There are two possible scenarios in the American reality TV elections: 1) Trump must not win because the world as we know it will end, or 2) Trump must win because the world as we know it will end. There is clearly only one candidate in this election. The election is: Trump Vs Not-Trump.

An excerpt from my new book.

It is useful to frame every fallacy as a violation the fundamental laws of sense: non-contradiction or identity. This is precisely what Makes a 'fallacy'; if no violation of the fundamental laws, then no fallacy. For example, the ad hominem fallacy equivocates between the identity of the person (X) and the identity of their argument (not-X), which implies that X is not identical to itself. This also implies that X and not-X are simultaneously true, in the same respect, therefore contradiction. By demonstrating the invalidity of arguments directly from the fundamental laws we can eliminate the risk of misunderstanding of fallacies, or confusing valid arguments with fallacies. For example, identifying a performative contradiction (when an action Y of person X affirms not-Y) may seem like an 'ad hominem' fallacy, since it attaches to the meaning of what X does in order to invalidate their argument, but it does not equivocate. For example, using language to persuade someone that language has no meaning (M) implies that M and not-M are simultaneously true.

Democracy is an alibi of the oligarchy.

Here is an idea for a movie; historical fiction. It is the year 2015. In a corporate boardroom somewhere high in Manhattan there is a meeting of Hollywood script writers, media moguls, some high ranking military personnel, Henry Kissinger, Steve Bannon. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are standing together near a massive window overlooking the city, engaged in a friendly conversation and occasional laughter. The meeting is about the 2016 presidential elections. Kissinger opens the meeting, explains that he is acting on behalf of Global Leaders, who believe it is the right time to make some big political moves (which are not explicitly articulated). In order to fulfil their ambitious plans they need to manufacture public consent, especially in the United States of America. Kissinger then produces the script that this executive committee is obligated to follow. The plan is for Hillary Clinton to run for President in 2016. The campaign is supposed to be of the highest calibre, to the effect that Hillary should win in a landslide. Nevertheless, the election is to be rigged, making Donald Trump the 45th president. Trump is supposed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the working class and express their basest biases and amplify their grievances. The 46th presidency is to be played in the opposite direction. Trump is by then expected to moderate his administration and gain popular support to the effect of wining the 2020 election in a landslide, since he is to be pitched against the “senile pervert”. Kissinger assures the audience that “we will run plenty of plausible conspiracies and present (via 3rd parties, of course) such incriminating evidence that should preclude Biden from being tolerated by any decent American citizen. That election is to be ‘stollen’ in favour of Biden, this time in an obvious fashion, in order to provoke the sense of injustice among the working-class majority. It is only then that Trump will have sufficient trust and support that will allow him to win in 2024 and implement our ambitious programme in full…. ;)

Psychiatry has only one plausible therapeutic aim: to re-establish the integrity of the rational consciousness of the patient. In order to fulfil this aim in a scientific fashion, one must have a consistent theory of rational consciousness, which psychiatry does not have. It follows that psychiatry pursues illegitimate aims that are neither scientific nor therapeutic.

No major political party chooses an individual who would act like an incoherent senile pervert or a cackling imbecile as a presidential candidate, unless it intends to ‘lose’. It is quite an art to convincingly throw a fight to an adversary who has significant moral deficiencies too.

When a person is ‘inauthentic’, who is responsible for their inauthenticity: the true self or the inauthentic self?

No political party commits to the nuclear option of stealing an election, but at the next election plays fair and square, and meekly concedes defeat to the one they stole the previous election from, even though they could now be tried for treason. At the same time, the one who was previously defrauded of electoral victory shows great restraint by not mentioning it again, or seeking to punish them for treason:)

When an entertainer/celebrity takes a stance on any political, moral or scientific issue, they are merely ‘advertising/promoting/selling’ that stance. This is their real job; being a celebrity is just a prerequisite for being able to sell ideology.

The dominant school of thought over the centuries was (apparently) that most people are too irrational and corruptible to self-govern, therefore, for the sake of order, they must be ruled with an iron fist. The problem with that school of thought was that it precluded humanity from evolving to a more rational and less corruptible state. It may be that a new school of thought is currently favoured, allowing people a substantial degree of freedom to make their own existential decisions, then to spectacularly fail and to suffer the consequences, and thereby evolve, either by natural selection or by learning through suffering.

Given that time is a concept/meaning but not of itself a sensation/feeling, then meaning must be taken as more fundamental than feeling, and the laws of meaning/sense as more fundamental than meaning. In that sense, rationality (the trinity of Logos: non-contradiction, excluded middle, identity) was perhaps correctly identified as the absolute being, the foundation of everything there is, the first principle.

‘Captive Mind’ is essential reading, a masterpiece of philosophical intuition through experience, and Milosz’ most important work: the real ‘heart of darkness’ that Joseph Conrad never wrote. amazon.com.au/Captive-M…

Proponents of “Intuitionist logic” deny the validity of double-negation-elimination, which holds that not-not-X is equivalent to X. They typically justify this denial by presenting some variant of the following example: “that I do not disagree with you does not mean that I agree with you”, “that i do not dislike this movie does not mean that I like it” etc. These are not examples of double-negation (of the same X), but equivocate between different types of negation that occur in natural languages. The argument is therefore fallacious. The phrase “I do not disagree” is a figure of speech intended to express that I abstain from taking a position on the question of truth or falsity of the claim you are making, not that the claim is not-false. Another way, the first negation applies to my intention to take a position on the claim, the second negation applies to the validity of the claim. These are different logical types, therefore not a double-negation of X: ‘I do not want to judge your claim as false or true’. Once the subjective component is removed, we are left with X is not-not-true, therefore necessarily true (necessarily, because its negation implies contradiction). Similarly, ‘I do not dislike this movie’ is intended to express that I do not have bad feelings about the movie, which is not a logical opposite of having good feelings. The logical opposite of ‘not having bad feelings’ is ‘having bad feelings’; the logical opposite of ‘having good feelings’ is ‘not having good feelings’.

When Thomas Nagel discusses “what it is likeness” (in his famous paper “What it is like to be a bat”) he can be understood in two ways, which are related in a special way but logically distinct. It is the connection between these two possible interpretations that, in my understanding, made a significant contribution to phenomenology, or at least an inspiration or a discernible possibility of taking it in a new direction (that late Husserl understood must be found but did not find: he called it “transcendental intersubjectivity”). It is unclear whether Nagel ‘meant it that way’ or is it only something that his argument unwittingly made conceivable.
Here is an explanation i recently made on this topic: There is a critical difference between “what it feels like to be X” and “what it is like to be X”. The former is a presupposition of subjective experience (which is not normative, therefore not truth-apt, therefore not knowledge-apt); the latter is plausibly a normative concept that tells us what X’s are like (as a type of things we ‘mean’ when we speak of X). Both of these logical forms are crucial to experience, but the latter is more fundamental, as it engages with the concept itself, or what it MEANS to be a particular something, or simply, WHAT anything is ‘to us’ (where ‘us’ is a language community or society that has evolved and reflexively sustains the said meaning). By making this distinction we can dispense with the notion of “subjective knowledge” (which is trivially true of everything we perceive, including delusions and illusions), and we are left with knowledge proper, in the normative sense of proven beliefs about objective reality. Nevertheless, the ‘what it is likeness’ (as a normative property of thought/meaning), which is systemically integrated according to the laws of sense, determines the identity, structure and relations of everything ‘we’ (our ontological type) perceive about the objective reality, and therefore it still does not constitute knowledge proper, but a narrative convention, a kind of social ritual that continuously evolves towards greater systemic consistency.
I understand (transcendental) phenomenology as a link between the subjective and the objective, via the subjectivity of others: the ‘what it is likeness’ in the ontological sense is a process whereby we generate common meaning, which comprises the world as we know it, and the foundation on which the conscious Self is objectified as an acting subject. We can conceive of ourselves, our own face, by identifying with the faces of others: we internalise some of what we see as what ‘I am like’, and thus develop the phenomenological sense for what humans (as a type) are like. On top of that we develop the phenomenological sense for different types of what we are not-like, which are all the other object-types that we do not recognise as our type but are like one another. A lot of this content is conveyed through language, and our sense of language is a higher-order phenomenology: we can thus understand not just what beings like us are really like, but what beings like us understand and mean, and how they relate to us, how they perceive us, how much they conceive of us as being ‘like them’, true to their sense for our likeness to their kind.
When we read comments written by strangers, whose likeness to kind was cultivated in a different group, tuned to somewhat different narrative structures, turns of expression, humour, sarcasm, emotional reactions, conceptual prods and projections, we are likely to somewhat misinterpret their intended sense of expression. We are not as ‘like to them’ (in the way they communicate) as we are to those by means of which we cultivated out self-ideation. This can be a basis for radical divide between some people and groups, but there are always commonalities we can resort to close the gaps in meaning that interfere with constructive communication and understanding as beings of the same kind.

Language is the most useful commonality insofar as it can be translated, clarified, but this requires the attitude of good faith and often substantial effort to be really understood, to accomplish likeness. On the other hand, we may have reasons not to be like someone else, not to fully relate as beings of the same kind, and these reasons can be communicated too, but if the reasons for favouring unlikeness are consistently articulated and both parties are willing to understand them, they are already mutually transformative on the fundamental-level of our rational agency, making us more alike as consciousness even if we have not yet resolved some object-level differences. This, i argue, is crucial to human becoming, to higher levels of integration as conscious selves.

The idea that genuine Zionists run the most powerful nation on earth (and by the same token every other developed nation on earth) conflicts with the fact that Zion is the most dangerous place on earth for Zionists and their lives are evidently as expandable as those of anyone else, used as regular cannon fodder. Despite allegedly controlling virtually the whole world they somehow cannot subdue an impoverished, walled ghetto in the midst of Zion, with no apparent prospect of ever living in peace. In view of this inconsistency, Zionism may be understood as just another mask, another false narrative, a propaganda tool used on Jews, and against the interests of regular Jews.

Illustrative vs Declarative Sentences
The sentence ‘John likes Mary’ can be interpreted in at least two distinct, mutually exclusive senses, which I call illustrative and declarative.
The first sense illustrates a relation between two characters who may not be real, in order to use it for declarative or argumentative purposes about something that does not require the relation ‘John likes Mary’ to be true, or to refer to any specific John or Mary.
The second sense declares that ‘John likes Mary’ is true, and John and Mary are identifiable individuals.
Illustrative sentences are not subject to the principle of sufficient reason as they make no truth claims; they merely illustrate a meaningful situation, whereas declarative sentences are subject to the principle of sufficient reason and are logically inconsistent if asserted without the knowledge that John likes Mary, even if John does like Mary.

That nativist supremacism and tribalism are the primary unconscious drives among the global majority, and this majority is notoriously unresponsive to moral reason, may explain why governments are instigating the socially disruptive mass migration from tribal cultures to nativist cultures. By puting foreign tribalism and nativist supremacism in the same space, conflict becomes unavoidable, which may have two possible outcomes: the rejection of both tribalism and nativist supremacism, or fighting to the death and making room for new students.

Nastiness, malice, spite, are the primary forms of frustration with the lack of meaning, a lack of integrated self, a confession of having committed to nonsense over the structure of sense. When someone degrades the person instead of consistently engaging with their argument, they are screaming inside, trapped in a kind of hell.

Consciousness somehow recognises and mirrors itself ‘in others’, which is quite an explanatory challenge.