So, will you homeschool all your children and refuse to accept any kind of school vouchers?
This really oughtn't to be about one guy's sense of personal invincibility--which clearly would not survive any serious scrutiny. To pretend so is merely buying into his faulty premise.
The issue began as whether people ought to have some particular type of demonstrable stake in a polity to participate in the voting process. The proposal has been put forth that instead of a positive requirement to own land, there be a negative requirement that anyone who uses certain government benefits will vote for the expansion of those benefits and therefore should be be disqualified from voting as insufficiently objective.
This is patently ludicrous. Suffrage is not about objectivity. Suffrage is about each voter doing his part to advance those positions which are important to him. The statement that X, Y, or Z ought not to be able to vote because he will vote in a way contrary to MY wishes leans pretty far towards the totalitarian ends of the political spectrum.
No, John Adams didn't see it that way. John Adams was wrong. John Adams, like the poster here, cherished the belief that because of various accidents of his birth and circumstances, he was more deserving of human rights than other people--no, not even people, but entities like women and non-land-owning rabble like RevDisk and Vaskidmark.
The poster here--who has now personally attacked me twice in as many weeks, to the point of being asked to edit or to having his posts edited by a mod--believes not only in a particular political system that does not exist and that has never existed and that will never exist because it flat-out denies some basic facts of human existence. He further believes not in integrating those beliefs into a political or personal philosophy in any kind of rational way, but instead of personally insulting as insufficiently human anyone who does not share his particular beliefs.
He considers his own personal beliefs--which apparently include a bizarre combination of Calvinism and Objectivism--to be so flawless that he can merely dismiss as irrelevant to truth aka his worldview any factor in any problem he chooses not to recognize, with no regard for the social contract supporting those factors, the economic structure underlying them, or the morality informing them. He really does believe that anyone who really, really wants to can and will and ought to be just like him--single, childless, and a member of the military. Oh, and to be properly human, must really, really want to be just like him. And if one cannot attain being sufficiently in the image of his god, one is "basically worthless."
So fine, there is clearly a lack of imagination going on here. I recall a family member recounting her experience with a Secular Humanist Jewish congregation, and how odd it seemed to her that they prominently displayed images and words in iconic forms indicating a worship of humanity. It seems that some people have distilled that down further to the worship of self.
The problem is, HE'S STILL WRONG. And it doesn't matter how many times he attacks me as a member of an underclass and a worthless human being. He'll still be wrong. It's all based on twisted syllogisms based on incorrect premises that don't stand up to logical scrutiny, or any scrutiny outside of the Objectivist philosophy. And a philosophy that works only so long as it remains completely internal and is not subject to outside forces is so inherently flawed as to have little or so philosophical value.
But, that's not what this is about.
What this is really about is that I made a snap judgment a while ago about the poster in question and reacted in accord with that judgement when conversing with him. I later regretted have acted with so little thought and sent a private message apologizing for having made such a judgment and for having behaved in accordance with it. I have noticed that since that time, subtle and overt attacks from this poster have become pretty consistent, which I consider sad but not really unexpected.
Nonetheless, I am me and not he and have no plans to change that, not because of his repeated attacks but because I have philosophical, logical, cultural, and moral objections to the beliefs he insists are essential to humanity.