The second certainly doesn’t distinguish him from Clinton, and the first does only because important political people, like Clinton and Clapper, never get prosecuted for lying under oath to congress.
2 Likes
Critics accusing him of lying is not going to convince his fans that he’s a liar.
1 Like
Yeah, I don’t get it. Let’s assume he’s more careful when he’s speaking under penalty of perjury (so he told the truth when it counted) and he lied at the Debates. He’s lied multiple times at the Debates. He’s going to lie again when he debates Hilary. This, sadly, just is no longer news.
2 Likes
Trump supporters are simply going to wish this away.
1 Like
Jeb Bush looks like he’s wearing a black-face goatee.
Let me get this straight… so Donald Trump, known liar and cheat who runs companies into the ground, who fails to pay contractors, who ran a scam university, who donated to an attorney general to see a problem go away in Florida… THE Donald Trump who gets a massive daily flow chart of lies we have seen here on occassion… the same Donald Trump who actually said that Hillary was responsible for the whole Obama birther debacle and that he “stopped it” - all of this to the roaring cheers of his supporters mind you - Donald Trump said at the GOP debates that he didn’t try to change Jeb! 's mind on some minor local issue even though he had once said under oath that he actually had?
My God! This. Changes. Everything.
(there is a third option: Eichenwald and Newsweek are a sad joke)
3 Likes
Nothing will budge Trump’s hard-core supporters, but keeping hammering at his brazen lying will hopefully peel away some of the less extreme Republicans ( yes, I think such people still exist) along with people who are only now paying much attention to the race.
3 Likes
He has a wife, he just keeps her well away from the Kremlin, presumably for safety reasons. In fact, it’s said he doesn’t sleep at the Kremlin.
I prefer the idea that he needs a constant supply of white cats because he’s wearing them out stroking them.
6 Likes
I once worked for a company where the new CEO started talking about how reality was only perception, which in a company whose products were based on actual science was sufficiently worrying that I made my excuses and left. I still twitch when I hear neocons make it clear that as far as they are concerned reality is what they say it is, nothing else. Alice in Wonderland is prediction not fiction.
7 Likes
Trump is a psychopath. Psychopaths can neither lie nor tell the truth. In their minds, there is no difference between the two. Yes, there is a third option: being mentally incapable of doing either of the other two.
2 Likes
Hey Xeni, you are supporting Hillary, right? Just checking.
Me, I’m voting for Jill Stein. And I live in Ohio,
I’m sure Mr Trump will appreciate that.
Meanwhile, one of his top advisors is now under federal investigation for meeting with the Kremlin to discuss the lifting of economic sanctions should Trump become president. He also is known to have met with the Russian intelligence official thought by the US to have engineered the DNC cyberattacks. This could be a much larger bombshell than Trump lying under oath repeatedly.
11 Likes
I’m afraid you have misunderstood the famous experiment. While nobody looked in the box, the bribe status was a superimposition of all possible values from “did not happen” to “as bad as bad could be.” Now we have opened the box the waveform has collapsed, so at this point we should know which it is. Unfortunately the entire resources of the media of the United States seem unable to make the determination. Perhaps the answer is to let physicists run the government. Very few people would understand what was going on despite lots of papers being published about it, and things would be a lot more weird, but nothing would happen that hadn’t been properly peer reviewed by people who actually knew what they were writing about.
Idealistic, that’s my problem.
10 Likes
Is it weird that postmodernist thought has come to be employed in the corporate/neo-liberal world? Cause that’s some pretty straight up postmodernism, I think.
5 Likes
It was very popular with management consultants at the time. The job of management consultants is to leverage cutting edge thought by thinkfluencers to persuade managements to do what their instincts tell them, and anything which suggests that reality is negotiable will get a hearing*
*This post was constructed in a facility that may make use of management speak. Caution is advised.
7 Likes
And now it’s coming back to bite them in the butt…how appropriate!
1 Like
I have absolutely no idea what to make of this essay. Probably alt right crap, dressed up in a fancy suit.
However, any list of Counter-Enlightenment thinkers is incomplete without the names of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Like their May 1968 contemporary Michel Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari wage war against reason, freedom, democracy, and humanism, explaining the tyranny and reactive forces triumphant in each of them. It is a conundrum not lost on the liberal Leftists of the Academy: if it were the case that only the Right opposed modernity on behalf of cultural, political, and social aristocracy, no one would have noticed the continued power of the Counter-Enlightenment; nor perhaps when former colonial subjects like Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon had the impudence to discount the value of Enlightenment ideals, for what could Nietzsche have possibly meant to them?
But, when modernity was attacked by French academics, well schooled not only inliberté, egalité, and fraternité, but also in the essentials of the logocentric secular philosophy of Man and the State, the liberal Academy not only took notice, but also sought ways to use the new illiberal philosophies of these “postmodernists.” In some cases, like Jean Baudrillard, most of what is said against modernity is interpreted as an easily assimilable attack on Ronald Reagan’s America. In other cases, like Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, the objects of scorn – governmentality, power, and metanarratives – are mistakenly believed to be the problem of clock-punching proletarian wage slaves.[3] Finally, in the case of Jacques Derrida, the methodological destruction of value and meaning is all too vengefully turned against the canon of Western literature, without the slightest inkling of how it undermines their own cushy authority.
1 Like
I’ll have to read this soon, but yeah. Me neither… the counter-enlightenment seems to me to be focused on a critique of modernity, to be sure. As such, if we think about the modern era in part being marked by our modern political divisions (left, marxism/communism and the right, conservatism and maybe even a certain kind of republicanism), their critique works equally well on both sides of the political divide, right? But the alt-right seems to work almost like a fun-house mirror version of what Foucault and his colleagues are talking about. I never got the idea that Foucault wanted to go back to pre-revolutionary world.
2 Likes
People like Sokal were quite explicit that this outcome is part of why they were opposed to postmodernism.
When you devalue truth and objective reality, you abandon your best defence against fascism.
4 Likes
Our small models [of reality] are often useful approximations without being complete models. Our starting assumptions, such as Leibnitz’s principle of sufficient reason, Einstein’s disbelief in chance, etc. can get in the way. Our attempts to expand small models into bigger models need constant reality checks.
Are postmodernism and poststructuralism so different from Hume’s, Kant’s, or Voltaire’s modernist critiques of hyper-modernist hubris?
And does post-modernism suggest a time after the time after the Black Death to anyone else? Fortunately the 3rd Pandemic wasn’t on the same scale as the 1st and 2nd, but I’m afraid of the implications of no longer being after the Black Death.
P.S. From a social standpoint, the Victorian belief that they were close to understanding moral truth didn’t help. It led them to criminalize the Hijras, for example, and to deny Indian peasants their traditional claims on the land in order to grant others proper private property.
4 Likes
