Starbucks makes an unintelligent design decision
23 Comments Published by punkass marc September 1st, 2006 in Advice, Big Business, Drugs, Godbaggery, Mutterings Of The Disturbed, WankersEverybody’s favorite coffee underdog made a bold move to capture a new demographic: they quoted Wesley Smith from the Discovery Institute on one of their cups.
For the record, that quote reads:
The morality of the 21st century will depend on how we respond to this simple but profound question: Does every human life have equal moral value simply and merely because it is human? Answer yes, and we have a chance of achieving universal human rights. Answer no, and it means that we are merely another animal in the forest.Wesley Smith
senior fellow with the Discovery Institute
Intelligent Design blogs are claiming victory in the field, probably more excited over a potential Starbucks endorsement than one from the Pope.
[Aside: Can I just say that when the Pope likes the ideas coming out of your country because they provide even better anti-science ammo than he could think up, your country has a problem? USA! USA!]
I suppose Starbucks has been unfairly slapped with a liberal-elitist image. Say “Starbucks,” and most people imagine a potpourri of Mac laptops, mock turtlenecks, and the gentle strumming of Aimee Mann. Apparently, Wal-Mart Coffee now hopes to attract the abacus/mock toga/Faith+1 crowd. That’s where the money is these days, right?
To help them in their transformation, I’d like to suggest some other Wesley Smith quotes they might consider for their coffee cups and muffin wraps.
If killing is right for, say the adult cancer patient, why shouldn’t it be just as right for the disabled quadriplegic, the suicidal mother whose children have been killed in an accident, or the infant born with profound mental retardation? At that point, laws and regulations erected to protect the vulnerable against abuse come to be seen as obstructions that must be surmounted. From there, it is only a hop, skip, and a jump to deciding that killing is the preferable option.Wesley Smith
senior fellow with the Discovery Institute
People recognize this intuitively and are repulsed by the standard bioethical agenda: human cloning, fabricating hybrid beings that are half human and say, half ape, and using cognitively disabled humans in place of higher animals in medical research.Wesley Smith
senior fellow with the Discovery Institute
Time will tell whether becoming known as “the Human Cloning party,” will help or hurt the Democrats.Wesley Smith
senior fellow with the Discovery Institute
Indeed, the government is already flirting with transhumanist fantasies. Thus, “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance,” a 2002 report issued by the National Science Foundation and United States Department of Commerce, recommended the government spend billions pursuing some of the very technologies that transhumanists crave to utilize in their morphological quests.Wesley Smith
senior fellow with the Discovery Institute
23 Responses to “Starbucks makes an unintelligent design decision”
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*gurgle*
Good thing I already knew Starbucks is teh sux.
I’m with JG on that – I’ve always hated their plastic food and weak coffee. Just another reason to hate them, really.
This guy must be really crazy. How may “transhumanists” are there? Is there a political party or something?
I guess I’ll quit drinking Starbucks, but it’s the only coffee on campus.
That’s probably the closest thing to “peer review” that will ever come out of DI.
Transhumanists? Most furries can barely make rent every month, much less lobby for government research in human-animal hybrids. Ability to make elaborate cos play costumes or churn out reams of Disney-esque animal porn? Check. Organize and fund necessary machinations to get “billions” of tax dollars for ridiculous purposes? Not so much.
I, on the other hand, made a very compelling case on why the NSF should fund my army of lizard men. Wesley will wish I’d stuck to “morphological” quests.
Does anyone know how best to communicate our displeasure to Starbuck’s? I’m sort of a novice at this stuff, but it strikes me that there are enough sensible folks on this blog and others that we could probably get the cups pulled if we put our minds to it.
But, Kyso, we already have enough lizard-men. In fact, they’re running things now, working hard to get all of us to use own own lizard-brains.
How about a set of Pat BuKKKanan quotes?
They could start with “What I would like is — I’d like the country I grew up in. It was a good country. I lived in Washington, D.C., 400,000 black folks, 400,000 white folks, in a country 89 or 90 percent white. I like that country.”
Then you could add AnnC, MMalkin, etc.
That ought to get the diverity ball rolling…
Honestly, I’m much more bothered by Starbucks being union-busters than by a quote from a creationist on cups. Hell, it was a lot more odious when they printed a quote from Lucianne Goldberg’s son. And the fact that they burn their coffee and mix their drinks from prepackaged powders and syrups.
Hell, put that all together and Starbucks is at most one tenth of one percent as evil as Wal-Mart.
Kyso, most real hard-core “Transhumanists” aren’t furries; they’re people like Richard W. DeVaul, who works at the MIT Media Lab and wears his wearable computing apparatus pretty much everywhere he goes. I don’t know if DeVaul himself is a Transhumanist, but most of the actual Transhumanists seem more interested in what they see as systems optimisation through technology than turning themselves into chimeras.
I can’t see the problem – Wesley Smith may be persona non grata in evolutionary and scientific circles, but his statement about morality in the 21st century is a resonable point of view (I too am suprised with my fingers typing this!) which resonable people can debate…
It’s bad because the quote is taken out of context. In a vacuum it might not be the worst quote ever, but it’s coming out of a patchwork of TEH CRAZY, and it’s really bad form to quote people in ways that misrepresent the entirety of their opinion.
It also implies Wesley Smith deserves some amount of consideration, when he’s really no more truthful than the Freepers.
Re MikeEss: They could start with “What I would like is — I’d like the country I grew up in. It was a good country. I lived in Washington, D.C., 400,000 black folks, 400,000 white folks, in a country 89 or 90 percent white. I like that country.”
I guess Pat Buchanen isn’t very good with statistics, or he’s talking about a very long time ago. These days, DC’s 60% black and 30% white. More importantly for the Right, I’m sure, is that it’s 70% Democrat (and went 90% for Kerry).
Yeah but important bloggers don’t go to those areas of DC, and congress critters certainly don’t admit they exist.
I mean jesus, next thing you know they’ll be POC in government who are more than mere tokens! And the next thing you know civilisation as we know it (racist, discrimnatory by default) will collapse…
I haven’t heard the Starbucks union-busting story, but other aspects – especially their offering of full benefits to part-time employees – make me wonder if we’re targetting the right corporation. Not in complaining about Wesley Smith, but in, you know, throwing bricks on anarchist marches. And by we, I mean them. I like their iced green tea. Just saying.
Auguste, I am only pointing out their poor choice (and its contextual shortcomings).
PZ linked this post and one of his commenters made a great point:
I’m not bothered so much by the quote — it’s really as vacuous as any ot the others that I’ve seen on Starbucks cups. I’m bothered more by the fact that this cup-quote thing is symptomatic of a greater societal trend that I’m not very comfortable with. I’m sure everyone here has noticed, but modern discourse is frought with epistemic relativism, and not the kind that arises from giving ethics careful consideration. These days balance, not correctness, is the thing we should strive for in opinion.
Right. I was trying to clarify in what was on the whole a brain-dead comment that I was really commenting more on the general zeitgeist of Starbucks-hating rather than anything you wrote.
Which is why this thread was the perfect place for that comment.
Shorter me:
“Hey, you’re the one who brought up Starbucks on a blog that you know I read!”
Their coffee sucks, that’s enough of a reason to avoid them.
But don’t worry, after the Northern Hordes invade and free you from oppression, we will install a Tim Horton’s on every corner.
Mac laptops [...] and the gentle strumming of Aimee Mann.
Just like heaven!
Too bad heaven makes crap coffee.
Just sent to Starbucks’ Corporate Social Responsibility department via:
http://www.starbucks.com/customer/contact_forms.asp?nav=3f
In regards to the quote now on Starbucks cups by Wesley Smith of the Discovery Institute.
Please see http://punkassblog.com/2006/09/01/starbucks-makes-an-unintelligent-design-decision/ for source.
To have a quote from this person on your cups is to do an extreme disservice to your image as a liberal and progressive company.
The Discovery Institute is well known to be a radical religious right forum that seeks to eliminate the sciences from the education system and replace it with the doctrine of a sect of Christian religion. (Yes, they only complain about biology in general, evolution in particular, but if you profess that the earth is less than 6000 years old, you need to get rid of geology, physics, etc that show that idea is patently false)
The notion implied by the quote that humans are somehow apart or special from the rest of the world is to do a great harm to our world and us. The only thing that seems to be truly special about humans would seem to be an ability, beyond what our physical size would otherwise suggest possible, of removing the forest (and rest of nature) from around us.
While a concept in the quote, that all humans should have basic rights, is not arguable, having a quote from a source such as this is like taking lessons in morality from the Taliban.
If this is an indication of Starbucks’ corporate philosophy or leanings, my business is going elsewhere.