(with apologies to George Orwell).
Monday, January 23, 2017
Creed for the Trump Age
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that Trumpism destroys. Trump theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘Liberal Science’, ‘Progressive Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
Jeffrey Shallit
Recurrent thoughts about mathematics, science, politics, music, religion, and
Recurrent thoughts about mathematics, science, politics, music, religion, and
Recurrent thoughts about mathematics, science, politics, music, religion, and
Recurrent thoughts about ....
-
Jeffrey Shallit
American mathematician, professor of computer science at a major Canadian university, & skeptic.
All comments are moderated to remove spam and duplication. Please be patient; your comment will usually appear within 12 hours.
5 comments:
And this is one reason I have fought truth-denying postmoderns, "science studies" scholars, antirealist philosophers, etc. for years now. Not only do they make scholarship a joke, but the views are more or less totalitarian in result, if not necessarily in intent.
Amen. We live in Orwellian times.
The Pew exit poll, broken down by gender, skin color, and religion (or lack of) says that the one group that voted overwhelmingly for Trump was, you guessed it, white evangelical Christians. Without them, no Trump. Yearning for the End Times?
This point should have been driven home by the comments Sean Spicer made at the press conference - a series of lies so brazen that less than two minutes sufficed to show them as such. No sign of retraction, only doubling down by the administration, and over something as completely unimportant as crowd size.
The decision to put out that level of falsehood and denounce anyone who said "That's not true" is too large to have been made by Spicer - it had to come from the president. As the Washington Post fact checker wrote:
"This is an appalling performance by the new press secretary. He managed to make a series of false and misleading claims in service of a relatively minor issue. Presumably he was ordered to do this by Trump, who conjured up fantastic numbers in his own mind, but part of a flack’s job is to tell the boss when lies are necessary — and when they are not."
If Trump's staff cannot stand up to him, things are going to get interesting here.
Btw, did you enjoy your "National Day of Patriotic Devotion"?
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/24/2017-01798/national-day-of-patriotic-devotion
It would be silly season, if Trump were not surrounded by hardcore authoritarians who long for nothing so much as to really stick it to everyone left of Mitt Romney.
Post a Comment