*Shrug*

Hold on a sec, and let’s flip this. What kind of person do you have to be to see a author who writes smut make a side comment about capitalism, and feel like you need to go out of your way to put a question in their inbox being super smug and condescending about it? I mean, why do that? 

Why do this, even? Why ask this thing up there? I mean, you clearly realize I don’t feel much shame about what I say on here. It’s clear I don’t have much tolerance for concern trolling or arguments about politeness or being personable. What exactly are you expecting?

You don’t have to respond to my weird comments. No one is making you put these things in my box. Why are you doing this? Why?

Have you considered that maybe I’m giving you what you want? That you want me to be rude, so that you can feel good about being a better person than I am? So you can unfollow me, or block me, but come crawling back to read my shit anyway? Let’s get brutal here, let’s lay the whole truth out–you know what my reply is going to be before you even send this.

Suppose, for a second, I responded with remorse. “Yes yes, you’ve shamed me, yes yes, I was wrong to say this shit that I said.”

Would you feel as good if I did? Would you feel better than you do now, smug in the satisfaction that you have the moral high ground here?

Why do I reply like this? Because this is what you’re expecting. This is why you say things like this. Here, maybe I can split the difference:

MY OFFICIAL STATEMENT

“Yes, I’m sorry to have offended anyone. I should know better than to try and get into complex linguistic and philosophical arguments with anons online, because they never end well, and I come off looking like a jerk, and no one wants to be seen as a jerk. Still, I can only reply to these things, and I swear to reply honestly to all of them. I can’t help it if someone is wrong, but perhaps, in the future, I’ll try to be more polite about it.”

There, do you feel good? I hope so. I just want you to be happy with yourself. That’s what everyone like you wants, right?

Yeah, that guy was an idiot.

Yes, actually.

I think plants experience pain, or at least, something if we were experiencing it, we would consider pain. I think the smell of freshly mown grass is the smell of agony.

At the risk of setting off another ask box fight, this is why I find compassion arguments for veganism and vegetarianism unconvincing. I understand that animals feel pain when they are killed for food. I agree that the conditions of factory farms are deplorable, and that we should minimize suffering and improve conditions of the animals we eat. However, I don’t think this is sufficient reason to not eat meat at all. 

The nature of eating is that we have to take energy and nutrients from other entities in order to sustain our own lives. I don’t think there’s a solid moral distinction that can really be made between the objective suffering of a plant and of an animal–subjectively of course, we experience them very differently, or rather, we don’t experience the suffering of plants at all. 

There are lots and lots of other reasons to be vegetarian or vegan. Meat production is a waste of resources and land, it’s bad for the environment, it’s expensive. But death and destruction is fundamental to all consumption, in my mind. 

But hey! I’m a weirdo who thinks jobs didn’t exist several centuries ago! What do I know? Don’t @ me.

If I knew, I’d book us a flight.

1. Yes, it was your pedantic nature that started this thing, so of course you would think a typo is a sign of your superiority.

2. Political entities *are* concepts. 

3. Again, you do the thing where you just say I’m wrong, and then do nothing to rebut my claims, so I can’t actually reply to you. 

4. The reason I recommended you read Kripke’s book “Naming and Necessity” is precisely because his argument, and one that I agree with, is that when it comes to names and natural kinds, you actually *can’t* say “What one would call X today, did exist at Y point in time in the past.“ This is because both names, and terms for natural kinds, obey a very particular set of linguistic rules–to sum up his argument rather quickly, the serve as rudimentary markers, but don’t carry any semantic content of their own. I didn’t go any further into that argument, because if this conversation was this difficult for you, trying to have an actual conversation about theories of names and philosophy of langauge would have been disastrous to your self-esteem.

5. Bye! Thanks for reading my stories at least! Unless you’re just a random troll! It’s been…well, not exactly fun, but an interesting exercise.

Yes he did, and we all will be dealing with it, yes. See you on the other side! Probably!

Your using a word’s meaning as it’s commonly accepted today, and then trying to apply it throughout all of human history. That’s the problem I’m pointing out. I’m saying that even though we have the word “job” currently, that doesn’t mean you can then look back through all of history, and start calling things “jobs” just because they’re similar.

This is like saying that “The United States” existed a millennia ago. Technically, all of the land that is currently “The United States” exists both now, and back in the year 1017, but the social reality of the country did not exist then. If you went back in tine, and told someone that you were standing in the United States, you would be wrong. Jobs did not exist until capitalism created the economic mechanisms and structures that allowed jobs to exist.

So, when I said you’re assuming language is static and unchanging, you’re right, that was a mischaracterization of your view, and I’ll be more precise. Your problem is one of objectivity. You’re assuming that your current linguistic frame of reference is absolute, that the current form of the English Language is somehow capable of adequately describing everything not only within it’s current time frame, but also within the context of every other time frame. Still, that’s not how language works, but is a great example of Capitalistic reification, to assume that our current economic system isn’t just absolute, but capable of being applied backwards onto every single other form of human life that has already existed. That simply isn’t the case, but it’s an easy form of alienation to find yourself caught up in.

I mean, you *say* you have shit to back this up with, but you aren’t *giving* me anything. You need some receipts here. 

Still, if I’ve offended you, you’re welcome to back off already. You *must* have better things to do than keep arguing with some internet porn author, right? Surely there’s someone else in your life you can talk to who respects your intellectual rigor and sensitivity, instead of wasting more time with me.

You must.

Or else why would you keep putting these in my inbox?

I waste four years of my life getting a degree in philosophy with a minor in political science, with a particular emphasis in propaganda and political language, and you think I would waste an opportunity to absolutely own someone on the internets with it? 

What the fuck else is it ever going to be good for? Money? Pssshhhh. 

Getting paid wages for work is literally what Capitalism is. That’s the entire point. When we talk about economic systems before Capitalism, we are discussing economic systems where this economic relation did not exist yet. Feudalism, for example, the economic system directly preceding Capitalism, was the exchange of land rights for work–wealthy lords allowed people to live on their land, in exchange for one’s labor. That might bear a passing resemblance to a job as we commonly use the term, but it isn’t the same economic relation, not by a long shot. You are using relatively new terms of language and trying to make them apply to eras when they didn’t even exist yet. 

As far as the term labor, you say I’m not using it accurately, but you didn’t offer any actual counter argument…so…whatever. 

As for Marx intending people to have jobs…???What???

For one thing, throughout his writings, Marx never adequately described what, exactly, Communism would look like (I say that as someone who has read a substantial number of his works). One thing that would not have existed in Communism, however, is any form of relation which would resemble the employer/employee relation which is fundamental to capitalism, so…no. People would do work, and labor would exist, of course, but the economic relations of a Communist society would be fundamentally classless–there would be no “employers”, and so there would be no one offering “jobs” at all, or at least, not jobs in the sense that we understand them now.

In the end, you’re making still making the same fallacious linguistic argument–you’re assuming that language is static and unchanging, and that just because something appears similar to a natural kind we currently use, that means it must be an instance of that natural kind, but that isn’t how language works, that isn’t how natural kinds function logically, and that isn’t how reality is socially constructed. Go read Saul Kripke’s book, “On Naming and Necessity,” and then get back to me when you’re done with being a corncob.