Today I did yard work for about 6 hours. I learned about the irrigation system in my yard at my new house, pretty engaging stuff. Cleared out about 1/4 acre of dead foliage. Fixed a few sprinklers, transplanted some bearded ibis plants. I like those ibis plants; I like plants that don’t flower. Flowers are basically plant dicks and I don’t like to see anything I’m taking care of have its dick all out in the open. Talk to you, red rocket. Is there anything more off-putting than a dog’s boner? Like I know its natural and I have a dick so I understand. But it gives me some sexual assault vibes. My future brother-in-law’s brother has a German Shephard that has a some sexual attraction to me and it sucks, tbh. I pet him real good the first time I met him and now he thinks I’m into him and I’m really not anymore. I feel like a girl at a club who let a guy dance on me one time and now he won’t leave me alone.
Taylor is balls-deep doing wedding stuff today. She is making an incredibly detailed presentation to distribute to our guests. I think she might be wasting her time a little. If this thing gets read by 20% of people I think that would be a good conversion rate.
Topic today: moral relativism and the idea of eradicating mosquitoes. I see it brought up online a lot: genetically alter a virus that is very communicable and makes mosquitoes infertile. Sign me up. The argument against this is of course un-intended consequences. What will this do to the eco-system? What will happen to the things that eat mosquitoes?
So I mentioned moral relativism. My definition of this is: morality is not totally objective, it’s kind of on a sliding scale depending on the circumstances surrounding the subject. Example: somebody steals bread to feed their starving family, it’s not morally wrong. This seems reasonable in theory, but situations in my opinion or usually too complex to let other people judge things on a case-by-case basis. What if the bread stealer refuses to work? What if they spent the bread money on hookers and blow? What if they were brought up in a culture where stealing bread was the norm and therefore don’t budget bread money because they weren’t ever taught to? You can continue justify just about anything with a determinist outlook on humans. If you think everybody is a product of their environment, nobody need be held responsible for anything. Even if you just think this type of circumstantial evidence is only a part of the equation and should be simply considered; what’s the line? It’s very hard to draw often times. And I see people every day justify obviously bad things for progressively less logical reasons.
Example from today’s news: Canadians are burning down churches because of this residential school scandal. So summarizing what I know about it: Canada for a long time (until the late 90’s/early 00’s) had these native residential schools where native kids would live and it was controlled/ran by the Catholic church. These were nationally funded. These schools had a bunch of bodies buried under them and apparently they were doing some sketchy stuff, hence the bodies. Pretty fucked up. In 2008 the Canadian Government owned up to this stuff and passed some law or something addressing the issue. The Catholic church apparently didn’t apologize well enough, so now people are burning down churches. I’m pretty sure these are native churches ran by natives, so you basically have white people running into the rez and burning their stuff as vigilante justice.
So a lot of people are justifying this. It’s very simple for people taking this stance. Churches=Catholics=bad. If you oppose burning, you side with the church, which means you’re evil. This is the same issue as the BLM riots. If you oppose Black Lives Matters actions, you oppose them, you’re racist. I don’t know how mature these people are that make these arguments. They could be 14 for all I know. But the response from governments and the media make me think that they take this line of thinking as relevant and main-stream. They don’t necessarily side with it (they do sometimes) but they acknowledge it and as the kids say nowadays “Normalize it.”
For me it’s equally simple: you can’t burn down churches. It’s arson, it’s a felony, it’s a good law. I agree with breaking unjust laws, but don’t tell me arson is unjust. Your justification is irrelevant. And I don’t understand what the benefit is to justifying these acts with all this “context.” The only opposing argument I can think of is that understanding the motivations for acts like this allow our collective consciousness to shift towards the thinking of the perpetrators. Which may be good if you agree with the perpetrators, but it sets a pretty fucked up precedent. So now, if you do bad things in the name of something, people need to “understand” why you did the bad thing and come around to your way of thinking. So basically all these people are saying by justifying this stuff is: Fuck Ghandi.
So since everything is relative and there’s no actual true definition of morality in this universe, maybe I can define an extreme on the morality scale that everyone can agree to. This could set a baseline of sorts for our collective moral compass. My example is this: parasites are evil. Like actual parasites, not somebody acting like a parasite. We don’t want to be pushing the line of what constitutes a parasite now, that’s more moral relativism. So parasites live off other organisms. They have evolved to do one thing, suck the life out of something else. Maybe they suck its blood, maybe they lay eggs in it and the eggs hatch and eat the organism, maybe they do that zombie shit where they take something’s brain over. Either way, the parasite only exists to reproduce. They kill, steal and make more of themselves to do more killing and stealing. This is definitely bad, right? Like that’s pure evil. And you could make the argument that mosquitoes don’t have morality. And you could even argue that humans shouldn’t assign morality to natural phenomenon. But I say fuck that. If you stand for nothing, you fall for anything. Mosquitoes kill over a million people per year. I say we eradicate all parasites, for the good of our earth. I’d argue that you love the Earth more if you want to kill parasites, so that other organisms don’t have to die just for something evil to live. Like if a polar bear eats a seal, I can live with that. But if a tapeworm kills a coyote just so it can reproduce more tapeworms, that’s unjustifiable. So stop whining about unintended consequences. The unintended consequences of eradicating mosquitoes would be that the world is more awesome. Respecting “nature” is bullshit (nature meaning if something is natural then it’s good). If silence is violence, than not fixing fixable issues that arise in nature is just as bad as releasing plagues of mosquitoes into villages for fun.