07-15-2017, 02:50 PM
OK, some people deserve no attention. The lunatics incapable of expressing a coherent thought probably can't understand my response, either. Internet trolls draw attention for all the wrong reasons. I do not want to discuss my sexuality and especially not what someone wants to believe about me because of one of my stances. (I became resolutely for gay rights once I was gay-bashed because what makes life safer for gays makes my life safer in case someone gets my sexual orientation wrong). I have no desire to debate people who have cruelty and destructiveness as cornerstones of their thought. And, yes, there really are people who are just simply wrong and they cannot accept after finding out that they are wrong that they cannot accept the reality.
The real problem isn't some lunatic howling at the moon. The problem is the person schooled in the wondrous product of three millennia of achievement can still believe in catastrophically-failed patterns of thought even after one can express clearly the consequences of such thought. That is where Galen and I have a problem. He believes that unrestrained greed is the fount of all achievement, something to be cultivated irrespective of the human cost.
To be sure, people can hold some cranky ideas as theology, but if they can devise a workable society out of such -- then so what.
The real problem isn't some lunatic howling at the moon. The problem is the person schooled in the wondrous product of three millennia of achievement can still believe in catastrophically-failed patterns of thought even after one can express clearly the consequences of such thought. That is where Galen and I have a problem. He believes that unrestrained greed is the fount of all achievement, something to be cultivated irrespective of the human cost.
To be sure, people can hold some cranky ideas as theology, but if they can devise a workable society out of such -- then so what.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.