7 Minutes

Till the start of NaNoWriMo. Frenzies of last minute research into obscure Christian mythology and lots of nervous energy...

NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month. http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Starts November 1st the second after midnight, ends November 30th the second before midnight. You have to write a novel in that amount of time. That's 50,000 words in 4 weeks. Sounds like a daunting task, but I think I'll give it a go. I figure that, if nothing else, it'll give me a motivation to write. I've got some vague ideas of a science fiction story that I might use, or I may wing it.

Nature

I was reading a debate recently on vegetarianism and veganism, and the pros and cons of each. As such debates always do, it evolved into one centered around cruelty to animals in farms. The debaters began talking about the intelligence of the animals and what they’re really missing out on, and (here’s what I really wanted to get to) whether farming was natural. One debater kept persistantly making the arguement that farming should be abilished because it is “unnatural”, and he was repeatedly shot down for this. I’m going to shoot him down a bit more (though I find it highly unlikely he’ll ever read this…).

There really can’t be any arguement made for the “unnaturalness” of farming. All animals have one purpose: to survive and make more of themselves; before we came along and got really insanely good at using tools, the competing animals were pretty much balanced enough to prevent anything like large-scale society or farming. But then humans appeared, and started making the ant-harvesting sticks fancier; next thing you know, we’re domesticating animals for pets and food and sprawling across the Earth’s surface. All of this stems, ultimately, from a desire to survive. We evolved intelligence to help us in this regard, and though it has been used for many and varied other pursuits, it’s ultimate purpose has mostly been to aid us in not being killed. And, as such, we’ve begun using our intelligence and skill with tool-making to breed lesser creatures to insure a food supply. Which would have occured had any other creature gained our level of sentience, intellect, and ant-harvesting-stick-making skill with said hypothetical animal’s food source.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone cruelty to animals; farming should be humane. It just shouldn’t be abolished because of some distorted and Disney-warped definition of nature. Urban sprawl may be screwing with the environment, but it’s still a product of the natural human desire to survive and dominate. All animals want to survive, and all sentient species would most likely come to dominate as we have because of that primal urge to survive. Thus, our unique dominance of planet Earth is not unnatural in any way; it’s about as natural as you can get.

OMGBLOG has moved

I heard about blogspot and moved OMGblog there. It seems to have a much friendlier interface.