Ted Rall for July 09, 2010

the oil blanket - “so whatever”…

Actually, that’s almost kind of a silver lining… hmmm, Box Jellyfish, anyone…?

I like this cartoon. I’ve always been fascinated by Portuguese Men of War. Not that I want to get close and personal.

What are all these sea creatures doing in our oil? Is there any way to liquify them to make more oil? Seems like the only humane thing to do.

Ted, you there?

Did you know all that information before, or did you just look it up for the cartoon?

Which is to say, have you an interest in marine biology that precedes the oil spill?

I totally didn’t know Portuguese Men of War were colonies of creatures. Portuguese Man O’ War

And no, I did not know about blanket octopuses tearing out and using PMoW tentacles. In point of fact, I had never heard of blanket octopuses before.

so the human race is blighting the planet, whats new?

“Each zooid is an individual, but their integration with each other is so strong that the colony attains the character of one large organism. Indeed, most of the zooids are so specialized that they lack the ability to survive on their own. Siphonophorae thus exist at the boundary between colonial and complex multicellular organisms.”

So what is an individual, anyway? And it’s not just siphonophores that make me wonder. There’s a great book I read many years ago, Life on Man, by Theodore Rosebury, that discusses all of the little creatures that live on us. We are not alone.

Eww, cooties.

Yeah, we’ve all got ‘em. (Some more than others.)

Got my SCUBA certificate in 1962. There are many “neat” things in ocean waters, and thanks to nuclear plants, garbage dumping, and oil spills, a lot fewer than when I started diving.

I’m waiting for andy and a few others to now call for the destruction of Man of Wars because they’re “socialist commie organisms”!!! How DARE they depend on each other for existence! Be like “conservatives”! Drill and refine YOUR OWN oil, grow all YOUR OWN FOOD, sell the rest to folks CEOs put out of work! We money making capitalists depend on NO ONE BUT OURSELVES for survival!

hey fennec - and yet your faith is human-based?

anyway, is it men-of-war or is it man-of-wars?

Google is quick and painless:

http://www.the-brights.net/

Then there are those who can’t accept the “creator god” of genesis, with only this motley planet and those “humans” who created a god in their image, but recognize that “science” and observation, say we do NOT have all the answers?

I certainly think we don’t have all the answers. I also suspect that the way to get the answers is to ask the questions. Science offers a research program. What is the research program offered by theology?

So, about the cartoon…

Yes, people do have a propensity to want to save animals that are “cute” and ignore the plight of equally endangered, but less attractive animals. And, yet…anything that would save the eco-system would save ALL of the life, so I would have to think that this is one of our less unsavoury hypocrisies.

“A: God made Man to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.”

That sounds an awful lot like slavery to me.

hey fennec - i’m sorry - it was sort of tongue in cheek

btw your principles are godly principles anyway

you know i love’ya

“A: God made Man to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven.”

Sounds like God’s got self-esteem issues to me, sirromsirrom. Couldn’t He just have gotten a dog, instead?

Scratch that, maybe He did. We all know how destructive a dog can be if you leave it home alone for a few thousand years…

I’ve never really thought about it, but the term “atheist” is kind of negative – and it might be a good thing to have a term that accentuates the positive. I’m not sure about “Bright”, however. (Why not “Brighter” or even “Brightest”?) I am happy to say that I’m a humanist – though not in the sense that I belong to any organization of humanists. But that covers only part of what is intended by Bright.

I don’t mind “atheist” as a description of that particular aspect of my personality; I am “a-theist” - without belief in any god or gods. But atheism doesn’t necessarily imply a disbelief in all metaphysics; Buddhism has no god, but still has metaphysical elements. I reject metaphysics outright.

I’m a “humanist” in that I believe that the human condition should be of paramount concern, but the first people to call themselves “Humanists” were actually Christians, who attempted to reconcile Classical philosophy with Jesus’s teachings, and they would have argued that Jesus’s message was “humanistic” in essence, dealing with man’s responsibilities towards other men, as much as it dealt with man’s responsibilities to Jehovah (the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath).

So lately I’ve been describing myself as a Jesusite/Atheist Irrational Materialist Existentialist (J’AIME).

(By the way, I consider conservation/ecological awareness to be fully compatible with humanism. Having a healthy planet is a good thing for humans.)

Although I am a secular humanist, some of my favorite humanists were Christian – particularly Erasmus, also his friend Thomas More. Was Rabelais a Christian?

One doubt I have about calling myself humanist, however, is that I don’t want to imply that I think human beings are the center of the universe. We’re just an accident, in my opinion, but now that we’re here, I find us pretty interesting. But I find the non-human parts of the universe pretty interesting, as well.

On what I think is a related note, I would certainly say that consciousness has a material base, but is consciousness in itself material? Comments?

I think of consciousness as a process, or a property, rather than anything material; it has no existence apart from that-which-is-conscious. “Growth” involves material change, but “growth” itself is not a material “thing”.

But I don’t know that there’s a lot of agreement on just what consciousness IS, at this point. It’s sort of like the question of “artificial intelligence”; they’ve made great strides towards achieving it, but at every step they have to redefine what they’re looking for: “We thought ‘intelligence’ meant ‘this’, and now we CAN do ‘this’, but it still isn’t really enough.”

http://www.the-brights.net/

good site !!!

drc. - your point being ? yuk,yuk !!!

i just made a t-shirt saying, “and your point is ?” so many people comment on it - seven people ordered one, so i guess i better go to work.

To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart: I can’t define consciousness, but I know it when I have it.

@Radish: Your radio tuner analogy is exactly the same one I have thought about for years. We must be on the same wavelength.

sirrom and radish – speaking of broadcast of consciousness, have you read the later works of Philip K. Dick? Valis. for instance?

“sirrom and radish – speaking of broadcast of consciousness, have you read the later works of Philip K. Dick? Valis. for instance?”

Me, no. But I agree for the most part with Radish. Astral projection would be another manifestation of the same phenomenon. However, Nirvana is also conceived of as the Void, which opens up another line of interpretation.

I rather suspect Dick was totally bonkers when he wrote Valis, but he was such a good artist that he created a wonderful strange book out of his own insanity. But the roots of his insanity go way back – they are apparent even in Confessions of a bleeep Artist, which is, in my opinion, one of the very best American novels of the post-war period.

try NAKED LUNCH, by william s. burroughs

Say what you want about Rall’s cartoons, but they do seem to generate the most interesting discussions.