Stephen50right wrote:The world is a dynamic place, always has been and always will be, especially when it comes to politics. I've been a conservative and registered Republican my entire life. Certainly the Republican Party of the past had its issues with racism and anti-Semitism, and that was repugnant and unacceptable to me. I stayed with them based on their sound fiscal ideas, and did my share to change the party's social platform. Now, I'm actually very happy that today's Republican Party is working hard to become more inclusive every day, and is strongly pro-Israel.
This is nostalgic postmodernism, which is a trap the academics had once found themselves stuck with, but have mostly been able to free themselves. The political right in the US, however, has enthusiastically dove into the quagmire without knowing it (or have been led into it and not known what they were being led into).
The postmodern critique of history was initially interesting enough. If, for instance, we're examining the history of the Raj one would be irresponsible to rely strictly upon the British accounts. To go through and find out the experiences of the Indians, even if it wasn't an "official," history of the time certainly proved useful in critiquing and understanding not only Indian independence but the role of British imperialism.
However, when this broke down further, it became a complete mess:
Stanford wrote:While Vattimo takes post-modernity as a new turn in modernity, it entails the dissolution of the category of the new in the historical sense, which means the end of universal history. “While the notion of historicity has become ever more problematic for theory,” he says, “at the same time for historiography and its own methodological self-awareness the idea of history as a unitary process is rapidly dissolving” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 6). This does not mean historical change ceases to occur, but that its unitary development is no longer conceivable, so only local histories are possible. The de-historicization of experience has been accelerated by technology, especially television, says Vattimo, so that “everything tends to flatten out at the level of contemporaneity and simultaneity” (Vattimo 1988 [1985], 10). As a result, we no longer experience a strong sense of teleology in worldly events, but, instead, we are confronted with a manifold of differences and partial teleologies that can only be judged aesthetically. The truth of postmodern experience is therefore best realized in art and rhetoric.
This is to say, there was no reliable history. Why have historiography, when every individual has feelings to interpret the past with? Why have an agreed upon sense of things that occurred, when you can just live in the moment and see how you feel?
The modernity that post-modernism attempted to fix, however, persisted in that it was verifiable and accurate. As your own post hints at when you acknowledge that, in regard to understanding history and contextualizing information that there's, "Nothing totally wrong with that...However in my view..."
Is this not the brace holding up the contradictions? You can sense that there is, "nothing totally wrong," with information, and you'd be reluctant to say otherwise; but like a nervous tick or reflex, you cannot help yourself from erasing it with your personal (and completely unverified) view of the world (your feelings, as I've described it) as being more accurate than the information that you cannot bring yourself to admit you do not follow.
Again:
Kaya Yılmaz wrote:The rejection of historical realism (i.e., the past was real and objective) constitutes a crucial theme in the philosophy of postmodernism Another major theme of postmodern approach to history is the elimination of the boundaries and hierarchical distinctions between elite culture and academic culture (Cohen, 1999: 126) by means of dehierarchization, deconstruction, demystification, and dereferentialization (Berkhofer, 1995).
Postmodernism symbolizes the death of centers, displays incredulity toward metanarratives, and is characterized by a social formation in which the maps and status of knowledge are being de-centered, re-drawn, and re-described (Lyotard, 1984, 1997; Jenkins, 1991). Zagorin (1999) succinctly outlines the premises of postmodernism in relation to history:
In the most general sense, postmodernism stands for the proposition that western society in recent decades has undergone an epochal shift from the modern to a post- modem era said to be characterized by the final repudiation of the Enlightenment's legacy of belief in reason and progress and by a pervasive incredulity toward all metanarratives imputing a direction and meaning to history, in particular the notion that human history is a process of universal emancipation. In place of grand narratives of this kind, so it is held, have come a multiplicity of discourses and language games, a questioning of the nature of knowledge together with a dissolution of the idea of truth, and problems of legitimacy in many fields (p.5).
As if this claptrap isn't bad enough, it's a historiographical document not put into Chicago formatting.
Stephen50right wrote:The Democratic Party has morphed into a party of far left socialist ideas, a party of racism and bigotry, whereby in past years many folks out there looked at the Democratic Party as just the opposite of that, which we discuss all the time in other threads. I only bring this up in guidance to some of your self-called sources and citations. While I'm not saying at all that those are bogus, I am saying that a source and citation from the past may not be relevant in today's world.
John F Kennedy would hardly be recognized as a Democratic Party member in today's Democratic Party. So for example to reference him as a source and citation for today's Democratic Party, now that would be bogus. So I'll speak for myself, what you called "feelings" and of course you meant that in a derogatory manner towards me, and that's okay. If anyone can't stand the heat, don't go into a political forum. But what you call "feelings", are my viewpoints based on many years of political reading and discussing political subjects. Frankly, I'll take that and also "feelings" from the other side, over someone's sources and citations which may or may not be accurate or relevant. You call them "feelings", frankly in a political forum, that to me, including your "feelings", are much more interesting than reading a "George Will" type source or citation.
And here, again, there is not the slightest hint at anything regarding a fact, let alone a citation, a source, a historical or current political view.
Simply, "I'll speak for myself, what you called 'feelings.'"
Of course it's feelings—that's the entire post-modernist movement. However, you have yet to use your postmodernism in a way that would facilitate an equality. Your inability to admit that you find facts useless, even if you give tacit support of them as a curiosity, reflects in a single foot being kept in the worst tendencies of modernism.
This is to say, the worst tendencies of modernism was totalitarianism. One could apply this to the Americans during the Cold War, Stalinist Russia, Victorian Britain, Nazi Germany, etc, etc. The official truth, as interpreted by the Enlightened seekers of truth, was to be covered and approved at all costs because it was accepting orthodox reality.
The postmodernists would deconstruct this view (of, say, McCarthy or Stalin) as being a singular one of many; and the many were all equal to each other in truth. Someone that insisted that the world was flat, or that blacks should be genocided were all equally as correct as anybody else's view. That was, in essence, their experience based upon their views, and there was no right or wrong.
You have embraced the postmodern deconstruction of knowledge and fact, but have not shed the modernist perchance for totalitarianism. Which, in some ways, I would argue is the worst of both. The modernist could point to knowledge as commonly understood (even if flawed) before dismissing someone or something. The postmodernist could not dismiss anything.
You can dismiss everyone else, while at the same time also dismissing knowledge as is commonly understood. Leaving you like Cnut attempting to stop the waves through sheer force of inner will; demanding the world act accordingly with your feelings and upset that it does not.
So you have two views here, if you are seeking reconciliation (which it seems you are).
Either you need to provide some evidence, source, citation for anything you actually believe (putting you as a modernist)
Or you need to embrace everybody's lack of evidence and facts as equal to your own rejection of logic and facts (putting you as a postmodernist).
Your attempt to do both leaves even greater leaps of logical fallacy than you realize. At best, you will find one day that you've been a fool. At worst, you've been a useful idiot for something nefarious that is counting on you not having considered the inconsistencies of what you've been told.
---
Until this point though, I'm going to have to insist that you provide any kind of citation, source, evidence, or logic to anything that you have said in this tread. After pages and pages, there is nothing that you have done but whine about how you feel and expected us to concede to you. There will be some work you need to do in order to convince yourself and others of what you posit. Like it or not, work is part of life.