I can't make any sense of that.

Of course you can’t.

Trail and error proves the merits and demerits of any moral principle. Slavery isn’t inherently wrong—it could have been used in a charitable way as to avoid the outright murder of one’s enemies—but it has proven itself wrong according a variety of human measures applied over a sufficient period of trial and error.

Well, saying “it can” also implies that “it cannot”. The point is, again, that the authority has to justify it.

Go on then.

It’s the authority that has to justify it. All I know is that if I see a father stop his child from running into a busy street I’m not going to question that authority. I will question the authority of an official, though.

An authority must be legitimate. For instance it can be justly reasoned that a father is the legitimate authority of his child. A politician is the legitimate authority over swaths of people because those people voted him in. They believe a feudal remnant such as a voting contest is the legitimate means to select authority, and that authorities need to be selected in perpetuity. So be it; but these little games and the fact that they play them legitimizes the contestants and especially the winners as authorities. What isn’t legitimate, but criminal, is that these politicians claim authority even over those who do not vote, who do not want to participate in their charades, and who have not voluntarily agreed to participate in their hierarchy.

Laws are legitimate and criminal for the same reason. People have bestowed politicians with the legitimate authority to make them. The man scribbling rules has no such legitimate authority.

The Mueller investigation began when AG Rosenstein buckled under Democrat and media pressure after Comey’s firing.

I refuse to believe everyone in the media didn’t know what “collusion” meant, and therefor what they were reporting on was true.

Again, the Muelller report states that “collusion” is synonymous with “conspiracy”. But because the word is irrelevant to law they went with “conspiracy”. That’s the extent of the matter. They had to do that because the acting attorney general told them to investigate whether members of the Trump campaign—and perhaps Trump himself—had committed crimes by “ colluding with Russia government officials ”, which you yourself admit is not a crime. So not only was the DOJ starting a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign based on something that isn’t a crime, but they used the rubric set forth by the media, not law, to set it in motion.

“Collusion” is synonymous with “conspiracy”, as explained in the Mueller report. No one from the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russians to influence the election, according to the Mueller report. There simply wasn’t any evidence for it. And despite there being no evidence, despite there being no collusion, I can’t recall any journalists coming to anywhere near the same conclusions. It was the biggest nothingburger.

There you have it.

I wish I could call them errors. “Russian collusion” and the multi-million dollar investigations, the red scare, the lives and careers and reputations ruined by it was premised on the fake political dirt of the opposition party. One could go so far as to argue the years of this kind of reporting helped usher in the present threat of nuclear war. This is the greatest media disaster in modern history and some outlets received Pulitzer Prizes because of it. No correction, no apology, nothing.



If my memory serves, I seem to recall that you believed Trump didn’t condemn white supremacy and neo-Nazis after Charlottesville.

If the agent determines all of his actions then yes he has free will.

Is he not his ingrained predispositions?

Can the agent choose not to avoid those actions? If he cannot, is he acting freely?

Yes.

You hold the same standards for news as you do politicians? No wonder fake news works so well.

Journalist Sharyl Attkisson has a great compendium of media mistakes, lies, and propaganda in the Trump era.

https://sharylattkisson.com/2022/03/50-media-mistakes-in-the-trump-era-the-definitive-list/

But you are not isolated from your environment. You cannot think freely without breathing oxygen and you cannot walk freely without having a ground to walk on. So why is that slip on a banana peel not your free act?

I’ve already argued that the actions we take while slipping on a banana peel are myriad, but invariably have to do with avoiding slipping. The moment a slipping action occurs, everything from our inner ear, our brain, our flesh and bone, move to avoid the act of falling and injury. Slipping, falling, colliding with the ground, and breaking one’s arm are not the “free acts” of the agent because those are the actions he is trying to avoid.

I’m not sure why one has to be isolated from his environment for this to be the case.

nothing pops into the head, as if from nowhere. I think; and whatever contents could be said to be found in that act are freely generated by me and no one or nothing else.

So it is not enough for my free will act to originate in me. I must also be alive and maybe also intend to do the act? But how do I choose an intention without already having it?

It is enough for your act to originate in you. Whether an action is willed, determined, directed, chosen, intended, controlled, conditioned, dictated, regulated, they arise within and are performed by the same agent. In a sense, then, you’ve chosen, determined, directed, regulated, willed your thought by having it.

Nope. Free will pertains to living beings, in particular humans.

If you slip on a banana peel is it an act of your free will or is it an act of the banana's free will?

Neither. When one slips on a banana the actions he takes range from trying to limit the harms of slipping (trying to regain balance, extending one’s arms to suppress the fall) to doing nothing. The slip itself is more of an act of physics, I suppose.

I think that’s a fair analysis. But, of course, there is no such syndrome. It’s less to do with mental illness and more to do with belief and propaganda. No doubt people want to believe certain things about Trump, and continue to believe certain things, even when the opposite has proven to be the case.

Forgive me, but I have trouble with the “ability to do otherwise” principle of free will. Many have taken it as a priori while I can hardly wrap my head around it. What matters to me, and responsibility in general, is whether he was the source of his actions. Thanks for clarifying.

True. Right and left are relatively meaningless in the Trumpian context. He is hated on all sides.

It does not mean that you do them un-freely either. The action is generated without cause or input from anything else in the universe. There is no restraint or anything barring such actions from being committed. It is not “determined” by any other being. So how is it not free?

‘To choose’ implies that a set of options exists *from which one chooses*. I don’t see how else ‘to choose’ could be understood. So in order for one to be able to choose their thoughts, they would have to be able to *think* of several options and choose one of them to be their next thought *without thinking their next thought in the process*, which is of course impossible.

If this is correct, does this automatically rule out the possibility of free will?

It doesn’t. To rule out the possibility of free will one will have to show that thoughts, or any action for that matter, comes from somewhere or someone else.

Well said. It is a phenomenon on the level of mass psychosis, even a religion. He’s both folk hero to his supporters and folk devil to his detractors at the same time.

Fair enough. But, just to say, we can read the opinions of the highest court in the land to discover why in fact it was overturned.

What if RBG didn’t die? Any speculations on what would have happened had she lived?

Trump finally announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election. Get your popcorn.

Counterfactuals. Such speculation is fun, no doubt.

I believe his point was that Congress would have protected abortion by federal law, in the same way that they plan to protect same-sex marriage by federal law.

Is it a “They would have” but they didn’t, sort of argument?

Yeah, they're definitely both the same. One party believes in climate change, the other says it's a hoax. Minor differences.

Bipartisan Senate Climate Solutions Caucus
Conservative Climate Caucus

I apologize and thanks for clarifying. The legal outcome, though, is decided by the Supreme Court, and has zero to do with party politics. My point was that the parties can avoid this by amending the constitution so as to make it unequivocal. Thanks for the last word.

A non-sequitur is when the logic does not follow. I thought we were talking about the differences between the two parties. Then you mentioned Supreme Court decisions, for some reason.

That's quite a non-sequitur.

I’m not sure how. As I understand it SCOTUS ruled that abortion was not a protected right under the Constitution in that case.

Dobbs would not have happened if the Senate was Democratic during the last half of Obama's second term or while Trump was president.

It would not have happened if there was an amendment to the constitution affording people the right to an abortion.

The only viewpoint under consideration when it comes to voting is deciding which person you want to decide matters for you.

None of which was legislated in congress.

I’m against voting in general. But I don’t think we should get rid of the parties. Parties can change. Party civil wars are welcome, in my opinion.

A dead guy was elected in Pennsylvania. It reminds me of the Artemis Ward quote, “inasmuch as we don't seem to have a live statesman in our National Congress, let us by all means have a first-class corpse”. The absolute state of American elections.

It isn’t the two-party system that’s the problem—proportional representation, where those voted out can still cling to power in their coalitions and minority governments, is stupid. It’s that there isn’t an effective opposition. You could not get a sheet of paper between the official positions of the two parties.