10-19-2021, 11:55 PM
(10-19-2021, 07:10 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(10-19-2021, 01:37 PM)David Horn Wrote:(10-16-2021, 05:52 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote: I don't understand this point of consensus. Please point it out to me. Before you say getting along, we can live separately from the people we disagree with and have separate subcultures.
Consensus is not unanimity, but it does indicate a broad level of support for whatever centers the consensus. For example, a consensus around the idea of pizza as delicious and great food in general lead to massive numbers of pizza joints everywhere on the planet. Even for those few of us who hate it, we still have to admit that its a net good in this world.
We do have to agree that consensus is not the same as exceptional, but consensus ideas are rarely bad. They may be mundane, though.
That's not how consensus works now. How consensus works is everyone has to eat anchovies on their pizza because 51 percent said they want it and don't care about the 49 percent who don't want it.
Consensus requires give and take, and the recognition of the validity of some parts of the opposing views. Of course there must be some validity. After COVID-19 is over, a reversion to more of a free-market economy will be appropriate just to constrain inflation. More of a free-market economy than we now have, but not the race-to-the-bottom economy of the 3T and most of the 4T. COVID-19 has imposed war-like conditions upon our economy, but not severe enough conditions to make rationing desirable.
One has no right to expect people to accept as facts positions that are demonstrably wrong. Thus nous avons in French does not mean "five cats"; 4+5 is 9, and not some other number that is not nine (3 squared and 3x3 are also representations of 9); the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in Russia in 1917 and not some other year; delta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet and not in some other order; iron has 26 protons and not some other number of them. Magnetism is real and fire-breathing dragons are not. Resolute belief in a folly does not make that folly any more real.
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I see COVID-19 as the most likely manifestation of this 4T to mark this Crisis Era for America unless something spills over from overseas. To be sure, much weird stuff is going on in China whose international effects are being met so far with wishful thinking elsewhere, as in the good old U S of A.
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.