DavidOdden

Okay, so your metric of government size is in terms of absolute dollars spent. I submit, then, that your use of the word “now” is less accurate than the alternative expression “for a very long time”, though the Wiki data only goes back 10 years. Let’s take a simpler case: who is in charge of enforcing laws against murder or theft? There is not a single answer (even setting aside the jurisdiction matter). The police may actually implement force to arrest and detain a suspect, but the individual officer does so by following objective procedural rules spelled out by their superior (the chief of police). The chief of police is (usually) appointed by the elected mayor, though a sheriff may be elected. Apart from arrest power, there is prosecution power, which is held by a different government employee, perhaps a hired city attorney (subordinate to the mayor) or an elected prosecuting attorney. Actual enforcement is the product of a further step, a trial which involves a cabal of civilians who decide certain facts, lawyers who make arguments, and judges who procedurally oversee the interaction between lawyers + witnesses and jurors. The judge may be appointed or elected, depending on level. At the state level, higher level judges (justices) tend to be elected and trial judges tend to be appointed by a cabal of superiors). Ultimately a judge gets to decide what the law says regarding the force to be used in a case, and other judges above him get to decide whether he has correctly applied the law. If upheld, the judge orders another agency to use force (for example haul his ass to prison and keep him there for 10 years). In short, what is enforcement. In no system of government is there a guaranteed mechanism for compliance with the law. In the US system, any person who has been wronged can appeal to the judicial system, and you can have your day (week, month) in court. The courts fail not because the courts are corrupt and unsupervised dispensers of justice, but because the elected creators of law are on average unprincipled evil bastards, which is because they are elected by a popularity contest that has no discernible relationship to a real political issue. The media will be happy to declare some spurious cause-effect relation so that if the Republicans lose a few seats and the Democrats win a majority in the three elected federal sub-parts, where will be plenty of post hoc analysis lacking any rational basis in reality. At most it will amount to the emotional reaction “I hate Trump”. Or, “I hate Biden”. (Admittedly, Trump stepped out in a surprising way last time with his “Build the wall” promise, I don’t expect to see any concrete issues in House and Senate races, recalling that it is the House and Senate that write the laws and POTUS that enforces them). At the federal level, the “watcher” is POTUS, who is empowered to command enforcement of the law. The voters are the watchers of the watcher, and generally speaking I don’t think that those higher-order watchers are doing a very good job (they have no idea what the watcher- and commander-in-chief is actually ordering to be done). POTUS commands a secretary to enforce a particular law in a specific way, you get to comment on the announced plan for enforcement, if you’d like. The real problem with law enforcement at the federal level is the interpretive deference rule known as “Chevron deference” which holds that the governments interpretation of the law is presumed to be correct, unless it is plainly incorrect. It remains to be seen, and not soon enough, what if anything will remain of that doctrine. I still don’t understand that this notion of a “permanent government” refers to. Dollars spent? Number of employees? Subjective law?

First: do you have a factual basis for that claim (I assume you're not just intuiting what you think reality is) – gimme a number, and what nation has the second largest government? Second, are you claiming that the fact of having many government employees establishes that we have a "permanent government"? As far as I can see, this is just a right-wing meme, the counterpart of the left-wing meme "The Man". Every nation has some substantial set of employees which doesn't get traded out every two of four years. I'm just trying to understand what this invention "permanent government" even means. Law provides checks on the power of government employees. The problem is not with employee tenure or the fact that federal janitors are un-elected, it is the scope of government in the first place. It is the minimally-fettered power of a few hundred federal lawmakers to actually make those laws (and the also minimally-fettered of the various tens or hundreds of of thousands or state and municipal lawmakers to make lower-level laws), that is the source of "the problem". Evidence is strong that Mayorkas is not part of some permanent government: he was first appointed 3 years ago, and at most could serve another 5 years. It seems to me that the word "permanent" in this meme "permanent government" is redundant, people just mean "the government", though specifically "the government that I disagree with".

OO is supposed to serve a particular purpose, which is not the same as the purpose of Twit-Face or alt.philosophy.objectivism and its spawn HPO, if you remember them. When content deviates from that purpose, it is right for management to take corrective action. My judgment is that adherence to that purpose here is not strict, and it has gotten much looser since I first joined about 20 years ago. Every person who contributes here should be able to articulate their justification for contributing, to say what value you receive in exchange for your posts. If you can’t do that, you should re-evaluate your self-sacrifice. In fact, very many former contributors have done so (by which I mean, the vast majority). There are loose guidelines which state what the purpose of OO is and what contributors should and should not do. Intellectual honesty is one of those requirements, the problem is that intellectual dishonesty comes in many flavors, one being evasion and the other being unreasoned reliance on authoritative statements. The covid thread reeks of evasion and was worthy of closing on those grounds. I concluded that there was no rational value to be had in the thread, and that put paid to my participation there. I might, in another incarnation, contemplate whether just leaving the thread open does any harm. There have been many fora for Objectivism, most of which have fallen into complete inactivity. When you peruse the content of other Objectivist fora, ask yourself if you would want to be associated with that group and if not, why not? My judgment is, “No: crappy content” (NB this explicitly does not refer to HBL). The potential harm of crappy content to Objectivism should be obvious, so now we know the basis for closing crappy threads, what remains is a specific evaluation of one or more threads, to decide if they are overall above that crappiness threshold (I will not engage in a specific autopsy here). I would like to avoid reaching the “crappy content” conclusion w.r.t. OO.

I am curious about this notion of a “permanent government” in the US. Now we know that Lukashenko has been the absolute ruler of Belarus ever since it separated from the Soviet Union, Putin been has ruler of Russia de jure or de facto since 1999. Many African nations have been ruled by single absolute rulers for decades, e.g. Equatorial Guinea, China is controlled by a de facto permanent ruler. Iran and Burma are essentially run by permanent councils / juntas with an irrelevant figurehead. In the US, OTOH, we change president relatively often, and Congressmen individually last about 4 terms in the House and 2 terms in the Senate though there are individuals who last for decades. Of course, the federal appellate judicature is composed of life appointees. Clearly, this permanent government of which you speak isn’t composed of the executive, legislative or, realistically the judiciary. What I’d like to know is, what or who is this permanent government in the US? I suppose you might be talking of career military and civil service employees. In what sense to the various park rangers, TSA agents, clerks in the bureaucracy, embassy grunts and so on constitute a government? And if you aren’t speaking of the clerks and cops, who are you speaking of? In what was was this supposed government “disrupted” by Trump (and how was that disruption not exactly the same as the “disruption” created by the Carter-Reagan, Bush-Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush-Obama or Trump-Biden transitions)? Is this government distinct from the shadow world government run by the Illuminati?

Separately, let me address the rational thought / rights question. “Rights” derive from man’s nature: our proper means of survival is reason, not e.g. superior force as in the case of lions. More specifically, man’s actions are chosen, not automatic / metaphysically given, and man uses reason to devise a moral code guiding his choices. “Rights” are a part of that moral code specifically devised for existence in a society, that is, when we live together through voluntary trade (the natural outgrowth of living cooperatively in a society). An alien species might well have aspects of the faculty of reason yet be compelled to survive by superior force, hence the fictitious Kzinti. In the Man-Kzin Wars novels the cats seem to be in an evolutionary middle stage, that they have language and space ships but cannot freely resist the compulsion to kill and eat. The human concept of rights and surrender of the use of force for survival to government monopoly is simply not applicable to a Kzin. The connection between language, the faculty of reason, and the concept of rights as applied to humans does not come from the ability to group individuals together under concepts, or to form communicative propositions, and it does not come from the fact that we can perform logical computations like “If A then B; A is true; Then it follows that B is true”. Rather, it follows from the fact that we can freely chose our actions, and that we can survive using our wits rather than our claws.

Professionally speaking, (*sigh*). This animal language nonsense apparently will never go away. The first relevant division in cognition that has to be made is between “symbol” and “concept”. Very simple organisms with nervous systems can at least respond to physical stimuli. We don’t know anything significant about bug-cognition, but we do know that honeybees have the ability to communicate information about good (via an iconic dance, where the signal is directly related to the message (direction and distance). When we get to birds and mammals, people increase their metaphorical talk about “language” (though they say the same thing about bees and in fact in extremely metaphorical cases, about inanimate objects). There is a fair amount of evidence that some birds and mammals have something along the lines of “self-awareness”, thus they utter the message “Me. Me. Me”. There is a lot of variation in the form of the message, so that the signal may be stored and repeated for a short while (i.e. “today” or “this season”), or maybe longer terms. This is simple a label a name. Humans have a unique ability, which is to for concepts, which is (first) the mental grouping together of existents defined on some perceptible basis and (second) a label attached to that grouping. Thus we have in English the words “dog”, “cat”, “rat”, “mammal”, and “animal”, each of which refers to a different thing. We use these discrete labels to communicate to others. Concepts can be formed by grouping other concepts together, to form a new concept (mammal, animal, pet, etc). The various labels can be combined into sentences which communicate propositions. Sequences of propositions can be organized into “reasoning”, as exemplified by Atlas Shrugged and ITOE. The ability to self-identify is not the same as having a rational faculty. Even the ability to learn to group immediately-evident classes of existents under a communicable label is not the same as having a rational faculty, and there is no evidence that dolphins or apes have even that rudimentary capacity. The “signal complexity” claim is a red herring. What is lacking is evidence for discrete generalizability and combinability. Words of human language are made of cognitively-discrete combinable sound units, like “k”, “s”, “i”, “m” and so on, but the physical reality is continuous modulation of an acoustic waveform. (That cognitive fact is why we can write with distinct letters to represent the infinitude of physical symbols). The whale/dolphin language-advocates have yet to establish that the emited waveforms of those animals have an analogous cognitive status: construction of complex structures built on concatenation of cognitively discrete units which are realised as physical continua. We have known for a century that bee dance superficially looks complex because there are very many possible signals, but they don’t reduce to complex and structured combinations of atomic units. Us linguists object to misusing the word “language” to refer to things that aren’t language, like “the language of music”, or talking of DNA as being a kind of “language”. You can call the laws of physics the “language of reality”, but it ain’t a language. Abstraction and recursive structure build on lower-level abstractions is the essential feature of human language, and no animals on Earth have it, other than the rational animal.

I see. Well, I am not a fan of competing jurisdictions, there ought to be fundamental unity in the political and legal system, where individual rights are protected irrespective of where you live. By eliminating municipalities and states as political entities, we would go a long ways towards a system of government that protects the rights of individuals rather than the ‘rights’ of states. But even so, that raises a (potentially surmountable) problem with juries and trials, that trials have to take place in a specific geographical location. An unbiased random selection of 12 individuals from the US population would on average yield 60% white jurors, 19% Hispanic, 12% black and 6% Asian, also roughly an even distribution of males and females; 10% without complete high school education, 18% with graduate degrees, about the same number with just a bachelor’s degree etc. Also about 35% Protestants, 13% Catholics, a fraction of Jews and Mormons, and no discernible number for actual hard-core atheists. Other demographic properties include type of employment and income or wealth level, also the urban / rural divide. We can include political affiliation and sub-affiliation (MAGA, RINO etc). The only demographic property that seems to be reasonably geography-neutral is sex (biological, not orientation or self-identification). The number of Republicans in Washington state is way below whatever you think the national average is, and it seems to be the opposite in Texas. Texas and Georgia have the highest Black populations, Wyoming and Montana have the lowest. Unbiased random sampling can never achieve national-representativeness as long as juries are geographically-based. It might actually be possible at some point to dispense with local juries, but right now that would be such a huge technological clusterfuck that it should not even be considered briefly. And so, we are necessarily stuck with juries that are unrepresentative of the nation (notice that I didn’t even mention demographic quotas as a scheme to reach representativeness, except to point out that it is an even worse idea). Rather than seeking demographically ‘representative’ juries, we should be seeking objective juries who will apply the law to the facts, rather than advocating along ideological lines. Jury-tainting can arise when local tabloids exercise their First Amendment right to declare the unconvicted to be guilty so maybe a venue-change is a solution, more likely these days it would solve nothing because media-generated prejudice is nationwide, and there is no event that you can point to when you have a long-term KKK-favoring population in a county that would justify a change of venue. There simply are no neutral venues. An alternative to the current unqualified juror problem is to develop a better system of voire dire, to identify individuals who are willing to actually apply the law rather than reach an ideologically-driven conclusion. Foreign-born people who want to become US citizens have to pass a fairly trivial civics quiz, which native-born individuals do not have to pass. We could devise better jury-qualification standards.

The well-known problem with the “consent of the governed” argument is that laws are not created by the consent of the governed, they are created by individuals who voted for a particular lawmaker who voted in an assembly with a bunch of other representatives – we don’t directly consent to laws (with a few rare examples in a few western states). Applying “consent of the governed” thinking to criminal trials, judges themselves should be eliminated and replaced with the judgment of “the governed”. The accused is one of “the governed”, but there is no requirement that they consent to being tried. And surely you have heard arguments to the effect that “by living in this society, you implicitly consent to abide by its rules”. That is utter nonsense, it perverts the concept of consent. Rather, if you chose to live in a society, you know that violation of the laws of that society will have consequences. The question that remains, a question that Objectivism has an answer to, is “what are the proper laws of a rational society”? There are two senses of “representative”. Formally, a “representative” is an individual who purports to speak for you in a law-making ritual (legislative session). There is no implication that the person elected to be your representative shares any of your beliefs or cares about your interests. We have a procedure for deeming that a given person is your “representative”, based on geography. The other popular sense is the completely subjective “looks like me” sense, that some individual may share with you beliefs, interests, race, religion, hobbies or whatever. There is no rational basis for requiring jurors to be representative of the accused in the subjective “look like the accused” sense (I can’t even imagnie what it would mean to have ‘representative’ jurors in the ‘voted for’ sense, the concept makes me shudder). The jury selection process does work in favor of a defendant who is most like the general population in a trial venue, which is not a good thing. This worked in favor of the accused in cases of racist murders of Blacks in the south in the 60’s, where all of the murderer’s neighbors had the same view as the accused, so they did not consent to convicting and punishing the murderers. Demographics changed over the years, so now in a few cases the populace has finally consented to punish rights-violators. Fairness is not determined by demographic similarity of the dispensers of justice and the accused, or victim. Fairness is about dispassionate application of an objectively-stated moral code to the facts at hand. By training and temperment, a triumvirate of judges is better able to reach an objective conclusion than a dozen street-recruits. Consent of the governed is irrelevant to the question of fairness.

I can’t decide if I agree or disagree, because we are talking about a fundamental contradiction baked into the legal system. The function of law in a proper society is to narrowly limit the use of force, following objective moral principles articulated by the government of that society. The function of the juror is to decide whether the accused has in fact breached those principles in a specific way. It is in the nature of objective law that conviction is for a specific prohibited act, and not for a general evil character, and it is part of the law that you convict only under specific circumstances, you do not convict because you subjectively believe that the person is evil (nor acquit because you feel that they are virtuous). Under the law, the jury / a juror is not to provide a ‘reading of the situation’, they are to carefully scrutinize the data admitted by the court into the record, from which they draw a logical conclusion – a yes or no answer to a specific question asked by the court. “Are you persuaded that on this data, this person performed this specific prohibited act, having this specific intent?”. They are not to invent testimony not actually offered or to create arguments not actually proffered, they are simply to decide whether they are persuaded by the prosecution or not, based on the record. This being a specific intent crime, the defense could just advance a version of the political theater argument, if the goal is to prevent conviction (assuming these are not sacrificial animals on trial). If the defense does not advance the myriad arguments that those were purely symbolic political acts, a juror could still decide that the defendants are virtuous therefore should not be convicted for their acts, and could decide to change function from neutral evaluator of the facts to partisan advocate for one side. Jury nullification is always an option, and the only cure for jurors subjectively ignoring the law is to eliminate trial by jury (maybe not a bad idea, but a huge change in the US legal system requiring constitutional amendment). In civil law systems, (professional) judges are unbiased finders of fact, not supervisors of process and interpreters of statutory meaning. Under the law, jurors do not construct defense counter-arguments, they evaluate prosecution arguments, asking whether they possess reason (facts and argumentation) to doubt the prosecution’s argument. Hopefully, the defense will provide such reasons for doubt, and not leave it to the subjective whims of a biased juror. However, the formalism of law is quite defective (in this case the legislature has provided no legal definition of ‘forgery’ or ‘falsely’ for certificates of ascertainment), hence the juror must make up his own definition – unless the judge sua sponte cooks up his own definition.

Incidentally, no falsification crime is a strict liability crime (unlike underage sex of drunk driving charges), the prosecution must prove that the defendant knew that the statement was false.

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.

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.

‘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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.