Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "It's Not On":
He seems obsessed with commenting on everyone and everything, rather stupidly at times, and always being at events where even third-rate people offer him a photo-op.
Possibly his ego is larger than his brain.
I would rather vote for a chimpanzee.
Posted by Anonymous to Our Town and Its Business at 3 July 2014 10:16
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Charlie Rose's guest on a show last week was a Harvard Professor of Law . He has written a book on the Supreme Court of America.
One of Charlie's questions was the large issues the Court would have to deal with.
The definition of a person , the Professor answered. (I paraphrase) Is a chimpanzee a person , he said.
It wasn't the only answer. But it was so utterly sensible.
We know they think and exercise judgement. They are organized. They laugh and love and grieve the loss of a loved one.
They share our genetics.
If we keep on burying principles and rules to live by the gap continues to shrink.
Thursday, 3 July 2014
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5 comments:
It's amazing what you can find when you go searching.
An ABC copyright from December 2013 begins:
"Tommy, a 26 year-old chimpanzee owned by a couple in upstate New York, has a lawyer and a trust fund in a bid by a non-human rights group to have him declared the first animal to be considered a person under the law..
In what may be the first case of its kind, the Boston-based Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) is asking a court to free Tommy from what they describe as a "small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed" in Gloversville, N.Y.
NhRP argues, based on "law, science and history," that the chimp has all the rights of habeas corpus - a writ that requites a person under detention to be brought before a judge - so that he may be released.
The group says animals like chimpanzees possess: "complex cognitive abilities as autonomy, self-determination, self-consciousness, awareness of the past, anticipation of the future and the ability to make choices; display complex emotions such as empathy; and construct diverse cultures."
I particularly like this last ability and wonder what our Culture Centre would look like if these cute little hairy creatures had been in charge.
Possibly we have been under a gross misconception all along as to our politicians' innate ability to mismanage everything they seem to touch.
Chimps might have been better.
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