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Showing posts with the label Donald Trump

Why the Facts Don't Matter Anymore!

"That’s just, like, your opinion, man!                                                 -The Dude                   ‘Fuck the Facts,’ the slogan of the young and passionate, has been around for at least as long as I can remember. It was at least so when I was an angsty teenager. Today though, we are truly living in a post-fact world, where facts do not so much not matter, as much as what matters is who gets to use them and how. So in effect the facts indeed do not matter. This is obviously a contradictory statement.   But contradictions are logical fallacies and so is the statement ‘this statement is false.’ You get the point.                 The world in which we live is now entirely hypernormal. We have other words for this state of affairs, fake, unreal, obscurantist, post-truth, but hypernormal fits so well with our current way of life. Strange and terrible things are happening all the time. Events are seemingly coming and going and are entirely out of our control. There

The Separation of Market and State

In light of the inauguration of Donald J Trump as president and the million people marches out there, I’d like to stay optimistic about developments around the globe, yet I find myself sinking back into a realization that we are not experiencing anything new.   The inauguration of both George W Bush and Barack Obama spawned protests and counter protests, all a bit wishy washy, with no clear goals or agendas, littered with celebrity speakers to make the crowds feel good about themselves.   I fear we have not learned much from the past.   I fear that the protests are a simple reaction, not a means to a sustained political and social change.     If we look at Trump’s cabinet appointees, we see that he’s filled it with nothing but business types, some with no political experience, much like Trump himself.   But is this a revolutionary move on Trump’s part?   I would argue the opposite.   Trump is just doing what is considered hegemonic in the current globalist business ethos.   He

Popeye Trumpism and the Pitfalls of Authenticity

As disconcerting as the election of Trump was, nothing is more telling than the fact that authenticity is coming back into the lexicon of everyday use, courtesy of the populist right and the crypto-rightism of figures like Alex Jones.   When Hillary said she was two different people in public and in private she might in fact have been sincere, pointing out a simple truth.   In fact most of us act differently in front of different people. We are a different person in front of our friends or in front of our parents.   The same goes for the public and private spheres.   We not only act differently, we speak differently without realizing that we do so.   That Trump is seen as authentic because he seems to be the same person everywhere he appears, only shows how perfectly he plays his part in public.   Are we to assume that President Trump will be the same person as Apprentice Trump, the boardroom Trump, and the bedroom Trump? I can only surmise that Trump’s election is taking humanity b

Did Somebody Say Fascism? Shadefreude and Hannah Arendt on the American Election of Donald Trump

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to her book The Origins of Totalitarianism “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Never has our future been more unpredictable, n