Ah, the whole "I'm furry" as a personal transpecies identity thing. One of the things that is supposedly why furries have such a bad name. I can't imagine it makes transsexuals too happy, who feel that they are born in the wrong body being male or female, being themselves compared to by people who feel they identity largely with animals. And even more so by a society at large that takes pride in eating and killing animals.
On the other-hand, while I don't think they're transpecies, making furries these horrible people because they sympathize with animals isn't the sort of thing I get behind. A lot of furries, seem to have more respect for living beings than a lot of people. And having a little bit of a Dr. Dolittle complex isn't a horrible thing. Humans have enough hubris in their own kind, and not enough beings treat beings as having dignity based upon being living beings.
I think that adoration for other animals is a good thing. While some people may take it too far. I'm far less worried about those who take their love of animals too far, than people who take their indifference to animals too far.
Oh, how many people out there call men who do not hunt, "faggots"? Too many.
I think a lot of the science fiction about the upcoming singularity doesn't focus on being supposedly "weird" enough. Everyone is so certain that everything is going to "weird" to our culture, and different, that even approaching it, things will start to be seen as unfathomable. As in, a lot of it written about it, gets philosophical on the extremes of transhumanism and the like. But most stories still focus on Anglo-Saxon, middle class, heterosexual Americans. Even when getting anywhere near the Singularity, things are going to get fascinatingly weird and not enough material delves in that. We're going to see people use transhumanism to become fully functioning men and women everyday, to gender-bend, to become different races, to look a completely different age than they are, even look like children or old men and women, or even look like "furry" animal-people.
And that's a whole can of worms. Is the rest of society going to see them as less them human. Are they going to see furries who choose to get furry bodies instead of wear a fursuit, as having a bestiality attraction to themselves? Are people going to try to restrict their right to marry, love, or have sex? Are people who choose to have bodies that resemble children going to be seen as being paedophiles towards themselves? TV stations and the media in general is going to go absolutely nuts over the transhuman developments that may happen in our lifetimes. People are going to bend the heck out of gender, race, species, age, and together, these things are going to create a massive moral panic, I anticipate.
People are always asking the question of what it means to be human. But does it matter? People do deserve ethical treatment because of our speciesism. They deserve treatment because they're living beings. And if there is anything that humans deserve special treatment because of, it's our sentience and sapience.
That I'm aware, a lot of games about Transhumanism and Singularity don't tackle this enough. We may become robots that don't look anything like humans anymore. We might decide to look more like other animals. Obvious these things are going to happen because there are people who already want it. But hardly anybody is addressing it. The fact we're going to have white children go walking around with bodies that resemble black adults, we're going to have people who look like Asian women walking around, who were born white men, we're going to have people walking around that look like monsters, like trolls and orcs and the like, or inhuman looking robots like R2D2, or even 60 year old men fitting their bodies into something that looks like a 12 year old girl or people choosing to look exactly like a household cat.
Grandpa is going to look like this, someday.
I wonder how the kids are going to feel about that. Imagine this coming out of this mouth.
"Well, you see, kids. I was a war veteran in the United States. Back in a time when, while there were females in the military, they'd only had the right to serve in combat for a few decades. And was mostly made up of men such as I. And the middle east was still a predominantly Muslim place." Seem weird? This is going to happen. This is in
your future. Guys like this [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiWXAwbwIGQ], will someday be girls like the above. This will happen.
Quite a future we find ourselves in the presence of.
