Book Review

For everyone who was interested in the topic of meat-eating and vegetarianism, you should read the book Food for Thought: The Debate over Eating Meat by Steve F. Sapontzis.

It's a book of 29 essays by different people and it deals with a ton of different topics all centered around meat eating. The topics were: A Controversy with a Long Past, What Anthropology and Medicine Have to Tell Us about Eating Meat, The Recent Philosophical Debate over the Moral Status of Animals and its Implications for Our Diet, Traditional and Contemporary Religious Teachings about Our Relation to Animals, The Feminist Debate over the Relation between the Treatment of Animals and of Women, The Environmental Debate over Respecting Predatory Nature and Protecting Animals, and Which is More Important, Respecting Cultural Diversity or Protecting Animals?

It was pretty cool because each section had 3-4 essays that dealt with all of the different views of each topic.

It was pretty interesting so check it out.

Everyone loves music

"Many definitions of music implicitly hold that music is a communicative activity which conveys to the listener moods, emotions, thoughts, impressions, or philosophical, sexual, or political concepts or positions."

I really liked this quote from the wikipedia article about music. I believe that that is how many of us see music today.

When we are feeling a certain mood, we go and find music that relates to our mood, or music that can change our mood. Say someone is feeling sad, they can either listen to sad, mopey music that relates to their mood, or they can put on some upbeat music to try and change their mood.

Music is a language because everyone listens to it and everyone relates to it. Take for example the fact that everyone uses song lyrics in their away messages. There's always a song that is able to say just what you're feeling and that's why music has become a language to us.

What is music?

The wikipedia page we had to read about music kinda made me mad in a way. It seems like the idea of music has been bent so much that there cannot even be a clear definition of what it is anymore.

You have a person who releases butterflies on a stage and them flying away is supposed to be considered music? That is just completely ridiculous. Butterflies dont even make noise. This is almost as ridiculous as the way that the idea of art has been stretched. I remember in the beginning of the year when we took a trip to Mass Moca and one of the exhibits was a bubblegum machine filled with used tampons. How is that art? I believe that example and the one of butterflies being music are NOT examples of these ideas being expanded, they are more examples of these ideas being corrupted.

And dance? Yes, dance can be a form of art, but not of music. Music is what you play in the background while the person is dancing.

It's not that I'm being close-minded or anything, it is just extremely obvious that butterflies flying and people dancing are not examples of music.

Just like when people listen to the sounds of thunderstorms on CD. The fact that this is put on CD does not make it music. It makes it plainly a thunderstorm, on CD.

Music can be any mix of instruments and vocals. But that's where it ends. Dancing=art. Thunderstorms=nature sounds. Releasing butterflies on a stage and watching them fly away=weird.

Why We Invaded Iraq

Wanna know the real reason we invaded Iraq? This is why,
http://media-empire.net/spam/e-Spam.php?intSpamID=251

Public Transportation

I have no idea how we got onto the topic of public transportation yesterday, but it really got me thinking.

I've lived in Berkshire County all my life and I have never taken the B Bus. And now that I think about it, I only know one friend who has, and it only happened this year.

Everyone I know is so worried about getting their cars on the road for the summer, including me, even though it's gonna cost a lot of money to do so.

It would be smarter for people like me to use public transportation, even though it has kinda gotten a bad reputation. Most people believe that the B Buses are filled with hobos and sketchy people, which is probably only true because most regular refuse to use it.

But there is also the fact that it only runs at certain times and brings you to certain places. I guarantee if you wanna go to Wal-Mart at 3:25 in the afternoon you cannot just walk outside and have a bus waiting to take you there. That's the reason why most people stick to having their own car, even though it's more expensive.

Although I still probably wont use public transportation, I do agree that it is a good thing that really isnt used enough and that by using it people could save a lot of money in gas and insurance. The problem is people like to get to where they want to go as soon as they want to go there, which is why people who can afford cars (even if just barely) still wont take the bus.

Am I Anti-American?

According to Jensen's article, people who argue for peace are considered "anti-american" or "un-american".

This is weird to me because I think, as an American, you are supposed to want to protect your fellow citizens, not ship them out to foreign countries to be killed.

What's the point of war? It's been going on for how long now? And we're still fighting? It seems to me that this war isn't really working, maybe it's time to try peace.

And I don't see how this idea of peace is "anti-american" because I think people who want peace are looking for the same end result as the people who are pro-war, they just wanna achieve this in a less violent way and in a way that makes things easier for the whole world, not just America.
So I guess people who are anti-war are un-patriotic only in the sense that they are looking out for the world as a whole, not just one country.

Q & A #8

While reading the article for Q&A#8 there was one sentence that really stuck out to me: "If in the end we are just Americans, if we cannot move beyond patriotism, then we cannot claim to be internationalists."

I feel that this line only applies to Americans after the terrorist attacks occurred. Which, in a way, goes along with Jensen's first point.

This first point talks about the people who became extremely 'patriotic' after 9/11...the ones who really couldn't have cared less about patriotism before but now they feel that everyone should support the war. This reminds me of all those stupid Toby Keith songs that came out around this time for some reason. He never made a political statement before 9/11, but after it happened he came out with about 50 songs that basically said "Support our troops. Defend our country". This makes patriotism seem fake in a way because it was never really shown until September 11th.

It seems like this overwhelming parade of patriotism is ridiculous in the sense that it was never really there before. Yes, I understand that it happened because people wanted to show that they wanted to defend our country, but I don't feel like it has really helped anything. 5,000 country songs and American flags hanging off the home of every redneck in the country does NOTHING to defend our country.

It all seems fake. It's like a show.

Furthermore....

People become vegetarians and vegans because they feel bad for the animals. "These animals have hearts and brains and they have feelings too." Sure they may have feelings but guess what. Most animals eat other animals

Yeah...you dont see wolves running around saying "I'm gonna become a vegetarian and not eat this rabbit because it has feelings too"

Obviously these animals dont feel bad about eating meat, so why should we?

Question

People are so concerned with eating meat because the animals were once alive....but weren't the plants that people eat once alive too?

Natural and Unnatural

The article we had to read about the words 'natural' and 'unnatural' talks about whether things that are marked as 'natural' are actually better for you than the things which arent marked as natural.

An example I thought of to exhibit this is grape juice. You see the commercials for Welsch's grape juice all the time and they always have a young child telling you that Welsch's is "all-natural". In this case. "all-natural" means that Welsch's doesnt add tons of sugar to their juice, their product is actually made from grapes. So that leads me to believe that some things that are marked as natural really are better for you.

When it comes to the question of whether or not it is natural to wear clothes, the article was right to say yes and no. It isnt natural in the sense that all of us are born naked, and that clothing is something that we add to ourselves every day. Wearing clothes is natural in the sense that all of us do it and that it is illegal to go out not wearing clothes. Dressing ourselves is natural to our society because we all grew up doing that. But it probably wasnt natural to the first society of people who populated the planet

I was thinking about the Paul McCartney quote that Katie brought up about how if slaughterhouses had glass walls that more people would choose not to eat meat. And that makes me wonder if the people that work inside these places have been affected by what they see. Because this is something that they have to see everyday for hours at a time. We've all seen movies about animals being slaughtered and that does change some peoples views but not many. I think seeing it in real life would convert many more people to vegetarianism, myself included.

I have included some pictures I found about what goes on inside the slaughterhouses...I'm warning you that they are very graphic so dont look at them if you cant handle stuff like that.
http://www.veganoutreach.org/whyvegan/images/ChickensShackledlg.jpg

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://cache.viewimages.com/xc/56288814.jpg%3Fv%3D1%26c%3DViewImages%26k%3D2%26d%3D17A4AD9FDB9CF193CC300C081D9F4700B25EF2F761116F4A9DDA87A37572E0BCA55A1E4F32AD3138&imgrefurl=http://www.viewimages.com/Search.aspx%3Fmid%3D56288814%26epmid%3D1%26partner%3DGoogle&h=396&w=594&sz=54&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=27rpnLaPFLyRBM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=135&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dslaughterhouses%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4GGIH_enUS223US223%26sa%3DN

I dont really have much else to say on the matter, I am still in favor of meat-eating...but I do agree that what these animals go through isnt very nice.

...this might offend some people

The topic of our Q & A this week was about the subject of meat-eating. Honestly, I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating animals, and while I can understand the viewpoint of vegetarians and vegans, I really don't believe that not eating meat is going to help anything. Sure, it may be considered "wrong" that animals are slaughtered for us to eat, but are any less animals gonna be slaughtered because some people choose not to eat them? Probably not. Furthermore, it's not like we kill every single species of animal, we kill the ones that are beneficial to us. Vegetarians, and especially vegans, miss out on many of the nutrients the rest of us get from animals, and they have to take pills to make up for it. Whether or not meat-eating is 'morally right' is a completely personal opinion based on your own chosen morals, but honestly, I don't see how vegetarians and vegans can see it as morally wrong considering the fact that most of these people ate meat for a minimum of ten years of their life. I honestly think vegetarians are crazy and vegans are even crazier (sorry megan!) if they really think that giving up meat is going to change anything besides the level of their nutrition.

In class the other day someone, I'm sorry I cant remember who, asked the question, " Is religion just rationalizing so that we dont have to deal with the bad in life?" and the example they used is that when someone dies, people always say things like, "Oh, well God took her" or "Shes up in Heaven now". And I guess, when looked at that way, it does seem that we use God and Heaven as a way to make things seem better than they really are.

It's the same concept as how people believe that everything happens for a reason. You only say that when something bad happens in hopes that something good will come out of it. It doesnt seem as bad when you tell yourself that God made it happen or that theres a good reason why it happened.

And maybe that is all religion is....its just something that makes you feel better when you have problems. Whether youre blaming your problems on religion "God did this", or youre looking to this higher power to solve your problems for you.

I'm not good at the whole title thing...

So today I was reading the whole atheism/agnosticism thing and I decided to ask some of my friends what their opinions were on which is better, and one of my friends told me that Agnostics are "baby Atheists". This was kinda amusing to me because I always thought they were two different things. But the way that she explained it to me was "Agnostics are Atheists who don't have the balls to actually stand up for anything"...and I kinda thought that was stupid. I think the difference between the two has nothing to do with balls, I think its just that Agnostics are more hopeful people; they dont know if God really exists, but theyre not gonna completely say he doesnt...because no one really knows, and theyre willing to accept that. They dont feel like they have to have complete knowledge one way or the other. They accept that they dont know everything. And I think that takes more balls then just saying something definitely doesnt exist without having proof of it.

Untitled

"Implicit in the cognitive norms of empirical evidence and observation is the assumption of fallibility, the idea that we may not be getting the world quite right, that we might someday have a more accurate view of reality based on more reliable and comprehensive observations and evidence. "

This quote was taken from our most recent reading, and something about it bothers me. I dont see how fallibility can be considered an assumption, because history has already proved that its true. It says that 'we might someday have a more accurate view of reality...", but we already know this to be true because todays world has a better view of reality and of what the world is like than the people from 400 years ago did.

Of course, as the years go on, science will improve and we will be able to have 'more reliable and comprehensive observations and evidence".

So I think 'assumption' is the wrong word to use here. It's not an assumption if we already know that it is gonna happen.

i just dont know...

In the reading that we had to do, one sentence really stood out to me: "We are not content to have our certainties – others must share them as well, since a plurality of worldviews raises doubts about our truth."

This reminded me of something that was brought up in class about religion. Someone, I'm sorry I cant remember who, brought up the fact that religion is huge mainly because it is passed down from parents to their children. This goes along with the quote because all the religions put together are a "plurality of worldviews"...and they are all trying to compete with one another. So most parents push their religion on their children and make them think that their religion is the best, because of the "others must share them" point.

All the different religions we have in this world "raises doubts about our truth" because no one really knows what the truth is. Everyone has a different idea of what the truth is, which is why they choose the religion they follow.

Religion is confusing.

I <3 the history channel

Alright, so today I was watching the History Channel and they had a show on about Nostradamus. Now I know most people dont believe in him and think he was fake, but this show kinda made me think about time and what we have been discussing. Everyone has heard the theories about Nostradamus predicting things that have been happening in our day, like the Holocaust and 9/11. Now my question is, is it possible for someone to see ahead in time? If the whole story of Nostradamus is true, and he did make all these predictions, then that means that all time is already planned out for us, and we do not really control what happens in our time. I'm wondering what everyone else thinks about the possibility of being able to see ahead in time.

Uhhhhhh......

Hmm, so all this talk about time has really got me thinking. Today, the wonderful Katie Collins brought up the topic of time and calendars, and how if people go by different calendars, how can we all be on the same page? But the way I see it is, calendars and hours and minutes and seconds are all things that we as humans have made up. They dont really exist, its just our way of making life more routine. Its kinda like how the east coast and the west coast run on different time schedules. When something happens in the US, its still happening to all of us at the same time, despite what time zone we are in. Time is real, but the way we describe it is not. We have made it easier on ourselves by splitting time into measurements. These measurements are fake, but time itself is not.

grrr....

This reading about time is very frustrating. It's making me mad because i dont see how people can think time doesnt exist. One example that made me mad was this: "Does the instant that we label as "11:01 A.M." for a certain date exist independently of the events that occur then? In other words, can time exist if no event is happening?"
How can it be that any instant, there is no event happening? It makes no sense. There is always something happening. Sure, at 11:01 in the morning you may not be doing anything exciting that you would consider to be an important event, but that doesnt mean that there is nothing going on. Every single second in every day, you are breathing and that in itself is an event. And if this is happening every second, that means that every second is really happening and therefore, yes, time does exist. It doesnt just stop because nothing of importance is going on.
Anyways, that just really frustrated me and made me mad so i wanted to share it.

What is the difference?

Today in class, the difference between the mind and the brain was brought up. I find this to be very interesting because it seems like everyone had different ideas about what separated the two. That makes me wonder if there really is a difference between the two. Personally, I think the mind is more based on emotions and your subconscious feelings. The brain, on the other hand, deals more with physical things, and what is on the surface. For example, when you start to develop feelings for someone, thats usually not something you can control, it happens subconsciously in your mind. All feelings and emotions stem from your mind. Your brain deals with more mechanical things, like moving your arm or doing homework. I dont know how many people will agree with this theory, but this is just how i see it.

hmmm

I think that yesterday's class has probably been the most interesting yet. I really liked the discussion we had on limits. I think that people set their own limits based on motivation and confidence. For example, let's look at people who do triathlons. Everyone has the ability to swim, run and ride a bike, but you dont see everyone doing triathlons. This is because they have set limits on how much they think they can do. They dont have the motivation or confidence to be able to exert themselves that much, but its not that they physically cant; they have just limited themselves. I think everyone can do all of the same things to the same degree, so we arent born with limits, we place limits on ourselves. Thats why some people are better at things than other people are. Some people say "I can't draw", but thats only because they put that idea into their own mind. Everyone can draw, its just a matter of how much effort you put into it. If you put a lot into it, then you are going to be able to draw really well. If you dont put a lot into it, and your drawings are horribly, it doesnt mean you were born artistically limited, it just means that you limited yourself. Basically, I believe that we all set limits on ourselves based on what we really want to do, and how hard we wanna push ourselves.

so confused

ok, can someone explain to me the difference between metaphysical realism and epistomology? There is a quote from the von Glasersfeld paper we read that got me confused.

"In everyday English, that conceptual opposition can be brought out quite clearly by pitting the words "match" and "fit" against one another in certain contexts. The metaphysical realist looks for knowledge that matches reality in the same sense as you might look for paint to match the color that is already on the wall that you have to repair. In the epistemologist's case it is, of course, not color that concerns him, but he is, nevertheless, concerned with some kind of "homomorphism", which is to say, an equivalence of relations, sequence, or characteristic structure -- something, in other words, that he can consider the same, because only then could he say that his knowledge is of the world."

It sounds like both things look for some relation, but there is a difference in what they look for that i don't understand.

I think of all the "isms" we have learned about, skepticism seems to be the most wide-spread, basically because everyone is a skeptic whether they realize it or not. Everyone questions everything. But does that mean that they really believe in skepticism? If they do not realize they are being a skeptic, then are they really a skeptic?