Just sort out free education and decent accomodation for everyone. It just isn't difficult to do these days.
You paying? Because despite your breezy assertions to the contrary, that's a lot of money and resources for a society to pony up for people who can get all that on their own.
And don't forget that government support of public universities has been cut dramatically over the years.
[...]
It's only going to get worse as the tea baggers insist on deeper and deeper cuts to everything but the defense budget.
Who can continue to pay for something that has for many decades consistently increased faster than not only those state government budgets, but the economy of the US as a whole? Budget items which increase much faster than the rate of growth of the US are a big target for not just "tea baggers", but for anyone who has their own share of the pie to protect.
A huge part of the motivation behind the tea party movement is to combat these ballooning costs.
So let me trace out what I think the cause and effect chain is here. 1) Universities go up in cost faster than the rate of growth of budgets or economies for decades. This leads to 2) reduction in government support for universities. 3) The same sort of lack of spending control over entire US-based government budgets leads to 4) tea party movement which wants to cut everything except allegedly that defense budget.
So we can complain about reduced government spending on universities or tea baggers, but I think it'd be far more productive to address initial causes, out of control spending.
The news media cried "housing prices fall dramatically! The economy is crumbling! Everyone tighten your belts, this is the big one! We're coming, Elizabeth!"
There's always some idiot out there who claims we had a disaster because we're weren't optimistic enough. The real answer is easy credit and stupidly high leverage. Real estate just happens to be where it happened.
The difference being your subjective judgment is on his person, his character. My judgment is on his words
That is incorrect since I too based my judgment on his words which just happened to be a loaded question which simultaneously ignored real third options. I dealt appropriately with that.
Ok, I believe you. Takes one to know one after all. I'll trust your expertise.
That's typical sore loser behavior on Slashdot. You don't have anything useful to say, so you do a little ad hominem attack instead.
You don't understand the difference between private debt and public debt.
You have yet to explain the difference. I could view private borrowing in the same way. I don't consider it a productive way to do so since it obfuscates the actual economical dynamics of the situation.
There are no existing financial or legal structures which require the United States government or the US private sector to render its real resources to any so-called creditors outside of voluntary market exchange.
Those aren't the only "structures" out there. Inflation is an economic structure which can require the US to do such things or face consequences. The people who say that the US should borrow more money never have an answer for inflation.
We have plenty of people willing to work, plenty of jobs that need doing and plenty of resources, but are constantly told there is "not enough money" to connect these things.
So what? Lack of money is not even remotely the problem, but such things as large disincentives for hiring people and using resources, considerable labor competition from cheaper parts of the world that don't have the above problems, and substantial future uncertainty (in large part due to public borrowing - who is willing to commit in such an environment without public funding?).
Even the President claims that the "government is out of money," even though the US is the sole issuer of its currency, and only borrows in this currency.
The President says a lot of stupid shit. I wouldn't single out this particular statement as anything remarkable.
I mean, seriously, any sane person realizes that it's stupid not to have health insurance, which is a way to pool risk.
As an aside, any relatively liquid investment or savings is also health insurance (as well as insurance for any other sudden, large cost to you). Risk pooling is an advantage of second party insurers, but only if your risk is large enough to justify being in the pool. For example, if you and your dependents are healthy and wealthy, you probably would just want at best a bit of catastrophic insurance with a high deductible. You are self insuring with your wealth against lesser costs (or perhaps even all health care costs, if you decided to forgo insurance altogether).
I mean, seriously, any sane person realizes that it's stupid not to have health insurance, which is a way to pool risk. So, why not make pooling risk a government function and save a mountain of middleman costs?
A government in this role would be yet another middleman. To eliminate middlemen altogether, you'd have to pay directly and fully for your own health care.
The private shuttles don't solve the "last mile" problem that public transit provides, though. For the most part, the company shuttles only have a handful of stops.
To the contrary, they solve the last mile problem quite well with people going right to the business where they work without a lot of irrelevant stops like typical public transportation buses would have.
At any rate, it's not very efficient mass transit to transport people in one direction; it means your buses are empty nearly half the time.
Compared to what? Most transit systems have this sort of problem for the same reason. Most people want to go one way at the start of a work day and the other direction at the end of the work day.
And I'll just note that I have actually traveled on the public transportation systems in the Silicon Valley area. They are relatively good for US public transportation, but still terrible compared to the car.
For example, I took Amtrak from Davis, California to a Stanford University conference a number of years ago. I managed to make it only a few hours later than expected. And I was almost trapped in Sacramento on the return. I have yet to feel the inclination to try something like that again, though it did occupy my time.
If I had done it by car, it might have been a little more expensive due to parking expenses at Stanford, but I would have made it on time, been on the road about half the time (even if I had traveled optimally), and without getting trapped in Sacramento.
He then interpreted each of the two possible answers in a more-or-less objective fashion.
Utter nonsense. I'll repeat the "yes" interpretation so that you can get a sense of the depth of your foolishness.
If the answer is "Yes," then you're some kind of barbarian, and we're done here.
First, of all, objectively, what is "some kind of barbarian"? The use of the phrase "some kind" all by itself rules out objectivity, it indicates a personal judgment on barbarian-ness by Man On Pink Corner. And use of the term "barbarian" in this context is loaded with subjective connotations of cruelty and fierceness.
Second, why are we "done here"? What's the objective case for claiming that one can't reason with some kind of barbarian? I'll give you a hint here. There is no such objective case. This is again a personal judgment by a person who has demonstrated that they can't deal well with disagreements and employ cheap rhetorical tricks like the loaded question, ad hominem attacks, and false dilemmas.
That rebuttal was rather easy. I suggest you think before typing so that you don't make such weak errors in the future.
The reason I answered the question I wished to answer is because there is a fundamental problem with his viewpoint, namely, no consideration for whether we have functioning health care or not. A sick poor person has a health problem so the hospital should be forced to serve him for free no matter whether the hospital can afford to do that or not.
In that situation, I'd rather have dead poor people in the streets than a system which is bankrupting the hospitals that we rely on.
but most debbt is like this - borrowed to invest in improvements
Public debt is the obvious exception to this rule. For example, suppose Congress passes yet another idiotic regulatory scheme which causes $10 of damage for every dollar of its budget. Ok, now they borrow $1000 to fund it. The agency causes $10,000 of harm to society and now society has to pay that debt back as well. Well, that's an unproductive "investment" (since it actually has considerable negative return on investment), but it's the sort of thing that Congress (or any budget-making authority in a government) does, having no noticeable competence with investing.
That's your subjective judgment of his character based on his words
Well, I'm going with my subjective judgment over your subjective judgment.
not the content of the words themselves
This wouldn't be the first time that a Slashdotter proposed a fantasy scenario unconnected to reality. The solution is to substitute the scenario with a more realistic one.
Come on. 21 billion hours is a huge amount of time. Disaster support only uses a minute sliver of that time. What's the rest going to get used for that is more productive than gamers doing something else for that time?
As a Canadian I have yet to see the very interference of the government into my health.
Ok, so you don't see the interference. I'm not sure why that is relevant.
I have never had any government official stop me getting an x-ray, stomp on my doctor when he ordered an ECG, or any of the other numerous tests and prescriptions he has ordered for me.
And what of the stuff that your doctor might have ordered for you, but didn't? Opportunity cost is invisible.
The problem is that this sort of thing is highly subjective. Basically, the old system of inflation was to take a fixed basket of goods that was thought to represent the demand of a particular group (consumers, manufacturers, etc). That turns out to have problems because that basket of goods slowly becomes obsolete.
So then, they changed it to the current hedonics system, which as I understand the intent, is supposed to be a parameter space of baskets of goods of equivalent utility to our groups in question (here, attempted by decomposing goods into their functions and treating good bundles as equivalent which have equivalent combinations of these functions). So in particular, substitution of expensive goods with less expensive goods of equivalent quality are allowed. One then looks at the point on that parameter space with the lowest cost to the group in question and that becomes the basis of an inflation calculation.
I see plenty of means to distort this sort of calculation by deciding which functions are more important and lowering the weight of stuff that has an exceptionally high rate of cost increase (such as housing, education, and medical care - which is true throughout the developed world, I might add).
That's what communism (or whatever it'll get called the next time it is tried) does in practice. I know This Time Will Be Different (TM). But it never is. Once you've built the perfect society, then you'll have to deal with the imperfect people who live in and continue to thwart your perfect society.
Wrong. Whatever is produced at a given point in time is available for consumption at that time. We will never send real resources backwards in time in order to "repay" public debts.
That isn't the point of debt. Debt is borrowing money or resources now and paying for them with future income or resources. So you can borrow more to produce more, but as a consequence, you will be producing less in the future for a period of time.
Let's put this into perspective. Suppose the interest rate on that public debt was very considerable 100% per year for ten years and adjusted for inflation. That is, every dollar you borrowed, you had to pay back each year for ten years. According to your view, you get massive creation of "output" in that first year followed by ten years of lost "output" of the same amount each year. I'm sure it'd be great to be the lender, at least till year two or so when the borrower and economy collapses without paying back enough of the loan to make it worthwhile.
It makes no sense to speak of "lost output" caused by cessation of public borrowing while ignoring that payment of that debt creates "lost output" in the very same sense. You really are advocating the creation of money in the sense of quantitative easing (well over three trillion dollars just in the US).
The real theft your generation has perpetrated on mine is all of this lost output which can never be regained.
No one has an obligation to fulfill your naive economic fantasies. I'll also note that in the "Lost Output Clock" link, they have a graph at the very top which has a blue line with no connection to reality. The slope of the red line in the years 2006-2008 is lower than the slope of the blue line. That tells me right there that the slope of the blue line should be lower. And when you do that, you get that the red line crosses the blue line around 2014.
Public debt needs to increase so the output gap can be closed.
Just print infinite amounts of money. That'll close any such output gaps and simultaneously make the currency completely worthless. The extreme of hyperinflation which according to your words should be delivering optimal output, doesn't actually do so. So there is at least one other factor you are missing in your initial assumptions about how an economy works.
Why would the division of power between local, national and supranational governments have any influence on personal autonomy?
Because there is a fundamental power struggle between the individual and the collective state. The more divided the power of the latter, the weaker it will be. There are two common ways to do this. First, is by function. I don't know of a democracy that doesn't divide up the power of making law from that of implementing law. And most also provide for a third fairly independent body to interpret the legality of that law and its implementation.
The second common means is division via scope or extent of the exercise of power. By making many powers exclusive to local or national level governments, it pulls power away from the most dangerous level, supranational as well as providing autonomous counterweights to that supranational government.
His words are "someone without insurance, or who otherwise has no ability to pay". That implies all other options including charity or witchdoctors or priests or going to McDonald's (hey, the preservatives and chemicals in that junk might just kill the cancer!/s) have been exhausted.
Actually, no, it doesn't. It just means that he was trying to pretend those other options didn't exist.
It was already answered by the guy who posted it. And as he so smugly noted, he ruled out "yes" and "no" as answers. I don't bother answering loaded questions directly, because that's a waste of everyone's time.
Question: Do you believe that someone without insurance, or who otherwise has no ability to pay, who is suffering from an acute medical emergency, should be turned away from a hospital emergency room and left to die on the sidewalk?
I don't believe he should be turned away. Nor do I believe the hospital has an obligation to serve him for free. What I believe is that people like you should pay for his health care. If it's really such a big moral obligation for you, then pony up. If you can't be bothered to back your words, then I can't be bothered to either.
If the answer is "No," then I've got some even worse news for you: we already have "socialized medicine." The patient will, in fact, be treated, and you and I will, in fact, pick up the tab. It just costs us several times more than it would in any other civilized nation on Earth, because unlike those nations, we insist on kidding ourselves.
Nope. You are wrong on this. It costs as much as it does, because the US has systematically encouraged a vast growth in the consumption of health care and health insurance. Poor people in ERs just aren't the ones driving up the costs of health care because they're only a small portion of the whole population.
If the answer is "Yes," then you're some kind of barbarian, and we're done here.
Now, if I actually were "some kind of barbarian", then why would a few idiotic and mildly condemning words from a self-appointed defender of civilization be relevant to me? Personally, I find such statements (if you aren't "X" (where "X" is merely the state of disagreeing with you), then I won't say anything to you) to mean simply that you aren't competent enough to argue with someone who doesn't already wholly agree with you. That's a pretty pathetic state to be in. You ought to work on your communication skills a bit. Slashdot could be a good place to do that.
But having said that, you know where the exit to Slashdot is, if you find you can't handle it.
Slashdot Mirror
Just sort out free education and decent accomodation for everyone. It just isn't difficult to do these days.
You paying? Because despite your breezy assertions to the contrary, that's a lot of money and resources for a society to pony up for people who can get all that on their own.
Home price bubbles since 1913. Who knew!
Anyone who paid attention to home prices since 1913. There has been a vast run up in home prices. It's not just some thing that happened last decade.
And don't forget that government support of public universities has been cut dramatically over the years.
[...]
It's only going to get worse as the tea baggers insist on deeper and deeper cuts to everything but the defense budget.
Who can continue to pay for something that has for many decades consistently increased faster than not only those state government budgets, but the economy of the US as a whole? Budget items which increase much faster than the rate of growth of the US are a big target for not just "tea baggers", but for anyone who has their own share of the pie to protect.
A huge part of the motivation behind the tea party movement is to combat these ballooning costs.
So let me trace out what I think the cause and effect chain is here. 1) Universities go up in cost faster than the rate of growth of budgets or economies for decades. This leads to 2) reduction in government support for universities. 3) The same sort of lack of spending control over entire US-based government budgets leads to 4) tea party movement which wants to cut everything except allegedly that defense budget.
So we can complain about reduced government spending on universities or tea baggers, but I think it'd be far more productive to address initial causes, out of control spending.
The news media cried "housing prices fall dramatically! The economy is crumbling! Everyone tighten your belts, this is the big one! We're coming, Elizabeth!"
There's always some idiot out there who claims we had a disaster because we're weren't optimistic enough. The real answer is easy credit and stupidly high leverage. Real estate just happens to be where it happened.
The difference being your subjective judgment is on his person, his character. My judgment is on his words
That is incorrect since I too based my judgment on his words which just happened to be a loaded question which simultaneously ignored real third options. I dealt appropriately with that.
Ok, I believe you. Takes one to know one after all. I'll trust your expertise.
That's typical sore loser behavior on Slashdot. You don't have anything useful to say, so you do a little ad hominem attack instead.
You don't understand the difference between private debt and public debt.
You have yet to explain the difference. I could view private borrowing in the same way. I don't consider it a productive way to do so since it obfuscates the actual economical dynamics of the situation.
There are no existing financial or legal structures which require the United States government or the US private sector to render its real resources to any so-called creditors outside of voluntary market exchange.
Those aren't the only "structures" out there. Inflation is an economic structure which can require the US to do such things or face consequences. The people who say that the US should borrow more money never have an answer for inflation.
We have plenty of people willing to work, plenty of jobs that need doing and plenty of resources, but are constantly told there is "not enough money" to connect these things.
So what? Lack of money is not even remotely the problem, but such things as large disincentives for hiring people and using resources, considerable labor competition from cheaper parts of the world that don't have the above problems, and substantial future uncertainty (in large part due to public borrowing - who is willing to commit in such an environment without public funding?).
Even the President claims that the "government is out of money," even though the US is the sole issuer of its currency, and only borrows in this currency.
The President says a lot of stupid shit. I wouldn't single out this particular statement as anything remarkable.
I mean, seriously, any sane person realizes that it's stupid not to have health insurance, which is a way to pool risk.
As an aside, any relatively liquid investment or savings is also health insurance (as well as insurance for any other sudden, large cost to you). Risk pooling is an advantage of second party insurers, but only if your risk is large enough to justify being in the pool. For example, if you and your dependents are healthy and wealthy, you probably would just want at best a bit of catastrophic insurance with a high deductible. You are self insuring with your wealth against lesser costs (or perhaps even all health care costs, if you decided to forgo insurance altogether).
I mean, seriously, any sane person realizes that it's stupid not to have health insurance, which is a way to pool risk. So, why not make pooling risk a government function and save a mountain of middleman costs?
A government in this role would be yet another middleman. To eliminate middlemen altogether, you'd have to pay directly and fully for your own health care.
The private shuttles don't solve the "last mile" problem that public transit provides, though. For the most part, the company shuttles only have a handful of stops.
To the contrary, they solve the last mile problem quite well with people going right to the business where they work without a lot of irrelevant stops like typical public transportation buses would have.
At any rate, it's not very efficient mass transit to transport people in one direction; it means your buses are empty nearly half the time.
Compared to what? Most transit systems have this sort of problem for the same reason. Most people want to go one way at the start of a work day and the other direction at the end of the work day.
And I'll just note that I have actually traveled on the public transportation systems in the Silicon Valley area. They are relatively good for US public transportation, but still terrible compared to the car.
For example, I took Amtrak from Davis, California to a Stanford University conference a number of years ago. I managed to make it only a few hours later than expected. And I was almost trapped in Sacramento on the return. I have yet to feel the inclination to try something like that again, though it did occupy my time.
If I had done it by car, it might have been a little more expensive due to parking expenses at Stanford, but I would have made it on time, been on the road about half the time (even if I had traveled optimally), and without getting trapped in Sacramento.
He then interpreted each of the two possible answers in a more-or-less objective fashion.
Utter nonsense. I'll repeat the "yes" interpretation so that you can get a sense of the depth of your foolishness.
If the answer is "Yes," then you're some kind of barbarian, and we're done here.
First, of all, objectively, what is "some kind of barbarian"? The use of the phrase "some kind" all by itself rules out objectivity, it indicates a personal judgment on barbarian-ness by Man On Pink Corner. And use of the term "barbarian" in this context is loaded with subjective connotations of cruelty and fierceness.
Second, why are we "done here"? What's the objective case for claiming that one can't reason with some kind of barbarian? I'll give you a hint here. There is no such objective case. This is again a personal judgment by a person who has demonstrated that they can't deal well with disagreements and employ cheap rhetorical tricks like the loaded question, ad hominem attacks, and false dilemmas.
That rebuttal was rather easy. I suggest you think before typing so that you don't make such weak errors in the future.
The reason I answered the question I wished to answer is because there is a fundamental problem with his viewpoint, namely, no consideration for whether we have functioning health care or not. A sick poor person has a health problem so the hospital should be forced to serve him for free no matter whether the hospital can afford to do that or not.
In that situation, I'd rather have dead poor people in the streets than a system which is bankrupting the hospitals that we rely on.
but most debbt is like this - borrowed to invest in improvements
Public debt is the obvious exception to this rule. For example, suppose Congress passes yet another idiotic regulatory scheme which causes $10 of damage for every dollar of its budget. Ok, now they borrow $1000 to fund it. The agency causes $10,000 of harm to society and now society has to pay that debt back as well. Well, that's an unproductive "investment" (since it actually has considerable negative return on investment), but it's the sort of thing that Congress (or any budget-making authority in a government) does, having no noticeable competence with investing.
That's your subjective judgment of his character based on his words
Well, I'm going with my subjective judgment over your subjective judgment.
not the content of the words themselves
This wouldn't be the first time that a Slashdotter proposed a fantasy scenario unconnected to reality. The solution is to substitute the scenario with a more realistic one.
The original question posed to you was not a loaded question.
Whatever. It was a loaded question even if you think otherwise. And the poster even explained why right after he asked the question.
Come on. 21 billion hours is a huge amount of time. Disaster support only uses a minute sliver of that time. What's the rest going to get used for that is more productive than gamers doing something else for that time?
As a Canadian I have yet to see the very interference of the government into my health.
Ok, so you don't see the interference. I'm not sure why that is relevant.
I have never had any government official stop me getting an x-ray, stomp on my doctor when he ordered an ECG, or any of the other numerous tests and prescriptions he has ordered for me.
And what of the stuff that your doctor might have ordered for you, but didn't? Opportunity cost is invisible.
The problem is that this sort of thing is highly subjective. Basically, the old system of inflation was to take a fixed basket of goods that was thought to represent the demand of a particular group (consumers, manufacturers, etc). That turns out to have problems because that basket of goods slowly becomes obsolete.
So then, they changed it to the current hedonics system, which as I understand the intent, is supposed to be a parameter space of baskets of goods of equivalent utility to our groups in question (here, attempted by decomposing goods into their functions and treating good bundles as equivalent which have equivalent combinations of these functions). So in particular, substitution of expensive goods with less expensive goods of equivalent quality are allowed. One then looks at the point on that parameter space with the lowest cost to the group in question and that becomes the basis of an inflation calculation.
I see plenty of means to distort this sort of calculation by deciding which functions are more important and lowering the weight of stuff that has an exceptionally high rate of cost increase (such as housing, education, and medical care - which is true throughout the developed world, I might add).
That's what communism (or whatever it'll get called the next time it is tried) does in practice. I know This Time Will Be Different (TM). But it never is. Once you've built the perfect society, then you'll have to deal with the imperfect people who live in and continue to thwart your perfect society.
You are right about passing debt to our children
Wrong. Whatever is produced at a given point in time is available for consumption at that time. We will never send real resources backwards in time in order to "repay" public debts.
That isn't the point of debt. Debt is borrowing money or resources now and paying for them with future income or resources. So you can borrow more to produce more, but as a consequence, you will be producing less in the future for a period of time.
Let's put this into perspective. Suppose the interest rate on that public debt was very considerable 100% per year for ten years and adjusted for inflation. That is, every dollar you borrowed, you had to pay back each year for ten years. According to your view, you get massive creation of "output" in that first year followed by ten years of lost "output" of the same amount each year. I'm sure it'd be great to be the lender, at least till year two or so when the borrower and economy collapses without paying back enough of the loan to make it worthwhile.
It makes no sense to speak of "lost output" caused by cessation of public borrowing while ignoring that payment of that debt creates "lost output" in the very same sense. You really are advocating the creation of money in the sense of quantitative easing (well over three trillion dollars just in the US).
The real theft your generation has perpetrated on mine is all of this lost output which can never be regained.
No one has an obligation to fulfill your naive economic fantasies. I'll also note that in the "Lost Output Clock" link, they have a graph at the very top which has a blue line with no connection to reality. The slope of the red line in the years 2006-2008 is lower than the slope of the blue line. That tells me right there that the slope of the blue line should be lower. And when you do that, you get that the red line crosses the blue line around 2014.
Public debt needs to increase so the output gap can be closed.
Just print infinite amounts of money. That'll close any such output gaps and simultaneously make the currency completely worthless. The extreme of hyperinflation which according to your words should be delivering optimal output, doesn't actually do so. So there is at least one other factor you are missing in your initial assumptions about how an economy works.
Why would the division of power between local, national and supranational governments have any influence on personal autonomy?
Because there is a fundamental power struggle between the individual and the collective state. The more divided the power of the latter, the weaker it will be. There are two common ways to do this. First, is by function. I don't know of a democracy that doesn't divide up the power of making law from that of implementing law. And most also provide for a third fairly independent body to interpret the legality of that law and its implementation.
The second common means is division via scope or extent of the exercise of power. By making many powers exclusive to local or national level governments, it pulls power away from the most dangerous level, supranational as well as providing autonomous counterweights to that supranational government.
His words are "someone without insurance, or who otherwise has no ability to pay". That implies all other options including charity or witchdoctors or priests or going to McDonald's (hey, the preservatives and chemicals in that junk might just kill the cancer! /s) have been exhausted.
Actually, no, it doesn't. It just means that he was trying to pretend those other options didn't exist.
So the question is, do we respond like humans, or animals?
Do you even know how to respond like a human? For your information, emotion is an animal response.
Heh, I see I'm not the only one hearing from with whiny ACs who can't get that a loaded question is not an honest question.
And as we all know, public funds are free. Nobody spends a dime for that stuff.
Answer the goddamned question, already.
It was already answered by the guy who posted it. And as he so smugly noted, he ruled out "yes" and "no" as answers. I don't bother answering loaded questions directly, because that's a waste of everyone's time.
Question: Do you believe that someone without insurance, or who otherwise has no ability to pay, who is suffering from an acute medical emergency, should be turned away from a hospital emergency room and left to die on the sidewalk?
I don't believe he should be turned away. Nor do I believe the hospital has an obligation to serve him for free. What I believe is that people like you should pay for his health care. If it's really such a big moral obligation for you, then pony up. If you can't be bothered to back your words, then I can't be bothered to either.
If the answer is "No," then I've got some even worse news for you: we already have "socialized medicine." The patient will, in fact, be treated, and you and I will, in fact, pick up the tab. It just costs us several times more than it would in any other civilized nation on Earth, because unlike those nations, we insist on kidding ourselves.
Nope. You are wrong on this. It costs as much as it does, because the US has systematically encouraged a vast growth in the consumption of health care and health insurance. Poor people in ERs just aren't the ones driving up the costs of health care because they're only a small portion of the whole population.
If the answer is "Yes," then you're some kind of barbarian, and we're done here.
Now, if I actually were "some kind of barbarian", then why would a few idiotic and mildly condemning words from a self-appointed defender of civilization be relevant to me? Personally, I find such statements (if you aren't "X" (where "X" is merely the state of disagreeing with you), then I won't say anything to you) to mean simply that you aren't competent enough to argue with someone who doesn't already wholly agree with you. That's a pretty pathetic state to be in. You ought to work on your communication skills a bit. Slashdot could be a good place to do that.
But having said that, you know where the exit to Slashdot is, if you find you can't handle it.