Reading the article linked below makes me realize yet another way in which Rudy’s argument that truth doesn’t exist is faulty. It’s not truth that is lacking. It’s all over the place! It is a common agreement as to what is, and is not, reality!
Even way back in Roman times, the argument was that because everyone experiences events differently (and defines words differently), there can be no agreement on “truth.” But that was nonsense: What they were actually saying was that if truth (quality) exists, we probably wouldn’t recognize it. (This is where an expert in the “Dialogic” might point out that this is an almost geometric proof that truth lives in consensus, or at least very close to it, and in shared experience. The author refers directly to: “shared consensus.”)
But Republicans have gone beyond making shared consensus impossible:
“It’s a way to de-legitimize what it means to know something at all. So you often find today that people don’t really care if something is totally true. They’re just looking for something they can hang their hat on, to create enough doubt to justify their core beliefs and sow cynicism at the same time. …”
There is a conspiracy! That’s another point that the author makes. There is a conspiracy to undermine reality. There are no gaps in history: if reality is undermined, it will be replaced by something else. You might call that a working definition of “insanity.”
If Trump is someday made, “Executive President,” without a fixed term of office, it will be because we allowed the “Influencers” to undermine reality, and redefine, or more properly, “undefine,” experience.
When someone tells me that they haven’t even heard any proof, or read any reports, that suggest that Donald Trump is a lifelong criminal, as happens almost every day, I get proof that the redefining of reality is advancing apace. It’s also becoming something of a shibboleth – and a conversation ender.
I don’t care anymore about lower-case Trump. Take away his powers, and leave him to his babbling crypto-speak. To his endless conspiracy theories – from books that he can’t read. Leave him to wallow in his hate; accusing, defaming, belittling, damning: “All who have betrayed him.”
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley-
(Chauncey’s piece at the link below is really, really excellent. This is the best analysis of who the Base are, and why they behave so “irrationally,” that I’ve seen. You may not agree with everything he says, but this is excellent writing.)
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