[clairity]

> "What has been most shocking to me is the normalizing of postmodern thinking in American politics and journalism. The idea that there is an objective reality, facts, truth/falseness, e.g. the sum of votes for candidate A was greater than for candidate B, seems quaint and naive. There are now only competing narratives and “alternative facts” that you have on the menu to choose from. It all seems quite fucked up to me."

the irony being that this is all assertive, emotive opinion and no rationale, no chain of plausible statements to consider and weigh, a narrative to either agree with or implicitly be relegated to the "fucked up" contingent.

emotions, which lead to narratives, are (perhaps more primitive) mental processes that help us survive (perhaps imperfectly) in the world. it's worth understanding and exploring that, rather than reeling off an overly dismissive, and ironically twitter-worthy, rant.

[crmd]

I know. This epistemological self-referentiality, i.e. "whether or not objective reality exists is itself a matter of opinion, therefore there is no objective reality", is why I consider postmodernism an intellectual dead-end.

[clairity]

but you're railing against the limits of epistemology then, not postmodernism, but ascribing your frustrations to the latter. the amount of things we can know with any certainty is (infinitely?) many, many orders of magnitude smaller than all the information in the universe, doubly so for sociopolitically-mediated information. postmodernism is simply a mechanism for understanding/coping with how little certainty there actually is.