Journal Bill Dog's Journal: walled minds 15
An anon poster wrote today:
I'll argue the reverse. Life is competition. We compete with others for resources and, in today's consumer market, for "stuff". If some people aren't smart enough, don't care enough, etc. to turn on DNT [Do Not Track] - well that keeps web services cheaper for those of us that do turn it on. If the advertisers are getting quality demographics, market segmentation, etc. from the vast majority of folks then the people here - who know better - can continue to get free web sites. If nobody was tracked then we'd have to pay for our sites. Simple enough. Let the herd be tracked. Those that care and those that know will turn on the DNT.
I refuse to view life as a competition as much as I refuse to go along with the "we're all in this together" mentality.
We don't compete with others for resources; this is a flawed, Left-wing view, that everything is a zero sum game. A Left-wing view where the Right says of it "accept it" and the Left "we must do something about it". But either way they're both reactions to and in terms of how Leftists have defined how people are to think about it.
I take neither side of the issue because I reject the issue. Life is about neither ends of the Left's competition vs. cooperation false choice, it's about each person living it how s/he sees fit.
So it's not a matter of some people being "not smart enough" or "don't care enough", in that the reasons don't really matter. It's just people making choices and deciding what's important to them and how much. I don't want to be tracked so I avoid and block Google properties. Others may feel strongly about supporting the free sites that they regularly read. Still others may have mixed emotions and end up at different levels of in-between.
This is not a continuum of good on one end and evil on the other, or dumb vs. smart, or herd versus nerd. It just is. If anything, it's a range of equivalent goodness; it's good that people get to decide for themselves. Their decision is "good" because they made it (for themself). Incidental effects on me notwithstanding; I could end up with more or fewer free sites that I care at all about, depending on if more or fewer people are more or less concerned about ads and tracking. But I'm better off overall that my fellow man can have this incidental effect on me, because the alternative (of all of us having no personal choice in the matter) is far worse.
p.s. Another AC under the same topic posted this: http://advertising.microsoft.com/advertise/microsoft-media-network. I don't know how much this has gotten off the ground, but I for one did not know that MS had gotten into the advertising business. Troubling to me because I had been counting on them being a company that sells software, and not people, like Google.
If we don't compete with each other for resources (Score:2)
Then is it your view that the earth is infinite?
I have a tendency to agree that *for all intents and purposes* the Earth is infinite and what scarcity exists in our economic system is largely artificial, caused by exclusive private property rights and some people being allowed to own so much that the Earth becomes more finite than it should be; we should be easily able to support a population of 28 billion and we're struggling with 8 billion because of this. In addition, many of the resources that the Left
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It is my view that the earth doesn't matter, it's people that matter. So I don't think too much about the finiteness or infiniteness of this planet and its resources. That's what the Left wants everyone to be concerned about, but I try not to let the dominant values set of the modern world dictate what I think about, let alone what I think about what I think about. As part of my Christian journey I try to be *in* the world, but not *of* the world [gotquestions.org].
On competition for resources, think of job hunting. Whenever
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So the words Imago Dei mean nothing? Men aren't made in the image of God? And thus, do not attempt to form communities in imitation of heaven?
It's always the left... (Score:2)
Of course the zero-sum game is "left-wing thinking", because you disagree with it... doesn't matter if a right-winger spouts the same nonsense, because they're republicans in name only [wikipedia.org].
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It's hard to argue that "No true Scotsman" applies to an assertion whose meaning substantially includes the assertion of corruption involved.
That is, taking an example from wikipedia:
Implicit in his reaction is the assumed premise that true Scotsman have remained pure (so the object o
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It's hard to argue that "No true Scotsman" applies to an assertion whose meaning substantially includes the assertion of corruption involved.
To quote Wikipedia for RINO [wikipedia.org]:
Republican In Name Only is a pejorative term that refers to a member of the Republican Party of the United States whose political views or actions are considered insufficiently conservative or otherwise conforming to liberal positions.
There is no assertion of corruption. There is only the statement that the Republican member is "insufficiently conservative". Implicit in that statement is the argument that they are not true Republicans, because they're not conservative enough.
I don't see how one can look at the phrase, "Republican In Name Only" and not see that it is synonymous with "Not a True Republican".
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I was referring to my assertion, not the example one from wikipedia. I asserted, lamentingly, that even Right-wingers are getting compromised, in the sense that I spoke of, by the Left. Whipping out the NTS card does not demonstrate that my assertion is wrong.
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I was referring to my assertion, not the example one from wikipedia. I asserted, lamentingly, that even Right-wingers are getting compromised, in the sense that I spoke of, by the Left. Whipping out the NTS card does not demonstrate that my assertion is wrong.
... but there are right-wingers who think that this is a zero-sum game.
The believing that the world is not a zero-sum game is not a necessary precedent for being "right-wing" or "conservative". In fact, a conservative could be argued to be even more in favor of a zero-sum game, because they want to conserve as much of the game as possible. e.g. There are only so many tax dollars, and the various budgets have to make due with what is available. We cannot just arbitrarily raise the amount spent, just because
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The Right-wing is known for its "a rising tide lifts all boats" philosophy. And the Left has their 1% vs. 99% and the 1% has the 99%'s money and it must be redistributed back. The Right is about individual achievement and getting as much as you can work for for yourself. The Left is about the advancement of the collective and urging consciousness of limited resources. This isn't rocket science, and it's not controversial.
We don't even think of the economy as a zero-sum game. I.e. we're not against raising t
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The Right-wing is known for its "a rising tide lifts all boats" philosophy. And the Left has their 1% vs. 99% and the 1% has the 99%'s money and it must be redistributed back. The Right is about individual achievement and getting as much as you can work for for yourself. The Left is about the advancement of the collective and urging consciousness of limited resources. This isn't rocket science, and it's not controversial.
None of this requires that someone in the right-wing must not believe that the economy is a zero-sum game.
In fact, those who call for a gold-standard economy are specifically aiming to turn the economy into a quite-literally zero-sum game, in order to defeat inflation.
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Of course it doesn't; I'm speaking about *generalities* about the two schools of thought. It's just that when someone exhibits a characteristic that is more characteristic of one side than the other, I tend to think that, barring further evidence, that might be the side they are predominantly on, no matter what they claim they are. Someone could claim they're a Right-winger all day long, but if the only
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Someone could claim they're a Right-winger all day long, but if the only thing I ever see come out of their mind is defined by a box the Left has made for people, then they're more of a person who's not good at being a Left-winger than they are someone who's good at being a Right-winger.
You mean, by a box that you define for the Left. You're certainly not using the left's opinions in this matter, as we all construct our own boxes. When a Protestant calls the Mormon faith "non-Christian", it's because the Protestant has established a box that they define as being "Christianity", and refuse to put "Mormonism" in there. Even though, a Mormon could readily agree with all points of the Nicene Creed, which my church home (from when I was Christian) considers as the fundamental list of Christian
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It seems you're circling back around now to points you've already tried to make. And that I've already said my peace on why I think they're all invalid. I don't see how there's anything more to say.
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It's hard to argue that "No true Scotsman" applies to an assertion whose meaning substantially includes the assertion of corruption involved.
Hell, Conservapedia's page on RINOs [conservapedia.com] doesn't even assert "corruption". But makes a baldfaced patent assertion of No True Scotsman:
A RINO (Republican in Name Only) is an officeholder or candidate who is a member of the Republican Party, but holds views to the political left of most Republican voters. The term "RINO" describes politicians who claim to be Republican but are in fact liberal. [emphasis added]