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Originally Posted by Sean
I'm not sure I quite agree. What I'm primarily talking about is that I think the people in PETA are idiots... I've never been a believer in the idea that "any publicity is good publicity". In the case of PETA, I remember when I actually used to think they were a good organization that was working for a just cause. That was before they started doing moronic things like equating chicken farms to the Nazi Holocaust, or the Westminster Dog Show to a KKK rally.
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Just a reminder that I'm not defending PETA as an organisation or saying that I consider their approach in this instance as necessarily the right one. However we appear to disagree on the strength of our feelings about it. Clearly there are going to be people such as yourself who find it offensive - perhaps a lot of people - which is why I would question it on the grounds of 'net' effectiveness compared with the publicity it receives. Personally I don't feel offended by it. I'm not going to say I think it's silly for people to get offended by two people dressing up, but for myself I genuinely don't feel that strongly about it at all. Nor would I if they dressed up in homosexual-exterminating Nazi garb to make their point.
I may or may not agree with the veracity of their comparisons, but the only time I'd feel
offended is if they were actually
advocating something along the lines of what their KKK/Nazi clothes might suggest they'd advocate.
In other words, the clothes have nothing to do with it, and nor does their comparison.
On the tight-rope between drawing parallels and implying moral equivalency, and the deliberate exploitation of that proximity for creating controversial publicity campaigns (<< apologies for how pretentious that sounds), I'm not sure what else I can say without repeating myself. Even if any of them have taken the parallel into direct moral equivalency, the above still stands.
However, let's say for the sake of argument that PETA
are asserting that selective dog breeding/dog eugenics is morally equivalent, and is as wrong as the Holocaust. I still don't buy that, but for now let's just assume that's the real extent of their comparison. In my view, it's a mistake (a common one) to conclude that they'd be downgrading or trivializing the Holocaust, for the simple reason that we would be assuming the wrong moral starting point (and almost certainly be incorrect in doing so). Believing that selective dog breeding is morally as abhorrent as the Holocaust is not the same as believing that the Holocaust is morally as trivial as selective dog breeding. In other words, equating the two is only a problem if the two are being equated as similarly trivial rather than similarly serious.
Whether I agree with the equivalency is a purely intellectual argument about whether I consider animals and humans to be on an entirely equal footing, not about whether I think the object of that comparison is really that bad after all. As it happens (not being a 'fundamentalist' sort of guy), I don't agree about the moral equivalency between human and animal. But I wouldn't try to attribute to them a downgrading of the Holocaust (or rather the crimes of the KKK. Christ. Sorry, I got sidetracked by Mr Godwin back there... ) because it would be a disingenuous way to attack them.
That's why I think often in these controversies (and they crop up surprisingly often, whether it's off-the-cuff remarks by politicians or activist groups or whatever), the accusation that people are trivializing something is almost always based on fallacious logic, but because
so many people in society make the same mistake, we end up pandering to this unnecessary notion of phantom offense, and the person or organisation concerned is obliged to bow down and deliver their utmost apologies for the 'comparison'. (Sometimes the whole thing comes across like a big public desire to simply utter the words, "How DARE they?!")
As for Charles Darwin, to the very best of my knowledge, he never once advocated, let alone practised, eugenic policies (though I understand his cousin was a different matter). Darwin 'observed' the world around him and 'proposed a theory' about how things came to be as they were. The gap between Darwin's explanations in
On The Origin of Species and the advocating/practising of human eugenics is of
several magnitudes greater than the gap between actively practising human eugenics and dog eugenics.
But I agree with you on one thing - it would make for a good commercial.