content: (ramble) Appeal to Nature Fallacy and First Principles Thinking The appeal to nature fallacy is basically where you frame something "natural" as being good. For example, if you're arguing that transgenderism is bad because it is unnatural, this is fallacious. This is actually a pretty good rebuttal that some of the smarter leftists have pointed out about the right, that a lot of their ideological framework is based around natural processes. However, I think what we are really getting at, when we say that transgenderism is "unnatural" is that it doesn't work, or is not stable, or cannot be perpetuated for long periods of time. Because, "natural" and "artificial" blend into each other. Civilization is a product of the genetic expression of humans, much in the same way that termite mounds are the genetic expression of termites. Now, a monkey experimenting with swallowing a rusty caltrop -- this is "unnatural" because the caltrop bleeds and kills the monkey. It does not become a food source that effects the long-term survival strategy of monkeys, it's just a dumb thing that one monkey tried that ended up killing him. I think what we're really getting at when we argue about the "natural"-ness of a behavior is whether that thing is harmful to the group with which we identify. I don't think people on our side really care about the existence of man-made tools and concepts. We don't like these things because they're gross, they feel wrong internally, and they do damage at some level to the group, or threaten the solidarity and existence of said group. I don't think that we're definitionfags, we just sort of see behavior which is not CONSTRUCTIVE (maybe that's the word) to our group and to our sense of self. I think pointing out that pornography is "unnatural" may sound way better than what it actually conveys -- that it's gross, it causes harm, and it leads to anti social behavior which degrades the solidarity and wellbeing of the group. This may be why the Nazis were big on the word "degenerate." Given the fact that they were well aware of their modernist critics such as the Bauhaus school, who pushed for radical, artificial experimentation, I'm sure that they knew that pointing to the "degenerate" nature of such ideas was a more rigorous articulation of what they disliked. This being said, while the word "degenerate" has been packed with baggage (because the Nazis used it too much), I oppose behaviors on the grounds that -- duh -- they degrade society. While I do somewhat support radical experimentation (as I am an artist), only a portion of this experimentation will produce behavior that is stable and not harmful to the group. Experimentation is what we call "risk taking." This gets me into another related subject. One concept that I think is very important to push that will always be better than what we have now is education reform centered around first principles reasoning. If the great philosophical breakthrough of the enlightenment was the premise that "we should use a logical system to make sense of the world," well I think the great philosophical breakthrough of our time should be first principles. Of course, I wish there was also a system for the average person to pursue an autodidact's education without any money -- but that's another subject. First principles reasoning allows members of a society to inform themselves and to make decisions that are less likely to be outright retarded. Incorrect ideas are probably always based on some kind of fallacy or emotional oversight, and involve many basic fallacies. As a sidenote, the easiest way to "win" any argument (as in, corner that person and make them feel stupid) is to point out the fact that they used a basic fallacy as a justification and that this completely discredits their more complex arguments, and makes engaging with them not productive or fruitful because they can say pretty much anything to push back. And if you just keep bringing up the fallacy and pressing on the fact that fallacies point to an incomplete thought process, this will force them to, after saving face, reevaluate themselves.