The Law Of Least Harm/Most Good

A friend, when commenting on my new-found vegetarianism, asked me half jokingly, half snarkily when I’m going to stop buying clothes that are made in sweatshops and when I’m going to stop buying vegetables picked by cheap immigrant labor.  He has a point.

The problem is, you can’t step outside your home without causing harm to someone or something.  Heck, you probably couldn’t touch anything in your house without causing harm to someone or something.  Those appliances don’t build themselves and they ain’t built in America by well treated employees.

What’s a globally conscience individual supposed to do?  You try to follow the law of least harm/most good.

This makes things like becoming a vegetarian an easy choice.  Meat production in the United States can be said to follow the law of most harm/least good.  Meat provides you with nothing that you can’t find somewhere else so there absolutely no necessity in eating meat.  That, by itself, isn’t enough to say that you shouldn’t eat meat, but in order to justify eating that meat, it better be a fairly humane process.  And it is not.  Wow, is it not.  The law of least harm/most good is easy to follow in this case.

Then there are things like tomatoes.  To eat tomatoes or not to eat tomatoes?  That is the question.  It is issues like whether to eat tomatoes or not where it becomes difficult to tell which side to fall on.  Tomato farming has some of the most unfair labor practices in the United States.  Tomato picking is done exclusively by immigrants who are easily taken advantage of because of their illegal status.  At the same time, though, these are jobs that the people might not otherwise have.  What little money is made often gets sent home to families that desperately need it.  Not eating tomatoes would mean a loss of jobs for those immigrants and a loss of those jobs could be deadly to their families.  Good is being done despite evil intentions.  That makes an issue like this prime for vigorous activism to push for better conditions and better wages for the pickers while at the same time continuing to eat tomatoes.

Speaking of activism, if you want to follow the law of least harm/most good you should be volunteering.  It doesn’t matter for what.  No, you are not too busy.  No, it doesn’t take a lot of time to make a difference.  Under 30% of adults above the age of 16 currently volunteer.  That’s around 60 million people.  Those volunteers average 51 hours a year volunteering.  That’s 3 billion volunteer hours a year.  Imagine if all 200 million people over the age of 16 gave just 40 hours a year ( under 4 hours a month!)  to volunteering.  That would be 8 billion volunteer hours a year.  Think of the good that could be done with that.  All it takes is one simple step.  Call an organization whose cause you agree with and offer to volunteer.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you are only one person and one person can’t make a difference.  It’s true, you are just one person and it’s true, you might not make a difference, but it is guaranteed that you won’t make a difference if you do nothing.  You will be amazed at what just a little bit of effort following the law of least harm/most good can accomplish.

Book Review: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5 stars

Warning: The contents of this book may be hazardous to your very comfortable eating habits.

Continue reading →

This Is Why Environmentalism Is So Important

A recent article from Kevin Drum points to the fact that there is a pretty good causal effect between crime rates and lead poisoning.  Crime rates in the United States are on a sharp decline and the removal of lead from everyday life may be the cause.  How cool is that?

This is why environmental issues are so important and also why people have a hard time seeing environmental issues as needing to be solved.  It can take decades for the effects of what we are doing to the environment to become readily apparent.  Eat lead paint as a toddler today and you kill someone 15 years from now.  Your average person would never make that connection.  There are hidden costs to many of our everyday activities that we would never be willing to pay if the costs were known up front.  Corporations know this.  Science takes decades and there is a lot of money to be made in those ensuing decades before something is considered harmful.

The lead we pump into the atmosphere from factories and coal fired plants costs us more for correctional facilities.  Your tube socks you buy at Wal-Mart cost you much more than what you pay for it because of the welfare support needed for its employees since Wal-Mart refuses to pay a living wage.  The meat you eat costs much more than what you pay for it because of the diseases they cause and the harm the factory farms do to the local environment.  Carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere decades ago is causing global warming now.

Humanity has trouble taking responsibility for things that happened yesterday.  It is no wonder that it is nearly impossible for us to take responsibility for things that happened decades ago.

By The End Of This Book, I Will Be A Vegetarian

Willfully ignorant is not a phrase that anyone would use to describe me.  When it comes to eating meat, however, that is really the only phrase that can apply.  I have known about the horrific state of animal husbandry in the United States for years.  I have heard many stories about the abysmal conditions in which animals are kept in factory farms.  I am aware of the vast ecological destruction that occurs from industrial fishing practices.  I have known that the meat we eat often makes us sick, the people who work in the industry sick, and the people who are unfortunate enough to live nearby a factory farm sick.

These are all facts that have been fed to me little by little over the years.  I have known about them the way I know about the fact that the sun rises in the morning.  Very little thought was put into it.  That has all changed because of a book.

I am currently reading “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer.  I’m about half way through the book and I’m finding that nothing I’m reading is new to me.  There are no new facts and no new conclusions.  What there is is everything I have known as disparate facts all condensed into one book.  And it is devastating.  There really is something incredibly powerful about reading page after page of how awful factory farming is to force you to come to terms with your complicity in perpetuating mass suffering.

99% of all meat and animal byproducts consumed in the United States comes from factory farms.  They live in inhumane conditions from the day they are born to the day they die.  They live in pain from the day they are born to the day they die.  They are killed in ways that are inefficient and often lead to fully conscious animals being skinned and gutted.  And that’s if they live that long.  Male chicks are almost all killed after hatching.  Unhealthy pigs are taken by their hind legs and swung against the ground bashing their heads in.  None of the meat that comes from these animals can be considered healthy because of the conditions in which they are processed.

Terms like “cage free” and “free range” and “grass fed” are merely marketing ploys and are all but meaningless.  “Cage free” can mean that the enclosure the animal is placed in doesn’t meet the definition of a cage even though the animals are packed in just as tightly.  “Free range” can mean that the animal can look through a screen window and see the outdoors.  “Grass fed” can mean that a minimal portion of the animal’s diet is grass.  If you do not have first hand knowledge of the conditions in which the animal was raised, you must assume those terms are a lie.

Seafood, alas, isn’t much better.  One pound of caught shrimp can cause over 20 pounds of bycatch (sea creatures that are not the intended target).  The world average is 6 pounds of bycatch for every pound of shrimp caught.  Almost all this bycatch dies and is thrown overboard.  “Dolphin friendly” tuna is anything but.  All it means is that they don’t specifically target dolphins when looking for tuna.  All tuna fishers end up with dolphin bycatch.

There are much more humane alternatives, but they are difficult to find and require research that is really not possible for big city dwellers.  And even if you can find them, they are only more humane.  There is no such thing as a humane way to kill a living animal.  There is only more humane and less humane methods.  Even the most humane current standard causes suffering.

Despite all that, I still find it really difficult to say that I will give up meat.  It is a completely unnecessary food item to consume in a first world country with a vast agricultural distribution network.  I don’t need meat’s nutritional content and I get plenty of pleasure from other non-meat food items.  There is really only one logical, moral, and ethical choice in the matter, though, and that is to give up eating meat.

It’s The Sun!

One of the many good things about being forced to take the two weeks that comprise Christmas and New Years off is that those are easily the dreariest two weeks of the year for going to work.  The Sun is at its minimum life span in the sky if it decides to show its face at all and the weather is usually cold and snowy.  I get to completely bypass those foul yearly occurrences.  And when I go back to work today, I am greeted with a light sky in the morning and a light sky in the evening.  Sure, it’s already dark by the time I get home, but some Sun is certainly better than none.  It really is amazing how much a little sunlight can alter one’s mood for the better.

And I Think To Myself What A Horrible World

It is really hard, as a winner of the genetic lottery, to wrap your mind around how much tougher it still is to be a woman in society today.  Instead of simply teaching men not to rape, we have an entire industry teaching women on how to not get raped.  If they do get raped, they then often get blamed for being raped.  After all, there is this whole industry dedicated to rape prevention and they didn’t follow the rules.  Ergo it must be the woman’s fault.  Women are taught by society that they have to be sexy and then society blames them for being too sexy.  This would fuck up the sturdiest of women as certainly as war fucks up the sturdiest of soldiers.

All that is bad enough.  But then you have stories like this.  An Indian woman was literally raped to death by six attackers.  If it can be considered good news, her father has demanded that her name be known in the hopes that other women may find courage to come out if they have been raped.  Her name was Jyoti Singh Pandey.  Everywhere, there is a stigma associated with being raped.  In India, with its caste system, it is worse than most places.  Her family is very brave in releasing her name.  I hope her father is right and something good does come of this.

And then you have stories where someone brags for 12 minutes on camera about a girl that was gang raped at a party.  I find this one even more abhorrent than poor Jyoti’s.  Why?  Because this one has countless accomplices who will never be charged with any crime.  Not only was there assuredly countless witnesses to the gang rape(s) of this poor teenage girl that haven’t come forward, but it looks like there were attempts by authorities to minimize the fallout because of the involvement of a local high school football team.  You can follow the link in the above story for all the gory details.  Be warned they are pretty horrific.  If the allegations are true, police knew and did nothing.  Prosecutors knew and did nothing.  Coaches knew and did nothing.  Students knew and did nothing.  I can only forgive the students.

Society enables monsters like those above.  Chances are YOU enable monsters like those.  Chances are you know someone like them.  Chances are you know you know someone like them.  Call a woman a whore, you enable them.  Criticize a woman for dressing too sexily, you enable them.  If a woman says no and you push her to change her mind, you enable them.  Think it’s ok to get a woman drunk enough to have sex with you, you enable them.

There’s the old quote, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”  I disagree.  If you do nothing, you were never a good person.

Exactly How Big Is The Sun?

Look at the Sun.  Now look at me.  Can you see me?  No.  You are blind.  Because you looked at the Sun.  Never look at the Sun.  I’m on a horse.

So how big is the Sun?  Short answer.  BIG!

Slightly longer answer.  It has a diameter of 1,391,980 kilometers. That’s 109 times the size of the Earth’s diameter of 12,756 kilometers.  It’s also 1,300,000 times the volume of the Earth.

It’s still really hard to determine the sheer immensity of the Sun from mere figures, though.  Phil Plait points us to another way to measure the Sun.  The light from the point of the Sun that is closest to us gets to Earth 2.5 seconds faster than the light from the edge of the Sun.  Put another way, the Sun is so large that light from the edge of the sun takes 2.5 seconds to travel one radius length of the Sun!  Yowza!

Free Photoshop

Adobe, out of the kindness of their “we’re sick of maintaining our activation servers for a 10 year old piece of software” hearts has decided to give away Photoshop and Creative Suite 2 for free.  Yes, it’s a little outdated, but it still has everything at least 90% of you out there need for your image editing needs.  Score!

Deep Space Nine

Back when Deep Space Nine was on the air, I quickly gave up on it.  I just couldn’t get into a show about living on an immobile space station week in and week out (this from a huge fan of Babylon 5).  My choice was almost certainly encouraged by the abysmal choice of an opening sequence.  Spend two minutes panning around the outside of a mostly deserted space station while playing a beautiful, but incredibly down beat musical score (this was before DVRs when people used to actually watch shows when they were on).  Everything about it screamed boring.

The only reason I decided to give it another try was a friend who claimed that DS9 was easily the best Star Trek TV series ever made and Captain Sisko was by far the best captain.  Speak words like that in the wrong Trekkie bar (if such things existed) and you’re bound to start a fight.  He warned me that the first season was pretty slow, but it would get much better.  I have to say he was right.

The first season was, once again, pretty boring.  In retrospect, I’m sure they wish they had done a better job of it, but it is what it is.  The Deep Space Nine universe is much more complicated than the other Star Trek series.  If you look at season one as setup for what is to come, it becomes tolerable.

I would also add season two as a setup season, but it definitely gets moving nicely.  It is in season two that you start to get a feel for how dark the series is going to be.  You have a Bajoran civil war, Federation citizens turned terrorists, and a mysterious super race of soldiers of a mysterious empire called the Dominion from the Gamma Quadrant.  You can just tell that the fun has just begun.

The Federation has always been this ridiculous ideal and that is certainly part of the charm of the Star Trek universe.  That is completely thrown away in DS9.  The Federation becomes as morally ambiguous as all the other races which would certainly be far closer to the truth in any real world situation.  As soon as the pretense of an idealistic Federation is thrown away, Deep Space Nine really starts to shine.

And Captain Benjamin Sisko?  Badass.  How badass his he, you ask?  The man poisons an entire planet making it completely inhospitable for humans while it is currently inhabited by humans!  On purpose.  He is the first captain that actually seems human.  Most Star Trek shows have vanity episodes that focus on just how human the captain actually is, but almost every episode of DS9 shows Sisko’s humanity.  Warts and all.  That’s how captains should be portrayed.

If you are like me and gave up on Deep Space Nine, I highly recommend that you go back and watch it if you have access to Netflix.  If you’re not into the whole Star Trek thing, Deep Space Nine is different.  It’s well written, well acted, and well directed.  At seven seasons, it’s a big commitment, but I think it’s one that’s worth it.

Oh, The Humanity!

My internet has been out almost all day today.  It’s back now, but it keeps cutting in and out at inopportune times.  I was planning to watch the last few episodes of Deep Space Nine on my last day before heading back to the job, but alas, that doesn’t seem likely.  I am being punished for enjoying my two weeks off too much.

It really is amazing how dependent on the internet our society has become.  Games require the internet.  Movies require the internet.  Information requires the internet.  Communication requires the internet.  I wonder what would happen to society if the internet collapsed and the cellular phone infrastructure collapsed at the same time.  Mass hysteria, that’s what!  I might actually have to get to know my neighbors if that happened.  Perish the thought!