Hey there AriKatsaris... So we're move back up here now - with Katsaris the Morally-Unimpeachable taking full advantage of the highly-biased comment-response system (which prevents people from responding to Katsaris' gibberish directly unless they have sufficiently fellated the ruling clique here). And "downvoting without comment" - apart from being so babyish that it qualifies for child support - enables something of an attempt to control the dialogue.

Eventually we will get to he nub, which is that Katsaris the Morally-Unimpeachable thinks that the State is necessary (of course without ever having examined what his betters throughout history have thought about the issue - reading the literature is for lesser mortals): in other words, he has no understanding whatsoever of the dynamic consequences of the paradigm to which he subscribes.

Dishonesty takes many forms, young Aris: first and foremost is claiming expertise in a discipline in which you're an ignoramus. Legally it's referred to as "misleading and deceptive conduct" to attempt to pass yourself off as an expert in a field in which you have no training: compensation only happens if there had been a contract that relied on your economic expertise, of course... we can be thankful that's not the case, however the overarching principle is that claiming to be an expert when you're not is dishonest - the legal sanction is subsidiary to the moral wrong.

Secondly, it is dishonest to perform actions for reasons other than those that you give as justifications. Your Euro-fearmongering and Islamophobia (the Harris-Hitchens "We can bomb the brown folks coz some of them are evil" nonsense) mark you out as someone who has staunch political views, and those inform your decisions (your stated reasons are windows-dressing - and hence dishonest).

You practice misdirection all the time. Again, dishonest.

You're innumerate, too. That's not a mark of dishonesty, it's just a sign of someone who does not have the tools to be a decent analyst of anything.

We can do this for as long as you like: right up until you have to go stand in line for the next outburst of sub-moronic schlock from J K Rowling, if you like.

EDIT: some more stuff, just to clarify...

Here's the thing: I don't expect Aris "I Don't Need to Read the Literature Before I Bloviate" Katsaris (the Morally-Unimpeachable) to have a sudden epiphany, renounce all the nonsense he believes, and behave like an adult.

What I expect to happen is that over time a small self-regarding clique will change their behaviour - because unless it changes, this site will be even more useless than it now is, and right now it's pretty bad. Not Scientology bad, but close enough to be well outside any sensible definition of 'rational', and heading in the wrong direction.

Yeah, so I'll just leave this here... (since in the best tradition of correct-line-ism, mention of 'correct line' cultism perpetrated the morally-omniscient Aris Katsaris results in... ad hoc penalisation by the aforementioned Islamophonbe and scared "China and Russia will divide and conquer Europe" irrational fearmonger).

Not only are you an economic ignoramus (evidenced by the fact that you had no idea what transitivity of preferences even MEANT until late December 2012) but you're also as dishonest as the numbskull who is the front-man for Scientology.

If you can't read English, then remedial language study is indicated: apart from that you're just some dilettante who thinks that he doesn't have to read the key literature in ANY discipline before waffling about it ("I haven't read Coase"... "I haven't read Rand"... "I haven't read anything on existentialism"... "Can someone on this forum tell me if intransitive preferences implies irrationality?").

You're a living, breathing advertisement for Dunning-Kruger.

Wait - don't tell me... you aren't aware of their work. Google it.

Here's the thing: if I was as dishonest as you are, I would get together 6 mates and drive your 'net' Karma to zero in two days. It is so stupidly easy that nobody who's not a retard thinks it's worth doing.

And the big problem you face is that I don't give a toss what number my 'karma' winds up at: this is the internet.

I've been on the web for a decade longer than you (since the WANK hack, if that means anything to you, which I doubt): I know this stuff back to front. I've been dealing with bloviating self-regarding retards like you since you were in middle-school (or the Greek equivalent).

You do NOT want this war: you're not up to it, as evidenced by the fact that you think that all you need to do outside of your narrow disciplline (programming, no) is bloviate. Intellectual battles are not won or lost by resorting to stupid debating tactics: they are won by the people who do the groundwork in the relevant discipline. You're a lightweight who does not read core material in disciplines on which you pontificate, which makes you sound like a pompous windbag anywhere other than this site.

You would be better off spending your time masturbating over Harry Potter (which is to literature what L Ron Hubbard is to theology) or hentai... and writing turgid pretentious self-absorbed fan fiction.

Ga Muti. (or Ka muti if you prefer a hard gamma).

It's you who put it in bold letters. Perhaps you should start not emphasizing sentences which aren't important ones.

A sentence can be important without being the complete rendition of one's views on a topic: you're being dishonest (again).

Seriously, if you spent as much mental effort on bringing yourself up to speed with core concepts as you do on misdirection and trying to be everyone's schoolmarm, the community (for which you obviously purport to speak) would be better off.

I note that you didn't bleat like a retarded sheep and nitpick the idea to which I was responding, namely that morality was about maximising global awesomeness (or some other such straight-line-to-tyranny). No demand for a definitions of terms, no babble about how that won't do for coding your make-believe AI, no gabble about expression.

And last but not least - given that you've already exhibited 'bounded literacy': what gives you the right to judge anybody?

I'm not going demand that we compare academic transcripts - you don't have a hope on that metric - just some indication apart from "I feel strongly about this" will suffice. Preferably one that doesn't confuse the second person possessive with the second person (present tense) of the verb "to be".

"Your [sic] being downvoted",,, hilarious: you're showing the world that you can't write an English sentence - which is hilarious given your prior waffle about "the precise meaning and consequences of [] words".

Pretend it was a typo (which just happened to be the "you're/your" issue, which is second to "then/than", with "loose/lose" in third, as a marker of a bad second-rate education).

Make sure you go back and cover your tracks: you can edit your comments to remove glaring indications of a lack of really fundamental literacy. Already screencapped it anyhow.

That's worth an upvote, for the pleasure it has brought me today.

Oh please... what sad, sophomoric nonsense. "Down-votes" are for children: In my entire life on the internet (beginning in 1993) I've never down-voted anything in my whole life - anywhere - because down-votes are for self-indulgent babies who are obsessed with having some miniscule, irrelevant punitive capacity. It's the ultimate expression of weakness.

Key point: if you have never read Coase - a fundamental (arguably the fundamental) contribution to the literature on nuisance-abatement in economics and the law - then you're starting from a handicap so great that you can't even participate sensibly in a discussion of the concept, because (here's the thing...) it starts with Coase. It would be like involving yourself in an argument about optimal control, then bridling at being expected to have heard of calculus.

You brought the Coase issue into play it by implicitly asserting that that the "willingness-to-pay-to-abate" idea was mine - showing that you were gapingly ignorant of a massive literature in Economics that bears directly on the point.

While we're being middle-school debaters, I will point out that your paraphrase should properly have been "Letting people do as they will as long as they are not imposing costs on others" (don't mis-paraphrase my paraphrase: it's either sloppy or dishonest - or both).

But let's look at that statement: what bit of that would preclude the right to hire gangs to do violence to a peaceful individual? The bit about imposing costs maybe?

And nonsense like "That's your argument, but you don't even know it" is simply ludicrous - it's such a hackneyed device that it's almost not worth responding to.

Let's just say that right through to Masters level I had no difficulty in making clear what my arguments were (I dropped out of my PhD once my scholarship ran out), and nothing has changed in the interim. Maybe you're just so much smarter than the folks who graded me, and thus have spotted flaws that they missed. All while never having had to stoop to read Coase. Astounding hubris.

Another thing: the people of Iran do not contribute willingly to the funding of their state. That was not even a straw man argument - it was more like the ashes of a particularly sad already-burned straw man, that was made by a kid from the short bus.

Now some Iranians might be perfectly willing to fund State terror (just as some Americans are happy to fund drone strikes on Yemeni children) - ask yourself what budget there would be for the 'religious police' in Iran if the payment of taxes was entirely voluntary. The whole thing about a State is that it specifically denies expression of individual preference on issues of importance to the ruling clique: war, state ideology, internal policing, and revenue-collection.

I am amused that you used Iran as the boogie-man du jour, given that Iran actually has no purpose-specific "religious police". The Saudi mutaween are far more famous, and their brief is specifically and solely to enforce Shari'a. The Iranian government has VEVAK (internal security forces, who do not police religious issues) and the Basij - the Basij does some enforcement of dress codes, but apart from that they're nowhere near the level of oppression as in Saudi Arabia, and do not exist specifically to enforce religious doctrine (unike the mutaween).

It's been some time since I checked the standard style manuals: is there really a stated style for emphasis in comments on the internet? It would not surprise me too much - there are a lot of people with too much time on their hands, who like telling others what to do (and the less important the sphere of endeavour, the more urgent the need to be boss of it). [Oh, and apologies in advance for not using em-dashes...]

As to whether you "d[id] that right", it depends. Reading it back to myself, it would appear not. Try all-caps on the bold bits and see if it makes sense hen you read it out loud... then do the same for the material to which you took stylistic objection and see if that makes sense.

As to Goebells: that specific example really needed to be in there, since he made clear that he admired Bernays (and the American eugenics movement). Born-against-Christians are the handiest example of indoctrination.

I don't know what "applause lights" are: doubtless some egregious thing that is so important that it merited a new jargonistic term for the [meta]cognoscenti to use to beat us 'mundanes'. (What does the style manual say about italicising Italian words on the internet?)

LBNL: if you don't think that there is a clique here who is, quite specifically, "march[ing] [their] little soldier arguments", I think you have not been paying attention. It's as bad as coming across a coven of Randians, and almost as correct-line as the Freepers (the trolling of Freepers is one of life's little joys).

The sort of people who say "Your entire theory of life and morals is incomplete and would bee useless for programming an AI" in response to a 21-word phrase at the end of a comment which did not purport to be exhaustive or complete, and was never put forward as a candidate for coding an AI.

Also the sort of people who say "What you said doesn't make sense to me, so you must be wrong and not know what you're talking about" while revealing gaping holes in their understanding of early-undergraduate material that is absolutely central to the issue at hand.

I've taught people like that - usually at first year level: people who throw about words like "utilitarian" and "consequentialist", while steadfastly ignoring the long-term consequences of the system they are advocating (or implicitly supporting) and attacking anybody they view as ideologically impure. It's hilarious.

Again ArisKatsaris - the "correct-line-ometer" prevents me from responding directly to your comment (way to stifle the ability to respond, site-designers!). So I'ma put it here...

In short your description of what morality entails isn't sufficient, isn't complete

It was a comment - not a thesis, not a manifesto, not a monograph, and certainly not a "description of what morality entails".

To assert otherwise is to be dishonest, or to be sufficiently stupid as to expect a commenter's entire view on an important aspect of moral philosophy to be able to be transmitted in (roughly) 21 words (the bold bit at the end). Or to be a bit of both, I guess - if you expect that it will advance your ends, maybe that suffices.

Here's something to print out and sticky-tape to your monitor: if ever I decide to give a complete, sufficient explanation of what I think is a "description of what morality entails", it will be identified as such, will be significantly longer than 21 words, and will not have anything to do with programming an AI (on which: as a first step, and having only thought about this once since 1995, it seems to me that it would make sense to build in the concept of utility-interdependence, the notion of economic efficiency, and an understanding of what happens to tyrants in repeated, many-player dynamic games.)

This one's for you, ArisKatsaris - the "correct-line-ometer" prevents me from responding directly to your response, so I'ma put it here.

I have checked what I wrote, and nowhere did I write that the (well understood) Coase-style arguments about how to ameliorate nuisances, had anything to do with morality. They are something that any half-decent second-year Economics student has to know, on pain of failing an important module in second-year Microeconomics: it would be as near to impossible as makes no odds, to get better than a credit for 2nd year Micro without having read and understood Coase. So if you think I made it up from whole cloth, I suggest you've missed a critical bit of theory.

So anyhow... if you want to go around interpolating things that aren't there, well and good - it might pass muster in Sociology departments (assuming universities still have those), but it's not going to advance the ball any.

As to 'hiring thugs to beat up people who engage in' [insert behaviour here]... well, that seems a perfect analysis of what the State does to people who disagree with it: since I advocate the non-aggression principle, I would certainly never support such a thing (but let's say I did: at least I would not be extorting the money used to pay for it).

This is a funny place - similar to a Randian cult-centre with its correct-line "persentio ergo rectum" clique and salon-intellectualism.

Not generalising in the least: I'm a man of the people who interacts often with the common man - particularly the rustic and bucolic variety (from the Auvergne in Deepest Darkest France to the dusty hinterland of rural Victora and New South Wales).

Everywhere I've ever lived, I've had conversations about animals (most of which I've initiated, I admit - and most of them before I went veggie), with folks ranging from French eleveurs de boeuf to Melbourne barristers and stock analysts: their lack of awareness of the complexity of animal sense organs (and their ignorance of animal awareness research generally) is astounding.

It may well be that you've never met anybody who thinks that all animals see in monochrome - maybe you're young, maybe you don't get out much, or maybe you don't have discussions about animals much. Fortunately, the 'animals see in black and white' trope is dying (as bad ideas should), but it's not dead.

To give you some context: I'm so old that when I went to school we were not allowed to use calculators (mine was the last generation to use trig tables). If you polled people my age (especially outside metropolitan areas) I reckon you would get >50% of them declaring that animals see in "black and white" - that's certainly my anecdotal experience.

Lastly: what makes you think that dogs see in monochrome? As far as we can tell dogs see the visual spectrum in the same way as a red-green colour-blind human does - they have both rods and cones in their visual apparatus, but with different sensitivities than humans' (same for cats, but carts lack cones that filter for red).

Of course we are only using "We can do this, and we have these cells" methods to make that call: as with some migratory birds that can 'see' magnetic fields, dogs and cats may have senses of which we are not yet aware. Cats certainly act as if they know something we don't.

Do you seriously think that the Pledge of Allegiance (and other similar things) are not designed to indoctrinate? Let's go to the writings of the guy who penned the Pledge of Allegiance:

• "..the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State." (emphasis mine)

The foundational aim of indoctrination is to get people when their minds are sufficiently plastic as to have few critical filters (i.e., in childhood) and to 're-wire' the plastic brain/mind with the indoctrinator's desired trope at the front. This is done by rote (church liturgies, pledges and so forth).

As elsewhere, you commit a logical fallacy: that the fact that you're unaware of the work that has been done showing that propaganda works, means that it doesn't.

Also, bad things do cause other bad things if the other bad things stem from a reduction in a defence mechanism, where the reduction was caused by the initial bad thing. Bombing water treatment (bad thing) and sewage plants causes increases in water borne disease (other bad things).

There's no requirement for magic (and therefore no requirement for attempts at deploying hackneyed middle-school debating tropes).

There is a very sound basis for believing that attempts to indoctrinate lead to a tendency for the population to be indoctrinated: the best basis that I can think of is that governments invest heavily in indoctrination using the same methodology as developed by Bernays and later Goebbels. If the methdology was not leading to the desired result, .gov would change it (I'm no admirer of .gov's ability to get things right, but the indoctrination of the pubic is the sine qua non of the tax-parasite's life).

Indoctrinated individuals have a greater tendency to lower levels of critical thinking (ever had an argument with a born again Christian? cheap shot, but I can give you a bunch of cites from the psych lit, too). Thus any device that increases the net level of indoctrination will cause - not by 'magic' - an increase in other things associated with reduced critical faculties.