Archive for category observations + conclusions + beliefs

Date: February 11th, 2012
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

precious metal rules

So I’m reading through this manga ‘IS‘ about intersex people – I can’t imagine what it’d be like to go through that, but something kind of hit me while reading it: status quo advocates that you observe the world around you and change yourself to fit in; but it’s far better to observe yourself and then change the world around you until you fit.

“Easy for you to say,” mutters that voice in the back of my head, “as an affluent white male, whose only legitimate claim to minority status is becoming more accepted every day. You’ve got it easy.”

Sometimes I wish I didn’t know anything about privilege – these days most of my second-guessing comes from thoughts along those lines. It’s a good sign, of course; if I understand myself to the point where my subconscious / unconscious feelings are the only things left unmapped, I’m probably doing pretty good.

I guess that still leaves me with the question: is it easy for me, as a gay guy, to say that rather than changing yourself to make the world more comfortable with you, you should change the world so you feel more comfortable? Does that even require any effort on my part?

Probably the more pertinent question is: does it matter whether it’s easy or not – is it right? Is that cop-out reasoning? It seems absolutist, doesn’t it?

If survival is the tantamount biological imperative, what’s the social equivalent? Is social ‘survival’ more important than any of my ideals?

Practical answer must be ‘yes,’ right? The practical answer is that you do what you can, for as long as you can. That’s got an appealing mix of resignation and pride, doesn’t it?

This probably all requires some more thought on my part. I’m not sure how deeply I want to delve into all this at the moment.

Date: November 29th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, things to think about

this has always been the title of this post

Over the years I’ve liked the concept of ‘belief’ less and less. Implications of religious belief in particular notwithstanding (another thing I’ve come to like less and less) I’m bothered by the idea that anyone would make decisions based not on the world as it is, but on the world as they see it. Which is likely more than a little hypocritical on my part, given what I’m ostensibly fated to write next: I’m almost certain I believe in Hard Determinism.

This isn’t predestination, it’s causal determinism, and it directly opposes the existence of free will. It probably also contradicts quantum stuff, though I’ve got to admit I’m not by any means well-versed in that realm. Here’s what I know:

The substructure of the universe regresses infinitely towards smaller and smaller components. Behind atoms we find electrons, and behind electrons quarks. Each layer unraveled reveals new secrets, but also new mysteries.

- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “For I Have Tasted the Fruit” (Alpha Centauri, 1999)

So far as I know, this is true. Bigger things are made of smaller things – for that matter, big things are smaller things. I’m me, I’m human, I’m made of cells, which are made of chains of molecules, which are made of atoms stuck together, which are made of all sorts of other stuff – somehow all that stuff sticking together makes me, such as I am.

Now let’s think about pool tables.

A ball in motion on a pool table collides with another ball. The event involves well-known properties of matter, expressed in immaculate mathematical equations. Velocity of moving ball impacts stationary ball, transfers momentum, is left to come to rest while other ball moves in a trajectory determined by first ball’s motion. Every time ball A hits ball B, with those parameters in place, the same effect will result. There isn’t any uncertainty about it. It’d be silly to ‘believe’ that something else would occur. For another relevant quote:

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

― Richard Dawkins

Public verifiable evidence is simple enough to acquire in the case of our pool table – set up a robotic arm, place the balls precisely on the table, line up the shot in exactly the same way, and you’ll see the same thing happen over and over again. That’s science. It’s repeatable, it’s predictable, everything is accounted for.

I remember playing the ‘why’ game when I was a kid – keep repeating ‘why’ whenever an adult gives you an explanation, forcing them to delve ever deeper into progressively elementary explanations until they give up in frustration and invoke the ever-popular: ‘just because.’ That’s when the kid wins – when the adult has to admit they don’t know everything, which is of course a childish thing to feel the need to prove. However, it’s relevant to this topic, because it brings up an interesting question – what if the adult didn’t run out of explanations? We could ride that spiral of causality down into infinity.

But the implications. The pool balls always move the same way. Behind each effect we find a cause, and what caused that cause, and what caused that cause, and so on. Every event was precipitated by the conditions that heralded it. This isn’t predestination, as far as I can tell, in fact it can’t be, because god himself would be caught in the line of causes and effects.

This conclusion might sound hauntingly religious, though: everything happens for a reason, everything is fated to happen, everyone has a destiny, reality itself is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I can’t see it any other way – my very impulse to sit down and write this was itself the product of causes so complex that I can’t conceive them, but their existence seems nearly undeniable. I can’t trace the exact sequence of shots in my own personal game of pool that’s led me to this point, but I know they’re there for me and my 4-dimensional experiences just as they’re there for the pool table and its 2-(maybe 3 if you’re feeing generous)-dimensional outcomes. All effects have causes, proceeded by effects, proceeded by causes, ad infinitum.

This has implications, of course. First of all, free will becomes an illusion. We can’t choose, because the factors that influence our choice are quantifiable, even if we don’t currently posses the means to do so. In our ignorance, we’ve taken inevitability and called it intention, ascribing choice where none exists. Which is of course a lie, because we were never capable of choosing what to call it in the first place.

While this might be the truth, I’ve got to admit that the conclusions I draw from it are somewhat of a cop-out, because it doesn’t change things for us. Morality is obviously completely invalid, as it requires free-will to assign responsibility to people for the choices they make. Try this: If I murder someone, I deserve to be murdered. In reality, if I murder someone I never had a choice; my substructure of the universe was always destined to interact with their substructure of the universe in such a way that the collection of tiny element known on our macro level as human life would cease to exist in that form – e.g. I would kill them. I was always going to kill them. So why punish me for killing them? The answer is so easy that it feels like cheating – because I was always going to be punished.

It sounds childish – in response to repeated ‘why’s, we’re simply replying, “because.” But it’s the right answer. It might not be a particularly useful answer, I suppose, but nothing else seems to make sense to me.

Date: September 18th, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, technology + design

technology makes life too easy

So - Letter From Paris: 28 Days (Without the Internet) by Beth Arnold, in a nutshell:

…this Thursday, Sept. 15, I leave Paris for a remote Greek island. There I’ll submit myself to basic rehab’s 28 days of cleansing from my addiction, of giving my brain and body a much-needed rest. No Googling. No Social Media. No email on any device at all. This exchange of my normal, toxic element for a healthy new natural environment is designed to bring me back into a more direct and complete relationship with myself. I will meditate and exercise every day. I will look for whole and organic foods in order to cook healthy meals. My reading sources will only be in print. If I communicate with someone, I will have to speak with them by telephone. No texting, no Instant Messaging. I will return my life to a human pace.

I read stuff like this and it’s hard for me to see anything but technophobia / naturalistic fallacy, double standards, hypocrisy, and whatever you call reverse chronological snobbery (oh man I love having an excuse to use that term.) Somehow she thinks there’s something different about this era’s technological advancements as opposed to the others, to wit:

unless she’s walking / riding horseback to that island from france (doubtful) she’s going to be taking planes and boats to get there – a few hours on a plane – is that living life at “a human pace?”

her ‘reading sources only in print’ are directly enabled by the web of technology she seems so eager to escape – from inception to production to distribution, everything is streamlined by technology. she’s okay with this, of course, because otherwise she’d have to wait for everything to be done by hand, or else be satisfied with just whatever people are talking about.

and the telephone? really? so back in the good old days they just talked on the telephone instead of this newfangled textin’ and emailin’ – and you know what they were saying a century ago? back in the good old days folks just talked to eachother, or wrote out letters by hand. every era has had thoughts about how things are too easy these days, and back in the good old days everything was more difficult, and they were somehow better off for the inconvenience.

people who think this way annoy me. we’ve got all this cool stuff, which can be used to make our lives so much easier, more comfortable, and enjoyable, and they’re not happy. oh but now things are too easy, they whine. if I were into ad hominems I’d snidely suggest that the problem is with her, not with everyone else, and not with technology. memory serves up ‘anecdotal evidence,’ another relevant relic from college argumentation and research class.

ultimately I see this article as her failing to learn from cypher’s mistake (though I love the irony of cypher eschewing the physical in favour of the virtual, while Beth is doing the opposite.) maybe she’ll really experience “…the emotional, physical, and spiritual journey of our time … the journey from the Internet back to the inner self,” but the fact that she has managed to somehow ‘lose herself’ to the convenience of modern technology makes me question how solid her sense of self was to begin with, and if anything reflects poorly on her own character, not the technology; and I remain unconvinced that this is “the journey that millions of people feel in their hearts they need to take, but haven’t yet been shown the way,” rather than a journey that she feels in her heart she needs to take.

Date: September 16th, 2011
Cate: dreams, observations + conclusions + beliefs

the wonders I’ve seen

I had the happiest dream earlier this morning: I was wandering through the halls of my old highschool, looking for the door to the staff parking lot. I’d gleefully parked my car there, since I didn’t drive in highschool and thus had never had the chance to break the rules like that. The building was empty and cavernous, but brightly lit -- and there was the steady heartbeat-like thud of a bass drum from somewhere in the distance.

Eventually I turned a corner and the music got louder -- at the end of the hall, there was a loose crowd of people. As I approached, I recognized the song -- ‘Standing’, by VNV Nation. (skip ahead to 2:10 on the video to hear it.)

And as I got closer to the crowd of people, the music got louder, until I realized that there was a concert at the end of the hall. I started recognizing people as I approached -- my family, my friends, and we were all singing:

And fighting time, so much I ask, I will this moment last forever;
Though seasons change and things come to pass. remain inside of me.
And fighting time so hard I pray that this moment lasts forever.
And will the world stay standing still -- at least for me.

… I’ve thought about what I’d like to experience when I die, and I think I can safely add this one to that list. I like the idea of losing my grip on our world, and finding myself in a dark empty space, someplace familiar, but clearly a place to pass through on my way to somewhere more important -- and then to essentially ‘go towards the light,’ until I come to a place of warmth and comfort where I can stay forever. It’s entirely fantasy I have no reason to hope for, but still. It’d be such a relief.

Date: July 23rd, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

is the stability offered by accepting unfavorable/unfair/illegal working situations a worthwhile tradeoff for the instability but ease of concience offered by fucking shit up?

this will turn into a full blog post at some point, I’m pretty sure:

of course you don’t have the luxury of quitting and finding another job. of courseyou don’t have the resources to sue. if they’re truly purposefully taking advantage of you then they are counting on you thinking that way and therefore not calling them on it. they’re screwing you because they know they can get away with it, which is basically the worst kind of bullying.

you cannot in good conscience maintain a “that’s just how it works, no point doing anything about it” attitude in the face of this. of course that’s just how it works, that is how it will always work, until someone does something about it. and if you’re not willing to do anything about it, how can you expect anyone else to do anything either?

you don’t even have to play hero and stop them from screwing over everyone else, you only have to stop them from screwing over you – and if you’re not even willing to do that… you’ve got to wonder, is it even worth complaining about?

http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/ix9jo/til_pizza_delivery_is_considered_a_hazardous_job/c27fgpg?context=6

Date: April 23rd, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

Dying is the last thing I plan to do.

Either by design or thought
we are doomed to know our own end

- “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” by Lou Reed

Mortality is probably a good thing to cover in the Mortality Blog. Death is a fact of life (so far as we know) and it’s a pretty depressing one -- the boon of self-awareness comes with the bane of knowing we are all going to die.

(okay, bad video, yes. just pop it out and let it play in the background.)

Shatner’s song makes light of our common destiny, which I support -- because there’s really not much else you can do about it. You can sit around and fret about inevitability, or you can accept it and try to pack in as much living as possible before your time is up.

My beliefs, such as they are, are balanced on this tiny little pearl of truth (if you’ll pardon the flowery prose) -- that after you die, it’s over. It’s totally and completely over, you cease to exist, maybe everything else ceases to exist, but it’s a moot point, because even if reality continues without you, you’ll never know it, because you’ll be dead. And everything, and everyone dies.

This simple little fact drives the instinct to survive and procreate -- to try to spread out as much as possible before entropy catches up. If you truly feel that you’d rather be dead than alive, even in an extreme situation, there is something terribly and fundamentally wrong with you. Life, any life, any terrible life of pain and misery, is incalculably more valuable than the absence of life.

The idea that a life of torture is better than no life at all is probably a luxury that I can afford, having lived a life of comfort (likely mostly undeserved) thus far. It’s the only belief I hold strongly enough that I would consider imposing it on someone else. Which is why abortion, war, and capital punishment are all extremely uncomfortable issues to me -- existential angst bothers me like nothing else I’ve experienced, in a manner that seems profound and untouchable, impossible to deal with directly, better relegated to a deep dark corner of my mind that I rarely purposefully venture. We’re not talking Thanatophobia - I suspect I’m far too ‘well-adjusted’ to have any seriously irrational phobias. Still, just thinking about it causes anxiety, speeds up my heart, makes me grit my teeth, makes my thoughts swirl around and keeps me uncomfortable until I can come up with something else to distract myself.

Since there ain’t anything new under the sun, Ernest Becker has already described my outlook in Terror Management Theory. You can read the wikipedia article yourself I’m sure, but this first paragraph is exactly what we’re talking about:

Terror Management Theory (TMT), in social psychology, states that all human behavior is motivated by the fear of mortality. The theory purports to help explain human activity both at the individual and societal level. It is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker‘s 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues all human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound—albeit subconscious—anxiety in people (called cognitive dissonance) that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, how well someone adheres to a cultural worldview is the same concept asself-esteem; people measure their own worth based on how well they live up to their culture’s expectations.

How convenient that there’s an all-powerful all-knowing invisible being who can save you from death; or that you’ll be re-incarnated after you die in this life and live another; or that you’ll ascend to godhood and get virgins or whatever. Yeah, so much for religion. This is why it will take an act of god (or something) to make me a believer -- otherwise, Occam’s Razor leaves me with Atheism, because I can’t see religious belief as anything other than “The terror of absolute annihilation,” and I can’t help feeling that I’m more willing to face reality than religion’s advocates. There is no god to save us from death. It is terrifying, yes.

The value of human life in general is an easy transitive relation to make, empathy making it simple enough to jump from “I don’t want to die,” to “they don’t want to die,” and “I don’t want them to die.” Survival instinct extends in an inverse pyramid from self, to family, to friends, to peers, etc. On a very basic level, I don’t want anyone to die, and it seems so simple and easy to me that I can’t help being a little baffled by people who disagree, and justify murder.

If life is the essential element, then to deprive someone of life is the most vicious and terrible act you can commit, an expression of the darkest part of humanity: a life of self-awareness and free will, including the choice to erase another person from existence. If the prospect of my own mortality is my deepest fear, the idea that my death could be a result of another person’s action is buried directly above -- and if a man can kill another man, he can kill me. So when we start talking about whether murders and rapists and traitors deserve the death penalty, or how young a person can be and still be aborted with impunity… it scares me. Since the fear of death is already there, that slippery slope leads straight from strangers to peers to friends to family to myself, and when I’m lying in bed at night in the dark and I can’t stop thinking about that last moment of consciousness…

Audio MP3

One sees one’s own death
one sees one committing murder or atrocious violent acts

- “The City In The Sea / Shadow” by Lou Reed

So that’s awful. I mean, there are other things that worry me, but this is the only one that really matters -- I’m worried that we still don’t put enough importance on the value of human life. I’m afraid of dying, and I’m afraid that other people aren’t as worried about it as I am, when it’s the only thing anyone should really be worried about.

Date: March 18th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about

my experiences with being governed

Should I be worried that  as a citizen of a representative democracy, I don’t notice any difference between representatives? And I mean real, discernible differences that have a significant impact (positive or negative) on my life – I’d settle for a trivial impact, even.

All the changes in my life over the past 5 or 6 years have arisen from decisions that I’ve made - opportunities that I’ve taken advantage of, limbs I’ve gone out on, risks I’ve mitigated, mistakes I’ve made, people I’ve met, things I’ve read, etc. But ‘people I’ve voted for’ doesn’t fit in that list. I try to do the ‘right thing,’ research who I’m voting for, make sure I’m making an informed decision, but lately I’ve started to become curious whether it matters. I’m tempted to choose what I vote for randomly, the next election season.

I’m not complaining that my vote doesn’t count, it’s something more profound than that: that we’ve gone from an ostensibly dumb conservative republican president to a conversely smart liberal democrat president, and I can’t tell what’s different. We’ve still got soldiers in the middle east, and don’t-ask-don’t-tell might be repealed, but I’m not a soldier, you know? I’m not saying I don’t have opinions on those subjects, but they’re all in abstract, because none of it effects me. Financial crises? I’m doing about as well as ever. National disasters and civil unrest in those other countries somewhere across the sea, where I don’t know anybody and will never have to deal with their problems.

This might sound like bragging, or possibly uncaring, but it’s really not either – it’s complaining. If anything it sounds stupid, even to myself, when I wish that something drastic would happen, a touchstone I could look at and say, “X impacted Y, because I voted for Z.” What if we completely cut ties with middle eastern oil suppliers, and gas price quadrupled overnight? That’d be something. What if suddenly homosexuality was made illegal? What if the draft was reinstated? What if marijuana was legalized? Something big, something to be up in arms about. Something I’d feel good about dropping everything else to either fight or defend.

Short for a blog post, maybe, but the list of ways that my government impacts my life is shorter. I feel like that’s a problem.

 

Date: March 12th, 2011
Cate: observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, things to think about
1 msg

obligatory dead baby joke

foreword: Hey, look at all those fallacies fly! Look upon my rhetoric and despair! In my defense, I’m talking about the way it makes me feel, though, and this is a blog post; so the only person I’m really arguing with is a strawman who doesn’t mind it when I use throw around appeals to emotion. My prose wanders into unfair territory only because I like stringing words together and this is something I feel strongly about.

I don’t like abortion. Here’s why: abortion is murder, and murder is reprehensible. I could probably put together some syllogisms for this if you’d like, but if you’re into that sort of thing you could just as easily do it yourself. Onward to explanations.

Maybe I should do the mortality post first? Spoiler alert – the reason this is the ‘Mortality Blog’ is that I’m making a (perhaps futile) attempt to deal with my fear of dying by treating the subject a little more casually.

Anyway, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that the idea of people dying makes me uncomfortable. Wouldn’t I be a psychopath if I didn’t care whether other people lived or died? Maybe I care too much? Are there some people that just need to die?

Again, maybe I should do the post on the worthwhileness of human life first.

In the meantime, I have the following insight to offer: my problem with abortion stems from my deep-rooted problems with people dying, let alone people being killed. Which brings us to the point of contention - have you already figured it out? – how old do you have to be before you’re considered a person?

Okay, okay, that was a loaded question, no fair. Knowing about logical fallacies makes it okay to deliberately use them as an attempt to interject humor into an otherwise fairly humorless conversation. Somewhere between a twinkle in your parents’ eye and a certificate of live birth, a person appears. The question is, at what point does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a human being?

In the beginning, we’ve got some sex cells, a genome half’n'half cocktail, with daddy’s sperm on one hand, and mommy’s eggs on the other. Are the separate sex cells people yet? I don’t think so. The chances that a petri dish full of sperm will ever develop into a human being has to be awfully close to 0%. It’s probably fair to say human life begins a little further down the line.

Let’s move on to other more exciting words – penetration, ejaculation! Thousands of joyous sperms wriggle their way towards fertilization. They’re on their way, the egg is waiting at the other end of the obstacle course. But is it soup yet? That’s getting trickier, because if you just wait, there’s a chance that the alpha tadpole will cross the finish line, the touchdown will be converted, and any number of sports metaphors I’m probably doing a terrible job of pretending I understand will set things on the right track for birth, 9 months later. Personally, the fact that the sex cells are still separate makes me think that this isn’t yet a human. It’s two halves of a whole, which will likely hook up, but it’s not necessarily going to happen. It’s a chance of a chance of a chance. At this point, spermacidal lube and whatnot is still in play, and maybe none of the swimmers will make it to the other end of the pool. Sports metaphors are nothing but glibness, coming from me.

Fertilization. My college dropout education and terrible memory for trivia (also a quick look at wikipedia’s article on the topic) tells me that at the moment of fertilization, the sperm merges with the egg, and boom, you’ve got a nice neat set of human DNA (well, ideally, anyway.)

(I’m going to take a moment here to point out that ‘Ooplasm‘ is another – and in my opinion, superior – term for ‘Ovum.’ Thanks, wikipedia!)

So now we’ve got one cell, made up of leftover bits of gamete, containing a brand new strand of DNA, freshly spliced together from mom and dad’s contributions. It’s an embyro!

And as far as I can tell, an embyro is getting much closer to being a human. There’s really only one more ‘right place at the right time’ consideration: implantation. The brave little potential person floats back downstream, passing all the disappointed-looking sperm who didn’t make the grade, and is looking to latch onto the uterus to keep things moving in the right direction. En route, it busies itself mitosis-ing, so we’ve got multiple human cells at that point, each possessing a copy of that person’s own unique DNA.

This is where I feel like we’re entering the territory of ‘life.’ Once the little guy has latched onto the wall of the uterus, it takes a few weeks to go from embryo to fetus. At some point it stops being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells’ and starts being ‘the brave little bundle of human cells that could,‘ or maybe even ‘the brave little human that is.’ Which is why I don’t have any problems with contraceptives – the morning after pill stops that brave little bundle of cells from even bundling, or hopefully from making it to implantation.

But once you’ve got a little embryo latched onto the insides of you, I think you’ve got a life in your hands. That life could’ve come into being through terrible circumstances, it could be a love child or a hate child, it could be an accident or the fulfillment of hopes, it could be a blessing or a curse, but it’s still a life. It’s a human. If you let it alone, it’ll grow up as big as you are. Days after being born, it’ll grab your finger and smile at you. If you give it a few years it’ll even try to start talking to you. It’s gone from ‘potential’ to ‘person.’

If I were to change my mind about abortion, that would be one area to look at: when does it stop being an ‘it’ and start being a person. However, you might agree with me on this point, but disagree on the degree to which I take the next one – killing people is wrong.

It’s a topic for another blog post, which is on my to-do list. But for the time being, let me say that I’m of the opinion that killing people isn’t a good thing. Yes there are nearly 7 billion of us, and that might double sometime in the next century, but human life isn’t cheapened by being common or easily obtained. Somewhere at the root of this feeling is the idea that if a person could turn out to be me, could turn out to be you, then who knows who else might turn up. And we’ll never know, if that person gets killed off early.

… and now, the problems.

I’m not unaware of the ‘but what if’s floating around my opinion. I apologize for the intentional double-negative, but like I said earlier, humor in a relatively humorless situation.

  1. “But what if it’s killing the mother?”
  2. “But what if it’s a rape baby?”
  3. “But what if it’d be kinder to put it out of its misery?”
  4. “But what if it has little prospect for any kind of meaningful life?”
  5. “But what if the process of bringing a baby to term will completely derail the life of the unwilling mother?”

I’m just coming up with these off the top of my head, and they’re horrible. They’re absolutely awful questions, the kind that make people cross their arms and huff, “I don’t want to play this game anymore,” during a particularly insensitive round of ‘would you rather?’

#1 – According to Matt Lohkamp, self-defense is a totally okay reason to kill someone. Murder is no less horrific in this case, but I’d be comfortable giving the murderer a nice tight hug and murmuring, “It’s going to be okay. You did the right thing.” If complications from pregnancy are going to kill the mother, she should be able to choose to kill her unborn child to save her own life. Fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide.

#2 – Self-defense isn’t going to work for children conceived of rape. The Futility Closet‘s ‘Duet‘ post today is actually what prompted me to write about this particular subject – it pulls a quote from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” It’s not a perfect comparison, I know. But it makes you think. It makes me think, I guess, if nothing else. If you find yourself responsible for the life of another human being, entirely against your will, what should you do? What if the disgust and nearly indescribable trauma of the act of rape itself taints the normal baby-bonding emotions, to the point where you’re disturbed by your own child? Is it okay to kill the child?

Again, fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. It’s such a terrible thing that attempting to imagine my way through what it’d be like to find myself in that situation makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I’m going to admit I haven’t come up with an answer I feel great about. Maybe there is no ‘good’ answer. I do, however, feel comfortable supposing that the answer you arrive at depends on context. Sometimes some people are going to choose to abort the child, other times other people are going to choose to keep it. Maybe only very rarely will the latter case be seen. But what if, what if?

At best, I think I can say that this isn’t necessarily a question of life-or-death (as opposed to #1) – it’s a question of easy-or-uneasy. You’re choosing whether your own quality of life is more important than the actual life of your unborn child. It’s terrible! It’s a terrible decision! It’s a decision no one should have to make, yes, but I’m pretty sure that’s the choice at hand. Should you kill your child so that your own life is easier to live? Let me repeat one last time: fuck that’s a terrible thing to have to decide. If anyone has any insight to offer on this particular point, I could probably use some.

#3 – This overlaps with another subject I should probably consider for the future: euthanization, suicide, that idea that death is ever preferable to life. Oh that’s a sick idea. That rubs me in completely the wrong way. The idea that the bleakness of death would ever be a nice change from the harshness of life just… it wrenches at me, physically. This is so much shitty stuff to deal with in this topic, geez.

Given relative certainty that the life in question will never make it to birth… I would be very close to giving it a ‘maybe.’ A horrible birth-defect that would barely allow the child to live past the first month? “….mmmmmmmaybe,” Matt mused, teeth clenched, face contorted by an elaborate grimace. Let’s enter the world of my imagination for a moment: I am a fetus, and some terrible twist of fate has left me missing most of my head, and all the important things my little head is supposed to contain. Gross. But since this is imagination land, I know then what I know now – that a brief life of pain and misery is preferable to a non-existent life.

But that’s how I feel personally, now, barely a quarter of the way through my own lifetime. So maybe it’s not fair for me to assume that someone else would feel the same as me – and yet, I don’t have any frame of reference for any other outlook apart from: survival is of supreme importance, and a terrible life is always better than a lack-thereof. The trauma of dealing with your child dying naturally, possibly in extreme pain after a heartrendingly brief and tortured existence… you’ve got to weigh that against sending your child to oblivion. Again, it’s not life-and-death, it’s picking between an easier life and a harder life. Personally, I’d like to think I’d pick the harder life, if it meant giving someone else even a short-and-sour taste of life before they met oblivion.

#4 & #5 I have less sympathy for. We’re moving farther and farther outside of the question of ‘a life barely worth living’ and close to “It’s not fair!” ala The Labyrinth. It’s easy for me to sit here with my lack of a uterus and relatively low chance of being raped, let alone impregnated, and say, “well ideally…” – and maybe that’s a hint as to why abortion rolls further towards being a ‘women’s issue’ rather than a ‘human issue,’ but still. If you have to choose between college and a baby, between prosperity and a baby, between peace of mind and a baby… it hurts to think that someone would be selfish enough to choose murder to make their lives easier, and it scares me, because it makes me wonder how far they’d be willing to take that.

I think that’s all I have to say on the subject at the moment – that kind of sums up where I’ve found myself after a few years of contemplation. I’ll definitely take another post to delve deeper into mortality, and survival, because that feeds into this. There is of course one other rather obvious omission from all this – the issue of legality. I’m still not sure how I feel about that, which means in the meantime, I’d rather it was legal, so that other people can sort it out for themselves. I’m not ruling out a future point at which I might reach the conclusion that abortion should be illegal in certain situations – I certainly don’t think that’s impossible, or even unreasonable. I think that there must be such a thing as a ‘frivolous abortion,’ though I don’t want to consider outlier data until I’ve dealt with the more common reasons behind it.

tl;dr: murder is wrong, abortion is murder, therefore abortion is wrong.

Date: March 10th, 2011
Cate: matt's life, observations + conclusions + beliefs, society + culture, technology + design, things to think about

stuff to talk about

So… what, I only ever post to the mortality blog when I have a particularly interesting dream, or when someone dies? Is that really worth paying for a domain name?

The mortality blog is meant to record things that might otherwise disappear when I die, let’s be frank. I’m not sure where it all fits, how to get it all out, but it seems important that it be accessible, somewhere, in case someone finds it interesting. In my own totally biased opinion, I’m an intriguing and complicated person. But how much of that matters to anyone who isn’t Matt Lohkamp?

Some of the stuff that might otherwise end up here probably shows up on Facebook. Which is cool, because it almost serves a different purpose – Facebook posts reach a very specific audience of friends and family and coworkers and classmates, who are generally people I feel I can relate to well-enough to discuss sensitive issues. Whereas the mortality blog is public. I mean, no one reads it, but they could if they wanted to – is that significant, that anyone could read my blog but no one does, while only a couple hundred people can read stuff I post on facebook, and a couple dozen actually do?

Well maybe I’ll roll a bunch of topic ideation into the end of this blog post along with a well-intentioned but completely unrealistic resolution to write here more often.

  • We could talk about money: how much money I make, how much I should be making, the way I decide how much to charge clients, etc. We could also talk about how the practice of tipping makes me uncomfortable.
  • We could talk about procrastination, a favorite subject, and why I spend my downtime wishing I had something more important to do, only to find myself getting distracted by the most insignificant things when I actually have something more important I should be focusing on.
  • We could talk about sexuality, because I can’t help having that running through my head every other day of the week.
  • We could talk about my extremely preliminary attempts to wade into… I don’t know, feminism, privilege, rape culture, whatever all that stuff is; and why I’m even interested in it.
  • … or on a broader subject, we could look at how I look at things – my approach to new subjects, to sorting out how I feel about things, how I measure the extent to which other people’s feelings figure into my own opinions, etc.
  • We could talk about life and death, since I’m scared to death of my own mortality (and everyone else’s) and yet can’t seem to help thinking about it sometimes. We could talk about abortion and the death penalty, if we wanted to talk about controversial stuff.
  • We could talk about video games and computer games, because I have all kinds of experience with that stuff.
  • We could talk about music. I like lots of different kinds of music – I mean, mostly a few kinds, but the exceptions to the rules are heinous exceptions, and I do take perverse delight in appreciating art that other people ridicule or revile.
  • Maybe I could do some thinking about the relationship between morality and legality – are they mutually exclusive? Are there issues that are primarily the domain of one or the other? Regardless of how I feel about abortion, gay marriage, and monopolies, should there be laws that address them, either to protect or prohibit?
  • The extreme degree of disconnect I feel with our government. How is the office of the president of the united states important if nothing he does directly effects me? Same question, senators and governors and mayors. After all the effort of ‘doing the right thing’ and educating myself and voting, does milk cost any less? Does gas? Can I roll through a stop sign with impunity when it’s clear no one is coming? Does anything that our elected officials do actually impact my life? That might be a good thing to write about, yes.
  • My interest in places like 4chan? I mean yes, perverse appreciate for ridiculed and reviled art, disdain for taboo. Maybe those things would be good to think about.
… that’s some stuff. Oh, and maybe,
  • why I still haven’t upgraded this blog’s wordpress engine to 3.1, and how funny it is that I call myself a web developer who is good with wordpress.
well I feel better. Maybe sometime in a couple months I’ll actually make another post. I wouldn’t hold my breath (because I’d likely asphyxiate, though I’m pretty good at holding my breath for a long time.)