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Alchemy

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    A musician and bookseller who loves heavy metal and horror movies.
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    Atlas Shrugged, books on objectivist philosophy
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    John
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  1. I have no concrete evidence that my definition is the standard one nor did I argue for anything of the sort. My personal definition comes from my own observations and experiences along with the conclusions drawn from such. The entire point of my original post was to try and get a more objectively accurate understanding of the concept, knowing that my own was most likely lacking.
  2. As a student of Objectivism and one who grew up around a scientist and an engineer, I have not really encountered an in-depth discussion of these topics. I have encountered multiple definitions for scientism, but none of them seem to sufficiently define what it actually is from a philosophical standpoint. Also, most of the discussions and critiques I've found on scientism approach it from a religious/mystical perspective. While they seem to make some valid points, their arguments are ultimately based upon faith rather than reason....which can basically be boiled down to the infamous "this town ain't big enough for the both of us" trope. My own definition of scientism would be the conflation of the practice of science with religion and the scientists themselves as clergymen. This attitude can be found in those who, devoid of any objective view on ethics, profess a "belief" in science or in the edicts of individual scientists concerning highly complex political and social issues. These are the people who ponificate about "following the science" or who champion tyranical altruism in the name of "scientific concensus". As someone who grew up loving science and finds especially the earth sciences endlessly fascinating, scientism is a particularly infuriating issue. This, of course, leads into the discussion of corrupted and/or politicized science which is already a serious problem. Thoughts?
  3. 2046, "white privilege" and "social justice" are tools of altruists and collectivists...and you wield them with quite a bit if skill considering you're on an Objectivist forum. Tools such as these are the antithesis of Objectivist ethics in that they seek to deal with people, on a moral level, not as rational individuals, but as groups. They are tools concerned with self-contradictory concepts like group rights or group benefit. As i'm sure you are aware, groups do not have rights above or beyond the rights of the individuals within said groups. Likewise a group cannot benefit, only individuals can. A group therefore is incapable of having "privilage". Secondly, you are simply restating the old altruistic argument that successful people are only where they are because of the exploitation of others. This is a monstrously evil philosophy to propagate...that a man who is successful by his own mind and efforts is somehow not deserving of the wealth he has produced...for one absurd reason or another. Then, of course, the only logic conclusion one can draw if one accepts that as axiomatic, Is that a man must sacrifice part of his life to another who feels he is more deserving. Third, the philosophy you are spouting is close relative to early 20th century, proto fascist philosophy. By that I'm referring to not only your viewing people as collectives rather than individuals, but also your boogie man rhetoric, your defense of tribaliam, and your racial scapegoating. These were all tools used by statist minded despots to brainwash and control the masses.
  4. Probably a losing proposition, but every once in a while I'll argue with actual socialists and Marxists. Basically, I made the statement that all taxation was theft and that if I could change one thing about the philosophy of the US it would be for people to realize that their money, wealth, income, etc was property. In much the same way somebody from the government could not force their way into your house and take your coffee table (because the guy down the street doesn't have one), nobody, government or otherwise, has the right to force you to part with your money. Of course, he took issue with this and asserted that he didn't see how taxation was theft in that people can get involved politically to try and change the tax laws or simply leave the country and refuse to participate. He also asserted that because they benefit from paying them, that also means it's not a form of theft. He added that if the person being taxed was completely okay with it, that it was not theft in that theft cannot exist with consent. I argued that theft was a moral absolute in that it was immoral and any amount of justification or sanctioning of the act didn't make it any less so. Basically, just because you're okay with people mugging you (out of some twisted sense of social justice) doesn't change the act in and of itself and it does not all of a sudden make it morally okay. Or because you sanction having houses burglarized doesn't mean that if yours get's hit, it's suddenly not theft. He spat back that if a person consents to being stolen from, it's not theft and it's certainly not morally wrong. He went on to say that my problem was that I was mixing ethics and economics. He then made snide remarks about how surprised he was that I didn't understand a simple word like consent. I asked him hypothetically, if the same person who was okay with getting mugged or having their house robbed, decided that it was perfectly okay with the same happening to others, did he consider THAT to morally okay too. He made a remark that he worries for my community if I didn't realize how stupid that was and went on talk about all that socialism had done for the world for the last 2+ centuries. It got a bit ugly after that. Any thoughts? Was my reasoning sound or flawed?
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