First off, we got our hot water back Thursday (that I whined about). I ordered a water heater that seemed equivalent to what we had from Amazon after looking several places. Why Amazon? They promised delivery Wednesday while the blue and orange borg both said delivery “as early as Thursday.” A couple of weeks ago, a battery powered porch light we've been using died and we ordered one from the Home Despot with "Thursday delivery" and it ended up being Friday. Once bitten, twice shy.
The new heater was running by Thursday evening.
Today, as you've undoubtedly heard, is the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. The thing I find most remarkable is that the wall has been down longer than it was ever up - 28 years; growing up in the '60s, it was a regular topic of conversation and it seemed to have been there all my life. Which is the case, if we define my life as the time I was aware enough of the world to be aware of things like the wall. It went up in 1961, the year I got out of first grade and started second, and came down in 1989 when I was 35. I probably became aware of the Berlin wall within two or three years of it being completed.
FEE had several stories about the dystopian life in East Berlin, with this one being the best. The part I had forgotten was that the wall coming down on November 9th was a mistake - the kind of mistake you associate with bloated, inefficient, arthritic bureaucracies, like the German Democratic Republic.
However, 1989 was different. And it was the result of a mistake. The GDR decided to allow East Germans to apply for visas to travel. Politburo spokesman Guenter Schabowski missed most of the critical meeting but was tasked with announcing the new policy to the international press. He indicated that people could travel now, “immediately, without delay.” Crowds gathered at Berlin’s crossing points as GDR border guards unsuccessfully sought guidance from above. Receiving none, they opened the gate after 10,316 brutal, sometimes murderous days.
Conservative podcaster Lauren Chen had a truly
This “professor,” Ryan Wash, is the unification of corrosive racism and postmodernism. He starts out by saying that “space is not real” and “science, technology, it's all fake”. “It's a projection of white fantasies that has worked to control our interpretation of how the world works...” Since he hasn't personally gone to space or visited the other planets, they aren't real. Never mind telescopes and looking at stars or the other planets, he wishes to remain ignorant. When asked if that meant Paris wasn't real if he hadn't visited the city, he confirmed that nothing is real unless he has personally experienced it. Student Michael Moreno questioned him, asking if space was invented by white people to keep black people down, what about the black astronauts? Wash seemed unaware that there ever were any black astronauts and refused to believe at first, then switched over to the race traitor idea, before going back to saying that he can't confirm anything exists unless he personally experiences it.
Quoting from a piece in American Thinker that I linked to before:
There is no universally agreed-upon definition of "postmodernism." Like the philosophy itself, it means whatever the person who espouses the position wants it to mean. Three general tenets are acknowledged: Objective truth is unknowable, objectivity is fallacy, and modernity is a failure. By the last they mean that the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the Industrial Age are all malevolent failures of reason and objectivity, as they failed to solve the world's existing problems and created new ones. Stephen Hicks, Ph.D. explains in his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault:There is no such thing as reality, only our perceptions and reactions to reality. Considering how much progress has come from the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial and Information ages, it's remarkable anyone could still accept postmodernism, but this professor does. It's an idea so bad that you need to have an advanced degree in some field completely removed from reality to be stupid enough to accept it.
Postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment project in the most fundamental way possible... [it] rejects the reason and the individualism ... And so it ends up attacking all of the consequences of the Enlightenment philosophy, from capitalism and liberal forms of government to science and technology.
Oh, it gets better, and while Lauren's video is almost 18 minutes long it's worth watching. Professor Wash is questioned by a student who records the entire exchange. Wash's solution is to send all the white people to space, since they invented it. It's really too stupid to summarize.
I'm glad somebody else remembered Wall Day. We won the cold war 30 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt was a cool and damp Thursday night. Hundreds (a few thousand?) came across the checkpoint after midnight, just to see if they really could. The trick was then going back home - would they be allowed to return?
Friday night was a massive party in the city center. A couple dozen people died when the scaffolding they were dancing on collapsed - and the party went on.
I read a book in the mid-90's, titled "Reality Isn't What It Used To Be." The book was all about how there is no objective reality. I thought it was a farce.
ReplyDeleteI'm far from an expert on postmodernism, but it seems that they started with the obvious stuff like how two people might perceive a color differently (it's bluish green... no, it's greenish blue - that kind of thing) and then they extended it to absurdity.
DeleteI always say that personal perception is fine for "I like blue better than red" or "I like pizza", but that doesn't work for real world things like, "what's the speed of light?" or "does this virus survive in air?" I don't know if anything is as stupid as saying that since I've chosen to never look at planets and stars through a telescope that those things don't exist.
I violated the first law of YouTube and read some of the comments. One person said this was a debate class and the argument was straw man, just to provoke debate. That's the kindest possible justification, but even astonishingly stupid in that context unless his goal was to show how stupid that viewpoint is.
Interesting. I started to Google the book title, and it suggested "reality ain't white".
ReplyDeleteI would love to see Professor Wash get the full experience of outer space, without a pressure suit. Just 30 seconds or so of that, not enough to kill him. Make sure he has a good view of the Earth with maybe the Moon in view too. Then pull him back inside, bring him back and let him heal. He still would say it was a white person's lie.
ReplyDeleteI know where there is a slightly underutilized altitude chamber capable of pulling down to 62,000 feet altitude to test full pressure suits. could save you some money on lifting the professor to an suitable altitude to get the "outerspace like low pressure experience" the professor richly deserves.
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