Lozada — in "Can truth survive this president? An honest investigation" (WaPo) — continues:
But she is more focused when exploring the left-wing pedigree of post-truth culture. Even though she laments that objectivity has declined ever since “a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base,” Kakutani calls out lefty academics who for decades preached postmodernism and social constructivism, which argued that truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points. In the early culture wars, centered on literary studies, postmodernists rejected Enlightenment ideals as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” Kakutani writes, paving the way for today’s violence against fact in politics and science.Even as Kakutani plows through all that left-wing postmodernism, Lozada plows through 4 more books bemoaning the moribundity of truth.
“It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them),” Kakutani sniffs. But while she argues that “postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land,” she concedes that “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.
I'm going to read the Kakutani book. I'm interested in all the cultural references! "Fight Club," "Great Gatsby" — that's right up my alley! And I'm fine with quick jumps that show the author's mind at work. It's what I do, and I'd like to read somebody else doing it.
I wouldn't use the adjective "scattershot," because I feel the references are coming at me, and I don't feel as though I'm being shot at, but as if various ideas are being thrown my way, and I'll see what I can catch, that is, what seems right to me. I know that sounds, ironically, like a reinforcement of the thesis that we're living in a post-truth world. But, no. Not really.
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122 comments:
The good postmodernism says truth is a woman. She has to be courted.
Or, today, I suppose, offered a job as a star.
There is truth, as in when one is dealing in the clean, desert battlefield of science and engineering, and "truth", misused in human affairs, and fought in hopelessly close terrain.
Some people are simpky blind to the nature of the battlefield, or are themselves warriors in that "truth" jungle.
Fight Club is fine, as far as Palahniuk novels go. It's both a rejection of the trappings of a modern society and a warning about the nihilism of neolithic masculinity. I prefer "Choke' though, as it captures the inherent vice of Socialism.
It's what I do, and I'd like to read somebody else doing it.
What you don't get, Althouse, is that that is fine internally, but not meant to be shared. As Helen Hunt said to Bart Simpson, do you ever think anything you don't say?
You'd be better off reading some of Thomas Sowell's work.
I've ploughed through Derrida, about 6 shelf-feet of him, but found it a pleasure.
They are going to hate plying by their own rules for a change.
It's a question of whether you like to be surprised by discovering what you are blind to in your culture. Derrida and Erving Goffman; Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell.
As if CNN, NYT and WaPo publish the truth? Please!
Cavell does not like Derrida. But they see the same stuff, one from a classical philosophical perspective and once from a Wittgensteinian perspective.
What the hell is "postmodernism'? Everyday living is modern there is no such thing as postmodern in life. Sounds like Sheldon and his buddies with their time machine. Was 1940 post modern to 1939; 1965 to 1964; 2001 to 2000. Yes. The same kind of BS that the art critics spouted in front of "The Kramer".
""Turns out America today, in its sense of randomness and meaninglessness and indifference to consequences, is like 'The Great Gatsby.' And like 'Fight Club.' It’s also like 'No Country for Old Men.'""
Discuss the inter-sectionalities.
Just kidding.......The statement sounds like something you might hear on The View.
Can the Left separate fantasy from reality? It seems every criticism they have comes from some over-the-top kind of media:
“Trump is Voldemort - even Hogwart’s fell”
“We are one step away fromThe Handmaid’s Tale”
“Hillary Clinton - YASS Khaleesi!”
One almost begins to think that the Left’s egos may be actively retreating into fantasy because reality isn’t matching the movie in their heads, that reality in front of their faces is showing them that THEY’RE the villains, and the ego will go to great lengths to protect itself such a psyche-breaking realization. 🤔🤔🤔
A classical philosopher trusts language where Wittgenstein does not. Wittgenstein says langauge makes a convenience of grammar, to convince you you have a picture of what's going on, where no such assurance exists. A lot of language is just tokens in accounts.
A careful philosopher, in explaining how everything works, comes to how pictures work, and he explains it, unawares, with a picture. This, if he is a careful and rigorous thinker, he has to conceal from himself. If he is careful and rigorous, he will find himself unable to finish, instead going into repetitions and deferrals and mentioning additional difficulties. Probably like quantum computer guys explaining why it's not working yet. Tehcnical difficulties.
Derrida, the classical philosopher, is good at spotting the circles that the careful philosopher is concealing from himself, but puts it down to a structural fact, sort of like Godel's proof that mathematics is either inconsistent or incomplete.
Wittgenstein puts it down to a misunderstanding of what language is. It's accounts, a social thing, not description.
The political scene is all biggest-dick, not much related to that postmodernism.
"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." -Attributed to Churchill
"I'm always disappointed when a liar's pants don't actually catch on fire."
Dishonesty is the BEST policy. - All the liars and perjurers that I've come across in my life.
"Penalty for committing perjury. Perjury is a felony in California law. If convicted, the person could be sentenced to up to 4 years in the California State Prison. The judge has discretion, however, to grant probation and impose little or no actual jail time."
What do we do with lying President Trump? Four years in a country club prison doesn't seem like enough time to deter future presidents from lying. How about cutting his lying tongue out?
Trumpit
But you may keep your doctor.
Multiple, independent sources, or it's a political myth, which may or may not be a semblance of truth.
No, America is not like any of those books. America is neither meaningless nor random. Turns out the author of those remarks is closeted with prog theorists and true believers. It is nonsense.
Trumpit
Hillary is likeable enough.
I think TGG is terrible.
She was comparing the detention of illegals,
With the internment of issei and nisei
Truth died a long time ago when the press refused to report it. The examples are legion.
The press lies by commission and omission. They lie for personal gain and they lie for ideological purposes.
Now they're screaming "truth is dead" over a moldering corpse that they stabbed with their pens.
Distant connection to "Fight Club" -
Manny Pacquiao just won the world welterweight title, again, at age 39.
I guess he just got bored of being a Senator and playing basketball.
Scattershot was the exact word that came to mind when I read the Guardian excerpt you linked yesterday.
One of the many idiocies of the age is the continued mockery and horror expressed regarding Kellyanne Conway's notion of "alternative facts." What she should have said is "alternative fact sets," since that it what she was actually getting at. One draws conclusions from a set of facts. Conservative voters include facts that liberal voters do not include and exclude others in drawing conclusions. There are certainly facts in dispute, but most of the disputation is not about facts, it is about which set of facts is relevant. We see plenty of moaning about a post-truth world, but this is mostly moaning about conclusions that conservatives refuse to admit as legitimate.
"Truth" is constructed. In many cases, rather shoddily.
Some people are just not smart enough to use post-modernist ideas- Lozada is almost the perfect example.
Truth, the real physical, natural sort of truth, is like a punch in the face.
Sometimes a constant battering, when you can't get something to work. No spinning or redefining will do, that fist is coming at you.
All kids should learn to box, and take a punch.
She was talking about thr bowling green incident where two iraqi nationals had been planning an attack, she conflated it with the Chattanooga incident.
"And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?"
Thanks for the tools, lefties! Enjoy the whirlwind!
I wonder if any of Michikiko's ancestors were at Bunker Hill or King's Mountain? Shiloh or Gettysburg? Is she a person with credentials that I should accept as an arbiter of truth? Perhaps she was, but squandered them at the New York Times, an established purveyor of falsehood.
It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them),” Kakutani sniffs. But while she argues that “postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land,” she concedes that “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.
See, there in bold? That's the problem. It's not that "dumbed-down corollaries" of post-modernism filled the minds of Identity Politics thinkers of every kind (e.g. black, feminists, Latino, LGBT, etc), until a philosophical movement that prided itself on "de-centering" every text, on exploding all binary oppositions, on dissolving all essences, became the foundation for political movements every bit as dogmatic as Leninism. No, the problem is that those nasty right-wing Trumpies appropriated their methodology.
Well, it looks like the Lefties are in a pickle here. There really isn't any "reason" that post-modernism's corrosive methodologies are, in essence, left-wing only. I can't speak to Deleuze/Guatarri, but both Foucault & Derrida admitted as much. To go back to Marxism means the complete re-assembly of their activism along class lines vs identity politics lines, a re-assembly that just might prove fatal. And, finally, Classical Enlightenment Liberalism just won't carry the freight that they want it to carry. It has place for blacks, LGBTs, Latinos, etc as fellow citizens, but not as subject who possess a black, feminist, whatever "consciousness". Classical Enlightenment Liberalism is already out there on the playing field, & it's call "conservatism".
I'm going to read the Kakutani book
Not to suggest blog content or anything, but I would read our hostess’s serial thoughts on the Kakutani book with great interest.
"his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises"
As far as I can tell, dedicated Trumpophobes truly believe that presidents never told lies, broke promises, or were inconsistent before. This is a level of amnesia / naïveté that I find quite astonishing.
Certainly deconstruction chipped away at the master narratives of progress and enlightenment by showing how power and conformity are constructed in discourse, rules, laws, and that truth is not foundational. For a twist, I like Zizek who shows how the power of absence works in our lives, and shuns the postmodern father who under the guise of permissiveness imposes his will. He also says do not ask the philosopher how to avert a meter hurtling towards earth, but ask a physicist. There are limiatations-- to say that direct quotes, or historical evidence is fake is a reduction of the post-modernism project. There are philosophers like Rorty or Appiah who consider essentialism unnecessary, but believe that we have to chose actions which will leave a better world for out descendants.
Great Gatsby, etc.all speak to a level of panic in the Fake Intelligentsia as the Movie Trump's loyaly American voters watch is outdistancing the propaganda movie the brainwashed see in Groundhog Day repetes.
You just need to first study the great hypnotist, Scott Adams', powerful tools of analysis.
And See, Kanye West blow up the Groundhog Day repeators into tiny little pieces on the trash heap of history.
Paco Wové said...
"his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises"
As far as I can tell, dedicated Trumpophobes truly believe that presidents never told lies, broke promises, or were inconsistent before. This is a level of amnesia / naïveté that I find quite astonishing.
*************************************
Just as bad, they seem to forget that they themselves deny objective truth.
So, why is Trump lying when he speaks *his* truth? How do they know what the objective truth is?
It's an epistomological mess, all the way down.
Okay, I broke down and read the Lozada article. Lozada is basically defining “truth” to mean “whatever the Times and the Post say it is.” If the Post says 2 + 2 = 5 then by golly so it does! And if Trump and right-wingers say that 2 + 2 = 4 then that just goes to show what sort of lying liars they are.
Seems to me I read about this in a book somewhere ...
“Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them. For decades, critical social scientists and humanists have chipped away at the idea of truth. We’ve deconstructed facts, insisted that knowledge is situated and denied the existence of objectivity.”
“Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools?” in the New York Times. Cry me a river.
Deconstruction seems to have eaten everything else, such as that in modern education there is nothing to deconstruct, because the kids literally know nothing save modern dogma, which they are not permitted to deconstruct.
They cannot even be argued with, because they not only don't know how to do that, but they have no knowledge of anything, no literature history or facts, with which to wrestle. Even the concept of argument is alien.
Roesch, you and yours have produced a generation of, well, a rather ill-mannered Eloi.
Since Althouse still reads it, I was considering subscribing (again) to the New York Times. Only I was put off by the words the NYT uses in its own subscription advertising to describe the New York Times: 'objective, facts, truth.' The Left has been deconstructing objectivity and truth for 300 years or so, and now they try to sneak those words back into the conversation to describe themselves. That's amazing.
I decided not to subscribe. I am going to follow the example of Jessica Morales (which Althouse showed me) of living unplugged from the daily news. I'll still stop in here, though. :-)
"and that truth is not foundational."
I certainly hope you don't teach Math or Physics that way.
We have enough feminist collapsing bridges as it is.
Blogger buwaya said...
Deconstruction seems to have eaten everything else, such as that in modern education there is nothing to deconstruct, because the kids literally know nothing save modern dogma, which they are not permitted to deconstruct.
Watch homeschooling grow. My ex-wife, who was a public school teacher in the 60s and a big fan of public schools, now says she would home school them if she were doing it again.
But while she argues that “postmodernists are hardly to blame for all the free-floating nihilism abroad in the land,” she concedes that “dumbed-down corollaries” of postmodernist thought have been hijacked by Trump’s defenders, who use them to explain away his lies, inconsistencies and broken promises.
Nobody's "hijacked" anything. That isn't what's going on.
"Journalists" do "fake news". Public intellectuals do its equally dumbed-down corollary, "not even wrong explanations".
Though if you read the book, Althouse, let us know if she bothers to provide examples of this alleged use of dumbed-down corollaries of postmodernism. Never attribute to "an author's mind at work" what can be explained by simple projection, parochialism, and good old-fashioned thick-headedness.
Truth, the real physical, natural sort of truth, is like a punch in the face ... No spinning or redefining will do
In a limited, specified frame of reference, observable and reproducible. The rest is myth and prophecy based on circumstantial evidence and inference.
My stepson, who builds custom homes in the Oregon wine country, recently built one with a whole wing for grandma who was planning to homeschool the kids there. There was even a classroom in a 7000 square foot house for three people, plus three kids.
Your chances of leading a useful, pleasant life are probably greatly enhanced if you've never read or even heard of Derrida.......Woodrow Wilson was not so prolific as Lenin. Woody only wrote about a dozen books compared to Lenin's fifty, but both men were towering intellects as defined by the towering intellects of their times. (A bit of circular reasoning there, but you don't need Derrida to keep the top spinning.). Warren Harding was nobody's idea of a towering intellect but life was much more pleasant in his America than that of Wilson's America or Lenin's Russia. I wish some smart person would explain to me how and why so many smart people were wrong about so many things over the past few hundred years.
As I have claimed elsewhere, in different words, Trump is destroying (post) + modern philosophy with the same tools Ayn Rand used to destroy Immanuel Kant ... Pay attention to facts and reality ... They take priority over words and feelings
Your life is at stake and that is your skin in the game.
(eaglebeak)
Perhaps, as a palate cleanser, we should plunge into the pre-moderns--Plato, Aristotle, the Parmenides fragments, Euclid.
From the days when philosophers based their work on the notion of coherence between the laws of the physical universe and the operations of the human mind.
"'Truth' is a social construction." It's difficult to see how this statement could be dumbed-down any further. It says what it says; it is what it is. It is simply a reformulation of the Sophist belief that Plato argued against: "Justice is the will of the stronger." Just replace "Justice" with "Truth" and you have all you need to know about the post-modern political philosophy of progressives.
Shaka, When the walls fell
I doubt that Diogenes was searching for Carlos Lozada. Truthfully!
Apropos this thread ...
Via Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Dim-Hypothesis-Lights-West-Going/dp/0451466640
You can't honestly accuse the American Right of a "postmodernist" denial of the existence or importance of "truth". When a Rightist or even Trump refers to "fake news" that's an acknowledgment that there is such a thing as "true news", which you don't find in WaPo, NYT, CNN, etc. When Conway referred to "alternative facts" she was acknowledging (clumsily to be sure) that "facts" exist and are important, which the MSM ignore.
Take as an example climate change skeptics, or as the news media like to call them "climate deniers". They don't deny science, they interpret the scientific data differently. They deny that the output of "climate models" reflect the reality about the climate. Do you remember learning ages ago that "the map is not the territory"? That's what the skeptics are saying.
I'm old enough to remember when the NYT was justly proud that its political opinions did not affect its political news reporting. That's no longer true. American Rightists aren't not being postmodern when they notice that. They WANT the truth, and they complain because they aren't getting enough of it from the news media.
Disintegration ..
Integration ...
Misintegration...
Discover where the on/off switch is and why you control it.
Cads like Sasha Baron Cohen, Obama, criminals, prostitutes, attorneys and academics thrive on abusing the trust, civility, and good nature of honest folk.
Now, attorneys, prostitutes, SBC and criminals acknowledge that it is so they can run a scam and seize money or power.
The Academy and journalists needed to invent or adopt Post Modernism as an excuse for being rat bastards.
Now this woman is whining that the Right is doing the same thing and she no longer has that advantage.
To which I say to her 'go fuck yourself'.
Civility and manners were created to avoid fistfights and murders on a regular basis. It was taught mostly by women who wanted to see their children grow up and not be beaten or killed.
To bad that is no longer the case in a large segment of women...
How much of postmodernism is an attempt to better search for truth and how much is a dodge to avoid empirical realities that Neo-Marxists find inconvenient?
On a similar plane, how much of deconstructionism, intersectionality and postmodernism an attempt to control thinking and language so that only "true intellectuals" are able to figure things out?
That happened before the printing press when the population was largely illiterate and only priests could read or possess books.
Great Gatsby - 1920s
No Country for Old Men - 1980s
Fight Club - 1990s
True Detective - 1990s, 2010s
America, in the Age of Trump, is like every other era in America.
I can't find it, but I remember some Academic published a piece on Post Modernism which was lauded as one of the singular works in the issue: densely and 'elevated' to rarified subtleties of nuanced thinking
Until they found out he Sashaed them up the ass by writing obsfucated drivel that even they could not make heads or tails of.
Which says something about the 'quality' of the philosophy and its proponents.
The Sokal hoax, more than 20 years ago.
Many of us voters for Trump weren't supporters of Trump but opponents of Hillary. And in many cases, like, for example, me, have become supporters of Trump because he's keeping his promises, not breaking them. Court appointments being the single most important one. The ones he hasn't kept are due either toa lackluster congress or judges ignoring the Constitution in their rulings. And for all the people who can't make sense of his foreign policy, it's really incredibly simple. America First. For the average American, that's a policy we can get behind. Is he crude? Yep. Is he likeable? Well, depends. If you liked the characters played by Rodney Dangerfield in Caddy shack or Back to School then yes. If not, then no. I liked them.
Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and other groups who don’t have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a college class on deconstruction – phrases such as “many sides,” “different perspectives”, “uncertainties”, “multiple ways of knowing.” As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book "Merchants of Doubt", rightwing thinktanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science have employed a strategy first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. “Doubt is our product,” read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”
Strangely, liberals who claim to be scientists ignore where the road to truth runs afoul of reality. In all favored "scientific" endeavors chased by advance degree "experts" is the obvious reality that "follow the money" is the reason why conservative thinkers disavow the likes of "climate change" and "environmental problems."
Examining the real world of so-called scientists, without a science to fall back on, demonstrate that the foolish are chasing their fortunes by holding out collection plates while singing off-key - most certainly these rent seekers want something for nothing. We are now forty years into "fixing" global warming and rising CO2 when neither supposed calamity has been demonstrated to be a problem. And nobody has been issued a death certificate citing "second hand smoke" as a cause of death. There simply is no statistical evidence to really prove these dire world-ending catastrophes - mostly because the earth is too big and too complex for mankind to analyze with any degree of competency.
Obviously fake news has preceded Trump by at least 40 years and "fix it," regardless of cost doesn't bode well for prosperity. But hang on and real scientists, working inside capitalism. will find our next fracking miracle.
Truth is an interesting historical character.
I'm reading Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, his biography of John Wesley Powell, the leader of the first U.S. expedition down the Colorado River and through the canyonlands of Utah, eventually through the Grand Canyon.
It was unknown territory. Stegner takes delight in exposing the "imposters and mountebanks" who promoted a Western paradise totally at odds with reality. There is hucksterism about this mountebankery, but also an astounding quality of self-deception:
William Gilpin, after half a lifetime in the West, could see through a glass eye so darkly, that he denied geography, topography, meteorology, and the plain evidence of his senses, and his advice to America and his dream of the future floated upward on the draft of his own bombast. One who had frozen and starved and chewed his swollen tongue in thirst, he could still deny the facts of Western desert and Western climate.
There are interesting deceptions and self-deceptions -- much much more subtle -- among all of Powell's associates, including Powell himself.
""Turns out America today, in its sense of randomness and meaninglessness and indifference to consequences,
They’re indifferent to the consequences of socialism.
Derrida gives bullshit a bad name.
Anti-vaxxers are a huge mixture of both left and right with the same thing in common- extreme distrust of authority.
And so called "climate deniers" are the ones with science on their side. Gaia Worshipers, aka Global Warming believers believe in global warming as a matter of fact. And refuse to even listen to any argument against it. Like, for example, the continued existence of the polar ice caps, which were supposed to disappear a few years back.
Deconstruction is a bad name for bullshit.
Walter Durante, Potemkin villages and the NYT hasn’t stopped.
Stupid autocorrect corrected faith to fact twice. Then a third time before I hit publish. I don't have a lot of faith in technology that makes decisions, like self driving cars. Because of simple glitches like unwanted autocorrect. Or the store that wouldn't put"Summa Cum Laude" on a cake because "cum" is a bad word.
If you want to read/learn about "america today", why in the world would you choose M. Kakutani as a vehicle? Have u never read her reviews and editorials?! All one needs is ANY two of them to learn everything she thinks on that subject. A dyed in the wool faux-intellect and self-righteous ideologue - yeah, we need more of those, yes?
'“It’s safe to say that Trump has never plowed through the works of Derrida, Baudrillard, or Lyotard (if he’s even heard of them),” Kakutani sniffs.'
And that, Sniffles, is how you got Trump, and how you'll get more, good and hard. From the Amazon page: "Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and points toward a new path for our truth-challenged times."
If I accept we are living in "truth-challenged times," and I further stipulate that times past were not thusly challenged (they were), that in no way assures me that Kakutani is the one to lead us to that, uh, shining path. The things she thinks are safe lead me to question whether I should ever get in a car driven by her, or go to the range with her.
Still trying to count the angels on the head of that pin. It's all fun and games until someone gets their eye poked out.
I’m indifferent to their consequences.
"How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.
"Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires."
-- Joseph Ratzinger, April 18, 2005
When proclaiming the truth about something as fundamental as the human person, made male and female, is likely to be met with vicious condemnation and ostracization, we are living in a post-truth dictatorship of relativism.
What they’re really fighting against is egalitarianism.
They’re losing their prom king/Queen status and fighting like hell to keep it.
The great unwashed masses can afford a lot of what they have. It’s starting to blend together.
Decidedly lukewarm review of the book in today's Los Angeles Times by its books editor Carolyn Kellogg. Points to the subtitle: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. It's just notes.
'Scattershot' implies multiple tangents shot out from a single source.
The use of movie titles in the example is the opposite: multiple tangents aimed at a single source.
So, rather than 'scattershot', I believe the appropriate word would be 'bukkake'.
Let me know if you need me to explain further.
-LWL
It's just notes.
Likely the reason Michiko Kakutani spent her life reviewing books instead of writing them.
MK did you notice the reference to physicists and meteorites in your usual kind of attack on my comments? Truth is a philosophical concern different then a concern about how well a set of equations, or laws can predict the outcomes of physical or sub atomic particles. As an aside most of the bridge failures that I know of have been engineered by men, not women.
For the self-righteous leftists who complain about Trump's "lies", name a politician who doesn't lie: Obama, Hillary, Warren, Schumer? Don't make me laugh. Campaign promises that politicians never keep are lies to fool voters.
Trumpkins don't care about Trump's "lies", care more about what he does, the promises he keeps.
@roesch, point of information. The pedestrian bridge at Florida International University that collapsed and killed eight, was designed by a firm owned and operated by a woman, who inherited the leadership of the engineering firm from her father.
Just so you understand where I am coming from, 2 + 2 = 4. All the electo shock therapy you can apply won’t make it equal 5. Sorry ‘bout that.
@elkh1, leave off Trump’s puffery and hyperbole, and how many outright lies from Trump can you come up with? Disagreeing with the left wing loonies is NOT a lie, however much they might want it to be “truth.”
2+2=3 if the speed of light is 4.
Truth as a "philosophical concern" (translation: a political concern) is intruding into "scientific" truth these days. Even into engineering. We now have colleges of "engineering education" (since when was that a thing?) asserting that various pomo concepts trump empirical analysis. That is, a clear view of reality must yield to dogma.
This is simply filth, polluting the sacred.
"...truth is not universal but a reflection of relative power, structural forces and personal vantage points."
ESPECIALLY personal vantage points. This concept is the foundation of all modern Human Resources rules and regs: doesn't matter what you itended to say, but how your listener interprets and receives your words. Since I can't read anyone's mind, I exercise "universal precautions" and limit my interactions at work.
'The Great Gatsby' 'Fight Club' 'No Country for Old Men' 'True Detective'
These stories are neither history, as we commonly conceive it, nor empirical science. Instead, they are investigations into the structure of Being itself and calls to action within that Being.
We now have colleges of "engineering education" (since when was that a thing?)
We have already had one bridge collapse. The boast from the supposed designer to her daughter about building a beautiful structure has now been deleted and is in the Memory Hole.
The next one will come.
I'm trying to think of an historical precedent. Even the Soviets seemed to be concerned with function over politics.
2+2=3 if the speed of light is 4.
We need some definitions here: The definition of"2"; the definition of "3"; the definition of "4"; the definition of "+"; and the definition of "=".
As an aside most of the bridge failures that I know of have been engineered by men, not women.
Just as most people killed in combat have been men. Your point ?
@rhhardin, had problems with your math courses, did you?
Lysenko in the Soviet sphere, ubre Blanca in the Caribbean,
Michael K said:
" Even the Soviets seemed to be concerned with function over politics.
********************************
Maybe I'm missing your point but...when and where did the Soviets ever build anything world-class?
Other than Lasik, what invention did the Soviets ever make that wound up being sold and used in world markets?
And how about Lysenko?
Does Chernobyl ring a bell?
"Trumpkins don't care about Trump's "lies", care more about what he does, the promises he keeps."
He's only kept his promise to sign a tax windfall bill for the rich. You Trumptards have the wool pulled over your eyes endlessly. You don't care about his lies. Well, you've been lied to so often that you can't distinguish a lie from the truth. Trump's a polluter, a looter, & a third-grade tooter who likes hooters.
roesch/voltaire said...
Truth is a philosophical concern different then a concern about how well a set of equations, or laws can predict the outcomes of physical or sub atomic particles.
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An utterly empty and unsupported assertion.
Since when do YOU get to decide what truth is?
Pass the bong.
"Fight Club" is a book? I liked the film. Although its one of those films that decline in interest the more you watch.
"No Country for Old Men" - tried to read the book, and gave up. Too much like the movie - which was a live action cartoon.
Have started on "Corrections" but it seems awfully familiar. Maybe it gets better.
What difference, at this point, does it make?
"Maybe I'm missing your point but...when and where did the Soviets ever build anything world-class?"
Their biological warfare labs. And Sputnik. Off the top of my head.
Tsar Bomba was pretty world-class.
More crazy stuff from trumpit.
Other than Lasik, what invention did the Soviets ever make that wound up being sold and used in world markets?
They actually invented radial keratotomy, which was the low tech version of Lasik.
The T 34 was pretty good, and Sputnik as someone already mentioned.
The AK 47 was excellent and is still used.
The MiG 15 was a very good airplane.
There are other examples, but none of them are consumer goods.
Lozada: "But she is more focused when exploring the left-wing pedigree of post-truth culture." Yep! The Left just LOOOOOOOVES to lie.
Crimso said...
"Maybe I'm missing your point but...when and where did the Soviets ever build anything world-class?"
Their biological warfare labs. And Sputnik. Off the top of my head.
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Ahem. Does the rest of the world use Soviet biological lab warfare technology? If so, what for?
Sputnik? That was a first, but it was quickly outclassed by...the US. Remember Apollo 11, 12,13,14,15,16,17? Still waiting for that Russian moon launch, or their shuttle the Buran...
All the other stuff Michael K mentions were pretty good......50-80 years ago.
Just tell me what consumer or industrial products the Russkies sell to the world NOW, not just weaponry.
Just point me to a consumer product available in the West that proudly proclaims, "Made in Russia" that's bought by millions.
Just yesterday, the Russkies admitted they won't be producing any more Su-57's, their top of the line 5th generation fighter.
Why not? Because they CAN'T. Because as a stealth aircraft meant to counteract our F-22s and F35s, it doesn't work.
Look at the facts. Russia has about 40% our population, and about a TENTH our GDP.
Snort.
They had one too notch designer korolev, he had been at least once or twice in the gulag, Mr kalishnakov was also fairly talented.
Also old The Bolshoi Ballet.
Ice skaters.
Gymnasts
Building the Soviet Man, tho....
The seem to be good at using umbrellas in interesting ways and they have a talent with some clear liquids...
I'm beginning to find this Russia/Putin obsession more and more boring.
I don't give a fuck about Putin, unless you can show me how he's deeply effecting the USA.
Crimea was ruled by Moscow for 220 years, and no one in the USA gave a shit.
Now, we're supposed to care. Of course, our ability to get Russia out of the Crimea is about zero, because Putin has 10,000 nuclear warheads and its 8,000 miles away.
There's always a Republican/Conservative type who loves all this crap about Putin.
They think of the world as a giant game of "Risk" and they're fascinated by the "Great Game". Whither Afghanistan? What about Georgia? Are we increasing our influence in Kyrgyzstan?
OMG, Putin has gotten ahead of us in Syria! OMG, how can we let him do that! Its the key to the whole middle-middle-east! Let syria go, and we've lost Lebanon!
Like I said, I getting more and more bored at the hysteria.
roesch/voltaire said...
As an aside most of the bridge failures that I know of have been engineered by men, not women.
The fact that someone even notes this as if it is relevant is emblematic of everything that is wrong with our university system.
The university/education system is toxic and destructive. It needs to be removed root and branch and rebuilt from the ground.
Blogger roesch/voltaire said...Slavoj Žižek
Thanks for the reminder of that guy. A Marxist who claimed if he was American he would have voted Trump. He says many of the same things as Jordan Peterson, but does not court the right. A pervert's Guide to Idiology is a great film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUKbhKV7Ia8&list=PLUce3U30I0ckzSa0B8wu_V-N_ToFwmxJ7
1+1=4, Buckminsterfuller proved it geometrically. It's the basis of synergy.
Seeing Red said...
The seem to be good at using umbrellas in interesting ways and they have a talent with some clear liquids...
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I think it was the Bulgarians who were the innovative umbrella users.
rcocean said...
There's always a Republican/Conservative type who loves all this crap about Putin.
They think of the world as a giant game of "Risk" and they're fascinated by the "Great Game". Whither Afghanistan? What about Georgia? Are we increasing our influence in Kyrgyzstan?
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You need to keep up.
Those countries you mention are peripheral to EUROPE's concerns, which are:
*Russia's open and notorious threats against the Baltic States, which are not nor ever have been part of an historical Russian Empire.
*ditto its resentment against the Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Hungarians and Czech states for having the temerity NOT to be subjugated by the Russkies.
As for "all this crap about Putin": have you not, sirrah, noticed that it is the proglodytes, aka the left, that has an obsession about Putin? The same Putin they think has a Svengali-like hold over Trump?
But yes, yes, we know: it's all part of a Grand Cabal between Trump and Putin to sell out the West.
Snort.
The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't use Fight Club as a simile for anything.
Maybe I'm missing your point but...when and where did the Soviets ever build anything world-class?
Other than Lasik, what invention did the Soviets ever make that wound up being sold and used in world markets?
Oil, vodka, weapons, whores. Those are the only Russian things worth having, and they export them, so it's really hard to understand why they're afraid of us invading them. Americans prefer delivery to takeaway.
Blogger Big Mike said...
@rhhardin, had problems with your math courses, did you?
7/15/18, 7:32 PM
B-Mike, he's sloppily alluding to a paradox of relativity; simply expressed, a flashlight traveling at Mach 1 does not project a beam at c+Mach 1.
Howard. B Fuller, one thing that is equal to two things plus one thing that is equal to two things equals four things. Fuller was a ditz.
rhhardin said...
2+2=3 if the speed of light is 4.
3.2, not 3.
The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't use Fight Club as a simile for anything.
Fight Club is metaphor.
Jay Elink:
I agree with your basic point, but you asked "when and where did the Soviets ever" I gave you correct answers to the question you asked. "The Dead Hand" by David Hoffman makes a compelling case for my assertion that Soviet bioweapons work was "world-class."
One of the many idiocies of the age is the continued mockery and horror expressed regarding Kellyanne Conway's notion of "alternative facts." What she should have said is "alternative fact sets,>>>
I think she should have simply said, "all the facts." People understand that concept immediately. By saying "alternative" she left open the interpretation that she was making up facts and/or that she was suggesting that known facts should be discarded in favor of her preferred or possibly false facts.
Even though she laments that objectivity has declined ever since “a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base,”
Good grief. I rarely - if ever - watch FOX News and I've never visited Breitbart even once. However, I've been reading those evil right-wing blogs since 2002/2003.
Good thing, too. Otherwise we would've been objectively stuck with President John Kerry.
Good luck reading Michiku Kakitani.
That's all I'm going to say.
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