{"id":32,"date":"2007-05-19T10:45:36","date_gmt":"2007-05-19T18:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/weeklyrob.dreamhosters.com\/?p=32"},"modified":"2007-05-19T10:45:36","modified_gmt":"2007-05-19T18:45:36","slug":"spiders-and-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/?p=32","title":{"rendered":"Spiders and Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I washed a spider down my shower drain last night.<\/p>\n<p>I generally let them live, as long as they&#8217;re not in my bed, or crawling around somewhere in my way, or clearly venomous. (I killed a black widow a few months ago with no remorse at all.)<\/p>\n<p>As I washed it down, I thought about how I&#8217;d rather let it live, all things considered, but I&#8217;m willing to kill it if it makes my life easier or better in some way. So that&#8217;s not much consolation to the spider community. Then it occurred to me that that&#8217;s more or less true with humans, too.<\/p>\n<p>That is, depending on the level of improvement of my life, and the starting level of the&#8230; goodness of my life, I&#8217;d be willing to kill a human.<\/p>\n<p>The starting level is important. Right now, I think my life-goodness is too high for killing. That is, no matter how good my life would be if I killed someone, the improvement wouldn&#8217;t be enough to justify murder.<\/p>\n<p>But if my life sucked more, and killing someone could get it unsucked, then I&#8217;d have to think about it a bit.<\/p>\n<p>Which made me think of a little story.<\/p>\n<p>Jane is a professional torturer. She comes in and tortures Steve every day. She&#8217;s not thrilled about it, but she needs the money. Steve would prefer to be free from torture, and get to live with his family back home in a non-dungeon.<\/p>\n<p>One day, Steve figures out a way to escape, but it involves shooting a few guards in the face. He plans and plans, but on the day of the escape, something goes wrong and he gets caught. Jane&#8217;s boss says she&#8217;ll get a raise if she kills Steve. Could anyone blame her for killing him in order to get a 5% raise? Of course not.<\/p>\n<p>The End.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I washed a spider down my shower drain last night. I generally let them live, as long as they&#8217;re not in my bed, or crawling around somewhere in my way, or clearly venomous. (I killed a black widow a few months ago with no remorse at all.) As I washed it down, I thought about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity","category-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyrob.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}