Dear sharanga;

How much was the donkey’s GPA? Higher than your or less? Ha! Ha!!

Thanks!

Yapa

That’s it. You are behaving like a sour loser should. Take care.

George,

If I work 40 hours a week, and the tax rate is 20%, I will be working 8 hours per week for nothing. That means 32 hours per month, 384 hours per year, and if assume I work for 40 years, I work for 15,360 hours for nothing. That is 1 year and 9 months of slave labour during the course of my lifetime.

I find your comment amusing. But no thanks.

(Please post this here, not below)

Dear sharanga;

“I hope that you see that when you write 2+2=4 in your examination paper, even though you think it has a lot to do with internal factors over which you have control, in actuality this act is mostly determined by many other factors over which you had absolutely no control.”

Please teach your course of education to a donkey, measure his GPA in the term end exam and decide the internal factors and external factors that affect GPA.

Got my point?

Thanks!

Dear sharanga;

This is a pathetic situation. It seems irony of fate some people’s intellectual productivity seems very low despite their claim that they have a higher GPA and good education. They need a lot of effort to understand a trivial thing. It seems these positive intellectual factors themselves are the reason for the deficiency. I call this sort of deficiency “book worm syndrome”. They need to consume big theories and heap of arguments to understand a small thing. I don’t think a person with an average common sense needs anything else to understand the injustice of economic inequality prevailing in the world. But a person claim to have a big GPA still cannot understand this trivial fact.

“Emperor’s clothe” denotes a similar situation. Wisest ministers and courtiers could not realize that the emperor in front of them was only wearing the “cold clothe of the sky”, while a lad hanging onto his mother’s arm pointed his finger to the manhood of the emperor.

In your last birth were you a minister with a high GPA, dear sharanga? Or were you an emperor?

Ha! Ha!!

Thanks!

Dear Sharanga,

Given your understanding of the world and your analytical skills I volunteer Yapa to help you out in that exam of yours! Man, with Nutters in Arms like you guys we are all in Dire Straits!

I was in agreement with you in the argument that evolution is not teleological but then you made the fatal Social-Darwinist error of trying to justify wealth attribution on the grounds of “survival of the fittest”.

These were the same arguments that the colonial project used and remain hale and hearty to-date in the monopoly-capitalist project (Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” being the corollary to “survival of the fittest”). The idea that evolution has favored some with more superior genes and therefore they are entitled to favored status. That sub-optimal outcomes of evolution have to just put up or shut up. The logical extension of this thinking leads to “what is mine is mine” but ironically also to “what is yours is also mine” (because of the superior nature of the fittest); hence the post-colonial terminology of the “Commonwealth”.

If we are to use biology as a guide to social organisation it is better that we look to symbiosis and mutualism. These associations are actually a lot more prevalent in nature than the survival of the fittest kind. It is these forms of cooperation that create resilient ecosystems (mycorrhiza/plant), and to extend it to people, resilient societies. In conclusion you gotta give to get. So shut up and pay your taxes you deadbeat!

George,

If you think analogy is faulty, keep on thinking that. I have an exam next week. Would you do it for me?

If you find it amusing that I mix-up right wing arguments, keep on being amused. I have no intention of robbing you of your amusement. I find it amusing however that you look at people in right-wing, left-wing terms. Your politics is binary, which is amusing.

I find it even more amusing that you think governments serve the interests of the wealthy class. Karl Marx has been dead for over a century and you still think that there exists such a thing as class awareness. It is amusing that you don’t realize people with power do not serve the interests over any particular class, but rather themselves.

I find it amusing that you think I need to justify the actions of the “international wealthy class”? I don’t have a red shirt. Can you send me one?

“My dumbass government throws you and any others born out of wedlock, in jail for not paying their taxes! And you are most welcome to hold on to your GPA for whatever ’tis worth.”
????????????
Brilliant.

Actually wijayapala, I was under the impression that your one liner question warranted only one liner answers. But if you consider it was a debate, then indeed you can consider yourself victorious. Congratulations!

Yapa,

At least, not you must see where I’m getting at.

In determining whether a person deserves to keep a certain portion of his wealth, it is not enough to just check whether there’s a one to one connection or not. You need to consider something more arbitrary. In your case it is how does a person’s wealth compare to the average wealth per person.

So in deciding whether to rob a person of wealth-K, or in other words, in deciding whether he does not deserve a certain portion of his wealth, you need to consider two things. Those are,

1. Does he have a one to one connection to wealth-K
2. Is his wealth above the average wealth per person

Get the point? The point is, not having a one to one connection to your wealth alone does not make you undeserving of a certain portion of your wealth, even according to you.

I brought this up only to support my position that a person cannot be robbed of his wealth or GPA solely on the basis of not having a one to one connection to wealth or GPA. It is possible for a person to still deserve his wealth even though he has no one to one connection to it.

Up to now in this comment, all I have done is supporting my view. Now I shall do the refutation of your argument.

I want you to consider the following statement you made.

“A person entitled on the basis of his own competencies for 4.5, might get 6.5 with the help of external factors but not 9.5”

I do not know where you find this kind of GPA scale, but I can afford not to mock you. What I want you consider is the phrase “external factors” in your comment.

What constitutes an external factor, and what constitutes internal factors?

Are internal factors the things inside your body, and external factors are things outside your body? If that is the case, a computer chip transplanted inside your brain is an internal factor. That can’t be right.

You might consider internal factors are biological attributes that you are born with, and everything else is an external factor. This leads to a confusion. The nutrition you got after your birth are external factors. There is no difference between those nutrition, and the nutrition you got when you were inside your mother’s womb because she ate them for you, supplied them to you through her blood. Even your genetic content was determined by an external factor – intercourse.

Therefore, the only meaningful classification of internal and external factors are as follows.

Internal factors – Factors over which you have control
External factors – Factors over which you have no or little control

Now consider the following,

1. Under which category does your IQ fall?
2. Under which category does your good health fall?
3. Under which category does your ability to do hard work fall?
4. Under which category does your parents fall?
5. Under which category does the environment in which you grew up fall?

I believe it is obvious that factors 1,4 and 5 fall under external factors.

Factors 2 and 3 would be completely external factors if the universe was deterministic. Even if the universe is not deterministic, both factors 2 and 3 are more external than internal since genetic disposition of the person has the biggest impact on them.

Those are five of the most important facts that I can think of that has an impact on your GPA.

I hope that you see that when you write 2+2=4 in your examination paper, even though you think it has a lot to do with internal factors over which you have control, in actuality this act is mostly determined by many other factors over which you had absolutely no control.

You draw a difference between wealth and GPA based on a belief that GPA is mostly determined by internal factors of a person, and wealth is determined mostly by external factors. But you define internal factors and external factors in a meaningless way. In fact, I’m not sure whether you even have clear definition for internal and external factors.

I must stress that my definition of internal and external factors is the only meaningful way they can be defined in this context. Your claim that success based on internal factors are deserved while success based on external factors are undeserved. This could only be true if the person had control over the internal factors, and no or little control over the external factors. I hope that much is obvious.

Yapa,

You seem hurt. That’s when people go around mocking the opponent. Don’t get things personal.

Now, after your last comment, you should realize that there’s an additional assumption in deciding whether a person deserves to keep all his wealth or not. This assumption is arbitrary. In your case the assumption is “only the people with under the average wealth per person deserve to keep a portion of wealth to which he has no one to one connection.”

In deciding whether to take a portion of a person’s wealth, in othet words, in deciding whether a person does not deserve a portion if his wealth, you consider two things,

1. Does he not have a one to one connection.
2. Is he above the average wealth line.

Do you see the point I’m trying to make? Let me spell it out in bold font.
The absence of a one to one connection alone is not enough to determine that a person does not deserve a portion of his wealth. A person can deserve a certain amount of wealth even if he does not have a one to one connection to it

The above two sentences in bold are important, not to refute your argument, but rather to support mine.

Now to the refutation of your argument.

Consider the following statement you made,

There is no such an inequality in GPA. A person entitled on the basis of his own competencies for 4.5, might get 6.5 with the help of external factors but not 9.5.

I don’t know from where you got this GPA scale, but that is tangential. The important phrase here that I want to consider is the phrase “external factors” .

What constitutes an external factor? Is it the fact they are outside the body that makes them external? If that’s the case, a computer chip transplanted inside the brain is an internal factor.

The only meaningful classification of internal and external factors is as follows.

Internal factors – factors over which you have control
External factors – factors over which you have no control, or ver limited control

Now,
1. Under what category would you put a person’s IQ?
2. Under what category would you put a person’s health?
3. Under what category would you put a person’s genetic disposition to work hard?
4. Under what category would you put a person’s parents?
5. Under what category would you put the environment in which he grows up?

These are the five most important factors that I think have an impact on GPA. Among them the person has absolutely no control over factors 1, 4 and 5. If we live in a deterministic universe, we would have absolutely no control over factors 2 and 3 as well. If we do live in a non-deterministic universe, you woul still have only a limted control over factors 2 and 3.

So you see, Yapa, even though you seem to think that internal factors had a lot to do with you calculating 2+2=4, and writing it down, it actually had more to do with external factors over which you had no control.

One to one connection is actually not something that actually exists. Consider the act of you writing 4 as the answer to 2+2. Forget about minor factors that has some effect on this, such as ink flowing out of you pen, due to gravity, to write the number 4 on paper.

The direct major cause for the act of writing 4, was you thought that 2+2 was 4. Do you think the thought is the ultimate source? It is not. Everything is caused. Your thought wouldn’t have occurred to you if you lacked the part of the brain that performs calculations. You have that brain part only because you have the necessary genes. You have those genes because your parents met and made you. Likewise, this causal history can be traced back to 15 billion years when the universe began. You’ve never had any control over any of those.

So GPA and wealth are not as different as you think. Both are largely determined by factors over which you had absolutely no control.

*****
I must at this point also ask you something else.

If indeed you deserve your GPA because you have a one to one connection to it, then it must also mean that a mentally retarded person also deserves his lack of a GPA. You might even justify it with karma.

But if karma actually exists, then karma has a lot to do with you wealth. Certain good karma earns you wealth, and you deserve your wealth. As a Buddhist, how do you justify the government taking the rewards of your good karma away? Or is it that some of your bad karma has given rise to a government policy change that affects everyone so that after all, you deserve to lose your money?