Before opening the article:
“Well I eat meat so I don’t really have the moral high ground here.”
“Every year, to the horror of the rest of the world, hundreds of whales and dolphins are chased into bays on the Faroe Islands and massacred in barbaric ways with metal hooks, which are driven into the stranded mammals’ blowholes before their spines are cut,” she said in a statement shared with The Independent.
“The animals cry out in pain. Whole families are slaughtered, and some animals are seen swimming around in their family members’ blood for hours
Yeah…fuck those people. Some cultures are just worse than others.
Some cultures are just worse than others.
Hmm, do you think “good cultures” should interfere with “bad cultures” and stop them from their barbaric practices, teaching them the enlightened ways of the good cultures?
Yes. Fuck the prime directive, it’s monstrous and evil, and a way for non-interventionists to feel proud of themselves while washing their hands off problems they could easily solve, sanctimonious bastards that they are.
Fair - how much does this idea overlap with colonialism in your mind? Usually we refer to colonialism as intervention for the sake of extraction, but it was/is often motivated through intervention for the sake of morals.
Colonialism isn’t motivated by morals, colonialism is stealing other people’s land for its resources (most of the time; and sometimes the people were the resources being stolen) or strategic importance, or because it’s there, or because everyone else was doing it and not having colonies looked weak, or because it was a nigh uninhabitable far away place were you could dump any undesirables you wanted to forget about.
Morals were merely an excuse or justification, never the real reason.
More often than not colonialism didn’t even consider the native cultures (or the natives themselves, except possibly as a nuisance or, unless they were the resource being stolen, and then they weren’t considered as a culture or people, they were considered as product), they were irrelevant. Maybe some missionaries tried to teach them religion, so they could go to hell for their sins, and very occasionally some scholar categorised and described the cultural artifacts being stolen or destroyed, but that was never the driving force.
When I say fuck the prime directive I’m not talking about colonialism. I’m not talking about destroying cultures, or stealing their lands. The Faroese wouldn’t be any less Faroese if they couldn’t torture whales. They’d still have the rest of their culture, their language, their history, and, unlike with colonialism, their land and their lives. The “harm” to them would be minimal, and the world a less cruel and monstrous place.
Thanks for the elaboration.
What might be a practical way to do it? The Faroese currently have a colonial overlord, Denmark, should they send police or armed forces to stop the slaughter by force? Or should the international community try with sanctions first?
Should we also intervene in e.g. cruel factory farming in other countries like the U.K. or France? Or at least stop the torturing of geese to make foie gras?
Not if the bad cultures are indigenous and have been doing it for long enough. Nothing wrong with hunting endangered species if your culture is endangered.
The primary species being hunted, pilot whales, according to the IUCN is least concern (the lowest rating) and they consider the hunts sustainable: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/9250/50356171 The dolphin species aren’t endangered, either.
If you object to this on the basis that they’re intelligent that’s fine, but I also hope you don’t eat pork, since pigs are also highly intelligent (and for factory farmed, they lived and died in far worse conditions).
The Faroese are indigenous, have they been doing it long enough?
Yeah…fuck those people. Some cultures are just worse than others.
Factory farms are still way worse, because of the permanent confinement in cramped cages full of shit, the cruel treatment for their whole lives, and the insane scale. It’s like this event happening every second.
Just look at the Dominion documentary and compare it to this. We’re the worse culture.
Is this the place the documentary “The Cove” took place/was about?
I honestly hope it is because I’d really like to not believe that there’s more than one of these…
No, sorry, that’s Japan. People are monstrous everywhere.
WTF why are there children watching this?
Because they’re going to be eating it later, and this is less fucked up than how factory farmed animals live and die. The whaling that occurs in the Faroe Islands is non commercial, unlike the whaling done by Japan, Norway, Iceland, and South Korea.
If you eat meat you’re just paying someone else to do the same thing out of your sight 🤷♂️ Especially for something like pork, which similarly involves killing a highly intelligent animal. I didn’t grow up whaling, but I did grow up with family members who hunted and fished, and I think it was good for me to see in real terms where meat comes from and participate in processing it.
We can just not do both
Sure, feel free to go try to convince indigenous people to give up part of their way of life if that’s not ethically fraught to you. I’m not going to do it because if you care about animal suffering this isn’t even a drop in the ocean compared to factory farming. Effort is finite, I’m spending mine on the creatures living in factory farms, not the ocean.
How about we just don’t murder any animal or human? The Faroese can easily get by without killing thousands of whales they just do it because they can
‘They’re just bad and evil and do it for no reason’ would get you failed in an ethnic studies class. If you want to stop it from happening you need to understand the cultural background and significance. Cultures do change, but using colonial influence to force change isn’t the way to do it.
So you wouldnt try to stop a rape from happening if that was entrenched in a culture? Murder is bad and there are no reasons for animals to still get killed today.
You’re making up hypotheticals like any of this is happening in a vacuum. Eating a whale isn’t raping a person (or even an animal as you yourself acknowledge when you call it murder), it’s part of survival for many indigenous peoples living on remote islands. Are you paying to replace all that lost protein, fat, and calories? Do you have any idea how expensive it is to ship it there? Unless you’re dedicating yourself to radically altering the foods available to the people living there, you have no right to criticize how they feed themselves.
It is goofy to fixate on indigenous peoples engaging in sustainable hunts as long as factory farming exists, absolute waste of time. I can’t help but wonder if people freak out so hard about it because they feel like there’s a higher chance of coercing minorities.
Probably because it’s part of their culture. I personally don’t agree with it, whales and other sea life should be protected, but I understand that it’s important to include children in their culture. And also most of the world is very far removed from how meat gets to the table, people would probably be a bit more responsible about their consumption if they were involved in how the sausages get made.
This is just me questioning ‘culture’ : I saw a video of an Israeli child, not more than 7 years old in one of those chat platforms that matches people around the world for 5 minutes chat, and she was matched with an adult that greeted her and said he is Palestinian. The child immediately punched the camera. Is this culture? Is there a difference between the whale killing and this? I think maybe the concept of culture being this unchangeable thing that transcends humanity and empathy should be questioned, specially in how society is evolving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Is this culture?
Yeah, unfortunately it is. But there’s a difference between traditions and ingrained cultural racism.
Is there a difference between the whale killing and this?
Is there a difference between continuation of traditional practices of food sourcing and culturally acceptable racism? Yes, definitely. Does that make culling whales morally acceptable? Of course not.
I think maybe the concept of culture being this unchangeable thing that transcends humanity and empathy
I never said that, though I can see how what I said could be perceived that way.
I guess the same reason why all our ancestors were present as kids. In my chilhood I was present when my family killed chickens and goats.
Monstrous
Barbarians
