Tim Gier's Blog (18)

You already believe you are a good person who would not want to hurt others.

You already believe it is better to be helpful and kind whenever you can.…

Eric Schwitzgebel, Professor of Philosophy at University of California at Riverside, writes a blog called The Splintered Mind. His latest post is about how people do moral reasoning and how that reasoning is affected by seemingly irrelevant things. His findings, even among professional Philosophers, may suprise you....



People's responses to…

Dale Carrico, Ph.D. Lecturer, Department of Rhetoric, at the University of California, Berkeley writes at the blog amor mundi. Today's entry talks about "ag-gag" legislation as it relates to Carol Adams conception of the absent referent as well as how the animal-industrial complex devalues and damages human animals along with the non-human…

It seems like Rob Johnson just can’t let go of his obsession with ARZone.

On Brandon Becker's Facebook page, Rob Johnson said a number of things that are all equally banal, but I’d like to focus on just this:

Similarly the latest ARZone blog, which I am told Yates was promoting yesterday, is on the fact that they deem ARZone to be successful and so they deem the AR movement to be successful as ARZone supports open debate. There's a famous Chomsky quote that…

Yale University Professor of History Timothy Snyder reviews Steven Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136957/timothy-snyder/war-no-more?page=show

According to Snyder, Pinker's libertarian bent contributes to a basic flaw in his analysis: he "overlooks the crucial relationship between…

"The outrage generated by exposes of factory farming have led to a number of responses, but by far the most popular has been the rise of progressive systems of animal production designed to be more humane. Free-range pork and chicken, cage-free eggs, and grass-fed beef are prime examples of consumer options that have become mainstream alternatives to factory farmed meat. Within these arrangements, farm animals enjoy greater freedom to move about, socialize, eat from the land, interact with…

This is an interesting article. It's too long to post the whole thing here, so I'll just excerpt a couple of bits, but I encourage everyone to read the whole thing.

This part talks about the change in how people identify themselves in 2009-2010 compared to in 2005-2006.

Bon Appétit Management Co., which services Penn's dining facilities, has noticed an upswing in the number of students who say that they are vegetarian or vegan, said Terri Brownlee, the regional…

As of the end of the day May 31, 2011, ARZone had 1936 members and should surpass 2000 members by the end of June.

During the month of May, according to Google Analytics, the ARZone website (www.ARZone,ning.com) was visited by 2706 unique visitors from 80 countries across the planet for a total of 6040 visits. Those visits resulted in 16917 total page views.

ARZone is a global social network organization dependent on…

You probably have heard or seen reports online of people who say “I tried being vegan and almost died” as their reason for why they are no longer attempting to be vegan. Celebrity; Angelina Jolie remarked in a news interview “I joke that a big juicy steak is my beauty secret,”- “But seriously, I love red meat. I was a vegan for a long time, and it nearly killed me. I found I was not getting enough nutrition.” Angelina was obviously not vegan, ever. Veganism is not a plant-based diet.…

"Being featured on ARZone's worldwide Live Guest Chat has reinvigorated my thinking about a couple of topics (here's the transcript). And then I read the "OMG!!!!!OED!!!!!LOL!!!!!" in today's New York Times, and I couldn't resist posting.

A couple of years ago I wrote about whether it's a good use of my time to be a purist about the term "animal rights" when most of the world doesn't have…

In a new blog post, Mary Martin, PhD links to a new…

In the new book, Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation, Co-author Professor Robert Garner says this:…

The following is an adaptation of something I wrote in March of this year in response to a proposed boycott of the State of Alaska. Friends of…