One common trait among many of our civilization’s great thinkers is their humility. Perhaps this started with Socrates and the line for which he’s so well known: “I know that I know nothing,” meaning that true wisdom is knowing you don’t know anything.
About 2000 years later, in the 1660s, we have this quote at left from Isaac Newton.
Of course, not all great minds through the ages were so modest. Take, for example, the physicists of the late 19th Century who were convinced that everything of any real importance in their field has already been discovered. A few later we Einstein, followed by quantum mechanics. Oops! That belief didn’t age well.
All this raises a series of unanswerable questions. Is there an end to physics, i.e. a point at which we honestly do have our arms wrapped cosmology and all our puzzles have been solved: wormholes, time travel, dark energy and matter, string theory, unified field theory, parallel universes, another universe before the big bang? If there is such an end, how close are we to it?
What Noam Chomsky says here is spot on, especially with respect to Trump.
What makes Trump so good at this is his facility to invent a new boogieman every couple of days. Communism, Dr. Fauci, Venezuela’s drug boats, Iran, birthright citizenship, democrats, the damage done by previous presidents, the climate hoax, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the vandals at the Reflecting Pool, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, liberals in education, the Hollywood elite, unsafe vaccinations, trans people, a nuclearized Iran, massive voter fraud, Haitians eating our pets, Harvard, the ex-Fed Chairman, NATO, wind turbines, the far-left radicals, the election control people, the list goes on.
Then there are the near-daily outrages:
Turning Gaza into a luxury resort, annexing Greenland, curtailing environmental emission standards, usurping the Panama Canal, refusing to pay E. Jean Carroll, pardoning hundreds of violent convicted felons, accepting bribes for pardoning white collar fraudsters, insider trading, orchestrating deals that benefit his children, targeting Jack Smith, protecting ICE agents who commit murder/manslaughter, and leasing federal wilderness land for oil exploration
The more indefensible the better.
Is her point that there are countries that are even more repressive to women’s rights?
Does anyone disagree with that?
The words at left may seem obvious to you and me but realize that we live among tens of millions of people who are completely desperate to cling onto their beliefs that Trump is an honest and effective servant of the American people, however contrary to the evidence this may be.
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