Rinzai Did Nothing Wrong.

Yes: I value the opinions of others, insofar as I can vouch for their integrity. Yet that requires that they fervently believe that what they say is true, that they can stand beside it, put it into practice, and uphold it as a sacred principle, as though it were a Higher Power which compelled them. It thus follows that, so long as an opinion is valid, one must validate it not by merely practicing that view within one’s own life, but by holding others to it. One cannot impose morality on anyone, because morality is binding on us all, in equal measure, and one’s only burden is to fathom it, to the extent one can, and to uphold it. That is not an imposition; it’s an obligation, and, without it, we have nothing. You once asked me: “At what point is it an evil to impose one’s views of righteousness on someone else?” I’ll answer with the obvious: at no point, whatsoever, since it is impossible. Where Righteousness is what’s at stake, one can’t “impose on someone else”, as though one posed a...

A great many people want the finer things in life for free, especially if they should learn that others have those things. That’s well and good if one assumes that “all are equal in the eyes of God,” yet in the voice of someone godless it just screams “self-worship”. For example, it’s become a fashion for the atheists to say that, if a man should serve his neighbour *merely* out of love for God, then such a service is not genuine, for no one ought to *need* belief in God in order to serve man; one only needs the love of man. That “love of man” is easy to imagine if one loves oneself, and self-love is a frequent aspect of self-worship.   Yet consider this example: that a classic hero loves his parents for their virtue, holds the Laws which govern his Society to be a sacred institution, and reveres the values of his culture and its heritage. Now, should this man be burdened with a younger brother who abuses all these things and people which the hero cherishes as sacred, it is natural...

The second greatest mystery of *Death Note* is why anyone opposed the central character at first, whereas the greatest mystery of *Death Note* is why anyone opposed him by the end.   This mystery persists into the so-called “real world” of the Internet, wherein protagonist Light Yagami enjoys the privilege of sharing the “Pure Evil” label on the Fandom wiki with King Richard and with Adolf Hitler. What the rationale behind this placement is eludes me, since it seems to follow “wiki logic” and so reinforces the established understanding that a wiki is not knowledge but, at best, a means of reaching knowledge, and it’s only so if it is implemented well. The Crowd does not decide what’s right or wrong, as members of the Crowd are only righteous if their thoughts accord with fact and Reason, at which point they cease to be mere members of the Crowd. It is the Crowd that is responsible for most of the atrocities of history, with leaders such as Hitler acting merely as a figurehead, devo...

Dilemma is the heart of narrative, as is established by Jeff Kitchen in his interviews. Yet what appears to be dilemma, a decision in between two evils, is quite often nothing more than a scenario wherein one course of action is defensible and others cannot be, but failure is a common risk. It’s in the aftermath of such a failure that excuses come, and often such excuses harden into orthodoxies which become a moral dogma. Yet a moral dogma, though it is dogmatic, is not moral. Though it’s paradoxical to say that something we describe as “moral” is not moral, that’s because to classify a thing as “moral” means to claim that it *aspires* to be moral, yet the possibility of failure leads us to conclude that it is not what it pretends to be, and contradictions in semantics cease to bother us when we remember what the nature of a moral act is truly.   Fans of anime who vilify Light Yagami may claim that it was Light’s *decision* to employ the Death Note which leads to his downfall. ...

I want to make this clear, as well: when I debate with someone, I do play to win, but it is not for some ulterior reward, but for the love of the debate, as is the virtue of the sportsman in all games. It is a “win-win” situation, truly, since the one who “loses” a debate and is converted wins the greater boon, the prize of growth and knowledge, while the one who “wins” receives the lesser prize: the comfort of a confirmation.   Most of what I say I say for argument. I do not “hold” these arguments as “my own views”, as though they were extensions of my person and to damage them is to do injury to me. In short, I’m not a lunatic, and I would love to meet someone who’d prove me wrong consistently in such a way that I believe in spite of foregone biases. In seeking to convert, I know that I may be converted, and I run exactly the same risk as Others. That is the extent of moral obligation in this matter; all else follows from this *a priori* principle.   So long as risk is mutua...

I am not here to ask you for permission to communicate. That’s not my burden; rather, I feel obligated to explain why you were wrong to ban me in the first place.   I was NOT in violation either of your rules nor of my ethical imperatives. You were engaged in a debate regarding matters of great, even universal, import to the human psyche. I contributed what arguments I could, engaging with the other members of the Chat and disconfirming their positions for the sake of argument. I did NOT push the matter to extremes; I merely answered those points which were raised and made the necessary counterpoints according to my frame of reference.   You had no reason to suspect me of ulterior ambitions; nor do you do now. My comments could have only been of benefit both to the conversation and to those involved. I did not even hold my arguments to be my personal beliefs, but simply valid possibilities. Assuming that the Truth was our common aim, I recognized a harmless situation, one wher...

I just want for you to know that, while you won the sympathies of Zanmek, you have not won mine. I have agreed no longer to engage in philosophical debate with you nor any other members of his server nor his channel. That is well; you’ve demonstrated why it is a waste of time. Yet just know this: I offered you my point of view as I would intimate it to my closest friends, not out of some presumption that you cared for *me*, but rather the belief that you were virtuous and would consider the position as an opportunity to learn, to criticize, and to improve together as a species. I had tried to treat you “as a human being”, by my definition, but you clearly had another definition. Though you’re legally entitled to this definition, there is something that you have to know, however: that I gifted you a sub to Zanmek’s channel, one which had not processed by the time we had this little “argument”. I thought you’d have the basic decency to join in that debate with gratitude, and this was wha...