Quick take: New York judge rules that Donald Trump is a leftist, post-modernist revolutionary against "white supremacy"
Oh, was that not how you read the ruling? Allow me to clarify. As you have probably learned by now, Judge Arthur Engoron issued a "summary judgment" in the fraud case against Donald Trump for how he reported the value of his assets. In the most egregious example, leading to the summary judgment-- skipping the trial because Trump doesn't have anything even remotely resembling a legal argument-- he reported the size of his apartment in Manhattan as three times its actual size, in physical dimensions. Trump has always been a little insecure about size. The argument that his attorneys have tried to make is that value is subjective, so he cannot be guilty of fraud in the subjective reporting of value. The problem is that the physical dimensions of an apartment are not subjective. They are objective. This is not even a matter of disputing measurement. I suppose one could be more or less crude in the process, and hence arrive at varying results, but that isn't what happened. Trump claimed that his apartment was three times its actual size.
His defense is intrinsic subjectivity. All is subjective. Behold, Donald Trump, The Postmodernist. For you see, math is a white supremacist construct. Do you remember this gem of a document, teaching teachers that they must dismantle white supremacy in math education by combating the ideas of objectivity, and right answers? Where was Ibram X. Kendi, offering to testify on Trump's behalf, or filing briefs?!
Do we not recall that this crosses international borders? Just last weekend, I noted recent events in Ontario, Canada, where recall that Heather Theijsmeijer taught her students that the very notion that 2+2=4 is "white supremacy." If you dig into the deep, dark bowels of postmodernist academia, you will see an understructure discussing how to give the claim, 2+2=5, some verisimilitude, or at least polish the turd which emerged from the aforementioned bowel. Why make such a claim? To combat white supremacy, of course.
Dear critical race theorists and anti-racists,
Behold, your champion. The greatest proponent of postmodernism ever to challenge objectivity or the white supremacist construct of math. Donald J. Trump.
Defend your champion.
Or, you know, you could call bullshit on bullshit.
Eric McFadden, "Actual Size." I prefer the version on his self-titled album, but this was the version on youtube, which was from his collaboration with Wally Ingram.
Trump is the end result of what happens when post modernist theory is disseminated to the mouth breathers. Once we can all make up reality it really gets out of hand. Like most academic thought, postmodernism was a reaction to what came before, but it completely missed the point. Objectivity isn't the problem, it's the garbage ideas that were taken to be objective.
ReplyDeleteIn the classroom, when I am not just venting my spleen on the inter-tubes, I am slightly more sympathetic to Foucault, although not to Derrida. Derrida is worthless. Foucault, however, made some valid observations, such as the observation that "madness" is socially constructed by psychologists and psychiatrists as, in part, moral judgment with a cultural lens. See, for example, the fact that homosexuality was once categorized as mental illness. The psychology/psychiatry professions are still cultural constructions, with moral lenses. Foucault was not entirely full of shit. He just took it way too far, and then those influenced by him took a too far idea too far...er. You can make the case that the belief in the objectivity of psychology was what fed postmodernism, and there is something to that. I give my students Kuhn. Objectivity is a goal, an ideal, but the best we can do is a set of hopefully useful predictive models.
DeleteAre you saying Derrida is to be derided?
DeleteI'll show myself out.