If you're trying to troll this forum, which is the only sensible thing you could be doing with what you're saying, you're trying too hard. Seriously, you can just post any mildly provocative thing on this forum and someone would bite.

That is what you think. Please do not attribute what you think to what I said.

"I think that the idea that a scientific basis for any particular form of government is ludicrous, that includes communism."

Hang on, which scientific basis are you referring to? I haven't seen one, so how can a non-existent thing be ludicrous? That's like saying you think the current monarch of France likes his tea with 2 sugars. It simply makes no sense.

Marxism is called scientific socialism because it uses dialectical and historical materialism to make observations and predictions about social development. It doesn't postulate that there's some kind of abstractly universal and natural ordering of human society like liberalism or utopian socialism does, conditions matter.

But Tendmote is confusing the issue by claiming that Marxism is somehow saying that socialism in particular has a scientific basis and others do not. Which is not true. Marxism describes the development of feudalism and capitalism using the same methodology.

No, I'm extremely skeptical that the methodology is in fact scientific, regardless of the social order it is applied to.

It’s just a little weird that Marxist political theory comes with it’s own “Scientific Socialist” framework for analysis, which presumably legitimizes it.

I really don't care what you think about it. You're not Barrington Moore or Theda Skocpol.

It's not weird if you actually looked at the material instead of demonizing it from ignorance. All that it means is that unlike other political theory, it does not simply assert that certain political formations or principles are natural but instead are the result of prevailing social and economic conditions and are subject to change. That's all that it means. I don't see why you have such a big problem with it. It's a rather banal point.

Karl Popper characterized Scientific Socialism as a pseudoscience

If we used Karl Popper's criteria then virtually all modern science would be dismissed as pseudo-science, which is why Popper's criteria for what counts for science has long been discredited.

A lot of modern science should be dismissed as pseudo-science. Popper is the shit. Something is either wrong, or potentially wrong. Make and test predictions. It's a cautious outlook.

There's nothing cautious about it. Popperian method would have thrown out all of Newton 's gravitational theory because it could not predict where Uranus was at one point. Instead of eliminating Newton's theory, Neptune was discovered which made sense of the Uranus conundrum.

If Popperians were consistent, they'd throw out Popper for being wrong.

So because our understanding of Newtonian physics is incorrect we should simply dismiss it to be never used again, when it is in fact an extremely good approximation for most situations a human will need to deal with?

Thomas Kuhn supplanted Popper sometime in the 60s I think. We haven't looked back.

^Well, most of us haven't, apparently.

"Thomas Kuhn supplanted Popper sometime in the 60s I think. We haven't looked back."

Well, "we" doesn't make this right; see "Argumentum ad populum"

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"Popperian method would have thrown out all of Newton 's gravitational theory because it could not predict where Uranus was at one point"

No, a subsequent experiment could have clarified the causes and effects and shown that the poorly informed experiment did not falsify the theory.

"Newtonian physics is incorrect... never used again"

No one in the world has ever believed that. ("Argumentum ad populum"; so maybe you're right anyway, but can you prove it?)

Social "science" weenies always hate on Popper!

"No one in the world has ever believed that."
Come back with some very basic understanding in quantum mechanics, then say that again.

If you actually meant that nobody has ever believed that we should stop using Newtonian Physics you are simply proving my point.

@dD_ShockTrooper I should clarify, no one has ever believed Newtonian physics should be discarded because no one has suggested it, not even as a result of Popper's views on falsification.

Also, "very basic understanding in quantum mechanics" - do you have such an understanding? If you have a physics degree, I salute you; I couldn't cut it in physics. If not... a very basic understanding of quantum mechanics is asking a lot of anyone.

"No, a subsequent experiment could have clarified"

The subsequent "experiment" which clarified Newton's theory was the ad hoc postulate of a hidden planet. Something Popperians emphatically rejected. According to Popper a "good theory is not ad hoc".

I reject the Popperian orthodoxy then! Still, if a theory can't be falsified, it isn't science. That still applies to Scientific Socialism. The fact that communism is packaged with a methodology that does not provide for testing claims is dubious.

"Social "science" weenies always hate on Popper!"

That's not true at all. Especially rat-choice theorists in economics & polisci, they all love Popper, and Popper did a lot of work in social science.

But it can be falsified. Take for example the Iranian Revolution. Standard dialectical materialism would claim that internal contradictions within Iranian society stemming from social and economic conditions, i.e. class antagonisms, caused the revolutionary change in government. A competing hypothesis would claim that the introduction of new ideas - radical Shi'ite Islam - instigated the upheaval independently of any real change in social or economic conditions or class antagonisms. Another competing hypothesis would be that deficiencies in the institutional framework of the pre-revolutionary state caused the upheaval, or the failure of leadership of the Shah caused the upheaval. The theory is very falsifiable.

I will paste a famous biologist's words about comunism.

"Nice theory, wrong species"

^Evolution is still a possibility, albeit a far-fetched one.

@Putin33 Any of the Iranian Revolution statements could be true, could be false, but are not falsifiable in the scientific sense of yielding falsifiable *predictions*. They are not scientific theories.

The "Scientific" in "Scientific Socialism" implies a kind of "scientific certainty" where there is none, which leads to dangerous lack of compromise and extremism.

Why would evolution be a far-fetched possibility?

I don't think Shock was trying to say that evolution itself is far-fetched, just evolution in such a specific direction as to make human kind more amenable to communism.

I still think he's wrong though. There doesn't seem to be a mechanism by which communist humans would reproduce more than non-communist ones and such would be needed to drive evolution in that direction. Therefore it is not a far-fetched possibility. It is instead not a possibility at all.