November 2024 – Quick Abacus

November 3, 2024 Political Ideologies

Trump is Hitler, a fascist, a Nazi – say leading Dems. Here is a piece of reality.

this is another issue on which there is no similarity between Trump and Hitler. Trump has an elaborate sense of humor and often even makes fun of himself. One of my distant relatives in Germany was a Nazi prosecutor. He sought the death penalty for a shipyard worker who had written a funny poem about Hitler. The man was shot. Like almost all despots, Hitler had no sense of humor, leave alone self-irony.

Equating Trump to Hitler not only shows a pitiful lack of understanding who Trump is and what he tries to accomplish. It also shows a dangerous lack of understanding who Hitler really was and what he did and the severity of his crimes, his war mongering, his insane ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, and his imperial aspirations. Maybe equating Trump to Julius Caesar works better. Here is Mark Anthony about Trump (loosely based on Shakespeare):

November 3, 2024 Science and Philosophy

Lack of Knowledge and Flawed Thinking Breed Bad Politics

Recently, I listened to a Korean communist woman being interviewed about mathematics. She explained how Westerns non-communist logic and science are all wrong. The interviewer responded by asking her if she believed that 1 + 1 = 2. Her response was approximately this: “If you add one drop of water to another drop of water, you do not get two drops of water but one bigger drop of water.” Hence, the equation of 1 + 1 = 2 must be wrong and all math built on this must also be wrong.

What she performed is called a ‘semantic shift’. The term ‘plus’ is equivocal. This means that it can relate to different concepts depending on the context. First, she relates it to numerical addition. When we say, “one plus one” in a purely numerical sense, we are operating within the context of arithmetic where one numerical value plus one numerical value is two.