Sorry, I was using the word in the non-technical sense. But thanks.

If you assume that everything exists (which I do), including hobbits, determining what a thing exists as becomes paramount to their ontology. For me it's as simple as writing the word "Hobbit" on a piece of paper and taping it to that object. Without being able to find a little man called a hobbit, I'd have to place it on the book "The Hobbit" or on some guy reading the book, or a bunch of neurons. These objects—the book, the guy reading it— are the ones at risk of being undermined by considering the Hobbit to be an object. Anyways, interesting stuff to think about.

I already said that Pomerantz and another prosecutor resigned. As you have clearly read from the article, there are more prosecutors involved, including Bragg himself.

Mr. Trump is his own most dedicated promoter and for years has acted as a booster for the value of his buildings and his brand. The possibility that Mr. Trump’s exaggerations could be criminal has long intrigued prosecutors, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office at one point came close to indicting Mr. Trump on charges that he had misrepresented their value.

The current district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, declined to pursue that case, but later indicted the former president in connection with a hush money payment to a porn star.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/nyregion/trump-james-fraud-trial.html

What happened to the baseball team analogies?

I like the phrase and I too have an object-oriented ontology. I also express a “flat-ontology”, I suppose, at least insofar as objects cannot be identical to their relations.

But I think it’s wrong to look at objects as the ultimate stuff of the universe if each one is unique and never exhausted by its relations. The principium individuationis suggests pluralism, that there is an infinite variety of objects.

I don’t think something like The Civil War or abstract or fictional ideas are can be considered objects, either, and that to do so risks undermining the actual objects involved in thinking about and expressing those ideas.

Anyways, I'm going to take a look at the book. Thanks for sharing.

I was quoting one of Ankush Khardori's sources from his article in New York Magazine.

“That was never conveyed to the team,” one of the sources told me, while cautioning that it was at least conceivable that there were discussions among Vance, Pomerantz, and Dunne that were not shared with others in the office. “The authorization,” at least so far as the source could summarize, was to continue investigating. “It was never, ‘All right, go forth and indict,’” the source continued, “because there was nothing, there just wasn’t anything … There was nothing to indict.” If anything was expressed during this period, it was that “this would be a great civil case.’” Indeed, Attorney General Letitia James’s office brought such a civil case last year that largely followed the same outline.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/mark-pomerantzs-revealing-fight-with-alvin-bragg-over-trump.html

I was writing about the prosecutors in the district attorney's office (note: "the prosecutors", "the criminal prosecutors", not "the attorney general") investigating Trump for the exact same thing. If you do not recall two of them quit earlier this year. This was because, to their chagrin, "There was nothing to indict", ie, no crime, no evidence of any crime. They had nothing and were angry the DA refused go along with it. Obviously, you know nothing of this, nor should I be required to fill in the holes of your knowledge, but hopefully this clears it up for you.

How is that possible when the sentence you quoted refer to other people? It’s clear to me where the distortion lies. At any rate, that’s my public service for the day.

I didn't say she chose not to bring a criminal case. I said "prosecutors refused to pursue the case". You even quoted it. Is this your idea of good faith?

One-sided stories, churnalism, contextomy, card-stacking. Propaganda as a public service.

This is like saying a baseball team refuses to play basketball.

When dealing with Fooloso be prepared nonsensical analogies and other sophistries.

You can't think of any reason why criminal prosecutors would refuse to pursue a case?

Another odd find in the Biden saga. Still, no evidence Joe was involved. Just his address, his son, his family, Air Force 2, and so on.

House Oversight Republicans say new bank subpoena shows Hunter Biden listed father’s Wilmington house in wires with China

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee subpoenaed a bank for Hunter Biden’s records and obtained two wire transfers from Chinese nationals to Hunter Biden in 2019 that listed President Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home as the beneficiary address, the panel announced Tuesday.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/26/politics/house-oversight-republicans-hunter-biden-bank-subpoena/index.html

I know what a civil and criminal case is and the difference between liable and guilty. No need to scurry around and gather disparate quotes and authors, which I never read in any case.

Fraud is a crime but prosecutors refused to pursue the case. I wonder why? “Liable” is becoming the common theme because guilt escapes you. New York is a banana republic. See what SCOTUS says. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It isn’t standard procedure to tell a general in a foreign army that he would warn them should the US attack.

You’re just quoting disparate paragraphs from all over the internet. You’re not pointing out much. None of it gets into what Milley said to the Chinese.

Sorry, but judges aren’t the commander in chief of the armed forces.

Clearly I was speaking about the unnamed official, not the named one.

We heard it here first. Lawyers get to determine what an “enemy” is.

Thanks, unnamed official.

He gave aid and comfort to the enemy behind the back of the president. He admitted to it in his book.

Milley, broken with a moral panic, went around the back of duly elected president and informed the CCP about Trump in order to cool tensions. He violated his oath, ran contrary to the will of the people, and arguably committed treason.

An embarrassing moment for Trudeau and the Canadian government. Trudeau, Zelensky, and the Ministers of parliament gave a standing ovation to a Ukrainian WW2 veteran in the House of Commons. It turns out he was an actual Nazi, fought for the SS in Ukraine and everything. You can’t make this stuff up.

You don't get other people's problems. And yet you want them to help you argue against them in other places.

The perfection of your form makes me wonder if you are an algorithm.

Odd accusations, and as usual without argument. I’ll pass.

I don’t get the complaint. But I’m still interested to read how what I wrote is a counterpoint to what I have proclaimed in other places.

I’m trying to participate in the discussion of what freedom is. I haven’t once dismissed it, I’m afraid.

I do not believe in determinism. These presumptions sound like your own. But if you wish to ever know what I believe about any given topic, feel free to ask.

How so?

Weighing ideas and other exercises in “high-order thinking” is one of the easiest activities to accomplish, in my opinion. It is the least evolved, doesn’t involve much energy, and is the easiest to mimic in artificial intelligence. So I view that experience as highly overrated, even inconsequential.

I think our difference lies mostly in the respect of feelings, and what parts of the body we identify with. I hold the view that feelings don't offer us much information when it comes to the biological facts. I can't even see, feel, or hear a vast majority of it, and the sensations biology provides are often fleeting, even misleading. So to me, any feelings-based, first-person account of the self is entirely limited, and often wrong.

But where other people, instruments, and examinations of the biology are involved, we never discover such notions as hierarchies and conflicts. When I look at the biology it's difficult to observe where one organ ends and another one begins. What is the brain without the heart or lungs, or the skull and spine, for example?

Your story about getting in shape does not indicate to me some internal competition, but biology working as it should. The physiology of your hunger is indicating that you want food, while your pre-frontal cortex is deciding whether you should eat. Since all of it is biologically interconnected, none of it foreign or parasitic, it's much easier for me to conclude they are working together in service to the whole.

As for the divisibility of persons, wherever a person is divided, one or both parts die. One doesn't need to draw a line around it because it is already contained within itself, in this case by an epidermis. And the only way to divide it is by brute force, to destroy it. So while we might be able to imagine that a person is divisible, actually dividing a person says nothing in regards to his divisibility, but in the brutality of the one doing the dividing.

Note that in most parts of the world this already happens. Consider public education. In your view, the state should back off and thus allow the strongest to determine what the ethical life should be. But isn’t this the very thing you despise most about state intervention: the corruption aspect?

I’m not sure why the strong should determine what the ethical life should be. The point is that no person or group of persons has the right to determine what the ethical life should be. They may have the legitimate authority to instruct one in ethics, to act as an exemplar, or to outline the expectations of this or that society, but never the right to determine them or another’s conduct. All of that, in the end, is left to the moral agent, the person who acts, both in fact and in principle.

All fair points. It’s sort of a question of whether the state should involve itself in the moral life of citizens. Lycurgus of ancient Sparta became known for involving the state in ethical life straight out of childhood where citizens would become normalized to having no limits of love, community, and military honour. For instance, the state allowed adultery if the players were in love, and there were requirements for people of different economic classes to dine together and eat the same meals. The Spartans were highly regarded by some for these as philosophical accomplishments and they endured for many generations after Lycurgus’ death.

That being said, does the state have any duty to guide citizens into a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness, or should we agree simply to submit that the exceptions are the rule? I mean, how many drug users do you know whom you would call satisfied and fulfilled individuals (… be honest)?

Thanks for the historical examples. Very interesting.

I don’t think the state should involve itself in the moral lives of its citizens because I believe the state is an inherently immoral and anti-social organization. Following this, I do not believe the state ought to have any duty or power to guide citizens into a life of satisfaction, fulfilment, and happiness, whether it works or not.

It is simply not up to them. Their power doesn’t satisfy these two questions: is any man fit to be another man’s master? and is their authority over other men legitimate? The answer to both is “no”.

It’s probably true that the level of satisfaction and fulfillment is entirely absent among drug users. But these levels and these terms are not up to some praetorian guard to define, let alone enforce.

A human being is one entity, and no person is divisible, certainly not into master and slave, lower and higher. We can spend eternity categorizing him into parts, but it will forever be a poor accounting of the brute reality.

It’s better to say that an addict has cravings rather than is a slave to them, in my opinion, because to do otherwise suggests that these impulses are not his own.

My guess is that most of the pull towards prohibition is aesthetic rather than moral or ethical. At any rate, there is hardly an ethical principle in prohibition. It’s just that they do not like the look or the thought of people using drugs.

But a mixture of cynicism and authoritarian spirit shapes the attitude towards prohibition, while trust and permissiveness shapes the attitude away from it. I’d prefer the latter, myself. I say this because, as Spooner wrote, vices are not crimes. If one is not allowed to do what he wants to his own person and property, there is no such thing as right, liberty, or property. So to legalize would be the ethical thing to do, to maintain some semblance of human rights.

On the selfish front, if I think about who I’d rather share my community with, the authoritarian or the drug addict, I’d much prefer the addict. At least they can overcome their conditions, or die from it, one or the other.

The idea of self-tyranny or slavery to one’s thoughts and desires is an odd one because one cannot be a slave to himself, both master and slave at the same time.

Just to add, Neo-Republicans Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner propose that there exists a kind of liberty distinct from its negative and positive varieties. This Republican version, though rarely explicated, courses through the European and American traditions all the way from the Roman constitution until today, according to them.

Republican liberty finds its footing on the premise of “non-domination”, defined as the independence from another’s arbitrary will. It differs from the liberal tradition of liberty as “non-interference” insofar as one needn’t rely on another’s good will in order for Republican liberty to manifest.

Professor Pettit always uses Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as an example.

The banker Torvald was so enamoured with his wife, Nora, that he’d let her get away with anything. Despite the glaring disparity in the equality of the sexes at that time and setting, both legally and culturally, Torvald never got in her way, so Nora had a kind of liberty not available to most women. She lived in that state of “non-interference” as defined by the liberal tradition because Torvald rarely interfered in her life.

But was Nora really free? Not according to Pettit. If at any moment the good will of Torvald went parabolic, he would have all the legal and cultural right to interfere with Nora’s life. In other words, Nora’s liberty was dependent on the arbitrary will of Torvald. If Torvald’s will was good, she was not interfered with; if it was bad, she was interfered with, and Torvald would have every right to do so. Thus, Nora was in no state of liberty at all—quite the opposite. Her status was that of the Roman servus. Her slavery was hung above her head, always present, even while Torvald refused to interfere.

Nora was still in bondage to her master’s will because she was forever dependant on it. This dependency is important to the neo-republican. Nora toiled towards keeping Torvald happy, and serving him in order to retain some semblance of her liberty. She had to self-censor. She had to be nice and pleasant even when she would prefer to do otherwise. This sacrifice, in combination with her status in relation to Torvald, is why Nora had no liberty despite Torvald’s non-interference in her life.

The Republican relies on the Rule of Law and the good will of the State to protect him from another’s arbitrary will, finally setting him free. For someone like Nora to be free, to have Republican liberty, the state must protect her status, and remove all the legal and cultural forces someone like Torvald might use to dominate her.

Freedom is an idea. The word doesn’t describe much and can often be used to suit anyone’s purpose. I’ll suit it to my own.

The suffix “-dom” indicates that it is a condition, so we can understand that someone examines their own brain for imagery of a state of affairs, or they keep multiplying nouns to make any sense of it.

The suffix also indicates that the word is an adjective made into a noun. Adjectives can be used to describe the world. The adjective is “free”. When used to describe a person, this person is free to the extent that he is not interfered with, if others leave him alone. He is free if others do not censor him, coerce him, enslave him, attack him, imprison him, and so on. So the condition of “freedom” is only possible when the arbitrary wills of countless people align in such a way that they will all, each of them, refuse to interfere in the life of another. So it could be said that freedom is a condition dependent on the good, freedom-loving will of others, traits which are currently in short supply.

Don’t bother. I only wished to note the glittering generalities at work here.

I heard it becomes more true the more you repeat their spin.

Note the propaganda. The man who saved democracy from Trump, actively worked against the democratically-elected president and stifled his agenda.

A corporate/activist conspiracy makes drastic changes to election laws in the lead up to an election, spends Zuckerbucks and other dark moneys to set favorable voting conditions, pressures social media to suppress unfavorable information, and opposes one candidate’s efforts at every single step, and we’re told it is “making voting easier”. Always a nefarious motive for the enemy, and a benevolent motive for our new found defenders of democracy.

I’m saying it’s propaganda, written by Nancy Pelosi’s biographer, no less.

I pointed to the article to show that certain actors admitted to a conspiracy to alter election laws behind the backs of Americans, to use dark money to election infrastructure, to suppress and manipulate information, and so on. The whole article is a propaganda piece and an admission of guilt all in one. You’re simply repeating the propaganda, while avoiding their admission.

If you believe one can only rig an election by falsifying votes and/or throwing them away then I’m not going to satisfy you.