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what is pro-life?
Tuesday, March 29 2011
In terms of damage to the language, "pro-life" might be one of the worst offenders (if you are willing to exclude, for the moment, the naming of congressional legislation). The term "pro-life" has broad implications, as if it meant to stand in support of all life in opposition to whatever its opposite is taken to be (either death or the inorganic world). This is not, of course, what we know "pro-life" to mean. Instead it means the support of a very small subset of the arguably alive against the wishes (and even the lives) of others who are living. That those being supported by those who are "pro-life" are entirely restricted to the human unborn means that the vast bulk of life itself is being completely ignored by those who are pro-life. Theirs is an absolute demand: the end to abortion, even if it means the suffering and the potential death of those who have already been born and in whom society has a considerably greater investment.
As you can tell, I have a more practical view of life and death. While most of us prefer to live and to avoid death, dying actually matters less to those experiencing it than it does to those socially and economically connected to him or her. The only people connected to an unborn human are its mother and (far more remotely) its father and grandparents, and none of those people can be said to have a relationship with it. That anyone outside of that group should step in and speak for the unborn strikes me as absurdly meddlesome.
I have far more respect for "pro-life" attitudes that reflect a genuine respect for life as it is actually being lived. It's noble to actively work to protect habitats against the encroaching human populations, to advocate the humane treatment of animals, and to work to overcome cycles of drop-out, crime, and incarceration in neglected communities. It all comes down to empathy: do you actually care about the individuals you are seeking to help, or are you instead trying to please divine bean counters?
My own sense of organic empathy (the broadest form of "pro-life") is so sensitive that I try to avoid any actions that have a negative effect on any living organisms. I swat mosquitos and crush ticks because the consequences of being bitten are so unpleasant, but I will leave a wasp nest in peace unless it is less than ten inches from where I need to work. When I split a log open in the winter and dozens of hibernating ants tumble out, I feel terrible, and sometimes I even sweep them into a pile and try to put them in some place where at least I won't be stepping on them.
I even develop relationships with weeds, particularly vigorous ones that I've watched grow from seedlings. I often allow such weeds to persist in the garden until Gretchen pulls them out. But down in the greenhouse, where a weed can theoretically live forever, I'd basically given up on actually cultivating vegetables. Instead I'd found myself cultivating lush clumps of grass, a number of mystery rosettes, and some sort of hearty nightshade (whose fallen fruit, probably toxic to humans, litters the greenhouse floor).
Today, though, I decided it was time to take back the greenhouse for vegetables. I tore out all the grass clumps, rosettes, and nightshades, though (in a nod to our existing relationship), I didn't simply throw them out. I transplanted them into the semi-frozen ground just east of the greenhouse. They'll probably suffer thermal shock there, but I needed my pots and trays for things like jalapeños, lettuce, arugula, and spinach. I did such a complete job of planting in the greenhouse that I didn't want to stop, so I tidied it up considerably, throwing out old caulking tubes, latex gloves, and odd pieces of treated lumber and Durock. (Durock, by the way, doesn't hold up nearly as well as Wonderboard to cycles of freezing and thawing in the presence of lots of water; this is something I discovered after using it to sheathe my brand new greenhouse door.)
Later, the greenhouse was mostly tidy, but the tidying bug had yet to subside, so I finally got around to installing a bookshelf in the brownhouse, meaning my brownhouse reading materials will no longer be kept in an unkempt pile in the still-unplumbed sink.
A couple days ago I'd downloaded a file from a suspicious site (anyone with any web experience can immediately identify a suspicious site by its appearance, particularly the content and loudness of its advertising). But I'd scanned the file in ClamWin and it had come up clean, so I'd gone ahead and executed it. I could tell immediately from its behavior that the file was malicious. There was a pause, some desktop icons blinked, and then nothing happened. So I'd immediately gone and rooted out the infection, which had amounted to a few Run: lines in the registry, an executable in C:\Documents and Settings\gus\Local Settings\Temp, and a couple new things in C:\Windows (sort by date is an easy way to find these things, though it would be really helpful if full paths were given in the Windows XP task manager).
Shortly thereafter, I found that I couldn't access thepiratebay.org, the most useful torrent search engine on the web. I'd assumed it was down, but when it stayed down, I found myself trying a proxy to get to it. Damn if that didn't work. Was Verizon, my internet provider, blocking thepiratebay.org? I wouldn't put it past those assholes, but that would be big news, and nobody was reporting it. So today, trying to get to the bottom of this issue, I tried pinging thepiratebay.org. My computer told me it was pinging 127.0.0.1, which I know to be localhost (that is, my computer). The only way that could be happening was if new entries had been put in my hosts file. So I opened that up, and sure enough, a dozen or so torrent search enginges were in there, all of them set to 127.0.0.1. Who would want me to stop using a torrent search engine? Who do you think? Is the MPAA paying Russian hackers to set up bogus warez sites to poison host files in an effort to make torrent search engines unreachable? This seems like a pretty crude (and not too effective) technique, but I can think of nobody else with the motivation to block access to torrent search engines. I think, by the way, that the file that did this came from a site called datayahoo.in, which is registered to a clearly pseudonymous Joseph Hayes.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?110329 feedback
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