Is the Philosopher, ‘Peas Man” Michael Marder Stoned or just a Stone?

If Peas Can Talk, Should We Eat Them?

By MICHAEL MARDER

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Tags:

Flowers and Plants, Peas, Philosophy, Research, Vegetarianism

Article from the New York Times:

 Imagine a being capable of processing, remembering and sharing information — a being with potentialities proper to it and inhabiting a world of its own. Given this brief description, most of us will think of a human person, some will associate it with an animal, and virtually no one’s imagination will conjure up a plant.

Since Nov. 2, however, one possible answer to the riddle is Pisum sativum, a species colloquially known as the common pea. On that day, a team of scientists from the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at Ben-Gurion University in Israel published the results of its peer-reviewed research, revealing that a pea plant subjected to drought conditions communicated its stress to other such plants, with which it shared its soil. In other words, through the roots, it relayed to its neighbors the biochemical message about the onset of drought, prompting them to react as though they, too, were in a similar predicament.

Curiously, having received the signal, plants not directly affected by this particular environmental stress factor were better able to withstand adverse conditions when they actually occurred. This means that the recipients of biochemical communication could draw on their “memories” — information stored at the cellular level — to activate appropriate defenses and adaptive responses when the need arose.

Leif Parsons

In 1973, the publication of “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, which portrayed vegetal life as exquisitely sensitive, responsive and in some respects comparable to human life, was generally regarded as pseudoscience. The authors were not scientists, and clearly the results reported in that book, many of them outlandish, could not be reproduced. But today, new, hard scientific data appears to be buttressing the book’s fundamental idea that plants are more complex organisms than previously thought.

The research findings of the team at the Blaustein Institute form yet another building block in the growing fields of plant intelligence studies and neurobotany that, at the very least, ought to prompt us to rethink our relation to plants. Is it morally permissible to submit to total instrumentalization living beings that, though they do not have a central nervous system, are capable of basic learning and communication? Should their swift response to stress leave us coldly indifferent, while animal suffering provokes intense feelings of pity and compassion?

Evidently, empathy might not be the most appropriate ground for an ethics of vegetal life. But the novel indications concerning the responsiveness of plants, their interactions with the environment and with one another, are sufficient to undermine all simple, axiomatic solutions to eating in good conscience. When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetal beings thus reconceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.

Recent findings in cellular and molecular botany mean that eating preferences, too, must practically differentiate between vegetal what-ness and who-ness, while striving to keep the latter intact. The work of such differentiation is incredibly difficult because the subjectivity of plants is not centered in a single organ or function but is dispersed throughout their bodies, from the roots to the leaves and shoots. Nevertheless, this dispersion of vitality holds out a promise of its own: the plasticity of plants and their wondrous capacity for regeneration, their growth by increments, quantitative additions or reiterations of already existing parts does little to change the form of living beings that are neither parts nor wholes because they are not hierarchically structured organisms. The “renewable” aspects of perennial plants may be accepted by humans as a gift of vegetal being and integrated into their diets.

But it would be harder to justify the cultivation of peas and other annual plants, the entire being of which humans devote to externally imposed ends. In other words, ethically inspired decisions cannot postulate the abstract conceptual unity of all plants; they must, rather, take into account the singularity of each species.

The emphasis on the unique qualities of each species means that ethical worries will not go away after normative philosophers and bioethicists have delineated their sets of definitive guidelines for human conduct. More specifically, concerns regarding the treatment of plants will come up again and again, every time we deal with a distinct species or communities of plants.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea,” the true identity of a princess is discovered after she spends a torturous night on top of 20 mattresses and 20 featherbeds, with a single pea lodged underneath this pile. The desire to eat ethically is, perhaps, akin to this royal sensitivity, as some would argue that it is a luxury of those who do have enough food to select, in a conscious manner, their dietary patterns. But there is a more charitable way to interpret the analogy.

Ethical concerns are never problems to be resolved once and for all; they make us uncomfortable and sometimes, when the sting of conscience is too strong, prevent us from sleeping. Being disconcerted by a single pea to the point of unrest is analogous to the ethical obsession, untranslatable into the language of moral axioms and principles of righteousness. Such ethics do not dictate how to treat the specimen of Pisum sativum, or any other plant, but they do urge us to respond, each time anew, to the question of how, in thinking and eating, to say “yes” to plants.

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Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His most recent book, “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life” will be published later this year.

The above article was found at the New York Times.

Comment:   it was only a matter of time when university loonies blinded by their  religion, Marxism, would devise a belief that  plants and animals are equal.   Michael Marder isn’t the first of the crowd.   For years the lefty gals who dictate things garden have felt sorry for Native Minnesota plants for being overlooked (‘neglected’, they would claim)  from today’s garden trade.   Plants should be made equal.  That so many natives not sold in the trade   are  ugly in look or habit, or both makes no difference to the lefty soft of mind  but hot in heart.    …..

Plants not ‘citizens’ of the original thirteen states are also  on the lefty gal feel-sorry-for list as well.  

It is likely that the majority of  urban American junior high-age ‘students’ believe that a tomato is manufactured at the local super market.  

Growing marijuana in the basement might be the closest touch the American under forty years old  to the world of the out doors…….in the basement no less.    These are the folks who believe in Obama’s  man-caused Global Warming fantasy.

Let’s face it   In my lifetime the American has left first hand food producing, moved to the city and suburb,  reduced their consumption of useful much less vital learnings at school and university,  having been trained to become a Marxist  automaton  rather than to know basic botany and the miracle of life, animal or vegetable.

I do hope these lefties become paranoid about eating vegetables.    As Dennis mentioned  during his show, what is the Marxist trade going to live on, if they come to believe that both animals and vegetables have ‘feelings’, and  the human  has become a cannibal eating the both?  What will happen to our female population?

May God bless them, but  most of these crackpots are women.    Japgarden Juniper  (Juniperus procumbens), named thusly for over two hundred years now is now called “garden juniper” in  politically correct horticultural circles.

They are university people whose knowledge seems to be confined to the  politically correct.   Should we let them practice  what they preach. or try to convert them to learning knowledge?

I caught a part of Dennis’ radio program to day while delivering  a hill top spruce,  three Calgary Carpet junipers, two Juddii vibernums,  three Euphorbia polychroma, and two gold rubiy barberries.  None of them have been really ‘native’ to anyplace except in today’s  home grounds………I recommend you don’t eat these ‘daisies’ as substitute peas.

Barack”s Book Story Telling turns out to be Story Telling too

Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend

by John Hinderaker   at   PowerLine:

There has been a lot of hilarity today over the revelation that the “New York girlfriend” who plays a significant role in Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams From My Father did not, strictly speaking, exist. Rather, she was a composite or “compression” of several girlfriends that Obama now says he had after he graduated from college. To be fair, Obama wrote in the introduction to his book that “some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known,” so the reader was forewarned. Whether a typical reader would have imagined that the “New York girlfriend” was such a composite, and that various incidents attributed to Obama’s relationship with her never happened, I don’t know.

The revelation comes from a forthcoming biography of Obama by David Maraniss that is excerpted in next month’s Vanity Fair. Like most Vanity Fair articles it is just about interminable, and I haven’t yet had time to read it all. But already, several interesting points emerge.

There actually was a New York girlfriend. Her name is Genevieve Cook, and Maraniss interviewed her for his book. Not only that, she kept a journal that included the time when she dated Obama, from which Maraniss quotes. She is by no means hostile to Obama, but her account of their relationship diverges from his, in Dreams From My Father, in a number of ways.

For example, in his book Obama says that he broke up with the New York girlfriend. Not so, replies Ms. Cook: actually, she chose to end the relationship as a result of what she saw as Obama’s remoteness. But the one who writes the autobiography gets to tell it his way.

In his book, Obama tells a story about taking his New York girlfriend to a play. The story is important because in Obama’s telling, it led to the end of the relationship. The play, as you might imagine, dealt with race:

One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.

Only Genevieve Cook says it never happened. No such play, no such dialogue. Maraniss charitably supposes that the event involved a different, later girlfriend in Chicago who was part of the “composite” girlfriend character. But Obama places the play in New York, not Chicago. My guess is that the incident never happened at all: one nice thing about fictionalizing an autobiography and including fake characters is that it gives you license to include events that didn’t happen but, from an artistic standpoint, should have.

It was striking to me that when Genevieve met Obama he was a 22-year-old college graduate, but hadn’t yet figured out what his name was. In high school, he had generally been called “Barry,” but by this time he apparently was looking for something more formal:

She called him Bahr-ruck, with the accent on the first syllable, and a trill of the r’s. Not Bear-ick, as the Anglophile Kenyans pronounced it, and not Buh-rock, as he would later be called, but Bahr-ruck. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her.

I find that very odd. Think how fundamental a part of you your name is: when you were in elementary school, did you have any doubt about what to call yourself? At 22, Obama was still trying out names.

The Vanity Fair excerpt talks about another girlfriend, not the “New York girlfriend” but a woman Obama had known at Occidental who spent a summer in New York and dated Obama. Her name is Alex McNear. McNear, unfortunately, kept the love letters that Obama sent to her. They are hilarious, and tend to confirm the perception that Obama is a hopeless bullshitter:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

That, folks, is not a parody. It may provide a hint as to why Obama’s college and law school grades remain a well-kept secret.

In one respect, Maraniss’s account of Obama is endearing. He describes how Obama became a community organizer; one problem was that he wasn’t quite sure what a community organizer does:

Obama had focused his ambitions on organizing since his last year at Columbia, while acknowledging that he was not entirely certain what it meant.z’

Comment:    There is next to nothing genuine, forthright and honest associated with Barack hussein Obama.    He knows who he is, but he is not one of us.    He is a foreigner to America…..a place he obviously doesn’t like.

Obama Folks’ Occupy’s Communist Day riots and mayhem didn’t quite Topple Capitalism

Occupy May Day Fail      by John Hinderaker     at   PowerLine:

The Occupy movement chose the international Communist holiday, May Day, to try to bring the country to its knees. The effort was a complete fizzle. Demonstrations were few and far between, and achieved nothing beyond minor disruption, even in New York, where Occupiers had vowed to paralyze the city. The principal news story that emerged from the event was the arrest of five “anarchists” who plotted to blow up a bridge near Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain Dealer notes the anarchists’ close connection to the local Occupy movement:

Five men involved in Occupy Cleveland stand accused of plotting to blow up a bridge over Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Sagamore Hills. The organization itself has not been implicated, but the arrests prompted organizers to cancel their May Day protest and instead spend the day distancing themselves from what they characterized as a fringe element. …

Brandon Baxter, Anthony Hayne, Joshua Stafford, Connor Stevens and Douglas Wright are “self-described anarchists,” federal officials said Tuesday. And according to a half-dozen Occupy Cleveland leaders and supporters interviewed by The Plain Dealer, they found a home under the organization’s tent on downtown’s Public Square.

No surprise there. But CNN considered the would-be terrorists’ allegiance something of a mystery. Its “Overheard on CNN.com” feature posed the question, “Where do anarchists fall on political spectrum?”

One of the most talked-about stories on Tuesday was about five men arrested for allegedly conspiring to blow up a bridge about 15 miles south of Cleveland, according to court documents released Tuesday. Authorities say at least three of the men are self-proclaimed anarchists, and a lot of readers pondered what kinds of philosophies the men held and how they could be classified politically.

Are the men connected with the Occupy movement? Or with the tea party? Or neither?

The feature led off with photos of the five men who were arrested. Here they are:

Hmm. Occupiers or tea partiers? Hmm. It’s a puzzle, all right.

Well, not such a puzzle if you check their Facebook pages, which Jim Treacher did:

Just How Much will the Obama Democrats RIG the November Elections?

THE REALITY OF VOTER FRAUD     

by John Fund      at National Review Online:

Houston — The 2012 elections will feature many close races, likely including the presidential contest. That makes concern about voter fraud and ballot integrity all the more meaningful, and a conference held here last weekend by the watchdog group True the Vote made clear just how high the stakes are.

“Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of voter fraud that has been documented by historians and journalists,” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 2008, upholding a strict Indiana voter-ID law designed to combat fraud. Justice Stevens, who personally encountered voter fraud while serving on various reform commissions in his native Chicago, spoke for a six-member majority. In a decision two years earlier clearing the way for an Arizona ID law, the Court had declared in a unanimous opinion that “confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy. Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”

Indeed, a brand-new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 64 percent of Americans believe voter fraud is a serious problem, with whites registering 63 percent agreement and African-Americans 64 percent. A Fox News poll taken last month found that 70 percent of Americans support requiring voters to show “state or federally issued photo identification” to prove their identity and citizenship before casting a ballot. Majorities of all demographic groups agreed on the need for photo ID, including 58 percent of non-white voters, 52 percent of liberals, and 52 percent of Democrats.

Catherine Englebrecht, the Houston businesswoman and mother who founded True the Vote in 2009 after witnessing an ACORN-style group registering thousands of illegal or nonexistent voters in Houston, told the voter observers from 32 states gathered for the summit: “There is nothing more important this year than your work in making sure legitimate votes aren’t canceled out by fraud.” Liberal groups ranging from the ACLU to the NAACP oppose voter-ID laws, claiming that voter fraud is almost nonexistent and that an ID requirement would amount to voter suppression. It’s certainly true that in-person voter fraud — the type of fraud most easily fought with voter-ID laws — isn’t the whole picture. Voter-ID laws must be combined with tighter controls on absentee ballots, the tool of choice of fraudsters. But filmmaker James O’Keefe demonstrated just last month how easy — and almost impossible to detect — voter impersonation can be: A white 22-year-old assistant of O’Keefe’s was offered the Washington, D.C., primary ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder, the most visible opponent of ID laws.

Just this week in Fort Worth, Texas, a Democratic precinct chairwoman was indicted on charges of arranging an illegal vote. Hazel Woodard James has been charged with conspiring with her non-registered son to have him vote in place of his father. The only reason the crime was detected was that the father showed up later in the day to vote at the same precinct. Most fraudsters are smart enough to have their accomplices cast votes in the names of dead people on the voter rolls, who are highly unlikely to appear and complain that someone else voted in their place.

Comment:   List any category of politics you wish, name one in which Obama and his ILK can be trusted to recognize truth much less practice it.    Why is it that the institutionalized retarded and senile and the dead always vote Democrat in presidential elections?

One of the highlights of the True the Vote conference was a speech by Artur Davis, who was a Democratic congressman from Alabama until last year. Davis has been an up-and-coming black Democratic leader, having been selected to second the nominationof Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver.But in 2009 he decided to vote against Obamacare because he viewed it as unworkable and too expensive. When he ran the next year in the Democratic primary for governor in Alabama, he was attacked as disloyal and defeated by a coalition of liberals, teachers’ unions, and old-style black political machines.He told me that the voter suppression he most observed in his 68 percent African-American district was rampant fraud in counties with powerful political machines. To keep themselves in power, these machines would frequently steal the votes of members of minority groups. “I know it exists, I’ve had the chance to steal votes in my favor offered to me, and the people it hurts the most are the poor and those without power,” he said.

 

Davis made it clear in his speech to True the Vote that much of the opposition to voter-ID and ballot-integrity laws is a sad attempt to inject racism into the discussion and intimidate supporters of anti-fraud laws. “This is not a billy club, this is not a fire hose,” he told his audience while holding up his driver’s license. “Where is this notion that if I have a right [to vote], that I don’t have to be bothered with responsibility?” He concluded with an appeal for all sides to eschew racial appeals: “We have to be one country, but the way you become one country is you stop actinglike a country that’s divided into different buckets and bases of people.” 

It’s a pity that so much of the discussion about voting this fall will be drenched in race. Americans have two important rights when it comes to voting. The first is the right to vote without fear and intimidation, for which this country fought an epic civil-rights struggle in the 1960s. Those gains in voter access must be preserved. But Americans also have a right to vote without their ballots’ being canceled out by people who are voting twice, are voting for the dead or nonexistent, or are non-citizens. We can and should accomplish two goals in the 2012 election — making sure it is easy to vote, and making sure it is hard to cheat. Groups such as True the Vote will be essential to make sure both sides of that imperative are fulfilled.

— John Fund is the national-affairs columnist for NRO.

The Fraud-American-Indian Elizabeth Warren another Democrat cheating for Favors

Elizabeth Warren camp:

Her great-great-great-grandmother

was Cherokee

by Allahpundit    at HotAir:

Yesterday I thought this story was small potatoes but revealing as an insight into how far Warren might go to gild her resume with a diversity credential. After this, though, I’m honestly interested in hearing her address it. What’s the threshold of “minority” status in her mind? Are we back to the “one drop” rule or is 1/32 juuuuuuust enough for a shot of authenticity whereas 1/64 is a bridge too far? Actually, maybe those standards aren’t so different: When you’re talking about a great-great-great-grandparent, one drop is about all that’s left.

Ace notes that the premise behind diversity hiring is that a minority employee brings a perspective that whites simply can’t. Another premise, a la affirmative action, is that a minority employee deserves special consideration because he/she had to cope with cultural disadvantages that whites haven’t. Is Liz Warren claiming that she’s in either of those boats? Can’t wait for this press conference.

Desperately scrambling to validate Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage amid questions about whether she used her minority status to further her career, the Harvard Law professor’s campaign last night finally came up with what they claim is a Cherokee connection — her great-great-great-grandmother.

“She would be 1⁄32nd of Elizabeth Warren’s total ancestry,” noted genealogist Christopher Child said, referring to the candidate’s great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, who is listed on an Oklahoma marriage certificate as Cherokee. Smith is an ancestor on Warren’s mother’s side, Child said…

Meanwhile, Warren’s camp issued statements from five faculty members at the four universities where she’s taught, including Harvard Law School and University of Pennsylvania, to knock down any suggestion she used her Native American background to get hired.

“To suggest that she needed some special advantage to be hired here or anywhere is just silly. She was hired for her great abilities as a teacher and a scholar. Her family tree had nothing to do with it,” wrote Jay Westbrook, chairman of the business law school at the University of Texas at Austin, who hired Warren.

The same genealogist also discovered that one of Warren’s great-grandfathers, although white, did live for a time in Cherokee territory, which makes him … kind of minority, I guess? Good enough for her to claim 1.5/32 status?

Three lingering questions here. One, as noted yesterday: Why did Warren stop describing herself as minority circa 1995? What changed? Two: Why did she start describing herself as a minority circa 1986? If she didn’t have hard documentation until literally yesterday that she was part Native American, what evidence was she relying on to claim that distinction in the first place? “Grandma told me I might be part Cherokee” doesn’t cut it, I hope, when we’re talking about criteria that qualify as a competitive advantage in one’s profession. You need proof, or at least you should. Three, via Ann Althouse: Why does Warren’s campaign seem so impressed by the fact that her previous employers are willing to say her ancestry played no role in hiring her? Of course they’re going to say that. If they don’t, they know it’ll be interpreted by the public as an admission that she was graded on a curve in the hiring process. Either embrace diversity hiring as a glorious fair-minded policy or don’t, but don’t try to have it both ways.

Comment:   Now wonder Obama Democrats are running their RACIST campaign this election round…….reeling in the garbage caused by Marxist diversity tribalism taught at your corner high school and university.