Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday (obviously) and I am writing this on…my lapcom!!  That’s right, I’m pleased to say that after all my discussion yesterday about trying to give my thumb bases a break, I maintained the impetus into the evening to bring the mini lapcom back with me, and I am now using it to write this post.

I’ve probably already said more about this than was merited, but I’m rather pleased with myself.  That doesn’t happen all that often nowadays—me being pleased with myself, I mean—so I am trying to indulge it as much as I can, hopefully without overdoing it.

Let’s see, now, is there anything else to talk about today?  Hmm.  Nothing comes to mind right off the top of my head.  Perhaps I should just call it good and wish you all a good day and say “Ta ta for now” in abbreviated form.

But, no, I don’t think I’m going to do that.  Not having anything to say has rarely stopped me (or lots of other people, I suspect) from running off at the keyboard/mouth.  I don’t know if that’s healthy or good or not; probably there is no specific absolute “value” slot or slots in which to put that fact.

The goodness (or badness) of a thing is often largely dependent on that for which some particular person might use it, or the semi-arbitrary tastes of any given person.  But as for absolute goodness or badness, I’m not sure those concepts ever fully apply.

Even nuclear weapons can at least be argued to have had some modicum of benefit.  It’s an ill wind indeed, as they say, that blow no one any good.  There can be little doubt that the atomic bomb shortened the war in the Pacific in World War II, and that was good for Allied soldiers, though clearly not good for Japan, at least not in the short term.

Then, of course, there was the Cold War, which was terrifying and had the potential to send civilization back millennia or more.  Thankfully, it did not.  It’s a bet I wouldn’t encourage the world to make again—that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction would prevent most conventional wars that might otherwise have led to the death of many millions and the immiseration of millions more, albeit without destroying civilization in the process—but we got away with it that time (so far).

So, yeah, good and evil are largely viewpoint dependent, though they are not absolutely subjective.  I suspect there are quite a few things in the world, or in the potential of human behavior, about which if you surveyed many hundreds of thousands of people, the very large majority would agree on whether they were generally good or generally evil.  Child sex trafficking comes to mind as one of those more or less universal evil things, I suspect.  On the other hand, saving innocent children from violence or disease or catastrophe would probably pretty generally be considered good.

But of course, all this is very anthropocentric (or anthropoidocentric, maybe).  If you were to canvas the opinions (if they existed) of various sexually transmitted viruses and bacteria and protozoa, they would probably be in favor of all forms of sex trafficking, and of indiscriminate, unprotected sex in general.  It might be their equivalent of clear-cutting the Amazon rain forest to make room for non-native crops.

Blowflies would surely be quite satisfied, at least in the short term, if humans had massive, bloody wars that left bodies strewn, unburied, in the streets.  But humans—selfish bastards that they are—are unlikely to do such a thing just because it would be nice for the flies.  They might do it for other—arguably no better—reasons, but not for the flies.

Shakespeare said (or, well, Hamlet said*), “there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  And, of course, in Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place, and of itself, can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell”, though I may have left out some archaic contractions.

To be fair, we should expect Satan to say something like that, shouldn’t we?  And we should not give too much credence to his viewpoint.  Hamlet, on the other hand, is much more morally ambiguous than, say, the leader of the fallen angels, so it’s more convincing when he says his line during a semi-philosophical interaction with his two former friends.

Well, I feel that this has been a rather peculiar blog post, even for me.  I suppose one might expect that, if one normally wrote peculiar blog posts, one might expect that a “peculiar for me” blog post by such a person would be a “normal for someone else” blog post.  But that intuition is misleading and usually wrong.

There are many more ways to be “peculiar” than there are to be “normal” in most cases, so, like the phase space that can be used to diagram entropy, when things move from one spot semi-randomly to another, they are much more likely to become more peculiar than to revert to more normal.

The other way only works in strictly one-dimensional situations, though in those situations it is worth noting.  For it is a fact that, ceteris paribus, the lesser of two evils is the greater of the two goods, just as a less negative number is a more positive number, by mathematical definition.

On that, I’ll draw this lapcom blog post to a close, with a deep, sincere thank you for reading:

Thank you, deeply and sincerely, for reading.

TTFN

*You cannot assume that an author agrees with a point made by one of the characters in the author’s works.  This is true of many a celebrated quote.  The famous Oscar Wilde line “I can resist anything but temptation” is spoken by Dorian Gray, who is not a particularly good person, and probably does not represent Wilde’s considered ethical opinions.