annatar1914 wrote:I draw some comfort from that oddly enough, that if I'm objective I can see that this isn't too out of the ordinary for modern times. And yet, there is a batshit crazy wing of the Liberals that is not capable of objectivity or rationality.
After reading Richard Rorty's
"Contingeny, Irony and Solidarity" several decades ago, it occurred to me that it's not that the left is incapable of reason, it's that they cannot accomplish their political objectives with reason; hence, they actively abandoned it. I linked the text so you can save yourself the 20 bucks or whatever.
Richard Rorty wrote:About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight. This precedent made utopian politics the rule rather than the exception among intellectuals. Utopian politics sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a hitherto unknown form of society.
So this semantic game around the notion of "truth" ultimately rejects an aspect of the Enlightenment, and reduces much of it to semantics. This is where I profoundly disagree with them, and why I can never be a leftist.
Richard Rorty wrote:This development has led to a split within philosophy. Some philosophers have remained faithful to the Enlightenment and have continued to identify themselves with the cause of science.
Rorty is often considered an American pragmatist, but I think abandoning science is not pragmatic at all. Material developments resulting from science and reason have been too profound to pretend that it is all meaningless.
Ricard Rorty wrote:We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.
Truth cannot be out there - cannot exist independently of the human mind - because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own - unaided by the describing activities of human beings - cannot.
The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks called "facts." But if one clings to the notion of self-subsistent facts, it is easy to start capitalizing the word "truth" and treating it as something identical either with God or with the world as God's project. Then one will say, for example, that Truth is great, and will prevail.
So I agree with your sentiment that some of these people are batshit crazy. However, there are some who know
exactly what they are doing, and are deliberately undermining reason and truth as constructs upon which a society can be built. You could almost characterize them as intellectual anarchists.
annatar1914 wrote:They'll get frozen out of the process I believe. There's a reason why this thread is in the ''spirituality'' section; they simply have become enemies of both God and their fellow Man.
Well, they have also become enemies not so much of the truth, but the notion that "truth" can exist.
annatar1914 wrote:Some of the dirty tricks are on the GOP side I'm sure.
Oh, no doubt. However, I don't think I've ever heard anything so bold as the pushing of mail-in balloting, assertions by people like Hillary Clinton that Biden should not concede under
any circumstance, that there will be a "red mirage" where Trump wins big, and then they will come in ex post facto with tons of uncounted ballots where they need them that they have suddenly "discovered" and attempt to overturn the election. The transparency with which they are willing to commit fraud is unlike anything I've ever seen.
Much of what is happening to Trump is unprecedented in US politics--pushing a 25th Amendment removal, pushing an emoluments clause removal, launching a completely phony Russiagate scandal, impeaching him on completely bogus grounds, politicizing a pandemic, stoking riots across US cities, etc. Now we'll have the RBG seat riots on top of it.
annatar1914 wrote:Like with Lincoln though, and the Southerners who were convinced in 1860 that he was wanting to end slavery by hook or by crook, these conspiracy theories have a way of becoming real because of the very actions of the crazies who float them.
Well, the Republicans did do just that. If you parse the slavery argument from a legal perspective--and why the confederacy rhetoric lingers on--what the Union did was straight up illegal. The Emancipation Proclamation took private property without just compensation; then, they ratified the 14th Amendment by the barrel of a gun, ultimately sanctioning a 5th Amendment violation against taking private property without just compensation, but only in the case of freeing slaves. I will not offer a moral defense of slavery, as I oppose it politically and morally myself. I used to debate an Italian gal who was a translator, who also could not understand my position on equality--it seems leftists can only understand someone who doesn't agree with them as defending the
ancien regime. She died of brain cancer. Anyway, she said she was trembling when I posted the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. That war was justified on moral grounds. "He (the Lord) hath loosed the fateful lightning
Of His terrible swift sword; His truth is marching on." "As He (Christ) died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free; While God is marching on." The Battle Hymn of the Republic scares the living shit out of atheists.
annatar1914 wrote:When the time comes those sowers of discord will find the money spigot has run dry. I suspect many of these mobs out in the streets have been paid to do what they're doing, and if the Right were paying them they'd almost as soon do their bidding as easily as they have for the Liberals.
Agreed. That's also why Trump is a seminal figure, as someone like Bush probably wouldn't have used US Marshals or sedition laws among other things to bring the violent arm of the Democrats to heel.
annatar1914 wrote:Actually I don't recall, lol. But I have a hunch about this election; Biden/Harris is taking a dive like McCain and Romney did for Obama. The crazies are just window dressing no matter what they think, camouflage for the Democrats giving up on 2020.
I think so too, but I don't think the effort to delegitimize Trump will stop after election day.
annatar1914 wrote:I think that they will give up much of this nonsense. They in fact are giving up this nonsense-or trying to- by letting it play out in front of the American people and discrediting this insanity for at least a generation.
Agreed. However, like Nixon, they still didn't let him govern in his second term. Trump needs to take the House and hold the Senate too. Nancy Pelosi has never proven to be anything but horribly divisive.
Richard Rorty wrote:I have been urging that the democracies are now in a position to throwaway some of the ladders used in their own construction.
This is why I think the craziness is deliberate. It's why I couldn't take Anthony Kennedy seriously in Obergefell. It's why I can't accept Neil Gorsuch as a conservative either with his recent ruling on protection against sex discrimination applying to transgenders when such people were considered mentally ill at the time the law was written. Even the conservatives are radical liberals in my view. They've simply lost their minds.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden