Thanks for the links to the cases -- so the Federal Court found no standing by US citizens to bar Griffin, but the State Court did because citizens are given standing under the State's "quo warranto" law. I wonder about Biden's standing -- wasn't Trump trying in injure him? And hasn't Trump's (continued) insurrection undermined Biden's legitimacy as President?
The New Mexico version of standing might be true of a lot of other states, for all I know. I would hope Biden wouldn't make formal complaints modeled on Bush's (which wasn't ever supposed to turn up as a precedent--though it did in that zombie North Carolina case https://www.takebackthecourt.today/press-release-bush-v-gore-invoked-13-times-in-moore-v-harper-arguments) if only for political reasons. Republican get away with being whiners, because their base are all whiners. Democrats have to be happy warriors, and that's Biden's greatest strength as well.
Thanks for the recommendation. It might inspire me to actually start writing. I looked at the Fed Soc article -- They cite the Federal District Court case denying standing, but don't try to deal with it. They do suggest some enforcement ideas -- probably unworkable. https://www.scribd.com/document/664341170/Trump-Can-t-Run#fullscreen&from_embed
I figured maybe the plaintiffs weren't from the same county and I'd have wanted to deny them standing too, but of course I don't have any knowledge of it. Yeah, I don't have any faith in the enforcement ideas.
Of course, even if a perfect being exists, there's not the slightest guarantee that he's anything even remotely resembling the god that St. Anselm worshipped.
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 13, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
Several small points of varying degrees of relevance and importance:
1) "such a being must exist, because if it didn't exist it would not be perfect" — didn't Plato already swat this away? "Forms" etc.; meaning, such a thing actually CANNOT exist. I'm reminded of Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park" (who is much smarter than his movie derivation since Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel while writer-in-residence at MIT, where he spent time with James Gleick, understood Chaos while David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg, clearly did not), giving a perfectly accurate representation of 20th Century scientific thinking about the possibility of absolutes:
“Gennaro shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, it’s very simple. Except for the air, which flows freely, everything about this park is meant to be isolated. Nothing gets in, nothing out. The animals kept here are never to mix with the greater ecosystems of earth. They are never to escape.”
“And they never have,” Hammond snorted.
“Such isolation is impossible,” Malcolm said flatly. “It simply cannot be done.”
“It can. It’s done all the time.”
“I beg your pardon,” Malcolm said. “But you don’t know what you are talking about.”
2) I think what Mssrs. Baude and Stokes might be saying, if one reads charitably (and, in so doing, opens up a window into a wide and interesting area of political and legal abstraction), is that, if one WANTS an armature upon which to hang any effective program or campaign to get rid of Trump — such a program or campaign being a separate project outside the scope of their discussion, but impossible to commence or even consider if lacking such an armature — then one NEED LOOK NO FURTHER than the one that they've found. It's like a variant of Scalia/Thomas/Alito thinking: you start with the ending that you desire and you make it happen, except that you can't do anything until somebody combs through the books and finds a good reason, like Al Capone's taxes (for the comparison to work, we must assume that there were many other public figures in 1929 who could have been charged with tax evasion but were not) — and so, to complete the comparison, yes, Trump did violate the emoluments clause, but as we had no reason to try and get rid of him then, what relevance did or does it have?
I'm reminded of how Julia Flyte's wedding to the undesirable Canadian Rex Mottram was supposed to be prevented in "Brideshead Revisited": Her brother announces that he's made inquiries into Mottram's past and he "got the final answer": Mottram was married and divorced previously, in Canada, which means he can't marry "as a Catholic" — he just converted — even though, as he points out entirely reasonably, he wasn't a Catholic when he got the divorce (elsewhere Julia laments that she could not renounce her religion to marry whom she wished “while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her").
Rex is supposed to come off as a monstrous cad for suggesting that yes, the wedding violates Catholic principle "but the Cathedral is booked and nobody is the wiser" — another reasonable idea — but my point is that, once those in power have decided to do a thing, they can do it or not at their convenience, but they CANNOT do it unless they've got a rationale that they themselves will accept, independent of whether anyone else does.
(I called this a "charitable" reading — it makes it work — but it's really more of a condemnatory reading, I guess.)
3) I really think you ought to chose between "Who're you going to call" and "Who you gonna call."
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 13, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
Hey gromit, are you around? I know this isn't a public message board but I've had a full-on conversion about "Nashville" (which our host knows about) and I want to thank you for your rôle in getting me to see it again — it's a masterpiece.
Speaking as a confirmed empiricist, and nominalist too, I can only say Plato was wrong on this, as on virtually everything. Focusing on things that don't exist, such as the Forms, is the number one worst error in philosophy. I don't know how Anselm felt about this though.
On the other matters, novel-Malcolm is certainly right, even if he didn't have to be right in such a flamboyant way. I have to give more thought to the idea that there's an analogy between Catholic restrictions on how to live in countries with Protestant divorce laws on the one hand and the Constitution of the United States on the other. Are you suggesting our young conservatives would like us to think they were never really married to Trump because the sacrament wasn't observed during the wedding?
I felt "Who're you gonna call" was a more precise rendering of the syllable structure in the song, but I'm not that confident/
The way the philosophy majors put it when I was an undergraduate was, "Existence is not a predicate." I.e., it's not a quality that a thing has or does not have, because it makes no sense to affirm a predicate, which may be true or false, about something that is not. The favorite illustration of this:
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 13, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
See, that's what I thought, and tend to believe myself to know my way around the basic predicates, but here's Yas frowning upon my having the bad taste to discuss nonexistent things.
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 13, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
Wait a minute, what about asymptotes in math, or imaginary numbers (which a lot of mathematicians have admitted should have another name), which are crucial for so much math since as far back as the 16th Century but — as everyone learns upon first being presented with the idea — really can't exist in any real-world way since you can't COUNT with them; because you're starting from two impossibilities: the square root of negative one (which blitzes every pocket calculator) and moving perpendicular off the number line? What about the Aztecs having a number for "zero"? Does "zero" exist?
My point about Catholic restrictions is that (inadvertently or not) Waugh, who may be trusted to get it right, says earlier in the novel — albeit facetiously? — that Julia's protestant friends, "schooled in happy ignorance,” can sin and get to heaven since they're not Catholics, whereas once Rex converts he cannot marry her without plunging them both into sin...he might not recognize or acknowledge the mechanism by which I'm tripping him up, but I'm saying that if even the inviolate laws of God move around based on aggressive human application and interpretation, then certainly the United States Constitution can do the same, looking away from one Trump transgression while seizing upon another, without either any contradiction ("we are focused on this but not that") or even any responsibility to know how to make the thing happen. (It's like speeding laws, on freeways: nobody is "allowed" to drive over a certain speed, but in reality it's going to apply more if you've got out of state license plates.)
The lyric is "Who you gonna call," as written, and I'm actually a stickler for rock'n'roll didacticism, down to Lennon's "It's gonna be alright" and every last "ain't." (And MIchael McDonald's "Ya Mo Be There," which I just thought of and added.)
I checked out imaginary numbers while working on the post, and got really widespread agreement that "imaginary" is the wrong word. Zero is regarded as both real and imaginary at the same time (the formal definition of an imaginary number is one that is a product of i times a real number, and i times zero is zero). That explanation of what's wrong with the imaginary numbers, that you can't count with them, is exactly what I think about St. Anselm's deity, that it's a mathematically valuable concept but of no use in the empirical world.
I understand Waugh's point to be about how unique and weird it is to be a Catholic, and a Catholic in upper-class jazz-age England, where an activity that's completely normal for everybody else, divorcing and fornicating, is a terrible sin for certain people under these abstruse conditions dealing not with degrees of wickedness but with the identities of the people involved (who in the story, including the relevant exes, are Catholic and who aren't?). I don't get how it applies to the constitution.
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 13, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
1) There are two discrete questions about the semantics of the word "imaginary" in the context of imaginary numbers, and I think our discussion needs to focus on one rather than the other.
I once knew a Columbia history grad student (a friend of Paul Lerner's) whose thesis had to do with math and science as a source of bad metaphors in the vulgate — Pynchon's "entropy"; "Chaos"; "uncertainty" etc. — which, she elaborated, is a side effect of science's greater and greater dependency on words that have powerfully evocative invocations in colloquial or literary contexts, so they get borrowed and misused; especially in the last hundred years, poets and social critics seize on "Relativity" or "incompleteness" as literary devices that "prove" that science reveals whatever collective psychological unease or dissociative state of society that they want to talk about. This is a mild example: imaginary numbers have a specific meaning that doesn't relate to their being any more or less nonexistent than conic-section curves or Euler's constant, but the chosen word has unfortunate connotations. Yes, i and the complex numbers that it generates can't be found through arithmetic and can't be related to bushels or whatever, but that doesn't mean that they have a property of nonexistence that can be generalized, any more than other mathematical things do.
My point was more like, forget the word; let's acknowledge that math and philosophy (and psychology and any other discipline that involves abstractions) obviously traffic in stuff that isn't real (again, not like "real numbers" but in the common sense of what's REAL, like, my mortgage is real but my heartbreak isn't) so that was my way of objecting to your broad dismissal of "[f]ocusing on things that don't exist," which, unless I'm missing something very big and obvious, seems wrong to the point of being perverse. Of course (again) it's entirely possible that (as with the math) I'm stumbling over a simple misunderstanding about the finer shades of Platonic vs. Enlightenment/Modern thinking.
2) I got way too complicated with the Waugh (in my typical fashion). I was trying to draw a simple distinction:
Julia believes that her Protestant friends can marry eldest sons or divorcees and get to heaven since they're "schooled in happy ignorance" — the point being that THEY ARE SINNERS but since their religion doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter; THEIR heaven works differently. I don't know whether Waugh believes this but I just don't see how he possibly could; it's a reversal not just of Catholicism but of the entire concept of religious doctrine, by which ignorance of the sin is no defense and all heathens will burn which is why we must evangelize. (Joe Biden, it seems to me, performs the same trick as Julia, explaining that yes, he's Catholic so abortion is murder, but he "respects" other religions and stays out of this — obviously we can't have a modern world free of religious war unless everyone thinks this way, but it seems to me to be very sophistic and convenient...although this is a longer discussion.)
On the other hand Rex's sin — only a sin for Catholics — occurred before he converted to Catholicism (as he immediately points out), so he should be in the clear just like Julia's Protestant friends...but according to the family there's "nothing that can be done." My point being, all of this dogmatic analysis deftly conceals that the Flytes are making a DECISION about whom to pin down and whom not to, just like those cops who pull over certain speeders when everyone's speeding, or like Baude and Stokes who would not be interested in your points of why Trump's violating the Constitution by regaining the Presidency matters while his violating the Constitution by renting out the post office does not...there's an unspoken selection process, I'm arguing, that's where the action is (Julia isn't going to attempt to convert her socialite friends; it's not her business, and they'll go to heaven anyway, while her fiancé's faith is of direct value to her, so it's got to be changed, questions of "sin" notwithstanding) — like Julia's brother, Baude and Stokes are just groping for the rationale that will let somebody else get rid of Trump without screwing up any principles.
3) I was just kidding about the "Ghostbusters" lyric; apologies if it was annoying.
I was thinking that if you adjust the fine tuning, my mortgage isn't any more "real" than my heartbreak — not as real as, say, a brick, or my hunger — but the cops who will eventually show up to escort me from the premises at the end of the process that starts with my refusing to pay my mortgage (itself an abstract act; I'm not handing over a leather satchel of gold pieces) are real indeed.
Aug 13, 2023·edited Aug 13, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
Trying to make it more clear: the Flyte family are trying to stop the marriage, but they can't interfere with Julia's decisions (in other words, the reasonable course of action: trying to persuade her, or to constrain her by cutting off her legacy), but they don't have to because they can resort to an inviolate authority, God. The fact that the rule they're citing could just as easily be applied to countless others doesn't matter — so what? — but nevertheless there must be a Divine rule or the game's off.
I'm saying that Baude and Stokes are playing the same game: they must have recourse to their own unimpeachable authority, the constitution, but the way that they're obviously applying it selectively is not relevant to them; it's de rigueur.
And, thinking about it, the comparison is even better because yes, pointing out that Trump isn't "allowed" to be President again doesn't actually solve the problem — that's for somebody else to do; they're just authorizing it — and, Julia DOES marry Rex, notwithstanding the sin. (That catches up to her at the end of the book, but, again, by CHOICE, not through any divine action — God doesn't smite anyone in the story, like the constitution won't enforce itself — but, again, there must be a transgression or the game's off.) When her brother says "I've finally got the answer," it's the same maneuver as Baude and Stokes: in each case the meaning is "The inviolate rationale for what we want somebody else to do has hereby been identified."
Lesser-known fact: Trump was inciting insurrection in 2012. When the networks declared Obama the winner, based on the electoral vote count, Trump stupidly thought that Romney had won the popular vote (because not all the West Coast votes had been tallied), and stupidly forgot that it's the electoral tally that counts, not the popular vote. So he tweeted that this was an outrage, that "the loser one! [sic]" and that "we" should "go down to Washington" and "stop it." First time farce, second time deadly dangerous, I guess.
Sounds like he "stupidly" deployed the same Red-shift bullshit as in 2020. I see Roger Stone's shadow everyplace, I wonder if this is another case of that.
In Bush v Gore, the Court said Bush was (supposedly) denied equal protection by different methods of counting the vote in FL. Different part of the 14th Amendment, but still …
A good point that doesn't get near enough attention. Who has "standing" to bring suit is one of those normie-norms that can be twisted any which way when you care not a whit about blowback. The Insurgent Party is happy to stomp them into the ground to get their desired result, while the State holds back because it relies on those norms, it created those norms, to hold itself together and protect itself. Even after Trump's little extravaganza in the street, they are struggling with how to deal with a direct threat. And yes, all the endless whining about Fitzmas, Mueller Time, and the feckless coward Merrick Garland, is about wanting somebody else to make the monster under the bed go away. This is at root not a political problem, and the judicial system and politics aren't going to "solve" it. We're all going to get our hands dirty, like it or not. Trump is just the Insurgent Id laid bare, getting rid of Trump doesn't get rid of the Insurgency, just it's most recent mouthpiece. We're all going to get sick of The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime. You're already sick? Stick around, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.
Certain legal (b)eagles I know are bantering about the definition of 'officer' (which they seem to think is a keystone issue in Amend 14 sec 3). I leap in here to paraphrase what I tossed their way:
The president is an office holder, therefore an 'officer'. If states, in their role as managers of elections, refuse to place said officer's name on the ballot per Amend 14 Sec 3 said officer is free to petition Congress to 'remove such disability'. If failed, said officer is free to exercise Amend 1 and implore voters to write in his/her name onto the ballot. States presumably would be free to accept or decline to honor those votes per their authorities to manage elections.
I am blissfully unqualified to swear to the above.
The president is definitely an officer. IDK about state legislatures, they don't manage elections. That's the job of the secretary of state, a statewide elected official who takes care of normal disqualifications (candidate didn't get enough signatures, candidate was convicted of a felony) according to a pretty strict rule book. I don't think any secretary of state would be willing to take this on though. If they did it would certainly go to court.
Thanks for the links to the cases -- so the Federal Court found no standing by US citizens to bar Griffin, but the State Court did because citizens are given standing under the State's "quo warranto" law. I wonder about Biden's standing -- wasn't Trump trying in injure him? And hasn't Trump's (continued) insurrection undermined Biden's legitimacy as President?
The New Mexico version of standing might be true of a lot of other states, for all I know. I would hope Biden wouldn't make formal complaints modeled on Bush's (which wasn't ever supposed to turn up as a precedent--though it did in that zombie North Carolina case https://www.takebackthecourt.today/press-release-bush-v-gore-invoked-13-times-in-moore-v-harper-arguments) if only for political reasons. Republican get away with being whiners, because their base are all whiners. Democrats have to be happy warriors, and that's Biden's greatest strength as well.
Thanks for the recommendation. It might inspire me to actually start writing. I looked at the Fed Soc article -- They cite the Federal District Court case denying standing, but don't try to deal with it. They do suggest some enforcement ideas -- probably unworkable. https://www.scribd.com/document/664341170/Trump-Can-t-Run#fullscreen&from_embed
I figured maybe the plaintiffs weren't from the same county and I'd have wanted to deny them standing too, but of course I don't have any knowledge of it. Yeah, I don't have any faith in the enforcement ideas.
Of course, even if a perfect being exists, there's not the slightest guarantee that he's anything even remotely resembling the god that St. Anselm worshipped.
That's what's really wrong with the argument. It doesn't get close to the religion.
It's the (Andrew) Jackson Effect ...
Several small points of varying degrees of relevance and importance:
1) "such a being must exist, because if it didn't exist it would not be perfect" — didn't Plato already swat this away? "Forms" etc.; meaning, such a thing actually CANNOT exist. I'm reminded of Ian Malcolm in "Jurassic Park" (who is much smarter than his movie derivation since Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel while writer-in-residence at MIT, where he spent time with James Gleick, understood Chaos while David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg, clearly did not), giving a perfectly accurate representation of 20th Century scientific thinking about the possibility of absolutes:
“Gennaro shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, it’s very simple. Except for the air, which flows freely, everything about this park is meant to be isolated. Nothing gets in, nothing out. The animals kept here are never to mix with the greater ecosystems of earth. They are never to escape.”
“And they never have,” Hammond snorted.
“Such isolation is impossible,” Malcolm said flatly. “It simply cannot be done.”
“It can. It’s done all the time.”
“I beg your pardon,” Malcolm said. “But you don’t know what you are talking about.”
2) I think what Mssrs. Baude and Stokes might be saying, if one reads charitably (and, in so doing, opens up a window into a wide and interesting area of political and legal abstraction), is that, if one WANTS an armature upon which to hang any effective program or campaign to get rid of Trump — such a program or campaign being a separate project outside the scope of their discussion, but impossible to commence or even consider if lacking such an armature — then one NEED LOOK NO FURTHER than the one that they've found. It's like a variant of Scalia/Thomas/Alito thinking: you start with the ending that you desire and you make it happen, except that you can't do anything until somebody combs through the books and finds a good reason, like Al Capone's taxes (for the comparison to work, we must assume that there were many other public figures in 1929 who could have been charged with tax evasion but were not) — and so, to complete the comparison, yes, Trump did violate the emoluments clause, but as we had no reason to try and get rid of him then, what relevance did or does it have?
I'm reminded of how Julia Flyte's wedding to the undesirable Canadian Rex Mottram was supposed to be prevented in "Brideshead Revisited": Her brother announces that he's made inquiries into Mottram's past and he "got the final answer": Mottram was married and divorced previously, in Canada, which means he can't marry "as a Catholic" — he just converted — even though, as he points out entirely reasonably, he wasn't a Catholic when he got the divorce (elsewhere Julia laments that she could not renounce her religion to marry whom she wished “while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her").
Rex is supposed to come off as a monstrous cad for suggesting that yes, the wedding violates Catholic principle "but the Cathedral is booked and nobody is the wiser" — another reasonable idea — but my point is that, once those in power have decided to do a thing, they can do it or not at their convenience, but they CANNOT do it unless they've got a rationale that they themselves will accept, independent of whether anyone else does.
(I called this a "charitable" reading — it makes it work — but it's really more of a condemnatory reading, I guess.)
3) I really think you ought to chose between "Who're you going to call" and "Who you gonna call."
Hey gromit, are you around? I know this isn't a public message board but I've had a full-on conversion about "Nashville" (which our host knows about) and I want to thank you for your rôle in getting me to see it again — it's a masterpiece.
Speaking as a confirmed empiricist, and nominalist too, I can only say Plato was wrong on this, as on virtually everything. Focusing on things that don't exist, such as the Forms, is the number one worst error in philosophy. I don't know how Anselm felt about this though.
On the other matters, novel-Malcolm is certainly right, even if he didn't have to be right in such a flamboyant way. I have to give more thought to the idea that there's an analogy between Catholic restrictions on how to live in countries with Protestant divorce laws on the one hand and the Constitution of the United States on the other. Are you suggesting our young conservatives would like us to think they were never really married to Trump because the sacrament wasn't observed during the wedding?
I felt "Who're you gonna call" was a more precise rendering of the syllable structure in the song, but I'm not that confident/
The way the philosophy majors put it when I was an undergraduate was, "Existence is not a predicate." I.e., it's not a quality that a thing has or does not have, because it makes no sense to affirm a predicate, which may be true or false, about something that is not. The favorite illustration of this:
Some tame tigers exist.
But most of them don't.
That's why there are so few tame tigers.
See, that's what I thought, and tend to believe myself to know my way around the basic predicates, but here's Yas frowning upon my having the bad taste to discuss nonexistent things.
I was taught that too, not that syllogism, which is very cool, but the "existence is not a predicate" line, but I just thought it was too easy.
Wait a minute, what about asymptotes in math, or imaginary numbers (which a lot of mathematicians have admitted should have another name), which are crucial for so much math since as far back as the 16th Century but — as everyone learns upon first being presented with the idea — really can't exist in any real-world way since you can't COUNT with them; because you're starting from two impossibilities: the square root of negative one (which blitzes every pocket calculator) and moving perpendicular off the number line? What about the Aztecs having a number for "zero"? Does "zero" exist?
My point about Catholic restrictions is that (inadvertently or not) Waugh, who may be trusted to get it right, says earlier in the novel — albeit facetiously? — that Julia's protestant friends, "schooled in happy ignorance,” can sin and get to heaven since they're not Catholics, whereas once Rex converts he cannot marry her without plunging them both into sin...he might not recognize or acknowledge the mechanism by which I'm tripping him up, but I'm saying that if even the inviolate laws of God move around based on aggressive human application and interpretation, then certainly the United States Constitution can do the same, looking away from one Trump transgression while seizing upon another, without either any contradiction ("we are focused on this but not that") or even any responsibility to know how to make the thing happen. (It's like speeding laws, on freeways: nobody is "allowed" to drive over a certain speed, but in reality it's going to apply more if you've got out of state license plates.)
The lyric is "Who you gonna call," as written, and I'm actually a stickler for rock'n'roll didacticism, down to Lennon's "It's gonna be alright" and every last "ain't." (And MIchael McDonald's "Ya Mo Be There," which I just thought of and added.)
I checked out imaginary numbers while working on the post, and got really widespread agreement that "imaginary" is the wrong word. Zero is regarded as both real and imaginary at the same time (the formal definition of an imaginary number is one that is a product of i times a real number, and i times zero is zero). That explanation of what's wrong with the imaginary numbers, that you can't count with them, is exactly what I think about St. Anselm's deity, that it's a mathematically valuable concept but of no use in the empirical world.
I understand Waugh's point to be about how unique and weird it is to be a Catholic, and a Catholic in upper-class jazz-age England, where an activity that's completely normal for everybody else, divorcing and fornicating, is a terrible sin for certain people under these abstruse conditions dealing not with degrees of wickedness but with the identities of the people involved (who in the story, including the relevant exes, are Catholic and who aren't?). I don't get how it applies to the constitution.
I refuse to argue about Ghostbusters. Whatever.
1) There are two discrete questions about the semantics of the word "imaginary" in the context of imaginary numbers, and I think our discussion needs to focus on one rather than the other.
I once knew a Columbia history grad student (a friend of Paul Lerner's) whose thesis had to do with math and science as a source of bad metaphors in the vulgate — Pynchon's "entropy"; "Chaos"; "uncertainty" etc. — which, she elaborated, is a side effect of science's greater and greater dependency on words that have powerfully evocative invocations in colloquial or literary contexts, so they get borrowed and misused; especially in the last hundred years, poets and social critics seize on "Relativity" or "incompleteness" as literary devices that "prove" that science reveals whatever collective psychological unease or dissociative state of society that they want to talk about. This is a mild example: imaginary numbers have a specific meaning that doesn't relate to their being any more or less nonexistent than conic-section curves or Euler's constant, but the chosen word has unfortunate connotations. Yes, i and the complex numbers that it generates can't be found through arithmetic and can't be related to bushels or whatever, but that doesn't mean that they have a property of nonexistence that can be generalized, any more than other mathematical things do.
My point was more like, forget the word; let's acknowledge that math and philosophy (and psychology and any other discipline that involves abstractions) obviously traffic in stuff that isn't real (again, not like "real numbers" but in the common sense of what's REAL, like, my mortgage is real but my heartbreak isn't) so that was my way of objecting to your broad dismissal of "[f]ocusing on things that don't exist," which, unless I'm missing something very big and obvious, seems wrong to the point of being perverse. Of course (again) it's entirely possible that (as with the math) I'm stumbling over a simple misunderstanding about the finer shades of Platonic vs. Enlightenment/Modern thinking.
2) I got way too complicated with the Waugh (in my typical fashion). I was trying to draw a simple distinction:
Julia believes that her Protestant friends can marry eldest sons or divorcees and get to heaven since they're "schooled in happy ignorance" — the point being that THEY ARE SINNERS but since their religion doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter; THEIR heaven works differently. I don't know whether Waugh believes this but I just don't see how he possibly could; it's a reversal not just of Catholicism but of the entire concept of religious doctrine, by which ignorance of the sin is no defense and all heathens will burn which is why we must evangelize. (Joe Biden, it seems to me, performs the same trick as Julia, explaining that yes, he's Catholic so abortion is murder, but he "respects" other religions and stays out of this — obviously we can't have a modern world free of religious war unless everyone thinks this way, but it seems to me to be very sophistic and convenient...although this is a longer discussion.)
On the other hand Rex's sin — only a sin for Catholics — occurred before he converted to Catholicism (as he immediately points out), so he should be in the clear just like Julia's Protestant friends...but according to the family there's "nothing that can be done." My point being, all of this dogmatic analysis deftly conceals that the Flytes are making a DECISION about whom to pin down and whom not to, just like those cops who pull over certain speeders when everyone's speeding, or like Baude and Stokes who would not be interested in your points of why Trump's violating the Constitution by regaining the Presidency matters while his violating the Constitution by renting out the post office does not...there's an unspoken selection process, I'm arguing, that's where the action is (Julia isn't going to attempt to convert her socialite friends; it's not her business, and they'll go to heaven anyway, while her fiancé's faith is of direct value to her, so it's got to be changed, questions of "sin" notwithstanding) — like Julia's brother, Baude and Stokes are just groping for the rationale that will let somebody else get rid of Trump without screwing up any principles.
3) I was just kidding about the "Ghostbusters" lyric; apologies if it was annoying.
That's fine. I meant to say the same thing about the God of the ontological argument: mathematically interesting, but not real in the common sense.
Right; ontology is endlessly relevant, isn't it?
I was thinking that if you adjust the fine tuning, my mortgage isn't any more "real" than my heartbreak — not as real as, say, a brick, or my hunger — but the cops who will eventually show up to escort me from the premises at the end of the process that starts with my refusing to pay my mortgage (itself an abstract act; I'm not handing over a leather satchel of gold pieces) are real indeed.
Trying to make it more clear: the Flyte family are trying to stop the marriage, but they can't interfere with Julia's decisions (in other words, the reasonable course of action: trying to persuade her, or to constrain her by cutting off her legacy), but they don't have to because they can resort to an inviolate authority, God. The fact that the rule they're citing could just as easily be applied to countless others doesn't matter — so what? — but nevertheless there must be a Divine rule or the game's off.
I'm saying that Baude and Stokes are playing the same game: they must have recourse to their own unimpeachable authority, the constitution, but the way that they're obviously applying it selectively is not relevant to them; it's de rigueur.
And, thinking about it, the comparison is even better because yes, pointing out that Trump isn't "allowed" to be President again doesn't actually solve the problem — that's for somebody else to do; they're just authorizing it — and, Julia DOES marry Rex, notwithstanding the sin. (That catches up to her at the end of the book, but, again, by CHOICE, not through any divine action — God doesn't smite anyone in the story, like the constitution won't enforce itself — but, again, there must be a transgression or the game's off.) When her brother says "I've finally got the answer," it's the same maneuver as Baude and Stokes: in each case the meaning is "The inviolate rationale for what we want somebody else to do has hereby been identified."
Your last paragraph really does clarify it for me.
Philosopher Raymond Smullyan once used the ontological argument to prove (tongue in cheek) that the Devil does not exist. Reasoning:
1. God is defined as the being who possesses all perfections,
2. The Devil is the being completely opposite to God.
3. Therefore, the Devil possesses no perfections.
4. Existence is a perfection.
5. Therefore, the Devil does not possess existence, or -- to put it more simply -- the Devil does not exist.
Comforting to know!
nice
Lesser-known fact: Trump was inciting insurrection in 2012. When the networks declared Obama the winner, based on the electoral vote count, Trump stupidly thought that Romney had won the popular vote (because not all the West Coast votes had been tallied), and stupidly forgot that it's the electoral tally that counts, not the popular vote. So he tweeted that this was an outrage, that "the loser one! [sic]" and that "we" should "go down to Washington" and "stop it." First time farce, second time deadly dangerous, I guess.
Sounds like he "stupidly" deployed the same Red-shift bullshit as in 2020. I see Roger Stone's shadow everyplace, I wonder if this is another case of that.
In Bush v Gore, the Court said Bush was (supposedly) denied equal protection by different methods of counting the vote in FL. Different part of the 14th Amendment, but still …
I'm willing to throw my existence away to eliminate all the orange stains.
Don't do that! Stick around and help clean up!
We shall see. I used to be a marine. Hard to overcome previous subroutines.
A good point that doesn't get near enough attention. Who has "standing" to bring suit is one of those normie-norms that can be twisted any which way when you care not a whit about blowback. The Insurgent Party is happy to stomp them into the ground to get their desired result, while the State holds back because it relies on those norms, it created those norms, to hold itself together and protect itself. Even after Trump's little extravaganza in the street, they are struggling with how to deal with a direct threat. And yes, all the endless whining about Fitzmas, Mueller Time, and the feckless coward Merrick Garland, is about wanting somebody else to make the monster under the bed go away. This is at root not a political problem, and the judicial system and politics aren't going to "solve" it. We're all going to get our hands dirty, like it or not. Trump is just the Insurgent Id laid bare, getting rid of Trump doesn't get rid of the Insurgency, just it's most recent mouthpiece. We're all going to get sick of The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime. You're already sick? Stick around, you ain't seen nuthin' yet.
Certain legal (b)eagles I know are bantering about the definition of 'officer' (which they seem to think is a keystone issue in Amend 14 sec 3). I leap in here to paraphrase what I tossed their way:
The president is an office holder, therefore an 'officer'. If states, in their role as managers of elections, refuse to place said officer's name on the ballot per Amend 14 Sec 3 said officer is free to petition Congress to 'remove such disability'. If failed, said officer is free to exercise Amend 1 and implore voters to write in his/her name onto the ballot. States presumably would be free to accept or decline to honor those votes per their authorities to manage elections.
I am blissfully unqualified to swear to the above.
The president is definitely an officer. IDK about state legislatures, they don't manage elections. That's the job of the secretary of state, a statewide elected official who takes care of normal disqualifications (candidate didn't get enough signatures, candidate was convicted of a felony) according to a pretty strict rule book. I don't think any secretary of state would be willing to take this on though. If they did it would certainly go to court.
Yeah, shorthanded the authority of the lege. The SecState determines the details I think, tho the lege sets the regs in the first place...
Could "Stupid" have been Billmon?
Maybe!
Great post. My thoughts exactly. The Federalist Society and what army. Magical thinking worthy of Joan Didion.
You may want to edit - some paragraphs repeated.
Thanks! I think I've fixed it.