) it will award him the crashing defeat he deserves.

And may all his undeserved fortunes fail him while he is still compos mentis to collect the wages of his vicious and vacuous vanity.

I sincerely hope that Peter Singer’s “The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically” will do a lot of good by inspiring a lot of people to do a lot of good.

But when I reached this sentence:

“Aaron Moore, an Australian international aid worker and artist, is one of the relatively few Christians who have taken the words of Jesus seriously. On his website, Moore links them to a statement of mine…”

I knew I would not be finishing this book[1]. I put it down when I got to:

“Everyone has boundaries. If you find yourself doing something that makes you bitter, it’s time to reconsider… Now Julia doesn’t scrimp on ice cream because, as she told the class, ‘Ice cream is really important to my happiness’.”

The book has the style of a self-help book, but of course it can hardly be that, since what it is promoting is other-help. I guess it’s not for me because what it is recommending already seems very obvious to me. But I was also disappointed to see most of it devoted to helping people, just as most charities are. Of course people need help, and certainly much more help than they are getting. But I’m not sure they need the most help, nor that they need help the most.

There is no misery that animals undergo that humans don’t undergo too, whether “natural” or human-inflicted. But most animal misery is human-inflicted, one way or the other. And most humans are not undergoing that misery. Nor is most of human misery deliberately inflicted on people by people; on animals, most of it is. And it’s legal to inflict that misery on animals. And most people inflict it, or demand that it be inflicted on their behalf. And most of it is not necessary to human survival or health. (Nor even to human wealth: there are more humane ways to make a living, or even a killing (financial). I also doubt that ice cream, hence bovine agony, is necessary for human happiness.)

I think the most good you could do would be to inspire people to stop causing gratuitous misery. I am not sure how inspiring people to get rich so they can donate most of what they make to charity to reduce mostly human misery is the most good you can do. But Peter Singer did write “Animal Liberation,” which has inspired a lot of people to help animals. Maybe there will be some trickle-down from “effective altruism” to animals too. I hope so. I don’t pretend to know any more effective solutions. I just wish this book had devoted more than a chapter to the most numerous and wretched victims on the planet — and to doing the least harm you can do with the money you spend.

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[1] It is not at all that the contemporary philosopher of ethics who has inspired generation after generation to renounce meat and defend animals is not to be likened to the biblical prophet of charity: quite the contrary. It’s just my own squeamishness about who draws attention to the likeness. (The animus toward ice cream, however, and toward professions of its need for happiness, is not squeamishness but deep dismay at the implied trade-off.)