Peter Korpi

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

This is the most pressing emergency America faces, If it is not addressed before the next election we may well be lost. Trump is right to see it as an emergency!

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 UPDATE: CNN is PANICKING that President Trump could take massive action to secure elections nationwide ahead of the midterms via "national emergency"

Why are they so scared of FRAUD being rooted out?!

"He's upping his rhetoric about rigged elections. He talked about California, now he had this speech. He's doing this for a reason!"

"The president's creating a pretext for intervention, calling an emergency."

If states aren't allowing fraud, there's no reason to worry. SIMPLE.

The fake news is hiding fraud.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I'm increasingly becoming convinced that one cannot simply pick up and read philosophy safely, but this will be misread as me saying people shouldn't read philosophy or that I want to dictate how they read philosophy.

The point I'm making is also especially true for the increasingly ideological philosophy that started to emerge in the later Renaissance period, through the Enlightenments, and certainly afterwards, especially in the Modern Era and since. The reason for this is instructive to my point (and requires elaboration).

For example, while I do think most people should eventually read Marx to understand what he actually said and argued, I would recommend that literally NOBODY read Marx until they're at least conversant in the significant errors in thinking he presents. I'm not saying this to poison the well but because the well is actually poisonous, and knowing you're about to drink the poison is necessary for conducting a correct (and safe) reading of the text.

In general, I'm against blank-slatism in reading philosophy, especially ideological philosophy. These texts do not exist in the academic ether as pure, unsullied expressions of ideas to be engaged on their own terms as they appear on the pages. They are profoundly otherwise, and knowing this matters a lot for how one engages such a text.

I think it can generally be taken for granted, especially through the Medieval Period (though imperfectly), what an author's ideological dispositions and presuppositions would have been in this older stuff (which may reverse as we get back toward Antiquity). It is usually Catholic, in fact, although other stuff, including esoterica, existed.

As we get to the Renaissance and Enlightenments (note the plural!), the idea of a return to a "universal" philosophy, which is in some sense broadly "secular" (or secular-ish) kind of emerges, and it sort of dominates by the time we're getting into the Modern Era and since. The idea emerges that people aren't speaking universal truths within a religion but universal truths without one, or without one in particular. That's a dangerous and important shift.

When you pick up a piece of philosophy, there are a lot of assumptions baked in. There are also views and agendas, not some kind of blank-slate universal background such that the words on the page simply say what the words on the page seem to say, especially in the more esoteric thinkers, like the Romantics and the Idealists.

I do not think we can rightly approach this kind of philosophy without understanding what's going on with the people who wrote it and the context in which they were writing. We should also be aware of esoteric hidden content or content that's meant to seduce the reader into an ideological frame while looking like it is merely stating facts (what Eric Voegelin called "grimoires," or books of spells and spellcasting).

This sounds like I'm trying to impose something upon the text, but it's more accurate that I'm saying these texts actually require exegesis (and not eisegesis, but knowing generally, say, that a Communist book is full of crazy Communist shit that should be read extremely skeptically is a fair "lens" to apply). It's very similar to how the Reformation began to ask people to read the Bible.

I don't know about you, but if you have ever picked up a Bible fairly naively and started to try to read it, it's not only really challenging but a ton of it just doesn't make sense. As the Bible was being written, its authors took for granted that the people who would be reading it (ultimately, Jews, then Christians) would have the underlying historical, geographical, and cultural context to know what an Amalekite is, for example. Without knowing this kind of stuff, the Bible is a confusing and at least slightly horrifying book.

Atheists often get this pretty twisted. They do a "blank-slate" read of the Bible and see some pretty horrifying stuff, and when they sit down with an informed Christian or Jewish thinker or apologist who can explain the context, which usually makes it make contextual sense, they see it as covering up what seems to plainly be there. It's the atheist, though, who is reading the text wrong (naively), though, even though it is always possible for the religious person or apologist to be engaging in motivated reasoning in interpretation.

Philosophy, even in the highest of the high Modern "post-Enlightenment" circumstances, is not written on a blank slate any more than human beings are blank slates. To read philosophy, especially of that era, in such a way is to read it completely wrongly, and it is therefore very often to get taken in by it, with all the negative connotation that phrase carries.

One way to say this is that rather than being neutral, much philosophy (especially Enlightenment(s) and post-Enlightenment(s)) is heavily polemical while hiding the fact of being a polemic. Much is also "socio-esoteric," which is to say some form of esotericism, occultism, or magic, posing as though it is not by appearing to be some kind of socio-political or socio-economic analysis. If you don't understand these things, you cannot read these works correctly and will fall for them.

This is why I get uncomfortable when I see things like the video going viral today, ostensibly encouraging us to read more deeply in the Western canon and to develop a broader and deeper vocabulary from that reading while casually recommending the work of people like Schiller, Carlyle, and Ruskin. Those works were not chosen arbitrarily (alongside Plato). They align, and where they point carries an agenda. The suggestions weren't made casually but deliberately, and the purpose of suggesting them is left hidden, as though you'd have to be crazy to point it out.

Schiller, to be fair enough, as a kind of romantic German idealist, has important work he did on beauty and its relevance to human society and development. Carlyle and Ruskin, however, for whatever else they said, are some of the most vicious early critics of free societies and free enterprise ("capitalism") in the writing of the time. Their inclusion in the list was deliberate. It was to subtly introduce to people who care about restoring "the West" that abandoning the post-Enlightenment(s) projects, including capitalism, is a necessary part of the project.

Someone who is unfamiliar with those ideas is not likely to engage them with the necessary skeptical lens, and thus there's a propaganda being done. I don't like it. I don't like it when anyone does it, in fact, for any hidden purpose, passing off sweeping philosophical (ish) nonsense like it's some kind of neutral presentation and exploration of ideas when it actually has ideological, polemical, or even mystifying purposes.

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

@ConceptualJames You align well with the teaching in Colossians 2:8, thank you for taking the time to write this James.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

New Republic: “Have you ever considered you deserve to be assassinated?”

There is no functioning country when half the population believes the other half deserves to die.

[planefag @planefag]

The problem with NBC and ABC refusing to air Trump's speech is that it undermines the media's own justifying mythos; that The People are competent to rule the Republic and thus must be kept informed by the heroic Fourth Estate. By this act they tell the public "you're too stupid to not elect Hitler."

This was, of course, already implicit in them calling Trump Literally Hitler after the people had elected him twice, but refusing to air his speech on *election integrity* after they, themselves, spent almost a decade trying to elide the aforementioned contradiction by blaming "election interference" from The Bad Guys is a truly poetic coda.

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

RT @EricLDaugh: 🚨 HUGE DEVELOPMENT: US Court UPHOLDS the Postal Service requiring all states to submit voter rolls for citizenship checks i…

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

@tuuu28283 Awesome, she’s looking beautiful. 😎 do they have anything similar to the Sports Car Club of America(scca) in Japan that would allow you to go drive solo events?

[MOMof DataRepublican @data_republican]

I didn't realize that the major networks do not pay any regulatory fees, but the others do. Time to change that. That's the least they can do considering they are operating on behalf of the CCP.

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

@camhigby “Only trotskyites are targeted, loyal citizens are safe”
Name for me a piece of power that government has not abused and has willingly surrendered. This is a clear violation of our 4th amendment rights and you’re out here shilling for it?! wtf kid.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

After WWII, Japan reflected deeply on its past invasions.

With sincere apologies, we provided China with massive economic aid and technology guidance for decades.

Yet now, as the world's second largest economy, China teaches its children to kill all Japanese.

They claim not only Taiwan, but parts of Japan as their own.

No matter which party you support or what your views are, Chinese interference must be stopped.

Otherwise it will end in disaster.

As a Japanese person, I feel this reality very painfully.

[Andrew Kolvet @AndrewKolvet]

NBC, ABC, and CNN refused to air President Trump’s speech on foreign election interference because they say it erodes trust in our elections.

Here’s 4 minutes of Dems eroding trust in the 2016 election.

It’s not principled. It’s propaganda.

[Gun Owners of America @GunOwners]

Governments don’t get to ban an entire class of commonly owned firearms because they don’t like them.

That’s not "public safety," it's just tyranny.

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

The great irony of battlefield safety culture is that it can make men so afraid to act that they die waiting for permission.

Train civilians the same way, and a civilization soon becomes too afraid to save itself.

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

@tuuu28283 Happy Saturday! I hope it is a good day for you guys!

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

@tuuu28283 I would guess this grew from an association of this group of people and similar food orders in Japan?

[Pro America Politics @proamericapol]

Ready for this? The evidence CBS presents to fact check Trump is that communist China denies it.

I'm not kidding. And they conveniently have a pre-written denial from China ready.

So, not only did they not broadcast Trump's speech, but they were actively collaborating with the CCP beforehand.

Enemy of the people. 👇

[S2 Underground @s2_underground]

North Carolina just authorized the emplacement of Flock cameras on every single state road.

You ask, What's the penalty for police officers who abuse this intelligence collection sensor suite, and use the surveillance tools illegally?

It's a misdemeanor. Same class as petty larceny.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 NOW: Some Senate Republicans are reportedly NOT SOLD on getting the SAVE America Act passed and implemented for the midterm elections, including Thom Tillis

Tillis is AIDING FRAUD

After President Trump’s bombshell election integrity and foreign interference address, EVERY SENATE REPUBLICAN should be trying to ram SAVE through on every bill, without exception!

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

I'm an Angeleno...nearly all my friends and family are democrats. All of them are terrified of the socialist psychos hijacking their party and pushing their insane communist gobbledygook, but they don't know what to do cuz they get called "bigots" when they voice any concern.

[Peter Korpi @certifiablePop]

@tuuu28283 It’s a wonderful thing to do, though I do not often get time to recently :(