the person of true equalimity accepts hunger, thirst, extreme heat or cold, until he dies of starvation, dehydration, or exposure.
— god must be atheist

Well, if they actually lost the ability to prefer or even notice any difference in experience. IOW they got no feedback at all about pain and unpleasance, then they would be handicapped and perhaps to death. But in real life they are not ignoring pleasure and pain, just not reacting to it emotionally as much as they can. — Coben

I would go one step further and claim that a truly equanimic person ACTS on his own emotions, which act for him is the lack of action. He may feel hungry, thirsty, cold, but it does not affect him emotionally, or if it does, he ignores those feelings, despite the physical impulses that are present. This is what I mean by extreme equanimity.

I don't think most stoics and others argue that it is happiness, even happiness is something they want to be equanimous about also. — Coben

1. This can be verified by research, or debunked. I demand you do the research, since you suggested this. (I am being an asshole like so many who demand me to do research on every fucking word I write.)

2. This was the basic premise of the OP. The OP's basic premise had no assumption on what most stoics and others argue abou thappiness; he was, instead, curious (or pretended to be curious) what our opinions were.

3. My objections here are worth shit, so please ignore them at will. (But not at Free Will, as that does not exist.)

Later on in life I discovered that this was true: Really alienated and/or depressed people don't write books. — Bitter Crank

Frantisek Kaffka and Gerhardt Oberhauptfuhrer Nietzsche* were two truly alienated people who wrote excellent, long, and many books. And you can't get more alienated than those two blokes. If you do, you must be cheating.

I admit I don't know Nietzsche's fist name and middle name. I bet they are even scarier to spell than his last. What I wrote as his first names is the result of unresearched speculative facts which are most likely false facts.

Later on in life I discovered that this was true: Really alienated and/or depressed people don't write books. — Bitter Crank

I thought everyone wrote books, stories, poetry. That's why it's no longer possible to get published.

I think the main advantage of a single cell organism over a multi cell organism may be obvious, it cannot develop a tumor? — Hrvoje

There are other advantages of single-celled organisms over multi-ones.

1. They never get a cold.
2. They don't have to go to work; in the least they are exempt of punching a time-card.
3. Their debt-to-equity ratio remains stable.
4. They can get into the pants of really beautiful people much easier than you and I put together.
5. Addiction is a strange concept to them. Thus, they can bet on the horses till they are blue in the face, they won't get hooked and cause them to put their families through incredible financial and social hardships.

and at the extreme, the person of true equalimity accepts hunger, thirst, extreme heat or cold, until he dies of starvation, dehydration, or exposure.

Mind you, he may be happy in his life that leads up to dying, and he may be happy during dying. — god must be atheist

If you accept the above -- and you don't have to or need to, this is not scripture -- but if you do; or else if someone says, "given the above", then we can safely conclude that happiness is not caused by happiness, but happiness is actually happiness. That is, the above proves that equanimity is a state of happiness, because equanimity is a state of happiness. That is, we say we are happy when we are equanimous, therefore when we are equanimous, we are happy.

What I am trying to say is that it is an unproven, and possibly false assumption that equanimity is a state of happiness, and we can only accept that it is, if that is one of our basic premises.

Inside you are waging a war against facets of yourself you cannot acce — Coben

The reasons we get 'disturbed' by experience is because this has worked for us. — Coben

True equanimity would not look equanimous, because you would also accept your own passions, reactions, and expressive self. Buddhists and stoics tend to only accept the outside, not their insides.

Now if you tell this to a Buddhist they will often say, no, I observe my emotions and reactions and accept them.

This is like saying I accept that my baby is angry, but I do not let him move or make a sound related to that anger. — Coben

All the above I fully accept. With complete equanimity. In fact, I wish I had thought of saying it, and now I am sad because I had not. I should have thought of the above, for it forms one of my tenets that support my world view of the validity of causality and physicality of our existence as biological beings.

A normal person is unperturbed when things are going steady. But he is not happy; he is just not unhappy. Compared to unhappiness equanimity compares as a happy state; but compared to ecstasy, rapture, equalimity compares as a dull state. This is an opinion I can't back up with research.

Also, you can look at happiness/suffering, joy/unhappiness, pleasure/pain as part of a need/reward system. Unfulfilled needs drive you to find fulfilment, which make you happy. You are happy for a while, but it fades, and you find yourself again in a state of needing to attain happiness, normally by satisfying your one or other need. A pendulum-like progress through time. A truly equanimous person does not experience this, therefore he won't survive, at the extreme of equalimity, as no disaster, calamity, suffering affects him adversely, so he does not feel he needs to act on those, he accepts them.... and at the extreme, the person of true equalimity accepts hunger, thirst, extreme heat or cold, until he dies of starvation, dehydration, or exposure.

Mind you, he may be happy in his life that leads up to dying, and he may be happy during dying. That is the true power and logic behind the equanimous person. Does not get affected by pain, suffering, so he dies, but before he does, he is truly happy.

I donno. But none of my write here was based on research, statistics, or nuclear physics. It was all speculative, therefore invalid, rejectable, and stupid.

happiness occurs when a chance event turns out to be more rewarding than expected. — god must be atheist

according to the news item, this is a research finding. But I can't research who did the research and wht their tools were.

You can check it out yourself: money does not make you happy, but winning money on the lottery does. Women / men don't make you happy, but falling in love does. Science / knowledge does not make you happy, but getting praise for discovering a scientific fact or writing a nice book does. ETC. A sudden influx of unexpected gain of any kind makes you happy. Your kids give you more worry and headache than pleasure, yet when you get a child, you bang your chest, "I did it!"

Any choice, always and in every situation?
— Possibility

The idea is just that some choices are possible, contra the idea that none are. — Terrapin Station

oops. Only one choice is possible, no matter how many possibilities are presented.

This is the bread and butter of the "no free will possible" camp.

Having no choice means inactivity, a frozen world with no moviement and no change of anything in it.

------
I did not use any references in this opinion. I trust the reader to intuit the meaning of my post without any reference to Socrates, Aristotle, Hume, Kant or Spinoza, to name only a few of them.

BAck to the topic:

--------------
If more than one choice was possible, then that would violate the law of excluded middle. For instance, if I bought a watch (one watch) and chose and bought a Berghammer watch and a Rolex watch, then there would be separate histories happening in time concurrently. That is not happening, so when you set out to buy one watch, your choice is always one watch of the kind that you choose.

Perhaps war is a state of chaos, or, one might argue, a state of injustice.
But it's certainly not lawless, is it? Humans came up with a huge amount of "martial law", from warriors' codes of honour to the Geneva Conventions... — WerMaat

The UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) would like a word with you. — Terrapin Station

War has its own laws, but it ignores a great number of laws that civil societies in the western democratic societies enforce on individuals.

War is not a complete state of lawlessness (it obeys physical laws, for instance, and it obeys obeying laws in the German army, apparently), but it is far less restricted by law than civil order without war.

I have not performed research on this, for instance, counting the number of laws to be obeyed by an individual in a civil peace-time society, and counting the laws the war activity must obey. I appeal to the readers' own intuition to verify this claim by me.

"Generally he has to obey.
He may but need not obey if the order has obviously no legitimate aim (e. g. "clean my boots" in usual situations), violates the soldier's own human dignity (e. g. "run into the city and shout that you are a fool"), or is unconscionable (e. g. obliges the soldier to spend amounts of his own money above limits mentioned in directives).
He must not obey if the order violates others' human dignity, international law or consists of a crime (including a misdemeanor). Otherwise, subordinates are guilty of their deeds if their criminal character was obvious to them." — WerMaat

So aside from learning knowledge how to kill the enemy AND survive at the same time, a German soldier is burdened with having to deal with and make accurate decisions on heavy theoretical legal, and philosophical choices related to soldiering.

I daresay this demanding mental rigour would exceed the thinking capacity of most soldiers of most armies around the world.

My source for this opinion was the previous post which I quoted.

I don't know what equanimity means. So I looked up the meaning. It is (more-or-less) accepting good and bad; staying calm; not getting upset; etc. This is a result of a quick search on the Internet.

I have heard on the radio (Source: CKFM 102.9. 2010 plus or minus ten years) that happiness occurs when a chance event turns out to be more rewarding than expected.

In this light, and in this light only (there are other lights, I admit) the person who responds to calamity and disaster and loss and abandonment wiht a shrug on his shoulder is indeed get less negative rewarded then more; hence, their expected was "If I lose my children in burning house, I'll be devastated," but in real life they are not devasted. That's equanimity, being better than expected.

But if one trains to be equanimous, and his response is consistently such to disastrous events, then he or she probably does not experience happiness, as he has grown to expect equanimity instead of anxiety, fear, or anger.

So, in short: equanimity helps in the short run in the beginning, but hwhen it becomes routine, then it deos not generate any great ecstasy.

REMEMBER PLEASE: I based my opinion here on a tip that happiness is caused by getting better than expected results.

So, what do we need them for, huh? — alcontali

I, personally, after graduating from university, joined Internet philosophy forums. They were parts of dating sites then, but the format and the dialogues were the same. Ie. "I believe in god and free will" "I believe in determinism and scientificism", and then the conversation devolved to mud-slinging.

Photocopiers can't do that. They need to evolve for thousands more years to perform on such intelligent level.

THAT's what education prepared me for.

If you consider that graph to show an immoral situation, then yes, we are all indeed poorer both morally and financially. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

You say "that" graph. Which graph?

Yes, especially if you add in the huge and immoral profit taking on the right of the graph. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

"Add in"? The graph already contains its entire domain and range of the graph. I had not even once suggested to truncate the graph. What are you talking about?

And how do you add in something to a graph that is not represented by its axes in terms of "kind" or "functionality"? it is about poverty, not about actions. "profit taking" is an action, not a property of poverty. The properties of poverty, as I understand it, is the income amount per period, and assets at a given point in time. Actions are not a part of it.

Please explain. To me this statement is not intuitive.

Do you see the graph as showing a moral demographic shape? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I have never once envisioned what shape a moral demographic shape looks like. Can you insert a picture which shows that shape?

Common sense is that we should not inject harmful substances into the body, but that does not tell us whether the substances in vaccines are harmful or whether the benefits outweigh the risks. — Fooloso4

I think common sense does see that vaccines help stave off illness. It may not have been common sense opinion in the nineteenth century, but it was in the second half of the twentieth century. The new trend, the Vaxxers, is too weak to call their opinion common sense.

Do you need backup statistical evidence for this? Then I ask you to please state backup statistical evidence for your opinion too.

So here we go, two different people evaluating common sense in opposing ways. This means that nobody has monopoly on common sense. Therefore I may need indeed to to cite supporting material that show that in the second half of the twentieth century common sense was that vaccines worked and they did a good job.

I concede this point.

The strength of your reasoning is directly tied to the evidence on which it is based. Or, if your claim is that in any particular case or in all cases there is no need for evidence then you must be able to explain why evidence is not needed. — Fooloso4

This is reasonable. Except sometimes people either don't understand the explanation, or else their point of view is so different that they don't WANT to accept the explanation.

Therefore your advice, that I must be able to explain why evidence is not necessary is well-meant and in theory works, but not in practice.

I cannot speak for everyone but there are some of us here who do not think that is is being demanding but rather is just standard practice in philosophical discussion that makes reference to philosophers or deals with matters of fact. — Fooloso4

Should I treat this as a common sense appeal, an opinion, or something that needs to be backed up by evidence?

Your assertion is an opinion on an opinion. It appeals to the common sense of a subgroup of the community. It references a practice which is happening in philosophical discussions and not happening in philosophical discussions, given that it is not easy to delineate what separates a philosophical discussion from a discussion which is not philosophical, other than what is decided by opinion.

You see, there are problems with this advice. Again, the jist of it makes sense, and I get it, but you are correcting me to iron out mistakes, which mistakes you are committing yourself.

With this I DO NOT mean to emphasize that we are making mistakes; instead, I wish to show that we are not making mistakes, neither you nor I. Instead, the interpretive evaluation of the claims can turn mistake-free service of an argument or opinion into a mistaken argument or opinion.

And when that happens, that is, the interpretive evaluation renders my otherwise philosophically speaking mistake-free opinion, then I get angry. I am sorry, it is an emotional reaction I can't control. The demand to correct something which is correct in its original form, is something I can't abide with emotionally. It demands of me to do busy-work for nothing.

This interpretive evaluation can take many forms, the two most common ones are employing fallacious arguments by my opponents, and simple nay-saying.

Some, many, most? discussions on the forum are built from poorly presented facts, undefined or poorly defined terms, and unsubstantiated claims. I don't mean this as a reference to you. Expecting people to clearly state their positions and the basis for them is not unreasonable. It's at the heart of what philosophy is. As for common sense - it's just one of those phrases like "a priori" or "self-evident" that are most accurately translated as "seems to me." — T Clark

This is also very reasonable. Thanks, T Clark.

Some people are badgers, and that's just what they do. I've seen this kind of repeated response quite a few times over the years in various threads--"you didn't explain anything", "you still haven't answered my question", "you haven't shown anything", etc. The badgers quite often have no more insight into the issue at hand than they accuse their targets of having.

Sometimes you just have to move on, and ignore some people. — Bitter Crank

Thanks, this makes sense, and I should have known. But I did not.

Well, it's my "reasoned opinion" that you are completely wrong about Wittgenstein. — Luke

I accept your disagreement, but I see no reason accompanying your opinion.

I offer my opinion that you are wrong about my being wrong. My opinion is based on reasons that are not stated.

What you determine to be ‘common sense’ arguments are still based on your own subjective experiences - which you cannot assume to be commonly agreed upon, unfortunately. There is no such thing as ‘common sense’. — Possibility

I would say there is, but this is not a thread to discuss that notion in detail. If you like, I can open a thread with the post "is common sense some insight or thought or opinion commonly accepted?"

When you write in reference to other authors, unless you offer a direct quote, you are interpreting what they say based on your subjective opinions about what their words mean to you. — Possibility

Thanks, Possibility. This is what I had always thought, until a demand came to two separate posts of mine, to name where the author stated what was my opinion. So if you and I agree on this, many others are not on the same page; therefore I take your encouragement to say that the text of a post of mine was written as my own opinion.

Thanks for your insightful input.

Thanks for your input. Valuable insights.

Negative input: it bothers me as much as it does the next person, but per se it does not bother me all that much as a persistent and vehement demand for naming my source when source was not needed, just some insight into human psyche.

I would be equally upset if someone demanded me to explain something that is statistically sound, but causally can't be shown.

How would one go about telling these people that they are asking for something that is not available or not necessary? the argument spake for itself, it had no lose ends. Why the ongoing badgering, then? How does one stop such badgering, which included egging-on insults, like "you haven't shown anything", "your reasoning is faulty", etc, when these are empty accusations without merit? One has to defend one's thesis, but why does one need to defend against false criticism?

I agree that this site is evidence/proof positive. There is nothing wrong with that. What I am against is when reason alone is sufficient to show a point, and which relies on common knowledge for evidence, yet people shout at me, "name your source". As if independent, natural thought was a plague to avoid, that's the impression I get from many members of this site.

And when one presents a reasonably put-together case of conceptually manipulating common-sense evidence to show a point, then they charge that one did not put together an argument because one did not name one's source.

But there are times when one can figure things out on one's own, and no reading or references to arguments is needed. Not understanding an argument like that baffles me. It is clear, simple, and transparent... why do people with frothing mouths demand me to show historical evidence of the same thought process? That is what I am against. I am against ignoring common sense arguments.

Divorce.

Christian divorce, in the sense of the Roman Catholic Church.

1. Marriage is a sanctity, and it ought to last until the death of at least one of the two partners.
2. Except when the pope approves annulment.
3. and Except when there is no consummation of marriage.
4. Except annulment can't be obtained for many otherwise reasonable causes (such as incompatibility).
5. Except when annulment can't be obtained despite a great wish for it, the couple can divorce in civil court and potentially live in sin with a different partner (or with bunch of different partners, in sequence or concurrently with many)
6. Except living in sin is an unforgivable sin,with grave consequences in the afterlife.
7. Except when one does not mind selling his soul to the devil. for him to take the seller's soul captive for all eternity.
8. Except in the case when the Lord, the Devil, Hell, etc. don't exist at all.

Mud-slinging. The last resource of low-life on the Internet when their hate has no other outlet.

What is your point, other than expressing extreme hatred and ill will toward me? If that's your only point, then you are venting, not arguing. This is not the place for venting and hatred. You're mistaking this place for social media.

If you are arguing, then you are expressing an opinion, with a reasoned opinion that all reasoned opinions are ridiculously wrong. Mine, Aristotle's, everybody's, yours. That's your well-reasoned opinion. And your well-reasoned opinion is ridiculously wrong. About well-reasoned opinions.

You just mimicked a paradox, not at all an original one. In a slightly different form of the original one.

I don't suppose you have any specific references, other than his entire body of work? — Luke

That is correct. I was making an opinion on Wittgenstein's entire work, and not making an opinion on a specific quote or passage in his works.

Dear Luke, please refer to this post for a considered reply to your query:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6291/is-it-an-unwritten-community-lawscustom-to-demand-factual-proof-when-making-a-reasoned-opinion

Okay. I can easily accept that. Seeing I know nothing about what makes up matter.

I'm having trouble understanding how 'changing your mind' is reconcilable with 'determinism'. — Wayfarer

You are having trouble understanding how things change.
— god must be atheist

I think it's more the case that you're having trouble saying anything coherent. — Wayfarer

I beg to differ. I think you have a mental block accepting the causality in the universe. That's a big hindrance in intelligent conversation, when the topics all require the participants to follow a path of cause-effect and hence, reason.

You can't follow reason. You explain your inability to understand with other's inability to express themselves. In my own opinion you are not capable of recognizing your own incapacity to follow arguments that employ logic and reason.

Yet there is the measure of absolute povetry, — ssu

Extreme poverty is typically defined as a state in which a person lacks access to all, or several, of the goods needed for meeting basic needs. — ssu

And you are saying this is not an arbitrarily thought-up definition of poverty. You are saying this is not the brain child of some think-tank who had been tasked to define what extreme poverty is. You are saying this is an absolute measure of poverty. You are saying therefore

that it's universal, and can't be changed, because it's absolute.

Then you turn around and say that this definition is "typical". That is, not absolute.

If you yourself are saying it's not absolute, why are you trying to convince others that it's absolute?

I think your error fundamentally is that you mixed up "the measure of absolute poverty is defined" with "the measure of relative poverty is defined with absolute values".

The figures you quoted, therefore, are not measures of absolute poverty. They are absolute measures of poverty.

There is a difference between "absolute measure of a relative property" and "measure of an absolute property." IQ is an absolute measure of a relative property; cm or miles are measures of an absolute property.

When I said Witty talks about the original use of a word, or the original use of language, I meant to say he did not spell that out, but obviously he did talk about word's meanings in original use.

You asked me, Luke, what's the difference between usage and original usage. The answer is original usage is the first occurrence of he word in the language; and use of the word or language is the ensuing historical or current use of the word.

Witty did not say "I reject the status quo of the language". It is my judgment that he has, and hence his entire body of work.

I hope this post answers your questions and objections to your satisfaction.

I think Witty talks about the origin of usage; and usage is different from the origin of usage.

The origin of usage is using a word in a particular way, and many other users will use it in a similar, but not same way; this gives rise to a general form of the meaning, a sort of "mean" or "average".

After that the average takes over, and the meaning of the word will be considered in every subsequent use to be the meaning already averaged.

In my opinion Witty lacked the insight of accepting the status quo of language. He delved into apparent contradictions of language, and he conveniently ignored the social and cultural reconciliatory practices that eliminated the contradictions. He was a genius who stopped his thinking at a premature insight, whereas he ought to have proceeded further in his thinking.

"A conclusion is a place where you stop when you got tired of thinking." -- traditional, origin unknown.

In NKBJ’s defense, she might be arguing that people ought to take a stake (and often do) in the community regardless of how the system treats them personally. — Noah Te Stroete

She did not say this, and she denied the validity of valid arguments. I am sorry, I don't have the patience to continue doing a quixotic battle against windmills.

She had no defence. She said things that in my humble opinion were plain stupid.

NKBJ, in my humble opinion, and this is external to our debate here, and I don't want to influence anyone else with this opinion, not even you, but only to explain to you my future course of (rather benign) actions, and why I chose that course: you are stupid. You are basically so stupid that you don't understand the power of argument.

My opinion of you here is not an ad hominem argument; this is not an argument; it is simply an opinion I formed about you, and that's where the buck stops.

Consequently I don't want to deal with you. Ever. Please note that I am stopping as of now to read your posts. If you respond to this post of mine, or any other, or if you write me a private note, I won't read it.

Please don't misunderstand that I do this to make others to follow my example. No, it's just simply between you and me.

I'm having trouble understanding how 'changing your mind' is reconcilable with 'determinism'. If you are able to change your mind, then how is that not a free choice? I suppose you could say 'I have no choice but to accept....' but even so, 'acceptance' seems to me a willing act. — Wayfarer

I am afraid I can't tell you what you want to hear. I could tell you how things in the environment change, which cause you (or me or anyone else) to change their minds. Things are in flux, affecting each other.

But I can't explain that to you, because you don't want to hear that, and when you hear that, then you will not understand something else, and when that is explained to you, you will go back to your rejection of everything being caused and everything causing something else.

You are having trouble understanding how things change when they are caused to change. Well, well.

Okay, NKBJ: I appeal to human nature when I say that the more disenfranchised, the poorer, the more marginalized somebody is, the more likely it is that he or she will want to have a system in place where social safety-nets are more abundant and more easily accessed. Converesely, those who find much reward in the system, do not promote social safety nets, as their safety and well-being is well-established, and providing for the safety and well-being of those who are in need will only reduce, even if however litte in amount and in impact, the status of the well-off.

This is my point. If you were unable to figure this out, I am sorry.

It almost hurt me to go down to this basic level of understanding human nature: the more helpless one is, the more help he or she will wish for, the less helpless one is, the less he or she will wish for help. This is... something that you don't have a concept of? If you do, why did you have to egg me to say this thing which a simple, uneducated 25-year-old is capable of figuring out?

Instead of exercising your brain, you called me spineless (not literally), stupid (not literally), and an incompetent arguer (not literally).

I hate this. I really did not come here to tell somebody as if it were wisdom,that "the helpless need help, and they therefore wish for it."

Cripes.

Why did you do this? Why did you do this to me? Are you really incapable of extrapolating such little wisdom from a few words that indicate this, or you had an agenda to make me do things I thought I would not need to do in the company of intelligent people which I hope this website is populated with?

Why did you egg me on? This is a serious question, not rhetorical. What was your very reason to squeeze this almost trival, trifle knowledge out of me, instead of admitting that it was almost self-evident?

I have a transparent face. Many people have told me that.

stuff.

Matter is made of stuff.

I am not kidding. This is the latest (of what I have heard) theory in physics. Matter is stuff.

Well, then, Pantargruel, if you believe in free will, then you can do that only if you throw away the entire set of cause-effect relationships, and also reason and logic, and off you go.

We already agreed to not argue with each other on this topic, on a different thread.

Arbitrary is different than relative, something can be relative but still make sense. — DingoJones

This is a nosequiteur. You are stating here that arbitrary does not make sense. You are illogical there. You state that relative makes sense because it is not arbitrary.

The two in this sense that you put forth is not argument against mine. Both arbitrary and relative make sense. What nakes no sense is to base a DECISION or JUDGMENT on arbitrary claims or definitions.

I hereby call you out , DingoJones: are you known now, or have been known on PhilosophyNow website as Logik, or Timekeeper, or Skepdick? Yes or no.

Arbitrary implies no thought put in, — DingoJones

This is patently false. People can put a lot, and I mean a LOT of thought into arbitrary decisions. Your claim is not valid.

There are two ways of creating a definition: by consensus, or by declaration.

In language we create definition by consensus.

In science and in philosophy we create it by declaration.

If you declare a definition, then two separate definitions will be potentially different. Because they are ARBITRARY.

If you deal with different definitions, you get nowhere.

Poverty in the sense the article deals with it is defined. Not by consensus, but by arbitrary declaration.

Therefore there is no common ground. No axiomatic structure to start from.

Discussing poverty in terms of economic measures would be like discussing which is more important: sacrificing some benefit for ethical purposes or sacrificing benefits to create something aesthetic.

If you ask me one more question to elaborate on this, I don't know what I will do. It is not a hard concept: poverty is not defined in any sort of way, but arbitrarily. Therefore you can't discuss it as a quality that has an absolute value. Just like wealth is relative, so is poverty. It makes lots of sense to say "I am richer than you, you are poorer than me," etc., (hypothetically speaking, of course), but it's a RANKING system, not an absolute value system. Once you draw a line what is poor, you are upsetting the lingual definition, and if you don't draw a line, it stays relative.

Hence, I suggest that poverty can be eradicated the way I suggested.

Then you, DingoJones, come to me with these questions, "yeah, but, yeah, but", but there is no "but". Poverty is a term of signifying rank based on a discrete difference, poverty is not a term of state.

Period.

I really wanted to contribute to this topic. I tried my best, but I could not.

What's wrong with me? It's the first time in my life I wanted to voice my opinion and I was not able to. Due to lack of opinion.

But I read the OP! I am entitled, or rather, promised, by the type of webpage this is, to be able to give an opinion after reading the opening post.

I feel like I am cheated. The ground pulled out from under me. No leg to stand on. Biting into a ripe, fresh orange, only to realize I bit into thin air.