DavidOdden

That “percentage similarity” figure is highly misleading, a better statement is that there are 35 million differences. Darwin had absolutely nothing to say about DNA, he only spoke vaguely of gemmules, particles of inheritance, which in fact was a theory developed by the Greeks millennia earlier. Philosophically-speaking, the specific mechanism is irrelevant, what matters is that traits are inherited from parents. From which it follows that two beings with the faculty of reason will by nature have an offspring with the same trait. It is equally self-evident that there is some mechanism of change of traits: Darwin set forth a scientific basis for understanding how that happens. His was a scientific theory of history (one not correct in all details) whereas Objectivism is a philosophical theory of the nature of man. For which reason (different subject matter) Rand would not have addressed your implication. As I explained above and as is well known in evolutionary science, there are massive substantive differences between humans and apes especially in cognition.

Have we been here before?
Why do I feel déjà vu?
Anyway, I look forward to your blog pieces in fifteen weeks decrying the enemies of democracy who doubt that the biggest turd of all time really did receive the most votes for president in all American history.

I’ve heard people say such things, but it is a thoroughly confused way of talking. Reality is “what exists”, nobody seriously claims that reality does not exist. There is another notion of “same reality”, the “multiverse” view that has become more popular recently where there are copies of the universe “out there” that we can’t see except if we are superheroes. Supposing that this is sorta true, that discovery would just tell us of a new aspect of existence that we did not know of before, some “phase” property where we ordinarily only interact with existents that are “in phase” with us. “We” live in this phase-universe, “they” live in another phase universe, all that Objectivism has to say about that is what all scientists have to say about that, namely “Where is your evidence?”.
Instead, what they mean when they talk of “same reality” is that it is impossible to directly know anything, instead every consciousness creates its own internal state specific to that consciousness, and there is no causal relationship between reality and that internal (subjective) mental state. Now, it is true that mental states are individual, that there is no such thing as a collective consciousness where you and I literally share the contents of a single mind. What the subjectivists seem to believe, which we reject, is that knowledge is uncaused. Nobody has come up with a coherent description of this “subjective reality” idea, so the best way to understand it is to understand what Objectivism says about existence and knowledge, then investigate what it would even mean to deny that position.
Objectivism says that we have anatomical devices which sense certain things about reality, such as sound, heat, color, and so on. We use these devices to perceive the universe. We cannot directly perceive x-rays or sounds above 60 KHz, and we even know these facts (and why they are true). We also have cognitive devices that allow us to retain and organize this sensory input. These devices operate in a physically-regular fashion, just as electromagnetic radiation operates in a physically-regular fashion. Humans are special no Earth in that we have some unique cognitive devices for retaining sensory information. In particular, we organize sensory information into general “concepts” based on common properties. We can reduce (primary) colors to frequencies, the wavelength of the light emitted, where “red” is about 430 THz and “blue” is about 750 THz. You simply have to learn the conventional boundaries for your culture, something that you do as a child (where there may not be a difference between “green” and “yellow”, just as English doesn’t have the Russian distinction sinij vs goluboj). The decision to organize sensory inputs one way vs. another is voluntary, in the sense that it is not immutably predetermined by the universe. Because we choose how to organize our knowledge, some people get the confused impression that this means that knowledge is random, chaotic and uncaused.
The concept of “proof” presupposes the Objectivist viewpoint. If you insist that knowledge is subjective and random, then the notion of “proof” or “true” is meaningless.

I’ve heard people say such things, but it is a thoroughly confused way of talking. Reality is “what exists”, nobody seriously claims that reality does not exist. There is another notion of “same reality”, the “multiverse” view that has become more popular recently where there are copies of the universe “out there” that we can’t see except if we are superheroes. Supposing that this is sorta true, that discovery would just tell us of a new aspect of existence that we did not know of before, some “phase” property where we ordinarily only interact with existents that are “in phase” with us. “We” live in this phase-universe, “they” live in another phase universe, all that Objectivism has to say about that is what all scientists have to say about that, namely “Where is your evidence?”.
Instead, what they mean when they talk of “same reality” is that it is impossible to directly know anything, instead every consciousness creates its own internal state specific to that consciousness, and there is no causal relationship between reality and that internal (subjective) mental state. Now, it is true that mental states are individual, that there is no such thing as a collective consciousness where you and I literally share the contents of a single mind. What the subjectivists seem to believe, which we reject, is that knowledge is uncaused. Nobody has come up with a coherent description of this “subjective reality” idea, so the best way to understand it is to understand what Objectivism says about existence and knowledge, then investigate what it would even mean to deny that position.
Objectivism says that we have anatomical devices which sense certain things about reality, such as sound, heat, color, and so on. We use these devices to perceive the universe. We cannot directly perceive x-rays or sounds above 60 KHz, and we even know these facts (and why they are true). We also have cognitive devices that allow us to retain and organize this sensory input. These devices operate in a physically-regular fashion, just as electromagnetic radiation operates in a physically-regular fashion. Humans are special no Earth in that we have some unique cognitive devices for retaining sensory information. In particular, we organize sensory information into general “concepts” based on common properties. We can reduce (primary) colors to frequencies, the wavelength of the light emitted, where “red” is about 430 THz and “blue” is about 750 THz. You simply have to learn the conventional boundaries for your culture, something that you do as a child (where there may not be a difference between “green” and “yellow”, just as English doesn’t have the Russian distinction sinij vs goluboj). The decision to organize sensory inputs one way vs. another is voluntary, in the sense that it is not immutably predetermined by the universe. Because we choose how to organize our knowledge, some people get the confused impression that this means that knowledge is random, chaotic and uncaused.
The concept of “proof” presupposes the Objectivist viewpoint. If you insist that knowledge is subjective and random, then the notion of “proof” or “true” is meaningless.

My understand of what was taught in high school history is over a half century old, so I really have little idea what they teach these days. But not no idea. Given what I have learned about the contemporary situation, I would take seriously a proposal to drop history and all social sciences from the curriculum, but also probably all literature, so now please spell out what the basic curriculum of high school would be, bearing in mind the staggering incompetence that most students have in math and science.
Instead, I suggest that there should be a re-consideration of the purpose of education. There seem to be three main viewpoints on that topic. One is that there are certain data points that are so important that it is impossible to exist as a human without knowing them. I guess “Declaration of Independence was July 4, 1776” would be an example, at least if you are an American. I lived for many decades without knowing when Norwegian Grundlovsdagen is, unlike every Norwegian. So obviously, importance depends on context. As it stands, the best justification offered is the intuition that “that datum is intrinsically important for our culture”.
The second is that education serves as indoctrination for a social agenda, so if the agenda is “pride in American accomplishments” that leads to one curriculum, but if the agenda is “shame in American accomplishments” that leads to a different curriculum. The same holds for scientific subjects, that the agenda should be something like “eco-responsible farming”, “justice-based medicine”. This is the current dominant approach to curriculum development.
The final approach is based on developing skills of reasoning. I have no issue with that approach, the question is how can it possibly be implemented? The main problem with a focus on reason-based education is that ideological indoctrination has hijacked the concept, by replacing actual reason with progressive pseudo-axioms under the umbrella of “critical thinking”. That brand has already been corrupted, I suggest referring to it as “Critical Theory” and put it in opposition to something else like “Reason-Based Education”.
There are three agents for setting curriculum. The first and best-known are the governments, which get to dictate what “counts” in a curriculum (bear in mind that even though the government does not run all education, it does dictate content to some degree for any education that is “accredited”). You can run an after hours counter-culture school that will supplement the government curriculum, that is what Sunday school is about, but it doesn’t “count”. Legislatures are notoriously bad (evil, not inefficient) at figuring out what should be in the curriculum. The second agent is the school bureaucracy, such as the school board or the curriculum committee. This is the weakest link in the chain, since they must follow orders from above but have variable control over the actual agents of education (teachers). Their greatest power is course-material selection, the H-bomb of education. The final agent is the college of education, which teaches future teachers, therefore teaches what and how to teach. This is the most direct and effective way to change the actual curriculum, because it is the teacher that directly imparts something to the student, so to the extent that teachers have some freedom to choose how and what, that is where actual curriculum change is best implemented.
The obvious follow-up question is, what can be done (by whoever) to bring about a change in what teachers do? Somebody has to devise and implement a curriculum for university education classes focusing on that which is most important, that means that somebody has to become a professor of education. Furthermore: there can’t just be a single such somebody, those professors of education have to be widespread in meta-education. The decay of education has been a slow process, largely encouraged by and not distinct from general cultural decay. It has not all been decay, there have been improvements especially a decrease in involuntary tribalism (discrimination based on the un-chosen).
Some parents may remove their children from a particularly offensive school system to protect their child, but the wisest parent leaves their child in school, exposing them to the harsh reality of what life will be like for them, and then supplements the child’s education at home.

My understand of what was taught in high school history is over a half century old, so I really have little idea what they teach these days. But not no idea. Given what I have learned about the contemporary situation, I would take seriously a proposal to drop history and all social sciences from the curriculum, but also probably all literature, so now please spell out what the basic curriculum of high school would be, bearing in mind the staggering incompetence that most students have in math and science.
Instead, I suggest that there should be a re-consideration of the purpose of education. There seem to be three main viewpoints on that topic. One is that there are certain data points that are so important that it is impossible to exist as a human without knowing them. I guess “Declaration of Independence was July 4, 1776” would be an example, at least if you are an American. I lived for many decades without knowing when Norwegian Grundlovsdagen is, unlike every Norwegian. So obviously, importance depends on context. As it stands, the best justification offered is the intuition that “that datum is intrinsically important for our culture”.
The second is that education serves as indoctrination for a social agenda, so if the agenda is “pride in American accomplishments” that leads to one curriculum, but if the agenda is “shame in American accomplishments” that leads to a different curriculum. The same holds for scientific subjects, that the agenda should be something like “eco-responsible farming”, “justice-based medicine”. This is the current dominant approach to curriculum development.
The final approach is based on developing skills of reasoning. I have no issue with that approach, the question is how can it possibly be implemented? The main problem with a focus on reason-based education is that ideological indoctrination has hijacked the concept, by replacing actual reason with progressive pseudo-axioms under the umbrella of “critical thinking”. That brand has already been corrupted, I suggest referring to it as “Critical Theory” and put it in opposition to something else like “Reason-Based Education”.
There are three agents for setting curriculum. The first and best-known are the governments, which get to dictate what “counts” in a curriculum (bear in mind that even though the government does not run all education, it does dictate content to some degree for any education that is “accredited”). You can run an after hours counter-culture school that will supplement the government curriculum, that is what Sunday school is about, but it doesn’t “count”. Legislatures are notoriously bad (evil, not inefficient) at figuring out what should be in the curriculum. The second agent is the school bureaucracy, such as the school board or the curriculum committee. This is the weakest link in the chain, since they must follow orders from above but have variable control over the actual agents of education (teachers). Their greatest power is course-material selection, the H-bomb of education. The final agent is the college of education, which teaches future teachers, therefore teaches what and how to teach. This is the most direct and effective way to change the actual curriculum, because it is the teacher that directly imparts something to the student, so to the extent that teachers have some freedom to choose how and what, that is where actual curriculum change is best implemented.
The obvious follow-up question is, what can be done (by whoever) to bring about a change in what teachers do? Somebody has to devise and implement a curriculum for university education classes focusing on that which is most important, that means that somebody has to become a professor of education. Furthermore: there can’t just be a single such somebody, those professors of education have to be widespread in meta-education. The decay of education has been a slow process, largely encouraged by and not distinct from general cultural decay. It has not all been decay, there have been improvements especially a decrease in involuntary tribalism (discrimination based on the un-chosen).
Some parents may remove their children from a particularly offensive school system to protect their child, but the wisest parent leaves their child in school, exposing them to the harsh reality of what life will be like for them, and then supplements the child’s education at home.

For those who are not familiar with Trump’s VP pick, he signals the end of free market economics in the Republican Party (here and here). He rejects the traditional Republican opposition to antitrust laws and the view that Lina Khan, Biden’s Commissioner of the FTC and chief government aggressor against business success is indeed engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing and has aggressively pursued an anti-innovation, anti-tech, anti-big business anti-consumer agenda.
Vance loves this: “I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job”. He holds that we need to “build a competitive marketplace…that allows consumers to have the right choices and isn't just so obsessed on pricing power within the market”. Not, “we need to get government out of the way of business”, but to actively build a “competitive marketplace”. It will be interesting to see if Vance repudiates this position from a few months ago, or does he more clearly embrace government-run economy. It will be more interesting to see if Trump responds to the mounting criticism of this choice with anything more than a standard Trump “He is a beautiful choice” nonsense.

A lie is not the same as an error. A lie is knowing that a statement is false, yet making it. Your claim that Biden lied is false, therefore by your criteria, you lied. Moreover you even assume the “assertion while knowing it to be false” meaning of “lie”. Bush did not provably lie, not did Biden. I have no problem with asserting that Bush and Biden should not have made statements that they were not certain were true, but that is not the definition of a lie.
You can validly say that “the media” lied, although there is no such thing as “the media”. Some a-hole (or multiple holes) deliberately manipulated the presentation of Trump’s interview. A different a-hole accepted that manipulation as fact, believed it to be true, and responded accordingly. Moreover, a third-order a-hole restated Biden’s text to remove false statements (it is true that there were riots in Charlottesville and that there were white supremacists involved, as repeatedly re-tweeted on social media – that part is not a lie). Your lie, or error, lies in imputing to Biden certain knowledge, without a shred of evidence that Biden knew the statement was false. Had you checked your sources, you probably would have realized that your accusation of Biden lying was not warranted, just as Biden could and have checked his sources before making his accusation.
A question which I don’t think is checkable at this point is the details of creation of any of those hoaxes. Some jackass (i.e. a-hole) posts an unresearched emotional reaction on a public forum and it gets reposted by others. WTF with waiting 4 years for this Snopes report? The explanation is rather simply that emotional ideology overrides reasoning. You cannot immunize yourself from the accusation of lying by playing the “while knowing it to be false” card without granting Bush and Biden access to the same card. Perhaps you can get away with a moral argument that as a lowly peon as opposed to being President of the United States, you have no moral duty to determine what is true before making an accusation. You can blame the media for Biden’s failure and your own. You might also demand original sources, given that media including the million of morons who contribute to social media have a tendency to lie, in the sense of not bothering to do their research. So I am actually not surprised that you couldn’t connect the argument to the axiomatic, because it is pretty hard to do.

It is not plausible, it stretches the concept of plausibility to its ultimate limit, to predicate Biden’s current assertions on a continuing erroneous impression of an event that occurred years ago. 
Say Trump’s news conference happened at 2 pm on a particular Tuesday and Biden learned of the content of his remarks from a third party and assumed the information he became aware of was a true representation of Trump’s word and made statements based on that misrepresentation later that day or even early the next day, then sure your tortured description would ‘fit’. But that explanation does not account for him restating a falsehood today. See he lied, from that particular Thursday onwards , unless you assume he was never confronted with evidence of his innocent mistake.
Do you not remember how any public official making a public statement had to preface the statement , no matter the subject matter of the statement with a disparagement, disclaimer about violence and white supremacy lest they be badgered by the ‘press’ until they spoke the magic words?
It is conceivable that you do not pay that much attention to such things, but politicians do , that is pretty much all they do. It is inconceivable that Biden or anyone on his staff remained then or continues today to remain ignorant of the content and context of Trump’s remarks on that day, he/they are lying. It is a certainty.
It is not something that was ‘debunked’ years later , it was never bunked in the first place.
Perhaps you are making a category error in applying ‘certainty’ in this situation. I do get the impression that most of your arguments stem from a confusion about the difference between the symbolic nature of language and the epistemic implications that confusion results in on more ontological premises. As long as subject/ predicate schema is strictly followed truth results. To me it feels like casting spells ,lol.

A lie is not the same as an error. A lie is knowing that a statement is false, yet making it. Your claim that Biden lied is false, therefore by your criteria, you lied. Moreover you even assume the “assertion while knowing it to be false” meaning of “lie”. Bush did not provably lie, not did Biden. I have no problem with asserting that Bush and Biden should not have made statements that they were not certain were true, but that is not the definition of a lie.
You can validly say that “the media” lied, although there is no such thing as “the media”. Some a-hole (or multiple holes) deliberately manipulated the presentation of Trump’s interview. A different a-hole accepted that manipulation as fact, believed it to be true, and responded accordingly. Moreover, a third-order a-hole restated Biden’s text to remove false statements (it is true that there were riots in Charlottesville and that there were white supremacists involved, as repeatedly re-tweeted on social media – that part is not a lie). Your lie, or error, lies in imputing to Biden certain knowledge, without a shred of evidence that Biden knew the statement was false. Had you checked your sources, you probably would have realized that your accusation of Biden lying was not warranted, just as Biden could and have checked his sources before making his accusation.
A question which I don’t think is checkable at this point is the details of creation of any of those hoaxes. Some jackass (i.e. a-hole) posts an unresearched emotional reaction on a public forum and it gets reposted by others. WTF with waiting 4 years for this Snopes report? The explanation is rather simply that emotional ideology overrides reasoning. You cannot immunize yourself from the accusation of lying by playing the “while knowing it to be false” card without granting Bush and Biden access to the same card. Perhaps you can get away with a moral argument that as a lowly peon as opposed to being President of the United States, you have no moral duty to determine what is true before making an accusation. You can blame the media for Biden’s failure and your own. You might also demand original sources, given that media including the million of morons who contribute to social media have a tendency to lie, in the sense of not bothering to do their research. So I am actually not surprised that you couldn’t connect the argument to the axiomatic, because it is pretty hard to do.

A lie is not the same as an error. A lie is knowing that a statement is false, yet making it. Your claim that Biden lied is false, therefore by your criteria, you lied. Moreover you even assume the “assertion while knowing it to be false” meaning of “lie”. Bush did not provably lie, not did Biden. I have no problem with asserting that Bush and Biden should not have made statements that they were not certain were true, but that is not the definition of a lie.
You can validly say that “the media” lied, although there is no such thing as “the media”. Some a-hole (or multiple holes) deliberately manipulated the presentation of Trump’s interview. A different a-hole accepted that manipulation as fact, believed it to be true, and responded accordingly. Moreover, a third-order a-hole restated Biden’s text to remove false statements (it is true that there were riots in Charlottesville and that there were white supremacists involved, as repeatedly re-tweeted on social media – that part is not a lie). Your lie, or error, lies in imputing to Biden certain knowledge, without a shred of evidence that Biden knew the statement was false. Had you checked your sources, you probably would have realized that your accusation of Biden lying was not warranted, just as Biden could and have checked his sources before making his accusation.
A question which I don’t think is checkable at this point is the details of creation of any of those hoaxes. Some jackass (i.e. a-hole) posts an unresearched emotional reaction on a public forum and it gets reposted by others. WTF with waiting 4 years for this Snopes report? The explanation is rather simply that emotional ideology overrides reasoning. You cannot immunize yourself from the accusation of lying by playing the “while knowing it to be false” card without granting Bush and Biden access to the same card. Perhaps you can get away with a moral argument that as a lowly peon as opposed to being President of the United States, you have no moral duty to determine what is true before making an accusation. You can blame the media for Biden’s failure and your own. You might also demand original sources, given that media including the million of morons who contribute to social media have a tendency to lie, in the sense of not bothering to do their research. So I am actually not surprised that you couldn’t connect the argument to the axiomatic, because it is pretty hard to do.

A lie is not the same as an error. A lie is knowing that a statement is false, yet making it. Your claim that Biden lied is false, therefore by your criteria, you lied. Moreover you even assume the “assertion while knowing it to be false” meaning of “lie”. Bush did not provably lie, not did Biden. I have no problem with asserting that Bush and Biden should not have made statements that they were not certain were true, but that is not the definition of a lie.
You can validly say that “the media” lied, although there is no such thing as “the media”. Some a-hole (or multiple holes) deliberately manipulated the presentation of Trump’s interview. A different a-hole accepted that manipulation as fact, believed it to be true, and responded accordingly. Moreover, a third-order a-hole restated Biden’s text to remove false statements (it is true that there were riots in Charlottesville and that there were white supremacists involved, as repeatedly re-tweeted on social media – that part is not a lie). Your lie, or error, lies in imputing to Biden certain knowledge, without a shred of evidence that Biden knew the statement was false. Had you checked your sources, you probably would have realized that your accusation of Biden lying was not warranted, just as Biden could and have checked his sources before making his accusation.
A question which I don’t think is checkable at this point is the details of creation of any of those hoaxes. Some jackass (i.e. a-hole) posts an unresearched emotional reaction on a public forum and it gets reposted by others. WTF with waiting 4 years for this Snopes report? The explanation is rather simply that emotional ideology overrides reasoning. You cannot immunize yourself from the accusation of lying by playing the “while knowing it to be false” card without granting Bush and Biden access to the same card. Perhaps you can get away with a moral argument that as a lowly peon as opposed to being President of the United States, you have no moral duty to determine what is true before making an accusation. You can blame the media for Biden’s failure and your own. You might also demand original sources, given that media including the million of morons who contribute to social media have a tendency to lie, in the sense of not bothering to do their research. So I am actually not surprised that you couldn’t connect the argument to the axiomatic, because it is pretty hard to do.

The current protests are caused by one specific thing: the death-worship cult that has infected societies across the world. There are various attempts to rationalize death-worship, for example the “at capacity” slogan, but that is just a side-show. Extreme tribalism is a by-product of the mentality of fear necessary to maintain the death-worship cult. Objectivism focuses on the conditions necessary for man’s existence qua man in a social context, which presupposes that existence qua man in a social context is a good thing, whereas the death cult denies man’s nature, and denies the virtue of existence in a social context. There are some inconsistencies in the rhetoric of the death cult, they typically support freedom of movement for those who are oppressed (presumptively by the rich), but they do not support freedom of movement for the rich (or at least the not-totally-destitute). This inconsistency comes from their fundamental principle, which denies man’s nature – of course, there are many specific ways to deny man’s nature, these Barcelona animals have selected a specific variant, whereas our domestic animals tend in a different direction, in favor of ethnic tribalism. Demanding logical consistency is a hallmark of us reactionaries who oppose the death cult.
The part that you correctly find scary is the expansion of personal assault as a tool of political expression. We have experienced things like this, Kristallnacht being a well-known example likewise the BLM riots and the January 6 riots. Those have been attacks on government and businesses, the current situation in Spain is much scarier because it is a direct attack on the customers. It approaches the personalized atrocities carried out under the Cultural Revolution, only it is worse since it is being carried out by young punks with no semblance of connection to law, government and civilization – it is the embodiment of the hell of anarchy. The threat of which can lead to emergency fascist control of everyone.
However, I think this is just another passing tantrum, like BLM, climate change, and various anti-economic terrorist attacks (whatever happened to the Greek debt riots? Whatever will happen to the Kenya debt riots?). Funny thing about the Yippie and SDS punks of the 60’s is that they grew up, seized the reins of power, and no longer are staunch supporters of “free speech” (i.e. their right to express their political viewpoint). It is likely that local Euro-governments will impose some kinds of restrictions on tourism, aimed at the relevant local businesses rather than the customers.

In my Colorado USA the national parks would be unnavigable and useless to all, with open gates. Visitor limitation is required. That’s fascist the same way Disney World utilizing gates and limits is fascist.

Let’s see if it is still funny in early ‘25 when everyone can see they cheated again, and he still won’t leave.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/more-soul-crushing-news-dems-musk-enters-2024-fight-sizable-gift-trump-super-pac
Elon Musk has committed an undisclosed “sizable amount” to a Trump super PAC.
Meanwhile, “Completing something of a Black Friday for Democrats, the story broke just hours after the New York Times reported that major donors had frozen $90 million pledged donations commitments to Biden's top super PAC, having concluded that Biden is a dead man walking -- politically if not otherwise.”
Too bad how they can’t get Biden to leave.
Remember being told not to vote for Trump because if we let him be President he would never leave?

The role of the government is to protect rights, not to increase domestic protection of products by economic intervention. Taking government hands off the economy is a virtue, increasing domestic production is not. I assume you understand the difference. Laissez-faire means removing the regulations, I’m looking for the evidence that Trump supports laissez faire capitalism and not “anti-foreign interventionism”. Name the specific regulation, show me how it is not a direct implementation of what Congress mandated. Show me the evidence that Trump will only address restriction on capitalism, rather than direct support of US businesses.
There is a separate question that spins off from your support of Trump’s executive behavior. Fortunately, SCOTUS already handed him his ass over his interventionism in the economy, regarding his order to force herring fishermen to pay for their own economic deaths. The demise of Chevron does potentially restore individual rights which he would otherwise infringe. The other more subtle yet important question for Objectivists is how great a virtue objective law is. Although many Objectivists support the rule of law over arbitrary individual dictates, we generally support only laws that protect individual rights, and as far as I can see, Congress has passed no laws that protect individual rights for over a half century. So is it okay to ignore the law if it is for a just cause? Should POTUS be given the power to write laws, ignoring what Congress does (NB that is the definition of a dictatorship)? What we need is not a president who plans to ignore the law, we need a Congress that is willing to correct errors of law.
Trumps policies are indeed “just typical conservative ideology”, but not even traditional Reagan conservatism, it is patently un-American neocon policy. And yes, we are rapidly approaching that ultimate inversion, where the government can do anything it wants, under the orders of the Glorious Leader, who rules by brute force. The last vestiges of rule-by-law are being constantly eroded, and Trump is most eager to accelerate this obliteration of rule-by-law in favor of his brilliant executive insights.

I’m glad to see that you agree that the best interpretation of Trump is “just as bad as the alternative(s)”, and that there is nothing good about another Trump term. It is true that “Muslim ban” is political rhetoric which Trump first created and which was essential to his first election “success”. Remember 2015: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”. Everyone then adopted his term. It’s political rhetoric just as “Stop the Steal”, “MAGA”, “Buy American, Hire American”, “Drain the Swamp”, “Build the Wall and Crime Will Fall”, “I will make Mexico pay for that wall” and his various “hoax” memes are all political rhetoric.
I am also glad that you acknowledge that the SCOTUS immunity ruling is an existential threat to individual rights (you didn’t mention that it was enabled by the tragedy that Trump appointed three ‘justices’ who bear responsibility for that expansion of presidential power. It is good that you recognize that Trump is a buffoon, but that is not the problematic fact. The problem is that he is a totally unprincipled and unthinking buffoon.

There isn’t any serious doubt that Trump is a threat to the American way of life, the best counter-argument in his favor would be that he is no more of a threat than Biden or Harris. By comparison to previous Republican nominees for president, Trump is so bad that he is at least as bad as the previously-presumptive Democrat nominee and current occupant of the office, and then the argument can proceed to the effect that he is actually worse.
This is where it matters what you think the job of POTUS is. Would Trump be better at running the country? Is that what the president is actually supposed to do? Will he increase oil and gas production in the US, and is that what POTUS is supposed to do? Is it good for the US to impose trade restrictions on China and in general to return to a tariff-driven anti-import economy?
A few things stand out as significant w.r.t. a Trump re-presidency. He has a certifiably xenophobic anti-immigration agenda, and will clearly pursue a policy of blocking foreigners from entering the US. This is a flagrantly un-American stance, moreover, his earlier failed Muslim ban was plainly unconstitutional, which goes to the question of whether he is tempermentally suited to be the chief custodian of US law. In balancing the interests of the US in terms of foreign policy, he has demonstrated an unthinkable level of support for the fascist dictators of Russia and North Korea and a shocking animosity towards our allies in NATO, who would be vital to defending the interests of the US against aggressor nations.
Although I do not believe that his weak efforts to engineer a coup d’etat on January 6 rise to the level of crime, his actions unambiguously show his contempt for the law. Paired with the recent court ruling that POTUS is above the law in a special way, we can not assume that he will act in accordance with the law, if his whims tell him to act differently. Which brings us to another potential threat of a Trump presidency.
POTUS appoints new Supreme Court justices, and there is some possibility that Thomas will need replacing under the next president (especially from a voluntary retirement based on Thomas’ assessment that the subsequent POTUS will be a hard-left extremist, so better to fall on a sword held by a softer-left president like Trump than… Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or AOC. For some reason, Democrat presidents have been better at figuring out which jurists are more in-line with their own legal and political theories (e.g. O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter). The only thing worse than a 4-year POTUS with Trump’s view of the law would be a lifetime appointment of a Trump-like justice. The most we could hope for would be (1) he doesn’t get the opportunity or (2) he is as wrong in is assessment of judicial candidates as Bush I was about Souter.
It is a crap shoot especially since the pig in the other poke might turn out to be a goat, or a rabid dog. Whereas previous presidents (at least in my lifetime) have had the moral character that precludes them overthrowing the government, I see no positive moral character inside Trump, no restraint that keeps the American government on track as an American government. If, in addition, he takes the House and Senate, no forces of government can constrain his desire to rule America the way he sees fit.

 

I’m glad to see that you agree that the best interpretation of Trump is “just as bad as the alternative(s)”, and that there is nothing good about another Trump term. It is true that “Muslim ban” is political rhetoric which Trump first created and which was essential to his first election “success”. Remember 2015: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”. Everyone then adopted his term. It’s political rhetoric just as “Stop the Steal”, “MAGA”, “Buy American, Hire American”, “Drain the Swamp”, “Build the Wall and Crime Will Fall”, “I will make Mexico pay for that wall” and his various “hoax” memes are all political rhetoric.
I am also glad that you acknowledge that the SCOTUS immunity ruling is an existential threat to individual rights (you didn’t mention that it was enabled by the tragedy that Trump appointed three ‘justices’ who bear responsibility for that expansion of presidential power. It is good that you recognize that Trump is a buffoon, but that is not the problematic fact. The problem is that he is a totally unprincipled and unthinking buffoon.

There isn’t any serious doubt that Trump is a threat to the American way of life, the best counter-argument in his favor would be that he is no more of a threat than Biden or Harris. By comparison to previous Republican nominees for president, Trump is so bad that he is at least as bad as the previously-presumptive Democrat nominee and current occupant of the office, and then the argument can proceed to the effect that he is actually worse.
This is where it matters what you think the job of POTUS is. Would Trump be better at running the country? Is that what the president is actually supposed to do? Will he increase oil and gas production in the US, and is that what POTUS is supposed to do? Is it good for the US to impose trade restrictions on China and in general to return to a tariff-driven anti-import economy?
A few things stand out as significant w.r.t. a Trump re-presidency. He has a certifiably xenophobic anti-immigration agenda, and will clearly pursue a policy of blocking foreigners from entering the US. This is a flagrantly un-American stance, moreover, his earlier failed Muslim ban was plainly unconstitutional, which goes to the question of whether he is tempermentally suited to be the chief custodian of US law. In balancing the interests of the US in terms of foreign policy, he has demonstrated an unthinkable level of support for the fascist dictators of Russia and North Korea and a shocking animosity towards our allies in NATO, who would be vital to defending the interests of the US against aggressor nations.
Although I do not believe that his weak efforts to engineer a coup d’etat on January 6 rise to the level of crime, his actions unambiguously show his contempt for the law. Paired with the recent court ruling that POTUS is above the law in a special way, we can not assume that he will act in accordance with the law, if his whims tell him to act differently. Which brings us to another potential threat of a Trump presidency.
POTUS appoints new Supreme Court justices, and there is some possibility that Thomas will need replacing under the next president (especially from a voluntary retirement based on Thomas’ assessment that the subsequent POTUS will be a hard-left extremist, so better to fall on a sword held by a softer-left president like Trump than… Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or AOC. For some reason, Democrat presidents have been better at figuring out which jurists are more in-line with their own legal and political theories (e.g. O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter). The only thing worse than a 4-year POTUS with Trump’s view of the law would be a lifetime appointment of a Trump-like justice. The most we could hope for would be (1) he doesn’t get the opportunity or (2) he is as wrong in is assessment of judicial candidates as Bush I was about Souter.
It is a crap shoot especially since the pig in the other poke might turn out to be a goat, or a rabid dog. Whereas previous presidents (at least in my lifetime) have had the moral character that precludes them overthrowing the government, I see no positive moral character inside Trump, no restraint that keeps the American government on track as an American government. If, in addition, he takes the House and Senate, no forces of government can constrain his desire to rule America the way he sees fit.

 

There isn’t any serious doubt that Trump is a threat to the American way of life, the best counter-argument in his favor would be that he is no more of a threat than Biden or Harris. By comparison to previous Republican nominees for president, Trump is so bad that he is at least as bad as the previously-presumptive Democrat nominee and current occupant of the office, and then the argument can proceed to the effect that he is actually worse.
This is where it matters what you think the job of POTUS is. Would Trump be better at running the country? Is that what the president is actually supposed to do? Will he increase oil and gas production in the US, and is that what POTUS is supposed to do? Is it good for the US to impose trade restrictions on China and in general to return to a tariff-driven anti-import economy?
A few things stand out as significant w.r.t. a Trump re-presidency. He has a certifiably xenophobic anti-immigration agenda, and will clearly pursue a policy of blocking foreigners from entering the US. This is a flagrantly un-American stance, moreover, his earlier failed Muslim ban was plainly unconstitutional, which goes to the question of whether he is tempermentally suited to be the chief custodian of US law. In balancing the interests of the US in terms of foreign policy, he has demonstrated an unthinkable level of support for the fascist dictators of Russia and North Korea and a shocking animosity towards our allies in NATO, who would be vital to defending the interests of the US against aggressor nations.
Although I do not believe that his weak efforts to engineer a coup d’etat on January 6 rise to the level of crime, his actions unambiguously show his contempt for the law. Paired with the recent court ruling that POTUS is above the law in a special way, we can not assume that he will act in accordance with the law, if his whims tell him to act differently. Which brings us to another potential threat of a Trump presidency.
POTUS appoints new Supreme Court justices, and there is some possibility that Thomas will need replacing under the next president (especially from a voluntary retirement based on Thomas’ assessment that the subsequent POTUS will be a hard-left extremist, so better to fall on a sword held by a softer-left president like Trump than… Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or AOC. For some reason, Democrat presidents have been better at figuring out which jurists are more in-line with their own legal and political theories (e.g. O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter). The only thing worse than a 4-year POTUS with Trump’s view of the law would be a lifetime appointment of a Trump-like justice. The most we could hope for would be (1) he doesn’t get the opportunity or (2) he is as wrong in is assessment of judicial candidates as Bush I was about Souter.
It is a crap shoot especially since the pig in the other poke might turn out to be a goat, or a rabid dog. Whereas previous presidents (at least in my lifetime) have had the moral character that precludes them overthrowing the government, I see no positive moral character inside Trump, no restraint that keeps the American government on track as an American government. If, in addition, he takes the House and Senate, no forces of government can constrain his desire to rule America the way he sees fit.

 

It seems to me that the most that one can reasonably do is scrutinize the logic of Sapolsky’s challenge: “What is needed to prove free will: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone’s brain was unaffected by preceding factors”. This is a common fallacy of rationalism, which can only be countered by a counter-challenge. My counter-challenge is “What is needed to prove determinism is: show me your ability to predict the choices made by men”. (Cognitive) determinism is an unfalsifiable pseudo-axiom. What constitutes a proof is not metaphysically given and is not self-evident. A proof is a presentation of evidence and the disposition of counterevidence. Sapolsky does not get to stipulate what constitutes proof, that is an objective question of logic (does all of th evidence support the claim? That is what a proof is).
Ordinary observation of humans refutes the premise that all choices are predetermined. To refute that refutation of determinism, it is insufficient to cry out wittily “You were predestined to make that argument”, one (Sapolsky) has to provide an actual model of the universe from which we can compute any man’s choices, and one must provide at least a modicum of experimental evidence to support the correctness of that model of the human mind. Needless to say, nobody has come within a light year of that gauntlet, much less ever having picked it up.
The underlying logical premise is based on the law of non-contradiction, which says that being whipped and burned is not the same as not being whipped and burned. The universe exists in a definite non-contradictory state. Alas, certain philosophico-scientists conflate epistemology and metaphysics, believing that if one cannot know whether X is the case or denial of X is the case, then the universe itself has an indeterminate state. More traditionally, existence is binary but knowledge is ternary (or more): we have “true”, “false” and “I don’t know”, but the fact either exist, or it doesn’t.
The Sapolsky-style argument is based on flawed burden-of-proof reasoning, that he who makes the claim must prove the claim. I direct your attention to vast amounts of evidence for free will, but the Sapolsky-style argument rejects the evidence because a particular statement is offered as axiomatic, when in fact it is not an axiom. The burden of proof now rests on Sapolsky or his followers and predecessors to provide a model which predicts human choices at the level that ordinary science would hold to “disprove the null hypothesis” (the .05 level, which AFAIK is actually unacceptably lax in physics which I understand requires 99.7% CL to be “evidence” and 99.9999% CL to be “discovery”).
Up until 2001, there was no explicit physical model of the fact that bumblebees fly, but nobody seriously doubted that they do. Likewise, there should be no serious doubt that humans have free will, even if we can’t reduce it to an equation rooted in sub-atomic physics.

Degenerating for a moment into legal technicalities, defamation has to be a false statement of fact as opposed to being an expression of opinion. You may feel that “being a fascist” has a clear objective meaning and it can be proven to be false, the law disagrees with you, this is a non-factual statement of opinion, similar to saying that Jones is an asshole. A statement of fact like “Jones raped me” would be actionable. Metaphorical interpretations of “rape” do not count.
If you claim that Jones said “I support eating the rich and confiscating their wealth”, or, “I support eating the homeless and confiscating their tents”, that is a factual claim, not a conclusion about what kind of political label might be attached to them, be it elitist, socialist, atheist or whatever. As a factual claim, you would then have to prove that Jones said these things to defend yourself (Jones would also have to prove that the false statement caused him harm).