NEWS: Spanish Socialists Go Apeshit Over Human Rights

CULTURE: Spanish Socialists Go Apeshit Over Human Rights

The Spanish Socialist Party plans to introduce what it's calling the Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow.

How about human rights for the oceans, too? After all, the human body is around 60% water, the brain is 75% water, blood is 82% water, and lungs are nearly 90% water.

Did you hear that..?

That's the sound of everyone in PETA blowing their loads in unison.

Damn hippies. You know, several birds can talk, apes can't talk, thus, why give apes human rights when you don't give birds human rights? and why stop there?

[Edited on Apr 26, 2006 by witty_pseudonym]

SAVE US DR. ZAUS!!!!

[Edited on Apr 25, 2006 10:13PM]

Quote of the day.

hmm spain is starting to sound sort of nice.......

Why not include pigs? They share more genes with humans than gorillias and organgutans.

Is it April 1 again?

Well, you know what they say about opinions and assholes....

Birds do talk...or rather they can mimic; pretty amazing actually and are usually much more eloquent than many of these horny narcisstics around here.

Have you ever seen Koko the ape who knows sign language and is best friends with a kitten?

Mammals are very similiar. to each other. Ever heard of a thing called evolution? We have something called a tail bone...hmm, I wonder why it's called that?

I think this came about because apes are still being poached in the wild so stupid white tourists can have souvenirs and billionaires can have private illegal zoos. The great apes are endangered and their numbers drop rapidly.

It really brightens my day to see people talk shit about on people who are trying to be positive and change things. Well, if you prefer the Christian McWalmarting of the world, enjoy...

And we share 93% with yeast.

But, on the optimistic side, Koko couldn't vote with any more ignorance than the average human. At least she would have an excuse for not reading the issue statements.

However, there is a broad line between offering apes the requisite protection to which they are entitled, and granting them "rights as persons."

Will they have to pay taxes? Can one be indicted for murder, or rape? Who will head up the department to get Koko off the welfare program once she is declared a "person?" Or, perhaps, we should follow PETA's lead and re-release her into the wild to be ostracized and torn to bits by her fellow apes (after which we electrocute them for murder?)

So many questions, so little mind.

[Edited on Apr 25, 2006 11:47PM]

Doesn't California recognize dolphins as citizens or honorary citizens, or something like that? Does that mean they can vote or get passports issued to them?

Although you didn't actually quote any particular post you're responding to in particular, I'll defend my post specifically, since it's pretty much the same as all other posts on this subject in the thread.

Firstly, yes I have heard of Koko, and koko was why I brought up the bird comment. Koko and several species of birds are just a few of the many examples of how proficiently an animal can mimic language without understanding it.

Also, please do not put words into my mouth (or the people on this board in general). I am not "talking shit" about people who are attempting to lower poaching, I am not "talking shit" about people who believe in animal welfare and animal rights. I am simply pointing out the fact that there is a gigantic difference between giving an animal the same rights as a human and actually defining an animal as a human "person". One is a noble cause (even though I do not agree with it), the other is patently absurd

[Edited on Apr 26, 2006 by witty_pseudonym]

Although, in fairness (but mostly for the fun of stoking the argument) Koko has actually demonstrated the ability to independently organize sentence constructs to express desires, and has invented words to represent consistent, abstract, concepts.

Thus, inferring an understanding of language as opposed to mimicry.

I still think she would vote against Bush though...

More discussion stoking (hee hee)

Common fallacies of logic and rhetoric
o Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
o Argument from "authority".
o Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).
o Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
o Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
o Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
o Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
o Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
o Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
o Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").
o Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
o Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
o Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
o Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
o Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
o Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
o Confusion of correlation and causation.
o Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack..
o Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
o Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

[Edited on Apr 26, 2006 12:26AM]

Well, seeing as how a portion of the scientific community is in the middle of an academic trench war over this issue, we probably won't reach a conclusion, but consider your fun argument stoked.

Although yes, koko has created sentence constructs, this is at heart one of her biggest language flaws. Her sentences generally have no repeatable grammar, and often contain a lot of "white noise", i.e words that simply have no place in the sentence. If she had a clear understanding of language, it follows she would stick to rules (even if those rules were incorrect) and not speak gibberish. Another flaw in her skills are that they rely heavily on interpretation from a handler. For example, koko generally uses the term nipples for people, which her handler has interpretted as meaning people because "the word nipple sounds like people to her"

But anyway, I need to go to work, so no more monkey-attacking for me

Yeah, the genetic difference between a person and a banana is not all that much considering the comparison.

Does this all mean I can go to spain, and as long as the simian in question is consenting and of legal age, fuck it hard, without la policia intervening?

Me cago en la leche tio!

I'd trade my apartment and job for a life swinging in the trees in a heartbeat. If only my big toes worked like thumbs.

I can't help remember the 2000AD episode where an Orangutan wins political power; and then George Bush comes to mind.

that shit turns me on.

Hey! Numbers with absolutely no context with which to judge them! You know, if a surgeon had a 96.4% success rate, that number wouldn't seem so high anymore. If there were a 96.4% survival rate of car trips over 50 miles, no one would drive anywhere. The fact that we share 96.4% of our genes with orangutans is a meaningless attempt to awe someone into believing "they're just like us". Which logical fallacy is that? Misunderstanding statistics? Or misrepresenting statistics?

[Edited on Apr 26, 2006 by Clov]

But that's a good point. If you consider the highter primates "human", someone is going to fuck one and say it consented. Then we'll get into whether any of them are intelligent enough to consent, resulting in all orangutans being declared legally retarded, and then some hotshot lawyer is going to sue on behalf of all of the orangutans on the ground that labelling an entire subgroup of humans "retarded" is discriminatory and so on and so on.

If being best friends with a kitten makes you smart, my grandmother is Einstein.

To the tune of The 1812 Overture!