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ace, dear, for what it's worth perhaps the most fundamental divergence i have with you is that i don't consider conceptual rigidity a virtue--quite the contrary is the case.
you approach politics as a religious believer. i think that's absurd.
you cannot argue effectively for the validity of your assumptions--they're articles of faith.
you have some tedious and bizarre notion of competition. i don't care about it.
you seem to imagine that if you are able to keep repeating the same things no matter what kind of arguments are leveled against what you're saying, that somehow you "win"--but that's only in a charlie sheen sense. you know, in a self-obsessed kinda way.
your socio-economic philosophy is demonstrably a failure if you look at it's implementations in the actually existing world and the consequences of those implementations---your position is that reality is just a variable, and what matters is your faith. i see that as childish. you see it as something else.
in the actually existing world, your socio-economic philosophy has enabled the dismantling of the american productive infrastructure. you live in a fantasy world of heroic entrepreneurs.
in the actually existing world, the modern state performs fundamental stabilizing functions that allow the capitalism that you worship in a genuinely abject manner to operate as a system. these functions came about gradually over the course of this history of late 19-th/20th century capitalism. you seem to know nothing about the history of capitalism and, worse, your ideology doesn't require that you know anything about it.
but if your ideology does not require that you know anything about history--and by extension know anything about the present---then what fucking good is it?
the main things your neo-liberal nonsense have accomplished are:
an unprecedented concentration of wealth
a financial crisis
a massive debt burden incurred largely through two unnecessary, stupid wars and through unnecessary, ill-advised tax cuts for the wealthy.
the pulverization of the lives of ordinary working people.
a radical intensification of class conflict.
a massive expansion of the prison system
an unprecedented percentage of the population in jail
a dominant discourse predicated on denial, on the substitution of simple-minded fantasies for complex and often problematic realities.
your socio-economic philosophy implemented has been an unmitigated disaster.
no wonder you have a reality-optional approach to things.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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