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DavidOdden

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  1. One aspect of this case which is ignored by the media is that this cannot be taken to be a real effort to defraud, forge or falsify. The submitted documents do not even marginally resemble actual certificates of ascertainment, they are clearly political theater in the fashion of leftist political theater of the 1960’s. The recipients did not, would not, and could not take serious the premise that these are real and official documents, given what the real thing looks like. The “Electoral College of Michigan” is an invention. The Sec’y of State does not address the certificate to specific individuals, the document is created by the SOS not a supposed “chairperson” of a non-existent entity, the actual certificate lists all nominated electors including write-in candidates and various minor party candidates. Crucially, vote totals for everybody are included. None of this is included in the theatrical documents. Compare the fake document and the real one. Michigan law does not state what it means when one “falsely makes, alters, forges, or counterfeits a public record, or a certificate”. Conviction will hang on proving intent, and proving it beyond reasonable doubt, which means, showing that alternative intentions must be objectively non-credible. However, since this is a political trial, defendant mental state will simply be assumed and will not be critically scrutinized. It is even possible that some number of them are willing to sacrifice themselves, in order to enhance the impact of conviction and imprisonment of the opposition, for a protected political-expressive act. No aspect of Michigan election law addresses “legal authority for the false electors to purport to act as ‘duly elected presidential electors’ and execute the false electoral documents”, in fact the electors were actually nominated (it’s just that their candidate lost), and the documents do not purport to legally report vote totals, which is what determines which nominated electors get to vote in the final event. Thus the Michigan AG falsely and fraudulently purports elements of a non-existent crime. The AG falsely, abusively and fraudulently disregards the obvious political-theater purpose of these documents. This is a prime example of the serious rot that has infected objective American law, that anything not sufficiently proven to be true is “fraud”. This is not what fraud means, but it is how the term has been redefined (on the other side of the fence, the right also flashes out charges of “fraud” at incautious statements, as an educational tit-for-tat example above I have accused the Michigan AG of fraud). Because the First Amendment protects political theater, the left and right could easily join forces to fight against their common enemy and obstacle to political control – the First Amendment.
  2. When the decision is made, we can read it and decide what the case is really “about”, sans baseless declarations by various idealogues. The real potential question is whether the government should give a special status to internet providers of some ilk, or should the government treat such entities like they treat anyone else. The extant contradiction is that the federal government has granted a special legal status to internet providers (like Facebook, also web hosts) to the effect that they are declared to not be publishers. Why does that matter? Because a publisher can be held liable for the content that it publishes, just as I could be held liable if I make a false claim about Smith being a rapist. Crucial to the law distinguishing internet service providers from ordinary publishers is that an ISP does not exercise control over content. Well, we know that Facebook and so on do exercise such control over content. Therefore: Facebook is a publisher, they should be liable for the content that they publish. There are numerous issues potentially “at stake” in this case. One is the question of whether a platform should be liable for what it publishes, like any other publisher. Another is whether the federal government has the exclusive right to make that determination (analogous to enforcement of immigration laws, the exclusive power of the federal government). Also at stake is the question of a government can promulgate regulations articulating the conditons under which a publisher may be immunized against liability. And of course, the idea of being a public utility underlies the law that allowed immunization of Facebook and ilk. We can guess what some of the main findings will be in this case. The most sweeping and most-principled ruling would invalidate the law that social media does not bear liability for what it publishes, which would undercut the whole basis for these state laws. The runner-up and apparently most likely outcome would be framing “the question” as being about compelled speech and the First Amendment, thus leaving ISPs in a privileged position. Under standard NPR reasoning, you can have your cake and eat it too, what remains to be seen is how principled SCOTUS is willing to be.
  3. ‘Physicality’ is an abstraction, the reification of ‘physical’, where ‘physicality’ is the same in meaning as ‘physicalness’ and ‘physicalhood’, the latter being of dubious social acceptability (that is, we don’t talk that way, mixing Greek roots and Germanic suffixes). We don’t have problems understanding the word ‘reality’ and its relation to ‘real’, but there are problems with ‘physical’ and ‘physicality’. The historical fact is that ‘physical’ is used in science to describe the tangible (entities) as well as the real (a broader concept), e.g. forces. We would say that an electron is physical, it is a thing, and it has properties (like charge, angular momentum) which are not themselves things (unless some version of physics says that charge is an entity, a constituent and not just a property of an electron). I can only vaguely estimate the meaning of ‘commonly referred to as part of physicality’. Clearly, experience, like charge or color, is not a tangible entity, yet it is real, it has a basis in tangible entities. Now, the other problem that I see here is the claim about ‘commonly referred to’, which omits three important things: referred to by whom, the standards for claiming that something is common (ballpark: if something is the case 1/3 of the time, is it ‘commonly’ the case, or does it have to be the majority or plurality case?), and the evidence in the form of proof of actual reference (who is counting, what are they counting?). I say that it is not productive to cast doubt on a high-level concept because the concept is not a mass-having entity. I also suggest that scare quotes and metaphors are the enemy in this discussion. Atomic particles do not have bodies. As far as I understand what is being said, an AGI is not scare-quotes “synthetic”, it is literally synthetic, man-made (the A stands for ‘artificial’, by definition man-made). A person, rat or fish unquestionably has a body, a mountain, stream or tree does not, however, we do commonly metaphorically speak of cars and books as having bodies. Typically, ‘disembodied’ refers to a mystical concept, the spirit, and is used at least by right-thinking people as a slur to suggest that an opponent is invoking dubious mystical concepts such as spirits, which is not the case here. In the present instance, I see no evidence that an AGI is held to be a mystical spirit, but it is an abstraction describing what real entity does (would do, if it existed). The Objectivist epistemology is, similarly, not a tangible entity, it is a system of ideas which are real but themselves have no mass or specific space-time coordinates. Ideas are the product of a consciousness, which is an aspect of a tangible entity. Via the miracle of language and its objective nature, ideas can be preserved and transmitted, not just passively experienced. I have just transmitted some ideas to you, which you cannot reasonably say are ‘disembodied’ (disagreement could be informative). You can see a representation of the ideas on your screen, or you can hear an analogous representation if you have a screen-reader running, and you know that there is some entity-based mechanism underlying my typing, uploading, and your reading. In that sense, my ideas are physically-based. You might expect that for reasons of scale, we cannot control microscopic entities like viruses, much less molecules, yet it turns out that we can. That doesn’t establish that we can overcome the scale differences between 6’ tall people and quantum-realm Ant Man stuff, but scale differences per se do not define an impenetrable barrier to human control. The fundamental question is whether a quantum computer could exist, and from what I can tell (slovenly internet search), such things actually do exist, though they may be impractical and not very good at present. We still haven’t developed Mr. Fusion, but progress has been made to the point that fusion is not just a way to blow the shit out of everything.
  4. As I mentioned at least twice above, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides the proof that you have demanded, which incidentally is an unreasonable demand (evidence is evidence, you don’t get to arbitrarily stipulate what constitutes evidence). You have not addressed the facts, instead you retreat behind automatic denial as a means of evading the science. In the face of evidence having been presented, it is incumbent on you to disprove that evidence. Indeed, I have no evidence that you have even looked at that article, and I can think of no rational reason for your refusal to directly address the science. You offer no alternative conclusion regarding the axiomatic (the myriad scientific observations of covid), instead you just repeat your denial without evidence to support an alternative, nor do you even state what such an alternative is. In other words, you are engaging in selective epistemological nihilism. My current counter-offer is that you should provide evidence that malaria exists: I will take the position that you have taken, which is to just deny that malaria exists. I sincerely hope that you do not hold a political-consequences theory of epistemology, that the standards of proof depends not on the logic of the claim and the objective nature of the existent, but are determined by whether the existent has been misused to support initiation of force. Under which logic, I substitute measles, smallpox or Spanish flu in my challenge to you, all of which triggered tyrannical governmental responses. I would like to see what you consider to be acceptable proof that malaria exists, and see some reasoning as to why you find that evidence to be sufficient (unless, of course, you are also a malaria-denier).
  5. The same question can be asked about the common cold, appendicitis or malaria. Do you know by your own reason that these things exist, or do you merely rely on the expertise of others who say that they exist? I have personal sensory experience with the common cold and appendicitis, and not malaria. I now know that Turkey exists, though I do not know directly that Iraq exists, however, I have friends (whom I trust, perhaps unreasonably so) that can attest to the existence of Iraq. There is a simple formula that can be followed to deny all knowledge: just deny something. If you claim “I personally had covid”, the counter-claim would be “How do you know it was covid that you had, not something else?”. Indeed, Peikoff discusses the procedure in his explication of reason and certainty – to be certain, you must not just have evidence for a proposition, you must eliminate all evidence, even conceptual evidence, for alternatives. You could say “Possibly I had covid” or “Possibly I had appendicitis”, but how can you rule out all of the alternatives. It is always possible to say “It might be something else”. The key to not devolving into epistemological nihilism is to reject unsupported denial as a logical tool. To deny that an individual has appendicitis or the common cold, you must offer superior evidence that they have a specific alternative. My initial hypothesis regarding covid was that I had strep throat. I refuted that in two ways. First, the probative throat pustules of strep were lacking. Second, the antigen test was positive. My knowledge of what I had was not complete, for example I do not know which of 5 variants I was infested with, and certainly not which of the thousands of sub-mutations. The broader lesson is that you don’t deny knowledge just because you are not omniscient. If you intend to discount the testimony of scientific experts, you have to have superior evidence that they are not to be trusted. In fact, scientific experts collectively provide the essential evidence against themselves. I always urge people to directly engage the peer-reviewed literature as best they can, though I can’t make heads of tails of physics publications. An article will (should) contain the seeds of its own destruction, identifying weaknesses and alternative accounts, because the reviewers demanded that those seeds be planted. Unfortunately, most popular knowledge of science is transmitted in untrustworthy venues. I don’t know whether Science is trustworthy in other areas, but I can tell you that it is completely untrustworthy in the area of linguistics, where it occasionally publishes an ill-researched article. Blogs are plainly untrustworthy. So, a crucial skill in evaluating scientific claims is being able to evaluate the credibility of a journal, which is a very difficult task. Belief in climate change is a major problem, because it's a very specific package deal which is partially related to something else that the senses directly validate – weather change. "Climate change" is an ill-defined assertion that cannot even be spelled out as a concrete scientific hypothesis. Covid, on the other hand, is a specific, testable, and tested scientific claim.
  6. Starting from the fact that lawsuits and criminal prosecutions are (ideally) seeking redress for violation of a person’s rights, justice is not served by an arbitrary time-based curtailment of the right to justice. Any time limit on justice demands proper justification, and “it has been a long time since the wrong was done” is not valid justification. The basic rationale for statutes of limitation is that miscarriage of justice is more-possible because of the unavailability or unreliability of witnesses after a certain number of years. A crucial presumption of SOL is that a person who has suffered a wrong will diligently seek justice, which of course requires that they have discovered the wrong, where for instance a surgeon who fails to remove an internal tumor can be sued for malpractice longer than the standard 3 years for personal injury, owing to the fact that the surgeon’s wrong is effectively un-discoverable. The proper political question (not constitutional) is, at what point should a person’s right to justice be terminated by the state? The primary limit should be based on the miscarriage of justice problem of litigating stale cases, where the witnesses are dead or cannot be trusted to remember: and we need an objective rule governing that limit, it should not be treated on a subjective case-by-case basis. Victim awareness of the wrong (the discovery rule) is also a valid reason for exceptionally extending the limit backwards, but this backwards extension should not provide an easy excuse for indiligence in protecting one’s rights. In the particular case, the New York Legislature simply abandoned the rational underpinnings of SOL law, by picking out an arbitrary subset of wrongs deserving of a longer limit on justice. It is not as though the victim was unaware of what purportedly happened, she simply chose to not care until she found a reason to care. So then why can’t I sue a contractor for defective workmanship 20 years ago?
  7. As far as I know, ASA does not “allow” judges to set aside the earlier statute of limitation in specified cases, it requires them to, that is, discretion rests with the plaintiff, not the judge. Since statutes of limits are legislative creations and not constitutional rights, I see no possible constitutional question. SOLs are often changed, and changes are not held to be unconstitutional simply because a number is changed by an act of the legislature. There is no denying that there is a political agenda in increasing SOLs for politically-incorrect torts while decreasing SOLs for a politically-correct tort would be equally consistent with that agenda (for example, consumer complaints – an increase is okay – but debt collection – a decrease is okay). Again, this is not a constitutional issue, it is a plain old political question (proper vs. improper government). Not every bad idea is Marxist. The Republican party is full of bad ideas and bad philosophy, but it isn’t all Marxist.
  8. I found the article a bit disappointing, though not surprisingly so. Nice to have a new result, sure, but the potentially most interesting part was the implication that AI contributed something. It seems to me that they whiffed the explanation of how AI contributed anything to the process, something that could not be done as well by a handful of smart people and a supercomputer. For example, why, specifically, is it necessarily to use AI (and a supercomputer) determine whether the material can actually exist in reality, why can’t you just hand-code a supercomputer program to do that. Perhaps (as suggested in the article) it was that the human scientists had a prejudice against certain possibilities, so they would be inclined to skip over a solution that actually works but goes against conventional wisdom. If that is the case, this has more significant methodological implications about the conduct of science. I have long held that one of the most significant flaws in typical human reasoning is the common failure to seriously consider alternatives, to check your assumptions. So why would the two types of ions be expected to compete with one another and result in worse performance. What is the observational evidence for this position? Did they also make an underlying high-level theoretical discovery about the theory? I know that Science News is all about the executive summary, not the in-depth understanding of the big picture (i.e. stepping outside of the box), but somebody has to care about the big picture.
  9. The attempt to order language before concepts, or vice versa, is a logically flawed enterprise, because neither exists without the other. Both are essential properties of the faculty of reason. A concept, in Rand’s analysis, is not simply a mystical assemblage of generalized entities that somehow cohere, a concept is an open-ended definition with a label. There are no definitions without language (inspect all of Rand’s examples of concepts), and the labels are the representational filing device for concepts, i.e. morphemes, expressed either with physical gestures, written symbols, or in its normal state, sound. Claims about feral children are vastly overstated and over-romanticized. First, no children are taught language at all, they learn language on their own from peo-ple speaking in their environment. Second, that process begins before birth. Fetuses do not learn words, but they learn, from exposure, many facts about the language of their environment. Remember that the womb is not a soundproof chamber. Third, there are virtually no decent scientific studies of feral children, and no evidence about the cognitive state of actually-feral children (children who exist without human contact: you can see why it is logically impossible to test for the existence of concepts in a feral child, were you to find one. The one somewhat-studied such child was Genie, for whom there is no publically available scientific evidence regarding her initial cognitive abilities although we weakly knew in principle how to assess their existence. There is no evidence at all that she had concepts when rescued (after substantial psychological treatment, she gained a limited ability in language given substantial intervention efforts, which apparently failed for the most part). There is a misunderstanding of concepts as involving some sort of universal “inner language” where actual language learning involves discovering the relation between universal inner language and actual individual languages. Under the universal inner language theory, of course, all humans are born with something like a language already built in, and early Chomskian linguistics did take that stance, and therefore by definition all children must have built-in concepts in some kind of Cartesian “universal machine language” for humans. We know better now (I am not sure whether Chomsky himself knows better). Under that theory, one must claim that feral children have concepts and can form propositions, they just can’t express it in ordinary ways. In fact, feral children are so severely damaged, cognitively, that they really provide evidence for nothing about the nature of language. Concepts and language are developed in parallel, by iterated reasoning. A child observes that mom, dad and the dog are different existents which have different properties. The child associates the sounds of “mommy”, “daddy” and “doggie” with the referents (or whatever names are assigned to those people / beasts). They learn to differentiate, after more exposure to the world, learning that “daddy” and “grampa” are different names and different people. So far, these are names, not concepts. The leap to concepts comes when they learn of types, and can distinguish “doggie” from “kitty”. Feral children are not really a "gold standard" in linguistics, they are a sound-bite gimmick that Cartesian linguists used to invoke as supposed factual support, but for what? In fact, it just suggests (does not show) that there is an age past which a first language cannot be acquired by normal means, that age being around the age of majority. But children do acquire language well before that, except in extreme cases usually involving severe child abuse or mental / physical disability.
  10. However, a lockdown plus rigidly-enforced anti-social distancing would dramatically decrease all communicable disease transmission. A lockdown for a single person is highly effective, for two or more people in a household, much less so. The US lockdown practice was not as draconian as the French lockdown, which was literally “stay in in your apartment unless you have an emergency pass”, whereas the US practice was aimed at primarily “non-essential” businesses such as restaurants, cultural events, classes, going to work in an office, and the truly non-essential business of church gathering. It is true that a walk on the beach was an offense in France, but not in the US as far as I know, and I endured the plague in Washington which was one of the most extreme-restriction states. Nevertheless, the dog park and plain old city streets was a no-mask zone. The underlying theory of isolation is reasonably good up to the point that you have actually impenetrable barriers between dwelling-units, and do not allow people to leave the isolation ward. Neither of those requirements was rigidly enforced, hence the randomness of the covid-containment numbers. A classic example of misintegration. The mask theory is a third misintegration, since it is invalid to extrapolate from the actual masks and hook-up procedure used by trained surgeons to common face-diaper procedures, which only somewhat reduce the number of viral particles that you take in. There is only one way to determine the efficacy of disease-containment strategies, namely with carefully-controlled scientific experiments, which cannot be conducted. Vague concepts like social distancing, lockdown and masks are not even applicable to the observational studies of medical practitioners, which do not generalize to Everybody In The World.
  11. I am compelled to insert a few technical corrections regarding universal grammar and Chomskian linguistics, which has been invoked here. First, Chomsky has held 1,900 different positions, often 7 at the same time. He is famous for saying “this is implicit in my earlier work”. Boiling away various temporary ornamentations of his, his theory has two aspects: a theory of the “faculty”, and a theory of the substance. Categories like noun, verb, vowel, nasal, quantifier are “things”, the substance, which he has claimed that are in a genetically endowed list of things that we know at birth. Those are the “innate concepts”. Over the years, the size of that list was waxed and waned, right now it is very small and for many practitioners (such as myself) it is null. Then there is the “faculty” aspect, the ability to do things. There too we find a range of views, one being that there is a list of things that you can and cannot do in language, and one that claims that there is little to nothing pre-specified. My position is that language is one aspect of the faculty of reason (which is itself an aspect of general cognition), so as far as I am concerned, the language faculty is not characterized with any substantive limits. However, language and reasoning still have a nature. It is the ability to structure words and form concepts that are part of human nature, and language is the essential tool for forming concepts and expressing propositions. The problem with radical tabula rasa theory is that you cannot learn a language or a fact with a completely blank brain, thus the conceptual faculty cannot itself be learned (how would a child know to learn “concepts” as opposed to storing every sense-image that they encountered; how would a child learn the principle of conceptual economy rather that the principle of maximal precision?). A faculty is a built-in ability to create a cognitive structure based on sensory input, and language (general, not a specific language) is the most obvious instance of a faculty. When you learn a language, you do not memorize all of the words and sentences of the language, you learn a small set of atoms, and a set of rules for building larger labels (whole words and sentences). Those rules have a definite nature, which in fact mirrors the hierarchical nature of knowledge plus some knowledge of what a rule does (for instance, unifies two concepts into one, or positions one thing after another). There is a kind of “negative knowledge” to the effect that prime numbers or the Fibonacci sequence do not play a role in grammar, which is not directly stated as such (i.e. no rule computes with a word is in a prime-numbered position, or even an odd-numbered position), instead it simply follows from the fact that that mechanism is not part of the faculty of language, which is universally available to all humans and happens automatically upon exposure to language, unlike the ability to sing on key or compute prime numbers which takes conscious training. In discussing “Chomskian linguistics”, you have to carefully distinguish Noam Chomsky’s current idiosyncratic beliefs and behaviors, from the theories of those whose interest is the mental mechanism that enables humans to have language. Extreme-nativist Chomsky (P&P theory) is fully incompatible with the Objectivist epistemology, but even Chomsky no longer believes in that, and his linguistic views are much closer to mine, which are, of course, based on Objectivism.
  12. Usually, when we talk about “the government”, we mean the US government. In this case, we should instead say specifically “The US government” and “The Chinese government”, since I don’t think the intentions of the two governments are the same here. There is no merit to the idea (occasionally floated in irresponsible venues) that this was a CIA experiment. On the other hand, given the actual history of CIA clandestine evil-doing, it not unimaginable that the CIA might do such a thing. Ability to imagine an event is not proof that the event happened, and until real evidence to that effect is uncovered, we should give no more attention to a CIA theory than we would give to a claim of a convention of gremlins discussing Hegel’s Logic on Venus. The plausible theories of the origin of covid are (1) bad luck at the meat market and (2) deliberate creation by the Chinese government with probably accidental release. Under any theory of what happened, it is very clear that the Chinese government has been extremely secretive and obstructive of all attempts to learn the truth. US government involvement in not clarifying the origin of covid is not obvious, but seems to fall in line with a general pattern of spinelessness in foreign affairs – a general unwillingness to upset the Chinese government (since they have shown their willingness to engage in subtle economic warfare, which IMO poses an under-appreciated existential threat to the West). The question is not whether covid exists, but rather whether it is “metaphysically given” vs. “man-made”. Either way, governmental responses have been nothing short of 100% wrong.
  13. Yet you still have no personal evidence to support your position, it is entirely based on believing the claims of other people. That would be fine, if those other people are shown to be credible and trustworthy. I have no reason to believe that Massey is trustworthy, and based on my reading of her FOI-related posts, I conclude that she is not trustworthy w.r.t. this particular issue (which is whether covid exists). You on the other hand, apparently have faith in her belief, and use her postion as the basis for your own argument. Your challenge to the covid-existence is ineffective, because you have not provided any evidence that supports the claim that covid does not exist, which is necessary to overcome the direct evidence of the senses, which cannot be rationally denied, that covid does exist. You might imaginably argue that there has been a specific misidentification, for example you could claim that covid is a bacterium, not a virus, or you could argue with the specific scientific classification of covid, but you have not done that. Your argument also seems to depend on an invalid package deal, a mixed wall of scientific and political claims. All of the political issues such as lockdowns and mask mandates are red herrings w.r.t. the scientific question of the existence of covid. Every known Objectivist, as far as I have been able to discern, holds that it is not the proper role of government to show down businesses, mandate a suspension of property rights, force vaccinations and mask-wearing etc. irrespective of their scientific beliefs about the nature of the disease. Feel free to challenge improper governmental action, but don’t lump in nihilistic unscientific claims there covid doesn’t even exist. As I mentioned before, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides prima facie scientific evidence, of the type that you demanded, for isolation, purification and distinct identification of the virus. Scientists have shouldered the burden of proof, now the burden rests on those who deny that proof. You claim, in broad terms that many such studies “on closer examination, have not actually done so”, but you do not provide any evidence in support of that assertion. The subsequent sentence “Numerous FOI requests worldwide for records of isolation have resulted in "no records found" (any administrative exclusions notwithstanding)” is irrelevant as I explained above (FOI requests provide evidence of government records, not scientific results). My main point here is that science is a specialized kind of knowledge, not the same as philosophy, and making any scientific claim requires the integration of massive amounts of existing knowledge. At best, you can reasonable declare that you are personally not persuaded that covid exists, just as you could reasonable declare that you are personally not persuaded that the Earth is a sphere since you have not directly seen any evidence supporting that claim and you do not accept the claims of myriad others who claim that the Earth is a sphere. I do not actually accept your premise that “isolation, purification and distinct identification” is a logical requirement for an existential proof of an existent, but I have acceded to the demand and provided one reference, in the hopes that you would engage the science and abandon the irrelevant political rhetoric.
  14. I should acknowledge that I casually played the legality card in my previous post, which was irrelevant. I do think that his scheme was illegal, but that is only relevant in deciding whether he is morally fit to be the supreme law enforcer of the US, and in no way supports the existing efforts to prosecute of exclude him from the ballot.
  15. If this conversation were being conducted on generic social media, it would be contextually correct to think that the central issue is legality therefore prosecution and other legal sanctions such as ballot-barring would be the ultimate motivation for the discussion. But this isn't Facebook or Saloon, this is an Objectivist forum. I think I am sufficiently on record as opposing the conclusion that there was a clear violation of the law by Trump. What should be most important here is moral evaluation of his character, and whether he is fit to be president of the United States, given the enormous power (improperly) given to that position. Trump's (attempted) maneuver is sufficient evidence of his despotic African / Russian dictator style of governance, and he deserves condemnation for that. It does not follow from that that Biden is the better choice, we are basically scrod for the next term. The vote fraud card is very dangerous since it is used by both winners and losers in actually fair but not 100% perfect elections in many Third World nations, and often leads to riots and in some cases military intervention. It's not a card that we should play lightly, instead we should grant that we lost, if "we" lost, and look to see what should be done in the future to improve the message to the voters.
  16. It's fucking hilarious that you think I said anything even vaguely implying that any form of speech is illegal. You should learn to read more carefully.
  17. Trump’s primary attack on the American way of conducting elections was a threat, not an realized act of war. Specifically, illegally declaring (selected parts) of the constitutionally-mandated election procedure (the counting of electoral votes) to be invalid. This did not happen, and I can’t say that it was more than a rumination. He was defeated at the polls and that should have been the end of it. It is not important that he did not actually force Pence to implement his plan, what matters is that he even considered it in the first place.
  18. So to paraphrase your response, you personally have no evidence to support the claim, instead you believe a claim made by others. Which is pretty much the same basis that 99.99% of people on the planet have for the affirmative belief that covid exists: they have heard an “authoritative request”, they have no reason to deny the claim and some reason to accept the claim – an act of faith. Clearly, we have an epistemological crisis: contradictory positions, so how do we chose between rejecting vs. accepting the claim (that covid is real)? In reviewing some of the voluminous files provided on the web page, I concluded that the requests themselves were misconceived, in terms of what constitutes a record under 45 CFR Part 5, which starts by clarifying that The FOIA does not require us to perform research for you or to answer your questions. The FOIA does not require agencies to create new records or to perform analysis of existing records; for example, by extrapolating information from existing agency records, reformatting publicly available information, preparing new electronic programs or databases, or creating data through calculations of ratios, proportions, percentages, trends, frequency distributions, correlations, or comparisons. Ill-defined requests for “any information on this topic” are very likely to run into the 2 hour search limit. As a meta-test test of FOIA compliance, you might therefore request something more specific, such as information contained in the article “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies”. I don’t believe that this published article would be produced by a FOIA request, because scientific publication on a topic within the scope of what a federal agency “does” are not automatically records subject to disclosure. The regulation states that “Disclosure of the requested records must be meaningfully informative about government operations or activities. The disclosure of information that already is in the public domain, in either the same or a substantially identical form, would not be meaningfully informative if nothing new would be added to the public's understanding”. Discovery of some fact about covid in the above publication would not “shed light on the operations or activities of the government”, therefore would be outside the penumbra of FOIA. There are better tools for searching for scientific information. A FOIA request is about as appropriate as would be using a hammer to remove a screw.
  19. Just to get clear on questions of evidence, what is your evidence that all 220 FOI agencies have responded with "no records found", and exactly what record was requested (i.e. your proof that the specific request was made)?
  20. I got something about 16 months ago: mostly a persistent sore throat like strep (without the blotches). My wife was also feeling crappy, then she hollers down to me that she had covid, I took the test again and the test device showed lines. I infer that I had covid, but I don’t “know, with certainty” that I did. The main question, then, was “what should I do?”. I decided to take the benevolent path and not risk transmitting it to others for the requisite time, and just waited to get over it. The alternative would be to assume that I don’t have any bio-disease, so maybe I would go shopping or partying, or something. In other words, when you don’t know “for absolute positive certain” what the correct conclusion is, you have to carefully weigh risks and the quality of knowledge that you have. My direct knowledge was pretty minimal, everything that I know about covid is second to third hand (I don’t classify “common knowledge” as “knowledge”, and gen-pop health services announcements are also not “knowledge”, they are social-management strategies). Mask facts and distancing facts were prime examples of ideologically-engineered conclusion which had a mild relation to scientific fact. The 6’ figure was derived from standards applied to doctors, a number for reducing chances of getting whatever the patient was emitting (20’ closer to the Truly Safe distance, also completely impractical for ordinary human interaction). I decided to read a couple of serious (paywall) articles when the plague first happened, and like everything else in medicine (and science in general), I found multiple tiers of information. Popular media and politicians rely on the lowest level of pseudo-information, the executive summary. This is strictly a series of conclusions and recommendations, and no evidence – the existence of evidence is implied. You can either accept or reject the popular statements, but to do so on a reasoned basis, you have to work hard, ultimately you have to engage the peer-reviewed scientific literature. This goes for covid, lipids, pollution, global warming, species endangerment, homelessness, and every other hot-button political issue. I just don’t have the bandwidth: I’m gonna do what makes sense for me, knowing that death is always possible and fearful death-avoidance isn’t living. Others may prefer to prolong their process of dying, in the mistaken belief that living is “not being dead yet”. Anyhow, I assume your grandfather had something, which the professionals decided was “covid”, and it isn’t important whether covid is “one thing” or “a class of things”. In terms of declaring what they (the CDC mouthpieces) should have said or done, the one thing that I would fault them for is the huge missed opportunity to elevate the population’s understanding of science. They could have focused more on evidence and logic, rather than the resulting conclusions. The main reason why they did not was that suggestion any possibility of doubt would encourage irrational rejection of conclusions that were not absolutely, definitively and with certitude proven beyond imaginable doubt. Some aspects of this thread are ridiculous, mainly the implied conspiracy theory that nothing actually happened, it was like the staged landings on the moon. Sweeping aside the innuendos and nit-pickings at the lower margins of the science, there are only two important questions. First, was there a disease (or class of…) – can we rationally be Holocaust-deniers about the event? I say no, it happened, details of the disease are of lesser importance. The second question is what the government should have done, and that is pretty obvious at least here: nothing. The function of government is not disease control. But we have been saying this for decades, covid presents nothing new, and IMO losing serious ground in that struggle for hearts and minds. It is up to the person who cares to find the evidence that objectively (in)validates their conclusions. It would have been nice if the CDC had packaged the science better, but there shouldn’t be an official governmental voice of science in the first place, so applying a “should” to a “shouldn’t” requires you to embrace a contradiction.
  21. Genetics does not immunize against racism, which is an ideology that is chosen for any number of bad reasons, even self-hatred. The real question is whether a person is properly deemed racist for holding an ideology that some ethnic group is intrinsically inferior or superior. The real answer to that is “of course, that is what it means to be racist”. Unqualified plural nouns can be interpreted in many ways, so a statement like “the Indians did not recognize property rights and where essentially constant nomads” might mean “all Indians” (just as “dogs are mammals” means that all dogs are mammals), or “most Indians”, “many Indians” or “more than 1 Indian”. In light of that fact, it is an error to speak vaguely, the part that is not clear to me is whether you mean “most Indians”, or “many Indians”. The other part of the racist canard is whether a person believes that an alleged inferiority / superiority is due to genetics, versus culture. It is not at all hard to dismiss the genetics-based stance, but it has also become socially unacceptable to embrace anything that smacks of cultural evaluation, however there are exceptions carved out where it is acceptable to criticize a person for “white-savior” or “male dominance” behavior (usually based not on the behavior itself, but on the bases of the fact that the person is white or male, or has a philosophy). In evaluating Rand’s beliefs about Indians, based on paltry documentary evidence, we have to look to see what is the most likely interpretation reflecting her actual intent. She does refer to generic unqualified “American Indians”. She says that she believes the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayals of Indians, without also stating her beliefs on the most unsympathetic Hollywood portrayal of whites, which I also believe. Her understanding of Indians is based on a portion of Indian life in the US, that of the Plains Indians, which was indeed nomadic, a lifestyle where one’s means of survival depend on non-systematic rights to land plus corporate ownership of land, not individual ownership. This is even true of contemoorary white mammal-herders. It is wholly inaccurate as a representation of even the majority of Indians (counting individuals) but it is true w.r.t. the majority of territory in the US. Even now, most of the US is made up of under-populated minimally-settled land in the middle. I live in one of those states where the majority of land is not owned by individuals, it is held by “the tribal chief”, to be administered “for the benefit of the tribe”. I find post-hoc historical criticism to be supremely annoying because it is typically carried out in a factual and philosophical vacuum. The historical brutality of the Catholic Church to my historical peoples can or cannot be excused because they were taming a group of irrational savages, by teaching them different forms of irrational savagery. The irrational savages some of whom settled America gave way to an increase in rational men who build cities and industries, though there are still way too many people who are not on board with the program of living rationally. Historical analysis is completely pointless and irrelevant to anything, other than the academic discipline of “historical criticism”. The use of force is still not under the control of objective law – that is a goal to which we aspire, not a state of grace that we have reached. What we have now is better than what we had then, and this is a general truth about human progress. The valid criticism that can be leveled against people in the past is not that they were irrational, it is that they were ignorant. If you didn’t know that fact before this moment, I would not criticize you for being irrational, but a man who has had the truth explained to him and still rejects that truth without valid reason to do so, that man is irrational.
  22. What she actually said is reproduced in Ayn Rand Answers (ed. by Robert Mayhew), pp. 102-104.
  23. I guess I would not deny that such a perspective exists, but it is confused (maybe just “average confused”, not “hopelessly confused”). If you want tasty bacon, it (the experience) is a value to you. Perhaps it is the worst food for you for some reason, so you gotta give us some rational hook here. I’ll make something up: tasty bacon triggers an uncontrollable 2 lb. 5,000 calorie feeding frenzy, which may have negative health effects, thus bacon is also a disvalue (unless you value death). We have two values, and they both are slotted in the hierarchy according to a single goal, living qua man. The things under discussion – the experience of bacon, remaining physically healthy – just is. It’s when you use some logic to integrate these abstracted facts into a system of choices that value becomes by definition “moral”, a code for guiding choices of action. The thing that you value is not the moral rule derived by some logical process, the value is either the experience of bacon or the benefits of abstaining from bacon. “Eat bacon no more than once every two weeks” is a moral rule, derivable from a hierarchy of values, “Eat bacon whenever you desire” is a different rule, not rationally derivable from the facts that gave you the preceding moral rule. The idea of “hierarchy” seems to be too confusing for most people to handle, especially when speaking of rules like “Stay healthy” or “Enjoy life”. Instead, (too) many people devise absolute rules like “never eat bacon”, as though there is an equivalence between bacon and plutonium (I have an absolute rule against eating plutonium, the ultimate death metal). In some cases, a thing can be abused to the point that it contradicts the reasoning that justifies placing it in a certain position in your cognitive hierarchy. The pure selfish-utilitarian theory of value has a particular central purpose in life: slab-avoidance, which is a mis-identification. The eudaimonist theory of value posits a different purpose: living, as an active process. There is a third more widespread view that I have ignored, the cult-of-death theory that says that you should not exist but you must exist until you inevitably die as a sacrificial animal.
  24. The value of a table is not part of its identity. The properties of an existent define its identity, and a property is a fact of the existent that explains what it does. A table can be made of metal or of wood, it can be red or white (you can add other properties of tables, and consider the relationship between what the thing does and that property). You can even reduce high level properties (like “red”) to more elementary, indirectly discernable properties (insert list of molecules and textbook information about light). The act of valuing (by a particular individual) as a property of that individual is likewise reducible to a complex fact, viz. an existing hierarchy of values and knowledge of self and the world around you that an individual has. I don’t value that brick-red metal table compared to this amberish wooden table for various functional and aesthetic reasons, whereas my brother values the red metal table more (we don’t need to inquire deeply into why we have different interests, but he needs tables that won’t catch fire). My valuing is not subjective, it is objective and well thought out, but it isn’t universal to all humans because not all humans live my life and have my nature. I hereby challenge the distinction between objective and subjective value as useless therefore invalid, instead I would distinguish rational and irrational value systems or applications of systems to facts. One value held by many people is “accumulation of wealth”, another is “expansion of knowledge”. In the world that actually exists, these and other values are independent values. One might value money more than knowledge, or the opposite, and from that difference could follow a career difference. Galt was not irrational in taking a low-paying janitorial job, given the disvalue of the alternative. You can reason to the hierarchy “money over knowledge”, or to the hierarchy “knowledge over money”, in fact to some extent you must reason to one of these when evaluating job options. With my knowledge of my own nature, I end up reasoning to one ranking, which is rational (the product of non-contradictory identification). Perhaps you can expand my knowledge and show me that the opposite ranking is actually better suited to my nature, but that hasn’t been done. “Market value” is useful only as a crude predictor of the future, it has little relation to an actual cognitive object, a hierarchy of values. It is at best a standard by which you can compare your cognitive system to that of a large selection of society. The seller might want to unload the devalued item quickly, or they may want more money and can wait for a customer who is willing to pay more (different seller demands). The customer might want to spend less money, or they might have a strong desire for the particular item or an immediate need for an item of that type (different buyer demands). If you and I know each other’s respective values and other relevant circumstances, we can probably arrive at a price, aided with the law of supply and demand. Most sales are conducted in a knowledge vacuum, and you can only know “average price”, not a value system. “Subjective value” is distinguished under the law from “market value” because the legal system needs a definite way to address knowledge lacunae, i.e. the situation where a person is held liable for damage to another person’s property and the other person declared that the goldfish is worth $10,000,000 to him. Market value is also useful in setting the price attached to an offer, especially in real estate, so that you know whether the house will stay on the market unloved for years. Price is not the same as value, but it is a result of different value hierarchies, especially the difference between the value system of the seller and the value system of the buyer.
  25. It is true that the roots of Objectivism can be traced back some three thousand years (not ten), but the soil that it is rooted in is found in Greece. Western philosophy has been influenced by numerous Asian streams, however Aristotle cannot be said to have been influenced by Christianity or Judaism. Centuries later, the Romans welded Plato and Jesus together to create a still-living hydra monster, but we cannot generalize these secondary developments as “Western philosophy” thereby tainting Objectivism with improper Christian underpinnings. It is also true that Objectivism has a normative trend – there are “rules”. Rules are not a recent invention, indeed they substantially predate the evolution of humans, or mammals. Obviously rules in the sense of explicit moral codes are the exclusive property of humans because only humans have language, the tool for encoding explicit moral codes, and we may presume that such rules have been around for over 100,000 years. Mostly they would have been in the form “Give me your stuff or I’ll kill you”, or “Touch my stuff and I’ll kill you”. The dominant putative authority for moral rules across the globe has been the supernatural, except that the ancient Greeks sought to devise moral rules deriving from nature (as did the Cārvāka of India, who vanished), and this is the essence of Aristotilean and Objectivist ethics. If Objectivism were a synthesis of 10 millenia of world philosophy, it would be incoherent as Christianity is, especially in its modern instantiations. It is very clear from the historical record that Rand eliminates millenia of prior “synthesis” to find the Aristolilean core, then developed and perfected it into Objectivism. Identifying that philosophical root is what makes Objectivism radical. I don’t deny that in the 60’s the leftist movement redefined the meaning of “radical”, but I also don’t care. The reason why we should not just look at outcomes is because inspection of outcomes is vastly inferior to an understanding of actual causation. We now have rampant outcome-based systems of pseudo-knowledge on our computers that threaten civilization because they are based in a neo-religious interest in superficial behavior (outcomes) rather than what causes behavior. Outcomes are just the raw data that we call on to understand causation. It is meaningful to ask what are the principles that define Protestantism, Orthodox Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. We can even ask what distinguishes Calvinism from AME-ism. The fact that there is a difference between AME-ism and Syrian Orthodoxy does not invalidate the unity of Christianity as a body of religious principles. Even within a single church (literally, a building not an institution) individuals can disagree. Because man’s behavior of chosen and man is free to choose between alternatives, we face a real quandry in characterising any philosophy or other kind of volutional behavior by humans. The integrationist viewpoint looks for the underlying principles that guide men’s choices, the disintegrationist viewpoint emphasises the diversity of behaviors. In order to judge a culture, you have to first identify the culture, meaning that you have to know what its causal principles are, and what essential properties distinguish it from other cultures. It is not an essential property of Christianity that Shabbos is on Sunday, even though that is a property distinguishing SDA from other Christian sects. That is one sense in which Christianity “speaks with many voices”, and we can multiply Protestant disunity by noting many other non-essential differences such as abstinence from alcohol, abjuring homosexuality, belief in credobaptism, doctrines regarding sin, the essentiality of sacraments etc. The question should not be whether you can find differences between individuals, the question should be whether a particular concept is valid in the first place, and if so, what are its defining features. I am lightly skeptical about the validity of the concept “modern Judeo-Christian culture”, as opposed to “Jewish culture” and “Christian culture”. Rather than defining the unity in terms of religion, I would define that unity based on geography: western civilization. As it happens, Christianity spread along with other aspects of western civilization, and the Judeo-prefix is a recognition that western culture is not exclusively Christian in religion. I would prefer the label “Religious western culture”, which is distinct from “atheist western culture”, but still similar in being “western culture”. Then any reference to “modern Judeo-Christian culture” simply directs our attention to the religious aspects of western culture. By inspection of the texts and behavior, we can identity a certain “Judeo-Christian” unity, even thought here there are measurable differences that should be omitted. If there are professed (purported) Christians who act selfishly, you should not ask whether they believe in some part of the Bible that seems to teach selfishness, you should ask whether they simply reject the principles of their nominal religion without embracing that rejection. Crossing the line from agnosticism to atheism is extremely difficult, and I believe that many so-called Christians are only social Christians, who are unwilling to openly declare their atheism.
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