Form: Argument

A NOTE ON ARGUMENT – A SUBSTITUTION FOR VIOLENCE
Nov 2009

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.

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