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Notes -
Degeneracy is a Human trait.
Cowardice is a Human trait.
I would be lying if I tried to deny that I was a Degenerate or a Coward. I am human. You are free to call me a "fake tough cookie". Honestly I get it. Thing is though that once one has seen the elephant, many come to the conclusion that courage is a cheap thing. That more often than not it comes down to either being pissed off, or having no fucks left to give.
You say I am "eager to speculate on how your opponents might be functionally subhuman" and my reply is that I am anything but eager but when
in Romeon TheMotte one must do as the mottizens do. And perhaps that's where the perceived "disdain" that both you and @arjin_ferman have called out comes from. I don't want to be that asshole but since the move from reddit, and all you ever see of a user is what they post in I've found it harder and harder not to become that asshole. After all, the baseline human response is to meet like with like. Love with love, and contempt with contempt. As I said up thread I ran this test almost a month ago now and the responses I've gotten each time each time the topic comes up has been something to the effect of "who you going to believe, our apocalyptic rhetoric or your lying eyes?"Likewise, you say you have a "religious admiration for the truth" but what exactly does that mean? True statements can be used to mislead just as readily if not more so than fabrications. What does "honesty" and "the truth" even mean to you? For my part the basic principle that I try to hold to is "say what you mean, and mean what you say". I would like to believe that I have done so but I am only human.
Irony, Hyperbole, Sarcasm, these things are poison.
Understandable. I believe my eyes over your lies. I also share visible evidence, which apparently does not suffice to break you out of a loop where you blindly insist on a falsehood and pat yourself on the back for your straight-shooting. You seem to have committed to reduce yourself to a broken record that could as well be implemented with an obsolete Markov chain bot, but this is not my problem.
Actually it kind of is. Every time I observe such a failure to make use of human freedom under the shackles of pride, it feels like witnessing death. @FCfromSSC has mentioned my old frustration recently, but this is that taken to the limit. Oh well – people are mortal. In such a way too. That, too, is why I am an immortalist of the Cosmist bent. If I were an actual fancy materialist post-Christian sectarian like Fyodorov, this would've sent me on a rant as to how mortal sins, and particularly pride, are literally mortal, transgressions against the will to perfection allowed to us by our creator which is the essence of our soul and our potentially eternal life. A finite state machine cannot meaningfully partake of eternity, you see, precisely because its repertoire of possible states is fixed, and in this case fixed from the inside. In that same sense I could say that the Christian or in fact neo-Platonist idea that «God is Truth» must be understood literally, as a metaphysical position. But that'd be corny. Or not? ...Maybe for another time.
Miss me with this postmodernist shit. If this has to be explained, there's no point to bother explaining. It's an instinct. I believe that truth is the cognitive equivalent of a fact, and honesty is conveying one's best effort at understanding a given issue accurately, i.e. sharing truth. But of course one can obnoxiously nitpick at definitions of every word, and every step of the pipeline can be in some way surreptitiously distorted by one's biases. We have simple words, commonly agreed terms and formal logic to try and adjudicate uncertainties, but it's impossible to so easily defeat bad faith, lack of trust and irreconcilable high-level assumptions.
I have explained my understanding of the issue as well as I could for the moment, and illustrated it with evidence that has led me there. My understanding seems to be more grounded in evidence than yours, and the specific evidence provided is strictly incompatible with your previous assertions. This doesn't appear to be of any interest to you, because it does not even affect the your rhetoric. Hence I conclude that you are either a liar or someone otherwise incapable of participating in a honest discussion, such as a person without a concept of truth, i.e. a «postmodernist». That's all.
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