Years ago after reading Metaphors We Live By, I started looking at our language-driven biased world with skepticism.
Later, Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature made a much better concrete case for that bias. For the past two decades, neuroscience and anthropology made me completely irritated with our use of language without any understanding of how it not only has the highest impact on our thought process but also affects the entire civilization and causes so much unwarranted sufferings.
One of my all-time favorite movies is Arrival; if you haven't watched it, please watch it. If you already watched it, please re-watch with a new mindset. The aliens in the movie are fictitious but the rest of the science is true.
Check out of this Wikipedia link on the stereotype of animals based on our language which has become a reality because of one simple reason. We use these stereotypes in everyday language and in turn, we look down on animals to convenience ourselves to make them suffer for our selfishness.
PETA in 2018 made a thoughtful and right case by comparing 'Anti-Animal Language' to Hate Speech and called to eliminate them from our lingo.
Most people I know have smirked at me when I make a case for the careful use of language when referring to animals. Some of them used the fucking worst ineffective word of all time - "interesting".
Imagine if you are calling your kid an idiot and stupid for years and decades and then check out what happens. I am not even talking to about what kind of a human being that kid becomes and what the kid thinks of you.
I am talking about irrespective of what kind of a human being that kid becomes and what kid thinks of you - what you "feel" and "believe" about that kid after decades of using the words idiot and stupid.
You can never escape the self-imposed prison you built where your kid will always be an idiot and stupid. That is the power of language.
When it comes to eating animals and other morality related stuff, I always use reality with no place for sugar-coated words or metaphors. Bacon and Pork are nothing but a dead body of an intelligent pig and Veal is nothing but a baby cow murdered while still in their innocence without giving them any chance to experience and cherish this planet. I will say now what future generation will look back at us and will say - "Fuck you, morons. You don't have a heart nor brain because you refuse to self reflect outside of yourself and your super cuddly family."
Rebecca Solnit this week even proposed a need for change language in politics:
While oncologists are questioning the use of "war" metaphor, Anya Plutynski went even further in her book Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in Disorder by questioning why we are classifying everything into one simple word called "cancer"? Is that even right? She is calling bullshit on scientists who are also prone to these language biases and using one-word "cancer" for multitudes.
The day he was cremated, I was quoting her stating we should even stop stating cancer as one holistic disease and ranted about all of the above issues with sapiens and their language, how we refuse to even change a simple thing like spoken lingo even if it created so much pain and suffering. Finally, I said that's why I prefer to live with animals and that's one of the reasons why I lived with Max for 14 years.
The uni-emotions creatures refuse to get it and gave a sarcastic reply something along the lines of I prefer animals because they don't speak back to me.
Yes, this comment was made on the day my Max became ashes. Remember, I didn't ask them to quit killing animals but just be conscious and aware of the language we use and correct it. Uni-emotional creatures are driven by ideology. Beware of them. Flush them out of your lives.
This is part 2 of my lessons from Russ's latest episode with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.
Later, Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature made a much better concrete case for that bias. For the past two decades, neuroscience and anthropology made me completely irritated with our use of language without any understanding of how it not only has the highest impact on our thought process but also affects the entire civilization and causes so much unwarranted sufferings.
One of my all-time favorite movies is Arrival; if you haven't watched it, please watch it. If you already watched it, please re-watch with a new mindset. The aliens in the movie are fictitious but the rest of the science is true.
Check out of this Wikipedia link on the stereotype of animals based on our language which has become a reality because of one simple reason. We use these stereotypes in everyday language and in turn, we look down on animals to convenience ourselves to make them suffer for our selfishness.
PETA in 2018 made a thoughtful and right case by comparing 'Anti-Animal Language' to Hate Speech and called to eliminate them from our lingo.
Most people I know have smirked at me when I make a case for the careful use of language when referring to animals. Some of them used the fucking worst ineffective word of all time - "interesting".
Imagine if you are calling your kid an idiot and stupid for years and decades and then check out what happens. I am not even talking to about what kind of a human being that kid becomes and what the kid thinks of you.
I am talking about irrespective of what kind of a human being that kid becomes and what kid thinks of you - what you "feel" and "believe" about that kid after decades of using the words idiot and stupid.
You can never escape the self-imposed prison you built where your kid will always be an idiot and stupid. That is the power of language.
When it comes to eating animals and other morality related stuff, I always use reality with no place for sugar-coated words or metaphors. Bacon and Pork are nothing but a dead body of an intelligent pig and Veal is nothing but a baby cow murdered while still in their innocence without giving them any chance to experience and cherish this planet. I will say now what future generation will look back at us and will say - "Fuck you, morons. You don't have a heart nor brain because you refuse to self reflect outside of yourself and your super cuddly family."
Rebecca Solnit this week even proposed a need for change language in politics:
It is an ongoing mistake to refer to politicians as leaders. Almost all are followers, and they should be if they are to be representatives.Finally, Siddharth Mukerjee popularized the aversion for "war on cancer" metaphor in his book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and thankful, most oncologists feel the same way.
While oncologists are questioning the use of "war" metaphor, Anya Plutynski went even further in her book Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in Disorder by questioning why we are classifying everything into one simple word called "cancer"? Is that even right? She is calling bullshit on scientists who are also prone to these language biases and using one-word "cancer" for multitudes.
The question "Is cancer one kind or many?" presupposes that there must be one way in which cancer kinds can be classified in virtue of their "natural" properties or features. But there are many "natural" features or relevance of the classification of cancer, and they do not yield a unified classification schema. Perhaps ironically, to be a good naturalist and realist about natural kinds requires granting that the "natural kind" category is itself not very natural.
There must be some empirical warrant for categorizing kinds in the ways we do. But the case of cancer suggests that which empirical facts and which features or properties are appropriate for classifying kinds in one domain may or may not be appropriate for all contexts or other domains.
It is surely true that cancer(s) have shared features, in virtue of (very broadly speaking) shared properties, causes, and mechanisms. But it is also true that there are many ways of picking out kinds of cancer. Depending on the scale of analysis and the type of feature one chooses, cancers cluster in different ways. Indeed, a similar point has been made regarding classification of biodiversity.I was halfway through her book when Max passed away and I still haven't finished it yet.
The day he was cremated, I was quoting her stating we should even stop stating cancer as one holistic disease and ranted about all of the above issues with sapiens and their language, how we refuse to even change a simple thing like spoken lingo even if it created so much pain and suffering. Finally, I said that's why I prefer to live with animals and that's one of the reasons why I lived with Max for 14 years.
The uni-emotions creatures refuse to get it and gave a sarcastic reply something along the lines of I prefer animals because they don't speak back to me.
Yes, this comment was made on the day my Max became ashes. Remember, I didn't ask them to quit killing animals but just be conscious and aware of the language we use and correct it. Uni-emotional creatures are driven by ideology. Beware of them. Flush them out of your lives.
This is part 2 of my lessons from Russ's latest episode with Dr. Azra Raza, author of the new book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last.
Part 1 of my lessons are here and you can listen to the full interview here:
Russ Roberts: Now, you summarize our current approach to cancer as a 'slash, poison, and burn.' What do you mean by that? What does each of those mean?After years of understanding about the power of language and using anti-metaphors, not even for once I correlated surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to slash, poison, and burn. I failed.
Azra Raza: Slash means surgery. Poison means chemotherapy. And burn means radiation therapy.
Russ Roberts: And what would you say is the mix of those three in our current--that's our arsenal of weapons. Has that arsenal shifted over time? Or has it changed much? Or are we still doing a lot of each?
Azra Raza: This is one of the main reasons for me to become an author suddenly, because I'm not a writer. I really am an oncologist and a scientist and I've dedicated my whole life to treating patients and trying to study their disease in the laboratory.
But, I was forced to take the pen on, because--while it is very true that we are killing 68% of cancers we see today, the reason we are curing them is mostly because of early detection.
And, the treatments we are giving them are, by and large, the same treatments that we have been giving for 50 years--which is the slash, poison, burn.
[---]
Russ Roberts: We should probably explain. People who have had experience with cancer or loved ones with cancer understand this, but you should explain why you use the word 'poison.' The technique of chemotherapy, which is the poison part of your trio, why do you call it poison? What is its modus operandi? How does it work?
Azra Raza: It's literally, somebody described it taking a baseball bat and hitting a dog with it to get rid of its fleas. That's what giving chemotherapy is. Chemotherapy cannot distinguish between a normal cell and a cancer cell. But, it kills rapidly-dividing cells. That's why side effects of chemotherapy affect rapidly-dividing normal cells the most.
For example, hair fall-out, because hair follicles grow very fast. Or we have severe nausea and vomiting because GI [gastro-intestinal] tract is sloughing cells and diving very rapidly.
So, chemotherapy basically is a sledge hammer that goes in and starts killing cells, and because cancer cells are dividing faster than normal cells in an organ, we kill more of the cancer cells and less of the normal cells. But, still normal cells die.
Yes, Max had to go through all three of them. He was slashed, he was poisoned and he was burned. I can go on and on debating if what I did to treat Max was right or wrong. Dr. Raza does answer that question:
Many times I am asked this question, Russ: 'If you have acute myeloid leukemia, Dr. Raza, you are being so critical about the treatments,' and they will say, 'Would you take the treatment?' My answer is, 'Of course I'll take the treatment, because every human wants to have hope. I want to be that one unicorn who's going to be the exception. And, 30% patients with acute myeloid leukemia will survive five years even today.' So, I'll take that chance. Sure.My answer is simple. I am a smoker. I am healthy now, maybe much healthier than average American or Indian. But my probability of getting cancer is very high. The probability of most of us getting cancer goes high as we age. I do eat a very healthy diet, workout regularly, walk miles a day, and take a lot of well-researched non-animal-based supplements. But everything has a shelf-life. There is also that beautiful truth of the impermanence of everything.
If I get cancer, no matter how radical the cancer treatment options have progressed and I will not use it. I will use only slash, poison, and burn. I will use the same cocktails of chemo poison that Max was given. I have to go through what my Max went through for two years to have more time with me. This not for some poetic beauty or some abstract subjective justice. I really want to experience what my Max experienced.
I have seen Max go from one of the most beautiful and strongest dogs to weak and fragile within a matter of weeks. The same will be true for me. No matter how strong I feel now, I will fade, I will be become weak and perish. It is the beauty and truth of life.
Taleb said it eloquently in the closing lines of his book Antifragile:
"The glass is dead; living things are long volatility. The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.
I am not here to live forever, as a sick animal. Recall that the antifragility of a system comes from the mortality of its components— and I am part of that larger population called humans. I am here to die a heroic death for the sake of the collective, to produce offspring (and prepare them for life and provide for them), or eventually, books— my information, that is, my genes, the antifragile in me, should be the ones seeking immortality, not me.
Then say goodbye, have a nice funeral in St. Sergius (Mar Sarkis) in Amioun, and, as the French say, place aux autres— make room for others."
What if I don't get cancer? That decision was made pretty much when Max's initial cancer diagnosis came positive. I had made a decision to not take any medicines that are tested on animals no matter what my health situation is.
I think the last time I had my physical done was in 2012 or 2013 and I haven't taken any medicines even before that. It's been almost roughly 10 years since I took any medicines, except cough or cold pills which I stopped since 2018.
I will amend my decision to take medicines only if six people close to my life quit eating meat. The choice I put on their table is stopping killing animals for your gastro-intestinal pleasures or see me die even with some simple illness. I am sure they will never give up killing animals for my life but that is the point. Time will expose these demons inside even ordinary people. Trust me, better angles of human nature are rare. Very rare, indeed.
Nature bought me close to Max and gave me a wonderful experience. He opened doors that I knew existed. There are billion more different versions of Max's in chickens, whales, and in every other living being. I will be one of the many tiniest forces to help those billion other Max's.
I will close with the song Streets of Philadelphia. Looking back on the 1993 movie Philadephia, when gay marriage and HIV to say the least was looked down on in most parts of the world. Now, within a quarter-century, HIV treatment options are much better now plus intersex marriage and love are vastly accepted.
Can we try to do the same for cancer and eliminate animal sufferings in the next quarter-century? Maybe the former is harder but the later is your hands. You can change it starting from your next meal.
I was bruised and battered, I couldn't tell what I felt
I was unrecognizable to myself
I saw my reflection in a window, I didn't know my own face
Oh brother are you gonna leave me wastin' away
On the Streets of Philadelphia
I walked the avenue, 'til my legs felt like stone
I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone
At night I could hear the blood in my veins
Just as black and whispering as the rain
On the Streets of Philadelphia
Ain't no angel gonna greet me
It's just you and I my friend
And my clothes don't fit me no more
I walked a thousand miles
Just to slip this skin
The night has fallen, I'm lyin' awake
I can feel myself fading away
So receive me brother with your faithless kiss
Or will we leave each other alone like this
On the Streets of Philadelphia
Now, please take a few minutes to listen to these two of the most famous Oscar speeches; one from 1994 by Tom Hanks and another from 2020 by Joaquin Phoenix.
A simple and common trait between both these men is that they are emotional and that was the driving force to see the truth in cruel reality beyond themselves and their families. You might understand why I puke when I see a uni-emotion creature.
A simple and common trait between both these men is that they are emotional and that was the driving force to see the truth in cruel reality beyond themselves and their families. You might understand why I puke when I see a uni-emotion creature.
A healing embrace that cools their fevers, that clears their skin, and allows their eyes to see the simple, self-evident, common sense truth that is made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all and was written down on paper by wise men, tolerant men, in the city of Philadelphia two hundred years ago.
I've been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively. And I think at times we feel, or were made to feel, that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality. I think, whether we're talking about gender inequality, or racism, or queer rights, or indigenous rights, or animal rights, we're talking about the fight against injustice. We're talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.
I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world. And many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric worldview, the belief that we're the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that's intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something to give something up. But human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious, and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.
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