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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Would You Hit It?

2 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

Most certainly I would NOT hurt a widdle kittie! I agree with William Burroughs that willingness to hurt a kitten is the firm foundation on which one grounds a proper philsophical understanding of evil. But the thought of the bioconservative freakout occasioned by the very notion of eroticizing a cloned kitten in a beaker proved to be, well, catnip.

jimf said...

That is an almost unutterably depressing photo.
The fact that the kitten is sitting in a beaker
highlights its total dependency on human whim
(and the fact that its whole species, like the
domestic dog, was shaped by interaction with
humans for **human** purposes). It looks (and is)
quite, quite lost.

I am extremely ambivalent about the whole notion
of **pets**. I don't own any, and won't ever own one.
I very much enjoy fussing over friends' animals,
and I have something of a reputation among my
friends for being someone whom their animals like
to see, but I just don't like the thought of
having that much power over (or responsiblility
for) another living creature.

(Of course, **some** SF writers imagine that the
best the human race can hope for is to end up as
the pets of our successors. Iain M. Banks makes
that seem quite attractive, at least on the surface,
but there's a dark, dark undertone to his Culture
novels that I think a lot of his >Hist fans miss.)