Picaro
Picaro's JournalSame impression
I’m in District 3 in Collin county represented by the doddering octogenarian (or is it nonagenarian?) Sam Johnson who is finally retiring.
I stopped by to vote in the Democratic primary and everyone there at that early hour was a Democratic voter. This was but a brief moment in time and was very early...before 7:30 am.
On the other hand the only folks setting up to do electioneering were from the Republican side—specifically for the Huffines vs Angela Paxton race which is super nasty. Haven’t looked up the results yet on that one.
My impressions are that the Democrats are showing up and voting and the reported statistics beat that out. Don’t think many will stay home this midterm.
Objectivism is just a way of justifying being an asshole
Ayn Rand was an asshole. If you wanted to be sexist you would call her a bitch, but in my mind asshole is the right term.
So, when you talk about Trump and Ryan and the whole lot allowing them to talk about being Objectivists or Randians you are allowing an artful dodge.
Theirs is the asshole philosophy. Everyone but them and their wealthy asshole patrons can simply fuck off and die.
Objectivism is a philosophy for nasty, selfish 13 year old boys and girls. If you haven’t dropped it by the time you are around 16 then you are a budding asshole (sociopath).
Incredible
“We are the experts.” That cannot be argued with (although the cravens will).
These teenagers speak with power and passion. Amazing.
I can imagine myself still curled into a fetal position and whimpering after having suffered a trauma like this.
Wow.
I wish logic was taught in our schools
I attended one year at an English school when I lived in Bogotá Columbia. One of the courses that was required was philosophy. One of the sections in the curriculum was Introduction to Logic.
The first part of this part of the curriculum was concepts of logic and how to navigate through logical constructs. One of the areas of focus was logical fallacies. The very first thing you talk about when you’re talking about logic is that you cannot prove a General case from a specific instance.
You get into building syllogisms based on this fallacy so that you can see what it looks like.
One of the most common is:
the water is green
the boat is green
therefore the boat is water
When you see that written out it looks utterly absurd of course. You know very well the boat is not water.
I see these jumps from the specific to the general every day and in almost every political conversation. The right wing seems to be particularly enamored of coming up with these generalities.
Again, I wish that logic was taught inour schools. If it was it would become a reflexive skill and reasonable people would immediately discard this kind of thinking because it really doesn’t make any sense. That would leave only diehard racial supremacists (because trust me there are plenty of non-white racial supremacists) to contend with and to ostracize.
What makes this type of thinking so seductive is that we, as a nation, are untrained in logic whereas many other nations routinely teach it at a relatively young age.
Profile Information
Name: Ernie FergusonGender: Do not display
Hometown: Plano, TX
Home country: USA
Current location: Plano, TX
Member since: Thu Apr 30, 2009, 11:22 AM
Number of posts: 1,521
