Quantum Non-Linearity: Trump starts to dump his extremist supporters

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Trump starts to dump his extremist supporters

Trump's Alt Right Storm Troopers - dumped.

As the dust begins to settle after the political pantomime that was the American election, the big question here at Quantum Non-Linearity is this: Will Trump mellow and eventually settle down to be a more measured and reasonable mainstream president than the promise of his campaign? Of course, this may well be wishful thinking on my part. The recent scenes at the above Alt-Right rally where Trump supporters call out "Hail Trump" and give Nazi salutes (see above) has horrified many people. It is easy to see this rally as evidence that our worse fears of an impending fascist nightmare are starting to take shape. However, I try to keep a track of the news and watch how things are developing: Here are some relevant links:

According to this BBC news item Trump disavows the Alt-Right

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38069469

But here's a quote from Wiki on "Breibart news". This links the Alt Right via Breibart News to Trump's chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitbart_News

[Breibart News was] conceived by Andrew Breitbart during a visit to Israel in summer 2007, with the aim of founding a site "that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel" Breitbart later aligned with the European populist right and American alt-right under Bannon's management and Bannon declared the site "the platform for the alt-right" in 2016. The New York Times describes Breitbart News as a "curiosity of the fringe right wing", with "ideologically driven journalists", that is a source of controversy "over material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist", and was a "potent voice" for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Here's some more background on Breibart:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-38005983

How's Trump going to explain all that? But then Trump isn't an idealist; I read him as the sort of guy who is unlikely to be bothered by theoretical consistency and nuance; he's first and foremost a showman who primarily deals in spectacle and theatre.

Trump's attack on his worshipful Alt-Right supporters smacks a just little bit of Hitler's night of the long knives:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

The Alt Right are no longer any use to Trump! Another parallel is that Hitler exploited the German Christian taste for law and order, but underneath he regarded them with contempt.

Reports are surfacing of a softening of Trump's climate change position:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/trump-hints-at-re-think-on-climate-change/ar-AAkEfv3?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=UP97DHP

...add to this the great disappointment of some of Trump's vindictive followers that he's not going to pursue Hillary Clinton with charges of corruption. Is Trump becoming part of the empowered establishment already?

Trump's anti-idealistic pragmatism may well save us from the idealistic nightmares of fascist and evangelical fundamentalism. Perhaps the uncompromising fascist, libertarian and Christian evangelico-fundamentalists who voted for Trump are already getting their just deserts for their misplaced trust in Trump to implement their extremist views; They should have realised that they couldn't put their trust in Trump's promises. There's poetic justice here: Some of those Christian fundies are now finding themselves in bed with ruthless atheistic social Darwinian "libertarians"!

However, it's early days yet and it's a great trumptation to see light at the end of the tunnel when it's not actually there; there is still plenty of time for things to get a lot worse - see the following joker in the pack: Trump and Biff Tannon:
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/movies/christopher-lloyd-stunned-by-back-to-the-futures-trump-prediction/ar-AAkzfyo?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=UP97DHP

NOTES:

See this link on Breitbart which is entitled "Vanity Fair: Trump succeeded because of Breitbart"

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/11/23/vanity-fair-trump-succeeded-breitbart/

But set against the claims of that article are these articles by right-wing Trump supporter Denyse O'leary:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/darwinism/the-alt-right-popular-media-and-darwin/

https://www.mercatornet.com/features/view/the-alt-right-donald-trump-and-oddly-enough-darwin/19049

O'Leary's article, of course, denies the link between Trump and Breitbart:

The term “alt right” is thrown around a lot these days to account for Donald Trump’s winning the U.S. presidency. Mainstream media, blindsided by results they should have been able to predict, are deflecting blame. Many conjure a vast, shadowy, menacing group that propelled Trump to power in hidden ways. A more accurate story is more complex—and far more of a problem for the generic worldview of current mainstream media.

O'Leary is probably right about the reality being more complex. Also notable in O'leary are the comments about the link between the Alt-Right and "Darwinism". The ironies are coming in thick and fast!

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Trump starts to dump his extremist supporters

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION