[ExI] "meat"

[Lee Corbin]

Damien writes about his diatribe

 > Now the peanut gallery can start
 > yipping about "political correctness."

As chairman of the peanut gallery, I object
to this demeaning of our mission. Modesty
should have prevented you, in the first
place :) from presuming that you had the
clout to set up political correctness!

> Most of the people posting here seem
 > to have no notion how depraved it
> is to speak of human bodies as "meat".

I plead guilty. Indeed, we should aspire
to good taste whenever such an alternative
is pointed out to us.

> I wish you'd all get over this nerdish
 > affectation.

This causes me to wonder exactly how much
of our common memeset here might fall
under that description.

> Meat is dead, hacked-up flesh. My body
 > isn't meat, it's me, and yours
> isn't meat either. It's a living person.
 > The jeering philistinism of calling our
 > bodies "meat" reminds me of insensitive
 > oafs who disdain van  Vogh's paintings
 > as "daubing"...

I admit to being quite surprised by your
vehemence; but point well taken---though
use of the term did start out as a joke.

Lee


> or Shakespeare as a "scribbler".
> 
> Yes, sometimes it's hard not to distance yourself from your frail flesh 
> when some of your organs start to break down, or viruses make you sick, 
> or when a consumerist culture flings endless hyperstimuli images of 
> toned, buff, beautiful humans at you, making you (for values of "you" 
> that I'm sure include at least some people in these discussions) squirm 
> with self-disgust inside your overweight unfit short-sighted geekish 
> pizza-and-Coke-fed body. I think we'd be better off trying to maximize 
> our sense of self-reliant embodiment rather than indulging in abjection 
> and denial.
> 
> None of this diatribe implies that *only* mammalian, conscious 
> embodiment deserves respect. But if we wish to see respect for minds 
> instantiated on different kinds of substrates, when they finally arrive, 
> we'd do well to start by getting rid of the cheap sneers at "meat".
> 
> Now the peanut gallery can start yipping about "political correctness."
> 
> Damien Broderick
> 
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