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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
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NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Thursday, August 4, 2016

REALITY CHECK

As Jerry Fresia and others have noted, I am fatally prone to optimism -- a Tigger in a world designed for Eeyores.  One of the several number-crunching political sites, The Upshot, now has Clinton at a 77% probability of winning in November, which to my ever-hopeful heart sounds pretty good.  However, they helpfully point out that this is roughly the probability that an NBA professional basketball player will make a free throw.  Do I really want my future and that of the entire world to depend on whether LeBron James hits a free throw?  Actually, I just checked, and James' lifetime FTA is .744, so Hillary Clinton's chance of being elected is better than LeBron James' probability of making a free throw.  There, that sounds better.

Sigh.  It is going to be a long Fall, Kant or no Kant.

1 comment:

s. wallerstein said...

I think it was after the 2004 election there was discussion on why working people vote for Bush with lots of brainy participants and at one point the late Richard Rorty pointed out that half of the population have an IQ of less than 100.

Now it seems that besides some people who vote Republican because they have always voted Republican since Eisenhower or Nixon (just as they have coffee every morning) and some rich guys in the construction business who are Trump's pals and thus will get fat contracts with Trump in office, the people voting for Trump are not very bright nor very perceptive about who has personality or psychiatric problems.

Now there are lots of stupid people around, and maybe more stupid people are going to vote this time than they generally do because they see a role model in the vulgar bully who is Trump. So I'd say that smart people should vote for Clinton, not because she's wonderful, but because she's business as usual and business as usual is a lot better than Mussolini with dyed hair and with exactly the same mindset as the kids who pushed me around (and I imagine many other of the ex-bookish kids who read this blog around) back in high school over 50 years ago.

When I see Trump, I remember a kid from high school. He wasn't very bright, but his father had a lot of money and was mixed up with the mob, according to my father who knew such things. We had to wrestle in gym class and although I was the school's worst athlete, I was pinning this kid when he whispered to me, "if you pin me, I'm going to wait for you after school with my friends (all bought with his father's money) and we'll kill you." That's Trump.