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Norman Fischer's avatar

I've often thought that the advocacy for more liberal forms of government was part and parcel of Descartes indifference to the authority of custom throughout the Discourse.

These reflections are useful in adding another layer, however; perhaps the indifference to custom is in the end in the service of a buddng scientific authority, albeit in the interests that are a Lowest common denominator (e.g. health and agriculture).

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Zippy's avatar

Speaking of indifference to the authority to custom and by extension the reduction of everything to the lowest common denominator it seems to that the now leading edge vector of that process is a certain orange-haired religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian. He is also a pathological liar and a life-long professional grifter/con-man.

He comes out of the there-is-a-sucker-born-every-minute showbiz tradition of P T Barnum. In today's world Barnum is now obviously wrong.

There are now thousands of suckers born every minute. Millions of them are enthusiastic members/supporters of the MAGA (make America grotesque again) created and energized by their potty-mouthed Orange Haired "messiah".

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Zippy's avatar

Has anyone ever seen the movie Beavis & Butthead Do America where the two pottty-mouth's trash everything in their path.

They are of course constitutionally incapable of engaging, let alone sustaining a loving relationship with a real living-breathing-feeling woman.

Donald Trump comes out of and now empowers that tradition. Indeed towards the end of his recent election campaign he deliberately pitched his appeal to the Beavis & Butthead bigrade, especially at the Madison Square Gardens hyper-rally. It is more than likely that many of his enthusiastic male fans are also religiously and culturally illiterate

Many/most of them probably got their sex "education" from watching pornography for many hours on the internet. They probably also spent many hours playing video games most of which would have been saturated with violence and deeply misogynist too

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Jeff Steele's avatar

Looking forward to the sequel unpacking this:

“such an analysis is the only sound basis for a realistic assessment of the possibilities available to us and the eventualities we’d be prudent to prepare for.”

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Jeff Rensch's avatar

Breathtaking! Questions I had: who (what governmental entity?) would have benefited from D’s experiments? More concretely, we are in cold war with powers that probably want to destroy us and we need the H1-B expertise to prevail in that war, or do people think we automatically lose when the H1-B people arrive? Deglobalizing is defeat. I guess I’m saying that politics always shows up.

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