(sorry all, for the late reply. I was supposed to get notices in my inbox when someone posted here, but that hasn’t happened since 11/3)
Wow, Mat, that’s the best you could do? I was really hoping you could give me something that would explain your hostility, but no such luck. Instead you provide little more than petty, misguided nit-picking mixed with a healthy dose of strawmen & logical fallacies. And in the process, even made one of my points for me.
Your whole argument seems to be that I made my point in a poor, sloppy, amateurish way.
1. Welcome to public forums. Most of us on these places aren’t exactly PhD’s in literature.
2. How is that a reason to attack my character with such hostility? You don’t know a damn thing about me, my motives, or my background. All you know is that I, like most of us, am not a great writer. The rest is assumption.
First, you criticize my writing ability. And you get no disagreement from me there. I never claimed to be Shakespeare. But then you contradict yourself by suggesting that because some have managed to make a living writing about what they love, that that’s an option for me as well. (Never mind that I seriously doubt your examples, Shanafelt and Hanke, survive by their writing gigs alone. Most locally published writers don’t) Which one is it, Mat?
>Also, I like how you don’t bother to hide the fact that altruism is not your root motive. You are made to feel guilty by this person and you wish to assuage that guilt.
Yet another of your completely misguided assumptions. The point I was trying to allude to in that paragraph has nothing to do with either altruism or “feeling guilty”. It is that when one person is down, negative, stressed-out, in despair, it affects those around them, making everyone feel worse, which in turn affects their job performances, personal lives, etc. And later I suggested that if people at the bottom economically were simply paid a more livable wage, allowing them to survive working shorter hours, it would benefit all of us. We would see it in reduced crime, higher education levels, better access to preventive medical care, etc.
And because I didn’t want to make the post about me, I didn’t indicate where my own economic status lay. Somehow you took this to conclude that I was some sort of comfortable well-off yuppie feeling “liberal guilt” towards those poor serfs beneath me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I AM one of the working poor. Always have been. I even worked many of the same shit jobs I refer to. And will probably end up working some of them again soon.
>So, art is not worthwhile without also being commerce?
No, idiot. I never suggested anything close to that. Only that the vast majority of artists can not pay the bills doing the art they love, and must therefore take jobs they don’t love.
>“Success gurus” are not talking to the lower or working classes.
They absolutely are. You’ve obviously never seen their ads or their books. It’s clearly marketed to the poor and desperate. After all, why would they need to market success “advice” to someone who’s already successful? Hello, McFly?!?
BTW, I’ve seen people I know & love fall prey to these scams. I know what I’m talking about. You clearly don’t.
>What jobs are those, exactly? You don’t seem to say - you just seem to know what jobs are the ones that everyone wants to have.
You can’t be serious. I shouldn’t have to name them and in fact deliberately left it to the readers’ imagination. It’s simple, Mat. Do this exercise: Name 5 great high-paying jobs you would love. $10 says it’s much harder to get those jobs than a low-paying job you’d hate.
>So, which gurus and con-artists are selling the Alpha myth?
As bad a writer as I am, you’re an even worse reader. I said: They are selling the notion that everyone can be wealthy/successful/at the top. Which ignores the point you agree with me on: That for someone to be at the top (the alpha), others need to be at the bottom. The success gurus never actually address the Alpha issue, because it would obviously disprove their whole selling point.
>You have to understand that most of Europe was relatively well-developed and well into a commercial business culture as far back as the early 1500’s when settling this continent began. This is probably why Europe was way out in front on the social-democratic political front for many years.
You really need to take a History refresher course there, hotshot. Most of Europe was in pretty dire straits in the early 20th century. Ever hear of Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, etc, and the economic despair that made their rises to power possible? They didn’t begin their modern socio-economic restructuring until after WW2. In fact, during the 50’s and 60’s the US system was the envy of the world. But we let ours go to hell while Europe dramatically improved.
