Cecil

[haltz]

I don't think it's fallacious to discuss resource allocation. If someone said that whale hunting wasn't an issue because of the starving kids, that would be a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_o ... _privation

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

They really thought that the whaling industry had given up? What morons.

My lord those Sea Shepherd people are obnoxious. While I have no desire to kill whales or think people should, those people make me just as angry.

How about you spend some of that freaking money trying to feed some starving children or housing homeless.

I like to call this the "there are kids starving in Africa" fallacy.

? There aren't kids starving in Africa?

It's a logical fallacy. Saying you can't do or worry about X because Y is still a problem.

Well, sure, but in this case you can pretty easily say the tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands if not millions of man hours they spent saving a couple hundred whales would probably have been better spent feeding those children, no?

I don't know a thing about this group, but just for the sake of argument how many wildlife organizations would you like to shut down in order to feed all the starving children? It's also not as if money is the only barrier to feeding hungry people.

My two cents is it's possible to work on both, and there are other obstacles to address if you want to feed hungry people.

Yes, you can work on both. I'm not saying you can't. I am saying that the route that Sea Sheppard took to stop the whaling is extremely inefficient in both 1. the amount of whales saved and 2. the amount of resources spent to save them.

In other words, with some roundabout numbers, let's say the whalers kill 2 whales a day for a couple months and end up with 100 whales a year. Let's say for 7 years since that's what we can chronicle through the show. According to the show, they've stopped them one year. Partially stopped them another year. And, caused them some problems during other years. Let's be generous and say they saved 400 whales.

They have two deep sea vessels, one trimaran, one helicopter, 4 of those little speed boats, and a couple waverunners. They employ what about 100 people per year. Oh, they also have a million dollar boat at the bottom of the ocean. They go through hundreds of thousands of gallons of gas every year. Guys have gone to jail. Blah blah blah. I'm sure the recoup a little bit from Animal planet for the right to film them, but their costs have to be well into the tens of millions of dollars just for the equipment over that time. Let's be conservative and say their total equipment cost over that time is $10M.

That puts the cost to save a whale at $25,000 and that does not include all the manhours (which is somewhere around 100 ppl x 3 months x however many hours a month). Can I make the argument that is a waste of time and/or there are more efficient ways to save the whale population? Probably. Can I make the argument that the resources could be better deployed elsewhere? Absolutely. That's all I'm saying.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

I don't think it's fallacious to discuss resource allocation. If someone said that whale hunting wasn't an issue because of the starving kids, that would be a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_o ... _privation

Would have been easier to just + this and move on.

[slide_into_first]

I think it means, don't fellate a relative's privates.

[ghostrunner]

Like I said, I don't know that much about them. I assume they and their supporters make an argument that publicity and even failure is a long-term good.

I mean, if people want to give them money specifically for what they do and they are presumably passionate about it, I don't see the point in saying "you should be feeding starving kids with that money"

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Here's a story of the Sea Shephard doing what countries won't do about rogue trawlers fishing illegally. I'm all for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/world ... antes.html

The situation kind of reminds me of this.

Yeah, it's tough to get behind a lion killer, but it's almost equally tough to understand the outrage.

[dmarx114]

Must be one hell of a high to drop $50k on wounding a lion with a bow and arrow.

[Bo Hart]

Must be one hell of a high to drop $50k on wounding a lion with a bow and arrow.

In fairness, I get an adrenaline rush killing a spider with a can of Raid.

[cardsfansince82]

I can't believe you would spend $3.99 to kill Cecil the Spider.

[sighyoung]

I can't believe you would spend $3.99 to kill Cecil the Spider.

Right after Cecil had written "Some Pig" and "Terrific," too.