For all practical purposes, all I can really do here is to come back to this:
In regard to particular human behaviors unfolding in a particular existential context that most of us will be familiar with, what constitutes an “honest expression” relating to either 1] moral and political narratives or 2] human autonomy and free will.
Apparently, I’m not doing these exchanges in the way that they are supposed to be done. In the way that you and KT have been “helping” me to understand.
On the other hand, what else is there? We need a context in which the definitions and the meanings we give to words in these exchanges are fleshed out…illustrated…insofar as they have an actual impact on what we think, feel, say and do.
Also, as though there are not dozens and dozens of exhanges here at ILP in which conflicted folks don’t hurl at each other the same sort of accusation that you are hurling at me.
From my frame of mind, this is often just one more example of objectivism. I produce “confusion and frustration” in folks because I don’t come around to their way of thinking. Whereas with respect to the “the big questions” and/or the “is/ought world” I don’t expect there ever not to be confusion and frustration.
Of course you have no way of really knowing the extent to which I construe this as a hopelessly mangled and distorted assessment of my own frame of mind. But then [in my view] this sort of thing is built right into discussions like these.
And even though I have accumulated “distractions” as my own “whatever works” method of achieving some measure of “comfort and consolation”, it doesn’t make the hole go away. It doesn’t make the parts embedded in an essentially meaningless world and oblivion go away.
All I can do is to go in search of others who have an interest in exploring these questions. See what they have to say about them. Knowing all the many, many times in my own past when I once believed this but than believed that.
Maybe. Maybe not. In any event, I am running out of time to find out.
And yet I am still convinced that any number of folks like you and KT and Gib are repelled not by my “methodology”, but by the arguments that I make. In particular, the part where I reconfigures into “i”.
The fractured and fragmented “I”, unable to pin down right and wrong behavior objectively. The mere mortal “I” that tumbles over into the abyss that is nothingness. The “I” that can’t even decide with a measure of self-assurance that “I” is all his own, autonomously.
Well [here and now] you know that better than I ever could.
Okay, over the past 10 years, what positions [regarding important matters] have others managed to change your own point of view about?
And you seem to insist that the problem here is always me not them. There have been arguments that would have worked but I refused to listen. Willfully refused apparently. If I had really been willing to listen to the advice of some I would finally understand once and for all how a rational human being is obligated to think about things like, say, Communism.
Truth be told, so do I. But there are clearly some instances where winning and lossing are more easily calculated than others. Sporting events, gambling, playing the stock market, board and video games.
Instead, it’s when the discussion shifts to the morality of these interactions that “winning” and “losing” becomes more problematic.
Likewise, the extent to which we can ascribe either winning or losing to our abilities or to a wholly determined universe in which either winning or losing was never going to be anything other than what it had to be.