[quote=livinincali][quote=6packscaredy]
if we taught nothing but mathematics all day long, it would still not be “valueneutral”. im not sure exactly what value that would be expressing, but im pretty sure it would be some technocratic nightmore and it’s not neutral.
[/quote]
The fundamentals of reading are “valueneutral”.
“The cat is sleeping.”
Has no moral value behind it. It’s just a simple statement. If the cat is sleeping it’s a fact, if the cat is not sleeping then it is a lie, but it doesn’t impose some sort of cultural view. Does the selection of cat versus dog create some sort of underlying “value”.
1 + 1 = 2 no matter what, unless you’re economist searching for a free lunch.[/quote]
Cats are a highly divisive subject.
Cats on the one hand are beloved housepets, and the darlings of people who purport to love animals.
But on the other hand, cats kill millions of songbirds every year, and are hated by birders and others who love truer, undomesticated animals, and the wildness and wilderness they represent.
Cats are not really animals, in the sense that theya re merely extensions of our own needs, desires and thoughts. You will never see a neurotic animal in the wild, but you have plenty of neurotic dogs and cats because we burden them with our insane, unreasonable fantasies.
. To focus on “cats” in a reading excerpt is to implicitly value domesticated animals, and also, humns versus wildness…that is because domesticated animals are animals that reflect human nature, as developped through thousands of years of cat.human interactions in the domestication process, as opposed to wild animals. The cat is in a sense about humans subjugating nature, for our own needs. This has religious overtones which many of us find objectionable.
This tension concerning housecats and how hated they are by birders has been discussed at length in the bestselling novel FREEDOM, by Jonathan Franzen. This book is, by the way, amazing.
If I were someone who valued birds, birding, and wild animals, I would be deeply offended by the glorification of housecats by specifically mentioning them in the reading excerpt, as opposed to other animals with an actual wild nature .
Also keep in mind that deforestation and meat production of an enormous order to support the “companion ” animals of the west. Cats have a large carbon footprint. i think its quite a stretch to say that cats and dogs eating their way through the forests of the amazon is a value neutral subject.
i would dare you to try again, but I would prefer that you just submit to my assertion that there is no value.neutral subject.
