I’ll point you to the OP and the arguments.

We have back-peddled so far that Critical Race Theory and its racist assumptions are mostly mainstream. The pseudoscience and false taxonomies of race are given state prestige. But thankfully views critical of CRT, their paramilitary wings, and their attempts at societal subversion haven’t been made completely verboten.

In the UK, where I believed sense had gone the way of the dodo, a small opposition has found itself protected by law.

The headline in the Times: “Law protects opposition to critical race theory, judge rules”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/law-protects-opposition-to-critical-race-theory-judge-rules-rmrj2qnzt

https://archive.ph/La6Mf

Is the tide turning?

Anybody who desires a functional government acting in good faith

The big, bloated, and corrupt institution could use some time off.

Who cares?

The impeachment inquiry into Biden has begun.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66954626.amp

Now we have to deal with the inevitable politicization of the impeachment process, thanks to the two previous charades. I wish the politicians would take the higher road and leave the choice to their voters, but then again, we’re well beyond high road at this point and it would be a mistake to think that the GOP is not just as politically craven as the Dems.

The Dems seemed to think there was not enough evidence for an impeachment, and kept saying so, except it’s an impeachment inquiry. There is plenty of evidence of for an inquiry. It looks like the inquiry will be the impetus for subpoenaing bank records and all that, so any hard evidence ought to be forthcoming. Biden ought to be supportive of this because there is so much of a cloud around his name that this should clear up the air.

How do you account for something like a stop sign? If a foreigner asks you what it means, and you say, it is a spiritual recommendation to stop, meditate, and appreciate the immediate surroundings, you are quite objectively wrong.

We know what a stop sign means because over our lifetime we have come to learn what a stop sign means. We know the word “stop”, use it often, understand the colors associated with stopping, see others stopping when pulling up to it, and so on.

If a foreigner grew up learning that it was a go sign, that the sign meant “go” and the people around him treated it as such, he would see it as a go sign. I suspect we continually generate and supply the meaning to the signs rather than the other way about.

This isn’t to say that the signs are arbitrary. Far from it.

The meaning is invariably in the human being. The meaning of a word, for example, is only constant at the point of a speaker or listener, her body, and never in the signs and mediums. This is why we cannot understand the meaning of a sign by looking at it. Nothing called “meaning” is in the sign. Nothing called meaning is conveyed from one point to another by way of linguistic vehicles. There is no meaning in guttural soundwaves and scratches on paper. Philosophy ought to steer clear of this magical thinking and approach a biological or individual account of meaning, leaving the word-chopping to the linguists.

You’d be surprised. I would argue Canada places more power in the hands of its leader than does any other western country. Trudeau invoked the Emergency Act to quell protests critical of his government’s handling of the pandemic, for example. These powers allowed him to engage in nefarious activity against his own citizens, like directing banks to freeze their accounts. Imagine if the US president tried to do that.

I feel the same way about all things digital. Maybe it’s the medium, or that all of it is largely a string of ones and zeroes, and a portrait of the artist as a person who moves a contraption around on his desk, clicking it every once in a while. Of course artificial intelligence could do that better than a human being, when you think about it.

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.