Hello All,
Here are a few selections from the eight-page Open-Source monograph, “The Mismeasure of Animals” – just released on Dec. 25, 2012.
Comment freely and distribute anywhere. The full document is available (free) at TheMismeasure website.
~john lestat
LEAD: As the untold story goes, earth’s most-influential modern human mismeasured the intelligence of animals and popularized his underestimations in the bestseller we ought know as The Origin of Species-ism, now applauded by most everyone who should know better as the ur-text of animal rights. As in The Descent of Man, Darwin repeatedly declared from banner lines and chapter heads that all non-human species were near-thoughtless puppets on the control string of instinct and any overtly brainy behavior was merely the imitation of an intellect.
SELECTIONS:
Animal is dictionarily racist.
" . . . As in all post-Darwin dictionaries, Webster’s NIV2 defines ‘animal’ like nigger, ‘animalistic’ worse, and the scriptures of Britannica Online claim any brilliant behavior is simply instinct masquerading as intelligence. When by definition animalistic means savage & irrational and humane means tender & compassionate, language use alone breeds preconceptual bias; so rather than sponsor homo¦supremist ideology by simply speaking a word, a·ni·mal must be done for, with änima a possible replacement, pronounced ah·ni·mah and pluralized by capital letter.
Instinct is a fiction.
" . . . Instincts were invented in a flat-earth era of pre-schoolers to explain what we couldn’t then understand: 500+ years of instinct-hunting later, we’ve confirmed as many unicorns. Modern scientific studies of instinct are comedies of unchecked variables and you’re-kidding-me logical errors, not to mention that we never pick on anyone our own size. The average brain used to demonstrate instinct’s existence is 1,000,000x smaller than human, such as . . . "
The New Slaughter Rule
" . . . As for the 20,000,000 Änima we don’t see being shot per hour, that’ll be enough of that. Hearken, the new Slaughter Rule: Kill on camera, or not at all. With a DNA-demonstrated eyewitness-mistaken-rate of 70%+, relying on human eyes for regulation of anything isn’t sensible, anyway: video needs no appointment, sees without preconception, and its memory is exemplary."
The Full Änima Cost (FÄCt) sounds complicated, but it’s just a lot.
" . . . Every earthly product has come at an unpublished and nearly inestimable änima cost, including the number of lives required, the hours of forced labor, and the length of their imprisonment. Finding the FÄCts of a vegan burger would start with a seed that was collected, packaged, delivered, planted, watered, fertilized, tilled, weeded, picked, stored, processed, wrapped, packaged, frozen, driven, unpacked, cooked, and trashed—with heart-beating creatures collaterally damaged or forced to labor at each stage."
Plants aren’t animals
" . . . Printing the FÄCts on every bauble, process, and service will speed the global transition to plants, they being models of anabolic efficiency who gladly labor for free, converting light to materials for any human use and pleasure, growing happily when overcrowded and fed garbage, not fretting dying by the billions for our convenience, and can be made to taste identical to cooked muscle with appealing consistency by the least application of a familiar äphorism. Moreover, anything Änima can do, vegetable, minerals, and machines can do pain-free, which we’ll get to sooner if we fight our own battles with reality, rather then rig the system with preconceptual prejudice against the already subservient Änima."
Nature, hellish for all.
" . . . Unimproved earth is miserable and unpredictable for most animals, so humans used the uncompensated harvest of highly perceptive creatures’ bones, proteins, and labor to speed building the civilization used to escape it, leaving behind a note to the remaining Änima in Darwin’s hand: ‘Stay back. Nature’s good enough for you.’"
A human-raised wolf is a dog.
" . . . There is no gene for wildness, domestication is simply a synonym for human-parenting, and a hand-raised wolf is no more likely to grow up and bite us than Lassie—actually less likely now that we just learned wolves can read our facial expressions better."
As an ethic from a unimpowered age, Do Not Murder asks too little of modern humans.
" . . . Empowered humans need something harder than Do Not Murder, which with the lest effort can be a complete success. Consider instead bar one of B|Friend Ethics: If it causes pain to the unwilling, find another way. With an earth full of pain-feeling life, we can scarce take a step without the opportunity for ethical improvement."
An immature choice made by parentless species: Rather than walk, Hi-Ho, Silver!
" . . . Now that the rising-tide of civilization has lifted our ships far above the struggle to survive, it should be easier to see we kept afloat the species who owned them by drowning the rest. More than the west was won on the funny math of self-reliance that chose not to till the soil by our hand, but didn’t see it as a slave-labor cost."
How many zeroes make a holocaust?
" . . . In our reality show circa 2012, humans preside over a global tableau of 300,000,000,000 currently captive Änima being worked-to-execution to power our civilization. From space, civilization looks like a zone of alienated- and enslaved-to-death Änima that extends everywhere we care to be, and under our direct thumb are most of earth’s red-bloods, a billion-or-so we kill every two days."
Evolution: obsolete. Evolutionists, the new Latinists.
" . . . Natural selection and evolution are functionally dead to an earth now moving at the well-beyond-natural speed of human civilization."
Predator = empirically accurate sense deceptions
" . . . Pre-Victorians like Darwin saw wild lions as carnivores, but the obvious-to-anyone survivalist clash between predator and prey is just an empirically accurate sense deception created from the surface 5% seen from afar, whilst highly affectionate, hyper-perceptive, uncommonly creative wild lions are better defined by the 95% of their life spent more discreetly than tackling foes forty times their size, including showing off their polygraphic intelligence and mothering orphaned antelopes, to get ahead of this story.
AND A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
If you find “The Mismeasure” to your liking, spread the word. The documents online are free and there are 300,000,000,000 Änima who could use some human assistance.
This document is living and flawed and will improve as we attack it. Where it’s successful, celebrate; where it’s flawed, amend. In February of 2013, a Open-Source w/Benefits version of the “The Mismeasure” will be posted at CloudLit – where I hope it will be continually revised and updated and upgraded.
And finally, there’s one document you won’t see in its entirely on TheMismeasure website: “How To B|Friend a Wild Lion.” Lions are unilaterally stressed in the shrinking prison we call the wild, and the b|friending process is untested. That’s why I’m in central Africa, to play test the process. Unfortunately, I used every available resources to get here, and penniless and friendless isn’t helping me get to a lion in need.
Dec. 26, 2012
John Lestat, Ph.D.
FB @ Occupy The Wild