Indeed, the failure of competitors occurs in competitive markets, esp. when fraud is involved. But really.

“”Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” – 1984

apparently, corey, you can no more do this than we can march through life with cromwellian purpose sternly insisting that our own beliefs represent the absolute truths which must be imposed on everyone else.

“seven years of college, down the drain” – animal house

Oooh, your moral relativism is so trendly and cool. Can
I be like you? I so much want to wander aimlessly through life pointing out how non-absolute everything is and laughing dismissively at people who believe in stuff. How neat.

“We are nihlists!” — The Big Lebowski

However, people are so brilliant that they can tell the difference between tired tradition reinforcing itself and “the wisdom of the ages”. It starts with a few, then if there is truth to it, others join.

Jack Diederich 1, Corey 0

truth, like justice, is a relative term used most often to define/defend an absolutist point of view.

Format wars hasten the death of media content, people stop reading the classics, and the United States has a King again.

and burnt orange is the new black.

tastes change corey. get over it.

“Tradition” is limited by memory, which is limited to lifespan of humans plus whatever myths we continue to pass on. Wisdom is lost every day, with the elderly slowly forgetting, sitting alone in the magnificant poorhouses we have invented for them. Format wars hasten the death of media content, people stop reading the classics, and the United States has a King again.

I wish I could go back to being 15 and disaffected Jack, and you sound like you could use it too.

This is not to say, of course, that all criticism of social conventions and traditions is destructive or unjustified; surely no society in the world can have existed in which there was not much to criticize. But critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilization needs conservation as least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles is capable of doing much–indeed devastating–harm. No man is so brilliant that he can work out everything for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to tell him. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.

Those who want to upset the current order are typically the current losers who hope for something better. That doesn’t mean tradition or the current order is unfair, it just means they dream of not sucking so much. Why has the American revolution held together as long as it has when its propoents were members of the privileged order ? Franklin, an old man, gladly saw his loyalist son jailed. The “Indians” in the Boston tea party were the most well to do in Boston. They held a revolution anyway and theirs currently holds the record for old age.

Justice and change are not inherently related. Those who want change call it just because who would call themselves unjust? Ditto for the other side. Someone has a quippy name for the rule that goes “any country with Republic or Democracy in its name isn’t.”

You may resume being 15 and disaffected.
(apparently I’m in a bad mood today. But don’t wait for an apology)

I have an answer in mind, but I wonder what the others think (before throwing out my answer as red meat).