Hamm On Wry

Ok, so Scott Adams is a brilliant man. I get a kick out of reading his blog because his take on most of the world is, well, not with a grain of salt, but more a bran flakes and salted beef cereal take - i.e. decent food served in odd combinations. His question about our supposed War for Money leaves you without a real way to answer, but does bring up an interesting debate on the side. I can’t, however, stand the people who comment on his blog, because they seem too much like the professors I had in college, the ones who would saunter past a group of students discussing something amongst themselves and offer an opinion as if they, somehow through divine intervention or massive quantities of dung-beetle wine, had the right answer. And they’d give it over a shoulder, while holding their meerschaum pipe and wearing plaid from L.L.Bean. Too often they’d throw out “Nietzschien”, “Hegelian” and “Nihilist” when they meant “strong”, “reasoned” “meaningless” because they had to seem ‘all-knowing’. But I digress.

Adams has posed the question “would America have a moral obligation to attack Iraq under false pretences if its experts believed that doing so protects the most lives in the long run?”

What an excellent question, and as of this writing he has 208 comments most of which will, from my perusal, either mock him, the subject, or try to make out like their grey matter matters more than Gray’s Anatomy (the book, not the TV Show).

I like the question because he puts in “moral obligation” which just makes me giggle. I happen to despise morals and adore, prefer and uphold ethics.

I will repeat that for the slower of you out there - I despise morals. I adore, prefer and uphold ethics.

I suppose now would be a good time to clarify for some people out there, and I might as well. It’s Sunday, after all, and a good many of the folk in and around Houston are out thumping their bibles in the hopes that a few good whacks with the good book can clear up some of the sinning they’ve done so they can avoid at least a few eternities in Hell. They should be all over this post, too.

The problem with morals is that they tend to be based on religion or a belief system that can, in and of itself, be contradictory to other life. Even other Human life. I’ll give you one word, and it’s “Crusade”. And I mean the ones where Europe invaded the Middle East because God told them to.

Whole centuries were spent at war for a moral reason - saving the Holy Land from the infidels. This can be paralleled to the current situation with militant Islam and terrorist attacks on Europe - it’s basically the reverse of the Crusades, although with more interesting and terrible weaponry. With morals it’s actually quite easy to create a situation where you’re hurting, maiming, killing, raping, pillaging, etc., and still being moral or even upholding moral standards. And this is because moral standards are self-defining to each group. It’s why I don’t care if you’re being moral, I care if you’re being ethical. Any one leader can define a new moral standard, which may or may not be ethical, but it’s fact.

Ethics, however, are a different beast entirely. Being ethical requires that you find a balance between all things that are or seem right. I’m not entirely positive on how this is done, but given that you can’t find people who teach ethics who haven’t been convicted of ethical lapses, but I kinda figure that ethics are defined by the entirety of humanity. It’s sort of the ‘rules of balance-meets-law school’ theory of life.

For everyone I’ve just lost (or, as I like to call them “everyone”) it goes like this:

This school of thought says these 10 things. That school of thought says these 14 things. There are 3 things that are conflicting in each of those lists, 7 things that are the same, and the second list includes 4 thoughts that are unique. Therefore, I will discard the 3 conflicts from BOTH lists and continue my life, looking for a third list and abiding by the 11 items left over from the first two lists.

Which, as you continue through life and get to the 15th or the 30th list, you find that a lot of morals conflict, and truly ethical rules are few and far between, but once found, they become universal in their application.

I can best sum this up with an illustration of the difference. A Jewish lawyer would be morally opposed to defending a Nazi in a court of law, however ethics dictate that they’d do it and give the best defense possible because it’s necessary to a just legal system that everyone, regardless of who and what they are, be defended as vigorously as they are prosecuted. I’m not saying it would be easy, or fair, or fun to do, but it would be ethical, and frankly, anyone who maintains their ethical standards in their day-to-day life is someone I want around me. You probably do, too.

Michael Lucas has been blogging for a while, and even though English is not his first language and he’s a porn star, he’s not a stereotype. Other than the size of his, *ahem*, business machine. His take on the lounging president (”sitting” seems too active for him) is priceless, and while totally Not Safe For Work and Not What My Mom Thinks I thought it was great. And personally, the brains behind the drive behind this particular porn-star are more impressive than his cock. (Now go figure out what I meant earlier.)

Ok, so I’m up early and I’m going over some notes and files and seeing what I haven’t posted in the recent past that I fully meant to and I came across a few things. I know, I will have the finale to my long-winded and perhaps wrong-headed article on stupid ideas for healthcare reform posted as promised, just consider the last 10 days a gimme and get over it. Besides, I bet if you read that post again, as I have just now, you’ll find that I seem to actually make sense. So you know you’re going nuts, too.

Anyway, here are two things that I wanted to post. First, a clipping of a conversation that I was having with my friend Casper. It’s pretty self-explanatory:

I figure that should generate some lovely hatemail, and I can only hope it includes curses from the Biblical Curse Generator which has been thoroughly wonderful at helping me describe how I feel without using the word ‘fuck’ over and over this past week.

Now the second is a bit more disturbing, at least to me, as it would seem to hold the key to my soul. I was up waaaaaay too late and couldn’t get to sleep so I was catching up on reading several of the blogs that I enjoy. I had gotten to Blurbomat, home to the husband-like-appliance in the dooce household, and Jon is a pretty amazing writer, artist, random-word-of-the-day-with-sprinkles kinda blogger, kinda like his wife. So anyway, he had written something that I felt the need to comment on - but apparently it was about time for me to sleep, so in mid-sentence I crashed. I awoke nearly 2 hours later, laptop on my face, only to find that I hadn’t finished my comment, and had instead typed a bit of, um, well, you decide:

No for real, read it again.

Um, yeah. I have no idea either. The fact that I can pronounce “bhabitatae” is the chocolate frosting on this one.

First off, I’m talking about the comment spam that ran my hosted server through the roof today. I got home and had a message stating that I had used nearly 100 times my normal daily server cycles, and while that doesn’t put me anywhere near my limit, it does make me want to find out why. I did some searching and it turns out that a new, sneakier, more annoying version of blog comment spam has hit the net, and it attacked several of the sites that I maintain. More on this in a minute. It’s been a day, and I’d like to post about it, if only for me. Feel free to skip bits.

Today was a really long day, even though I really didn’t get going until 10 am. I spent most of it with The Cheerleader as she combed through the wreckage of her dreams - which I have to tell you, is exhausting. I love her with all my heart, and today was really hard to watch. I will miss Richard deeply, but mine is the depth of a tablespoon next to the ocean compared to her. She’s been amazing, really, because while everyone else is either falling apart (like me) or becoming automatons (those who stare blank-faced asking what they should do, which is also sometimes me), she’s chugging along, arranging everything as best she can, and only stopping to break-down when there is no other option. I, however, am a complete mess. I’m supposed to be there for her, to be strong, to be supportive and anchor-like for her, but I haven’t been able to get my wits about me enough to stand for myself, let alone be there for her as much as I’d like.

Hell, today I was scared of my phone, not because it might include a bill that could wipe me out, although that’s always a possibility. No, today my fear came from a phrase that I kept hearing in my head, over and over and over again. A phrase that the so-called ‘helpful’ around me had offered up as a sort of verbal talisman, when instead it was almost an invitation for the universe to stop on by and take another friend. I kept hearing “these things always happen in threes” and, I’m sorry for saying it this way, but SHUT. YOUR. PIEHOLE! Three I cannot take, and I know this because the thought of a third tragedy shut me down for a good portion of the day, and continues to make me dread answering the phone.

Unless I don’t recognize the number, them I’m all sorts of chipper. Like that’s some sort of safety? Yeah, I never said I was sane. Truly.

Anyway, so I have one real task to accomplish and that’s make the DVD of all the pictures of Richard. So I’ve been going through the incredibly-deep-yet-thankfully-digital stack of photographs that I have, some of which I deliberately swiped from The Cheerleader. In doing so, I realized that about 99% of the rest of the world will not have seen these yet, and there is a good portion of you who won’t be able to make it to the funeral to see them there.

So I did two things. I removed the ability for content spam to affect my sites, which didn’t take long, but still was a hateful thing to have to deal with. Spammers suck.

The other thing I did is place a slide show at Richard & Janna’s site, of all the pictures I have of Richard. I figure that even if you get to see the DVD presentation that you might want to see more, maybe pause and really get a good long view of a particular pic. I haven’t really gone through them, so there may be duplicates or blurry ones, but I’ll update the slideshow when I’ve edited down the pics for the DVD. If you have any questions or the slideshow isn’t working for you, please let me know in the comments here.