MARKING TIME
Well, I put in three hours yesterday canvassing for Clinton in Raleigh, and another hour this morning phone banking. Did I do any good? I rather doubt it, but at least I tried. There are now 129 1/2 hours until the polls close in the East and results start piling up. Do you suppose I can hold my breath that long?
You've explained that you are often ironic and irony is hard to decipher unless you know the person well.
ReplyDeleteYou've expressed great anxiety about the outcome of next Tuesday's presidential election and I wonder if you are genuinely anxious about that or whether there is some irony in your proclamations of great anxiety.
I know that you are interested in the outcome of the election (as am I and as is everyone who follows politics) and I know that you don't want Trump to be elected (neither do I), but I don't ever recall feeling great anxiety about who will win an election or great joy when a candidate, even one whom I supported, won.
I'm not suggesting that my reaction is in any way "sane" or "good" and that your reaction is in any way "not sane" or "bad". I am just curious about the extent of your anxiety, and since you blog about it, ironically or not, I feel justified in asking.
By the way, one of the best arguments for supporting Hillary so far is how much the FBI obviously dislikes her. Anyone who the FBI dislikes that much must have something positive about them.
Rumor has it that the FBI is littered with Breitbart readers. Yet another reason to fear a President Trump. They will become a faction of his goon squad.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking for myself, there is no irony in my anxiety about Trump. He is plainly unlike any other Republican candidate in the authoritarian overtones of his personality and rhetoric, and he rose to power through racist demagoguery, plain and simple. Perhaps our civic institutions will be strong enough to resist him. But I'd rather not find out.
I realize that I'd been using the Halloween festivities as a psyhological barrier to the impending moment of truth. Now that we're over this week's "hump day," I'm trying not to think past this weekend. Once Monday rolls around I think I may die from an aneurysm.
Therapists are supposedly reporting a rash of Trump anxiety complaints. For myself, in addition to his character and views, his stupidity scares the hell out of me. George W's stupidity scared us all, but this guy is a bad combo of stupid and self-confident.
ReplyDeleteThe Huffpo's piece on the rising "alt-right" is chilling to say the least and ought to raise the anxiety level
ReplyDeleteof just about all your readers.
http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/alt-right/
Professor Wolff
ReplyDeleteI been watching your lecture 5 on youtube on Kant's critique. On synthesis of intuitions, do you think synthesis is possible if we had no language.
To geetikagupta: That is a fascinating question that has never occurred to me. Let me think about it.
ReplyDeleteRE geetika gupta's question: Wouldn't Sellars's Kantian epistemology be the view to compare with Kant's here, since he plainly thinks that language use and conceptual awareness are coterminous?
ReplyDelete