Hume

Hume is the skeptic that maintains we cannot know with certainty what is beyond our senses, but that we have come to rely on custom, or habit, for what we do know. When we hit a billiard ball a particular way and observe its effect, and then witness the same thing over and over again, we come to expect that this is the way it is with billiard balls. This also applies to human/social phenomena, as this excerpt shows.

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Should a traveller, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men, wholly different from any, with whom we were ever acquainted; men, who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge; who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar, with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.

-- David Hume, “An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding”

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The Culture War Online

Here is a great quote on professional trolls, right-wingers who make it their business to use the Internet to raise the noise level of the Culture War. A lesbian journalist checks out the Republican National Convention, and sees that it is even worse than she thought.

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They ventriloquise the fear of millions into a scream of fire in the crowded theatre of modernity where all the doors are locked, and then they watch the stampede, and they smile for the cameras.

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What’s happening to this country has happened before, in other nations, in other anxious, violent times when all the old certainties peeled away and maniacs took the wheel. It’s what happens when weaponised insincerity is applied to structured ignorance. Donald Trump is the Gordon Gekko of the attention economy, but even he is no longer in control. This culture war is being run in bad faith by bad actors who are running way off-script, and it’s barely begun, and there are going to be a lot of refugees.

-- Laurie Penny at Medium.com

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