(10-29-2019, 07:01 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(10-28-2019, 12:20 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > So what blinds you to the hollowness, cruelty, recklessness,
> ignorance, and dishonesty of Donald Trump?
So what blinds you to how you continually embarrass yourself by making
one completely idiotic statement after another?
You are a reasonably intelligent fellow. I may disagree with you, perhaps because I am not as much of a pessimist on human nature except on economic elites who can get away with much that the rest of us cannot get away with. This said, I see huge gaps in the character of Donald Trump. Those gaps are not sporadic incidents; those are the norm.
What I see wrong in Donald Trump I would see wrong in a liberal. Maybe liberalism requires more empathy than Trump has (empathy is rare among reactionaries, fascists, and revolutionary socialists); liberals are likely to be stronger on the human touch than on technical virtuosity than are conservatives. Other than that, the other vices serve no cause.
I fully recognize that most people can get away with a lack of intellectual depth, as most economic roles (a/k/a jobs) are designed for ease of performance. Caution is a virtue that makes an occasional act of audacity all the more devastating to an enemy in war... and a daring twist of literary or musical phrase or a seemingly-unlikely brush-stroke in a painting can be a stroke of genius. If one does much of such and it does not work, then one is simply insane. Trump makes pedantic expressions of commonplace knowledge as if he were a low-elementary pupil trying to be as profound as the teacher, as in "not many know this, but (insert a piece of banal common knowledge)". This is unimpressive. Most people know that iron is a metal in common use.
I have learned from personal experience how to detect egregious lies and stupidity. As James Randi puts it, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Statements contrary to accepted knowledge are usually false, indicating either deceit or gross error, unless one can prove such true (many thought Einstein was crazy for his theory of relativity, but he was proved right with scientific experiment, and that was difficult to do). The arrow of intellectual history has been toward greater refinement of truth. Although truth is often controversial, falsehood often shows itself as such through contradictions in the reductio ad absurdum that Euclid introduced.
By the way... if I were to say that "not many people know this, but Euclid was an important person in the history of mathematics", then I would be saying something absurd -- not because Euclid is so important in mathematics, but instead because "not many people know..." contradicts reality. Trump says stuff like that.
Dishonesty and folly can look much alike, but all in all, truth does not self-contradict. I could make the case that the great Euclid's method of proving geometry and number theory work by raising the level of basic knowledge. Thus the square root of two, if rational, must be an integer between 1 and 2... and there can be no integer between 1 and 2. But consider also that people with something to hide must cover up one misdeed with a lie, and when caught on that lie must create a bigger lie to cover for the first one, and so on.
I recognize much cause for distrust of President Trump. Smart people have fallen for horrible leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc.
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.
