On this thread, on the subject Why are we alive?, begbert2 and I had a debate on whether all our actions are motivated by seeking happiness / avoiding misery.
This was off-topic, but it didn’t appear anyone minded the hijack (I should note though: I did say early on that it was off-topic, and I was reluctant to discuss the topic on that thread).
It’s a fascinating topic but it was spoiled early on by several flippant responses by begbert2, and he got worse with each post.
Now, I’ll admit that after a while he started to wind me up and I retaliated with some childishness of my own. For example, I started prefixing all my posts with one of his dafter quotes*.
But the difference is, I was still trying to engage in debate, still making arguments, analogies, using quotes and cites as (s)he simply responded each time with dodges and macho posturing.
Some examples (all the responses are in the correct context: no creative editing here):
I agree. But note, you don’t need to follow the arguments, just notice how evasive he’s being. In the first example, he dodges answering a question, in the second he’s just being an ass,
and in the third, I challenge him to come up with a cite, and he refuses until I produce a cite. I do so; he can find nothing to challenge about it, but he still refuses to produce his own.
As for the argument not being good, why do you say that? It is only one part of my argument against Egoism, but it seems to work fine. What don’t you like about it?
Actually, Begbert is a computer nerd (compsci major). He, like many of his cohort, is one of those people who is strongly invested in what he calls rationality, but can’t debate because he is fundamentally unable to make the assumption that he might be wrong – that would be too injurious to his self-image.
His views that I have noticed so far are pretty much nerdly par-for-the-course; that is, pat, unexamined theories of behavior and how the world is that have nothing to do with what’s actually going on, mainly centered around how people would be much happier if they ignored all this stupid emotional baggage and acted logically, just like Data does.
He also seems to be unable to read or make a logical argument, and even worse, appears to be some sort of Ayn Rand, Jr. Your challenge of his assumptions/theories (e.g. his self-image) provokes a hostile response because it attacks his carefully crafted self-image that was most likely created as a response to his poor social skills.
There’s really not much point getting into this in depth because nobody but Mijincares about the way this “debate” progressed (to use the term loosely) - but I thought I’d provide a little clarification as to why his “in the correct context: no creative editing here” reconstructed exchanges make so little sense.
The answer is, naturally, all the creative editing here he used to get things out of the correct context.
For example, in his “Example 1”, the exchange didn’t go:
Mijin: I of course meant internal rewards, that is, “good” emotions.
begbert2: Then why did you ask a question you already knew the answer to?
It actually went:
Makes a lot more sense when you don’t snip for incomprehensibility, doesn’t it? In the extremely unlikely event anybody cares, I’m sure they’d find that if one reads the original text rather than the Mijin patented multicolor cliff’s notes version, that things will tend to make a lot more sense.
Not that you’d gain much by reading it, mind - Mijin exhausted any of a semblance of a point he had long before we got to the posts he’s mangling here in this OP. The hijack continued as long as it did because I let him bait me with his juvinile asininity for far too long. (I would apologize to the universe for that, but frankly it’s the least of my crimes. Plus being rebellious and unrepentant is cool. Gets more chicks.)
So yeah, Mijin is a juvenile asshat who simply can’t stand that I “beat” him in that debate (the victory apparently being determined by who got the last word, which was me, with the one-line post “Goodbye”). This is nothing more than him whining like a little baby about it. And seriously, if anybody at all but him gave two shits about this at all (and I am among the people who don’t), I’d strongly suspect that this pitting would turn into a reverse pitting, rather than dropping off the page like the falling turd its initiater is.
Heh, the shit does draw the flies! I burned ivn1188 quite recently in this thread - and was hardly alone doing it, because he’s some sort of moronic creationist dipshit or something, which is a sure way to popularity around here.
He’s going on about me being compsci because I responded to his oh-so solid debate tactic of claiming that I was some kind of undereducated liberal-arts person and that his oh-so-impressive less-than-Master’s-Degree education made him much more qualified to debate stuff than me. So I commented that I was compsci, which kicked his junior-high-school level ad-hominem right in the balls. (Poor baby.) His response to that was hilarious, though - the best thing he could think of was to accuse me of being “uninteresting”. Naturally this immidiately came back to to bite him in the ass.
I like this pitting. It’s fun!
Wow that OP sounded like an anonymous note from a seven year old tattling on his brother for not following the rules. " big mean begbert, wouldn’t debate how I wanted him tooooo. And, and his responses were, they were flippant. Oh yeah and I’m a douche."
So he blasted some sand up your hatchet gash, rinse it out and get over yourself.
It “bit me in the ass” because I have a better education than you? And because I can spell and properly hyphenate?
Compsci is a B.S. degree, which includes a few humanities here and there. Your speech communication class and music appreciation classes aside, you demonstrated your inanity in multiple ways. And, just for the record, I called you uninteresting from the start, because you are. This being the internet, you can claim “BUUUUuuuuURURUURURURNNNN!!” but it just clarifies how sad and pathetic your mental capacities are.
Run along to the office and write some SQL commands or something, the adults are talking.
No, because alltwo responses it generated were roundly mocking you. Try to keep up, will you? I mean, try to pretend that you have the mental capacity to keep up. I know it’s difficult for you.
And even if you had more education than me, which I am hardly certain of , it’s pretty clear that it wasn’t better - or if it was, then you were clearly so terminally stupid that even the best of scholars could not rectify your gratuitious and demonstrated cognitive failings.
Out of morbid curiousity, what the hell do you think your point is? Are you asserting that taking a few humanities classes is a bad thing? A good thing? That you had none of them? Only them?
Are there any thoughts connecting up in your head before you say things?
Liar. (Not that it matters at all, but it’s just amusing that you’re such a twat that you’ll lie about something so inconsequential, just because you can’t stand that I’m right and you’re in a lifelong state of being so terminally, terminally wrong.)
You may not realize this, but you’re really quite hilarious.
Dude, I’ve known three year olds who conducted them as maturely as you. The OP a least consistently maintained a maturity level of at least a junior high school student; why don’t you try to emulate him?
(And to his further credit, unlike you, he may have been arguing more dishonestly then a left-handed politician, but he was nowhere near as stupid as you - and didn’t lie near as much, either. Though on the other hand, you’re a hell of a lot funnier!)
I am not jsgoddess, and I freely admit that I have not read the referenced thread. Nevertheless I cannot see how your argument demonstrates anything about egoism. No egoist who has thought about the matter more than a few moments would claim that the content of a goal is immaterial, so that the only important thing is getting one’s own way. We satisfy goals only insofar as the satisfaction results in the most happiness for us. (Where happiness can here mean something more abstract like flourishing, if you’d like.)
If I am an egoist who eats a cheeseburger, I do so because it makes me happiest subject to the relevant constraints. If I cannot eat a cheeseburger then it means I have maximized my happiness (or flourishing, or whatever) in some other fashion.
This is one of the main points of the pit though surely? You’re having a debate about something, and the other guy constantly dodges the arguments. You pit him, and other folks who’ve had the same experience with the dude join in. People do it with Lekatt and what have you all the time.
I suggest this thread seems weird to you because you haven’t had a run-in with begbert2.
That’s the best you can come back with?
That because I admitted to knowing your position that I should know how you’d respond to any question, even questions deliberately constructed to show the flaws in your position?
Again, as I said in the thread, if I asked a Flat-earther, why pictures of the earth from every angle look round, would “You know my position, so you know the answer to the question” be a good response?
That thread was the first time I’d used colours in SD. And I only did it twice, because after so many long back and forth posts I was trying to say “OK, finally, this is my conclusion”.
There are many people I’ve met, who, when they hear statements like “I like helping the sick” see that as proof that such an action is not selfless.
However, “I like X” can simply mean “It is my will for X, therefore I enjoy X” not that getting that enjoyment is the reason for acting (and, implicitly; they wouldn’t do it if they didn’t get that positive emotion back).
In any case, even if my argument applies to no-one, that doesn’t make it a bad argument. I didn’t say: “This point defeats Egoism”, simply I addressed Egoists with that point because I believed that it is relevant to many of them.
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