What Egypt needs is not acceptance or understanding for a self-evident matter, namely that Islamist political parties have the right to participate in power and that it is in the nature of the democratic process to respect the results of elections.
Last week's historic passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in the U.S. Senate underscores the strength of the current groundswell that has been years in the making but, in just the past couple of years, has suddenly overtaken a growing majority of Americans with the conviction that full LGBT equality is a self-evident matter of fairness and core civil rights.
And, third, if it does, is it possible to write legislation that will protect those who are old and sick, or chronically disabled, but who do not want to die?A self-evident truthNo matter how zealously you drink your orange juice, eat your fruit and vegetables, organise your sleep and do your exercises, the fact remains that one day you will be dead.
Still, though it seems self-evident, importance of subject matter does not equal quality of execution.
One might see this as less a sinister point than self-evident truth, but no matter.
In defense of our president, Martha MacCallum stated on Fox's "America's Newsroom" that the value of Black life is self-evident, insisting, "Black lives matter, which of course they do".
More importantly, it raises the question of how one is to justify these new axioms, for as one continues to add stronger and stronger axioms the claim that they are either self-evident or definitive of the subject matter will grow increasingly more difficult to defend.
Should either of these optimistic views turn out to be correct, then the question of justification in mathematics would take on a particularly simple form: Either a statement would be an axiom (in which case it would be self-evident or definitive of the subject matter (depending on the view under consideration)) or it would be derivable in first-order logic from some such statements.
Good questions, bad questions, self-evident questions, unrealistic questions — it matters not.
God gives His followers more opportunity to reap rewards by making even the self-evident norms of moral living matters of divine obeisance.
When self-evident statements like "black lives matter" become slogans repeated with depressing regularity, El-P and Killer Mike's unapologetically political hip-hop album, Run the Jewels 2, feels in some ways like the most relevant release of the year.
