A brief debriefing

E: what's with this passive aggressive drivel, Bottle? 

B: i'm just tired and mopey and i was listening to AFI before stumbling across Penfriend. Plus the world is constantly being terrible, and you can't ever just go get what you want, often because it doesn't actually exist yet. Presumably that record will materialize in the future, or else merchbar would remove the ability to pay for it, but that's really just your standard 401k, better off just assuming that money's gone forever in exchange for the hope that someone will eventually captain this sinking ship to shallow peaceful waters. Plus i was revisiting that Pete Singer argument that regular people are evil. 

E: they are. 

B: no i disagree, they aren't. They are only given the choice between immediate pleasure and immediate sacrifice and they are punished for choosing contextually wrong. Altruism and Objectivism, like oil and water, don't mix without some kind of emulsifier. In this case, the reward for sacrifice must be demonstrably greater than the reward for self-interest, but choosing to suffer for profit is an extra-dimensional twist that becomes its own form of Objectivist gluttony. 

E: what are you babbling about? 

B: i didn't think i was babbling. There is no right or wrong, there is no prize for winning because there is no competition taking place. The question at hand is the value of adopting an argument. I am not actually narcissistically mopey and nihilistic, but in the current situation the expression of those sentiments is pleasurable to me, intellectually speaking. How Erykah Badu and AFI found themselves awkwardly interracting in the same brain space is anybody's guess, but Penfriend was an excitingly delightful non-sequitur of a blindside to bust us out of it. 

E: kay, yeah, i guess that sort of makes sense. 

B: good, glad we got that all sorted. Now back to the drudgery of another day of it.