this is starting to sound like dialogue out of star trek.
we'd all make better decisions if we had no emotions, i guess!
there's something dehumanising in the relentless verbiage, no sense of give and take, just wearying repetitions of what seems an increasingly robotic take on life, expressed with hairsplitting relish-less relish.
you are doubtless intelligent in an AI fashion, but it seems cognitively alien in some way i can't quite put my finger on, something emotionally autistic in the subtext, bleeding through the comments, also a slightly superior, hectoring tone that leaves a funny taste on the monitor.
excuse me for drifting into ad hom territory, but i use it to counter what i perceive to be a trollish passive-aggressivity, especially towards Jake, that provoked so many interesting comments i thought it just a new foil for a while for some here, who usually aren't so forthcoming as a rule.
but it's gone on so long, and while your command of language and argument is impressive, especially in a non-mother tongue, it's fucking hard work tracking you, and after doing the work, there's a vacuously cheated feeling left at the end, as i said in another comment on another semi-tedious thread, there's no 'there' there!
so i must regretfully conclude that you V are a new kind of troll i never encountered before, one that bores victims into reluctant submission, because who has the stamina, at the end of the day, to argue one's points with such a fixed-non-position as yours? in trying to be absolutely impartial, you actually create a semantic black hole for the idealistic to supposedly wormhole through to some post-ideological nirvana, where actually we all end up rendered, flattened into some different, dispassionate shape, disembodied algorithms jammed into some utilitarian anti-philosophy.
it's a recycling of the 'god is dead' mantra of the 50-60's, but this time it's ideology.
so fucking what?
you've created a little tautological loop, and having successfully convinced yourself of its invincibility to discussion, continue to batter the blog with spurious, sophistic, shaggy-dog circular non-reasoning that so far has convinced no-one of the veracity of any of the pseudo-truistic non-points you indefatigably belabour, with admirably impressive tenacity.
there's a kind of zen futility to the whole operation, kinda makes me wonder if you enjoy creating a sort of vortex into which heartfelt arguments meet a watery grave, a maelstrom of meaninglessness into which they tumble, energy and time misspent chimera-chasing.
davy jones in person!
i sure hope you got your jollies here, where's the next lucky blog you plan to enlighten in your, er, unique way?
sheez, i'm sorry if i offended some netiquette, but some of these threads have had me wanting to scream at what i have finally deduced, wading through so many murky mystifications, can only be wilful, wanton and contrarian obtuseness.
i really tried, but this one's off any map i can relate to.
happy looping! i sure wish i hadn't bothered spending precious time down a rabbit hole, but hey, chalk it up to getting accustomed to ET being a place where mental energy invested was always over-amply rewarded.
there went another cherished illusion!
wheeee (with h)... have a peaceful day.
nice job, i admit you had me going for a while... hats off to the saintly levels of patience others have revealed, in trying to welcome you and make you feel respected and 'chez toi'.
fool's gold, it just shimmers, ultimately weightless... being endlessly 'right' is a vaccination against productive discussion. we lefties are easy to bait into 'deep' dialogue, but eventually you have to come clean and take a position that consists of more than shooting holes in others'.
but you're way too clever a fox for that, huh? you are a giant wind-up, that gets kicks from daring provoking people into spitting out what you masochistically really want to hear, namely that your counter-arguments hold no water of life, they're just maya, mindstuff, monkeymind chatter, much ado about Sweet Fanny Adams...
but you were dying to have your bluff called, right?
we're on to you! at least your posts elicited some excellent responses.
lucifer's advocate? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
Apparently you have never tussled with a global warming skeptic. :-)
The rest was bonus hours spent replying to fierce ideological shots. I merely said, ideological stances have a tendency to exaggeration, to flaming, to work for some ideal, and was noting people might be getting fed up with it.
There is no "there", just a question whether utilitarians are to take the place of the "illuminated" politicians. No intention to promote anything, but the reactions were blazing. I explained why: a non ideologue is mistaken for a hidden kind of one, and attacked by everybody else. What's the goal of pragmatism? Simply utilitarian, I suppose. No more grand vision of the future. What's my goal? None, I framed an issue that I found interesting, and for the rest, mainly replied to ranting. Jake made valid points, which we discussed, and pure sloganeering (which he admitted). But in general, he dragged me on ideological ground. What do I care that he sees the society as a war between fatcats and (cornered, battered) civic organizations? For me, that's the dychotomic view typical to ideologically polarised people.
My "impartiality", utilitarianism, certainly looked excessive and boring, due to too much repetition. My mistake was to not set things straight from the very beginning, know when to draw the line, instead of leaving those "interesting" sub-threads develop to no end, and then complain of it. For instance, it was a big mistake to speak of "sheer communism". It was ideological, and my subsequent clarification was useless. I shouldn't have replied to Ted Welch on "communist dictatorships", as it had nothing to do with my diary.
I'm not trying to revive anything, you can see that but a few people joined in. And for a reason: my diary was a bit too "academic", phrases too long and convoluted, the subject quite trivial, if you take a critical look at it. The subject was actually so dull, that stopping the ideological rants make it look void: the only "brilliant" idea is that we would be diving into prosaic utilitarianism.
So yes, you can say 300 + 300=600 posts were published on anything and everything but the topic, because the topic itself hardly interested.
"saintly levels of patience others have revealed, in trying to welcome you and make you feel respected"
Oh? Except the newcomers' welcome, each of my subsequent posts were met with mistrust and accused of rightwing propaganda. On the women discrimination, or these two blogs on ideology, all I said was in the end quite trivial stuff. But the slightest scent of me not being totally and fully for the weak and the poor, no matter how trivial and argumented, provoked the ire of a handful of people and derived into hundreds of posts.
Yes, lucifer's advocate in a way. I confess to this, I promise I don't do it on purpose, to troll, flame or hurt anybody, I just seem to thrive on hot debates and me taking several sides for the fun of argumenting. I actually tend to do that, indeed. I realize this won't bring me any more fans than I already have :)
I would apologize for this, even if it really was not meant like that. I really only wanted to speak of utilitarian politicians. But then, you do admit to having found some interest in those other reactions after all. If only for that, my "void" can be forgiven and forgotten :)
cheers Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last! (Martin Luther King)
