Inspector

The problem with your analysis is that there is a particular kind of book that does that sort of thing - a smear-job or a parody - and Catcher is not one of those. For several reasons: First, those kinds of works are filled with value judgments by the author - both direct and indirect. Try re-reading the section of The Fountainhead that deals with Peter Keating, and then reading Catcher (if you can bear it). There's a huge difference. Not the least of which because when the author is against the loser, it is entertaining - which is something Catcher truly is not. To just present - naturalistically - the life of a loser is an exercise in excruciation. (And that's Catcher to a "T," isn't it?) Secondly, there is a satisfying resolution in the kind of book you equate it with, as well as a satisfying presentation of how the idiot should be different. Yes, there are admirable people in Catcher, but you don't at all see how Holden is supposed to be like them and not him. Instead, Catcher was exactly like you say in your comparison to Godot - an existentialist nightmare that speaks of the pointlessness and futility of life. The fact that you conclude that life is not pointless and that the character is simply a moron is entirely separate from the actual intention of the author. It would be like reading Don Quixote and concluding that he is silly. Well, yes, but that's hardly the point of the book.

If you go find Tenure's thread about the book, you'll find my opinion on it. To sum, I wrote "CRAP" in black marker across the cover it. It's a book about a loser. In fact, I'd say it's about someone who's just about the Platonic Ideal Of Loser. Utterly unbearable to read. And depressing and/or maddening that so many idolize him and worship the book and its author.

You'd better edit that again: the SKS is NOT an "assault weapon." It is a SEMI-automatic carbine.

Are you talking to slow children? No, no no! We are not saying people shouldn't get insurance; we are saying people shouldn't go around breaking windows! Geez!

Kendall's (correctly and effectively, IMO) responded to most everything here, so I'm going to skip to the end: Because the proper correction to your mistaken intrinsicist command of "never support dictators" isn't to adopt an intrinsicist command of "always support dictators." The correct approach is to hold an objective principle that supporting dictators is generally bad, but which recognizes context and will work with what facts we have in the real world. For instance, in Vietnam, if we were to continue fighting, we would have been in the perfect position to make demands of the South Vietnamese. "Either adopt a constitutional government (in fact here, we have written on for you) that protects individual rights or we shall throw you to the (Communist) wolves."

Straw man. Nobody is suggesting looking at the situation in isolation. You can look at the causes all you want, but only consider them inasmuch as they are in fact relevant to the solution. As I said, however, you picked a historical context to make your argument in and it is a violation of the discussion to start altering history before the event in question. The fact is that we need to discuss it in the context that we did support the Soviets and therefore they did have the capability to invade Iran. The way that you are looking at the situation is starkly rationalistic. It's as if you're Britain and the Nazi panzers are storming Poland. You're sitting there saying "well, we never should have appeased Hitler with Austria and Czechoslovakia." How is that going to stop the Wehrmacht? Yes, it's true that Chamberlain should not have appeased Hitler. But after the fact that he did appease Hitler, it's useless to think that the proper actions change based on who made the mess. As if because Britain had a hand in causing the problem, that it should therefore never turn around and begin self-asserting. That's precisely the argument that you're making here: because there is some guilt on the part of the US in the past (in this case in creating the Soviet menace), that we therefore must remain paralyzed and/or surrender in the present. (note that this argument is simply repeated for present-day Iran. Because we had a hand in the cause of Iran's threat, we therefore must remain paralyzed and/or surrender in the present) In fact, this argument could have been lifted whole-cloth from the left and/or libertarians. You seem like a reasonable fellow in other regards, so I suggest that you re-examine that argument and see if you really do agree with it. In other words, check your premises.

Indeed, but if we are discussing what the proper course of action to react to Iran was, then we need to discuss it in the context that we did support the Soviets and therefore they did have the capability to invade Iran. You are committing precisely the fallacy that you rail against. The solution is to pursue proper foreign policy and not to compound our problems by declaring ourselves "to blame" and then surrendering to threats and aggression as a result.

Those costs would have been small had our government not acted as cowards in the face of that crisis. Which I already explained to you. You seem to simply refuse to see anything foreign-policy-related in self-assertive terms.

You are correct that my phrasing was less than ideal. As it said, "U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation." This phrasing ("nearly") means that there is at least one other nation out there with higher life expectancy. However, without knowing more we really can't say what that means. However we can say that the statistical lifespan of the Japanese is distorted by non-medical factors and so it is inappropriate to claim, as Bob did, that "There is no reason (other than diet or lack of exercise) we can't have a life span like the Japanese currently 5-7 years longer than ours." So the drive of what I was getting at remains correct, despite the mistake in the technicality of my phrasing. And furthermore, all this talk of obesity... of what relevance is that to the non-obese?

You seem to ignore the fact that we were in a cold war with the Soviets and it most certainly was in our interests to see that such oil resources did not fall.

Okay, that is going into the "favorite OO.net quotes" thread. I can't seem to locate it, however...

Actually, if you had bothered to read the link I gave: other nations do not actually have better health than us. Listen, Bob, brass tacks here: I already told you that there are other forms of exercise than walking or biking. And not everybody likes those things as much as you do. I will be doing no such thing as you suggest and whenever I get a physical, the examiner asks me if I am an athlete. And I drive everywhere and eat fatty meats. The key is that I do get really good exercise and I control my caloric intake. A healthy lifestyle can be achieved in many ways, and while I am sure that your methods work for you, I am saying that they do not work well for most people and it is by no means necessary for most people to live your wacky lifestyle. I like my ground-shaking, tire-shredding muscle car and I often sing its virtues. But I don't go around trying to sell it to the general populace. I know that I live an odd lifestyle with it and that most people wouldn't tolerate it. Yes, maybe you can do that in places that are completely hostile, either by density or insidious design, to the car. But not in my city, you don't. I'd like to see you try that in Pheonix, AZ where commutes are 20+ miles each way and temperatures are 120+ degrees. It's a city built by and for people who like to travel by car and like the suburban lifestyle that it makes possible. Guess what Bob: some folks just don't like to live like you do. And it is fully possible for them to be healthy with it, too. So how about you just absorb that and stop preaching your personal tastes as if they were some kind of Universal Good?

(bold mine) There. In the very sentence, it engages in the unmitigated nonsense of using commie-weasel-speak to equate conditions of existence with physical force. It's dishonest and a butchering of the English language. "Coerced" here is equating the two definitions of the term "force." Obfuscating the difference between "I'm all out of strawberries so I am 'forced' to eat blueberries" and FORCED as in burly men have strapped you to a table and are cramming blueberries down your throat. (a la the donut-chair in The Devil and Homer Simpson) So right out of the gate, this is total nonsense that can be completely dismissed as the childish gibberish that it is.

John, you are more right than you know. Those machines are set to give you the calories burned by your activity plus the calories you would burn anyway just by standing there. This is why they ask for your age, weight, and so forth. So if anything, that kind of exercise burns even less than that - on average about 83 calories less per hour than indicated.

There you go again, slinging that line, Bob. It was amusing at first, but I really must speak up this time. For many - I might venture to say most - people, however, your prescriptions of carlessness (or less-car-ness) are far from ideal. There are plenty of ways to get exercise and not all of them involve being inconvenienced transportationally or engaging in low-intensity steady-state activity (known by some as "soul-crushing tedium"). Some poor souls are actually enriched by such activities (hard to believe I know!), but luckily there are other, more developed, folks out there who have created exercises such as weight-lifting which are more in tune with our refined and superior tastes. And as a bonus, these higher-intensity activities also do not require such an expenditure of time, which is a valuable asset to many. Perhaps not to those who have nothing better to do, but to many it is. Was that a cheap shot? Hmm, a better question would be if your own screeds against the car contained similar cheap shots. 'Tis all in fun, then. So, gentle ribbing aside: The point I am seeking to drive home is that it is vulgar for you to sell your personal tastes as universal principles that us poor benighted idiots ought to adapt to. If you like to pedal a nineteenth-century toy as your primary means of transportation, then all power to you. Some folk eat invertebrates, in fact I am told they pay princely sums to do so, and I'm sure that it's all jolly good fun for them. I, however, would rather be smacked repeatedly about the face than eat sea-bug ("lobster") or give up my eight cylinders of ground-shaking automotive bliss for something that is impractically slow, physically painful, open to the elements, and sets me arriving at my destination stinking and covered in sweat. And when I say "impractically" I mean that literally as it would be physically impossible for me to accomplish in it what I do on a daily basis in my car. And don't even try to tell me that I'm living the rest of my life wrong because I can't accomplish it with an anachronistic device powered by manual labor - the implication being that we should all live like hippies in our "sustainable" hives of human filth. To sum, if you like your pedal-bike there so much that you'll build your life around it then good for you - I bear you no ill will and genuinely hope that you enjoy your lifestyle choice. To prescribe it as a universal taste which we all ought to share (a distinct practice from simply saying how much you like it), however, is vulgar. Maybe some of us (me, for instance) are just built differently and thus don't enjoy that kind of exercise - much less enjoy it enough to let it be the determining factor of where we live, work, eat, and so forth. And it is beyond ridiculous to actually look down your nose at the rest of us for not living like primitives. Furthermore, if you do some simple counting of calories it is painfully obvious that the primary problem out there is diet, in which so much energy can so easily be consumed as to make any exercise null and void. But the point, which I don't want lost here, is that Americans' health is not actually behind the rest of the world as they claim. Even with all the fat-assery. This is just one more in the series of commie lies.

Did you follow the link?

The fact is that "life expectancy" and other UN statistics are blatantly distorted against the United States and in favor of socialism.

Jen: Your example would be improved if even the two men involved agreed that Frank should settle the dispute.

Yes, as others have pointed out: this map shows currently exploitable reserves of oil. This is a number which historically has gone UP every decade as more development and technology comes into play. It should not be confused with the actual amount of oil in the ground.

I don't know if I can really articulate this properly - perhaps RB can weigh in - but 4reason's situation and response is just about textbook. I mean, that is a completely typical response of a normal person to a situation like that. Most people are just not at all cognizant or remotely prepared for crime, criminals, how they operate, or how to react to it. People just don't think about it at all, and so if faced with it suddenly are floored, and as a result don't always react in the kind of way that would be best for the situation. I mean, even after escaping the immediate danger, she didn't know how to even begin thinking about what to do next. Again, I think most people don't. They just didn't think it would ever happen to them. Of course the criminals count on this. But a lot of people from good neighborhoods just go through life with a kind of naive sense of invincibility. They grew up around basically reasonable folks and just assume that certain things - violent crime that is - are just not possible in the adult world. They happen on television or in ghettos - not in the "real" world. Of course, they are possible. I was quite frankly offended by a few of the posters here who questioned 4reason's story. "Well, why did you do this? Why wouldn't you have done that? Why didn't you immediately go tell," etc, etc. But that is in fact the reaction that the vast majority of untrained people will have: to be paralyzed, even after escaping the immediate danger. Telling themselves "this can't be happening... can it?" while it is in fact happening and they just wasted their one chance to escape it. People wonder why I carry. Well, it's because I don't live in a world where such things are "just impossible." None of us do, but I actually know it.

I'm definitely with RB on this one, Mammon. You absolutely do not want to take chances with these kinds of people and this one has already demonstrated lunacy. To attempt to deal with him as you would a rational person would be a dangerous mistake.

Well I don't know about exercise feeling like that, but I can tell you this: Your newfound feelings about sex (i.e. being uninterested in it apart from in accordance with your standards) are something I have seen before and are not at all unusual for a person in your circumstances. Specifically, I have seen this arises when: 1) You have achieved self-esteem - you value yourself and consider yourself worthy of achieving the sex life of a rational being, and you would consider it beneath you and degrading to seek the hedonistic "wriggling of meat" which passes as the substitute in today's culture. 2) You have achieved integration of your mind and body in setting your standards. You are not evasive of your nature as a rational being and do not seek sex apart from the values which make it actually worthwhile and not self-deprecating. You refuse to blank-out what your true feelings of your prospective suitors are, in pursuit of some kind of hedonistic, range-of-the-moment clawing for sex; sex as such - sex as an end in itself, irrespective of your rational evaluation of the partner. You have recognized that it is not sex as such that a rational man seeks, but rather a parter worthy of sex (after which and only after which he is interested in "sex"). You do not see sex as a disconnected thing to be pursued independently of the values which give rise to it (thus undercutting those values and ruining the entire point), but rather have integrated your understanding of why you want what you want, thus limiting your desire to the rational. You have understood, subconsciously, that reality cannot be cheated or lived in the range of the moment - i.e. that hedonism is self-defeating and will not serve to gain you values; only to destroy them. So, rather than an animal in heat, your mind is now functioning in the mode of a human being. At least, this is what you seem to have integrated into your subconscious. Good for you! Congratulations!

Now, Bold Standard, I hope you can see that although you have not grasped what I am saying... it could be worse. Onivlas has really failed to grasp what I am saying and is instead responding with pure knee-jerk. Gee, you think maybe?!? Perhaps if you actually read what I have written, you would see that this is a key and central point of my argument. And that if you actually read what I said, you may not even disagree with me at all! Let me clue you in: this is not about transsexuals - this is about the fact that transsexuals are indistinguishable from cross-dressers!

Then in my opinion you have not read my posts carefully enough to effectively argue against me and it would be an exercise in frustration (for me) for you to continue it before you have adequately understood me. I suggest you continue re-reading what I have said until you do find where I have addressed that, and only then attempt argument. I also addressed that point. Definitely, you need to re-read.

Sorry I didn't see your reply until just now. Yes, and believe me: I did have Bin Laden's speeches in mind.