Sunday, January 30, 2005

Close, but wrong. The subset of the species is the individual actor who acts out of relatively simple self interest. The counter argument is most often seen as a defense of some unquantifiable collective truth or will that is seen as coercive. But as I wrote in a comment at L2R:
"The market as such is responsible for the decision that the look of a tomato could be considered more important than its taste."
The morality of this absurd outcome is based on the fact that that everyone, and therefore no one is responsible for it.
But that isn't neutrality it's moral passivity; the same passivity seen in the ideal of 'objectivity' in journalism.

The alternative isn't Stalinism or Catholic Monarchy, it's in the nurturing of the skill of judgment. It is simply, more and better, and openly biased, speech, as in a courtroom.

Any state is coercive. Social norms are coercive. Language itself is coercive. But let's have an ongoing debate about the terms, and teach the forms of debate themselves. That's the point of a moot court yes?

If you concentrate on the formal structure and not the outcome -and that's the point of our constitution- you teach responsibility, the responsibility everyone should face to have an opinion. From that point you begin the debate. The Market [Market Theory] says that some things are off limits and writes them in stone as truth. But there is no fucking truth other than to eat, shit, fuck, and die. Everything else is artificial.
And freedom is as vague a term as any other.
The ultimate freedom after all is the ability to kill without anger or regret.

Have you ever lived in a house with plaster walls? Sheetrock isn't crap because its toxic, it's crap because it's made to be demolished. It's flimsy. It's garbage. And I'm saying this as a carpenter. I use the stuff.

To end on old turf: Bad tomatoes market theory and fantasy fiction all have a lot in common. They all represent the desire of the individual imagination to express itself, rather than the desire of an individual imagination to communicate.

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