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Today's USRant is a few hours away - that's what happens when you decide to take a nap at 3 a.m. (I woke up about eight minutes ago).
Breakfast first, then Ranting. It's important to get one's priorities right, after all.
Well, maybe one teensy Rantlet before I go...
I keep telling myself that eating bacon isn't causing the death of little piggies. After all, the piggies wo cntribute the bacon on my plate are already dead, hopefully of a heart attack in their sleep after a long and enjoyable life...
Yes, when it comes to bacon consumption I am like a US "investor" - telling myself stories I don't believe, to try and escape cognitive dissonance (I know bacon is shameful, but it tastes s'dam GOOD).
Once we discover the keys to animal language (which, in my view, will be at least as complex as human language), another link in the chain of horror will be fused. (Pigs are - by all sensible measures - posessed of roughly the same cognitive skills as a 12 year old).
And once Drexlerian nanotech sweeps the globe and we can have pork without killing a pig, we will look back on our history with the judgemental eye of the convert... our forefathers (including me) who ate butchered animals, will be seen as being equally barbaric and unenlightened as our forefathers who accepted the "official" line that indigenous people weren't quite human (and therefore could be slaughtered en masse).
Nobody in power actually believed that at the time - not in their heart of hearts. You could look at the behaviour of indigenes - how they interacted, their obvious affinitiy for their children and so on - and you could tell that they were human. In the same way that the European lower orders were human - nasty, brutal and short - but human nonetheless.
Look at a chimp, a gorilla, or a lion, and tell me they're not self-aware. Even chickens know to avoid predators, and slugs will avoid things that hurt them. If you seek to avoid pain, you are aware of the ramifications; if you deliberately avoid areas where you've seen pain inflicted on others in the past, you're planning - which makes you more human than most US investors.
And don't use the word "anthropomorphism" either - that goes in the same bucket as "conspiracy theorist" and "anti-Semite": words that bigots use to attempt to make others look unpalatable.
Just use Occam's razor: if it looks like it's planning, if it behaves like it's self aware, then it is.
Oh see... now I've started. Time to hit the showers....
