Phil Hands for September 28, 2016

Good one.

dump is mentally ill. Its “presidency” would be catastrophic. There is a frontline program on PBS about the candidates.

I support the other guy, but I did not see a knock out of the Trump. I saw a debate that reinforced each candidate’s base.

I can’t think of a single positive thing to report about Trump. Are they supposed to make up the news the way Trump makes up “facts?”

Despite the FACT that all the scientifically based polls have Clinton winning the debate, Trump is claiming all the polls show that he won “big time.” Yep he’s got all the best “facts”

LOL, I got to admit Phil you got Trump pretty well. But Hillary is no better, Lots of Rhetoric, No real facts.

Really crappy, phoning it in. The same one everywhere isn’t impressive.

What beauty show queens and female comedians have to do with a presidential campaign eludes me…

That’s an interesting article, martens. I have too much to say about it. (But I’m not sure why twelve-tone music is a challenge to standards of truth.) The trick is to acknowledge all of the problems in the enlightenment idea of truth and still maintain some standard of objectivity. It’s not a simple task, but I think it can be done.

Trump’s performance was a disaster! He was totally unprepared! Terrible job! Very low-energy! Very schlonged!

A quote from it that I found incorrect. .He is the ironic, self-referential embodiment of the newer postmodern conception of truth. He is a joker, a clown, yes, but a strong and determined one — a Nietzschean Übermensch with ludicrous hair and excellent comic timing. Hillary Clinton, with her weak appeals to objective truth — “that’s just not accurate” — is no match.-First Dr. Nietzsche found an example of one of his “overmen” not in Napoleon but in the artist, writer, polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. (He wasn’t anything like a Nazi at all anymore than Nietzsche was. Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth was a proto-Nazi.)

Very false too, or so I’ve been hearing.

Oh yes, to see all those big corporations and billionaires getting more money, it’s a beautiful sight to him.

trump’s taken business bankruptcy 6 times. He’s also morally bankrupt.

The elites have chosen their Goddess. None shall speak ill of the chosen one.

The only thing his campaign seems to be doing is transferring funds from campaign contributions to his foundation.

It’s a long discussion, too long for here. Just a few quick points. (1) Postmodernism is quite various, and there’s no single thing that amounts to postmodernism. (2) One place to start is Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Some people think that Kuhn’s argument effectively does away with science as objective knowledge of external reality. I don’t think Kuhn thought so, but that’s an implication that some people think is justified. Some of this actually goes back to Kant (who is not usually thought of as post-modern) and his argument that we don’t have direct access to reality but only through what he calls the categories. (3) Another angle is through some of the French theorists, including Derrida and Foucoult and Lyotard, who mount a critique of the Enlightenment, though they don’t agree with each other all the time. I think some of their critique is valid, but not all by any means. My own position, for what it’s worth, is that there is such a thing as reality, but our knowledge of it is always mediated, and that if nothing else we can know that some things are not true, even if it’s difficult to establish with absolute certainty what ultimately is true. Gosh it’s hard to talk about this stuff, and I’m sure I’ve made a hash of it. I’m sure I’ve just been confusing.

AND Phil got the hands right!

@martens…er, that article flummoxed me as well. :-/ I understood that the two view ‘truth’ differently, and how (sort of), but I don’t know what modernism & post-modernism are so I was lost regarding the author’s comparisons….(and lonecat’s explanations) Whoooosh…

The most common Trump word isn’t listed UNBELIEVABLE

Well, here’s another new book to add to the never-endling list…. Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?:A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain.http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10305.html.There is an interesting, short TED talk on the page..This looks like a really interesting and entertaining book.

Clearly I’m way behind all of you in my reading, but just opened Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies.

If you’re interested, you might take five minutes to look up the Sokal Affair, also known as the Sokal Hoax, not one of the finer moments in post-modern thought.But not all post-modernism is a hoax. Just most of it.

Thanks Baslim, lonecat. I’ll see if I can order it over this weekend and pick it up in the UK since I fly out this Saturday

Many thanks to marten, lonecat, and Baslim for leading a genuinely intriguing discussion of postmodernism and Trump. For my part, I would like permission to use this quote from lonecat: “if nothing else we can know that some things are not true, even if it is difficult to establish with absolute certainty what ultimately is true.” Again, thank you all!

trump are smart

HUGE facts too I´ll bet.