Philosphical Conundrum

An interesting irony. Watching the Scalito hearings in the Senate on CSPAN, a repug senator was seeking to discredit the opposition to Alito by showing that a witness the Dems had arranged to speak against Alito (and then cancelled) was an extremeist and how desperate the opposition must be to have considered him. I don't recall the name but apparently this witness had had an op-ed piece in the LA Times comparing our slaughter of animals to the holocaust. So this repug senator goes into detail about how we know that animals (pigs, cows . . .) can feel fear and loneliness and love and how we put them on trucks and take them to be slaughtered in mass. He then asks if our use of them for food justifies this and if it would have justified the holocaust if Jews had been eaten. This is worth considering and the irony doesn't stop with this right-winger making the case against animal slaughter and doing so very effectively.

If one is to make the case that the holocaust is far worse than and not comparable to the organized mass slaughter of cows or pigs, the ONLY basis for this is the assumption that humans are in a different league than other animals -- a relative assumption at best, based on what -- on sentiance maybe? (Though sentiance may be questionable in the case of many.)

If one is to make that assumption, that humans are above animals and that unlike animals, human life is sacred, then one must ask how this repug can support the premeditated slaughter of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of humans by this administration, especially for an agenda at best questionable and at worst, based on a pack of lies.