Doug Morris

If you have questions about whether something is legal, you should probably ask at least one lawyer.

Some people talk about Trump leading us to less government. Leaving aside the complexities of what he has done, how long will this last? There will probably be a reaction against it, partly because of the way it was done, partly because the opposed point of view is still very strong, partly because Trump turns a lot of people off. After a few election cycles, how much better off will we be because of Trump? Might we be worse off? Also, what if he causes a nuclear war? Even if its a war elsewhere, say between Israel and Iran, that is very much against our interests.

A while back I heard someone on NPR talk about how we got here. I haven't researched this; maybe someone who has can give us more solid information. According to what I heard, when land grant colleges were created, they had a lot more places than they could fill with an appeal based on academics, so they needed another appeal to fill those places. They used athletics, creating the close association between higher education and athletics in America that looks strange to other countries. I didn't hear the person on NPR mention the issue of government meddling creating distortions, of which this would be an obvious example.

At a reunion I attended several years ago, one of my classmates was in a wheelchair and had prostheses on the lower part of both his legs. He said it was his fault because he drank water from a river, filtering it through a cloth.

DavidOdden, Numbers and concepts are both mental constructs for dealing with reality, and both exist as such, although they are not physical objects. Actual unicorns do not exist in the real world. They exist in certain imaginary worlds. In the real world we have contents of consciousness relating to unicorns, and we have actual physical objects that are representations of unicorns.

Easy Truth, I thought I made it clear that "Darth Vader" is a proper name, not a concept.

"Unicorn" is a concept that has no referent in reality but does have referents in certain fictional and folkloric contexts. "Darth Vader" is a proper name that has no referent in reality but does have a referent in at least one fictional context. I don't see much difference between them except that one is a concept and one is a proper name.

Some concepts do not have meaning in reality but do have meaning in some fictional, folkloric, or other imaginary contexts. "Unicorn" is a good example of this.

Philosophy is the science studying the fundamental relationship between Man and existence. Trying to apply the concept of "instinct" to human beings implies that we have innate ideas. Most animal species do not have ideas of any kind. They can have perceptions, associations, memories, feelings, and biologically determined behaviors, but not ideas. The concept of "instinct" is useless and misleading when applied to humans. It is also of limited value when applied to other animals because it is a copout that shirks the task of achieving understanding of what mechanisms lead those animals to act as they do.

A link of possible interest about using geometry to fight gerrymandering. http://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2017/08/04/geometry-fix-gerrymandering

If it was an inside job, what are the prospects of identifying the perpetrator?

MisterSwig, I admit I have not been following this in detail. Please note that my original post asked questions and did not make statements. My more recent post was to clarify why I thought it was worth asking a question.

One reason for concern is the indications that there may have been collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. I hope Mueller does a good and transparent enough job in his investigation to settle such questions.

I am copying the following link to a Frontline presentation about Putin's interference in USA elections. The person who presented this link finds the presentation very alarming. (She is not an Objectivist.) I have not, as yet, had time to watch this myself. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/?utm_source=promourl&utm_medium=direct&utm_campaign=frontline_2017 For anyone who has watched this or researched the matter another way, how much danger do you think we are in? Is there anything ordinary citizens can do about it?

I should have made clear that both the "yields a falsehood" sentence and the question "Does anti-reference refer to itself?" from the starting post lead to contradictions if evaluated naively, and both should be rejected as inherently circular ("paradoxical"). A statement that refers to its own logical properties such as truth, falsity, provability, or unprovability is inherently circular and therefore invalid. A statement that refers to other things about itself, such as "This is a sentence", "This is not a sentence", "This sentence is six words long", "This sentence is twenty-two words long", "This sentence is in English", "This sentence is in Swahili", "This sentence makes a statement about a sentence", or "This sentence names and analyzes the current President of the United States" can be evaluated as true or false.

The sentence ""Yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation" yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation" leads to a contradiction even though all the concepts used in it are valid concepts. What we need to do in cases like this is not to reject certain concepts but to recognize that certain sentences are inherently circular and therefore logically invalid. This also applies to certain questions, such as "Does anti-reference refer to itself?". Such statements are not true, but they are not ordinary falsehoods; in particular, their negations are not true either. Such questions cannot be correctly answered "yes" or "no"; they must be answered by pointing out their circularity.