The Off Topic Topic

[Caliga]

I'm in a moral quagmire about orcas.  Do whales that kill whales need to be saved?

Yes, because that makes them the coolest whales of all.  Baleen whales are lame.

[CountDeMoney]

No.

Anyway, check out these fucking scumbags:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_Australia

Heh, that's kinda cool. 

Just think of them as really big hunting dogs.

Yeah, Tonitrus, I'm in a moral quagmire over dogs.

[Ed Anger]

Try to turn on Internet set top box... Nothing. Fiddle with cords..nothing.

Try to turn on blu ray player....nothing. Fiddle with cords.... Nothing.

SONOFABITCH.

[Josephus]

dad got into a fender bender in a parking lot. Said he saw the other car but couldn't find the brake pedal in time.

[Ideologue]

No.

Anyway, check out these fucking scumbags:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_whales_of_Eden,_Australia

Heh, that's kinda cool. 

Just think of them as really big hunting dogs.

Yeah, Tonitrus, I'm in a moral quagmire over dogs.

I hope a dog eats your cat.

[CountDeMoney]

My cat fucks dogs up for breakfast.  And then grooms.

[Jacob]

Your moral calculus is completely fucked up, Ide, if you're fretting about Orcas hunting to eat.

[lustindarkness]

Ide, are you trolling or do you really believe all that crap?

[Razgovory]

My cat fucks dogs up for breakfast.  And then grooms.

I understand the dogs, but why does your cat hold something against the guys who take care of horses?

[Razgovory]

Larch: Yeah, but it's part of a serious question I've been considering for a long time, and seems to be something every other vegetarian ignores: if it's wrong for me to do, why is okay for something much stupider, of much less value, to do it?  "Because it's nature" is not a sufficient answer, since nature would dictate I have no limits to my behavior but physical law and rational self-interest.

"Because I can't do anything about it" is a better answer, but hardly satisfactory.

The chance of orcas driving other whales to extinction is pretty low.

The threat of extinction is not, I expect, the primary reason cetaceans engender sympathy or for the significant unrewarded effort by humans to aid their plight.

The solution is of course, that it's not wrong for you to do it.

[Ideologue]

Your moral calculus is completely fucked up, Ide, if you're fretting about Orcas hunting to eat.

Not what I said.  I said I fret about orcas killing whales.

Not all orcas do so as a habit.  Only a couple of mammal-eating populations/species.*  Other orca populations/species eat fish, which while not ideal is acceptable.  I feed my cats fish; I fret very little about that.

It has nothing to do with standards of behavior, which I understand cannot be readily cut and pasted onto non-human, somewhat stupid life forms (enforcement would be an issue if nothing else), but with a bad outcome to that behavior, i.e., dead sapient life.  If orcas ate gorillas, I'd fret too.  No matter how awesome it would be to watch.

*I understand there's some uncertainty over whether the different groups of orcas are the same species; they do not appear to interbreed, but I don't think anyone knows if they cannot interbreed.

[Sheilbh]

Worry about dolphins. They kill porpoises for fun.

[Ideologue]

I worry also about dolphins and their rape culture.

[garbon]

Why don't you worry about your life?

[Neil]

If you think whales deserve to live by dint of being intelligent/empathetic/whatever, and think human whalers ought to be swept from the seas by the USN, as I do, then you can't just ignore it when monster dolphin things kill them because they're not human.

At the same time, orcas are certainly too intellectually and morally stupid to understand when they kill other cetaceans that what they're doing is wrong.  But I don't care about intent; I care about the outcome.  If a guy with an IQ of 60 was murdering people, you'd still find a moral dimension to his slayings.

That said, as obligate carnivores of high moral value, if all orcas ate fish (a life form of significantly lower moral value), I would not have a problem.

You're stupid in so many ways here, it boggles the mind.  For one thing, having the USN doing retarded bullshit like babysitting whales is exactly the sort of thing that a chick would do.  It's like on Robocop 2, where they reprogram him with all kinds of stupid, womanish directives.

If you had retards killing even dumber retards in a pre-morality society, nobody would care.  We know this because that's exactly what happened.