These opinions warrantied for the lifetime of your brain.

Loading Table of Contents...
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

John Galt's Ego Terminally Wounded In Just Three Rounds


"John Galt", you write "Because you offer no evidence that all elections are without fraud, your game theory ideas have no merit."  The structure of your argument is that the existence of vote-counting fraud any time any place makes all voting futile.  That argument needs no further rebuttal beyond this restatement of it, as the fallacy of the excluded middle here is obvious.

Thanks for not responding to my point about polling.  Instead, you repeat your name-calling mantra about my "childish" "blind trust in vote counters", unaware that even without polling data I was able to publicly predict the D, R, and LP vote percentages in my last two races for Congress to within 2 percentage points for each candidate.  I suppose the "vote counters" must have worked overtime to ensure that the vote totals came out close to what I predicted, so as to keep me unaware of the conspiracy that only someone as boldly clear-eyed as you can see.  Ah, if only you hadn't sworn off further discussion, you might reveal that I also have a childish blind trust in all of America's polling firms, each of which is in fact part of the Vast Vote-Counting Conspiracy. :-)

I'm not familiar with van Notten's theory of justice, at least by that name.  I was about to ask you to compare it to Ruwart's take on justice as explicated by her quotes assembled in my blog posting that I linked to above.  Then I remembered that it's pretentious to expect people to click a link if a topic interests them, as opposed to expecting them to hunt down primary source material based on a dropped name. :-)

I'll state my request for the third time: "how could I have phrased what I had to say in a way that couldn’t arbitrarily be called 'pretentious' or some other name?"  You didn't answer this question about my "erudite statements", nor did you even give any clue about what statements of mine you were referring to.  Thus your only response to my request to troubleshoot my alleged "pretentiousness" was to complain how I divided and distributed my words.  Pardon me for not lavishing you with thanks for such an unsatisfying response to my request -- even as I paid your response the respect of systematically addressing every element of it.

Your wounded psychologizing about me was an intriguing tease the first time, a predictable (and predicted) disappointment the second time, and is now just tedious.  How delicious it is that someone calling himself "John Galt" should whine that his interlocutor has taken insufficient care to protect Mr. Galt's ego from the offensive spectacle of the other party intelligently answering Galt's criticisms of his statements.  :-) You just broke my irony meter.

I know you've sworn off all further responses to me, but just for the record, I remain open to being shown how some paragraph of mine above could be rewritten to make the same points in the same amount of space while somehow also immunizing it from this vacuous charge that it "oozes" the idea "that everyone you are corresponding with is beneath your intellect".  That's an interesting induction given that your sample size here was 1: George.  I doubt seriously that you're very familiar with my correspondence -- and in particular my recent correspondence with George.