Paine,
We have free speech, logic and rhetoric so that we may make arguments, not a polysyllabic variant of ten year old girls trading insults.
I realize that you may resort to these tactics because you are incapable of seeking a truth via argument. I also realize that you post sufficiently in this forum with a small number of other apologists, that you feel justified in your alternate reality, and lack of intellectual rigor. But that does not mean that you are contributing to the dialog, or conducting an argument.
Altruism is incalculable (as in unknowable), and does not allow multiple people to cooperate QUANTITATIVELY toward any end requiring risk and action, nor in measuring and understanding outcomes, and it’s result does not produce status differentiation, which is a necessary component of the mating ritual. You are applying the method of the family wherein altruistic actions are perceptible and create an economy of altruistic exchange, rather than the economy wherein such exchanges are imperceptible, and therefore, absent a currency that allows measurement.
Calculable ends are not just a matter of preference but of necessity. Status attainment is not just a matter of preference but of necessity. Incentives are not just a matter of preference but of necessity. And the management of the worlds resources in time and space is not a matter of preference but of necessity, since the velocity of that set of exchanges and application in the fulfillment of human needs and wants is just as important as the volume of them.
In effect you are simply immature, and are applying the epistemological processes of the family to the extended order of human beings, when numerically, you cannot KNOW about large numbers of people what you can KNOW about a family.
Marx was effectively a luddite. And you are as well. We are only similar to one another as farmers and tribal hunter gatherers. But in a vast division of knowledge and labor spread across billions we are increasingly unequal in ability, when ability is judged as the increase in production that decreases prices, and the voluntary coordination of people so that they can act to reduce prices. We can redistribute some of these rewards, as long as the process of doing so is CALCULABLE enough so that status, incentive, and individual calculability are maintained. But we cannot be ‘fair’ as you mean it, because that kind of fairness is not possible to know, comprehend, or calculate. Most often class warriors like yourself simply seek to create a status among their peers by political means that cannot be established by material means.
Implicit in your postings (all of them) is a ‘freedom’ that you take for granted, yet do not understand. That is that we grant men free speech, in substitution for withholding our violence, so that we may seek the truth, not simply seek to achieve our ends – violence is a much easier tool for achieving ends. And since a state can only dispense violence — it is its only tool — that violence, and the state, are a continuation of that exchange of violence for seeking truth, not seeking ‘to win’. Therefore if you do not debate rationally, men need not withhold their violence against you. And if they do, they simply allow you to steal from the social order.
In other words, if you are not seeking truth and are name calling, then you are both stealing from the public wishing well by which we all pay for the act of free speech so that we may seek truth — not so that we may get what we want. And if it is just to get what we want, then not only can the weak revolt, and return to violence, but so can the strong. Some of us are possessed of petty interpersonal violence, some of us capable of protest and rabblery, some of us capable of slaughter and civil war. That the weak threaten violence is a humor, since the strong are more capable both of its execution, and of paying a minority handsomely to oppress or kill the discontents.
You may be one of those people for whom degradation of our ‘group’s’ competitive ability and therefore status and prosperity is acceptable. And if that is the case, then again, you steal from those who seek to perpetuate our advantage and prosperity, by failure to participate in argument.
You may be one of those people for whom this is a mask for envy and laziness and simply wants others to take care of you rather than earn for yourself and others.
You may be one of those people who is willing to consume cultural capital for current ends, and who is willing to steal from the sacrifices that were made by those generations that came before us.
You may be one of those people that thinks, despite the vast ocean of data, that people are infinitely plastic in their behavior, rather than that humans behave in very clear and established manners across all states, nations, civilizations and times, and therefore are a utopian.
I don’t know which of these errors you’re making. But I do know that your failure to engage in an argument, is to hide behind an electronic connection as a means of stealing from your fellow man.
This may be too subtle for you, but I am casting you as a thief, fool and liar who works against the public good, in order to obtain what you want by deceptive means, rather than what can be obtained by honest voluntary exchange, using the only tools and institutions of cooperation that man has so far invented – those that are calculable, and the institutions that make them so. You are part of the reason democratic capitalism has failed, and why totalitarian capitalism has emerged as the dominant economic force to be employed in the world.
