The only possible explanation is that “j0nesing_around” is actually an artificial intelligence from the future sent to troll liberal blogs.

It’s not true AI, though: more like Eliza.

ELIZA has almost no intelligence whatsoever, only tricks like string substitution and canned responses based on keywords.

In other words, LGF will evolve into SkyNet…

My examples are a metaphor for a state of mind… I don’t want to make your kind of sense.

Do all conservatives do acid?

Don’t you think it’s kinda even worse on the other (pseudo-conservative) side, where anything and everything is labeled in a black-and-white manner as ‘freedom’ or ‘terror’ or ‘liberation’, though? Once in a while some things pop up on occasions that do have a few different angles, you know.

My examples are a metaphor for a state of mind, and engels gets all tied up in a critique about my failure to engage on the level of Prospect, Kurzweil, and expected utility. He doesn’t understand that I reject some of the fundamental presuppostions as fallacies and so have resorted to allegory.

I don’t want to make your kind of sense.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007172.php

Oh, the shame of it.

The liberal mind never sees things in black and white. Things are never as they appear. Ever.

For example a big man with long red beard kills a small white dog with an axe in the middle of the street in front of everyone … a solid down to earth conservative will say –
“A big guy with a red beard axed a little white dog to death.”

You think this is how the average liberal will see it? Oooooooh no. No way jose! Take this bleeding heart called um … Mikhail Flumkeind … he’s has an entirely different take on it. Listen up …

“I saw this severely disadvantaged person who has been mercilessly duped by the Bush administration make an impulsive gesture driven by desperation and need and a poodle owned by that awful Republican zillionaire Goldy Goldestein
accidentally wondered in the radial arc of his descending axe … the axe he always uses incidentally for chopping the wood he needs to feed his starving children.”

Ok, see that! Life is seen through the lense of a myriad of abstract rationales and theories. NOTHING is the way it seems. Obfuscation … smoke and mirrors … oh yeah baby, and then some.

If you challenge such odd ball takes on what was clearly the cold blooded murder of a dog, they look at you as though you are an idiot, and say with lofty irony …

“Haha yes well you just don’t get it!”

Take another example. Two cops are tracking a suspect who has just slaughtered and eaten all the residents of an old people’s home. This suspect is purple and has yellow tinges on his skin that glow in the dark and shoot laser beams.

Ok, the conservative, no-nonsense cop is going to put out an alert that says JUST THAT - all of the above.

However the liberal, complex and of course … “sensitive” cop will say to his associates –
“Gee guys, we can’t refer to his skin color that would be profiling. And we can’t say he is “fat” – oops sorry, I mean “large” – and that he has a wooden leg with “Allah rules” carved on it because that might offend the muslim community. So the liberal cop ends up posting …

“The suspect was wearing a ball cap, white t’shirt and blue bermuda shorts, roughly 5’10 and appears to have a minor disability.”

So in deference to political correctness and all … the liberal cop puts out a description that applies to a billion people on the planet, whereas the conservative cop nails the one, and the ONLY possible villain.

So, in answer to the bollocks thesis …

Absototallootly.

E.g.: if we make more aggressive use of the US military to promote US interests in the world, then liberal democracies will pop up all over the place and free market will flourish. All that, and everyone will get a pony too.

See, it’s not that everyone will necessarily agree, it’s just that we will ‘kill or capture’ those who resist and sufficiently intimidate the rest – for their own good.

Or have we forgotten the fact that the pony was first deployed in an attack on Libertarianism?

With that said, I am not a huge fan of the “and a pony” argument; my own critique of the libertarians, the Marxists, the anarcho-capitalists, the neocons, ad barfum, is not that they promise more than they can deliver, but that their utopias all rest on the notion of “once everyone agrees with our fundamental ideological tenets, the glorious future will be inevitable!

When I’m being charitable, I read “and a pony” to mean, “and everyone will of course eventually come around to this point of view.”

This is how you distinguish a nutter from the rest—in the nutter’s ideal future, the rest simply do not exist.

Isn’t it as likely that a pessimistic theory could lead to ludicrously optimistic results as an optimistic theory?

Without a meta-theory to measure ex post payoffs, how do you take the expected value?

How about this related practical question.

How does one optimize the choice of one’s preferences?

Furthermore, since we know ignorance is bliss, the singularity is oh so unblissful and Kurzweil is the devil.