Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from April, 2012

Peter Singer: The Ethics of Food

In this persuasive lecture on ethics about modern diet and eating habits, Dr Peter Singer , the Utilitarian philosopher and professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, highlights and questions ethical issues concerning food involving animals, its corresponding cost to the ecology and considerations for animal rights that the humans have been, perhaps rather conveniently, avoiding to acknowledge. In his typical free-thinking, lets-face-it approach characterized by pragmatism rooted in down-to-earth reality, one can clearly bear witness to Prof Singer avoiding all possible temptations or invitations to indulging into any kind of rhetoric. Or so much as letting any sentimentalities enter into the frame of reasoning even while discussing gross cruelty to animals and the overall ecological impact it draws. The approach remains factual and clinical, and the presentation is driven by data in its most part. For philosophical indulgences around the issue, the Q&A section that follows

Humor: Scott Adams, The Hypnotist

This blog entry is a fan-post about choosing the three best blog entires that Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has posted over the month of March '12. Arguably, this is also a lazy task. Understandably, this will need some explaining. Scott Adams is a genius with hypnotic calibre. He can even prove it by producing a certain Certification in Hypnotism that hangs on his office wall, and about which we, the ardent followers of his humor blog at Dilbert.com and elsewhere such as his occasional NYT and WSJ columns, have heard more often than perhaps the issuing authorities themselves. That a certain obscure yet timely reference or reminder of being a certified hypnotist can turn his otherwise benign looking paragraphs into mesmerizing wand of a wizard is something only a certified hypnotist can do (I agree that this logic defeats itself, but I never claimed that hypnotism has anything to do with logic. If you have read Scott as regularly as he writes you have already learned that