no-isms

bad ideas, why

Each of the ideas or schools of thought below is metaphysically, epistemologically, and/or ethically indefensible. I’ve tried to make that distinction clear, but…

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This is a living document. Because i have no dialectic, i will address issues as they are brought to my attention.

Some of the terms have several possible definitions and i leave it as an exercise for the reader to choose the one they believe applies. But if you want to do the work to add a synopsis of each, i’ll consider using that version.

Woo means untestable forces claimed to have physically discernable effects.

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many sourced from:

wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies,

and,

wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophical_concepts

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•accelerationism ( more of everything that's existentially wrong now )

•adversarial due process ( the state has the responsibility to find any reasonable excuse to Not find a person guilty if it legitimately cares about their best interests, filing charges against someone should only happen when it's irrational beyond a reasonable doubt to forbear )

•ageism ( age varies independently of moral worth and physical capacity, people should be judged as individuals )

•age restrictions ( age varies independently of capacity )

•age verification ( treats you as criminal by default, outlaws common sense, deterrence punishment is inherently unjust )

•anarchism ( a state of anarchy is indistinguishable from the state of nature and is ethically regressive )

•animism ( is true only in the socio-linguistic sense, not any metaphysical sense )

•anti-reductionism ( not everything can be explained by reduction Yet, so what? )

•annexation ( unless by consensus, it's tyranny - subjecting unwilling participants arbitrarily to a new set of rules )

•a priori knowledge ( no thing exists outside the capacity of a mind to distinguish it )

•artificial scarcity ( regressive, unethical )

•asceticism ( woo - earning an imaginary future reward )

•authoritarianism ( no central authority can be legitimate or efficient if it doesn't delegate massively and effectively )

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•bar exam ( if the law is so complex that an ordinary person cannot navigate it, it is de facto and prima facae too complex to be ethical, and not being able to afford a lawyer prevents justice for the poor )

•bioconservatism ( besides medical deficiencies, there are obvious means to enhance our abilities and experience that can be had without existential risk, as well as uplifting other species )

•blight laws ( equate to not wealthy laws, require gentrification )

•bond ( treats the low standard of evidence, probable cause, as sufficient both to treat supposedly innocent people as bad as anyone adjudicated guilty ( locking them up if they can't afford the bond ), unjustly favors the wealthy )

•brandishing a firearm ( thought crime based on the assumption of intent to intimidate, but even if it clearly was, that is not inherently harmful unless it's actually pointed at them )

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•capitalism ( the kernel of all versions of capitalism is the profit motive which is inherently unfair and unsustainable )

•captcha ( proving that you're not a program to a program is obviously dehumanising and sadistic, and they increasingly prove nothing )

•caveat emptor ( fair commerce requires they're be no underhanded dealings )

•Chinese naturalism ( woo )

•civil asset forfeiture ( if there is not adjudication of guilt there can be no legitimate case that the property was involved in crime. it's a double standard )

•clearly established ( legal standard - an inversion of rights, starting with final interpretations which are subject to many layers of potential problem, rather than common law rights which are elementary and foundational )

•coalition governments ( no possible legitimacy due to constant changes, can never represent everyone, always special interests )

•communitarianism ( a legitimate state rests on the value of the individual, social pressure to behave in any manner not required by reason is social tyranny )

•compatibalism ( free will is literally the opposite of determinism and the only way they're compatible is semantically, with free will as an emergent metaphor )

•compulsory voting ( mandating participation in a system which may be working against an individual's best interests can only be considered tyranny, the assumption of infallibility is the root of much evil )

•concealed carry ( legal privilege - the 2nd amendment protects our freedom more than any other right and yet has never been anything but infringed. having the right to bear arms is only recognized, not granted by the constitution and you have at least the right to carry arms any way that doesn't endanger others )

•Confucianism ( woo, slave morality, ethically arbitrary )

•military conscription ( military service can only be legitimate by being informed and voluntary, the draft requires submitting your life itself to an ideology you may fundamentally disagree with, find abhorrent, or that works directly against your best interests )

•consequentialism ( see: utilitarianism )

•political conservatism ( an assumption that the status quo is or ever was ethical is unwarranted )

•contempt of court ( tyranny - respect can only be earned, not required, and legal fiction are always incompatible with justice. The unwarranted assumption of infallibility is the root of most evil in government. contempt of court laws require people to act as though a court is not contemptuous regardless of whether it is and are effectively enshrining contempt of truth in favour of "us good" )

•copyright ( knowledge and creativity are the public commons and copyright is a crime against humanity )

•corporate citizenship ( Citizens United - a legal fiction which harms all who cannot afford to participate by giving unearned and unwarranted power to groups of people with capital above and beyond the rights of those who cannot afford to buy in )

•cruel and unusual ( legal standard - the usualness of a punishment is irrelevant as to whether it's ethically acceptable, and gives an excuse for punishments which are merely cruel, not both )

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•deism ( god as an untestable force is indistinguishable from fiction and ought to be treated accordingly )

•democracy ( expert opinions are not equivalent to the layman's and cannot reasonably be treated as such )

•denialism ( anti-truth )

•deontology ( duty ethics is an abdication of morality )

•detention without prior charge ( an inversion of the bedrock of justice, innocent until proven guilty )

•Dialectical Behavioural Therapy ( suggests radical acceptance - if there was less acceptance in the world we'd have less problems because they'd have to be fixed instead of swept under the rug )

•law enforcement discretion ( if they're not certain they're preventing harm they have no right to involve themselves, and if they are certain of it, they may only legitimately enforce righteous laws, complete subjugation of the rule of law to the momentary emotional state of an individual, and especially one who is neither more ethical or ethically capable than ordinary people, if the law is written legitimately, a law enforcement officer either clearly knows what to do or has the ethical responsibility to forbear. arbitrary due process is fundamentally incompatible with justice )

•dogma ( dogma is an instance of faith - belief without appeal to evidence and is always intellectually regressive )

•dualism ( while there is a physical and a metaphorical layer to reality, they are only ever separable semantically )

•due process ( subversion of justice as it replaces reasoned accountability with rules which are presumed to be infallible )

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•emotivism ( ethics is based on pragmatic best practices, not mere feelings )

•epistemological idealism ( the mind-based version of things is of an external reality, never independent )

•epistemological nihilism ( knowledge is justified belief sufficient to accept a particular fact or take a particular action, not an esoteric ultimate )

•esotericism ( a misguided attempt at salvaging wisdom from woo )

•eternalism ( mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain and regardless of any external influences, exists independently of them )

•ethical positivism ( see legal positivism )

•Executive Orders ( any power not vested in a legitimate authority based on actual expertise is inherently harmful and executive orders bypass requisite legitimacy )

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•felony murder ( legal fiction - any felonious act which results in a death, however unforeseeable, is considered murder, double standard because the same analysis is not used for law enforcement, intentionally ignores some of the facts in favour of jumping to the conclusion )

•modern feminism ( the ethical requirement of equivalent opportunity has been twisted into varieties of equity which are neither desirable or possible )

•filial piety ( family has no particular ethical weight )

•filibustering ( turns politics into a side show )

•fines ( typically have no correlation to justice, disproportionately effect the poor, who also have less opportunity to avoid them, than the rich )

•free markets ( never actually free and not controlling them is inherently brutal to the most innocent and fragile )

•free will ( there is no sense in which the will is free and the word will alone is sufficient for discussing our experience of freedom )

•frivolous lawsuits ( if someone is going to the trouble of involving the law, they have a legitimate complaint, whether or not it's the one they say, and require a legitimate resolution, not being pushed away )

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•gag orders ( truth belongs to everyone, especially harsh truths which are necessary to make difficult decisions well )

•gnosticism ( baseless woo )

•government mandates ( if government cannot convince by the weight of evidence it has no authority to insist on its decisions )

•group sovereignty ( groups are never of one mind so the idea that they act as such is inherently irrational, moreover, no group can have rights beyond those of the individuals within the groups and sovereignty implies control beyond the scope of those individual rights )

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•Hegelianism ( distinguishes spirit from the material, but they are not independent )

•hidden fees ( fraud )

•history and tradition ( legal standard - rights have nothing to do with tradition and their history is irrelevant as to whats ethical )

•"home" page of social media ( represent businesses interests, never your own )

•hylozoism ( metaphysical category error, ignores emergence )

•humility ( inherently self-depricating understanding of self-worth, neither reasonable or honest )

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•absolute idealism ( we are each a unique embodied perspective on the universe with three layers of filter )

•indeterminism ( causality is infinite and not indeterminate but simply mostly undetermined )

•empty individualism ( there are three physical dimensions; time, space, and scale, and we each have a unique position in each of them at any given time )

•open individualism ( the continuity of self is a metaphysical necessity )•income tax ( disproportionately effects the poor who have to spend a much higher percentage of their income on basic necessities )

•indefinite detention ( human rights violation )

•innatism ( the mind begins as a blank slate with distinctive developmental tendencies )

•integral theory ( most of the integrated ideas are not technically specific enough to admit of the connections implied )

•Integrated Information Theory ( phi is used to indicate the whole is literally more than the sum of its parts which is literally impossible )

•interactionism ( mind is a metaphor for the patterns in the brain - emergent )

•interim measures ( college speech code - inverts due process and ignores the presumption of innocence, punishing based on accusation alone )

•internalism ( facts about the world provide reason as impetus, though not as meaning, for action )

•intuitionism ( math is a language and like all languages is as useful as its ability to describe reality )

•investigatory stops ( a standard of evidence so low as to allow arbitrarily detaining anyone at any time, based on the sheer number of laws that exist, especially egregious for misdemeanors )

•Islamism ( like every religion, Islam is based on fantasy, but it also requires subjugating everyone and every thing, including history, which is a crime against humanity )

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•Jainism ( woo )

•jingoism ( nationalist tyranny )

•Juche ( nationalist, dogmatic )

•jury of your peers ( the choosing of peers is all but arbitrary and not of people with moral authority to judge others )

•Justified True Belief ( the appeal to a hypothetical ultimate validation makes the idea of knowledge ineffable and therefore useless )

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•Kabbalism ( woo )

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•law of attraction ( metaphysical balderdash )

•legal fictions ( wrecklessly disregard actual truths in favour of expediency and are always incompatible with justice )

•legal immunity ( impunity to disregard law and ethics which no one ever needs or deserves )

•legalism ( ethically archaic )

•legal positivism ( laws not based on legitimate authority and needs are whatever rules the powerful care to enforce, as have always been )

•love it or leave it ( nationalism, not admiring one's current form of government is both a right and a duty against tyranny, those who like it least probably have the most legitimate complaints against it and are precisely who a legitimate State would change to accommodate )

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•Machiavellianism ( pragmatism over reciprocity and decency )

•mandatory reporting ( destroys any legitimate potential for trust )

•Manifest Destiny ( power and opportunity do not confer a right )

•Maoism ( archaic, captured, expansionist, populism )

•material support for terrorism ( includes disagreeing that it's terrorism )

•monarchy ( rule by bloodline is contrary to merit and arbitrarily good at best )

•mentalism ( when not admitted illusion - woo )

•metaphysical libertarianism ( there is no free will and everything is infinitely causal )

•moral absolutism ( morality is contingent on priorities, there is no other place for them to come from )

•moral anti-realism ( objective moral values exist to the extent we share priorities, the least of which is survival, normative facts are whatever truths lead to those priorities )

•moral realism ( morality is contingent on priorities and objective morality is only possible in lieu of any evidence to the contrary and to the extent we share priorities )

•moral skepticism ( knowledge is justified belief and moral knowledge is best practices )

•moral turpitude ( arbitrary social mores turned into legal crimes, bypassing reason entirely )

•mysticism ( woo or dogma )

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•naive realism ( there are physical, subconscious, and personality filters between Actuality and reality )

•natalism ( less people literally means more resources to go around so until resources are legitimately and adequately distributed, it is necessary for non-oppression to reduce the population )

•nationalism ( arbitrary sphere of morality )

•National Socialism ( nazism - arbitrary sphere of morality, ethically archaic )

•neo-conservatism ( lost most of the good of past conservatism and accentuates much of the bad )

•neo-liberalism ( existentially unfair and unsustainable, exceptionally good at hiding externalities, contempt for non-Machiavellian truth )

•neutral monism ( the fundamental stuff of the universe is physical, the mental is an emergent metaphor )

•new-age-ism ( woo, archaic metaphysics and ethics )

•new realism ( all things are patterns in a mind whether or not they have an external referent, we know the external through three distinctive layers of filter )

•mereological nihilism ( parts are distinguished according to expected use-cases )

•non-compete agreements ( arbitrarily forces a worker out of their area of expertise, creates a perverse incentive to fire someone rather than to come to terms over a disagreement )

•non-disclosure agreements ( an unnatural constraint on someone's fundamental right to record and share their experience, ethically disenfranchises them )

•non-dualism ( we are each a unique embodied perspective on the universe from a unique position in each of the three spacial dimensions; time, space, and scale, we distinguish other things according to expected use-cases )

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•objective idealism ( the objective nature of the world is inaccessible to us, the parts that are come from a filtered perspective )

•Objectivism ( ethical egoism, incompatible with civilization - which requires equivalent worth of all )

•occasionalism ( incoherent woo, special pleading, rational inconsistency )

•officer safety ( inverts the role of pubic servant by putting their safety above that of any ordinary person )

•open fields doctrine, Hestor v US ( eviscerates the idea of private property's protection from government intrusion )

•organicism ( metaphysical category error - the universe is naturally ordered only at an infinitely larger scale than the useful subset we typically distinguish as natural, life is likewise a subset of nature )

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•paganism ( archaic woo )

•panpsychism ( infinite metaphysical category error - consciousness only exists in biological brains )

•pantheism ( infinite metaphysical category error - defining god as everything is imagining the universe has a mind but minds only exist in biological brains )

•parking boots ( status crime - inversion of innocent until proven guilty, amounts to theft )

•mandated participation in law enforcement actions, esp. against yourself ( until you are adjudicated on the facts by a legitimate expert to be culpable, you are entitled to ignore law enforcement and the State in all ways )

•patriotism ( Nation states are arbitrary in relation to morality and rarely something the patriotic individual had any part in or should take any pride in creating )

•payment fees ( accepting payment is a core necessity of business and always part of core expenses, they're only an excuse for taking additional money for no additional service )

•not commenting on pending litigation ( what could be more in the public interest and their right than to follow the progress of justice? )

•perennialism ( the commonalities of religion are psychological and sociological, not metaphysical or epistemological )

•planned obsolescence ( externality - bad for every individual customer and society as a whole )

•Platonism ( all things as exist as a pattern in a mind, but not all things have an external referent )

•plea bargains ( abdication of justice - which requires a rational examination of all the relevant evidence, typically coercive and extortive )

•populism ( tyranny of the majority, incompatible with basic social or State legitimacy )

•possibilism ( particular patterns in the universe exist or not independently of whether we have epistemological warrant to believe so )

•post-modernism ( Truth is one subsuming thing and can be known, the fact that there are infinite perspectives on reality does not imply any of them are necessarily illusory )

•prescription drugs ( contempt for the agency and authority of each person as the penultimate expert in their own physiological needs )

•presentism ( experience qua experience is the only thing that exists solely in the present. all other things, including our selves, have continuity )

•prior restraint ( tyranny, contemptuous of the importance personal agency )

•probable cause ( effectively outlaws any behaviours law enforcement considers suspicious by granting them the power to detain based on less than reasonable certainty that any crime exists at all )

•profit motive ( unwarranted accumulation, inherently unfair and unsustainable )

•not letting people recover their property from a dangerous house ( interferes with both bodily autonomy and the right to property )

•public advertising ( a blunt force externality which arbitrarily favors some, if any, at the expense of everyone )

•public unions ( the State has ultimate control of its own decisions, public unions are redundant if the State cares about its own interests and an indication of a much deeper problem otherwise, neither public unions or the apparent necessity of them can be ethically warranted and where they exist they arbitrarily favor certain public employees over any public servant or citizen who is not party to of one of them )

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•qualia theory ( impossible reduction of conscious experience, which is always continuous, to a singularity )

•qualified immunity ( inversion of justice, immunity after the fact is impunity before the fact )

•quantum mysticism ( the quantum level of reality is little understood even by it's most studied experts and there are more questions within QM than answers, mysticism is many orders of magnitude higher effects )

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•racial reparations ( race is an ineffable division, justice can only be individual and specific )

•racism ( one's genetic heritage has no particular ethical value )

•Rastafari ( theist woo )

•rational basis test ( government deference )

•reasonable man standard ( besides being ineffable, this standard is typically invoked by people who are not themselves reasonable or capable of judging a reasonable man's beliefs )

•relativism ( however contingent, all subjective ideas are rooted in the objective in-so-far as they are useful to us )

•religion ( dogmatic, ethically regressive )

•unnecessary rental requirements ( tyranny - leaving aside that enclosure is a crime against humanity, to the extent one rents out their space, they have no mandate or right to unnecessarily restrict the freedom of their renters )

•retaliation lawsuits against government agents ( there should never be legal standing to file such a complaint - if the law is legitimate it should always be enforced and if discretion is required it most always be weighted in favour of freedom )

•resisting arrest ( indistinguishable from "guilty until proven innocent" or "compliance first, rights later" )

•right to be forgotten ( travesty of justice, one person's comfort trumps the right of everyone else on the planet to have an accurate representation of reality, a crime against history and humanity )

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•sales tax ( disproportionately effects the poor who already have to spend a much higher percentage of their income on basic necessities )

•scholasticism ( theist apologetics, epistemological woo )

•scientism ( having faith in science is incompatible with both the nature and purpose of science - rigor )

•sealed warrants ( a travesty against transparency and accountability and therefore legitimacy )

•sedition ( one has no ethical responsibility to the state in which one is born or that claims jurisdiction over them, only a legitimate state could obtain such authority and it would have no need )

•sexism ( sex and gender characteristics have no particular relationship to personal worth )

•shamanism ( esoteric woo, epistemological malarkey )

•Sharia ( holy texts are neither sacred, true, or wise )

•Sikhism ( metaphysical woo )

•Social Darwinism ( venerates the animalistic state of nature as ethically desirable, incompatible with civilization, unsustainable )

•software activation ( creates a method to steal by preventing future use of the software when the activation system is unavailable, in the name of preventing you from stealing from them, which only effects those who are Not trying to steal from them because software activation is routinely disabled for illegal distribution )

•solipsism ( a difference that makes no difference is no difference, the way we experience the external is what the word external refers to, whether or not it exists inside a single mind )

•spiritualism ( epistemological and/or metaphysical woo )

•legal standing ( requires you to be harmed before you can object to government acts, arbitrarily includes only the most direct and obvious externalities )

•stand your ground laws ( redundant to well established natural rights, giving ground is nothing a legitimate state or society can require )

•status crimes ( disdain for the importance of evidence, and the legitimacy that justice requires )

•sting operations ( seeking to prosecute people who may not have misbehaved or come to the attention of the state otherwise is antithetical to freedom and justice, amounts to soliciting crime )

•structuring ( legal fiction - tax laws which prevent certain uses of money falsely assume that there is no legitimate reason to do so )

•subjective idealism ( even if our external experience is in some sense mind-bound, it is still a distinctive kind of experience and is what words like external and reality refer to )

•ubiquitous surveillance ( no ethical legitimacy possible - intrusive, chilling effects, etc., only clearly visible surveillance cameras can be ethical unless for the purpose of capturing interference with other security apparatus, people have a right to know if they're being surveilled, whether or not recorded, unless and until they cause harm )

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•taking responsibility ( it can only be accepted if offered )

•ethical Taoism ( slave morality, capitulation, metaphysical nonsense )

•Taoist skepticism ( language is the only way to adequately express truth )

•tetralemma ( logically incoherent, the epistemological state of a proposal can only be true, false, or some degree of unknown, to say that it is neither or both is to frame-shift the proposition to a different scope )

•theism ( god as an untestable personified force is indistinguishable from fiction and ought to be treated accordingly )

•theology ( attempting to explain the impossible in terms of the incredible )

•theosophy ( mystic woo )

•traditional public forum ( legal fiction that arbitrarily limits rights outside of a limited scope )

•transcendentalism, Ubuntu ( there is no sense in which we are all one, we are each a unique embodied perspective on the universe, interconnected, yes - inextricable, no )

•treason ( no person swearing allegiance to a nation has created a valid contract because they are usually under duress and nearly always mal-informed, but regardless, whatever they believe they've sworn allegiance to does not exist in the way they imagine and changes constantly, there can be no ethical requirement to adhere to an ideology when an informed conscience speaks against it )

•trespassing ( trespassing laws are an inversion of the natural right of every person to wander the Earth freely, they act as though not letting someone else infringe your natural right is an infringement of a more important right to exclude )

•tried as an adult ( there's no purpose in distinguishing between a child and adult if that factor can be arbitrarily applied or ignored, if a difference isn't distinctive it cannot be rational or therefore ethical )

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•utilitarianism ( fails to account for intent, which is always ethically relevant, an impossible calculus which leads to arbitrary results )

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•value pluralism ( there are ethical universals in-so-far as we share priorities, the least that can mean is a) survival as a prerequisite for all meaningful goals, b) truth as a prerequisite for all non-arbitrary goals, c) sustainability as a prerequisite for all non-temporary goals, and d) reciprocity as a prerequisite for civilization, anyone who values civilization and all that it enables ( ie, peace, stability, social progression ) must accept those priorities in that order of importance )

•verificationism ( only empirical verification or logical necessity can provide justified belief but that does not mean metaphysical truths are not warranted, it means they are pragmatically warranted by coherently explaining things that cannot be verified empirically or logically )

•vitalism ( soul-equivalent woo )

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•wu wei ( slave morality, Taoism is an abdication of ethical sovereignty )

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•xuanxue ( metaphysical woo )

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•zionism ( Jews are not a homogenous group, are not chosen by god, neither deserve or need a religious homeland )