I'm truly struggling to name examples here. Well, aside from several assholes. Sure, they were... "winners", but history pretty much remembered them as absolute assholes... whom they were.
Have you never heard the phrase 'vae victis'? You can call them assholes all you want. They got what they wanted. Rockefeller crushed everybody else in the oil business. Edison died wealthy while Tesla died poor. Genghis Khan died the ruler of the greatest empire in history up until that point. Lenin funded his early activism in part through bank robberies with Stalin's help. Maybe you don't retain a perfect reputation forever, but so what?
Your takes are so... edgy, for the lack of a better word. I feel like you are only writing them out to be a focal point of a local counter-culture or something, since you seem like the only one who is making them.
I find it odd that you think my takes are edgy, really. Everyone knows that politicians are lying crooks. The libertarian refrain that taxation is theft is not merely random words. The government is just a band of bandits that have taken on fancy titles and symbols. As Voltaire says, "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
I don't really write to be the focal point of anything. I developed intellectually through a series of writers and I simply carry on the intellectual trajectory of the milieu I came from.
And to top it off, you really don't feel like following your own advice, it seems, because you are not against "engaging in practical hypocricy" or however you've put it in another thread.
I'm not sure how I'm failing to follow my own advice. If OP is engaging in hypocrisy, I am saying that it should be practical. If it is unpractical, it does not deserve respect. If you're going to violate your stated word, you should at least do it with a positive product in hand. I think it's worse to be untrustworthy in your deeds than to be untrustworthy in your words. If you can't
do, it doesn't matter what you
say.
I sometimes support people doing things I wouldn't do, because I think it's good for them. I don't like the church, but I know some people need the church to keep it together. I don't like insurance - detest it, actually, but I know that many people are too improvident with money to retain bonds. This is probably more along the lines of 'practical hypocrisy'. I'll say what I think will produce the better end, even if I don't believe the words. In the case of this thread, I consider the low attention span zombies such a low issue that I think telling a general truth is more valuable than morally grandstanding to OP about his (probably going to fail) scheme to make money.
Ross, in general I think that you have an automatic reaction against me. I'm really not sure why being a little bit cynical about human motivations and what actually works is so anathema to you. I'm not sure if the underlying assumption is that, because I call something amoral, it is therefore bad. I don't really think so. The government is a band of bandits, but I'd rather one band than many. I'd rather a band of bandits sympathetic to me, than ones who feel nothing for me. There is nuance to what I believe, but I feel as though you don't try to grasp that. You assume simple stupidity or malice, which I find truly bizarre.