Defending Objectivity
It is useless and idiotic to endlessly debate the condition of Schrödinger’s cat when all you must do is lift the lid of the box to find out.
I read Josh Blackman’s article this morning at the Volokh Conspiracy (hosted by Reason dot com) about Justice “Wise Latina” Sotomayor avoiding the legal term “alien” in a ruling, even to the point of editing a 1987 opinion written by Justice Thurgood Marshall to change the term “alien” to the squishy woke weasel word “non-citizen”.
Blackman notes:
“This trend towards legal newspeak troubles me. Expurgation was never going to stop with racial epithets. Any language–past or present–that offends will be canceled.”
He is right. With the Wise Latina changing history, I was reminded of what George Orwell wrote:
“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”
Given that nothing really ever changes and what was old is new again, the very denials of the disaster that the Biden administration is indicate 1) the absolute intent of the Democrats to lie about everything, 2) the total denial of objective reality, 3) their necessity to create an alternate reality where their incoherent and absurd thoughts and statements can be true, 4) the complete, absolute, total and all-encompassing mental illness that is progressivism and 5) that there is no length the lying progressives won’t go to gain and retain power.
George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” and “1984” as warnings – cautionary tales of man’s descent into dystopian existence – not as instruction manuals for how to do it. Blackwhite, newspeak and thoughtcrimes are the order of the day. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. The economy is great, America is safer now than at any time in the past 4 years, any schlub can walk into a gun show and buy a fully automatic weapon without a background check (a statement made by several Democrats).
As Reagan said, there is so much the left knows that isn’t so, meaning there is a significant gap between the real world and the Utopian construction the progressive Democrats favor. I guess that I have been rooted in the “hard” sciences like engineering and mathematics for far too long to have an appreciation of living in a world where words have flexible meanings and actions and results do not matter.
Postmodernists, deconstructionists, and “progressives” are the creation of a successful and productive society. They exist as a luxury appendage to a society that produces more than it consumes, thereby providing the luxury these “intellectuals” employ to tear down the very mechanism that allows them to exist. This type of reductive and destructive reasoning is totally worthless to society. It helps no one in understanding anything and serves only as a convenient excuse for the harsh reality of the world and the interactions of its inhabitants. All three of these are all the result of individuals seeking to explain their lack of success, social mobility, and meaningful achievement in the face of the objective success of productive members of society and individual self-determination. They are incapable of coming to terms with their own limitations; therefore, they must construct an alternative explanation for their lack of tangible value to society through a system of pseudo-logic that it has absolutely no basis in reality.
I completely understand the usefulness of philosophical debate as a part of intellectual inquiry about subjects we do not understand, but the practical side of me thinks it is useless and idiotic to endlessly debate whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead under the box when all you must do is lift the box to find out. If you have the power to intellectually discover the “is or is not” of a situation, why waste time with hypothetical propositions? It seems useless to argue that the status of the cat, once determined, is the opposite to what is observed because the cat’s condition depends on our current perception of reality. The damn cat is either dead or alive. In the cat world, there is nothing in between.
It seems these days most of the debates are designed to confuse and obfuscate rather than to clarify.
Progressive ideology depends on people never recognizing objective reality. It depends on people railing about how the steak sizzles, not the quality of the meat (or even if the steak even exists). Many contemporary “movements”, the BLM “movement” in particular, are based on events (Hands up, don’t shoot!, all cops are bastards, George Floyd was a saint, etc.) that are objectively false - but are sustained by perpetuation of a perception of offense (white cops are hunting young, unarmed black men) that the authorities are too afraid to correct for fear of violent reaction – or the correction would end the group’s political usefulness.
The problem is this – uncorrected perception will become a sort of pseudo-objective truth (i.e., conventional wisdom) if it is not effectively countered with objective fact. Therefore, progressives tend to prevaricate and dissemble and why truth is the political right’s most effective weapon. Objectivity is their biggest nightmare.
That is why they must wage war against objectivity - and that is why we must defend it.
It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.