DavidOdden

So that’s an interesting question, scientifically and philosophically. Some bugs such as the golden tortoise beetle and fish change color in response to external events like being touched. The unknown scientific question for the beetle is, how does this happen? The similarly unknown philosophical question is, is this knowledge? Or is this like the patellar reflex? Insects are pretty low on the cognitive hierarchy. It seems reasonable to think that octopuses have what qualifies as “instinctual knowledge”, in terms of their ability to mimic other animals. Though again, I don’t know to what extent this is instinctual rather than learned stochastically.

I don’t recall having said anything about animals changing color. On the face of it, it doesn’t constitute knowledge of any kind. For example, various plants change color seasonally, as do some birds, and we normally don’t say that plants have instinctual knowledge. I don’t really know what you’re referring to. I have various epithets for people who attribute human properties to plants and animals depending on what I think their motivation is, but if you’re looking for a standard term for the practice, I would say “anthropomorphizing”. Perhaps “personification”.

“Instinctual knowledge” is generally used to refer to innate knowledge, that is, knowledge which is genetically predetermined and not learned from experience. I would not devise a definition of “knowledge” according to which only humans have “knowledge”. You could call it a cognitive program of some sorts, which governs behavior. It isn’t a short-term spinal chord reaction, and it isn’t an immediate emotional response. It is not an ability (for example, the human ability to reason is not knowledge, it is a faculty). As the name implies, instinctual knowledge is a kind of knowledge. The point of rejecting “instinct” is simply that people are very sloppy in calling everything “instinct” when in fact it is no such thing, especially when it is applied to humans. Breathing is not an instinct, it is an autonomic function. Keeping quiet then being stalked is not an instinct when done by humans, it is an application of reason. Reason is the application of logic to prior knowledge to create new conceptual knowledge. Animals don’t have a faculty of reason, they don’t have concepts and they don’t have propositions, they have something else.

I can only conjecture about motivations. Humans “use” things other than reason, for example we “use” digestion which is not a kind of reason, likewise respiration, perspiration and defecation. Everything that we directly perceive is automatically processed by the brain and is not the product of reason (however, reason will enter into the discussion once we sort out perception). There are various reflexes which are automatic spinal chord reactions to stimuli, such as the patellar reflex, the Babinkski reflex, a number of eye reflexes. These are all extremely simple immediate physical responses to stimuli. Instincts are more complex and delayed behavior patterns, which are innate in an animal. There are myriad examples such as Pacific salmon return to the birthplace instinct, numerous sex-related instincts, bee dances (communicating where the food is). There are very few proposed candidates for instincts in humans, none of them persuasive in my opinion, the best cases being applicable to infants (for example, crying, which is not analogous to the pupil contraction reflex, and happens right away without any thinking about it). Perhaps the “maternal bonding” instinct, driven by oxytocin, could be included. Whereas numerous animal instincts can reasonably be said to constitute a kind of knowledge that they already know, the only good candidates for instinct in humans are particular feelings, which are not knowledge. I think it is true that people do use emotions in place of real knowledge. This is painfully obvious when you ask a person why they hold some opinion, and they answer “I (don’t) want X”, which is completely illogical insofar as I asked for your reasons for holding an opinion. Can’t you at least say “X is bad (good)”? While I am skeptical about instincts for humans, I am certain that there is no such thing as “instinctual knowledge” in humans. We don’t have it, there is nothing to account for.

Under the premise that you lead with your main conclusion, Byrne makes a significant error in saying that the US is being “weakened by an erosive array of social, economic and political forces”. This is a good example of the concrete-boundness that characterizes the disease of Disintegration. The cause is philosophy, which leads to social, economic and political results, as well as legal and education, and any number of other concrete manifestations. Also, “erosive” is a bit of a floating abstraction (what does “erosive array of forces” even mean? Does he mean “array of erosive forces?”). “The deterioration of traditional cultural norms and the social upheaval that’s followed — from the living room to classroom the boardroom — is no surprise to Ayn Rand scholars”. Well, I for one am surprised, first because those unspecified traditional cultural norms were, in part, rotten, and were badly in need of deterioration. OMG the traditional norm of heterosexual mono-racial religious marriage with women playing the role of baby-makers and housekeepers has deteriorated, America is doomed! So the underpinnings of the article are rotten, and cannot be repaired by a later add-on quote “She understood that culture, society and politics are shaped by philosophy and when she saw the philosophical trends of the 1940s and 1950s she knew where it would eventually lead”. Let’s see now how the analysis fares w.r.t. education. Again, the conclusion to be proven here is “Centralized educational bureaucracy has reached deeply into local education in recent decades — to the quantifiable detriment of the system and the nation’s schoolchildren”. The vaguely-hinted-at idea here is that a uniform federal education system is plainly inferior to an erosive array of disparate state level education systems. This is an instantiation of the states-right premise that, for some mystical reason, government action at the state level is automatically better than government action at the national level. Which I suppose would be because it is better for each smaller group of individuals defining a state will better protect individual rights because the group is small. So, it’s not the level / size of government that counts, it’s the fact of government at all that counts. But actually, the problem is not just about government messing things up, it is about bad philosophy messing things up. Private education can be as bad or worse than public education. The worst institutions of higher education are, in my opinion, private and not governmental. It’s not that they are bad in the sense that they can’t teach that 2+2 = 5, it’s that they very effectively teach evil ideas, especially wokeism. The direct consequence of this training is – that’s where grade school teachers come from. This year’s corrupted college student at a private university becomes next year’s school teacher (private or public, elementary or high school, it doesn’t matter), and next decade’s administrators and eventually operators of the school who sets policy. I don’t think the article is terrible, it is just disappointing in a predictable way. How about that religion thing? What is the main cultural vehicle for the promulgation of altruism?

I don't find your response to be on point. I provided what should be a sufficient reminder of the argument, and clearly a small passage can only stand for and not fully reproduce the reduction of a conclusion to the axioms. Oddly, you don’t justify the claim that a justification would consist of a valid argument ending with a particular phrase. Nor do you justify the claim that Rand insists on using a word in her own special sense, or even that she does so without insistence. Perhaps the first step should be you proving what the ordinary sense of the word “definition” is. We could then compare Rand’s putative “special” sense (which I suppose you can identify for us), and even other senses of the word that are out there. My main “criticism” of the Objectivist epistemology is that it focuses on the logic of reasoning and not the applied statistics of ordinary thinking, which is where polysemy rears its ugly head. BTW if you are thinking that all of Rand’s conclusions follow from a set of listed axioms (see Galt’s speech) and nothing else, you are mistaken, and nobody believes that Objectivism is a purely deductive system, in fact it is mostly inductive.

I address your first assertion; see ITOE p. 41 The rules of correct definition are derived from the process of concept-formation. The units of a concept were differentiated—by means of a distinguishing characteristic(s)—from other existents possessing a commensurable characteristic, a "Conceptual Common Denominator." A definition follows the same principle: it specifies the distinguishing characteristic(s) of the units, and indicates the category of existents from which they were differentiated. Is this sufficient, or do you require further explanation?

I suspect that the problem is that you are unaware of the nature of scientific research into the human mind in the relevant era, when behaviorism held sway. The solution is to read actual psychological research, between the 30’s and the late 60’s, if you are skeptical. It is hard to grasp the depth to which psychology descended in those days, when nowadays people would take for granted that people have minds and can use their faculty of reason to make choices, so you would never imagine the intellectual horror of logical positivism and behaviorism. Knee jerks are automatic non-cognitive responses of the human nervous system – a short circuit from the patella to the spinal chord, existing in a number of mammals, and in no way involving the mind. Behaviorism reduced all human behavior to variations of that mechanism. Rand’s criticism of behaviorism isn’t a peer-reviewed refutation of “scientific” results, it is an appropriate and metaphorical dismissal of a self-evidently false view of the nature of humans. It is not “made up”: it simply was not ever proffered as a scientific refutation, it was a philosophical dismissal. The scientists provided the requisite refutation.

My crow just died. Do you want to simplify this to one manageable point of discussion?

I’m not sure, because I don’t entirely understand your reasoning. You would not play with a deadly weapon because you can only be contextually certain that it is safe, but likewise you should not be in the presence of a deadly weapon for the same reason, and you should not play with a carving knife or a pit bull for the same reason. Never drive. You have abandoned reason in a specific and important way. It is impossible to exist, while being absolutely free of all risk (to life, limb or property, in that order). You therefore refuse to live (an active process, not just the absence of death) because you want to live, a contradiction. This is the epitome of irrationality, or, unawareness. The problem with your model is that you assign an infinite cost to an action when actually the risk is finite, and you don’t consider the associated benefit. Let’s rephrase the scenario a bit. You earn a piece of gold for digging a ditch, and you don’t have to spend it on immediate survival, so you consider options for increasing your wealth – investment. You might put it under your mattress, or you could put it in a low-yield interest-bearing insured account, or a medium-yield uninsured mutual fund, or a wildly risky venture in cold fusion. I vote in favor of the middle two options. It is irrational to be paralyzed by a negligible risk, just as it is irrational to ignore a high risk. I’ve described the extent of my knowledge of investment instruments, which determines I will do. I am only contextually (quasi-)certain that the FDIC will guarantee my savings accounts, but I am contextually quite certain that stuffing money under the mattress is a very irrational economic plan. I accept that you may be contextually ignorant of the mechanics of a given deadly weapon. I think I could inspect a revolver and determine that it is not loaded, and I know enough about physics to know that a demon won’t suddenly cause the revolver to be loaded. I think I am ignorant enough about the workings of an electric car that I would never ever ever consider doing any repairs on one myself. It would be irrational for me to work on an electric car, and it would be irrational for the local Toyota Zero mechanic to refuse to work on one for fear of being electrocuted. If you have a concrete, articulable reason for believing that you could be harmed by some action, then it is necessary to compare risks and benefits. It is standard irrational gun safety hyperbole to declare that you should never … something with a weapon. A semi-automatic pistol is complicated enough that you have, or should have, conceptual knowledge of great danger. Even though a revolver has a more “you can see everything” design, you still may not know how to uncock the hammer (if necessary, and how would you know?), and open the cylinder. It’s irrational to declare a gun to be an absolute threat, but it may be contextually rational to find the gun to be very risky. Then the next question is, can you mitigate the risk (don’t point it at your head! point it at the slaver’s head!), and is your freedom worth some risk? As far as I know, kombucha is a deadly poison, and in my knowledge context, I’m unwilling to gamble with my life by taking a drink. The essence of rationality is integrating what you know with logic. Your fear of guns should not be based on what you don’t know about guns, it should be based on what you do know about guns, which includes awareness of your ignorance important facts. Like the concept "one in the chamber". You are also correct that in this ferkakte scenario that you should expect something devious from the slaver who set up this ethics trap in the first place.

The core practice of “scientism”, as framed by Hayek, is that the methods of Science are appropriate in “their proper sphere”, but are not appropriate when they are the “slavish imitation of the method and language of Science”. This applies most pointedly to the social sciences. The questions that immediately should spring to mind is, what is the nature of scientific methods, and to what are they appropriately applicable? If we know that, we might have some idea when the application of those methods to some other sphere of knowledge is “slavish”. In fact I agree that methods are often applied slavishly, even in the hard sciences. This leads us to our first definition of scientism, as being “the uncritical application of a methodology in pursuit of knowledge, motivated purely because of the unjustified belief ‘that’s how (this) science works’”. I am familiar with various scientific sins in the acoustic analysis of speech, the problem being that numerical methods (signal processing) are often applied inappropriately because “that is how we do it”. Application of the methods of physical sciences to human behavior suffers from a particular defect that might lead one to conclude that human behavior cannot be studied scientifically. We should pause for a moment to consider what the alternative to science is. You might say that rather than drawing any general conclusions, a social scientist should only passively record what happened at a particular time and place (old-school ethnography). The enterprise of acquiring knowledge – science – is not just limited to making concrete observations, it involves reasoning about causation behind the behavior. The problem with many scientific theories of human behavior is that we can’t plug in a number or equation that accounts for the fact that humans chose their actions (well, their chosen actions, you don’t choose for your blood to circulate, it happens automatically). Some people ignore free will in their attempts to scientifically model human behavior; some people eschew the attempt to devise causal models of human behavior. One thing that Objectivists bring to this discussion is our epistemological stance, that the universe is knowable; and, we should check our premises. We operate in terms of well-defined concepts, not floating abstractions – Objectivism is the scientific method applied to everything, even art! Science focuses on what objectively is, not on subjective appearance, and so does Objectivism. Hayek’s objection to “inappropriate scientism” is really an attack on a particular view of science which is incapable of yielding scientific knowledge about human behavior. The anti-cognitive, positivist behaviorist view that held sway over social sciences has been beaten back somewhat, to the point that his objections would need to be reconsidered in the contemporary millieu. Politicized science is really something completely different: it is the rejection of the scientific method in the hard sciences.

We could start with λογική, if you would like. How do you see the Objectivist concept of logic being different from Aristotle's? Concepts are more stable as the things that unify referents (units), because of polysemy. Sometimes, a word subsumes more that one concept.

Good enough, but what are you observing? How do you know that you have observed an instance of “scientism”? Are you observing e.g. “How ‘scientism’ is used in academic publications on philosophy of science”, or “How ‘scientism’ is used on Fox news”? I am inclined to take this as my starting point. This would lead me to click Boydstun's link, or go directly to Hayek 1964. IMO when a person coins a term, we are obliged to stick with the concept that they have identified, rather than change the definition. So we know what Objectivism is and it doesn't change everytime someone feels like changing the term. In other words, what exactly did Hayek mean by scientism? Is that not what you are asking?

“Scientism” is a sufficiently niche term that I don’t see how you can determine “what it actually is from a philosophical standpoint”. You define it as “the conflation of the practice of science with religion and the scientists themselves as clergymen”, Wikipedia says that is “is the opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or only way to render truth about the world and reality”. Clearly, one of you must be wrong. Let me proffer a third definition, that it is the belief that governmental lawmakers are to be chosen on specific technical expertise. How would we decide which definition is correct? Rand discusses the problem of definitions in ITOE, but her discussion is at a much higher level, where there is no dispute over the actual referent of a concept, it is merely a question of the cognitively most-suitable definition. What we’re faced with here is a fundamental dictionary question – what does “scientism actual mean”? So, perhaps you can offer some concrete evidence that you’re using “scientism” in “the standard way”. This will be hard to do, since this is an obscure word of English.

They certainly could have used a decent philosopher to guide them in drafting their statement. Is there anything in the world that is actually indivisible? Despite the etymology, atoms of iron can be ‘divided’ into parts, and I guess in light of this new-fangled physics of the past 60 years, protons can be subdivided. Plus, leptons can be distinguished in terms of charge and mass. Nothing is truly indivisible or undistinguishable. I wonder what it even means to say that liberty is indivisible, but from context we can conclude that they are denying that a person can be “politically free” yet not “economically free”. Insofar as most people nowadays do not approve of economic freedom (specifically, the right to make a profit) even when they approve of religious, expressive, and voting freedoms as well as the freedom to do anything non-economic that you want (let’s call it lifestyle freedom), they are clearly denying that the concept “freedom” or “liberty” can be validly applied to everything except profit-making activities. The more pointed question that should be asked is, what is the utility of reifying adjective plus “freedom” constructions? There can’t be a contradiction in an undefined, meaningless statement. We could strive to assign a specific meaning to “economic” and “political” whereby we can consign a choice to one’s “exercising political freedom” vs. “exercising economic freedom”, eviscerating all conventional meaning from the words “political” and “economic”. So they should have given up on “freedom” or “liberty” as the fundamental concept. But, the alternative concept “rights” has long been hopelessly corrupted to mean “entitlement to receive”. My opinion is that deeper delving into the concept of “rights” with the public is better carried out on a long-term personal basis, moving an actual face-to-face conversation in the direction of a better and more-corrected understanding of the concept of rights. This is probably one reason why there aren't any successful Objectivist politicians.

It should be noted that the Sharon Statement from 1960 (the foundational document of YAF) begins: In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths. We, as young conservatives, believe: That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force; whereas the present statement says In order to ensure that America’s best days are ahead, we affirm the following principles: 1. Liberty. Among Americans’ most fundamental rights is the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force: a right that, in turn, derives from the inseparability of free will from what it means to be human. Liberty is indivisible, and political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom. The similarity is well beyond what might have arisen from like-minded individuals across 63 years expressing common sentiments: the omission of God must have been an essential choice that they made. In the current context of conservatism as even more fundamentally religious as it was 6 decades ago, this is an almost shocking (pleasing) omission.

This all underscores the futility of rankings by ill-defined criteria. I live in an oppressive dictatorship which is very democratic – the fascists are a voting majority in my state, this being a counterexample to Freedom House’s claim that “freedom flourishes in democratic nations where governments are accountable to their people”. I would like to see a well-conducted survey taken from a fixed view and limited view of rights – the Objectivist view – where the majority cannot exercise their “right” to require people to hold a particular religious or social view, or a “right” to wealth equal to that of all others. The main problem with all of these surveys of freedom (or democracy as a proxy for freedom) is that they weight criteria arbitrarily. How should we weigh “economic” rights against “lifestyle” rights? And how should we weigh existing violations of rights against probably future violations of rights. This is clearly an issue with US politics, if you compare a Clinton-style regime with a future religious-right regime. Economic oppression is self-limiting, but religious oppression is not. The underpinning of economy policy is reason, typically polluted with misidentification. The underpinning of religion is the rejection of reason and the embracing of death. The appropriate question, which can be equally posed for the US and India, is whether the threat of a religious regime is palpably high. When it becomes a matter of official policy that “we are a Christian / Hindu nation”, it is too late.

A rational man acts according to his nature, which means that he survives by reason. An irrational man does not live by reason: he may behave randomly, in exact opposition to reason, or according to emotion. We have a moral code which we apply to our choices that says what exactly that entails, therefore I know that it would be immoral for me to blow out my brains right now since life is great (that’s a fact about the current context, not the idea of blowing out one’s brains qua absolute). We can apply that moral code to the evaluation of others, and conclude that Putin is, by nature, immoral (not just once, but as a general fact of his character). I am currently under irrational government compulsion to hand over part of my wealth to the government robbers (multiple governments!). I would not do this if I had a free choice, however, the government threatens me with force if I do not comply. A person’s response to force is by nature outside of the scope of reason – force is the denial of reason. Me paying taxes is not “rational”, it is the best I can come up with in light of reality and my hierarchy of values. You have drawn a dichotomy between moral and immoral, but there is actually a trichotomy. The actions that another takes when under compulsion cannot be morally evaluated. The slave’s choices are outside the scope of moral evaluation, precisely because of the contradiction created by force. A further problem with your scenario, and with many hypothetical moral philosophy scenarios, is that it isn’t epistemologically consistent, instead it flits between the perspective of the individual and an observer. As an observer, we do not know the slave’s hierarchy of values – his actions cannot be morally evaluated. Evaluating the choices of others in such an epistemologically-impoverished circumstances is not reasonable, I might even say irrational, but I won’t. The more interesting question is, what would you do in this circumstance, and why? I pay my taxes because even though I value freedom, I also value my life, and I recognize that knuckling under to the demands of government is necessary in order for me to live my life qua me (as opposed to living off the grid in the Sahara desert, where the weather sucks). I recognize that surviving purely by reason is impossible, but I have discovered that living is still possible. That means that the choice to exist, the primary choice, still remains at the very top of my hierarchy of values. Your scenario adds a strange complication, that the master will free the slave if he engages in a silly symbolic act that he would never otherwise engage in. Equally “applicable” would be the mandate to drink a cup of kombucha in order to gain freedom. At this point, I am starting to think that the slave is not simply “failing to act purely by reason”, I think he is positively insane, in refusing to rectify his enslavement because he has been the victim of force. Change the scenario just a little: a person is subject to improper government compulsion, and he is given the choice of replacing the existing dictatorship with a less-cruel but still not perfectly rational government which still uses improper force. He would ordinarily not choose an irrational government which employs improper force. Since my hierarchy of values is different from that of the slave whose highest value is to not be the victim of force, I have a hard time evaluating this guy. Since one’s hierarchy of values is chosen, I would conjecture that the person is indeed irrational because he bought into a contradictory philosophy which makes “be free from compulsion” be his primary choice. I would try to get the guy to read Galt’s Speech, to see if that might straighten out his crazy hierarchy of values.

When this goes up the food chain, the primary tension will probably be a First Amendment battle between Biden’s right to be a leftist extremist vs. other people’s rights to disseminate false statements. The core issue will be what constitutes coercion. Common sense tells you that if a person tells you “I really could use the money in your wallet. Do you want to continue living?”, your life has just been threatened, but nowhere did the person say “Give me your money or I will kill you” – the threat is implied (you can read between the lines and infer a negative consequence for non-compliance). Common sense is often suspended in court judgments. Section IIIB(1)(a)(i) lays out the legal framework for concluding that the government did coerce, the unrelenting pressure to comply being a significant factor supporting the conclusion that the government was not just “expressing an opinion”. In principle, the government might attempt to justify violation of the First Amendment because it is “necessary” in aid of the government’s (stipulated) compelling interest is preserving public health – a rotten doctrine to be sure, but it is an accepted legal fact. The scientists’ opinions would largely be irrelevant to this argument, except in testifying to something that they would be on very shaky grounds about – that viewpoint suppression is necessary to prevent an apocalypse.

Concretely, as cited and discussed in the court ruling against the government, White House Communications Director, Kate Bedingfield’s announced that “the White House is assessing whether social-media platforms are legally liable for misinformation spread on their platforms, and examining how misinformation fits into the liability protection process by Section 230 of The Communication Decency Act.”

Section 230 grants a special privilege to internet platforms, immunizing them from contributory liability (primarily defamation) for customer content material that they publish, unlike newspapers or broadcast media. The hammer in this instance is the threat to withdraw the privilege unless the platform acts as an agent of the government by removing expressions that don’t meet government approval. Of course, the platforms like the privilege. Plainly, the privilege should not exist, and all individuals should be equally liable for defamation.

The WSJ article mentions in passing, but does not give appropriate analysis to, the contribution of “Section 230”, which is 47 USC 230, in the censorship debate. That piece of law relates to a legal distinction between expression and mere transmission. For example, if you make death threats, you can be prosecuted. If you knowingly tell lies to the effect that Smith is a rapist, you can be sued for defamation. It’s not just the person uttering the word who can get in legal hot water, it is also those who “publish”, for instance the New York Times or the Fort Bend Star. The reason is that the newspapers knowingly and deliberately made the defamatory statements public (private writing of false lies is not legally actionable). A crucial distinction is made under the law between a publisher and a distributor, that the truck driver who delivers the newspapers to the newsstand is not held liable for his role in making the falsehoods public. The role of section 230 is that it declares that an “internet service provider” is not a publisher, therefore unlike any other publisher, an internet publisher has no liability for publication of other people’s defamatory statements (or other torts excluding copyright infringement, though §230 does not immunize against criminal, copyright-infringement, or obscenity cases). Now the question is, is this legal immunity a good thing or a bad thing? On another page, we can debate whether defamation should be legally actionable, the crucial point is that it is actionable, but in a limited fashion where an internet publisher is deemed to not be a publisher, therefore not responsible. The law also immunizes an internet publisher from a breach of contract lawsuit for removing user content, if the publisher finds the content to be objectionable. This means that an ISP does not have to contractually own up to their arbitrary removal powers. Section 230 creates a twisted plate of conceptual spaghetti that is very difficult to untangle. Should there even be a legal cause of action for defamation; should a publisher be allowed to call on a hidden contractual provision; should internet publishers be treated differently from other kinds of publishers? The matter is exacerbated by the fact that the courts do still hold internet publishers liable about half the time. The crux of the variation is whether the company is just an “internet service provider”, or is it an “information content provider”. Normally, if a business exercises editorial control, it is not just a distributor, it is a publisher. But internet publishers enjoy special privileges, that they can exercise control over objectional content without exercising editorial control. Say what? No wonder people get confused about censorship.

The recitation of plaintiff and defendant arguments in the background section is standard practice, and you can’t automatically read endorsement into these words, especially when it comes to a crucial question that both sides agree on, that she is not discriminating against any individual on an illegal basis such as sex or religion, which simplifies the court’s task. It is true that plaintiff in their petition for a writ of certiorari did submit as one of the question to be decided “Whether applying a public-accommodation law to compel an artist to speak or stay silent, contrary to the artist’s sincerely held religious beliefs, violates the Free Speech or Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment”, but the court did not answer the religion fork of the question, they focused on the Free Speech issue. That means that I too as an atheist cannot be compelled to worship or compose sermons, or to compose progressive-statist praise poetry when a customer do asks (as was possible until this ruling). But that would be the case if Free Speech only applied to religious matters. Every petition to the courts uses a huge-bore shotgun in the hope of hitting something, so I am not surprised that they played the religion card.Notice that the Free Exercise Clause is not mentioned even once even in the dissent, a clear indication that religion was not an issue. Plaintiffs also invoke Employment Division v. Smith which was about religious actions (not expressions) which leads to their question 2 of “[w]hether a public-accommodation law that authorizes secular but not religious exemptions is generally applicable under Smith, and if so, whether this Court should overrule Smith”, and again the ruling completely ignores the religious prong, never citing Employment Division (because religion is irrelevant to the question). I’m not inclined to listen to the entire two and a half hour of the argument, which is here, since the party arguments are not proof of anything about the court's reasoning. I doggedly insist that what matters is the legal principle established here, namely the holdings.

I don’t see this in the opinion, but maybe we’re looking in different places. I am focusing on the legal conclusion, the holding, pp 1-6. That is where they state the principle which is now law, and it is about free speech, “the principle that the government may not interfere with ‘an uninhibited marketplace of ideas’”. In Barnette, the court even declared in the holding “That those who refused compliance did so on religious grounds does not control the decision of this question, and it is unnecessary to inquire into the sincerity of their views”, a principle that remains true to this day. No part of the majority opinion rests on the Establishment or Free Exercise clauses, and a connection to religion is not a requirement for their opinion. If you have a candidate in the majority opinion, I’m all ears (or, eyes). Anyhow, the point about Nazis is that we must make choices as to what stances we will publically take, and how energetic that stance will be. Should we actively and loudly defend the rights of Nazis to demonstrate with the same fervor as we would apply to a demonstration against the ideology that they express? Or do we deem their ideology to be so much more vile, compared to actual government suppression of speech, that we can scale back our defense of Nazi speech rights? I generally take a stronger stance against improper government, though an quite aware that today’s individual ideology can become tomorrow’s governmental initiation of force. On the third hand, I can’t run myself ragged on every ideological battle. So I find these to be tough choices to make.

The underlying principle is, I would say, correct. There is an actual business here, not a frivolous business, and the plaintiff sincerely hopes to expand that business. However, the law clearly states that in order for her do so while acting according to her judgment, she will be punished for having violated the law. It is a fundamental principle of law that a person must not be required to violate the law and receive punishment in order to challenge the law in court, for which reason plaintiff has standing. As the court stated, “That required her to show ‘a credible threat’ existed that Colorado would, in fact, seek to compel speech from her that she did not wish to produce. Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus, 573 U. S. 149”. I don’t understand your point about Queer, which does not figure into the ruling. The ruling is an entirely good thing, in my opinion, because it makes clear that the First Amendment prohibits compelled speech. Perhaps it is not good enough because it doesn’t also declare that the government cannot compel action either, however there is no constitutional basis for that conclusion. Clearly, we need a constitutional amendment that also protects one’s right to not do, but that will not be happening any time soon. Typically, people believe that the government can do anything that it wants to. That seems to be true, but theoretically there are some limits, as articulated in the US Constitution. But still, the courts have been highly variable in how they interpret those limits. The current SCOTUS is slowly dialing back one set of principles of deference to the government, limiting what the government can so. Their main problem is an unresolvable one arising from the structure of the US: a collection of states, organized into a nation. The states-rights religious crowd is pleased with Dobbs because it recognizes the right of states to choose its laws. The rest of us are displeased because it allows violation of individual rights. The states-rights religious crowd is also pleased with 303 Creative because it recognizes the supremacy of individual rights over the right of states to set its laws. The role of the current court is to enforce a particular view of “rights”. It is not the Objectivist view, it is the view that rights are those things created by the Constitution (or is “historically fundamental”, a major vague loophole). In other words, our view of the concept “rights” has not taken hold, and until it does, we can’t expect others to act in accordance with that view. The tougher question is discerning a specific principle saying “how we should respond”. Should we defend the rights of Nazi and religious bigots to express their viewpoint because of rights, or should we oppose the actions of Nazis and religious bigots because they advocate potentially dangerous viewpoints? As Rand identified, we should, when the opportunity arises, oppose both religion and violation of rights. I don't deny that the religious zealots will see this as a victory for their god, but it is in fact a victory for individual rights.