Got fifteen minutes to spare, so I thought I would get a head start on blogging.

Got our specific challenge, I mean, assignment today in Ethics. A healthy young couple with promising careers ahead of them (but still in school) get pregnant. Is it okay if they abort it? I have to first explain what this philosopher called Hursthouse thinks in general, then what she would say about the issue, then what I think as expressed relating to Hursthouse.

Not crazy about that last part. I have very clear and well thought out opinions on the matter and having to refer them to the rather hodgepodge and inconsistent “virtue” ethics will seriously cramp my style.

Virtue ethics means well, and I understand why it is popular, because it appears to offer far less disquieting results than Kantian ethics or Utilitarianism, and it jibes with people’s inherent sense of ethics quite well. But it basically boils down to “the right thing to do is what a virtuous person would do”, and that begs the question rather hard.

It did make me realize, though, that while I need my ethics to be logically consistent and solid, others do no. Others will get more guidance and comfort from something less logically rigorous but better suited to our deep sense of right and wrong.

I confront difficult moral issues head on, and trust the products of my intellect to reveal the truth.

But not everyone can do that. In fact…. people like me are very rare. Most people are a lot more involved with life, and detachment isn’t of use to them.

It is to me.

(—)

And I am back after a hearty meal of pizza and cheese filled breadsticks honey garlic chicken bites and giant cookie.

Okay, not healthy exactly. Semi-healthy.

I feel good, though. I think I really needed a plus sized meal. I have been feeling like I have been running around a meal and a half behind metabolic demand lately. I’ve been skipping meals again, which I know is very stupid for someone like me, and yet the forces of laziness and lack of hunger keep joining together to talk me into doing it.

It’s time like this which make me wish that there were food pills like they had in the Jetsons. Normally, I find that idea repulsive. What lunatic wants to take the eating out of food? But in circumstances like these, they would be darn handy.

The closest we have is multivitamins, and they are hardly nutritionally complete. The jury is out as to whether we can absorb and make use of nutrition from pills at all, and assuming we can, the best a pill can do is supply you with nutrients like the vitamin C and iron, and micronutrients like zinc.

They can’t provide you with the macronutrients like protein and carbohydrates, which the body needs in very large supplies all the time.

(—)

Been thinking about Trump lately. (Someone talking about Trump on the internet, how rare. )

I feel a little bad for the people who got on the Trump train early, and because they are conservatives and thus would rather die than change their mind, they are now along for the ride no matter what. Most liberals can’t even imagine what that is like. As it was with Dubya, these people are not just committed to the candidate.

They are committed to believing whatever that candidate says. I am sure there are a lot of Trump supporters that are not racist at all, or only a little racist against Mexicans. But those people are, in effect, half-racist now because they have to – in the psychological sense – keep believing that Trump is going to save America, and that he’s a great guy, and so on. So even if there is a part of them that is growing increasingly uneasy with where things seem to be going…. they are trapped by their own need for certainty and lack of mental flexibility.

He has them now, and he can do whatever he wants to their minds. A couple of months ago, I would have said that he could still lose them by saying something they don’t like, but it’s increasingly hard to imagine what that would be at this point. What could possibly be bad enough to shake these people if everything he has said so far hasn’t done it.

It would have to be something huge (yooj). Like him saying that he was going to raise their taxes, or legalize pedophilic sex, or suchlike. Something so huge (yooj)that they absolutely could not absorb and believe it. Something so huge (yooj) that it would also give them a breaking point, something where they can say “I was with him until…. ” and save face.

Like when my very conservative father dropped Mulroney. The signs were there that it was coming. He kept mentioning that he was a “small-C conservative”. ^[1] So it should not have come as a surprise when he announced that he no longer supported Mulroney.

The reason he cited was that Mulroney had gotten too cozy with the Americans (never a good thing for a Canadian politician) and that gave my father the necessary breaking point. He never had to admit that he had backed a terrible man. Technically.

That was, incidentally, I knew Mulroney was fucked. If he managed to lose people like my father, his ass was grass.

So Trump could still stumble and fall. But it would take something pretty big and he is probably too smart to do that. It might seem like he can say whatever he wants and his people will still line up to such his big old alpha cock.

But that is only because he is dumping hate on people his supporters already don’t like and don’t feel any connection to at all. If he was to attack them… I am not sure what would happen, but it would not be good. They would turn on him, and quite possible kill him.

Wouldn’t that be a sight.

But how to arrange it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.