Egyptian Scribbles: Maybe this place should be called Caitro? Cats, cats, cats

Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Maybe this place should be called Caitro? Cats, cats, cats

I've never seen so many cats in one city-- usually because where there are large populations of stray animals, most of those strays are dogs so that the cat population is kept under control -- or at least more hidden from view. Here, the felines rule. And they aren't just little skinny cats. They are true street cats: part cat, part tiger, with massive heads and thick necks. They are everywhere.... lurking under the parked cars, sitting in the middle of the pavement, up in every little nook and cranny of a building.
Given the central role that these cats play in my daily life, I decided that I should include regular random shots of cats on the street. So here is my first photo of a couple of cats on the wall directly opposite the office where I work.

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."