ChuhuaZhu

I have not participated in forum/chat/blogs since late high school, basically because I found interacting with people on the internet to be pointless, and the interaction generally just tended to piss me off. About a week back online, spurred on only because I stare at a computer screen all day at work, has reminded me exactly why I stopped. I won't be coming here again.

This is kind of a strange use of terms. I think there are things I ought to do because I have values, I don't think I could talk about 'owing' myself anything, as though attaining something were separate from some personal motivation for doing it in the first place. I associate with people when I enjoy it. I pretty much try to keep all the rest out of my life.

My point is precisely the idea of 'getting out there' and 'doing something' presumes that wonking around in a political zoo will accomplish anything for me. I deny that it will.

I don't believe the word 'superior' means anything, outside of some tautological definition from expressly stated heirarchies of values. I don't think I owe a damn thing to anyone on this planet, aside from those I have voluntarily assumed contractual obligations towards. The fact that the majority of people are ignorant is unfortunate but it just isn't my problem (in the sense that I am required, or even ought to want to, do anything about it). I am happy when people can learn and improve themselves, but when the majority of human beings are as screwed up and as clueless as they are it's a lot better to focus on me than waste my time on them.

Government itself is evil. I am not against breaking into the Death Star to throw a monkey wrench into the works, but the government is an evil institution. Furthermore, the very structure of government is that of an evil institution with evil incentives - it is built against subversion by political means, because political means are its way of spreading lies and crime. So I think it is generally worthless. From a personal and specific point of view, I have absolutely no obligation and even less practical interest in actually involving myself in all this worthless BS like the pseudo-Libertarian Party, much less will I affiliate with a bunch of war mongering theocrats and welfare statists like the Republican Party (I can't stand republican institutions anyways, what a horrible name). It's not worth my time, it's far more worth it to spend my time making money and avoiding them, because they will fall or not whether or not I monkey around in things I despise and have no interest in, whereas I can make a real difference in my personal life. And frankly it is people taking these half-wits and scum-bags seriously that gives them their power, stop playing their stupid games and obeying their rules and they are revealed as nothing but cads and knaves, of no consequence to anyone but the hangman. It is NOT that people fail to be 'vigilant' or support the 'wrong' policies that makes the government a threat, but that people are foolish enough to treat these priests of Leviathan with any regard in the first place. To be more eloquent about my point, I'll quote Étienne de La Boétie: “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

That's a question of strategy, which I admit to be rather clueless upon. I'm an egghead. Aside from the very vague 'educate people in how to think and provide resources for advancing their self-knowledge' it's not something I have given a lot of thought to. That being said I am pretty confident that political action is worthless, because politics and politicians are worthless. We have been trying this political action gig since the Levellers, and it's just gotten us into the same endless cycle of a little more free, imperialist war mongering, slavery, and so on for infinity. It's not going to work because the means themselves are either intrinsically evil or highly at risk of being corrupted due to their close proximity to evil.

I think it's pretty obviously the case - the present state is rather inexplicable otherwise. I think with the right knowledge and assistance they could better themselves and see the problems with the present way of dealing with the world, but as a matter of fact they do not possess these things. Most people are decent intrinsically, but they know little to nothing about what to do about it.

The procedures of Narconon are only a specific application of Dianetics, which were quite useful to me when I had some substance abuse problems in high school. That aside, it does have a good record as far as addiction counseling and recovery centers go.

Not bad necessarily, but ineffective and confused. He points out that Amazon has helped people avoid sales taxes, and that they really are faced with the direct power of the State if they don't cooperate. They may be a bit cowardly, but libertarianism isn't a suicide cult. Even if they were libertarian, what can they do? Get sanctioned by Liebermen? How is that going to help WikiLeaks?

Never underestimate the incompetence of government security.

Interesting quote from Assange. My view as an anarchist is that the USG has no rights or property, and it is a criminal terrorist organization. 'Treason' is as fake a crime as prostitution.

I think this is going to accomplish precisely nothing. So the Fed released previously secret information. Who is going to pay attention to it? A bunch of libertarians and gold nuts who already hate its guts and want to sell the rubble. The rest of the population sleeps on, because they lack the basic philosophical and intellectual tools to care or understand in the first place. And if they had those tools, the information from the Fed would be irrelevant. Although Paul says many things I agree with (and some I do not), I think he's wasting his time.

You're taking the word of an judge from the Supreme Injustice arm of the People's Republic of California? What do you think he would say of Ayn Rand? Anyways, whatever personal failings LRH may have had, and as problematic as the Church of Scientology can be at times, this is pretty irrelevant to the practical philosophy of Dianetics.

I forgot to change the text in my bio . I moved up here to work at a Mercedes dealership, across the water from Portland. I lived in south/central Oregon before that. Thanks for pointing this out. Thanks for the links, Mr. Smith.

From a couple of folks, great. From the Randroids, not so much. Anarchists are evil and all that. By the way, I am a huge fan of your work Mr. Smith. Atheism: The Case Against God is not only terrific on its subject, but it's a fantastic general work on epistemology, ontology and logic. I have been half-heartedly trying for a few years to find a way to contact you. Just my luck you respond to my introductory post!

Right, but it's the only way to have any idea in regards to general subjective preferences and relative scarcity. When you help someone you know or give money to FEE it's a consumption expenditure, it's not an investment in social improvements in capital allocation. I use 'social' here to mean interpersonal organization, not the reified or collective sense. Of course for any individual it is his psychic profit and not his monetary profit that he is after. Monetary profit is just a means to the end of psychic profit.

I don't mind helping people I know or institutions whose contributions I value (such as the LvMI). However, I think charitable institutions have inherent problems in that they are not profit-maximizing and can't tell if they're doing any good except by the most hazy and questionable methods; and most of the money tends to get eaten up in overhead. I think that producing economically calculable goods in the market place is a better method, since it decreases the costs overall for innovation and increases opportunities for people to make themselves productive.

In defense of Dickens, though he had altruistic ethics and was under the sway of Christian mysticism, he never had any redistributive/interventionist schemes in mind. He thought people should be charitable voluntarily.

As PDS points out, it's Ebeneezer Scrooge. I like him because despite Dickens' attempt to paint him as a bad guy, he comes out seeming like a decent, upstanding guy; if a bit surly. I'll look into it. Right, and I wasn't planning on paying for it. I was interested in seeing if there was anything valid to it, I have a couple of friends on the Internet who say there is good advice despite it being poorly written. I don't use the term 'pulp fiction' as to distinguish it from good fiction, I would say that pulp is America's prime contribution to literature. Roots in Poe and the Three Museketeers, going on to H.P. Lovecraft and Conan the Barbarian and finally the modern American comic book it tends to integrate many strongly American tropes: confident, competent individuals taking a stand against a world which is either confused or villainous, positive views of initiative and science, the belief that man can improve himself through understanding and dedication, and that in the end the only thing good has to do to win is not to surrender to evil because it is inherently superior and correct. Doc Savage, despite some of his altruistic tropes, is a prime example of this. Atlas Shrugged, especially, with its megamillionaires rationalistic geniuses, shale oil, cloaking device, perpetual energy machine, supermetal and so on, not to mention death rays pretty well fits into the pulp genre, even if it is a bit more overtly philosophical than most pulp stories are (then again, pulp stories do often have a fairly strong philosophy behind them, even if it's not entirely without internal contradictions). All from mainland China (SE specifically). My mother is 3rd Gen-American and my father is 2nd Gen-American. As far as how my philosophy was received while working on my degree, I mostly wrote on rather 'academic' topics such as ontology, and though I did criticize philosophers who I felt were wrong (when we had to write on certain subjects or intellectual figures) I never really got any flak. Economics (my minor) was MUCH worse.

This is pretty much a reproduction of my blog post over at Sense of Life Objectivists, with some additional information interpolated. First of all, I'll reproduce my "biography". It was written to sound exactly like something you'd read on the inside of a book cover, so it was written third person. Chu-hua Zhū was born to Chinese-American parents in southern Oregon, where she attended private secondary and primary schools. During early high school she encountered the works of Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard and Friedrich Nietzsche and found instant resonance with her strong but until then inchoate individualist and meritocratic views. Through high school she continued to read many authors critical of the mainstream self-sacrificial and collectivist ideologies, such as Thomas Szasz and Murray Rothbard. She became a strong proponent of laissez-faire capitalism and individual liberty, to the point of anarchism. Though she has a number of disagreements with the philosophy and organizations of Ayn Rand, she still largely considers herself an Objectivist and also practices Dianetics. After highschool she attended the University of Oregon and achieved a B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Economics. She presently lives in Oregon and works at a luxury automobile dealership. I agree with most of Objectivism, such as an logic, self-interest, the harmony of rightly-understood interests, the degrading effects of altruism and collectivism both on the individual and civilization, and the ability of humans to know their world by using reason to examine experience. I am a staunch advocate laissez-faire capitalism, to the point of anarchism. This is one of (but not all of) my problem with the Ayn Rand Institute, which I think has basically become a shill for NeoCon war mongering. I think Rand was conceited and sometimes lamentably confused rationalization of her pet interests with actual rationality, but despite her personal failings I would unhesitatingly recommend her to someone interested in philosophy or pulp fiction. I am an atheist, but I am also a FreeZone Scientologist, as I believe the ideas of L. Ron Hubbard expressed in Dianetics and The Way to Happiness are compatible and complementary to reason and individualism. Indeed, Hubbard sometimes outdoes Rand, though in general he was nowhere near as consistent (or interested in) an advocacy of laissez-faire. However, just as the case with the ARI, I think the Church of Scientology has essentially perverted Hubbard's ideas. I find their use of intellectual property and libel lawsuits to attack their detractors to be entirely immoral. Just as with Rand I do not hold the LRH was infallible of the apex of philosophy, and believe that there is much Objectivism and Dianetics can gain from one another, as well as from further developments in the fields of applied philosophy. Presently I am interested in exploring NeoTech, among other things. One point which rages among libertarians and Objectivists these days is intellectual property. I simply do not think it is right to tell another man what he can do with his own property just because you thought of it first. We'd all be paying royalties to the inventor of the wheel if we went by that reasoning. I think that intellectual property is nothing but a state-created monopoly, a violation of individual rights which positively requires an interventionist State to enforce. In economic terms I also think it is highly counter-productive, for praxeological and empirical reasons. As you might be able to tell, I am an advocate of Austrian economics as advanced by Mises and Rothbard. Despite some philosophical differences with these two thinkers I believe they were quite simply the greatest economists of the 20th century, and having their books to read is the only thing that kept me going through the awful pseudo-economics I encountered at the University. I am, through reading Thomas Szasz and L. Ron Hubbard, extremely opposed to compulsory psychiatric treatments and the stigmatizing myth of 'mental illness'. I am also critical of Rand and Branden's views on psychiatry, the former took a somewhat dictatorial and unrealistic approach (all psychological difficulties stem from ideological confusions, an example of her foundationalist error) and I think Branden's self-esteem psychology is lacking in both content and applicability. That being said I have no personal animus against Branden. That pretty much covers the outline, and let me just say 'Hello' to everyone.