Just the Facts, Ma'am

That was Sgt. Joe Friday's request on the fine old TV police show, Dragnet, to a person being interviewed after a crime when they started to embellish or provide opinions or conclusions about the event. This principle needs to be applied to much of modern life. Too often we receive opinion, or worse, spin, fallacies and outright false statements from person seeking to sell their ideas. I think this is a very, very broad problem with public discourse. When was the last time you saw a true, honest debate in the major media grounded in facts ? Perhaps 30 years ? Gen Y and Z might answer never.

For me ( a boomer ), I think the last one was in 1978 when Ronald Reagan debated William F. Buckley over the proposed Panama Canal Treaty. I remember that very, very well. Point and counterpoint was presented respectfully with plenty of facts and reason. Have you heard ANY such debate over health care ? Nope.

We need to elevate the "is" over the "ought", "might", "perhaps" and "maybe". Deeds and facts trump words and images.

This problem is a very broad one in modern life, extending to the realms of art and music, too. In those fields, the connections to the "is" broke down about 150 years ago when Impressionism and Romanticism became dominant, respectively. The value of a painting or piece of music became tied to what one wrote or said about it, not what one saw or heard, respectively. The words replaced the facts _ what the work of art or music was on its face became subsumed by what what the painter or author or critics "said" about its meaning.

The huge growth in fiction in literature over that same 150 years is likely connected to this movement. Novels get more readership now than actual events or experiences. A travelogue of what someone actually experienced in Africa or Mexico - even if embellished to make it more readable - is now secondary to what some fiction writer makes up. A movie gets credence even though it never happened, or is a goulash of events from different times and places.

In the 1920s, popular culture completely misrepresented and misinterpreted the success of Einstein's special and general theories of "Relativity" to wrongly apply that term to many, many other aspects of human society and culture. Blather like "Every thing is relative" ... "It depends on one's perspective" seemed to get scientific support. WRONG ! In Einstein's Special Theory of Relative, there is absolute truth: the speed of light is a constant and is THE SAME in every frame of reference - from every perspective. All the popular blather is simply wrong.

Nietzschean perspectivism is not universal: there are absolute truths in human thought. Mathematical theorems are TRUE in every aspect and from every perspective. Events do happen. One event can cause another from ALL perspectives.

Movies nowadays are being fabricated entirely from computers: why film on location when the computer can create what one "thinks" the location "should" look like. When will people be replaced entirely in films ?

The Latin language is over 2,500 years old. Its verb for "is" or "be" has the infinitive form, "esse" from which our American word, "essence" is derived. We - the people - need to return to the "is" of our world, its essence, its facts, its reality. Drop the dreamy imaginations, reject the propaganda. Bring back the "is" to our thinking.

Just the facts, Ma'am.

Markets

More up. I sold CLF from my Fido Fund - the fund I keep old favorite stocks or moderately to long term investments - for a 100%+ gain over about six months. It might go up more, but I'm not a pig. Je ne suis pas un goinfre.

Word of the Day

"Devoir" - noun [$10] archaic [from French]
Devoir means 1. duty, one's best (do ones devoir); 2. (in plural) courteous of formal attentions; respects (pay one's devoirs to)
Sentence: Each voter will need to do his/her devoir this fall, and pick a representative who IS honest. If a politician lies to you once, why do you ever believe him again ?