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Look around your home. Is there anything there that gives you energy? Validates your consciousness? Reminds you of the unique manifestations of your identity? Any song, book, film, tactile object that resonates with the possibility of a goal worth aiming toward? Is there something you could put on your wall that will add a spring to your step, or release the tense confusion of a recent argument because it resonates with a problem solving mindset? As one works toward building a solid foundation in reality, aesthetics is where humanity has a chance to evolve creatively through the contribution of each individual. It takes a great deal of personal resilience to create something that is true, to the epic depths of your mind, regardless of whether another person might recognize some universal appeal.

Any federal property and any interstate transportation, I believe. I don't think 'unconstitutional' is the barrier it once was.

A national mask mandate on federal property. I believe that it would be unconstitutional for him to mandate it nationally but time will tell.

The court's struck down the entity that is currently sitting in the office of the honorable of the governor of the state of Michigan's executive order akin to being able to make law ex-nilo. Now it has been delegated to the Michigan Department of Health to enforce the regulations (that they create ex-nilo.) The Nanny state requires willing charges to submit to having a nanny. The department of de-education has been cultivating that soil since implementing compulsory education. The operation of moral law does not require anyone's belief. And by extension: nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Then Trump did not push the idea that there was massive fraud. And he promoted trust in the judicial system to sort it out. And peace reigned in the Capitol Building on January 6 2021. And then I woke up.

My objection to the extensional view of meaning is that people who speak a language know the meaning of words in the language, but they do not know the extension of a concept, or even what an extension is. They have the capacity to compute the extension (once you tell them what an extension is). But as we know, there are enough competing theories of “meaning” that you have to start with a more important question “What do you mean by ‘mean’?”. We have to exclude unrelated senses such as “arithmetic mean”, “cruel” (where, in fact, the word “meaning” is not applicable, only “mean” is). Being focused on the “meaning” sense of “mean”, it is or should be clear that “meaning” refers to a mental state, thus a tree in the forest has no “meaning” except insofar as a mind deals with that tree. Furthermore, meaning is about symbols, not e.g. raw experiences. Once you reduce experience to symbols, you can talk about meaning. In the course of eliminating words spelled “mean”, I did not get rid of a collection of senses more related to the linguistic concept of meaning, for example “What do you mean by that?”, i.e. what are you presupposing, why are you saying that, or the even more semantic idea that some sentences can strongly suggest a conclusion without actually asserting it. Unfortunately, work in philosophy of language did not crisply weed out such “suggestive” types of meaning. Reasonable inferences about a person’s intent can often be drawn from a simple statement like “I haven’t eaten since breakfast”, but that statement literally just means that the person hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and is not necessarily a request to be fed, even though you could conclude that from the fact of saying that he hasn’t eaten. There is a connection: you draw conclusions based on something. As for extensions, what (I ask rhetorically) is an “extension”? One theory is that it is a collection of actual things, like “all of the giraffes, past, present and future”. If that is correct and meanings are extensions, what does it “mean” (vide supra) to know the meaning of “giraffe”? We can kick the can down the road saying “Yes – if you accept my account of what it means to ‘know’.” It’s not that you have actual experience with all giraffes, it’s that you have some experience that creates a mental thing (name to be discovered), and with that mental thing and the faculty of reason, you can conclude, for all x, that x is or is not a giraffe. Then what is the mental fodder for reasoning which leads to this chain of conclusions? In one view, it is the intension: or, the definition – of a concept, whose symbol is a word. Now we can dispose of extensions and intensions. If you know the definition of a concept, you can use reason to categorize anything w.r.t. that concept. You don’t need extensions, or intensions, because you have definitions of concepts, symbols that label which concept it is, and what you can do with the faculty of reason is make identifications – say what a concept refers to. In short, a sensible theory of reference, intension and extension renders these concepts superfluous, given identity, definition and inference.

Yes and that is the key issue, THE ENTIRE SYSTEM is corrupt is what they believe. It's not just the election system, it ALL OF IT. This is what's hard to understand. When did it start? Why? The obvious fact, just looking around us, we should be able see for the most part, we have a system that works. So there's some sort of evasion that's going on (caused by some intense blind anger). This kind of (angry) thinking (or lack of thinking) is dangerous, I mean deadly dangerous.

True and very important point. Another point to be considered by anyone who thinks it's time for armed revolution: If our current government is overthrown by force, under current philosophical and political conditions, what will replace it? I haven't read or watched The Handmaid's Tale, but based on descriptions I've seen of it, it seemed far fetched to me. Now I'm not so sure. (I should add that it is OK to have a far fetched premise in a work of fiction.)

I had quoted you as saying that the left has a "de facto monopoly" on media and social media. That conservatives and libertarians are not represented. I point to podcasts and local radio stations and forums and magazines and newspapers and on and on to demonstrate how that is not the case, at all. I don't know precisely how to parse "numbers/influence"; how influential are folks like Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones? But I did point to the fact (so far as I know, and I invite correction) that Fox News is the highest-rated cable news network. So how exactly we define "mainstream" (which seems rather besides the point to me, except for your using the term), I don't know, but I think that conservatives are fairly well represented overall. Anyone who wishes it has plenty of access. This seems absurd on its face, but all right. I'll ask you to please explain what "Leftist" means here, and how Brook and other Objectivist intellectuals display it?

One of the bizarrest forms of ovine behavior that I've seen is people driving all by themselves, wearing the diaper. I wonder if they are afraid of infecting themselves.

An app available for 'smartphones' has metrics of less than six feet in conjunction with a time-span of over 15 minutes, an interesting juxtaposition to superpose with an encounter generated by mere walk in a park, sans a face diaper.

I wear one when required, out of respect for the fact that a private business is required to enforce the mandate. I never decided on a consistent policy to use in situations where I have a choice. I go for walks in a public park and don't wear one, even though it's required as far as I know, because no one is around to enforce. I'm not interested in wearing one without having a good medical reason to believe they actually work. If this premise were somehow proven, and this was communicated through a source I respect, I would be more interested in wearing one, but right now I feel like this is subjugation with unproven quackery at the hands of health authoritarians.

If it were only a matter of individual rational behavior, that's easy. How hard can it be to be courteous, amenable and aware of others or even of others' grandmas back at home? One doesn't derive moral kudos from these. (Many do). So one can be flexible to different situations where other people are. And of their rights. The trouble is (the non-issue of) masking is all to do with group behavior, on the macro scale, not one's own acts. Your life isn't your own to choose. What's expected, demanded and/or mandated from one for the sake of the general, abstract, 'other' and their well-being is paramount. By governments and 'society' pressure. Predictable and evident, any citizen runs short of good will under these circumstances, and gets a resentful but vague sense of his sacrifice to others, particularly where his 'selfish' livelihood, etc., is being hurt - but lacks the necessary ethics to explain how morally right he is. Compulsory blanket masking and social distancing that over-ride one's personal assessments and choice, are just an extension of lockdowns. We are released on condition of good behavior, comparative to prisoners wearing ankle bracelets who know they can be returned to gaol at the least arbitrary slip. E.g. "Ten" are allowed to gather, but twelve? decreed unlawful and harmful by the science bureaucrats and politicos who calculate and enforce these things. Even these social metaphysicians reluctantly grasp that they need the economies to recover and -some- human activity to return. Sorry to be the grouch...

I’m my normal friendly and outgoing casual shopper and even more conspicuously, consciously while wearing my Trump 2020 mask.