Fischer vs. Kasparov

How does one get everything you listed? Money, right? Money pays for water, sleep, indoor plumbing, security, the likelihood of finding a spouse, etc., etc. 

They just want brains.

Never said money was the most important thing. Cite the quote where I did.

I said the search for truth was the most important thing. You then listed around 20 or so (didn't bother to count) of life's necessities that were more important. I then pointed out that if one's profession were the search for truth, as many are, that would provide money to pay for everything you cited. You and/or others then made the patently absurd claim that one could live a fulfilling life without money (that was the extreme statement, not mine) and we debated the possibility of that.

Again, quote where I said money was the most important thing. I don't believe that so am curious how you arrived at that conclusion.

nutsack then chimed in, as he is wont to do, with a comment that reinforced the bigger point (I.e. the search for a truth being, in my mind, secondary to the search for the truth.)

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Great examples corrijean but nowhere in any of them do I say money is the most important thing. I'm simply saying that money is the byproduct of the most important thing and covers/pays for the 20 or so things that were cited as more important than the search for the truth. Some of the latter comments pertained to refuting the absurd notion that money was not necessary in today's world to live a fulfilling life - I'm, again, not talking about a lot of money, but some money. It's important to restate this because of the poster who claimed I was "greedy" for saying money is necessary. Din't confuse the byproduct or result of something with being greater than its source.

I commend you for re-reading all those posts, though. You're a better gal than I

Kasparov had an even score against Spassky and Petrosian because of losses when he was a teenager, and he played very little against them after that. He won both his last games against Spassky, as well as both his last games against Petrosian, in 1982 and 1983, when still being quite young. Of course no one would deny that Spassky and Petrosian were past their primes in 1981-83, but they were still quite strong. Spassky was #4 in 1981 and won Linares in 1983.

Handpicking results against an opponent when the player one wants to look bad was very young isn't hard, one could easily do the same thing with an older Fischer. He had a 3-5 score against Geller, losing the first of the five when he was 19 years old, and the last three when he was 22-24. Geller's world ranking when he won those five games was lower than Spassky's when he won against the 18-year-old Kasparov in 1981.

Fischer-Korchnoi was 2-2 in wins, Fischer-Tal 2-4 and Fischer-Spassky 0-5 before the third match game in 1972. That is a career score of -9 against Spassky, Korchnoi, Tal and Geller in July 1972. After the match against Spassky the stats of course looked better for Fischer, but it was still a clear minus against these four. Anyway, when comparing Kasparov and Fischer it isn't that important how they played in a couple of games as teenagers.

They're not the only ones.

chesspoo's love of money will get him a lot, but when jesus returns, it won't get him a cheeseburger.

Is the love of money the root of all evil?

I think evil existed long before men ever coined or printed it.

Is it the root of many evils?

No just a tool used by those many previously well rooted evils.

Is money a gift from God?

To the believer, of course it is. Personally, I think it was a godsend for the poor herder who was rather restricted to trading his goat skins to a much richer man, who had even more goat skins. Money is quite a gift.

Does the believer love every gift of God?

Not always, but I don't hear many of them complaining about money. I notice they tend to shun discipline quite well in many cases, but really enjoy having money and it's uses.

it feels like you said a lot here.  but in the end, no.

Yup, agreed.

chesspool seems unaware of the fact that all of the truths he is referring to are human constructs, and so not really truths at all.  We can combine his two obsessions to demonstrate this nicely; as I stated earlier, money has no intrinsic value: it is an expression of exchange value, and also (almost without exception) a demonstration of a particular set of power relations.  Both of these things are constantly in flux, defined by the obsessions of the particular era in which they find expression.

With this in mind, we can alter the expression "it is true that money is necessary" to say "it is true that the current structures of power and exchange are necessary."  This is an obvious falsehood, as one can easily imagine alternate systems; Grobe pointed out examples of peoples living under a completely different system even in this world.

I'm taking the metaphysical road, so of course one may say that earning money is important within our current structures, and I would have few qualms with this as a practical piece of advice; however, even then it is semantically ambiguous, as really what one is saying that it is important to be able to acquire necessities, and money is the construct that is most often used to this end.  It still remains that as a pursuit it has no value in and of itself.

So what of the truth?  Nietzsche demonstrated quite conclusively that our value/ethical systems are quite arbitrary and always subject to change across eras in The Genealogy of Morals, so why should we assume that there is a singular truth that anyone has access to?  In fact, I would posit that truth is as much a product of structures of power as taboos are, and the false truth of money lends itself to this conclusion.

I don't believe in God; chesspool does, so he probably beleives that he has access to a singular truth.  One thing puzzles me about this though; if one is truly searching for a singular truth, shouldn't one renounce all religions, belief systems, value judgments etc, even if only to return to them after experiencing the nothingness of being?  An impossible task for any human, surely, but the only effective way of discerning if there is a universal truth, as proceeding along a linear line that many have already traversed clearly only leads one to accept the compromised judgments of history.