When does killing an animal constitute murder?

In Message 60
Now don't be modest! Or you could swiftly be the target of satire!

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

In Message 84
Oooo. That's definitely better than Jack Benny's "...wait, I'm still thinking."

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Thank you for describing what Straggler has been unable to see in Jar & Ringo's posts. With the subjective statistical variance so high in these hypothetical things for what people use to decide what to do, average is not dependable enough to formulate a rule of thumb. While the average may sit significantly higher for humans than for cockroaches in anyone's ordering, the variance of these situations is so huge, it is foolish to formulate a behavior before gathering the specifics of the situation.Getting back to Melindoor's OP, I suspect we all do harbor what are quite simply specieist prejudices. This almost reminds me of the difference between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lennon was assassinated. McCartney can never, ever be assassinated. He can only be murdered. Or at least so the saying goes.If a violent psycho shoots and kills in cold blood, then, as we move down the list of species as ordered by the already known specieist humans, when is it no longer murder but something like reckless destruction or poaching or something else under the umbrella of animal cruelty?I would probably emotionally go with what the scientific community now perceives as the intelligence of the species in question. And probably have a similar known-to-be-faulty-but-it's-mine system as Straggler and frako have.Douglas Hofstadter, in his "Godel, Escher, Bach" on page 314, introduces a character Aunt Hillary, who is a sentient ant colony, the individual ants being mere cells to her whole. Killing certain ants is akin to getting a haircut, perhaps, but killing off the colony - in this case of the intelligent Aunt Hillary, would be murder?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

You thought wrong.BTW, what is this garish caricature of the Black Dahlia? Is it because Obama is black?

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

And yesterday I would have agreed. But now I think, for me, the more accurate term is "awareness".BTW nice irony in your screen name....

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

OKAY!!!! You DO understand where Ringo & Jar are coming from!HooRay.Straggler continues: Yes, and I understand that you are trying to help Melindoor's thread along.The first thing that should be flatout ruled Off Topic are those weird hypothetical tests of ant versus disgusted pedophile murderer questions.Joan Baez had a very funny, but piercingly devastating, answer to a typical Draft Board question she had heard about. The question was to imagine driving on a mountain highway with a wall of rock on one side, a cliff on the other. You have your own darling family in the car with you as you are coming around a curve. Suddenly as you come around the curve, you see your grandmother trying to get a dozen babies off the road! - now, do you just slam into them all willy-nilly or do you rip the car violently to the right and down the cliff or into the wall of rock on your left (American road rules)??Baez looks at the guy and says: I go into a high state of panic, I freak out! I try to stop the car on a dime, but because I'm so freaked out I plow into my grandmother & the babies anyway and still go fatally shooting over the cliff, whereupon I land on a village church in full attendance for some family who lost a child to cancer, killing them all along with my family, and then starting a fire that burns the whole village down and ruptures a container holding vile chemicals that bursts downstream polluting hundreds of villages below for 100,000 years.So rule out those preposterous scenarios!!! Please - we've had enough.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

OKI have decided what my view on the OP is:Everything involving the consumption of DNA from other things is, in fact, MURDER.The extent to which we forgive ourselves for committing such murder is derived from our stupid "learned" vanity over the DNA we consume.It is impractical to enforce "Thou Shall Not Murder" at such a wide scale of course! Furthermore, we would all die if it were enforced at the death row level. So it's the stupid ingrained vanity. If it wasn't for vanity, we'd all be dead.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

CS writes: except that the clarification is more properly phrased:If group A is less likely to X, then group A is less likely to Y.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Yes. I think the mother should be able to abort up to 21 years.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Ah, yes, Felix Mengele. Some might say, "just now", we've reached the Godwin event in the thread. But, hold on, to linger here a bit longer...of course these experiments were perhaps the most reprehensible actions ever taken by humans. Ever. Although Emperor Nero has some lengthly, and maybe equal record, of *matching* Felix in foul Reprehensibility, carving up the bodies of boys alive to satisfy his depravities and so on.Straggler - you are trying to draw an absolute line and I commend you for the effort.You are looking for a backbone of civilization that should cut across all humanity.I look for that too.Suppose someday way up ahead the civilization we live in decides that killing animals for food is wrong (a sort of vegan view point).What about harvesting beef from cows. Take some, let the cow grow it back....YOW! does that hit us with negatives. But wait - the cow lives on. Yes, only to be harvested again, like a corn field. Can we make it more like an apple tree? Egods, even amongst vegetables there are connotations. So now there may be problems morally with killing certain vegetable life? Play Mozart to your house plants?We have seen "meat" grown in laboratories - like eating cardboard - not at all like chicken, I've heard - is this the way of the future?Anybody here seen "Silent Running" with Bruce Dern as the hero? He grows real tomatoes on the space-born solariums preserving the last remnants of the earth's garden species. His co-astronauts are just up for a temporary tour and cannot grok his viewpoint. Joan Baez does the music. R2D2 was inspired by Huey, Dewey & Luis.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

I think I have a problem with it. Maybe H.G.Well's depiction of the Morlocks. Maybe Soylent Green. I dunno. Maybe just a shiver up my spine. I cant go there, Oni. Call me irrational.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

Here is the original text: First off, the United States, after WAY TOO LONG A TIME, granted these rights to women and black people and so forth. They are still bogged down in stupid religiously fucked up brains on the issue of gay rights.This did not go far enough. And even if it were at last extended to all of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, it would still not be far enough.In the Science Fiction world you may run across the acronym HILF, which stands for Highly Intelligent Life Form. Even this is not enough. We rightly protect the rights of those among us who have damages or conditions of the brain that some may construe as judging them "not highly intelligent". I suggest we use the term SALF, Self-Aware Life Form.Therefore,
my first recast of the Declaration of Independence quote would thus look like this: * to allude to Fermat's Last TheoremBut there is room for more of this sort of thing here. I think we might consider, in this wonderful forum, some ideas to improve on the various governmental documents around the world so far.The bit about the Creator is perfect. No God need be mentioned specifically or even needed. ("Hi, Ma and possibly Dad and possibly THuihuiygkca numbers 4,5,6,7,8 and 9!)It is the words Inalienable and Endowed that make the US Founding Fathers (probably Jefferson as attributed, but with people talking into his ears in each side) statement so POWERFUL.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d

While I would like the opportunity to recast it again should that situation arise, I remember another SF story about an alien lifeform that sent a representative individual. Turns out all the individuals were telepathically connected and each one was expendable in the manner of trimming fingernails or cutting hair. When the species finally figured out that humans were not so connected and thus the investigative experiments of killing individual humans in various different manners for observation became woefully understood as the egregious killing of isolated entities, the species quickly terminated the earth-bound representative. Perhaps reminiscent of Douglas Hofstadter's character, Aunt Hillary, in Godel, Escher & Bach.

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- xongsmith, 5.7d