Thought of the Day: Misuse

If the biggest thing you can fault a thing for is its misuse, then the thing itself is probably good.

Comments

jill said…
Like pitbulls?
dogimo said…
Hm. I don't know that I'd agree that's the worst thing you could say about pitbulls.

But sure, I guess the point applies! A pitbull well-treated, well-trained and well-loved is a big ol' lovin' lover of a dog. I've spent many summer hours on a folding metal chair in the grass, sippin' a light lager, giving a huge monster of a big ol' pig-dog of a pit bull major (and well-deserved) scratches.

That dog was such an idiot.

It's the Akitas that scare me, though.
Mel said…
Nuclear weapons?

I'm wondering if they could be seen as probably good. Is there a proper use of nuclear weapons ? ... as opposed to the threat of their use doing good. As wiki says, "their ethical status remains the subject of scholarly and popular debate."
dogimo said…
I'd argue thus: as concrete avatars of the possible, there is no choice for humanity but that nuclear weapons exist. Because they are possible, they are inevitable. Therefore the proper use of nuclear weapons is not so much as to create threat, but to establish an equilibrium in which an unbalanced threat can not occur.

Boo yah. You already pretty much defeated my original point, Mel, but I went down swinging wildly with my counterpoint.

Which, arguably, has some validity to it.

I want to point out something in the next comment, though. Which is: the reason you didn't beat my point even though you seemed to.
dogimo said…
What I forgot was, my original tenet wasn't that all things are good (only some are misused) -it was that if misuse was the worst charge you could level it was probably good.

So within that, some things may have far worse charges against them besides misuse! Arguably, some things are horribly bad even when "properly used."

I thought of that during the previous comment, but I felt I had to still post what I'd said while under that bewitchment you somehow laid on me, where I thought I was obligated to defend nuclear weapons.

A nice typo: unclear weapons.