you don't have the right to make laws that violate other people's rights.

Sure you do. Positivs rights and negative rights and all.

Where on that spectrum fall laws that are hostile to employees forming unions?

But you can make laws that protect people's rights.

You, who have actually read her work and given it an honest moment's thought, have been down voted by people who don't viciously know far more than you do about her work without the humdrum necessity of actually having read it.

They can be valid experiments that reveal important insights about the workings of human consciousness and still be utterly irrelevant to the question of free will. With 100% certainty, because this is the case.

Surely anyone can be 100% sure about their opinion, but without empirical, falsifiable data, it's not of much use.

This was the intent behind Political Correctness - a term cribbed from the Soviet Union's ideology and popularized in the United States at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It's an intentional tool of social control by corrupt people who want to enforce a worldview on others.

Ther is no such thing as it "going too far". It shouldn't exist at all.

The simple fact is that mathematics is derived from nature first by observation of countable entities and then a process of abstraction from those observations. The natural numbers don't merely correspond to countable things - countable things are the original source of the much more abstract idea of "natural numbers". Whether or not any further baste actions are a useful tool for measuring and describing the physical world is an entirely separate question from the nature and source of mathematics as a field of study.

It would probably be best to do away with the term "mathematical truth" altogether. It's confusing and sloppy. Mathematics has no separate truth from the physical world - it's just a field of epistemological methods.

> It would probably be best to do away with the term "mathematical truth" altogether. It's confusing and sloppy. Mathematics has no separate truth from the physical world - it's just a field of epistemological methods. This sounds like a contradiction -- epistemology is, more-or-less concerned with what's true. If mathematics is simply a field of epistemology (with is own methods), then it's not a stretch to say that there is a mathematical truth -- a truth that satisfies the methods of the filed of mathematics.

> The simple fact is that mathematics is derived from nature first by observation of countable entities and then a process of abstraction from those observations.

I think it's more complex than that... I suspect that math (and many other fields) starts out this way, going from concrete to abstract, but once it gets to the abstraction phase then it takes on a life of it's own. People find the abstractions interesting in their own right, they seem to develop a sort of historical direction, and they have compelling properties on their own merit, so people felt compelled to develop them. People's intuitions, however, are strongly shaped by physical reality. And those mathematical abstractions are often useful for modeling physical reality, causing a strong interplay between reality and mathematical abstractions.

> Mathematics has no separate truth from the physical world - it's just a field of epistemological methods.

I don't think that can be right. First of all, there are many mathematical things that don't correspond to anything in the physical world. Second, I'm not sure that "epistemological methods" correspond very well to the physical world, either. (I mean, yes, in one sense it's something humans do in their heads, so it's part of biology, so it's part of the physical world, but that seems like a bit more than what we usually mean by "the physical world".)

More that that, though, we don't think of everything as physics. Biology, and even chemistry, we think of as separate disciplines. Thinking of mathematics as also a separate discipline seems perfectly reasonable.

> mathematics is derived from nature

And where does 'derivation' come from?

> Life just isn't possible if you try to 'do no evil'.

Shouldn't that indicate something about the validity of one's view of morality?

Not really. It indicates something about the society you live in.

Imagine that you are born into a tribe that sacrifices children once annually. You have to do it, you can't get around it without suicide.

Your view on the 'evilness' of an activity you are effectively forced to perform is no more or less valid.

Piketty's data doesn't prove any such thing. Even the poorest people in the US can now have an iPhone, a piece of technology that was unavailable in any form to anyone just ten years ago.

The rising tide does lift all boats. The data only shows that return on capital will always outstrip wages as a way to accumulate wealth.

To put your point in other words, Newtonian mechanics isn't wrong. It's a system of measurement that is only useful at certain scales.

Imagine a yardstick that is only marked at full inches. You can use it to measure things in the scale of a couple of yards, a few feet, and many inches. You can't use it to measure anything smaller than an inch because it's not marked for that scale. You can't use it to measure anything more than a couple of yards because that's unwieldy. That doesn't mean that the yard stick is "wrong".

This is a flawed analogy, because the yardstick is accurate at the scales for which it is practical, whereas Newtonian mechanics is inaccurate at all scales, just less so in its sweet spot.

Newtonian mechanics is more accurate at yardstick scales than any real-world yardstick is.

Of course. Nobody is arguing that Newtonian mechanics is not a phenomenal approximation at scales that are very useful for humans, but that doesn't make the analogy any less flawed.

Then I don't understand what you mean. You said the yardstick is accurate at some scales whereas Newtonian mechanics is always inaccurate, which to me implies that the yardstick is more accurate at some scales.

This is a fair point.

The yardstick analogy was set up by the parent to be 'because the yardstick doesn't have marks less than an inch'

Then yardstick is always an approximation that is useful within a particular domain, just as newtonian mechanics are always an approximation that is useful within a particular domain. So far we are in agreement.

Newtonian mechanics always produces an incorrect result, however when the error is small enough to be neglected, because our measurements are noisy or we have no requirement for greater precision, then we can say that they are accurate for our purposes. This is pretty much the definition of an approximation.

It also must be pointed out that in order to know whether our application falls within the domain of values for which Newtonian mechanics are accurate enough, we must also understand something about relativity and quantum mechanics.

Newtonian mechanics alone can't tell you anything about when it is grossly inaccurate, and when it gives you a value that is indistinguishable from experiment. You must understand its limits in order to use in in the general case. It is therefore not 'perfectly accurate', but merely a good approximation based on limited data.

How is notifying the Iranian government that Obama doesn't have the power to make any deal without their approval a violation of the Logan act?

If he's so concerned about America exhibiting the signs of a Fascist dictatorship, perhaps he should take a long, difficult, critical look at the ideology that actually accomplished it: Progressivism.

We aren't "headed toward" Fascism. The Progressive Movement and their fundamental changes to the government of the US was a core inspiration for Fascism. This is old, old news.