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Boydstun

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Posts posted by Boydstun

  1. Jacob, I use the words "retarded" and "idiotic" regularly, for a lot for collective actions. For the application you used the term, I think the term now favored by the with-it folks is "mentally challenged." That is Madison-Avenue-speak for "significantly mentally subnormal" I'd say.

    Plato had some serious criticisms of democracy. Have you read Bastiat's The Law? Do you know if it is read at all in India? Translated into Hindu? Do you know why socialism was the top ideology in India at the time of Nehru? What do you think of the current leader in India? He seems to be terrible on religious tolerance in the view from here.

    It seems a stretch to think of the United Nations as a world government. 

    I saw an article a few years ago in which a Brit was criticizing the US for not simply becoming an empire like Britain had been, instead of meting US international influence and responsibility in the way it does. Modern Americans, I'd say, would not make the sacrifice that British families made to sustain the empire. After the British failure of empire in the American colonies, the King kept a stronger military presence in other venues, such as India. Not only a bigger boot on the conquered, but an endless bigger burden on the Brits.

    It is my understanding that sacrifice to gods under the Rgveda is a reciprocity in which people give to gods and request things from them such as economic wellbeing and cure of disease and in which they praise past generosity of the gods. (That much in era of tribal society, although in later, chiefdom organization, sacrifice as part of rich-folk ritual to glorify and preserve life of the ruler.) Do you know if self-sacrifice per se is shown as something noble in Rgveda? In the US, the virtue of charity in both Jewish and Christian faiths, as well as virtue of self-sacrifice for others in the Christian case, has been continually planted into functions of the state. In the US, those religious values and virtues color the backgrounds of what people think the state should be doing, such as redistributing wealth, mandating conservation of energy, and serving in the military or Peace Corps. Is there a Vedic background for such functions of the state being accepted among the people in India? Is influence of Christian or Islamic religion in politics significant there?

  2. Universals and Measurement

    I argue in U&M that Rand's measurement-omission analysis of concepts implies a distinctive magnitude structure for metaphysics. This is structure beyond logical structure, constraint on possibility beyond logical constraint. Yet, it is structure ranging as widely as logical structure through all the sciences and common experience. I uncover this distinctive magnitude structure, characterizing it by its automorphisms, by its location among mathematical categories, and by the types of measurements it affords. I uncover a structure to universals implicit in Rand's theory that is additional to recurrence structure. 

    Several years after writing U&M, I developed my own metaphysics, akin to Rand's, but significantly different from hers. For the future, on the ontology side, I expect my own philosophy of mathematics to have taken for definition at the outset, as mentioned above: mathematics is the discipline studying the formalities of situation, where situation is one of my categories as presented in my fundamental paper Existence, We, and the formal is divided between the foundational formalities which in that paper I introduced as belonging-formalities (in the world regardless of our discernment) and tooling-formalities (our set-theoretic [or better, perhaps, categoric-theoretic {in the sense of categories in mathematics; sets being one such category}] characterization of belonging-formalities.) Formalities of situation would cover both of those formalities. Formalities of my other two categories that are not entity—character and passage—would belong to logic, rather than mathematics. If this allotment to these disciplines can indeed be shown appropriate, it would show a big advantage of my category-division of existence over Rand's category-division: entity, action, attribute, relationship. Although, whatever I am able to come up with for using my categories in ontology of mathematics, I could also probably mimic using Rand's categories, though that would be less tidy. It is important that I amend Rand's measurement-omission analysis of concepts, expanding it to give theory of mathematical concepts, beyond kind-concepts, in order to bring forth for her a serious epistemology of mathematics—one competitive, notably, with Kant's epistemology of mathematics.

  3. Law of libel was the principal means of governmental censorship in England and in America. Freedom of the press was not actually attained in America until the case NYT v. Sullivan. Justice Thomas has declared he wants the legal power of libel restored for public officials, like in the good old days. That would be a square regression into the days in which criticism of government officials was punishable under libel.

    I think anyone reading this text you are now reading can discern that this medium is press.

    Emergence of a Free Press by Leonard Levy is an eye-opening history.

  4. For unknown reason, the link did not hold up. I'll try again:

    Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny

    The title of that first book should have been:

    A Natural History of Human Thinking

    From the publisher:

    "Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own."

  5. 53 minutes ago, Doug Morris said:

    In another conversation I once had, someone expressed the view that all students should have to work their way through college.  She didn't say who should impose this requirement.

     

    When my father started to college, his roommate had brought with him a dairy cow. They had a deal in which if you brought your cow, tended it, and supplied milk for the cafeteria, you got waiver of some charges. That would be about 1936. By the time I went to college in the late 1960's, a student could not make enough to pay for college (and the cow deals were off). The in-state tuition would have been feasible, but not the required staying in dorms and meals in them. I was not eligible for those government-backed loans because my father made too much money. Apparently some of the society had decided that parents should pay for their children's college if they could afford to, although my father was of the older view: not. My mother, who I barely knew at that time, offered to pay for my college. (I paid for the first semester, depleting my life savings, and I took advantage of the work-study program to make a little money while in school. Also I worked a private night job.) She would take out a loan at their regular small-town bank and repay it each term. She was a second-grade school teacher.

    I don't think those government-backed loan programs were such a good idea, as they encouraged too many people to go to college. I don't think it is right for repayment of some of those loans to now be the burden of citizens who did not make those loans. (That does NOT mean one should vote against candidates this fall who favor such "forgiveness" of those loans if the opponent is an anti-abortionist [such as Gov. Abbott]. Maybe just don't vote, if that is the opponent.)

  6. SL, I listened to the first 15 minutes (a big listen for me—reading is a lot faster). I doubt the influence among new professors heading a certain way on account of the American War in Vietnam and the upheaval on college campuses over that War. The long-term effect of the students and others protesting that war and changing minds about it was more plausibly and importantly that GW Bush had to go with call up of the Guard to make his aggression in Iraq, because the public has remained suspicious of foreign wars in which we were not attacked to this day, ever since the American War in Vietnam, and they were not going to allow return of the draft, notwithstanding the registration system the old military interventionists succeeded in getting back in place in around 1980. This I'm sure of: No scholar landing a job as professor in the hard sciences or mathematics at my alma mater got their position on account of political/cultural agendas. They had to succeed so far as they did by the same old hard competition in their subject matters of research, same as it ever was. One thing is very different in the culture generally and in what is subject in college classes since back in my time, and that is talk of sexuality. That was not something that would be mentioned when I was in school, just like in the wider culture back then. I do think it is ridiculous to have toleration classes and fields of study in that area. It is not that difficult for students, even before college, to be respectful of other people not like themselves, and to not beat them up physically or verbally. Where were there parents on this before college? I am suspicious of any talk favoring anti-wokeness, however. Racial prejudice, especially white against black has continued without any gap since I was a child in this country. Things are enormously better legally on that score today, thanks to the activism in the 1960's mainly. But the racism continues significantly, even if not so acute as in my parents when I was growing up. I don't mean that special courses should be imposed to try to nip racists in the bud; that is futile and is not how we made the revolution on racial equality and integration that we did make. And of course, white students should not be made to feel guilty because their ancestors were not slaves in America. That campaign toward making people feel guilty over things like Original Sin has a source in white tradition we readily recognize; it is not coming from black leaders, I've noticed; Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example,  wrote against that guilt-push a decade ago in connection with any rational notion of 'white privilege'. I don't think there is anything wrong with a teacher or, later, a professor, calling out a disrespectful student concerning race. When I was in sixth grade, we got a new teacher at our school (1960) mainly to be the school's music teacher, but she also taught our class some main subjects. One day a boy used the word "niggers". I don't think I'd have been using that, as from church I knew that racial prejudice was wrong and as we knew, notwithstanding the continual hateful usage by our folks at home, that you should say "coloreds" or "negroes" (in those days), in the reference (negative for sure) the boy was making. The new teacher said: "What did you say?! Don't you ever use that word in this class again!" (This was a school all white at that time, I should have said.) It stuck. At college, in an English lit class, there was this one young man who was some sort of conservative, apparently, and he would denigrate this young woman student who was known to be socialist. He would refer to her as "spook," which was apparently a derogatory coinage at the time, and the professor put a stop to that. She later tried (but failed, as I recall) to commit suicide because it seemed everyone was against her. I don't think it is really all that difficult to be respectful towards other sorts of people, and anyone not yet getting that by college surely should be woken up. I suppose the Lewis and Clark college in the video is private, so they can have their dumb-ass sociological efforts if they want. I did not like the focus of the speaker in the video on importance or value of open discussion of public affairs on college campuses. I rated such activities as appropriate for our late-night student bull sessions; as far as outsiders coming on campuses for such presentations or discussions, I'd class it with having football at the university (I never attended a game). By the way, Milton Friedman could not speak on campuses in the 1960's because of being shouted away by leftists. So things are not so different as the man in the video would like to represent them, although, the trash going on by some administrators at some campuses he flags are indeed appalling and not like what was going on in my era.

  7. 15 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

    Modern public education is trash.

    Like "public" health, "public" education serves the State and purportedly the public, while neglecting the individual whose personal health and education for successfully living their own lives is neglected and sacrificed in favor of whatever "statistical" advantage the group can acquire from that sacrifice.

    Whatever you call the mess education is in, someone is to blame... even if perhaps we do not know who exactly that is.

    SL, did you attend public schools? Did your daughter attend public schools?

  8. 8 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

    Could you say a little more about your and Dewey's childhoods?

    For what it's worth, in that anecdote I posted, the S's and Mrs. B.'s husband were all professors.  Mrs. B. worked in education at a different level.

     

    John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont. The youth worked in the lumber yards there. His father was in the Union army during the Civil War, quartermaster for a regiment of Vermont cavalry in Virginia. The father afterwards, in Burlington, was a grocer and tobacconist. He was from an old farming family, and John regularly visited and did chores on his grandfather’s farm.

    I did not live on a farm, but my folks had grown up on farms in Oklahoma in the 1920’s and 1930’s. We lived on a two-acre lot outside OKC, where our family built our house during the 1950’s. Our folks raised us about like they had been raised on the farms. We did not have livestock, no fowls or milk cow. We had fruit trees, a row of grapes, dewberries, fruit trees, and a vegetable garden large enough to supply our family of six for the entire year by canning and freezing. I raised bees and sold the honey in the neighborhood. We children fed the dogs before our breakfast, and in the winter, I would start a fire in the fireplace. We cut firewood with our father out on the farms and brought it in the trailor our father had built to our acreage (via the old Route 66, later via I40). We butchered cow and hog on the farms. We children were right in on it. Children had little freedom, no allowance, and no pay for work for the family work projects. Whenever we could make money, we were encouraged to do so, and we each put half of whatever we earned into an individual savings account for college someday. My brother and I made money doing yard work in the neighborhood of mostly well-to-do folks such as lawyers, doctors, and architects. We caddied at the nearby country club, where our family could not afford to be members. (We had privileges, however, at the Officers’ Club at the AFB where our father worked as a civilian.) We children worked most all the time in home hours in those years. I recall the period in which we were laying the stone forming the outside wall of our house. Lydia, my stepmother would have selected and stacked up stones to be laid in the next segment. She cut and faced them too with hammer and chisel, as did we children on days not for school. After our father got home from work he would lay the stones, and my brother and I would mix the mortar, which we colored with a black powder. The next morning, that mortar needs to be scraped out in front so the stones have maybe an 3/4 inch overhang. This we did with 1 x 2 wood with a flathead nail, about 8 penny, protruding from one end just the right amount beyond the wood. We children would scrape the mortar before going to school. Our grammar school was only about 3/4 mile away, and we could walk. When our father went to school as a child, it was far, and they got there by horse, four children on a horse. (I don’t know if the horse had to wait all day till school was out or what.) We children knew that we were being raised much differently than our classmates and that our situation was more like our cousins growing up in the country and those living next door to us.

    Hardness.jpg

  9. Doug, this is an excellent topic. An informed critical assessment of the views put forth by Rand and Peikoff in this area is long overdue.

    Education – Dewey

    In his 1915 Schools of Tomorrow, John Dewey describes various new types of schools in various parts of America  and beyond reflecting the influences of Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Montessori. “On the basis of their results and his own philosophical and psychological analysis, Dewey indicates what reforms are required if the promise of equal educational opportunity in a democracy is to be achieved. These are merely sketched in outline. The philosophical foundations of Dewey’s theory of education developed in a more systematic way were published subsequently in his Democracy and Education.” (From Sidney Hook’s Introduction to volume 8 of John Dewey – Middle Works, 1899–1924. Hook was Peikoff’s Ph.D. dissertation director.)

    Against common misconceptions of Dewey’s views on schooling, Hook remarks that Dewey did not advocate voiding of authority of method or “the discipline of things.” He did not advocate leaving the student free to learn or not learn anything at any time. He did not advocate having an unstructured curriculum, he opposed only curriculum imposed on the child without any relationship to her psychological nature and the stages of her development. He opposed the common past methods of imparting learning designed to make it easy for adults and having the consequence that virtues stressed for the child are obedience, docility, and uncritical acceptance of the adult’s views. Dewey did not oppose the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic. “Reading, writing, arithmetic and geography will always be needed”, Dewey writes. Although, he would have them taught in their relations and application to each other. He was a champion of vocational education, and he kept in view that most students would become under obligation to earn a living. An individual’s choice of vocation is profound and far-reaching. “Each individual should be capable of self-respecting, self-supporting and intelligent work,” Dewey writes, and education should equip individuals for making an intelligent choice of vocation. Education in Dewey’s time and ours is no longer confined to the cultivation of gentlemen of leisure. Dewey urged reconstruction of education to provide individuals with more opportunities  for personal growth and enrichment of personal life, but also for intelligent participation in the democratic process.

    Dewey spells out and praises highly Montessori schooling as described in her book The Montessori Method (his treatment is on pages 302–13 of the cited volume of Dewey’s works). Evidently, there were few if any such schools in America at that time. He notes a difference with aims between Montessori and his American progressive approach. Like Montessori he recognizes the value of liberty of the child in educating her. But he looks also to the larger freedom of using intelligence in situations typical of life, which are social. Children need to have the experience of some working together in common pursuits. It is not enough, in social training, to learn not to interfere with others as they execute their own ends. But overall, Dewey applauded the rise of Montessori education method, which had gone into effect in Italy.

    At the time Dewey was writing this, I suspect that almost universally, children were engaged in working together with family on work projects before and after school, starting before breakfast, really. He would have experienced that as a child also. My childhood was like that, which was in the 1950’s. So it is a puzzle to me why he thought that was a skill and interest to be invested in school. Perhaps he had come to know of children (of professors?) who did not have childhood home life like his or mine. Perhaps he was interested in children learning and becoming friendly toward joint work with people not family for common ends. That is important for employment in the real world, I’ve noticed. Then too, America at the time was swelling up for the decision to make war on the Kaiser.

  10. Frederick Cookinham has given the following notice on Facebook today: 

    I just got an email with some sad news. My friend Anne C. Heller has died of cancer at 71. She was the author of AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE (2009), the second biography of Rand after THE PASSION OF AYN RAND (1986), by Barbara Branden. The email came from Anne's husband, David De Weese.
     
    I first met Anne in 2003. She came to one of my Ayn Rand-themed walking tours. She said that she was thinking of writing a biography of Rand; she had not made up her mind. She took all five of my Rand tours, and we had a lot of fun for the next six years, sharing information on Rand. She said when we met that she did not know much about Rand. I said that this was a good thing. Barbara's strength was also her weakness as a biographer: she had been close to Rand for 18 years, and then had a rather explosive parting of the ways. So you couldn't beat Barbara for access and knowledge of her subject, but she had her own agenda. She was too close to her subject. Anne would be coming to the subject with a fresh pair of eyes, as we proofreaders say. No ax of her own to grind. In 2009, Anne published a fair and objective biography. I like to say that in a world of Rand idolators and Rand bashers, some of us aspire to be Rand scholars, and present the public with accurate and complete information on the life and thought of a world-famous writer.
     
    Anne next wrote a biography called HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES. I heard Anne being interviewed on the radio about her new book. The interviewer said that Rand and Arendt had nothing in common. Anne set him straight. Rand and Arendt were both world-famous twentieth century Jewish women writers. They both came to America as European refugees from totalitarianism.
  11. 1 hour ago, Doug Morris said:

    What about interval measurement?

     

    Oh yes. I think we should insert interval measurement between ordinal and ratio measurement. Thanks.

    Suppes et al. discuss this in chapter 4 of FOUNDATIONS OF MEASUREMENT(vol.1), which is what Suppes is presenting in lecture in the video. He covers representation of different measurement structures, more briefly than in FM, in 3.4 of his final book REPRESENTATION AND INVARIANCE OF SCIENTIFIC STRUCTURES (2002).

    Patrick Suppes was a wonder. In the American Philosophical Association meetings in the Pacific division, I had the great experience of hearing Suppes both in lecture and as an audience participant in presentations by others. By then his hair was all white. His mind and knowledge and memory still fantastic.

    Robert Nozick wades into this sort of measurement in his paper "Interpersonal Utility Theory" which I heard him read at the University of Chicago in 1982. The large room was packed. This paper is in his book SOCRATIC PUZZLES (1997). 

  12. Yes. I did not think that book (2014) successfully advanced philosophy of mathematics or what Rand's epistemology might contribute to philosophy of mathematics. However, it is a good entry place that makes some areas of mathematics accessible, and for that, it can be added to the list above of places to get some grasp of those areas. As far as a philosophy of mathematics tied to a more general philosopher goes, I think the book that same year by James Franklin (2014) AN ARISTOTELIAN REALIST PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS – Mathematics as the science of Quantity and Structure is better.

    (On the ontology side, I expect my own philosophy of mathematics to have taken for definition at the outset: mathematics is the discipline studying the formalities of situation, where situation is one of my categories as presented in my fundamental paper "Existence, We", and the formal is divided between the foundational formalities which in that paper I introduced as belonging-formalities (in the world regardless of our discernment) and tooling-formalities (our set-theoretic [or better, perhaps, categoric-theoretic {in the sense of categories in mathematics, as in some of the books in my list above}]; formalities of situation would cover both of those formalities. Formalities of my other two categories that are not entity—character and passage—would belong to logic, rather than mathematics. If this allotment to these disciplines can indeed be shown appropriate, it would show a big advantage of my category-division of existence over Rand's category-division: entity, action, attribute, relationship. Although, whatever I am able to come up with for using my catergories in ontology of mathematics, I could also probably mimic using Rand's categories, though that would be less tidy. It is important that I amend Rand's measurement-omission analysis of concepts, expanding it to give theory of mathematical concepts beyond kind-concepts in order to bring forth for her a serious epistemology of mathematics.

    On 11/3/2014 at 11:20 AM, Boydstun said:

    Robert Knapp's book aims to make the case that mathematics, all of it, is best characterized as the science of measurement, direct or indirect. In that general outlook, as well as in its general outlook that mathematics is about the world, it seems to fit comfortably with Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts in terms of measurement-omission. The fit is not good when examined more closely.

    To characterize mathematics as the science of measurement, we need to integrate such a perspective with modern theory of measurement as lain out in the three-volume work Foundations of Measurement. Therein one learns the ordered, hierarchical relations of the various measurement structures, which for single-dimension measurement includes these plateau: absolute (counting), then ordinal, then ratio measurement. That middle one is extremely important for Rand’s measurement-omission analysis of concepts. She mistakenly supposed that all magnitude structures in the world or in consciousness possess the suit of traits making ratio measurement appropriate to them, but that we have ordinal measurement to make do when we have not yet learned to apply ratio measurement to a domain (such as to value relations and to states of consciousness). That mistake is easily remedied, and does not undermine her measurement-omission way of analyzing concepts: There are magnitude structures in reality to which these various forms of measurement are appropriate, including structures for which ordinal measurement is appropriate, but ratio measurement is not.*

    Counting is often thought of as a way of measuring, and that is also the way it is analyzed by the authors of Foundations of Measurement. In Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, counting was not what Rand had in mind, in topic, as measurement. To have a theory of concepts in which counting was the type of measurement being omitted in conceptual abstraction from instances would not be a novel theory, for that much is true of any theory of concepts. But to say that conceptual abstraction can be understood as not only that which-one sort of suspension of specifics, but further, as suspension of particular measure-value along shared dimension(s) of the particular instances falling under the concept, now that, that is a distinctive theory. Let measure-value be so little as relative places in a linear ordering, even then the theory is substantial and original.

    Yet in Dr. Knapp’s book, I’m finding no treatment of ordinal measurement, hyperordinal measurement, or in the case of multidimensional magnitude structures, such geometries as affine (which is the measurement structure appropriate to spacetime in the situations for which special relativity applies). Our author goes with a definition of measurement stated by Rand, one that  (unfortunately for her theory of concepts) implies that all measurement is ratio-scale measurement. I say broaden your definition of measurement. Knapp does portray counting as a form of measurement, in addition to ratio-scale measurement; the forms of measurement between them in the hierarchy of measurement is neglected. Oddly, for a treatment of mathematics aiming for concordance with Rand’s epistemology, there is no consideration of ordinal measurement in this book. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Odd too is the treatment of groups as measurement of symmetry taken as related to the broader category similarity, yet without assimilation of Rand’s measurement analysis of similarity into the account. Again, please correct me if I’m just missing it.

     

  13. At the entrance of Plato’s Academy was the inscription: LET NO ONE IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE! I quite agree. No general epistemology having no competent epistemology of mathematics is a real competitor in general epistemology. Mathematical knowledge is crucial in the conceptual power of humans. These books are some of those I study in my quest for formulating a competent epistemology of mathematics, and some may be excellent for interest of some readers here.

     

    THE JOY OF ABSTRACTION

    Eugenia Cheng

     

    CATEGORIES FOR THE WORKING PHILOSOPHER

    Elaine Landry, editor

     

    MATHEMATICS: FORM AND FUNCTION

    Saunders MacLane

     

    THE FOUNDATIONS OF GEOMETRY AND THE NON-EUCLIDEAN PLANE

    George E. Martin

     

    ALGEBRA

    Saunders MacLane and Garrett Birkhoff

     

    MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS

    Robert Geroch

    Scan 8.jpeg

  14. The results of the orbiting MICROSCOPE test of the equivalence principle—the equivalence of inertial mass to gravitational mass—which is the fundamental proposition necessary for Einstein's geometric theory of gravity General Relativity are the most accurate we have yet attained. They affirm no difference of the inertial and gravitational mass in a measurement with accuracy down to one part in a thousand trillion. 

    MICROSCOPE physicists looked, from data gathered from April 2016 to October 2018, for any difference in gravitational effect on two cylinders: one 301-gram titanium alloy, the other 402-gram platinum alloy. Physical Review Letters  

    Ye 'ole Eötvös Experiment

  15. In the USA, the right to liberty is inalienable. Under the law, you cannot sell yourself into slavery. Contracts of master-slave roles (labor and property) in sexual relationships are not enforceable under law. Autonomy is legally protected, and your desire to cease being autonomous is overruled by the legal aim to preserve autonomy as a general social condition. I'd say proper function of a just legal system is systematic protection of individual autonomy; autonomy is human being as an end in himself. Where does the moral value of consent come from? It is no ethical primary, it should not be a blank moral  presumption, ripped from conceptual context and conceptual genesis, but for the shallow libertarian thinker as philosopher (such as Murray Rothbard).

    The right to life is rightly inalienable. You cannot sell or give away the power of decision to kill you to someone else unless you are entering a condition in which your health no longer supports your capability for executive reason. A system of liberty is a system prohibiting transfers of autonomy.

    Law has more important issues calling for remedy than consensual fights to the death between persons, at least for our lifetimes. There need be no law concerning suicides or duals or concerning the imagined scenario, except as law preventing law being drawn into contractual or tort law in connection with such episodes (were such imagined scenario to become instanced in the real world of USA).

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