ferret

great comment in the punk board.

I got into a drunken argument at 1:30 AM last night about Bush, and it just makes me sad that people who listen to punk rock these days don't think about the world and how fucked up it is.

I've not done a lot of study on it but I'm familiar with the concepts. The problem is that not all memes are created equal. Fads are memes, too, and just because an idea finds and audience doesn't make it universal or durable. IME the more complex an idea, the more explication it requires and the less likely it is to be universally acepted or applicable. The ideas of language or music or art are pure memes. Everybody has them and nobody is willing to relinquish them. Ideas like democracy or the penatatonic scale however, may find an audeicne, they may inculcate themselves into the collective consciousness of many, but theyre still going to face competing ideas and theyre still going to find cultures that they don't work for. Democracy and self determination are very powerful ideas, but they still died for 1600 years in Western culture and in the ensuing 400 years we still have no consensus on what they mean and how to best impliment them, and we've still had little success in exporting them beyond the developed world. Contrast this with, say, the very simple idea of the T shirt. You can find them in every corner of the world after 50 years.

Animal rights is not a simple concept. More importantly it is fundamentally at odds with the notion of the derivation of rights that western culture has accepted. In short there are a lot of people out there positing that they exist, but very few out there explicating why. What you end up with then is a purely empathic statement that ends up not being for anything, merely against something. Those ideas always fail. Plus to be quite honest, I'm more than a little skeptical that PeTA is genuinely engaging in such notions. Its more than a bit convenient for them in rationalizing their behavior and serving a great many other needs not of their cause but of their institution.

[Edited on Dec 21, 2003 3:47PM]