DavidOdden

Plainly, this forum has degenerated to the point that intellectual honesty is no longer a value

Plainly, this forum has degenerated to the point that intellectual honesty is no longer a value

"The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum." David Odden

That was screen-capped from Google Gemini. 
 
I see the term "anti-value" used a few times on this forum, but "anti-virtue" isn't as common.
There is no such thing, of course. Productivity is a virtue, even if someone else doesn't like the product. Hitler and Marx produced books by practicing the virtue of productivity. Whether the books are morally valuable to someone else is irrelevant. 

Producing things of objective value is unconditionally a virtue. Not everything created is an objective value (example: Das Kapital; Mein Kampf). Keeping with the context of Trump as our Supreme Leader, it is irrelevant whether he produces value in real estate, since the job of POTUS is to execute the laws of the United States, not to manipulate the economy or make a profit off of real estate deals. Applying the relevant criteria, Trump is an anti-virtue, as president.

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology.
Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective.
This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary?
So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil.
To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

Producing things of objective value is unconditionally a virtue. Not everything created is an objective value (example: Das Kapital; Mein Kampf). Keeping with the context of Trump as our Supreme Leader, it is irrelevant whether he produces value in real estate, since the job of POTUS is to execute the laws of the United States, not to manipulate the economy or make a profit off of real estate deals. Applying the relevant criteria, Trump is an anti-virtue, as president.

It goes way beyond ‘interesting’, it enters the territory of morally imperative. There is a plain contradiction in Oliver’s position. The media (NYT) bears a responsibility for turning this personal discussion into a propaganda event, it then has carries that responsibility to defend the oppressed in the present case. (*Crickets*). Of course, that presumes that the purpose of the media is to objectively report facts rather than advocate a particular ideology.
Occasionally, a rational commentator will notice one of these contradictions and will write about it, as Schwartz did. What should be said is that the NYT has a responsibility to put this very question to Oliver – unsympathetically, in the same manner that they address others whom they deem to be politically incorrect. Attention needs to be put on the media for its reporting bias. However, to be effective such attention would need to be itself objective.
This then reminds me of a recent Gus blog where Gus interjects a comment that “Trump’s Supreme Court appointments eventually overturned Roe vs. Wade”, which is misleading (he appointed only 3 of the majority justices, and that statement carries the false and unsupported implication that this was Trump’s reason for those appointments). It’s fine to pick on Trump, but let’s see some actual facts, not just mystical divination about the mental state of voters and guilt-by-association reasoning. Now, hitting rather close to home, there has been a chorus of crickets over the fact that the Trump faction in the House at least temporarily limited some of the right-trampling power of the FISA courts. This action was taken with the full approval of Trump, and yet where is the laudatory commentary?
So yeah, we can understand this in terms of a hierarchy of values. Truth is a value; but Trump is a greater disvalue; ignoring a relevant truth is less evil than making an false assertion or implication. Some media elevate the ‘Trump is evil’ axiom to the point that they will make literally-false statements, but that is not so common because of defamation law (though certain media are statutorily immunized against such actions). A safer bet is to rely on false implications (which can still be a cause of legal action, just easier to summarily dismiss). When silence is available, that is a completely un-actionable method of promulgating the viewpoint that Trump is evil.
To be clear, Trump is evil, my point is that the philosopher’s job is focus on the logical infrastructure of political discourse, and to point out these contradictions. We cannot in all honesty demand adherence to logic if we also repudiate logic. The laughing-face emoticon is an exemplar of an intellectually dishonest tool, which should be obliterated from this forum.

A further question should have been addressed. Which is worse, mandating display of the Ten Commandments in public schools, or public schools? I say the greater evil is public schools, not the Ten Commandments. The particular law is limited to governmental schools including schools receiving funding by the state, and therefore does not impose any religious requirements on purely private schools.
In the original bill, there was a simple commandment to display the document which was only directed at public schools. I surmise that there was some discussion of whether this law would pass higher judicial review, which resulted in two economic hooks, the expansion where it includes schools receiving state funds, and the limitation that no school is compelled to spend its funds to purchase a display. I believe that the economic burden argument would have ultimately doomed the earlier version in the courts, whereas the current law encourages the good citizens of Louisiana to donate displays, in case some school has in mind using the economic burden as a justification for non-compliance.
In comparing evils, it is hard to choose between Hitler, Stalin or Mao, but seemingly easy to choose between any or all of those three vs. Kant (did Kant actually kill anyone?). Yet I would deem Kant to be the greater evil, in that the harm caused by his philosophy includes all of the above mass murderers, plus public schools. Public schools are likewise a broader and less-obvious evil compared to allowing or requiring expressions of religion in “public spaces”. To effectively argue against such a law, you have to address and overcome the First Amendment rights of The Religious (which are abridged by prohibiting religious expressions in public spaces). The expressive rights of the many cannot be be sacrificed for the sake of the contrary expressive rights of the few (very few in Louisiana). Appeal to separation of church and state is a cheap and weak argument though probably the only one that stands a chance w.r.t. judicial review. The proper moral argument is, simply, directed at the evil concept of public schools.
I see tadmjones made this identification also, while I was laboring over my screed.

While I would agree with the principle of avoiding theocracy, religious schools should not be disallowed in law. The solution is to do away with government supported schools.
But Christianity is very foundational to Louisiana, Catholicism in particular as in their 'counties' are 'parishes'.

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force?
Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed.
Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit.
Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount?
At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force?
Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed.
Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit.
Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount?
At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

I suppose the article does an adequate job of addressing the standard political complaints about jobs in relation to imports (though I don’t accept the claim that “Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined” on the simple grounds that this is a factual claim which deserves actual numbers and sources rather than an unsupported assertion – but facts apparently get in the way of reasoning). One issue which does indeed figure into Objectivist reasoning on this topic is the question, what is the proper response to initiation of force?
Governmental force can be justified as a response to the initiation of force, therefore if the government of China initiates force against its citizens to compel labor or to subsidize manufacturing (etc.), it is not immoral for the US to retaliate by restricting the aggressors from profiting from their violations of rights. We have no duty to retaliate when the force is not directed against us, but it is morally allowed.
Not all international trade is voluntary, a proper analysis of the issue has to include whether or not some nation operates on free market principles, or does it use slave labor and government subsidy to allow their goods to better compete against goods traded under free market principles? Of course, there are no nations operating under free market principles – our goods are at a disadvantage because of price inflation resulting from government regulation including minimum wage laws. Our own government puts American goods at a disadvantage because it initiates force in order to create a supposed social benefit.
Even though all goods are tainted with the stain of force, we cannot therefore forbid all trade (hopefully this is not a controversial proposition). On the opposite side of the continuum, is it ever proper to limit trade in goods created by initiation of force? A kind of case that should be obvious is that it is proper to restrict trafficking in stolen goods, e.g. I cannot break into a warehouse, take goods, then sell them at a discount. But what about the case where the vendor did not himself steal the goods, instead, the government confiscated the goods and gave them to a vendor, who then sold them at a discount?
At the level of theory, all we can say is that initiation of force is improper. At the level of practical law, it is far from clear what degree of initiation of force can be ignored, when it comes to the governments (proper) function of protecting rights. A simple principle that could be applied is that it is proper for the US government to protect the rights of US citizens, and only US citizens. I am referring to the sketchy realm of the morally optional, when it comes to government action.

Indeed, because of the First Amendment, the only realistic path to a hate speech law would be a political change where Kamala Harris and those like her hold the reins of power and appoint a majority of SJW justices who are able to devise a new interpretation of The Constitution where prior case law on hate speech is swept away, analogous to the reset of the right of privacy obliterated by Dobbs. That took a half-century and clearly it could not happen any time soon.
Of course, a new constitutional amendment could create an exception, but the US is nearly unique in how difficult it is to amend our constitution. A close runner-up w.r.t. hate speech laws is Norway, which has a little-enforced law against hate speech. I was surprisd to learn that Estonia actually has no law against hate speech, and they are is being “prosecuted” by the EU for not enacting an anti hate-speech law. In Estonia, it would take a mere act of parliament to sweep away that exception.

I am indeed, but linguists aren't word-mavens. Nevertheless since these are not expressions used by My People, I don’t really understand how Other People use them. Which is why it is useful to ask a person who uses one of these expressions what they intended, especially the details.
The issue that I was addressing is not just about blogs, which I don’t like in the first place. It is more generally about the withdrawal of Objectivism from public fora, and the shuttering of Objectivist fora. Maybe fear and the increase of viewpoint-intolerance in society does explain it. Perhaps I should be more fearful, but at least so far, I find OO to be a useful venue for reasoned discussion.

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.

An essential feature of the Objectivist ethics is that man is not a sacrificial animal, hence the rejection of self-sacrifice. Objectivism does indeed require the integration of all facts, but not all statements represent facts. The only “fact” involved in an irrational statement is that so-and-so uttered a statement, and a rational man has no obligation to consider such statements. Case in point, a rational man on OO has no obligation to assimilate, address and refute some arbitrary communist racist woke screed – an arbitrary string of words is not ipso facto an “argument”. There is a point at which “argument”- and viewpoint-rejection are valid responses (I would say after a half dozen attempts to elicit signs of rationality from the author, another more-hopeful person might set the threshold at a dozen tries). A person who advocates self-sacrifice isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who refuses to engage in moral evaluation isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore. A person who sanctions evasion isn’t acting like an Objectivist anymore.
I do agree with your call for the forum to practice Objectivism (all of it, not just epistemology). Evasion is the antithesis of Objectivism, and I am glad that you now accept that point. Indeed, I would hope that people would be more scrupulous in calling out evasion when it happens

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.

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.

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.
 

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).