Does the falsity of a statement(p) necessarily imply its opposite(~p) is true? (My professor says it does imply.) — Jerin Jaison

Well, yes it does. In any logical system I'm aware of, a proposition P being false is always a way in which ~P is true, even if there are multiple truth values.

Because by and large the people around one don't usually want them considering going through with it. This seems pretty straightforward.

So you might even say that soundness is analytically defined as those forms of argument which happen to preserve truth. — Moliere

That's validity. Broadly, validity is defined as "Truth preservation over all cases", or if one wanted to be a douche, "Preservation of the designated value across propositional transformations" (I wrote this in class once and the professor indirectly told me to chill the fuck out, lol). Soundness requires a valid argument and true premises.

Or, given that there are multiple systems of logic, we could also say that soundness is relative to some system of rules of inference, and all arguments which follow said rules of inference and also contain true premises produce sound arguments. — Moliere

No no, validity is indeed defined relative to a logic. After all, what counts as a "case" isn't fixed across logics. Soundness is the same concept across the board basically. So long as the designated value is preserved from the start to the end and the premises are true, it's a sound argument. The conclusion is veridical.

It almost seems like we need to already know the truth of our premises in order for the logic to be worked out. — Moliere

Not for the validity. That's the logic part. Soundness (at the object language) does need the argument to be valid but the truth value of the premises isn't a question of logic. The logic is the machinery guiding the inferences, soundness is, like, whether or not the machine is doing a good job.

Who cares about certainty? It's always this weird kind of desire for something that is either impossible because it's formulated to be so or else it doesn't really matter because having it wouldn't get one much of substance.

It's why the solipsism bit is nonsensical. People will admit there's no way to know for sure that solipsism is false, but that is because any observation or perception is compatible with solipsism being the case. But that means there can't be any reason to accept solipsism because anything would count as evidence for it. It's trivial, no refutation because no justification uniquely supports it, even in principle. Its always less likely to be the case than not to be the case, so where's the worry?

Ditch certainty. Ones knowledge of anything is fallible, you could always be wrong. But what matters is what reason you have for thinking something to be true or not. Idle possibility suppositions are pretty impotent so... yeah. I'm not really good for therapy on the issue if it's really bugging you

Have you never heard a physicist say that a ball thrown upwards decelerates because its kinetic energy is converted into potential energy, that a faster collision makes more damage than a slower one because more kinetic energy is dissipated, — leo

You are confusing convenient speech patterns with the literal belief in the things spoken about. This is an obvious misunderstanding. You already know what energy is defined by in physics so I don't know why you're going on about this.

I don't know who might claim that consciousness is explained by fundamental particles, but many physicists believe that they would arrive at a "theory of everything" by uniting the four "fundamental" forces into a neat unified theory, yet such a theory would still be totally unable to account for the fact that we experience anything, feel anything, and that they don't realize. It's not that it would be very complicated to derive consciousness from such a theory, it would be demonstrably impossible, and so it couldn't be a theory of everything claiming to have found the fundamental building blocks of existence. — leo

Name one published physicist who has claimed a "theory of everything" like string theory could be used - even in principle - to analyze and speak about literally everything. These are theories of fundamental physics, no one thinks they're going to be used to understand highly emergent phenomena, mathematics, politics or what have you.

All that we do is stating that the proposition p is false. John being a girl is only one among many possibilities — Jerin Jaison

I don't see where the problem is. There are many conditions whose truthhood which will entail negation of some statement. There are many ways for something to not be the case. Negation is just a flipper. If in any way the proposition fails to be true then it's false (in a bivalent logic).

Physicists like to treat energy as an entity that has the ability to cause things, but energy doesn't cause anything, it is simply a description of motion and potential to cause motion. We don't need to talk about the fuzzy concept of energy to describe the universe, we could simply talk about particles and their motion and their ability to move other particles — leo

I don't really understand what you're saying here. No physics student, much less a physicist, treats energy as a tangible thing. You yourself point out the standard definition of it, the capacity to perform work.
"particles and their motion and their ability to move other particles " just means energy (kinetic or potential) in physics.

(even though as we talked about in your thread about physicalism such particles cannot explain the emergence of conscious experience so they cannot be all there is).

I probably don't want to jump down this rabbit hole here, but I'm just going to say this sounds really disingenuous. I've never heard a physicist talk about consciousness as being explained by fundamental particles. Maybe some extreme anti-reductionist idiots in philosophy might say that, but one might as well suggest analyzing political systems with fundamental physics. One will never even begin to answer or discuss the most basic aspects of politics, so I'd be surprised if you could name any known physicist (with an actual publication record) speaking so cavalierly about that.

I don't mean to say you're dishonest or something, but this sounds like a category of opponent who doesn't exist, or barely so if it does. Maybe that "mad dog naturalist" philosopher whose name escapes me at the moment (Alex Rosenberg?) might but his epithet kinda sums up the view on him.

Are inference rules, such as modus ponens, disjunctive syllogism and others, possible of being proved? I mean, are they axioms, which validity is transcendental and exist by itself, or can they be deducted from the very three logical principles? — Nicholas Ferreira

No. "Proof" is defined by the axioms and inference rules one adopts. Ergo, there's no way to independently prove the validity of such things because proof and validities are what you get from the above things. There's no transcendental rules that cannot be violated.

A proof of that (in the colloquial sense of "proof") is that even in formal logic, you kinda have to develop the logic twice. Your construction of the formal system is done within a metatheory which itself can have its mathematical properties investigated, it's axioms brought to light, etc. And sure, you could keep going, checking out the meta-meta theory, etc., but you're just doing the same thing as you were in the object theory.

So the notion of a purely independent proof, of "laws of thought" or absolute, inescapable presuppositions that need no proof is just an incoherent idea. You just pick the ideas that seem reasonable or right to you - whether for pragmatism, interest or what have you - and let things play out. Like, the formal logic "LP", the Logic of Paradox, is a propositional logic which does not validate Modus Ponens. Of course, to be of any use beyond vague mathematical interest it can be augmented with a non-truth-functional conditional, but this is just to give evidence to my point about why an absolute background proof of such things doesn't make sense. Nearly any rule can, by some means, be done without in a formalism. The only real no-no everyone* agrees on is avoiding triviality.

*Outside very sparse philosophical interest; I've seen one wishy-washy "defense" of trivialism that was more for interest than believability.

That they are not known has to do keeping the experiment 'blind' so that the determinist cannot say there was unconscious interference or brain states influencing things. — EnPassant

Again, that's not the point. Knowledge is irrelevant to whether or not determinism is true or false.

Simply associating a number with an action, in advance of the number being known, is not physical determinism. For physical determinism to obtain it must be shown that a physical state determines the choice. The experimenter could as easily have decided that if n is the digit action n+1 will be performed. There is no rigid deterministic connection here. — EnPassant

Come on. The physical state of your brain (or whatever mechanism does the assigning) in deciding what action is associated with what number is part of the world too. You're treating the experiment as if its construction stands outside physical law and then claiming that it proves determinism is false. Who would be convinced by that?

Yes, but it is enough to show that the 'decision' is not physically deterministic. The slightest non deterministic action is enough to prove the case. It is clear enough to me that the 'choice' is determined by mathematical fact, not a physical state. But it is subtle; there are many physically deterministic threads running through this and one has to be careful to see what is deterministic and what is not. — EnPassant

You haven't explained this at all. Your first attempt was to say it came from "mathematical reality", but even here you don't explain how. You're the one picking which numbers entail which action, which numbers (you picked an arbitrary irrational number as I recall) and then you're saying that the numebrs determine the action indeterminstically. Like, no. You setup all the prior machinery - you, a physical system - and that yielded a set of actions. None of that is indeterministic, nor is it even clear how you think this violates determinism. Math isn't indeterministic, nor was the exercise you gave. The choice came from you and your setup, not from math.

But it is not just about one choice. There is a sequence of choices corresponding to the sequence of digits and that sequence cannot be decided upon because the sequence of digits is unknown. That is why there is a whole sequence of actions. — EnPassant

Let's see if this holds up. I don't know what the person beside me at work is going to do next. He could commit the changes he's making to a file, he could scrap it, he could yank out the power cable in frustration, etc. I assign actions to each of these and other possible acts he may perform next. But of course, I don't know which he will do, it's unknown to me. So clearly whatever I do next is indeterministic because I lack that knowledge.

That is obviously not a challenge to determinism. Knowledge isn't what settles that metaphysical dispute. It's whether or not the events which occur after some specified time are fixed due to natural law. And me lacking knowledge and acting based on what happens to occur in an uncertain scenario is clearly besides the point. You're confusing epistemic uncertainty with metaphysical indeterminacy.

It's easy to have the wrong idea about what you're doing when you think about non-existent objects. Both Meinong and Russell got it wrong. Russell thought that when he wrote 'the present King of France is bald', he was claiming, falsely, that there was a real present King of France. However, he was not; he was pretending that there was a real present King of France. — Herg

Sure, but the theory of definite descriptions is on shakier grounds these days when compared to Meinongianism, which has had an unexpected resurgence. The proposal (whether you accept it or not) is that the best explanation for the truth-aptness the relevant sentences is an appeal to non-existent objects. When you phrase it as "pretending" is sounds like you're calling me deceptive rather than misguided. If that wasn't the implication my mistake.

If you say 'Sherlock Holmes is the world's greatest detective', this is not a true statement. We only pretend that it is true, just as we pretend that there is such an object as Sherlock Holmes. — Herg

I think the sentence was "Sherlock Holmes is more famous than any detective" or something like that, but disregard that. To say the sentence is false seems to require adopting something like Russell's theory of definite descriptions. After all, few would hear me say "Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective" and interpret that as me saying Holmes exists. Because that's how Russell's theory would interpret that. And obviously that assumption is false and thus the sentence that assumes it.

If that's not how you are determining it isn't true, the only recourse that comes to mind is a restriction of either the Principle of Excluded Middle or of Bivalence. So we're either in many-valued logic or some kind of constructive logic. I'm not opposed to those (I'm a pluralist about logic) but I don't think it's the an easy bullet to bite. That said, I'll check out the paper you mention.

What do you think about objects in dreams? If you dream about a horse, do you hold that there is a horse? I hold that there is not.

A non-existent horse, yes. An existent horse, no. If one holds to Meinongianism, "there is" is not the same thing as "exists". Being has been partitioned into different kinds so if I speak truthfully about the horse in my dream I'm not committing myself to the existence of the dream horse. It has enough being to predicate things of it but it's a thin sort of being, not physical.

The reason that people present fictional things is almost never "to explain how we can speak truthfully about such things." — Terrapin Station

That's not what I said. I said the proposal to believe non existent things (Meinongianism) have some sort of being is proposed to explain how we speak truthfully about fictional things. I did not say fictional things are created so that we can speak truthfully about them. In other words, tan explanation for why I can say true things about Sherlock Holmes is the theory that non-existent objects corresponding to these things exist.

I assume that MindForged means that the chief reason philosophers propose non-existent objects is to explain how we can speak truthfully about such things; it's clearly not why novelists present them.

The disagreement between MindForged and myself is about the status of non-existent objects as it is hypothesised by philosophers (not by novelists, who mostly probably don't think about it). MindForged holds that we need there to be non-existent objects to explain how we can speak truthfully about them; I disagree. — Herg

This is correct.

That is not physical determinism. It is a 'blind' decision because the list is made before the digits are known. Physical determinism says that each physical state is, by way of the physical laws of nature determined by a previous physical state. If this is correct it must be possible to show that the value digit is determined by physical law, but that is not the case. It is determined by mathematical reality. — EnPassant

Again, you seem to miss the obvious. The decision is determined and thus whether or not the digits are known beforehand has absolutely nothing to do with determinism. That's epistemology, not metaphysics. The value of the digit is irrelevant because what course of action is done because of the digit in question is the result of the physical states which caused you to put assign each action to each respective number. This has no challenge to determinism at all. "Mathematical reality" isn't determining anything at all here for if it did, the action itself would follow from pure mathematics. But obviously they don't, you're the one deciding what number corresponds to what action. Proof: Why does number 1 correspond to " Go to the library"? The answer is because that's what you "chose" to make, and your choice is not arbitrarily outside of determinism. Your whole thing relies on begging the question.

That determinism locates the digit has no relevance because it is the value of the digit that determines the choice and that value is a primitive truth, not something that is physically determined.

The value doesn't determine the choice, the choice determines what the value entails you do. That's not a primitive truth, how ridiculous. The list of actions does not exist in a vacuum, it's the result of determined choices, of physical states of affairs which caused you to create it the way you did.

No, you're not saying 'pretend'; you're simply pretending. — Herg

You can say I'm pretending but I'm not.

No, there are no non-existent objects. To say that an object is non-existent is the same as saying that there is no such object. — Herg

Which makes it quite difficult to explain how one can truthfully speak about non existent objects. After all, for the sentences about them to be true there must be something making them true. But on your view "existence" and "being" are the same thing so you've no way of explaining truths of the sort I mentioned before.

I think you are pretending that he is real without realising that that's what you are doing. You know that he isn't real, and yet you speak of him as if he were — Herg

I am not pretending he is real, I don't know where you're getting that. He is a fictional character and nonetheless I can say true things about him. It is both the case the Holmes is fictional and he is more famous than any other detective. You haven't at all addressed this other than to say I'm unwittingly assuming he is real despite directly saying he isn't. Unreal things can have properties and relations with real things.

The story I'm referring to is not trivial. It's quite a good story. The point is that logical laws, just like physical laws, can be disobeyed in a work of fiction, as long as the resulting narrative makes sufficient sense for the reader to follow it. — Herg

When I said "trivial" I was referring to the definition of trivial in formal logic: incoherency due to every sentence being a theorem. Fictions with contradictions are, in standard logic, reduced to triviality.

See above re. the difference between applied and pure math. My point is that the value of the digit is not determined by any physical state, yet the digit determines the choice from the list. — EnPassant

The choice from the list is determined by which action you "chose" to assign to the digit. How this escapes determinism is beyond me. You haven't shown your list was somehow freely chosen (which would have settled the debate anyway if you managed it).

That's not about whether you're pretending, it's about why you're pretending. — Herg

Incorrect because everyone knows that I'm not claiming nor at all pretending Holmes is real. It's simply true that he's more famous than any living detective despite being a fictional character. I am not saying (nor does anyone interpret me as saying) "Pretend Holmes exists and he his more famous than all other detectives". If you don't understand this that's because you don't think there are non-existent objects. Holmes is purely fictional and yet that fictional entity is in fact the most famous detective. It's a true statement.

It's true that fiction-writers usually follow the principles of logic, but that's merely because most of what fiction-writers want to do doesn't require them to depart from those rules. They can produce fiction that doesn't follow the rules of logic if they like: for example, there's a short story - I can't remember who by - in which the rules of mathematics are not determined until someone actually does the maths, and there are aliens who have done the maths on certain numbers before we have, and they have forced maths to work differently for those numbers from the way it works for the numbers we got to first; which, of course, is not logically possible. Existent objects, on the other hand, have to follow the rules of logic. — Herg

This doesn't make sense. The reason most (really, all) fiction writers attempt to keep their stories consistent is because otherwise their story doesn't make sense, even to them. Doing otherwise results in triviality, wherein the world doesn't cohere. I'm not familiar with the story you mention.

I really don't understand you. Fictions are non-existent objects. It's true that the chief reason for proposing that there are non-existent objects is to explain how we speak truthfully about such things. And given there are inconsistent such objects, refusing to extend the theory to them is without justification.

Usually that's synonymous with non-existent objects. They're adopted to explain something about fictions. But the explanation works just the same for the inconsistent fictions, so we either accept those or dispense with this theory.

Because the whole reason for adopting non-existent objects is to explain how we can say true things about objects that don't exist. And this entails that we can speak truly of inconsistent objects of that variety, granting them a kind of being. In fact, Meinong himself accepted this as a consequence (even a virtue) of his view, saying that Non-contradiction didn't apply to non-existent objects.

If you don't accept that the purpose of this is to explain that then you can't really accept it to begin with (which is fine), at least unless you're willing to have a lot of ad hoc restrictions. Or as I said, unprincipled.

Because:

they play the same theoretical role: explain how we make true assertions about things which don't exist.

If the reason why adopting such a view is to serve the above then it applies just the same to inconsistent non-existent objects. In which case recourse to Non-contradiction is just irrelevant. You'd have to just insist on the principle for no reason (or beg the question for it), and there'd be no explanation for why you stop there.

Non-existent objects cannot be entertained unless you accept contradictory objects.
— MindForged

Could you explain that more? — Terrapin Station

Sure. Lots of objects do not exist. The planet Vulcan, unicorns, maybe God. But there are an even stranger class of non-existent objects, the contradictory ones. The square-circle is surely a non-existent object, but to accept this means to accept that there are objects with inconsistent properties. And there doesn't seem to be a principled (non-question-begging) distinction between the consistent and the inconsistent objects that don't exist, they play the same theoretical role: explain how we make true assertions about things which don't exist. The square-circle is surely circular, surely a shape, etc.

And so it seems if you accept that there are non-existent objects you're committed to quite the ontology. But obviously you cannot adopt the Law of Non-contradiction if you accept this because you're committed to things like the non-existent square-circle. But then it gets even weirder since it's unclear why, if you accept this, why the property of existence rules out contradictory existent objects as well for you.

Evidently I didn't make myself clear. To speak of a non-existent God is to pretend that there is a God when there isn't. Since it's a pretence, it's not bound by the laws of logic. — Herg

No, that doesn't ring true. If I say "Sherlock Holmes is the most famous detective", no one thinks I'm pretending Holmes exists. The principles of logic (or more properly, the principles of the logic I happen to adopt) do not cease to apply when dealing with fictions. Otherwise authors would never structure their stories or try to retcon earlier mistakes.

No, because as I said reality does have a mathematical structure to it. To call that "not reality" is just incoherent, the structure of reality is obviously part of reality.

The second error is to suppose that a non-existent God can't have contradictory properties. Anything we think of that is non-existent is imaginary (by which I mean that we can conceive of it but it doesn't exist), and imaginary things can have contradictory properties (e.g. Meinong's round square, which is imaginary and is both round and not round); it's only things that are existent (i.e. real) that can't — Herg

Ehhh, unless you're a dialetheist like myself you cannot really run this sort of argument. Non-existent objects cannot be entertained unless you accept contradictory objects. But in doing so, I think you really have to accept that contradictory existent objects are possible as well, because in principle there doesn't seem to be a reason that the property of existence makes inconsistent properties unavailable. And that's a tougher thing to argue for, though there are arguments.

Just for the record, math is a game that we play, with definitions and rules.

Math does not really exist outside of the human mind. It is simply an analytical tool that humans use to do things in an organized manner, such as count buffalo by prehistoric hunters. — hks

I don't really think this is quite enough. Math is not just a game with rules and definitions. Universes have structure, structures which can be mapped onto mathematical systems whose properties we can explore. That gives a sense of "realness" to some areas of mathematics which puts it well over this seeming notion of total instrumentalism. It does not simply exist in the mind, and really, it seems to be exactly the opposite. Mathematical systems have properties the human mind does not (infinite properties, for instance).

Yes, but it wasn't as if Catalonia was being left to pursue its own destiny without outside interference. Catalonia didn't shoot itself, it was murdered. — Bitter Crank

This just proves my point. If they can't defend themselves because the ability to do so requires setting up "unjust" hierarchies then it just shows their ideology is useless because it has no built in justification for defending the structure it needs. I'm no Marxist but they don't get the pass of "Well the U.S. was making a concerted effort to discredit and destroy socialism. It's not fair, let us do it unfettered by the reality of opposing forces". In many ways, anarchists have a rosy, ahistorical understanding of their own history a lot of time. Catalonian anarchists set up a state because they knew it was required for a time, and even then they were destroyed by the fascists.

I didn't say it was impossible to start an anarchist society (or the precursor to one). The Catalonian example was a type of socialism, no doubt about it. But the ideology they possessed (among other things) was a hindrance to maintaining it, I'd argue.

Incentivize people to move elsewhere in the country. I left Dallas because the traffic is stupid in certain areas and it was costing me money and time.

I mean I know I'm probably making this sound easier than it is but then you're talking about whether or not we should continue to allow immigration which is way more complicated and tenuous than what I'm saying.

I'm not sure I follow. You yourself said:

If we have good reason to hold one is sure over another

which is surely about whether or not we have good reason to believe something. So we're surely talking about justification in believing something to be the case not about preference. But that's not truth then, clearly. And unless I'm much mistaken, when Terrapin says neither realism nor idealism are refutable he's talking about the truth of which is the case. They might well accept your reasons as more... reasonable in believing realism, but still hold it's not determinative in settling the debate (or even that the debate cannot be settled to the required level to call one side refuted).

Am I missing your point?

Are punishment and revenge the same thing? This seems like a mistake.

This is an outright contradiction. If we have good reason to hold one is sure over another, then we are dealing with refutable positions. By the measure of truth, having a reason to select one potion over another involves some sort of refutation of an opposing position. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't think that's the case. We may well have good reasons for accepting realism (or idealism) without that position being proven. Having a good reason to believe X is not equivalent with establishing that X is the case. Justification and truth are not the same concept. So it's not a contradiction.

I think atheism is a view I have good reasons for holding. That doesn't mean I've proven no gods exist.

Oh it's surely possible. But maintaining it for more than a trivial amount of time? Doubt it, every time anarchists take over they fail (Catalonia anarchism was the longest and that was, what, three years?). And even when they last more than a few months, they still set up a government. It's why I can't take anarchists seriously whereas I feel I can actually talk to Marxists and debate them outside of hypotheticals they don't have any substantial basis for. They had something substantial to point to (half the globe) so it doesn't come across very "And this would definitely happen".

/Needless potshots.

You're assuming there's a specific goal or something with allowing immigration. It's just weird man. We might well have broad things we want to continue but not a specific end point we seek beyond which we say "Don't want". It's not a question of space concerns (plenty of room) nor of money (plenty of that, though largely concentrated among the hyper wealthy).

I mean it's a bit like how we have rights. We don't keep free speech until we reach some point where we take it away. Rather, having it (or in this case, allowing immigration into the country) is something we seek to maintain because of some set of principles, not as a goal-oriented policy. Some people construe it that way sure but that's not why most people are fine with it (depending on circumstance).

I'm really confused about this whole thread. "Unperceived object" is not a contradiction in terms (does anyone really think that???).

Whatever I experience I experience as an idea in my mind. I assume that this idea is caused by an object in the external world. However, I can never experience this object itself since this object is by definition independent of my experience.

I'm not a direct realist but a direct realist (because some kind of faulty representationalism is clearly the case) would surely laugh at this and say you're just defining your way to victory and then thinking you've found a novel truth. Literally anyone can do this and it's a shitty argument in any context. "X is the case because I've defined the crucial terms Y & Z in such a way that they entail X". That only works if everyone agrees on how to define the terms. If they don't agree on those then it clearly doesn't follow. So this:

In other words, it is impossible to perceive an unperceived object by definition.

Give the definition and see if it's actually impossible. I'm willing to bet the definition is not so clear that a reasonable alternative can't be given to avoid the apparently irrefutable conclusion.

We determine what symbols mean. They have no intrinsic meaning.

I don't think this is really relevant since nothing I said was about meaning and symbols, just the setup of "choosing" based on the symbol that happens to come up. I certainly never said symbols have intrinsic meaning. The interpretation of some symbol as having some meaning can itself be deterministic in which case it just further entombs the determinism.

Not that I'm claiming determinism is the case, just that nothing in the OP's exercise challenges determinism in any way.

I don't even think it's a challenge to determinism at all. It's only non-deterministic if you ignore the setup of the entire list and why you select certain actions. If you want you can refer to this as "meta-determinism" but that's going to be relevant to any discussion of determinism vs indeterminism, so this doesn't seem terribly enlightening. Like take this bit:

Now our choice is not determined by any physical or neurological state. It is determined by purely non physical mathematical entities.

No it isn't, it's determined by the marks on the paper/whatever medium (or mental representation) and what you "chose" to assign as the course of action for that particular digit. There's absolutely nothing here that invalidates any sort of determinism, even the simplistic variety. The "choice" here to set the arbitrary act to some number coming out of a random irrational number you selected can easily have been determined and so the rest is as well. You're mistaking the epistemic issue of not knowing beforehand which course of action you would take with the metaphysical issue of it being deterministic or not.

Does economics have many problems? Yes.

Is it still a science? Also yes.

It's all about their attempt to obtain power at all costs. It has nothing to do with righteousness. To think otherwise is incredibly naive. — Hanover

I don't think this has any bearing on the fact about what the GOP is doing, particularly in the Georgia case. The Dems being self-interested tells me Precisely nothing about the validity of the GOP denying or stalling more than 50,000 from voting in Georgia and 80% of them are non-whites who tend to vote Dem.

And I think you'd be incredibly naive to assume things that you don't have evidence for. — Terrapin Station

Of course the fact that such laws were implemented almost immediately after the Voting Rights Act (which prevented such laws for obvious and historical reasons) was repealed is apparently lost on you. Again, you are being ridiculous if your expectation is for politicians to be up front about nefarious deeds. Indeed, Trump must be innocent of any nefarious connection to Russia because Trump hasn't conformed it.

I'm being rational and evidence based, of course. That Kemp is both the man in charge of determining if the upheld voters are denied whilst also being the one running for governor likewise must be irrelevant evidence because Kemp has not admitted to doing this to benefit his own bid for governor.

You'd have to be incredibly naive to think otherwise honestly. The whole point of these laws - made possible by the SCOTUS pull backs of the Voting Rights Act - is to make it harder for minorities to vote since they tend to vote for the Dems. The relevant laws (ones which would reject those whose names missed, saw, a hyphen or a middle initial) were enacted precisely because those would not affect white people very much, and we see that in the results: 70% of those rejected are black Americans and 80% of the total are non-whites. The Dems in Georgia fought that bill because they said this would happen. The bill didn't have any benefit besides voter suppression, the results speak for themselves. It's not even clear if the provisional ballot alternative will even work because Kemp's office is in control of it (he's the Secretary of State) and he's also the person running for governor. That's just a conflict of interest.

Really, if the above doesn't suffice then the only thing that would likely satisfy you is an open admission of guilt on the part of Kemp and the GOP, which is absurd.

Here's one from just a week ago from Marco Rubio:

Marco Rubio tried to sound like a reasonable voice on climate change despite his science denial by pointing to legislation he’s helped advance on sea level rise adaptation. But as renowned glaciologist Lonnie Thompson put it, “the only question is how much we will mitigate, adapt, and suffer.”

That's the context in which I usually come across this. An admission that the thing is real but only insofar as to continue putting off any means by which to mitigate its severity.

Apologies for my assumption, it's how I'm used to seeing that response play out.