This is the doctrine that the world is composed of two sorts of people: those who operate through dichotomies, and those who don’t. Self evidently, most leftists consider themselves to be in the second category. Their moral strength lies in their resolution to oppose, with violence if necessary, the rule of those who divide people into categories.
United in their determination, they resolutely oppose the Republicans, who operate strictly through bigoted Us/ Them categories, such that one need know nothing about any of them to form firm and–of COURSE–accurate judgements. Their perfidy knows no bounds.
This is what you get when you destroy reason. The worst part of it, I think, is that the capacity for irony oriented humor is lost. Nothing is funny, any more, but the most vacuous and angry spiteful sorts of humor.
I was playing with this today. Consider this statement: “this statement is simultaneously true and false”. If it is true, it is false. If it is false, then it is not true, but that is includes as well.
This is the sort of thing academic philosophers do or did, and doesn’t interest me much beyond a couple of points.
Words can never be true or false, in my view, except to the extent they point to a reality beyond words. Math can be true, within its domain, but only beyond it to the extent it incorporates knowable facts like the accelleration of gravity.
Reason, so called, can be infinitely corrupted by the abuse of language. Yes, people can be classified as Other, but this process does not become benign when the “right sorts” do it. This is nothing different than the bigotry that was universal a thousand years ago.
These comments may be a bit disjunct, but arise as a result of recent repetition of a discussion I have done dozens–likely hundreds–of times.