04-15-2019, 08:34 PM
(04-15-2019, 01:05 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(04-14-2019, 11:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Does anyone have a problem with Donald Trump, having praised Wikileaks to the heavens during his campaign, saying now that he knows nothing about it? Talk about an Orwellian memory hole!I assume that you are unable to see the signs and associate the blue regime that you currently support as being similar to the one that you read about/ learned about by reading "1984".
Sorry, Mr. President, and I have read Nineteen Eighty Four several times since adolescence... and it fits you well, especially on linguistic fraud.
Unless one tries to be witty, clever, or poetic, one should keep language as simple as possible. Profound wisdom can express itself in simple raiment, yet utter nonsense can proclaim itself with arrogant use of pomposity. on the one side is the late Bertrand Russell, who expresses himself in ways that a fairly-smart high-school student can understand (if he so cares). In contrast one finds incomprehensible balderdash in the official explanations of Nazi racism, especially in Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century. All I could respond to about a paragraph of its translation is that that is the purest Scheiss that anyone could have ever written.
Have you ever heard of the Sokal affair? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
Quote:The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax,[1] was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".[2]
The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[4][5] Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.[2]
The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.
I do not have a graduate degree, but I got to see the article and recognized it as patent nonsense -- as is much postmodernist gibberish. I am fully satisfied that nobody needs to transcend the conventions of English to find some higher truth in English. Maybe some specialized material in science and technology is difficult material by its nature -- but on occasion I enjoy reading such material.
Get this straight: there is no higher truth than objective reality. Anyone who claims otherwise lies. Although knowledge and technology may advance, basic truth does not change. The methods that the pre-Christian Greek philosophers used in discerning truth from nonsense remain useful. Human nature does not change, which explains why classical Greek drama remains relevant to this day.
Whenever someone can remember something that Donald Trump says such as "I love Wikileaks" from 2019 and three years later hears him saying that he knows nothing about it. one can recognize him as a liar, a fool, or both. It was useful in 2016, but he denies using it in 2019. Honest people do not do that. Trump is a liar, and he is a fool for believing that there aren't large numbers of people who can juxtapose two contradictory statements and recognize a liar.
I try to keep my communications as simple as I can get away with. I write complex sentences solely because ideas that I deem worthy of discussion are themselves complex. I have talked myself out of two speeding tickets and a parking ticket, but I did not lie. I admitted to mistakes of perception or interpretation of the meaning of a sign.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.