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Designer, writer, Reagan conservative. My musings can also be found here:

http://www.barkingdogoftheradicalright.com

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Brian Watt
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Brian Watt
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Jun 26, 2010

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Brian Watt

I live in a Southern California community on the edge of some undeveloped land and not too far away from the Cleveland National Forest. In the 17 years I've lived here there has been one mountain lion attack near an adjacent community when a bicyclist was riding through another park on a bike trail where several mountain lion signs had been posted. My recollection is that the animal was eventually tracked down and killed. It used to be the policy that when you purchased a home in the area you signed an acknowledgement that you knew you were going to live in mountain lion territory and to be watchful of your family and your pets. I can't understand people who choose to hike along back trails alone. Much wiser to hike with several people and maybe a large dog or two for added protection. Should we kill predators that have attacked humans? Yes. Should we indiscriminately attack all predators to somehow make the point that we are the rightful top of the food chain? Ludicrous. Should we be smarter about how we venture out into the wilder areas around our communities? Definitely.

Brian Watt

CoolHand

Brian Watt

And don't forget killer bunnies. They have big, pointy nasty teeth. Run away! Run away! · 2 hours ago

You'll need a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch for that one, you will. · 18 minutes ago

Consulting The Book of Armaments...I believe it's Chapter 2, Verses 9-21...

Brian Watt

Robert Lux

Terry Mott

Blue Yeti: If you are stupid enough to wade into a clearly marked alligator infested lake to retrieve a $2 golf ball, you deserve to be eaten. To penalize the alligator for doing what comes naturally seems grossly unfair to me.  · 2 hours ago

First, allowing a lake on a golf course to become, and remain, "alligator infested" is idiotic.  It's a golf course, not a nature preserve.  If a society is brain-addled enough to allow, encourage, and/or mandate such a practice, perhaps it deserves to have some of its members end up as alligator scat.

Second, killing man-eating predators, either reactively or proactively, isn't "punishment".  It's defense. · 3 hours ago

Should lions, tigers, and the other large cats be driven extinct? · 15 minutes ago

And don't forget killer bunnies. They have big, pointy nasty teeth. Run away! Run away!

Brian Watt

Valiuth: There is no such thing as exacting justice on nature or the sundry of creatures and plants that comprise it. The sharks don't care if you hunt them to extinction or if you love them. Our debates about how to protect ourselves from "rouge" animals are really questions of what are our aesthetic values.  

We only protect creatures we find cute, interesting, or impressive. We build attachments to them in the way we build attachments to all sorts of abstract things. People are willing to let people die for the preservation of symbols, because really we value the symbols more than the people. Animals are symbols to us.  · 2 minutes ago

Speaking of cute...snakes can be adorable as this Onion video shows...but extra care needs to be given to keep them as pets.

Brian Watt

BlueAnt

Blue Yeti If a parent is irresponsible enough to let their toddler anywhere near an alligator, don't kill the 'gator for behaving exactly as expected, arrest the parents for gross negligence. We're conservatives. We're supposed to care about personal responsibility and using our God given intelligence to assess danger and risk, especially when it comes to our children.

...

If a child gets taken by a gator, that gator needs to be put down, or it learns that small humans are an accessible form of prey.  You don't declare all out war on every gator in a 50 mile radius, but killing identifiable man-killers is a natural prerogative, completely separate from notions of justice or revenge.

Small animals and occasionally large will always be alligator prey. Gators don't "learn" otherwise. You could I suppose set up an alligator training school. A life-sized doll replicating a little boy or girl is placed in front of the snout of a gator and then the trainer could swat its every time it lunges for the doll? "No...no...no...don't do it...Bad alligator! Bad!" Might have to go through several trainers. Any volunteers?

Brian Watt

Terry Mott

Blue Yeti: If you are stupid enough to wade into a clearly marked alligator infested lake to retrieve a $2 golf ball, you deserve to be eaten. To penalize the alligator for doing what comes naturally seems grossly unfair to me.  · 2 hours ago

First, allowing a lake on a golf course to become, and remain, "alligator infested" is idiotic.  It's a golf course, not a nature preserve.  If a society is brain-addled enough to allow, encourage, and/or mandate such a practice, perhaps it deserves to have some of its members end up as alligator scat.

Second, killing man-eating predators, either reactively or proactively, isn't "punishment".  It's defense. · 1 hour ago

Can the gators be trained to caddy? They ought to know something by now on how to properly strike the ball and chip up to the greens. I think there's a helluva golf joke here just dying to get out.

Brian Watt
Nick Stuart: @Brian : I suspect it would be a behavioral thing. Animals have become unused to bad things happening to them if they get too close to humans. That's what's happening with the geese and coyotes here in suburban Chicagoland anyway. It would certainly have the effect of culling the boldest (and stupidest) ones. · 8 minutes ago

Oh, I see. If you cull the boldest and stupidest sharks from the greater population of sharks you get smarter and more fearful sharks who know to avoid humans and places where humans scuba dive and swim. Good luck with that. You do realize that Finding Nemo was not a documentary, yes?

Brian Watt
Nick Stuart: Wild animals are losing their fear of man, which is generally not a good thing. Time to remind them who sits on top of the food chain. If we don't get the exact croc or shark that is the culprit, pour encourager les autres, they'll get the message. · 2 minutes ago

Sharks and crocks don't convene meetings and discuss whether humans are exacting more retribution upon them, do they? I think you may be giving them more credit for rational thought than they are capable of. Let's face it, in certain environs, humans are prey and ought to be conscious of that and take the necessary safeguards to protect themselves. Exacting justice on sharks for the sin of one shark is a pretty damn silly notion. 

Brian Watt

In Alaska you are required to carry a rifle in most parks to protect yourself against bear attacks. Maybe surfers should practice surfing with shotguns.

Brian Watt

Rachel - Yeah, I don't think I'm missing the Big Picture. I think I'm fairly steeped in it. At the moment, there is little to no evidence that something so complex is something other than the product of natural, mechanistic laws. One could even argue that inferring that a deity created something so complex isn't even logical but rather wrapped up and entangled in the vestiges of earlier mythologies. If one resists the "natural" urge to ascribe phenomena whether as massive and complex as the structure of the universe or the human brain or as superficial as it rained today because I prayed last night for it because my lawn is starting to turn brown -  to superstition and myth and instead attempted to explore the natural mechanisms at work in the universe, then one might truly get a deeper understanding of the Big Picture. It does take a commitment to challenge one's preconceived notions and that can be incredibly difficult for some.

Brian Watt
Rachel Lu: I don't think the problem of evil (which is what you're onto now) *tells against* the cosmological argument or the argument from complexity. If I walk out onto my lawn one winter morning and find a glittering ice sculpture (let's say, depicting a lion standing over his recent kill), I'll immediately wonder, "Who did this?" It will never occur to me that it would have happened naturally. If you point out to me that, in fact, there are some problems with the sculpture (the lion's tail is too long, and he's eating a bighorn sheep, which doesn't live in the African savannah) that won't make me any likelier to conclude that it was a random natural phenomenon. I'll just wonder why the creator made these mistakes: did he not know that bighorn sheep aren't native to Africa, or was this part of some artistic point? And so on. And ice sculptures are far less intricate and complex than life more generally. · 2 minutes ago

I'm not talking about evil. I'm talking about intelligence or the lack thereof within the apparent design of nature.

Brian Watt
Rachel Lu: I might add: it would probably be a complicated matter to diagnose the extent to which natural selection *was historically intended* as an alternative to theistic creation, and the extent to which it just happened to offer that, for those who were interested in a Possibility B. Whether a theist can unproblematically believe in natural selection likely depends on what, precisely, you take the theory to imply. Theists have never been troubled by the observation that the world is subject to physical laws, and that these shape and order the natural world. That's obvious, and just as we'd expect a created world to be. It's also fine for scientists to seek natural explanations of natural phenomena; even if they believe that supernatural ones are possible, that's not their province. But most theists will be bothered by the suggestion that all life is purely the product of undirected mechanistic laws. If that's what the theory of natural selection implies, it's problematic. · 5 minutes ago

The evolution of the laryngeal nerve in mammals is an indication that that the designs in nature can sometimes be less "intelligent" than "naturally" supposed as shown here.

Brian Watt

Rachel Lu: 

For Brian -- I don't think any serious theist expects that every aspect of creation should fit neatly into some transparently obvious narrative. As Lady Philosophy reminds Boethius and God reminds Job, the Creator's ways are higher than ours and often opaque to us. But when I say that the world "powerfully appears" to be ordered, what I mean is that it exhibits incredibly complex life forms, which themselves fit together in perfectly balanced ecosystems. The natural human response to such beauty and complexity is to say, "How amazing! Someone must have made this, because it couldn't just have sprung from the ground." 

Of course there are other "natural human responses" that articulate that the designs are sometimes not so terribly beautiful but rather quite flawed and imperfect. If one is predisposed to think that a deity can do no wrong then that deity's creations and the mechanisms that he employs to create those creations must also be perfect. For all the gushing about how wonderfully intricate and amazing the human eye is, it is in fact a flawed and imperfect mechanism. There is both a literal and religious blind spot to overcome. 

Brian Watt

Works for me. Even if it does look like a promo for Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungun. 

Brian Watt

There's a good probability that billions of planets in the universe harbor life...which is routinely destroyed. There is a possibility that another asteroid will destroy all life on Earth at some point in the future. That could or could not be a designer's purpose. If one believes that it could be then it would be interesting to explore the thinking behind that proposition.

Brian Watt

Rachel, Permit me to clarify. The universe does appear to exhibit structure and design but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is a designer, a supreme omniscient, omnipotent consciousness behind it all. 

Natural selection was offered up as merely an explanation to account for very apparent physiological similarities between and among different species. It suggested that there was an underlying mechanism at work as a causal agent much later identified as genetics and the workings of the DNA molecule. It's as ordered as it is occasionally error laden resulting in mutations, deformities and the still born. Is it purposive? Perhaps so, but not the concern of most practicing scientists who only wish to know how the mechanisms work and sometimes fail. The universe itself is predominantly lifeless , grim and full of doom for stars, planets and galaxies that routinely get torn apart. Don't have to be a evolutionary biologist, an actor playing a superhero, a Norse deity or a rocket scientist to acknowledge that.

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