Re:Help Us Raise $200k to Free JavaScript from Oracle
by ToucanLoucan on Friday September 19, 2025 @02:33PM
(#45304883)
> What a weird ad hominem.
Not ad hominem. Not a personal attack, it's an attack on an ideology, and more to the point, this isn't a debate, it's a discussion between random people and fallacies are concepts used to explore the intellectual errors present in formal arguments, not conversational trap cards. You can't just say "Aha! A fallacy!" that's not a rebuttal, you have to go on to explain why it's fallacious thinking. But again, neither is appropriate outside a debate.
If you wanted to make it a debate, you could reckon with the assertion at play: that Libertarianism as described is incompatible with compassion, and make that argument.
> I'm an Objectivist,
Your defenses of Objectivism are at least better constructed, however you're hinging the lot of it on an extremely narrow definition of compassion where it only "counts" if it is rooted in personal benefit, the same claim that spawned the discussion you arrived in in the first place. However you don't explain why this is and in so not doing, omit that doing nice things for people is also done for solidarity, for moral or ethical duty, basic decency, or again, nothing more complicated than the release of dopamine in the brain. We're social animals; it feels good, physically, to help one another. This is wired in our brains and not really optional, so much so we also see it in our more ape-like cousins, like chimpanzees and bonobos. And Libertarians. Sorry couldn't resist.
In any case, people generally and in this thread particularly critique ideologies like Objectivism because like many hyper-individualist frameworks, it treats interconnectedness, cooperation and intimacy as suspect unless a transaction can be defined to explain it. Not simply because Rand said "fuck everyone" (although I would certainly make an argument on how the politics she and those like her have fucked everyone in the United States and Britain especially) but because the framework struggles to account for basic tenets of society like collective responsibility, systemic biases and injustices, or, again, the simple notion that doing things for your fellow man makes one feel good, even if that good feeling is the only gain you have.
And yeah, all of that said, it's fucking gross that people film TikToks of themselves giving food to the homeless. Shitheads are shitheads and they've been with us since our ancestors left the caves, and critique of them has followed. That doesn't however mean there aren't countless acts of genuine charity happening every day that go undocumented, because the vast majority of people are not those kinds of people. Nor does it detract from our existence as social animals who benefit one another all the time, through simple acts all the way up to moments of genuine heroism and care that is simply not explainable in the Randian model.
Not ad hominem. Not a personal attack, it's an attack on an ideology, and more to the point, this isn't a debate, it's a discussion between random people and fallacies are concepts used to explore the intellectual errors present in formal arguments, not conversational trap cards. You can't just say "Aha! A fallacy!" that's not a rebuttal, you have to go on to explain why it's fallacious thinking. But again, neither is appropriate outside a debate.
If you wanted to make it a debate, you could reckon with the assertion at play: that Libertarianism as described is incompatible with compassion, and make that argument.
> I'm an Objectivist,
Your defenses of Objectivism are at least better constructed, however you're hinging the lot of it on an extremely narrow definition of compassion where it only "counts" if it is rooted in personal benefit, the same claim that spawned the discussion you arrived in in the first place. However you don't explain why this is and in so not doing, omit that doing nice things for people is also done for solidarity, for moral or ethical duty, basic decency, or again, nothing more complicated than the release of dopamine in the brain. We're social animals; it feels good, physically, to help one another. This is wired in our brains and not really optional, so much so we also see it in our more ape-like cousins, like chimpanzees and bonobos. And Libertarians. Sorry couldn't resist.
In any case, people generally and in this thread particularly critique ideologies like Objectivism because like many hyper-individualist frameworks, it treats interconnectedness, cooperation and intimacy as suspect unless a transaction can be defined to explain it. Not simply because Rand said "fuck everyone" (although I would certainly make an argument on how the politics she and those like her have fucked everyone in the United States and Britain especially) but because the framework struggles to account for basic tenets of society like collective responsibility, systemic biases and injustices, or, again, the simple notion that doing things for your fellow man makes one feel good, even if that good feeling is the only gain you have.
And yeah, all of that said, it's fucking gross that people film TikToks of themselves giving food to the homeless. Shitheads are shitheads and they've been with us since our ancestors left the caves, and critique of them has followed. That doesn't however mean there aren't countless acts of genuine charity happening every day that go undocumented, because the vast majority of people are not those kinds of people. Nor does it detract from our existence as social animals who benefit one another all the time, through simple acts all the way up to moments of genuine heroism and care that is simply not explainable in the Randian model.