My first thought about reading this was how the Chinese whaling fleets would use this to their advantage. Not something I would be cool with and with any "good" technology, you have nefarious parties always looking to exploit it for their own ends.
That's because many people allow their (completely warranted) distrust of the CCP to justify all sorts of other spurious, baseless accusations of the CCP.
The CCP has done many things that deserve criticism; let's not invent new ones.
Human morality is above any nations petty laws. Culprit is the right word for those monsters still slaughtering these magnificent creatures.
Animals hunting other animals is a natural part of life.
Very few if any clean kills, infliction of immense suffering on creatures that have a cognitive capacity rivaling that of humans prior to robbing them of life, clear lack of necessity in the first place.
I dunno, seems kind of evil to me. This makes a good argument that the cruelty involved is undue:
Would you extend this to humans hunting humans?
But one thing that sets humans apart from other animals is our development of culture. As part of that we've made rules against killing (and eating) other humans in most cases, which is generally advantageous to all of us. So I'd argue it's a strategic change we've made.
If God didn't mean for people to hunt and eat other people, they wouldn't be made of meat.
But obviously that's not in our own interest, so it's perfectly natural for us to avoid resorting to canabalism.
All those animals had humans to thank for saving them from the wrath of God's genocidal whims and piques of anger.
It's a wonder none of the animals ate their delicious meaty human crew! I wonder how much fresh meat it took to feed all those carnivorous animals for that long, and why it didn't go bad sitting around for more than a month.
Maybe they brought along some extra humans to sacrifice, who would have drowned and been wasted otherwise, to keep the lions and tigers and jackals and pigs in fresh meat.
The Bible is such a great kid's book, especially all that pro-slavery stuff -- it should be mandatory reading in schools! It really makes you wonder. ;)
Oklahoma education head discusses why he’s mandating public schools teach the Bible:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/oklahoma-education-head-di...
This State Requires Schools to Teach the Bible. Parents and Teachers Are Suing:
https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/this-state-requires-s...
Elections have consequences!
The choice of verb is ironic given whales are mammals. I suppose that's why they call it whaling, although even that obscures the horror.
But I find it inconsistent to call China out for this instead of Japan. HackerNews has a tendency to jump through mental gymnastics to justify that Japan is perfect and can do no wrong. I say this after just leaving a Japanese museum 30 minutes ago that had blackface figures on exhibit
Either don’t call any country out for whaling or start by calling the countries typically deemed as more developed, advanced and progressive first. In other words, be moral relativist or if you should to be a moral absolutist then don’t pick and choose countries to exempt
HackerNews has a heavy US skew. From public statments of holders of the highest offices of their country - "they are all pesants" is the extent of US knowledge about Asia and if they knew what a map was they would point to the region inhabited by only pengins and suggest they should bomb them back into the stone age.
Or levy tariffs on the penguins.
This is an interesting comment that seems to suggest that exhibiting blackface figures in a museum context is inappropriate or bad. I have never been to Japan and have not seen this display so I can't comment on the contextual layout.
I am left wondering how future generations can ever benefit from the mistakes of their ancestors if those mistakes are not documented and available to serve as teaching moments.
Maybe this is why it is called a cycle of life - we erase or bury all the uncomfortable stuff so that our kids and their kids have no idea that we (our societies) already suffered the consequences of crossing that bridge long before they came around.
I would argue instead that museums are the best context for displays like blackface where they can put everything into context for future generations and perhaps as a people we can concentrate on solving new sets of problems with each successive generation. That would sound a lot more like progress to me.
It’s just there are people (Americans) who offended by this and riled up about progressive issues such as feminism, for which Japan is behind even China, but then shut that part of their brain off when they decide they want to idolize Japan.
The context is that it was a museum of retro items. The imagery is very similar to the backlash that the Pokémon Jynx received such that it has to be redesigned for the American market [1]. I don’t think the Japanese have any malicious intent, but perhaps unaware (and I don’t blame them) that the visual motifs offend some people.
Another example is social justice warriors recently being offended by the “Manji” symbol present in Japan from Buddhism and other religious for thousands of years, but were later appropriated by the nazis into the swastika. Japan had to change their digital maps recently because of this. [2]
[1] https://lavacutcontent.com/3-pokemon-redesigned-due-to-racia...
[2] https://japantoday.com/category/poll/should-japan-stop-ident...